ROLLUP: Uptober Green Light? | Robinhood Goes All-In | $400M Bitget Hack | Prediction Markets to SCOTUS

Bitcoin just broke its bearish market structure, but surging bond yields could still test the rally. Ryan and David unpack Uptober, Robinhood’s trading push, the Bitget hack, and prediction markets’ path to the Supreme Court. --- 📣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 0:09 Bitcoin Breaks Bearish Structure https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://x.com/hariskhantrader/status/2104621748591403035 6:35 Bond Yields, Liquidity & Macro Risk https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105337195884052870 https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-inflation-rises-less-than-expected-august-consumer-spending-surges-2026-09-30/ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105355997892239838 https://x.com/EpsilonTheory/status/2105345560064745548 https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-MOVE/ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105279482957369587 22:06 Robinhood Goes All-In https://x.com/fintechfrank/status/2105082039733305734 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105062331436966323 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105063773165818119 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105072369509257220 https://robinhood.com/us/en/agents/ 33:19 BitGet Hack & NEAR Permissionless Debate https://www.theblock.co/news/business/bitget-starts-phased-withdrawal-resumption https://x.com/AlexAuroraDev/status/2104554958754357482 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2104955420401955273 https://x.com/kylekrason/status/2104562944457740481 https://x.com/near_intents/status/2105642219357241796 44:23 Prediction Markets Head to Court https://www.legalreader.com/new-york-sues-polymarket-over-gambling-rules/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-appeals-court-rules-against-kalshi-says-states-can-regulate-prediction-2026-09-25/ https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-receives-cftc-approval-for-coinbase-clearing-llc 48:29 Ethereum’s Cryptographic World Computer https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2104160561374343176 https://x.com/cryptographicas/status/2104212366271390055 https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2104260847975707013 56:14 AI Agents & Bank Runs https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/2104213040937812262 https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankers Station, it is the first week of October and the bearish market structure broke the weekly Bitcoin candle and in addition to that, the monthly Bitcoin candle both closed above the previous May high. I think the big question for the entire market to answer is that is this a green light for October? Ryan, do you remember October last year?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Oh my God, you said it. You cursed us now. We're all doomed.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  We were, you and I were very excited for October last year and the first week of October last year was like a little bit green and we were kind of excited.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we said October too many times and we cursed it and the rest of the month sucked.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  It became downtober.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was bear market tober.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  It was bear market tober, but, but that was last October. That was last October. We still have October possibly on the menu for this month.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think a question to be answered is what's macro doing and could that disrupt our, I'm not going to say it, our October? Because there's a little bit of a paradox going on in markets. Inflation came in kind of cool, but the 10-year yields are going sky high and they're not stopping. Ben Hunt said this week, something in the financial world is going to break when referring to these yields. We'll talk about that. Also, David, you went to the Hood Summit. That was in Houston, Texas. I want to know why you went, what Robin Hood is shipping. I'll find out all about that because I saw a lot of announcements coming out, but you were on the ground. I want to get your impressions on that as well.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Also, there was a $400 million BitGet hack, an exchange hack on Friday of last week. And also that has turned into a conversation around near intense and the permissionless nature of that system and whether crypto wants that or not. Also, New York has sued Polymarket. A federal court has ruled that states can regulate Calci and it seems like we're all taking this to the Supreme Court is just looking more and more inevitable these days. So we're going to cover all of this and more, but first we're starting with the market. Once again, the Bitcoin weekly candle closed above the May high of this year. So we, the weekly candle close was the highest Bitcoin price that we've had since like early January of this year. That is also true for the October monthly candle

• 2:14Speaker 00

  as well. So when this is kind of-

• 2:16Speaker 01

  September, you mean. The September. Don't get out of yourself.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  September, excuse me. September. We are now in October.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  If you are a trader, if you do TA, the importance of weekly and monthly candles closes is that's just what is going to be on the chart looking forward. And had we dipped below the May high, you would have seen a lower high, but instead we got a higher high for the year. And so the idea here is that the bearish market structure that we previously had has broken, giving us potentially a green light, a runway for more bullishness in the remaining three weeks of this month.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  My, I don't know what your quant is saying, David, but my quant, Michael NATO, has also signed off on what you just said. He has said we are in the early bull and we got the confirmation this week because we got a second weekly close, what you just said, above the 50-week moving average, which is 76.8K and we got a close above that, 84.5K. So the last objection people had, which was like, are you sure? Is this sustained? I mean, the chart is rejecting that. And if this chart doesn't hold, it doesn't, not to say we couldn't go down, we may still go down, but if this overall structure,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  the structure that you said has broken now in an upward direction, broken the back of the bear market. If that doesn't hold, after these, you know, monthly averages are locked in, then it will be the first time ever it hasn't holded. So that feels like a, a good foundation from a crypto market structure to just say, we are in the early bull phase.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Speaking of good foundations, I do kind of enjoy, I don't really enjoy it because it's financially painful, but nonetheless, we are seeing some weakness in some alts for the first time. Lit is down 30% from the highs.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. What are you enjoying about this? The buying opportunity? Are you getting like that?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  No, I'm fully allocated. I got no cash.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  But less, it's just like, this is-

• 4:21Speaker 01

  You enjoy the pain of markets, right?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  I enjoy the pain. I'm a little bit of a masochist. You know, my financial era was born by buying like a thousand dollar ETH in 2017 and having that go to $80.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And still believing.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  And still believing and, and then making that all back in 2020, 2021. And so it's just important that we just get a breather. Prices go down. There's some pain in the market for that to not be too frothy. We don't want to have a blow off top too soon. And things had gotten really frothy in like those five assets, like Zcash, for example, down 20%. Morpho down 17%, Uni down 17%, while all of these tokens had painted between like 50 and 300% gains in the last like two or three months. Kind of in the same way that like this Bitcoin bear market, if we are indeed at the very beginnings of another four-year cycle, there's bull market ahead of us. That was the easiest bear market of all time. If this is the only dip that we get, it's going to be

• 5:17Speaker 00

  one of the easiest dips in all coins in the last like three months. I could see more pain being on the table. It feels about right, but also at the same time, there's just a new pattern happening in the crypto market right now. And so I think this is kind of something to pay attention to. It's like, how, how volatile are we to the downside these days? Because so far Bitcoin is saying not, not that volatile to the downside.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Well, this is like just probably some mean reversion here, right? Because alts, as you said, had been on a tear. Do you ever look at the Glassnode altcoin season index? Look at this. We got into almost like full altcoin season zone and we're taking a spin down from that. The last time we got here was like way last summer when things pumped and you could see some other phases when that has happened in the past. So this is a little bit just mean reversion after this, these massive leaps. And you know, Bitcoin has been up so much, what, like 44% since the June lows? 96% of the top 50 crypto assets actually beat Bitcoin over the last 30 days. So Bitcoin's already up.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  All of them other than one.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Pretty much.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  The following 48 tokens by market cap beat Bitcoin in the last, how long?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  That's right. 30 days, the last month.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, last month. One other thing that might be weighing a little bit on altcoin markets or in general, we have to weight this into where crypto is going from here in the early bull case is inflation and yields. And there is a story emerging that is somewhat of a paradox. So firstly, we got inflation numbers in this week and the print was actually better than expected. So annualized inflation, that's CPI, 3%, whereas expectations were about 3.3%. So below expectations, also the numbers were revised

• 7:13Speaker 01

  down from previous numbers in July. So July was actually revised down and most of this was driven by high energy costs. So it was, you know, price of the pump, gas, oil, that type of thing that was really the driver. So inflation numbers good. And in a normal world, in a normal market, what you'd expect to see is as inflation cools, longer or lower long-term yields on bonds, right?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  And the reason for this- If the monetary asset is stronger over longer time horizons, people will accept less yields over that time.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. So if you get a good inflation print, a low inflation print, you'd expect yields to fall. That's typically what happens. This time that didn't happen. So this week-

• 8:02Speaker 00

  I think yields rose more than they had in, at all weeks previous. Like this was the FASX acceleration of yield to the upside this week than like the last four weeks we've been reporting this.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so here's a tweet. So yields continue their rise even on the back of this inflation news, not even budging from that. The 30-year is up to 5.64%, its highest since 2022, 2022.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  No, no, no. 2002.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Oh my God. Sorry. Yes. 2002.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  A little dyslexia on that.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  The highest since 2022. A little dyslexia on that readout. And the 10-year is back to 5.3%. So yields going crazy. Wait, what do you think's happening?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  5.3% yields going crazy.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Well, that is crazy. I mean, this is the biggest like market in the world. This is the risk-free rate for capital around the world. And we haven't seen these rates and this velocity and trajectory since before 2022.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Basically our financial lifetimes. Because I was not paying attention to the bond market in 2002, Ryan, let me tell you.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so I, I saw some tweets in the week, including this one from a friend of the show who's been on before. I haven't had him on in a while though. Ben Hunt, he said this, not to be alarmist or anything, but this move in the 10-year, in the 30-year, isn't oil or Iran related. He says that because oil was actually down in the week. Something in the financial world is going to break. That's what he said. Not to be an alarmist about things.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  If there's one thing I know about having Ben Hunt on the podcast, is that he's kind of an alarmist.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Sometimes he's right, though, right?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Not, yeah, not to discredit him in any particular way. He's just like, he's a bit of a, yeah, alarmist, alarmist.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Well, the mechanism here, the thing that he's worried about, isn't necessarily the raw number yet, although that is, you know, something to be alarmed at. It's the speed at which this is happening. This is like yields are going up so quickly. We haven't seen that, as you said, in your entire investing lifetime, and a lot of investors feel the same. So he thinks something could break. What do you think? Do you think this is like the sign of something going really wrong? And this is why maybe Besen is panicking and he's trying to buy the long end and do all the intervention that he's been talking about lately? Why else would he be doing that if we were, if everything was normal?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  When, when something as large as the bond market moves this violently, something is going to break? Like somebody, somewhere, business, head fund, whatever, is positioned in a way where this really fucks their shit, to use a technical term. Does that mean like catastrophically, this messes with everything in the whole world? I'm not totally convinced. I was listening to the Jim Bianco on his recent podcast. He just started a podcast, I think he's like five or six episodes in.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  He's a bond guy. He knows bonds.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  He's a big bond guy, big bond guy. And he was like, he was talking about how like the whole world is freaking out because we haven't seen these rates in so long. Like 5.6% is such a high number.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Unprecedented.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Unprecedentedly high. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like if you go back into the history of bond market yields, of yields and interest rates, like 5.6% is a totally normal number. You know what's an absurd number? Anything below two. And so granted, ever since-

• 11:20Speaker 01

  That was the weirdness. Not now, right?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  That was the weirdness. The whole ZIRP era, post 2008, even pre 2008, the whole, that whole thing has been distorted. And finally, the clock has run out on like the era of low interest rates. But that was the weird stuff. And 5.6% is a totally normal number.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I think that's right. Other bond people I'm listening to are saying the same thing. You know, I mentioned Howard Marks last week. Also, Michael Howell is someone who, who covers this fairly well. And he made the point that 5.3%, it was normal in the 90s. In the 80s, yields were 10 to 15%. And for huge periods during the 80s, the US economy is growing like gangbusters. It was like boom times.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  The economy is growing right now. Like, and that's also outside of AI as well. Like consumer spending is up. There are plenty of healthy indicators in the economy.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  There is a take here, though, that you see this is in the move indicator. This is something else that, that Howell follows. He calls it kind of the heartbeat of bonds and sort of his heartbeat metric for a global liquidity. And it's, it's almost like the VIX. Do you know the VIX for stocks?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  This is what the move index is for bonds, right? So it's a marker of volatility and jitters.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  When the VIX spikes, it's everyone is glued to TV screens to Twitter because something happened. Something big happened.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  And you could see some spikiness. Like here's the ultimate bond spikiness on the move index back in 2008. Do you remember what was happening there? So we, we've got some spikiness right now. And Michael Howell's conjecture is he's watching that because if you get further spikiness, it is an indicator that liquidity conditions are shrinking, basically. So global liquidity is shrinking.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  As the spike spikes.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  As the spike spikes, liquidity shrinkage. And liquidity shrinkage is bad for our begs. It's bad for debasement trade. It means there's less fiat money supply in the market. And so he's watching this because he thinks there's the case where things could get bad before they get good. So basically, VIX spikes, and then in response to that, governments, Besen, WASH, everybody has to respond with some policy. That policy is going to be money printing. And on the other side of that is launched the next global liquidity cycle. So he, he thinks that we're somewhat in a cycle wind down as far as global liquidity goes. And the next cycle will begin when there's some sort of jitteriness and crisis.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So that could cause crypto assets to still dip, even though we're talking about this as if it's an early bull market. And that's one possibility there. I'm not saying it's the, the only possibility, but it's something that some of my quants are saying, David.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I can kind of see it where the, what do we call this? Not the VIX, the bond, what's the bond market?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  The move.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  The move, the move. So the, the bond market VIX, I like that name better, actually. The thing to watch is like how spiky that's going to get, or is something going to like break? Is a seal going to burst per what Ben Hunt is saying? We're all glued to the news because some bank went over, third bailout of the banks or whatever. Liquidity disappears because everyone has to cover their debts. You know, Bitcoin crashes, crypto crashes. But then there's a flood of liquidity after the fact. Like that's the pattern that we've all seen. I feel like that would be the worst case scenario. There's probably a much easier case scenario. Like either way, when this, the VIX for bonds stops being so spiky and it eases out,

• 14:46Speaker 00

  the process of it easing out has got to be bullish, just because, great, volatility is, is leaving the bond market, stability is coming back to the markets. And Bitcoin has seemingly done acceptably well, while the VIX of the bond market has been spiky, which would be the time where you would expect it to not be doing well.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's going to continue to do well because deficits continue to mount. The US fiscal policy continues to not improve, just get worse, of course. And that's the, that's the debasement trade. So maybe investors are seeing kind of the long-term picture here. And another simple explainer for yields, in addition to kind of the fiscal situation, is just what we've been talking about. What Howard Marks pointed out in his memo last week, which is AI capex, AI debt is competing against treasuries for those yields. The economy is booming, and so yields are going to go up the way they went up in the 1980s. And this is not actually, in that context, that alarming, except for the fact that the whole world

• 15:47Speaker 01

  is now based on the AI trade. And, you know, that could be alarming. Again, if we have all the eggs in those baskets and something happens with that. There was also this other minor point, David, that Kobiyasi I saw made, which is, he did something sneaky on the inflation methodology this month. So they actually changed it. They changed how inflation was calculating. There's some details here. They revised it back. But they basically, according to Kobiyasi, they re-categorized some things like portfolio management, investment advice, put it in different category. And-

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Is this, is this like gerrymandering for inflation?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  It's goalposts moving. It's gerrymandering for inflation a little bit. And he said that alone could have knocked about 20 basis points off inflation. That could be the explainer. So the other reason yields could be up is just the markets not buying these inflation numbers because there's a little bit of goalposts moving.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  That's, that's some Soviet-style accounting is, is the idea that comes to mind. That's never good. I mean, it's good in the short term because like we can all trade on paper and hot air. But, oh yeah, over the long time, markets need truth. And if the government's not giving us truth, that's like a terrible, terrible thing.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  I think the bond markets are really good at sussing out truth, right? Like there's nothing, there's no escaping bond markets.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Soviet-era accounting, but in the United States of America doesn't actually work.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. So, I don't know. Are you bullish? How are you feeling about things with this macro context?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Can I, I want to throw a few things your way. We haven't talked about oil. Oil is actually still at wartime highs. So there was the war, the, the height of the Iran war conflict. Oil spiked up to 90 to $110. It came down to like 60. It is now back up to $93 a barrel. So oil is at wartime highs. The bond market yields are cratering up. That's, that's scary. The midterms are coming next month, and the markets never really like midterms. And like the Hormuz situation is as resolved, unresolved as ever. But if you take all of these things into account, like the resolution, the resolution of all

• 17:56Speaker 00

  of those things is bullish. Bond market yields are one day going to stop cratering to the upside. Oil prices are high. They can't really go much higher because there actually is a secret oil flowing through this Strait of Hormuz. The Iran war, the Iran and the Trump administration are in tension, and that's unresolved, but that could get resolved. Any way that this falls out is bullish. Like the status quo is all of these things are bad. Like the oil is high, yields are high, midterms are coming up. That's giving the market the jitters. And Bitcoin painted a higher monthly and weekly candle despite all of those things. The, the default path seems to be that Bitcoin is like bullish despite

• 18:38Speaker 00

  all of those things. But then all of those things could fall one by one like dominoes. And so I'm kind of seeing like, okay, Bitcoin has done well in a very hostile market environment for the last like two months. Each one of those things could clear up. We will get past the midterms. Bond yields will stop accelerating to, to the upside. Well, the Iran war and the Hormuz will eventually resolve. And all of that, those are, each one of those things are catalysts that I'm seeing can see happen in the next like quarter to a year.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I think what you're saying is like, given the debasement that's on the rise, we can clearly see, given crypto market structure has fundamentally changed to the upside, right? And, and given some of these other things could get resolved, it's riskier to be offside.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. You want to be allocated. This is me, I'm trying to be bullish, Ryan. This is me trying to be bullish.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  David's never not allocated.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Pretty good. I think it's a pretty good perspective.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do too. And coming up next, David, I want you to give me the perspective, give Bankless listeners the perspective on Robinhood Hoods Conference. What did you see over there in Houston? What are they up to? AI agents controlling portfolios? Are they doing anything crypto? Also, there was a $400 million crypto hack last week. Has some implications for a lot of things and there's a bit of discussion going on about it. I want you to fill me in all this and more, but before we get there, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

• 20:03Speaker 00

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• 20:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:31Speaker 00

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• 22:06Speaker 01

  This is Frank Shapiro. Big news out of the Robinhood's Hoods Summit today. He mentions a few bullet points. 24/7 stock trading, including weekends, corporate earnings prediction markets, I guess corporate earnings, he can open up prediction markets on that, perpetual futures for US customers. It says eligible US customers, by the way, AI trading, and also a social trading platform. This kind of reminded me of like the FOMO app that's picking up in crypto, Robinhood's version of that. All of those were some of the highlights that Frank mentions. I'm not sure if he was there. You were there in person.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  I was there.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Why did you, like, give me the context. Why did you decide? I know you don't go to every conference, of course. There's a lot of things you don't go to.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  I've gone to very few conferences this year, actually. I think this might have been my first.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  You prioritized this one. Why this one? And what was the news coming out of it? What was the vibe, the news? What's your feeling?

• 22:58Speaker 00

  I mean, Robinhood has just captured such a centerpiece of attention in the crypto industry. It seemed worth going. They also invited me to speak with their two crypto leads, Nicola White and Hillary Scaffington. One is the VP of Products, who's doing all the crypto product stuff. And Nicola White, she leads Bitstamp. So Robinhood bought Bitstamp a while ago. Nicola was doing market making in crypto. Now she leads the Bitstamp and the crypto integration. So this was actually their trad conference. They kind of do this on-off thing with the Hoods Summit, which is their normal Robinhood equities brokerage trad-fi conference.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  That's where you were at, the Hoods Summit.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Which is what I was at. And then next, and also previously, they did their crypto event. The most recent one, you'll remember, was in London with Johan Kobrath. And that's when they launched the Robinhood chain and all the other stuff. This was their trad conference. And so we were not, I was not expecting crypto things out of this conference, and that is what we got. It was mostly trad stuff.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And yeah, it's all fusing together, right? Because even Bitstamp is a crypto thing, isn't it?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's kind of like, well, then, David, the crypto podcaster, why were you moderating a panel at the trad Robinhood conference? Well, because perps, tokenized stocks, Morpho, these things are now all in the main Robinhood app.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  That's kind of cool.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  That's why they brought me in. And so.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  What are they up to then? What were the highlights for you?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  So the highlights, you had a rant room with Frank Shapiro. They opened up with 24/7 markets, so you can kind of see the priority and emphasis that they had. I thought it was pretty funny. They showed a bunch of Donald Trump truth social posts and tweets about the Iran war conflict, and they're like, wouldn't you have liked to trade these things?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  It happened over the weekend, right?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Because they happened over the weekend? Well, now you can. I thought that was pretty funny.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Product market fit in this crazy era of tweets. Wait, but like, how are they able to do that? Why couldn't we do that before? How come we can suddenly do that now?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I would like to actually explore that a little bit more. Part of the answer does come from having tokenized assets trading on Bitstamp, because it's a 24/7, 365 marketplace. And so part of that answer is that. They also have just extended their own brokerage services to beyond hours. And so like if one Robinhood user is buying an asset and another Robinhood is selling an asset, and they both happen to be doing that at 8:00 PM on a Tuesday, they can just clear those things. And so they're just pushing the left and right earlier and later on the day.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  That seems so obvious and such a product market fit for how people want to trade these markets now.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It was very clear that if you were, the Hoods Summit and all the products they were releasing is for speculators. It is not for the investor. Robinhood and their words that they use is like, we are for the day traders, the speculators, the people on margin and leverage. Like, these are for you. The passive investor was not really a target audience here. But yeah, anyways. Okay, so that was one of them. The 24/7 trading was definitely the headline thing. Prediction markets for earnings reports. I actually thought this was pretty interesting. They opened this section up with, hey, isn't it really frustrating when you're bullish on earnings? And then you are correct, but then the price of the asset goes down in price?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Isn't that annoying? Well, now you can just have exposure to an earnings report with a predictions market. And so I actually think of all the prediction markets that society hates, I feel like this one should not be included in them because it's a financial derivative about a financial company. It's just so finance-coded. It's not like, it's not sports gambling. It's not betting on the weather. So I really like this category of prediction markets because it's a financial product about finance.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Well, even Vitalik would approve.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. The crypto element was the perpetual in the main Robinhood app. And so this was the big.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  For US users?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  For US users. Eight markets: Bitcoin, ETH, Sol, XRP, Doge, Cardano, Lincoln, Hype. And so for some US users, they're rolling this out to a few select users. They're going to get feedback. They're going to roll it out to even more. They're going to get feedback, and then one day they'll roll it out to everyone. I thought the interesting thing was, they asked the audience, like, raise your hand if you've ever traded a perpetual or you know what a perpetual is. And like, less than one-fifth of the audience raised their hands.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  What?

• 27:23Speaker 00

  I thought that was really interesting.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  What are they doing? Options?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Options, yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  This is a trade, you're telling me this is a trader trad-fi crowd, and they hadn't, like, four-fifths of the audience had not used a perp?

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what they said. Yeah. And maybe the audience just doesn't really raise their hand. That's always kind of a bias. But they asked earlier in the show, like, how many people are you guys going to buy an iPhone Duo? Because they are building out a custom Robinhood app for the iPhone Duo, like the two-fold one.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  And like, a third of the audience raised their hands. So it wasn't the audience being shy.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  The audience was willing to raise their hands.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So low saturation.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  So more of the audience is interested in buying an iPhone Duo than has traded a perp before. So this is also, the perpetual is also being offered through their Bitstamp exchange. And so they bought Bitstamp. It has the CFTC license that allows them to offer this to US customers, US users. And so when somebody on Robinhood main app goes and does a 10x Bitcoin long or a 10x Bitcoin short, it routes it through Bitstamp. One of the big news on the week was lighter. The lighter token was down like 20%, 30% on this week. It was from disappointment that this was not lighter being the service provider in the backend.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Wait, so I know you've been following Lider, you're a Lider Bull. Robinhood does have a partnership with Lider.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  In the Robinhood wallet, which is their crypto app. It's like the MetaMask or Phantom. It's the Robinhood wallet.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so they're doing both plays. It's Bitstamp for the main Robinhood wallet and kind of the whole buttoned up version. And then Lider for the more crypto native wallet.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And also non-US because Lider does not have a CFTC exchange license.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Got it. So Lider's still in the picture, but I guess there was some hope out there, market hope.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the distribution difference between being in the main Robinhood app versus the Robinhood wallet is massive. And so there was like a lot of disappointment from the Lider Bulls on the timeline. The answer as to like, why, why did Robinhood not put in Lider? Is Lider doesn't have a CFTC exchange license. You have to have that. It's just like the, the conversation stops there. Robinhood bought Bitstamp so they could do stuff like this. Trade 24/7, tokenize assets and do perpetuals. And they have the, the CFTC exchange license. That's why they did this. I think the question is, is in the future, if and when Lider does get its CFTC license, will then Robinhood also route orders to Lider?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Or will it actually just keep it for itself and only flow it through Bitstamp? Because why would they share it with anyone else? Like they will just route it through their exchange. Maybe Lider does give better execution and will always give better execution than Bitstamp, but Robinhood doesn't care because they get the fees. So like, that's the fork in the road. You can interpret things both ways. The CFTC license to coming to lighter, which I think is coming to lighter inevitably. I think we will know this inside of two months because, what are you laughing at?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I'm just laughing because I think I saw your tweet where it was like flew all the way to Houston.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  For Robinhood to fund my bags.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a Robinhood for my lighter bags to be down 20%.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  It's great. I'm sorry, man, but it maybe it's only a matter of time. It just takes some time.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  We are going to find out whether or not Lider gets a CFTC license inside of like two months because they've been, they've been talking about it for a while and the CFTC has 180 days to give a response.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Well, we know the Vlads are very tight, so that's great. Well, there was a couple of other things I want to ask you about. One was the social trading element. So somebody described this to me as like, it's almost like the crypto FOMO type of experience. There's a social trading thing that they were talking about. And then also agents, AI agents, what? You can get an AI agent to like manage your trades.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Have you heard about agentic trading, Ryan?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  That's been all crypto has talked about for the last like 18 months, I feel like.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Have you ever used it?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  I would not trust like right now, no. Like I actually, I would like to. I would like to give an agent like, you know, a couple of hundred bucks and just.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  See, see what happens?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Okay, so during this section, I'm like agentic trading. You can now, you get the power of a hedge fund's brokerage information advantage inside of Robinhood using agentic trading. And I just turned, I turned to the guy next to me. I didn't know him. We were just strangers. And I just asked him, I was like, who the fuck is doing agentic trading? And then he opens up his phone to the agentic trading tab. I was like, me, I'm doing it. He had, he had given his agent like $2,000 and his agent had done a bunch of trades. And I'm like, okay, fuck me, I guess.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Wait, what do you do? So like, how does this work? Do you just like, hey, agent, you know, generate, generate overperforming, like your performance over the next 90 days? Make no mistakes, go.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I think it's one of those things where like the quality of the output is downstream of the quality of the input. And so you need to prompt pretty well and be like, okay, like I am interested in this kind of exposure. I'll be cautious about this. I don't know. I still haven't used it, but some people are doing agentic tradings.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Would make it like dumber.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  I just, I don't want to give the input to the agent. You know what I mean? I want the genius, super smart agent working for me and to figure it all out. But then I feel like someone has already front run me on that. If some other hedge fund is using a much more powerful agent, better data.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Maybe you could just kind of, if you set a strategy, maybe you could just like automate a strategy. In that context, I would, I would be okay with it.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see, anything else? Yeah, Robinhood Social, they, they launched, you said it was like FOMO. It's like FOMO and FinTway. It feels a little bit more like, a little bit more trad than FOMO. Because this is definitely built by millennials and FOMO is built by zoomers. But it's very similar. So like verified trades, verified PNL. It's like a Twitter kind of form factor. Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Very good. That, that's the conference. There was also a hack that we should talk about, a $400 million hack of the BitGet exchange. Did that happen earlier this week or late last week?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  That was Friday of last week.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Friday of last week. BitGet, if you're not familiar, it's offshore exchange, so outside the US. It's one of the biggest offshore exchanges, top five, let's say. It's definitely not of the scale Binance. And it was a $351 million hack. What are the details behind this and what was the conversation it spawned?

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so not a crypto or a protocol hack. This is just a kind of a hack of BitGet's internal security. So attackers spoofed.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Right, not the cold wallets.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, just the hot wallets, not the cold wallets. So attackers spoofed internal transfer data and drained hot and warm wallets across multiple chains. Private keys were not stolen, private keys were not lost. But that, the total sum of the losses came to about $387 million, which is the largest exploit loss of crypto in 2026 so far. I had to kind of explain the technical terms of like how it all worked, but I don't really understand it. But it was an internal BitGet security thing. There was, there is a $464 billion protection fund from BitGet. And so users are whole, not, no user will lose any money. Withdrawals were paused and then they resumed. And so kind of nice that no users were harmed in this exploit.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  I think it's probably North Korea. I think is the assumption here. There's like, that's the Lazarus group that did this, but I'm not sure if that's actually confirmed. A lot of the assets moved through ThorChain. ThorChain said they can't do anything about it. I'm sure Taylor Monahan.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  After they were stolen. So the assets were stolen by, let's say it was a hacker like Lazarus group. Then the next thing is the hacker has to then launder those funds in order to get liquidity on them, right?

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ThorChain is a pretty common place for this, these funds to go. A bunch of Bitcoin did go through Wasabi Coin Join, which is a Bitcoin mixer. And then about half a million dollars tried to go through NearIntents. And this is when the story moves into the NearIntents space. So NearIntents is an application on top of the NearBlockchain that does cross-chain transfers. 500,000 about dollars tried to go through NearIntents. And NearIntents has this shield thing. It's like an intense security, it's like a security filter, like a bouncer that checks every swap before it goes through NearIntents. Alex, the general manager of NearIntents, he kind of describes it as like a risk intelligence layer.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Kind of like, yeah, a bouncer, cops preventing.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Firewall almost, I guess.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Firewall, I think that's a good term, yeah. So $166,000 did get through, but it blocked about $503,000. This spawned kind of a conversation. These aren't really the biggest numbers, but it spawned a conversation.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  These are tiny numbers in the context of 350 million, right?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but really the conversation was around the permissionless, around NearIntents. Near, due to the crazy price action going from like $2 to $5, is now kind of the center of attention. And so the, you know, the hardcore cypherpunk nature of some of these systems is being, you know, we're kicking the tires here. And I think people are learning that NearIntents is not like a completely permissionless, censorship resistant, cypherpunk protocol. This is the first time a lot of people learned about that.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  So when it comes to a hacker steal some funds and they try to kind of, you know, launder it somewhere, they'll use different protocols for this, right? One is tornado cash, which cannot be turned off.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Another is ThorChain, as you said, which has operators. But their stance at ThorChain is basically like permissionless, credibly neutral. We can't do anything about it.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's always been confusing to me about ThorChain is like, there is an off switch and they're like, we're not, we're not messing with the off switch.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right, and Taylor Monahan is among those who have called them out and saying, no, you actually do have an off switch, you could do something about it. Now, this is near, has an automated sort of firewall bouncer at the door that sort of flagged these things as stolen funds, transactions and, and paused it almost automatically. And so what's the debate in the crypto community? So whether you should have the authority to do this or was it a debate around neutrality?

• 37:33Speaker 00

  A little bit. I think really the reason why this is a bigger debate than it really needs to be is that there's some of the words that Near is using, like they're using the words like, we are permissionless infrastructure, but we're not neutral. And somebody is saying, well, then, then you're not actually permissionless. Like, don't use the permissionless word. Then there's other people who are saying, you shouldn't have this ability at all. And I'm throwing a flag at that of like, we have some of the hardcore cypherpunk protocols, the, the permissionless ones, we've got that stuff. Exchange hacks and bridge hacks have lost the most funds in crypto ever. Like it put over $8 billion combined on those two, two things. So like, and now we have this cross-chain infrastructure that also, the news of as of this morning,

• 38:17Speaker 00

  got exploited today for $3.8 million. And the reason why it wasn't worse.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Wait, a separate hack? This is a separate.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  A separate hack. This is the NearIntents application also got exploited for $3.8 million. The reason why it wasn't worse was this same shield mechanism detected the transactions and prevented the loss of further funds. And so all of the people that lost money in this NearIntents exploit will also be returned the money because NearIntents makes $3.8 million in like a week. So it's like, not really that big of a deal. And so my, my take is like, we have this system that is like discerning between bad and good. And we've had the previous systems where like, you know, code not kings, you know? We've had the previous systems already. And like now this new system is more discerning. Sure, there is trust.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  There is custodianship for a moment in NearIntents. These have historically, at least with my vernacular, been bad. But then also at the same time, you know what else is bad? It's losing like $9 billion of user funds. And so like my stance is like, hey, man, like this is a new strategy. Let's see it play out.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess maybe it's a semantics debate over like definitions of words, right? So there's this person quote tweeting permissionless doesn't mean neutral. Yes, it does. And so calling out near for using the words, I guess, permissionless and also, you know, saying we're permissionless, but not neutral. Now, Ilya on the near team had a response to this. Crypto space really has a choice. Grow the F up or get sidelined with random regulations. So he's making the point, hey, we're building a product. We don't want the product to have, you know, money laundering capability. We're, you know, we're actually, we have the ability to do this and therefore it's a good user experience. Like, we should be doing this. It's kind of the right thing to do for our users. It's what everyone wants.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And I guess your point is like, that's a fine experiment to run. We already have the super credibly neutral infrastructure, the tornado caches, the Ethereum's, the Bitcoins of the world. And so like, why, not everything has to be like that, especially when you're a layer up and you're on kind of the intense layer. So.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think people are also confounding near with near intense. Near is a blockchain. It is permissionless. It is censorship resistant. It has all of those like same properties that we know and enjoy in crypto. Near intense is an application that has no technical dependency, vice versa with near the blockchain. And the near, the near intense application is a little bit more trusted, has a little bit more opinions about it, is not fully like cypherpunk. And that's also true for any bridge whatsoever. Cross train bridges have dependencies in them. That's just the nature of how they are.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's another thing that happened this week, which is base. So Coinbase, they, they have a protocol. It's not the ERC 20, but it's a base standard. So you can run something called the B 20. It's a token protocol standard on base. And you can also do ERC 20s, but B 20 now added a seize function on top of it. So that the, the author of the B 20 token standard has the ability to actually seize assets if they are stolen in a hack like this. And this is not the full cypherpunk, crypto punk version, but it is product market fit for something like equities. If you're the issuer of an equity and North Korea steals your, you know, your capital, essentially.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Your Apple shares, yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not just going to be like, oh, I guess that, you know, North Korea is on my, my board now. I guess they have a seat on governance, right?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Let's send them, let's send them the Zoom call.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just like, won't issue your tokenized shares in that format at all. So we have space for fully cypherpunk, you know, store value assets. We haven't lost that. And now we're getting, you know, other product market fit for different use cases. I mean, I think it all makes sense and this is much ado about nothing.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Speaking of near, we also got a near ETF this week out of Bitwise. So this is ticker NRR, the Bitwise near ETF. Pretty notable launch if you compare it to Solana, we have some pretty healthy numbers, something like over half a percent of the total near supply flowed into the Bitwise near ETF on day one, which is pretty crazy, half a percent of the total supply. If you look at like the Bitwise narrative as like what near is, because Bitwise educates to the next marginal circle of investors outside of crypto.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, how are they selling it?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Intersection of crypto and AI.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Near intense, which is a primary near product is seeing rapid growth. Near is quantum resistant and private, highly scalable, low inflation with revenue funding buybacks. So.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  All makes sense. Good time to launch an ETF when you're on the upswing like that. Uh, let's talk about what's next. New York says prediction markets are actually illegal gambling. What's the news there? Is this going to go to the Supreme Court? Also, Vitalik with a post on the week. He says Ethereum isn't a blockchain anymore. Actually, not just a blockchain, it's something else. And it has the, the words world computer in it. We'll talk about all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. 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 10 10 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point.

• 43:52Speaker 01

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

• 44:23Speaker 00

  The state of New York has filed a lawsuit against prediction market company, Polymarket, saying that the platform is operating an unlicensed gambling business in New York. State officials have asked the judge to stop the company from operating in New York and are also seeking financial penalties and payments to users who took part in the platform. Also additionally.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Wait, users too?

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Uh, got to protect the users, you know? A US appeals court on Friday ruled against the prediction market operator Kalshi, saying Ohio and Tennessee can regulate its so-called event contracts under their gambling laws. So two blows to prediction markets this week. Polymarket getting sued by New York, Kalshi losing a case against Tennessee and Ohio. This, the outcome of this, the current state of, there's like a, a game of risk being played by the prediction markets teamed up with the CFTC versus the states. And it's pretty split. Uh, and so there's different like circuits with, with the court. The states have won the sixth circuit, that's Ohio and Tennessee, and the ninth circuit,

• 45:31Speaker 00

  that's Nevada. Kalshi won the third circuit with New Jersey and New Jersey's attorney general already asked the Supreme Court for a review. And so there are still some circuits to play out, but it seems kind of inevitable that this is heading to the Supreme Court. David, actually the writer David from, from Bankless has been writing on this. So if you want to follow, I think he's actually the person producing the best content about the inevitable conclusion of prediction markets in the Supreme Court. So you can subscribe to the newsletter.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  I mean, it's definitely going to the Supreme Court, right?

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Day with destiny.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Well, states, states want their cut. They've had their cut on other sports gambling in the past. And so they're going for the cut. I guess that's what the judges are ruling. The CFTC is on, you know, team, these are just markets, any event contract markets. And so the Supreme Court, I guess, is going to have to decide. That seems pretty, not existential, but incredibly important. That ruling will be incredibly important for the future of prediction markets. And it's sort of a, a binary type ruling, right?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, Coinbase has received a CFTC approval for Coinbase Clearing LLC. This is the third of three licenses that one can get out of the, out of the CFTC. And Coinbase now has all of them. So Coinbase can now be the exchange, the broker and the clearinghouse for fully collateralized derivatives. So this is not margin, this is not perpetuals. This is prediction markets and this is also crypto binaries and fully paid options. So just getting a little bit more options in the derivative space, which includes prediction markets. This is what Coinbase needed to do to fully ignore Kalshi, kind of in the same way Robinhood did previously.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Robinhood first had Kalshi as his prediction market supplier. And then Robinhood just gave Kalshi the boot for its own prediction markets platform. Coinbase now has the ability to do this as well.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Do you think, do you wonder if like Polymarket and Kalshi will kind of fight back in the form of launching a crypto exchange? So if Coinbase and Robinhood are going to come into their territory, then what's to stop Polymarket from say, becoming more an exchange and kind of, they all, we're seeing this with the, the AI labs, right? You know, the frontier labs are all somewhat circling around and launching the same thing.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Uh, sure. I mean, they're going after Coinbase's gargantuan business and like Robinhood too, for example. Honestly, that's why I'm kind of a hood bull is because the best thing to have in all of this debate, if everything is going to become the everything finance app, the super finance app, then like, you want to buy the one with a distribution, which is kind of why I'm bullish Robinhood. Cause like Robinhood has all of those things. And then it also has the 50 million customers or whatever.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Product skills too, right? They have the ability to stitch it all together in a pleasing user experience and that is a cut above.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  A delightful user experience was ringing in my ears by the end of the hood summit.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of a delightful user experience, are you ready for the cryptographic world's computer, David?

• 48:36Speaker 00

  What the fuck is this segue?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  This is, um, I think the point is like, uh, this is Vitalik and he put out a post this week and he said that Ethereum is not so much a world computer anymore. And he's going with a phrase, it's more like a cryptographic world computer. And he's basically talking about the original genesis of blockchains back in the 2010s and what they were, what Ethereum really was and what they're going to be soon. They're starting to become now what Ethereum is going to be in, say, 2030. And the big difference is you go from a world where you have to, if you're Bitcoin or early versions of Ethereum, um, you have to reprocess

• 49:20Speaker 01

  every single transaction. That's how you get verifiability to a world where all you have to do is verify it. He's talking about a world that has been unlocked with ZK proof technology, ZK snarks, ZK starks, that sort of thing. And he calls this a fundamentally different world. In fact, I mean, do you even call Ethereum just a blockchain at that point? Or you're kind of limiting it if you just think about it as a blockchain. It's really a cryptographic world computer for the verification of whatever you need to verify. And so a lot of the compute, a lot of the things can happen somewhere else. Ethereum is just used for verification purposes. One poster put it this way, Ethereum does not

• 50:04Speaker 01

  have to be fast enough to do everything, only to verify it. And he said practically, um, with ZK, the unlock, you know, we're doing some of this today. Peer DAS was attested to this, of course, uh, snark proofs. Um, decentralization goes from being sort of a, a cost that we pay to being an advantage, right? Because we can have parallel compute, parallel storage. It's sort of like the magic of, of snarks that I think we've previously been very excited about at Bankless. And what you actually get, the guarantees you get are guaranteed inclusion. So this is fossil. This is censorship resistance that really can't be tampered with. And I think Ethereum, once it ships fossil, will be best

• 50:46Speaker 01

  in class there. He promises base layer privacy, quantum safety, four to eight second latency. I think you'd like to see that even lower, but at least four to eight seconds. And then light nodes that verify instead of trust. You can run everything in the light node. So it's kind of packaging the entire Ethereum roadmap, but in this term of not just a blockchain going off of, you know, paying homage to Ethereum, the world computer, the cryptographic world computer. I read, I'd loved your impressions of this. I'm not even sure if you read this, but I read this and I was simultaneously incredibly bullish and also bearish. And

• 51:28Speaker 01

  that's how I kind of feel about Ethereum these days is just like, this is the most bullish thing I've ever read, I think. Or maybe it's like a road to Urbitz and like, because we're not talking about use cases at all in this post, which always worries me. Like, I'm always like, you know, that goose meme of like, you know, it's chasing guy, like, I'm like, world computer for what? For what? What are we building it for? Just tell me. And I think the thing we're building it for is store of value for money assets, for censorship resistant store of value. That would totally make sense to me, but that's not in the post. We're talking about abstract verification cases that are hard

• 52:10Speaker 01

  to wrap your arms around. So Ethereum is just this really interesting project, I think, right now, where it's like, in some ways, it's the most ambitious thing that exists in crypto. And in other ways, like, we're still, like Vitalik anyways, not the champion.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  We're still trying to find how to use it.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Well, Vitalik is not the champion of describing exactly how it's used in the real world. And so there's a lot of layers that have to happen in between that.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think our kids are going to find some really cool things to do with Ethereum. And I, I kind of think that that, what I'm saying was like, that same thing is what you're saying is like, I do think that this is going to be incredibly useful as we accelerate as a society, as, you know, the future is going to be so weird. This is something I've been saying on this podcast forever. The future is going to be so weird. It's going to move so quickly. Uh, if you extrapolate some of the conclusions of the sovereign individual, which is a book we've cited a handful of times, like, the role of governments just kind of gets nerfed to the power of the internet and technology.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  And in that world, we need some society ordering system like Ethereum.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Some truth machines, some verification machines.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Some global, global truth machines that exist that transcend nation states and are even higher and, and more powerful than nation states. And I just don't know what to do with that right now. But like, I think in the future, we're, as a society, we're really, really, really going to need it. But the, but now it's just like, yo, let's do, let's do like-

• 53:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny though.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Sub-second blockchains to trade tokenized assets.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I feel like Bankless from inception was sort of built around answering a bit of what to do with that. And our answer has always been like decentralized finance. It's been monetary use cases. That's the thing we do with it.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Then, then we were really hopeful on like the next layer, which would be like decentralized identity and, uh, alternative systems that otherwise the government would give you.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  And maybe we were too accelerated in our timeframes, but it's just like, it seems further than ever today.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  That's the bullish piece, right? Of all of this. It's still like an incredibly radical, revolutionary, massive TAM potential thing, world computer, cryptographic world computer. And then the bear side of it is like, all right, like connect these to the actual use cases. And I feel like crypto is very much pivoted into use cases season, right? Where's the revenue you're throwing off? Who's using it? What's actually happening on these systems? And the biggest use case to me for Ethereum is still the Bitcoin style store of value type use case and DeFi associated with that. And that's not in the world computer, cryptographic world computer. I mean, that's not the branding of that. So somebody else is going to have

• 54:57Speaker 01

  to add that. Barnaby from ETH Labs added this important kind of pushback, agrees that this is incredibly bullish, um, except for one thing, needs to make sure that state, the valuable state remains on Ethereum's L1. It's not just verification, not just settlement. He says this, I don't want a liquidation resolving on some other server, an AVE server. That valuable state has to stay on Ethereum. And I think that is an important piece that previous renditions of the Ethereum roadmap, like the L2 roadmap, have missed. So hopefully people like ETH Labs can add that layer to it. Hopefully people like Tom Lee can come in and give a narrative that's not the cryptographic world computer to investors. And maybe it all comes together into something really beautiful here.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it's 2026, so we don't need to beat a dead horse, but after Vitalik talked about all these amazing Ethereum properties, like quantum resistant verification on your phone, like verification of your account balance of Ether, the asset on your phone. And dot, dot, dot, that's why Ether is the best asset of all time.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be awesome.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Wouldn't it be great if you had said that?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's, it feels like it's very sayable.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  It's just like, say, say why it's good for Ether, the asset.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Oh my God. Oh my God. All right. Um, last thing to close this out. Uh, this was a tweet I saw circulating. I saw it in a number of financial publications, actually. Yano from Blockworks, calling out a Financial Times piece. Uh, this is a chief economist at Apollo saying that AI assistants like Muse, which was released, I believe in the last week or so, Instinct, also ChatGPT's DOT, uh, they could be used to cause a bank run because consumers, they start using these AI agents. They say, hey, AI agent, optimize my finances. The very first thing an AI agent is going to say after they say, cancel your, whatever subscriptions that you don't use, is, hey, look at your savings. You have 5,000

• 56:59Speaker 01

  in savings.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Hey, that, that $5,000 in your Wells Fargo account? Why don't we take that and put that somewhere else?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yep. Put it in a SoFi app and you can get, you know, four or 5%. Put it in stable coins. You get it, you know, 5%. Why not do that? And then, oh, you want me to do that for you? No problem. Click here, click. And then the AI agent will go do that. Well, problem is David, banks aren't set up that way because they love to extract rent on consumer savings.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  From those who don't want to get 5% on their savings deposits.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was the big issue that they, the flag that they threw with the Clarity Act, the stablecoin yield, right? It's just like, oh no, this will drain all the deposits out of the banks and this will collapse the, um, US lending system, right? Well, AI agents may also deliver that in the form of, uh, an instinct or a muse or a DOT that is working on the user's behalf instead of for the banks. So to me, all of this is great news, but um, maybe the banks will get alarmed and try to, try to block these AI agents in Congress?

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, they certainly will, because that's their one job is to protect their margins and this is how they get the margins. I mean, overall, if this thesis does play out, I'm incredibly bullish on just the world because of all the AI agents that are making like my money more capital efficient. Think, if they can do this, think about all the other things that they can optimize. Like the world's just going to get better a lot faster. And part of that is that money is going to leave the banks. That's a, the world's going to be a better place as a result.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I agree with that. It's bad for rent extractors, but-

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Yes, it's bad for rent extractors.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Everybody else. But by the way, are you using any of these AI agents that have come out? So ChatGPT just released their DOT yesterday. I don't know if it's too soon if you've even seen that, but there's Muse, there's Instinct. It's basically like, um, shrink wrapped versions of OpenClaw. You remember the whole OpenClaw thing?

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  You set it loose. You connect it to your stuff.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  I've heard positive things.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  It works for you in the background. It wakes you up or whatever. Sometimes it'll give you a phone call and it'll just be like, hey, David, you're like, you gotta get to your meeting. Uh, you know, you're late.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Can I get it to check my email for me?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. That's table stakes. That's table stakes for these things.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. Maybe I'll get that.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's worth the privacy trade-offs for you, but, um, it is interesting and is-

• 59:09Speaker 00

  I'll be your guinea pig. How about that?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  All right. That sounds great to me. David can be the guinea pig for the Bankless community too. So we'll, we'll wait his experiments.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Bankless Station, that has been it for the first week of October. We'll see you back here for the second. In the meantime, crypto is risky, but not risky enough. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.