ROLLUP: Redtober Is Here | AI Debt Fears | $102M Ledger Attack | Richard Heart Arrested

Uptober has turned into Redtober. Ryan and David unpack crypto’s selloff, why the early bull market may still be intact, and how inflation and AI debt fears are rattling markets. Plus, Ledger’s $102M supply-chain attack, Bank of America’s $5B scandal, and Richard Heart’s arrest. --- 📣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 🌎RIPIO | LOCAL CURRENCIES, ONCHAIN https://bankless.cc/ripio 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:09 Redtober: Crypto Selloff & Early Bull https://imgur.com/Jx7GgQg https://thedefireport.io/research/early-bull-reset https://x.com/tulipking/status/2110373109861675080 https://polymarket.com/predictions/midterms 10:38 Hot Inflation & AI Market Risks https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2110711659115200824 https://imgur.com/dok7hZN https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-vs-the-railroads 19:55 Ray Dalio's Debt Warning https://www.tradingview.com/news/benzinga:ef9c504ad094b:0-ray-dalio-warns-us-debt-crisis-could-deepen-as-2-1t-in-new-treasury-supply-hits-market-credit-market-players-call-that-a-death-spiral/ 26:23 Ledger's $102M Supply-Chain Attack https://x.com/Ledger_Support/status/2108551100613714002 https://x.com/MagicalTux/status/2108556423445835827 https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/ledger-finds-unauthorized-hardware.html https://news.bitcoin.com/security/cryptobilis-founder-reveals-company-was-sold-months-before-exploit/ 31:34 France's Crypto Wallet Reporting Proposal https://x.com/alistairmilne/status/2110051872363159959 34:52 Bank of America, CZ & Debanking https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2110309077175963947 https://x.com/nic_carter/thread/2110375740097138847 41:15 Richard Heart Arrested https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/10/15/hex-founder-richard-heart-arrested-in-istanbul-turkish-media-report https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/2110369479729299872 https://x.com/ercwl/status/2110385013900341709 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2110362834043273313 48:43 PaperTrade's 1,000x Leverage Game https://x.com/papertrade_xyz https://exchange.papertrade.xyz/dashboard https://www.theblock.co/news/defi/2026-10-11-trader-nets-1-28-million-on-new-1000x-exchange-papertrade-by-moving-hyperliquids-eth-prices-418239 53:28 Solana Upgrades & Starknet's Layer 1 Vote http://theblock.co/news/ecosystems/2026-10-15-starknet-opens-seven-day-vote-on-independent-layer-1-over-quantum-risks-418673 57:52 NEAR Foundation & Venice AI Growth https://x.com/TheBlockCo/status/2110717366447268011 https://x.com/sabrinaesaquino/status/2110126741142556857 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2110391671762325563 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, it is the third week of down-tober. We are not getting up-tober. It looks like October is not on the menu. It was the same exact thing that happened last year. Happy one-year anniversary, Ryan, this week of 10-10. That happened one year and five days ago. Wow, it's been a while.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  You said this was like last year, but like last year was a lot worse than this. I'd just like to say, I mean, we're not that down that much. Like last year was like the end of crypto's fourth cycle.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  October last year started with a hint of bullishness and then quickly reversed course to be very, very red. And so that is a repeat of last year.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Turning red, aren't we?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Last year Bitcoin started at like 120,000 and then ended at like 80,000 or 90,000 or something. And we started this month, or even last month, in 60,000, and we're ending 80,000 last month. And so this is what I said. The direction of travel is quite different.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Every month, we start out with the rollups, saying the words "up-tober" curses the month, okay? And it's bound to be a down-tober instead, or like a blood-red-tober.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  It's not just us, though. Everyone in crypto does that. In addition to down-tober in the crypto markets, we also got a flush coming out of the AI sector of the traditional stock markets, both in the United States equities markets, but also the Korean stock market. Korean stock market down 23%, blowing back into the Nasdaq and the S&P. The AI credit part of the AI infrastructure build-out starting to show some cracks and maybe is blowing back into Bitcoin, into crypto, or maybe not. Ryan has a take?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  I do have a take on that. I don't know if it's the best-informed take, but I do have a take, David. Also, I have a take on the attack on the Ledger wallet supply chain, okay? Somebody was implementing a spy sort of device inside of Ledger wallets, the hardware wallets you guys know, that would read your seed phrase during setup and beam it to some hackers that would then steal your funds. Over 100 million in funds stolen this way. How deep does this attack go? We're also going to talk about the Bank of America. Apparently, they had been ignoring some suspicious activity, a little bit of terrorism, a little bit of drug cartels.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Money laundering.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Money laundering.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  A little bit of crime.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, 5 billion worth, and they were fined by Finson this week. CZ has some thoughts on that fine, actually, having been there before. What else we got?

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Richard Hart, we have not talked about that name in a very, very, very long time. Good riddance as well. Was arrested in Istanbul on an Interpol red notice. The law finally caught up to him. We're going to talk about the saga and how it all concludes. And I have a take about the hexicans that I want to share with you as well when we get there.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  That's great. Can't wait.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  And then we're also, I'm going to talk to Ryan about paper trade.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is this thing? What the heck is this thing?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  I know Ryan has been just dying to get his hands on a way to go 1,000x long in any particular direction.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  That's what we're doing.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  So we're going to talk about what it's been like in paper trade 10 days in or so. But let's start in the crypto markets. Bitcoin is down 2.5% on the week to 82,500. I think we're actually are recovering a little bit at the time of recording, at least some of the down-market coins. But overall, down 2% on the week. I think there was a lot of bullishness as the Bitcoin price broke through the previous May highs of this year into $85,000, $87,000. We are now below the May highs, and so people are now worried about, I don't think we're so worried about setting a lower low, but I think people are worried about setting a higher low but going down nonetheless. Like the whole Ben Cowan

• 3:51Speaker 00

  bearish until the midterms take seems to be coming back into focus, back into view.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  I thought he reversed on that, though. He did reverse on that, right?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  He didn't quite reverse on it. He said that he was wrong about getting new highs above the May highs, but he still like held out like room for like, the midterms could still be rough. I was just wrong about having like a new high set in this year.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, maybe this is part of a midterm sell-off, of course. So on Polly Markets, 64% chance the Democrats take the Senate right now, and 91% chance the Democrats take the House. So this could be a blue sweep coming in early November.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  And you can't imagine that the crypto assets want that. Like, over the last like month or so, we have to have seen like Bitcoin and other crypto assets just pricing a Democrat win, right?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wonder, but I mean, like, why would that be so negative for crypto at this point? I could understand why a crypto disparaging president would be incredibly negative for crypto, but it's not like we have any laws in Congress, right? Clarity's dead. What does crypto have? Yeah, I don't know that this would be so bearish for crypto.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, traders could just be trading it, right? Like, I agree with you, the fundamental analysis. I don't think the Democrats are going to come in and be like, "All right, let's rip everything about crypto out." I don't think they care that much. They're mostly indifferent to crypto.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  They're focused on AI right now.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're focused, AI is like taking all of the flak, yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really has. I was going to say, I think because, part of the reason the vibe seems so down this week is not just because of Bitcoin. It's only actually off 2.5%. It's because of the rest of the alt market has continued to sell off. We started seeing that in the beginning of October, and that has persisted, eat down 7.5% on the week. But if you look at Sol, Zek, Hype, Near, another 10% down, and that's stacking on, what, the 10%, 15% down from last week? What's happening in the altcoin market right now?

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess using Bitcoin as a barometer for the market isn't really that useful these days because Bitcoin has just been really slow. A lot of the activity has been down-market in some of those coins that you've mentioned. Near, in the last like two hours, so we are recording right now at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, in the last two hours, some tokens have had a rebound in strength. So VVV is up 10% on the day. Near is actually back up above $5. So there's definitely been some strength in the market. Not everywhere. Pump and Lit are both down 20%. Hype is down 10%. Zcash down 10%. And so, yeah, it continues to be a flush from some of the strongest assets in the market, but you're still seeing some strength.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Do you remember what 2023 felt like? That was the early bull of last cycle. I want you to teleport your mind back there.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  It was early bull, but we still felt like shit.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. That was sort of the point Michael NATO made this week in the DeFi report, and he looked at this number, which is, so in blue, you see the 50-week moving average for Bitcoin and the Bitcoin price in purple. And at the time of inflection, the same point at which we saw this time, where things started to flip early bull bullish, we did stay above the 50-week moving average, which is about 78k Bitcoin. So if we stay above the 50-week moving average, and the average will go down a little bit over time, that would still mean a Bitcoin over 75k. That said, though,

• 7:33Speaker 01

  there was about seven months of oscillation, of sideways action, of like, we might call it Bart's on the charts, right? Where it held this very narrow range. We had two times 17% corrections on Bitcoin and just seven months of absolute chop, even though it was the early bull market in 2023. So that's kind of the way early bull markets feel. They feel sideways.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  It's like Schrödinger's market, like, is it a bull market? Is it a bear market? You just don't know until hindsight.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so still, my base case is that we have broken the back of the bear market, that we're not going bear.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  For sure. We are not setting a lower low. We are not going down the low that we set a couple of months ago.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Exactly, but that doesn't mean like the good times are here and like it's all, you know, going to be sunshine and rainbows and easy from here on out. That's not what the early bull market actually has been in the past. It's not what it feels like. So we're probably continuing to just maintain that trend.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. There are some just idiosyncrasies. Like, this is a new cycle. We are in a new era of crypto. Everyone feels it. We're in like the product era. It is interesting to me that like, with one big story of this last flush or so, the last two weeks, is like, what are the tokens that have really spawned this boost in crypto morale that are up anywhere between 4 and 10x from the bottom? Like, VVV at $24 right now was $1.59 months ago. You know, Zcash was $50 12, 14 months ago. So some of these tokens are up bigly.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Like Lit, for example, was $1. Now it's at $3, touched $5.50. Revenue generating assets, other than Zcash.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Zcash is not that.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Revenue generating assets are all up very, very big. Hype, the big one, is up very, has been up very, very big. It's all revenue generating. And that, those assets really changed the whole tide, the whole morale of the rest of the market. And two weeks ago, what, even last week, it really kind of did the euthanasia roller coaster where people are like, "Oh, the bull market's on. Let me go take a leveraged long position on a super illiquid dogshit coin." Like, I don't want to name examples because I just made it mean, but there were people buying the bottom of, calling them quality alts, and let me tell you, they were not quality arts alts. So we just skipped into like the bull market froth way too soon. And that was like last week, and now I think we're

• 10:09Speaker 00

  just paying our debts from like people going from fundamentals to like rampant speculation just way too fast in crypto. And that's getting flushed out right now.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I agree. And I also agree with the idea that our tokens seem much stronger this cycle than in previous cycles. And I think that could persist into the, like, into this early bull phase and then into kind of wealth creation phases a little bit later. So that might be where the majority of crypto alpha has actually generated less Bitcoin dominance this time around. But let's talk about some of the other things in the waters in macro and financial markets. I think the big thing we should start with is inflation. It came in pretty hot this week, David. So September inflation came in at 3.7%. That is almost

• 10:56Speaker 01

  4%. This is versus an expected 3.6%. It was 3.4% in August. And I mean, this, like, when you start to get to 4% inflation, I mean, that does not feel normal at all. I think this is going to bite Republicans in the midterms as well. And where was the bulk of this inflation coming from?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Energy, gas, air travel, which is gas. Fuel, I don't know why fuel and gas are in different categories, but they are. It's all energy. It's all downstream of the Iran war and increased gas prices coming out of the Strait of Hormuz.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so when you have hot inflation prints, then what happens is the probability that the Fed has to raise rates increases. And that's what we saw in prediction markets and probabilities go up that the Fed was going to continue to increase. We also saw the 10-year and the 30-year long-duration US bonds, they spiked back up. So they were starting to settle down a little bit. Now they spiked back up on the, on the back of this because of course, investors in bonds want higher yields in exchange for this very hot, these very hot inflation numbers. It's just, I mean, GDP has been pretty high lately, you know, tracking five, between five and maybe 6%. And inflation has been hot too, so 3% to 4%.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Just the nominal number here, like nominal growth here is like pretty large, right? So I guess real growth, we might be like 1% to 2% in real terms. When we got 4% inflation, 5%, 6% GDP growth, everything is running pretty hot on the money side of things. Also, the AI financing concerns popped up. There was CoreWeave, which, I don't know if you saw this, David, but CoreWeave, which is kind of the neo-cloud story, it's data centers for AI. It fell 17% on Wednesday. Okay?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  And the big scare was CoreWeave bonds, which now the 2032 bonds bought at par four months ago, so bought at 100, trade at 78 cents. Okay, so this implies that CoreWeave might have a greater than 50% chance of default in the next five years. That's what bond investors are pricing this as. And so it's become a narrative again of like, okay, like, how is the AI buildout going? Are the revenues justifying the amount of capex spend? Where is that capex spend coming from? Because in 2025, it was all retained earnings from hyperscalers.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It's just basically profits on their balance sheet, cash on their balance sheet. Now it's bonds. Here's a chart from the No Opinion post I read this morning. Look at 2026. This is the amount of bonds issuing, issued by the hyperscalers that are flooding the market. So we're starting to see more and more debt, more and more leverage to fund the AI buildout, which means everyone is focused on kind of the revenue side. What is Anthropic? Is OpenAI? Are these, these neo-clouds, are they generating enough revenue to justify the, the loans and the debt that these companies are taking on? And when there's little blips, like there was a blip this week on OpenAI revenue projections, this was in the last week or two, and also Anthropic.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Anthropic, yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Both, right?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Both, really?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. OpenAI, it looks like it's coming in closer to 50 billion ARR, rather than the 68, 70 billion that investors thought. Anthropic is looking a little softer as well. And again, still growing insanely quarter to quarter, but just not as fast as it had been previously. So people are wondering if, if revenue is starting to approach that S-curve. And when that happens, then the entire AI trade starts to become suspect. I should say like NASDAQ is down 1% to 2% on this. So it hasn't hit, you know, the stock indices in large measures, just hitting some specific sectors. But you're starting to, to hear this narrative once again that, okay, like debt funded, is this like railroads again?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Is this 1873, when, just after a railroad boom, we ran out of debt, loans started going bad and it caused like, you know, a multi-year depression in the US?

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Did it cause a multi-year depression?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Oh, nice.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  So it caused a multi-year depression, it looks like this. Noah actually has another chart in his story, it looks something like this. Let me see if I can find that. Here you go. This is the number of miles of railroads built in the US. And I think these bars are kind of like, you know, depression, recession type bars.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Depression in the number of miles built, but not a broad economic contraction.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Oh no, it definitely did that too. It definitely did that too. See, see this gray part, that is all kind of recession, negative growth arrows of the chart. But, but here's the interesting thing about the railroads, you know, there were multiple cycles of this too. So you see this like.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  So after there was a flush, they just, they started happening again?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  There was a boom in the 1870s and then a bust. Okay? And then there was another bigger boom in the 1880s, followed by another bust. And then there was another bigger boom in like the late 1880s, followed by another bust.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Wow, that's funny.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Right? So you had multiple cycles of this with railroad infrastructure.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  All of this in the AI sector feels very expected. The efficient frontier of AI investment requires some amount of leverage, right? It's just like, who, of all the companies that have burned through their cash, before AI really turned into like an investment project, all the big companies, all the hyperscalers like Facebook, Amazon, all had, were sitting on piles of cash, like Microsoft.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Burned through all that cash, but the race isn't over and so you have to go into debt.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  And there is a, a correct amount of debt, a correct amount of risk.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  You can't, you can't have no debt because the race is still on. You can't have too much debt because you'll get wiped out. But there is a correct amount of debt and whichever company plays this game correctly is going to be one of the winners. And so when we see like people like CoreWeave kind of getting punished by the market or other companies getting punished by the market, this is what you would expect to happen when the market is so sensitive to Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue numbers. So we got Anthropic's revenue numbers this week, $16.8 billion of Q3 revenue, which is up 50, 5-0% quarter over quarter, which how can you be upset about that?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  You can, if you're expecting like 100% or 120%.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  So there was 140% revenue growth quarter over quarter between Q1 and Q2, and then only 45% revenue growth in Q3, the 50% number I just quoted.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And so it's actually slowing down. And so when people are on margin and the acceleration slows, the acceleration is decelerating, then all of a sudden, the people on the further end of the risk spectrum get in trouble the most. This is totally normal and expected and markets climb a wall of worry and I feel like this is just what this looks like.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it, it is the case that like you need 100%, 140%, some more numbers like that in order to justify the amount of capex that's being spent here. Of course, Korea was starting to price this in. So didn't you say that the COPC was down almost like 20% or something like this?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, 23%. And the COPC is our NASDAQ or SPY. So imagine if the SPY was down 20%, 20%. The reason why it's like that is because memory stocks, just like chip producers for the AI buildout are such a large part of the Korean stock market. And so the Korean stock market is down a very big amount. When the Korean stock market is down that much, it blows back into the American stock markets. So there's a little bit of contagion happening here. You know, if the, if the AI trade hadn't kind of unwound in the last week, would crypto prices be higher? Probably also true, they probably would be higher. It maybe is a little bit of that. Did crypto need to cool off? Yes.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  And the reason why we, we know this is true is because, as we said, Bitcoin was down like 1% or 2% on the week, but the big ones that have gone up multiples are up down 20 to 30%.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like our equivalent of memory stocks went down.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like overall, I think there's a lot of reasons to talk about. We talked about inflation, the AI climbing a wall of worry, people worry about leverage, revenue growth stalling out, but also timing with just like, yo, crypto was running hot for a hot bit.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Well, can I give you the, the backdrop on this and maybe a projection beyond where we are in 2026 into 2027? This was, I think this was kind of the required reading of the week. My favorite piece of the week was from Ray Dalio. He had, wrote an article called Numbers Behind the Bond and Bear Market and Outlook to Equities, all of these things. And here was this major point, and I want to see if this resonates for you, David, because due to all of your crypto experience, living through these cycles, okay? He said the big problem that he sees in the 2027 horizon, he of course talked about debt to GDP and interest payments, how that was going to hit in kind of like the, the fiscal dominance era that we're in.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And he also talked about rollovers. So we're moving a lot of the long-term bonds in the US, the long-term debt, we're converting those to bills, we're converting them to three-month, one-year, shorter-term treasuries, of course, we're trying to sell it. In 2027, there is going to be a lot more debt that needs to be sold to investors. You have much more supply and you have whatever demand is available to sop that up. So he says this, "The way I would think about the 2027 challenge is that the supply of debt will likely rise from about 3.5 trillion in 2025 to about 4.4 trillion in 2027.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And that doesn't include the debt rollovers, where we have to take the long-term debt, roll that over into short-term debt." Okay, so think of this as like token issuance, token over supply, and you have to have an extra 1 trillion in dollar token demand to sop that up. And if you don't have that, well, yields will have to continue to increase to compensate. So you have that happening in 2027. And that's just government debt. Then you have all of the AI debt looking for buyers. Again, token issuance, token debt, looking for demand of buyers who, investors who want the exposure to that type of debt, competing against this too.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  So a lot of issuance, and not only issuance and debt at all-time highs and growing at pretty exponential rates, we also have a lot more equity token issuance. All right? You get a SpaceX IPO, you get the Anthropic IPO. Okay? Even Google, for the first time, I don't know, in decades, issued shares this year.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Issued net new shares in order to fund some of their expenditures. So a lot of new equity issuance.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Makes me want to buy some hard assets.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Okay? Things that don't inflate in supply, and that was actually Dalio's conclusion here. He's like. 2027, I see long-term yields continuing to ramp up. I see equities being kind of flat. It doesn't matter what price to earnings do and like profits do. If we have all of this new issuance, there's not going to be enough demand to sop it up. So he again is back to, yeah, you better have gold, maybe a slice of Bitcoin and prepare for the debasement trade. I'm not sure if he's entirely right. I feel like directionally, he's going to be right. I don't know if this all hits in 2027 or we get to extend this a little bit longer.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  But this piece is kind of required reading, in my opinion, for understanding the debasement trade and why hard assets and why crypto monies.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  I don't think anything Ray Dalio says will be able to be like confirmed right in a short timeframe. He's just such a long-term guy. It also kind of makes him just seem a little bit infalsifiable, but that's a topic for a different day.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. That would be the main criticism of Dalio.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  He's like, over 80 years, I'll be right. I'm like, all right, dude, I need to make some trades this decade, please. All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about the ledger, the ledger exploit attack, a physical supply chain attack on real ledgers bought from a real reseller, but with a spy chip in the ledger, over $100 million have been gone. And also Bank of America just ignores $5 billion of money laundering going through their bank. I thought, I thought banks weren't supposed to do that. The terrorists and drug cartels? We're going to talk about all the bankers that went to jail as a result of all this. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. I've been trading crypto for almost a decade and I've used so many different wallets, exchanges, aggregators or front ends.

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• 25:59Speaker 00

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• 26:23Speaker 00

  So on October 9th, which was Friday of last week, Ledger began investigating wallet thefts that had been linked to ledgers sold by a Southeast Asian reseller, CryptoBilis, and ordered CryptoBilis to halt sales and shipments. Ledger later confirmed that a hardware implant had been found in at least one effective affected device. So some poor soul bought a ledger from an authorized reseller and then put their money in the ledger after setting up their ledger and then their money was gone.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Many poor souls, we should, we should specify.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Starts with one, starts with one. The investigation starts with one. And then so Ledger opens up this ledger, be like, hey, there's this extra chip in here. We need to figure out what this chip does. And so what the chip did was it intercepted, you've, you've set up a few ledgers in your lifetime, right? I'm sure many of the listeners have. You go and you set up your ledger and your ledger securely gives you 24 words and that's securely produced on the device. And you plug it into the ledger software on your computer and the ledger software says, this is a verified ledger device, you can trust it. None of that was tampered with. The new chip intercepted when the ledger device gives you the 24 words, it just watches that go onto the screen and then using a radio transmitter, it transmits that over

• 27:41Speaker 00

  data using an electronic SIM to the attackers. And so the ledger device is, it's tampered, but it's not, the software is not tampered with. As this investigation continued, as of that Ledger's October 13th update, hundreds of reported exploited devices were found across different reports, over estimated $102 million stole from 324 wallets. Wallets, not individual victims, but you could imagine individual victims are in maybe the one, the 100 range. Yeah, so physical supply chain attack, we've seen these before, but not at this scale. But this is by far the biggest supply chain, physical supply chain attack in crypto.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it was relatively sophisticated as well. This company, CryptoBilis, was not a recent reseller. They'd been a long time reseller of Ledger products for Ledger, somewhere in Asia, right? And they were purchased by a Chinese national company of some kind. Now, this company seemed to be sort of shady. I believe they were purchased six months ago. The previous owners were under NDA, so they couldn't even, they felt like they couldn't disclose that they were purchased. And this, this new purchaser quite clearly was some sort of op that was installing a spy device in the ledgers in order to harvest those seed phrases and those private keys,

• 29:08Speaker 01

  gather up enough of them and at the point, right before they were discovered, actually launched the attack. So all of this hit because somebody cracked open a ledger and was like, huh, there's a spy device here. Posted that on Twitter. And then it seemed like whoever's operating CryptoBilis then was like, oh shit, our cover's blown. We better get out with the private keys we had and then just started draining the wallets with all the private keys they had. And that's where you get the 100 million number from all of that.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Do you see who posted that picture on Twitter?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is Mark Kropelis, right? The Mad Gox guy.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  He's on his redemption arc.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Scary attack though, right? And this begs the question of how many other parts of the supply chain might be infiltrated? And Ledger is still trying to, like, I saw reports that possibly there were some resellers in, in Europe that had some tampered devices. I mean, you just don't know, there's quite an incentive to tamper if you're a reseller of these devices.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. The buying from a reseller, even though it's an authorized reseller, doesn't seem like a good idea. Definitely don't do an unauthorized one. Like people were talking about reports of people bought, bought like used ledgers, like, give me a break.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like go on eBay and just be like, oh, yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Don't do that. But also like buying from Ledger has also resulted in like data exploits, which has also made self-custody hard. Self-custody has just taken L after L after L in the last like two years.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, a bunch of punches to the gut. And not only that, I mean, this attack aside, we should just say, the way to purchase a hardware wallet or the best way to purchase a hardware wallet is, is definitely from the company itself, not from a third-party reseller in any case.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Even from the company, like they, the company is dependent on the supply chain as well.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're, they're not producing the chips. They are, they're servicing that out to a third-party producer.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And there's never been an issue there so far. But again, these attacks keep getting more and more sophisticated and they just find the points of vulnerability. So that's, that's definitely a hit to self-custodial wallets. You could use multi-cigs, you can have multiple, there are ways around this, but it is a hit to self-custody usability. Speaking of which, David, not only are we taking hits from, from hackers and like pirates taking these funds, also governments coming after self-custody. And I think this is going to happen more and more in countries that are having a problem servicing their debts. Okay, France is one of those countries, relatively high debt to GDP, yields on French bonds going up.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I don't know if you've seen the, the high school protests in France, government looking for new ways to get money, new ways to get capital. And one of the things they want to prevent is any sort of backdoors, maybe with crypto. There was a amendment in, in France put together by some MPs that was reported out that would require all self-custody wallets to be declared. Okay, so you have to declare whether you have a self-custody wallet, if it's over, at first it was 100K in euros and now there's a revision to make it 5K in euros. So any self-custody wallet you have that has over 5K euros in it, you have to declare and report to the French government.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And of course, we've seen hacks on the French infrastructure, tax infrastructure has actually revealed the holders and the locations and the addresses of these holders. So it's a massive physical security risk to all French citizens. Not only that, it's an inventory of digital property that the state maintains. And you know, this is like.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  That's in other contexts, it's called a hit list.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it's like, just like not a good direction of, of travel, certainly. But you could see, this is a French government trying to seal off all of the doors for any form of, of capital flight and you know, suspicious that some of that capital flight could come in the form of crypto. So another hit on self-custody.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  One of the quotes that resonated with me at token 2499, I saw this was, I can't remember who was giving this presentation, but it was about Zcash. Assets that can be seen can be seized. And so if it is advocating for putting your Z cash in the shielded pool, but like even if it's Bitcoin, for example, like you would think Bitcoin is like very seizure resistant. And mathematically, that's true until quantum. But if the government knows and can link physical, digital property to your identity, then they have means to go after you and your $5,000 of like digital assets that you keep in your, in your back pocket.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Well, so if you're the French government, you're trying to do that. How soon until you just ban any form of privacy? So you can't have a private self custodial wallet or that's illegal, subject to fines, subject to jail time. I mean, that would be the logical direction of travel here, right?

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. I don't know if that would be bullish or bearish.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  It seems to be just a thing that is happening that markets and the world will have to contend with. Speaking of something else that's happening.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Speaking of things that are happening, I saw that transition coming from so far.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Bank of America, David, the biggest fine in US history from the OCC to a bank, 1.2 to an American bank, I should say, $1.2 billion, hitting Bank of America with a fine for $1.2 billion. The charge is that the bank failed to flag over $5 billion in suspicious transactions. Money laundering, yeah. Chinese money laundering networks, illicit finance, drug cartels, terrorism, the gamut, $5 billion worth. And so this was a penalty that FinCEN, OCC issued to the Bank of America for, for these, for these crimes.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  CZ had an interesting take on this. No one went to prison, no home confinement, no DPA's, no one was charged, water under the bridge onwards. Very interesting that no, no bank manager, no banker was harmed, was sent to jail, was, was, was threatened by this. This was just a fine at the corporate level, unlike when FinCEN has taken actions in crypto, where people like CZ have actually gone to jails. There's a little bit of hypocrisy there.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, this reminds me of Bill Gurley's talk a couple of years ago at the All In Summit, where he was just talking about like, yeah, like the reason why stuff this happens is because certain sectors have a very close approximation to DC. Like the, the banks are in DC. You know, who wasn't in DC when CZ got arrested and put in jail? Crypto. Crypto was not paying its protection money to the DC racket, but the banks have been paying protection money to the DC racket for years. And so that's why they are allowed to get away with this.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  And that's also why in a counter move, crypto has decided to move into DC.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Pay protection money to the DC racket.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Honestly, it makes, it makes one jaded, like just like looking at the whole process. That's, that's what crypto had to do. And also it corrupts crypto in the process, the way it has corrupted banking.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  It's mutual, it's mutual corruption.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just like insidification of ER industries. And yeah, it's unfortunate, but AML KYC, I guess it doesn't work, David?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure it works when the state wants it to work.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  There was also simultaneously this week, a report from the OCC on de-banking. And Nick Carter was, was quick to claim this, we weren't imagining it. Operation Choke Point 2.0, the thing he had talked about so much was real. This report, he says, confirms it. So it confirms that banks between 2020 and 2025, banks in the US, based on all the complaints they saw in the investigation that the OCC did, de-banked individuals and businesses based on three things. Political risk, industry risk, religious risk, some combination of those. And that was enough criteria for a bank to de-bank someone.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Nothing illegal, just if you're in kind of a risky pool of actors as digital assets, as crypto was, you could be de-banked. This was actual policy coming out of the OCC. And this report kind of delineates it and puts a stop, formalizes it. And also reiterates that they're putting a stop to it now. So that, that's no longer continuing.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it feels like we're tracing over what we already knew to be true. I mean, certainly we knew it to be true, but I guess this kind of just makes it common knowledge for everyone else. But also everyone else doesn't care. Like the only people who still care about this are crypto people, right?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  I think anyone who's been de-banked cares about it. I guess people who have never been on the other side of that don't care about it.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. All right. Coming up next, we're going to talk about Richard Hart, the creator of Hacks. Just injustice, complete injustice to his arrest and seizure in Istanbul. We're going to talk about how we can free Richard Hart. And we're also going to talk about Paper Trade, where you can get 100, excuse me, 1,000 X leverage. But when you get liquidated, you get to be part of the house. We're going to talk about this and all of the, the shenanigans going on on Paper Trade. But first, we can talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. 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.

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• 40:27Speaker 01

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• 41:12Speaker 01

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

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Ryan, how do you label Richard Hart? Who was he in crypto? He was the founder of Hacks. He was a persona.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, Ponzi scheme demagogue, maybe.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, like cult leader. I think actually is one of the better descriptors of Richard Hart.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Richard, he had been in crypto since I was in crypto, since the very beginning.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  The amount of people he got into Bitcoin is actually pretty notable. The amount of people I heard, oh, I'm embarrassed to say this, but I actually got into Bitcoin because of Richard Hart.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Because of Richard Hart?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's one of these characters that, you know, in a different era, he would have started a literal religion. If he was in the 1800s or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, he was one of the first streamers before we have the modern streamers that we have today. He was like one of the first streamers. He created Hacks and Pulse Coin, Pulse Chain, Pulse X, all that kind of stuff. A US citizen that was living in Finland for quite a long time, was arrested in Istanbul on an Interpol red notice. We might remember going back to when the SEC was going after Richard Hart

• 42:30Speaker 00

  because of the assets that he had issued, the Pulse X, all the things that I just, I just mentioned. Richard Hart actually won that case. This was, the Interpol red notice was not because of the SEC, because that's the case was basically dismissed. That was dismissed on 20, in February of 2025, on jurisdictional grounds. This is what I learned this week. The way that Richard Hart got away with the SEC case was that, and this is something that when the Pulse Chain and Pulse X and all that kind of stuff was being spun up by Richard Hart, the efforts of Richard Hart, you would send him ETH to a contract and then you would get Hacks back in return.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  And there was like a one to, like a one to one, you know, you put in one ETH, you get the same amount of Hacks back. And Richard Hart would say like, you are not, this is not a sale. You are sacrificing, this is a sacrifice that you are making in order to get hex. This is a, the hex is a gift, or the ETH to me is a gift. And the hex back to you is also a gift. It's not a token sale. Uh, and also I'm in Finland, so you can't come after me SEC. Uh, and so he raised something like hundreds of millions of dollars on this. On, on the idea that the hex, uh, the ETH being given to him was a gift. Because he loudly told everyone that this is a sacrifice. Well, the Finnish IRS was like, gifts? You say?

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Gifts are actually a taxable thing. That's not just like a miscellaneous category. A gift is a, you can't just give people money, large amounts of money that goes, that must pay through taxes. So the Finnish IRS says, oh, you're in this court case in the United States. You're saying that these are all gifts because now you owe us 30% of your hundreds of millions of dollars. Which if you've ever watched Richard Hart for two seconds and all of his Rolexes and Gucci that he's bought. He's not paying taxes. He's not paying taxes. I didn't know that he, I didn't know that he was in Istanbul. I'm sure he knew that Interpol was after him. So he was in, uh, he was in Turkey when he was arrested.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Uh, and he is now, uh, in jail, I guess, going to court for Finnish tax fraud. Is actually the, the final conclusion of the Richard Hart story.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, what to make of hex? What to make of pulse chain? What, what are the hexicans actually doing about this? And by the way, I, I was never actually super sure. What exactly was hex? Was it like an ERC 20 on Ethereum?

• 45:04Speaker 00

  It was an Ethereum copycat, but I have no idea, dude.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  This is sort of like a Tron type of like copy paste thing. It was, I know it's from that era, the era that that started, but it never picked up actual use cases beyond pumping and shilling the hex coin itself.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Dude, I don't know, man.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  You clearly have not followed the hexican stuff.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Because the fact that it's like an EVM chain that was a clone of Ethereum is just not relevant to this story. The, the hexicans are cult leaders of their deity, Richard Hart. Now, like, I have a take here is actually like, Richard, you know, the difference between a cult and a religion is?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  What's the difference? Scale?

• 45:43Speaker 00

  The leader, the leader is dead.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And so Richard Hart is like, he's, he's going to jail. He's like being removed from the equation. I think the hexicans are going to get stronger as a result of this, not weaker. Like this is not like them, they're, they're crisis, they're not having a crisis of faith here. They're just going to double down because that's what cults do.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  What am I looking for on like CoinGecko? Like, is it hex, hexagon? What is this?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, hex, yeah. Yeah, hex was down, it dropped, it dropped like, uh, 50% on the news. All the Richard Hart tokens dropped like 50% on the news.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  I, I think it goes up from here.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  That's crazy. I, I guess maybe you're a future hexagon then, David? I mean, I know it's bothered you in the past.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  The hexicans are still, I haven't seen the hexicans since the SEC case, uh, against Richard Hart. Like I forgot that they exist, but now they're all up in my replies. They're in everyone's replies because people are remembering that they exist. They still exist, dude. And it was all the same ones. It's the same accounts.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  And they're, these are real people. These aren't just like kind of Richard Hart's bot network.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, because all of it, because the hexican cult army got started before LLMs were a thing. Like the hexicans have been around for a long time.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Well, I thought it was very big of you to post your David crying photo, the thing that has been memified across crypto Twitter and like beyond. Because this actually has a tie into the hex story, doesn't it? Back for you.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  It ought not to. Uh, the David crying moment on the weekly roll up was just a fatigue and sadness about the demise of FTX.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  And poor sleep, right?

• 47:25Speaker 00

  And all, I had like terrible sleep. I, I was running on like three hours of sleep a night for like four nights in a row. Because FTX was like in this slow motion implosion.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  This is 2022.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  We were covered, we were live streaming every single day. I was exhausted. Um, and, uh, and so I was like, I was just sad about the state of the industry and the hole that we had dug ourselves. We were, like, we were doing the weekly roll up and we had Richard Hart's tweet up on the screen. Completely coincidentally, and we just happened to be talking about that. And so like, Richard Hart was like, this is, this is perfect for me.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  And so, uh, I actually still, oh, I still have this, this painting actually. This is a hexagon, uh, painted this for me.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Oh my God, a hexagon made that for you?

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hexagon painted this and shipped it to me.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  It's so beautiful.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  A hundred USDC or something.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  That is so 2022.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  So are you cool now with the hexicans? Is this like full circle? Are you posting this meme?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  They're not causing me any problems. I mean, like, I'm not going to go hang out with them because like, I'm not, why would I hang out with somebody who's compelled to become a Richard Hart like cuck?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Okay, look, though, um, Richard Hart is arrested, but he still has his day in court, right? So, you know, he's, you know, who knows how the story could unfold? There might be still a way out for him.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. All right, let's get into paper trade. Uh, Ryan, have you ever been bullish on an asset and been like, man, I wish I could have a thousand times the exposure to that?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yes, like I'll take the upside on that, but I don't want the downside on that, if that makes sense.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a thousand X up and not a thousand X down.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Is that what paper gives me?

• 49:02Speaker 00

  I don't know if people have created that one.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Paper trade is a per platform, uh, on top of hyper liquid that lets you go a thousand X long or short. Uh, no real spot orders are ever made. It's all synthetic, completely derivative only, which is why it's paper trade or trading paper. Um, the beauty of this fantastic Ponzi game, and I say Ponzi game endearingly, like it's a great Ponzi. It's a really well designed.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Have you described that?

• 49:30Speaker 00

  When you get liquidated, because you win a thousand X.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Which you will, if you win a thousand X.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Uh, you are compensated with the paper token. And the only way to get the paper token is by getting liquidated. You can't, it doesn't trade on secondaries. If you want paper tokens, you have to go long or short and get liquidated and you'll be compensated with paper.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  If you get liquidated, they give you paper as compensation? So you could dry your tears with paper?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. But then you can go and stake your paper and then you can get the fees, the liquidation fees from other people as well. And so you become the house by staking paper. You become the house. And so far, uh, traders have lost $50 million, but $42 million has been paid out to paper stakers. So some of those degens who got liquidated just took their paper compensation and staked it and got the fees of other people getting liquidated.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  What an exceptional holder base you're creating. You're, you're creating a bunch of holders of your, of your token, of your asset that are like, um, degenerate traders that have lost big money.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. Yeah, well, some people went onto the platform and like tried to get liquidated on purpose because they want the paper tokens. That's how you get the paper tokens.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  What a sick game.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  In the first, in the first week, they, the paper trade is beating the NASDAQ in volume.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  What?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yes, that is a true statement. A trillion dollars of volume in the first week, a trillion dollars of open interest.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  What assets are we trading here, by the way? Is it, is it crypto assets or is it everything?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  All the, all the blue chips, I'm sure you can kind of go down market and get some of the more crazy ones. But I don't think you can go too far down the market because of the oracle manipulation exploit that also happened this week. And so when you are on 1,000 X leverage, oracle attacks become pretty trivial. Because a trade on paper trade doesn't ever hit the order book. It doesn't ever hit the spot market. It's all synthetic. So a hyper liquid whale went to hyper liquid and started buying tens of millions of dollars in ETH. While also having what I could only assume is a 1,000 X long ETH position on paper trade.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  You can move the market.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  You can move the market because it's all synthetic. And so as a result, paper, the paper trade team had to just like kind of increase the constraints. They had to lower the caps on, uh, the open interest on some of these markets. Uh, so like this one traded made out with a few millions of dollars. I think, I think it's recovered pretty well and people are kind of going back at it. Uh, but this is definitely one of the most interesting things, interesting projects, uh, to have started in crypto for sure.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Why, why you say interesting? Because like it's never been done before or I mean?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a thousand X. Like where else can you get? I, I think this is probably the most liquid place to get 1,000 X exposure.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Why do you need 1,000 X exposure? It's like a.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  To gamble.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  It's like the czar, like super megaton, you know, nuclear bomb. It's like, that's like way more than anyone has ever needed.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what if it works out?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  You don't have to go 1,000x. You can go like to something more modest, like 200x.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  The novel thing that's really interesting to me is is kind of the the paper token distribution itself as

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Like fascinating.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Mechanism's pretty genius.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Is this like a VC funded thing or?

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Uh, no, this is Jez and uh, I'm forgetting the other person's name. Uh, I, they're in pleaser doubt, but I never got the, uh, Jez and Blur. Yeah, I met Blur a number of times in 2021.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like hyper liquid. And that it's just like a small team self-funded in order to build this thing.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, correct. Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  So there's not like a lot of paper float that's with VCs or

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  You know, third party investors.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. It was one of the more attractive things about it, I think.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Well, I'm happy for everyone that is trading paper. It's like, it's great.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  All right. We got the Solana App and Glow upgrade coming down the pike on October 14th. That'll bring faster settlement to Solana, 150 milliseconds for settlement. This also will take away the on-chain vote transactions. So validators just send votes directly to each other and bundle them into certificates instead of posting individual vote transactions on chain. So it's kind of a, an overhaul of the voting mechanism. And also the consensus mechanism is also getting an overhaul. So Solana's legacy Tower BFT consensus mechanism mechanism is getting replaced and upgraded. And this is coming in Wednesday, October 21st, 21st. That's right. That's right.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  150 milliseconds is, is pretty good.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Fast.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  It's very fast.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  I don't think that's perfect settlement. I think it gets perfect settlement later, but you have like near perfect settlement at 150 milliseconds.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what layer ones can do that now? I mean, and does that matter? Is that a big differentiator? I guess time will tell. Big Monads doing that kind of thing. I mean, Megi, Megi Eth promised to do that sort of thing.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  These like other factors matter a lot more this cycle than in previous cycles. It seems very much about distribution.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. That's right. Speaking about layer ones, uh, Starknet is voting to become a layer one. We talked about this last week where Ellie on Twitter just raised the idea of Starknet is investigating open to the possibility of becoming a layer one.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  I think I saw, he threw us a little bit of a shade, David. He said, like, we've been talking about

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Well, I was throwing him, I was throwing him some shade about just like Starknet always has been posturing about like leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  They've always been dissatisfied in some way about Ethereum.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  It wasn't meant to be shade, but it's more of just like, come on, just like, just do it. Just do it.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And they are voting to do it. Who votes in this? Is it?

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Stark holders.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Is it validators or all holders of any Stark token? So they really have on-chain governance? On-chain governance then?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if, I don't know if it's on-chain governance.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  I think, I think this is just like a sentiment check. Uh, so if the Stark community says yes, then the team will go into it. Uh, right now, at the time of recording, uh, 180 million Stark tokens have been cast. Uh, would you like to guess, uh, which outcome according to the, the vote so far?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Oh, it's going to be yes, because token price has been up, right? Right?

• 56:01Speaker 00

  That's a good point. 99.9% vote in favor of yes.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Man, so what do you think that's, um, what do you think this means? What do you think this implies for layer twos in general, for Ethereum layer twos? I think that's the bigger story than like Starknet.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  I think it means that like being a layer two is just not that much of a differentiator. I mean, we'll see. We need, they need to move, they need to migrate off and then we need to get the data after the fact.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  I just feel like, so my conclusion, probably like 18, 24 months ago, after being bullish on layer twos prior to that, or somewhat bullish for Ethereum prior to that, was that layer twos were a complete side quest for Ethereum. And Ethereum is much better off focusing on layer one, block space and Ether, the asset and DeFi use cases there. And this just feels like further evidence of that. I mean, like, why subsidize a bunch of chains that you don't have like mode or lock-in and clearly not getting enough value from you? Like, why do that at all? I mean, Ethereum definitely needs to this cycle focusing on its layer one and Ether, the asset.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  I 100% agree with that. Also, like Starknet itself, it's not an EVM chain. It's got its own Cairo language. It's not that composable. And so the, one of the main benefits of all these other EVM chains is, is the composability with, you know, Ethereum itself. And so it's, it's always kind of been on a silo. And so like, is this a loss for Ethereum? Like not, I wouldn't, I would say it's mostly indifferent. Uh, not to throw any shade at Starknet. Is this a win for Starknet? Potentially because, uh, Starknet is dependent on Ethereum and Starknet is already post-quantum. And so they kind of, kind of get to shine that light. Overall, like, I kind of think in the grand scheme of things, like this isn't going to be that big of a deal.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Well, tell me if this is a big deal. So, uh, the Near Foundation just added Mert to the Near Foundation Council.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the Foundation Board. Yeah. And so like for Ethereum speak, this is like Vitalik, Aya, uh, that one Swedish attorney, one more person that who governs the EF. This is, uh, the governance board of, uh, NEAR. So Mert, Ilya, a few other NEAR co-founders, uh, one more person who I'm, I'm getting. So Mert has joined the NEAR Foundation Board. I mean, Mert is just like really well-respected after kind of just like leading Solana's technical strengths into the Solana bull market. And then also seeing Zcash at $50 and pushing forward Zcash. Uh, I think, I think this is because of privacy, uh, NEAR confidential intents and all the things that, um, NEAR is

• 58:44Speaker 00

  doing with like the whole privacy world. I think there's like a big Zcash, uh, NEAR pairing because like Zcash, private money, NEAR has confidential intents. Um, and so it's such like a very technical endorsement of NEAR's tech, I think.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Well, I guess Mert's star continues to, to rise, uh, as, as does NEAR right now.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  I haven't heard that term ever used outside of the context of Nick Carter and the Bitcoiners.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  That's my favorite, that's my favorite usage of it though. Uh, tell me about Venice.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Tokens per day chart. What is this chart showing us? Is the token, is VVP doing okay, by the way, in this alt downturn? Or not so much?

• 59:26Speaker 00

  As of this morning, VVD is doing one of the best, better performer in the market.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Because usage is up. That's what this chart is telling us, right?

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's up 12% uh, this week, all of that happening in the last 24 hours. So it was starting to like kind of slide with the rest of the market. It got down to like $21 after being at a high of 34 at the very peak in September. Uh, it got down to like, yeah, below, below $22, but it has rebounded up to $24.5 right now. And I think it's because of this chart, this chart, and then maybe also the data center clip that I tweeted out. But I think this chart is really sealing the deal. As a VVD holder, whenever I see this chart on Twitter, I like stop what I'm doing and I pay attention, uh, because this is revenue for Venice. It is like highly correlated with revenue for

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Venice. It is adoption of the product. Uh, and I like this slope. And when this slope gets more aggressive upwards, I get more bullish. And so I like asked John, the head of strategy at Venice, um, when he thinks Venice crosses 1 trillion tokens a day before or after the, the new year.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  We're at half that now, right?

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  We are at half that now, and that is well ahead of

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  And that's the chart we're looking at, token usage chart.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  That's the chart that we're looking at. When I, when I, so Sabrina, Sabrina is, she works at Venice, uh, head, she was the head of APIs at Venice. Uh, she tweeted out, uh, this chart, uh, and it was, it had flattened a little bit. And I was like, again, as a VVD holder, I was like, oh.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  I don't like flat.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  It got, it flattened. No, I want it to go up. Uh, she, the four days later, she posted this new chart and there is a 25-ish jump in daily token consumption on the Venice platform, all from this one model. Uh, this is, this is a, um, deep seek model. Um, it's really good at coding, gives very fast responses. Uh, but for some reason, this deep seek model just like jumped massively in terms of consumption.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Is the driver here token efficiency, do you think? Or is it more like privacy is really the driver here? Is, is people just don't want their AI queries being spied on?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Right. Because it's not any more efficient to do this inference via Venice versus like doing it directly. I think the only explanation that I can do have is like, why did Venice win this? Is privacy? Because that is their core competency. Um, the other core competency, competency that I think is coming online with Venice is like the combination of many, uh, models to do like more complicated work in very coherent ways that are built, uh, together. That's their minds product, but that's not what I see here. What I see here is I see one model just being hammered all at once in this idiosyncratic jump up where like the, the, uh, deep seek model was being used a

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  similar amount as all the other models. But then you see this one model just jump from maybe like 10%, 5% of the graph to something like 50% of the graph.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  My speculation is one single customer came online on the Venice API and that customer is using AI inference for whatever reason, either to resell it to people on their website who need inference, or like one possible alternative is like, there's a data sensitive industry that is using Venice for inference, maybe customer support. Maybe it's a healthcare company who's got customer support and they want an AI agent to automate some of their stuff. And they are just hammering one single model to do customer support. Like that would fit, that would explain this chart. But like the notable thing is that it's, I think it's one single company who is using the Venice API and they're just using this one model and they're using it in a very big way.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  And it made the daily token consumption of Venice jump like 25% overnight.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  It's like signing a big enterprise customer, I guess. That's what you're saying.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Very cool. Well, David, I think we have to tie it off here, but, uh, you have a little moment from our old friend who we hadn't talked about in a long time, Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren. She had a, a hot take on crypto that you wanted to share with the bankless world.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Oh, it's not about crypto at all. It's about, uh, hot sauces, actually. She, she tweets out, Hellmann's mayonnaise, McCormick spices, Cholula hot sauce, Frank's red hot. What do all of these products have in common? One company could soon control them all. I have concerns that McCormick and Unilever's $45 billion merger could increase your grocery prices.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Getting protected from big hot sauce. What is going, how is this a real tweet?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  That's a valid concern. I don't know. I, I feel like Elizabeth Warren is not conspiracy theorizing in the way that like kind of the world demands right now. This is not a very deep conspiracy theory to me.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  You gotta go after something far bigger. I mean, we're doing aliens. We're doing all sorts, like reptile.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dream bigger dreams, Elizabeth Warren. Like, find a bigger fish.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  My lord. Our, hopefully next week we can get some, uh, green in the market, but until then, Bankless Nation, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. We are Head to West. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.