ROLLUP: Black October | Uptober Lasted 4 Hours | JPMorgan's Bitcoin Forecast | Gold Alchemy

Uptober lasted four hours. Now comes Black October: rising war fears, AI-powered cyber threats, and a market on edge. Ryan and David debate whether crypto is next, JPMorgan’s bullish Bitcoin forecast, fusion-made gold, and a major stablecoin win. --- 📣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 0:08 Black October, Uptober & Market Jitters https://www.coingecko.com/ https://apnews.com/article/mideast-yemen-saudi-israel-october-22-2026-dde5b98a8bf961224514994b02babce9 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2113252218568679571 https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2113215401983152439 5:38 Bitcoin's Early Bull Case https://thedefireport.io/research/cycle-awareness-update-3e75 9:26 JPMorgan's Bitcoin Forecast & Ethereum's Struggles https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/insights/portfolio-insights/ltcma/ https://x.com/saylor/status/2112587713060757820 https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/2112387154923983105 https://imgur.com/8j76G5h 20:23 Crypto Movers: Pearl, Lighter, Venice & Monero https://x.com/zoomerfied/status/2112970717591748767 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2112966535744544859 https://www.21shares.com/en-eu/product/venc https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/monero 28:31 Black October: Cyberattacks, AI & Banking Risks https://x.com/takaichi_sanae/status/2112890642590564386 https://x.com/NSACyber/status/2112903220209098897 https://x.com/Mudit__Gupta/status/2112938784392163779 https://x.com/devmuzzammil/status/2113042127039164663 https://x.com/nic_carter/status/2113064786556592250 https://x.com/jachiam0/status/2112968705240109558 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051 https://x.com/MadisonMills22/status/2113251043173683683 42:53 Fusion Gold: Bitcoin's Unexpected Advantage? https://x.com/MarathonFusion/status/2113001073019662481 https://x.com/MarathonFusion/status/2113001085912895846 https://x.com/nic_carter/status/2113054840595390792 50:23 Stablecoin Rewards, Solana Upgrade & Aero Merger https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2112871300079161630 https://cointelegraph.com/news/american-bankers-association-occ-genius-rules-stablecoins https://x.com/solana/status/2112906742585512150 https://aero.xyz/articles/aero-launches-today --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, it's the third week of October. We started with Uptober, we moved to Redtober, now we have entered Black October. That's what they're calling it, Blacktober, the worst cybersecurity week ever. Two bugs in PHP. The NSA is telling organizations to go offline while they figure this stuff out. I think something like 15, like, critical vulnerabilities in different companies, web services, coding languages, I don't even know.

• 0:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  The whole internet.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  The whole internet is imploding right now as we speak. Is crypto next, or did crypto already go through this bullshit in March of this year? Are we next, or were we the canary in the coal mine?

• 0:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  How is crypto positioned is my question. In addition to that Armageddon that's going on, also, Trump is planning to strike Iran again. I think our bags are down as a result. Nonetheless, though, David, I want you to tell me about a week of overperformance down the market a little bit. There are some tokens that picked up on the week. Zcash had a good week, Lighter had a good week. Venice gets an ETP in the European stock markets. I guess that's like an ETF. That sounds kind of good, right?

• 1:17David Hoffman?

  That's good, yeah. And we have the unexpected white swan for Bitcoin. A fusion startup announces their plan to alchemy gold. You can't, you know, we talk a lot of shit about Bitcoin trying to overcome the quantum hurdles. Like, ah, Bitcoin, you're slow, you're just slow and clumsy, you can't get over quantum. But, you know, Bitcoin can software update. You can't software update gold. So if they figure out how to alchemy gold out of, with fusion, like, that's it. That's it for gold.

• 1:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm actually super excited about this story. I want to talk to you about this story. It's very interesting. It hasn't been done yet. None of this is priced in. So the white swan is on the horizon, maybe still many years away. But we got to talk about what the implications would be if every fusion plant became essentially a gold mining apparatus.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Gold, it's not a miner, it's a gold fuser.

• 2:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 2:09David Hoffman?

  All right, Uptober, we had a modicum of Uptober this week. We had it for about four hours when Bitcoin got above $84,000. It hit $84,800 this week.

• 2:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was that Wednesday?

• 2:22David Hoffman?

  That was Wednesday. That was Wednesday. So for like half of Wednesday, it was looking good. We had recovered from Redtober. We were back into Uptober. Then we get three negative news headlines that just took all of the wind out of the sails. One, US and Israel are apparently attacking Iran soon. Those attack reports got leaked this week. WTI and oil prices, Brent crude, are as high as they have been this entire time. $115 for a barrel of Brent crude oil. Yikes.

• 2:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is not going to be good for inflation numbers.

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  That is not going to be good for inflation numbers. It's already not good now. It's going to be, the longer this goes on, it takes time for this number to work its way into inflation. But nonetheless, like, that's, it's been higher for longer in this second phase of the, of the oil prices than it has been in the first.

• 3:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? It's not going to be good for Republicans at the midterms either, because voters are going to be on their way to the polls and they're going to look at the gas price and they're going to be like, F this.

• 3:22David Hoffman?

  I'm voting for lower gas prices, which means the Democrats, yeah. Iran state television reported that seven oil tankers caught fire after they were, they struck them on Thursday, overnight on Thursday. So that's last night. Iran says stuff like this. I'm sure the number's not seven, but is, we don't know if the number is zero either. So we're still trying to get that verified. But this is what causes insurance companies to be like, yeah, we're not ensuring that you're, you're a massive oil shipment through the Strait of Hormuz. It's just way too risky.

• 3:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that happened. In addition, I saw some more jitters in Asian stock markets. We talked about that a little bit last week. Has that just continued into the week?

• 4:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we had Meta report earnings and like the, they are doing the capex investment thing, but at like a normal amount. Overall, there's just jitters about capex slowing down, like AI, the AI capex build out just slowing down as people who are on leverage or on debt, on margin, trying to do the build out are slowing down their spending. And so that's leaving organizations like Meta who are cash flush and have like a revenue positive business are the, going to be the last ones to really be pushing the AI capex spend up the hill.

• 4:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess it's more continuation from the core we news last week, which is like AI debt concerns and AI growth concerns, right? So that's the second thing. We got Iran oil prices. The second thing is the AI growth and debt concerns. What's the third?

• 4:50David Hoffman?

  The third is the internet is just apparently exploding.

• 4:55David Hoffman?

  As AI swarms just attack everything that they can get their hands on. We're still in a little bit of a fog of war. So all of this kind of got, so we'll, we'll talk about this in a bit. But like, the NSA tweeted out to like, if your website uses PHP, you need to be standing by with your finger on the trigger for a software update because shit's going to go down. The Japanese prime minister tweeted out something to the same effect, like the prime minister of Japan. It's got, had like 80 million views on Twitter, on X. And so.

• 5:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. World leaders saying it, the NSA is saying it via tweet. I mean, that's pretty unprecedented. I don't think we've seen times like that.

• 5:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's, the whole thing is unprecedented. People are calling it just the worst month in cybersecurity absolutely ever. We'll talk about that in a bit. Let's get into crypto though, because crypto, once again, felt like it was moving up under its own steam before all of this stuff happened, before like the three negative catalysts came. And I want to know, well, what I want to know is, is crypto going to move up when it is finally left alone? I know you were talking to Mike this week. What'd Mike have, what'd I have to say?

• 6:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike says we're in a good spot. I mean, this is the early bull market playing out. We're still above the 50-week moving average, right? If you zoom out, you look at the seventh day even on the week, Bitcoin is down maybe 1%. ETH down 1.5%. So it wasn't a bad week. I think one interesting thing from his report this week is sort of comparing Bitcoin and the NASDAQ over time. Because it has been true that since the Bitcoin bottom, July 30th of this year, Bitcoin has far outperformed anything else and so has crypto largely. So about 40% compared to NASDAQ 1%. So decorrelated from NASDAQ.

• 6:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there are times in Bitcoin's history, what I have up here is a Bitcoin NASDAQ ratio chart. There are times in Bitcoin history where it's completely uncorrelated from NASDAQ and the QQQ and other times where it almost behaves like a levered NASDAQ option. And so timing is everything here. Like, when you zoom out actually, and if you had purchased at the bottom of 2017 versus the NASDAQ, so 2017, the beginning of 2017, before the big bull run, you, Bitcoin would have appreciated about 7,000% versus the NASDAQ.

• 7:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you had, if you had bought in 2021, kind of the bottom there, you would have had an, almost 900% appreciation versus NASDAQ. And 2025, you would have had a 310% appreciation versus NASDAQ. And now we're up 40%, right? So we can guess that this will go higher. It looks like if we are in the early bull phase, Bitcoin and crypto writ large will appreciate versus NASDAQ as it has in the past. Again, assuming we are in the early bull phase. So that's the good news. I guess maybe some of the bad news though, is if you were a top buyer. So say you bought Bitcoin at the top of 2017 and everything was super hot. You were basically from 2017 to now, the exact same.

• 8:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  You were just as good.

• 8:07David Hoffman?

  In NASDAQ terms.

• 8:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  In NASDAQ terms. Bitcoin and NASDAQ performed at the same level at the top of 2017. You know, you, you, you would have been about equal. Okay?

• 8:18David Hoffman?

  Well, if that's the worst case scenario, the worst case, if you just were the unlucky fellow who top ticked the 2017 Bitcoin price, you performed equivalently to buying the NASDAQ index. If that's the worst case scenario, that's not terrible.

• 8:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's say if you bought the 2021 top in, in Bitcoin, the 2021 top.

• 8:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 8:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so you're actually 30% behind the NASDAQ at this point in time.

• 8:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there was a lot of 2021 buyers.

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe you make it up later. But anyway, it does show that of course, something we've always knew, known is that, that crypto is a much more volatile asset class. And it does totally make sense. I mean, it makes sense that some people just buy and hold forever. That makes sense to me. But it also makes sense to play some of these cycles. There's this big difference between buying the top and buying somewhere in the middle or the bottom of each cycle in terms of your net performance.

• 9:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, which is why we watch stuff like this, because we can start to map where the bottom is. And we are saying the bottom was sometime recently in the rearview mirror.

• 9:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, I can't do that, but my quant, Michael NATO can. At least that's what I'm counting on, all right? David, do you see this this week? JP Morgan added Bitcoin to its famed report. This is the first time since 1999. Every year it releases the report. JP Morgan, biggest bank in America, one of the biggest banks in the world, reports on all of the assets that are worth holding and which ones will overperform. And for the first time, it listed Bitcoin.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  It mentioned Bitcoin for the first time ever.

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and not only mentioned it, but actually put it at the top of the heap. Do you see this chart?

• 10:00David Hoffman?

  Wow, wow, wow. I actually didn't know that JP Morgan produced a famed report. I'm not a consumer of bank famed reports, but yeah, I mean, I take the point that JP Morgan is a very big bank and probably a lot of people read this.

• 10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so this is actually Michael Saylor synthesizing JP Morgan's report and putting this in, in graph form. But in terms of all the asset classes that JP Morgan's long-term report outlook, return outlook covers, and this is when they say long-term, they're talking 10 to 15 years. So that's long-term for JP Morgan. They listed Bitcoin at the top, 10% annualized performance over the, the long-term, 10 to 15-year period. Next to that was US real estate, so REITs, that would be 8.2%. Stocks, 7.5%. Bonds, it's pretty bullish bonds, 5.6% returns. Gold, 5.5% and cash, 3.2%. All right, so anyway, it's, I don't know.

• 10:57David Hoffman?

  3.2% long-term returns in US cash? How did that work?

• 11:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know.

• 11:02David Hoffman?

  That calls into question everything else.

• 11:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe this is why I don't read this report, but it is notable. I, I want to actually give you some of Jamie Dimon's greatest hits in terms of quotes, because this is from.

• 11:13David Hoffman?

  CEO of JP Morgan.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  CEO of JP Morgan. In 2017, this is what he said about Bitcoin. It's a fraud, worse than tulips, it won't end well. You might say, well, that was way back in 2017. How about his more updated views? 2023, at a senate hearing nonetheless, Jamie Dimon, "I've always been deeply opposed to crypto and Bitcoin. If I were the government, I'd close it down."

• 11:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is him at Davos in January 2024, referring to Bitcoin. "I call it pet rock."

• 11:46David Hoffman?

  So... I mean, I also call Bitcoin pet rock, so that is...

• 11:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pet rock, but now pet rock is in the lead in terms of investment for his own report at 10%.

• 11:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah. To go next to your pet shiny, shiny rock. Yeah, your gold, Bitcoin and gold.

• 12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Matt Hogan was psyched about this. He said this, "First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they add you to their long-term capital markets assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best performing asset of the next decade." Here it is, compound return of 10%.

• 12:18David Hoffman?

  Nice, nice. I mean, it's stuff like this that I think gives crypto investors the confidence, who listen to this podcast, to see this report from Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan, be like, okay, sick, Bitcoin's gonna go up 10% a year for the next 10 years. That's great. Let me go buy the shittiest altcoin I can.

• 12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, crypto investors always on the frontier, right?

• 12:42David Hoffman?

  Speaking of shitty altcoins...

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, don't you dare. Don't you dare.

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  Oh, this is a, this is the downward trend line on ETH BTC that people have been watching. For a few weeks, it was starting to break out, ETH BTC on this trend line. It went, ETH BTC went from like down below .03 to like .033. It's not there anymore. It has, it has fallen back down. This trend line continues to plague ETH BTC. ETH BTC is at .0293. It's gonna break at some point. Like, it has to break at some point.

• 13:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Break up.

• 13:18David Hoffman?

  Break up to the upside.

• 13:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, cuz it's like, it's breaking down right now. It's been breaking down for the last five years.

• 13:23David Hoffman?

  Like, once again, just plagued by it. I was hopeful it would break up just for the sentiment of like half of crypto Twitter. But it doesn't seem like it's happening now. I like, I kinda think that this is the range that ETH BTC is in, somewhere between .02 and .04. Yeah, .02 to .04. Yeah, kinda, yeah. .02 is too low, but like, anything higher.

• 13:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I still, I still take the other side on that. I think that it has suffered over the past five years for three reasons. The first is bad narrative. So I think it's done a stupid thing and it hasn't positioned itself as a store of value. So Ether the asset not being a store of value, it's just had a...

• 14:06David Hoffman?

  Did it not position itself as a store of value throughout 2021 and 2?

• 14:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not good enough, no. It still depended some of its store of value-ness. I mean, but, you know, like, it's just bankless. And I think that it positioned in a way that was like sort of the ultrasound money meme. That narrative got messed up because people thought it was all about fees to Ether the asset. And that can't be the way. It's not the way Bitcoin is valued as a, it's not the way Zcash is valued as a store of value. It shouldn't be the way Ether is. And the community went all in on that. Also, L2s were a side quest. We talked about that. That's the second thing. The third thing is, I just think there's fewer use cases of blockchain than everyone expected

• 14:49David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  five years ago. And I think the use cases are finance and the big king use case is store of value. Now, I'll give you the contra on this. I still think Ether the asset is one of the best-positioned digital store of values, like moving forward on a go-forward basis. And I think you could look at all of those weaknesses and say, okay, well, when the narrative returns and people realize the fundamentals of this thing, it actually is a pretty damn good store of value. And it has the key store of value things like multi-sig, safe infrastructure. It has privacy, you know, the privacy protocols like Railgun, Xerox privacy, all of these things.

• 15:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has some of the key features of Zcash. It has a roadmap that's gonna be quantum resistant. So it has a lot of the fundamentals in place. It's just the narrative really hasn't, hasn't kicked for it. And I think that's the thing that's, that's actually holding it back. But at some point, it's gonna have a run.

• 15:49David Hoffman?

  There, there's a, something schadenfreude in me when I see the implosion of the internet. And I'm like, actually, this is kinda what Ethereum was supposed to be, like, supposed to replace. Like, the original vision of Ethereum with like Whisper and Swarm and IPFS was like, yo, the internet, let's like rebuild the internet. And I'm watching the internet like crumble. I know, that's being dramatic. I don't really know the scope of what's going on. But like, a part of Ethereum's like, uh, social contract was like, we're going to like rebuild the internet on cryptography with hardened, with everything super hardened. And so like...

• 16:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was too big. It was too big of a scope and it was never going to happen. And I think...

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but like now, kinda the environment that it was built for is actually happening. And so I do kinda consider that. At the same time, I take your point of like, it's actually like fundamentally, it's in one of the best positions. But what about the, the, when you control for the market cap of it? And so it's got a very, very high market cap. It's also well-positioned, but it's got a high market cap.

• 16:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I, we'll be talking about gold a little bit later in this episode, but like, what, gold 20 trillion, 30 trillion? Something like that? And Fusion could knock out gold? I mean, there is a massive market for digital store of value assets that can make it through this AI era, I think. And it's going, it's not just going to be one, I don't think. I think it's going to be a portfolio of those assets.

• 17:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And all I'm saying is I think Ethereum is positioned well. One thing that the side quest for L2s actually did for Ethereum that is net beneficial, I think is underrated, is it very much enshrined the EVM as a standard, you know? And it has now a large group of well-funded, world-class developers working on the EVM. And that wasn't necessarily guaranteed to happen five years ago, seven years ago, before the L2 roadmap. And now you have Coinbase hacking on it. And now you have like, you're like Monet, all of these teams, even Hyperliquid's all EVM-based. So the amount of dev firepower that's gone to the EVM is an underrated aspect of success of the L2 roadmap, I think.

• 17:58David Hoffman?

  This is true. This is true. All right. Next up, we're gonna get into the movers of the week. I gotta talk to Ryan about what this pearl thing is. Also, Lighter held its Q3 investors call yesterday. There's a bunch of tidbits of information to get out of that. We're gonna talk about Zcash, VVV, and also this silent dino coin from the pre-2017 era that's quietly pushing all-time highs. We're gonna talk about all of that and more. And then we're gonna talk about Internet or a mageddon. But first, we're gonna 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. And I'm basically always looking for the same thing, just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets, where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially, and still control all of my funds.

• 18:42David Hoffman?

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• 19:26David Hoffman?

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• 20:10David Hoffman?

  Local rails in, on-chain in the middle. And for builders, Ripo offers APIs, webhooks, widgets, and a sandbox just from day one. Start building with wrapped fiat today at platform.ripo.com.

• 20:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ryan, have you heard of Pearl?

• 20:26David Hoffman?

  I have heard of Pearl. Yeah, it's been on my radar for a bit and I'm late to like actually diving into it and researching it because it's been one of the tokens of the Zygiis of the last like two weeks. It's up 30% this week. I think it was up like even more last week. Pearl, there's been a swath of kind of what I would call 2017 style coins, which are like, let's take Bitcoin but fix it, style coins. One of them is Qantas, like Naval invested in it. It's a quantum secure, post quantum Bitcoin. 21 million units. What is this drop? It's a store of value. It doesn't try not to be anything other than Bitcoin, except it's quantum secure.

• 21:11David Hoffman?

  Qantas is that. Pearl is kind of similar. It strips out the Bitcoin proof of work and replaces it with basically AI inference. So you pay Pearl tokens for AI inference, but AI inference also secures pure Pearl, the blockchain. So there's like a feedback loop there and it has been the best performing.

• 21:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you mean by AI inference? Do you mean like basically like GPUs?

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the idea is that the same computers that like do inference also secure the Pearl blockchain.

• 21:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  As a byproduct, they can mine.

• 21:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it feels a little bit like merge mining. Remember merge mining?

• 21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's merge mining with like AI inference and Bitcoin.

• 21:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  But still, 21 million, the goal of Pearl is to be a store of value asset.

• 21:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I need to get the team on the show and actually like talk to them about it more deeply.

• 22:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Market cap of this thing is fully diluted, I should say, 4.5 billion.

• 22:09David Hoffman?

  No, it's small, dude. It's not small. Pretty chunky, pretty chunky.

• 22:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure, but I mean, there's just like market cap that's available in the market, 750 million or so. So a lot, I'm sure, to be mined.

• 22:21David Hoffman?

  Right, but yeah, the current Pearl, okay, everyone knows like, okay, 21 million units, but it's being traded at a $4.5 billion valuation. What's the Qantas market cap, the FTV of Qantas right now?

• 22:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  When I saw that, that was like in the billions as well.

• 22:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's definitely.

• 22:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it QNT?

• 22:38David Hoffman?

  No, it's that red orange one.

• 22:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  QTC.

• 22:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the spooky October themed one. I don't know what's going on with CoinGecko, but the max supply is 21 million. It says that 21 million times the price is 1.9 billion. I don't know what the difference is between the market cap and the FTV. I don't know what that calculation is, but this is trading at 1.9 billion. So there are two Bitcoin clones that are trading in the multi billions of dollars. That's not something I kind of ever expected in this day and age.

• 23:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that feels like 2017, right?

• 23:06David Hoffman?

  Right? Yeah, it does. It does. But they're actually like holding up. Okay, so that's Pearl. That's the mover of the week. Congrats to all Pearl holders. You're up 31% this week. Lighter, up 25% this week. Lighter had its Q3 investors call yesterday. Some of the big headlines were they are going to file in November for both a DCM and a DCO license with the CFTC. And DCM is basically the derivatives platform, like a marketplace. And then the DCO is what allows, is like their ADL rules. So it's their liquidation, liquidation rules, the things that allows them to do

• 23:44David Hoffman?

  basic derivatives clearinghouse related activities. So they're going to file for that in November. On the call, there was a quote from Vlad where he said, "As soon as we have these licenses in place, we'll be able to integrate it in different part of Robinhood's US offering as it makes sense for their product, both on the perps and options side of things." It'd be nice to get the Robinhood confirmation, but like Vlad, the founder, basically saying like, "Oh yeah, once we get these licenses, then we are in the main Robinhood US app", which is as anyone who's holding lit, is kind of like one of the main entrees that we're looking for in terms of catalysts.

• 24:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so cool that there's an earnings call for this, I gotta say.

• 24:22David Hoffman?

  They do a really great job. Yeah.

• 24:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's, what is lighter right now in terms of market cap? It's in the low billions, like one to two billion, something like that?

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  Low single digit billions, yeah.

• 24:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's refreshing to get a company and an asset you can buy in the low billions.

• 24:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, fully diluted, 3.5 billion, market cap 900 million.

• 24:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like the stock market these days, companies waiting later and later to actually IPO. Everything's staying private for longer, even something like SpaceX, where it's a private for like 12, 15 years, something like that.

• 24:54David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 24:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't get it until it's in the trillions. I wish there were more token businesses like this in crypto where investors could buy at the lower market caps and in much earlier phases and they were public and open and they had earnings calls. This is a great model.

• 25:10David Hoffman?

  Yes. Yeah, we are here to drive value to our token. Every quarter, we are going to talk about the work that we have done to drive value to our token. And we're also going to give investors who are holding our token clarity about what we are trying to do. It's great.

• 25:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and it works when there's on-chain revenue, especially. When there's not, when it's like, eh, we don't know what the token does. It's a utility token or whatever, then it's like much less interesting. So I love this new crop.

• 25:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. The last quote that I really liked from the call was, "Spot, perps and options all margin together." That's kind of the gold standard that Lighter is really going for is just the one single derivatives platform with the spot market that all has one single unified margin account. That's also a ZK circuit, layer two on Ethereum. To me, it just kind of feels like the final boss of all exchange infrastructure, inside of crypto or outside of crypto. Like you have to imagine that you're like the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange and you're looking at like the powerhouse of MAC minis that Lighter runs to do its circuit verification. Be like, dude, we have nothing like that.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a win for the L2 roadmap as well, I gotta say that. It's not a win for Ether yet, but it's not a win for the roadmap.

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  The other company who does a phenomenal job of reporting data in public, Venice. Venice is the third best mover of the week, up 20% this week. OneShares launched its Venice Token ETP and exchange list a traded product backed by VVV. So it's an ETF in US terms. This is on the Swiss stock market. Has a fee, Anchorage and BitGo are the custodians and has a little bit over almost $1.5 million in AUM. I think this is kind of funny because Venice is a token. It's a private company with a token, but now it's on the stock market. And so in this is like Venice's IPO moment, this is how they IPO.

• 27:03David Hoffman?

  They IPO with the Venice token going into ETPs or ETFs that trade on liquid stock exchanges.

• 27:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dual, everything's becoming dual track. Hopefully that's the direction of travel.

• 27:15David Hoffman?

  Totally. Zcash up 14% on the week, but honestly, I actually kind of think the interesting story is Monero.

• 27:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the Dino coin you were referring to?

• 27:23David Hoffman?

  The Dino, the Dino privacy coin with strictly inferior privacy assurances is at all time highs. Not breaking all time highs, is at previous all time highs. But like Monero and also Tron are these tokens that no one really talks about or has in their portfolio, but have just been on a slow march of. Yeah, we're embarrassed about to have them in the industry, but they are just monsters in terms of price performance. Monero is up like 20% this week, but I mean, this chart is just an absolute monster.

• 27:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it came out of that era too, the let's fork Bitcoin but add one feature, right? And so it's like, well, forking Bitcoin, same monetary schedule, proof of work, everything else. But the one feature is sort of privacy, right? And so that's what Monero has been doing ever since, I suppose.

• 28:11David Hoffman?

  Was Monero a Bitcoin fork?

• 28:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if it was technically, but you know that whole era, that whole vibe.

• 28:17David Hoffman?

  Of the same, yeah. Monero is not a Bitcoin fork.

• 28:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 28:21David Hoffman?

  Okay. But I take your point, like a simple blockchain meant to do one thing.

• 28:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, similar to Qantas, right? It's just like Bitcoin, but just like one more feature.

• 28:30David Hoffman?

  There's one more feature. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, let's talk about Black Tuesday, the worst.

• 28:35David Hoffman?

  Black October.

• 28:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Black October, I should say, the worst week for cybersecurity maybe ever. It felt like actual Y2K or something.

• 28:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it feels like we're doing Y2K.

• 28:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but for real, you know, like not just the, actually things seem to be breaking. So, so when did this start? How did it come across your desk?

• 28:56David Hoffman?

  The first tweet that I saw was from the NSA, not an account that I follow, let me tell you. But they tweeted out, "Effective immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database." Basically saying, "Hey, if your website's running PHP, you are extremely vulnerable and you need to have your finger over the trigger to do this update that patches this hole." It kind of spiraled after that. The Japanese Prime Minister tweeted out, "An urgent request that I would like to act on, you to act on tonight",

• 29:39David Hoffman?

  talking about the PHP vulnerability, and that was just PHP. This topic is a bit above my pay grade, but overall, yesterday was just a complete nightmare for cybersecurity. Railway, Node.js, LiteLLM, GitLab, OVH Cloud, CLI, OpenCode. I don't know what these are, but these are all technical things that apparently all had vulnerabilities found.

• 30:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just libraries, right? Open source code libraries.

• 30:06David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 30:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, PHP alone, though, so so much of the the internet is based on PHP, right? Like Wikipedia, WordPress, this whole platform. I saw some estimates like thirty to forty percent of all websites, you know, might have this type of a vulnerability, if not patched. And the crazy thing about this vulnerability is it's a vulnerability in sort of the the codebase itself, right? In PHP itself. Most vulnerabilities we see are, you know, vulnerability with a single app or a single, you know, I guess, website. This is just like everything based on it. And it's still a sophisticated exploit that kind of requires somebody to work with an AI in order to exploit, probably. But the exploit itself was found via

• 30:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  a GPT 5.6 soul. So that is a model.

• 30:59David Hoffman?

  Which is, by the way, the model from from OpenAI that you have in your Claude app. It's like the consumer version.

• 31:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Consumer grade in public.

• 31:08David Hoffman?

  Is consumer grade, yeah.

• 31:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So this was found via OpenAI. They have a Patch the Planet program. It's a good thing they do. Working with AI security firm in California, they discovered some of these bugs a couple of months ago, actually. And so they've been coordinating quietly in the background towards this announcement with the PHP Foundation and everyone affected. But two months, it's been known by at least somebody. That's a long lead time for some black hat actor in order to front run that. And once, if they can attack a website or an app with this vulnerability, they get some level of root access to the server. So they could swap out the website for a wallet drainer, or for, I don't know, some sort of

• 31:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  malicious code that infects your computer. Like, so it's it's a pretty big deal.

• 31:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. It it just feels like we're in a big fog of war, because we don't know what the white hats of the world, the OpenAI, anthropic US government NSA, what, who are they talking to? And how are they patching the world's most critical stuff? Because like, right now, if you go on Twitter, it feels like the world is on fire. But I'm getting the idea that these organizations, you know, OpenAI NSA people, have been knowing that this stuff like this is coming down the pike for a long time. And they've been like fixing the worst of it. And now it finally just actually, the virus day actually comes. There's a pretty interesting, call it copy pasta on X of a story. Who knows if it's real or

• 32:42David Hoffman?

  not, but I think it does a very good job kind of illustrating the significance of what's going on. And so this is an account called IT Unhinged. "Security called me today at 6:12 a.m. Patch every PHP server immediately. I asked what happened. Two critical vulnerabilities, remote code execution, no authentication required. Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to our inventory, we have 12. According to reality, nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. We have three running old internal tools, one under somebody's desk, two inside vendor appliances, a forgotten employee directory from 2016, and a server named PHP Old Do Not Touch. Naturally, that one runs payroll. Then we found a PHP 5.5

• 33:27David Hoffman?

  box. I asked who owns this one. The documentation said Brian. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said, oh, wow, that's still running? Excellent. By 8 a.m., leadership joined the incident call. CEO asks, can the hackers actually get in? And the security team responds, potentially, yes. CEO says, without a password. Security responds, yes. CEO says, then why do we need passwords? Which is not the lesson. Finance asks if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17 in the morning, somebody suggested temporary taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing

• 34:12David Hoffman?

  refused because their campaign is going live. So for the next hour, the company officially decided to maintain a landing page for 20% off of webinar registration. It's more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally passed everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server, hostname temp, PHP 2014, uptime 4,500 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block access to it, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels."

• 34:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:41David Hoffman?

  "Security has it classified as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half of our employees. The emergency patch took over four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took 11. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off." I think that does a good job illustrating the stick, stones, and duck paper version of the internet that we have been standing upon for all of our time. And kind of what I was referring to earlier, which were like, you know, Ethereum wants to like rebuild the internet in this more secure, hardened, very adversarial environment way. Now, the internet is an adversarial environment. You know, you have to always, like, Facebook

• 35:24David Hoffman?

  is getting attacked 10,000 times a second. But that was before AI. Like, the level of adversarial nature of the internet is that's coming down the pike because of AI agents and AI swarms is going to 10x. And you have to just like tip your hat to blockchains, which are code systems that are supposed to thrive inside of adversarial environments.

• 35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that there's the hope. And of course, we we feel good on the week being crypto, being like, ah, the rest of the internet's affected, but crypto is fine. That we have been sort of in a hardened environment that has been exposed to all of these attacks for so many years. And, you know, we're more hardened, we're more anti fragile. We're built to outlast them versus the rest of the internet, which is a bunch of duct tape and poor IT guys trying to figure out what does what and try to keep up with the world. But it's very clear that as these systems get more and more capable, and honestly, just have the time to suss through all of the code and libraries and find these exploits, that these types of events are going to happen more and more.

• 36:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  One AI researcher said, "It feels like March 1, 2020 for cyber," as of course, the precipice of of COVID, right? When we were just like, it was just starting to land in the narrative in in consciousness, like, what was happening? Oh, this is not a cold? Like, what? Okay, this is something different. This is something new. And so he compares it to that time period, which is also part of the story. This week, it's PHP exploits and vulnerabilities in this codebase that have been in existence since 2012, and just so obscure, no one noticed. Next week, what might it be?

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're hoping it's not our crypto systems, because we're so hardened and great. But who knows what it could be? And that's why he's harkening this to like March 2020.

• 37:17David Hoffman?

  I did see a tweet that was like, you, here's what you need to do. You need to get a Starlink in case your internet service provider goes down. You need to have three months of cash in your pocket at all times. You need to go buy groceries. And I'm like, oh, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That feels a little too doomer for what we're going through in this present moment.

• 37:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there is a question. This was a tweet from Madison Mills. "What about our our vaults? You know, the world's banks, for example?" This is a scoop from her. "Major US banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions," sources told Axios. "The findings have alarmed banking executives who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond." So what will respond faster, do you think? Sort of the hardened crypto ecosystem to these types of events, or traditional banks? Because at some level, they're up against

• 38:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  similar types of of threats nowadays. I know crypto, it's it's bearer assets, whereas, I don't know, banks, maybe they could just like restore the ledger from a backup or something. But I do think that there's something to this. And I wonder how long it will be until we see some sort of AI agent heist from a bank. And I'm kind of curious as to what that might look like.

• 38:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Also, at the same time, AI agents inside of customer accounts, what if that's my muse? What if that's my OpenAI? How do they know that it's actually not me just telling the bank that, hey, send money to this person because that's what I need to be have done? Like, the differentiating between good bots and bad bots is not possible.

• 39:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  So where are we at the end of this? Are we like, from a crypto perspective, obviously, the entire internet is going to need to go through months of hardening, as these AI agents get smarter and saturate more and more places. And that's going to be a rough process. So that realization is now hit. What about crypto? Like, are you worried?

• 39:29David Hoffman?

  It's hard not to be excited about crypto because like, we've already chewed glass? Like, we're already over the chasm to some, to some degree.

• 39:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. What's the worst they could do? A billion dollar hack? That happens all the time.

• 39:44David Hoffman?

  Like, I don't know. I go back and forth on this because if there is an AI agent heist from like people's bank accounts, like, there's, you know, stealing money from bank account doesn't work very well because there's KYC everywhere.

• 39:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 39:57David Hoffman?

  Like, the money can't go places. They can, they can literally just take it back. That's not true with crypto. Like, if there is a heist of crypto, which happens all the time, the money's gone. At the same time, like, our systems are more hardened because of that fact.

• 40:13David Hoffman?

  I don't really know. I think, I think I just need to kind of sit and watch and watch this one play out. But it's hard not to at least see why crypto fits the future of the internet more than all of these like paper and duct tape systems that we were like talking about a second ago.

• 40:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I absolutely agree with that, too. All right, coming up next, David, we got to talk about the OCC. They just gave crypto a big win. This comes in the implementation of the genius bill. The banks are pretty pissed. We'll talk about that. Also, a startup that turns mercury into actual gold via alchemy. This is a fusion startup. What's going to happen to gold?

• 40:52David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin catalyst we never saw coming.

• 40:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Is Peter Schiff freaking out? I guess we'll talk about all that. Before we do, let's thank the sponsors that made this possible.

• 41:01David Hoffman?

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

• 41:46David Hoffman?

  The Bankless MCP is exclusively available to Bankless premium subscribers. So you can go to bankless.com, upgrade to premium, and connect the MCP in just a few minutes. And all of a sudden, your crypto queries to your AI LLM, whatever you use, will get a thousand times better. So go check it out. There is a link in the show notes. And once you become a Bankless premium member, you can hop into the Bankless Discord and let me know how you like it. Cheers.

• 42:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael NATO. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search the DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify,

• 42:51Ryan Sean Adams?

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

• 42:54David Hoffman?

  We haven't really talked about it much on Bankless because it's a bit out of our scope, but there has been a pretty wild fusion and fission, like, kind of startup VC froth market. Like, there's a lot of excitement in the fusion and fission space. Still very early, like, earlier than quantum, quantum startups by a lot. But like Sam Altman, for example, has invested in like a fusion or fission startup. It's one of the talks, talks of the town if you're into frontier technologies. There's this startup called Marathon Fusion that tweeted out that they are targeting the alchemy of gold. Demonstrated high rate alchemy, trying to turn mercury into real stable gold.

• 43:37David Hoffman?

  And like, we know that this is possible. We know that it is possible to take mercury molecules and then turn it into gold. The reason why we don't do that is because it's like wildly economically inefficient, as in it takes like 10,000 times the cost to produce the gold to, to power that operation in the first place. But with AI, with frontier technology, with more power, we can actually just, that is just turning this into an engineering problem.

• 44:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the, the tweet from Marathon Fusion was they turned mercury into real stable gold, beating CERN's record by a factor of 10. Okay, I'm the first thing to-

• 44:19David Hoffman?

  Set in 2025, so CERN, whatever the hell CERN is, set that record in 2025. So a 10x in a year and a half?

• 44:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. So the, but the thing is, of course, this is a very, this is a trace amount, just kind of like very, very tiny amounts.

• 44:33David Hoffman?

  Market, yeah.

• 44:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nick Carter tweeted this out. He said, "This is gold's quantum FUD, but it's way worse because you can't software update gold." And so Fusion had not really been on my radar too much with respect to, okay, what are the threats to gold's monetary premium? You know, other things had been in the past. For instance, people talk about asteroid mining, and as space gets cheaper, that will certainly become feasible. But that still feels very much decades away, which is probably why Ray Dalio talks about gold and extols the virtue. "If you're worried about debasement, use gold. Why not Bitcoin, Dalio?" He says, "Well, Bitcoin can be hacked, there's this quantum risk, all of these things."

• 45:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder if Ray Dalio has considered the fusion risk, David? Because in looking into this, and again, this is at a high level, I think Nick Carter could actually be right here. It's not the first time I've said those words, by the way. Not right now, but we're talking possibly 2030s even, where this technology starts to become real. And the physics itself is real. So you can turn mercury into gold, okay, through a fusion reactor. All you need, it produces this as a byproduct. So all you need is gigawatts of fusion, essentially.

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  That's all you need. I've got that in my closet, actually. Gigawatts of fusion.

• 46:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this is a real possibility. And by the way, Nick thinks this could be accelerated by AI. But if you had a mid-sized fusion plant, say mid-sized 1.5 gigawatts, something like this, gigawatt hours, the same size as some of our fission nuclear plants, as a byproduct per year, in addition to producing that energy and that power, it would produce about three tons of gold. Okay? So three tons of gold as a byproduct. And if you scale that out, and you said, we had all, let's say, all of the nuclear plants that we use fission on today, and you said those, we had the same amount, only fusion plants, okay?

• 46:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  We would be adding a meaningful amount of gold supply every single year to the market. So maybe like doubling the amount of gold supply in the market. And Nick is actually right. There's no difficulty adjustment on that. So if we unlock fusion, okay, for every gigawatt of fusion that we produce, we can actually produce gold as a byproduct. And as those gigawatts scale up, more gold supply will also scale up and will have more gold in the market. And this technology, while not ready today, could start to be a force in the 2030s. And certainly 2040s? Like, it seems very reasonable.

• 47:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I know people say, "Well, gold is gold, like, it'll always be, it's Lindy, it always has a monetary premium." I mean- That was true of silver.

• 47:45David Hoffman?

  It only works because of scarcity.

• 47:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Okay, that was true of silver at one point in time, and then the Spanish found silver mines in, you know,

• 47:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  in the new world.

• 47:56David Hoffman?

  This is the one thing that punctures Lindy. The Lindy is the Lindy because of the scarcity.

• 48:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And it's not something that could be updated or patched, you know, the way Bitcoin can by way of quantum. Anyway, it's not enough for me to kind of look at my portfolio and being like, like, oh, sell all gold.

• 48:12David Hoffman?

  Let me market up my gold.

• 48:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it is a factor. And maybe Dalio doesn't have to be concerned about it because it's not going to happen in his timeline. But I think if you're a millennial, if you're like 40 or under and you're thinking about investing.

• 48:25David Hoffman?

  If you have a retirement timeline to port your portfolio, totally.

• 48:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Three, three things. There's one statement in their tweet that I think we should all pay attention to. Quote, "We've reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems." With AI, engineering problems are now simple. You just need to throw AI at it and then with time you'll get it. The other thing is like asteroid mining is also real. How can you look at what SpaceX is doing with launching rockets and then capturing them with chopsticks and being like, oh yeah, they're totally not going to go and mine gold asteroids. These are two separate engineering problems that can flood the market with gold. And gold is a long duration asset, as you've said, people buy gold for like long-term storage.

• 49:15David Hoffman?

  And so therefore, and markets are forward looking. So all this engineering problem, all it has to show is some kernel of success somewhere. And all of a sudden, the market's going to start pricing that in.

• 49:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this has happened in the past with like silver. Again, New World Silver, the Spanish, you got a century of devaluing of silver when massive amounts of supply came in the market. I kind of think what this means is that if you are thinking about store of value as a single asset, I think you've got that, like, I think that is the incorrect view of what store of value actually is. I think store of value is a portfolio of assets, both digital and physical, that the state can inflate or seize. I mean, like nation states, and it has to be a portfolio. I don't think you can go all in on gold or all in on silver or all in on Bitcoin or all in on Zcash.

• 50:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's a mix with some expected value outcome for all of these different assets. That's my conclusion.

• 50:18David Hoffman?

  I think you can go all in on Zcash for that.

• 50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can.

• 50:25David Hoffman?

  All right. Shall we get into stablecoins?

• 50:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sure.

• 50:28David Hoffman?

  Not a store of values. Okay, so the OCC has finalized its Genius Act rules. Okay, Crash Course. We passed the Genius Act. It's a law. The law takes effect January. If you think that you have been operating under the Genius Act up to this point, you are wrong.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 50:45David Hoffman?

  The Genius Act takes effect in January. It's always been this way.

• 50:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  And so the OCC has finalized its Genius Act rules. And the banks are pissed. The banks are pissed.

• 50:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why?

• 50:58David Hoffman?

  I don't know why they're pissed. They shot themselves in the foot by not compromising on clarity. And because the proposed limits on stablecoin rewards are gone, are is unresolved. So the whole bank versus crypto fight over yield kind of remains in its gray area. Stablecoin issuers cannot pay interest on stablecoins. They cannot pay interest on the yield that they get from their T-bills. They cannot pass that along, but they can do what they've already been doing, which is give stablecoin rewards, which is a huge loophole, which is the thing that the banks were pissed about, which is why they tried to come back to the table after the Genius Act was established to fight in clarity. Clarity failed, and so we have the rules that create this loophole in the first place. So the banks did not get the crack down.

• 51:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the OCC just formalized the loophole. They formalized the, uh, the, leaving the door open to Coinbase giving yield back to its customers, let's say, on USDC.

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it says that they will assess arrangements, like reward arrangements, case by case. Existing programs have not gotten, received blanket approval. But like the, the status quo is, is tolerable. It's like the status quo is a status quo. And so rewards are being paid and that will continue.

• 52:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you know, this is a win for crypto because all the bank lobbyists are pissed. This is the American Bankers Association. The Genius rules undermine what we're trying to do. Banking advocates pushing back against OCC's finalized rules. So if the banks are angry about it and they are rent seeking, then that means US consumers benefit and obviously crypto benefits as well.

• 52:32David Hoffman?

  This is good for us. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of things. Alpenglow is live on Solana mainnet. That's the, the biggest software update to Solana probably ever. Finality goes from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Fault tolerance rises from 33 to 40% if you care about that. But it was a success, went off without a hitch. Now vote transactions aren't on-chain, which I think is kind of nice because it always was annoying to me that they would put votes as transactions and count it as TPS. That was always bullshit.

• 53:06David Hoffman?

  But congrats to Solana for, for, I, I think this is like if Ethereum had its like,

• 53:13David Hoffman?

  there's no cor, there's no cor, I'm not going to try and do that.

• 53:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I think it's a different project entirely. I don't think Ethereum is trying to get to 150 milliseconds at all.

• 53:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was trying to say, no, this is like Ethereum's merge or EIP 1559 because they're very, very big upgrades. But it's still, it's just not the same. It's just not the same. On the Ethereum side of things, Aerodrome and Velodrome merged to just Arrow. So Aerodrome and Velodrome, two separate projects from the same team. One on the OP mainnet, that's Velodrome, and then one on base, which is Aerodrome.

• 53:45David Hoffman?

  They use, I don't know why they did this because I was a big Velodrome holder.

• 53:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I always found it confusing.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  I don't know why they did this. I, I was bummed because I was a big Velodrome holder because I really liked the project. And then they, and then they were going to deploy on base. I'm like, sick. This is going to be a huge catalyst for my Velo tokens. And then they deployed Aerodrome on base and they just minted a brand new token. I'm like, wait.

• 54:07David Hoffman?

  What am I holding?

• 54:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  The good news is if you held those Velodrome tokens, they become Arrow tokens, right?

• 54:12David Hoffman?

  They become Arrow. Yes. Okay. So all, if you are a Arrow or Velo holder, you will need to upgrade to a new token. Still called Arrow. That's true.

• 54:24David Hoffman?

  Okay. If you're, if you're an Arrow or Velo holder, you need to pay attention to something. But it's now just Arrow.

• 54:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm reading this. All existing Arrow and Velo token holders will need to upgrade to the new token Arrow. But specifically, I think you can redeem both for Arrow tokens, right?

• 54:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but one token is called the same as the other? Arrow?

• 54:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure. It's all Arrow now, but Velo becomes Arrow.

• 54:46David Hoffman?

  There should have just been one token this entire time.

• 54:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, I hope we, I guess, enforce better norms around tokens in the future. I remember there was a time where we didn't really understand tokens or I'm not sure. But do you remember like, Nosis, I feel like was guilty of this in the past too, where they just like issue a token every single time they do a new product.

• 55:06David Hoffman?

  New smart contract, new token. Yeah.

• 55:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Imagine if Amazon did this. Instead of buying like Amazon stock, they had, you know, Amazon for shopping. They had Amazon for, you know, cloud, and you don't get that all compounded together in one single asset.

• 55:19David Hoffman?

  Facebook buys Instagram and then issues Instagram equity instead of Facebook equity.

• 55:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's part of the reason that tokens have been so uninvestable and confusing. But anyway, this is good news. We're, we're going back to nature's healing. We're going back to something that's much more normal and aligned with what investors want as far as outcomes.

• 55:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So congrats to the AR team. I know you guys have been working on this for, for a long time. That'll be it. Ryan, I don't know. The internet might not work a week from today. So I don't know if I'll see you in a week, but if the internet's still working, I'll see you for the fourth week of October weekly rollout.

• 55:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  That sounds great, man. I think it'll be fine. So I'll see you then.

• 55:57David Hoffman?

  Crypto is risky. The internet is also risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are head west to this frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.