Pod Insights Bankless ROLLUP: Circle IPO Hits $20B | Stablecoin Summer Is On | Trump Wallet Chaos | EF Deploys Special For About this episode This week, Ryan and David unpack Circle’s explosive $20B IPO—crypto’s second biggest—and what it signals about Wall Street’s newfound love for stablecoins. They break down the confusing Trump wallet drama, where even Trump’s own sons deny involvement, and explore why Pump.fun’s rumored $4B token raise has the industry split. Ethereum enters “wartime mode” as the Foundation lays off staff and spins up a lean new R&D force called Protocol. Plus, Ray Dalio says “a bit of Bitcoin,” Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill adds $2.4T to the deficit, and SBF is headed to Netflix.
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TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES
0:00 Intro
0:41 Circle IPO
https://x.com/circle/status/1930624298760143333
https://www.theblock.co/post/356602/circle-seeks-7-2-billion-valuation-in-upsized-ipo
https://x.com/ruiixyz/status/1930386144216396176
https://x.com/EconomyApp/status/1930657679418241238
https://x.com/jerallaire/status/1930595978215637360
https://x.com/EffortCapital/status/1930621939279679542
9:34 Markets
12:23 Trump BBB
https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1930265604105150647
https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1930256218108383338
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930452348234805665
https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1930659468536144062
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1929954109689606359
https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1929993372586152364
23:53 Pump.fun is getting ready for a token
https://blockworks.co/news/pumpdotfun-token-sale
https://x.com/nextfckingthing/status/1929871539018576257
https://dune.com/tiagocryptonary/pump-fun-analytics
https://x.com/lmrankhan/status/1928163796691845133
https://x.com/VannaCharmer/status/1930318687333986639
32:00 Ethereum Foundation announced another big change!
https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/1929620145984753843
https://x.com/econoar/status/1930361688047661495
https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/06/04/ef-treasury-policy
https://x.com/centauridoteth/status/1929896351447372191
https://x.com/ViktorBunin/status/1929945974316662804
44:43 Strategy found a new way how to raise more money for Bitcoin
https://x.com/saylor/status/1929635975367475403
https://x.com/DylanLeClair_/status/1929661889963086170
49:01 Trump team launched a crypto wallet - or did they?
https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1929943367892283828
https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1929966635445576103
https://x.com/0xLeoInRio/status/1929955682037731340
https://x.com/molly0xFFF/status/1930351820288741708
https://x.com/Ronxyz00/status/1929884476328276036
https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1930015280094429381
57:50 SBF is heading to Netflix!
https://x.com/netflix/status/1928153876475097117
1:00:26 Bankless is looking for talent!
https://x.com/i/jobs/1929890683927638133
https://x.com/i/jobs/1929889475783520481
1:01:38 Closing & Disclaimer
1:02:01 Moment of Zen
https://x.com/l3olanza/status/1930320045139173881
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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript 12,178 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:10 Ryan Sean Adams? There it is.
0:11 David Hoffman? Huge congratulations to Circle for being crypto's second biggest IPO. Coinbase is the first. They didn't technically have an IPO, but details. So we have our second big United States company going public and trading, Ryan. First, Circle shares were sold in the IPO at $31, $31 the day before. Do you know what Circle is trading at right now, about one hour into trading?
0:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, I saw something about this, but it's significantly up, right? So, I don't know, has it doubled?
0:42 David Hoffman? It has more than doubled. I'm looking at it right now. It's trading at $88.50. It also hit a peak high of $103, which is just crazy. So almost a tripling out of the gate, a tripling out of the gate of the evaluation of Circle.
0:57 Ryan Sean Adams? I can't live this chart. It's like it's breaking the charts, David.
1:00 David Hoffman? That's why it's from the chart. Okay, just type in C R C L. And that's the ticker of the Circle Internet Group, Inc. Apparently that's the company name, trading on the NASDAQ.
1:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Wow, just a green line straight up, huh?
1:12 David Hoffman? Big, big green line. Yeah, well, you're going for a weekly candle. And let me tell you, it hasn't been trading for a week.
1:17 Ryan Sean Adams? I'll do the, how do I do shorter time rates?
1:21 David Hoffman? Click the W and go under one minute. There you go. $20 billion is the valuation that Circle is trading at.
1:27 Ryan Sean Adams? That's crazy!
1:28 David Hoffman? People were initially pricing it at around $6, $6 or $7 billion currently trading. I mean, we're just, we're one and a half hours into trading, so who knows? But it's coming in at $20 billion.
1:39 Ryan Sean Adams? They gotta feel smart for like rejecting the Ripple offer, rejecting any Coinbase offers in the $6 to $9 billion range, just going with his IPO. It's like, I'm a lot more shareholder value here.
1:50 David Hoffman? Yeah, well, so far, they still have lockups and all that kind of stuff. So things still need to play out. But yeah, they're coming in at a juicy, juicy valuation, which, I mean, this sets the tone. This sets the tone. A lot of people are saying, oh, this is now going to be the starting gun for a variety of further crypto IPOs. I think people are looking at Kraken.
2:12 Ryan Sean Adams? David.
2:13 David Hoffman? There are other companies that people are looking at. Everyone's talking about Bankless going public.
2:18 Ryan Sean Adams? No one is talking about that.
2:19 David Hoffman? A $20 billion valuation.
2:20 Ryan Sean Adams? You know what they are probably talking about? After our episode last week, they're probably using the word "stablecoin summer" to describe this price action, okay? I told you it was going to be "stablecoin summer", and you said, "How can people make money on stablecoins?" The answer was right in front of us this entire time. They just had to buy stocks.
2:39 David Hoffman? Yeah, I'm seeing people's screenshots of their IPO purchase requests in Robinhood and other venues, and they only got like 1/3 of it filled, 1/2 of it filled. But if you got any amount of Circle stock in the IPO buy, you are up like 2X. So congratulations.
2:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Are you surprised that there's this investor appetite for this? Like, this is surprising to me.
3:01 David Hoffman? It is a little bit surprising to me, and I'm like of two minds about this. Circle is just the only good, meaningful way of getting stablecoin exposure for TradFi. That is the only valid conduit for stablecoin exposure.
3:15 Ryan Sean Adams? But we've been telling them they could buy ETH. ETH is a stablecoin platform.
3:19 David Hoffman? Most stablecoins are on ETH, yeah, that's right. ETH is not available on the NASDAQ, though, and apparently that matters. And so, yeah, if you are bullish stablecoins and you would like to have exposure to stablecoins, Circle is now trading on the NASDAQ, on, excuse me, on the NYSE. And so, that's a way to do that. And so, maybe you can read into this $20 billion valuation, this 3X higher valuation than what people predicted, because Wall Street is just super bullish stablecoins, which we know they are, and that's what's happening. The other half of the story is like the story of Circle economics, which I don't know if that totally is defensible at a $20 billion valuation, because their income, their profit, was
4:00 David Hoffman? Like 130 something million dollars over the last year. So how does, how is 130 million dollars of income justifying a 20 billion dollar valuation? And they still have that Coinbase deal where they split like almost half of the revenue or something, or third of the revenue with Coinbase.
4:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
4:18 David Hoffman? Uh, and so I don't know if the market's disconnected from reality. Maybe Circle has plans to like clean this up and make better economics. But I mean, I know when you compare this to Tether, which I would love to see Tether go public.
4:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Imagine, can you imagine? Right. Cause like, I mean, for crypto natives, we've always looked at sort of the income statement of Circle versus something like Tether. And as you said, I mean, Circle, it's got all of these additional costs here and it has to do this revenue share. It amounts to a net income of 156 million, even though they have how many, you know, billions in stablecoins out there. Not only is
4:50 David Hoffman? 60 billion.
4:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Not only is Tether like double that size in terms of the amount, triple in terms of the amount of stablecoins issued. It's also, I don't know, like five, six billion a year in terms of profit. It's just like a cash cow. Incredible. Really the number of employees it has, it's got, it's like one of the most profitable companies in existence these days. And of course it'll never go on public in the US markets. But you can imagine if it did.
5:17 David Hoffman? Yeah. But nonetheless, this is just a monumental event for the crypto industry. Like I said, it's the second big United States company to go public. The first IPO Coinbase floated shares, which was like a different mechanism. They actually did, Circle actually did an IPO. Jeremy LaRue tweeted out, "I'm incredibly proud and thrilled to share that Circle is now a public company listed on the NYSE under CRC. 12 years ago, we set out to build a company that could help remake the global economic system by reimagining and rebuilding it from the ground up natively on the internet." So you also just have to sit back and reflect that this is just yet another huge milestone for the crypto industry. So congratulations to Jeremy LaRue and all of the Circle team.
5:57 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, and I wonder if this will trade like based on the genius bill and that going through Congress, if that will be reflected in the market price. And it's a good way to educate Wall Street on that. What's this take that you included here?
6:08 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is from David at Blockworks, Blockworks Research, I think, Blockworks Advisory. Yeah, he says, "With Circle going public today, one thing that the entire world is underway on is Coinbase's venture portfolio," specifically because he's calling out that there's a bunch of Coinbase investments that would not ever go liquid with a token, but instead will go liquid on the NASDAQ or the NYSE. And so he thinks that this is also a starting bell for like a valuation of a lot of Coinbase's venture portfolio and generally venture capital. More companies, more crypto companies going public on public markets, which is always going to be good for VC. And he says that I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if Coinbase Ventures' non-token portfolio is valued at 10 billion in two to three years now
6:53 David Hoffman? that the market is likely valuing it at zero today. I think the, the stock market, the traditional market, does not understand the value of Coinbase Ventures as a part of Coinbase equity.
7:04 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, I was, I knew you follow Coinbase stock, you're like, on a daily basis. Yeah. So was this up on the Circle IPO? Down?
7:15 David Hoffman? Kind of, not really. I mean, we're also dumping right now. I just got the notification that Bitcoin is below $103,000. So goodbye, James Wynn, you're out of here for the fourth time. Coin is down, it was up. I don't know if it's trading at any sort of relevancy to Circle right now.
7:33 Ryan Sean Adams? We got a lot more to talk about on the Weekly Rollup today, guys. Tariffs are back. Also, a tax bill deficits are causing some tension in this Elon and Trump relationship. Okay, I don't know if that chapter is coming to a close. We'll talk about that. And also, how Ray Dalio thinks you should position your portfolio as a result of these tax deficits. We'll talk about that.
7:52 David Hoffman? Ryan's going to bring you the very sophisticated macro takes. I, in contrast, have some macro memes for you, for all of y'all.
8:00 Ryan Sean Adams? You gotta talk about the breakup, aren't you?
8:01 David Hoffman? I'm gonna talk about, well, I'm gonna talk about the memes. We're gonna talk about the memes. I got some memes to show you. Pump Fun wants to raise- Billion dollars at a $4 billion valuation, but the real news here is that a token is confirmed. And I think an airdrop also confirmed.
8:15 Ryan Sean Adams? Gotta be. You can't have a token without an airdrop in these times.
8:19 David Hoffman? At least Pump Fund needs to have an airdrop. And then also the Ethereum Foundation rolls out a new special forces team called Protocol, along with some strategic restructuring and also new information about their treasury policies. So we are now getting treasury policies from the EF, which is appreciated.
8:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, and got to talk about this too. Trump? Did the Trump team launch a crypto wallet that Trump knows absolutely nothing about? This was the weirdest story of the week.
8:44 David Hoffman? Which, which part of the Trump teams in the Trump universe launches, launching what product? We don't really know anymore.
8:50 Ryan Sean Adams? We gotta, we gotta figure this out. We'll get to the bottom of it on this roll up. David, there is a meetup coming up that you wanted the Bankless Nation to hear about. This is beers with Bankless and Frax. When is this happening and where?
9:01 David Hoffman? Yeah, so if anyone is coming to Permissionless, any Bankless listener that is coming to Permissionless, we're doing a meetup with Forax. That is in Brooklyn.
9:08 Ryan Sean Adams? I like how you said that.
9:10 David Hoffman? Forax, yeah.
9:11 Ryan Sean Adams? It's like an emphasis on the FR. It's good. Yeah.
9:13 David Hoffman? Yeah. This is happening at Telea Beer Company, great beer company. So we just rented out the place. We're gonna have free beers for all you listeners out there who want to come and get free beers. And so there is a link in the show notes to register for the event. If you are a Bankless citizen or a Frax community member, you get priority access. And I will see you all at Permissionless.
9:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Awesome. Tell me about markets, David. What's Bitcoin on the week? You said dumpage earlier and I'm kind of scared to look at this chart, but I'm going to.
9:41 David Hoffman? I think I need to go actually update my numbers. Looking at Bitcoin right now, $103,150, down 3.2% on the week. Ether, Ryan.
9:52 Ryan Sean Adams? What?
9:52 David Hoffman? Ryan, what did you do last week?
9:54 Ryan Sean Adams? I believe you, I believe you called for $3,000 Ether last week.
9:58 David Hoffman? Yep. We are looking at 2,567. Trust a little bit outside. We are down 3.4% on the week.
10:07 Ryan Sean Adams? This is just, I got cocky, alright? You were blowing me up. You were telling me about a five-week streak. Every week I've been back, ETH has been up.
10:16 David Hoffman? You're supposed to be the cool-headed one.
10:18 Ryan Sean Adams? I was super cool-headed and then I just got overly excited and in the moment, I blurted out 3K. I wasn't planning to do that. It just came out and now look at us.
10:28 David Hoffman? You tried to manifest a little too hard.
10:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, you know, I'm going to be much more humble on rollups going forward, okay? And I'm not making a price call this week. It's kind of sad to see what like, what's causing this dumpage, David?
10:41 David Hoffman? I don't know. I mean, dumpage, Bitcoin's at 103,000. So is that dumpage? I don't really know, but.
10:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Circle's up though, like, I mean, are they, are they selling their Bitcoin and Ether and they're buying Circle stock? Is that literally what's happening?
10:53 David Hoffman? Everyone is dumping their assets to buy to pump Circle up to $20 billion. We got a total crypto market cap of 3.35 trillion, down like 1% from, from last week. But also we got a mover of the week. Oh, actually, we wouldn't call this a mover. We have a crypto token launch. We have these all the time. We, we talk about them. We celebrate them when they're in the trad markets, but we get them all the time. Lagrange, which is a ZK coprocessor startup, coming in at a whopping $1.25 billion valuation. They just launched their token.
11:25 David Hoffman? For a ZK coprocessor, which is an extremely hard thing to like, describe in a sentence.
11:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, ZK coprocessor. I can barely say it. Like, so explain that one. Like, and I thought infra was dead, right? This is sort of niche.
11:40 David Hoffman? This is deep, deep tech infra.
11:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Ethereum infra and it's already 1.2 billion?
11:45 David Hoffman? Yeah, a coprocessor is like, you know how blockchains all redo their own computation and all the nodes do all their own computation? This is kind of like, not that, the opposite of that, where you just have one person do the ZK computation and then you can just show your workaround. And I think it's like more generalized rather than, like, we talked about this for enshrining the layer one as a ZK rollup. And that's how Ethereum will scale. And I think this is like similar to that, but more generalized.
12:11 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
12:11 David Hoffman? But 20% float, so you know, 80% is still locked, but coming in at a $1.25 billion valuation. So congratulations to Lagrange and Lagrange investors. Lagrange, I believe.
12:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Lagrange, Lagrange. I don't know. Tell me about these memes, though.
12:25 David Hoffman? Oh yeah, I got, I got some memes for you. Okay, so you know the big, beautiful bill that's going through Congress?
12:31 Ryan Sean Adams? I do know that. And actually, okay, big, beautiful bill. I thought it's always in quotes whenever I read it. This is the tax bill that's going into Congress. Okay? I thought they were quoting Donald Trump, who's calling it the big, beautiful bill. Do you know that's literally the name of the bill, David?
12:45 David Hoffman? Yeah, it's literally the name of the bill. They're calling it-
12:47 Ryan Sean Adams? You knew this?
12:48 David Hoffman? Yes. Yeah.
12:49 Ryan Sean Adams? I had no idea. It's literally a congressional bill. It's called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That's the name of it.
12:55 David Hoffman? Yeah. And so this is, this is going through Congress. It's, it's kind of like, I guess, Donald Trump. It's Donald Trump's budget. Uh, it's Donald Trump's. It's like a big, big deal. It's his proposed budget.
13:04 Ryan Sean Adams? The bill is a meme in itself, like the title of the bill. It's just like, what are we doing here?
13:08 David Hoffman? We could unpack like all of the details of the bill, but that's the beautiful thing about memes is actually memes just really distill a lot of information here. So this is, this is the Better Call Saul meme where he's just like presenting a board to people. And the board says, "We cut spending by increasing spending." And it's Donald Trump's face. And then if you go to the next meme, if you would, uh, and it's Donald Trump showing documents to this interviewer. This happened, I think, in the Trump 1.0 era.
13:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Confused interviewer.
13:38 David Hoffman? "I have a plan to cut spending." And then he shows the papers to the interviewer and the paper says, "We're going to increase spending." And the interviewer is just super confused. And then here's Elon Musk. So this is when this becomes drama in the White House. So this is the train running into a school bus meme and the school bus represents money that the Doge has saved the government. And then the train just ramming through that thing. It's Trump's big, beautiful bill. So apparently the Trump's BBB is going to add something, something like $2 trillion of budget deficit. Oh, you have the numbers?
14:12 Ryan Sean Adams? I have the numbers. I did the research. I did the research for this section. You've got the memes.
14:17 David Hoffman? I've got the memes.
14:18 Ryan Sean Adams? But the memes are better. I don't even think I need to explain any details. It's literally what's happening. But, okay, is this, does this also imply some kind of tension in the Trump Elon relationship?
14:29 David Hoffman? The Trump Elon relationship is totally broken up.
14:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, should we play this? This is Donald Trump.
14:33 David Hoffman? Elon is out. Besant is in.
14:36 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm gonna, I'm gonna play this clip. It's Donald Trump.
14:38 Speaker 02 He said the most beautiful things about me. And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.
14:44 Ryan Sean Adams? Let's talk about Elon.
14:45 Speaker 02 I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot.
14:49 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm very disappointed.
14:50 David Hoffman? I'm very disappointed, yeah. And he did do a lot for Elon. He got into the Tesla, he shelled Tesla, he did that whole everything's computer meme.
14:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Brother, Elon did a lot for Trump too, though, okay? And in fact, he was...
15:02 David Hoffman? Did he though?
15:02 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, yeah. He did, that's true, that's true. Yeah, he did do a lot. Elon's taking credit for getting Trump elected, basically. In another tweet that I saw recently this morning, also getting Republicans both the House and the Senate. Yeah, this is true. I did see this tweet from Elon Musk about the big, beautiful bill. He's saying about the bill, "I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it."
15:31 David Hoffman? Wow, wow, wow, wow.
15:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Holy shit. Let's get a little spicy out there.
15:35 David Hoffman? Wow.
15:36 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
15:36 David Hoffman? Anyway, so my big takeaway here is that,
15:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
15:40 David Hoffman? Other than the Elon-Trump drama, which is always hilarious, is that even despite Elon Musk, who is an insanely good operator, no one can argue that. He has made massive companies, he is a process engineer, he knows how to do process and organization. Elon Musk went toe-to-toe with government bureaucracy, tried to cut spending, tried to lean up the government, and lost. Big time. Like, did not actually save any money. So if Elon Musk cannot get the government to lean up and be more efficient and save money, no one can. And without that, like, all Trump is doing is like, okay, you know what, F it.
16:20 David Hoffman? Two trillion dollars more deficit, and then meanwhile, I'm also gonna issue a Bitcoin ETF with one of my companies. And so Bitcoiners are always right. Bitcoiners are always right.
16:30 Ryan Sean Adams? That's another thing we should talk about. That is what he's doing. You know, there's so much he could say about Doge. I mean, of course Elon Musk was, he was doing the cuts in the executive branch, right? Existing government operations, and the big costs of the future are really entitlement programs, aren't they? It's like, that's, you know, so he wasn't... tackling the things that needed to be cut. This big, beautiful bill, you are right. It would add 2.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years' time.
16:58 David Hoffman? Right.
16:59 Ryan Sean Adams? So because this bill has both tax cuts, right? Which decreases US revenue and it also has spending, spending cuts as well. And so if you kind of like add this together, it amounts to a 2.4 trillion dollar deficit. The odds of it, so it passed through the House already, like the last week of May. And the odds of it getting past the Senate, they're saying are about 50 50. There's four Republicans in the Senate who might flip over, not get it approved. But Trump wants it and he's like, get it on my desk. I want to sign this thing by the 4th of July. This is the biggest tax cut and spending cut in history. It's a big, beautiful bill, right? So, I mean, like, did, did anyone seriously think any government from either party, Democrats or Republicans,
17:44 Ryan Sean Adams? was going to reverse the deficit problem that we have? Like, was there ever any hope of that? Was anyone ever serious about that?
17:52 David Hoffman? I was hopeful. Yeah, I thought they started off this administration pretty serious about that. And I was like optimistic. It's like, okay, we're doing the pain thing, which if we're ever going to get back on track and have like fiscal responsibility, it's going to take pain and like, that sucks, but I guess, I guess we're doing it. And I can't really complain because it's a responsible thing. And I was on board with that and turns out, no.
18:13 Ryan Sean Adams? It wasn't. It never was. Yeah, I didn't think it would, like, I was not as hopeful as you were, David. I was super bearish. I know that they were talking about it, right? But they wanted to appear like they were doing, not actually go through the pain. Did you see Ray Dalio's post about this? So he's coming out with a book and he explains it this way. So he compares it to a household and the US right now, this year, revenue to the household is $5 trillion. That's what the US makes in tax revenue. Okay.
18:41 David Hoffman? Right.
18:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Expenses, the stuff it's spending, $7 trillion. So if you take, and plus, the US as a household has a lot of debt out there, about $30 trillion of debt, or six times its revenue. And for actual households in the US, so if you, you're a US citizen with a household, you are about 230 K in debt. That's your portion of the $30 trillion of US debt. Yes, you are a household.
19:08 David Hoffman? $230,000 of debt?
19:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, that's yours.
19:11 David Hoffman? Because I'm a Canada and United States citizen?
19:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes. That's right.
19:14 David Hoffman? Wow.
19:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, and so the annual interest on that debt is about 1 trillion, of course. And some of the debt comes due, right? Because it's debt, it's got a term. About 9 trillion comes due in the next little bit. Okay, and the the hope of the US government from a fiscal position is hoping that creditors or others will just like relend to them. Relend, renew the terms, keep doing it.
19:40 David Hoffman? Which they have so far.
19:42 Ryan Sean Adams? So Dalio says, he just sums it up. He's like, this is the current condition. That's it, David, 230K in debt. And, you know, what do you think he says? What do you think his portfolio prescription is for all of this? Knowing Dalio, the way you know him.
19:56 David Hoffman? Not bonds.
19:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes.
19:59 David Hoffman? Yeah, whatever.
19:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Not bonds.
20:01 David Hoffman? Doesn't say Bitcoin. Did he say Bitcoin?
20:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, okay.
20:04 David Hoffman? No.
20:04 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, he did.
20:05 David Hoffman? He said Bitcoin before, so it's not the first time.
20:06 Ryan Sean Adams? Can I give you his quote?
20:08 David Hoffman? I would have expected him to go straight to gold.
20:10 Ryan Sean Adams? I know, but I've been reading Dalio. He's been talking about this for years. We've both been talking about it for like, we've been talking about this stuff for.
20:15 David Hoffman? Yeah.
20:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Please come on the podcast. Sure. So this is what he says. I suggest diversifying well in asset classes in countries that have strong income statements. I don't know where you find those. And balance sheets. And not having great internal political and external geopolitical conflicts. Again, I don't know where you find those. Sorry, Dalio. Underweighting debt assets like bonds. Basically, you know, he's saying bonds are shit.
20:37 David Hoffman? Sell bonds.
20:38 Ryan Sean Adams? And overweighting gold and, wait for it, and a bit of Bitcoin.
20:43 David Hoffman? A bit of Bitcoin. What do you think he means by that? Do you think over or under 1%?
20:49 Ryan Sean Adams? It's a bit, you know? So that's up for you to define. I mean, for some people listening, that might mean 50% plus, just a little bit of your portfolio.
20:58 David Hoffman? Just a little bit. So are we talking like Michael Saylor or above or below Michael Saylor's level of Bitcoin?
21:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Come on, though. This is notable. I mean, we've been doing this podcast for how long? And now Dalio's, we've always been wondering, hey, you're in the gold train. Why are you not on the digital commodity train? There he is with Bitcoin.
21:16 David Hoffman? Yeah, I remember in the 2021 cycle, we talked about Dalio a lot because that's when, you know, the United States did the helicopter money and all that kind of stuff. And we were, we were just saying, Ray Dalio, say Bitcoin, just say Bitcoin. And he was like, gold. And we're like, no.
21:30 Ryan Sean Adams? And then we would say, but he actually means crypto assets. Yes. He doesn't just mean gold. And sure enough, we were right. Just had to wait for it.
21:37 David Hoffman? All right. Coming up next, on the opposite side of Ray Dalio and macro, we're going to talk about pump funds getting ready to launch a token. And then Ethereum is in front of Congress this week. So what was said in front of Congress and who was representing? And also the SEC giving clarity on staking, ETH staking was downstream of all of that. But first, before we get there, we're going to talk about Uniswap, our sponsor. It's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It's the best place to do DeFi. Let's go hear from Uniswap right now. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient DeFi experience. With Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains is simple, fast and cost effective, helping you move value wherever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol, you'll enjoy a minimal price impact on every trade. And now Uniswap V4 takes it even further.
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23:44 David Hoffman? or off-chain. Audited by ZK Security, the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X. Pumpfund wants to raise $1 billion via a token sale, which would include a public sale, so Pumpfund doing an ICO for a token.
24:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
24:02 David Hoffman? At a $4 billion valuation. So they want to raise $1 billion. They want to grow a $1 billion treasury and launch their token at a $4 billion.
24:11 Ryan Sean Adams? And this is an ICO, you said?
24:13 David Hoffman? There are still, we're still getting, looking for more details. I think what's happening is that they are just like talking to VCs, talking to potential investors, trying to find-
24:23 Ryan Sean Adams? Is this coming from accredited investors? Or is it going to be, is there going to be some sort of a public sale, you think?
24:29 David Hoffman? I'm, from what I'm reading, what I've heard, and also what is, you know, reported on by Blockworks, again, is also talking to, what they said, two sources with knowledgeable, knowledge of the matter, said that there is looking to be a public sale and an airdrop. There's a Twitter account who tweeted out, "Pumpfund launching PumpToken in the next two weeks. Airdrop for users confirmed as well." And then one person says, like, "Are you LARPing?" Or, "Give me, give me sources." And then this Twitter person says, "Nope. Source close to the team confirmed. Seed investors already know." And so if, if they are looking to raise $1 billion, they're going around to investors in the space and showing like terms and talking about terms. And so that's how this would ultimately get to some news reporting agency like Blockworks.
25:14 David Hoffman? And so a loose confirmation of an airdrop, loose confirmation of a $4 billion valuation public sale. What do you think about $4 billion for Pumpfund? What do you think about that?
25:25 Ryan Sean Adams? I was gonna ask you the same question, David. And Ashley, okay, let me give you some more comps here first, and then get your answer in mind. But let's, let's compare it to Circle, okay? They were hitting the bell earlier. So the app Pumped Off Fund has already generated $700 million in cumulative revenue.
25:41 David Hoffman? Cumulative revenue.
25:42 Ryan Sean Adams? On a very small team. So you gotta imagine the vast bulk of that is actually profit. And we said earlier, what's annualized Circle doing these days? 150?
25:50 David Hoffman? 140, 150.
25:52 Ryan Sean Adams? 150 million, alright, versus, well, let's call it, you know, 600 million? In, you know, annual profit for Pumpfund? Okay, Circle, what did we say, 20 billion? Pumpfund, $4 billion. Which is the better deal, David? Which would you rather buy today? Pumpfund or Circle?
26:09 David Hoffman? When you put it like that, wow, Pump Fund seems like really cheap. I don't know what the... And so the revenue for Pump Fund has come down. They made a lot of their money with like, I think that their peak revenue was around the Trump meme coin launch, because that's when all meme coins was like, went absolutely gangbusters.
26:27 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
26:27 David Hoffman? Looking at more recent timeframes of revenue, Pump Fund has made $6.5 million of revenue over the last 30 days, and that annualizes out to $78 million if this Dune board that we're looking at is accurate. So $78 million of...
26:40 Ryan Sean Adams? That's less, less than Circle.
26:42 David Hoffman? Say, let's say they have like $8 million of costs, very slim team, maybe it's less, maybe it's more, $8 million, they're making $70 million a year.
26:49 Ryan Sean Adams? Sure. So durability of the revenue is the question, isn't it?
26:53 David Hoffman? Yeah. For a $4 billion valuation at $70 million of revenue annualized, that, there's a gap there.
27:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, it depends what you think, right? So like, hmm, what's the moat? You know what Pump Fund kind of reminds me of? To be honest, like, I'm not su... So I am not convinced of the durability of meme coins. It's certainly durable this cycle, but if... And I think they will persist, don't get me wrong. Meme coins will always be a thing. But you have, I sort of think of Pump Fund as almost like the OpenSea of last cycle, right? You had NFTs, OpenSea was dominant, looked unstoppable. What happened? Well, NFTs went down, you had other competitors like Blur launch, do things a little bit differently, suck up some of that liquidity, and also the NFT market collapsed, right?
27:43 Ryan Sean Adams? Easy, like, and so the dynamics around meme coins in crypto, you're taking some bets on the future here, and there's so much disruption that could happen in terms of like the market dynamics or new entrants. It's really hard to think about like that versus buying a Circle. Not that we're seriously, you know, like considering these two things, I suppose, but I just have questions about the durability of this lead and the durability of the space.
28:08 David Hoffman? I think the comparison of Pump Fund to OpenSea in 2021 is one that many people are making, and this is a, so we have a bullish tweet and a not bullish tweet. VannaCharm or Mossy, he was on Chopping Black recently, great episode. He made that point of just like, this is more of a flash in the pan. This is more of a one-time meta. I'm not totally convinced. I think there's two ends of the spectrum here. There is 2021 OpenSea, which raised at a $13 billion valuation at the absolute top. And I don't think they could even be valued at like half a billion right now. And so there's that end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is like, this is actually 2013 Coinbase.
28:53 David Hoffman? Actually, meme coins do have incredible durability across time. You know, Dogecoin has been around for a long time. Meme coins were not created by Pumpfund. Meme coins have been around, Pumpfund has really captured it. And so it's actually much closer to 2013 Coinbase, in which meme coins are here forever. And there are meaningful attempts at dethroning Pumpfund. There's Believe, there's Virtuals, there's other token launchers.
29:18 Ryan Sean Adams? They haven't been successful yet.
29:20 David Hoffman? They've had some success, yeah. I wouldn't say not success. And so there's actually going to be always a consistent interest in funding Pumpfund competitors because of the durability of meme coins. And so that's the bullish end of the spectrum. I'm somewhere in the middle. I think 4 billion is kind of rich. I don't think the 4 billion token is going to make any investor at $4 billion valuation. You're not going to like 10x that.
29:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, how do you get to 50 billion from that? How do you get to 100 billion on that? So this is the bullish tweet. "It's been about eight months now, and I hope you're starting to see the vision for where Pump is headed. They're going after platforms like Twitch and TikTok. It's only a matter of time before creators realize they can monetize far more effectively on Pump." That's the take here.
30:06 David Hoffman? That's interesting. Placing Pumpfund shoulder to shoulder with Twitch and TikTok, I think is interesting. As a content platform, where it's actually content first, more than token first. I think that's really interesting.
30:16 Ryan Sean Adams? The problem, though, is just like, how much do you get from that if you're a creator? I mean, there is something extractive from your community about meme coins, or there certainly can be. And oftentimes, the incentives lead towards shortcuts, extraction, people feeling burnt. Everyone wants to buy the meme coin so that it goes up, right? But when it goes down, it sucks. They hate it.
30:38 David Hoffman? No one wants to collect the meme coins. Meme coins are not collectibles.
30:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, if you're a creator, you want something that goes up, you're amazing. It goes down, you're hated.
30:46 David Hoffman? You are hated.
30:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Get off the internet, they hate you. It's just very volatile.
30:51 David Hoffman? Ryan, what do you think the aggregate market cap of all Pump Fund meme coins is? Like, if you add the market cap of all the Madam together?
31:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Just the Pump Fund ones, not all the crypto meme coins.
31:02 David Hoffman? Pumped on, yeah, exactly, that's right.
31:04 Ryan Sean Adams? I would get, we have 5 billion, something like this.
31:07 David Hoffman? Yeah, pretty close, 4.5 billion, 4.5 billion.
31:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Same as the market cap of the platform.
31:12 David Hoffman? Yeah.
31:12 Ryan Sean Adams? That's interesting, I don't know what that tells me, that's interesting.
31:15 David Hoffman? It's interesting, I also don't know what it tells me. I think BNB, somebody was, I posed this question to Twitter. BNB is actually like far worse in the sense that the valuation of BNB is massive.
31:26 Ryan Sean Adams? BNB, Binance Chain thing?
31:28 David Hoffman? Binance Chain, yeah, the aggregate value of Binance Chain, you know, people call this a casino. Binance Chain is a casino.
31:36 David Hoffman? People, the value of all aggregate tokens on Binance is like 1/10 the value of BNB itself. But granted, Binance Exchange buys and burns BNB, and so you're actually investing in like Binance revenues too. So maybe it's not a very good comparison.
31:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Real hard to compare Circle and BNB and Pump.
31:51 David Hoffman? Yeah, let's compare Circle and Pump Fund, shoulder to shoulder.
31:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Let's throw in, you know, a bank like JP Morgan, compare that too. Well, let's talk about the Ethereum Foundation update this week. So the Protocol Special Forces Team, alright? So some people saw this tweet from the Ethereum Foundation announcing Protocol, and they were like, what? Like, what is Protocol?
32:13 David Hoffman? Announcing Protocol, like, question mark?
32:15 Ryan Sean Adams? What is Protocol?
32:17 David Hoffman? Protocol, I think it's just the name of a very slimmed down research and development team that has been categorized into three swim lanes, three lanes. You know, the Verge, Urge, Splurge, all, those are gone. There are now just three.
32:32 Ryan Sean Adams? They're still there, we just don't talk about them.
32:33 David Hoffman? They're still there, but like, this is not what we're talking about, this is not who we're presenting it.
32:36 Ryan Sean Adams? Sure.
32:37 David Hoffman? What they are now is First Track, Scale the Layer 1, led by Tim Bako and Ansgar. Second Track, Scale blobs, led by Alex Stokes and Francesco Diamato. And Third Track, Improve UX, led by Barnabé and Josh Rudolph. And then Donkrad is the person orchestrating all of these things. So he's kind of like the head of these three independent teams. Each team is only two people, and then Donkrad is the guy at the top. And this is the Ethereum. Development team, this is the people dictating the next steps of the protocol.
33:11 Ryan Sean Adams? Love it.
33:11 David Hoffman? And the EF wrote in the blog post, "The process of shipping protocol is messy, asking us to respond proactively to demands that are hard to articulate and even harder to fulfill. This moment may be Ethereum's best shot at deploying not only our technology, but our values at planetary scale." And this announcement also came with a reduction in staff. And so there were layoffs from the Ethereum Foundation. Tim Baker wrote, "As a part of this reorientation, we have also revisited our team structures. We'll be doubling down on some areas and reducing efforts in others. This resulted in us deciding to part ways with some EFers whose skillsets no longer matched our priorities." So, okay, remember when I'm going to invoke he who must not be named by the Ethereum community? That person is-
33:54 Ryan Sean Adams? There's so many of them. Who are you about to say?
33:56 David Hoffman? Kyle Samoni.
33:57 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, that's one of them, yeah.
34:00 David Hoffman? When we had him on the show, we were like, "Okay, Kyle, what do you think we need? What does Ethereum need to do?" And he goes, "Yeah, Ethereum needs to go into war mode." Like, there needs to be-
34:08 Ryan Sean Adams? Didn't he say fire people at the-
34:09 David Hoffman? There needs to be fire people, yeah. A wartime CEO needs to come in and people need to get fired.
34:15 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, didn't he also say fire Vitalik somewhere else, or am I misremembering that?
34:20 David Hoffman? Did he? I'd have to go back and re-watch. Anyways, I'm seeing Donkrad being elevated to a position of very strong leadership, people being fired, laid off, and the organization being restructured to be able to, as Tim said, ship code, ship technology at a planetary scale. That's what I'm seeing.
34:38 Ryan Sean Adams? It's good. I think this is good. This is like, you know, to me, this is Tamasch coming in.
34:45 David Hoffman? This is absolutely Tamasch. This is Tamasch.
34:47 Ryan Sean Adams? He's bringing organizational, executional firepower, a thing that the EF, for all of its great things, and there are many great things about the EF, as a piece it was missing, to be honest. Not executing on things, particularly the roadmap, not having clear timelines, communication, and he's just putting names accountable and leaders accountable for specific deliverables. And these deliverables are exactly where Ethereum needs to go. And the technology is there. If Ethereum could just execute on this roadmap-
35:17 David Hoffman? Quickly.
35:18 Ryan Sean Adams? Like, things are going to go very well from here.
35:20 David Hoffman? Yes, yeah.
35:21 Ryan Sean Adams? And there's still a big if, but I'm starting to see mounting confidence here, right? Like, this is a good sign to me. Scale L1, scale the blobs, improve UX, these are all the things that, and now we have a team that's executing on it. It's called Protocol.
35:36 David Hoffman? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I do these kind of high-touch episodes that require like multiple guests being stitched together. And so I'm doing Ryan interviews with each of these teams for like 20, 25 minutes each. Going to stitch them together. Oh, cool. Hopefully Donkreg gets back to me on Telegram and says, yes, I'm down to be the co-host because I'm going to get Donkreg as the co-host because he's the guy. And so I'm trying to make that episode happen. So bear with me. I think that would be great. That would be a fantastic episode. Not the only news. Yeah. Coming out of the EF. So the EF has also released a new treasury policy. So we're finally getting some clarity about the EF's treasury. Because it has some ETH and it's treasury. It has some ETH in its treasury, yes.
36:14 David Hoffman? The big line, I think, we intend to reduce our annual OpEx roughly, linearly, over the next five years, ending at a long-term 5%. So the EF wants to spend just 5% of its treasury every single year, down from 15% where it is now. In addition to that, the EF will seek to earn acceptable returns on treasury assets. So they're going to invest, make their assets more productive. They both have stablecoins and ETH as well. They're going to invest in a manner consistent with Ethereum's underlying principles. And also quarterly reports will be a thing. So we're going to get quarterly reports. With going back to that investing their ETH topic, they want to support nascent DeFi protocols to help develop privacy features.
36:57 David Hoffman? And they're going to like allocate, deposit their ETH into DeFi protocols in order to get a yield. But primarily emphasize what they are calling DeFi punk protocols. So what's DeFi punk? I'm so glad you asked. DeFi apps that prioritize security, being open source, financial self-sovereignty, I think we would call that banklessness. Tech solutions over trust-based solutions. So no multi-sigs, no reliance on legal coercion as recourse. Active deployment of cryptographic tools to protect civil liberties. Not sure what that means. And then also privacy. So the EF is trying to make their capital productive by also leveraging what they are calling DeFi punk. DeFi apps, which I think we would have always called these DeFi apps, but the word DeFi has kind of been diluted that they needed to remake. Yeah, you gotta call it punk now. Yeah.
37:43 David Hoffman? That makes sense, right? DeFi punk is just DeFi 1.0.
37:46 Ryan Sean Adams? All and everything DeFi this these days, hyper liquid, that's DeFi, sure, right? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I would say, just a refresher, how much, how much ETH does the EF hold? Like, I'm just recalling this from memory. If someone were to make me guess, I would say it's like, it's pretty low compared to other foundations as a percentage of supply, right? Something like 1%. It might even be less than 1%. Now, that amounts to a lot of money because ETH is just so massive in terms of size, but it's not very much as a portion of total ETH supply.
38:15 David Hoffman? Yeah, yeah. If this Google search is correct, the foundation's total treasury is about $970 million, 790 million in crypto and 180 million dollars in non-crypto assets. I'm guessing that's, that's dollars.
38:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
38:31 David Hoffman? So less than a billion dollars.
38:32 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, less than a billion dollars. They really have to make it last, I guess. You know, it's good, though, for them to, to like, roll out these policies.
38:40 David Hoffman? Quarterly reports is gonna be really nice.
38:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I have a conspiracy theory.
38:43 David Hoffman? I'd like to challenge all other Layer One foundations to issue quarterly reports about their financials.
38:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Maybe they will, because I have a little bit of a conspiracy theory for you.
38:51 David Hoffman? Yeah.
38:52 Ryan Sean Adams? I think part of the reason the EF is doing more of this, transparency, I mean, there's lots of reasons, cultural change, all of these things, it's all, all good. They realized they, they woke up from their slumber, all of these things. Part of it, I think, is the SEC is no longer on their throat.
39:06 David Hoffman? Oh, I definitely think that's true.
39:08 Ryan Sean Adams? So they can actually add more leadership and more coordination to space, including things like quarterly reports. In the past, if they did a quarterly report, you know Gary Gensler would point at that, bring it into a court case and say, he was already snooping around, trying to say that Ether, the asset, was a security, that EF is kind of like a, you know, centralized corporation. And if they had a quarterly report of some kind, he would bring that, that would be admissible in court, and he'd use it against them. I think this is part of the reason we're seeing more leadership.
39:36 David Hoffman? I think you're absolutely correct. There's also a story of like Vitalik is just not an operator. He's just not an executive.
39:45 Ryan Sean Adams? That's true.
39:45 David Hoffman? So it's a little bit of both. You definitely see Tomasz fingerprints on this. But also on this one, Xiaowei, this is Xiaowei's work. So if we're gonna tip hats to Tomasz, we also have to tip hats to Xiaowei.
39:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Amazing. Let's tip a hat to Vitalik here, actually. This is him commenting on Ethereum Layer 1 scalability.
40:03 Speaker 03 How fast do we see a lot of these changes to the L1 that have been talked about in the last couple of months?
40:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay. So my view is like, generally, I think we should scale L1 by about 10x over the next year and a bit, based on delayed.
40:18 Speaker 03 Why the "in a bit"? Why not be more ambitious here?
40:21 Speaker 04 No, a year would be great.
40:23 David Hoffman? It's great just to see this reprioritization and this like can-do attitude of scaling the Layer 1.
40:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes.
40:30 David Hoffman? Just permeate around the Ethereum culture. I've been pushing for this for a while now. Like, I went back and forth. Like, last year, I was like, "Yeah, we need to scale the Layer 1." No, the path that we're on. It took me a while to like, get dug into this.
40:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Now you have conviction around scaling L1.
40:44 David Hoffman? I've been pushing to different parts of the Ethereum community for the last, like, I don't know, two, three months. I was in the Daily Great Discord, like, fighting with them, and they were like, "No, we can't do this." Like, "The engineers, you don't know anything, David, that the engineers don't know." And then you see the engineers start saying, "Yeah, we're gonna scale the Layer 1." I'm like, "Thank you! It's just an attitude thing. It's just an attitude. We can do things."
41:05 Ryan Sean Adams? We can. There's also, there is also, there are some trade-offs with scaling too much, but I feel like the Ethereum researchers know they got the Get Out of Jail free card now, which is ZK tech is really catching up. And so that's gonna allow massive scale here.
41:21 David Hoffman? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a conversation in the Bankless Discord from Centauri, one of our Bankless citizens, who said, "To get a 10x increase in a year, we need to pressure larger operators to change the gas limit on their nodes." Which brings us to this tweet from Victor Bunin, who is a protocol specialist at Coinbase. And he says, "Hey, so Coinbase is once again one of the first large operators to signal the increasing gas limit. People used to bully us to go faster, but guess it's not." Now is our turn to bully others. So he tags Lido, P2P, Figment, Helms, Chorus and say, "Yo guys, it is time to increase the Layer 1 gas to 60 million." Right now is at 36 million. Let's get it up to 60 million gas on the Layer 1. So there are people from Lido who are listening. There are people from P2P who are listening. You are requested to pump the gas.
42:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Let's do it. Let's do it. Alright, we got a lot more coming up. David, Sailor, Michael Sailor found a way to raise more money to buy more Bitcoin.
42:14 David Hoffman? I'm shocked.
42:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, he did.
42:15 David Hoffman? Which couch cushion did he look under this time?
42:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, who knows? Did the Trump team launch a crypto wallet? Some say yes, some say no. Maybe we'll find an answer.
42:23 David Hoffman? How are we set up for debate?
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44:43 Ryan Sean Adams? Tweet from Michael Saylor. Strategy today announced the launch of Astride, that's a ticker symbol, S-T-R-D, a new perpetual preferred stock offering available to institutional investors. All right, I thought, I thought Michael Saylor already had a stock offering, and that was called MicroStrategy, MSTR. Now he's got STRD that he's releasing. What's going on? Explain this.
45:05 David Hoffman? Yeah, it turns out he also has STRF, which has already been trading for a while. So we were trying to understand what's going on here. So MicroStrategy, MSTR, is the common stock. And you know how, you know how like Pendle kind of unwraps tokens and allows you to express different, um, different, different ways of having exposure?
45:24 Ryan Sean Adams? You're trying to explain complicated equity stuff to me in DeFi crypto language. Yeah.
45:27 David Hoffman? Yeah, it's a little, it's a little bit like that. So if you are maximally bullish Bitcoin and you would like to express that bullishness with MSTR, with MicroStrategy, you would buy MSTR. You would buy the common stock.
45:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Sure.
45:39 David Hoffman? STRF is a 10% like coupon, a Series A perpetual strife preferred equity. So it's, it's this thing that exists in this like no man's land between equity and a bond, a corporate bond.
45:51 Ryan Sean Adams? But it's preferred. So if common stockholders get wiped out because some, you know, something real bad happens.
45:57 David Hoffman? Right.
45:57 Ryan Sean Adams? The preferred equity owners are able to.
46:00 David Hoffman? Get paid out first.
46:00 Ryan Sean Adams? They get paid out first.
46:01 David Hoffman? Yes, okay. Yes, exactly. And so you, as a STRF preferred strife. Preferred equity owner, you get paid a 10% coupon, a 10% like dividend yield, a fixed 10% cumulatively.
46:13 Ryan Sean Adams? That's the benefit.
46:15 David Hoffman? So if the board skips a payment because it doesn't make any make many money, it piles up and you will get paid that payment that you are owed later.
46:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
46:22 David Hoffman? It's at the top of the equity stack. So like you said, if if anything, this gets paid out first. It is the most safe, most defensible. This new thing that he that MicroStrategy is issuing is STRD.
46:35 Ryan Sean Adams? It's a third thing.
46:36 David Hoffman? The third thing, the third asset. So he has MicroStrategy, he has STRF, now he has STRD, not yet trading. Say 10% series, a perpetual stride preferred. So is junior, it also pays 10%.
46:49 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
46:49 David Hoffman? But if MicroStrategy cannot make a payment and it misses a payment, you do not get that payment. You do not get that payment later, unlike STRF.
46:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
46:58 David Hoffman? And so.
46:59 Ryan Sean Adams? And it's also junior to STRF.
47:00 David Hoffman? Also junior. And so if MicroStrategy gets wiped out, you also get wiped out because now you won't be getting any more payments. And so this is like, it's a little bit sussing out the credit worthiness of MicroStrategy. So I think if something breaks in MicroStrategy, this thing will get wiped out first, like this thing will go to zero first. STRF will go to zero last and then MicroStrategy just trades like a like a company.
47:23 Ryan Sean Adams? So the reason he's doing it is so that he can sell this new stride shares, basically, and raise another, what, 250 million or so to go do what? What's he gonna do with 250 million?
47:36 David Hoffman? I don't know, you know, buy buy a few Bitcoins here and there. So yeah, he's got these two additional credit vehicles that he can sell more in. And if the market perceives him to be credit worthy, the price of these things will go up and he'll be able to sell more.
47:52 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, so for an investor, did I did I see Dylan Leclerc over here on Twitter call call these kind of like junk bonds? It's the stride is kind of like the junk bond version.
48:02 David Hoffman? Yes, the last, the most recent one that he issued, yes.
48:04 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it's kind of like it's junior, you're not getting the guaranteed payments, you know, it's like, I don't know, it seems, maybe some investors will want this, but it seems the worst of a couple of worlds here, right? You're not getting here in T-Pay.
48:17 David Hoffman? He ends it in a really interesting way. He's issuing a 1,000-year USD Bitcoin swap and buying the Bitcoin upfront. The balance sheet itself is extremely delevered. And so he's using whatever capital, whatever dollars he has, to pay loans in order to buy Bitcoin upfront. So he can get it as from, he can pull forward the future as much as possible.
48:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
48:39 David Hoffman? And then sell that future into Bitcoin.
48:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
48:42 David Hoffman? And then assuming that appreciates.
48:44 Ryan Sean Adams? It'll be totally fine so long as you don't get over-leveraged. And so long as number keeps going up, it'll be totally fine. I know that for certain.
48:53 David Hoffman? So long as number goes up. I mean, even if number goes down, he's also still fine.
48:57 Ryan Sean Adams? Probably fine.
48:58 David Hoffman? But like, he made a bad bet, or a worse bet.
49:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, yeah. All right, let's talk about Trump, David. I saw a tweet talking about a new crypto wallet that the Trump team launched. I went to the website. This is kind of what you see on the website. All right, it's like trumpwallet.com. Guys, I don't know if you should go to this or not. Because I don't even know if it's real. I actually thought it might be an official campaign. Okay, it is real. Anyway, the news was, this came out of crypto media sources like Bitcoin Magazine, et cetera, that Trump had launched a crypto wallet where you could buy, sell, trade. The Trump token was featured inside of the crypto wallet. And it was like the Trump version of a crypto wallet. In case you like, you're done with Uniswap and MetaMask wallets and you're just like, you wanted your Trump wallet, you know?
49:45 Ryan Sean Adams? Because you got to hold your crypto in the Trump wallet. So that was the news. And then something funny happened, which was the sons of Donald Trump, Eric and Donald Jr., started denying that this thing was real. They denied affiliation with this whole thing.
50:00 David Hoffman? And so the launch of the Trump wallet got community noted, saying the Trump organizations have not, have distanced themselves from this.
50:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Right. And so crypto media started reporting on this, mainstream media started reporting on this. Funny though, Magic Eden, the, originally it was an NFT platform, right? On Solana. Now they're maybe doing more things.
50:20 David Hoffman? They started doing Bitcoin ordinals, they bought Slingshot Wallet, yeah.
50:23 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, they said that this was real. In fact, they had helped. You developed this in partnership with Trump. And when pressed, guys, hey, they're saying it's not real. The Sons of Trump are saying this is not real. Magic Eden said, no, it's real. This is, we really have a deal with the Trump Organization. So I left this story here.
50:40 David Hoffman? They said they are partnering with the Trump meme coin team.
50:44 Ryan Sean Adams? Which is, I mean, the same people as.
50:47 David Hoffman? So Eric, Eric and Donald Jr. In Eric's tweet, he says that World Liberty Financial and that group, which he's a part of, has nothing to do with the Trump wallet. And that's not anything to do with any Trump organization.
50:59 Ryan Sean Adams? But they do have something to do with the Trump meme coin, right?
51:01 David Hoffman? Apparently it has, yeah, apparently this is a Trump meme. This is not a World Liberty Financial wallet. This is a Trump meme coin wallet.
51:07 Ryan Sean Adams? They implied Trump has nothing to do with it, that this is not the Trump official.
51:10 David Hoffman? Organizations have nothing to do with this.
51:12 Ryan Sean Adams? But that's not quite true. Somebody in the Trump Organization has something to do with it and did indeed roll this out.
51:19 David Hoffman? Magic Eden, which is a legit company, is doubling down on the fact that this is real. And it would be ridiculous for them to like launch a Trump wallet without actually being able to claim that to be true. Here's Donald Trump Jr. saying the Trump Organization has zero involvement with the product.
51:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Eric and I know nothing about it. They, they know nothing about it. So what is this?
51:39 David Hoffman? URL? Do you know what the URL is?
51:41 Ryan Sean Adams? I think, I thought it was trumpwallet.com.
51:43 David Hoffman? I'm going to trumpwallet.com and it is giving me a site cannot be reached.
51:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
51:48 David Hoffman? So maybe, maybe it's, maybe it's.
51:49 Ryan Sean Adams? They have the wrong URL.
51:50 David Hoffman? Anyways, unrelated, but also related. I saw this tweet from Molly White, which I think kind of explains everything. And it is a, kind of like an org chart map of all of the different Trump entities and all of their crypto dealings.
52:04 Ryan Sean Adams? And wow.
52:05 David Hoffman? It kind of looks like spaghetti. And there's like an unknown associations and there's known associations. And so you got World Liberty Financial, you got the Trump meme coin, you got the Trump NFTs, you have got the Melania NFTs. You have some people who are part of the Melania NFTs plus World Liberty Financial Organization. You have other people who are part of the memes and then like different part of the Trump meme coin. It's just a kind of a mess. And so I kind of am not surprised that somebody in Trump's orbit and influence and part of his companies do like. Goes and pioneers a Trump wallet and a different part of the Trump crypto verse is like unaware of that happening because I think they're all operating on under their own initiative.
52:46 David Hoffman? And somebody just decided to make a wallet and their other side of the Trump crypto verse is like, I didn't know about that.
52:51 Ryan Sean Adams? That must be it, right? The, the, the website and offering said it was the official Trump wallet and the official like, you know, Trump meme coin wallet endorsed by Donald Trump. They said this explicitly. This is the president of the United States, right? As like a big media empire, world's most powerful man, you wouldn't want to put that out there.
53:09 David Hoffman? No way.
53:10 Ryan Sean Adams? If you didn't really have some sort of permission there.
53:14 David Hoffman? Right. If you're gonna lie about that, you would, you would launch and then rug a meme coin. You wouldn't launch a project that you would invest in.
53:20 Ryan Sean Adams? I thought, okay, this is Lazarus group or something like this. And like, this is kind of a, you know, they spun up a website. This is not real. They've hacked Magic Eden's account. It's really hard to unbundle what's going on. It says, what's interesting about this spaghetti mess here is I do actually think Trump has some legitimate projects here. I keep hearing that the World Liberty Financial team is like a pretty solid team.
53:41 David Hoffman? Yeah.
53:41 Ryan Sean Adams? They're building a treasury of crypto assets, like they're doing DeFi protocol.
53:45 David Hoffman? They haven't gotten hacked or exploited or anything. Haven't lost any money.
53:49 Ryan Sean Adams? That could actually be something. And then you have other areas, which is like the Trump meme coin and like whatever that is. And then you have Trump wallet and you have Melania coin, whatever that is. And then there was also, you mentioned it earlier in the episode, Trump media. Which they're the, the truth social parent company, I believe, if I'm understanding this correctly. They are rolling out a Bitcoin ETF as well. So they're registering for a Bitcoin ETF. Which a Bitcoin ETF product is, you know, legitimate as well. So what do you make of all this?
54:23 David Hoffman? You know, I'm, you said the World Liberty Financial is legitimate. I'm going to the worldlibertyfinancial.com place because like, you know, it's supposed to be an app. It's supposed to be like an obvious fork.
54:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
54:34 David Hoffman? There's just a token sale website.
54:36 Ryan Sean Adams? I keep hearing that, like, people telling me that there's like a team, they're kind of like crypto legit. You know, I, I don't know.
54:43 David Hoffman? I, I've heard that too. And I was like, okay, I, how do I, can I go get yield in this? And turns out you can just buy W L F I.
54:52 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
54:53 David Hoffman? Anyways, what do I make of all this?
54:56 David Hoffman? Trump is a franchise, you know, like, I, I feel like there's that, um, there was that guy behind Elvis, like Elvis's promoter, who just franchised the F out of Elvis and sold everything Elvis branded and made Elvis like a bajillionaire. But I feel like that's just what's happening and they're just realizing that with crypto, you can do a crypto, you can do a Bitcoin ETF.
55:14 Ryan Sean Adams? So profitable.
55:15 David Hoffman? You can launch meme coins, you can launch NFTs, you can launch a DeFi app, or just do everything.
55:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Literally doing all the things.
55:21 David Hoffman? Doing, doing a wallet. Yeah. Just like, make every business possible, put Trump's name on it and sell it.
55:27 Ryan Sean Adams? See what happens.
55:28 David Hoffman? See what happens.
55:28 Ryan Sean Adams? See what happens.
55:29 David Hoffman? And then like, yeah, just like one corner made the wallet before a different corner who also had another idea. Cause like the other part of this is that Donald Trump Jr. said like, no, we're making a wallet out of World Liberty Financial. And so you have competing Trump project, products, and they're both wallets. And one's coming from the meme coin and one's coming from World Liberty. Yeah, you just don't know what's going on.
55:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you know, so the, the Clarity Act is, uh, you know, being presented in, in front of the House these days. And this is the new market structure bill. Right? Yeah. This is the new market structure bill. It's the successor to Fit 21. You guys have heard us talk about this, right? This is defining what's a security and what's a commodity in crypto. We need this bill. And there's congressional hearings going on this week and it keeps coming up. Maxine Waters, of course, you know, talking about the Trump coin, all of, you know, the Trump, Trump, Trump's activities in this. It's coming up. In fact, I don't know if you saw this clip, a CNBC interview clip, uh, with Donald Trump Jr. And the interviewer asks him specifically about the meme coin. This, this is the clip.
56:27 Speaker 05 Lead into some of the other things, the meme coin. Is that okay for your dad to have a meme coin? I think, listen, of, of, of course, when, you know, when he did that before he was in office, he did these things. The reason we got into crypto and we're all in on crypto and we're doing American Bitcoin and we have World Liberty Finance and USD1 was. Because there was a time, and probably I'd been on this show, where there was, I could call any single banker in New York City. They'd pick up the phone. I'd be able to get a loan for whatever real estate project I was doing across the street. Then we got into politics and all of a sudden, they wouldn't take your call. You couldn't get financing. We were de-banked. And what I realized, and my brother realized, because we were the recipients of every subpoena imaginable, was that, you know what? We were actually just the top of this sort of pyramid scheme that we didn't realize we were a part of,
57:11 Speaker 05 that the financial system was totally undemocratized. Because we had a certain balance sheet or whatever, we could kind of do whatever we wanted. The regular guy was messed up. Now we were all of a sudden in the shoes of the regular guy that wouldn't be able to take advantage of the markets. And we said, what's the solution for that? The answer is crypto.
57:29 David Hoffman? End of meme coin? Masterful. Why did you launch a meme coin? Well, let me tell you about this one time we got de-banked. He's not wrong about that, though. And, you know, we needed crypto and so, never mind. I don't think he said meme coin once in that. Oh my god, a complete masterpiece. It is funny, it is funny. David, let's talk about Sam Bankman-Fried headed to Netflix. What are we getting here, David? Apparently, apparently we're getting a one-season series on SBF in the fall of FTX, which I am just waiting on the edge of my seat for as a big TV person. This is not a documentary. This is an actual kind of, I don't know. Yeah, you know, I remember like The Social Network.
58:13 David Hoffman? I think it's something like that, where it's like a documentary but with acting and a story. It's a true story of what like happened. Yeah. The altruists is what they're calling this? The altruists, yeah. A huge just punch to the face of effective altruism. Yeah. Because I think that has to have a big overarching story. They're going to name it that. The actors portraying the people as we know them. Anthony Boyle, but I'm not a movie person. And then also Julia Garner. And these two individuals, I would say, are pretty. They are beautiful people. Crypto Twitter was not happy about that fact.
58:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Not happy with these choices?
58:53 David Hoffman? The contrast.
58:54 Ryan Sean Adams? They do not resemble the real characters?
58:55 David Hoffman? The contrast between the beauty of these actors and what we know SBF and Caroline to be was not what people wanted, because I think people want to make fun of Sam and Caroline.
59:06 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, they got hurt pretty bad, didn't they?
59:08 David Hoffman? Yeah.
59:09 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. Look at this one. So here's one, Bella Ramsey is what others were saying in Jonah Hill. I feel like Jonah Hill as Sam Bankman-Fried is kind of perfect, though.
59:22 David Hoffman? But I love Jonah Hill is the problem with that.
59:24 Ryan Sean Adams? You like him too much?
59:25 David Hoffman? Yeah, I like him too much. Yeah, he's too good.
59:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, there you go.
59:30 David Hoffman? I mean, it's unfortunate. If you're an upstarting young actor, like, do you really want your first role to be Sam Bankman-Fried?
59:38 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't know. That could be a fun role to play.
59:40 David Hoffman? Yeah, I guess.
59:40 Ryan Sean Adams? He's such a character. You know what? I hope he goes on a crypto podcast in this series.
59:47 David Hoffman? In the series? Yeah. Do you think the Eric Voorhees Twitter episode or livestream will be in there?
59:52 Ryan Sean Adams? Which means there could be someone playing you, David. There could be someone playing me.
59:56 David Hoffman? Oh, no, I'm not. I don't want that.
59:58 Ryan Sean Adams? You don't want that?
59:59 David Hoffman? I don't want that.
1:00:00 Ryan Sean Adams? But if you had to pick someone to play you, who would it be?
1:00:02 David Hoffman? Oh, my doppelganger, which is, what's his face, Tobey Maguire.
1:00:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, Tobey Maguire would make a perfect David Hoffman.
1:00:10 David Hoffman? Yeah, the people have always called me Spider-Man, yeah.
1:00:12 Ryan Sean Adams? Who would I be, then?
1:00:14 David Hoffman? Ah, who is your doppelganger?
1:00:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That's who I'd want to play me.
1:00:19 David Hoffman? Yeah.
1:00:20 Ryan Sean Adams? That'd make a good Ryan Sean Adams.
1:00:21 David Hoffman? He's not as attractive as you, but yeah.
1:00:24 Ryan Sean Adams? I could see that. I could see that. David, we're looking for some talent as we wrap this show up. So we got some jobs. If you're interested in a job, what do we got? Work at Bankless.
1:00:33 David Hoffman? Two very big jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. We are looking for a BD sales lead. So if you are in the BD sales ecosystem of crypto, you know every single company that's in crypto. You have contacts, you have a Rolodex. We are looking for you to do sales for Bankless, mainly sponsorship sales. And so if you are interested in that, and there is a link in the show notes, so you can apply. And then we are also looking for a growth manager, so somebody who understands. Podcasting, understands YouTubeing, clips, distribution, virality. We have a bankless, but also Limitless, our second podcast, which is doing very well, penetrating into AI and frontier tech, and we need to step on the gas on that.
1:01:14 David Hoffman? So if you would like to add fuel on top of a very hot fire, we have a killer podcast AV production team. We have me and Ryan as guests.
1:01:24 Ryan Sean Adams? Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
1:01:25 David Hoffman? And we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And we have access to some of the best guests that are coming on both Limitless and Bankless. So if you would like to add fuel to that fire, either on sales or on distribution and virality, click the links in the show notes to apply.
1:01:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Amazing. And because we didn't get a chance to see it, actually Ethereum was mentioned in Congress today in a congressional hearing. So I feel like we should play that as the moment of Zen. This is Vivek from Ethereumize. He's coming on next week, actually. They're dropping some big things, but we'll play that clip after I read this. Of course, you know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
1:02:01 David Hoffman? BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and many more are already building on Ethereum because it is the most secure and most decentralized settlement layer in the world. As a result, $140 billion of stable coins, $10 billion of real useful tokenized assets, and institutional-grade financial applications live on Ethereum.
Previous LIMITLESS - AI DEBATE: Runaway Superintelligence or Normal Technology? | Daniel Kokotajlo vs Arvind Next Is Joe Lubin the Michael Saylor of Ethereum? | The $SBET Opportunity Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated