ROLLUP: Saylor Risk? | Warsh’s New Fed | SpaceX IPO | Coinbase’s Everything Exchange

Equities are rallying, but Bitcoin is breaking down. David and Tom unpack Saylor’s STRC stress, Warsh’s first FOMC, SpaceX’s mega-IPO, Jito’s breakout, Coinbase’s Everything Exchange, and why perps may be crypto’s next real growth engine. --- 📣OKX | THE NEW MONEY APP https://app.okx.com/en-us/join/usbankless --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:07 Equities Up, Crypto Down: STRC Stress https://x.com/PeterSchiff/status/2067629492214829114 https://x.com/zackvoell/status/2067628541257429213 https://x.com/R89Capital/status/2067608064627491009 https://x.com/jdorman81/status/2067616073479078386 11:21 First FOMC with Kevin Warsh https://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-warsh-first-fomc-fed-meeting-interest-rates-2026-6 16:35 SpaceX Becomes One of the World’s Most Valuable Companies 25:43 Mover of the Month: JTO 31:01 Coinbase System Update https://www.coinbase.com/blog/system-update-take-control-of-your-money-with-coinbase https://x.com/oost_marcel/status/2067268725883981841 https://x.com/coinbase/status/2066890566667796530 https://www.theblock.co/post/405012/coinbase-unveils-system-update-unlocking-an-ai-advisor-global-unified-liquidity-options-trading-and-more 37:42 Anchorage Brings Hyperliquid to Institutions https://x.com/nathanmccauley/status/2066906951464947966 46:23 Blockworks Acquires Messari https://x.com/blockworks/status/2065468327120576863 50:40 UK Moves to Ban Social Media for Children https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/2066458640010158571 57:50 Polymarket World Cup Trade https://polymarket.com/sports/world-cup/bracket https://polymarket.com/event/world-cup-winner 59:50 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, it's time for another weekly roll-up. It is the third week of June and once again, Ryan Tritt Adams is on vacation. Well deserved. And we got Tom Schmidt. Usually we tap in Haseeb, but we have tapped in Haseeb like so many times. So we're bringing my BFF back. Tom, Tom, welcome back.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  I'm glad I'm the BFF, not Haseeb. I've seen him on Bankless too many times, so thanks for having me.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate you. Tom, you're in New York. Why aren't you at the Knicks Parade?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  You know, I'm gainfully employed, so I felt like it's very difficult to do both that and be at the Knicks Parade. But it looked insane. I was like, Fulton Street is completely jammed, full of people. So I'm also happy to just observe it digitally, you know?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wake up and do the thing that you shouldn't do, which is I immediately open up my phone and I pulled up Instagram and looked at stories. And there were all of my friends, like I'm two hours ago, already in Manhattan at like 6:30 in the morning. Like, Jesus, what are you guys doing?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I don't get it. I'm also, you know, I'm one of those, you know, bandwagon Knicks fans. So I can't, I can't really cop to being a Knicks fan, you know? I'm just like, I'm here.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm glad it's happening. The energy in the city is great. I get to ride it. We got some news to talk about. Equities are up on the week, but crypto is down. Strategies Stretch is trading 15% off par while there's a lot of grave dancing going on on Twitter. We have the new FOMC meeting with the new, brand new, shiny new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. He said, while he was getting the job, while he was going through the job interview process, that he's going to cut. And then once he got the job, turns out when he just was saying what Trump wanted him to say, now that he's got the job, he doesn't have to say that anymore. So now he's saying something else. There was the SpaceX IPO on Friday and now it's the seventh largest company in the world.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  And I got a question, why is GTO, the block building software on Solana, up 70% in 30 days? And then also Coinbase launched 21 new products all with their system update event. We're going to go through all of this and more. But first, before we get into today's episode, Tom, I gotta talk to our friends and sponsors over at OKX. The intercontinental exchange. Exchange, which is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, they backed OKX at a $25 billion valuation with a plan to launch tokenized New York Stock Exchange stocks and derivatives later this year on OKX. This is putting just TradFi and DeFi into the same app, finally. OKX is trusted by over 120 million global users and is bringing products to the US market that Wall Street

• 2:33Speaker 00

  has been talking about for years, and OKX is delivering them. This is the OKX new money app. It's not just a vision, but it's a roadmap with institutional backing to execute on it. Not an OKX user yet. If you are not, you can get $500 in Bitcoin through the link in the show notes. Unless you are living in New York or Texas, sorry about that. All you gotta do, go to OKX, click that link, verify your identity, deposit $100, you get some money, deposit more money, get some more money, trade more money, get more money, all up to $500. There's a link in the show notes to get started. Let's just go back to equities. Equity is looking good on the week, still rallying after the Iran war. A peace deal got minted.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Bitcoin and crypto followed them shortly, but not anymore, not yesterday and definitely not today. Bitcoin is now trading back right at the 200-week moving average at $62,600. I think, maybe this is just me, but I think people's eyes are all on Michael Saylor's Stretch product, which was starting to recover after it dipped down to $91 last week, June 5th. And they recovered up to like 96, 97, but it caught all the way down to $82, Tom. This morning, it's trading back up to $87, so far, almost 20% off of its peg of $100,

• 3:56Speaker 00

  making people very bearish about the confidence of Strategy. I don't know if you pay attention to Stretch. I pay attention to Stretch quite a lot. What do you think about all this?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is really the first time, I think we have strong evidence that Saylor and Strategy are weighing heavily on the market. People have been saying this for months, like, why is Bitcoin going down? Why is Bitcoin underperforming? And people say, oh, well, you know, there's the Saylor risk, but the market was not reflecting that. And, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you look at the bonds market, the bond market to determine, you know, sort of confidence in government and credence around government policy. This feels like, you know, the sort of tariff tantrum equivalent, but for Saylor.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  There was definitely a dislocation here because we could have been bullish. The equities market bullish all week. The FOMC hawkishness will talk about that. But what didn't seem to be too bad. Crypto was going up. Everything was going up except for stretch. Stretch never recovered. And it seems to be that like it is actually kind of a focal point of the Bitcoin market. And in therefore, like usually we've seen assets like hyper liquid, VVV, the revenue generating assets, which have been counter cyclical to Bitcoin. Today, they are cyclical to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is literally dragging everything down. And it seems to be that like Bitcoin can't get bullish until this gets resolved.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, obviously sailors sold a couple Bitcoin.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Just a couple.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  To inoculate the market, quote unquote. And then obviously, after the fact, announced I bought several times more Bitcoin. But I think it seems like this is always going to be a looming issue. It's a little bit like a, you know, token, like a long dated token vest of, this is just always going to be this thing dangling over your head. And so he needs to find a long term plan for it. I think people discussed, hey, maybe just selling a larger amount of Bitcoin now. So you have, you know, a year plus worth of cash to be able to pay dividends. But if anything, I think we're also just, it's an interesting instrument to trade, right? We're coming up towards the end of the month when the first dividend, you know, should be, should be coming out. Funding has been going crazy. So lighter has a stretch perp.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  And so it's, I was like, for a while, it was like 900% annualized. So some people are also doing, you know, this cash and carry trade. If they're going to hold the stretch, short the perps, maybe try to collect the interest. It's just like all sorts of a super interesting environment. But I feel like we're going to get this resolved one way or another, you know, closer to the end of the month. And I, I don't quite know how, because I do find, I'm not a particular big strategy or sailor bull, but he does have the ability to, you know, pull a rabbit out of a hat on demand. So maybe able to do something.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, the kind of the fundamental quandary that I see with stretch is that the stated intention of stretch is that if it trades below par, trades below 100, he'll simply just increase the interest rates to attract more buyers and he'll just pay more year yield to attract more capital, you know, slap your hands together, so simple. But the problem with that is that if you do that, then you run out of money faster. And there's like a confidence issue that you impose upon your asset. If you like jack up your interest rates from like 11%, which is already high, like how many other yield sources are you beating with 11% like most of them? And so you go up to 13, 14% in order to attract more buyers of the stretch asset.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Like, well, you're just going to run out of your cash balance faster, which is going to reduce the confidence. And so it doesn't really seem to be a solid, elegant solution. It seems that you're just kind of taking from one pocket, putting another, and then everything like nets out at the end. It's still a fundamental problem.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of businesses or investment strategies that are sort of predicated on this idea of Coinbase kegger from past decade or so. But the problem is you don't eat kegger, right? Like, the United States, on average, is maybe 1,000 feet above sea level, and then you hit the Rocky Mountains, and it's like, oh shit, I was not prepared for this. And the question is, how do you sort of moderate some of this volatility while you are structurally long-term Bitcoin? I think the plan is, you should have more of an insurance fund for this kind of thing. But ultimately, if you're long strategy, probably if you're buying stretch, you're

• 8:18Speaker 01

  also long Bitcoin. The question is, why this instrument to express that view?

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's the big question going on is like, why buy and hold MSTR? Jeff Dorman put out a tweet that people are really liking on Twitter. He goes, "My base case right now is 70% odds that they keep on doing what they're doing strategy, which is selling small amounts of MSCR every month at non-accretive levels, crushing the stock until it falls to 0.7 MNAV. This would at least give stretch holders a glimmer of hope." Bitcoin would be fine, but MSTR would be hammered. He's been hammering MSTR to this point. At least it is still above MNAV, but nonetheless, value capturing MSTR does not really seem to be a thing. So that's his first case. 25% chance for his next case is that he does the right thing, according to Jeff, and admits he messed up when he bought back the debt,

• 9:07Speaker 00

  sells $3 to $4 billion of Bitcoin, buys a ton of time, which is marginally good for MSTR, very good for its stretch, but bad for Bitcoin. And then a 5% chance that he does the nuclear option, which is just kill the dividends, let the preferred fall to 30 to 40 cents on the dollar, which would close the capital markets to Michael Saylor. But at least he shuts off the $1.7 billion per year cash outlay problem. At some point, I'm like, dude, like, you don't have an infinite money printer. Like, you've bought all the Bitcoin that the market is allowing you to have. I don't think the last option is too crazy for him. It's very painful, it's a bad look, there's probably lawsuits, a bunch of stuff involved with that. I don't know if you have an opinion on which is the most likely outcome here.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Well, I see you wearing that jersey. And really, the question is, do you want to be Brazil? Or do you want to be Argentina? And those are kind of the two paths open to you. I think one is maybe, you know, short-term painful, long-term, the better path. The other was you kind of kick the can down the road a little bit more. I really, and not the specialist, not the person to call when it comes to, you know, interrogating the psyche of Michael Saylor, which ultimately feels like you kind of have to understand and underwrite if you want to buy any of these assets. So I don't know, that's certainly an interesting area to specialize in in terms of the market. But I think if anything, again, I think you'd probably find some way to cover some of this short-term debt.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And then, hey, maybe we just give ourselves a little bit more window and hope that Bitcoin goes up in that remaining window.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Speaking of the psyche of Michael Taylor, this clip went around that people really didn't like. This was an interview that Michael Taylor gave on CoinDesk. He was asked about how he came up with Stretch, the philosophy behind it. And he just goes like, oh yeah, I sat down with AI and I use artificial intelligence to build Stretch, which is not a good clip to have to give confidence in the market. Although I think we all, everyone uses AI. I use AI. I'm sure, Tom, you use AI. So I don't really think, I'm not blaming Taylor for using AI.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It sounds a little goofy. Yeah. Maybe he was Fable 5, you know? Maybe he had early Mythos access and that was, that was really what really designed Stretch. So people are underrating it. You know, we had a almost ASI level model designing this instrument.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose it really depends on what model he uses. Well, I will reserve my bullish or bearish takes depending on the model he used. All right, let's get into FOMC meeting. So this is Kevin Warsh, a brand new Fed Chair, his first FOMC meeting. There's a quote from BlackRock that I'll read. Rick Reader, the head of fixing Comet BlackRock, says, "Today, we believe that the Federal Reserve's FOMC ushered in a new era of monetary policy in the United States." And so this is seemingly the news that the market is trying to digest is what is the Fed's new strategy? Because there was a huge deliberate regime change at the Fed showed by Kevin Warsh's disposition. He held rates at 3.5 to 3.75%. So that's, that's not any difference.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  That's not the regime change that's happening. The regime change is what the Fed is communicating to the market. And so Powell had this like cookie cutter, 341 word, like typical response, like, like formulaic a speech that he would give to the market. Kevin Warsh cut that by 130 words and he also intentionally killed forward guidance. And he also was the first Chair to not submit his own dot on the Fed dot plot, showing to not show his cards on his future opinion on rates. And in the past, Kevin Warsh has just shown articulated a disdain for forward guidance. And he says it just hamstrings policy.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  So analysts are calling it a green style span, return to constructive ambiguity. And so we're letting the market be a little confused and unsure. And the Fed just not showing his cards in order to give the Fed a little bit more flexibility and, you know, ammo about what they can do. Tom, what was your reaction?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think most of the critiques around Warsh were more, it felt like aesthetic, you know, it's sad to see Powell out and

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Powell looks like a Fed chair.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think specifically people missed the good afternoon instead of the good day with Warsh. I don't know, I think it's still very early and ultimately like what we've seen from Fed chairs in the past is really where they kind of show their true character is when there's a crisis and that's when they decide what to do. Obviously Bernanke very famous with 08, Powell with COVID. And so I think I've seen some charts floating around where you look at not dot pop but like banking analysts' projections of several years out of interest rate and it's all basically always wrong because there's always

• 13:56Speaker 01

  some exogenous event that ultimately ends up affecting Fed policy and that's really the moment when these things kind of matter. So I don't know, I think we got a few more years and a few more maybe hectic events before we see how good Warsh is.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Business as usual until something crazy happens, until the AI bubble pops and the Fed has to like watch to see if it needs to step in there or not. It is worth noting that nine of the 18 Fed officials now do see a hike by the end of the year, which is not what the markets were positioned for. So the one bad week in the market or the one bad day in the market this week was right after this FOMC, which was yesterday, Wednesday. S and P dropped 1.2%, two-year yields jumped up, the dollar has gone up, odds of an October rate hike has gone up to 60%, Bitcoin fell 3%, gold sold off. It's just like, yeah, it's a one-time response to the market. I don't think it's anything

• 14:51Speaker 00

  structural as of yet. The structural change is the game theory that Fed, the game that the Fed is trying to play around game theory. There's also something that I'm going to keep an eye on is Kevin Warsh introduced a task force. He just said task force over and over and over again. So there's a communications task force, a balance sheet task force, a data task force, a productivity and AI task force, all of these Task force, I think analysts are being interpreting them as like, these are just Kevin Warsh building mechanisms to build the consensus that he wants to build. So like, it's bureaucracy, but like Kevin Warsh wants to do something. And so he's setting a team of task force to

• 15:33Speaker 00

  give him the response, to give him the justification to do the strategy. So giving him leverage in the future. That's my read. That's a bunch of other people's reads. I don't know if you have a take on that, Tom.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I have less of a read. I will say on the data front, you know, I was always under the assumption that, you know, really the Fed was maybe the most authoritative, most accurate

• 15:54Speaker 01

  source when it comes to looking at these different measures of inflation or inflation that they obviously use to influence policy. And I was talking to Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet and Robot, who's a co-host of my podcast a while ago. And he was shitting on the Fed's data efforts. He said they actually have like incredibly poor data infrastructure. And it's like, you know, these private market investors have like, you know, way more sophisticated models for CPA. So maybe the answer is he's trying to turn the Fed AI native or something like that. I don't know. Maybe that's comparable.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  That would align with what Mike Selig is trying to do at the CFTC. He's just like, let's build this institution up in an AI era first. And so, I like that. I like that. That sounds very sci-fi. I'm into this. Speaking of sci-fi, let's go into SpaceX. So SpaceX is now the seventh largest company by market cap. Briefly, it flipped Amazon. Before it fell back down, it was briefly ahead of Amazon. You know, Amazon, the thing that makes like $750 billion a year in revenue, SpaceX, which makes $18 billion a year in revenue, flipped Amazon. It's now back down to number nine by total assets by market cap, number seven by total companies by market cap. It rallied post IPO, which I think was a little bit surprising, not consensus. The consensus was

• 17:11Speaker 00

  that this thing is a high FDV low float shitcoin and all the insiders are going to dump on you. Turns out it was a high FDV low float shitcoin, which was very easy to pump. It IPOed, it popped up to 165 and then it got all the way up to 216. It has since traded down, down to 180. Brand new company in the top 10 company market caps, Tom. What do you think?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, that may still happen.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  That may still happen.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  The unlock schedule for SpaceX is insane. I like this Bill Ackman tweet today or yesterday. It was the thing that makes SpaceX so valuable is that it's so valuable. I think referring to their ability to do all these acquisitions of X and XAI and now Cursor just using this extremely high share price. And so it's this really interesting instrument where you can almost say it's sort of a micro strategy like in that way where it's you're trading at some huge premium to maybe where these assets would normally otherwise be trading, which allows you to sort of suck it up into this vehicle. And maybe there's some synergies, maybe there's so that Elon Musk aura around it.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  But I think on the other hand, it is like this unique one of one instrument, right? People love Starlink and obviously Amazon has their own competitor, but everyone knows Starlink, the brand, and they're the real ones everywhere. And not many other companies, if any, have the kind of ability to get you large payloads in flight that SpaceX has. The fact that it has all these other things wrapped up into it, maybe more of a kind of rounding error. It's kind of like square buying title or something, but I don't know. I think I was also surprised by how warm the market was to it post-IPO, where for a while it seemed like this thing was getting shopped around. Everywhere fidelity lowered the minimum assets on platform required to participate from

• 19:05Speaker 01

  like 100,000 to like 2,000. And it just felt like, okay, this thing's getting super shopped around. Is it even going to get filled? Ended up being obviously very oversubbed and then totally, totally popping after the IPO. So I don't know where it's going to go from here, but I certainly think Elon is not one to doubt.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Bill Ackman tweet that you just mentioned where SpaceX has so much leverage because it's valuable. I think it just goes beyond, I love the take. I think it just goes beyond capital, but just like the clout of Elon and the prowess of Elon and the uniqueness of the fact that like what other company is exposure to space?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Interesting thing about SpaceX is that I think it could have in an alternative timeline IPO'd on the stock market at like one one hundredth of valuation. And that would have been another normal day and that would have been totally fine and no one would have thought anything of it. But there's like so much surface area for financial engineering and I don't say that in like a negative way. But just Elon knows this game and he intentionally did the high FTV low float thing. There's a lot of stakeholders at play who are incented to make this thing go up. Not even just inside of the SpaceX arena, but like yo, think about the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs that people want to be bullish on and we want those to go up.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  And there's the whole IPO vertical around those. So if SpaceX plummets, that's not looking good for OpenAI and SpaceX. And so like, there's just like a lot of, if you do it right and you financially engineer it correctly, you just manifest a new market cap. And it seems kind of weird that that's true, like shouldn't be, shouldn't companies be traded on their fundamentals? But like, I think it's a question of like, is it, is it hot air or is it just smart financial engineering? And I'm in the latter camp.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  I, I think there's a lot of, yeah, like path dependency to it, right? Like the way in which you, you raise the capital and you know, I think of almost some of these other, you know, businesses as almost like kind of filling in the gaps in like a, you know, jar of nuts of like, oh yeah, you can't just rely on this very chunky. Sort of not as you're immediately repeatable or sexy like government contracts to do these space launches. We also have all these little things kind of, kind of sprinkled in that allow you to sort of get there long-term in addition to obviously, you know, the Elon aura. And I think there's also an incredible vindication for pre-IPO perps and on-chain perps.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I don't know if you talked about this on the last show, but I think Trade XYZ, which is the RWA perp platform on, on, on hyper-liquid H I P three markets. They priced the IPO pretty much perfectly. They priced at like 160 and it got there at the end of the trading day. And even today, they're still doing hundreds of millions of volume on SpaceX. And so, you know, we saw a little bit of this with this Rubers IPO a couple of weeks ago, but it feels like this is something that we're going to see continuing for OpenAI and Anthropic and every new, you know, hot IPO that's coming out this year and coming years.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I think that's right. I don't have that in the agenda, that topic in the agenda, but you're totally right. I do think that the Cerebrus IPO was the shot across the bow, where like you saw the Cerebrus, you saw the picture of the people on the trading floor with Hyperliquid pulled up and you could see the red banner of like banned in your jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter because they were just looking at it for the price action. And that was like the first indicator, that was the spark. And everyone was watching Hyperliquid as just for, just for the pricing data. Like it wasn't, people on Wall Street probably weren't trading it, or maybe they were, but that didn't really matter. It was about the brand of Hyperliquid and the effectiveness of the pricing mechanism showing up. And now

• 22:42Speaker 00

  it showed up for the biggest IPO ever. Like this was game time for Hyperliquid and the pre-IPO markets, and they hit it out of the park. And there's two more gargantuan IPOs coming down the pike. So it's actually pretty cool to see something come out of the crypto world. Kind of like the tail that wags the dog in the TradFi world. Like that's one of our victories. That's a huge Hyperliquid victory. It feels like a little bit of a crypto victory, which we are desperately in need of these days. And so I kind of expect this to be an unfolding story as the private markets still get more kind of frothy and bigger and all the TradFi world kind of pays attention to the perpetual and all this kind of stuff.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally agreed. I mean, in some ways it reminds me of kind of the 24 election and poly market. And hey, you have this, you know, third market that you're probably not paying attention to, but it's providing way more signal, way more insight and, and, you know, way more accurate information than you're getting through kind of your conventional signals. And that ultimately ends up being, you know, the way market to market goes.

• 23:41Speaker 00

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• 25:53Speaker 00

  an active token on the market that I want to pay attention to and learn a little bit more. I go and dig into it. So this week is GTO. GTO is up 30% on the seven day and 70% on the month. GTO, it's the kind of like the flash block. Flash blocks had a baby with Lido, if you speak Ethereum, but it's on Solana. And so it's very, yeah, it's very intimately intertwined with Solana block building and transaction ordering. And they, in May 5th, at the Solana Accelerate Conference in May in Miami, they announced JTX, which is going to be a, an actual product rather than like a backend infrastructure product for Solana is a front-end user interface.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  That's a spot exchange and PERT protocol using. GTO technology, but on the Solana blockchain, kind of using, turning Solana into like a, a, an exchange app chain, if you will. You know, if GTO is successful, just use all of Solana's block space. And so people are pretty excited about the incoming JTX exchange. When JTX goes live, 80% of fees are going to go back to buy and return GTO tokens back to the GTO DAO. Then 20% will go into reinvest into the ecosystem for marketing, trading competitions and growth. So that's why people are pretty bullish on JTO, the GTO token. I think it's just kind of interesting that like, oh, now Solana's got a perp decks. And you know, Ethereum's got lighter as the perp decks.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Hyperliquid is the spearhead of perp decks. Ondo is releasing a real world asset perp decks. We're going to talk about Coinbase in a second. Coinbase released pre-IPO perps. Everyone is doing perps left and right. What do you think?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think as always, it's like it takes one person to kind of break open a category and then you have many fast followers. I think some of them definitely have, you know, a right to be there and they take an original idea and twist a little bit or serve a unique audience. Or, um, you know, have, have some interesting distribution story. Some of them, I will say also as a VC, uh, do not. And you, as soon as, you know, um, some new category has been out for a year, you get like a million new copycat kind of pitches. It is interesting to see, I would say like the next evolution of a lot of these, um, you know, pretty OG DeFi protocols. And that has maybe hit the ceiling of what their original market looks like. And so if you're GTO, okay, great. You have this great product on Solana, works super well.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  You've eaten up a pretty good share of, of legal staking volume. Where do you go next? I think if I look at, you know, something like, like EtherFi, right? On, on Ethereum, there's only so big, you know, the restaking market can be. Um, and, and moved into building a neo bank, which has been, uh, pretty successful. It seems like GTO is kind of going the opposite route of, hey, where do we kind of go next? What's the next big market? And obviously there's a lot of synergies between, um, you know, a product that can do, um, you know, really good order routing and really good block building. And something like a perp decks, which, um, you know, naturally needs, you know, a, a matching engine that has fairness and transparency and, and, um, you know, good execution. So, um, it's cool. I'm, I'm excited to see it in the wild.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I do enjoy the perp phenomenon simply because it's the most revenue generating product crypto has ever produced since blockchains themselves. I think that's a correct statement, or maybe Dex is like Uniswap makes a bunch of revenue too. And so like, that's what gives me some amount of like, hope or hopium about the phenomenon of perp Dexes. It does feel like the making of a bubble, like we are somewhere up the euthanasia roller coaster. I don't, I don't know quite where. Doesn't seem to be too frothy at the moment, but I don't know. I don't know if you have an opinion on this.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  I think at the very least, I don't think we're seeing, you know, a bunch of leverage or credit being pumped into this that is going to kind of unwind at some point. Maybe you could argue with

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Ironically, though, the product is itself leverage.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  That is true. That is true. Luckily, self-contained. It's like a little, you know, implosion in a dome or something like that. But I also think we're working our way through the alphabet when it comes to the TXs. You know, we already had FTX. There's no GTX luckily. We had HTX. We got, we had JTX. I don't know what's next, but you know, I would encourage entrepreneurs maybe to, you know, think outside the box a little bit. And there are other naming conventions.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Get away from the X.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  What is TX? Is that a thing at all?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I forget what the, actually, FTX stood for initially. There was some acronym, which I'm totally

• 30:27Speaker 00

  X is always for exchange. I don't know how T got there.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  What did FTX stand for?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna, Futures Trading Exchange. I don't know.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Did FTX stand for?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  I got nothing, dude.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Futures Token Exchange. Futures Token Exchange. That doesn't even make any sense.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Futures Exchange. But yeah, it, you know.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Bad name. Bad name.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Probably don't want to follow in their footsteps, but.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Let's talk about the Coinbase system update. So they announced 21 products all at once. This was on a June 16th. Under this like everything exchange brand and push, trying to become users' primary financial account, not just for crypto, but for everything. So some of the headline products that they released, tokenized stocks backed one to one by US shares with on-chain dividends and shareholder rights. Pretty cool, but this is only for non-US customers of Coinbase. Kind of ironic, but this does allow for 24/7 trading on US equities. Kind of cool. In the coming months, they announced options trading for crypto and stocks. They also announced real world asset perpetual futures and pre-IPO perps. Anthropic and OpenAI, they hinted as coming soon.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  They also popping open the hood of Coinbase. They talked about a unified order book liquidity, like order book platform for their US spot, international derivatives, dare a bit. And so one single order book to power all of their front ends. They also announced private transactions on base to bring privacy to base and then also Coinbase advisor. This is a Lincoln Mers project out of Coinbase. First SEC registered AI investment advisor. Seems pretty hypey. Tom, what are you, what are you, what's most exciting, exciting to you here out of all these products?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  I actually thought the base private transactions were pretty cool. I feel like we're seeing this, this, you know, privacy mini, mini Renaissance, obviously starting with, with Zcash and then I saw recently today or this week, Zama was doing these private deposit pools with Morpho. And then we have this. And so it feels like, again, this sort of missing elephant in the room, sometimes it's missing and it's also an elephant in the room when it comes to crypto. And now we're seeing, hey, maybe there's some green green sheets popping up around bringing privacy back. I think this feels, I mean, cool suite of products. I think some of these are obviously, again, followers of other companies that have gotten there first. And now Coinbase is being the second mover with their distribution. But the question is just like, hey,

• 33:04Speaker 01

  can they actually get people to treat them as the everything exchange? And when they wake up in the morning and they want to, you know, go buy some SpaceX, are they going to think I'm going to go to Coinbase? Or are they going to think I'm going to go to Robinhood or Fidelity or whatever my other brokerage is? And to compete, at least you need, you need something special to get people.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. It's important that Coinbase becomes feature complete and so I can buy Bitcoin alongside SpaceX and I want that in the same spot and I don't want a new tab. I just want it all right then and there. But that's like kind of getting up to par and they need to, they need to get there. I don't know why they would, why the generic user of the world, the generic investor of the world would use Coinbase over Robinhood, over interactive brokers. And so there needs to be a little bit of secret sauce there and I don't know, quite know what they tap into in order to unlock that.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I do always think too, I, I think they could use a little bit of a rebrand. Ironically, I think actually-

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Are you talking about the UI, the UI of Coinbase.com?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, that I feel like is always every, every two months, they're, they're moving things around. I think more, weirdly enough, I think Base would have been a great rebrand for Coinbase versus Base the Chain. You know, when you, when you're thinking about going to Coinbase, you know, the name really says it all. You were thinking, probably thinking about trading some coins versus maybe thinking about getting a mortgage or maybe thinking about opening a 401k, but a little minor niche.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I don't know if that's minor because like crypto has the worst brand it's ever had ever and I kind of don't see that changing anytime soon. Like crypto right now seems to be kind of fading into its backend infrastructure era where like Hyperliquid is just going, trying to become a platform, you know, Ethereum is becoming a platform. All the blockchain is fading away as designed was always supposed to be this way. And I think that kind of reduces our industry's ability to like change our brand because no one interfaces with us anymore. And so it's just left with how it is, which was FTX and Donald Trump, like implosions and grifts. And I don't know how we like take control of our brand. And that

• 35:13Speaker 00

  maybe that's bearish, but like Coinbase could, to your point, just like step away from it and be like, we're just not a crypto company anymore. We serve crypto products. We also serve stocks. The fact that it's tokenized is not your concern. That's our concern. Like you just buy the thing and we take care of the rest, which is how brokerages work.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, you know, probably a much bigger, you know, audience today and, and seems to be the way even the crypto world is going. Or if anything, I think it's more, maybe more bifurcating where, you know, stablecoins are very hot. So maybe they should call it Stablecoinbase and do the other rebrand.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  You mentioned privacy and how privacy is having a little bit of renaissance. This isn't in our agenda, but I do want to talk about Near Confidential Intense TVL, which is climbing. It's still pretty small, so it's a, this is actually a little bit of old data. This is three days old. I think it's past like 40 million, but what Near is doing is Near is providing confidential pools, kind of like, kind of like Zcash privacy pools, but for other chains and other assets. So on here is A, Near, but also USDC and Zcash and Tether and ETH. And so it's creating little privacy pools for other blockchains and it's also growing. There is a little, there is a big privacy renaissance happening at the margins.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  You know, Zcash is growing, Near is growing, Base has private transactions, Zama is doing stuff. And it feels good. It feels good that we are getting privacy in where, like it's kind of like the crypto industry putting our money where our mouth is.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, again, it's, it's been, something that's been long promised and it's cool to also see just the real adoption. I think about builders in the space and there've been a lot of false starts throughout the years, not, not for any particular reason, but hey, just the market wasn't there, the liquidity wasn't there, the demand wasn't there. And now people see, oh, if I want to live my entire financial life on chain, I probably also want privacy. If I'm going to be spending, you know, with, with a debit card out of my wallet or, you know, custoding my, my, my tokenized stocks in my, in my wallet, I probably also want to be able to then, you know, go, go spend and not let everyone know, you know, what I hold. And I, again, I think the numbers, the numbers kind of speak for themselves.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Are you a Zcash bull, Tom?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Uh, not financialized. We do hold, you know, Zcash and I think it has, you know, kind of a special, special place in the industry and obviously give them a lot of credit for pioneering. I think a lot of the ZKP research that has influenced and a lot of other, you know, downstream projects have ended up using.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  I want to bring up this post from Nathan McCully, who works at Anchorage. He said, "Exciting launch today. Anchorage Digital's link to staking and trading for Hyperliquid is now live. Clients can simply link their Anchorage Digital staking account to any external trading account. No bridging, no changes to custody status, and no interruptions to staking operation." Why I think this is interesting is, in the trad world, you have segregation of brokerage and execution, so the exchange does not also custody? And this is actually the same market structure that's emerging here, where you have Anchorage for custody, but you just plug in to Hyperliquid to do exchange.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And this is actually something that ironically Gary Gensler always pointed at the crypto industries, like, "Look at these hooligans doing uncompliant things. We've learned these lessons. Don't conflate, don't do what Coinbase is doing, which is put custody and exchange in the same place, because you have potential things that look like Alameda and FTX. And like, we've learned these lessons." And like, all the people in the crypto industry, myself included, and I still am, are like, "It's just more efficient and easier, and this is what blockchain technology enables." Like, actually, it's blockchains that are doing the custody, and Coinbase is actually just the exchange, but yeah, new technology kind of breaks people's brains. I do find it interesting that we are now mimicking traditional infrastructure via regulatory

• 39:12Speaker 00

  compliance, but we're kind of doing it on our own. I don't know if you have any takes or any thoughts on that?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in many respects, this is kind of just an extension of the shift towards off-exchange settlement for centralized exchanges that we saw post-FTX, where you saw stuff like Fireblocks and Copper Clearloop take off as a way to, again, segregate exchange from settlement. And I think, I'm assuming a lot of Anchorage customers are probably asking for Hyperliquid. I know I've talked to a couple of different primes and trading desks, and they have a lot of demand for hyperload exposure, specifically people wanting to trade perps or other instruments on Hyperliquid. And so the answer is, how? About doing that. Well, we can plug it in like we do any other exchange. And now it's a new venue that people are able to trade on.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  And so I think it's the cool thing about crypto, as you've been saying, is hey, it's transparent and programmable. And so if you want to go and custody your assets on a single exchange and trade there, you can. But hey, you can also trade via a DEX and sort of see what's actually happening on chain. It's all modular and transparent, which is kind of the ultimate crux of what a lot of this technology is about.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just looked it up. Anchorage has about $28 billion in AUM, which now in theory is just like one click away from Hyperliquid. That was always kind of the problem with Hyperliquid is bridging on to the exchange. This is kind of fitting in like one of my stories of the year I pay attention to. Like this is just my own internal model that I have about threads, story threads to pull on. Michael Saylor's Stretch is like a story I pull on. And the platformization of Hyperliquid is a story that I'm paying attention to. Like, how far can Hyperliquid go from migrating from just being a first-party exchange that like me, the user, goes on to and presses buttons versus becoming a backend platform?

• 41:09Speaker 00

  And this is firmly in the latter camp of like this is Hyperliquid growing up and evolving into being a backend platform, tapping into the AUM of the world. Doesn't matter where the capital is, but the capital comes to Hyperliquid because everyone wants to trade on Hyperliquid.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's kind of another flavor of this DeFi MOL idea. I think of even Coinbase.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Thanks, you owe me a nickel.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is that the rule? Maybe we'll debate this. We'll have a settlement offline. But it does seem like this is a natural way for these markets to end up. Again, like the internet where you have different layers with centralized protocols that you really do their one single layer well, and then kick the other responsibilities up to another layer of abstraction that can get more specific and sort of serve end clients. And maybe the answer is we have one big global standard for liquidity and everyone else can build. Their own brokerage or their own execution services or their own apps on top of it or whatever it might be.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  And so I don't know, it's very cool to see how rapidly this has been getting adopted as well as just, again, it feels like this is kind of the boring revolution of crypto where you're using it in the backend and you don't even realize it.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the boring revolution of crypto, crypto volumes are down the lowest ever since September 2024 on centralized trading volumes. Meanwhile, real world asset perps are hitting record highs. And so we've seen this in the Coinbase S1 and the Robinhood S1 is just like crypto trading volume, Bitcoin, Ether, the blue chips and all the coins as well. Just down and revenue just down for the centralized exchanges as a whole. But real world asset perp volume is up and to the right. And this really started with hyper liquid doing listing gold at the start of this year, right before the gold mania followed by oil at the start of the Iran war.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  And there's been a growth of real world asset trading volumes on perps. And so again, this kind of is the story that we always said was going to happen. And unfortunately, it seems to coincide with like a lowering of trading volume of Bitcoin and Ether. Like now that we have like gold and oil traders are trading gold and oil and they don't really care about Bitcoin and Ether. But it does seem like the sign of maturity of like we have real world asset perps. I do think that there's a very big real world asset perp story for the second half of this year.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like H I P three volumes have already hit like 40% of hyper liquid volumes and I think are growing. And I think there's a good chance through the end of the year that we see a day where H P three volumes actually exceed the rest of, you know, crypto volumes on hyper liquid and other exchanges, again, probably looking very similar. I do think a lot of these assets and that this asset focus is very, very cyclical, right? Like people want to trade oil when oil is very volatile and see some, you know, vol spike and then it goes back down. And, you know, a year ago, no one really wanted to trade oil and the beauty of a lot of these, yeah, perp Texas. Is they are able to very quickly and aggressively list new assets as they come online. You have to wait for, you know, ID to list, you know, SKH mix.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  You could just go trade the perp, you know, today. And I, I think as long as we can see this kind of like hot ball of money, you know, new focus asset dynamic. I think it's actually pretty bullish for, for perps that have a lot more agility and ability to list these new assets. And in the same way that I would say, you know, Uniswap did in kind of 2020, 2021, where, you know, new DeFi token comes out. Well, it's on Uniswap before it's on Coinbase and that is just a leg up and a, and a liquidity mode that kind of builds on itself.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, especially with being able to implement any asset that you can turn into a perp, which is anything. So long as there's a bull market somewhere, so long as there's a frenzy somewhere, that's kind of bullish for the relevant perp platform. The only thing that's like bearish for a perp platform is if like there's a global recession and all trading volumes go to zero. Because then your business runs out, but I mean, if Bitcoin goes from 140,000 down to 60,000. But oil goes up, gold goes up, people want to trade those things anyways. That's probably a decent amount of the reason why the hype token has just, you don't see the Bitcoin bear market in the hype token whatsoever.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think you just see this, again, this, this dispersion. I think that's kind of what a lot of these, these crypto exchanges are now trying to do of, hey, we need to diversify away from just crypto trading. I think, you know, Coinbase in kind of 2022 was really trying to push outside of, I'm just trading, going into, you know, savings and yield and other types of assets. Which you've kind of seen now, see manifested through their, their card and, you know, their, their other types of yield products. And maybe we're seeing that same kind of revolution, but, you know, moving away from even, you know, crypto specific products as well. I do think honestly, even in a recession, I think people are still going to want to trade. It's, it's one of those like almost, you know, recession proof kind of things where humans love to speculate.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And it feels like the cultural trend of speculating is just has continued kind of up to the right. And I think short of some sort of, you know, external force that's going to kind of revert it. It seems like this is going to be something that's going to kind of, kind of proliferate.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Let's get into my neck of the woods, crypto media. Blockworks has acquired Mazzari. So Mazzari is like an OG data analytics platform that also just integrated like a news and research engine as well. This was founded by Ryan Selkis. I don't know what he's up to these days. I have him used on Twitter, most people do. And this is actually-

• 46:50Speaker 01

  He's running for president. I don't know if you saw.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  2028, let's go.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  No, he's not.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Well, anyone can run for president if you're 35 and born in America.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Is he seriously running for president?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. Was Trump seriously running for president? Was Kanye seriously running for president? Who knows?

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Sure, but Trump was Trump and that's like, you can't, you can't say, yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Let me put it this way, he changed his handle.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  What's his handle?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I think, I think it's like Ryan Selkis 2028.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  No way, dude. Hang on, I have to let this up. Oh my God. Wow. All right, good luck, Ryan Selkis.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  So I have to show you that, but-

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you really did. Anyways, Ryan Selkis left Mazzari forever ago. I think he got kind of kicked out by the board because he was being deranged on Twitter. That's why I am reacting in the way that I am. It was, I don't know if we know specifically how much was paid, but we, the one rumor is that that is somewhere north of $10 million for Mazzari, which is actually a pretty steep discount because there was a raise that Mazzari did a Series B back in 2022, which valued Mazzari at over $300 million, approximately $300 million. And so it is actually just a sign of, A, media broadly, news is hard. Media companies are not what they are today in the world of like AI. Volume-based media is just not the same.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Like it's all kind of like creator-led media rather than volume-led media. And Blockworks got a deal for $10 million. So congrats to the Blockworks team for picking up, picking up Mazzari.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy to see. I mean, I feel like when I got in the industry, Misari was like completely authoritative. I mean, we had a Misari sub and I was thinking back in those days, I mean, Selkis was also just such a force on Twitter and in person and was a large part of the

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Far more normal.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Personality around it. I mean, yes, consensus was also just such a big event.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  There was Misari mainnet.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yes, it was a mainnet. And, you know, I think, I think you, once the kind of air starts to leak out, it's, it's hard to kind of, kind of plug the hole. So, but it is, it is a good product. So yeah, kudos to everyone involved on the, on the acquisition.

• 49:01Speaker 00

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• 49:43Speaker 00

  collateral and structured products on top of real-world yield. Even the best carry trades can be within reach. BRICS brings DeFi's promise to the emerging world and brings emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with BRICS.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  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

• 50:38Speaker 02

  your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I do not have kids.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Neither do I, so we're gonna talk as if we do have kids. This is Akir Starmer. He's the, what's his title? The Prime Minister of the UK. He tweeted out, "I am simply not prepared to be a bystander when the safety and happiness of our children is at stake. We got governments coming to protect children by banning social media access for children under 16 to give children their childhood back." So this is the UK banning social media for children. Now broadly, I kind of agree. Like, kids don't be on Instagram. Go play tag. And at first glance, I think that's, I think everyone can like, kind of agree with that. But if you get into the implementation details of how you actually ban the internet for a specific person and not another specific person, I think that's when it gets a little

• 51:31Speaker 00

  bit crazy. I don't know if you have a take on banning social media for kids, Tom?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally agree. I don't think there's anything, I think most people would agree actually with keeping under 16s off of social media. I think maybe one, the points of disagreement might be having this being implemented by the government instead of parents choosing to have this for their children, which I think most parents are probably choosing to have this for their children. And then two, like you said, how do you do this? You need more ID age verification, which just ends up kind of slippery slope. This obviously also honeypot for, you know, KYC information. And so I think that's kind of the thing people push back on is today it's ID verification for kids. Yeah, tomorrow it's who knows what.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  This does, I know the UK is no longer Europe, but this does seem like a very Europe thing to do. And I don't really have too much faith in their leadership over there, to be honest. And so I am kind of worried that Europe or the UK is going to allow this foot in the door. Because it's like a slippery slope, right? Like, once one government figures out how to do this, they kind of set a model for any other interested government to follow suit. And you ban one piece of the internet. Over on our shore domestically in the United States, we had a piece of our internet get banned this week, and that was Fable out of Anthropic. You know, one service, one tiny little service out of all the billion users. Users of the internet, like not too many people were using it, but still government took down a small piece of the internet.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  And I don't want to see that trend grow. And the reason why I put this in the agenda is because crypto definitely feels like the bulwark against this, like crypto knows no borders, knows no government. Yeah, you know, same thing with like VPNs, there's like anti-government, anti-border technology out there. And so this is something I'm kind of keeping my eye on because if this gets a little bit too authoritarian. So probably won't be next year, probably won't be this election, but I could see this being a growing trend into the 2030s. Crypto is going to have a role to play here one way or another.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think crypto and decentralized technology ultimately is it's the ultimate opt out, right? A lot of private companies, you know, choose to implement these, these kinds of, you know, age limiting features or other limiting features, I mean Discord added, you know, age gating.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Recently, but it's a private company opting in and you know, they use some kind of smart text, you're not uploading your ID or whatever. The problem is when you can't escape, what do you do? And I think always having an option to let people, you know, choose their own path is pretty important.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Tom, that's all my topics. I got one more topic, but I want to throw it to you first. What are you excited about? What are you interested in? What's rattling around in your brain this week?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  What am I excited about? I, I was looking actually at some of the new AI models that, again, in the spirit of letting people, you know, choose their own path. There's sort of this newfound, you know, open source AI renaissance. And so people are pretty happy about GLM 5.2, which is this Chinese model that came out and has, you know, performance that is on par, maybe surpassing, you know, Opus 4.8. And people say, hey, if you orchestrate correctly, it's similar to Fable or Open Router, which was founded by Alex Atala, formerly of OpenSea.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  We are recording a podcast with him next week.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. Also came out with this sort of hybrid model that allows you to stitch together many different models to get sort of Fable level performance. And so it feels like there's this cool undercurrent and sort of similarities actually between crypto was happening in the AI industry right now. In terms of a move towards, you know, open source and sort of self-sovereign compute, which is, I think, a much more optimistic vision for the future than, than the alternative.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Did you see that intersecting with crypto in any way? Or is it just kind of like the ethos that overlaps?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  I think we see some kind of fruits of that today. I think just A, in terms of like, hey, how do these things ultimately get funded? How do you actually access, you know, compute for this? If it gets restricted on an inference provider level, maybe as a way to tap into a more distributed inference network and actually access some of these models. But today, it's more of a personality and sort of ethos and alignment, I would say, where you see a lot of really crypto people coming to AI and vice versa, but ultimately driven by these same sort of ideas that, again, go back to kind of the early days of computing.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  There was one project I was talking to. There's a growing trend of AI labs kind of baiting, switching you with their model, where like they tell you one model, but then you ask it and like, I would like to use this particular model. And then you ask the query and then they really just serve you another model on the backend and don't tell you. And to some degree, when I ask, when I accidentally ask, you know, Opus 4.8 Max a stupid question, I don't need it. I can, it can like downshift me. But that's one thing. If I'm, if I'm like actually being intentional about my work and they're telling me I'm using Fable, but I'm actually getting some Sonnet. I think that's a growing trend and I have seen a handful of crypto projects trying to go after verified compute. I think this is what Noch Chain is going after.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  And so actually verifying the model and everything kind of end to end is kind of like auditable and secure in the same way that we would expect our blockchains to be. And so this is also a growing trend that I know is out there. I'm not, definitely not an expert in it, but like something is brewing over in that neck of the woods.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Totally. And I think there's also this in sort of private compute component in terms of just data. You know, people, I think, trust these chatbots with a whole lot of personal information that they probably would not trust even Google with, not realizing that, hey, this is, you know, can be retained for arbitrary amounts of time by these companies. It's subject to subpoena, it can be trained on, it could leak, whatever. And I think that that it seems unsustainable to me that maybe a future is one where yeah, people have had their entire personal lives held on a single company's servers. And it seems like there's a move towards having, you know, local or distributed private data, maybe accompanied with some sort of remote compute.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  But it does seem like these two are kind of going to collide at some point.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Isn't everything you're saying is what Near is doing, right?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Near is doing a lot of this, yes. I think it's like these sort of parallel currents between AI and crypto are kind of what I'm observing.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. We got the USA game tomorrow, Tom. You gonna watch it?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Probably not. I am not really a soccer fan.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  You're just not a sports guy.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  No, I mean.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Neither am I, to be clear.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, you're wearing Argentina jersey? What is this?

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I'm I get Argentina pride for some reason, like down into my soul. And so let me tell you about a trade that I made this week, Tom. There is the July 3 Miami game, which is like the one J versus two H group. And that is the first, the first winner of the J group plays the runner up in the H group, or vice versa, one of the two. There's like an 85% chance that that's Argentina versus someone. And so I bought tickets for that game on the chance that it's Argentina, which feels, it feels good. It's probably priced accordingly, but if Argentina doesn't advance, then like, then it's like, I don't, oh, yeah, I could hedge it.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  I could hedge it on Polymarket, which is exactly what I'm going to show you right now. That's actually not even where I was going with this. But Argentina's got a 12% chance of winning the World Cup. But let's, let's go and see the actual chances that they win the bracket. Yeah, so Argentina, 84% odds on Polymarket that it wins its J group. It has a game versus Austria on the 22nd, and that's going to be like, my ticket either goes up in value or it goes down in value if Austria wins. And if it goes up in value, it'll go up like 15%. But if Argentina doesn't make it, then the new game is Austria versus like, I think it's

• 59:30Speaker 00

  gonna be Uruguay or Spain or something. And this is not as exciting because it's like, this is Messi's last World Cup. And so I'm excited. I'm gonna go down, hopefully to Miami and watch the game. But this all rides on Argentina actually making it through their group.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope for your sake that they do because Austria versus Uruguay does not sound nearly as exciting, but.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Argentina versus Spain.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Anyways, that's the trade I'm in. Tom, thanks for coming on the show and helping fill in for Ryan. Always a pleasure to have you.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But this is Frontier. It's not for everyone. And we're glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.