ROLLUP: War Returns, Markets Shrug | Saylor Sells | Robinhood Memecoins | Ethereum 3.0?

War with Iran is back, but markets barely blinked. Ryan and David unpack Saylor’s $216 million Bitcoin sale, whether it marked the bottom, Robinhood Chain’s memecoin breakout, and Vitalik’s “Ethereum 3.0” roadmap. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 3:12 Iran War Returns, Markets Shrug & Saylor Sells 3,588 BTC — Was That the Bottom? https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/2074781504757027087 https://x.com/saylor/status/2074101854875656316 https://www.bankless.com/read/how-strategy-can-sell-billions-in-bitcoin https://x.com/rob_e89rtosmit/status/2074484772622172307 20:17 Robinhood Chain’s First Hit: Memecoins https://x.com/vladtenev/status/2074695821896065360 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2075062776473546979 https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/09/cashcat-trader-turns-usd800-into-over-usd1-million-on-robinhood-s-brand-new-blockchain https://dune.com/entropy_advisors/robinhood-chain-network-overview 28:17 Ethereum 3.0? Vitalik’s New Strawmap https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2073459000398463446 https://strawmap.org https://x.com/r2Jamong/status/2074053557284982925 https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2073708226701328474 https://x.com/dankrad/status/2073532475431887354 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/2073480431887056958 45:46 JPMorgan’s $700M Ethereum Fund & Paradigm Fundraise https://cryptobriefing.com/jpmorgan-jltxx-tokenized-money-market-fund-surges-250-percent/ https://x.com/TradingProtocol/status/2074383012939141407 https://x.com/matthuang/status/2074873573983035801 53:13 The Fight for 24/7 Markets & David’s Portfolio Check-In https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/2075230297134645744 https://x.com/econoar/status/2075056773724062031 https://x.com/rambo_xbt/status/2075192964259672434 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2062122936790581520 1:04:00 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, another Friday, another week. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Ryan, how you doing?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I'm great, David. I was really excited to celebrate the 4th of July, you know? The 250th anniversary. It is actually July.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  250 is a big one.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the, I think, is this the 10th? This is the 11th year of existence for Ethereum, is that right? July, Ethereum's 11th birthday.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yes, correct.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  No, is it 10th?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, Ethereum blockchain started sometime in July in 2015. So this makes Ethereum 11 years old.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  So where do you think Ethereum will be?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Forget America's birthday. Happy birthday Ethereum.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  250 years from now, where do you think Ethereum will be?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Still producing blocks.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Give me an ETH price prediction.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  I don't know if the dollar is the correct denominator at that point in 250 years. I mean, the dollar's got Lindy, but I don't know if it's got 250 more years of Lindy. Not to say anything about Ethereum's 11 years of Lindy.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Well, we are not going to be around, so it's not going to be our problem. Unless you do the Brian Johnson thing.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  I think there's a very solid chance that at least I will be around because I'm at least trying half-heartedly to do that.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Well, you might need a new roll-up co-host then because I'm not sure about myself, David.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  You're not going to do it?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  What do we got this week?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  This week, the ceasefire with Iran is over. The United States struck 80 targets over two days across Iran. Iran hit back with US bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. And oil sanctions on Iran are back on. So how are the markets responding to all of this? We did it during market hours this week. Usually Trump waits for Friday at 4:00 PM after the market closes.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Does he really?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  I guess he does.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  He did that like four times. Like, it's Friday at 4:00 PM, it's time to bomb Iran. But there was a ceasefire and then now it's seemingly over. Trump's got some words to say. There's also Michael Saylor. Once upon a time, in distant memory, he sold 32 Bitcoin and Bitcoin dropped like 20%. This week, Saylor sold 3,588 Bitcoin and Bitcoin went up 3%.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Huh. You told me you think that marks the bottom. We've got to dive into what your thoughts are on that. Also, the Robin Hood chain finished its first full week in production with a killer use case that's emerging. We'll talk about what that is.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  You've never seen this use case before. Brand new meta in crypto. We've never seen it.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Speaking of brand new, there's a new Ethereum roadmap brought to you by Vitalik. At least he published it, he pushed it out. It's called the Straw Man. I really get the feeling. Oh, Straw Map, oops, not Straw Man. I really get the feeling they wanted to call this Ethereum 3.0, but like just didn't because of reasons.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  He did say the third phase.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  He did say that.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Just say it. This is Ethereum 3.0, folks.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  We're on Ethereum 3.0.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  We'll weigh in on that.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Okay, we never really knew when 1.0 ended and 2.0 started and it's going to be the same thing now.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Um, 2.0 started with the merge. 1.0 was when the whole thing kicked off 11 years ago, 10 years ago, excuse me.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fair, okay.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  The merge was two. I guess we've been into you for a while.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a little bit like DC's ship though because the merge, we ejected the consensus layer and added a new one, but the execution layer stayed the same.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  We'll get into it. I think it's Ethereum 3.0 at least. But let's start with Iran, the big news around the world. What happened with Iran?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  So two major waves of airstrikes on July 8th and 9th across Iran, targeting 170 military sites in total. So I would imagine this was a pretty big, in terms of strikes, which was a pretty big one. This was in direct retaliation for Iran attacking three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, which the United States characterized as a clear violation of the existing truce. So I'm guessing what happened here is like, we decided to like, see what we can do with pushing boats through the Strait of Hormuz and seeing what Iran would allow. And Iran was like, well, we're going to strike those ships. And they struck those three ships and then, you know, the United States just escalated. And so here we are. So I think the big question is, is the ceasefire over? Like, are we just back to war with Iran?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Let's go ask the Donald himself. Let's see what he said.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Have any questions? Mr. President?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Is the ceasefire over? Is the ceasefire done? Is the MOU dead?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's a very interesting question. To me, I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. You know what scum is? They're scum. They're sick people. They're led by sick people. And they're vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They're good people. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. They're liars. We make a deal. And if I make a deal with him, we have a deal. And he goes out, he talks. We make a deal. Everyone's agreed, no nuclear weapon. We make a deal. They go outside, talk to the press.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  They say, we never even talked about it. There's something wrong with them. They're cuckoo.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  As far as I'm concerned, it's over.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  As far as I'm concerned, it's over, is what he says. Now, Ryan, you would expect markets to just be in turmoil.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Can we just pause there? I just feel like, that sounds pretty over, but it's also, it's Donald Trump. Okay, that's Donald Trump. So I feel like he's said those words previously. Talked about ending the Iranian civilization, all sorts of things. And then was back like, oh, these guys are great. Let's make a deal. We got a great deal. These are beautiful people, respect. And now he's back to what he was before. So I don't know. From anyone else, I'd be like, that's, this is so over. But from Trump, it's like, okay.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Right. And I think the markets are saying exactly what you're saying. So looking at the oil prices as like the indices of how over is this? It's not that over. Or actually, it's somewhere in the middle. So like, oil prices jumped from $68 for WTI up to $71. That's up 5%, which is in the grand scheme of the war, that's like nothing.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, zoom out a little bit on this chart.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Oh, this is, this is the entire war. This is the entire war.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Wait, this is the entire, wait, entire war?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so these are weekly candles.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Oh, this is the 200 week. I see, you're doing weekly candles.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  This is the weekly candles. And so here, I'll go to daily candles.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get it.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, like, we're doing fine.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we were above 100 at various points in the war, right? Like, as high as 112? Is that what this is?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  As high as 112. And then it was ranging between 85 and 112. And then the lows, which we were at three days ago, was $67 and we were at below $72.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So the market kind of thinks this is over, right? The market thinks it's over? I mean, not, sorry, not over. It's just like, not a big deal.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  It's not a big deal.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think like, the Trump administration did a phenomenal job, in my opinion, doing expectation management with the markets as it was to the war, when the war was actually in its height. They really just like, they only struck on the weekends. Then it was like, peacetime between Monday through Friday during market hours, but then once the weekend hit, it was wartime.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  And they did that so long that like, now that like, we're striking Iran again, the market's like, whatever. Like, we'll add 3% to the oil prices, but we're moving on. I mean, it showed up a little bit in the indices, but really like, the NASDAQ and the SPY are fantastically green today. So there was like a red bloodbath on like Tuesday, but it was one day.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  That kind of implies that the market is calling the shots on this war, which is sort of bizarre, but maybe that's what's going on. But it also implies that, I mean, Trump has a really, a real weakness around this. If Iran knows what's happening, they could do the same analysis you just did and just be like, Trump is not going to do anything if the markets go down. And so they can exploit that. They have all sorts of ways to exploit that. I guess.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  That's not my interpretation. My interpretation is that the market doesn't care. Donald Trump gets to do whatever he wants because the market is what will push Donald into a corner, not Iran. And so like, Donald just got away with two days of strikes across Iran and the market was like, whatever, we're just going to cough a little bit and go up.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  All right. I'm choosing to just like, not let it affect my.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  I think you're allowed to not think about it. That's what the market's saying.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  That's what I've been doing. That's what the market agrees with me on that.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Let's look at the crypto prices. So Bitcoin up 2% this week. We're at $63,000. ETH up 2% this week at $17.50. And then STRECH, I think, is the most interesting thing. Trading at $86, STRECH from STRATEGY. It's trading 14% off. I think this is kind of starting to like, find some sort of equilibrium about like, how comfortable people are holding STRECH and the yield at $86. $100 is too high, but $70 is too low. And the other indicator of like, health of this bull market, Ryan, that's the STRECH and MASTER MicroStrategy, like the crypto health of side of things. DRAM is like, the momentum of the AI stocks. It's kind of come off of its highs from $80 down to $60 since up to $65.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  And so I kind of think the memory stocks, the AI trade is kind of consolidating right now. It's not going too high, not going too low. There's a little bit of a pause, but as far as I'm concerned, like, the market, the trend is still in the market's favor. These are all my takes.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  What about this, what about this big Michael Saylor sale then? I mean, the market seemed to absorb that, which was somewhat unexpected, I suppose, because this is a $200 million sale here. I mean, that's not, it's, it's less than, it's about half a percent of all MicroStrategy holdings. But that's the first time that STRATEGY has sold in size. It's a big amount. It indicates more to come, or more could come, from somebody previously, in previous regimes, thought of as just an accumulator. You know, STRATEGY, Saylor does not sell. It only buys an outsold and the market shrugged that off. So what, what happened here and what do you think this means?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  The biggest piece of information for me on this is, Saylor sold a lot in comparison to what he sold last time. So 32 ETH, or 32 Bitcoin is what he sold last time. He sold 3,588, so way more. He raised $216 million, which is like, one and a half months of dividend coverage. So in terms of like, buying time, he didn't buy himself that much time. So it's, we're going from like, micro-sales to small sales of Bitcoin.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  But it's still, to your point, it's only 45 days he bought.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're right. It's still very small. And so I do think it's bullish that Michael Saylor is selling because he needs to become, in my opinion, irrelevant to the market. And when there is such a large overhang from Saylor and he has such a large obligation for dividends, that's just going to define the Bitcoin price because that's what the market is going to be looking at. And Saylor needs to, in my opinion, puke up some Bitcoin so he can absolve himself of some sins and like get 30-plus months of dividend coverage shored up. And so he's selling, but in my opinion, he's not selling enough. But it is notable that the Bitcoin price has gone up this week despite Saylor selling 3,588 Bitcoins.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Do you think Bitcoin price in the market is just saying, they're accepting the fact that he's going to puke up some Bitcoin? But so long as he pukes it up in an orderly fashion, the way everyone can kind of absorb, but it's not unexpected, you know, markets hate uncertainty. This is sort of some certainty in the market that they can predict. Yeah, sure, he's going to puke up a little bit, but he's going to do it in an orderly fashion according to a plan. It's not going to be a graceless collapse or unwind. It's just going to be something that now happens. And I guess the market is bullish on that because they've removed some uncertainty. This is how strategy is going to solve its STRC preferred shares dilemma. Yeah, funding problem.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, when he sold his 32 Bitcoin and then Bitcoin dropped like 20% from like 70 down to like 58,000 or whatever, like I don't think it was the market responding to that 32 Bitcoin sale. It was the market anticipating much larger sells like this coming in the future. And perhaps this is the first of a handful of these, hopefully, in my opinion, the first of many, where Saylor actually does, again, puke up some Bitcoin to shore up his defenses so the market can kind of move on. And so the drop in Bitcoin price way back, way back a month and a half ago or whatever, was front-running all of that future selling, this selling and all of that future selling, giving Saylor kind of terrible execution on the sale.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Like he's buying the top and then selling the bottom. But nonetheless, like this is, I think, what it takes for us to kind of just clear this debt that we have.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Well, let me ask you what you think this might imply. So do you think now that the market has, and Saylor's seemingly resolved the problem here, right? We have a path towards resolution. You just keep doing this type of sale in an orderly way, however frequently you want to do it. It's not a problem right now. It's going to be very orderly. So that removes the Saylor micro-strategy blow-up risk. I guess what I'm asking, your probability last time that we saw the bottom was what, like 50%?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Forty to 50%.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, has that gone up or down?

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's gone up. So because when we bottomed at like $57,000, Saylor was selling into that with this sale. And so to me, like, and so when I said it was 40 to 50% probability, I didn't know, no one knew that Saylor was selling at that time. Had I known that Saylor was actually selling into that, I'd be like, oh, he's the forced seller selling into the bottom. This is what a bottom looks like. So my probability is going up.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  So now you're weighting, your weighting is basically that you're what, 60%? Something like this?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Sixty-ish, 60% chance that that was the bottom?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  That 58K was the bottom.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  57 and a half K, I think was the Pico bottom.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  What about you? Has that changed?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  My probability has not changed. I think I'm like remain unaffected by the Saylor thing and I'm probably more influenced by Michael NATO and the work that he's doing. And his probability-

• 14:13Speaker 00

  I haven't listened to you guys' episode yet this week. What did you guys say this week?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  His probability that we've seen the bottom is 45%. So his probability that we have not seen the bottom, that we go to lower lows is 65%.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And he's like, limit orders at 55K or so. And-

• 14:29Speaker 00

  55? Why, we're like, it's the same, same.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  That's the first limit, set of limit orders. Then you've got 50K limit orders and then you could get into this, into the 40s if things get really ugly. And like 40 is kind of a, um, 63, 64%, something like this, drawdown from all-time highs, which should be commensurate with kind of the trend that we've seen. And his reasoning is kind of different. He's looking at, you know, the coin switching hands from different cohorts. And he's also looking at volume numbers. And he's like, we haven't seen the volume that we typically see in these kind of mark the bottom capitulation type events. He really wants to see some heavy volume on the buying and the selling before he gets the bottom signal.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  That it was not, this bottom was not a violent bottom and all the other bottoms have been violent.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  That said, look, his portfolio is something like 70% in crypto now, 30% cash, right? So he's still the weight of, you know, on the bullish side of things.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  He's leaned exposure. Which you see, like after, like right before 10-10, he went to like 80% cash, right?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did. Yeah, so he's totally switched and bought in. He just, he's, he's, he's pretty convicted that we haven't seen him.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  A little slower to call, a little slower on the draw there.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  There's one more angle of the Saylor thing that I want to talk to you about because I think it's kind of actually important. There was this, like, they had, they released the like statement or whatever they're filing about the selling of their Bitcoin price. And there was like a bunch of words that has come with this. And so there are now, there are three buckets in their like digital framework, monetization framework, shenanigans.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Which is just how they're going to sell or that's what this means.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  How they're going to sell. And so there's three different categories for how strategy sells Bitcoin. There is the build the reserve category, which they have, that's the authorization that they have authorized themselves to sell $1.25 billion for the USD reserve. That's one type of authorized sale of Bitcoin.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So that's just like emergency fund, cash padding, that kind of thing? That's what the reserves is?

• 16:37Speaker 00

  I wonder if it's emergency fund, it's just cash.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Rainy day, rainy day fund.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Then there's cover the preferreds, which is you sell Bitcoin to pay the fixed dividends and interest strategy owes on its preferred shares and debt, or to replenish the reserves after they pay them, when management decides to sell Bitcoin, beats issuing common stock. So after they pay out like their monthly dividend or bi-weekly, however long they're doing it, they're allowed to sell Bitcoin to immediately replenish those dividends. And then there is a third bucket, which is just to fund buybacks, which they are allowed to sell Bitcoin to repurchase its preferred shares, MSCR stock, up to $1 billion of each, with Bitcoin sales potentially covering related taxes, fees and expenses.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  So there's three different buckets for how they sell Bitcoin. That $1.25 billion authorization that they authorize themselves to, which they don't need to do, but they did, is untouched by this sale of $216 billion, a million dollars of Bitcoin. This, that is the cover the preferreds category, not the build the reserves category. The build the reserves category, they have still authorized themselves $1.25 billion of a permission to sell Bitcoin. And this sale from this week is not in that bucket. It's in the cover the preferreds bucket, which is a limitless bucket. They can sell as much Bitcoin as they need to cover the preferreds.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so they're just saying all of the sells we made this week didn't count toward the number we gave you last week?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And also redeem that. We authorize that to not count.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Right. So I don't know what I get from that other than the selling could continue and it's totally up to them.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  They can do whatever they want. What are all these words for, dude?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'm glad we talked about that and cleared all that up, dude. What do we have next?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Okay, coming up next, we're going to talk about the brand new innovative use case on Robinhood chain that has been recently discovered this week. No one saw it coming. And then also, Ryan's going to talk to us about Ethereum 3.0. We've got a new straw map to talk about.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  That's my term, okay.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  It's a metallic term. It's all of that and more, but first we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Trading is changing, not gradually, right now. OKX just launched Trading Bots directly inside the OKX app. Grid trading, DCA, arbitrage, you set your strategy once and it executes around the clock. No staring at charts all day, no manual entries, no missing moves while you're asleep. And for the first time, automated trading actually feels simple. But OKX is thinking bigger than just trading. They also launched the Agent Payments Protocol, an open standard that lets AI agents execute full commercial transactions on-chain. The Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap and AWS are already building on it. And now it's live inside the United States. And new users who deposit and trade can get up to $500 in Bitcoin through the bankless link.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  The link is in the show notes to learn more, not investment advice, not available in New York or Texas. Markets don't move one asset at a time. One day it's Bitcoin, the next Nvidia, then gold, and then the S&P. But most traders are still managing their portfolio across different platforms, different accounts and different pools of capital. Bitget just changed that. Their new Stocks 2.0 product lets you trade tokenized equities directly with USDT, all inside the same app you already use for crypto. This is not just another tokenized stock product. Stocks 2.0 is designed around deeper liquidity, faster execution and the lowest fees on the market at just 0.04% and one-to-one economic exposure to the underlying stock. Dividends, stock splits and other corporate actions are reflected automatically, helping your position stay aligned with the asset you actually want exposure to.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  One platform, one account, multiple markets, crypto equities, commodities and more, all accessible with USDT. Bitget, trade smarter. Start trading today through the link in the show notes. This is not investment advice. Last week, we had the rise of Robinhood Chain. This week, it opened for business. The bridges opened up and you're able to go and buy tokenized stocks and put money into Morpho and trade on Uniswap and get 7% yield. You know what happened, Ryan?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, people did all of those things that you said?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I mean, sure, some people did, yeah. But what is actually everyone's excited about?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  What?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Meme coins. Meme coins. Can I tell you about the meme coin that's on Robinhood Chain that people are excited about?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Uh, what's it called? What's the meme coin of the week?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  It's called Cash Cat. And the lore is that this is what Robinhood was called before it was called Robinhood. And there's a tweet from Vlad from 2021 about this. And people immediately found that meme and it jumped up to 180 million dollars in market cap or something. And then because of the flurry of activity of meme coins on Robinhood Chain, so many people wanted to bridge to Robinhood Chain that all of the bridges ran out of ETH, ran out of liquidity on the Robinhood Chain. Just like everyone bridged over and was like, oh, we don't have any ETH for you. You have to go to the canonical bridge if you want to go on. And so like, people just rushed in to buy meme coins on Robinhood Chain. I forgot that like, when a chain launches, the first thing that happens there is just

• 21:34Speaker 00

  people just buy the native meme coins of the chain, but that's what happened.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Doesn't always happen, though. I mean, didn't happen for Kraken's Inc. Like, it just depends.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Doesn't happen for lots of chains.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  But you would want it to. You would want it to.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Everyone would want it to. Maybe we'll talk about why, but like, this seems like an endorsement almost from Vlad Tenev, the founder of Robinhood. He tweeted this. While we're building Robinhood Chain to be the best chain for real world assets, it works great for memes, too. There you go. It does work great for memes.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Blockchains do work great for memes. That is something that we've actually known for quite a long time. So now, like, all the meme coin traders are like, looking at Robinhood and Vlad being like, are you guys gonna list the memes? Like, but you have to support the meme economy. You need to list Cash Cat on the main Robinhood app because we need you guys to support the memes. And I think people are just have way too much hope for that. I don't think that's happening at all.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I guess the theory of why a meme coin would explode on Robinhood is distribution. You've got, you know, 25 million trading D gens.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Same thing with Base and meme coins on Base. It's like, you pump the meme coins on Base and then Coinbase will list it.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but with Robinhood, it's untouched people, too, right? It's like, the same people on Coinbase.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  They haven't been burned by meme coins before.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yes, they've already been.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  We could burn them.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  We could be the guys that burn them.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  This is a whole new audience we could burn. This is a whole new audience like, that could tap into the potential. I think that is probably some of the theory. It's Robinhood distribution. I mean, you correct me, I'm not a meme coin trader. What do I know about this?

• 23:05Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  That sounds right.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  And I think people are getting, even if Robinhood does do that, which I don't think they will, and I don't think that they ought to, because you shouldn't be, in my opinion, distributing meme coins to your retail buying, like, just because you want to support the meme coin economy.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Why gatekeep, David? Why gatekeep? You're such a gatekeeper.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  I'm sorry. I'm listening to all the people who own Cash Cat on Twitter and being like, Vlad, list Cash Cat. Vlad, list Cash Cat. And all I'm hearing is Vlad, let me dump on your customers.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  That's always the case. This is always the case.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Like, there's no way. There's no way. And like, Robinhood moves slowly and, you know, to some degree, that's actually benefited them because they've been able to be like 17th mover advantage on Ethereum Layer 2s.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And they just get to bring all their distribution. And like, going fast, they would have been in the experiment, like, Wild West phase. And like, that's not their deal. And so I don't like, I'm not holding my breath for Robinhood to list Cash Cat on their retail app.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Nor do you think they should, you're saying? You think they should just keep that segmented sandbox? You want meme coins?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  If you want to buy memes, download Robinhood Wallet, not Robinhood app.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least there's a step there and a hoop someone has to go through. And so they're not, you know, like, enticed by this. But this has been pretty good for some of the native DeFi protocols for wallets. I saw 140,000 wallets have been opened on Robinhood Chain. This is Hayden Adams.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  On one day, that was just one day. I think we're cumulative wallets on Robinhood Chain is over 200,000. On July 8th, there was 141 new active wallets on Robinhood Chain. 500 million dollars of trading volume in Uniswap in 24 hours, which is roughly a third of Solana's DEX spot volume, just on the Uniswap version of Robinhood Chain. Pretty crazy.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I mean, could you make the argument that, hey, memes are a great way to bootstrap an ecosystem? You get users, you get people like, on the wallet, doing things, activity, and then once they come, they'll stay?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  I've heard this story before.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I feel like we've said this before.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  I've heard that before.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  More crypto wallets in more hands is net good.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  I think memes are always kind of just like, it's the spark. Whether or not it lights anything is completely unfounded.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Well, there were some DeFi protocols that are winners here. You mentioned Uniswap. There's also Athena and Morpho, which receives some total value here. So they benefit from Robinhood Chain doing well. Some of these Robinhood tokens were on Pump Fun, which is a massive.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, Pump wants to give their users in on the action. And so you can buy Robinhood meme coins on Pump Fun now, which also now includes Robinhood stocks. So you can now buy Robinhood stock tokens on Pump Fun, which is interesting.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  It's a great way to cycle your meme coin winnings into something that's a bit more sustainable and cash flow. I hope that's what they're doing, David.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  But how about the real world asset part of things? How about the tokenized stocks? Are those flying off the shelves? Are we selling some tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain?

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Sure. There's 366 million dollars of assets on Robinhood Chain. 266 of that is stablecoins, granted, and a decent chunk of that is, as you said, in Morpho, getting that 7% like boosted yield from the Robinhood stablecoin, the USDG. That's Paxos. So 90 million dollars of that is in Athena getting yield, 86 million dollars of that is in Morpho getting yield. And then there is a whopping 13 million dollars of tokenized stocks. Robinhood tokenized stocks, 13 million dollars, which, I mean, it's day three, you know?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  It's day three. Well, I'm sure that number will go up when they open it up, at least to the US. It's just Europe only.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. It's not even, it's not available in the US, which sucks.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's a lot of gates that, like, I haven't tried to purchase tokenized stocks.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  I actually haven't actually tried it out directly yet because Robinhood stocks are permissionless, actually.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a to-do for next time. David's gonna go try this.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Let's, uh, let's look at the data availability purchase from Ethereum. Some interesting stats.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Nerd.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  This is L2B. Now, Robinhood Chain is on L2B. And because Robinhood Chain is a Layer 2, and probably the most successful Layer 2 that's come out in the past, like, 12 months or so, right? As far as off-the-bat success. It's kind of like, people are looking for some validation of the Ethereum L2 roadmap, which has not been going well lately. So Robinhood Chain purchases its data availability from Ethereum, the Layer 1, and they have so far spent about 600 dollars purchasing that data availability.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  That's 600 dollars of ETH that's just gone forever.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  600 dollars of blob space so far. And that's just the start. And of course, it only spikes up when there's contention. So because there's much more supply than demand, the fees are low. Yes, you know the drill. Should we talk more about Ethereum? You want to talk about the straw map?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yes. You do have to give a shout out to Arbitrum, which is gonna be our token mover of the week, which was up 13% this week.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Oh, they are up? Because they were only up like 3% last week when we talked about this.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  So they got a boost. They got a boost because they get 10% of all of the execution fees of Robinhood Chain goes into the Arbitrum DAO. So Arb Token Mover of the Week, congrats, Arb.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Okay, now talk to me about the straw map.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. Did you see it? So this is Vitalik posting the straw map. So we already had a version of the straw map, which is basically Ethereum's roadmap for the next, call it, three to five years, maybe 10 years plus.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Why do we call it that?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Like, straw man, you know? I said, I think I said.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  It's like an idea of a roadmap?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's just like a draft of a roadmap, right? This could change. Like, don't take it too seriously. It's just a straw map.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  I never did.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Well, you might have reason to take it a bit more seriously this time around because this is a new version of the straw map. And this one has something I didn't see in previous versions, which is some columns for dates, for dates.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  That's new. That is new.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Can you imagine? Dates.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  How specific?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  It's just a straw map, so don't get too excited, okay? These are straw map dates.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  I got excited.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  But we do have, we do have these dates and we have them tied roughly to future hard forks. So we have lists of features tied to hard forks, which are shippable pieces of software on Ethereum, tied to like, I don't know, this looks like a six to nine month cadence. And it goes from 2026 and the two next hard forks all the way to 2029. And you also have this, this column called North Stars. And so these features are grouped. So you know, the layers of the cake for Ethereum. How many times have we educated ourselves on this and, and the rest of the bankless nation on this? Consensus layer, data layer, execution layer, the three layers of the cake. And then you have these North Stars, which I appreciate. Why are we doing these things?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  The North Stars are fast L1, so fast finality. Terra gas L2, so lots of blobs for Robin Hood chain and base. One gigabyte per second. And then gig gas L1, that's one gig gas per second. And then private L1. So those are the, the four North Stars for Ethereum at this point. And all of the features across all of these swim lines map to one of those four North Stars. Are you with me so far?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  So Vitalik calls this the biggest kind of thing. New era of Ethereum. He doesn't say Ethereum 3.0, but that's my interpretation. Now, unlike the merge, it's not like a one shot, like we, we, we ship the whole thing. So this happens much more gradually, which is maybe some of the reason you don't want to call this whole thing Ethereum 3.0. It's because it's just not a moment in time.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  There's never a moment.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  No, we're shipping Ethereum 3.0, as I'm calling it, in these kind of hard fork phases towards these North Star definitions. Do you have any, like, I don't know if you saw this compared to the previous version of the roadmap, but like, based on everything I've said, what are your impressions of, of the changes here, if any?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Well, this, the old version was a straw map, which was subject to change and updating and all that kind of stuff. And I think really the first version, you know, the beta version of the straw map was Justin Drake's most hated slide ever.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Out of DevCon in Bogota.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Was that 2024?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Bangkok, 2024.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Is it 2024? Yeah, it was 2024.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Where he introduced lean Ethereum, that whole idea.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yep. Right. And there was like a five year plan and everyone was grumbling about it. And, you know, well, we're two and a half years later and halfway through. But like, it's a straw map. And so it has been updated. So it was subject to change. We've changed it's now this. And what has changed in those two and a half years? AI and also quantum.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Those two things are like reshuffling priorities. And then you also have the unbundling of the EF. Vitalik doesn't really care about block times. ETH Labs now cares about block times. And so because of the reshuffling of the actual organizations leading this draw map, you kind of see also some of the priorities. And so it's just updated for 2026. It's kind of like my summary of how things changed.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I think it is updated for 2026 with some of those priorities. I want to get back to that in a second. But also I'd point out, it's like so much more detailed, so much less fog of war. If you go back to, do you remember Justin Drake's slide from 2024? It was just very vague. And it was like, there was a, we're going to pill everyone first, you know? Like, that's part of the reason he got some pushback, right? This is detailed. This has dates, this has columns, this has hard forks, this has specific features.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Does it have like micro strategy authorization to sell Bitcoin dates? Or are they dates?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I think that, well, I don't think you, the dates are straw map, okay? But the level of detail is something that we haven't seen for this era of Ethereum. But let's talk about the prioritization that you noticed. Yeah, the advent of AI. Formal verification seems to be getting kind of a, a big boost in this. Or at least you could see the effects in the same way that, you know, a secret unlock for Ethereum in the past has been snarks. That's what's allowing this roadmap. And we've already kind of priced that in, let's say, incorporated that in previous versions of the straw map. This one seems most affected by formal verification. Because there seems to be this idea that we can move from a multi-client execution layer

• 33:39Speaker 01

  to a more consolidated, single client pieces of the execution layer. So rather than have, in order to preserve security redundancy through multiple clients, there's this idea, I think, interjected through this version of the roadmap that we can consolidate, have a single client, as long as it's formally verified. That gives us the security that we need. And because we can only, only have one client, that speeds a lot of things up. So in particular.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  That was also a lot of development, just.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Governance, blah, blah, blah.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Coordination and so many different layers. Yes, it's so much faster, but you can just focus on one client.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what you see here is that the ZK EVM has been sped up. Okay, now it's in, it's in K star, the K star fork. Whereas previously it was like an L star or longer. So that has moved forward. And now you actually see.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Imagine L star. I'm going to be 40 years old at L star.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  This is, K star is 2028, L star is 2029. Okay?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  You're going to be 40 in 2029. So.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Hold the way.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Native rollups also make an appearance on this. I don't know if I've seen that on previous versions. Native rollups with a date is new. So anyway, I think that's, that's cool. Another thing that I noticed was there seems to be more acceleration towards quantum. So some of the quantum dates have moved up as well. More from the 2029 and, and 2030 to the 2028 time period for quantum acceleration. Privacy also more ambitious?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  I will say about quantum, it is nice Ethereum being the second market cap blockchain. Cause if you have a quantum computer, like, are you going to go for Bitcoin? Or are you going to go for Ethereum? And the answer is unequivocally, you're going to go for Bitcoin. Cause Ethereum is still going to be harder to break and more readily available. And so like Bitcoin will take the bullet for Ethereum.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's right. And also I think Ethereum is kind of leading the way for Bitcoin in terms of, you know, figuring out which cryptography works for blockchains. Privacy, Ethereum looks like it's going by the, by the end of this, in the longer term, going full Z cash. So what we're looking at is, at least in the straw map, okay, is a, a privacy pool at the consensus layer? That's like basically Z cash functionality on the L1.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  That is shielded pool in the layer one, that is Z cash.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Something that Bitcoin is not doing, but it's basically saying, hey, privacy, we'll take that. That'll be a feature that we add onto our blockchain rather than launch an entirely new blockchain. So those are the big things I noticed. Now, there are some things that were deprioritized. Data availability, blob features seem to be pushed back a bit, a bit more. Cause like, I guess we have enough and they're not being like, I mean, it's not generating a lot.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Just charge Robin Hood more money, that's fine.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It was an okay product. It's not a, it's blown out, you know, the, the records in terms of sales for blob space. Also, let's see, slot times were moved back a little bit. But I was looking at the ETH Labs team, like this is Barnaby from the ETH Labs team, to see what they'd say about this, this roadmap. And they were actually bullish. This is Barnaby saying, he likes decoupled consensus is very bullish, he said, because they're decoupling some things. You get the, you get the sense that ETH Labs might be able to move on slot times independent of this roadmap. Whereas like maybe the Ethereum Foundation isn't prioritizing it.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  There's opportunity because they're decoupling for ETH Labs to come in and prioritize it. So there's that too. And then one other thing I noticed, which is like, I don't know what this is exactly. Stale issuance, like I've heard talk about that, but like issuance, ETH issuance could be on the table in some form or another. It has an emoji, which is like uncertainty emoji. So that could be a discussion in the future too.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  I can't believe we're, we're going to do another round of ETH issuance debates in the Ethereum community. And like, I can just see that tidal wave coming. And I'm going to take part in it because I find ETH monetary policy probably the most interesting subject about Ethereum. But I'm just like, I'm just going to get so many gray hairs.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Did you share this take that Don Crad had on the back? So Don Crad, former ETH researcher, of course, now he's at Tempo. He said that Ethereum straw map has a lot of really cool features in all caps. Fully proven STF and scaling to gig gas with finality in seconds gets me excited, he said. But three to four years is very slow. I think we should be ambitious and get it done in one year.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  I think that's unreasonable to get it done in one year. I think if we wanted to get it done in one year, you would basically have to punt every single Ethereum developer and then get Tempo to come in and do it in their very like top-down, like centralized way. I don't know how we would do that in one year.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  So you're fine with three to four years, but not?

• 38:37Speaker 00

  No, I agree with Donkrad is that it should be done as soon as possible. But like, I just don't see how we do that. It's just like not in the culture that we have in Ethereum.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  DeFi Ignis had a take on this. He said it was bullish overall, but he said the missing piece is ETH tokenomics, although it's a non-issue of reduced fees attract more transactions per user. That's a big if. So his thing was like, there's nothing that addresses fee generation on Ethereum. It's that kind of insight. And if the bear market continues for longer, then Tempo, Canton, they start to eat away at ETH's market share.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  I don't know about that latter point. Because for all this, like Ethereum's just in a league of its own. And Ethereum and to his first point about like inducing fee demand, like that's no one's job to do BD and growth on Ethereum. That's kind of been the issue the entire time.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  What about the token economics take, which is just like?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  That's issuance. So it is touched on, that is issuance, but that's just reducing.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It's not just issuance, because like I think what DeFi Ignis and some people are looking for is for the burn to come back, for there to be some sustained cash flows in terms of fee generation or MEV sales.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  And we can't force demand to happen on Ethereum. We can't just induce demand.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  It's not just demand, it's also supply. I mean, you can.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Right, which is reducing issuance.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no, sorry. Not for like, I'm talking about actual fee generation. So what I'm saying is people like DeFi Ignis, think of ETH right now as it doesn't have a value proposition unless it can generate substantial fees. Not like issuance from like fees or MEV sales, right? Like the monetary premium thing is like, not a thing. We want to see discounted cash flow to ETH. And this roadmap does not create any discounted cash flows that they would like to see. I don't know what he proposes.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  But that's not what this roadmap would ever do. Like, when did we get like the burn? We got it from DeFi Summer. We got it from NFT Mania, which is like app, the application layer creating products that people wanted. And the Ethereum Foundation and the ETH developers were never involved with the app layer intentionally so. And so there's nothing in this protocol that is like, oh, and then here's how we create demand.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  It's not just the demand story. That's just the one point I want to emphasize because the other reason you got fees was because you had restricted supply, because you weren't scaling anything. See, part of the reason we have no fees right now is because supply outstrips demand. And so this is why I don't agree with the whole Ignis take and takes that ETH needs to be a discounted cash flow type asset is because fees will never be a thing. Fees will never, like, I think this whole roadmap, when I look at it, again, it's inkblot test. You could look at this and be like bullish, or you could look at it bearish. I'll give you the bullish way to look at this. This is optimizing for ETH as a store of value in a crop censorship resistant type way.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And it's optimizing for slow DeFi at the cost of fast DeFi. Say you're super fast slot times. You trade that off and you get like privacy for your crops asset. Like, I think what Vitalik's, because this is kind of Vitalik's vision, right? What Vitalik is doing is he's creating a crops DeFi friendly, a platform with ETH as the store of value without actually saying that's what he's doing.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Because that's what the roadmap essentially is. That's what it delivers if you get to the end of this.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're saying that Ethereum is a app chain. It's a application-specific chain. The application is Ether.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  The fact that you can build turn-complete smart contracts is really just because then we can build things like Uniswap and Aave for Ether.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  And we can implement the ZK, the privacy pool inside the layer one for Ether.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  So it's an app chain for Ethereum.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And it's about time that, because when I look at this architecture, I'm like, oh, that's what you're building. It's about time that Ethereum community and the F say that that's what they're building, because that's what they're building.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. If we, if the, if we as a community, as an Ethereum community, had gone back in time to 2017 and then started thinking on those terms, I think we would have ended up in a very similar, yet very different spot. Whereas like, what is Ethereum for? It's for Ether versus what is Ethereum for? It's for the world.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. Well, but like Ether is for the world. But I see what you're saying.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Ether is for the world, but Ethereum is for Ether.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  These tokenized use cases and all that, like all the stuff that was kind of a side quest to me.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Decentralized internet or world computer. No, no, no, no, world asset.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right. And then Bitcoin is like, but you stole that from us. I'm like, yep, that's right.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a good meme, but you're blocking Boo Boo.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Anyway, that's my take.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I don't really know how we got there from the demand side or whatever, but whatever.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that may be my last question on this. Do you think that Ethereum is going to deliver this? Maybe not in three to four years, but say four to five years.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the, the long-term conclusion of the roadmap is inevitable.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  But that's just never been the issue.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  What do we have coming up, David?

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Coming up next, we're going to talk about the JP Morgan $700 million fund on Ethereum. We're going to talk about the paradigm race. And then also, we're going to do a little portfolio check-in. Because Ryan, I'm going to top my own portfolio and do a little victory dance about something that I think I deserve. And so we're going to talk about that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 10-10 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search The DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  There's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  This is a title, JP Morgan built a $700 million fund on Ethereum and nobody noticed. So we talked about this, I don't know, a month or so ago, maybe six weeks ago.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  J L T X X, what a ticker.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  This is the second tokenized money market that JP Morgan has released. And there was a question at the time, well, will anyone care? Will it get any traction? It's actually grown 250% in the last month. So it is now a $700 million money market fund. And this is all on Ethereum. So just a refresher of what this thing is, it's a money market. So it's US Treasuries, overnight repo. It's not for, you know, typical retail investors. There's a $1 million minimum, there's some expense ratio. It is denominated in USDC. It is on public mainnet, layer one.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  It does accept stablecoins for redemptions. And it was designed for the genius act. And what's interesting about JP Morgan's strategy is they have their own internal blockchain system. It was once called Quorum. I always forget what it's called now.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Canexus or something.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  That's right. And they also deployed something on base. They deployed JPMD, which was their deposit token, and they piloted that on base. So you get the sense that their strategy is they're going to have an internal blockchain, but they're, and they're also going to have maybe payments, deposit tokens on base and various L2s. But on layer one, it looks like they're building their, you know, big money market funds. And what's interesting about that is they are actually doing it on Ethereum L1, not on a layer two, not on their own internal chain. And I was kind of wondering about this question because there is a real world asset war going on out there.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  I think I've made the point and you've agreed that Ethereum is not necessarily optimized for real world assets, right? Optimized for censorship resistance, it's, you know, privacy, like other things. And yet it still might win the real world asset game. Or at least JP Morgan is continuing to deploy there, the biggest bank in the US. What are your thoughts on, I guess, the real world asset game here? Do you think Ethereum could actually win this by just optimizing for crops? And then as a second, it becomes the liquidity hub and wins network effect for that? And then thus becomes the home also for tokenized real world assets?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Or do you think it's going to be a, like a knife fight out there with Canton and Tempo? And even Solana rising up the ranks?

• 48:32Speaker 00

  The properties that Ethereum has and what it's being built for, the crop stuff, and then the properties that what Ethereum, that what real world asset tokenized issuers want and in need are like somewhat overlapping, but they're not one to one. Like, no asset issuer is looking at like the censorship resistance of Ethereum and being like, "Great, I can call this place home." I was talking to Carlos Domingo from Securitize, and they issued, uh, Securitize. What does Securitize do? They se- securitize assets into tokens on Ethereum or public blockchains. And so when they SPACed, they did the obvious thing, and then they tokenized their own equity. So this is not a Robinhood stock token. This is not an Ondo, like, derivative.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  This is actual, uh, the, uh, the actual equity with, you know, DTCC compliance and their, because they're a, uh, what is it called? They're a transfer agent. They do all this stuff. So it's the actual equity. It's KYC'd on the Ethereum Layer 1. You have to have a KYC to get it, because that's how equities work. Uh, excuse me. It's not on the Ethereum 1. It's on Solana, and it is on Avalanche. Why is it there? Because they, because Avalanche has like the permissions and like the compliance needed that, uh, Securitize needs to make that work. And why is it on Solana? Because Solana has like the Prop AMM ecosystem to provide the really tight slippage, because there's just a lot of regulation and complaints, uh, constraints about how to compliantly issue these things. And they, right now, they can only do it on Avalanche and Solana.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  They're gonna do it on Ethereum, but the fact that it's not first on Ethereum is very notable to me. And I asked, uh, Carlos, like, "Why not?" And he was like, "Well, the block times are really slow, and that prevents our market makers from being able to compliantly quote the price that it needs to be." Because they have to do, they have to give you the, the asset at a best price.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Because they need to give you it at the best price. There's like some stupid rules about it, which actually the SEC is going to eliminate in a year, which is interesting.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  But this is like Ethereum has properties, and those are adjacent, somewhat congruous, somewhat parallel to real world asset tokenized issuer needs, but they are not the same thing.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  So it's not clear cut? It's, it's not the case that Ethereum will be the default for this?

• 50:39Speaker 00

  No.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  It will be the default in some cases. It seems to be at least currently the default for JP Morgan, their money market fund. But, I mean, I guess that could erode, that could change over time. Or it could be the default for certain types of DeFi use cases. Like, this is kind of a vault use case. This is definitely a slow DeFi type use case.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  I found the EtherScan for this. Um, so I'm looking at this. It's not even listed on CoinGecko. It's got like a preview page on CoinGecko. The EtherScan has six total wallet holders of this thing.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  So these are just whales, kinda, just parking stuff in this?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, one wallet holds like 83% of it. And so like, this is like an accounting tool, as far as I'm concerned.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. I mean, the, the other question is, if, uh, if Ethereum does win the real world asset, you know, war anyway, or let's, let's say it wins majority, something like 60%. Does that even matter for ETH price? Does it matter for ETH price?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Marginally.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's kinda what I think, too.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. A non-zero amount.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Paradigm has raised 1.2 billion for their fun, for their fun four, David. Um, they've kinda pivoted into AI a little bit?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  But I think more like a little bit, yeah. So they, I don't think there's any crypto, like 100% crypto VC left. Like, no one is a, let me know if I'm wrong, @me on Twitter, but like, no one is a crypto-only VC anymore? And you're seeing this raise, uh, reflected with Paradigm. 1.2 billion dollars is a pretty chunky raise. Uh, but they have also said, "In addition to crypto, they are also going to be investing in AI and robotics and just other frontier technologies." Which I think is like the right category. Like, that's kinda what I'm interested in, is like frontier technology broadly. Crypto has something to do with it, like Venice, for example, private AI. AI, also crypto. Frontier technology, absolutely. Like, using, using like nears, uh, like, uh, near AI to do all that kinda stuff.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Like, frontier tech. And that's sick. Uh, and so that category is, is what I think kinda crypto is now.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Is it safe to say?

• 52:40Speaker 00

  It's crypto plus frontier tech.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  This era in general, can we extrapolate this, has seen kind of the death of the crypto-only investor?

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Like, there aren't crypto-only, like, VC firms, as you pointed out, but like, you're not a crypto-only investor, right? Like, who's left as a crypto-only investor?

• 52:58Speaker 00

  There are a handful, a handful of people, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Most people are playing into other assets, though, and other frontier technologies.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  I mean, like, I have, I have more of my money in the stock market than doing crypto.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  That's, first time since I ever met you, I think that's probably the case, right?

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Uh-huh. So this is a story of what everyone is doing this cycle.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  David, you included this, the CFTC talking to the CME, telling them to buzz off? What's this about?

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the CME, uh, filed to do 24/7/365 markets. Uh, I think just starting with their oil market, and the, they asked the CFTC if they could do that, and the CFTC just said, "No, you can't do that. That is not what you are for. Like, stay in your lane, bro." Uh, and kinda interesting, I don't really know like all the nuances behind this, but this is very much, the CME very much did this in response to Hyperliquid and the 24/7/365 PerpDexes, listing oil and gold and all this stuff. Uh, and so the fact that the CFTC is telling CME is like, "This is not what you guys are for. Like, stay, like, stay in your arena, uh, do what you're good at, and then let the PerpDexes do what they're good at."

• 54:07Speaker 00

  I, that's kinda, kinda what I think is happening here. Uh, this is why Jake Shavinsky is tweeting this tweet, because he's at the Hyperliquid Policy Center, so he would know. And he's like, kind of like, kinda, he's able to read between the lines. But I do think it's interesting that there is a, there's a war being fought. In the same way the banks and Coinbase and crypto have been fighting each other for the past four years, there is a brewing war between the commodities exchanges and the PerpDexes.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And yet, within that, too, the cycle, there's a war between the PerpsDexes themselves. I think, maybe this gets into a little bit of your portfolio, but, uh, before we started recording, you told me you think that Hyperliquid versus Lighter is the, now, I think you said the new, uh, Ethereum versus Solana?

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Or something like this?

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the new Ethereum for Solana, that's right.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  So what's interesting is, it, it does feel like every single bull cycle for your cycle, we do get some kind of dichotomy of competitors here. It's like, I think 2017 is very much the Bitcoin versus Ethereum kind of cycle.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Maybe previous to that, it was, um, or like, a- after that, it was Ethereum, let's say, versus Solana, or Ethereum versus, uh, the ETH killers. Are you kinda planting a narrative that this cycle, it might be like the big PerpDexes fighting off Ethereum? Or, sorry, it was, uh, Hyperliquid versus Lighter? Is that just gonna be a sub-story of this?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'm planting the narrative, but like, you, this happened downstream of the Lighter partnership with the Robinhood wallet, and like, getting the endorsement from Robinhood is like, now, they're like, there are a bunch of very triggered dot HLs. Remember the dot ETHs? Like, we were the dot ETHs, now there's like dot HLs.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Is dot HL like the ENS for Hyperliquid?

• 55:49Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's an ENS. I think they just did it. Um, maybe, maybe it's actually like real, I wouldn't know. Um, but they, like, there are, like, Hyperliquid has made a ton of people very wealthy and has earned, like, won the hearts and minds of like a lot of people, because they got the Hyperliquid airdrop, and they got wealthy as a result of it. And so it's, it's created a very strong tribe. And now, like, Lighter has pumped like 50% or something in the last like week or so, off of the back of like the Robinhood announcement, which is, you know, an insult to the identity of a Hyperliquid person. Like, how dare any other PerpDex do anything good? And so now you're starting to see like the, the Lighter versus Hyperliquid tribe emerge? And I, like, I'm not used to being the smaller guy. I'm, I'm on-

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Oh, you've chosen a tribe. You're indicating you've chosen a tribe.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  I own both. I own both in a very healthy, like, one-to-one ratio.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  And so, uh, but like, yeah, I think Lighter has more growth to it. And so like, I kind of identify with like the Lighter camp, yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  So you're Team Lighter, and you're, you're excited about Lighter. What is the, what is the case for Lighter versus Hyperliquid? I'm curious. As someone from the, the Lighter tribe, how would they, what'd they say?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, Lighter is the very technically competent, I think it could potentially create a framework for the end game of like exchanges, like, full stop, not just crypto exchanges, not just PerpDexes, but like exchanges, like the NASDAQ and the NYSE, like, stuff like this. A high-performance, app-specific ZK L2 is such a logical conclusion of strange, uh, exchange technology. And Lighter posted a blog post about all of the tech that went behind, like, shaving off microseconds on like latency around Hyperliquid and like all this kinda stuff. It was, I started reading, I was like, "This is breaking my brain, I don't understand this." But like, the, the point was, point was made. Uh, and you get all of the assurances of the, uh, the, the ZK.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  So it's like, the individual user can verify the state of the exchange and the, the validity of the change, and the exchange playing by the rules, which feels very good, like a lot of the crypto punk ethos. But mainly, uh, they are positioned to take the US market. Uh, and so Vlad from Lighter, not to be confused with Vlad from Robinhood, uh, but Vlad from Lighter, who, they're buddies, by the way, which is funny. Uh, he's on the CFTC Advisory, like Innovation Advisory Board, and Lighter's just, just at the gate waiting to get a CFTC license to penetrate the US market. And they're doing the Coinbase thing, rather than what Hyperliquid's strategy is, which is being like the one PerpDex to rule them all.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  You go to Hyperliquid, it's a first-party exchange, you know, builders build on Hyperliquid, kind of like, you know, on Ethereum. Everyone comes to Ethereum Layer 1, that's kinda like Hyperliquid. Lighter is a little bit more like a hub-and-spoke model, uh, where they have a spoke now out to Robinhood chain, and it's its own instance on Robinhood chain. But with the ZK technology, a lot of the liquidity flows back to the main hub. And so this is like compliance spokes for bespoke compliance needs.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  I see.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  And so if any, if Charles Schwab wants to build a PerpDex, but they need to KYC all of the traders, all the liquidity and all this kinda stuff, Lighter can do that, and they can do that with their specific technology. And they have a bunch of forward-deployed engineers. So the whole idea is they just send their engineers to the United States financial institutions of the world who want PerpDex stuff. And then the forward-deployed engineers build it into the brokerage, or Robinhood chain, or whoever. And because, because each one is its own bespoke walled garden, is highly compliant with US regulation. So that's kinda the pit for Lighter, as, as it differentiates from, from Hyperliquid.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  It sounds like there's a little bit of a, like, Binance versus Coinbase thing going on here, or like a Tether versus USDC.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  It's like offshore versus onshore, yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's an element of this. Okay, so, uh, broaden it. What's your portfolio like these days? So you, you said you were going to, um, talk about it. So what's, uh, what's gone well, what hasn't gone well? I think this is, since you made some changes in May, correct?

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a tweet that like got some attention because I tweeted it out at the actual Pico top of like a lot of these tokens. But and so people were like making fun of me on Twitter because they were they were reading it as if I bought the tokens in that moment. And then they they were at the Pico top and like I tweeted this tweet in that moment because it was a brag. I wanted to remind people that I bought these tokens and they were all up. But I bought these tokens in like May, May like ninth or something. And then Lit was the token that I bought on June 3rd with like the bulk of my is the Ether portfolio that I sold. And so I would like to do an account of how these these people will call them trades. I will call them investments.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  There'll be trades if I sell them too soon, but since I hold all of them still, they are they are in the category of investments in my mind. And so Zcash, I'm down 20%. Hype, I'm up 56%. VVV, I'm down 20%. Near, I'm up 25%. And then Lit, which is a token that is my largest position, is up 80%. So that's my little victory that I'd like to take.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  So you you are moving into kind of your trader era, but you're, I guess.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  I don't know if that's right because I'm not going in and out of stuff.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Maybe you're just you're just rebalancing towards something in crypto that is much more application forward, let's say, use case forward.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they're all much smaller market caps, which just feels safer to me by comparison because like ETH has to justify a much higher market cap and it has to just work harder for that. And like when I look at like Lit, that's at like a $600 million market cap. I'm like, oh, there's a potential large amount of growth here.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  And that's kind of where I like I like the smaller caps rather than just like like ETH was great. And because of what it was, like money, internet money, all that kind of stuff. But like commanding, like trying to get to a trillion dollars, like that's a really hard fight.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  That's a hard fight as we've seen over the past five years.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Uh, well, congrats on those gains, David. That's I'm I'm looking forward to seeing how that does in the future and where you choose to deploy. I think like for me, I'm kind of like, I'm still waiting for the bottom, the bottom signal.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  You're waiting for people to puke ups and stuff?

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it's quite time. I think we're nine, we're nine and a half months into this thing. I still think it's going to take a few more months for this to sort itself out. I don't think we've seen the bottoms yet.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  When do you have, what is your shopping list?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Um, I like Lit would be on there, except it's had an incredible run from the very beginning. So if I bought Lit, it would be at some lows. I have some like Bitcoin, obviously on the lows would be interesting. Um, I don't know, I haven't fully decided. I mean, I'm, I'm really enjoying Michael NATO's work in his watch list. Like a number of these are our holdings that he has, for example. He's looking at Zach, he thinks it's overpriced. He's been a big bull of Lit, not quite in near, but there's some things on his list that I've been eyeing as well. So I just don't think we hit the bottom.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Pump fun, you're gonna buy pump?

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  It's printing some revenue, which is insane. And that's hard to ignore if you believe in kind of like, well, an application has to deliver revenue, doesn't it? That's what Hyperliquid and Lit do. They have the potential to do that. So does so does Pump. So that's, that's something I'm weighing, but it's not, it's like hard for me to get really excited about that particular use case, but.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't imagine you holding on to Pump for a long amount of time.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Right, right. Anyway, we have to end it there. Uh, David.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Can I show you these magic alien hands?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure. What you got?

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is the most wild thing I have seen on Twitter in a long time. So for the listeners, we are looking at a actuating robot hand with just seemingly perfect, high fidelity, human-like movement in all of the fingers.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Is this real? What like, what is it?

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  This is real, dude. Yeah. Yeah, we're watching brand new robot hands. We solved fingers.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Elon has said, uh, fingers are the hardest part of a robot.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, fingers are the hardest part. That's right. Dude, the future is going to be wild. I think that's the message I would like to leave this podcast with. Future's gonna be weird.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  I'm pretty, I'm pretty excited about it, though. I'm pretty excited, actually. Like, I've gotten over some of the existential stuff of AI. Maybe that's because I'm like using it to improve my life.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  We're probably fine.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. Like, and then what choice do we have? So, um, anyway, we'll see.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  All right, Bankless Nation, we'll see you once again with Ryan and David on the weekly roll up in seven days. But until then, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, this frontier is not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.