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Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of September and we've got a bull market on our hands.

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It's a bull market, but whose bull market is it?

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That is the question.

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The majors are up a little bit this week while the middle of the market is up 30%, 40%, 50% in just seven days.

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So what's going on?

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Even crypto guru Ben Cowan has said that the bull market is on.

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We're going to talk about, we're going to dissect the current state of the bull market.

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Yeah, I think once Ben says it's on, he's been bearish lately.

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Once he says it's on, that's confirmation enough for me.

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We also got to discuss Zcash at a near 10-year high.

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I think that's a fundamental change in the market, and I want to get your take on it.

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Also, David, tell me about Kalshi.

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They got cooked this week.

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There was a bunch of wash trading, a million identical $5,500 trades.

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The Wall Street Journal is talking about this.

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Some guy on Twitter is talking about this.

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And also I saw Vitalik has blessed a prediction market called Truro.

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That token was up a lot.

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He said this is the prediction market without any of the corpo slop.

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So we'll discuss what that means.

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Meanwhile, as we discussed, the 30-year treasury, the 10-year treasury are all printing their highest yields since like 2004.

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Not only is it a crypto bull market, but it is also a bond yield bull market, which is bad.

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Usually that's bad.

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Do we care?

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Does Bitcoin even care about high yields?

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I think that's another question that I want to ask.

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Let's just look at the charts, however.

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Bitcoin made its first leg up from like $63,000 up to $78,000.

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And people weren't totally sure if that was, you know, a head fake or not.

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But we have since made a second leg up from about $77,000 up to $85,000.

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And now people think it's on.

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I also think it's on.

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The second leg up off the 200-week moving average, I think, is a pretty big deal.

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That marks an eight-month high on Bitcoin, the highest prices since January of this year.

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And so the people who have previously been saying there is going to be a fourth-quarter dump, you know, we're not done through the bear market, we're going to once again touch the 200-week moving average once again in fourth quarter, maybe even go below it, those people are starting to change their tune.

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Yeah, I think there's starting to be growing consensus, even among the crypto cycle investor experts.

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People like Michael Nadeau from the TDR.

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The four-year cyclers?

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The four-year cyclers.

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Michael Nadeau from TDR, I would say, is one of them.

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Ben Cohen, also from Into the Cryptoverse, is another one of them.

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And both of them are aligning and saying that the weight of probability is...

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exactly where they'd want to see it for calling an early bull market.

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In fact, we'll get to Ben in a second because he's kind of flipped on this.

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He was holding out.

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He thought we were still in the bear market, that there would be another leg down, that we wouldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel until sometime in October.

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And he's on this week.

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He's apparently changed his mind on this.

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But Michael Nadeau, I talked to him on Wednesday for the TDR podcast and he said, I'm ready to say it now.

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He was previous weeks, he was cautious that this was an early bull market.

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And he's saying he wasn't sure yet, but now he's at 85% probability.

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I think there was a number of metrics that really nailed that to him.

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One is the golden cross was confirmed.

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Okay, so for people who don't know what a golden cross is, that's when the 200-day moving average, the 50-day moving average crosses the 200-day moving average.

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That finally happened in previous cycles.

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That has indicated that we have broken the back of the bear market and we've entered the early bull phase.

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He has some other reasons.

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that he thinks were in the early bull market.

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So there's a reset in the holder structure.

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You know, he follows these on-chain metrics of the cohorts, the cost base of the cohorts and which cost bases are holding what coins, where you see this process of coin cycling from weak hands back to strong hands and the strong hands form the base for the next market.

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Anyway,

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That reset has completed.

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Now we've got a bunch of strong ends in the 56K to 92K range of Bitcoin.

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37% of all supply now sits there.

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So we've gone through that cycle.

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We have a reset in leverage.

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Michael Saylor strategies, STRC, that's back trading at almost 100.

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And that is a belt weather for leverage.

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A lot of the leverage got flushed out during this bear cycle.

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We have a bunch of the KPIs that were hit.

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So, you know, realized losses as a percentage of change in realized cap, those types of things, supply and profit.

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All of the KPIs, I'd say, would be bear market bottom indicators.

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The majority of those were hit.

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We just hit the golden cross.

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And then this, we reclaimed the 50-week moving average.

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We did that two to three months from the cycle low.

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That's exactly what we would expect to see.

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And the 50-week moving average right now is 78.8K.

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So we've locked in at least one of those, a monthly close above 78.8K.

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We lock in another and another after that, then we're kind of like that solidifies it.

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That would be, according to all previous times we've seen it, the end of the bear market and definitely final confirmation that we are in the early bull phase of the market.

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And I haven't kept up with Ben's work, Ben Cohen's work.

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I know you are having him on the Bankless podcast tomorrow, but I think he's been a four-year cycle believer who sort of held out and has said, no, we're still in the bear market, right?

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The bull market is coming.

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It's coming sometime this year, but not until a little bit later.

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And he changed his mind on that this week.

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Yeah, both Mike and Ben I categorize as these guys who move slowly and require a lot of evidence.

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But when they change their mind, it's firm, as in they're not going to change their mind again in one or two or three weeks.

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And so it's kind of a big deal because it takes a lot of evidence for them to change their mind.

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The last time I was talking to Mike on the TDR, we really talked about comparing the last bear market to this one.

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And the last bear market was, you know, we had the Terra Luna collapse, followed by the Three-O's Capital Contagion, followed by FTX, like one, two, three sucker punches that created just so much pain and pressure, downwards pressure on the market, followed by the Gary Gensler era of Operation Chokepoint 2.0.

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pretty bad time.

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And during that time, you had Bitcoin not at the 200-week moving average, but below the 200-week moving average for almost two-thirds of a year, and then again for another third of a year later.

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And so a meaningful amount of time below the 200-week moving average, which was unique, idiosyncratic in Bitcoin's trading history.

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And then also when I was on the TDR with

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We are at the Bitcoin is at the 200 week moving average.

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But also we had no three hours capital.

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We had no SBF.

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We have not Gary Gensler, but the two most positive crypto regulators at the SEC and CFTC.

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This bear market is different.

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Granted, we were saying that when Bitcoin was at the 200-week moving average, Bitcoin could have potentially broken down below the 200-week moving average.

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But I think now if you are accepting that we are indeed in a bull market, we're not going back down to the 200-week moving average for a while.

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You can take this bear market, which was a pretty short time at the 200-week moving average, never got below it.

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Compare that to the actual fundamentals of we don't have to pay for our sins because we didn't have very many sins.

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Michael Saylor paid for his sins by selling Bitcoin under his purchase price.

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And we didn't spend too much time there.

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And so to me, those two things are congruent.

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Like very big, painful bear market for very valid reasons in the past.

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This bear market, much shorter because we have a lot less debt and we get to move on quicker.

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I think those two things check out.

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Yeah, the 200-week moving average is 65.5K right now.

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And you're right.

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We did spend some time below that, but not very much time this bear cycle below the 200-week.

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The furthest we ever got below was about 5% to 8%.

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Last bear market, we got 35% below the 200-week moving average and stayed there for a while.

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Yeah, if we do, now here's a if type of scenario.

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If we do hit that 65K or go below that for some period of time, say we get a few monthly closes below that 65K amount, you're saying you don't think we will.

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Michael Nato agrees.

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So does Ben Cowan now.

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They all agree.

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But if we did, I think that would break the back of this early bull thesis.

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So that's a number to watch out for.

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Oh, certainly.

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But like that's any evidence of we went down there.

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It's already broken.

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See, this is like all of the people saying it's not going to happen.

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And this consensus that we are in early bull does raise an eyebrow for me a little bit.

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Because if everyone's saying it, then it's like, well, maybe.

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But well, previously, everyone was saying that we were going to break down in October in Q4.

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And so that also raises an eyebrow.

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As of being in the market, you should always have an eyebrow raised.

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Yeah, that's right.

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Okay, but I do agree that it looks like we are in the early bull phase.

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So, you know, I think that's probably true.

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Ben Cowan talked about, he actually released a video, Why I Was Wrong.

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Maybe we're going to have to ask him why he was wrong.

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Not why you, Ryan, was wrong, why I, Ben, was wrong.

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Yeah, exactly, why Ben was wrong.

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He's bullish now, of course.

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What he got wrong in his words, he said, I assume the interest rate hike, he's talking about the Fed hike that just happened with Warsh last week, would immediately bring Bitcoin down and it didn't.

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So where he got it wrong is he said, my thesis was that rising energy prices would cause the long end to go up.

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Then they would raise rates in September.

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Then the dollar would go up and Bitcoin would reprice because of the rate hike.

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That's why essentially he thought there would be one more leg down.

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Also, previous bear cycles have lasted 9 to 12 months.

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It was getting towards about 9 months, but you could see it last 12.

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That's why he was calling for kind of a bottom October toward the end of this year.

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But what he got right or wrong, I would say, if you could sum it up, is probably macro.

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It's just over indexing on macro.

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And Bitcoin crypto just plowed through all of those macro concerns.

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And that, I think, is a lesson for all of us.

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It's just like I enjoy some good old fashioned macro commentary.

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I really do.

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But...

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I have to treat that.

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And I think any savvy investors been here for a while, including Ben.

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Ben knows this.

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You have to treat that macro analysis with a grain of salt because it's a very complex engine.

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There's so many other factors.

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The thing that won out here, I think, was coin holder rotation and seller exhaustion.

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And it was just time to go up after nine months of crypto winter.

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And so you don't want to be out of the market when the market decides it's just time to go up.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, yeah, I do.

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I do take that perspective.

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I was trying to not be a four cycler on the way down, but for some reason I see myself being a four cycler on the way up.

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Coindesk had a pretty interesting article I thought was pretty interesting.

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It says, the data proves that Bitcoin doesn't care about rising bond yields over the long term.

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And they had a bunch of analysis.

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And they basically say that the correlation between the 10-year yields and Bitcoin is at 0.18%.

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And so, you know, if yields go up, Bitcoin goes down with a 0.18 correlation, which is very low.

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That's just not, that's insignificant.

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And one of the reasons why I think it's insignificant is because so much of crypto cycles are herd mentality.

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And when it's time to go up, it's time to go up.

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People like the last bears sell, then they're not in control of the market.

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And the only people left are those left to bid.

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And people who have cash see the herd, get the contagion of like, well, somebody's making money over there.

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Let me allocate, let me allocate.

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And all of a sudden everyone's allocating and we get momentum on our side.

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So like my rationale for why Bitcoin is up

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at the 200 week moving average and why it's up season right now when things have been going up for like five weeks straight is because it's time.

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People are bullish, people are allocating, and that is spreading in like a contagion across the investor field.

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Well, in the words of Michael Saylor to all of the former bears, he says this to Ben Cowan, welcome back.

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So welcome back early bull market.

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Feels good.

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Feels good.

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Now, that doesn't necessarily answer the question as to whose bull market this will be.

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So say we are in the early phases of a crypto bull cycle.

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The question now any investor in this space has to ask is, okay, what assets do I want to hold for this next fifth crypto bull cycle?

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And the answer previous to that was certainly Bitcoin.

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You want to have a good portion of Bitcoin outperformed last cycle by a lot.

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Will that continue this cycle?

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It's been interesting to see a bunch of other tokens, some altcoins, let's say, outperforming.

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Ether up a little bit on the week, about 9%.

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But you'd even consider ETH a blue chip.

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And maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit.

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you've seen outperforming and whether we can extract any pattern from this early bull phase into what we might see into the future.

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What's been doing really well?

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Yeah, you said ETH was up a little bit.

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It's up 9%, which is a good amount, but it's a little bit in comparison to Athena, which is up 40%, Uniswap up 30%, Ondo up 30%, Jupiter up 30%, Arbitrum up 30%.

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And so the benchmark, the hurdle to be above the market was something like you needed to be up 15 or 20 percent this week to be beating an index of all legitimate crypto assets.

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What do those things have in common?

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What's...

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What's the thing that ties them together?

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I'm so glad you asked, Ryan.

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They make money.

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They all print revenue.

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Athena prints revenue.

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Uniswap, the fee burn on Robinhood chain, is printing Uni fee burn.

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You know, Ando, revenue, Jupiter, all of these things have revenue.

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Arbitrum, the only significant layer two token to receive the pump, is getting revenue 10% of Robinhood chain fees, which is why Arbitrum and not any other layer two tokens are up this week.

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It's revenue.

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Yeah, so Arbitrum is up, which is like in a world where Layer 2s are just, they've been just bleeding for the last few years.

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00:15:37.609 --> 00:15:42.173
It's not like there's a secular narrative, oh, let's pump L2 tokens this time around.

215
00:15:42.653 --> 00:15:50.498
Only Arb is pumping, and it's pumping because of its ties to revenue from the Robinhood chain that you can clearly see.

216
00:15:50.518 --> 00:15:55.562
It's a different reason for it being up than we've seen in previous cycles.

217
00:15:56.215 --> 00:16:03.602
Just like we talked about keeping one eyebrow raised during the bull market, Bitcoin cash moved 50% on the week.

218
00:16:03.622 --> 00:16:06.064
Don't tell me that.

219
00:16:06.084 --> 00:16:07.846
What do you tell me?

220
00:16:07.866 --> 00:16:09.487
Let me look at XRP.

221
00:16:09.988 --> 00:16:10.888
How did that do on the week?

222
00:16:11.349 --> 00:16:11.629
Yeah.

223
00:16:11.649 --> 00:16:12.510
How did XRP do?

224
00:16:12.710 --> 00:16:13.451
XRP.

225
00:16:16.862 --> 00:16:18.483
On the 7 day.

226
00:16:18.883 --> 00:16:19.464
17%.

227
00:16:19.484 --> 00:16:20.584
17%.

228
00:16:20.604 --> 00:16:22.645
So, okay.

229
00:16:22.725 --> 00:16:40.652
Well, I don't know that that disproves it, David, because it is true that everything is getting a bit of a raise from this, but also it is true that the cash flow generating tokens, the tokens with buybacks and real revenue story, are outperforming disproportionately.

230
00:16:40.672 --> 00:16:40.972
Yeah.

231
00:16:41.392 --> 00:16:41.973
There are some exceptions.

232
00:16:42.033 --> 00:16:43.614
And it's been that true for a while.

233
00:16:43.654 --> 00:16:55.605
Delphi Digital put out a tweet about like how revenue generating assets, a basket of revenue generating assets were up like 17% while the blue chips, ETH, Bitcoin, Solana were down 30%.

234
00:16:55.625 --> 00:16:59.789
And they put that tweet out in June and that's been only even more true ever since.

235
00:17:00.327 --> 00:17:02.068
Well, some people have been going farther.

236
00:17:02.108 --> 00:17:08.453
So I actually saw a publisher, David Feld from Bankless, published this in Bankless in the newsletter.

237
00:17:08.473 --> 00:17:09.855
This is not Bitcoin's cycle.

238
00:17:10.355 --> 00:17:13.978
And he made the case, okay, look at all of these assets that are pumping.

239
00:17:14.018 --> 00:17:17.260
They're pumping, they're growing fast because of cash flows.

240
00:17:17.280 --> 00:17:19.382
Guess which doesn't have cash flow?

241
00:17:19.402 --> 00:17:20.203
That is Bitcoin.

242
00:17:20.603 --> 00:17:24.026
And by the way, who is the next marginal buyer of Bitcoin?

243
00:17:24.066 --> 00:17:25.267
Saylor has all he wants.

244
00:17:25.767 --> 00:17:31.670
Last cycle, we had ETFs and you could quite clearly see institutions being the next marginal buyer.

245
00:17:31.971 --> 00:17:33.772
Does Bitcoin have that this cycle?

246
00:17:34.072 --> 00:17:36.113
Will it continue to outperform?

247
00:17:36.533 --> 00:17:42.897
And another way to take a look at that is like market cap Bitcoin dominance right now it's at about 59%.

248
00:17:43.517 --> 00:17:50.601
The usual model for what happens during the early bull cycle is we get early Bitcoin dominance.

249
00:17:50.681 --> 00:17:53.663
So Bitcoin dominance increases early in the cycle.

250
00:17:54.603 --> 00:17:56.825
And then alts follow later.

251
00:17:56.905 --> 00:17:58.987
So it's always Bitcoin leads, then alts follow.

252
00:17:59.847 --> 00:18:02.229
Is this going to be a little bit different this time?

253
00:18:02.289 --> 00:18:12.658
Like maybe what David Feld is saying is maybe this will not be Bitcoin cycle, at least not to the extent it was in previous cycles and certainly in last cycle.

254
00:18:13.158 --> 00:18:14.198
Do you buy that argument?

255
00:18:14.239 --> 00:18:22.102
Do you think that other crypto assets are going to get their time in the sun and Bitcoin just doesn't have as much potential this cycle?

256
00:18:22.862 --> 00:18:25.703
Also, obviously, much larger market cap.

257
00:18:26.044 --> 00:18:27.364
You have to take that into account, right?

258
00:18:27.384 --> 00:18:36.068
You can't, we're not comparing apples to apples when we compare like a multi-trillion dollar asset to something that's, you know, in the tens of billions.

259
00:18:36.628 --> 00:18:44.939
But that aside, do you think Bitcoin will do as well this cycle as last cycle or you think other crypto assets will take center stage here?

260
00:18:46.193 --> 00:19:02.465
I do go back to the era of like DeFi summer where Bitcoin and Ether were unresponsive while there was like money flying hands, euphoria, insane amount of wealth generated in like the lower market cap assets or the brand new assets.

261
00:19:02.725 --> 00:19:03.625
And then what happened?

262
00:19:03.645 --> 00:19:05.347
You know, Bitcoin went from $6,000 to $60,000.

263
00:19:05.387 --> 00:19:08.108
You know, Ether went from $300 to $4,000 plus.

264
00:19:13.612 --> 00:19:22.355
And so like maybe like the attention always starts inside of the cryptosphere and then it, you know, then it overflows and attracts attention.

265
00:19:22.715 --> 00:19:24.076
And that's what moves the blue chips.

266
00:19:25.076 --> 00:19:27.177
And so that pattern could still play out.

267
00:19:27.297 --> 00:19:30.958
But nonetheless, I am also concerned like the average typical person.

268
00:19:31.678 --> 00:19:36.603
commentator on crypto Twitter, I would say, is just like, our blue chips are really big and they're hard to move.

269
00:19:37.164 --> 00:19:42.930
And who is the marginal buyer of Bitcoin when gold is still doing its job as gold?

270
00:19:43.290 --> 00:19:46.153
And who's the marginal buyer of Ether after like Tom Lee?

271
00:19:46.333 --> 00:19:48.776
I don't know who's buying the blue chips because it's not me.

272
00:19:49.596 --> 00:19:50.277
I'm done.

273
00:19:51.178 --> 00:19:51.719
They're too big.

274
00:19:52.657 --> 00:19:52.857
Right.

275
00:19:52.917 --> 00:19:54.539
It's not going to come from crypto natives.

276
00:19:54.599 --> 00:19:58.743
It has to come from some new set of buyers and the market's maybe still establishing that.

277
00:19:59.023 --> 00:20:01.385
I still think there are net new buyers, right?

278
00:20:01.686 --> 00:20:05.309
Even Michael Howell is certainly not a crypto native, someone I do follow.

279
00:20:05.369 --> 00:20:06.530
I enjoy his macro takes.

280
00:20:06.590 --> 00:20:08.052
I enjoy his global liquidity takes.

281
00:20:08.572 --> 00:20:16.320
He still talks about Bitcoin as a 5X kind of levered gold type position in that if you believe in debasement,

282
00:20:16.900 --> 00:20:24.444
You could buy gold or you can buy Bitcoin and it has a 5x multiple to gold when global liquidity goes back up.

283
00:20:24.844 --> 00:20:25.024
Right.

284
00:20:25.064 --> 00:20:36.130
So there is a set of institutional believers out there who aren't sort of the crypto natives that you interact with that I do think will continue to be the marginal buyers of Bitcoin.

285
00:20:36.150 --> 00:20:36.410
Yeah.

286
00:20:36.971 --> 00:20:44.595
And they are going to believe even more this cycle as Bitcoin recovers, as new time all time highs are breached.

287
00:20:44.615 --> 00:20:44.815
Yeah.

288
00:20:45.233 --> 00:20:59.040
Yeah, I do think on the longest of timeframes, like if you believe that thesis and therefore you are looking to have exposure to debasement and you weigh Bitcoin or gold and you have a 10 plus year time horizon, then I bet you that that plays out.

289
00:20:59.460 --> 00:21:14.087
I think the very large, wide, random walk that Bitcoin walks to like around the debasement exposure line is very frustrating for investors because like you can be correct

290
00:21:14.807 --> 00:21:25.599
about debasement on a five to eight year timeframe, but Bitcoin just randomly walked down at negative 30% while gold was more steady around the debasement line.

291
00:21:25.859 --> 00:21:28.982
But then Bitcoin does the thing where in two years it makes it all back and then some.

292
00:21:29.283 --> 00:21:30.964
So it's a very frustrating random walk.

293
00:21:31.625 --> 00:21:42.815
Let's talk about an asset that's at all-time highs and that is a bit of an outlier from what we just said, which is we said assets that we're pumping are assets that have some sort of cash flow or revenue attached to them.

294
00:21:43.316 --> 00:21:48.701
And yet here we have Zcash, which just made a 10-year all-time high on the price.

295
00:21:49.001 --> 00:21:50.903
Now, I'm not sure if that's market cap all-time high.

296
00:21:50.943 --> 00:21:53.345
It's probably still ahead of market cap.

297
00:21:53.385 --> 00:21:55.667
Market cap all-time high is by far up.

298
00:21:56.728 --> 00:21:58.391
massively because Zcash is super inflationary.

299
00:21:58.411 --> 00:21:58.992
Oh, yeah, of course.

300
00:21:59.092 --> 00:22:01.256
Okay, it's the opposite of what I was saying.

301
00:22:01.276 --> 00:22:09.310
This is why the Zcash chart is kind of fucked, especially in the first third of its life, but also, most importantly, in the first...

302
00:22:10.673 --> 00:22:15.036
one month of its life because somebody, I tweeted out, Zcash all-time high.

303
00:22:15.136 --> 00:22:20.539
And then I think Austin came into my replies and was like, technically, it's a recent era all-time high.

304
00:22:21.079 --> 00:22:25.602
And if you go and you look at the Zcash all-time high chart, it starts at like $10,000.

305
00:22:25.622 --> 00:22:28.304
What are you talking about in price or in market cap?

306
00:22:28.324 --> 00:22:30.965
In price, in price, in price.

307
00:22:31.025 --> 00:22:34.627
The first Zcash tokens were trading at $10,000 for like $10,000.

308
00:22:36.048 --> 00:22:38.369
You're talking about this stupid thing here.

309
00:22:38.449 --> 00:22:39.930
That thing does not count.

310
00:22:40.150 --> 00:22:41.471
Yeah, of course it doesn't count.

311
00:22:41.531 --> 00:22:42.771
That's stupid.

312
00:22:42.791 --> 00:22:48.834
The vertical line that is reminiscent of Hunter Biden's laptop token does not count.

313
00:22:49.254 --> 00:22:49.875
Yeah, it doesn't.

314
00:22:49.995 --> 00:22:55.117
I mean, market cap, I think, is the true expression of how is this doing as a store of value asset.

315
00:22:55.137 --> 00:22:59.139
So Zcash quite clearly is in the store of value asset category.

316
00:22:59.159 --> 00:23:01.660
It's a crypto monetary asset.

317
00:23:01.720 --> 00:23:05.262
It's like early bankless thesis stuff where we were like, okay, there are...

318
00:23:05.802 --> 00:23:09.245
crypto assets that are emerging that will have monetary properties.

319
00:23:09.406 --> 00:23:12.268
It's sort of the Bitcoin play, but private.

320
00:23:12.769 --> 00:23:20.116
And now we are at a market cap of, we exceeded $26 billion last week.

321
00:23:20.276 --> 00:23:21.757
And this has been an insane...

322
00:23:22.638 --> 00:23:27.681
over performer, even during the bear market and certainly in the early bull market.

323
00:23:27.701 --> 00:23:29.642
Like, what are we up here, Zcash?

324
00:23:29.662 --> 00:23:31.943
We went from about eight billion now.

325
00:23:32.003 --> 00:23:35.425
We went from just even during the bear market up to now.

326
00:23:35.445 --> 00:23:39.007
It's like $7 billion right now to $26 billion.

327
00:23:39.027 --> 00:23:41.249
And $7 billion was after it pumped for the first time.

328
00:23:41.629 --> 00:23:45.251
And I think that was not even a year ago.

329
00:23:45.291 --> 00:23:49.894
Like when Zcash went from a $300 million market cap up to like $2 billion.

330
00:23:49.994 --> 00:23:50.614
When was that?

331
00:23:50.654 --> 00:23:51.915
That first vertical lineup.

332
00:23:53.214 --> 00:23:53.834
What's that?

333
00:23:53.854 --> 00:23:54.895
The first vertical right here?

334
00:23:55.335 --> 00:23:55.855
Yeah, that one.

335
00:23:56.195 --> 00:23:56.696
$10 billion?

336
00:23:57.276 --> 00:23:58.096
$10 billion at the top.

337
00:23:58.156 --> 00:23:58.576
What date?

338
00:23:58.716 --> 00:24:00.837
We're talking about 2025.

339
00:24:00.997 --> 00:24:01.678
November 2025.

340
00:24:01.858 --> 00:24:04.419
Yeah, so it's September 2026.

341
00:24:04.619 --> 00:24:06.740
This whole Zcash thing is less than a year old.

342
00:24:06.860 --> 00:24:09.161
It's put on $26 billion in less than a year.

343
00:24:09.481 --> 00:24:13.663
In the bear market and into the early bull market, put that much on.

344
00:24:13.963 --> 00:24:22.887
And when you start getting to $26 billion and you don't have cash flows, you are a store of value crypto asset.

345
00:24:23.607 --> 00:24:26.950
Part of your explainer for this was just like, this is Bitcoiners rotating in.

346
00:24:26.990 --> 00:24:30.212
It's like it's catching the Bitcoin bid trophy.

347
00:24:30.352 --> 00:24:31.493
It's not ETH money.

348
00:24:31.653 --> 00:24:34.255
It's not Solana money because those assets aren't big enough.

349
00:24:34.736 --> 00:24:38.559
It's Bitcoiners shaving off like 1% of their market cap.

350
00:24:38.679 --> 00:24:38.919
Yeah.

351
00:24:39.019 --> 00:24:42.680
And when that goes into a $200 million market cap, it goes to $26 billion.

352
00:24:42.820 --> 00:24:44.221
It's Winklevoss twins.

353
00:24:44.401 --> 00:24:45.701
It's Barry Silbert.

354
00:24:45.761 --> 00:24:46.561
It's Grayscale.

355
00:24:46.581 --> 00:24:48.302
You know, there's an ETF here.

356
00:24:48.322 --> 00:24:51.843
You can kind of see that rotation into this.

357
00:24:51.923 --> 00:24:57.425
But the reason it's meaningful, I think, is because this is a true...

358
00:24:58.705 --> 00:25:00.467
competitor maybe to Bitcoin.

359
00:25:00.807 --> 00:25:08.214
I mean, $26 billion is still slight in terms of Bitcoin's total market cap, but the category it's pursuing is store of value.

360
00:25:08.254 --> 00:25:20.285
And the only other asset to even try to claim at this type of market cap level that it was pursuing a store of value type strategy has been Ether, Ether the asset.

361
00:25:20.485 --> 00:25:24.307
And not even the full Ethereum community has kind of claimed that, you know.

362
00:25:24.788 --> 00:25:29.150
And Vitalik has, you know, been a little wishy-washy even about that.

363
00:25:29.190 --> 00:25:35.334
And so we have another crypto money that seems to be emerging in the game.

364
00:25:35.915 --> 00:25:39.297
And you wonder if that's going to persist for this entire market cycle.

365
00:25:39.317 --> 00:25:41.678
And if it does, what are we going to get to?

366
00:25:41.878 --> 00:25:44.200
Hundreds of billions of dollars for Zcash?

367
00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:44.900
Yeah.

368
00:25:45.301 --> 00:25:52.806
It's hard to say that Zcash is a Bitcoin competitor when you have a $1.7 trillion asset shoulder to shoulder with a $26 billion asset.

369
00:25:52.826 --> 00:25:54.548
Like that's a 65x difference.

370
00:25:54.668 --> 00:25:54.868
Sure.

371
00:25:54.908 --> 00:26:03.254
But I think the point we want to make is that it is a competitor for the marginal flow of dollars in 2026 buying assets.

372
00:26:03.314 --> 00:26:06.156
And so are they going to buy Bitcoin or are they going to buy Zcash?

373
00:26:06.196 --> 00:26:12.822
And if that flow split is 50-50 from the marginal buyer of Zcash, like that does make it a competitor.

374
00:26:12.842 --> 00:26:13.322
Yeah.

375
00:26:13.622 --> 00:26:19.226
Well, don't you think it's the first viable competitor that we've sort of seen?

376
00:26:19.246 --> 00:26:22.227
It's like after Ether had its very valid attempt in 2021.

377
00:26:22.287 --> 00:26:25.149
Well, who's pursuing the store value race right now?

378
00:26:25.389 --> 00:26:26.370
Still left in crypto.

379
00:26:27.451 --> 00:26:29.092
Do you think Ether is in the race?

380
00:26:29.472 --> 00:26:29.812
I do.

381
00:26:30.172 --> 00:26:30.673
Absolutely.

382
00:26:30.713 --> 00:26:31.753
I think Ether is in the race.

383
00:26:32.134 --> 00:26:33.114
I think it's Bitcoin.

384
00:26:33.234 --> 00:26:33.835
I think it's ETH.

385
00:26:33.995 --> 00:26:38.317
And I think now when you get over $25 billion, Zcash is in the race too.

386
00:26:38.858 --> 00:26:40.659
And I don't see anything else.

387
00:26:40.679 --> 00:26:40.939
Yeah.

388
00:26:41.475 --> 00:26:42.516
Yeah.

389
00:26:42.816 --> 00:26:51.926
There's one more to keep an eye on that I know that the team is like interested, has their eye on the ball here, which is like the NIR team.

390
00:26:52.266 --> 00:26:58.092
And I do think that there is an interesting pairing between Zcash and NIR and Bitcoin and Ether.

391
00:26:58.532 --> 00:26:59.193
So, so...

392
00:27:00.234 --> 00:27:16.565
Ether won the blessing of like the Bitcoin bid, like the trophy of Bitcoiners are going to buy this thing because there's going to be like an agreement that like, OK, maybe maybe hedging my Bitcoin exposure of my multi trillion dollar asset with a little bit of ETH is a good idea.

393
00:27:16.865 --> 00:27:19.587
And so that's why ETH just did so well in 2021.

394
00:27:20.047 --> 00:27:23.530
And that's and I think that same thing is happening to Zcash today.

395
00:27:24.530 --> 00:27:25.991
Then there's like why?

396
00:27:26.151 --> 00:27:32.555
Also because of the privacy, the technical superiority, the more modern asset, the one with less tech debt.

397
00:27:32.795 --> 00:27:35.196
And I think Nier is also kind of fulfilling that same thing.

398
00:27:35.316 --> 00:27:37.877
It's also on the privacy meta.

399
00:27:37.897 --> 00:27:39.618
So you have Zcash, the private money.

400
00:27:40.019 --> 00:27:41.339
And then what is Nier doing?

401
00:27:41.499 --> 00:27:43.320
It's doing private intents.

402
00:27:43.821 --> 00:27:47.703
And so cross-chain, like it just privatizes your asset transfers across chain.

403
00:27:48.303 --> 00:27:53.385
And the volume around near intense is up like 85% on the two week.

404
00:27:53.465 --> 00:27:55.626
The near is the biggest mover of the week.

405
00:27:55.866 --> 00:27:58.407
This week is up 54% in seven days.

406
00:27:59.068 --> 00:28:08.772
And I think if like there's in addition to the Bitcoin bid, there's always been this like second place trophy, which is like the smart contract bid that Ether, Ethereum has won.

407
00:28:08.812 --> 00:28:10.273
Solana then won it later.

408
00:28:10.333 --> 00:28:14.795
Like Solana won the dominant smart contract big flows beyond 2021.

409
00:28:15.975 --> 00:28:21.561
And I think one of the reason why NIR is up so much in the last seven days is because it's winning the smart contract bid.

410
00:28:22.221 --> 00:28:23.803
And that is the marginal flows.

411
00:28:23.863 --> 00:28:32.691
And so kind of going back to this problem statement that, hey, I put in my article, but we were talking about earlier is like the assets that are more attractive than our blue chips.

412
00:28:33.392 --> 00:28:40.536
are these much smaller cap assets, the $26 billion market cap asset instead of the $1.7 trillion one.

413
00:28:40.936 --> 00:28:45.999
Or in Nier's case, it's like the, what is it, $8 billion asset instead of the $500 billion one.

414
00:28:46.379 --> 00:28:56.545
So the blue chips are not getting the bids, and it's going down to these more modern, more new assets that are capturing the marginal flow.

415
00:28:57.345 --> 00:28:58.466
I think that could be the case.

416
00:28:58.686 --> 00:29:04.472
It could also be the case that just Near is the recipient of kind of this revenue meta pump as well.

417
00:29:04.673 --> 00:29:08.576
I mean, Intense are generating cash flow on Near as well.

418
00:29:08.597 --> 00:29:09.778
And you can kind of see that.

419
00:29:09.858 --> 00:29:13.461
You could see it has product market fit in a set of applications, right?

420
00:29:13.481 --> 00:29:13.882
It's like...

421
00:29:14.042 --> 00:29:18.203
the intense application around privacy, also doing things in AI.

422
00:29:18.703 --> 00:29:22.984
So maybe it's coming for some of the smart contract bid, but I'm not sure.

423
00:29:23.144 --> 00:29:33.866
It certainly doesn't seem like it's coming for the store of value bid, though, which is like what ETH Bulls in sort of the glory years would claim.

424
00:29:34.046 --> 00:29:41.827
And it does seem to be trying to actually create a business that is generating cash flow with apps and revenue and sort of more...

425
00:29:42.347 --> 00:29:44.989
more central kind of control over the product roadmap.

426
00:29:45.650 --> 00:29:46.330
Yeah, it is.

427
00:29:47.031 --> 00:29:54.617
It's doing kind of like the ultrasound money thing where it's using the revenues from confidential intents to like buy and burn Nier.

428
00:29:54.737 --> 00:30:00.422
And they have like, they're averaging, I think like 60% of Nier issuance is getting bought and burnt.

429
00:30:01.142 --> 00:30:03.042
And they're doing the ultrasound money thing.

430
00:30:03.262 --> 00:30:07.783
I still think the ultrasound money narrative for Ethereum was the best narrative that we had.

431
00:30:07.863 --> 00:30:12.764
And then ETH price went from down from like $4,000 down to like $800.

432
00:30:13.184 --> 00:30:15.265
And we all threw out ultrasound money into the garbage.

433
00:30:15.465 --> 00:30:16.985
I still think it's the best narrative.

434
00:30:17.385 --> 00:30:19.045
It's still worth that being the narrative.

435
00:30:19.465 --> 00:30:27.167
And I think like that's kind of why NIR is stealing the week, one, the week this week is because of something like downstream to that.

436
00:30:28.110 --> 00:30:33.473
Remains to be seen whether this momentum can hold and what's going to do well during the early bull.

437
00:30:33.493 --> 00:30:36.194
But we're going to be talking about it on a week to week basis.

438
00:30:36.234 --> 00:30:39.516
Coming up next, there was a Howard Marks memo.

439
00:30:39.776 --> 00:30:47.100
I was waiting for this to drop, talking about yields and why treasury market, bond market is going crazy.

440
00:30:47.400 --> 00:30:49.961
What assets to buy in order to hedge against them.

441
00:30:50.302 --> 00:30:51.202
I want to talk about that.

442
00:30:51.362 --> 00:30:54.624
Also, does he mention cryptocurrencies in the memo?

443
00:30:54.644 --> 00:30:54.884
Yeah.

444
00:30:55.910 --> 00:30:56.890
We'll discuss all that more.

445
00:30:56.911 --> 00:31:00.192
But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

446
00:31:00.672 --> 00:31:06.255
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447
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448
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Just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially and still control all of my funds.

449
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450
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451
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452
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453
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Crypto, tokenized assets, perps, payments.

454
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I can even earn yield confidentially.

455
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One account, over 30 chains, confidential by default.

456
00:31:38.231 --> 00:31:39.992
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457
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And it's powered by Near, which has moved over $30 billion cross-chain, uses post-quantum signatures,

458
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And that's run over five years on mainnet with zero downtime.

459
00:31:48.677 --> 00:31:51.999
Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control.

460
00:31:52.200 --> 00:31:57.543
Get 20% of your trading fees back on near.com using the Bankless link in the show notes, not investment advice.

461
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464
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469
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470
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476
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Cheers.

477
00:33:03.195 --> 00:33:05.857
Ryan, we got some more all-time highs to discuss.

478
00:33:05.897 --> 00:33:09.019
The US 10-year is at an all-time high of 5.15% yields.

479
00:33:09.039 --> 00:33:10.200
The 30-year is at 5.44%.

480
00:33:10.220 --> 00:33:11.981
These are highs not seen for over 20 years.

481
00:33:12.001 --> 00:33:12.241
Yeah.

482
00:33:12.261 --> 00:33:12.662
Almost 20 years.

483
00:33:12.682 --> 00:33:13.282
All-time highs...

484
00:33:21.107 --> 00:33:24.049
During the decade period, not all-time highs.

485
00:33:24.249 --> 00:33:28.872
All-time highs during the conscious years of us and our audience.

486
00:33:28.972 --> 00:33:30.173
All-time highs for the show.

487
00:33:31.354 --> 00:33:33.035
All-time highs for the crypto industry.

488
00:33:34.076 --> 00:33:36.177
And honestly, show no signs of stopping.

489
00:33:36.337 --> 00:33:39.839
I mean, they can just keep going up, growing at quite a pace.

490
00:33:40.380 --> 00:33:43.502
So, David, did you read the Howard Marks memo?

491
00:33:44.202 --> 00:33:46.263
No, because I knew you would tell me all about it.

492
00:33:46.763 --> 00:33:48.424
You know who Howard Marks is, though, right?

493
00:33:48.544 --> 00:33:51.025
It's just like a legendary investor.

494
00:33:51.105 --> 00:33:54.087
But for the benefit of our listeners, why don't you go ahead and tell us?

495
00:33:54.287 --> 00:33:54.647
I don't know.

496
00:33:54.707 --> 00:33:56.308
For me, he's kind of in the Hall of Fame.

497
00:33:56.408 --> 00:34:04.732
He's a bond investor, but he has just like these memos that he writes, almost like Warren Buffett-like, that kind of make sense of the current environment of the market.

498
00:34:04.772 --> 00:34:04.952
He's...

499
00:34:05.712 --> 00:34:11.914
very seasoned, very reasonable, very rational, and often right.

500
00:34:12.454 --> 00:34:15.674
And so I read every one of his memos that come out.

501
00:34:15.694 --> 00:34:20.636
It's just like every couple months or so, he'll publish something on what's going on.

502
00:34:21.036 --> 00:34:22.636
This memo was about yields.

503
00:34:22.976 --> 00:34:26.357
And he knows a ton about them because he is, of course, a bond investor.

504
00:34:26.897 --> 00:34:30.398
So it's called, Shall We Repeal the Law of Economics?

505
00:34:31.198 --> 00:34:36.819
And he gives reasons, three reasons for why yields are rising.

506
00:34:36.999 --> 00:34:39.620
And it's reasons that our audience is probably familiar with.

507
00:34:39.640 --> 00:34:40.800
We've talked about this.

508
00:34:41.320 --> 00:34:44.381
So Howard Marks is really reinforcing some of these ideas.

509
00:34:44.441 --> 00:34:48.082
So number one, yields are rising because inflation is high.

510
00:34:48.582 --> 00:34:50.042
Stubbornly high, he calls it.

511
00:34:50.443 --> 00:34:55.084
So we have inflation, PCE at about 3.7%.

512
00:34:55.724 --> 00:34:56.984
And recall the target.

513
00:34:57.104 --> 00:34:58.304
There is a target out there.

514
00:34:58.764 --> 00:35:00.205
And the Fed has still said the target is 2%.

515
00:35:01.185 --> 00:35:04.607
Well, we've been above 2% for a long time.

516
00:35:04.627 --> 00:35:05.308
Since COVID.

517
00:35:05.648 --> 00:35:08.370
COVID really popped our ability to hold 2%.

518
00:35:08.510 --> 00:35:11.372
Yeah, and 2% is just like we've never gotten back there.

519
00:35:11.392 --> 00:35:15.875
In fact, we're in 3% range and the high 3% and rising.

520
00:35:15.935 --> 00:35:17.456
So we have the war in Iran.

521
00:35:17.476 --> 00:35:18.736
We have oil prices.

522
00:35:19.237 --> 00:35:23.239
Lenders are demanding some protection from inflation.

523
00:35:23.319 --> 00:35:25.100
So they demand that in the form of higher yields.

524
00:35:25.120 --> 00:35:26.001
That's the first reason.

525
00:35:26.281 --> 00:35:27.122
The second reason...

526
00:35:27.562 --> 00:35:38.911
which has been a bankless theme, of course, and a theme of all the crypto, is there is zero fiscal discipline in the U.S. And not just the U.S., all countries around the world.

527
00:35:39.352 --> 00:35:41.113
Fiscal situation is blowing out of control.

528
00:35:41.874 --> 00:35:44.396
Sovereign debt is exploding.

529
00:35:44.716 --> 00:35:46.117
There's no signs of reining it in.

530
00:35:46.477 --> 00:35:49.200
He said that the U.S. has a golden credit card.

531
00:35:49.420 --> 00:35:50.561
There's no credit limit.

532
00:35:50.941 --> 00:35:51.802
The bill never comes.

533
00:35:52.362 --> 00:35:59.745
And this is, of course, the U.S. flexing its ability as the sovereign reserve asset and the global reserve currency.

534
00:35:59.805 --> 00:36:17.212
It's kind of flexing that golden credit card capability, $40 trillion in debt, $1 trillion a year in interest payments, now exceeding the amount that we spend on our military in the U.S. We're just spending that amount in interest.

535
00:36:17.232 --> 00:36:18.052
So we know about that.

536
00:36:18.112 --> 00:36:19.433
Zero fiscal discipline.

537
00:36:19.713 --> 00:36:22.054
The third is a capital demand squeeze.

538
00:36:22.074 --> 00:36:29.238
So he talks about you've got $5 trillion in AI buildout that need to be funded by debt instruments.

539
00:36:29.738 --> 00:36:38.863
So this is AI data center buildout needing funds, needing capital in the form of debt, and they're willing to pay for that capital in the form of yields.

540
00:36:39.483 --> 00:36:42.806
At the same time, you have Treasury and it's trying to issue its debt too.

541
00:36:43.266 --> 00:36:46.208
So you got $2 trillion in Treasury that needs to be issued.

542
00:36:46.249 --> 00:36:47.249
This is U.S. bonds.

543
00:36:47.750 --> 00:36:50.212
Whereas you have $5 trillion in AI debt.

544
00:36:50.252 --> 00:36:55.076
You know the AI people are good for it because they have the cash flows to support it.

545
00:36:55.916 --> 00:36:56.517
Do we know that?

546
00:36:56.997 --> 00:36:59.140
I mean, they have the profit right now.

547
00:36:59.500 --> 00:37:11.331
And so and also if, you know, NVIDIA chips, if that's kind of the new oil, if that is a commodity, as Jensen, people like Jensen are saying, then it's also collateral backed as well.

548
00:37:11.391 --> 00:37:13.313
So it's it's a competitive debt instrument.

549
00:37:13.333 --> 00:37:16.116
And that's just raising the cost of capital up.

550
00:37:17.037 --> 00:37:19.339
So he says about Besant that.

551
00:37:20.376 --> 00:37:27.262
You know, Besson has been going around saying, I don't think yields reflect the underlying fundamentals of this strong U.S. economy.

552
00:37:27.282 --> 00:37:33.107
And he says, on the contrary, I think U.S. long-term bond yields are reflecting the actual fundamentals that we have.

553
00:37:33.187 --> 00:37:40.473
If you just look at those three things, inflation, no fiscal discipline, and the AI capital squeeze, it's sucking all the capital.

554
00:37:41.053 --> 00:37:43.214
So he reiterates those points.

555
00:37:43.474 --> 00:37:47.436
That's the reason, according to Howard Mark, Mark's yields are rising.

556
00:37:47.836 --> 00:37:57.541
The question is, how do you protect yourself as an investor from what he's essentially calling kind of the debasement type trade?

557
00:37:58.321 --> 00:37:59.562
And he said, you could do a few things.

558
00:37:59.822 --> 00:38:03.684
One, you can have assets denominated in currencies other than the dollar.

559
00:38:04.144 --> 00:38:08.466
But the problem with that is the other currencies have a similar type of effect.

560
00:38:08.506 --> 00:38:09.667
They are debasing as well.

561
00:38:10.987 --> 00:38:16.348
Two, you could go to non-financial assets like gold or non-US real estate.

562
00:38:16.388 --> 00:38:18.069
You could try that.

563
00:38:18.089 --> 00:38:20.989
Or three, you could do non-US companies.

564
00:38:21.049 --> 00:38:24.070
The problem is there's not a lot of great companies out there.

565
00:38:24.550 --> 00:38:26.710
The US companies are overperforming.

566
00:38:27.271 --> 00:38:29.651
Or he says cryptocurrencies.

567
00:38:30.151 --> 00:38:33.052
He actually mentioned cryptocurrencies in the memo.

568
00:38:33.072 --> 00:38:33.752
So that's something.

569
00:38:33.772 --> 00:38:34.252
Yeah.

570
00:38:35.153 --> 00:38:38.736
A friend asked him, okay, Howard, should I sell my stocks?

571
00:38:39.376 --> 00:38:44.520
And his answer was this, the problem we face isn't a problem with the U.S. stock market or with U.S. companies.

572
00:38:44.981 --> 00:38:47.163
The problem is with the U.S. fiscal management.

573
00:38:47.363 --> 00:38:49.925
And ultimately, it's a problem with the U.S. dollar.

574
00:38:50.285 --> 00:38:53.468
He's basically saying American companies are good.

575
00:38:53.948 --> 00:38:55.649
In fact, maybe they're great.

576
00:38:56.390 --> 00:38:58.231
It's the American government that's bad.

577
00:38:58.832 --> 00:39:01.213
And so don't sell your stocks.

578
00:39:01.733 --> 00:39:05.516
That's actually a way to protect from some of this debasement as well.

579
00:39:06.476 --> 00:39:19.985
So I thought it was a well-reasoned, well-rationed, insightful memo and kind of gave me some, connected a lot of dots on what's going on in the current environment for me at least.

580
00:39:21.240 --> 00:39:27.943
This connects to a bit of discourse that I've been seeing around the timeline that I'm picking up on.

581
00:39:28.123 --> 00:39:34.066
And I'll pause and give a disclaimer that this is bull fuel, what I'm about to say.

582
00:39:35.026 --> 00:39:37.347
And I'm trying to not be too drunk in this bull market.

583
00:39:37.367 --> 00:39:37.988
Okay, Tom Lee.

584
00:39:38.068 --> 00:39:38.428
I'm taking...

585
00:39:38.648 --> 00:39:39.749
I'm taking evidence.

586
00:39:39.789 --> 00:39:45.591
I'm taking insight from my guru, Rancho Adams, of during a bull market, you want to be a little tipsy.

587
00:39:45.891 --> 00:39:46.771
You don't want to be sober.

588
00:39:47.152 --> 00:39:48.792
You want to be a little tipsy, but you definitely want to be drunk.

589
00:39:48.812 --> 00:39:49.172
It's pretty early.

590
00:39:49.192 --> 00:39:50.953
It's pretty early in the night to be drunk, David.

591
00:39:51.273 --> 00:39:52.274
I'm decently tipsy.

592
00:39:52.514 --> 00:39:52.814
Okay.

593
00:39:53.054 --> 00:39:54.094
And so I'm into bull stuff.

594
00:39:54.174 --> 00:39:57.736
But the bull stuff that I've been seeing on the timeline that I agree with,

595
00:39:58.276 --> 00:40:04.199
One came from a while ago, which came from Ansem, actually, when I was listening to his Market Bubble podcast.

596
00:40:04.659 --> 00:40:10.621
And he talks about, like, the way that Zoomers and millennials escape inflation is through investing.

597
00:40:11.241 --> 00:40:13.783
And so investing is a bit or inflation is a bitch.

598
00:40:13.863 --> 00:40:14.823
It's punishing everyone.

599
00:40:14.903 --> 00:40:16.604
You get out of that by investing.

600
00:40:16.644 --> 00:40:17.844
And that's the only good way to escape.

601
00:40:17.864 --> 00:40:18.344
Some type of assets.

602
00:40:18.364 --> 00:40:19.625
Some type of assets.

603
00:40:19.865 --> 00:40:20.886
That's step one.

604
00:40:20.986 --> 00:40:22.427
The other bull takes, so that was a while ago.

605
00:40:22.447 --> 00:40:23.167
That was months ago.

606
00:40:23.748 --> 00:40:32.494
The other bull takes I've been seeing on the timeline is like, what if the bond market is printing in 5%, 6%, 7% because the economy is fucking cooking?

607
00:40:33.015 --> 00:40:38.178
And this is something I've been seeing from Felix from Forward Guidance about the economy is ripping.

608
00:40:38.218 --> 00:40:39.059
The economy is ripping.

609
00:40:39.139 --> 00:40:41.061
There's money flying around in the economy.

610
00:40:41.081 --> 00:40:42.242
The economy is looking good.

611
00:40:42.502 --> 00:40:49.348
So the bond market is printing in higher yields because it wants to allocate to the stock market.

612
00:40:49.468 --> 00:40:52.251
And the stock market is the place to put your capital.

613
00:40:52.711 --> 00:40:57.896
And the bond market, the yields on the bond market are just reflecting the cost of capital because everyone wants to invest.

614
00:40:57.916 --> 00:41:06.003
So what if the actual fundamentals are great of the stock market, of equities, now is the time to invest, and the bond market yields like,

615
00:41:06.563 --> 00:41:08.945
Sorry, U.S. Treasury, you're shit out of luck.

616
00:41:09.045 --> 00:41:15.832
Everyone wants to take their money and invest in growth assets because that's the only way to escape inflation.

617
00:41:15.972 --> 00:41:21.817
Which is also somewhat ironic because a lot of these growth assets in the U.S. capital markets are U.S.-based companies.

618
00:41:22.783 --> 00:41:28.904
And so that is still fundamentals of the United States of America at some level and future potential tax revenue.

619
00:41:30.285 --> 00:41:31.105
So maybe.

620
00:41:31.865 --> 00:41:34.066
But the tax revenue is just not going to be able to pay the debt.

621
00:41:34.566 --> 00:41:35.266
It's going to.

622
00:41:35.786 --> 00:41:36.646
You have to debase.

623
00:41:37.526 --> 00:41:38.287
You have to debase.

624
00:41:38.307 --> 00:41:40.207
The tax revenue is the most helpful thing.

625
00:41:40.227 --> 00:41:43.588
There was one time I typed into a clot or something.

626
00:41:43.608 --> 00:41:43.868
I was like.

627
00:41:44.528 --> 00:41:47.449
What if we just did away with taxes?

628
00:41:47.849 --> 00:41:49.189
What would be the repercussions?

629
00:41:49.229 --> 00:41:50.309
Like, do we need taxes?

630
00:41:50.409 --> 00:41:51.209
Did away with taxes.

631
00:41:51.269 --> 00:41:53.850
Can't we just print the money to pay?

632
00:41:53.970 --> 00:42:00.872
And it was like, no, dude, like tax revenue is the majority of the reason as to why there's not hyperinflation.

633
00:42:01.312 --> 00:42:06.033
And so if you did away with the tax revenue, like you, it would be massively catastrophic to inflation.

634
00:42:06.353 --> 00:42:10.314
But nonetheless, tax revenue does not cover debt.

635
00:42:10.874 --> 00:42:12.414
And so therefore the debt compounds.

636
00:42:12.434 --> 00:42:12.614
Yeah.

637
00:42:12.789 --> 00:42:13.169
That's right.

638
00:42:13.370 --> 00:42:14.451
I think that's what's going to happen.

639
00:42:14.711 --> 00:42:17.334
And it's pretty sensible to hold assets.

640
00:42:17.815 --> 00:42:23.141
And I guess just almost any asset you can hold is certainly better than the dollar and certainly better than bonds.

641
00:42:23.501 --> 00:42:26.064
David, there's a story breaking from Kalshi this week.

642
00:42:26.124 --> 00:42:28.467
Did they get caught red handed doing stuff?

643
00:42:29.208 --> 00:42:31.749
I don't know if they have officially got caught red-handed.

644
00:42:31.789 --> 00:42:34.770
This was one of the Twitter stories for the decades.

645
00:42:35.090 --> 00:42:37.711
There is a Twitter persona.

646
00:42:37.731 --> 00:42:38.872
His name is ICOBeast.

647
00:42:39.072 --> 00:42:43.714
I've interacted with him a few times on Twitter before, but he got hired by Kalshi, who has like a crypto lead.

648
00:42:44.194 --> 00:42:46.475
And basically on Twitter, he has just been...

649
00:42:47.095 --> 00:42:47.896
Promoting CalShea.

650
00:42:47.976 --> 00:42:49.698
Like, our metrics look great.

651
00:42:49.818 --> 00:42:50.859
Like, CalShea is the best.

652
00:42:50.979 --> 00:42:52.681
Look how big our perps volume is.

653
00:42:53.121 --> 00:42:59.508
This most recent tweet was a picture of the CalShea's, like, market share of, like, regulated onshore perps volume.

654
00:42:59.868 --> 00:43:07.716
And he asked, chat is 96.7% a lot because that's how much volume dominance CalShea has over polymarket perps.

655
00:43:08.297 --> 00:43:18.499
Then an account named Benny on Twitter responded, it's easy to have 96% market volume dominance when three quarters of your volume is wash traded.

656
00:43:19.039 --> 00:43:23.640
And then ICOBeast replied like, no, you're wrong and dumb.

657
00:43:24.041 --> 00:43:25.201
I love this.

658
00:43:25.261 --> 00:43:27.221
Cope, seethe, rage.

659
00:43:28.602 --> 00:43:29.502
Now these words...

660
00:43:30.642 --> 00:43:37.364
These words are just imprinted upon the future of the crypto Twitter and all the Twitter surrounding these poly markets.

661
00:43:38.124 --> 00:43:41.104
ICOB follows up with, why the fuck would anyone try to wash trade when you have trading fees?

662
00:43:41.484 --> 00:43:43.105
Incredible intellect on display.

663
00:43:44.405 --> 00:43:51.987
Benny then, a few tweets later, self-informed, so called himself like, I'm an autist on Twitter.

664
00:43:52.447 --> 00:43:52.747
Don't.

665
00:43:53.447 --> 00:43:54.387
Don't piss me off.

666
00:43:54.687 --> 00:43:55.688
Don't piss me off.

667
00:43:56.148 --> 00:43:56.848
To prove this.

668
00:43:56.888 --> 00:44:02.269
ICOB says, better to remain silent and thought to fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

669
00:44:02.329 --> 00:44:05.030
I'll give you a few minutes to think through this and delete this.

670
00:44:06.250 --> 00:44:08.851
Benny responds saying, like, no, no, no.

671
00:44:09.091 --> 00:44:10.571
Like, reverse Uno card.

672
00:44:10.951 --> 00:44:11.251
You.

673
00:44:12.132 --> 00:44:14.372
And then nothing happens for a few hours.

674
00:44:14.692 --> 00:44:17.433
And then Benny releases a monster thread.

675
00:44:17.453 --> 00:44:17.653
Yeah.

676
00:44:17.833 --> 00:44:21.758
With a bunch of evidence, like hardcore evidence for wash trading on Calci.

677
00:44:21.778 --> 00:44:22.860
So I'll summarize his points.

678
00:44:22.920 --> 00:44:28.287
Point number one, there's a massive dislocation between ETH volume and open interest on the ETH market.

679
00:44:28.808 --> 00:44:35.377
So on the ETH volume, there's half a billion dollars traded hands on the volume on the ETH perpetual market.

680
00:44:35.497 --> 00:44:37.740
The open interest is 3.1 million.

681
00:44:38.041 --> 00:44:44.709
And so that is a daily turnover of 174 times the amount of actual open interest there is.

682
00:44:45.030 --> 00:44:46.292
That's just like absurd.

683
00:44:46.432 --> 00:44:47.293
Massive dislocation.

684
00:44:47.333 --> 00:44:49.516
Too much volume for open interest.

685
00:44:49.896 --> 00:44:50.998
That's the first bit of evidence.

686
00:44:51.138 --> 00:44:53.740
The second bit of evidence is that the position leaderboard is tiny.

687
00:44:54.140 --> 00:44:58.884
The number one position on the ETH market was up a whopping $17,000.

688
00:44:59.405 --> 00:45:06.090
When $500 million is changing hands daily, you'd expect people to be up or down more than $17,000.

689
00:45:06.130 --> 00:45:09.713
But all the winners or losers were in the six-digit range, so tiny.

690
00:45:12.907 --> 00:45:19.570
Third, there was the same trade size, about $5,500, accounts for over 50%, 5-0% of all trading volume.

691
00:45:19.590 --> 00:45:20.850
That's pretty suspicious.

692
00:45:21.230 --> 00:45:21.531
Yeah.

693
00:45:21.751 --> 00:45:24.452
This came from Calci's API specifically.

694
00:45:24.632 --> 00:45:36.617
Later, the Wall Street Journal reported on this and found nearly 1 million near-identical trades at $5,500 with more than $5 billion of volume traded in that size in that same month.

695
00:45:38.158 --> 00:45:39.018
Fourth bit of evidence—

696
00:45:39.198 --> 00:45:43.163
The original claim from ICO Beast was, why would there be wash rating when we have fees?

697
00:45:43.283 --> 00:45:45.386
Because if you're wash rating back and forth, you're paying the fees.

698
00:45:46.207 --> 00:45:50.393
The obvious answer is that CalShe gives volume rebates to market makers, so that's MUTE.

699
00:45:51.537 --> 00:45:53.059
But wait, there's more.

700
00:45:53.719 --> 00:45:58.464
Number five, the market makers allowed to market make on Calci are selected by Calci.

701
00:45:58.784 --> 00:46:05.411
Bloomberg previously reported that jump trading was given an ownership stake in Calci and allowed to market make on Calci.

702
00:46:05.731 --> 00:46:13.959
So not only is jump trading given the fee rebate, so the fees don't matter, but they own equity in the platform and therefore are incentivized to pump volume through it.

703
00:46:14.319 --> 00:46:14.800
But wait.

704
00:46:15.240 --> 00:46:16.060
There's one more.

705
00:46:16.460 --> 00:46:32.804
This has spilled over to the prediction market side of the business, where Benny showed that Calci has done some very manipulative metric accounting for how it accounts volume on its platform by showing the number of contracts traded, which a contract on a prediction market trades for less than a dollar.

706
00:46:32.844 --> 00:46:35.165
You know, you buy 30 cents to win a dollar.

707
00:46:35.225 --> 00:46:37.345
So a contract for here is 30 cents.

708
00:46:37.966 --> 00:46:43.427
But they just add this dollar sign, add this errant dollar sign to the contract amount.

709
00:46:44.027 --> 00:47:02.243
I don't know why they put the dollar sign there, but when 100,000 contracts are traded at 30 cents, it's reported as 100,000 contracts, but with a dollar sign, making it look like $100,000 was traded when only $30,000 was traded, which more than three X is that reported volume number.

710
00:47:02.843 --> 00:47:05.506
And so as a result, a lot of eyes are on Kalshi.

711
00:47:05.526 --> 00:47:13.293
Kalshi has stated that the CFTC is not investigating Kalshi for washtrading or anything like that.

712
00:47:14.133 --> 00:47:17.757
I think we're all kind of like waiting to see how this falls out.

713
00:47:17.837 --> 00:47:24.323
But the TLDR moral of the story is don't piss off autistic people on Twitter.

714
00:47:25.827 --> 00:47:27.508
Has Kalshi responded to this?

715
00:47:27.788 --> 00:47:30.269
I see a whole response with a TLDR.

716
00:47:30.349 --> 00:47:42.494
Yeah, there's a handful of, they say facts behind the Kalshi perpetual volume saying the repeated $5,500 tickets are one paid market maker quoting fixed sizes, hundreds of distinct takers.

717
00:47:43.034 --> 00:47:45.515
So the maker is producing $5,500 sizes.

718
00:47:45.535 --> 00:47:47.376
Seems like they're not denying all of it.

719
00:47:47.836 --> 00:47:48.716
Maybe some of it.

720
00:47:48.976 --> 00:47:50.537
Yes, they are talking about it.

721
00:47:50.557 --> 00:47:53.358
A lot of it is unsaid.

722
00:47:53.558 --> 00:47:55.139
And so that's why I kind of think the story is not over.

723
00:47:57.127 --> 00:47:59.389
I did see headlines about that.

724
00:47:59.449 --> 00:48:00.991
Thank you for explaining it, David.

725
00:48:01.011 --> 00:48:08.498
In contrast to that, I saw a tweet from Vitalik this week talking about a prediction market called Truro.

726
00:48:09.278 --> 00:48:10.419
And he said this about it.

727
00:48:10.600 --> 00:48:14.924
It's actually moving from base back to the Ethereum L1.

728
00:48:14.964 --> 00:48:18.987
So a kind of reverse L2 back to L1 kind of direction.

729
00:48:19.007 --> 00:48:19.468
He said this.

730
00:48:19.928 --> 00:48:36.862
Glad to see that Ethereum L1 will have a new strong prediction market contender that is dedicated to decentralization and being ethical and not corposlop and actually trying to do interesting and meaningful things with this class of economic primitive.

731
00:48:37.602 --> 00:48:46.474
was earlier this year, I think I saw a comment from Metallic, using a blanket criticism of some of the prediction markets.

732
00:48:46.514 --> 00:48:50.238
He's long been a champion of prediction markets in general, right?

733
00:48:50.258 --> 00:48:52.201
He's been all over this since like, you know, 2015.

734
00:48:54.143 --> 00:48:56.145
2016, the early days of Augur.

735
00:48:56.625 --> 00:48:58.686
But he offered some criticism in February.

736
00:48:58.726 --> 00:49:16.398
He said, over-converging, that prediction markets were over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit, embracing short-term cryptocurrency, price bets, the sports betting, the dopamine stuff, not the kind of long-term fulfillment or societal information value that he had hoped.

737
00:49:16.918 --> 00:49:28.883
So that was his criticism, and he's saying that Truro is maybe doing things right with decentralization and ethics and more of the Vitalik-style virtue that he really appreciates.

738
00:49:29.123 --> 00:49:35.226
The Tru token, it does have a token, was up about 10x after this Vitalik tweet.

739
00:49:35.346 --> 00:49:36.286
What did it start at?

740
00:49:36.646 --> 00:49:38.067
What was the market cap it started at?

741
00:49:38.852 --> 00:49:42.534
It's like 10x, but right now it's an $8 million market cap.

742
00:49:42.554 --> 00:49:45.455
So it's like basically... After the pump, it's at $8 million.

743
00:49:45.495 --> 00:49:48.257
Yeah, so this is a micro market cap.

744
00:49:48.277 --> 00:49:52.059
So I guess the Vitalik tweet gives you something, but it doesn't give you a lot of things.

745
00:49:52.359 --> 00:49:54.680
And it's basically, I mean, not used.

746
00:49:54.820 --> 00:49:58.102
The total value locked of Truro is $1 to $2 million.

747
00:49:58.122 --> 00:50:00.603
The market cap was $1.3 million before the Vitalik tweet.

748
00:50:00.623 --> 00:50:01.183
It peaked at...

749
00:50:05.992 --> 00:50:09.333
$17 million is currently at $10 million.

750
00:50:09.353 --> 00:50:10.654
Yeah.

751
00:50:10.774 --> 00:50:13.755
So we have total value locked in true of about $2 million.

752
00:50:14.355 --> 00:50:15.976
Seven-day trading value about $3,000.

753
00:50:15.996 --> 00:50:16.216
Yeah.

754
00:50:18.697 --> 00:50:34.930
It's just, it was interesting to me in contrast, David, because something I've been working through and struggling with is this idea of just like, what makes Truro better than something like Polymarket or even Kalshi?

755
00:50:35.250 --> 00:50:39.254
Like what makes a thing corporate slop or corpo slop, does that matter?

756
00:50:40.014 --> 00:50:44.157
And one thing that I feel a little exhausted from

757
00:50:45.098 --> 00:50:48.399
is picking between virtue and traction.

758
00:50:48.419 --> 00:50:55.100
It's like this forced choice sometimes in crypto where it's just like, you have the virtue path, but no one's ever going to use it.

759
00:50:55.420 --> 00:51:01.101
You'll have like one to two million in total value lock, but it'll be virtuous, right?

760
00:51:01.441 --> 00:51:07.283
Versus the traction path where you have to sell all your ethics and become corpo slop.

761
00:51:07.903 --> 00:51:08.843
And just this real, like,

762
00:51:09.623 --> 00:51:13.866
Growing a sense of virtue without any traction is kind of meaningless.

763
00:51:13.966 --> 00:51:15.047
It's kind of hot air.

764
00:51:15.828 --> 00:51:18.290
And so just an interesting contrast point.

765
00:51:18.350 --> 00:51:23.174
I don't like Vitalik, as we've talked about before, he's very much priest class.

766
00:51:23.254 --> 00:51:24.735
He's very much monk class.

767
00:51:24.795 --> 00:51:29.458
He's sort of the conscience of crypto, if you will.

768
00:51:30.019 --> 00:51:37.725
And sometimes that character class ignores market sensibilities, ignores product market fit.

769
00:51:40.885 --> 00:51:48.390
It's a whole, it's just like, what are we doing here if we're not trying to get traction for our protocols?

770
00:51:48.450 --> 00:51:53.233
And sometimes that requires the market telling us what works and what doesn't.

771
00:51:54.274 --> 00:51:57.156
And I'm like happy to cheer for virtue.

772
00:51:57.896 --> 00:52:02.802
But I want to invest in virtue that the market actually values.

773
00:52:02.902 --> 00:52:11.772
Because virtue for virtue's sake just gets you unused protocols and mechanisms that don't work and incentives in the wrong direction.

774
00:52:12.694 --> 00:52:15.737
Anyway, I'm glad to see Vitalik supporting apps.

775
00:52:16.558 --> 00:52:28.002
It's just, it feels like it's from a different era when we were, you know, trying to support stable coins like Rai or something like that.

776
00:52:28.362 --> 00:52:37.865
And it turned out that Tether just dominated everything, not based on kind of a virtue, but the minimum level of decentralization necessary to grow a product.

777
00:52:38.645 --> 00:52:41.806
And I feel like I just don't want to go back to that world.

778
00:52:42.837 --> 00:52:43.097
Yeah.

779
00:52:43.778 --> 00:52:44.038
Yeah.

780
00:52:44.058 --> 00:52:48.180
There was an era in crypto where the industry was mostly unbuilt.

781
00:52:48.820 --> 00:52:51.461
And that was like the 2019 and earlier era.

782
00:52:52.662 --> 00:52:57.825
And I think that's when we were allowed to like be full, fully virtuous, fully imaginative about what's possible.

783
00:52:58.705 --> 00:53:01.548
that was coming up on a decade ago, like seven years ago.

784
00:53:01.568 --> 00:53:11.500
A lot, we have a lot of evidence now and we now need to like weight both virtue and usage when we like think about what we are building here.

785
00:53:12.641 --> 00:53:17.246
And I think your sentiment is, it fell amongst many of just like,

786
00:53:17.927 --> 00:53:21.248
okay, like doing the whole virtue thing can only take me so far.

787
00:53:21.508 --> 00:53:27.750
And at some point, like I have to reprioritize other things because everyone is a market participant here.

788
00:53:27.770 --> 00:53:29.410
And so everyone's money is on the line.

789
00:53:29.450 --> 00:53:31.751
So it's personal for everyone here.

790
00:53:31.771 --> 00:53:33.952
All right, coming up next, we got a bunch of things to talk about.

791
00:53:33.972 --> 00:53:39.253
We got the variational token, probably one of the biggest tokens, maybe the biggest token launch of this year.

792
00:53:39.273 --> 00:53:44.135
We also have Ondo and BlackRock collaborating on Ondo Intelligent Portfolios.

793
00:53:44.715 --> 00:53:46.576
and a few other things we're going to talk about, all this and more.

794
00:53:46.596 --> 00:53:49.857
But first, we're going to hear some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

795
00:53:50.137 --> 00:53:50.797
Some exciting news.

796
00:53:50.877 --> 00:53:55.618
We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it.

797
00:53:55.698 --> 00:53:58.399
The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato.

798
00:53:58.479 --> 00:53:59.519
He runs the DeFi Report.

799
00:53:59.579 --> 00:54:04.341
This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened.

800
00:54:04.541 --> 00:54:06.982
His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point.

801
00:54:07.062 --> 00:54:08.402
I've been following him for years.

802
00:54:08.582 --> 00:54:11.983
And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes.

803
00:54:12.163 --> 00:54:19.926
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.

804
00:54:20.026 --> 00:54:22.427
There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday.

805
00:54:22.487 --> 00:54:23.227
They're 30 minutes.

806
00:54:23.287 --> 00:54:23.747
They're short.

807
00:54:23.787 --> 00:54:24.427
They're punchy.

808
00:54:24.547 --> 00:54:26.928
I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most.

809
00:54:27.168 --> 00:54:28.409
So let's do it together.

810
00:54:28.549 --> 00:54:29.749
Go subscribe to this podcast.

811
00:54:29.809 --> 00:54:32.410
Search The DeFi Report wherever you get your podcasts.

812
00:54:32.470 --> 00:54:35.531
YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes.

813
00:54:35.671 --> 00:54:37.232
There's a new episode waiting for you now.

814
00:54:37.432 --> 00:54:41.255
Variational has announced their TGE, their airdrop.

815
00:54:41.575 --> 00:54:44.997
If you don't know what variational is, it's kind of like hyperliquid.

816
00:54:45.017 --> 00:54:46.118
It's kind of like lighter.

817
00:54:46.158 --> 00:54:47.559
It's not exactly like that.

818
00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:52.883
The way that it works is that the variational product quits.

819
00:54:52.923 --> 00:55:00.834
quotes you a quote on a particular asset or instrument that you want to buy, whether it's an option or a perpetual or spot or something.

820
00:55:01.335 --> 00:55:06.102
It's kind of like a perp exchange aggregator or an options aggregator.

821
00:55:06.222 --> 00:55:08.105
Is this like one inch for perps?

822
00:55:09.550 --> 00:55:11.072
Yes, but more than perps.

823
00:55:11.632 --> 00:55:13.313
Matcha for perps?

824
00:55:13.333 --> 00:55:14.154
Yeah.

825
00:55:14.194 --> 00:55:17.837
It's an aggregator of financial instruments of sorts.

826
00:55:18.017 --> 00:55:21.980
And the cool thing is they port over into TradFi.

827
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:26.984
And so they have market maker agreements both in TradFi and on variational.

828
00:55:27.064 --> 00:55:30.227
And so they can kind of list assets that aren't tokenized, if that makes sense.

829
00:55:30.727 --> 00:55:34.210
It's very similar to Hyperliquid and Lighter, but also very distinctly different.

830
00:55:34.370 --> 00:55:35.951
It's very, very hyped.

831
00:55:36.151 --> 00:55:38.053
It's potentially going to be the biggest airdrop of this year.

832
00:55:38.073 --> 00:55:39.054
That's what people are talking about it.

833
00:55:39.354 --> 00:55:41.616
They are airdropping 32% of the supply.

834
00:55:41.896 --> 00:55:46.940
They're doing the Hyperliquid, like Lighter thing of 100% of revenues directed to the Treasury to buy and burn the VAR token.

835
00:55:47.280 --> 00:55:49.642
I'm interviewing the team on Friday.

836
00:55:49.662 --> 00:55:50.422
Oh, cool.

837
00:55:50.682 --> 00:55:55.066
Bankless subscribers will get that early, and then it will come out sometime the following week.

838
00:55:55.666 --> 00:55:56.207
So that's pretty cool.

839
00:55:56.227 --> 00:55:56.327
Cool.

840
00:55:56.930 --> 00:56:03.335
David, I saw this Ondo and BlackRock collaboration, Ondo Intelligent Portfolios.

841
00:56:03.495 --> 00:56:09.040
And these look to me almost, they're not ETFs, but they almost look like, what was Bitwise calling them?

842
00:56:09.700 --> 00:56:09.981
Vaults.

843
00:56:10.401 --> 00:56:10.701
Vaults.

844
00:56:10.721 --> 00:56:10.941
Vaults.

845
00:56:10.961 --> 00:56:20.349
They almost look like vaults, sort of a smart contract with a set of assets that's managed by some third party who makes sure that they're managing risk well.

846
00:56:20.749 --> 00:56:21.190
What is this, though?

847
00:56:21.210 --> 00:56:21.730
Yeah, that's right.

848
00:56:21.990 --> 00:56:23.171
Yeah, these are vaults.

849
00:56:23.231 --> 00:56:27.535
These are single tokens that wrap professionally designed models.

850
00:56:27.555 --> 00:56:32.279
That's what BlackRock is doing into a single token with Ondo tokenized stocks.

851
00:56:32.299 --> 00:56:33.480
So it's a single token that you can buy.

852
00:56:33.500 --> 00:56:39.485
And then there's Ondo tokenized stocks as a part of that token, like the constituent of that token, the makeup.

853
00:56:39.905 --> 00:56:43.708
And then the strategy is built and developed by BlackRock.

854
00:56:43.748 --> 00:56:45.409
So it's like BlackRock's models.

855
00:56:46.190 --> 00:56:48.712
on those assets and on those vaults.

856
00:56:48.912 --> 00:56:49.793
And so what are you buying?

857
00:56:49.813 --> 00:56:51.154
Because there's three products here.

858
00:56:51.174 --> 00:56:55.157
There's a high income, there's a diversified growth, and then there's a high growth.

859
00:56:55.257 --> 00:56:57.839
And you own these by owning the assets.

860
00:56:58.019 --> 00:56:59.721
What is actually inside of them?

861
00:56:59.741 --> 00:57:02.083
Like high income, is that like, what is that?

862
00:57:02.123 --> 00:57:04.044
Is that bonds of various types?

863
00:57:04.364 --> 00:57:05.525
Yes.

864
00:57:05.565 --> 00:57:08.167
What's in them is ondo tokenized real world assets.

865
00:57:08.367 --> 00:57:10.749
And those are, so you're buying an ondo

866
00:57:12.090 --> 00:57:16.955
vaults which is an asset that wraps up Ando tokenized assets into a strategy

867
00:57:17.702 --> 00:57:19.682
And the strategy is managed by BlackRock.

868
00:57:19.702 --> 00:57:20.983
So they do the risk management.

869
00:57:21.003 --> 00:57:22.403
They put their brand on the strategy.

870
00:57:22.663 --> 00:57:22.883
Yes.

871
00:57:23.283 --> 00:57:30.304
I don't know if it's like managed, but the strategy is like proprietary knowledge from BlackRock.

872
00:57:31.164 --> 00:57:31.684
Very cool.

873
00:57:32.025 --> 00:57:32.565
Okay.

874
00:57:32.925 --> 00:57:33.165
Yeah.

875
00:57:33.345 --> 00:57:38.006
I also noticed BlackRock put out this post, and this is like, they're all on crypto this cycle.

876
00:57:38.026 --> 00:57:45.387
Of course, they were last cycle with ETFs, but this is a post talking about machine native money.

877
00:57:46.167 --> 00:57:52.869
and how AI represents machine-native intelligence, but digital assets represent machine-native money.

878
00:57:53.129 --> 00:57:57.790
They're propagating this story that basically with the success of AI, what is AI going to need?

879
00:57:57.930 --> 00:57:59.270
It's going to need programmable money.

880
00:57:59.350 --> 00:58:00.431
What is programmable money?

881
00:58:00.791 --> 00:58:01.971
That is all crypto assets.

882
00:58:01.991 --> 00:58:03.432
That is all blockchain stuff.

883
00:58:03.492 --> 00:58:08.013
And so if AI is successful, then crypto assets are successful.

884
00:58:08.413 --> 00:58:12.094
This is something we've talked about for a while, of course, but the significance is,

885
00:58:12.794 --> 00:58:21.436
It's a BlackRock report going, you know, whatever, $10 trillion assets under management going out to all of their institutions and clients.

886
00:58:22.016 --> 00:58:28.458
And so good to have them in our corner from a narrative perspective, I guess, continuing to pump the crypto bags.

887
00:58:29.218 --> 00:58:33.699
Also news on this week, Binance takes a $100 million stake in Circle.

888
00:58:34.808 --> 00:58:36.428
Which is interesting, I would say.

889
00:58:36.448 --> 00:58:48.792
1.24 million Circle shares at a 5% discount two-year lockup, plus a five-year USDC deal where Circle pays Binance monthly incentives on USDC balances.

890
00:58:48.872 --> 00:58:54.213
So, like, Binance gets the yield, which is probably now what makes sense because Binance has a bunch of USDC.

891
00:58:54.553 --> 00:58:56.194
Binance kind of being brought into the fold.

892
00:58:56.594 --> 00:58:58.134
You know, it used to be offshore.

893
00:58:58.334 --> 00:59:04.496
It's starting to creep, getting crept on by the United States government so that it's kind of closer to the weakest.

894
00:59:04.676 --> 00:59:13.178
This is probably also Circle worried about all their exchange eggs being in the Coinbase basket too and losing some of that negotiating power.

895
00:59:13.218 --> 00:59:14.058
Yeah, yeah.

896
00:59:14.578 --> 00:59:20.340
God, if it was my job to manage the tension between Circle and Coinbase, I would be so stressed out.

897
00:59:20.960 --> 00:59:26.742
Anyways, speaking of Coinbase, Coinbase has opened up IPO allocations to U.S. retail investors.

898
00:59:27.242 --> 00:59:33.684
Usually you can buy into IPOs as a retail investor through Coinbase, starting with Aura, the whole like Aura Ring products.

899
00:59:34.184 --> 00:59:41.207
And so this is Coinbase on its arc to get more into like feature parity with Robinhood on the equity side of things.

900
00:59:41.287 --> 00:59:44.588
So Coinbase is kind of cornered, not cornered, but like owns a lot of markets.

901
00:59:44.608 --> 00:59:45.588
They're starting, dipping a toe in the water.

902
00:59:45.648 --> 00:59:52.342
I feel like from Coinbase, I still want the Robinhood features of I want to be able to buy my stocks at Coinbase.

903
00:59:52.883 --> 00:59:53.264
You can do that.

904
00:59:54.720 --> 00:59:57.121
As a U.S. customer right now, I can buy stocks.

905
00:59:57.141 --> 00:59:57.862
For sure.

906
00:59:57.902 --> 01:00:02.424
Haven't they had stocks on Coinbase for a while?

907
01:00:02.604 --> 01:00:04.805
I'm pretty crazy that I don't know about this.

908
01:00:05.245 --> 01:00:07.686
Coinbase is doing a lot of good stuff like this.

909
01:00:08.126 --> 01:00:10.607
They need to fix their goddamn web app.

910
01:00:10.767 --> 01:00:12.128
Their web app is so broken.

911
01:00:12.428 --> 01:00:13.609
It's been broken for a while.

912
01:00:13.729 --> 01:00:14.889
I know that they know it.

913
01:00:15.029 --> 01:00:16.050
Why can't they fix it?

914
01:00:19.170 --> 01:00:19.850
I'll send them that, David.

915
01:00:19.870 --> 01:00:20.451
And that's that.

916
01:00:20.471 --> 01:00:22.271
That's how we will tie that episode off.

917
01:00:22.711 --> 01:00:23.812
Risks and disclaimers.

918
01:00:23.852 --> 01:00:25.032
Bankless Asia, you guys know the deal.

919
01:00:25.072 --> 01:00:27.473
Crypto is risky, but not risky enough.

920
01:00:27.533 --> 01:00:28.634
The institutions have landed.

921
01:00:28.654 --> 01:00:30.554
So we are going even further west.

922
01:00:30.594 --> 01:00:31.395
This is the frontier.

923
01:00:31.935 --> 01:00:34.416
It's not for everyone, but we are glad you were with us on the Bankless journey.

924
01:00:34.436 --> 01:00:34.856
Thanks a lot.