# ROLLUP: Is the Bull Back? | The Clarity Act | Wall Street on Ethereum | Anthropic Nukes Perps

*Author: Ryan Sean Adams, David Hoffman*
*Published: May 15, 2026*
*Source: https://www.bankless.com/fr/podcast/rollup-is-the-bull-back-the-clarity-act-wall-street-on-ethereum-anthropic-nukes-perps*

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## TRANSCRIPT
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the third week of may uh david we got another all-time high in stocks i feel like this is on repeat is this like the fourth weekly roll up in a row groundhog

David Hoffman:
[0:14] Day for equity all-time highs not yeah not a bad movie.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:17] No not a bad movie to watch over and over and over again i just wish i had more of those equities trump is meeting with chinese president xi this week i guess that's why AI stocks in particular are up, but in the backdrop of this, we got inflation numbers in, and that is accelerating. Wages decelerating at the same time. Bond market yields are surging. The question is, how long can markets shrug off all of these counter indicators, and what does that mean for crypto?

David Hoffman:
[0:48] Well, on the crypto side of things, we had a very big vote with the Clarity Act, which passed moments before we started recording, We're going to give you all the news.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:57] It's not the final vote.

David Hoffman:
[0:58] Not the final vote. You are right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:59] A key vote is a key vote.

David Hoffman:
[1:01] Yes. The key vote. But we are over a key hurdle. The Democrats filed over 100 amendments. There is still the final bosses of the ethics and developer protections debate. But the odds of Clarity getting over the final hurdles are up. We're going to talk about all of that and more. Also, TradFi, Ryan, did you know, just loves Ethereum? Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:21] I think they love it more than me at this point. I don't know.

David Hoffman:
[1:24] So three major financial institutions have all announced multi-billion dollar tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. We're going to talk about that. But then also the D-Day for Anthropic Secondaries.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:35] Yeah. What happened here? I want you to fill me in on that. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[1:38] Because I got you. I got the deets. I got the deets.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:41] Okay. Before we get into that, of course, we got to thank our friends and sponsors. David, tell me about the two presidents, the meeting of the two presidents. And we were talking about this right before we hit record. You were like, do we call him President Xi? Is he an official president? And yes, apparently he is. We have President Trump and we have President Xi. They are both presidents and they are meeting in China this week.

David Hoffman:
[2:01] This meeting, this summit between Trump and Xi has been planned for like over six or seven months. This initially, like why is this happening? It initially got inspired by an attempt to kind of just like quell some of the tensions with the trade war. But then Trump invaded Iran or started attacking Iran. And so that kind of added to the list of items needing to be discussed.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:24] Let me ask you, though, which president you think was more excited about this meeting, Trump or Xi? Yeah. Look at this intro video, man. It's got to be Trump. Look at this. Oh, oh, oh. This is from the White House account.

David Hoffman:
[2:36] For the video, yes. I mean, China just rolled out the red carpet for Trump because Trump's so easy to read. He loves that. Put a crowd of people yelling and cheering and waving flags.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:48] Give me a clip I can tweet from the White House account, please.

David Hoffman:
[2:51] Yeah, make me look regal, which is what China did for Donald Trump.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:55] They're good at that.

David Hoffman:
[2:56] Yeah, they're very good at that. Yeah. But the question I thought you were asking was like, OK, this is a this is like a cooperation competition between the United States and China. The optics here is like, let's make a deal with China. We are on opposite sides of the table amongst many issues. But look, we can we're reasonable people. We can despite being competitive superpowers, we can come to the table here. The question I thought you were asking, Ryan, was like, who's kind of got the more bargaining chips?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:27] Yeah, I am asking that, too. Yeah, who's...

David Hoffman:
[3:30] My take is Xi does. President Xi, China does. And the reason is, is because Donald Trump tried to make some moves ahead of this summit. So this summit was planned to first happen maybe like six weeks ago, four weeks ago. But Trump postponed it because he wanted the Iran war to kind of wrap up or progress a more favorable position to Donald Trump. Maybe he got a little bit of that, but really not a lot. And so President Xi, China, actually does have a lot of leverage because Trump feels some urgency to get some deals done ahead of the midterms. And President Xi doesn't have any of that pressure.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:11] Trump brought an entire techno-corporate posse, though, with him, right? Yes. Like, Jensen was there. Elon Musk was there. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[4:19] Tim Apple was there.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:21] Tim Apple.

David Hoffman:
[4:22] Yeah. There was, like, 12 industry executives that Trump—and, I mean, China, gee, they respond to economics.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:29] You're joking about Tim Apple. It's Tim Cook, right? Yes.

David Hoffman:
[4:31] But Trump called him Tim Apple.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:33] Oh, right. Again. I forgot about this. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[4:36] It was, like, in a tweet or something.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:37] Again this week?

David Hoffman:
[4:38] There was an official tweet where like Tim Apple will be joining President Trump.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:43] That's just like what you do, David, almost every week with Michael Strategy.

David Hoffman:
[4:46] That makes sense.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:48] It's in your brain. Tim Apple makes sense too. That might even make more sense. You're right. Tim Apple and Michael Strategy. Anyway.

David Hoffman:
[4:55] So what does the United States want? Yeah. On the United States side of the table, what does the United States want? The United States wants to secure large trade agreements, mostly planes and soybeans.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:06] Like they want to sell Boeing and they want to sell soybeans and they want to sell beef to China.

David Hoffman:
[5:11] They want to – I think we buy soybeans from China.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:13] Oh, do we? No, no, no. We're soy exporters. Got to be, man.

David Hoffman:
[5:16] Are we? Soy exporters. Yeah, it's huge. A bunch of soy boys over here. Agriculture is huge. And we also want to produce a board of trade to manage trade relationships moving forward. So we're trying to like smooth out the whole trade war thing. Yeah. Trump also, probably more urgently, and this is probably Trump's weak spot, wants to pressure Xi to use China's influence over Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and push Iran towards a peace deal. This is what Xi knows is a card that he has to play, is like Iran is a weak spot for Trump. What does China want? China has, Xi has really signaled that Taiwan is his top agenda. He wants the United States to back off from its presence around Taiwan, especially with arms sales to Taiwan. And also, they want access to American technology. They want semiconductors. They want chips from NVIDIA, which is very relevant because Jensen Huang was on the plane to China with Trump.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:14] And Jensen very much wants that.

David Hoffman:
[6:16] Jensen also wants to sell chips to China, as you could imagine. which brings us to our breaking news we are now allowing the united states is now allowing nvidia to sell ships to china that is the news that broke yesterday and so it seems like trump is coming with a gift right off of the plane saying hey gee thanks for inviting me we're gonna sell you chips now yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:34] Meet jensen he's here to sell you some chips uh nvidia stock all-time highs obviously on that news all-time highs so where are we at like nvidia like a seven eight trillion dollar it flipped silver

David Hoffman:
[6:47] As an asset.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:48] Flipped silver yeah you think it's coming for gold maybe maybe chips why the

David Hoffman:
[6:52] Hell not dude i don't know what happens in this nvidia is worth more than every gdp of every country in the world outside of the united states and china.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:01] Oh my god that's wild all right well talk about

David Hoffman:
[7:05] A country of geniuses in a data center.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:07] Yeah exactly uh and i you know i think probably a lot of investors feeling like geniuses if they bought NVIDIA two or three years ago, huh?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:16] Kevin Warsh, final confirmation for his Fed chairman seat as well. So new incoming chair of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, succeeding Jerome Powell. This was a pretty contentious vote, apparently. So the most contentious in history? Is that what I'm saying? He was confirmed on a 54 to 45 vote.

David Hoffman:
[7:35] Down party lines, basically.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:36] Down party lines, I guess. Okay, so the question is, what is Kevin Warsh going to be like? Like, is he going to be dovish or is he going to be hawkish on the Fed rates? There's some challenges for him in terms of being dovish. I know President Trump would love him to lower rates, keep lowering them, bring them down to zero.

David Hoffman:
[7:56] He was selected because he was like, yeah, I'll totally lower rates for you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:00] Donald Trump. Kevin said it was a good idea because we have this deflationary pressure from AI and a new Fed chair has to factor in that deflationary pressure from AI into the story here. and that was his reason for, like stated reason anyway, for thinking about this from a more dovish perspective. But that's going to be hard to do, David, given the inflation numbers that we have been seeing recently. And this was maybe the biggest news on the week. Tell us about inflation. What did we hit on the week?

David Hoffman:
[8:30] April inflation rose to 3.8%, which is the highest level since May of 2023. So we all remember 2020, end of 2021, start of 2022, to an ultra 2022 fastest rate hikes in history inflation went up to eight like 11 came back down, And then it got down to like below 3% and has been 2.5% to 2.7% ever since then. And it jumped up to 3.8%. So highest level since May of 2023 when we got inflation under control in the first place. And so this is absolutely the high oil prices downstream of the Iran war finally showing up in inflation across the board.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:11] Also, we're seeing this not just in core CPI. We're seeing this in PPI numbers, which are up even higher. So PPI, this is producer inflation. So this tends to be a leading indicator for CPI, actually. So this could be a direction of travel for CPI. It came in year over year at 6% versus the estimation here. This is what analysts estimated 4.9%. Yikes. Okay, so that is well above expectations. Well above.

David Hoffman:
[9:39] So it's going to be very hard, as you said, for Kevin Warsh to cut rates in an environment that is asking for rate hikes, actually. And in fact, I believe this is what Polymarket is saying, is that this has led to an increase in the probability of a Fed rate hike in 2026, up 8% this week. It started the week at 20%. It is now at 28%. A Fed rate hike? Of a Fed rate hike in 2026.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:05] Yeah. Oh, my God. That was not even on my radar at all that we'd be hiking rates.

David Hoffman:
[10:10] Yeah. There's a couple other inputs into this. Bond market yields are flashing red. So the 10-year is up to 4.5%. That's the highest since July. The 30-year treasury yield is above 5%. Which is, somebody's tweeted this out, like, this is Trump taco territory. So around 5% yields is when Trump starts to, like, freak out, sweat bullets, and, like, do something specifically to lower yields, whatever he can.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:40] And we know that because we saw this with the tariff scare around this time last year. It's when bond yields started to creep up.

David Hoffman:
[10:46] This is when Trump bends.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:47] Yeah, he backed down, right? And so will he back down on something with Iran?

David Hoffman:
[10:50] What will he do to bend over? I don't really know. But like this historically, this is always.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:54] What we've been talking about the pain, Iran pain versus U.S. pain. This is President Trump pain right here when you have CPI coming in at 3.8 percent when you have that's what you would think,

David Hoffman:
[11:05] Ryan. You would think that Trump would feel pain. But actually, Trump was asked, what does he think about America's financial situation this week from a news reporter? Let's go hear what his answer was.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:19] Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. That's the only thing that motivates. There you go. Single track mind, David. Not thinking about American financial situation at all.

David Hoffman:
[11:50] Dude, do you think that that was like, was that an oopsie? Or do you think he knew what he was doing?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:57] No, I think if you want to be charitable about that, you could say he was just single track mind. The nuclear issue is a bigger issue than short-term American financial pressure. That's how you could interpret this, but the sound bite is not great.

David Hoffman:
[12:12] When has any president ever said ever, I don't care about the average American's financial situation oh yeah yikes it's.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:21] Not great uh oil up on the week as well we're above 102 barrels at least at one point this week i'm not sure where we are at the time of recording so

David Hoffman:
[12:29] About there that's about but all of.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:31] This and like you know stock market is shaking this off stock market is roaring dude

David Hoffman:
[12:36] This is the big like takeaway that i have is that ai stocks and and also very strong corporate earnings are just plowing through any we have gotten so many bear cases thrown at the stock market in the last few months. We've got the Iran conflict, which did, the stock market, but then it recovered. Biggest recovery ever. High oil prices, increasing inflation, high yields. Consumer sentiment is at all-time lows. Something we skipped over is that because of the inflation numbers that came in in April, real wage growth has not kept up with inflation over the last two or three years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:15] Wait, do we have a chart of that?

David Hoffman:
[13:17] Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:17] Is this it?

David Hoffman:
[13:19] Yes, that's the one. Yes.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:20] Okay. Inflation is now eating up all wage gains for the first time in about three years. This is painful for Americans in a true financial squeeze. They're showing here as CPI, again, the 3.8% we were talking about, wage gains over the past year, 3.6%. So wage is not keeping up. This is very painful.

David Hoffman:
[13:37] Wage is not keeping up. But Donald Trump doesn't care about the average American's financial situation, as he just said. And the stock market is just plowing through all of those. Everything that I just said, it just does not care because for the fourth out of five days this week, the S&P 500 had its highest close ever. So since the bottom of the Iran war, which happened right at the turn of April, so six weeks ago, I'd say stock market, US stocks have added $11 trillion in market value in the last one and a half months. The S&P since the bottom is up 18%. The NASDAQ is up 28%. NVIDIA specifically is up 38%. Despite no Iran peace deal, despite oil above $100, $100. The market doesn't care.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:22] Capital's happy. Investor's happy for sure. But I think this is the chart really back to the CPI inflation when that is above wage growth. This is a key political indicator. This is not going to win you any elections. That time period where this was the case was 2022 through 2023. You could just see it right on the chart. By the way, these charts always crack me up. There's literally in every inflation chart that we see, like from now on, for eternity, We're going to see this gap here. No inflation data due to government shutdown. It's on every single chart, and it drives me crazy. Look at this.

David Hoffman:
[14:56] Dude, I have a solution for inflation. If you just shut down the government,

David Hoffman:
[15:01] we'll stop having less inflation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:02] We'll stop inflation that way. Yeah. Well, should we check in on crypto then? What's the story over in our world?

David Hoffman:
[15:10] I want to get into crypto, Ryan. We want to talk about the crypto prices this week. But first, it technically is about crypto. You remember IBIT broke, smashed through all records of the fastest ETF to get to $10 billion. IBIT, that's the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:26] Untouchable.

David Hoffman:
[15:26] Untouchable. 49 days to $10 billion. Who could beat it? Beat the previous record by like 200 days or something. Something monumental. Yeah. There is another ETF that is on the verge of beating iBit's record.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:40] Tell me it's a crypto ETF.

David Hoffman:
[15:42] It is a AI memory stomp ETF. The ticker is DRAM. It launched 42 days ago, and it is at $9.5 billion. So it's half a billion dollars short, and it has seven days from the time of recording.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:57] It's going to make it.

David Hoffman:
[15:58] It's totally going to make it. The biggest component is SanDisk, which is the best performing stock by far in 2026, and also Micron, MU. And there's just been like a huge surge of memory stonks and DRAM just launched at the perfect time to capture that. And so it is basically just shy of $10 billion, 42 days live into trading.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:19] And this is because DRAM is kind of the main supply chain constraint right now. Memory is, yes. The AI compute demand squeeze, basically. That's right. And so this is why we're seeing NVIDIA all-time high. This is why we're seeing DRAM all-time high. I even heard last week Larry Fink started talking about AI compute being like the new oil, the new commodity. You're sort of seeing these prices, right? Bitcoin as a commodity, DRAM as an AI commodity. No wonder prices are as high as they are.

David Hoffman:
[16:50] Yeah. Yeah, I think there's like been two phases in the AI revolution so far. And we're in the middle of the second one. The first one is the rise of chips and compute with NVIDIA. And just because this is the chatbot revolution, like LLMs are really good chatbots. They answer questions very, very well. And then memory is the AI agent phase of this whole thing where, okay, sure, we have good compute, but our agents are better when they can remember more things at once. They have longer context windows. They can work for longer. And so memory is the new bottleneck. And so this is the current inflection in AI stocks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:24] You're telling me we should have pivoted to AI commodities about a year ago, huh, David?

David Hoffman:
[17:28] A little bit more than that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:29] We've been in crypto. We've been in crypto. Well, tell us about crypto on the week. We're up a little bit. A little bit? Bitcoin is above 80K, which is a good sign. So where are we on the week?

David Hoffman:
[17:40] Yeah, 81,600 of 2.2% on the week. Severely lagging the S&P. I think we talked last week about the correlation between Bitcoin and QQQ.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:51] It's correlated, but I wish it was more correlated right now.

David Hoffman:
[17:54] I think the correlation broke this week. I mean, we're back up a little bit, but up until yesterday, We were down on the week while equities were up on the week. Strategy, MicroStrategy made a buy for ants. I mean, it's pretty big as far as I'm concerned.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:09] 43 million bucks, that's it? Why are they even tweeting this? What a waste of my time.

David Hoffman:
[18:16] 533 Bitcoins bought to buy strategy this week. Tom Lee bought 26,000 Ether for $63 million.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:24] Oh my God, Tom.

David Hoffman:
[18:25] So this is one of the weeks in which Bitmine actually bought more in dollar terms.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:29] Is he going to have a 5% ETH supply party? I mean, he's getting close, right, Tom Lee?

David Hoffman:
[18:33] He is at 4.31%. At ConsenSys, the conference from Coindesk that just happened in Miami, Tom Lee said that Bitmine is actually going to slow its ETH purchases as it approaches 5% of the supply.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:48] I mean, he's approaching 5% of the supply. He outbid MicroStrategy. Yeah, it is.

David Hoffman:
[18:53] This is a slow purchase this week, and he's still outbid MicroStrategy. Anyways, ETH had $2,300 up half a percent on the week. Just not the same amount of, like, liveliness in the crypto markets that there are in the equities.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:06] I mean, so if you talk to even, like, kind of the cycle people like Michael Nadeau, which I do on a weekly basis, If we lock in above 80K, so this 80 to 85K number, and we have a few weekly closes like this, it kind of breaks the back of the bear market. I mean, that's how it's worked in previous cycles.

David Hoffman:
[19:29] You're talking about the whole cycle thing of just like, yo, we're in the middle of the down cycle. It will be unprecedented.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:35] I mean, we're looking at some charts this week where like the short-term holder cost basis, all short-term holder cost basis right now, it's about 79K. And we closed above 79K last week. If we close above it this week and the next week and maybe the week after... Every time that's happened, that has kind of marked an end to the cycle. There's other things, too, like 200-week moving average. You got to keep an eye on that.

David Hoffman:
[20:02] Can we look at the long-term charts for Bitcoin and Ether? I just want to zoom really far out because the very long-term chart for Ether.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:10] Are you asking me to chart? I'm just pulling coin get-go.

David Hoffman:
[20:12] Well, I gave you the image.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:13] Oh, you did?

David Hoffman:
[20:14] I did, yeah. We're in the agenda. We're doing the agenda.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:18] Thanks, man. This is great. All right. Let me click over. There we go. Yes, we can, David. We can certainly pull up those. Here's my chart. This is long term.

David Hoffman:
[20:26] Okay, so this goes all the way back to 2020 and 2021. And you can see just like the bottoms. I am not a charter. This is like flashing red territory. David is drawing lines on charts, but whatever. There has just been a very solid base being established of all of the lows established in 2022 and 2023 again. And then again in 2024 and where we are now. We're like right above the lows. And same thing with Bitcoin. and Bitcoin has just like this kind of stable-ish foundation. Yeah. It looks good. It looks good. It doesn't look like it's going to explode anytime soon, but it looks like it's doing the thing, which I said it was going to do, Ryan, at the very beginning of the year, which is slow grind up. Remember me saying those words? Yeah. The next thing that happened is we actually drastically dumped down, but I'm still in this slow grind up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:13] That did happen. That did happen in February, right? But now we're slowly grinding up.

David Hoffman:
[21:17] We're slowly grinding up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:18] Well, Michael Nato's take is that we're still headed for another dump down before the slow.

David Hoffman:
[21:23] I can also, yeah, right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:24] Dump down to the 60s. Picture that. That could happen. Back to Fair Market Valley territory, and then we kind of slow grind. So it's too early for this to happen compared to other cycles would be his take. I don't know if he's right or not. But again, some of these numbers might change his mind as well. And this cycle could be different.

David Hoffman:
[21:41] I don't know what the bear catalyst is natively to the crypto industry, but we did kind of paint the bear case earlier. High inflation, high oil prices, consumer income, not beating inflation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:56] It's what we're not seeing, David, is like we're not seeing the new buyers. OK, so spot volumes are anemic right now for Bitcoin. And so that's what we haven't seen yet. Although ETF is showing up and micro strategy purchases are still showing up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:11] Let's talk about some of these ETFs coming down the pipeline because these are new. So there's a hype ETF and there are also some Zcash ETFs that have just launched this week.

David Hoffman:
[22:22] One. Filed. So the hype ETF is live. This is from 21 shares. So back to my hype staking enabled. So this is hype staking 0.3%. management fee uh, Hype is just getting more and more legitimacy, especially as the markets trading on Hype are more and more equities markets.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:43] Zcash too, right? This is Grayscale filing to launch, as you said, the first spot ETF for Zcash. Zcash, making it in the Wall Street Journal cover, it's more a secret version of Bitcoin. It's on a tear. That's what the title says. Zcash reminds some of Bitcoin's early days, but some see its privacy features as a red flag. Zcash has been on a tear from a price perspective lately. I got to say, it is hilarious to see it in an ETF. Let's do my cypherpunk privacy coin. What are we going to do with it? Let's just put it in an ETF.

David Hoffman:
[23:15] Zcash is the real return to cypherpunk values. I'll buy it in my brokerage. But the reason why Zcash is being touted, if you will, is it because it is partly very institutional friendly. It has the non-shielded version that institutions can touch as opposed to Monero, which is just, dark by default.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:39] You sent me this tweet by the way this is a first time nvidia is a top asset by open interest uh and for the top five assets by volume are stocks so i'm i'm not sure what market we're looking at i'm guessing this is a crypto native perps market is this like founder of uh

David Hoffman:
[23:55] Ostium uh who which is a perps market uh perps platform uh and just as what she's highlighting is that uh the most traded assets on their perps crypto perps platform is our equities.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:08] Yeah, I guess there's lessons in there. Our infrastructure is fantastic.

David Hoffman:
[24:12] Our infrastructure is so good.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:16] We got more to talk about, including Circle, Earnings Day, they had a price pump. Why? Also, tell me about Anthropic D-Day, David. The stocks took a tumble, at least the perp stocks. And Hyperliquid and Coinbase, they're doing something together. I thought they were competitors. All this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

David Hoffman:
[24:36] So it's still earnings season and we got circles earnings this week. The standout number is that USCC on-chain transaction volume jumped 250% year over year. And so there was a unique idiosyncratic jump in specifically USCC transaction volume in Q1. USCC now has 63% of total stablecoin volume out of all stablecoins, which is crazy because it does not have anywhere near 60% of total market supply of stablecoins. That's still like Tether. So volume for USEC is up bigly. If you want to go down even into the grittier details of the Circle earnings, there's this newer line item, from the P&L that their USYC money market fund didn't even know this existed, is the largest money market fund in existence according to Circle. Wait, what? Yeah. What is this? Yeah, they have a money market fund And it netted them $35 million in Q1.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:35] Wait, they have a money market fund that they provide to investors?

David Hoffman:
[25:39] I guess so.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:40] Tokenized money market? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Hoffman:
[25:43] And so this is, I think they have a similar problem that Coinbase had when Coinbase first went public was they had a very non-diversified revenue line. Like Coinbase was from trading volumes and Coinbase's big thing was the need to diversify the revenue. And I think this is happening to Circle. And so Circle has diversified revenue because of this money micro fund.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:02] Well, I did see another revenue diversification was the announced raising of $222 million. That's a weird number. $222 million in pre-sale of their ARK token. I suppose it's an ARK token, right? Is that what's being sold here?

David Hoffman:
[26:19] Yeah, it's the ARK blockchain.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:20] So ARK blockchain is a layer one EVM chain from Circle. We've talked about this before. A $3 billion valuation. Chunky. And what is the purpose of ARK, according to Circle? they're building an agent-led future. So this is part of the AI. I've heard this one before. Circle, they're doing command line interface, agent wallets, agent marketplace. We're going to be the agent chain. That's our layer one. And on all of these earnings reports, what you just talked about and the Circle ARK announcements, stock was up by 9%. I got to ask you though, what do you think the value accrual Why are ARK tokens valuable, do you think? Because it's not money. I don't think they're asking that question. Stablecoins are money.

David Hoffman:
[27:08] I don't think they're asking that question.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:10] But these are investors and it's 2026. If we're not asking the question in 2026, when do we get to ask the question?

David Hoffman:
[27:18] I think the better question is, can they make money from it? Which the historic answer of, can you make a layer one and make money from issuing a layer one token? That answer is always yes.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:28] Wait wait wait wait wait you think that like i mean there's some savvy investors here uh blackrock apollo um a16z crypto investors yeah so you you just think they're just doing the l1 trade that's worked previously and they're doing that again without any any idea how arc tokens will actually accrue value because i i assumed it would be through some sort of mev it can't really be transaction fees and or maybe they do kind of the mega e thing where the usdc on arc provides some yield to the token validators or something i just like i

David Hoffman:
[28:06] Think you're overthinking it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:06] I'm overthinking a three billion dollar token valuation for an l1 in 2026 yeah someone get jeremy a lair on the on the phone like i want to be in the analyst call i hope somebody asks him that in a quarter of a year.

David Hoffman:
[28:20] How do these tokens have value?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:21] Yeah. Maybe we should get them back on Bankless. Maybe he'll tell us. Sure.

David Hoffman:
[28:24] Maybe he won't be able to. I'd love to hear what the updated narrative is for... I mean, tempo falls into this category. ARK falls into this category. Plasma falls into this category.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:37] Why are we still asking this question six years in? We still don't understand how these tokens will accrue value. Yeah. And yet they do are valuable.

David Hoffman:
[28:46] They are demanded by the market at the very least. My big question is like, it's not even a question. I would just be so intimidated of going up against Tempo.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:56] Even if you're Circle?

David Hoffman:
[28:57] If you're Circle, yeah. I mean, because Circle's bread and butter is the USDC token. Doing a blockchain is a whole new thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:06] It can't be that hard, right? It can't be that hard.

David Hoffman:
[29:11] Can't be that hard. Maybe we should launch a layer one.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:14] We thought about it.

David Hoffman:
[29:16] No, we didn't.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:17] But we could never get our heads wrapped around value accrual.

David Hoffman:
[29:20] So we did the responsible thing and we didn't.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:24] This is a pretty big deal. Another, I guess, feather in the cap of USDC and Circle. There's always the question, if you're bullish USDC, do you buy Circle or do you buy Coinbase, right? I always have a question there because Coinbase does get 50% of all USDC revenue. Am I wrong about that? That used to be the case. That's right. Anyway, so USDC is now deploying on Hyperliquid. There was a Coinbase and Hyperliquid partnership of some sort. Maybe you get me up to speed on this. What are we looking at?

David Hoffman:
[29:50] Yeah, so there's some backstory here. So a while ago, there was a competition to become the native stablecoin issuer on Hyperliquid.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:58] That was like last summer, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a while ago.

David Hoffman:
[30:00] And they did this just because Hyperliquid had 8% of all USCC lived on Hyperliquid. Crazy number. Except all the yields from that 8% of USCC was going to Coinbase, their competitor, or Circle. Just like they had all of this, 8% of all USCC yields. That's an incredible amount of money. And so they auctioned off the right to use the USDH ticker, the USD Hyperliquid. This was won by an organization called Native Markets, which got the contract to issue and manage the aligned stablecoin. That's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:35] There was a whole DAO vote, right? There was a request for a proposal. I remember that drama. Yep.

David Hoffman:
[30:39] Yep. Yep. Yep. And so Native Markets won. They could issue USEH. They would manage the treasuries in the back, basically just like Circle or Tether, but native to Hyperliquid. Native Markets would pocket 10% of the yield, and then they would give 90% of the yield back to Hyperliquid. one half of the yield that Hyperliquid would get would go to buy and burn hype the other half would be distributed to HIP 3 deployers that were using the USEH trading pair, That only got so much traction. It got some traction, not a lot, not enough to displace actual USDC on Hyperliquid. And so this is where we get to part two of the story, which is what's being announced today. coin coinbase is saying that okay we are the native issuer of usdc on hyperliquid and we are partnering with hyperliquid to basically resemble the same deal structure as usdh and usdh is being sunsetted coinbase sounds like they bought the ip and assets from native markets and so native markets is being sunsetted in favor of usdc from coinbase and coinbase is the uh default official treasury manager for uscc on hyperliquid wow.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:53] Uh one comment stablecoin network effects undefeated here correct showing usdc dominance yep other comment i thought coinbase and hyperliquid were competitors don't they both have perps platforms aren't they both kind of on cheney

David Hoffman:
[32:07] I kind of don't get it wait.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:10] What don't you get like are you to your

David Hoffman:
[32:11] Point just like like coinbase is rolling out their perps platform hyperliquid is the perps platform coinbase also in addition to this is now staking 500 000 hype and so because this is a requirement uh to to do the job and so it's.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:27] All both fries we all win together this is like president she and uh president trump i guess and i

David Hoffman:
[32:32] Guess i guess but like economically coinbase and circle were making more money because they pocketed all of the yields and clearly Hyperliquid wasn't able to displace USDC with their USDH platform very much. And then Coinbase was like, eh, we'll just give it to you. Here you go.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:52] Who's bending the knee to whom, I wonder. I think this is still a net win for Circle Coinbase, actually, over Hyperliquid. Why? Because it's their coin, and they have established network effect dominance, and Hyperliquid tried to unseat them and couldn't, and they're back at the table.

David Hoffman:
[33:09] But they tried to unseat them and couldn't, which means that Coinbase and Circle won, and they get to keep all the yields, but now they're just giving it to Hyperliquid. It's like, huh, we won, but you guys win.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:22] I think they're playing a longer game, post-genius, network effects. You get the coin on Hyperliquid, then you win everything else. You win all of the other platforms as well.

David Hoffman:
[33:32] I agree with you. You have to invoke Tether there in order for that to really make sense. This is now a defensive moat against Tether from ever penetrating into Hyperliquid. But just to be clear, this is a big economic dub for Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid revenue, do you know how much Hyperliquid revenue grows from this?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:51] Oh, yeah.

David Hoffman:
[33:54] 25%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:54] 25%?

David Hoffman:
[33:55] Hyperliquid revenue grows by 25%. There's going to be like $450,000 of hype bought and burnt. every day because of this proposal.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:04] And again what does coinbase move

David Hoffman:
[34:06] Get they they kind of get like an optics thumbs up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:10] Hyperliquid is just a money printing machine you know you saw the coinbase layoffs like 14 or something is there 700 800 employees and hyperliquid has like 14 employees yeah yeah what are you gonna say they laid off more like they laid off like i don't know 10 times more than Hyperliquid actually has as employees. It's just an insanely profitable business.

David Hoffman:
[34:31] For all the reasons to be bullish, Hyperliquid, which I'm sure there's plenty, one of them is that they are already ahead of the curve in terms of just like labor in the world of AI.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:41] Oh, yeah.

David Hoffman:
[34:42] It's like you don't have anyone to lay off at Hyperliquid. They're the most lean protocol of all time.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:46] Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I mean, Tether is similar in this way, too, I suppose. So there's the high margin, low employee businesses are the future. Speaking of hyperliquid

David Hoffman:
[34:56] I have a conspiracy about how this came to be I think it has Kobe fingerprints all over it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:02] You mean Kobe? Kobe's still working for Coinbase, right? Correct.

David Hoffman:
[35:06] And he's also a hyperliquid bull.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:07] You think he's... Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right.

David Hoffman:
[35:11] Well, that makes sense. I think this is Kobe influence.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:13] All right. Well, he'll never claim it, I'm sure, at least not publicly. Hyperliquid, speaking of them, more and more things are getting priced first in our crypto perps markets, including this CBRS. What is CBRS?

David Hoffman:
[35:28] It is a company that just IPO'd on the trad market today. The IPO price was $185 per share, and so that's what people bought it at, raising $5.5 billion. It is an AI chipmaker specializing in just super high-performance inference chips. It's a new NVIDIA, new-age NVIDIA IPO-ing, very, very hyped. The interesting story here is that the pre-market shares for CBRS was trading on Hyperliquid, and Hyperliquid traders were pricing it around $300. So IPO-ing for $185, Hyperliquid is pricing it at $300, and then this morning at the day of the listing, it opens at $363. And so the conversation is giving Hyperliquid traders clout for correctly pricing this thing ahead.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:18] Of the IPO. Okay, so what you're saying, what you're implying here is that Hyperliquid is actually doing price discovery for these stocks.

David Hoffman:
[36:25] Correct, for illiquid pre-IPO stocks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:28] Yeah, that's right. Okay, and so that worked here. But also on the week, there's some times where it doesn't work so well. So this was the D-Day for anthropic secondaries. And you're going to have to get me up to speed on this story. How this came across my feed was basically like... Anthropik perps trading down like $300 billion or something like this after they announced that they weren't going to honor pre-market, pre-IPO deals or something? Tell me what happened here.

David Hoffman:
[37:02] So what was potentially the trigger was this tweet from Casey Craig out of Euphoria, Euphoria, the tap-to-trade app on Megameth, which just went live today. We'll talk about that later. She tweeted out a pretty funny tweet. She goes, in quotes, I'm buying Spot Anthropic on the Solana blockchain, end quote. Spot Anthropic?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:20] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[37:21] Not quite. One of the funniest phrases I've heard all week. There's nothing Spot about this. Brother, you are four layers of financial abstraction and broker crime away from touching actual Anthropic share certificates. Your spot position is a tokenized receipt for a possible future economic exposure to a Cayman SPV that owns shares in another Delaware SPV that maybe owns rights to further future equity pending transfer approval. You are approximately anthropic adjacent at best.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:50] That's kind of right, though. There's not a lot of property rights on the tokens people are buying in these pre-IPO markets.

David Hoffman:
[37:57] And then you do like another tokenization process of that Delaware SPV of a Cayman SPV that's trading on the Solana blockchain. Okay, so that tweet goes around. 24 hours later, there is a new article on the Claude support page titled Unauthorized Anthropic Stock Sales and Investment Scams. Basically saying, hey, if you guys aren't approved by us, which they have the right to, this is true for all private companies, they have to approve all share transfers. And so it doesn't matter if you SPV and SPV and SPV, if Anthropic doesn't approve it, you're not getting it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:32] So you might have a useless IOU, you might actually not have any rights to the token. They say this in the press release, any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock or any interest in Anthropic stock that has not been approved by our board of directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.

David Hoffman:
[38:48] Yes. Yes. And like this is stocks that trade on like a on a platform like Hyperliquid or Solana or some tokenized pre-market. It's pretty adversarial to the interests of the private company that the stocks are represents. So there are approved transfers happens all the time. it's a very big market and then there are unapproved transfers and there is a growing amount of unapproved transfers and then there's also ryan just straight up fraud as well people saying hey i've got like i've got an spv with 50 million dollars of anthropic shares you send me money and i'll hold that money for you and then i will give you stocks later but then they don't give them the socks later and they also don't hold their money that's also happening.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:30] OpenAI is saying the same thing as well. They did a press release right after Anthropic. And so this led to Anthropic shares on pre-stocks on Solana. That's, I guess, one of the platforms that are doing this. They dropped 34%. OpenAI tokens fell 40%. So evaporating, I guess, hundreds of millions in billions, I should say.

David Hoffman:
[39:53] In perceived value.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:53] And perceived market cap value on these platforms.

David Hoffman:
[39:56] But this is what happens, Ryan, when the private markets are just so large for so long. Like, what do you expect? People want access to the coolest companies ever. They're going to do crazy things to have exposure to things like Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:12] I mean, big picture. It's so shitty that all of these companies in the AI boom that we're experiencing now, generational event. Last time this happened was the dot-com boom. All of these gains are private, you know, and that sucks. That sucks on the way up, on the way down.

David Hoffman:
[40:29] But then it also sucks that when people attempt to get exposure to these things, like they finagle their way in. Yeah, then Anthropic says, hey, that's not allowed, and then nukes everyone by 40%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:38] Yeah. I think at this stage, David, public markets in the U.S., like, they're almost non-functional with respect to... new entrants and new assets because

David Hoffman:
[40:49] We need like a regular we need like a regulation jubilee it's just cost too much to become publicly listed and it's too encumbering we need it to be less encumbering for start.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:01] From scratch rebuild

David Hoffman:
[41:02] Rebuild yeah yeah i mean yeah dude like i don't know if the next generation can take another stripe or open ai or anthropic turning into a trillion dollars without any like 0.001% of a generation getting access to that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:16] Yeah, it's brutal. And, you know, I don't see a lot of people in Congress talking about it at all. No, because the way public markets have failed.

David Hoffman:
[41:24] They're trading. They're trading against us.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:26] Yeah, that's right. David, we got more to talk about. Maybe some of the fix could be the Clarity Act. We get these tokens available to the public sooner. There was a make or break vote that just happened. We'll tell you the results. Also, three of the biggest financial institutions in the world just released tokenized money markets on Ethereum. We'll explore that too. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Big vote on the week for the Clarity Act. It just happened and it passed. Before we get to that, let's talk about Brian Armstrong. This is him in the halls of Congress. He was talking about Coinbase's support for the Clarity Act in its current manifestation. Let's listen. Hey, everyone. Brian Armstrong here. I'm back in the Senate office building in D.C. in anticipation of crypto market structure legislation going to markup on Thursday, which would be a historic moment. And the energy here is just palpable. So first off, just want to say a big thank you to the Senate and, of course, their staff who have been putting in countless hours to get this bill to a good place. I don't think it's ever been in a more strong position and more bipartisan position. And I also want to thank the 3.7 million stand with crypto advocates who have made their voices heard to get this legislation to where it is today. Now, there were a number of open issues that have now made incredible progress.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:44] Stablecoin rewards was a big one. You know, I think there was a healthy compromise there brokered by Senators Tillis and also Brooks. And, you know, it was a good compromise because both sides left a little bit unhappy. But at least we got to a place that we can all live with. And then, of course, the other issues, which I mentioned in my ex-post back in January that were problematic in the prior draft, things like DeFi and tokenized equities and CFTC authority. These have all been improved and fixed from our point of view. And so the bill is stronger than ever. It's bipartisan. It's ready to go to markup. And I'm incredibly bullish on what this could mean for American innovation and ordinary Americans benefiting from this technology. So we'll keep you updated and keep fighting the good fight. Thanks. So, David, he was talking about the latest rendition of the Senate Banking Committee draft of the Clarity Act. And there was a key vote that happened on Thursday. We have the results of that vote. It passed. The Senate Banking Committee, what was, let's see, 15 to 9. Okay, that was the vote in the Senate Banking Committee. And it wasn't conclusive either that it would pass or that we'd get as many Democrats on board to vote in favor of this bill as we actually did. So it looks like the results of this vote were better than many in crypto actually expected. And there was some question going into this vote too about how they might edit it, what amendments might be in play here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:11] One was the BRCA. We've talked about this previously. This is something we care a lot about at Bankless. Coin Center cares about. This is non-custodial developer protections.

David Hoffman:
[44:21] This is the Roman storm part of the bill.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:24] Yes. And it's pretty much a Bankless DeFi red line here like it has to be in. And Coin Center's put in Yeoman's work to actually make this happen from 2018. They got the BRCA tied to Clarity Act fantastically, David. BRCA actually made it through this committee. And this was a committee that it might not have made through. So that's fantastic news.

David Hoffman:
[44:47] We're over a big hurdle that could have killed us.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:48] We are. Now, what passing means is that the committee has marked up the bill and then they're going to send it to the full Senate floor. Okay? So this is a banking committee. This is not the Senate floor yet. but even passing this is a big deal. What has to happen next is we actually have to get 60 votes in the Senate. That happens in June. I'll remind you that we had 68 votes for the Genius Act. So that's kind of the precedent. And that was approved. So we need to get 60. And that will require many key Democrats to come aboard here. But it passing the Senate Banking Committee is a good sign, certainly. And then after that, by the way, after it gets through the Senate, we have to go through the House. Remember, there was another bill in the House.

David Hoffman:
[45:36] There's so much left.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:38] Takes a long time. And then ultimately, you get to the presidential signature. So the White House goal is July 4th. Of course, that might slip into August, but this was a key vote. And David, there was a lot of pushback here. I don't know if you saw on your timeline, all of the banks sending mailers, sending emails out, freaking out over Mother's Day.

David Hoffman:
[45:59] I wasn't totally tapped into what was going on. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:02] I mean, I just saw some of this. It looked like a bunch of banks. This is a tweet. The bank banking cartel is in full panic mode. While Americans were celebrating Mother's Day with their families, the CEO of the American Bankers Association sent a frantic alert to every bank CEO in the country demanding immediate engagement. So they're still freaking out. They're still worried about the stablecoin yield issue. So this is Robert Nichols. He's the ABA president. That's the American Bankers Association saying like, this is, we need your help. You got to contact your senators, you know, this is going to cause capital flight and deposit flight from our banks if the yield issue goes through untouched. So anyway, the banks are trying their best, but despite that, Clarity has gotten through. Again, some compromises. We discussed the compromises last week. Can you remind folks what is actually in this version of the Clarity bill?

David Hoffman:
[46:56] So there's three main things. There's the splitting of the oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. SEC, surprise, gets security like tokens. CFTC, surprise, gets commodity like digital assets. It also creates a mature blockchain chain test. So tokens can migrate from a security to a commodity once the network is sufficiently decentralized with a pretty fantastic definition of decentralization, like one that actually did its homework. Then there's stablecoin yield. It bans the passive yield, allows activity-based rewards. Still kind of like TBD on what that means. And that's a question that I have for Alex Thorne when we interview him tomorrow. Or I think I'm on that interview. You're not. So that'll be a question that I will ask him. Jake Scherwinski tweeted out yesterday, the clarity text came out pretty good last night. It's not perfect, but nothing that passes Congress ever will be. If we want a market structure bill, we need to be pragmatic. There are compromises here, but the deal is decent. Now we wait for it to survive the amendments.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:58] I'm happy enough with it so long as we get BRCA. And again, that's not a given. So there's still some pushback. Senators, particularly Democrats, they want some give on ethics provisioning, preventing Trump from doing things in crypto. That's still contentious. I'm not sure how that will pan out, but that could be some fly in the ointment. And David, one of the things I was most excited about reading was actually this, you said it was a fantastic definition of decentralization. And it really is. So in the Clarity Act, there's like a full definition of what decentralization actually means. So if you're going to get into that commodity status, you have to be fully open source. You have to be permissionless and credibly neutral. So there can't be a person or group that has unilateral ability to restrict, censor, or prohibit use of... of the system at all. It has to be distributed. And they define that. You can't have more than 49% of outstanding units. So, you know, kind of the voting power has to be distributed.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:59] Autonomous digital ledger system. So it has to abide by something decentralized, has to abide by consensus rules. Like it has to be in code. You know, this has to be fully open for everyone to see and then economically independent. So Gabe Shapiro says the U.S. Congress is officially more cypherpunk than most of you on here are. He was talking to the crypto Twitter crowd because this is like a really strong definition of decentralization and it made the clarity bill here. It's pretty solid.

David Hoffman:
[49:33] So the Democrats in total and aggregate made something like 100 plus, maybe 200 plus amendments, proposed amendments. Elizabeth Warren made 16 proposed amendments to the bill.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:45] Yeah, she's not happy about this.

David Hoffman:
[49:46] Do you know how many of her 16 amendments actually made it through?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:49] No, actually.

David Hoffman:
[49:50] Zero. Really? None of them.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:53] Well, she was trying to amend crazy things. Like I saw something. Probably. There was anti-Defi amendments in there. There was definitely some things that would scale back the BRCA in there. I think there was things that were glommed on to prevent crypto companies from opening master accounts with the Fed. So there's all this weird stuff that they tried to tie in here. It looks like that got rejected. Just trying to

David Hoffman:
[50:15] Choke out whatever she can about crypto left and right and just not getting any of them. Let's go to the Polymarket. Clarity Act signed into law in 2026? We've been watching this Polymarket, probably our most watched Polymarket ever, coming in at 69% chance likely. Nice. that is up just from last week where it was like 60%. So we're up 9% on the week. It's still like, I want it to be higher.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:43] But you saw it has to go through all of this process still, even still.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:47] But this was a pretty major step. We'll take 70% odds here. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[50:52] Yeah. Okay. Money markets on Ethereum. Three of the biggest financial institutions of the world, BlackRock, JP Morgan, Fidelity, all shipped tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. I actually kind of thought we already had tokenized money markets on Ethereum from all of these.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:07] Not like these. We're getting more. Okay. Not like these. Tell me about this. So we had Biddle. Okay. Right.

David Hoffman:
[51:11] Which wasn't a tokenized money market. That was tokenized T-bills.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:14] That's right. Now BlackRock is doing two new tokenized funds. They have filed this week for that. So Biddle is about $2.5 billion in AUM. These new ones are going to digitize an existing treasury liquidity fund that they have, a $6.1 billion fund. So they're going to put that on chain. And they're explicitly targeting stablecoin holders with this. So this is BlackRock, like full steam ahead, just rolling out tokenized funds. You can see the Biddle charts here, by the way. Well, I have this somewhere in the charts. Yeah, realworldassets.com. The bigger one, I thought, on the week, from a news perspective, was JP Morgan. So, they're going to launch their second tokenized fund on Ethereum. So, they had something called MONEY, M-O-N-Y. But this one is even bigger.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:06] It's JLTXX. So, this stands for JP Morgan On-Chain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund. And this is an actual registered government money market fund. Okay? So, it's a big deal and it's really purpose-built for the Genius Act. It comes out of kind of the Genius Act of requirements. And if you buy a money market fund, say you want that 3% to 4% yield in your brokerage account, you're probably doing something like a Vanguard-type fund. You might be paying fairly high basis points on this. This is only 16 basis points. Okay, so the best available right now is Vanguard 11. This is 16. So this is very competitive. And again, this is JP Morgan releasing it. The third was Fidelity. So they released something called FILQ, same playbook, this is international. Anyway, it's very clear to me that all of the biggest, like look at who just said, JP Morgan, biggest bank in the US. Biggest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, two more, Fidelity, $8 trillion in assets under management, and they're all doing money market funds. So they see that this is the future, and they'll just do more of this post-Clarity Act as well.

David Hoffman:
[53:19] I have mixed opinions on this. Obviously, it's good. We want more value capital to go on to Ethereum. The contrast, the juxtaposition that I'm seeing is a couple of weeks ago, we had the worst exploits in DeFi where people were looping these crypto native assets on these crypto native protocols to get extra yield. And so we were looping our S ETH or the kelp restate ETH in Aave. Crypto native asset, crypto native protocol hooked to another crypto native protocol to juice up the yield. And then on the flip side of this, the juxtaposition is we're getting the too big to fail banks putting some of the world's safest yield directly on chain. And so it's like an antidote to the problem that we just had that we just created for ourselves with this crypto native looping to really get the yield. Like, OK, we now have maybe it's less yield, but we now have like very safe and stable yield, but we're getting it from the banks and we're not getting it from DeFi. So I feel mixed about that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:17] I was thinking, too, actually. I've been doing a lot of reflecting because, David, we're six years in to the Bankless podcast now and the Bankless thesis. And actually, James on our team, he rolled out all of our transcripts. So if you're a Bankless premium member, you can now access this. You can have an MCP connection. So dial your Claude, dial your chat GPT into the entire Bankless content library. and you can get that beamed into your interface.

David Hoffman:
[54:47] The amount of data that this represents, the amount of conversations that we've had with literally everyone, that's crazy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:56] I know. And so it's 1,230 episodes that we have in this library here. And I hooked it up to my client.

David Hoffman:
[55:03] 1,200? Sorry, 1,230.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:06] Yeah, not 12,000. 1,230 episodes. That's... Right? All of our transcripts, everything.

David Hoffman:
[55:14] We have been doing this for so long.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:16] I know. And so I was going down memory lane. And the question I had is, you know, our first 10 episodes, which I feel like were cornerstone to the entire bankless thesis. We did economic bandwidth episode. We did triple point asset ETH episode. We did money as a meme.

David Hoffman:
[55:33] We basically painted our own roadmap of understanding everything for the next like four years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:39] That was kind of the bankless thesis in those first 10 episodes. and so I asked Claude to analyze all the transcripts and now give us a report card six years later. How well did it hold up?

David Hoffman:
[55:51] Did you make sure that they're like, hey, don't glaze me?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:53] No, I didn't ask it not to glaze me. All right, so maybe it's glazing me.

David Hoffman:
[55:57] So we have a little bit of glaze in here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:58] I feel like my Claude doesn't glaze me, but that's probably what everyone says.

David Hoffman:
[56:02] Maybe your Claude is just really smart.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:04] Yeah, my Claude is smart. I know this. Anyway, here's what it gave us. Overall grade on the bankless thesis was an A minus. Okay. On the ETH bet specifically, we got a B.

David Hoffman:
[56:15] There would have been an A in a different era.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:18] Yes. It said we got the macro call right. Okay. So our very first Bankless episodes were during March 2020, COVID. Okay. We predicted Fed money printing, all that stuff. ETH is a triple point asset. Claude loved that. It said that became the industry standard way of evaluating ETH.

David Hoffman:
[56:36] Let's fucking go.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:37] Oh, I forgot to tell you our stats. Okay. So since our first episode recording, ETH is up 20X. All right.

David Hoffman:
[56:45] I was on a thread guy earlier, and he asked me what the best business decision we ever did at Bankless was. And I just go, talking about ETH.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:55] Well, you had to do it in 2020. If you did it in 2022,

David Hoffman:
[57:00] Not so much.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:02] All right, so ETH was $110 at the time. Bitcoin was $5K. Crypto market cap, we're up 20X since our first episode. DeFi TVL, this is where we outperformed, David. We're up 320x in DeFi TVL. And those were our big bets, right? It was Bitcoin, it was Ether, Ether in particular as a monetary asset, and DeFi, right? So that's why we're getting the A minus. I look at those prices, I'm like, okay, that's justified. Maybe if you started listing a bank list in 2021, maybe not so much.

David Hoffman:
[57:34] Yeah, the frame of reference really matters here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:37] That's right. And then so we got DeFi, we got a B plus on that aspect of it. Again, it summed up to an A-. But the things where we got lower scores were... it said we were too triumphalist uh the bankless future arrived through trad fi etfs blackrock stable right this is what i was just saying not against it exactly and so it said this is the framing that needs work it wasn't actually a uh it was a hybrid future it wasn't a fully bankless future yeah and also said eth uh uh didn't lead the decade so eth underperformed relative to like what we were hoping at least to this point we had a multi-chain blind spot and we were underway unstable coins. So that's kind of how I feel. That's fair.

David Hoffman:
[58:19] Yeah, I agree with the analysis. I think the grading is perhaps subjective, but the analysis I think is spot on.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:25] Yeah, I was going to give us more like a B overall. Yeah. Although, I don't know, maybe like 20X, that's A territory. It depends on when you measure it from.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:38] David, you want to tell me about Euphoria? I know you're very excited about this app.

David Hoffman:
[58:42] We like crypto native apps. This is a Euphoria as a tap to trade app on MegaEath. It's probably the most excited, anticipated mainnet release on MegaEath. I already know you, Ryan. You definitely have not traded, done this app, used this app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:58] No, I'm not into trading Euphoria, no.

David Hoffman:
[59:00] It's a price line and it's like one second charts and there's a line and you press your finger on parts of your screen and this little square gets highlighted and if the price line goes into the square, then you get money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:14] Is this investing? Is that what we're doing here?

David Hoffman:
[59:17] No, it's trading.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:18] Okay. It's trading. Trading.

David Hoffman:
[59:19] You're making bets like 17 seconds into the future.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:23] Oh my God. Wow.

David Hoffman:
[59:25] Anyways, they just went live. It's pretty fun. There's going to be a trap to trade competition or a bunch of other like activations. So I think it's pretty cool.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:33] You can only do that on a very high TPS blockchain. I'm guessing so. That's right. That's part of the mega-eth picture. That's right. Well, we got to end it there. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.