ROLLUP: The ETH Issuance War | $130M Coldcard Exploit | Saylor Sells Again | Uniswap Launchpad

TRANSCRIPT

David Hoffman:
[0:04] Bankless nation it's the first week of august and it's time for the bankless weekly roll-up we got some topics of the week coming your way the e issuance war we got another debate about an eip in ethereum lands this one's this one's different in the sense that it talks about ether as money so everyone,

David Hoffman:
[0:22] has an opinion on it including me and ryan maybe david yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:25] I want to find out your opinion, because we haven't discussed this yet, but I know, I think it was like three weeks ago when we heard rumor that this was on the horizon. You said to me, you were excited for the drama. So my friend, you got some drama. All right. You got some discussion about this and I want to get your take.

David Hoffman:
[0:47] Yeah. It's basically the ETH researchers versus the app layer, which usually you don't get such a clean line dividing this drama, but that's what we got. So we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about the cold card exploit. So over a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin drained from what was thought to be very safe and secure Bitcoin cold storage. Everyone, the common line was that everyone did everything right. And yet the Bitcoin got yanked. We're going to talk about how that happened and what is happening as a result of that over in Bitcoin land. Talking about the stock market, S&P and Dow Jones and the indices hitting all-time highs when there was blood on the streets last week. Dude, Wild. Wild. Apparently, you can have an all-time high in the stock market at any time, no matter what happened the day or a week prior.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:41] By the dip week. Also, we got to talk about Saylor. He sold some Bitcoin again, and he explained himself this time. He said, I speak as one saver to another. What was he talking about? We'll discuss that as well. Let's start, actually, David, with the stock market all-time high. This is the S&P, so it's not the NASDAQ. Like S&P, what, had been off in July like 5%, 6%. I know NASDAQ was down about 10%, something like this. And we got what looks to be in the first week of August a V-shaped recovery out of that hole. And now S&P is all-time high. NASDAQ has not quite hit it. But like, can you explain that? What happened?

David Hoffman:
[2:22] I don't know, man. I'm sharing my screen and you can see the candle. The candle's big. Like we had that gargantuan rise out of the bottom of the Iran war with three massive candles that brought up the S&P up 11% across like 20 days. The candle looks like that. It is a, the weekly candle in the S&P is a 3% candle that brought it from 7,500 all the way up to the tippy top, almost 7,800. We're down a little bit at the time of recording. But just like a gargantuan like recovery out from like where the S&P was down 3.5%, off of its highs and then it rocketed up 6 or 7% in a very short amount of time and this was all on the backs of Leopold, from situational awareness getting liquidated right at the bottom. So he must have been the absolute pico bottom because he had a pretty decent fund that had a lot of the assets that had just made incredible gains and forced seller at the bottom. And then I think maybe that gave the market the confidence it needed to just, hit the buy button because the game's not over and Citadel was stepping in. That's my read.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:37] It does seem like confirmation that at least the market thinks the game is not over for AI and the AI trade continues. I mean, this is even more stark if you look at NASDAQ, right? Kind of that V-shaped recovery. It almost looks like Ashenbrenner got margin called. He got carried out. He got liquidated here. And then once his positions were liquidated, the market recovered. And so it almost looked like it was targeted to take him out. And then the market spins back on the other side of things. Now, last week, we weren't sure if he was out-out, through his capital style. Hedge fund is kind of deleted. They are underwater. Apparently, this was still a flesh wound. It took a pretty large chunk out of his fund. So he is down 67% in July. But, David, still up big on the year, okay? This fund was outperforming, doing incredible work earlier this year. It's been an absolute superstar fund. It had a rough month, but did not completely collapse under the weight of this liquidation. The fund went from $20 to $30 billion peak to about $8 to $10 billion remaining. Meaning most of that in privates, a lot of the public positions were sold off and liquidated as a result of this. So he's still around, he's still fighting. And it looks like the market has just recovered from this large liquidation.

David Hoffman:
[5:05] He was reportedly on 400% leverage, which, yeah, like you get liquidated at that number.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:15] Didn't you tell me he was at his wedding when this happened?

David Hoffman:
[5:18] So he was, I think, I think it was the day. So there's a Vanity Fair article. There's a bunch of articles titled, How to Lose Billions and Gain a Wife in Two Days. Whether or not he was like in his tuxedo like you know like ready to walk up to the altar i don't know the timing of that but like it was inside of that window of opportunity where he was getting liquidated and had to get on the phone with citadel's ken griffin to bail him out, not bail him out but just like buy his bags uh but yes um.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:55] Story for the grandkids

David Hoffman:
[5:57] Sorry not not the best coded-ness of that memory, I think, for his future. But, like, whatever. Ultimately, his fund is still up 80% on the year, so it's still one of the best performing funds in a while, but you'd have to be a little... Better than crypto assets. As an LP, you would have to at least be, like, at best mixed feelings because you were previously up like 5x, 6x on your money, and now you're up 80%. And so you're still doing very well, but you were doing really well a second ago.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:31] Yeah, but it's also just sort of the risk management wasn't there, right? I mean, this is quite a cascading collapse. So I mean, LP has got to be a little shaken, little rattled. But the FOMO is back in.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:42] The AI trade continues. How about our friend Michael Saylor over at Strategy? He sold some Bitcoin on the week. What was that about?

David Hoffman:
[6:50] Yeah, so we have like, I think, three main instances of Saylor selling Bitcoin. The first one where he sold 32 Bitcoin, collapsed for the Bitcoin price by like $18,000. The next sell of Bitcoin, I can't remember the numbers, but it was much more than 32. It was like in the hundreds, maybe a couple hundred Bitcoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:11] Yeah, that's right.

David Hoffman:
[7:12] And Bitcoin was like flat or like even marginally up on the week. This week, MicroStrategy announced that it sold 1,638 Bitcoin worth $105 million, and Bitcoin jumps from $62,000 to $63,500. So Bitcoin up on the week. Ryan, I'm bullish about this news. I'm bullish about this news.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:36] Wait, why?

David Hoffman:
[7:39] Michael Saylor, the number one holder of Bitcoin, selling over a thousand and a half Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up? The bull case for me is that Michael Saylor needs to be removed from the market as a key man risk to Bitcoin price. And when he is selling $105 million of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin market doesn't care and actually goes up, it's like, oh, the market no longer cares about you. You're free to move to the background as the main marginal pricer of Bitcoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:14] Yeah, I think that's true. He's no longer the main character of Bitcoin price action, which is probably healthy because the market, I think when he sold the 32 Bitcoin, priced all of these future sales in basically. And now right now, the market outlook on what strategy is going to do is it's going to be a graceful, unwind process of some of this leverage. It's not going to be chaos. It's not going to be cascades. We know what Saylor is going to do. If there's an MNAV premium, he'll mint some more MSTR shares. MSDR holders might feel differently about this. They might not feel great about what's happening. But, you know, he's going to sell Bitcoin in order to pay preferred share owners. I noticed SDRC is back up above 90. It was like 92, 93.

David Hoffman:
[8:59] SDRC looks good.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:01] So much, much healthier. It's up 30% from the June lows, which at $71, that was like a good buy back then. Right now, yeah, SDRC. Right now, Bitcoin is kind of in an interesting place. Like, what are we at the time of recording? What, 64K, something like that?

David Hoffman:
[9:21] $64,500. We have been riding the 200-week moving average since the middle of June, basically. So like six weeks. We have been riding the 200-week moving average from $62,000 to where it is right now at like $64,000.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:37] So the 200-week is about $64,000. And we're just riding that. And we have been under that What, like 40 days? Like a few times briefly during this bear market, haven't we? But like not a long time.

David Hoffman:
[9:50] 40 days? No, I would say under a week we have been under the 200-week moving average.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:55] That's lately, I guess.

David Hoffman:
[9:56] That's lately. Historically, like we were under the 200-week moving average for like, yeah, I think 40 to maybe a little bit longer. But that was, again, post-3Rs Capital, Luna, FTX, Contagion, which, come on, you don't see any blood on the streets like that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:11] Oh, that's interesting. So Bitcoin has been highly correlated to NASDAQ. So part of the reason Bitcoin is up on the week is because NASDAQ is also up. And the correlation has...

David Hoffman:
[10:22] I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:25] The correlation has like not been higher in recent terms. But the question is...

David Hoffman:
[10:30] If you look at the NASDAQ chart and the Bitcoin chart, those are just different looking charts.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:34] I mean, yeah. I guess like in recent times, over the last 30 days. But I guess I think the question is, has Bitcoin bottomed relative to that?

David Hoffman:
[10:46] It's always the question. It's always the question.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:49] And so like, how are you feeling about it personally? Are you prepared to sell your AI stocks? Are you like fading this recovery, market recovery? And like buying crypto assets? Are you still like, okay, AI trade back on. I guess we're in for like, I don't know, round three, round four, whatever realm this is in terms of AI trade recovery here. What's your outlook right now?

David Hoffman:
[11:13] Yeah, I've been asking and talking about this question a lot in the last week or so. And I think we've been talking and asking about this question a lot on the weekly roll-up. As a vibe, the most non-technical, like, pseudo-answer possible, if you just look at this chart, which is the Bitcoin chart with weekly candles that goes all the way back to 2020, you see the cycles, right? You see the 2020 cycle, you see the 2022 to 2023 and a half bear market, and then you see the current cycle where Bitcoin went up to 130. Uh, this, the tail end of the current cycle coming down from 130,000, it just doesn't look done yet. The chart doesn't look like it's done completing its cycle. So as a vibe, like you can see it going down a little bit more and then having a big U-shaped bear market for like a year and a half.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:05] Sure.

David Hoffman:
[12:06] So as just speaking as to the visual aesthetics of the chart, it doesn't look done yet, Which is not a good answer, but it kind of correlates with like the whole, the cycles are intact. And if we believe the cycle is intact, the visual shape of the chart looks 85% complete, but not 100%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:26] I'll give you another vibe that I feel, which is kind of sort of similar to this, which is we don't fully bottom until the AI trade is over. And the market acknowledges that. Because I think what's happening, even as I'm looking at you, you're not prepared to sell your AI tech stocks and your QQQ, whatever else you have in your TradFi portfolio and buy crypto right now. Because you don't quite think it's over yet. And that's what I think the rest of the market also sees. They're still disproportionately in AI. They're still in NASDAQ. And they haven't yet come back to crypto. And I don't think we get that full recovery until that happens, until the AI, like the AI trade might have to die in order for crypto to live. I think that's, from a vibe perspective, how this could all play out.

David Hoffman:
[13:20] I've been thinking about that more and more and more. I was listening to your episode with Michael Nadeau this last week and the word time-based capitulation came up a bunch. Where I don't have any reasons for why there's any more forced sellers or sellers at all in Bitcoin. Saylor is selling 1,000 and a half Bitcoin and the price is going up. No one is a forced seller. There's not that much leverage in the system. Plenty of leverage and perps in the down market coins, but whatever.

David Hoffman:
[13:50] So who's going to be the forced seller? The answer is no one. But there could be opportunity cost sellers where the QQQ, and like Micron and like SK Hynix is just doubles in price. And you're like, what am I doing with this stupid fucking Bitcoin that's still at $64,000? And I want to get into the AI trade, so I'm selling so I can buy the top of the AI trade. And like, you can kind of see that. And that could take the rest of, when I just said, the aesthetic completion of the AI, of the Bitcoin cycle, could need six more months. And you could see the AI trade running for six more months, nine more months, and then the time-based capitulation of Bitcoin holders being like, fuck these stupid Bitcoins, let me buy some more memory stocks, even though memory stocks have gone up 5,000%. I kind of think you can see that happening.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:51] I can see it too. I can see it too. That might be what is playing out right

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:55] now and what has to play out before we see the bottom and before we see the bear market conclude. David, we got more to discuss. I want to talk to you about the ETH issuance war. What is going on? What is the proposal that rocked the Ethereum world this week? Also, the cold card exploit. Victims did everything right. What happened? Could this happen to other self-custodial holders? You said it seemed like no one did anything wrong, but somebody did. Okay, there was a problem in this. We'll unpack what that is, all this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

David Hoffman:
[15:31] On August 4th, six Ethereum researchers, Jerome Deschiches, Justin Drake, DAPLionPintail, and a few others, proposed a change to ETH's monetary policy, mainly how ETH staking rewards work. This is being called the tapered issuance burn. The idea is that Ethereum pays people, pays stakers for staking their ETH, but there's no cap on how much Ethereum pays for ETH stakers. No matter how much of the total ETH supply gets staked, even if all of the total ETH supply gets staked, stakers will still earn a positive yield, which means that there is always an incentive to stake more ETH forever. And so people are worried that, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:12] Can I stop you? So there's no cap, but there is a curve to issuance, right? issuance does go down, the more stakers that come into the section.

David Hoffman:
[16:21] That's not true. Always issuance always goes up the more ETH gets staked. The rate of new issuance goes down. Yeah, but a proportionate.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:30] Like a smaller proportionate amount, the rate of new issuance, right? That's the way to say it.

David Hoffman:
[16:35] Yes, yes, yes. So right now we have a third of all ETH staked, but there's been a perpetual march upwards, and this proposal, like, Proposes the idea that we don't want that number to, you know, approach 100%. We don't want 100% of ETH staked, but there's nothing to stop that from happening because there's always an incentive to stake more because more ETH will be minted to pay for the security of the ETH being staked. And so what this proposal does is that Ethereum starts destroying, burning a slice of the rewards before stakers receive them.

David Hoffman:
[17:13] The more of the supply, the stake, that stakes, the bigger the slice that is burned. So this is called ETH targeting. This previously was called ETH targeting, or excuse me, stake targeting. So once staking, ETH staking, hits about half, 50% of all ETH, and we're about 33% of all ETH right now, the entire reward gets burned, meaning staking pays essentially nothing beyond 50% stake, and the incentive to stake more ETH basically shuts off. And so this caps the incentive for staking ETH beyond 50%. So at like 45%, the staking rewards is almost nothing. You only have like 5% of the otherwise issued staking rewards being paid to stakers. And then at 50% is zero. So for people staking today, if this proposal were to go through, the practical effect would be that their base staking yield drops roughly in half from about 2.6% yield to 1.2% yield if this change were to go in right now. Who is pushing this and who is against this? The EF and EF researchers like this proposal.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:25] Is that generally true or is it just the subset of EF and research types who have their names on this proposal. By the way, Justin Drake is one of them. So I don't think he said anything public in support about this, but he is named on the proposal.

David Hoffman:
[18:40] He's on the, he's authoring the proposal, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:43] But you're not saying it's like all of the ETH researchers and all of the EF.

David Hoffman:
[18:47] Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's no consensus inside of the EF. Yes, you're right. So the people who have proposed this are all EF researchers and like the researcher type. The people who are against this are, interestingly, all of the DAP player people. So DeFi founders like Stani from Aave, Mike Silagazi from Etherfy, Lido is against this. DC investor, as a community member, he is very anti this. And so it's basically a handful of EF researchers and then basically everybody else.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:23] Sounds like a great proposal.

David Hoffman:
[19:26] Let me try and just like run through the arguments for both sides.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:30] Because here's the thing. Here's the thing. As you're running through that, I think I really want to understand, right? Because the proposal takes as a given that there is some problem right now and some problem with this. And it takes a given that we were on this march towards 100%. And the closer we get to 100%, the more problems that we'll see. I think that assumption really needs to be reinforced. Yeah, so what do the authors say about the problem here?

David Hoffman:
[20:03] Yeah, so the pro case, the pro argument for tapering slash targeting is that Ethereum is overpaying for security. And as a broad strokes, Ethereum has been discussed that Ethereum is overpaying for security, so therefore we should reduce issuance. That has happened many times. When we were in the proof of work phase, issuance went from 5 Ether block down to 3 Ether block down to 2 Ether block before we had the merge. And so there's a little bit of precedent of, hey, we're overpaying for security. Let's pay less for security. And that's just a matter of like economic efficiency and making ether.

David Hoffman:
[20:41] It goes along the social contract of minimum viable issuance. Like if we like minimum viable issuance, this is that. So that's one pro argument. Yeah. The next pro argument is that unbounded staking, so a capless, a constraintless amount of incentive to stake ETH erodes vanilla ETH's moneyness and centralizes the network on LSTs. And so with 100% ETH staked, you're going to see like Lido's staked ETH or like RocketPool, our ETH. Those will be Ether in the Ethereum economy because vanilla ETH will all be staked. So you'll actually see a disappearance of vanilla ETH and it will be replaced by liquid staking derivative tokens. And so as far as the Ethereum economy is concerned, basically it's going to be Lido's staked ETH or Rocketpool's RETH, some sort of LST, rather than vanilla ETH. And so essentially that captures the network by these liquid staking tokens and vanilla ETH kind of disappears.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:47] And also there's an argument there under that, that ETH would, ETH, vanilla ETH would lose its moneyness relative to those other units, right? It'd be almost like rather than in the U.S. economy, rather than us using the dollar, we're using like treasuries or something like that. Or not even treasuries, we're using like Bank of America money markets in order to pay for

David Hoffman:
[22:09] Our star market tokens. right yeah exactly yeah uh-huh and yeah and so like this also just kind of uh if you are just trying to hold vanilla ether, it this allows if this proposal goes through holding vanilla ether will just be much more palatable and you won't get diluted nearly as much by holding vanilla ether and so it's a it's a pro eth is money uh change is is an argument is and then like, Is an argument, yeah. And then lastly, it's like a minimal change. It's really not that complicated. They call it credible. It's just a permanent single constant that leaves most things intact. Like MEV is not being changed. EIP 1559 is not being changed. And it's kind of being framed as like just completing the post-merge monetary architecture.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:55] It's a minimal like technical change. It's just like a few variables in the code we have to change to make this happen. Like saying it's a minimal change from us, like anytime you do anything to monetary policy and issuance, It ain't a minimal change. This is a pretty big social change, but they're saying it's minimal from a tech perspective. It's not complicated. There's not going to be a bug in the system. It's pretty easy to implement.

David Hoffman:
[23:18] Okay, the opposition argues that this actually just accelerates the centralization that it claims to fix. So compressing yield, reducing the amount of issuance for ETH stakers, makes it more difficult for the marginal ETH stakers. So solo stakers and home stakers are going to have a harder time because they are less efficient than the industrial commercial stakers like Lido or Figments.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:43] Well, you just cut their revenue in half, but they have the same fixed costs.

David Hoffman:
[23:47] Exactly. And so people who really like operationalize and minimize their fixed costs do better here. But you know, the hobbyist staker, the people that carry their own hardware.

David Hoffman:
[23:59] Pay for pay for all the costs, those people are getting pushed out. And that's going to be the home staker, the solo validator, which as a social contract, and as like a system, you know, Ethereum has always preserved the sovereignty and power of the individual solo staker. That's like, that's who runs Ethereum. You know, Ethereum is not a product by corporations and institutions. It's a product by the user for the user. And this makes that harder. The next argument is that staking yield is DeFi's base rate. So leveraged staking loops, LST collateral on Aave, you know, structured product, institutional and treasury allocations. All of that, all the fact that staking yield is a thing is a pretty core primitive that holds up a lot of DeFi. Tapering it towards zero collapses so much of what DeFi is built on and just reduces a lot of the Ether in DeFi. So if your vanilla Ether isn't getting yield, well, you can get it in DeFi. And taking the yield away from Ether, I think the argument is that a lot of Ether would not have a reason to be in DeFi, and DeFi would just have less TVL and be overall less rich as like a sector.

David Hoffman:
[25:18] And then lastly, credibility and process. This is just like the issuance debate. There's like a 48-hour comment period, an aggressive timeline from the researchers, who are saying like, yo, let's push this through. And then the community is like, yeah, it's too fast. And then also just like issuance in Ethereum is already extremely low. It's one of the lowest, if not the lowest chain with the lowest issuance. Why are we trying to lower it anymore?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:48] It's as low as Bitcoin. It's as low as Bitcoin after like 12 years, you know, of Bitcoin doing this.

David Hoffman:
[25:55] So it's just why are we trying to fix a problem that's not actually a problem? Like perfect is the enemy of good. We're pretty good here. Why are we trying to be perfect? And then also modelers of saying that this is just like we underestimate second order effects if this changes go through. We don't really know the second order effects and that is dangerous. And so let's just not touch it. So I feel like those are the two sides.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:23] There's another sub-argument here that I've seen, which I think is also good, which is like, hey, anytime you open the window to changing the dials on monetary and issuance, you kind of reset the clock. And now everyone knows your store of value asset can actually be tweaked and changed. This is the ancient Bitcoin 21 million argument. And their core criticism of Ethereum is like, you guys move the dials. And so like, anytime you move the dials, you prove that the dials can be moved and you prove that there's some sort of centralized cabal, you know, like doing this. And so like if you move the dial, you sully the experiment at all. Right. And if you're in position is now we'll move it a few times.

David Hoffman:
[27:06] And I think we'll move it to being more restrictive and beneficial to ETH holders.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:11] That's right. That's right.

David Hoffman:
[27:12] Always in that direction. Not like always in favor of less issuance, not more issuance. I'm not, I'm not into that argument. I think the version of that argument that I do agree with is, yo, Tom Lee just bought 5% of ETH, and his whole entire idea is that he gets to stake it and get the yield, and we're just rugging that from him. What the fuck? And so that, as an adulteration of the social contract, I think is very valid. And Tom Lee is going to be like, what the fuck are you guys doing? What if this pisses off Tom Lee and he sells the ETHR? Not inherently because Tom Lee is like I'm worried about you guys like tinkering with the monetary policy, Because I'm worried about you guys destroying the value of my investment.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:57] I actually think that you might be underrating that, or at least I rate that much higher.

David Hoffman:
[28:02] The tinkering of the dials of monetary policy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:05] Oh, yeah. I think there has to be absolute overwhelming consensus. It has to be a bill going through Congress with 99 senators voting yes for any issuance change to happen. And especially when we're at this point of like...

David Hoffman:
[28:23] I agree with that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:23] We already have like really good issuance. It's already fine. What problems are you solving? I guess I'm sort of revealing my hand of like where I sit on this debate a little too much. But I guess I really do believe the Bitcoin argument of like you got to ossify that monetary policy. And the faster that Ethereum gets to complete ossification of it and that no one touches it because it's like good enough, the better for the moneyness use case and the story value use case. What I think is interesting about both sides, and then we can talk about some of the takes that we've seen and what you think and maybe what I think, is both sides are speaking on behalf of the solo stakers, you know, of decentralization. This is about the solo stakers. Both sides are saying, hey, this is good for the moneyness of ETH, right? So the side that's saying, hey, we got to push this forward is saying, yeah, we're doing this because ETH is money. And the side that says, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do this because you'll kill ETH's ability to be money because you're dialing with a monetary policy and you lose credibility that way. And also ETH is money in the DeFi economy. You nuke the DeFi economy somehow because of staking yields going down. Then you also lose moneyness there, right? So

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:43] It is, I guess, if you zoom out, refreshing that both sides really care about ETH as a monetary asset. So I mean, that's a win I take from this episode. They're just divided in terms of how to actually do this. So what are some takes that you've seen from around the community that you've enjoyed or some points that we really didn't highlight yet?

David Hoffman:
[30:06] Most of the takes on crypto Twitter, Ethereum Twitter have really just been from the anti camp because it's their position to react to this proposal. So Stani says, Ethereum should not focus on gaming staking issuance and cutting staking rewards. That is not the problem. Ethereum needs solve priorities or privacy, scalability and security. Yield becomes unpredictable, a negative factor for any institutional buyer, making ETH borrowing strategies mostly unviable. Ethereum should not be punished for its growth. DC Investor says, issuance is already very low. Staking yield is now a key driver. Predictability matters. Solo stakers should not be priced out. Focus on scaling. Mike from Ether5 says, disappointing on every level. EIP released with only 48 hours notice. Every builder on Ethereum opposes this. This reinforces the Ethereum critics' position that the network is run by a small group of insiders. I think that has been interesting to me. If you build an ETH product, an ETH deposit product, like Aave or EtherFi, you don't like this. No one who's building an ETH DeFi product likes this. And I think that is a very important signal. And I think this is something that the Ethereum community has been trying to elevate in the 2024 EF crisis of please listen to the builders building on Ethereum and making Ethereum valuable and Ether valuable, and that is Mike and Stani.

David Hoffman:
[31:28] And Lido. And so like those people have, these people have skin in the game, and the people with skin in the game are saying no. And the ETH researchers, you can argue maybe they love the ivory tower like technical perfection, but they have less skin in the game than Donnie from Aave or Mike from Etherfy because they're researchers. They don't have businesses built on this ecosystem on top of this foundation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:54] So what's your take on this? You think it's a good idea? You think it's a bad idea? If it was up to David, would you vote yay or nay?

David Hoffman:
[32:02] I mean, exactly what I just said. I can't in good faith vote yay for this proposal when every single DeFi builder is saying no. DeFi is how ETH became monetized as a monetary asset. And if they're not happy, then it's hard to in good conscience vote yes for this. I like this proposal from a technical purity standpoint.

David Hoffman:
[32:27] In a vacuum, I think this is a good proposal if we didn't have DeFi and Tom Lee and all of the path dependency that we have, but we do have that. So this would have been a great proposal to have introduced like years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, eight years ago, when like as soon as possible, basically. Maybe one improvement to the proposal is that let's not have this jump from 100% ETH targeting to 50% ETH targeting. Maybe we can implement it over a very long time like a decade so like first it targets 100% then it targets 99% then it targets 98% and that takes 10 years to approach 50% so it smooths it out, but I don't think even DeFi would really like that at all and so I also agree with your point, it's ETH, the monetary asset we need overwhelming consensus in order to change this and so I like the proposal I like the proposal in a vacuum, but there's too much baggage to say yes yeah I um.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:37] I think that my position is I don't even like the proposal in a vacuum, probably. Oh, interesting. Like it's interesting as like a hypothetical in a white paper, like what if we did this? But I think you need overwhelmingly good reasons in order to actually change issuance. And I don't see those reasons. Like the benefit does not seem worth the cost as opposed to the merch, okay? Incredibly obvious. full community buy-in that we were going to take proof-of-work issuance to proof-of-stake issuance and change issuance policy accordingly. There was a technical reason for that. There was massive benefit. There was overwhelming consensus. This doesn't even have anywhere near the mark. Like the benefits are sort of ethereal and vague and second order and we don't like know. But the other thing I go to is like just kind of an Occam test of just

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:35] If this got implemented, would this make me more bullish or more bearish on ETH? And the conclusion there is more bearish. Like, I would not be more bullish if this proposal was actually pushed out and implemented. And on that basis alone, it's kind of, it's not a good idea from my perspective. Now, there's another question, which is what's the probability that this goes forward and actually gets pushed, gets moved through? And I think that probability is like quickly approaching 0%. So I think we're like under five. Like we're just, I don't think this is going anywhere.

David Hoffman:
[35:12] I don't think this is going anywhere.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:13] Particularly given the reception that it received. If it had a completely different reception, if there's overwhelming positive sentiment, then maybe it would have a shot. But it is dead in the water at this point. And I predict there will be no issuance changes. So at some level, some of the people saying, aha, look, over Ethereum, it's just like, it's changing issuance policy again. See, it's not decentralized, it's captured, all these things. No, this is what decentralization actually looks like. This is the messy process of decentralization taking place. There's a proposal, it's pushed out there. The rough consensus of all of the stakeholders and participants and investors and researchers and app builders weigh in on it and it hasn't reached the threshold and so it doesn't happen it gets shot down and that's all healthy so We just had a long conversation about it, but like, I don't think it's going anywhere. And, you know, if this would make you bearish, you don't have to worry about that because I don't, it's just not going to happen.

David Hoffman:
[36:13] I would agree. Yeah. Like I said, it's one thing to be frustrated about the EF for not being communicative to its app builders and its DeFi ecosystem. It's another thing to push a proposal where the DeFi builders are all saying, this harms my business. Yeah. And also my business is in the business of monetizing ETH and making it more valuable. So WTF. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:36] Are you going to host some debates on this though?

David Hoffman:
[36:39] Um, I was thinking about hosting a debate, but instead I think I'm just going to talk to some of the DeFi app builders about their opinions. Because like we, I did this episode actually with Casper and Onsgar forever ago. Like this is not a new proposal. This is, this proposal is like two years old now. It was some sort of targeting proposal.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:03] And particularly at a time where some assumptions didn't play out, remember? Like people were thinking that Lido would sort of dominate everything and just like get all of the stake. And like, I think some of the things that people assume just like haven't played out fully. But yeah, we have covered this trend before, haven't we?

David Hoffman:
[37:19] Yeah, yeah. And so I've already technically done the pro side of it. And so now I'm going to do the anti side of it. And like, I can embody the pro argument well enough where like I can throw my

David Hoffman:
[37:32] interesting like angles at them and they can see what I can see what they do with it. All right, let's move on to the cold card exploit. So this is an individual named Jonathan Goodman, who tweeted out $1.6 million in Bitcoin was drained from my account on July 29th in the cold card wallet hack. My Bitcoin was in cold storage. My keys were on a cold card device kept in a safety deposit box that had never been connected to the internet. This part's nerdy, but here's what happened. Hackers discovered a vulnerability in the part of the hardware wallet code used to create seed phrases. This allowed them to use AI to brute force guessing seed phrases.

David Hoffman:
[38:11] I was at our cottage and heard about the hack today. No way this affects me, I thought. I logged onto Wasabi, the software that lets me view my Bitcoin wallets online. Right away, I saw lines of red transactions, withdrawals, and I knew... From 9.36 to 9.43 p.m. on July 9th, every wallet I ever had had been emptied. 18.2 Bitcoin gone, over $1.6 million Canadian. Perhaps the hardest part about this is that I did everything right. I never shared my seed phrase with anyone. My devices never touched the internet. Everything was kept in multiple safes and safety deposit boxes. None of it mattered. Oof.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:53] Absolutely brutal. Absolutely brutal. So the cold card, for those not familiar with it, is sort of like a Ledger wallet or a Trezor, some more popular devices, I think optimized really for the Bitcoin community. So it's a smaller wallet in terms of footprint, but didn't support other coins. It was more the Bitcoin purist approach to it. And of course, this same story played out in, I don't know, maybe thousands of other cases,

David Hoffman:
[39:23] Maybe more. $30 million total in Bitcoin being exploited from offline hardware wallets.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:29] And some of these, you know, are pretty like smaller holders, of course. These are retail investors and they're doing the thing that Bitcoiners are supposed to do, going bankless, can do, which is like not your keys, not your crypto. Okay, not... Not my keys, not my crypto, I will have custody of some keys. That's what they decide to do. And they use a hardware wallet and still it gets drained. Maybe let's talk about what went wrong here specifically. So the original poster said something to do with the way randomness, that the seed phrase was generated. What went wrong in the cold car? Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[40:11] So with a seed phrase, a seed phrase has theoretical randomness, as in like there are so many different possible combinations that even with AI, there's no way, to try all of them because there's more possible ways to create a seed phrase or a private key than there are like atoms in the universe. Like that's the theoretical security of Bitcoin. Apparently, the way that Coldcard was generating seed phrases was imperfect in its randomness, as in it had, a kink or a flaw in its randomness generation that allowed for AI to detect that pattern and reduce the scope of how much randomness it would need to do. And this is actually just like, once upon a time, I read a book on ciphers. You would actually like it. I should send it to you. And like the number one way to break a cipher is that there is an imperfect, imprecise way of generating randomness. And there's like a flaw that gets exploited by some pattern analysis.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:12] Like some kind of weak entropy. So whenever you're generating a private key of some form, you have to have actual true randomness.

David Hoffman:
[41:20] Perfect randomness.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:21] Yeah, there are many ways to do this. It's not like an unknown thing. It was just apparently the cold car wallet, it had a random number generator that was like much better, but it was not actually switched on. So it was using this much weaker form of randomness instead. And they didn't know about this.

David Hoffman:
[41:40] Green wasn't switched on.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:42] It wasn't switched on. They were using the weaker method rather than the stronger that they actually had. And so that means everyone who used a cold card wallet from this time period, from like 2021 and beyond, actually generated private keys that could be guessed by some attacker. Some sort of that was not impervious to a brute force attack. Because that's what's happening right now. And there have been waves of these attacks, right? Where, you know, hackers are just looking for cold card wallets, finding that profile, and then guessing at the seed phrase using AI to do that. And then once they do, they drain the wallet.

David Hoffman:
[42:29] Brutal. We don't really know who the hackers are. Like, obviously, I think everyone's first reaction is North Korea. We don't really have any evidence that it's North Korea.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:38] It could be anyone at this point, especially after this gets publicized and anyone who wants to go try to do this can like then go do this. I think we should tie this off with a few other things. One is this problem does not exist in the Trezor ledger wallets and the more popular wallets they have since, you know, released and emphasized how their randomness is actually generated. So it's not a flaw that happens in some of these other hardware wallets. So should be like safe if you're using one of those I guess the other thing though is does this pose an existential question as to like self-staking and self-custody or sorry not self-staking self-custody in general so if like you're still trusting the hardware wallet manufacturer with this type of thing to like generate private keys correctly and to do things correctly like

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:38] I guess it's a wake-up call that you can do everything right from a self-custody perspective and still be vulnerable to this. Some people are saying this will cause everyone to move their Bitcoin to ETFs or to put it on exchanges where these sorts of attacks aren't possible. Do you think this is the end of self-custody, David? Do you think it's just like too hard? There's too many problems with it and people choose not to do this moving forward and it'll all go in custodial. providers?

David Hoffman:
[44:10] I was getting lunch with a friend this week and she told me that, she was working at a company and somebody connected her with a contact that they wanted her to talk to and they took a few meetings and built some trust, got them to download Obsidian, which is, a thing that you use and I use, but it was a borked version of Obsidian. So after three meetings, she downloaded it and it stole all of her money in her in her browser extension.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:38] Are you serious

David Hoffman:
[44:39] Yeah and the reason why I bring this up is because they were using AI to fake themselves on the call and and to to run this exploit and so like the common denominator here is AI, AI has been just like the big and and that wasn't imperfect math that was social engineering nonetheless AI assisted and, And, you know, AI is the reason why people are scared to have their money in DeFi at the moment. Like AI is shaking the foundations of self-custody. And that's scary. And like, there's probably the fewest self-custody and the fewest bankless people since 2021, 2022 because of AI. And there's seemingly more holes to find using AI maliciously than it is easier to like patch them using AI to be defensive. And so like, yeah, dude, it's like the darkest days for self-custody ever. Like no matter how you want to secure yourself, like AI can find a way there, whether it's, like exploiting perfect randomness or your friends accidentally connect you to the wrong Telegram account because like the name looks kind of similar and they weren't checking.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:01] So right now the attack abilities are exceeding the defense abilities right now. It's just finding vulnerabilities.

David Hoffman:
[46:07] So whether that continues. I think it's a long time to recover from that because that is like losing all of your money strikes straight into the heart of your emotions. And like once it does that, then like no one wants to go doing self-custody. Like this guy, this guy that, lost 1.6 million dollars of his of it after doing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:26] Everything right like

David Hoffman:
[46:27] Ever going to do self-custody ever again.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:30] Yeah right and like i guess from one perspective this could totally have been avoided if cold card did things the right way instead of doing it the wrong way but at another level like what is an individual supposed to do like am i am i supposed to like analyze exactly how the randomness was like for the hardware wallet that I purchased, how that was generated in order to feel safe that it's like actually working That's just not feasible for the average person. So yeah, it's definitely a big pothole here. And hopefully things turn around a little bit. But for now, if you are using cold card, of course, the message is get off of that wallet.

David Hoffman:
[47:16] You could do something else.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:17] Move your assets, do something else. And hopefully the attacks subside and people are able to migrate.

David Hoffman:
[47:25] All right, let's move on. We're going to talk about a few more things. We got to talk about Clarity Act not looking good on a lifeline in the teens probability on Polymarket. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Uniswap Pools. Pools.trade is, yes, Pools.trade is their new product. I'm going to tell Ryan exactly what he needs to know about Uniswap's new token launchpad. And then also, CloudFair. Make those listeners know this if they listen to our episode with Matthew Prince, but CloudFair is introducing crypto wallets for anyone who wants it. What are they doing? What are they doing? We got the answers. We're going to talk about all that and more. But first, we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Uniswap introduced a 24-hour countdown yesterday for pools.trade. It took them like 27 hours. They had a little bit of a shaky start. But they introduced pools.trade, which is Uniswap's own native token launchpad. Like PumpFun. It's PumpFun for Ethereum.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:19] Uniswap is doing PumpFun now?

David Hoffman:
[48:22] Yeah. And like Grant said, there are so many token launchpads on Ethereum. This is not a new thing. But it is new. that Uniswap is going verticalizing and going down to the actual token creation mechanism. And so they have a couple ways to launch a token, a couple of different mechanisms.

David Hoffman:
[48:40] Both end up in a Uniswap V4 pool with a fixed 1 billion supply of tokens. So there's the crowd launch token. So that's a four hour TWOP auction to help make, just bundle resistant because like a big problem in the meme coin token launchpad world is that like one person will bundle up a bunch of wallets and own like 30% of the supply and then dump on your head. So that kind of fixes that. And then it graduates at a $10,000 fully diluted valuation or it refunds everyone if, the $10,000 market cap doesn't get launched Or there's instant launch, which is just like, no rules, Wild West, buy at your own risk, it's live immediately, classic bonding curve style. And so, yeah, Uniswap has released a token launchpad. It looks pretty similar to all the other token launchpads out there, but it is kind of exciting that Uniswap is launching it. And so, I think one of the interesting things is that the fees collected by this go back into buying the token itself. And so it's touted as more volume. It's even more beneficial for the price of the token as opposed to that coming out of the pool, of the liquidity pool. It goes back into the Uniswap pool in the token itself. And so it was an incentive for people to use it. What's your reaction?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:58] What do you think? Just like Robinhood meme coins kind of woke them up to this possibility. I mean, that's one... Reaction. The other reaction is just, it does seem like Uniswap is shipping, like shipping harder again. And I'm wondering kind of why. I mean, I know they were always shipping, doing a lot in the background, but it feels like some regulatory malaise has maybe lifted and they are getting back to trying new products and experiments again.

David Hoffman:
[50:28] Is that what you're saying? It kind of feels different in Uniswap land these days? Yeah, because I was talking to, I was hanging out with some crypto friends last night, and we all said the same thing. Hayden's tweets for the last two months feel more like founder-mode-y about Uniswap, and they're shipping more things.

David Hoffman:
[50:48] Yeah I would agree I think maybe at some point just like.

David Hoffman:
[50:53] The safety nest of your treasury kind of like runs out and you realize that you need to like generate positive economics and.

David Hoffman:
[51:01] Like Uniswap as an org has been a pretty big organization in the past, and again also to your point with the launch of Robinhood if you go to the Robinhood metrics like Uniswap dominance in, DEX volume is massive So the number one DEX on Uniswap is on Robinhood chain is Uniswap v3. The number two DEX is Uniswap v2. And the number three DEX is Uniswap v4. And that's combined 99% of DEX volume on Robinhood chain. Wow, that's a big win for them. So they are dominating on Robinhood chain. And that actually does go into the Uni token fee burn. And so with the launch and success of Uniswap on Robinhood chain, the amount of uni being bought back and burned by the protocol has doubled because of Robinhood chain. Particularly because of meme coins. And so because meme coin activity on Robinhood is 50% of all meme coin activity in crypto as a total. And all that volume is on Uniswap. And so Uniswap is burning uni tokens twice as fast versus like all the other chains combined. And so you can see like, oh, Uniswap sees value here, like revenue is coming in. This is working. The token hit like a 10 month high or an eight month high recently, the uni token. And so, yeah, like Robinhood Chain and Uniswap have kind of seen some new life. And I think it's about like, can they keep this motion going?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:26] Yeah, it's very, very good to see. Uniswap in motion, clarity seems to be completely stalled.

David Hoffman:
[52:34] Losing motion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:35] Losing motion. So two weeks ago, we were at 41% probability on Polymarket, 28% last week. Now it's 15%. So there was no filing of cloture before recess. So that means it's not going in front of the Senate. Democrats are still holding out on the ethics issue. I guess the White House compromises weren't enough. And also they have other concerns. I think it's not going to happen this year for sure. And we have to wait until the outcome of the elections to see if the new incoming Congress, yeah, the midterms, actually wants to pick this up or not. I don't think it passes. We may have lost our shot, may have lost our opportunity. I don't think that's the end of the world because we have a pro-crypto regulatory force. And as long as we stack up enough wins and get enough momentum, there's no way future administrations can kind of unwind that. Like once BlackRock has tokenized its assets it's like Democrat administration are they going to tell BlackRock, Larry Fink like hey sorry you got to undo all of that that's now illegal. No. That will already be in motion. It'll be too late. So that's probably the move crypto needs to do to get ahead of this.

David Hoffman:
[53:53] I think there's probably a big loss for young startups and future startups because of Clarity. And so, yeah, BlackRock is protected, but there are probably a bunch of theoretical, hypothetical startups that won't exist because Clarity is not a thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:09] I think that's probably true. David, good news on Cloudflare front, though. We've been covering them for a while. So what move did they make this week?

David Hoffman:
[54:17] They introduced Cloudflare wallets, which is pretty simple, allow you to store stablecoins, purchase services, and receive funds across the web.

David Hoffman:
[54:28] Wallets are not new, but Cloudflare using wallets is definitely new. Cloudflare is basically the internet's firewall. And so if you go into a website that is protected by Cloudflare, they have a little gate. When we talked to Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, he was very into the idea of protecting the content of the internet from the Google AI crawler bots that extract your content and then don't pay you for it. And I think this is the first tool introducing a wall between user-generated content on the internet and the bots of the internet scraping that content. And so he's trying to protect users and make the bots pay for them. And so the idea is like, this is actually a wallet for bots. Maybe it's your bot, but you need to pay in order to scrape the internet and you need to pay the people who produce the content. And so the first tool of like a big series of like mechanisms that need to be introduced for this vision to come into fruition, but it's pretty cool to see it in action. New this week out of the Nier ecosystem is staking for Nier AI. So you can now stake Nier token and then you get confidential inference.

David Hoffman:
[55:42] You just get free inference from the Near AI part of Near. So you don't pay for it with your card. There's no like cloud account. You stake Near, you get inference. Pretty comparable to what Venice is doing where like you buy API credits and you get inference.

David Hoffman:
[55:59] And also Venice uses Near AI. And so Near is kind of just building its own vertical of, hey, we have distributed GPU clusters all over the world. That's the Near AI product. If you stake Near.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:12] You just get inference. David, that's a work token. Do you remember work tokens?

David Hoffman:
[56:16] It's a utility token. Yeah, it's a work token. Very cool.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:21] Yeah, Nier are doing a number of things from a utility perspective. That's, I think, going to be a creative to the value of Nier.

David Hoffman:
[56:27] Yeah, I'm talking to Ilya today, actually, about exactly how this works and, why and what Nier really represents with all of this. I'll definitely be using the work token as a concept to talk to him about it. But another news on the week, Polymarket seeking investment at more than $20 billion valuation. Ryan, what's your reaction to $20 billion?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:49] That sounds about right to me. I mean, they are, yeah, it does. I mean, prediction markets are markets. Polymarket is an exchange. Exchanges are product market fit, hugely profitable business. Prediction markets are going to increase in the future. Polymarket gets a take rate. I don't know. I haven't looked at the math behind exactly how they're justifying this valuation. But what was it like, $9 billion? Was it that earlier this year? Was that a year ago during the ICE deal talks? And so $20 billion seems about right. I mean, it's the future. I hope they IPO. Like I hope, or like there's a token or something. I hope Polymarket becomes investable to retail investors because that's been the only, the shame of this whole process. But yeah, 20 billion seems right. What do you think? Do you think it's maybe the prediction markets is overplayed? You see sports books coming back to take a chunk out of them?

David Hoffman:
[57:52] Sports books are coming back, trying to take a chunk out of them. Sportsbooks are valued in the two-digit billion range. So like $10 to like $30 billion is the sportsbook arena. And then what prediction markets are going for is like the CME, which is in the three-digit billion range, like $100 to $200 billion. So it's still in the sportsbook range. I think everyone in crypto wants less of the sportsbook comp and more of the CME comp. But they're nowhere near getting anywhere close to the CME. There's like a lot left to do on that story.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:23] A lot of competitors have entered, that's for sure. Including Robinhood, of course. I know they're a friend, but they could also do lots of things with their own prediction markets.

David Hoffman:
[58:33] Robinhood's prediction market revenue is now 2X's as crypto revenue. And so prediction markets as a category, very lucrative, very monetizable. That's right. Last news on the week, ARK from Circle, mainnet is coming September 16th. Ryan, are you holding your breath?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:49] I'm not super excited about it, but like maybe it's a backend infrastructure type thing. I don't know. It's another chain. Like I probably won't see it. So not super interesting to me. What about you?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:03] No. Just before we close, David, like zooming out, what do you think crypto is right now? Like, are we lost in the wilderness? Is this another bear market where it's just like the tourists have left, the settlers stay? Does it feel different? Like, what's your state of crypto right now?

David Hoffman:
[59:22] Do you know that there's a meme of the girl watching the guy place like the square peg in the square hole and like the circle peg, But it always fits into the same hole. That's the joke. It doesn't matter what shape it is, it always goes into the same hole. And then he's like, the circle, it goes in the circle hole. And he goes like, that's right, in the square hole again. And it's like, I'm explaining this meme. It's like, oh, meme coins again. Like, oh, see the shape? And like, oh, we're doing meme coins again. And it's just like, shit, dude. DeFi is not great. Like, self-custody, not great. Like, It's just meme coins. And it's a bit frustrating. I've kind of capitulated it to just like, okay, well, they're at least fun and I'm having fun with my friends. But in terms of just like what we're doing on chain is like, sick, we're doing meme coins again.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:15] That's the new thing.

David Hoffman:
[1:00:16] That's a bit frustrating.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:17] Yeah, but like what about, I don't know, there's a lot that is working and has been set in motion and is kind of continuing to build, I suppose, right? So DeFi is actually working, it's growing. like at a much slower rate than I think we hoped. Store of value, that's still a thing. Bitcoin and maybe Ether at some point takes more of that. Those are some use cases that are working.

David Hoffman:
[1:00:44] Yeah, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic. There are a bunch of things that feel like they're like kind of close but not quite here yet. Like we still don't have a very big ecosystem of tokenized stocks, tokenized real world assets. There's like 17 competing standards and not one of them has really taken the lead. We need that in order for like perp platforms to create a fully internalized perp spot basis trade and which unlocks so much opportunity in the perp platforms, but we don't quite have that yet. So like there's, we feel like we're close, but making really slow progress on that front. And that I feel like is also constraining on like the creativity, what we can do here. Um, Clarity was supposed to be really helpful with that, but it doesn't seem like we're getting it. I don't know. Going back to the market conversation, you can kind of see just nine months, six months, nine months of boredom happening, and then there's capitulation, and then you realize that, oh, actually, wait, some of this stuff is working, and the rubber's hitting the pavement, and then it'll work. Yeah, it just feels a little bit like a waiting game right now. And then in the midst of that waiting game, people are getting hacked.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:57] I think that's right. It's a waiting game. I think maybe we talked about it earlier in the episode. People won't love crypto again, investors at least. They won't love crypto again until they start hating AI. So that probably needs to play itself out too.

David Hoffman:
[1:02:11] Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, Ryan, this is the first time we've recorded the roll-up and I'm home and you're elsewhere. So go enjoy your vacation wherever you are, my dude.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:02:20] I appreciate it.

David Hoffman:
[1:02:22] Bankless Nation, that was a weekly roll-up. Thanks for being with us. Once again, crypto is risky. you can lose what you put in but the institutions are here so we're going even further west this is a frontier it's not for everyone and we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot.