2025 Crypto News: Wildfires, Operation Choke Point 2.0, AI Agents, and a Surprise BTC Sale

David have you seen images from or videos from this California wildfire that's going on I have uh tried to not look uh it's crazy uh I think this is what Malibu looks like and this is as of January 8th so yesterday as of recording this is a a shot of live uh of Malibu some just driving down the street oh my God we're out of the way until we get water tenders or the water Sy just house after house on fire oh more oh my God

all this is the Palisades fire which is in like Northwest la which is this the most local approximate like Forest Area um Malibu is the like the next city over to the left of LA and then it gets into uh like Hollywood pretty close it's absolutely crazy I mean here's an image of somebody actually in their home I have no idea what they're doing their home is crazy because the fire is Raging right outside they look like they are inside of the fire yeah with their dog in the housee the heck out of there yeah the I

think the owner just felt comfortable because I think they just immediately ran out their front door and went into the street and the street was fine but yeah the fire was like right yeah cutting it up to the very the line like and so there's there's La surrounded by like hills and and um forested Hills And so there's three three or four different fires all coming in like encroaching on LA from from the west and then also from the north uh and so when they when it like intersects with neighborhoods it starts to go from a forest fire to like

just waves of houses yeah absolutely crazy I mean the reason this caught my attention of course because it's everywhere it's on all of my timelines across all social media uh and then also uh I saw this tweet so imagine having a beer asset being your own bank having a cryptocurrency in a house that uh you are out of and your loved ones are out of fortunately but um you didn't get your private Keys uh this is a tweet from Monty uh my 70-year-old Aunt lost her apartment in the LA fires most of her savings was in crypto and she lost

her wallet and C phas doesn't have any backups yes bad setup I know but it is what it is I feel sick this is all she had um it brings up the question of like you going Bank list and having your your private keys without a backup if you're like not doing this well uh maybe fire damage or house destruction is like a Threat Vector for you that you've not considered and I think this it's almost like a PSA for for the community obviously our hearts go out to everybody who's been been affected by this and also if you're not affected by this

think about backups uh think about not having these bare instruments inside of your house because your house is not necessarily a permanent structure yeah as a general rule of thumb living with your private Keys is not advisable uh find a place that is not where you live to keep at least one copy of your private Keys yeah there are tools like uh this is what I do this is ZX not going to make it what I do is split my seed with a Shamir secret sharing and

then store the shards at multiple locations so you can do something like that um you can have safe dep safety deposit boxes at the at bank accounts it's another mechanism nois multis is fantastic for this really good there's software solutions for this yeah software Solutions you like smart account wallet so you are not even just like the sole signer in the account you can have your your lawyer loved ones or somebody else or something like that anyway cussing your crypto asset requires a higher level of due diligence and and fires like these I think uh you like teach us exactly why but David we got a lot to cover on the second week of

January Bank list weekly rollup we got prices that are down some people are getting a little panicky and the question is it's 2025 is the bull market over was that it we're down the 30-day okay with Bitcoin and some people are saying we already topped um but if we haven't topped how much longer do we actually have so I want to talk to you about that there's also more evidence for choke point 2.0 as if we needed anymore uh but I feel like this is the evidence to end all evidence there has been some unredacted documents that we

are now able to show the world that we were not crazy we are not conspiracy theorists choke point 2.0 is very real so we'll talk about that and also the AI agent meta continues to reach new dominance in crypto investors attention M share we will quickly catch you up with some of the announcements coming out in the last like 10 days or so also is metat turning pro- Free Speech what is it planned to do there's a clip we've got from Mark Zuckerberg on this feels like the winds are changing and the US government has just green lit a $6.5 billion Bitcoin sale or what what

happened to our strategic Reserve David I thought we were going to buy Bitcoin the last 11 days of the Biden Administration and he goes out dumping $6.5 billion on on us of course he does it's not quite dumped yet but we'll talk about all that and more of course uh dve before we get in we got a message from our friends over at the Rodman log group so what do they want us to know yeah they want you to know that they are the best damn lawyers in crypto and I think we can vouch for them at bank list because they are also our lawyers they have been immensely helpful uh to just

help us navigate anything that we run into here Bank list in the crypto space and there's a lot of just like weird things that happen in the crypto space and in addition to know having control of your own funds and doing all the other things that we like to do in crypto you should also probably have your own lawyer too if you are a Founder in the space if you are a company in the space if you have any meaningful amount of activity in the space having a lawyer is pretty useful uh whether or like whether it's like a lawyer for your startup or just like even things like what I'm doing with them like estate planning there's a bunch of reasons why you might need a lawyer and we suggest

the Rodman Law Group you can get a free consultation from Rodman law at bankl this.cc Rodman law and it's not just Bank list by the way uh parcel ion protocol uh portal Ventures collab currency all sorts of Crypton native organizations use robman log group and uh we think you should too go check them out well David how about we check on the markets for the week uh King Bitcoin where are we at uh not super happy prices down 4.3% on the week to where we are at the time of recording 92,500 on the lower end of the 990,000

range we start started the week at 97,000 uh we broke through 100 ,000 a couple times this week uh but we are now threatening I would say to go down into the $80,000 range that's a good word for it I do feel threatened by this I'm not I I don't want to go back into the 80s how about you no 80s that's that's poverty Terri yeah we're not going to Poverty town okay and uh Michael strategy wants to make sure we won't get there of course he has acquired another thousand Bitcoin on the week 101 million

on the week uh this puts him at a total holding of I believe 2.1 % of all Bitcoin supplies so Michael sailor is buying as he always does I feel like we don't even need to mention that he's buying the week CU just like if it's if it's a week in a calendar year just assume Michael sailor is buying some Bitcoin okay um one thing that is new this week though is the US government a court just greenlit the sale of 6.5 billion in Silk Road Bitcoin that the US Bitcoins oh and Bitcoin gold and Bitcoin

SV and Bitcoin cash can't forget about those oh well I think a lot of people have forgotten about those so I'm pretty sure you can forget about them but I guess the US government has those too we don't care if they sell those though honestly please dump those yeah why you been waiting so long idiots anyway um this is um you know we've we've talked about this before of course there's there's been talk of uh the US government amassing his strategic Bitcoin Reserve right and we even had Senator synthony lumus on here who who

told us basically oh step one that is you just keep the Bitcoin you have we are currently looking at the Bitcoin Reserve it's not the official Bitcoin Reserve but this is it this is it even in the bill her her plan was like oh all that Bitcoin that the US government has confiscated will start with that that will be the new Bitcoin Reserve we just won't sell that and uh if people are tracking at home basically the US government had I want to say 187,000 something like this okay 183,000 Bitcoin it's what the US government had this would be the selling

of of 69,000 almost 70,000 uh and that would be about 6.5 billion so we're going in the wrong direction David going the wrong direction yeah the cool thing about the Bitcoin Reserve was that we were going to be able to start Genesis of the Bitcoin Reserve with a ton of Bitcoin and now we're just cutting that into third again like just really kicking us on the way the Biden Administration doing whatever they can to really dump us the way out you say Biden Administration but I don't know that it's we don't know that it's Biden Administration yeah it's it's just regular likeed as normal but I mean I

feel like if Trump was in office he would probably just put stop on this don't do this yeah yeah I I don't know what the authority is because this is actual court it's not like the the executive branch coming in saying it but like why now I'm not sure the US government got final approval in the Northern District Court of California to liquidate uh crypto's largest ever fed Federal seizure so this is part of that big Silk Road seizure and here's the actual um yeah notice Court notice so one thing I should mention though and this is important so even though the

judge authorized this it doesn't mean they're about to sell it doesn't mean we're about to see a massive dump because the ruling alone doesn't guarantee immediate liquidation we still have some time and there's some question is if if Donald Trump comes in is there some way for him to like pause this put a hold on it even even reverse it we don't know we will know when CU everyone's tracking the US federal government like addresses uh in crypto and we saw earlier in December um we saw on December 3rd the US government moved

nearly 2 billion in silkroad Bitcoin to coinbase if it's going to coinbase I don't think that's a good sign it's getting sold it's getting sold for for context remember when everyone was getting uh all like in a tizzy about Germany selling their Bitcoins yeah Germany sold about 50,000 Bitcoins they made about $2.9 billion dollar in revenue and that was all of their Bitcoins uh and we are just selling like a third is of ours 9,000 Bitcoins at least we're getting a much better deal than Germany got we're waiting for more

opportun time in the market yeah this is still the wrong direction and I I don't I don't like that uh selling pressure on the price of Bitcoin we're trying to keep stay in the '90s when we just say that we want to be in the '90s yeah 6.5 billion is is still a lot even for Michael sailor that would take him like a good number of quarters to actually make that up for us all right well let's see it hasn't been sold yet but we'll be monitoring this of course uh tell us about eth on the weekday David any good news there nope nope what I don't even know why you're asked uh down down 6% so

of the week 3,450 currently at 3,250 uh again threatening to go down into the 2900s uh 3,250 is kind of low I think we are at a 40-day low for both Bitcoin and ether 40 days we are down on the 30 days we haven't moved anywhere the markets haven't moved anywhere in 40 days we have 40 days not Creed price action that's why we have to talk about um like bare Market bull market what's going to happen next but before we get there

let's look at some flows uh ETF flows so it's been really positive last time we met you and I talked about ETF flows and it was looking real good for ethereum how about this week yeah we had a couple bad days of outflows on the eth and the 7th um $160 million of out on the eth uh 90 million dollars of out on the 7th um also a couple of good inflow days before that so kind of call it's like slightly righted on the year maybe we're negative like 50 to 100 million on the year uh but I mean we have $2.5 billion in the

bank in The Ether ETF flows Bitcoin telling a little bit of a different story it's interesting that there there's just like such different stories here the last uh yesterday not a great day for Bitcoin $600 million out but on the 3 and the 6th each had $ 900 million doll in almost almost $2 billion doar in two days uh before that there was a $4 million out so it's not a perfectly green streak for Bitcoin uh but Bitcoin started the year real strong coming in at 36 billion total dollars into the

Bitcoin ETFs um all right Global crypto market cap 3.3 trillion 3.37 Trill hey you got it right you got it right yeah the right number this this week so you know not not terrible not an inspiring number but you know I I was hoping for four by this time but we'll get there yeah I guess it feels bad the 80s feel bad 8 Kish that range feels bad for Bitcoin the 2000s feel really bad for eth and anything below 3 trillion does not excite me for the total crypto market cap that's where I am starting here and that's going to be this entire

that is a you buy that if we go into the two trillions of market cap or the 2000 2,000 range or the 80,000 range I am buying iy are you waiting for the dip or are you buying the dip now uh I'm not I'm never waiting for the dip but when the dip comes I will take advantage of it okay I'm never you know Mr Market has its offerings every single day I I'll take what I get when I like it but so you're still being patient a little bit I mean you're not I'm not I'm not being aggressive in this current moment okay but you're still well we'll talk about

how bullish you are in a little bit but before we do let's go to the uh spy let's talk about stalks okay the stocket cross cross reference some data how are the other markets doing is it just a a lack of activity time in crypto or what's going on in in the traditional stock market uh the Spy um which is you know has Apple it has Nvidia uh it's not at its Highs but it's still pretty pretty damn good it's like two or three or 4% off of its all-time highs it peaked uh in December at 61,000 it's currently at 5,900 so it's basically 200 points off

if it's high uh the trend looks good the trend looks really good so you can't really look at the Trad stock world and be unhappy uh so long as stocks continue to like not catch a cold uh we are happy in crypto and Nvidia is really leading things to it's AI stocks just absolutely crushing it right so Nvidia briefly I think this is the first time ever became the most valuable company in the world it flipped both Microsoft and Apple to

claim that title briefly now it's back down uh so I mean that's been a story that all of that growth happened basically last year and then a little bit this year dud this is so crazy the market cap of Apple is equal to the market cap of all of crypto that is nuts yeah that's another way to look at it right basically same with Nvidia almost same as Nvidia yeah yeah so one Nvidia this is why a lot of people are still ignoring crypto right because it's just like uh you know one stock I guess one

St stock in value one company all right David take us to the uh the movers of the week uh sponsored by Unis swap thanks Unis swap for this uh what are you looking at on the week what's up and what's down uh we usually yeah we usually go for up on the week but we're going to start with some Downs uh virtual and AI 16z are both down 28% on the week now that's down 28% on the week that's that's pretty rough that's 30% but if you zoom out to the month they are still up very bigly uh so we're just seeing a little bit of a retracement in

the AI sector in the last seven days or so their performance is still very Stellar um and then up on the week There's No weekly winners but I wanted to highlight this one token called uh fi Fay frasia uh it is it's also down on the 7day because again AI sector is kind of just down on the 7 day it is up 1,500% in 30 days it cracked the top 200 of all the coin market cap coins after only being at 30 million market cap just two weeks prior which this is something

you only see in a bull market going from $30 million market cap to $600 million market cap in two weeks that is a full bow podcast have you played around with fro do you know do you know what's going on over here not too much I I'm familiar with the the frasia experiments though right and it's basically like a that's it that's it it's like a manifestation of an AI agent in a female form almost reminds me like the the lore around this almost reminds me of that movie her you know it's just like the lore does yeah yeah but but it's um and wasn't there was there a a bounty sort of thing like

an interaction with can you convince frasia to give the money to you and a bunch of people tried to like convince frasia and like prompt it into giving the money and that was like experiment one they're running multiple experim also experiment at the conclusion of that experiment uh peaked Elon musk's attention so he commented on this one thread uh about this and he just said interesting uh then the token price pumped from like $10 million to $40 million and that was like in early December and now it's at $600 million

all right well what do you think here's a prediction for this cycle I think Elon Musk will take some interest in crypto xai crypto and AI maybe an AI agent to the extent that he will tweet some bullish things about a set of tokens uh or maybe come on a podcast and talk about his bullish sentiments there will be something that happens between Elon Musk and crypto in the field of this AI agent meta this cycle or like this this

year what do you think about that understanding Elon musk's maturity I think that's probably pretty bullish for fcoin he he comment he he likes Dogecoin web we know but he also uh did a wink wink to sorry come rocket last full cycle that's right that's right yeah so like what's the most stupid immature AI agent meme coin that will capture elon's attention I think fart coin's pretty pretty strongly maybe or maybe the bull cases it hasn't been invented yet and so we're about to see how stupid it can get

uh give us the L2 update sponsored by fra um what what what happened in L2 world this week well the what's about to happen is that there it's about to be a governance vote in the arbit from Dow for it to gain another green slice in its layer to beat um like security framework uh once this Dow vote goes in there will be a bold there will permissionless bold so that means that there are permissionless fraud proofs effectively so anyone can submit a fraud proof uh to uh claim claim theft claim anything and this is just the security

model for optimistic rollups uh and so State validation which is the last there are two remaining yellow slices on like the security wheel from layer 2B one is State validation one is exit window exit window is not a tech upgrade that is a trivial thing to do uh State validation is a tech upgrade this is the hard one uh and once this Dow governance go vote goes through uh arbitrum will have four green slices and one last remaining yellow Slice on the exit window which again is a trivial like parameter change uh so preemptive congratulations uh for Arbitron when that goes through uh and

really proving the point that layer twos are becoming decentralized they're becoming secure they're becoming extremely bankless uh and uh now it's based on optimism chance to lead the way yeah arbitrum is really been pushing the frontier of this too so they got to stage one first and this gets them like right on the precipice of stage two once this goes through so once you're at stage two you're sort of at least for um your property rights from a seizure perspective you're basically equivalent you're basically layer one haters said it would

never happen they said that these things would remain centralized and that's just like not what we've seen um particularly from arbitrum and then and then there's still the issue of the centralized sequencer which is interesting because you can have a centralized sequencer and you can have a full Board of green slices and be at a stage two rollup all of those things are possible and I think that causes a lot of just like cognitive dissonance in people and like we have a centralized sequencer but you're fully permissionless and you're fully like decentralized in all the other capacities and people can't really talk

past each other on that or they have I mean like like a centralized sequencer is not so bad right it's like a centralized it depends right it just has this word centralized in it and that triggers people because with the layer Layer Two even if you have a centralized sequencer you have full kind of property rights maybe not full censorship resistance in real time when you submit a traction a transaction on arbitrum but from the perspective of can you withdraw your funds if they do something evil and nefarious uh can you get a transaction through then you have all of those

things with a uh you know stage two layer too anyways moving on into the world of ZK rollups not optimistic rollups um Roy tweeted out the first op seeing to mainnet is live Ryan I think you're tapped into this one a little bit more tell me what's going on over here well you remember the episode we did with Uma basically the ability to turn all op stack chains into ZK EVMS right and we're like oh when's that coming she's like it's kind of ready like you could do it now well this is the first one going to mainnet so we actually have a op super chain compatible ZK evm on

mayet right now this one uh failure network is particular to AI agents it's like tees for AI agents so it's kind of that that narrative but it's a full layer 2 ZK evm layer 2 very cool to see this technology in place and um a lot going on in the ZK world and just like in parallel to all the stuff we talk about every single week dude this is in such a stark contrast to when ZK evm wars were going on and polygon and ZK sync were just RAC in neck and neck to ship their ZK evm and in 2022 both of

them were racing to announce it by ECC and then they both announced it at ECC 2022 and then a year later they both announced their ZK evm main net like they have just been like trying to front run their own development as much as possible to really claim market share and then Uma is like oh I just made a circuit it can take it's a push button uh you can take any op stack roll up and turn it into a ZK evm and it's also ready right now and it actually is ready right now and she's like oh yeah we can do this and now it's actually happening

like it's an stark contrast to the other ZK evm teams it's very cool and that's why that episode with her kind of blew my mind because we'd always talked about oh optimistic rollups will become come ZK uh evm rollups or ZK rollups at some point in the future but I thought this was like typical you know rollup ethereums like 5 years from now 10 years from now right no it's like this year it's happening now anyway we got a lot more to cover including David we got to talk about the bull market how long will this thing last in 2025 or or was that it have we already topped I got to know from you uh and also AI agents will they

be the 2025 meta or should we wait for something else Google searches at alltime high all this and more but before we get there I want to thank Unis swap a browser a mobile wallet the best place to do defi go check them out uniswap Labs is making history with the largest bug Bounty ever $15.5 million for critical bugs found in Unis swap V4 this isn't just any update Unis swap V4 is built with hundreds of contributions from Community developers and has already undergone nine independent audits making it one of the most rigorously reviewed code bases to be

deployed on chain and with 2.4 trillion in cumulative volume process across unit swap V2 and V3 without a single hack the commitment to security and transparency is Rock Solid now unisoft Labs is taking an extra step to make V4 as secure as possible with a $15.5 million bug Bounty head to the link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the Unis swap V4 bug Bounty all the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there C is transitioning from a mobile first evm compatible layer 1 blockchain to a high performance ethereum layer 2

built on op stack with igen da and one block finality all happening soon with a hard fork with over 600 million total transactions 12 million weekly transactions and 750,000 daily active users cell's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top layer 2s built for the real world and optimized for fast lowcost Global Payments as the home of the stable coins cell hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies including native usdt on Opera minay and with over 4 million users in Africa alone in November stablecoin volumes hit $6.8 billion made

for seamless onchain FX trading plus users can pay gas with erc20 tokens like usdt and usdc and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds but why should you care about cell's transition to a layer 2 layer 2's unify ethereum l1's fragmented by becoming a layer two cell leads the way for other evm compatible layer ones to follow follow cell on and witnessed the great cell happening where cell Cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership all right discussion time I think we started the year David this is on everyone's mind uh

what's 2025 going to look like from a crypto perspective we get a bullish full year or like will it only last a couple of months maybe q1 is it or maybe we've topped already sort of feels like that when you get you know Bitcoin down close to the U 80 80k type range and you get like 40 days of droppage here it doesn't feel great I that's not supposed to happen during bull markets so the question I want to discuss with you and bring in some other opinions here is uh what's up with the bull market what

where are we at in 2025 what do you think we'll see I think this question is kind of inevitable as soon as a bull market does actually stop because crypto bull markets are a game of musical chairs and so everyone constantly lives in fear that the music has stopped the thing is like no one can actually you can't hear the music you only know it stopped in hindsight yeah and so everyone is always like is it over is it over and people going to ask themselves it's yes right it's and it's just like people who have done this before live in PTSD of the bull market stopping because

that's when the pain it's so bad it's painful yeah it's very painful so I just want to start this conversation as like there's PTSD like sensitivities around when the bull market ends which is why as a member of crypto Twitter in the discourse everyone was going to ask this question is the bull market over is buket we'll probably ask it all throughout 2025 every sing every single hey back to your comment it is a sentiment thing so everyone has to check with everyone else well what do you think what do you think because if we all believe it's still on then it's it's then it's still on then it's still on then you let you keep the dice rolling

yeah uh the first thing I'll say is the bull market just started so probabilistically speaking it's probably not over okay too soon this is too soon all right so so that's David David this is your third cycle that's a third cycler uh take on it this is also Kane Warwick's take and uh he is a third cycler as well he had he published a blog post this morning entitled it's still a bull market relax so that's his message and basically I I'll skip all the way to the end but he kind of sums it up I think we go much higher from the

start of this year despite the fud and despart despite Mr Hayes he's talking about Arthur Hayes the trader we we'll talk about Arthur Hayes's comments in just a minute I do expect we top out in early 2026 but I'm open to the bull market last see another 18 months I think Bitcoin wow wow that is a long bullmark Kane Warwick all right he's a long cycler because there there are some people who believe we've already topped right then there's short cyclers who are like ah just q1 or just q1 and Q2 now

Kane is a bullish long cycler he thinks that this could go for all of 2025 and I'll continue I do expect we top out in early 2026 that's going to be the top but I'm open to the bull market lasting another 18 months he thinks it couldn't give go 18 months 18 months super so long wow then he makes some price calls while we're at it I think Bitcoin will eclips 250k e will break 10K thank God lots of other crazier [ __ ] will happen that's uh that's Kane Warwick's take so it's still bull market relax I I don't

know about the whole long cycle here but like this is generally my sentiment as well I tend to agree with both you and Kane on this yeah those prices check out to me 250k over 10K for Ethan CLE those prices check out to me the 18 months is like much longer than I would expect but the prices don't seem too high so I guess he's calling for a normally sized lengthened bull market which is fun and good and that's great I 18 months is a really long time bro I think I think the simple easy like uh like left curve take

is just like map it to last Cycles it's going to end Q3 Q4 of this year well do you do okay so you you're probably a mid cycler then you're bullish midy mid length cycle yeah like most of this year is going to be very bullish all right so if you want to trade these ups and downs somebody to kind of monitor is Arthur Hayes who's like a Trader have you kept up with his like series of blog posts I have not I have not well so last I checked in was December and he was basically thinking that January would be down and the like q1 would sort of be J down because everybody his rationale was

something to the effect of everyone's very excited about Trump so we got that kind of trump bump and then after he's in office they'll realize the policy doesn't change overnight and it'll just be a kind of a reckoning a disappointment with the the the Trump policy that was his take in December but this week he published another post uh and his take was a little bit different maybe I call it a pivot but Traders are allowed to Pivot David so don't worry they pivot their positions uh anyway he was kind of juxtaposing he still thinks

that people will be a bit disappointed with Trump actual policy and that could drag markets down but he's also seeing uh liquidity dollar liquidity being injected in the market that ramping up in q1 and he thinks net net that will offset some of the disappointment from uh Trump taking office so he says this fulfilling my role as a chief investment officer at his fund malstrom I will encourage the Risk Takers at the fund to turn the the risk dial to dgen dgen for this quarter is what he's saying so and then he gives some of his uh his dgen

picks so q1 for Arthur Hayes anyway is a fullon dgen which is a little bit a change from uh December I love how he just says right after that we love undervalued dog [ __ ] and have purchased purchased and then like he gave out five five tickers after that thank you for including these quality token picks and dentalized science that's just totally going to extend all of our lives and like you know bring scientist next Frontier the dollar liquidity is a take

that I I have heard echoed from around the cryptosphere coinbase echo this is that like it doesn't even the Federal Reserve doesn't even matter Trump's going to start coming in and he's going to buy people's happiness by like printing dollars and sending them all over I'm sending them all over the place and so that's going to be good for liquidity it's going to be good for risk assets yeah I think that's that that's probably uh true as well um one other you know fact pattern here is q1's are usually really good for crypto all right the average return in q1 for Bitcoin is