Crypto's Big Test: Ethereum’s Pivot, Tariff Storms, and Bitcoin’s Political Rise

Bank list Nation is the first week of May. It's time for the Bankless Weekly roll up where we cover just about everything that happened in crypto. At least uh everything that happened that's important. Uh David, man, we we got to talk about uh tariffs. All right. I want to bring some macro into today's episode. People have been looking for your macro takes. Oh, yeah. Well, they're high takes. All right. And GDP numbers just came in and they're kind of they're not looking great. So, I've got uh three macro catalysts I think that bankless listeners, crypto investors should be looking out for catalyst. Not

saying they're good catalysts. They could they could go either way, but we'll get into that. It goes somewhere. We're also going to talk about the Ethereum pivot or just a strategic rep prioritization. It really depends on who you ask, and we're also going to talk about that as well. Uh Worldcoin also, they they're rolling out the Orb in the US. We'll talk about what that means. And I guess this is like for people worried about dystopia and AI bot propaganda. I don't know which world is better, that world or like we're going to all get orbed, our eyeballs orbed. So like I may be up for this. I think as AI

has gotten more real, people are slowly coming around the idea of worldcoin more and more. We'll talk about that. Uh and then also Bitcoin is just embedding itself deeper into American politics. A massive hack sends Monero up 50%. Stewie is up 60% on a bunch of speculation that they're going to win Pokemon. Okay. And then Ripple tries to buy Circle but gets denied. All of this and more. But first, before we get into all of that, a message from our friends and sponsors. Build Bear. This is This one is for the web 3 devs. We know testing smart contracts, it shouldn't be a pain. It is

a pain. There's a lot that devs need to go through to make testing smart contracts work. BuildBar lets you spin up your own EVM sandbox. So you can test, debug, deploy all in one place. like GitHub for web 3, trusted by teams like Consensus and Gelato. So if you want to, which you should, you can streamline your workflow and launch faster. Check it out at banklist.cc/buildbear. All right, Ryan, you ready to get into the markets? Yeah, let's do it, man. It's been a while since I looked at these charts. So, uh, tell me what's going on on Bitcoin. Uh, Bitcoin up 4% this week. Really, uh, strong showing this morning.

$97,000. So, slowly grinding up, trying to hit that $100,000 mark. Ether up 5% this week. 5% up to $1,850. Those are very different numbers. Uh ETH Bitcoin ratio 019 and a total crypto market cap. Ignore the ratio. Total crypto market cap of 3.14 trillion. As a reminder, Ryan, the all-time high for the total crypto market cap, I believe, is just short of four. Yeah, it's like 3.9 trillion and

we are coming in at 3.13 trillion today. I mean, this is not looking so bad, right? Where's the blood here? I mean, Bitcoin is down. What's Bitcoin all time high? Oh, don't ask where are you going to find some blood? I know where the blood is. Oh god, look at this red uh chart on the ratio, but ignoring that. I mean, Bitcoin's looking good. Crypto market cap's looking good. Um, there's some positive indicators. So, uh, overall, I mean, I don't think we're in a bare market, David. Nope. Nope. Nope. First, before we get to your macro takes, we got to talk about the movers of the week. And this section is brought

to you by our friends and sponsors over at Uniswap. Suie is the mover of the week. A bunch of things is going on in Suiland. The price rebounded about 40% in April to $3.6 after falling from his January all-time high of $5.3. The market cap remains in the top 15. So, Suie has uh cracked the top 20 top 15 peaking above 15 billion. uh its DeFi ecosystem has surged recently with a TVL uh in uh Sui DeFi topping over $2 billion driven by high yield protocols

like Aftermath, Steamfy and also some native stablecoin integrations and also Phantom wallet uh supported um has improved its onboarding into the SUI ecosystem. Uh Suie itself pivoting hard into BTCI positioning itself as a Bitcoin defi hub with integrations like Babylon to enable Bitcoin staking. Uh then even beyond Sooie, uh Sooie is launching its own gaming console. Interesting strategy called the Sooie Play0X1. And then there was this massively speculated of rumor like dri

found out by the internet sleuths connecting like terms of service between like a sooie web page and Pokemon somehow. It's all rumor. We should say all rumor. So that there's a rumor out there that they may be partnering with Pokemon on digital collectibles and that has contributed to the Sooie price action. Uh all of this uh brought to you by uh the Banklist writer David C who put this into an article and that is our movers of the week section. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. Look at this too. Canary Capital Advanc's first ever Sooie ETF with an SEC filing. Just seems like Sooie is like trying to speedrun all of

the things that a blockchain is supposed to do to garner adoption. I I got to say though, look at this fully diluted valuation. That's almost $40 billion, David. $37 billion. Okay, that's $12 billion market cap, $37 billion fully diluted valuation. There's a big delta there. What are we pricing in here? We pricing in like future fees. Is this, you know, DCF model? Is this monetary? Only ask those questions about Ethereum, right? Other other ecosystems you don't have to ask those questions about. Yeah. Or just pricing and growth. Uh let's

talk about macro for a minute. Okay. So, I've been just digesting what has happened since the beginning of this year from a macro perspective. And there's kind of three things that I'm keeping an eye on. David and I think uh we should be looking at like the first is tariffs in general and this idea of a tariff driven recession. All right. The second is American capital flight. This seems to be a trade that might be on may not be. We'll we'll talk about that too. And the third is increasing global money supply. Okay. So that is the uh the good

old M2 monetary supply. These are the three things I think that are going to be really important for crypto investors over the next three to six months. Um the first is tariff driven recession. David, what's like your probabil how you feeling about things, man? Like what's your probability of a recession right now? Uh I mean I'm just going to outsource my opinion to poly market because I think that's the role of poly market and polyarket is pricing it in at increasingly high. Okay. So you got you just pulled it up because I think you're of the same mind. Coming in at 62% odds

of a recession in better than poly market, right? That's my take, too. I I'm not I'm not smarter than poly market. No way. Okay. So, so, so then you would you would basically defer to this and be like, hey, probably over 50% odd, 62% odd that that we're going to have a recession sometime in 2025. You pretty pretty much uh agree with that. Okay. So, GDP numbers came in uh just this week and it wasn't great. So, the consensus was we're hoping for growth this quarter, this is Q1 GDP of 0.3%. What we got was negative0.3%.

And keep in mind January was actually a positive number. So we had kind of a shitty February, kind of a bad uh March to contribute to that negative rather than positive on GDP numbers. So mis expectations by6% feels large. Yeah, it is large, right? And so this is this is clearly the result of tariffs. I it's very difficult to uh to I think spin this and say it's something else. This is because Q1 like we started Q1 being very bullish

and we in the middle of Q1 tariffs unexpectedly happened and so that's why that's why we missed. Yeah, they did. And uh keep in mind that now there's a baseline 10% tariffs that America has just on basically everybody and uh the secretary of the treasury Scott Bessant says that this is the new normal. So that's what's just generally in place. There is a next decision point on July 9th where you know ideally the US is negotiating with all of its partners. So EU, South Korea, Switzerland. It's said

that these deals might take like weeks not days. So maybe that those deals could come in before the 9th. Um if not then like that's another decision point. Uh and and the tariffs could increase for those partners there. And the China tariffs, they're just that's that's true tariff war between the US and China. It's all part of this geopolitical struggle. So there's a report I read from a you know a fund Apollo report. They're predicting a summertime recession, David. And here's kind of how this works. So we got our April 2nd

Liberation Day tariffs, right? And then we start to get, you know, containers ships to US ports coming to a stop. This these tariffs kick in and then they they kind of time box this out. Trucking demand comes to a halt. That happens in May or late May and then in early June we start to see layoffs in trucking and retail industry and we get a summertime 2025 recession. Right? That's how it is poss is saying is definitely a

possibility at this point and um short term that's got to be not great for crypto. Okay. like the short-term expectations on that catalyst. Recession is probably not good. Crypto is generally a um riskon asset. That's the perception so far. That's how it trades. So that's probably not going in our favor. The second thing though, David, is American capital flight. Okay. And this kind of trade seems like it's on, you can sort of see it when US stocks go down, bonds go down, like you know, you

uh bond yield prices, dollar goes down, and then you have gold skyrocketing up. Mhm. People are leaving. Capital is just saying goodbye. Basically, the US has been the uh store of value. I mean, like for the entire world. So, people store their value in the risk-free rate. That's US bills. Uh the US stock market, S&P, it's been kind of the capital reserve, the property rights system of the entire world. So, since Bretton Woods really and maybe that's showing signs of reversing. And so, the question is, does that trade continue? I guess

like it could be worse. When you reflect on the year, the S&P is only down four to 5%. And of course, like indices like the S&P and the NASDAQ, NA NASDAQ's down 8%. These are future predictions, right? So, it doesn't seem to be pricing in that much capital flight, at least at this point in time. But bonds, of course, are stubborn at 4% 10-year uh you know, treasuries. Scott Besson is trying to get bonds down as a result of all these tariffs, and they're not really falling. So you got stock market

down, you've got u bonds kind of pricing up or or being very sticky. And then you got, of course, we talked about total crypto, but then you have gold, which is trading at 33% up on the year. This looks like capital flight. Um Trump of course says this this ain't my stock market. This is Biden's stock market. Do you see this tweet here? Dude, that was so funny. Everyone thought that was so clowning. You should just read it out. What did he say here? So, Donald Trump uh tweeted this out on on Truth Social, his platform, his Twitter platform. This

is a tweet from January 29th, 2024. So, a little like almost a year and a half ago is when he tweeted this. He tweeted out, "This is the Trump stock market because my polls against Biden are so good that investors are projecting that I will win and I will drive the market up. Everything else is terrible and record setting inflation has already taken its toll. Make America great again." Okay, so that was his position that this is the Trump stock market a year and a half ago. He truths out just yesterday. This is the Biden stock market, not Trump's. I didn't take over

until January 20th, which was nine days uh before that he tweeted out the last tweet that I just read. Tariffs will soon be kicking in and companies are a year before. Nine days and a year. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. So, you know, I think it's pretty classic. If it's going up, it's Trump, but if it's going down, it's Biden. Yeah. He continued, "This has nothing to do with tariffs. I'm I'm not sure that the market is uh leaving all of that, but um so let's say the American capital flight trade continues, right? So it's tough to know what magnitude this is. It's clear that there's something uh kicking in

here. What do you think? Is that good or bad for crypto? People have noticed that Bitcoin has started to trade more like a gold since the tariff announcements. And I I consider Bitcoin as being in this like third body superp position between tracking the NASDAQ and tracking gold. And sometimes it tracks gold more, sometimes it tracks NASDAQ more. And in this moment, it has shifted to tracking gold more, but it still is exposure to NASDAQ. So I don't I'm bull I'm bearish on crypto if the stock market goes down.

But if the gold is going up in response to that, Bitcoin does get that benefit. It does get to be positioned as a sovereign non-s sovereign store of value, which is what this current market is looking for as an asset. I totally agree. I I think the tariffs are are negative in the short run. But this is this is basically the trend that everyone in crypto has predicted. This is the entire thesis. It's the decadesl long thesis that a credibly neutral alternative to the US monetary system to all the fiat monetary systems around the world and alternative property rights

system would kind of kick in. That's what we're seeing with Bitcoin. And I don't think it's just going to be gold and Bitcoin. I think it's going to be the rest of crypto, too. But that might not play out over the short run. We have no idea. And so can that counteract the tariff recession? Like we don't know. So you got to take that in mind. And the last thing is David increasing global money supply. And uh look at this chart Ral Paul puts out. This is global M2. It's a projection on global liquidity. Basically all of the money in the system, the fiat system across all countries. And it charts this uh with uh

with Bitcoin here. And we're at the point we're at a bottoming zone of global M2. The last few years we've had a cycle of actually decreasing global monetary liquidity in all all of the fiat systems and now we've sort of bottomed out and we're starting a new cycle. We're starting another Ralph Paul thinks of these in fouryear cycles a liquidity cycle and M2 is going up and if you get recession okay you get American capital flight what's going to happen the money printers are going to turn on. So what's that my friend? Is

that bullish or bearish crypto? Mhm. Mhm. Ray Dalio put out a really good tweet that we don't have time to cover, but he titled it, "It's too late. The changes are coming." This is a an essay and article that he wrote in inside of Twitter. And his first big point is that we are on the brink of a new monetary order. The domestic, political, and international world orders are breaking down due to unsustainable bad fundamentals that can be easily seen and measured. I think what he's pointing to and what I think everyone agrees with is like, okay, yes, new world order incoming, trade imbalance is being fixed. You know, China's needs to become

not dependent on United States debt. United States needs to become not dependent on Chinese manufacturing. That is going to cause pain. And in no way is there at all any sort of need to not print a bunch of money in order to ease that pain. Why why would we not do that? Yes. Uh and so if anything if pain is going to happen that is going to come out of the value of fiat currencies globally because we just are going to print ourselves into uh less suffering which has been the Bitcoiner thesis about monetary policy for as since as

early as I can remember. Look and all the governments are going to do this because the more they print and the more closed they become, the more isolated they become, the more attractive a credible neutral monetary system that is permissionless and completely open becomes. That is bullish crypto. Maybe not in the short run. Maybe we got through a summertime recession. I don't know what it's going to do, but like long-term time horizons 12 months and further, uh, we got to be going up. Yeah. All right. Coming up next, things are changing in the Ethereum Foundation. They put out a blog post, a handful of

blog posts talking about the new leadership structure. This isn't new news, but it's really codifying uh into an actual reality and putting that into a blog post. So, we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about did Ethereum pivot or did it do a strategic refocusing? I do think the words matter. Base and scroll are all stage one roll-ups and also worldcoins US roll out. Uh have people changed their minds about the eyeball scaling company because now there is perhaps is going to be an Appleike world coin retail store coming to a city near you to get orbs. So you just go go walk into

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on X. The Ethereum pivot or the Ethereum rep prioritization. Uh this is the theme I think that has been going around the Ethereum ecosystem starting with the Ethereum Foundation announcing leadership structure change. Uh so like I said this is not anything new. Shiae and Tamas are the new co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation and with that comes just overall a restructuring of the EF as a whole. So now there are four board of directors of the EF that includes Falcbuterin

Ayamayaguchi Patrick Stoneger uh who is the Swiss legal council and then also Shiae who is also the co-executive director and that and so the board oversees the Ethere Ethereum Foundation's vision ensures alignment with his values holds authority over the executive appointments holds authority over the executive appointments and of course the executive appointments are Shiae and Tomas uh who I think everyone is very bullish on Tomas coming in and providing some like leadership operational excellence in the Ethereum

organization. Uh and so the Ethereum Foundation put out this blog post and also another blog post from Shawe and Tamas about kind of a a co-statement about what their near-term goals are kind of read like what are those goals? There were were a handful of goals but Tomsh specifically identified three things that Tomas wants to bring for the next 12 months of time during his time as his his you know first first 12 months of as coed of the EF scaling the layer 1 scaling blobs improving UX now

these three things has kind of turned into an Ethereum tagline this is the uh take that h put out on Twitter this week is that oh this these are very clear precise three things that can represent a rallying in cry cry for the Ethereum community scaling layer 1 scaling blobs improving UX uh and to me I'm kind of like wrapping this all up and calling it Ethereum's pivot towards a product centric roadmap so rather than the rollup ccentric road map which we still are still on it is now a rollup and a strong layer one uh rollup ccentric roadmap uh which is the thing that uhar

and donrad identified in my podcast episode with him but I think if you can just really distill it down to what is ethereum trying to do what is it pivoting towards what is it refocus focusing towards it is refocusing towards a product ccentric roadmap. What's your take? I agree with that. So like uh there was some debate though whe whether you call it a pivot or a rep prioritization. I mean the thing that I would say justifies a pivot in some people's minds. I would say including mine is this top one scaling the L1 that did not seem to be according to the road map a priority um 3 months ago 6 months

ago uh certainly not a year ago. It was all about it had also been like culturally blasphemous to talk about scaling the layer one at times. Well, I definitely felt that like I felt that last summer when we had episodes with people like Max Resnik for instance who is now he's on Salana and his reason for that is like he's basically like oh Ethereum didn't scale to L1 so I'm going over here to a place they will. So that feels like a change to me and I would hazard to call it a pivot. But what's the other side of this? Anthony Cistano says look it's not a pivot. we always had scaling the L1 as part of the road

map. Merge, surge, scourge, verge, purge, all of that stuff. And he he's also not wrong. And he's saying this is more of a prioritization. So you're just taking things that were out there and you're bringing it up here. So pivot rep prioritization like do you think this debate even matters? I think it it I think it does matter. The messaging does matter. And I agree with Hazu's commentary on this where he says yes you can point to Ethereum's 100 item roadmap and say look we have been working on all of these things which is true scaling the layer 1 was always on the long-term

roadmap for Ethereum the pivot is that that long-term part of Ethereum's road map has been brought to the forefront and there are people like Dunkrod and Ongar and and Tamas who are like okay we are going to emphasize layer 1 scaling now this month uh and really like zooming out again I I will also talk about cite Hazu's take here where um this is just uh like an ego thing. It's an ego thing where like we don't want to admit that we were wrong. We don't want to admit fault. Uh and we actually get

to save face by saying it was always on the road map. And I think that is damaging because it's it's good to admit that we got things wrong. Like it is humbling. It's it's okay to change our minds. We don't have to like always say that we are infallible and we always got everything right. And so I I think the market and the broader crypto industry which is becoming larger and larger where like you know used there used to be a large amount of Ethereum dominance there's now less Ethereum dominance. Most people do not uh align themselves with Ethereum messaging. It's good and

okay for us to say it is a pivot because we got things wrong and we're going to make things right and that is what the market wants to hear. That's the take. I I hear that take too and I think to Tomas at the EF is is clearly a pivot as well because this is somebody from the outside coming in and changing things. By the way, Bankless listeners, we have an episode that drops with the two new EF co-leads. That's that's coming out on Monday, I believe, already out for uh premium subscribers. Okay. So, you you can hear from the horse's mouth what they're what they're planning to do there. So, that to me was like kind of a pivot in leadership. There's actually been some sort of cultural pivot at the

EF and like things like this. So, did you see this proposal from uh Dankrad? Rod. Yeah. He put out. So this is EIP to scale Ethereum L1 100x over the next 4 years. All right. And EIP this I don't think this could have happened uh 6 months ago in kind of the cultural state that Ethereum was in. And I don't know did you read his details like the details as to why he said like this was a very my take was it looked like Ethereum is waking up particularly the

EF researchers. I mean you and I we're investors. We're podcasters. What can we do? Oh, we're just like we're just talking heads, right? But the EF researchers kind of moving towards Well, let me just read what uh Donrad said. He said, "Keep considerations why I think we should commit to the gas limit change." Oh, first he says this. The current way of doing things is likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the next 5 to 10 years. And so instead, he said we shouldn't just do the current thing we're doing. we should aim to 3x

uh the scaling on Ethereum transaction throughput on Ethereum every year for the next four years and basically guarantee that to the market like that's the road map and then back our way into like making that possible and he lays out how he plans to how he plans to do that and he gives the reason he said Ethereum layer 1 will always be uh the fee revenue driver it's the moat for DA if you have an unimportant layer one, then you lose the alliance of all of your layer layer 2s. Layer twos want to

join a layer 1 that is like actually winning, actually has liquidity, actually has DeFi. And uh fragmenting the layer 1 liquidity across a number of layer 2s is a good way to lose the battle. I It's pretty stark and also pretty like objectively uh like we can action this. We can turn this into an EIP and ship it. I really like his line where he says committing to a scaling timeline makes it clear what the goal is and lets us plan backwards from that goal which I don't think is really the

thing that has happened in the EF and all core devs calls where we there was no there's always incremental progress towards the future but not goals to work backwards from and I think Donrat is advocating for like let's make this very firm commitment and get there and actually get there. Yeah. uh what's what's Vitalic gonna be doing because he put out some tweets as well um about what his focus is. So, Vitala tweeted out, "My personal focuses for 2025, one, Ethereum, obviously, particularly number one, layer 1, long-term road map, single

slot finality, long-term VM stateless statelessness, security, resilience, and decentralization." So, interesting that Vitalik is emphasizing the the long-term road map of the layer one. Uh, and then also full stack security, open source, privacy, uh, all the cipher punk stuff. And then also two big picture DACK. And so this is Falic saying, "Oh, I'm focused on defensive acceleration, DACK, which is stuff outside of crypto, right? Outside of crypto, inclusive of crypto, outside of crypto, uh, which is just like, you know, comm's tools, things like signal, um, infra and social layer

mechanism design. Uh, and then then he listed some other things as well. And so that's what Vitalic continues to be like kind of leading Ethereum via uh like philosophical blog posts. And I think that is what he is saying like this is my direction for 2025. I think overall this is a good development. Most in the Ethereum community I've talked to seem pretty excited about these changes rep prioritization or pivot and uh I think it's uh going to be bullish. Uh something else that's bullish for Ethereum David is two big layer 2s actually got to stage stage one on uh

L2B with respect to their level of decentralization. A key milestone something a lot of people said would never happen. They said these chains were not incented to ever become, you know, a stage one. Base got there this week. That was a big move. And also scroll got there. So now we have like the top four chains by total value secured and they are all stage one level of decentralization which is like fantastic. Can you remind like what is stage one? Can you remind people of sta the difference between stage one and stage zero? Stage one is just a measure of uh property rights uh as users have

on these layer 2s. And so a stage zero I would describe as like a pretty trustful layer 2. It's a pretty ruggable layer 2 like the operators can can kind of do has they have a large degree of control over users assets on layer 2. On on a stage one roll up there is um degrees of protections for users and so base hit this milestone by having a fully functional security council of 10 independent entities across multiple jurisdictions. upgrades to base now requires 75% consensus between the council base optimism uh and then

Coinbase and a few other things. So this is significantly reduced Coinbase's unilateral control over Bass, right? Uh and and so there's just like a very strong set of user protections for all users on base now. Big step towards decentralization. Uh David, tell me about the Worldcoin news this week. So they're worldcoin coming to the US. I thought they kind of were in the US. What's been announced? Yeah. So, Worldcoin is kind of rolling out maybe like a boots on the ground brand for itself. Uh, so the Atlas event in San

Francisco, World Coins event that Sam Alman gave a a keynote presentation at. Uh, he just rolled out a few key announcements. So, of course, the US roll out world is deploying orbs in six major cities, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco with a series of Applelike in-person stores. So, worldcoin like stores that you could go into. New users will receive 16 world tokens upon iris scanning and existing user users will get a pioneer grant of 150 world. Interesting. Uh so there are some

partnerships as well. So collaborations were announced with visa stripe and match group. Ryan, do you know what the match group is? Are you talking about like match.com like uh the dating website? Yeah, I'm actually surprised because you know you're you're a married man. So yeah, like match.com, Hinge, Tinder. uh they are going to integrate world ID uh so that they can verify that you are uh talking to a human not a bot because they're wait is that a problem on apparently there are like there's like dating bots that just like try to date

you like towards what end I don't know I don't know yeah but apparently there's bots on like Hinge and and match or whatever okay so there's going to be like retail stores in malls across America the way there's you know Apple stores where people can go in stick their eyeball into an orb. This is what it looks like for people who are not familiar with this. Still looks as dystopian as it always did. Okay. In exchange for world coins. So, they get sort of paid for this, right? Yep. And uh then what? You get the world app. You're all set up. You feel good