ROLLUP: 2025 Crypto Meta & Predictions | ETH Roadmap Updates | DEX's Hit All Time High | Vitalik Adopts Moo Deng?

Bankless Nation, welcome to the first Bankless weekly roll up of the Year of Our Lord 2025. David, we're here. We made it. It's been a long time since I've seen you, man. It's uh I think this is in our four years of doing this episode, entering the fifth year or this podcast, and doing the fifth year of doing this podcast. I think the last two weeks have probably been the longest that we haven't even interacted over Zoom virtually anywhere.

I think we sent each other four or five messages in Discord over the last three weeks. I've been in Argentina and the holiday break.

Went straight into the New Year's break. This is the longest that we have ever

just been chill.

I feel like that's good for our mental health.

Really good. It's been really good.

I took I took kind of a spring uh screen break. So I kind of like disconnected and then I just like today I kind of re-downloaded, you know, fired up the OS again and uh got up to speed on crypto and we're here to bring it up to us. You gotta you gotta take a break from time to time. All right, because like yeah, it felt really nice, felt very grounded. I felt more human again. Uh yeah, you know, I think that um we just spend so much time looking at charts on screens, like absorbing information, and it felt good just to be like normal.

Yes.

And just to be

That was the most

normal I have ever felt since getting into crypto.

Three weeks. While I was out, I put a one minute long time constraint on Twitter on my phone.

Wow. And one minute is is just long enough. If somebody sends you a tweet, you can open up Twitter and look at the tweet. But then one minute later,

if you if you start scrolling, you one minute later, like, okay, your your time's up. Time's up. You're done, done for the day. And that was really nice. So if you go to my Twitter feed right now, there's just

seven retweets over the last three weeks and zero tweets.

it's very spark.

Which is a that it's the first time I've ever done that. I can't believe it's

not. But now we're back.

Yeah, now we're going

taking the pain so you don't have to be on Twitter all the time, bakeless listener. We got a really busy week, actually. We're gonna start with the curated list of our ten favorite predictions for 2025 because everyone wants to know what's gonna happen this year. We got 10 fantastic things to look forward to. What else we got?

Uh the crypto AI sector did not get the memo of the holiday break season. Uh many tokens are up 3x from their pre-Christmas prices, which is

extremely recent. This is like 10 days ago. Uh so that's pretty nuts. And then also some less fun news uh the IRS is about to force all DeFi brokers uh to KYC their users, which, as we know,

doesn't make any sense in the crypto world. So we're gonna talk about this. Uh, who is actually viewed as a DeFi broker and what might they need to do?

Also, Blobs became the top ETH burners, which is pretty impressive over a seven-day time period. Dexes hit their record highs in December. Do Kwan is about to be sent back to the US into US hands, and Vitalik Buterin adopted Mo Dang. You know, the cute little headline.

That's Vitalic's now. Vitalik owns that, I guess.

He doesn't own that.

He's supporting him.

Before we get into all that news and more, a message from our friends and sponsors,

Alright, David, let's get into markets this week and the price of Bitcoin. So, what did it do over the holiday break? Uh, where are we on the week?

we are up 1.3% on the week. Starting the week, 95,500. Ending the week, 96,800. So flat, flatty up, flatty with an up bias. Ether

doing something similar, a little bit more green than Bitcoin this week. Started the week at $3,333. Up 3.8% on the week to $3,450. Still Ether kind of slammed down from where it got above $4,000, which makes everyone feel good. Now we're at the bottom end of the 3,000 range, trying to get our head over $3,500.

Okay, let's look at the one month on Ether. Look at this. Do you remember this? It was early December and we were above 4K. And I was thinking, I was thinking

I'll tell

December for the holidays. I thought Santa Claus would leave us some all time highs in the stocking. I thought we'd be closing in on 5K about right now. And then just like none of that materialized. So uh here's to 2025. Maybe this course corrects in in 2025 because the ETH ETF flows have been pretty hot lately.

you large.

Maybe they are front running some of the price appreciation that we hope to see in ETH. Tell us about those flows.

Yeah, so on the December 31st alone,

Ether, the ETFs drove 57 Bitcoin into the ETFs and 10,710 Ether, which is

$5.3 million of net inflows into Bitcoin. And Ether had $36 million of net flows

into the Ether ETFs. That's on December 31st.

Overall, December was a huge win for the Ether ETFs, just really outpacing, outpacing Bitcoin, uh really punching above, way above his weight. And we're finally really getting into some very positive numbers on the Ether ETFs, coming in at $2.6 billion in total net inflows. Uh was just pretty damn crazy.

That's good to see. I mean, all of that happened. I think like it started hap I mean, we were negative for most of uh most of November, weren't we? And then it kind of turned around toward the end of that month and now it's positive.

And now we are way more positive than we've ever been negative. It really, it really, the momentum changed to really, really fast.

It feels nice going into the year. Speaking of ETF, so Bitwise did this cool thing. Bitwise filed for a Bitcoin standard corporate ETF, Bitcoin Standard Corporations ETF. And really the incentive here is to incent the stocks of companies that have adopted the Bitcoin standard. So they're creating an ETF, an indice that's full of these companies. Look at these companies here.

All the companies that own in order to get into this club, get into this ETF, you have to have on your corporate treasury the Bitcoin standard, which they define as holding a thousand Bitcoin or more. So what's a thousand Bitcoin times the price of a hundred million dollars or more worth of Bitcoin on the treasury? If you have that on your corporate treasury, then you get into this club uh of the uh the Bitcoin standard corporation ETF that Bitwise is going to roll out.

Yeah.

And s I guess the investment this is here.

Exposure are you getting? You're getting exposure to companies that put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. But the companies could be anything. It could be a tech company, it could be totally crazy.

So it's weird. It's like it's like

That's kind of odd.

you're kinda getting exposure to like uh you know companies less

laser eyes.

Like it's kinda that, right? It's like

Well, I I don't know. Maybe there's you know you know the the the theory that if you're not you know the uh the CEO of the company, the co-founder of the company starts like lifting, like you know, doing uh squats and like bench presses and stuff, they get like gym fit, then like that's bullish, or like bald is bullish, right? And like people have run correlations with this. Maybe it's maybe it's something like that. Like you have laser eyes, you can see the future, you're stacking Bitcoin. Anyway, this club right now is composed of you could see it's about.

It would be about 22 companies right now with MicroStrategy at the top. No one can touch MicroStrategy. 444,000 Bitcoin. Okay. And then uh assortment of other companies that uh, you know, Coinbase, of course, has some Bitcoin on Treasury, but other companies like Tesla, you might recognize Galaxy Digital, of course. Some of these are crypto companies, some some aren't. Uh SEML SEML or Scientific. I don't know who they are, but again, it's like this whole own Bitcoin or your corporate treasury kind of incentive meme plus an investment thesis. Kind of neat.

Interesting. I I will love to see how this tracks over the year and how uh Bitcoin pilled company leaders compare to non Bitcoin pilled company leaders, because I guess that's the signal that we're gonna get from

As usual, I'd just rather own Bitcoin than these companies.

Yeah. To each their own.

Where where are we at on the ratio, David?

Uh ratio is we are kind of still in no man's land. We are higher than the lows. Uh we are not higher than the recent highs. Uh we are at.055. Uh so still kind of waiting for some action on the ratio. Uh, really no signal here. Uh total crypto market cap. We are above 3.5 trillion, coming in at $3.57 trillion. Still looking at that $4 trillion number.