ROLLUP: Clarity Bill Stalls | Powell vs. Trump | NYC Meme Rug | Silver Explodes | X Adds Crypto

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the third week of january's time for the bankless weekly roll-up the clarity bill it took front and center it was in the senate it was a big conversation this week it's probably the most important bill for crypto i would say david even above the genius bill which was much more straightforward much more simple but the clarity bill is supposed to do what we hope which is provide clarity to crypto on what's legal in the u.s and what's not there's some horse trading

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:28] going on, though. The bank lobby hates it.

David Hoffman:
[0:31] Horse trading. Horse trading. I've never heard of this phrase.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:33] Yeah, horse trading. It's like all the parties are negotiating together to see what they can get in and what they'll tolerate and what they won't. It's all the lobbyists working in.

David Hoffman:
[0:41] Okay, we're negotiating.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bank lobby wants to kill stable coin yield. They don't want you to have that, David. You in particular. Also, Coinbase is now rage quitting as of the latest.

David Hoffman:
[0:51] Yeah, I saw that. They withdrew their support.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:54] They did. The current version of The bill, they say, is worse than it not passing. But there are some still that I appreciate and respect in crypto that still like this bill, even as is. They say it's passable. Of course, they'd be on the Coinbase side of things in general. But we've got to figure all that out. Uncover the bill and also figure out whether it's going to pass or if we actually want it.

David Hoffman:
[1:16] Yeah, yeah. And what is it going to take? What do we have to give up to get

David Hoffman:
[1:20] that to pass versus what can we win? But there's plenty of other things to talk about. Jerome Powell, under criminal investigation from Trump's Department of Justice, is the central bank able to remain independent? And also in the world of finance and our government leaders, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams issues a meme coin. And you can guess what happens next, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:43] What happens next?

David Hoffman:
[1:45] What after merely hours after he issued the meme coin?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:48] Well, the first step when you launch a meme coin is you launch it. And the second step is always you got to rug people. You got to rug as many people as you can.

David Hoffman:
[1:55] Don't tell me that's what happened. Do you think this story was any different?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:59] We're going to talk about it.

David Hoffman:
[2:00] Everyone place your bets. We're going to talk about the silver going absolutely parabolic and X rolling out crypto integrations while also killing InfoFi, which I think is just a fantastic thing. And also Tom Lee using his Ethereum treasury company to invest in Mr. Beast because that's the same thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:22] He's got some comments on that. But before we get in, our friends over at David, let's talk about the big, big, big news on the week, which was Jerome Powell. And did you see the video that he sent out last Sunday?

David Hoffman:
[2:35] Yeah, basically, hey, world, look at this injustice that is happening to the central bank's independence. Donald Trump is coming after me. Let's watch a bit of this clip. Good evening. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned, in part, a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings, I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one, certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve, is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure.

David Hoffman:
[3:24] This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress's oversight role. The Fed, through testimony and other public disclosures, made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:40] David, what is he talking about here?

David Hoffman:
[3:42] What is he even talking about? Why is Trump coming after him? Back in June 2025, Powell was in front of Congress and talked about this $2.5 billion renovation of the federal headquarters building in D.C. So they were just getting a bunch of money, $2.5 billion, to renovate the Fed building. Very big building, renovating it for $2.5 billion. Federal prosecutors are looking into whether Powell lied to Congress during this testimony. This has nothing to do with anything about what Trump wants. I think the claim here is that Trump is just finding a way to go after Powell because Powell's not doing the thing that he wants, which is lower interest rates.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:22] Right. So the federal prosecutors are actually coming after Powell and coming after Fed. And specifically, they're saying that Powell misled them, that the cost of this building that you see right now is more than he said it would cost. That's what they're saying. As if building projects or government projects have never, ever gone over budget in the history. But Trump is summoning the DOJ. Presuming this all comes from Trump, which it does, to go prosecute Powell for that purpose. And Powell is saying, hey, it's not about the thing that they're saying it's about. It's about they don't like how I'm handling interest rates.

David Hoffman:
[5:02] Right. They don't like my independence. They don't like how I am free to do what I see is appropriate for my job because everyone else that Donald Trump appoints to whatever other sector of government always is identified as somebody who will just do Trump's bidding. Powell's not doing Trump's bidding, and so Trump is finding a way to go after him.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:24] Absolutely wild drama. I mean, this video message came out, I think, on a Sunday, right? Yeah, rocketed around the financial world. Yeah, it did. It was just full of everything that I was looking at, like all media. Lynn Alden calls this the most direct clash between the Fed and the executive branch since the 1950s. People probably don't remember that, but there's a lot of back and forth and a nibbling away of, like a complete removal of Fed independence during the 1940s and the 1950s, and that same sort of thing is happening here. I don't know that there's ever been a DOJ prosecution of the chair of the Fed, though. That is truly unprecedented territory. Now, a lot of people, David, will say, including I saw a tweet from Eric Voorhees about this, the Fed was never independent in the first place. That was always smoke and mirrors. It was always a political institution at the whims of the executive branch or members of Congress. And so this is just like not a big deal. What do you think about that? Do you think this is not a big deal? It's always been like, or do you think this is, are we crossing a Rubicon here that the US has not crossed maybe ever, or at least since like the 1940s?

David Hoffman:
[6:35] I take Eric's point in the sense that the Fed is not unbiased. The Fed has biases, but they are different from Donald Trump's biases, which are not the same type of biases as the Fed. And the Fed can be can be biased and still be independent from the president.

David Hoffman:
[6:54] And the Fed has a job. It has a mandate like we are humans. We can apply our energies and our efforts to try and get that job done. And I think, you know, you can look back at Powell's legacy. I think like Powell's done a pretty good job. We were talking hella crap about Powell. I remember you and I were talking about hella crap about Powell in 2020 and 2021 during COVID. And then everyone was like, oh, they have to thread the needle. They're totally going to mess it up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:16] He kept saying transitory inflation. That bothered me because like we knew it was much more durable than just like, oh, it'll be a few months. It'll be over.

David Hoffman:
[7:24] He's done a great job. And so sure, maybe he's opinionated. Maybe he's biased, but he's not biased to whatever like a short-term president is interested in. And so I'm not sure Eric Voorhees uh Eric Voorhees, his comments talk about the Fed as like an institution, but not about the local temporal moment that we are in right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:45] Yeah. I mean, Powell projects the opposite of the chaos of Trump. I mean, even when he was going through that, like just that that's that's a prerecorded speech that we just played. Right. Poker face. Yeah. Very monotone. Just the picture, the portrait of stability. So the question is, what's the probability that Powell gets tossed out? Obviously, this prosecution is in place. Still on poly market, the probability by the end of March is 4%, and the probability by May 14th is 8%. This has not moved all that much. So maybe the market has already priced this in. Actually, David, the best take I read on some of the things happening with Trump, this Fed prosecution, also Venezuela, came from Noah Smith this week. You know economist Noah Smith? He's got a great sub stack.

David Hoffman:
[8:34] Yeah, one of our favorites.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:35] Yeah, so his whole thing was, Trump is actually doing, did both Venezuela... And the Fed prosecution, the push towards lower inflation for political reasons. And a key political reason is he knows that affordability is what the American people want. His lowest poll ratings are all around affordability and inflation. And so what is Trump doing? Okay, Venezuela, access to oil. What does that do? It's an inflation lever that he can actually control because if you flood the market with oil, you get gas price down. And American consumers- Energy prices go down.

David Hoffman:
[9:09] Cost of living goes down.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:10] Exactly. And so American consumers notice that the price of the pump is one of the big inflation kind of things that are most notable. So he's doing that. And then also the other thing they notice is the price of their mortgage, price of their credit card bill. And so that's why Trump wants interest rates down too. So he's actually, this may look like chaos, but it's actually somewhat calculated from a political perspective. At least this is the argument Noah's making. But he calls it affordability. He calls it, Noah calls it gangster affordability because the way Trump is doing it is like straight up mob boss. Yeah. Let me go capture the president of a sovereign country and just yoink him and we'll open up.

David Hoffman:
[9:49] So it can lower our cost of living here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:52] Yeah. And let me use lawfare. Let me just go like crush, prosecute, use my DOJ to go prosecute Powell. So he'll like put the leverage on him to really lower interest rates. So there could be it was an interesting rationale for the political calculus behind all of these moves, which seems so chaotic at times.

David Hoffman:
[10:10] That's very interesting because I was intently watching a lot of the polymarket last night as Donald Trump was like posturing to make strikes on Iran. And then he said he called off the strikes on Iran and the polymarkets were all confused. You know what happened? Oil prices went down. I don't know why, but like you watched oil prices drop by something like four or five percent as a result of whatever he did or did not do last night. So that's also very interesting.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:35] Unstable genius, maybe. Maybe that's what Trump's doing.

David Hoffman:
[10:38] Unstable genius. It's actually a great brand for Trump. It kind of is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:42] It kind of is, actually. He's a genius in a very strange way. But the question is, how did markets react? And they did react in a big way. The market that reacted the most was the silver market. I'm going to show you the price of silver in just a minute. But you know silver is going crazy when the U.S. Mint suspends all sales of silver products. Okay, the U.S. Mint mints these collector coins. Did you ever collect coins?

David Hoffman:
[11:05] Yeah, my dad gave me sets of coins. It's 1999, Dave. Here is a penny and a quarter and a nickel and a dime, all from 1999. 1999? Every single year. Every single year he would give me a new set. Yeah, I don't know where those are now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:22] Well, for coin collectors, I used to collect coins as a kid. Not super aggressively, but it's very interesting, right? I find old money very interesting. Anyway, people collect coins from the mint like this. These are silver coins. And the U.S. Mint says, we can't sell anymore. Why? Because the price is moving too fast. So we're going to lose a whole bunch of money on this. So they stopped selling them. That was pretty unprecedented. And this is the price of silver. I'm looking at the one month. So one month price of silver, we're up 43%.

David Hoffman:
[11:55] Ironically, on this chart for people who are watching, the silver line is colored in gold. And the gold line is blue. So don't get confused.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:03] Yeah, yeah. That almost confused me just now as you said that. So gold is up 7%, silver up 42%. Same time range, we'll get into the price of crypto, but the S&P 500 is only up 2%. This is kind of a debasement, maybe Fed independence type of trade. But let me zoom out. That's only the five day. Let me zoom out to the one year here. One year, gold is up 200%. Wow. That's like a volatility of a crypto asset. but.

David Hoffman:
[12:34] Oh, silver is also, no, no, gold is up 70%,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:37] Silver is up 200%. Oh, sorry, sorry, I said, that's what I meant. You're getting confused. I did the thing. I was looking at the wrong line. Okay, silver is up 200%, gold is up 70%. Huge. These are huge numbers.

David Hoffman:
[12:48] Those are massive moves.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:49] S&P is 17%, and of course, yeah, Bitcoin and ETH are just like flat on the year.

David Hoffman:
[12:57] So market pricing that in. So the crypto prices were definitely solidly up this week. Like I got texts from my friends like, oh, we're so back. You know, Bitcoin is up $96,000. The Ether is at $3,300. Are we moving in tandem with these precious metals because of all the same, like, sovereignty and monetary reasons? I don't know. I think we could.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:13] We're getting a little bump. We're just, we're getting...

David Hoffman:
[13:16] I mean, we are still the forgotten asset class by comparison. But, like, there was a positive price movement this week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:22] Yeah, the reason you didn't get any texts from your silver friends is probably, David, you don't have any silver friends.

David Hoffman:
[13:26] I don't have any silver friends. I know you are my only silver friend. As my one coin collector.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:32] You think I'm a silver friend?

David Hoffman:
[13:33] You said you collected a little few coins here and there.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:35] I don't have any silver though, unfortunately. I wish I did. That would be great. That'd be great on a week like this. CPI numbers came in as well. They were a little bit lower than expected, so 2.6%. But we talked about the other markets and their reaction to this, which is like silver and gold up. You're right. Crypto did get a bump on the week. What are the numbers, the official seven-day numbers for Bitcoin?

David Hoffman:
[13:56] Yeah, both Bitcoin and Ether are up 5.3% on the week. Bitcoin's at $96,100. Ether is at $3,300. We're trying. Still not crazy price action in any direction, but it does feel healthy getting away from that 2,000 number on Ether and getting closer to 100,000 in Bitcoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:18] I did see a lot of shorts get liquidated.

David Hoffman:
[14:20] We are still not the star of any financial show whatsoever. We are still the forgotten asset class.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:26] I did see the shorts get liquidated, though. Did you? That always feels good.

David Hoffman:
[14:29] Feels good. Feels good.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:30] Yeah, feels good. I'm like, yeah, get them.

David Hoffman:
[14:32] I'll be friends with silver people. I'll be friends with gold people. Well, I will not be friends with crypto short sellers.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:38] Yeah. Oh, man. If you have any friends. Yeah. What are you doing? Who are you? What are you doing with your life?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:45] This was an interesting number, though, that I stumbled across on the week, which is the number of active addresses. This is comparing ETH to Bitcoin. Okay. And I haven't looked at this in a long time, probably, you know, like five years or something, a very long time. This is actually the first time that ETH has flipped Bitcoin in terms of number of active addresses. What? The first in history. Yeah. What? Seven day, moving average.

David Hoffman:
[15:12] How does that make any sense?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:14] You thought that had already happened?

David Hoffman:
[15:17] That doesn't make any sense.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:19] No way. This is the block. This is the block. They're reliable.

David Hoffman:
[15:24] But Ethereum, even as like non-scaled Ethereum is, it's still way more scaled than Bitcoin in a throughput standpoint. Granted, our transactions are heavier and more dense and do more things. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:35] I mean, it wasn't much more, though. Like previously, I mean, previous to this year, it was what, like double? I don't know, like 12 transactions per second versus Bitcoin's, what, seven or something like that?

David Hoffman:
[15:44] Right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:45] It's really, it's been this year that's really outpaced. But anyway, that's a flippening of a story.

David Hoffman:
[15:50] That's crazy to me.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:50] I had thought that that had happened already.

David Hoffman:
[15:53] I had thought that that was what it was for years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:56] Nope, nope. I mean, Bitcoin has a lot of active users, a lot of active addresses. Okay, so one other thing.

David Hoffman:
[16:03] What are they doing? Ordinals?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:06] No, it's not ordinals. It's the use case for Bitcoin, which is you move Bitcoin around. There's also the case that Ethereum is scaling so hard right now. Here's a tweet. And reduced gas fees so much. This person says, Vito says, I have no reason to use L2s anymore. Well job, Ethereum. And it's funny, if you go to how much does a L1 transaction cost right now, on Ethereum mainnet, it's about 0.016 cents. So it's just a penny and a half per transaction.

David Hoffman:
[16:36] I have not thought about the cost of my transactions in a long time.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:40] It's like the same price as Polygon, proof of stake, right now. It's within the same range as Arbitrum and Base, almost.

David Hoffman:
[16:48] Now, if Ethereum could just get some faster block times, it would actually start to approach parity with a lot of other very fast Layer 2s and other Layer 1s. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:56] It's good, though. I mean, this is ETH L1 scaling, and hopefully we see more of that moving forward. But I guess the question to maybe end the market section with is... Is this going to persist? Do you think we're going to get, we got a 5% on the week. Your prediction was slow grind up. Seems like we have the narrative at our back here, which is like, there's no Fed independence anymore. It seems like crypto should outperform. Bitcoin especially. It seems like it's its moment. Do you think we're setting a bottom here? Do you think this is the slow grind up or is there more bear to continue?

David Hoffman:
[17:31] Yeah. Other than the clarity passing, I just can't find any catalyst. And I don't really know how much of a catalyst that that clarity will be in the short term. Like, clarity passes, and you're going to see a bump in ETH price in that moment. It's not going to, it'll be a small to medium-sized bump up, but it won't really define anything big. Solon will also get a bump, not as much as Ethereum. Bitcoin won't really do anything at all. And then we're going, and it's going to be in the rearview mirror, and I don't know what positive catalyst is ahead for the year in either direction for what it's worth. I don't know why we would go down, but I guess no one does whether the black swans are black swans. But nonetheless, I'm still seeing headwinds in terms of losing our forgotten asset class status. I don't know about you, Brian, but I am looking very much forward to the SpaceX IPO. That is exciting to me. And also, Antropic and OpenAI, these are going to be very exciting financial markets moments and they're just not what the crypto industry is relevant to.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:28] I mean, the fact that we have Fed independence fears right now and no one's really talking about crypto, we're just talking about silver and gold instead. That's kind of not what we need, right? We want Bitcoin and non-sovereign store value assets and crypto to be outperforming. They're not right now. So I tend to agree with you. I mean, I think that this is not the sign of now

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:50] we're entering the bull run. At least we don't have a clear indication there. But we got to talk about the catalyst that you just mentioned, which is the clarity bill in the Senate. So much to discuss on that, but including, Do we want it to pass? And what's in it? And who's fighting over it? We'll talk about all that more. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right.

David Hoffman:
[19:11] We've got a lot to get through with the Clarity Act. We have two opposing bills being introduced that maybe they conferge. We have two opposing committees with proposing those bills in the first place. And then we have Coinbase defecting, Coin Center giving the thumbs up, and then Elizabeth Warren reeing as normal. So we're going to talk about all of this and more. First, let's just level set with what Clarity is. Let's talk about that. Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is main United States crypto market structure bill. It defines what a digital commodity versus security is. It formalizes the splitting of the jurisdiction between the SEC and the CFTC. It sets the rules for exchanges, brokerages, and custodians. It's a very big bill. Like Ryan said, kind of in the intro, our first bill that we got was the Genius Act, the Stablecoin Act. Decently uncontentious. It's just stablecoins promoting dollar dominance. Not like there were some things to fight over, but in the broad strokes of things, just like was very obvious and needed to get done and did get done. The Clarity Act is much more contentious because there are so many things to fight over. The securities, the Wall Street is going up against DeFi. Banks are going up against the stablecoin issuers. There's just so many different levels of surface area to fight over. And that is kind of the theme of the week is we kind of fought over all of them. The House passed their version of Clarity in mid-2025, and then it was time to go to the Senate.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:37] And that was good, by the way. We liked that. That was great. The House version was pretty solid.

David Hoffman:
[20:41] Yes. Then it went to the Senate, and the Senate has been stuck. They've been trying to craft its own version and reconcile the two different versions coming out of the two different committees, the Banking Committee and the Agricultural Committee. The Ag Committee is leaning the bill towards the CFTC. The banking committee is leaning to build towards the SEC, along with all their other DeFi and Sablecoin stuff. And that's kind of the state of play as it relates to like what happened this week. But just before this week in December, both the banking and agricultural sides pushed their clarity markups into January, January 2026. They just kind of punted saying like, we couldn't resolve this. Let's let's tackle this in the new year. Now it's the new year. That's now. And really, the fight is being over DeFi. DeFi treatment, whether the front-end devs or developers at all, are intermediaries and also stablecoin rewards and yields.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:34] Let's talk about stablecoins, rewards, and yields, because I think this is a big fight. Specifically, the banks are on one side of this, which is that American citizens, users should not get their stablecoin yields, that only the banks should get them.

David Hoffman:
[21:50] The banks should get the money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:52] Yes, and they're saying things like, well, this would destabilize the financial system, right? This would reduce credit creation. This would be really bad for smaller community-style banks. I think the net of it, though, is, David, they make a whole lot of money from

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:10] interest on your savings account, right? Again, the delta here.

David Hoffman:
[22:14] It is destabilizing, in a sense, of their whole paradigm.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:19] Yeah. So most of the big banks, and by the way, the big bank lobby, which they are well-funded. They've been in Washington forever, right? They kind of run that town at some level. What they're trying to do, this is sort of beyond the scope of the Clarity Act, what they're trying to do is they're trying to do a take back from the Genius Bill.

David Hoffman:
[22:36] Yeah, they did a whoopsie in the Genius Bill.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:38] Yeah, so they got outflanked by kind of the crypto proponents, the crypto lobby. And as part of the Genius Bill, they thought they closed the loophole for sharing interest to users. And indeed, issuers of stable coins cannot do that. But exchanges or other protocols can provide that interest. So the net effect is most users get that interest. Now they're trying to shut that down. And they're not making a very convincing case, I think, for American citizens and why this is good for American citizens. But of course, they have the ear and campaign of many of the lawmakers who are weighing in on this. And as of now, am I correct? They are kind of blocking all stablecoin yield. That's at least the current version of the markup we have. Is that right? Right.

David Hoffman:
[23:25] Yeah, yeah, that's right. Maybe just to make this a little bit more clear, the BlackRock's tokenized biddle fund passes yield onto its holders directly on chain natively as a part of the smart contract. That is also a security. In the Genius bill, they blocked that from being able to be done with normal stable coins. So if you hold USDC or Tether, you cannot get the yield of the interest of the T-bills that back it. But the loophole that Ryan said the industry flanked around the banking lobby around is that if you hold your USEC on Coinbase, Coinbase gives you 4.something percent, 4.25 percent as a reward. Not as interest, as a reward, a customer for a reward for doing that. And that's like the loophole that the banks were like, wait a second, that's not what we meant. And so they are trying to close that loophole in this bill. And that is the thing that they are being a very significant hardliner on.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:17] David, do you see this? So on the DeFi, that's the stablecoin thing. And on the DeFi that you mentioned, there are commercials being run like this one. Investors for transparency, primetime ads on Fox News, urging viewers to oppose DeFi provisions. How many Fox News viewers do you think are like, oh, DeFi, I hate that. I'm going to call my senator.

David Hoffman:
[24:38] Or DeFi, I know what that is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:40] Yes, tell your senator, look at this. Tell your senator, pass crypto legislation without DeFi provisions. How many people are like.

David Hoffman:
[24:47] What is DeFi? That's a new Zoomer. This is so funny. This is big suits with briefcases looking out on some federal building. It says, don't let DeFi stall innovation. This message paid for by the banking committee.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:04] What? It's actually wild. It's actually wild, the arguments that they're making. But they are spending money. So this is Hayden Adams on that specific commercial. A group named Investors for Transparency are running public ads plus lobbying to kill DeFi, the most transparent financial system on earth. Ironic but unsurprising, their site does not disclose who funds them. Oh, so it must be some sort of a super PAC type of money.

David Hoffman:
[25:31] It's the banks. Who do we think this is? It's the banks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:34] It's the banks. We know it is. We know it's you guys with Elizabeth Warren. We'll talk about her a little more later. But we did get something that was very positive. It's called the BRCA. Can you explain what this is?

David Hoffman:
[25:46] Yeah, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. And so I was talking to Austin Campbell forever ago, and he was very bearish on the Clarity Act passing because he thought that there's just too much to be fighting over. And so people are going to carve out an unbundle and pass these things kind of piecemeal. And this is kind of what's happening with the BRCA. This is a bill from Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden, which is a more narrow bill that protects developers and infrastructure providers of non-custodial services from being considered money transmitters under federal law. If you care about crypto, if you care about freedom, if you care about the developers to be able to write code, this should string at your heartstrings. This is a very big deal. This is the Roman storm defense bill of sorts. And it's really just trying to get pressure off of clarity to carve out this one thing. That it doesn't seem to be too controversial and is accepted by many people,

David Hoffman:
[26:43] I think, and is simply just going to get stitched on to the Clarity Act. And it's separate from the markups from the two committees. And it just narrowly focuses on if you are a DeFi developer, if you are front end, you are not a money transmitter and you cannot be prosecuted as such.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:59] Code is not crime, basically. And you're right, this is a separate sort of bill, but it has been bundled with the latest versions of the markups of the main clarity act.

David Hoffman:
[27:08] It's been compartmentalized, but then added on.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:11] Yeah, so this is huge. And the senators behind this, they're doing fantastic work here. Roman Storm's obviously very excited about it. I've seen him tweet about this. Basically, I mean, his whole, I don't know if this applies retroactively, but obviously if this passes, there's no reason.

David Hoffman:
[27:27] It doesn't hurt his case, that's for sure.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:29] No, it doesn't.

David Hoffman:
[27:29] Which also we have not heard of the prosecutors reopening Roman Storm's case again.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:35] Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, you're right about that.

David Hoffman:
[27:37] They are still in that window where they could, but they have not done that. And the longer that it goes. If this passes. And if this passes, like Roman's like, come on, come at me.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:46] Come on, come on, right?

David Hoffman:
[27:47] We know how bold Roman is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:50] Okay, so there are two drafts, two markups, right? One in the ag committee and the other in the banking committee. Are they similar, different? What's going on here?

David Hoffman:
[28:01] They have different biases. Like I said, the Ag Committee wants to put more of crypto under the CFTC. The Banking Committee wants more of the crypto industry to follow under the SEC. So there is some differences, but they are reconcilable. But they are reconcilable with time. So we need time. And so this is kind of where we are this week. The Senate Banking Committee was supposed to do its markup today. It was supposed to do it today, Thursday, January 5th, the 15th. Yesterday, they canceled it. The Ag Committee has postponed its markup. So it got pushed to the last week of January because Senate leaders realized that they did not yet have a bipartisan coalition on getting it done. So both of these things have been postponed. Why did, Ryan, the Senate Ag Committee postpone their markup,

David Hoffman:
[28:54] which was supposed to happen today?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:55] Senate banking, you mean? Senate banking?

David Hoffman:
[28:57] What did I say? Yeah, Senate banking.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:58] Yeah, I think it's because Coinbase dropped out, right?

David Hoffman:
[29:02] Yeah, Coinbase was through their support.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:04] Yeah, so, I mean, the banking committee is really interesting because it has people like our favorite Senator Elizabeth Warren on the banking committee, who used to be a lot more powerful and influential on these types of topics, is less so, but she is trying her darndest. She had filed 38 different amendments to this specific bill to, of course, remove developer protections, make AML-KYC obligations for all DeFi, for all front ends, repeal positive OCC guidance for banks, gut the SEC's ability to allow any tokenized stocks, like all of the things you would expect. She's there and she's a part of Senate banking trying to push this into the bill.

David Hoffman:
[29:44] Do all of the bad things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:45] It's impressive. Yes, yes. And this is part of the reason people like senators like Warren have gotten some of this language in, some compromised version of this language in the bill is part of the reason that you're right. Coinbase came out and they said, we don't support this bill. Right. We're out. Yeah. It's kind of, I guess, a rage quit. I think they're still hopeful that these issues could be changed, but they're kind of rage quitting for now. This is Brian Armstrong. He said there's too many issues with this last bill over the past 48 hours. There's a de facto ban on tokenized equities. There's DeFi prohibitions, giving the government access to your financial records, removing your right to privacy. Erosion of the CFTC is favoring towards a SEC. And of course, you're killing stable coins and you're killing stable coin yield. And he said, we'll keep fighting for all Americans' economic freedom, of course, but we'd rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully, we can get a better draft. So he's still hopeful there'll be a better draft. But he's saying, if you guys try to pass this, we're withdrawing our support, which is interesting. I mean, they're a major voice in the crypto community for sure.

David Hoffman:
[30:54] Yeah, I mean, major voice, major funder. And so when Coinbase withdraws their support, like what does that mean for Coinbase to withdraw their support? They're not a senator. They don't have involvement here. They just kind of fund everyone, which is a very big deal. So I'm assuming the support of Coinbase is highly related to the hundreds of millions of dollars that they pumped into the campaign last cycle. Interestingly, Neeraj from Coin Center tweeted out, actually, this bill's pretty good, and kind of voiced out some support from the bill. So there's a mixed response from the crypto industry about their stance on the Clarity Act as it stands. I think, here's my interpretation of what's going on, Brian Armstrong and Coinbase are definitely focused on the economic side of the Clarity Act. Stable coin yields being able to tokenize securities like more financial assets in more expressive ways to go to more people all that kind of stuff and they are not satisfied with that arena of the Clarity Act Neeraj from CoinCenter are primarily more narrowly focused on DeFi protections, developer protections, individual freedoms and individual rights from prosecution. And it seems to be that this bill does strongly protect DeFi. Not completely, because Brian Armstrong also said that there needs to be more DeFi protections. But I think that's why we are seeing two different opinions from CoinCenter versus Coinbase.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:21] CoinCenter, a fantastic organization. They've been protecting crypto and helping crypto sell sovereign values from the very beginning. I think they see the BRCA that we were talking about earlier as such a big win in that it protects non-custodial developers in the Roman storms of the world that regardless of anything else, if that passes, they still count this as a net win. And I think that's kind of the difference. Of course, they'd want all of the things Coinbase also wants, but creating a bill, as you can tell, there's a lot of compromise involved in getting something that no one loves perfectly, for sure. It is interesting, though, there are a number of other crypto organizations that still like this bill, even as is. I mean, they want more, but like Ripple, Kraken, A16Z, Circle, Robinhood.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:11] Okay, but like they've all said, eh, it's not so bad. It's not so bad. So I kind of wonder, I mean, you know, where this stands. I guess on the DeFi thing, that was my big question, right? Which is like, how much of DeFi is protected versus under threat? Jake Travinsky says in the current version of the bill, the latest draft leaves ambiguity about whether all sorts of developers and infrastructure providers could be forced to KYC users, register with the SEC, or comply with other rules that don't fit DeFi. Okay, so there's still some rulemaking, some loose language around this, even if a Roman storm can't be prosecuted in the way it was prosecuted. Maybe front ends have to enforce KYC for users. Like a lot of things that are pretty crappy, coming from the Elizabeth Warren side of the house here.

David Hoffman:
[33:59] Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what happens next? Like I said, the banking committee was supposed to do their markup today. It got canceled due to Coinbase's withdrawal support. The ag committee announced that its markup was rescheduled to January 27th. So that's kind of the next big milestone. That is in how many days? That is in math. 12 days. The time that we have here, so we have 12 days before the Agamal Committee does their stuff and then the Banking Committee has their stuff again as well. At least that allows these two different tracks to kind of like reconcile and get over some differences and see if we can make things more simple and come to agreement with certain things so we can kind of narrow the energies and the focus on the disputes, which is probably going to be stablecoins and DeFi. To summarize what the crypto industry wants out of this bill,

David Hoffman:
[34:49] Jake Stravinsky put five things into a list. Five things that Jake Stravinsky thinks that we need to focus on as an industry. One, preserving yield for stablecoin holders. Clarity Section 404 currently kills this. We don't currently get this. It's basically just The Senate is either going to pick the banks or the crypto industry as a winner and a loser.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:10] Or I'd say citizens. It's not just the crypto industry. It's like people.

David Hoffman:
[35:14] Yes, true, true, true. Notably, I like this line from Jake Schvitzky. There's no valid policy reason for restricting stablecoin yield or rewards. So there's no legal precedent. There's no policy reason. Somebody just gets the yield. Either we protect the banks and we prop up that industry, Or we allow innovation and allow the yields to go to the stablecoins, a.k.a. end users, a.k.a. people.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:37] Yeah, people are the banks. It seems pretty clear.

David Hoffman:
[35:39] People are the banks. People are the banks. Yeah. So that's the stablecoin issue. Second thing that Jake Stravinsky would like to see fixed, authorizing the SEC to enable tokenized securities. He says, last year, SEC chair Paul Atkins launched Project Crypto, an ambitious effort to upgrade the financial system by moving it on-chain. Clarity Section 505 appears to stop him from achieving that goal by eliminating his authority to treat crypto fairly. He follows up with, I bet Citadel loves this. Citadel, the Trad5, who's that? Ken Griffith, that guy. We don't like him. Third, reducing burdens on token issuers. We want more tokens to be launched and issued by people in the crypto industry. Jake Stravinsky says, In this current form of the act, Title I includes onerous equity-level disclosures not too different from public companies, audited financials at all. Works for mature companies, not for startups. It may be better to go offshore or sell stock instead. Basically, just like if you want to issue a token as a startup, you have to go through what is essentially a going public process,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:44] Which is infeasible.

David Hoffman:
[36:46] Yeah, and then what's the point? Four, protecting DeFi developers. Title III of the Clarity Act has several references suggesting that the surveillance state could take over DeFi. These must be removed or fixed. And then five, allowing institutions access to DeFi. He says Section 308 almost fixes this, but it gets it wrong by imposing burdens on the institutions that will scare them away from DeFi even more than the status quo. So those are the five things that Jake Stravinsky wants fixed in order to have an A-plus bill.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:11] In my opinion right now, the bill is like D, D-plus, maybe C-minus. D plus, probably. Like, I kind of, I'm on the Coinbase side of things. Like, it's not great in a lot of ways. This, all of that gets it to an A. Are we going to get all of that? I think probably not. But then the question is, do we support it? Do we want it passed?

David Hoffman:
[37:32] What do we give up? Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:33] This is David Sacks saying, of course, part of the Trump administration, passage of market structure remains as close as ever. The crypto industry should use this pause to resolve any remaining differences. Now is the time to set rules of the road and secure the future of this industry. Of course, they want to get it done. They want to get it passed.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:49] But it has to be good. It has to be good.

David Hoffman:
[37:51] So what is a polymorphic? I have an idea of what we can give up in order to get this passed. Because this is still a sticking point. The banks? Is the president's relations with launching crypto projects. Oh, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:02] That's a non-starter. It's still a sticking point.

David Hoffman:
[38:03] Like, we have not. Can we just give that to the Democrats? Let's give that. Let's give them that one. They can have that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:10] Sure. Sure. Yeah. But then Trump won't sign it, David. The probability that the Clarity Act is signed into law in 2026 on Polymarket right now is a 44% chance. So we've got a coin flip right now. This is on fairly low volume, about 10K volume. Very low volume. That could change in the future. But okay, I like those odds, 54%. 50. Matt Hogan, the Clarity Act is the Punxsutawney Phil of this crypto winter.

David Hoffman:
[38:32] I don't know what that reference is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:34] If it sticks its head out. You know like the Groundhog Day? Groundhog sees his shadow, you know.

David Hoffman:
[38:39] Yeah, I know.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:39] Groundhog Day. Weeks of winter versus doesn't. That's Punxsutawney Phil. He's Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, right? Who? So he's just saying, okay.

David Hoffman:
[38:48] Is he the guy that pulled the groundhog out?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:51] No, no, no. That's the actual groundhog. Is his name Punxsutawney Phil. Yeah. Is his name Phil the groundhog. You don't know this?

David Hoffman:
[38:59] No. Is it the same groundhog every year?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:01] Anyway, that's the groundhog. So if the groundhog sticks its head out but fails in Congress, the winter could continue.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:09] And if it passes, then winter is over, basically. He's saying that this is going to determine how deep the bear market is. So it's really important. Really important this passes. David, we've got more coming up.

David Hoffman:
[39:21] Such a long word.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:22] Why are you stuck on that? But New York City gets a meme coin and it's already been rugged. We'll talk about that. Also, Polygon going all in on stable coins. Two big acquisitions. Tom Lee and Mr. Beast teaming up for something? Is Mr.

David Hoffman:
[39:38] Beast in the vaccine? Why does it make sense? I don't know. I don't know.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:41] Maybe it doesn't. But we'll see. We'll talk about all that more. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

David Hoffman:
[39:47] Ryan, my former New York mayor launched a meme coin this week to the surprise of everyone. No one saw it coming. It's called New York City Coin, ticker NYC. Great ticker. And that ran to a $600 million valuation before, guess what happened next? Just moments after it launched, after it reached a $600 million valuation, all the liquidity was pulled for about $2.5 million.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:17] Okay.

David Hoffman:
[40:18] Yeah. So that's what happened. And Eric Adams, and maybe listeners might remember, we've played two clips of Eric Adams over the last year and a half of him just like kind of just taking a huge victory lap about how he agreed to take his salary in Bitcoin. He got a salary that one time in Bitcoin,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:34] Yeah, and he's the smartest guy in the world.

David Hoffman:
[40:36] Yeah, and he was just like teasing. People were saying I was dumb. Look who's laughing now. That's what he said. Look who's laughing now. So that's the guy. Launched a meme coin. Look who's laughing now. And then the liquidity rugs. It's a meme coin on Solana. That's where you launch meme coins that you want to rug.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:54] I find it hilarious the way he branded this, David. So this is his original tweet. He's proud to launch the NYC meme coin, a new token built to fight the rapid spread of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism across the country and now in New York City. Very civic-minded in this meme coin launch.

David Hoffman:
[41:16] Buynyctoken.com. I think the way that they were supposed to actually combat the spread of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism is like a charity. It's like the value goes to charity.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:27] Did it, though? I mean, that's all been very vague, right? Like, I mean, we don't know where the money is going to or who it's going to. That hasn't been disclosed.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:37] It just looks like Eric Adams is kind of using his celebrity to just launch a meme coin rug pull. That's what it looks like. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

David Hoffman:
[41:47] So here's what happened. Developer created a one-sided liquidity pool on Meteora. I think you were, this is when you were on your little hiatus earlier this year, Ryan. But Meteora was the epicenter of the Javier Malay meme coin. That's where the Javier Malay meme coin. And it's where just a lot, it's a lot of attention got put on this Meteora complex of pump and dumps from Hayden Davis. This is following the Hayden Davis playbook to a T. Why is he doing that?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:12] It's been so bad. Why is he burning his reputation like this?

David Hoffman:
[42:17] Who, Eric Adams? Yeah. Well, I think the idea is you target somebody who just doesn't know any better. Because Eric Adams was like, he made a public statement claiming that they did not move or withdraw investor funds or personally invest in NYC Bitcoin or profit from the launch. He says that liquidity moves were by partners to manage high demand, not to scam traders, which is exactly what a scammer would tell him to say if they were scamming him. For sure. So they're just using, they're the puppet master behind the scenes. He's like, Eric, we're going to launch this beam point. Everyone's going to love you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:49] So you're saying it could be the case that Eric Adams is also a scammer. It could also be the case that he's just like not very.

David Hoffman:
[42:56] Smart on this. He's a useful idiot.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:00] That's your take on why he did it?

David Hoffman:
[43:01] Well, that's how Javier Millet, it wasn't, Javier Millet wasn't a scammer. He was a useful idiot.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:07] I know, but this has happened so many times. Like somebody in Eric Adams' orbit would have to say, hey, yeah, but before you do this, should you look at what happened to Javier Millet? Like it was like an absolute disaster. It's going to tank your reputation. I mean, it's stupid any way you cut it. That's what Hayden Adams says. Part of what's so sad is celebrities and politicians- Notably.

David Hoffman:
[43:25] Different from Hayden Davis.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:27] Yeah. Can easily monetize their fame without scamming. Like you can still launch a coin and not rug. Hayden goes on. He's saying there is a way to actually do meme coins where you don't rug. But it seems like it's kind of a lemon market.

David Hoffman:
[43:41] Anyone who doesn't want to rug a meme coin doesn't launch a meme coin in the first place.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:46] Yeah. So what's your meme coin coming out, David? Is that never?

David Hoffman:
[43:50] We do have Dave Dow out there of 200 good Dave's. That's a good call to action. I haven't done a Dave Dow call to action. If you're named Dave, David, Dawid, Davide, any derivative of David, hit me up on Twitter so I can add you to Dave Dow. We have 200 strong grades in Telegraph.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:04] So now all the Daves are going to rug pull everyone else, huh? That's what you want to support, David?

David Hoffman:
[44:09] We've actually tried, not anyone, different Davids have tried to launch a David coin and all the other Davids are like, we don't want it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:16] You have to have consensus among the Davids before you launch. Speaking of consensus, this was a non-consensus move. Tom Lee, BitMine debt, he's still buying Ether. Still buying a ton of Ether, all-time highs in terms of the amount he owed. I saw this week that he is now staking over a billion dollars worth of Ether. Nice. Just a billion. That's just Tom Lee in BitMine. But this week, he invests $200 million, not in buying Ether the asset, but investing in MrBeast Media. That's right. The YouTube creator, MrBeast, one of the most popular creators on the planet. He is setting aside $200 million through the debt to invest in MrBeast. People asked, Tom Lee, why are you doing this? I thought you were an Ethereum debt. This is Tom Lee in his own words as to why he's doing this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:04] As you know, Bitmine is the largest Ethereum treasury company in the world, the largest holder of Ethereum. And it's our view that Ethereum, which is a smart contract platform, is the future of finance, where digitalization of not only dollars, but stocks and equities is going to take place. And over time, that really blurs what is a service versus what's digital money. Um, and that's where, uh, a collaboration and investment into beast industries makes sense. Um, as you know, Mr. Beast is the number one content creator in the world. His content is watched more than for each of his videos, 252 million views a month, which is more than the Superbowl. And really he is probably the iconic person for Gen Z, Gen alpha, and arguably millennial. So he is probably one of the most important creators in the world. So that is why David now do you understand.

David Hoffman:
[46:03] No that wasn't he never explained it he explained I was I was that was a good setup that was a good setup to for him to tell me and follow through with what

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:14] What the synergy is here? Yeah. I kind of think Tom Lee just had an opportunity and really wanted to buy into MrBeast Media, which like, who wouldn't? And so this was a vehicle for doing that.

David Hoffman:
[46:28] Yeah. The last time he did this, he invested in the WorldCoin vehicle and then it like immediately did an 8X and then he just pocketed that gains and like, I would presume maybe put it into ETH after that. So if he's making opinionated investments in like MrBeast and then he has a liquidity event and you can buy ETH from that, that okay sure

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:46] Unless mr beast do you think mr beast is gonna start chilling eath you think beast becomes mr beast becomes a uh eath maxi and he's just you know proselytizing.

David Hoffman:
[46:56] You know what i i love mr beast i actually i watch your shows mr beast guy and like i mean like i kind of feel like i'm watching brain rot and i feel like i'm a zoomer so i lose like five to ten years off of myself, but like, yeah, I'm like zoned out watching him throw cash around at these like very viral. Yeah. Mr. Beast is great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:16] Especially maybe there's some, maybe there's some synergy. And I mean, Tom Lee, I mean, say what you like, he is buying a lot of ETH and he is certainly, investing in things he's bullish on. So he's bullish on Mr. Beast. Maybe we can get him to say nice things about Ether. We'll see.

David Hoffman:
[47:31] All right. Moving back on chain. Ryan, World Liberty Financial. What is that? Do you remember what that was supposed to be?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:37] Donald Trump and Enco, his family, their stable coin. And also, wasn't it a borrowing and lending protocol? Didn't they like fork Aave, something like this?

David Hoffman:
[47:46] That was always the original plan is they were supposed to fork Aave and be

David Hoffman:
[47:50] a borrowing and lending application. So, in that same vein, they have launched World Liberty Markets, a borrowing and lending platform meant to expand the usage of the USD1 and WFLI tokens along with other things you can deposit like Ether and stuff like that. Is it Aave? Aave? No, it's Dolomite, which is a borrowing and lending application that is founded by one of the advisors to World Liberty Markets. This guy, Corey, who's got a CryptoPunk who looks very similar to mine, is the founder of Dolomite. And he became one of the World Liberty Financial advisors. And now World Liberty Financial is integrated with Dolomite, which is up 17% on the week, 12% on the week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:36] Yeah, I mean, I always thought they were going to do this. I think why it's interesting in the context of this week is Elizabeth Warren really, really, really, really hates this and is trying to prevent WLFI, it's trying to file for a banking license.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:54] Warren is trying to tie some of this language of Trump can't do this and World Liberty Finance can't get a banking license into the clarity bill. And that's why it all gets complicated. But to your point earlier, it would be really nice if all parties involved could just kind of divest their direct interests of this sort of thing. So we don't have Trump meme coins and World Liberty Finance and stable coins in the Trump empire clouding things up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:20] But I don't think we're going to get that. David, Polygon is making some interesting moves on the week. They acquire two companies, CoinMe and Sequence, for I believe $250 million. What are these companies? They are regulated payments companies.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:37] Okay, so this is, CoinMe in particular, has a U.S. Licensed fiat on-ramp and off-ramp in a retail network. And Sequence is an enterprise wallet in orchestration infrastructure. What they're doing here is Polygon has become a pretty... Yeah, Tempo, basically. Tempo, of course, is Stripe's upcoming stablecoin chain. Polygon has had a ton of stablecoin transactions in traffic. It's one of the largest ones, actually, if you kind of look at the numbers. Even in terms of Stripe's stablecoins and settlement, that's happening to a large degree on Polygon. And this is them going, I guess, would you call that up market? They are verticalizing really in that they are getting the other stacks that they were missing, which is the on ramp, off ramp and bridge type stuff. So this is Polygon saying our pivot really is a stable coin chain. And we're going to be sort of a tempo or a circle arc or some of the other competitors in this space. What do you think of this move?

David Hoffman:
[50:40] Yeah, my first thought is that it's just very clear that there is no such thing as a generalized layer two anymore. Like you have to be opinionated. You have to verticalize. You have to choose a vector, a sector, and you have to penetrate deeply into it in order to be a chain at all in these days. And so that's kind of what I'm saying here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:59] Everything's an app chain, basically?

David Hoffman:
[51:00] Everything is an app chain, or at least like, or the apps must be built by the chains. Like what chain is launching and being like, come build on us? Like, no, like Mega Mafia is like this native app ecosystem built on Mega ETH. Monad is incubating its own apps. World has all the world mini apps. Zello has Minipay and all of their apps. Like everyone's kind of got their own verticalized app ecosystem. And it makes sense that Polygon is putting this pretty like, it's not like in the code of the chain, but it's in the code of the company. In a sense, like what I mean by that is like it's a formal, intimate part of the actual company of Polygon. and what their goals are. And so that kind of just makes sense.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:42] As an L1 or EVM or like L2, you can't just copy a clone Ethereum L1 DeFi and just be like, yeah, we're that, but we have cheaper gas fees.

David Hoffman:
[51:51] Yeah, I think Solana was the last person, last chain person to be able to do that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:57] Yeah, that's a good take. David, do you see what's going on with X this week? So two things. One, they're doing smart cash tags. And two, they are restricting API access to Kaido. You talk about those.

David Hoffman:
[52:13] Yeah, so Nikita Beer has been the subject of a lot of crypto Twitter's ire this last week, mainly for kind of like nuking a lot of the algorithm around crypto Twitter content.

David Hoffman:
[52:25] He's a product lead at X. Yeah, he's a product lead at X. And he's also an advisor to the Solana Foundation, which this relates to both of these two stories. So smart cash tags, what are they? They're these interactive tickers. So the way that a ticker used to work on Twitter is you would do like a dollar sign BTC and then you would click into that ticker and then it would show you all tweets. It would filter all the tweets of the universe by tweets that had that same ticker in it so you could see what people were talking about about that same financial asset. That works in TradFi where there's a very narrow number of tickers that are all kind of orderly and non-overlapping because there's not that many. It doesn't work in the crypto context. Do you remember Blinks, Ryan? We talked about Blinks like once or twice. Blockchain Lynx, something that was pioneered by the Solana Foundation. This uses Blinks. This uses Solana Blinks. And so it connects to a token on Solana or you would presume on an Ethereum layer too. You see the base token ticker right there. And it'll show you the chart and the other financial information of a specific asset. So even if there are multiple assets with the same ticker, you type the ticker and then a little pop-up shows up and you choose the asset kind of like how you do in TradingView. And then it gives you more information. And so it's not just about filtering tweets at this point. It's being framed as this everything app. So social markets and also payments.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:53] Well, it's because it's not just showing you the chart. It's not just information. You could buy and sell like in DeFi using this.

David Hoffman:
[54:00] Oh, that is in this markup.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:01] Yeah, buy and sell. Right. I mean, that's the blink part, which is pretty cool because what does this turn X into? Kind of a crypto super app, sort of a financial super app. I mean, that's the direction of travel here.

David Hoffman:
[54:14] Did you know that X has money transmitter licenses in 12 different states and is also, in the back end, building X money? So you would, in theory, just be able to connect this later to swaps and custody and payments.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:25] It's a dark horse for a wallet competitor and also for a Stripe competitor, to be honest. That's not the only thing they did, though. There was a restriction of Kaido in InfoFi. What's this?

David Hoffman:
[54:36] Okay, so they revised their API policies to basically ban InfoFi products specifically. I don't know if you share the same opinion, Ryan, but I think InfoFi has completely plagued Twitter to really incent noise, not signal.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:54] We'll talk about what you mean by that. You're talking about Kaido primarily, right? Because there's other InfoFi, like prediction markets are InfoFi. I don't think that's where your ire is, right? And that's not what they're restricting access to. It's things like Kaido that.

David Hoffman:
[55:06] Basically- Kaido specifically, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:08] Yeah, they pay- What do they do? What does Kaido do?

David Hoffman:
[55:11] They basically like provide income for people to produce engagement about a particular project or something. And so if projects want like distribution or awareness or people to tweet about them, they will create an incentive campaign in order to do that. And this is very, like, we kind of think that this is very common in places like India and Africa, where, like, a lot of people are using this as income to go tweet about something. But it's completely distortive. It distorts the noise. It creates spam, slop. Yes. It just, like, degrades the value of Twitter as an information ecosystem because it incents noise, basically. So they just cut off the APIs. and the Kaido token is down something like 20% it looks like Kaido got exploited the

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:00] Aggregators have all the power in this type of situation.

David Hoffman:
[56:02] And so I'm not upset here, my Twitter experience has been meaningfully degraded I'm not crying whatsoever yeah

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:12] A BitGo IPO that is coming soon. So they have filed. This is the next big crypto ICO. About $2 billion is what they're targeting. Now, BitGo is a crypto custodian company. They've been here forever. They've had some wrapped Bitcoin type products as well. But primarily, the use case is custody.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:31] They have about 100 billion crypto assets, digital assets in custody right now. So it revealed the terms that is going to IPO at some point in the future this quarter is what it looks like. So that's the next one.

David Hoffman:
[56:44] They're raising at $1.9 to $2 billion on a fully diluted basis, expecting to raise around $200 million. So pretty chunky raise with a pretty chunky valuation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:55] This is cool as we close this out and talk about markets we're excited about. The Polymarket was at the Golden Globe. Okay, so the Golden Globes, a cultural moment for those who participate in this.

David Hoffman:
[57:08] A cultural epicenter, not my cultural epicenter, but many people's cultural epicenters of arts and culture. What do the Golden Globes do? That's movies, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:19] The Oscars are movies?

David Hoffman:
[57:21] Golden Globes. What does the Golden Globes do?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:24] We're really dialed into the Golden Globes, aren't we? Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[57:27] Cultural moments. Awards presented for excellence in international film and television.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:33] Film and television. Film and TV. I knew it wasn't just film. I guess it's a lesser Oscars, but it also includes TV. Anyway, so during the Golden Globes where they announced who's going to win what award, what movies, what films, this sort of thing, Polymarket was at the bottom. So I was predicting.

David Hoffman:
[57:50] So they showed the odds ahead of time. So here are the candidates, they read out the candidates, and then the Polymarket would show up with a Polymarket logo at the Golden Globes. I mean, here are the odds that people are trading on about the Polymarket or about the Golden Globes.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:04] And the momentum we've seen, I think, on prediction markets, things like Polymarket this year has been pretty phenomenal. I mean, you got to see how this just continues, right? Madero, the Madero market was absolutely insane to watch at the time of his capture. I know you are watching this market right now. Iran's supreme leader, will he be out by January 31st? There's January 31st and every month there's a prediction of the probability that he would be out. This has been spiking. This has shown some really interesting movement here lately. What's your take on this?

David Hoffman:
[58:38] I have just been glued to this particular one, specifically Jan 31st, which is down to sadly 10%. I want this to be 100%. Kamini is a terrible person. We should remove him, in my opinion, as a leader. And Trump is currently doing this, is it a head fake, is it not a head fake thing that we don't really know. And so my eyes have for the last week, Ryan, have just been glued to this one particular market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:03] Is this speculation that it would be a Trump and Maduro type thing? Or is this inside revolution? Or is this he he gets the current information.

David Hoffman:
[59:12] Is that Trump Trump yesterday started saying, oh, Iran has stopped the killing of the protesters. They said they're going to stop the execution. And everyone was watching. And I was like, what are you talking about? They are mowing protesters down. Why are you changing your tune all of a sudden? And then and then the reaction was, oh, this is a head fake. There is signs of fighter pilots flying over the Iran-Iraq border. So Trump is just head faking. And then this morning, he says like, oh, they called off the strike. There was going to be a strike, but they called it off because they didn't have the assurances that they would actually be able to have a clean attack on the regime. And so they called it off. But now some people are saying that that's a head fake because they wanted to scare Iran into going into their secret bunkers, what they know that they were going to do if they were ever attacked by America. And so they just trigger them to go into their secret bunkers. And now they know where their secret bunkers are. And so it's actually that's a head fake. No one knows what the hell is happening.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:12] No one knows.

David Hoffman:
[1:00:13] But nonetheless.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:13] But you can participate in this market. You can trade this market.

David Hoffman:
[1:00:17] But you can participate in this market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:18] Okay, so 34% the odds that he would be out by the end of 2026. That was just the beginning of January. And it spiked all the way up to 66%. Now it's at 47%. David, do you like those odds? Would you participate on the yes side or the no side for this market at 47%?

David Hoffman:
[1:00:35] Dude, so I had money in the January 31 market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:40] Oh, you're short-term trading this. You're not doing the one year, huh?

David Hoffman:
[1:00:44] No, dude, because the window of opportunity is now. But people who have been following me on Twitter have known that I have just been incessantly tweeting about the importance of removing the Iranian regime. And as a result of that, a lot of Iranians have been in my DMs telling me about the very limited conversations that they've had with their families in Iran. And the last 48 hours, 24 hours, the sentiment has shifted very negatively. The amount of death that has been reported is extremely significant. So it seems like the morale of protesters has gone quite down. Combined with Trump's not attacking Iran, I think morale is very, very low.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:24] It is just surreal to see geopolitical events being reflected in price charts and that's really where we are in 2026 like something like this that is so heavy and also provides public service in the form of information right you sort of know what the sentiment is what the probability is at any particular time but these are really important things that are happening around the world for For sure.

David Hoffman:
[1:01:49] I think that is going to be a cultural theme probably for the rest of the 2020s is I think a lot of people just find it unsavory that there's money and money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:59] Government making money on this market either way yes yeah.

David Hoffman:
[1:02:03] Either way and so like some i think a lot of a large swath of society is just not ready to understand that there can be a relationship between money and like people's lives uh and that is going like this this is the point that has he made on the most recent chopping block episode is just like there's a lot of just like cultural taboo and it's about making money when it comes to like events like this i

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:02:23] Got it but i gotta tell you as a media consumer right rather than read another 10 000 headlines or twitter opinions right to be able to see this in a chart is so much more valuable to understand the probability and state of the world of what various outcomes could be and how they might shake out um guess we got into the frontier we go crypto is risky you could lose what you put in but we are headed west, it's not for everybody but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot.