ROLLUP: Gold & Silver ATHs | Fidelity’s Stablecoin | Ethereum’s Quantum Pivot | Tether Buys Gold

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the last week of january it's time for the bankless weekly roll-up we got markets in a little bit of a tumble right now david i was getting ready to say gold and silver are unstoppable because they have been on the week

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:16] but now things are reversing but.

David Hoffman:
[0:18] Then they stopped at least for a moment at least for a moment but we

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:21] Do got to talk about gold and silver all-time highs this week peter schiff taking victory laps of course also.

David Hoffman:
[0:27] He's earned it

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:28] Did you know david tether has a nuclear resistant cold war bunker where they're stacking a tremendous amount of gold maybe even buying more gold than they are bitcoin right now you.

David Hoffman:
[0:37] Know what what does tether not have you know if you

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:40] Told me.

David Hoffman:
[0:41] If you told me tether had bought a private army i would be like you know what that sounds right

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:47] Yeah that might be by 2030 anyway we'll talk about that and also this energy from precious metals is that going to rotate back into crypto yeah, What else we got?

David Hoffman:
[0:56] Right, it totally will, right guys? Fidelity is launching a Fidelity dollar, a new stablecoin on Ethereum. We're going to talk about why this one is a little bit more significant than all the other stablecoins that have launched in recent months.

David Hoffman:
[1:06] And speaking of Ethereum, nice big chunky Ethereum section. We're going to make a pretty good macro ETH bull case. Ryan and I both saw on Twitter, we were both like, this is the best thing that we've seen around ETH in a while. We're going to talk about it. Quantum resistance efforts, macro conditions.

David Hoffman:
[1:21] This is a really good setup for Ethereum. And also, Ryan's got this story. Maybe you guys have heard about this. Oh, you want me to tell this story? I don't know this story. Ryan put it in the agenda. Son of a government contractor who may have stolen $40 million from the U.S. Yeah. So that they could brag about it and flex in Telegram, which is how they got ousted for doing it in the first place.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:43] Yeah, it's kind of funny, actually, David. I can't wait to tell you the story. But first, before you get in, we've got some news from our friends over at... How about our prices on the week, David? Tell us about Bitcoin.

David Hoffman:
[1:53] So storminess definitely feels like the right word. Storminess in like the bad way. Choppy waters down 5.5% on the Bitcoin, down to 83,700. Maybe that's actually down 6% or 7%. And dropping.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:07] We're in like 6.5%.

David Hoffman:
[2:09] 6%. 6% over the last week. ETH doing something similar down to 2,780, down 5%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:16] Okay, ETH is down less.

David Hoffman:
[2:17] Down less. Oh, yay. Oh, man. What's causing this? Seeing the 278, the 27 handle is not great. Yeah. Man, I don't know what's causing it. There's like a bunch of things causing it. Like gold and silver have been absolutely ripping. And then they like sneezed. And the whole rest of the market is just like down bad as a result. Yeah. Last night after the market closed, Microsoft printed terrible earnings and was down some very significant amount of percentage. Dropped 10 to 12 percent the worst day since COVID. Jeez. Since 2020 on just like slower growth and concerns that like massive AI CapEx just won't deliver returns.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:58] And so earnings were bad. It was not a bad miss, right? It was just like kind of a small-ish miss.

David Hoffman:
[3:03] It's a small miss, I guess, but like Microsoft, which is like, what, the third or fourth largest company in the world?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:10] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[3:10] Dropping 10% isn't great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:12] It's definitely a bellwether for all the other AI stocks as well, right? So that's it. So I guess it's the volatility. Maybe there's a time for a pullback.

David Hoffman:
[3:22] Dude, we're like positioning aircraft carriers outside of the Middle East, like Trump, and it's going after Powell and the Fed. We're doing a government shutdown.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:32] But we were doing that two days ago. We were doing that two days ago. Why today?

David Hoffman:
[3:36] There's just a lot going on right now, man.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:39] Okay. So we'll talk a bit more about gold because that's been a huge theme. But, you know, there has been a bright spot in crypto. It's not the crypto market cap, which is now under $3 trillion, David. But it is in an asset called Hype. Hyperliquid, actually. That had a good week.

David Hoffman:
[3:56] Very good week. Dude, Hype up 56% on the week. So why? When the rest of the market is down so bad, hype is up 50% on the week. Well, hype volumes due to gold and silver are up very, very bigly because they just recently launched their gold and silver markets. And they did it with their HIP3 program. Do you know what that is, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:22] Yeah, that's like their incentive program for launching markets, yeah.

David Hoffman:
[4:25] Exactly. Permissionless deployment. Maybe it's not permissionless, maybe it's still whitelisted, but like this one group, I was like reading into this, this one group, TradeXYZ, one of the leading HIP3 builders deployed the gold and silver markets. And so the HIP3 markets had a total open interest a month ago of $260 million to today where it is at almost a billion dollars in open interest just from third-party builders putting on third-party assets onto Hyperliquid. So obviously a very good time for Hyperliquid to put gold and silver into the platform. It's pretty interesting. The TradeXYZ, the people that made this market, they are accruing on a seven-day basis about $1.2 to $1.4 million in fees on the Hyperliquid platform for fostering, for building this market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:15] That's a nice incentive. And of course, you can create perps on anything. So as long as there is a market somewhere, either long or short, Hyperliquid can kind of list it and earn perps commission. It's interesting that it is trading off cycle, right? So like Bitcoin down, of course, but hype's still up on the week by 50%. You kind of wonder if.

David Hoffman:
[5:35] That can hold. Because the Hyperliquid right here is getting exposure to the commodities frenzy that's happening right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:41] Yeah, it seems like a counter-crypto-cyclical fundamental, but I don't know. Do you think it can really sustain this even in a sustained crypto bear market? I guess we'll have to see, but it is.

David Hoffman:
[5:52] Pretty interesting to see. Well, it's just, Hyperliquid is doing the thing of being like the global place to trade anything. And right now, gold, like commodities are the place to trade. So like, it's like Hyperliquid in this moment is like kind of breaking out from being a crypto asset.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:07] It's going to be hungry. I mean, all of cryptos like this, Hyperliquid perps in particular, they're going to be hungry to consume more real world assets, right? Totally. If the market's not in crypto, you want to get to the assets where the market actually is.

David Hoffman:
[6:18] Like Ondo last week announced, we talked about it last week. Ondo put some of their tokens on Hyperliquid last week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're doing it too. Let's talk about Powell for a minute

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:26] because there was an FOMC meeting this week, David, and the rates were unchanged. Okay, this was pretty much expected by the markets. So the rates... 3.5% to 3.7%. They said that Powell and company said economic activity is expanding in a solid place. Jobs gains remain low, but unemployment rate is stabilizing for all of these reasons. Oh, inflation is somewhat elevated, but for all these reasons, we're not decreasing rates any further. It was a 10 to 2 vote. So of course, Trump's favorites, Stephen Meirin and Christopher Waller, they voted yes, but that there was two dissenters and 10 voted to keep the rates the same, whereas two voted to decrease rates some more. What's interesting about this, David, is because remember Powell's statement, we talked about this, was that a week or two ago? Powell was like, hey, Trump is unfairly prosecuting me because I'm not bending to his will. And so Powell has been on a crusade, I think, to talk about Fed independence, including attending a Supreme Court hearing in the Lisa Cook case. David, are you familiar with the Lisa Cook case and who she is?

David Hoffman:
[7:38] Nope.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:39] Okay. Powell says this is perhaps the most important legal case in the Fed's 113-year history. So he had a front row seat to it. And the history of this is, so Lisa Cook is a Federal Reserve governor. She's still a governor, so she voted... In favor of stabilizing rates. She was one of the 10, so she's still voting. But in August 2025, Trump tried to remove Lisa Cook from the FOMC and alleged mortgage fraud in her past. Said she shouldn't be on the Fed because she has mortgage fraud in her past. Now, the federal law that governs this says you can only fire a Fed governor for cause, right? So this is Trump saying, well, we have cause. It's mortgage fraud. Cook is saying that's not true. That's an allegation that needs to be proven in court. And so I guess she won part of her case in a lower court. And the lower court issued a injunction, preliminary injunction preventing her firing. That's why she can still vote. That's why she's still on the board. Now this case is going to the Supreme Court. And it's really, the Supreme Court has to decide whether the president's firing can stand, whether this justified the cause or not. And this is significant. And I think Powell's right, because this is the first time a president has ever tried to remove a Fed governor.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:04] So big moves afoot in terms of Fed independence. And Powell's trying to hold that institution to be more independent. And Trump, of course, pushing back. Now, there's some trading markets about this on Polymarket, of course. So there is a 4% chance on Polymarket that Lisa Cook is out as a Fed governor by February 28th, 2026.

David Hoffman:
[9:26] If it's 4%, does that mean it's a nothing burger?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:29] Right now. But this is a big case, and that's only by February 2028. So maybe there's other... Other dates in the future. Anyway, it's Fed independence. Yes,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:40] no. It's one of those types of cases.

David Hoffman:
[9:43] As I understand, Donald Trump's strategy with just lawfare is that he will try any and everything to do anything that he is trying to get done. He just thinks that all options are available to him. And he can try. And so he's going to try. And so it's going to make news. But if you tell me 4% of this chance happening, I'm like, well, that's just not going to happen.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:06] Yeah. I mean, the other thing to watch, of course, is the polymarket on how many Fed rate cuts will happen for the rest of 2026. The probability of the rates actually decreased slightly after the FOMC, but not all that much. So that's happening. Meanwhile, David, the probability of a government shutdown has spiked on polymarket.

David Hoffman:
[10:26] This is the polymarket that kind of like rocked around the world this week. Yeah. Because we went from a chance of U.S. government shutdown by Saturday, which I think is the last day of this month, of January.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:39] Yep.

David Hoffman:
[10:39] It was at 9%. It was going down. It was like 20% earlier in the month, 10%, 9%. And then it shot up. To 80% in a single move.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:50] On January 24th, it shot up.

David Hoffman:
[10:52] On January 24th. And so now the market, polymarket, is pricing in that the government's getting shut down. And that's part of the story of the macro news this week. And also kind of why I think the market is just like super nervous right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:07] And so are there reasons for this? Like, so, of course, on this Saturday, if Congress doesn't pass the new funding for a group of agencies, right, then it shuts down. But it seemed like they were just going to pass it by default. And then the probability of them not passing it has now spiked up on the 24th. Was this part of kind of the ICE controversy?

David Hoffman:
[11:28] Yeah, this is as I understand it. So Democrats, the Republicans don't have control. The Senate needs 60 votes to get spending bills passed. Republicans don't have 60, so they need the Democrats, which means that the Democrats can just say no unless they strong-armed Donald Trump into an agreement. And right now there is the fight over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, which is where ICE is. It's ICE, right? And so the Democrats are like, we are going to shut down the government until you get ICE officers out of Minnesota or something happens there.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:01] So this was all after the killing of Alex Petty.

David Hoffman:
[12:06] The shooting, yeah, that's right. Alex Petty, which happened in the city, which I'm sure. Yeah, maybe this is what happened is like Democrats on the inside were like, yo, we're going to just like shut down the government until, because that's a way for them to defund ICE, I guess.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:18] Yeah, I mean temporarily or just get some concessions. Maybe that's what the hope is. Yeah. Uncertain, crazy, volatile times, aren't they, David?

David Hoffman:
[12:25] Fine, fine, fine, fine.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:27] We're going to talk about some of the volatility hitting the precious metals markets, including gold. It's getting so high, I don't know if we should be scared or not. Also, Tether, as I mentioned to you, David, they are breaking in to one of the top holders of gold in the world. Like, surpassing a lot of central banks at this point. So, we'll talk about that.

David Hoffman:
[12:45] They're one of the top holders of treasuries. They're also one of the top holders of gold.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:49] I know. They just need an army and a border, and there'll be a whole nation state.

David Hoffman:
[12:53] Can't they be one of the top holders of ETH, too?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:55] Well, you're going to give us the ETH bull case, too, after the break. So we've got all that to look forward to. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

David Hoffman:
[13:03] Ryan, the story of the year this year has just been commodities, precious metals. Precious metals, specifically.

David Hoffman:
[13:09] Gold has just been on a tear. Remember when we did that episode not too long ago? It was like four episodes ago with Luke Grommen, who was like, yeah, gold is the play. Man, if you had bought gold, I was thinking about it. If we had bought gold after that, I'd be in a much better position right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:26] You know, two years ago, we did an episode with Peter Schiff and he said gold was going to do well.

David Hoffman:
[13:30] Yeah, but he always says that. Luke Gaughan doesn't always say that. Okay, so there's a story coming to the market about the precious metals, but also kind of something like we had just like left off before the break of just like the politicization of the Federal Reserve, the destabilization of just like investor appetite. So I'm going to run through a little bit of a timeline. So January 19th, Monday, so about 10 days ago, this was kind of the kickoff of the tariffs in Greenland part of this, which is when gold and silver both hit record highs right after Donald Trump warned of extra tariffs on European countries tied to the Greenland dispute. Dollar slid. Gold hit 4,700. Silver hit 95. The next day, gold pushed further into all-time high. Reuters tried to tie this to a political risk-off move. Again, another softer dollar day. And also rate cut expectations that we have been talking about with the Fed. The next day, January 21st, gold hit $4,900, while the news cycle that day was talking about threats to the Federal Reserve independence. Fast forward to Friday, January 23rd, silver breaks $100, clearing that $100 psychological barrier, and gold is at $4,988. Monday, the psychological barrier breaks for gold. Gold hits over $5,000. Silver was up 20% over that weekend to $1,020.

David Hoffman:
[14:56] The next day, Tuesday, January 27th, gold hits 5,181. The day that the U.S. Government shutdown jumps from 15% to 80% on Polymarket. Following day, Wednesday, that was yesterday from the time of recording, gold made a staggering 5.5% move in eight hours. Do you know how big that is, Ryan? A 5.5% move in Bitcoin? It's got to be trillions of dollars. It is one Bitcoin's worth of a move in eight hours.

David Hoffman:
[15:24] Bitcoin was added to the gold market cap. And then, so the day of recording this morning, that mania, that parabola increased. Gold broke through 5,500. It topped out at 5,600. Silver at 121. And then, so nicely, right before we were starting recording, everything dumped usually things dump after we record this happened before we were recording everything started dumping so gold dropped seven percent went from 5 500 to 5 100 which is currently retraced back to 5 350 silver dropped 10 from 120 to 106 currently retraced back to 115 and also the s&p 500 dropped 1.5 which is where my portfolio feels like it has left off because my stock portfolio is down bad, right? There's always more youth bags.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:10] Yeah, well, I mean, that's the bigger story. I think it's crypto is not moving like these precious metal prices, right? But what's incredible is even after this kind of dumpage that we've seen this morning, This is still way up and gold hit all-time highs. It is still close to all-time highs and silver is just trading like gold's altcoin right now. Yeah, and when you zoom out on gold a little bit and start comparing it, right, you could see how big these moves actually are, right? So look at gold now. I mean, I know over the years, David, we've talked about this company's marketcap.com, like the biggest assets in the world. We've shown this leaderboard, right? But gold, number one, and nothing else is close. I remember a time when this was like, I don't know, $15 trillion or something. It is now almost $40 trillion.

David Hoffman:
[16:53] Yeah, like $10 to $15 trillion. Now it's at $40 trillion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:56] Yeah, and silver, number two. Silver used to be, I don't know, down like $25. Tenth. Yeah, something like that. And now it's $6.3 trillion. So gold and silver, indisputable. Silver bigger than NVIDIA on this run.

David Hoffman:
[17:12] Dude, the commodities. Commodities. Precious metals are the number one and number two most valuable assets in the world.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:19] This is another thing. I know we've been tracking this, but gold has overtaken U.S. treasuries in central bank FX reserves. This is the first time in 20 years. That happened in 2025. Look at, so, you know, in yellow, confusingly enough, is the foreign official treasury holding. In black is gold holding. So you see that? Well, it's a replacement of the assets. I don't know who put it in yellow, though. Yeah. If you look at the stock, I know we talked about this in our Luke Grauman episode, but this is the, if you measure stocks, U.S. Stocks in gold, they just hit a 12-year low if you use gold as the denominator here rather than dollars.

David Hoffman:
[17:58] Wow.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:58] All right? So, like, stocks aren't really moving in gold terms at all.

David Hoffman:
[18:03] As I understand it, stocks have never really moved in gold terms.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:06] Yeah. And this floated up in my timeline. it depends how far you zoom out but this floated up in my timeline David I thought you'd enjoy this this is an Olympic medal in 1908 it was 100% gold, And this is an Olympic medal today. It is only 1% gold. And I was just thinking, this is the most Seifedina Moose thing I've ever seen. We now have, we have Fiat Olympic medals, like quite literally.

David Hoffman:
[18:32] Oh, that is a good deep cut. That's a great deep cut. I wonder how many percentage of the listeners understand that reference.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:38] Now, if you want to read the Bitcoin standard, guys, it is that, you know, the Bible for that way of thinking about the Fiat way of the world, but it's not altogether wrong.

David Hoffman:
[18:47] It's like spiritually interesting. What he means by like what Ryan meant, which is an allusion, a reference to what Seyfedine meant, is like because of the money of the world is hollow, the fiat currency is hollow because we can print it from thin air, therefore there's nothing material inside of it. It hollows out the world.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:05] It hollows out the world, yeah.

David Hoffman:
[19:06] Seyfedine applies it to everything. Everything, like fiat food. Fiat music. The junk in your food. Yeah. Like terrible food with fillers and preservatives and bullshit. It's because we printed money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:17] It's because we printed money.

David Hoffman:
[19:19] Yeah. Fiat music, like, you know, Miley Cyrus, like the most pop culture, empty, hypnotic, like, like spiritually empty music. It's because we print the money. Yeah. But I take Ryan's point. I mean, he literally points to the Olympic gold medals and the modern Olympic gold medal is 1% gold.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:38] It's Fiat Olympics, David. I don't know what else to say. Good job, David Dean. Let's bring some more pain into here for crypto holders, which is gold hit 5K before ETH hit 5K.

David Hoffman:
[19:52] Yeah, but you should be a joke when ETH was like 4,500 and gold was like 2,000 whatever. And then like all the ETH holders got triggered because they were saying like, that's never going to happen. And then it turns out it just totally happened.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:03] Kind of sad. And if you want to look at another chart, look at this. This is gold outperforming Bitcoin on a five-year basis.

David Hoffman:
[20:09] Wow. Yeah, that's never happened before.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:12] Orange versus yellow. now yellow is.

David Hoffman:
[20:14] It had to happen at some point It had to happen at some point. Okay.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:19] All right. Well, do we want to bring some sunshine into the mix here? Which is like, this is a Meltem Dumiris tweet. The market cap of stores of value. So first it starts sad, which is in 2021, crypto store values were about 3 trillion in assets. In value, I should say. Precious metals were 12 trillion. Now, 2026, crypto is still about 3 trillion. Store value assets outside of crypto, precious metals are 40 trillion. Okay. This feels bad. This feels sad. But David, on the upside, look at how much we can grow into. Our TAM just 4X'd. We were always going to surpass gold. And now gold is so much bigger. So the TAM of crypto has just gotten bigger.

David Hoffman:
[21:00] I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm on board with that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:03] Why not? Um...

David Hoffman:
[21:06] Because gold doesn't need to rotate. You don't need to rotate out of gold in the same way that you do need to rotate out of fiat.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:13] You don't need to, but will you? I mean, will you? I mean, okay, so here's another counterpoint I have for you, which is, wait. First of all, let me give you some ETH porn really quick, too. Okay, so if ETH were to catch up to gold, which at one point, people on the Bankless podcast said that that might happen at some point in the future.

David Hoffman:
[21:31] Do you mean the hosts or guests?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:32] I don't know. We'll let listeners decide who said this on the Bankless Podcast. But at current prices, if ETH were to match gold's market cap, ETH would be worth $298K right now. If ETH was just a silver, a mere silver, and matched silver's market cap, it would be $50K right now. This is the type of space that the crypto digital store of assets could grow into, David, if you let your imagination go with you. But you seem skeptical.

David Hoffman:
[22:03] Perhaps a little bit. My big question is, okay, so we just had how much wealth

David Hoffman:
[22:08] created out of like gold. Gold has like, gold's up 110% on the year. It's gone from like 18 trillion to like 37 trillion. That means that we have like 20 plus trillion dollars of wealth that just got created. Where? Who's got that? Where did that wealth get created? Who's got all the gold?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:30] Okay. Central banks, China, and then I'll give you kind of a generation, which is the baby boomers.

David Hoffman:
[22:38] Right? The baby boomers own gold?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:40] I mean, the baby boomers are running the central banks. They are the most bullish. It's a cohort of them for sure. I guess my point is, right, I think it's inevitable that crypto catches up to this.

David Hoffman:
[22:51] I think that's right, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:53] Once, like, millennial, younger generations are in charge of central banks, do you think that they're going to want the yellow metal?

David Hoffman:
[23:00] Yeah, but that's too slow, dude. Like, when the millennials are, when do you think the boomers are going to hand us the keys to the central bank? Like, come on. We've got a whole generation between us. First, it has to go through Gen X. And the boomers don't want to give it up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:12] Investing is about patience. Investing is about patience, David. And sometimes you have to have that decades-long...

David Hoffman:
[23:17] Dude, the gold holders who held for, like, 15 years. while gold was flat are now finally happy. And I think that's partly the contribution to like why the sentiment in crypto is so bad because people are like, oh no, what if we're the gold bugs? And like we have to hold our crypto bags for 15 years in order to see a price. Like that's a current sentiment in crypto lane right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:43] I don't, it's not going to take 15 years though. That's just like, okay. So let me show you another data point, which is this. This is the Bitcoin gold ratio. If you look at this chart, It's not actually that bad.

David Hoffman:
[23:53] Oh, that's a normal, good-looking chart. Oh, wait, this is a Michael Nadeau chart.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:56] Yeah, this is a Michael I talked about on the DeFi report actually earlier this week, which is right about 12 or so now on the Bitcoin-gold ratio. Bitcoin-gold ratio, yeah. And we've hit lower lows just as recently as 2023, which is below 10. Okay? So from a ratio perspective, Bitcoin versus gold, it's kind of normal for... A bear.

David Hoffman:
[24:18] Actually, it looks like the general long term parabola of Bitcoin going up versus gold is pretty intact. And it's telling you to buy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:27] Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago.

David Hoffman:
[24:28] Sell gold and buy Bitcoin right now. Bitcoin is a deal in gold terms.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:32] It's getting closer to that. Right. And you might wait for a 10 or a nine on the ratio or something like that. But we're getting pretty close to that as of now. And look, it's up from one 10 years ago. All right. So. That's your map. That's your map.

David Hoffman:
[24:46] That solves all your problems.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:48] That's all you got to do. Is the Trump administration worried about this? Because more than crypto's loss, it's actually the dollar as a reserve currency's loss that we're seeing here. Here's another chart showing institutions reducing dollar exposure. This is the global foreign currency reserve as a percent. The US dollar is now down to about 56%, okay, from the 2000s dollar reserves were 71 percent so this is institution central banks reducing their dollar asset exposure right um buying other currencies and certainly also buying gold and trump has asked a little bit about this uh here's what he said well mr president with the current value of the dollar do you think it's declined too much no.

David Hoffman:
[25:37] I think it's great i mean the value of the dollar Look at the business we're doing. No, dollar's doing great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:43] Trump is not at all worried. Dollar's doing great. Not at all worried.

David Hoffman:
[25:46] I have a question.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:47] Go ahead.

David Hoffman:
[25:48] Does Trump want a weaker dollar?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:51] I kind of think he does.

David Hoffman:
[25:52] I think he does. So when, like, the dollar's going down and Trump is saying the dollar's doing great, he means I like what's happening here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:01] It's hard to know with Trump. It's working out great for me. It's hard to know with Trump because who knows what he actually knows?

David Hoffman:
[26:06] Who the fuck knows?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:07] It does feel like this is, when you listen to things that Besant says, for instance, Treasury Secretary, I think this is part of a plan, a weaker dollar, right? It's just less hollowing of manufacturing in the U.S. I mean, we're talking about Triffin dilemma, even last week, right? So you sort of need a weaker dollar and you need dollars to be less of the world export and to weaken in terms of reserve currency power if you're going to reverse the effects of the Triffin Dilemma and start to bring some manufacturing back to the US. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[26:37] So it's kind of part of the plan. It's aligned with increasing tariffs. Like a lower dollar is effectively the same outcome as increasing tariffs, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:45] Yeah. I mean, in a way, if you do these things in kind of parallel, right? It just seems to be an intentional economic strategy, which is the market's realizing this. And the market is, I think, overall, aside from the gold bugs you mentioned, which are a minority, most people, most U.S. Investors, most people don't have a lot of gold in their portfolio. And I think there's like, oh, shit, we better get some gold in our portfolio. And it's kind of a catch up that's happening right now. Speaking of catch up, David, tethered. Tether now holds 140 tons of gold. This is worth about $23 billion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:22] The CEO, Paolo, of Tether, says he aims to allocate 10% to 15% of Tether's total treasury to physical gold inside of their investment portfolio. And they hold all of this gold in a Cold War Swiss nuclear bunker. Okay? This is the value of Tether Gold Holdings. It's going up in dollar terms. But this is a share of their overall reserves, which are going up. And they're kind of going up at the cost of, I'm going to say Bitcoin, right? Because, you know, Tether has non-fiat reserves, of course. They have a ton of treasuries. But then they also have gold in Bitcoin. And Paolo says he wants to increase this to 10% to 15%. It's at about 7% now. So this is effectively them, from a relative perspective, buying more gold than Bitcoin, being more bullish on gold.

David Hoffman:
[28:18] They are a central bank, dude. Tether is a central bank.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:22] They're like a central bank from the 1900s with stablecoin technology.

David Hoffman:
[28:26] They're going backwards in time.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:28] I looked this up. If Tether were a country, just in terms of gold holdings, right? In terms of treasury holdings, they're top 15. In terms of gold holdings right now, they're top 25. Top 25 they have far more gold than like a lot of G20.

David Hoffman:
[28:43] Countries yeah that's why we were joking in the beginning when are they going to have the top 10 army of the world Like, why not?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:55] Like, right now they're outsourcing that to Switzerland, basically, who's kind of like sovereignty and security in this nuclear public. I don't know. It's very strange, I think. And we haven't seen it in our times. And this is what Ray Dalio makes the comment of. Maybe we should leave with the Ray Dalio reminder, which is like, in these unprecedented times, you need to factor in the denominator changing on you. Here's how he puts it.

David Hoffman:
[29:21] But last year, American stock market, American markets, significantly underperformed foreign markets. And people don't quite realize that. And the best asset class, in a sense, was gold. But think of that as being the money. So in answer to your question, okay, that was a lesson I learned, that if there's a depreciation in the value of money, it makes everything look like it's going up. Mm-hmm.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:51] There you go. Reminder, Dahlia was right.

David Hoffman:
[29:53] Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Ryan, I'm done with gold. Can we talk about ETH?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:57] Yes.

David Hoffman:
[29:58] I want to talk about ETH. So there's been something going on on the Ethereum layer one. Ethereum layer one transaction activity, like transactions per second and total transaction volume, ripping through the roof. Did you know this?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:11] Yes, I did know this.

David Hoffman:
[30:12] We're just breaking through transaction all-time highs. Pretty great. It's not for the best reason, however, because there is partially partially there's a there's this thing going on and called an address poisoning attack where somebody is doing this like kind of clever, nefarious, very evil, toxic thing where a scammer sends you a small transaction from a wallet that looks like a wallet that is yours. So maybe like the first few letters and the last few letters are the same, but the middle is completely different because of, you know, you can't perfectly have the same wallet. It's called an address poisoning attack the goal is to trick you if you are trying to like go get your own address to send yourself your own money or somebody you go to your wallet page on like ether scan and you go to the most recent transaction or something and you copy that address by

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:02] The way this is why you should never do that yeah don't do that for this very reason don't do that but some people do.

David Hoffman:
[31:07] Right and they know they know the vibe of what their first four characters or their address looks like so they go and then they find it and then they see it on their page where they would expect it to, but it was actually somebody who spun up a fake address to send them money in hopes that they would copy that one. And so then they send them, you mistakenly send that address the money. So what that takes is that you have to send basically every address on Ethereum, a very small transaction, just like even like a transaction that effectively does nothing just to put it into the blockchain. And then they hope that people falsely copy that address.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:40] And it almost never works, but it works 0.01% of the time, and that's enough. So there was a case, right, where there was $509K sent to an attacker's wallet because of this address poisoning, and that pays for the whole operation.

David Hoffman:
[31:55] It pays for it, yeah. And the month before that, one victim lost $50 million, so that's also very profitable. One of the reasons why it is economically... Possible to do this is because Ethereum is so cheap these days. So in one way, it's a success story of Ethereum. In another way, we're like, oh, no, it's not great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:14] Well, address poisoning is pretty easy to avoid if you don't do what we just said. But, you know, I guess this is also a bit of a PSA on those types of attack. But still, you were going to give me the bull case for E.

David Hoffman:
[32:26] The bull case is that, you know, the Ethereum layer one is the cheapest that it's ever been. And it's supporting the most transactions that it's ever been. And so like if you can support spam transactions at that scale, you can host so much more. So there's capacity on the Ethereum layer one. That's great. There's also a much more important topic, in my opinion, ETH quantum. So this got announced from Justin Drake this week. He tweeted out, today marks an inflection in the Ethereum Foundation's long-term quantum strategy. So basically the EF has set up a quantum team to aggressively apply a lot of the research that the Ethereum Foundation has been doing since like 2018, 2019. Ethereum post-quantum research efforts has been going on for forever. But since this is now in vogue in the narrative, and it's probably good for all blockchains to broadcast what they are doing about quantum, this is exactly what's going on. So Justin Drake describes this as, after years of quiet R&D, the EF management has officially declared post-quantum security a top strategic priority. and so they are the ethereum foundation is backing this whole effort with two million dollars of prizes

David Hoffman:
[33:34] In order to just kind of improve some of the cryptography that runs Ethereum. There's a $1 million Poseidon prize to harden this one hashing algorithm that is used heavily in ZK systems. And then another million dollar prize for another post-quantum cryptographic research around hash-based ZK constructions. Basically, there is money for people to just make Ethereum even more quantum resistant. And so a lot of stuff being put into production with this announcement from Justin Drake.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:03] Yeah, I think that the message is they're going to be ready when it happens, you know, and it could happen as early as like the early 2030s and Ethereum is going to be ready.

David Hoffman:
[34:13] Quantum computers will be ready to attack blockchains by the early 2030s.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:17] That's right. And as we've discussed, if that happens, Bitcoin is in a lot of trouble unless they do similar preparations because all chains need to replace some of their cryptography with quantum secure cryptography. I think Vivek from Ethereumize agrees with you, David. He puts it this way. Ethereum will be more feature-proof than any other blockchain ecosystem. That's why the financial sector is moving on to Ethereum infrastructure. It is nice that EF doesn't have its head in the sand with respect to this because it definitely is a problem.

David Hoffman:
[34:48] As an ETH holder, that makes me feel very good. I'm sorry, if I was a Bitcoin holder, I would be sweating right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:53] Well, Nick Carter is a little bit that way.

David Hoffman:
[34:55] Yeah, Nick Carter, a Bitcoin holder, is sweating. And thank God for Nick Carter because he's actually doing something about it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:02] There's more than Nick Carter, definitely. But a lot of the Bitcoin social layer just seems to be just in denial about it. Not a big deal. We'll worry about that later.

David Hoffman:
[35:11] It's going to be pretty funny when the Bitcoin social layer has to basically just come around and copycat Ethereum's efforts in order to improve their own system.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:18] Wow.

David Hoffman:
[35:19] They're not going to like that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:20] Well, I guess maybe this news is bullish for Bitcoin then, that Ethereum's going to forge the way here. But that's not the only reason to be bullish. Lorenzo from ARK, this is Cathie Wood's outfit. They've been pretty bullish on ETH lately, and Lorenzo gives a few reasons why.

David Hoffman:
[35:34] A couple allocators like ARK and Kathy are all kind of trying to wrap their heads around quantum, but also crypto. And so he puts out five things about why ETH is uniquely positioned. And I thought this was just a very good non-hopium analysis of ETH's current positioning. One, store of value plus quantum. We just talked about that. Commitment to quantum resistance makes ETH better. Long-term set-and-forget store of value asset. That's what we were just talking about. Two, immutable forever will be a tougher sell. This is the problem that Bitcoin is running into. As AI finds vulnerabilities faster, The need for a system capable of safe upgrades, like Ethereum, becomes more credible than the immutable forever promise of simpler chains, which is Bitcoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:17] So there's no such thing as ossification in this world. Exactly.

David Hoffman:
[36:21] Minimum ossification, like just whatever you need for the minimum viable ossification while still upgrading in case of something like quantum. Next, the cleanest monetary policy. ETH has arguably the cleanest monetary policy we see in crypto. We've been talking about that since forever, with zero net inflation since the merge. Structural separation. Ethereum's infrastructure doesn't compete with AI for power or capital, insulating it from future security budget pressures that will intensify as AI spending grows. This was what we were talking about when we saw multiple Bitcoin mining companies transition into ETH treasury companies, where Bitcoin service providers, like companies that their job was to provide security to Bitcoin, were throwing in the towel because being an ETH treasury company was a better business model because of staking. And now also they are, this individual Lorenzo is integrating just the capital and energy demands that AI has is going to be more profitable than mining Bitcoin because mining Bitcoin is not profitable as the happenings happen. I thought that was very, very smart. That's very astute. And then lastly, deflationary optionality. Ethereum's economics are currently sustainable, but future growth in stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments could dramatically ramp up fee burns. That's like the 1559.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:36] Block space demand, basically.

David Hoffman:
[37:37] Block space demand, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:37] So, Vance Spencer summarizes it. I wonder if you'd go this far. If the status quo plays out, ETH will be the only quantum secure crypto asset and flip Bitcoin in one to two years.

David Hoffman:
[37:48] Dude, are we saying that word again?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:50] I didn't say it. Vance said it.

David Hoffman:
[37:51] Vance said it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:52] There you go.

David Hoffman:
[37:54] There's like, maybe I'm just in the pessimistic mode, but just like ETH flipping Bitcoin. Oh, I just said it. Because of quantum is like, well, the more obvious way that that plays out is everything nukes. Bitcoin nukes super hard and ETH flips Bitcoin while being down 40% on the day in dollar terms.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:12] It'll take a long time for that to play out if it does play out. But it is interesting to consider. I think I agree that the setup here is pretty nice. Yeah. But it might take some time. We might go lower. I think we're going to go lower before we go higher. But it's a nice setup. It's a nice base layer for some catch-up a little bit later.

David Hoffman:
[38:30] Michael and the dough is in your brain, dude.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:32] Yes. David, we're going to talk about the digital dollar. And what is it? It's Fidelity's digital dollar, I should say. And which blockchain are they deploying to? You're going to tell me about the MegaEth mainnet and some of their performance that they've had. And OpenAI's plan for WorldCoin. What is Sam Altman doing? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:53] that made this episode possible.

David Hoffman:
[38:54] Fidelity launched the Fidelity Digital Dollar last week, a USD stablecoin with a ticker FIDD on Shocker Ethereum. Permissionless stablecoin, everyone can use it, targeting both payments and also institutional settlement, which is what stablecoins do, should launched in early February 2026.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:11] Yeah, I think Simon Taylor, he's a fintech expert with stablecoin expertise. He's got a good perspective on this. He says Fidelity, the $6.8 trillion shadow bank, he calls them a shadow bank, just entered the chat, the stablecoin battle, I should say. FIDD launching in February on Ethereum. And he actually concludes that the banks, the existing incumbent banks, shouldn't be worried about Circle and Tether so much as they should be worried about Fidelity. Because Fidelity is not a bank. It's an asset manager.

David Hoffman:
[39:43] But now it can do bank things?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:45] Yes, it can do bank things. And Fidelity is somewhat like BlackRock too. So Fidelity is moving. You wonder if BlackRock is going to move with a stablecoin as well? They could. Remember, they're there. And so they could be competitive type banks in this type of setup.

David Hoffman:
[40:01] Because they use Ethereum as their bank account.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:04] Yeah. And so, you know, Simon's making the point that this is actually a pretty big entrance here. And I think people forget this. I know you and I know this, Dave, but it's worth repeating for folks who don't know. Fidelity has been in crypto for a long time.

David Hoffman:
[40:18] Oh, yes. They were in crypto before Ethereum was a thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:21] Yeah, they're OGs. They don't get credit for that. They were mining Bitcoin back in 2014. They were paying for cafeteria lunch in Bitcoin at that time. They've been experimenting for a while.

David Hoffman:
[40:31] They were dogfooding a lot of stuff.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:33] And they're bullish Bitcoin. They're also bullish ETH. They put out a pretty good report last year that I read, which talked about ETH as a store of value. I mean, they've got a good crypto outfit and a good head on their shoulders when it comes to applying some of this technology. So I think Simon's right. I think this is going to be a pretty big deal. Along with that, David, Tether released their official onshore, U.S. shore, I should say, stablecoin. Okay, this is USAT that is now launched. This is Paulo saying an official Ethereum smart contract, USAT, gives a link in Etherscan. Can you refresh people? What is USAT? Why does Tether need a second stablecoin?

David Hoffman:
[41:09] So they can be compliant with the Genius Bill. And so USAT is USA Tether. It's the second stablecoin out of Tether that is Genius compliant so that they can penetrate into the US markets. I don't expect it to be that big, really. I kind of think it's going to be like Binance versus Binance USA. Like Binance USA had some traction, but really it was Binance that was the gargantuan. That's kind of my understanding.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:34] I kind of think that's right. And of course, Genius Compliant means everything has to be backed by treasuries one-to-one. So Tether can't do the cool thing that they really love doing, which is like fill Swiss nuclear bunkers full of gold.

David Hoffman:
[41:48] Yeah, you're not allowed to do that with a Genius Compliant Sablecoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:51] No, you're not allowed to do that. And that's, I think, the fun stuff for Tether, of course.

David Hoffman:
[41:55] All right, jumping to what I think might be the biggest announcement of this week is Mega ETH has announced the date of their public mainnet, which is 2-9-20-26. What date is that, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:08] Well, I was brought up, I went to school in Canada, David. So I understand what this is trying to say, which is February of 2026.

David Hoffman:
[42:16] February 9th, 2026. All the Americans were like, why are you guys announcing a September 2nd launch date? What the hell's going on? It's so far away. No, no, no, no, no. February 9th. So next week, something like next week, maybe the start of the week after that. Something that they did this week prior is this MegaEth global stress test, which like we should have seen this coming if they're doing a stress test or probably gonna like launch their main net coming up soon. And so they did this stress test. They did MegaEth 11 billion transactions in seven days, which is kind of crazy. And while doing just like spamming their own network with all types of transactions, they were also getting MegaEth users to also use their own apps to make sure that the apps could still function and reportedly no apps were disturbed in the middle of this like 7 billion transaction process. I want to do some benchmarking, Ryan. I've got some comparatives to make, some comparables. Inside of the seven-day stress test, the amount of block space that MegaEth produced in the seven days is about 2x the amount of base block space that base has ever produced ever. Which is kind of crazy in seven days.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:30] Yeah, like another way to normalize those metrics, it's between 18,000 to 35,000 transactions per second during this test.

David Hoffman:
[43:39] Yes, yes. And so, again, just to make the comparables, Base has taken in $180 million of transaction fees over its lifespan, and the cost of all of the transactions over that seven-day stress test for MegaEath was $2 million. So MegaEath just like spammed their own network for $2 million of transactions. And so you can just kind of see the contrast between the modern set of layer twos that we have and what MegaEath has. Now, some asterisks, this is a controlled environment. It's run by MegaEath itself. The network's not open to the public. So like it's not a perfect comparison since base is live and in production and in the wild and MegaEath data is still somewhat like behind like closed doors. This is just their testnet. But like nonetheless, I think it shows a pretty astounding like step function improvement in blocked space. I want to go to this website, growthepie.com Ryan, do you notice anything weird about this website right now?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:31] You're asking me about this, but I guess, okay, here's a spike on a chart I see. Transaction count and throughput count has spiked up ever since January 25th.

David Hoffman:
[44:41] The graph has completely just broken. Because what Grow the Pi does is it aggregates all of Ethereum's ecosystem's transactions, including the layer one and also the layer twos. And the first charts that you see are the rolling basis of transactions. So the spike is mega ETH being added to the aggregate transaction count of the Ethereum ecosystem. And it just breaks the graph. It just goes straight up. And not only that, but that is a seven-day rolling basis. So that spike is being averaged out over the seven days that this stress test wasn't even happening. And so the emphasis here is to just illustrate how much more block space mega ETH has.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:23] Yeah, I guess the scaling era is here for sure.

David Hoffman:
[45:26] This morning, Thursday morning, Namik, who's one of the MegaEath co-founders, he introduced this kind of like tokenomics mechanism. I'll call it a mechanism. They're calling it the KPI rewards. And I want to highlight this because this is something that I think is kind of like plaguing the industry about like why tokens aren't good investments. And so MegaEath is introducing this thing called the four, they have a four KPI scoreboard category. So there's this KPI milestone unlocks for mega supply. They are taking 53% of the mega token supply and they are putting it, locking it behind these four different categories. So ecosystem growth, that's like TVL and stablecoin supply, mega ETH decentralization, mega ETH performance, and also Ethereum decentralization. And they are locking 53% of the total supply of mega behind these KPIs and these, they only get unlocked by...

David Hoffman:
[46:20] If the KPIs are met and they get unlocked to people who stake mega ETH to that locking contract. And so if you want to get, if you are bullish mega ETH, you would have to hold mega. And then if you want the dilution of mega ETH, it has to go to the people who are staking mega ETH to that locking contract. So it's a mechanism that only transfers mega eth to people that have mega eth and want to lock up their mega eth because if you lock up more mega eth for longer you get more of the unlocked mega eth tokens so what they're trying to do is they're trying to be smart with their token dilution rather than giving it to like farmers or liquidity miners or anybody they are just doing this mechanism that gives it straight to the hands of the people who have proven to be long-term aligned with mega eth this is pretty similar to what cap money is doing are you familiar with caps stable drop no they are doing an airdrop so people that were farming cap points is uh this was a mega mafia um startup uh but now kind of transitioned to the ethereum layer one uh and though they are people were farming the points and they are airdropping stable coins their own stable coin because it's a stable coin project to the people that farmed their points.

David Hoffman:
[47:39] And then they are doing a Uniswap CCI. They're doing a token sale. And so they are saying, hey, people that deposited capital into the cap money project, here is your compensation. Here's your stable coins. And also we are doing a token sale if you choose to invest in the cap project. And so it's doing the same mechanism of allowing people to exit if they don't want to hold the token. Like here's your dollars, you can go away now. But if you do want to hold the token, you can invest dollars.

David Hoffman:
[48:09] And so this is, I think, just a maturation of the whole token distribution paradigm that we've seen throughout crypto. Projects are being very precise about who is getting their token so that tokens aren't just like bleeding out and down only. So this is like a meta that I'm following. I'm seeing both of this happen inside of CAP and also MegaEth.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:29] So we figured out distribution?

David Hoffman:
[48:31] I think it's something that I'm watching. It's something that I'm watching.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:35] You just mentioned CCA, auctions by Uniswap, when you were talking about the distribution of mega eth here um there's also this uh uniswap labs announces auctions are coming to the uniswap web app fully on chain powered by cca discover bid and claim starting february 2nd what's going on here yeah.

David Hoffman:
[48:54] This is in the same spirit of uh coinbase doing token sales natively on coinbase.com uh coin list also doing native token sales uh echo and sonar doing token sales there and this is This is Uniswap's product entering into that same field. And so Uniswap CCA in the background, but they also have a front end for people to just participate in CCAs. I think there are three there. One of them is the CapMoney CCA.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:20] These are token launches?

David Hoffman:
[49:22] It's a token launchpad. It's a token launchpad. No, that's not right. It's a token investment platform. So you can participate in Uniswap launched tokens straight through their front end. And so it's like a liquidity bootstrapping mechanism for firms that use...

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:36] Kind of what Aztec did?

David Hoffman:
[49:37] Exactly what Aztec did. And now Uniswap has a dedicated front end, which I think is pretty cool.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:41] Very cool.

David Hoffman:
[49:42] There was an announcement this week, Ryan, that caught my eye. Robinhood invested in crypto trading platforms Talos at a $1.5 billion valuation. So my big question was like... Why? Why would they invest instead of buy? And so that kind of perked my interest. I think, Ryan, this is a precursor to them buying or at least formally integrating Talos into Robinhood and them having a share of it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:07] What's Talos?

David Hoffman:
[50:08] I'm glad you asked. Talos is an institutional trade lifecycle platform for digital assets. I'm going to rattle off some buzzwords, but then I'll define them. So they bring connectivity, order execution management, request for quote system, smart order routing, all the post-trade stuff, and then FIX. There's a bunch of words in there that are trad words. Connectivity means that these are the pipes that let a trading system talk to other systems. So other exchanges, OTC desks, market makers, custodians in this like standardized, reliable way. Without connectivity, you're basically one app connected to one venue. You are the app and the trading venue, but with connectivity, You can plug into many venues and route orders wherever the best liquidity and price is. FIX is a standard, legacy standard for electronic trading messages, stands for financial information exchange. It's this industry-wide language for sending orders and receiving bids and fills between firms and trading venues. Smart order routing is this algorithmic router that lets you just split up your order across multiple venues to get the best outcome. And then post-trade is the clearing settlement and reconciliation and also reporting. Why this is important, right, is I did this podcast a while ago called Coin vs. Hood. And it was a debate between, like, which is a better asset to invest in, Coinbase vs. Hood. And the outcome of that was that they are actually going in completely different directions.

David Hoffman:
[51:32] Robinhood has incredible distribution. They are going in one particular direction. And Coinbase is doing this whole crypto white labeling service where like exchanges like Charles Schwab or Fidelity or whatever can just plug into Coinbase versus with Coinbase's white labeling service in the back end and get access to Coinbase's exchange and provide the value of a crypto exchange to their customers. This is exactly what Robinhood just invested in with Talos. And so what I'm seeing here is Robinhood is trying to penetrate into Coinbase's strategy with a very large investment into this Talos company. Now, I kind of would have expected them to like acquire it, but $1.5 billion is a lot. But what I'm seeing here is I'm seeing not a pivot, but an expansion of Robinhood's strategy to get more into Coinbase's territory with this investment. Speaking of Coinbase, they also announced that prediction markets are now up and running on the Coinbase app. We saw this coming from a long way off. They've always been playing on doing this, but this is now live inside of Coinbase. Politics and policy, economic, sports, and culture. It's going to be interesting to see what they curate, which markets they specifically curate. But as of now, via Kalshi, Coinbase is now offering prediction markets for U.S. Users inside of all 50 states.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:50] So OpenAI, do you see this, David? OpenAI is building a social network and they are considering integrating WorldCoin inside of it, at least the WorldCoin capability. So I don't know yet why no one has solved the problem that we see across every single social media tool that we use in Web2, which is like who's a bot and who's a human? And it's getting more and more annoying. And I guess it can get more annoying because everybody kind of feels locked in to the social media networks that they use, right? The network effect is just so large that we're willing to put up with all of this crap. But it is crap, to be honest. Like, I want to know, I'm talking to a human, I want to know who's a bot, and we can't do that. So this is OpenAI and Sam Altman saying, we're going to fix that. We're going to launch a OpenAI social network. Who knows what this looks like? I mean, it probably has AI in it, right? But we're going to use WorldCoin's capability to actually differentiate between the real humans and all of the robots, which I'm kind of interested in this. I don't know. I didn't look at the WorldCoin chart on this news. Did that move at all?

David Hoffman:
[54:01] Not that I saw. Not that I saw.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:03] Let me see.

David Hoffman:
[54:04] Because people said that, I mean, it's up 3.5%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:09] On yeah oh yeah it did.

David Hoffman:
[54:11] It went from four point from 46 cents up to 63 cents down back to 47 so it did have a bit of a spike i'm ryan i'm bearish yeah i'm bearish on this platform why

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:23] You just don't think opening eye can build a social network.

David Hoffman:
[54:25] That um it's like if this is valuable then the existing social networks will simply just integrate it and also i kind of think that like sam altman is just doing what sam altman is familiar with so he sam altman was that y combinator in the era of peak web to attention algorithm optimization sure so it's like to me i'm saying like oh like to sam altman everything for it to a hammer everything is a nail yeah he's like and i know what we'll do we'll build a social network bro that was for the 2010s like we are in the late we're almost in 2030 but

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:01] Like okay who's going to solve the problem that i just stated though. Don't you think it's a problem?

David Hoffman:
[55:05] The existing social networks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:07] Okay. So you think Twitter just adds that. But maybe they have to be forced to add that by competitors because they're not doing it right now. I had hopes that they would. They're not.

David Hoffman:
[55:17] They're definitely not. And I have run into a ton of bots in the last two weeks, let me tell you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:21] They're the worst. Bots are the worst. They're nice bots out there, but you just like...

David Hoffman:
[55:25] Not the ones I was talking to.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:26] They have so much more time than we do. They just waste a lot of time. That's a good point. Huge time wasters. That's a good one. For those bots.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:33] Back to the humans, David. I'm going to give you a crazy human story of the week. I know I was telling you a little bit about this, but there's an emerging story that's happening in crypto that I just think is really odd, only in crypto, kind of interesting. The son of a government contractor who was the contractor was responsible for custodying a portion of U.S. Government crypto funds that were seized. He is being it looks like allegedly he stole 40 million dollars.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:06] Of U.S. seized crypto funds. I think this is primarily in Bitcoin. And Zach XBT caught him doing this through some on-chain sleuthing, okay? So there's this government contractor called CMDSS, and some of the assets, crypto assets, seized by the U.S. Marshals were being custodied or the responsible custodian in some way was CMDSS. The CEO has a son by the name of, his name is John DeGita. He also goes by the synonym Lick, okay? And somebody caught Lick, John, flexing crypto wallets on a Telegram chat. So there's a back and forth between John and this other guy, and they were talking about their crypto stash. And this was all recorded. And unfortunately for John, some of the addresses that he leaked during this chat, ZachXPT sleuthed it out and connected it to government custodial wallets and a $40 million theft, quite possibly. Now, this is all alleged. So this is like ongoing U.S. government, U.S. marshals are looking into it. But it looks like this kid somehow got his hands on his dad's company's private keys How old.

David Hoffman:
[57:30] Do you think this kid is?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:31] I don't know. Early 20s?

David Hoffman:
[57:33] I don't think he's... I don't... No, dude. No? That is... Okay. Maybe that watch is something like a 20-year-old adult would want, but that picture is like a picture I took in middle school with the sunglasses, dude.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:50] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[57:52] I think he could be under 20.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:53] He's also launched a meme coin, by the way. So he's been in crypto for a while. There was the Solana meme coin lick that was launched on Pumped Up Fun. It's all connected to this guy's wallet. Can you believe if he literally stole $40 million from the U.S. Government on chain how did this guy expect this to end.

David Hoffman:
[58:11] I don't think he thought about that bro i don't think he was thinking that far ahead oh

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:18] All right well um i guess we got to wrap it up here david you got a meme of the week what are we looking at.

David Hoffman:
[58:23] I mean i don't even know if this is a meme this is just a hilarious photo of metallic can you click on that and blow it up this is metallic in a hammock having a good time and then there's like a gaggle of people just around him. Kind of you know what this reminded me of?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:44] What does it remind you of?

David Hoffman:
[58:45] That scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest is just running and then everyone's just kind of like watching him to do something and everyone, it seems to me like everyone is just like watching Vitalik. Say something smart, Vitalik. Say something wise. Say something wise, our sage, our old sage who's so wise. That's a funny photo, dude.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:06] Yeah. Classic. We got to end it there, guys. None of this, of course, has been financial advice. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.