# ROLLUP: War Returns, Markets Shrug | Saylor Sells | Robinhood Memecoins | Ethereum 3.0? *Author: Ryan Sean Adams, David Hoffman* *Published: Jul 10, 2026* *Source: https://www.bankless.com/podcast/rollup-war-returns-markets-shrug-saylor-sells-robinhood-memecoins-ethereum-3-0* --- ## TRANSCRIPT David Hoffman: [0:04] Bankless nation another friday another week it's time for the bankless weekly roll up ryan how you doing. Ryan Sean Adams: [0:09] I'm great david i was really excited to celebrate the 4th of july you know the uh 250 anniversary it is actually july this is the i think is this the 10th this is the 11th year of existence for ethereum is that right july yes correct no is it 11th David Hoffman: [0:26] Yeah the ethereum blockchain started sometime in July in 2015. So this makes it Ethereum 11 years old. Ryan Sean Adams: [0:33] So where do you think Ethereum will be? David Hoffman: [0:34] Forget America's birthday. Happy birthday, Ethereum. Ryan Sean Adams: [0:36] 250 years from now. Where do you think Ethereum will be? David Hoffman: [0:41] Still producing blocks. Ryan Sean Adams: [0:42] Give me an ETH price prediction. David Hoffman: [0:45] I don't know if the dollar is the correct denominator at that point in 250 years. I mean, the dollar's got Lindy, but I don't know if it's got 250 more years of Lindy. Not to say anything about Ethereum's 11 years of Lindy. Ryan Sean Adams: [0:57] Well, we are not going to be around, so it's not going to be our problem, unless you do the Brian Johnson thing. David Hoffman: [1:01] I think there's a very solid chance that at least I will be around because I'm at least trying half-heartedly to do that. Ryan Sean Adams: [1:07] Well, you might need a new roll-up co-host then because I'm not sure about myself, David. You're not going to do it. What do we got this week? David Hoffman: [1:13] This week, the ceasefire with Iran is over. The United States struck 80 targets over two days across Iran. Iran hit back with U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, and oil sanctions on Iran are back on. So, how are the markets responding to all of this? We did it during market hours this week. Usually Trump waits for, you know, Friday at 4 p.m. after the market closes. Does he really? Yeah, dude, he did that like four times. It's Friday at 4 p.m., it's time to bomb Iran. But there's a ceasefire, and then now it's seemingly over. Trump's got some words to say. There's also Michael Saylor. Once upon a time, you know, in distant memory, he sold 32 Bitcoin and Bitcoin dropped like 20%. This week, Saylor sold 3,588 Bitcoin and Bitcoin went up 3%. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:03] Huh. You told me you think that marks the bottom. We got to dive into what your thoughts are on that. Also, the Robinhood chain finished its first full week in production with a killer use case that's emerging. We'll talk about what that is. David Hoffman: [2:16] You've never seen this use case before. Brand new meta in crypto. We've never seen it. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:21] Speaking of brand new, there's a new Ethereum roadmap brought to you by Vitalik. At least he published it. He pushed it out. It's called the Straw Man. I really get the feeling. Oh, Straw Map. Oops, not Straw Man. I really get the feeling they wanted to call this Ethereum 3.0, but like just didn't because of reasons. David Hoffman: [2:38] He did say the third phase. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:39] I know. He didn't say that. Just say it. This is Ethereum 3.0, folks. David Hoffman: [2:43] We're on Ethereum 3.0. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:44] We'll weigh in on that. David Hoffman: [2:45] We never really knew when 1.0 ended and 2.0 started, and it's going to be the same thing now. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:49] 2.0 started with the merge. 1.0 was when the whole thing kicked off 11 years ago. 10 years ago, excuse me. David Hoffman: [2:56] Yeah, that's fair. Ryan Sean Adams: [2:57] The merge was 2. I guess we've been in 2 for a while. David Hoffman: [3:01] Yeah, it's a little bit like DC's ship, though, because the merge, we ejected the consensus layer and added a new one, but the execution layer stayed the same. Ryan Sean Adams: [3:09] We'll get into it. I think it's Ethereum 3.0 at least. But let's start with Iran, the big news around the world. What happened with Iran? David Hoffman: [3:19] So two major waves of airstrikes on July 8th and 9th across Iran, targeting 170 military sites in total. So I would imagine this was a pretty big in terms of strikes, which was a pretty big one. This was in direct retaliation for Iran attacking three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, which the United States characterized as a clear violation of the existing truce. I'm guessing what happened here is like we decided to like see what we can do with pushing boats through the Strait of Hormuz and seeing what Iran would allow. And Iran was like, well, we're going to strike those ships. And they struck those three ships. And then, you know, the United States just escalated. And so here we are. So I think the big question is, is the ceasefire over? Like, are we just back to war with Iran? Let's go ask the Donald himself. Let's see what he said. Do you have any questions? Mr. President, is the ceasefire over? Is the ceasefire done? Is the MOU dead? David Hoffman: [4:14] It's a very interesting question. To me, I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. You know what scum is? They're scum. They're sick people. They're led by sick people. And they're vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They're good people. Steve Whitcoff, Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. They're liars. We make a deal, and if I make a deal with him, we have a deal, and he goes out, he talks. We make a deal. Everyone's agreed. No nuclear weapon. We make a deal. They go outside, talk to the press. They say, we never even talked about it. There's something wrong with them. They're cuckoo. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. As far as I'm concerned, it's over is what he says. Now, Ryan, you would expect markets to just be in turmoil. Can we just pause there? Ryan Sean Adams: [5:14] I just feel like that sounds pretty over, but it's also Donald Trump. Okay, that's Donald Trump. So I feel like he said those words previously. Talk about ending the Iranian civilization, all sorts of things, and then was back like, oh, these guys are great. Let's make a deal. We got a great deal. These are beautiful people, respect. And now he's back to what he was before. So I don't know. From anyone else, I'd be like, this is so over. But from Trump, it's like, okay. David Hoffman: [5:44] Right. And I think the markets are saying exactly what you're saying. So looking at the oil prices as like the indice of how over is this? It's not that over. Or actually, it's somewhere in the middle. So, like, oil prices jumped from $68 for WTI up to $71. That's up 5%, which is in the grand scheme of the war. That's, like, nothing. Ryan Sean Adams: [6:07] Yeah, zoom out a little bit on this chart. David Hoffman: [6:09] Oh, this is the entire war. This is the entire war. Ryan Sean Adams: [6:11] Wait, this is the entire, wait, entire war? David Hoffman: [6:13] Yeah, so these are weekly candles. Ryan Sean Adams: [6:14] Oh, this is the 200-week. I see. You're doing weekly candles. David Hoffman: [6:16] This is the weekly candles. So, here, I'll go to daily candles. Yeah, I get it. And so, yeah, like, we're doing fine. Ryan Sean Adams: [6:23] Yeah, because we were above 100 at various points in the war, right? Like, as high as 112? Is that what this is? David Hoffman: [6:29] Yeah, as high as 112. And then it was ranging between 85 and 112. And then the lows, which we were at three days ago, was $67. And we were at below $72. Ryan Sean Adams: [6:39] So the market kind of thinks this is over, right? The market thinks it's over. I mean, sorry, not over. It's just, like, not a big deal. David Hoffman: [6:45] It's not a big deal. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, like, the Trump administration did a phenomenal job, in my opinion, doing expectation management with the markets as it was to the war when the war was actually in its height. They really just, like, they only struck on the weekends. Then it was, like, peacetime between Monday through Friday during market hours. But then once the weekend hit, it was wartime. That's insane. They did that so long that, like, now that, like, we're striking Iran again, the market's like, whatever. Like, we'll add 3% to the oil prices, but we're moving on. It showed up a little bit in the indices, but really, like, the NASDAQ and the SPY are fantastically green today. So there was, like, a red bloodbath on, like, Tuesday, but it was one day. Ryan Sean Adams: [7:30] It kind of implies that the market is calling the shots on this war, which is sort of bizarre, but maybe that's what's going on. But it also implies that, I mean, Trump has a really, a real weakness around this. of Iran knows what's happening. They could do the same analysis you just did and just be like, Trump is not going to do anything if the markets go down. And so they can exploit that. They have all sorts of ways to exploit that. I guess David Hoffman: [7:52] That's not my interpretation. My interpretation is that the market doesn't care. Donald Trump gets to do whatever he wants because the market is what will push Donald into a corner, not Iran. And so, like, Donald just got away with two days of strikes across Iran and the market was like, whatever, we're just going to cough a little bit. Ryan Sean Adams: [8:10] I'm choosing to just, like, not let it affect my... David Hoffman: [8:13] I think you're allowed to not think about it. That's what the market's saying. Ryan Sean Adams: [8:16] That's what I've been doing. That's what the market agrees with me on that. David Hoffman: [8:19] Let's look at the crypto prices. So, Bitcoin up 2% this week. we're at $63,000. ETH up 2% this week at $17.50. And then stretch, I think, is the most interesting thing. Trading at $86. Stretch from strategy, it's trading 14% off. I think this is kind of starting to find some sort of equilibrium about how comfortable people are holding stretch and the yield at $86. $100 is too high, but $70 is too low. And the other indicator of health of this bull market, Ryan, that's the stretch and master micro strategy like the crypto health side of things. DRAM is like the momentum of the AI stocks. It's kind of come off of its highs from $80 down to $60 and it's up to $65. And so I kind of think the memory stocks, the AI trade is... Kind of consolidating right now. It's not going too high, not going too low. It's a little bit of a pause. But as far as I'm concerned, the trend is still in the market's favor. These are all my takes. Ryan Sean Adams: [9:19] What about this big Michael Saylor sale then? I mean, the market seeped to absorb that, which was somewhat unexpected, I suppose, because this is a $200 million sale here. I mean, it's about half a percent of all MicroStrategy holdings. but that's the first time that strategy has sold in size it's a big amount uh it indicates more to come or more could come from somebody previously in previous regimes thought of as just an accumulator you know strategy sailor does not sell it only buys and outsold and the market shrugged that off so what what happened here and what do you think this means David Hoffman: [10:04] The biggest piece of information for me on this is Saylor sold a lot in comparison to what he sold last time. So 32 Bitcoin is what he sold last time. He sold $3,588, so way more. He raised $216 million, which is like one and a half months of dividend coverage. So in terms of like buying time, he didn't buy himself that much time. So we're going from like micro sales to small sales of Bitcoin. Ryan Sean Adams: [10:33] But still, to your point, It's only 45 days he bought it. David Hoffman: [10:36] Yeah, you're right. It's still very small. And so I do think it's bullish that Michael Saylor is selling because he needs to become, in my opinion, irrelevant to the market. And when there is such a large overhang from Saylor and he has such a large obligation for dividends, that's just going to define the Bitcoin price because that's what the market is going to be looking at. And Saylor needs to, in my opinion, puke up some Bitcoin so he can absolve himself of some sins and get 30 plus months of dividend coverage shored up. And so he's selling, but in my opinion, he's not selling enough. But it is notable that the Bitcoin price has gone up this week, despite Saylor selling 3,588 Bitcoin. Ryan Sean Adams: [11:19] Do you think Bitcoin price in the market is just saying they're accepting the fact that he's going to puke up some Bitcoin? But so long as he pukes it up in an orderly fashion, the way everyone can kind of absorb, but it's not unexpected. You know, markets hate uncertainty. This is sort of some certainty in the market that they can predict. Yeah, sure, he's going to puke up a little bit, but he's going to do it in an orderly fashion according to a plan. It's not going to be a graceless collapse or unwind. It's just going to be something that now happens. And I guess the market is bullish on that because they've removed some uncertainty. This is how strategy is going to solve its STRC preferred shares dilemma. Yeah, funding problem. David Hoffman: [12:00] Yeah. Yeah. When he sold his 32 Bitcoin and then Bitcoin dropped like 20% from like 70 down to like 58,000 or whatever. Like, I don't think it was the market responding to that 32 Bitcoin sale. It was the market anticipating much larger sales like this coming in the future. And perhaps this is the first of a handful of these, hopefully, in my opinion, the first of many, where Saylor actually does, again, puke up some Bitcoin to shore up his defenses. so the market can kind of move on. And so the drop in Bitcoin price way back a month and a half ago or whatever was front-running all of that future selling, this selling and all of that future selling, giving Saylor kind of terrible execution on the sale. Like he's buying the top and then selling the bottom. But nonetheless, like this is, I think, what it takes for us to kind of just clear this debt that we have. Ryan Sean Adams: [12:52] Well, let me ask you what you think this might imply. So do you think now that the market has and sailors seemingly resolve the problem here, right? We have a path towards resolution. You just keep doing this type of sail in an orderly way, however frequently you want to do it. It's not a problem right now. It's going to be very orderly. So that removes the sailor micro strategy blow up risk. I guess what I'm asking, your probability last time that we saw the bottom was what, like 50%? David Hoffman: [13:22] 40 to 50%, yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [13:23] Yeah, has that gone up or down? David Hoffman: [13:26] Yeah, that's gone up. So because when we bottomed at like $57,000, Sailor was selling into that with this sale, And so to me, like, and so when I said it was 40 to 50% probability, I didn't know, no one knew that Saylor was selling at that time. Had I known that Saylor was actually selling into that, I'd be like, oh, he's the forced seller selling into the bottom. This is what a bottom looks like. So my probability is going up. Ryan Sean Adams: [13:50] So now you're waiting, you're waiting is basically that you're what, 60%, something like this? David Hoffman: [13:55] 60-ish, 60% chance that that was the bottom. Ryan Sean Adams: [13:57] That 58K was the bottom. David Hoffman: [13:59] 57.5K, I think, was the pico bottom. Okay. What about you? Ryan Sean Adams: [14:04] My probability has not changed. I think I remain unaffected by the sailor thing, and I'm probably more influenced by Michael Nadeau and the work that he's doing. David Hoffman: [14:13] I haven't listened to you guys' episode yet this week. What did you guys say this week? Ryan Sean Adams: [14:16] His probability that we've seen the bottom is 45%. So his probability that we have not seen the bottom, that we go to lower lows, is 65%. David Hoffman: [14:24] Okay. Ryan Sean Adams: [14:25] And he's like, limit orders at 55K or so. David Hoffman: [14:29] 55? What? We're like, it's the same, same. Ryan Sean Adams: [14:32] That's the first set of limit orders. Then you've got 50K limit orders, and then you could get into the 40s if things get really ugly. And like 40 is kind of a... Um, 60, you know, three, 64%, something like this draw down from all time highs, which should be commensurate with kind of the trend that we've seen. And his reasoning is kind of different. He's looking at, you know, hold the coin switching hands from different cohorts. And he's also looking at volume numbers. And he's like, we haven't seen the volume that we typically see in these kind of mark the bottom capitulation type events. He really wants to see some heavy volume on the buying and the selling before he gets the bottom signal. David Hoffman: [15:11] That this bottom was not a violent bottom and all the other bottoms have been violent. Ryan Sean Adams: [15:17] That said, look, his portfolio is something like 70% in crypto now, 30% in cash, right? So he's still the weight on the bullish side of things. David Hoffman: [15:29] He's leaned exposure. Right before 10-10, he went to like 80% cash, right? Ryan Sean Adams: [15:35] Yeah, he did. So he's totally switched and bought in. He's pretty convicted. David Hoffman: [15:41] Slower than I am. Yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [15:44] A little slower to call, a little slower on the draw there. David Hoffman: [15:46] There's one more angle of the sailor thing that I want to talk to you about because I think it's kind of actually important. There was this, like they had, they released the like statement or whatever they're filing about the selling of their Bitcoin price and there was like a bunch of words that has come with this. And so there are now, there are three buckets in their like digital framework, monetization framework shenanigans. Ryan Sean Adams: [16:09] Which is just how they're going to sell or David Hoffman: [16:11] How they're going to sell. And so there's three different categories for how strategy sells Bitcoin. There is the build the reserve category, which they have. That's the authorization that they have authorized themselves to sell one point two five billion dollars for the USD reserve. That's one type of authorized sale of Bitcoin. Ryan Sean Adams: [16:32] So that's just like emergency fund, cash padding, that kind of thing. David Hoffman: [16:36] Yeah, I don't know if it's emergency fund. It's just cash. Ryan Sean Adams: [16:39] Rainy day, rainy day fund. David Hoffman: [16:40] Yeah. Then there's cover the preferreds, which is you sell Bitcoin to pay the fixed dividends and interest strategy owes on its preferred shares and debt, or to replenish the reserves after they pay them when management decides to sell Bitcoin, beats issuing common stock. So after they pay out their monthly dividend or biweekly or however long they're doing it, They're allowed to sell Bitcoin to immediately replenish those dividends. And then there is a third bucket, which is just to fund buybacks, which they're allowed to sell Bitcoin to repurchase its preferred shares, MSTR stock, up to $1 billion of each with Bitcoin sales potentially covering related taxes, fees, and expenses. So there's three different buckets for how they sell Bitcoin. that $1.25 billion authorization that they authorized themselves to, which they don't need to do, but they did, is untouched by this sale of $216 million of Bitcoin. That is the cover the preferreds category, not the build the reserves category. The build the reserves category, they have still authorized themselves $1.25 billion of permission to sell Bitcoin. And the sale from this week is not in that bucket. It's in the cover the preferreds bucket, which is a limitless bucket. They can sell as much Bitcoin as they need to cover the preferreds. Ryan Sean Adams: [18:00] Okay, so they're just saying all of the sales we made this week didn't count toward the number we gave you last week. David Hoffman: [18:04] And also, we deem that. We authorize that to not count. Ryan Sean Adams: [18:08] Right. So, I don't know what I get from that other than the selling could continue. Yeah, they can do whatever they want. David Hoffman: [18:16] What are all these words for. Ryan Sean Adams: [18:17] Dude? Well, I'm glad we talked about that and cleared all that up, dude. What do we have next? David Hoffman: [18:25] Okay, coming up next, we're going to talk about the brand new innovative use case on Robinhood chain that has been recently discovered this week. No one saw it coming. And then also, Ryan's going to talk to us about Ethereum 3.0. We've got a new straw map to talk about. It's my turn. Ryan Sean Adams: [18:38] Okay. Not Metallic's. David Hoffman: [18:40] No, it's Metallic's turn. It's all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Last week, we had the rise of Robinhood chain. This week, it opened for business. The bridges opened up, and you're able to go and buy tokenized stocks and put money into Morpho and trade on Uniswap and get 7% yield. You know what happened, Ryan? Ryan Sean Adams: [19:01] Yeah, people did all of those things that you said? David Hoffman: [19:04] I mean, sure, some people did, yeah. But what is actually everyone's excited about? What's that? Meme coins. Meme coins. Can I tell you about the meme coin that's on Robinhood chain that people are excited about? Ryan Sean Adams: [19:15] What's it called? What's the meme coin of the week? David Hoffman: [19:17] It's called Cash Cat. And the lore is that this is what Robinhood was called before it was called Robinhood. And there's a tweet from Vlad from 2021 about this. and people immediately found that meme and it jumped up to $180 million in market cap or something. And then because of the flurry of activity of meme coins on Robinhood chain, so many people wanted to bridge to Robinhood chain that all the bridges ran out of ETH, ran out of liquidity on the Robinhood chain. Just like everyone bridged over. It was like, oh, we don't have any ETH for you. You have to go to the canonical bridge if you want to go on. And so like people just rushed in to buy meme coins on Robinhood chain. I forgot that like when a chain launches, the first thing that happens there is just people just buy the native meme coins of the chain. But that's what happened. Ryan Sean Adams: [20:04] It doesn't always happen, though. I mean, didn't happen for Kraken's Inc. Like it just depends. It's true. It doesn't happen for lots of chains. David Hoffman: [20:11] But you would want it to. You would want it to. Ryan Sean Adams: [20:13] Everyone would want it to. Maybe we'll talk about why. But like this seems like an endorsement almost from Vlad Tenev, the founder of Robinhood. He tweeted this. while we're building Robinhood Chain to be the best chain for real-world assets, it works great for memes too. There you go. It does work great for memes. David Hoffman: [20:31] Blockchains do work great for memes. That is something that we've actually known for quite a long time. So now like all the meme coin traders are like looking at Robinhood and Vlad being like, are you guys going to list the memes? Like, but you have to support the meme economy. You need to list Cash Cat on the main Robinhood app because we need you guys to support the memes. And I think people are just have way too much hope for that. I don't think that's happening at all. Ryan Sean Adams: [20:56] I guess the theory of why a meme coin would explode on Robinhood is distribution. You've got, you know, David Hoffman: [21:02] 25 million trading degens. Same thing with base and meme coins on base. It's like you pump the meme coins on base and then Coinbase will list it. Ryan Sean Adams: [21:09] Yeah, but with Robinhood, it's untouched people too, right? It's like the same people on Coinbase. David Hoffman: [21:15] They haven't been burned by meme coins before. We could burn them. That's right. We could be the guys that burn them. Ryan Sean Adams: [21:20] This is a whole new audience we could burn. This is a whole new audience that could tap into the potential. Actually, I think that is probably some of the theory. It's Robinhood distribution. I mean, you correct me. I'm not a meme coin trader. What do I know about this? That's right. That sounds right. David Hoffman: [21:33] And I think people are getting, even if Robinhood does do that, which I don't think they will, and I don't think that they ought to, because you shouldn't be, in my opinion, distributing meme coins to your retail, buying, like, just because you want to support the meme coin economy. Why not? Ryan Sean Adams: [21:48] Why gatekeep David? Why gatekeep? You're such a gatekeeper. David Hoffman: [21:51] I'm sorry. I'm listening to all the people who own Cash Cat on Twitter and be like, Vlad, list Cash Cat. Vlad, list Cash Cat. And all I'm hearing is, Vlad, let me dump on your customers. Ryan Sean Adams: [21:59] That's always the case. This is always the case. David Hoffman: [22:02] Like, there's no way. There's no way. And like, Robinhood moves slowly. And, you know, to some degree, that's actually benefited them because they've been able to be like 17th mover advantage on Ethereum layer twos. Yeah. And they just get to bring all their distribution. And like going fast, they would have been in the experiment like Wild West phase and like that's not their deal and so I don't like I'm not holding my breath for Robinhood to list Cash Cat on their retail app. Ryan Sean Adams: [22:26] Nor do you think they should you're saying. You think they should just keep that segmented sandbox. You want meme coins to go on Robinhood chain. David Hoffman: [22:32] Download Robinhood wallet not Robinhood app. Ryan Sean Adams: [22:35] Yeah at least there's a step there and a hoop someone has to go through and so they're not you're like enticed by this. But this has been pretty good for some of the native DeFi protocols for wallets. I saw 140,000 wallets have been opened on Robinhood Chain. This is Hayden Adams. David Hoffman: [22:51] On one day, that was just one day. I think we're accumulative wallets on Robinhood Chain is over 200,000. On July 8th, there was 141 new active wallets on Robinhood Chain. $500 million of trading volume in Uniswap in 24 hours, which is roughly a third of Solana's DEX spot volume just on the Uniswap version of Robinhood Chain. Pretty crazy. Ryan Sean Adams: [23:14] I mean, could you make the argument that, Hey, this is memes are a great way to bootstrap an ecosystem. You get users, you get people use like on the wallet doing things, activity. And then once they come, they'll they'll they'll stay. David Hoffman: [23:26] I've heard this story before. Ryan Sean Adams: [23:28] I feel like we've said this before. David Hoffman: [23:30] I've heard that before. Ryan Sean Adams: [23:32] More crypto wallets and more hands is net good. David Hoffman: [23:35] I think memes just are always kind of just like, it's the spark. Whether or not it lights anything is completely unbounded. Ryan Sean Adams: [23:43] Well, there were some DeFi protocols that are winners here. You mentioned Uniswap. There's also Athena and Morpho, which received some total value here. So they benefit from Robinhood chain doing well. Some of these Robinhood tokens were on PumpFun, which is a massive... David Hoffman: [23:59] Yeah, so like Pump wants to give their users in on the action. And so you can buy Robinhood meme coins on PumpFun now, which also now includes Robinhood stocks. So you can now buy Robinhood stock tokens on PumpFun, which is interesting. Ryan Sean Adams: [24:12] It's a great way to cycle your meme coin winnings into something that's a bit more sustainable. I hope that's what they're doing, David. But how about the real world asset part of things? How about the tokenized stocks? Are those flying off the shelves? Are we selling some tokenized stocks on Robinhood chain? David Hoffman: [24:30] Sure. There's $366 million of assets on Robinhood chain. 266 of that is stablecoins, granted. And a decent chunk of that is, as you said, in Morpho, getting that 7% boosted yield from the Robinhood stablecoin, the USDG. That's Paxos. So $90 million of that is in Athena getting yield. $86 million of that is in Morpho getting yield. And then there is a whopping $13 million of tokenized stocks, Robinhood tokenized stocks, $13 million, which... It's not zero. It's day three, you know? It's day three. Ryan Sean Adams: [25:09] Well, I'm sure that number will go up when they open it up at least to the U.S. It's just Europe only. David Hoffman: [25:14] Yeah, right. It's not available in the U.S., which sucks. Ryan Sean Adams: [25:17] I'm sure there's a lot of gates that I haven't tried to purchase. David Hoffman: [25:20] I actually haven't actually tried it out directly yet because Robinhood stocks are permissionless, actually. Ryan Sean Adams: [25:26] Yeah, it's a to-do for next time. David's going to go try this. Yeah. Let's look at the data availability purchase from Ethereum. some interesting stats so um this is l2b now robinhood chain is on l2b and because robinhood chain is a layer two and probably the most successful layer two that's come out in the past like 12 months or so right as far as off the bat success it's kind of like people are looking for some validation of the ethereum l2 roadmap which has not been going well lately so robinhood chain purchases its data availability from ethereum the layer one and they have so far spent about six hundred dollars purchasing that data availability six David Hoffman: [26:11] Hundred dollars of eth this is gone. Ryan Sean Adams: [26:12] Forever six hundred dollars of blob space so far and that's just the start of course it only spikes up when there's contention so because there's much more supply than demand the fees competition yes you know the draw uh should we talk more about ethereum you want to talk about the straw map? David Hoffman: [26:27] Yes. You do have to give a shout out to Arbitrum, which is going to be our token mover of the week, which is up 13% this week. Ryan Sean Adams: [26:33] Oh, they are up because they were only up like 3% last week when we talked about this. David Hoffman: [26:36] Yeah, so they got a boost. They got a boost because they get 10% of all of the execution fees of Robinhood chain goes into the Arbitrum DAO. David Hoffman: [26:42] So, Arb token, mover of the week. Congrats, Arb. Yeah. Okay, now talk to me about the straw map. Ryan Sean Adams: [26:47] Well, I don't know. Did you see it? So, this is Vitalik posting the straw map. So, we already had a version of the straw map, which is basically Ethereum's roadmap for the next, call it three to five years, maybe 10 years plus. David Hoffman: [27:01] Why do we call it that? Ryan Sean Adams: [27:03] Like straw man you know uh i said i think it's David Hoffman: [27:06] Like an idea of a roadmap. Ryan Sean Adams: [27:08] It's yeah it's just like a draft of a roadmap right this could change like don't take it too seriously it's just a straw David Hoffman: [27:14] I never did. Ryan Sean Adams: [27:16] Well you might have reason to take it a bit more seriously this time around because this is a new version of the straw map and this one has something i didn't see in previous versions which is um some some uh columns for dates for dates David Hoffman: [27:32] And that's new that is. Ryan Sean Adams: [27:34] New can you imagine dates how specific it's just a straw map so don't get too excited okay these are straw map i got excited but we do have we do have these dates and we have them tied roughly to future hard forks so we have lists of features tied to hard forks which are shippable pieces of software on Ethereum tied to like, I don't know, this looks like a six to nine month cadence. And it goes from 2026 and the two next hard forks all the way to 2029. And you also have this column called North Stars. And so these features are grouped. So you know the layers of the cake for Ethereum. How many times have we educated ourselves on this and the rest of the bankless nation on this? Consensus layer, data layer, execution layer, the three layers of the cake. And then you have these North Stars, which I appreciate. Why are we doing these things? The North Stars are... Fast L1, so fast finality. Teragas L2, so lots of blobs for Robinhood chain and base, one gigabyte per second. And then gigagas L1, that's one gigagas per second. And then private L1. So those are the four north stars for Ethereum at this point. And all of the features across all of these swimlines map to one of those four north stars. Are you with me so far? David Hoffman: [28:57] Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ryan Sean Adams: [28:59] So Vitalik calls this the biggest kind of thing, new era of Ethereum. He doesn't say Ethereum 3.0, but that's my interpretation. Now, unlike the merge, it's not like a one-shot. We ship the whole thing. So this happens much more gradually, which is maybe some of the reason you don't want to call this whole thing Ethereum 3.0. It's because it's just not a moment in time. David Hoffman: [29:19] There's never a moment. Ryan Sean Adams: [29:20] No, we're shipping Ethereum 3.0, as I'm calling it, in these kind of hard fork phases towards these North Star definitions. Um, do you have any, like, I don't know if you saw this compared to the previous version of the roadmap, but like, based on everything I've said, what are your impressions of the changes here, if any? David Hoffman: [29:43] Um, well, this, the old version was a straw map, which was subject to change and updating and all that kind of stuff. And I think really the first version, you know, the beta version of the straw map was Justin Drake's most hated slide ever out of DevCon in Bogota. Was that 2024? Bangkok, 2024? Ryan Sean Adams: [30:04] Yeah. David Hoffman: [30:05] Was that 2024? Ryan Sean Adams: [30:06] Yeah, it was 2024. Where he introduced Lean, Ethereum, that whole idea. David Hoffman: [30:09] Right. And it was like a five-year plan and everyone was grumbling about it. And, you know, well, we're two and a half years later, we're halfway through. But like, it's a straw map. And so it has been updated. It was subject to change. we've changed it, it's now this. And what has changed in those two and a half years? AI, and also quantum. Ryan Sean Adams: [30:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. David Hoffman: [30:30] Those two things are like reshuffling priorities. And then you also have the unbundling of the EF. Vitalik doesn't really care about block times. ETH Labs now cares about block times. And so because of the reshuffling of the actual organizations leading the straw map, you kind of see also some of the priorities. And so it's just updated for 2026. It's kind of like my summary of how things changed. Ryan Sean Adams: [30:50] I think it is updated for 2026 with some of those priorities. I want to get back to that in a second. But also I'd point out, it's like so much more detailed, so much less fog of war. If you go back to, do you remember Justin Drake's slide from 2024? It was just very vague. And it was like, there was a, we're going to pill everyone first, you know, like that's part of the reason he got some pushback. Right. This is detailed. This has dates. This has columns. This has hard forks. This has specific features. David Hoffman: [31:17] Does it have like micro strategy authorization to sell Bitcoin dates or are they dates? Ryan Sean Adams: [31:23] I think that, well, I don't think you, the dates are a straw map, okay? But the level of detail is something that we haven't seen for this era of Ethereum. But let's talk about the prioritization that you noticed. Yeah, the advent of AI, formal verification seems to be getting kind of a big boost in this, or at least you can see the effects. In the same way that, you know, a secret unlock for Ethereum in the past has been Snarks. That's what's allowing this roadmap. and we've already kind of priced that in, let's say, and incorporated that in previous versions of the straw map, this one seems most affected by formal verification because there seems to be this idea that we can move from a multi-client execution layer to a more consolidated single-client pieces of the execution layer. So rather than have, in order to preserve security redundancy through multiple clients, there's this idea, I think, interjected through this version of the roadmap app that we can consolidate, have a single client, as long as it's formally verified, that gives us the security that we need. Because we can only have one client, that speeds a lot of things up. So in particular. David Hoffman: [32:33] That was a lot of development, just. Ryan Sean Adams: [32:36] Governance, blah, blah, blah. David Hoffman: [32:38] Like coordination and so many different layers. It's so much faster. We can just focus on one client. Yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [32:44] So what you see here is that the ZKEVM has been sped up. Okay. Now it's in K-Star, the K-Star fork. Whereas previously it was like an L-Star or longer. So that has moved forward. And now you actually see. David Hoffman: [32:57] I can't even imagine L-Star. I'm going to be 40 years old in L-Star. Ryan Sean Adams: [32:59] No, you're not. This is, K-Star is 2028. L-Star is 2029. Okay? Okay. You're going to be 40 in 2029. So, um. All the way. Native roll-ups also make an appearance on this. I don't know if I've seen that on previous versions. Native roll-ups with a date is new. So, anyway, I think that's, um, that's cool. Another thing that I noticed was there seems to be more acceleration towards quantum. So some of the quantum dates have moved up as well, more from the 2029 and 2030 to the 2028 time period for quantum acceleration. Privacy also more ambitious? David Hoffman: [33:40] I will say about quantum, it is nice Ethereum being the second market cap blockchain, because if you have a quantum computer, like, are you going to go for Bitcoin or are you going to go for Ethereum? And the answer is unequivocally, you're going to go for Bitcoin because Ethereum is still going to be harder to break and more readily available. And so like... Bitcoin will take the bullet for Ethereum. Ryan Sean Adams: [34:01] Yeah, I mean, that's right. And also, I think Ethereum is kind of leading the way for Bitcoin in terms of figuring out which cryptography works for blockchains. Privacy, Ethereum looks like it's going, by the end of this, in the longer term, going full Zcash. So what we're looking at is, at least in this raw map, is a privacy pool at the consensus layer. That's like basically Zcash functionality on the L1. David Hoffman: [34:28] That is a shielded pool in the layer one. That is Zcash. Ryan Sean Adams: [34:31] Something that Bitcoin is not doing, but it's basically saying, hey, privacy, we'll take that. That'll be a feature that we add onto our blockchain rather than launch an entirely new blockchain. So those are the big things I noticed. Now, there are some things that were deprioritized. Data availability, blob features seem to be pushed back a bit more because I guess we have enough. And they're not being like, I mean, it's not generating a lot. David Hoffman: [34:51] Just charge Robinhood more money. That's fine. Ryan Sean Adams: [34:54] It was an okay product. It's not a, it's blown out, you know, the records in terms of sales for BlopSpace. Also, let's see, slot times were moved back a little bit. But I was looking at the ETH Labs team. Like, this is Barnaby from the ETH Labs team to see what they'd say about this roadmap. And they were actually bullish. This is Barnaby saying he likes decoupled consensus is very bullish, he said, because they're decoupling some things. You get the sense that ETH Labs might be able to move on slot times independent of this roadmap, but... Whereas like maybe the Ethereum Foundation isn't prioritizing it, there's opportunity because they're decoupling for ETH Labs to come in and prioritize it. So there's that too. And then one other thing I noticed, which is like, I don't know what this is exactly. Snail issuance, like I've heard talk about that, but like issuance, ETH issuance could be on the table in some form or another. It has an emoji, which is like uncertainty emoji. So that could be a discussion in the future too. David Hoffman: [35:59] So I can't believe we're going to do another round of ETH issuance debates in the Ethereum community. And like, I can just see that tidal wave coming. And I'm going to take part in it because I find ETH monetary policy probably the most interesting subject about Ethereum. But I'm just like, I'm just going to get so many gray hairs. Ryan Sean Adams: [36:18] I do share this take that Donkrad had on the back. So Donkrad, former ETH researcher, of course, now he's at Tempo. He said that Ethereum straw map has a lot of really cool features in all caps. Fully proven STF and scaling to get gas with finality in seconds gets me excited, he said. But three to four years is very slow. I think we should be ambitious and get it done in one year. David Hoffman: [36:41] I think that's unreasonable to get it done in one year. I think if we wanted to get it done in one year, you would basically have to punt every single Ethereum developer and then get Tempo to come in and do it in their very top-down, centralized way. I don't know how we would do that in one year. Ryan Sean Adams: [37:00] So you're fine with three to four years, but not... David Hoffman: [37:03] No, I agree with Donkrad is that it should be done as soon as possible. But I just don't see how we do that. It's just not in the culture that we have in Ethereum. Ryan Sean Adams: [37:11] So DeFi Ignis had a take on this. He said it was bullish overall, but he said the missing piece is ETH tokenomics, although it's a non-issue of reduced fees attract more transactions per user. That's a big if. So his thing was like, there's nothing that addresses fee generation on Ethereum. It's that kind of insight. And if the bear market continues for longer, then Tempo, Canton, they start to eat away at ETH's market share. David Hoffman: [37:40] I don't know about that latter point, because, for all this, like, Ethereum's just in a league of its own, and Ethereum, and to his first point about, like, inducing fee demand, like, that's no one's job to do BD and growth on Ethereum, that's kind of been the issue the entire time. Ryan Sean Adams: [37:57] What about the token economics take, which is just like... David Hoffman: [38:00] That's issuance. So it is touched on. That is issuance. But that's just reducing... Ryan Sean Adams: [38:04] It's not just issuance. Because I think what DeFi Ignis and some people are looking for is for the burn to come back. For there to be some sustained cash flows in terms of fee generation or MEV sales. David Hoffman: [38:15] And we can't force demand to happen on Ethereum. We can't just induce demand. Ryan Sean Adams: [38:19] It's not just demand. It's also supply. I mean, you can... David Hoffman: [38:22] Right, which is reducing issuance. Ryan Sean Adams: [38:24] No, no, no. Sorry. Not for... Like, I'm talking about actual fee generation. So what I'm saying is people like DeFi Ignis think of ETH right now as it doesn't have a value proposition unless it can generate substantial fees, not like issuance from like fees or MEV sales, right? Like the monetary premium thing is like not a thing. We want to see discounted cash flow to ETH. And this roadmap does not create any discounted cash flows that they would like to see. I don't know what he proposes. David Hoffman: [38:58] But that's not what this roadmap would ever do. Like, when did we get like the burn? We got it from DeFi Summer. We got it from NFT Mania, which is like app, the application layer creating products that people wanted. And the Ethereum Foundation and the ETH developers were never involved with the app layer intentionally so. And so there's nothing in this protocol that is like, oh, and then here's how we create demand. Ryan Sean Adams: [39:23] It's not just a demand story. That's just the one point I want to emphasize because the other reason you got fees was because you had restricted supply because you weren't scaling anything. See, part of the reason we have no fees right now is because supply outstrips demand. Right. And so this is why I don't agree with the whole Ignis take and the takes that ETH needs to be a discounted cash flow type asset is because fees will never be a thing. Fees will never... Like, I think this whole roadmap, when I look at it, Again, it's inkblot test. You could look at this and be like bullish or you could look at it bearish. I'll give you the bullish way to look at this. This is optimizing for ETH as a story value in a crop censorship resistant type way. And it's optimizing for slow DeFi at the cost of fast DeFi, say super fast slot times. You trade that off and you get like privacy for your crops asset. Like I think what if what Vitalik's because this is kind of Vitalik's vision, right? What Vitalik is doing is he's creating a crops DeFi friendly platform with ETH as the store of value without actually saying that's what he's doing. Right. Because that's what the roadmap essentially is. That's what it delivers if you get to the end of this. David Hoffman: [40:39] Yeah. You're saying that Ethereum is a app chain. It's an application-specific chain. The application is Ether. Yes. The fact that you can build Turing Complete smart contracts is really just because then we can build things like Uniswap and Aave for Ether. Yes. And we can implement the ZK, the privacy pool inside the layer one for Ether. That's what I'm saying. So it's an app chain for Ethereum. Ryan Sean Adams: [41:05] And it's about time that, because when I look at this architecture, I'm like, oh, that's what you're building. It's about time that, Ethereum community and the EF say that that's what they're building because that's what they're building. David Hoffman: [41:17] Yeah. If we as a community, as an Ethereum community had gone back in time to 2017 and then started thinking on those terms, I think we would have ended up in a very similar yet very different spot. Whereas like, what is Ethereum for? It's for Ether versus what is Ethereum for? It's for the world. Ryan Sean Adams: [41:37] Yeah, I agree. Well, but like Ether is for the world, but I see what you're saying you're saying ether David Hoffman: [41:42] Is for the world but all. Ryan Sean Adams: [41:43] These tokenized use cases and all that like all the stuff that was kind of a side question like David Hoffman: [41:48] Decentralized internet or world computer no no no world asset. Ryan Sean Adams: [41:53] Yep that's right and then bitcoiners like but you stole that from us i'm like yep that's right yeah it was David Hoffman: [41:58] A good meme but you're blocking boo. Ryan Sean Adams: [42:00] Boo anyway that's my take and i don't really know David Hoffman: [42:03] How we got there from the demand side or whatever but whatever. Ryan Sean Adams: [42:05] Yeah. And maybe my last question on this. Do you think that Ethereum is going to deliver this? Maybe not in three to four years, but say four to five years? David Hoffman: [42:15] Yeah. Like the long term conclusion of the roadmap is inevitable. Ryan Sean Adams: [42:20] There you go. David Hoffman: [42:21] But that's just never been the issue. Ryan Sean Adams: [42:24] What do we have coming up, David? David Hoffman: [42:26] Coming up next, we're going to talk about the JP Morgan $700 million fund on Ethereum. We're going to talk about the paradigm raise. And then also we're going to do a little portfolio check-in. Because Ryan, I'm going to top my own portfolio and do a little victory dance, about something that I think I deserve. And so we're going to talk about that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Ryan Sean Adams: [42:46] This is a title. J.P. Morgan built a $700 million fund on Ethereum and nobody noticed. So we talked about this, I don't know, a month or so ago, maybe six weeks ago. David Hoffman: [42:57] J-L-T-X-X? Yes. What a ticker. Ryan Sean Adams: [43:00] This is the second tokenized money market that J.P. Morgan has released. And there was a question at the time, will anyone care? Will it get any traction? It's actually grown 250% in the last month. So it is now a $700 million money market fund, and this is all on Ethereum. So just a refresher of what this thing is, it's a money market. So it's U.S. Treasuries, overnight repo. It's not for typical retail investors. There's a $1 million minimum. There's some expense ratio. It is denominated in USDC. It is on public mainnet layer one. it does accept stable coins for redemptions and it was designed for the Genius Act. And what's interesting about JPMorgan's strategy is they have their own internal blockchain system. It was once called Quorum. I always forget what it's called now. David Hoffman: [43:57] Kinexus or something. Ryan Sean Adams: [43:59] That's right. And they also deployed something on base. They deployed JPMD, which was their deposit token, and they piloted that on base. Yeah. So you get the sense that their strategy is they're going to have an internal blockchain, and they're also going to have maybe payments deposit tokens on base and various L2s. But on layer one, it looks like they're building their big money market funds. And what's interesting about that is they are actually doing it on Ethereum L1, not on a layer two, not on their own internal chain. And I was kind of wondering about this question because there is a real world asset war going on out there. I think I've made the point and you've agreed that Ethereum is not necessarily optimized for real world assets, right? It's optimized for censorship resistance, it's privacy, like other things. And yet it still might win the real world asset game, or at least JP Morgan is continuing to deploy there, the biggest bank in the US. Ryan Sean Adams: [45:05] What are your thoughts on, I guess, the real world asset game here. Do you think Ethereum could actually win this by just optimizing for crops? And then as a second, it becomes the liquidity hub and wins network effect for that. And then thus becomes the home also for tokenized real world assets. Or do you think it's going to be a, like a knife fight out there with Canton and Tempo and even Solana rising up the ranks? David Hoffman: [45:30] The properties that Ethereum has and what it's being built for, the crop stuff, And then the properties that real-world asset tokenized issuers want and need are somewhat overlapping, but they're not one-to-one. No asset issuer is looking at the censorship resistance of Ethereum and being like, great, I can call this place home. I was talking to Carlos Domingo from Securitize, and they issued Securitize. What does Securitize do? They securitize assets into tokens on Ethereum or public blockchains. And so when they SPAC'd, did the obvious thing, and then they tokenized their own equity. So this is not a Robinhood stock token. This is not an Ando derivative. This is. David Hoffman: [46:12] The actual equity with DTCC compliance because they're a transfer agent. They do all this stuff. So it's the actual equity. It's KYC'd on the Ethereum layer one. You have to have a KYC to get it because that's how equities work. Excuse me. It's not on the Ethereum one. It's on Solana and it is on Avalanche. Why is it there? Because Avalanche has the permissions and the compliance needed that Securitize needs to make that work. And why is it on Solana? Because Solana has the prop AMM ecosystem to provide the really tight slippage because there's just a lot of regulation and constraints about how to compliantly issue these things. And right now they can only do it on Avalanche and Solana. They're going to do it on Ethereum, but the fact that it's not first on Ethereum is very notable to me. and I asked Carlos, like, why not? And he was like, well, the block times are really slow and that prevents our market makers from being able to compliantly quote the price that it needs to be because they have, to give you the asset at a best price because they need to give you it at the best price. There's like some stupid rules about it, which actually the SEC is going to eliminate in a year, which is interesting. But it's just like Ethereum has properties and those are... They're adjacent, somewhat congruous, somewhat parallel to real-world asset tokenized issuer needs, but they are not the same thing. Ryan Sean Adams: [47:31] So it's not clear-cut. It's not the case that Ethereum will be the default for this. No. It will be the default in some cases. It seems to be at least currently the default for JP Morgan, their money market fund. But I mean, I guess that could erode. That could change over time. Or it could be the default for certain types of DeFi use cases. Like this is kind of a vault use case. This is definitely a slow DeFi type use case. David Hoffman: [47:54] I found the Etherscan for this. So I'm looking at this. It's not even listed on CoinGecko. It's got like a preview page on CoinGecko. The Etherscan has six total wallet holders of this thing. Ryan Sean Adams: [48:03] So these are just whales kind of just parking stuff in this. David Hoffman: [48:06] Yeah, like one wallet holds like 83% of it. And so like this is like an accounting tool as far as I'm concerned. Ryan Sean Adams: [48:13] Interesting. David Hoffman: [48:14] Yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [48:16] I don't know. I mean, the other question is if Ethereum does win the real world asset, you know, war anyway. Or let's say it wins majority, something like 60%. Does that even matter for ETH price? Does that matter for ETH price? David Hoffman: [48:31] Marginally. Ryan Sean Adams: [48:32] Yeah, that's kind of what I think too. David Hoffman: [48:35] A non-zero amount. Ryan Sean Adams: [48:37] Paradigm has raised $1.2 billion for their fund for, David. They've kind of pivoted into AI a little bit. David Hoffman: [48:46] But I think more like a little bit. Yeah. I don't think there's any crypto, like 100% crypto VC left. No one is a, let me know if I'm wrong, at me on Twitter, but like no one is a crypto only VC anymore. And you're seeing this raise reflected with Paradigm. $1.2 billion is a pretty chunky raise, But they have also said, in addition to crypto, they are also going to be investing in AI and robotics and just other frontier technologies. Which I think is like the right category. Like that's kind of what I'm interested in is like frontier technology broadly. Crypto has something to do with it. Like Venice, for example, private AI. AI, also crypto. Frontier technology, absolutely. Like using like near AI to do all that kind of stuff. Like frontier tech. And that's sick. uh and so that category is is what i think kind of crypto is now it's just like crypto plus. Ryan Sean Adams: [49:38] Frontier tech this era in general can we extrapolate this has seen kind of the death of the crypto only investor correct like there aren't crypto only like vc firms as you pointed out but like you're not a crypto only investor right like who's left is a crypto only investor David Hoffman: [49:56] There are a handful. A handful of people. Ryan Sean Adams: [49:59] Most people are playing into other assets, though, and other frontier technologies. David Hoffman: [50:02] I mean, like, I have more of my money in the stock market than doing crypto. Ryan Sean Adams: [50:05] That's the first time since I ever met you. I think that's probably the case, David Hoffman: [50:08] Right? Yes. Yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [50:10] So this is a story of what everyone is doing this cycle. Ryan Sean Adams: [50:14] David, you included this. The CFTC talking to the CME, telling them to buzz off. What's this about? David Hoffman: [50:20] Yeah, the CME filed to do 24-7, 365 markets. I think it's just starting with their oil market. And they asked the CFTC if they could do that. And the CFTC just said, no, you can't do that. That is not what you are for. Like, stay in your lane, bro. And kind of interesting. I don't really know, like, all the nuances behind this. But this is very much, the CME very much did this in response to Hyperliquid and the 24-7, 365 perplexes. listing oil and gold and all this stuff. And so the fact that the CFTC is telling CME is like, this is not what you guys are for. Like, stay in your arena, do what you're good at, and then let the Perp Dexes do what they're good at. That's kind of what I think is happening here. This is why Jake Stravinsky is tweeting this tweet, because he's at the Hyperliquid Policy Center, so he would know. And he's able to read between the lines. But I do think it's interesting that, there is a war being fought But in the same way the banks and Coinbase and crypto have been fighting each other for the past four years, there is a brewing war between the commodities exchanges and the perp dexes. Ryan Sean Adams: [51:31] And yet within that too this cycle there's a war between the perpstexes themselves i think maybe this gets into a little bit of your portfolio but uh before we started recording you told me you think that hyper liquid versus lighter is the now i think you said the new uh ethereum versus solana yeah or something yeah it's David Hoffman: [51:49] A new ether solana that's right so. Ryan Sean Adams: [51:50] What's interesting is it does feel like every single bull cycle for your cycle we do get some kind of dichotomy of competitors here. It's like, I think 2017 is very much the Bitcoin versus Ethereum kind of cycle. Maybe previous to that, it was, or like after that, it was Ethereum, let's say, versus Solana or Ethereum versus the ETH killers. Are you planting a narrative that this cycle might be like the big perp DEXs fighting off Ethereum? Or sorry, Hyperliquid versus Lighter? Is that just going to be a sub story of this? David Hoffman: [52:26] I don't know if I'm planting the narrative, but, like, this happened downstream of the Leiter partnership with the Robinhood wallet and, like, getting the endorsement from Robinhood. It's, like, now there are a bunch of very triggered .HLs. Remember the .ETHs? Like, we were the .ETHs. Now there's, like, .HLs. Ryan Sean Adams: [52:44] Is .HL, like, the ENS for Hyperliquid? David Hoffman: [52:46] I don't know if it's an ENS. I think they just did it. Maybe it's actually, like, real. I wouldn't know. But, like, there are, like, Hyperliquid has made a ton of people very wealthy. and has earned like one of the hearts and minds of like a lot of people because they got the hyperliquid airdrop and they got wealthy as a result of it. And so it's created a very strong tribe. And now like Lighter has pumped like 50% or something in the last like week or so off of the back of like the Robin Hood announcement, which is, you know, an insult to the identity of a hyperliquid person. Like how dare any other perp decks do anything good? And so now you're starting to see like the Lighter versus hyperliquid tribe emerge. and I'm not used to being the smaller guy. Oh, you've chosen a tribe. Ryan Sean Adams: [53:31] You're indicating you've chosen a tribe. David Hoffman: [53:33] I own both. I own both in a very healthy one-to-one ratio. Okay. And so, but yeah, I think Lighter has more growth to it. And so I kind of identify with the Lighter camp, yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [53:46] So you're team Lighter and you're excited about Lighter. What is the case for Lighter versus Hyperliquid? I'm curious. As someone from the Lighter tribe, what would they say? David Hoffman: [53:55] Yeah, Leiter is the very technically competent, I think it could potentially create a framework for the end game of like exchanges, like full stop, not just crypto exchanges, not just Perpdexes, but like exchanges like the NASDAQ and the NYSE, like stuff like this. a high-performing app-specific ZKL2 is such a logical conclusion of, exchange technology and later posted a blog post about all of the tech that went behind shaving off microseconds on latency around hyperliquid and all this kind of stuff. I started reading it. I was like, this is breaking my brain. I don't understand this. But the point was made. And you get all of the assurances of the ZK. So the individual user can verify the state of the exchange and the validity of the exchange and the exchange playing by the rules, which feels very good, like a lot of the CryptoPunk ethos. But mainly, they are positioned to take the U.S. market. And so Vlad from Leiter, not to be confused with Vlad from Robinhood, but Vlad from Leiter, who they're buddies, by the way, which is funny. David Hoffman: [55:01] He's on the CFTC advisory, like innovation advisory board. And Leiter is just... at the gate waiting to get a CFTC license to penetrate the US market. And they're doing the Coinbase thing rather than what Hyperliquid's strategy is, which is being like the one perplex to rule them all. You go to Hyperliquid. It's a first party exchange. Builders build on Hyperliquid, kind of like on Ethereum. Everyone comes to Ethereum layer one that's kind of like Hyperliquid. Lighter is a little bit more like a hub and spoke model where they have a spoke now out to Robinhood chain. And it's its own instance on Robinhood chain. But with ZK technology, a lot of the liquidity flows back to the main hub. And so this is like compliance spokes for bespoke compliance needs. I see. So if any, if Charles Schwab wants to build a perpdex, but they need to KYC all of the traders, all the liquidity and all this kind of stuff, Leiter can do that. And they can do that with their specific technology. And they have a bunch of forward deployed engineers. So the whole idea is they just send their engineers to the United States financial institutions of the world who want PerpDex stuff. And then the forward deployed engineers build it into the brokerage or Robinhood Jane or whoever. And because each one is its own bespoke walled garden, it's highly compliant with U.S. regulation. So that's kind of the pitch for Leiter as it differentiates from Hyperliquid. Ryan Sean Adams: [56:23] It sounds like there's a little bit of a like Binance versus Coinbase thing going on here or like a Tether versus USDC. David Hoffman: [56:28] It's like offshore versus onshore, yeah. Ryan Sean Adams: [56:30] Yeah, so that's the element of this. Okay, so Broadnet, what's your portfolio like these days? So you said you were going to talk about it. So what's gone well? What hasn't gone well? I think this is since you made some changes in May, correct? David Hoffman: [56:42] Yeah, so this is the tweet that got some attention because I tweeted it out at the actual picotop of a lot of these tokens. And so people were like making fun of me on Twitter because they were reading it as if I bought the tokens in that moment. And then they were at the picotop. And like I tweeted this tweet in that moment because it was a brag. I wanted to remind people that I bought these tokens and they were all up. But I bought these tokens in like May 9th or something. And then Lit was the token that I bought on June 3rd with like the bulk of my, it's the Ether portfolio that I sold. And so I would like to do an account of how these people will call them trades. I will call them investments. There'll be trades if I sell them too soon, but since I hold all of them still, they are in the category of investments in my mind. And so Zcash, I'm down 20%. Hype, I'm up 56%. VVV, I'm down 20%. Near, I'm up 25%. And then Lit, which is a token that is my largest position, is up 80%. So that's my little victory that I'd like to take. Ryan Sean Adams: [57:49] So you are moving into kind of your trader era, but I guess. David Hoffman: [57:54] I don't know if that's right, because I'm not going in and out of stuff. Ryan Sean Adams: [57:59] Maybe you're just you're just rebalancing towards something in crypto that is much more application forward let's say use case forward David Hoffman: [58:08] Yeah and they're all much smaller market caps which just feels safer to me by comparison because like eth has to justify a much higher market cap, and how it has to just work harder for that and like when i look at like lit that's like a 600 million dollar market cap i'm like oh there's a potential large amount of growth here yeah and that's kind of where i like i like the smaller caps, uh rather than just like like eth was great and because of what it was like money internet money all that kind of stuff but like commanding like trying to get to a trillion dollars like that's a really hard. Ryan Sean Adams: [58:40] Fight that's that's a hard fight as we've seen over the past five years yeah uh well congrats on those gains david that's um i'm looking forward to seeing how that does in the future and where you choose to deploy i think Like for me, I'm kind of like, I'm still waiting for the bottom signal. David Hoffman: [58:59] You're waiting for people to puke up some stuff? Ryan Sean Adams: [59:00] Yeah, I don't think it's quite time. I think we're nine and a half months into this thing. I still think it's going to take a few more months for this to sort itself out. I don't think we've seen the bottoms yet. David Hoffman: [59:11] What is your shopping list? Ryan Sean Adams: [59:15] I like, Lit would be on there, except it's had an incredible run from the very beginning. So if I bought Lit, it would be at some lows. I have some... Like Bitcoin, obviously, on the lows would be interesting. I don't know. I haven't fully decided. I mean, I'm really enjoying Michael Nato's work in his watch list. Like a number of these are holdings that he has, for example. He's looking at Zach. He thinks it's overpriced. He's been a big bowl of lit. Not quite in near. But there's some things on his list that I've been eyeing as well. So I just don't think we fit the bottom. David Hoffman: [59:56] What about Pump Fund? You're going to buy Pump? Ryan Sean Adams: [59:58] It's printing some revenue, which is insane. And that's hard to ignore if you believe in kind of like, well, an application has to deliver revenue, doesn't it? That's what Hyperliquid and Lint do. They have the potential to do that. So does Pump. So that's something I'm weighing. But it's hard for me to get really excited about that particular use case. Yeah. David Hoffman: [1:00:21] I can't imagine you holding on to Pump for a long amount of time. Right. Ryan Sean Adams: [1:00:24] Right. Anyway, we have to end it there. David Hoffman: [1:00:27] Can I show you these magic alien hands? Ryan Sean Adams: [1:00:29] Oh, yeah, sure. What you got? Yeah. David Hoffman: [1:00:32] This is the most wild thing I have seen on Twitter in a long time. So for the listeners, we are looking at an actuating robot hand with just seemingly perfect, high-fidelity, human-like movement in all of the fingers. Ryan Sean Adams: [1:00:48] Is this real? This is real, dude. What am I looking at? Yeah. David Hoffman: [1:00:51] Yeah, we're watching brand-new robot hands. We've solved fingers. Ryan Sean Adams: [1:00:55] Yvonne has said fingers are the hardest part Yeah David Hoffman: [1:00:58] Fingers are the hardest part That's right Dude the future is going to be wild, I think that's the message I would like to leave this podcast with The future is going to be weird. Ryan Sean Adams: [1:01:04] I'm pretty excited about it though I'm pretty excited actually I've gotten over some of the existential stuff of AI Maybe that's because I'm using it daily It's improving my life I don't know And then what choice do we have Anyway we'll see David Hoffman: [1:01:21] All right, Bankless Nation, we'll see you once again with Ryan and David on the weekly roll-up in seven days. But until then, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, this is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.