Solana's Governance Vote, Ethereum's New Leadership, & Crypto Market Shifts

bankless Nation welcome to the weekly rollup each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the new news and this week I have the pleasure of being joined by Ethereum Community Chief Anthony Sano anthony good to see you my man how are you hey man i'm good good to be back after a little while uh here on the rollup mhm yeah yeah i uh we you have been our regular substitute teacher whenever like Ryan or I would need to take just a week off and we just always tap in Anthony Sesano ryan's been taking an extended sbatical just to spend some very much quality time with his kids uh so I've

been doing my best to like go around just like it's so easy to come back to Anthony Sesano so I had to get some differing diverging uh voices out there uh but it's really good to just like tap you in formally it's like it it was it was inevitable that I would bring you on and it's good to have you back here my man yeah yeah definitely yeah and I think it's it's a good thing to get broader kind of I guess voices on the show definitely like everyone knows my brand knows what I'm going to talk about like know knows what kind of turn I'm going to take so yeah it's been great to see you kind of branch out uh there and get other people on the show so we got a

lot of news to talk about this week athena and Securitize are launching their own chain called Converge which I think that's an ironic name and I'll give that my take about that uh Robin Hood partners with Kishi where the uh prediction market competitor to Poly Market uh then two ETH people are going to talk about the Salana governance debate uh the two ETH people are me and Ryan uh and then of course we got some excuse me and Anthony uh and then Ethereum has some updates as well that we're going to talk about and Kraken makes a 1.5 billion dollar acquisition just announced about an hour before

recording so that's going to be the news that we talk about but I just kind of wanted to zoom out and do a quick vibe check anthony just how you feeling about where we are it is March 20th 2025 we got Donald Trump making cryp crypto strategic reserves is we have a actually competent SEC crypto sentiment is completely dog [ __ ] uh and Ethereum is going through a transitionary period taking longer to go through that transitionary period but still going through it nonetheless overall like how would you kind of color this phase of crypto yeah i think I think why people

are I guess uh the sentiment on crypto Twitter you could say I guess is like not great is because I think people had these really high expectations of things obviously with Trump winning everyone was like "Oh you know everything's going to be great for crypto now we're going to get Gary Gendler out the SEC is going to be friendly we're going to get all these good regulations and they're going to let us do whatever we want and there's going to be a crypto reserve." And for the most part we got like most of that right we got most of that in place but I think what a lot of people maybe miss is that like those things can happen but their effects on particularly

the market can take a while to play out right and when you have the opposing force which is basically a lot of the uncertainty in the macro environment right now and the geopolitical environment you have the positive force of all this positive stuff happening for crypto in you know in a vacuum I guess and then you have everything else outside of that which you know if you read the headlines if you read the kind of the media and everything like things seem not great I guess globally right now in terms of geopolitics and the macro environment and stuff like that so you have these two forces going at each other uh and it seemed like for a little

while there the negative forces were were winning in you know in a pretty big way because prices came down a lot on things but we've leveled out at this point i don't know where things are going to go from here but maybe we trend sideways for a while i think the market's just digesting a lot of this stuff and the ecosystem is digesting a lot of this stuff but I think with cryptonatives what really hurt was that everyone was expecting a regular crypto cycle you know BTC goes up alltime high price discovery ETH does it next and then we have like a quote unquote alt season right but I think this time around what we had is we had BTC

obviously be be very strong ETH not be as strong as people expected it to be and then meme coins right there was no alt season besides memecoins really and that caught a lot of people off guard a lot of money was extracted out of the ecosystem and now we're at where we're at today so I think it's it's managing expectations um that that's my main takeaway here but generally on you know outside of the markets and on the fundamental side of things I'm extremely bullish like especially as I mentioned all the positive stuff happening in the US on the regulatory side but especially within Ethereum there's been a lot of

developments over the last few months in the Ethereum ecosystem which I'm sure we're going to get into a bit later you know the Ethereum Foundation leadership changes Etherealize making a really big move bringing Danny Ryan on you know those sorts of things those again are huge things that have happened but take time to play out in the market so I think that if people zoomed out a little bit reset their expectations they would be a lot happier yeah that's my take on it as well my take is just basically that there's a huge dislocation between the fundamentals of the industry and sentiment and if we talk about sentiment

you know that's that's an emotional conversation like why we were basically asking why the question why are people unhappy uh and happiness always is a divergence between expectations and reality we expected one outcome and we got a different outcome but the expectation the outcome that we definitely did get is very strong fundamental growth in the industry bitcoin strategic reserve uh a crypto pro- crypto president uh a pro crypto SEC and CFTC process wherever we need where we needed it to be which is you

know in the government leadership positions of the of the United States including in Congress where we're about to get a market structure bill and a stable coin bill but nonetheless like prices are down and this is coming just from from twofold in my opinion like Donald Trump's chaoticness for like whatever he's doing that is creating a ton of uncertainty in the market up to the point of like actual trade wars which of course is is bad for the market so we have prices down for that and that's just not even a crypto story that is just all all markets are down other than bonds um and then in addition to

that we've actually just had sustained high interest rates for a really long time over two years now and crypto has never been inside of a sustained high interest rate environment ever uh and it's just continuing to be higher for longer when it comes to the interest rate so we had the FOMC meeting this week happened yesterday the Fed decides to keep interest rates at the target rate of 4.25 to 4.5% they said that they could still see two rate cuts coming in 2025 although not as large as we've seen

in the second half of last year uh they said that they are expecting higher inflation and lower economic growth uh and this is all just leading to just a harder money environment i remember Anthony when you and I were getting into crypto it was in the ZERP era the zero interest rate era and that marked uh so much of the narrative that about why crypto is the way that it is like uh just poor monetary management by our leadership by our by our money over our money's ours and that was the era of

crypto and that era is over these this zer era is over and I do think there is some like relationship between this entering of a hard money era and the decreasing dopamine of the crypto speculators because what is bad for casinos is high interest rates and hard money uh and so I think people's sentiments of just like okay cool we've gotten everything we need as an industry to grow you know we have a crypto reserve we have um pro- crypto legislation but prices are down and that

dislocation is creating terrible vibes u but I think that's kind of to be expected when we have this like ZERP era being purged out of like the DNA of crypto speculators yeah yeah exactly i think so and and you know I've been saying this on my show for a little while now is that when money is hard as you say when it's hard to come along when there's not easy money it's very hard for risk on assets which crypto is still you know mo for the most part pretty much everything outside of BTC is a pretty big risk on assets i would even

argue BTC could still be viewed as relatively risk on uh it just doesn't do well in that environment and it definitely doesn't do well in a very high global uncertainty environment which I think is what we've been in for at least the last couple of months as you mentioned a lot of the stuff that Trump has been doing you know people talk about a new world order not in the conspiracy kind of tinfall hat sense but in the fact that the US definitely seems like it wants to withdraw a lot of its influence from the rest of the world so what does the rest of the world look like in 10 years from now because of that so there's a lot of uncertainty

there and people don't know exactly where to place their bets so when there's so much uncertainty usually people will be like well I'm going to sit in cash for a bit especially since rates are so high I can basically sit in cash and earn a pretty decent yield on it it's not like it's 0% rates right and then see where the chips kind of fall and see where things fall and then maybe I'll reenter the market once things stabilize a bit so I think that's the general kind of consensus right now but you know if you want to go counter consensus and make some bets and do it now like you might be able to make a generational bet right this is where

these kind of big investments can happen too so it's about how much risk you want to take on as as as per usual with these markets yeah I I think that's right i think right now the place in the market both the equities market and the crypto markets is we've already just been completely pummeled you know even Bitcoin Bitcoin is still in the what is it $85,000 range but 85,000 still now feels low compared to like where it was even though that is incredibly high but then the rest of the market is just down so bad eth is below $2,000 it's at $190

right now uh Salana is at $130 so the rest of the market is just wrecked and I think and also if you're like an Nvidia holder you're probably feeling the same thing like Nvidia is down like 30% or something off of the highs and so I think the current phase of the market is like like okay Donald Trump has paused chaoticness he it can't go down anymore like ETH is already below $2 like it can't go any lower than that right and so I think we're just kind of waiting for confirmation that Trump's trade war

era is over and he's going to like let the stock market have a breather and no one really knows if that's true or not like maybe he just resumes being chaotic uh but I do agree with what you said which is just like the current prices of crypto assets and like tech risk assets mr market is giving you a deal right now and you know you can choose whether to take it this is a tweet from Chris Berniski who says yesterday's close was meaningful for a bitcoin crossing the 20-day and 200day simple moving average with conviction now to see if we can

hold it we're not out of the woods yet but I like what I am seeing uh and so with with Bitcoin over $84,000 uh Chris is saying "Okay we are in a good spot if we can hold this right now." So I think markets are starting to like settle to these new lower prices we're going to hang around here for a little bit and then we're going to like slowly uh creep upwards if Donald Trump can like you know stop being chaotic that's kind of my take yeah yeah I think so and I think I said you know earlier how people's expectations may need to be managed here with with timelines and everything like

that you know the markets can go sideways for quite a while and they tend to actually do that and people don't realize how long they can go sideways for because during the sideways period it's usually boring so you kind of tune out most of it and then once prices start going up again you forget the fact that we just had 6 months of sideways price action and now you're like "Oh it's going up again i'm happy." And then maybe it turns into like a little mini bull market or something like that but we'll see um you know I think what's on everyone's mind right now in particular is is the four-ear cycle dead you know the four-year crypto cycle i've been saying for a while actually that I

thought think it's dead i don't think it's going to be the same kind of cycles going forward especially given that the alt season kind of phenomenon seems to have changed pretty dramatically from everything pumps to okay whatever's the hot flavor of the kind of season pumps uh we'll see if that that maintains going forward but I think that is actually what kind of ruined most people over the last 6 to 12 months is that they had expectations for certain things and it just didn't happen the way they expected yeah and I'm kind of a fan of the four-year cycle being over because

it's too you can't just have that forever like it's too easy at some point it needs to just go away uh okay so let's get into some more crypto native subjects but before we do we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Ronin ronin is one of the leading web 3 gaming ecosystems focused on growing gaming and consumer adoption uh they are taking the walls down off of the train used to be a permissionless chain going full permissionless uh and now you can go explore that permissionless ecosystem by using the Ronin wallet so check it out at

banklist.cc/ronin_wallet there's also a link in the show notes okay Anthony one of the big uh news of the week was this converge chain which is a partnership from Athena Labs the makers of the uh USD stable coin and securitize and securitize is kind of like this tech service provider that is used by BlackRock to issue the build fund securize has been around for forever they've just wanted to make onchain securities between these two companies they are making Converge a brand new chain a brand new blockchain uh and they label this they brand this as the

settlement network for traditional finance and digital dollars uh and then tweet continues and says "Our vision is to provide the first purpose-built settlement layer where Trady will merge with DeFi centered on USDE that's the stable coin from Athena and USDTB i actually don't know what that stable coin is all secured by DNA." Oh Treasury bonds okay so so staked st okay staked dollars dollars and staked dollars and then secured by ENA so this new layer 1 blockchain the staking token is ENA which is the token of Athena Labs

that's like the the governance token of Athena Labs it is also a permissioned validator set so it is not permissionless you can't just stake like you stake on Ethereum or even on Salana you actually are it's a whitelisted group of entities uh which is apparently just a bunch of institutions and centralized exchanges centralized known entities with like basically reputation on the line they stake ENA and they validate the blockchain I think any user can come to the blockchain any user can come to converge so it's not a permissioned chain but it's a

permissioned validator set uh and during the explanation about like the design choice about this uh it was explained to me by Rob from Dragonfly and also Carlos from uh from Secure Ties that this has been requested by institutions in order to get them comfortable with having this place that they can control where they feel comfortable issuing digital assets uh you know digital securities you know like real world assets and and securities and so this is the compromise that this design has made we're going to

give over the keys of this blockchain to institutions so that they feel like they have sufficient control over their own ecosystem where they can feel comfortable to create issue real world assets assets that um you know you would find more in trady that we all want to have on blockchain uh but then they just need they just need their own domain to feel control and then the explanation here is that once it's on converge technology like wormhole or any other you know cross crosschain interoperability layer will be able to take those assets port them over over to Ethereum port them over to Salana port

them over to to wherever blockchain there there's demand for it uh so that's kind of the the simple rundown of the news what's your take um I thought it was a a kind of weird announcement I guess cuz it's an L1 right like a as you said brand new chain an L1 but I would even struggle to call it a blockchain as you said it's permissioned it's pretty locked down it's extremely like it's completely centralized and I also wonder like why they didn't just do this as like a just a centralized database instead you know cuz making it a

blockchain with consensus and everything it just adds additional costs and overheads but it does make sense and I suspected that it was definitely due to the institutions requesting this um themselves because they are very new to this and they obviously want to get comfortable with it they want to have total control over things but the thing is is you can still have total control over it even as like an L2 and I feel like the L2 model is just better generally from a number of different reasons you mentioned things like bridging you know assets across the L2s work better with bridging than L1 to L1 does um you you get to basically lower

your cost dramatically as well i know that maybe the was like well we could use ENA for staking and maybe we can kind of get I guess a more valuable ENA through that because there is like this perceived L1 premium on tokens so yeah overall like I saw the all the reactions to it it was mixed you know it was very mixed people like is this really needed you know this doesn't really make any sense shouldn't we just be settling onto Ethereum instead and and they can still retain centralized controls through the token standards like Circle does with USDC or Tether does with with USDT right

so overall I'm going to say I'm in like a wait and watch kind of approach here but this doesn't really excite me to be honest um I'm not in this industry for for this sort of stuff like yes I'm excited about real world assets and things like that but I don't know if this is the right kind of instant in instantiation of that i think that hopefully if the institutions get more comfortable they'll realize that there are better ways to do this than than this way uh so we'll have to yeah we'll have to see how that kind of plays out i do see the argument that there are some benefits towards being a blockchain

rather than just a database this is an EVM chain and so there are some DeFi apps that they're going to launch on day one like day one apps right Morpho Maple Pendle uh Horizon from a uh and so that's going to be these like financial uh text stacks that are just built on this converge blockchain on day one and and also it's permissionless access so uh even though there are there's a permission validator set you know you the user can still go to this chain and use some of the assets here and in theory what's the point of the permission validator set then if It's

permissionless right like what are the why do you need a permission validator set if you're going to let people anyone come like I don't I don't buy it's not it's not working no I I'm I'm I'm waiting to get to that point and I'm trying to give them some benefit of the doubt uh okay so also in their announcement they say there are three distinct pillars that are operating par parallel a fully permissionless user access to a DeFi ecosystem which in theory there would there would be more like a larger diversity of like you know tokenized equities tokenized securities real world assets so so maybe that's why

people would come to this um permissioned blockchain a permissioned validator set blockchain uh but they also said that there are permissioned apps where tradi can interact with KYC parties and that is like one of the features of this that might get more um institutions comfortable with the blockchain and then third new permission apps built by sec on securitized tokenized assets and so the permissioned network side of this thing is like really a big emphasis because it's not just at the validator set but they want to also build permissioned apps but I would take this and this is what Rob from uh Dragonfly was explaining to me

he said permission validators is an unfortunate truth of bringing more institutional counterparties on chain we hear it across verticals and so he's saying that he's gone around to institutions and say they have said to him that we need permission validation permission validator in order to get comfortable and I'm like okay I understand that that is what they are telling you but why are we listening to them in the first place because they don't know what they want because when have institutions ever been right about how to build on a blockchain the reason why I incorrectly labeled this a

permissioned blockchain in a tweet was because this is what institutions were asking for back in like 2017 we're like okay blockchain not Bitcoin you know we're going to make in we're going to do IBM Hyperledger we're going to make a permission blockchain and it's going to be a settlement network between like permission parties and that is what the industry listened to and tried to build for them and no one cared about the end product because what is truly valuable in this industry is public permissionless ledgers where individuals uncceded individuals and KYCed

institutions all operate in the same sphere the thing that we are trying to fix in crypto is that the previous array of financial institutions are siloed servers and each Wells Fargo has a siloed server black Rockck has a siloed server jp Morgan has a siloed server and all of these siloed servers have very high transactional costs because each one has a server and we need to figure out how to get these servers to communicate and that just creates a bunch of intermediaries and a bunch of friction the cool thing about crypto is that we are inverting that relationship

where we are all building on the same server the world computer and this is why there is this cutthroat competition between Ethereum Salana uh Bitcoin whatever to be that same unified server and now I'm being told that uh institutions are just going to be a little bit more comfortable creating their own server we'll call it converge uh and it's going to be permissioned and I'm like no that the whole point of this is to all converge on the same chain not diverge away onto different chains and I

would like to contrast that with the uh uh announcement that came out of Coinbase called privacy pools and so this is an announcement that came out of Coinbase this week i actually didn't have this in in the agenda but I think it's very useful to explain coinbase introduced Coinbase verified pools a trusted way to seamlessly trade on chain basically using a Coinbase KYC attestation which is like a token that's in your wallet that Coinbase uses to attest that they have your KYC you and only you and other KYC users are able to

provide liquidity through a unis swap v4 hook and all traders in that unis swap v4 hook can trust that uh Coinbase knows the counterparty so I actually don't buy that we need a permissioned validator set because you can just build that logic into the app layer as Coinbase has proven that they were able to do with Uniswap V4 hooks and so stop listening to the institutions and what they need because they don't understand blockchain just build it into the app layer if you want KYC logic build it into the app

layer because we know that we can do that that's why we have apps in the first place i will end my rant anthony what do you think about all that no no i mean I totally agree with you and I guess yeah I was alluding to it earlier that it doesn't need a whole new chain um but also on the permissionless point like I I can't call a permission chain permissionless and that also goes like people may think I'm a hypocrite here but that also goes for L2s with centralized sequences like I've been pushing for these L2s to obviously decentralize um you know and and I think that they will i think that the major

ones definitely will um but when you have literally like an L1 blockchain with completely permissioned validators and you say it's permissionless well it's not because those permission validators can censor anyone they want and can do anything they want on the chain so really you're saying that oh you can come here and play but at any time we can you know rug you like you know you know we we can change you are beholden to the validators exactly exactly so so it it may be permissionless until it's not like I think that might be a better way to put

it rather you know if you look at something like Ethereum L1 I mean it's truly permissionless right it has thousands of unique node operators a lot of people would have to collude in order to censor you and they wouldn't even succeed for many many reasons which I won't get into now um and and yeah it's permissionless validator set as well and it's everyone can run their own full node so yeah I I just as I said like I'm in a wait and kind of see approach with this but I don't think it's the right approach i think as you mentioned Coinbase's approach is is the correct approach and will be the winning one uh

you know long term yeah yeah and I think that's a good argument about like layer twos layer twos and a stage zero centralized sequencer capacity have similar f like um failings as this but the point about being a layer two even if you're stage zero layer two and Austin Federa from uh formerly Salana he said like well the actual like nomclature of a layer of a stage zero layer 2 is actually not that different from a layer one with a bridge like point taken but the idea of being a layer two in the first place means that

you are on the path to going into becoming a stage two like that is your path to be and so if you if you like stop at stage zero forever then yes understood the point but Yeah no like a commit commitment towards being a fully permissionless layer 2 uh being on that path is is what matters here yeah yeah definitely and and yeah converge doesn't seem to be on that path right they just said web permission validator set you know have fun yeah yeah yeah anyways um it just throws in the face of like what

the hell are we even doing here like why are we doing this i mean I can I can see like if I'm playing devil's advocate like I can see it from from their point of view they want to get a product in you know they want to get institutions involved with products they want to bring them on chain if they're asking for this and it's non-negotiable you'd rather land the partnership than you give it up right so I understand that like I and and I I think it's it's that's probably what happened to be honest but at the same time I would love for them to be in the background keep pushing these institutions hey there's a better way there's a better way you know but we'll see because there's financial

incentives too involved right so right yes because now Athena is a layer 1 so like not only is it a stable coin likemaker Dow but now it's a layer 1 as well uh and so they also get the layer 1 premium uh and so I think uh that incentive can't be ignored anyways we can stop we can stop ranting about Verge uh we're going to talk about the Robin Hood partnership with Kishi we're going to talk about the Salana governance updates and then we're going to talk about uh Ethereum we're going to get to all of that and more but first a message from some of these fantastic sponsors

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ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds but why should you care about Cello's transition to a layer 2 layer 2's unify Ethereum L1's fragmented by becoming a layer 2 Cello leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening where CO cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership you may have already heard about Infinex infinex has in my opinion the nicest crosschain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere it

is called Switch Swap and Bridge and we're going to show you what it looks like first we're going to log into my Infinex account with a pass key now there's no seed phrases in Infinex this was a one-click setup with biometric pass keys but in addition to that my Infinex account is fully non-custodial so bam I just logged in it was two clicks and I'm already into my Infinex account so let's go make a switch i'm going to go switch my USDC that is on base and I'm going to buy Barachchain which is a completely different chain uh so we're going to switch this i'm going to press that button and then Infinex is

going to execute this order this crosschain order for me and now it is done but actually I'm not really feeling bearish anymore so I'm going to go from Barra uh to penguins i'm going to buy a penguin on Salana so I'm going from the Barra chain to Salana see no transaction signing no gas to worry about you just switch across whatever chain that you want with Infinex that was so easy go check out Infinex and try your first switch today robin Hood continues to expand their product offering with a prediction market now with Kishi Kalashi uh Kalashi is this kind of like aggressive polyarket competitor a

non-crypto polymarket competitor and so they actually Robin Robin Hood's crypto but it's mostly not crypto and Kishi's not crypto at all and so this is I think just us kind of keeping an eye on our non-crypto competition uh and so with Kishi now integrated into Robin Hood Robin Hood now actually has a prediction markets hub within its app uh via Robin Hood derivatives first it will center on politics economics and sports uh but of course Robin Hood's plan is to just provide markets to anything uh Robin Hood wrote in their press release "We have been in close contact with the CFTC

over the past several weeks and look forward to continuing to work with them to promote innovation in the future derivatives and crypto markets." Uh Kishi and the CFTC have litigate been litigating in court whether Kishi can offer contracts betting on US elections i think that was like the Elizabeth Warren uh like tirade over Kishi where she thought she just really didn't like betting markets as it related to uh politics um I think that has now in the been in the rearview mirror uh Vlad Tennov when he announced this he said he wrote as on on Twitter uh as a former

mathematician and physicist I am motivated by the search for objective truth how can we make sense of all the information out there and who can we trust prediction markets are the application of capitalism to the pursuit of truth um Robin Hood rose about 8% uh in the equities market after the announcement any takes with all this Anthony yeah I mean maybe a broader take here i think there's two major companies in the US targeting that have traditionally targeted different market segments there's Coinbase that has been all in on crypto then there's Robin Hood

uh that has been all in on Tradfi but over the last kind of couple of years accelerating in the last year you've had Robin Hood go come to crypto and come more aggressive into crypto right they want to be in crypto they want to offer you know more and more crypto products they want to do more and more crypto stuff and then you have Coinbase on the other hand going more Tradfi being like we want to do more Tradfi stuff we want to bring real world assets onchain you they did the verified pools thing that we just covered so it's it's an interesting dynamic right now where you have TRDFI wanting to be more crypto and crypto wanting to be more TRDFI and

those kind of two things are converging I guess for lack of a better word there um and and kind of uh uh uh meeting um meeting in in the middle which is which is interesting to see there but in terms of like prediction markets there was obviously a lot of fanfare around them during the election because that's usually what happens you people love to bet on the election there were some pretty big markets there uh you know poly market was obviously the the leader in that one and and this this competitor here kind of came a bit later but as you said is quite aggressive um when when it comes to it like I just view it as an