ROLLUP: $2B Polymarket Bet | Election Pump? | Ethereum Optimism | Trump 'WLFI' Launch

Trump token stuff, his DeFi token is out. How is it going? Kamala also said something about crypto. Is that a pivot? Or is it just really weird? Also, the election odds also doing something weird. Why are crypto prediction markets giving Trump such a massive lead, or are they being manipulated?

Bankless Station is the third week of October. It's time for the Bankless weekly roll-up. David, since our last roll-up, you got punched in the face. You punched a man in the face. I did. Lots of things happened. We're gonna talk about that maybe toward the end. But okay, how you feelin' dude? How you feelin' on the week?

You know you're fine.

I'm feeling feeling great. The week has been awesome. It's a fun week in crypto. If you're talking about the context of like being post fight, like my head still hurts.

Not as much as the other guy, maybe?

I'm assuming not as much as the other guy.

All right. Well, that that that's the mark of a champion fighter. Uh we'll talk to David Moore about the fight at the end of this episode. But first, David, we are 17 days until the election, so we gotta check in on our candidates. Donald Trump kicked off his uh WLFI token sales. Remember that DeFi protocol? Well, he kicked off the pre launch, he sold some tokens. How'd that go? We'll check in. And on the other side, Kamala Harris said something about crypto. Was it positive? Was it negative? Uh

Was it weird?

yeah, that was kind of weird. Definitely.

Weird.

Uh, and then also speaking of uh Trump and Kamala, the polymarket has completely diverged on these two candidates, giving Trump a 62% odd to Kamala's 37%, where just a week ago it was neck and neck. So, what's going on over in the world of polymarket? And do other polls, do other predictions line up with that? Meanwhile, in Ethereum land, while ETH price is kind of in the basement, the community is starting to get kind of spicy. Uh, seeing a lot of confidence out there, a lot of uh ratioing of alternative communities out there. And then meanwhile, New Tech is also shipping fuel, is launching their high performance layer twos, Paradigm is introducing their high performance layer twos, uh, and then Conduit has taken all of its change, of which it supports, to also become high performant layer twos. So a lot of scaling coming around in the different corners of the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the Bitcoin world, we're gonna talk about Sailor. He's getting ready to launch a Bitcoin bank. What actually is that? And Kraken with a wrapped Bitcoin product. We'll talk about all of that. And um, okay, let's check in on October, shall we? Okay, we're we're 18 days into the month. This is supposed to be a glorious month for crypto prices. How are we doing? Let's check in on our friend Bitcoin. What's the price in the week?

Uh on this week up 11%. Started the week at uh $59,000, currently clocking in at $67,300. So a very solid uh week on the week. We also basically the last weekly roll-up, we just painted the floor. Uh so that was the low. Uh and so we're kind of measuring from from uh trough to peak right now. Uh

Yeah.

but we could peak even higher. We could keep going even higher.

I mean, like post fight, right? That's why the market's bullish. Uh post that cane versus uh David fight. Um

One reason.

we are up in October though. It actually has like October has actually delivered. So it started the month at 63k on Bitcoin. How about ETH? What is that? Is it been October for ETH?

I I want even more uptoberness for basically all these assets. Uh I think we are at current starting prices. Uh, the first thing that happened in October was we dumped. Uh we have now returned to October 1st levels. Why did we dump that hard?

Yeah, why did we dump that hard? Uh to

I'll have to

go back from these.

to the first roll-up of the month uh to actually find out. Like, look at these red candles here.

What's this? Anyways, ETH up nine percent on

This is like war stuff. Do you remember?

This is middle.

stuff. Right. Oh good. The third war of the recent era.

Yeah. Okay.

Anyway, so this week, ETH is up nine percent on the week. Start of the week 2350, ending of the week two thousand six hundred and ten dollars where we currently are.

Flows looking pretty flat, David. But actually, you know, like

In flows, in flows, inflows.

inflows. More inflows than outflows. Uh, I guess on the Wizards.

That's right.

ETH still has a lot to chip away. It's like net. We've got

We've got a big hole to climb out of.

you like, what is this? 500 million? Um still in net loss flows. So I'll be I'll be happy when that gets to zero. But he's like, we're chipping away at it. Um, how about the ratio? We chipping away on the ratio.

Uh we have been flat on the ratio since October 3rd. Uh.038739. Um flat ratio.

People are sold.

Not down though. Not down though. The first step to going up is to stop going down, and we

What do you mean? Do you want to see down? This has been down over the last two years. Uh let me show you the ratio over time. This is uh Evan SS6, who's actually like, I think, uh, an ETH bull on Twitter, anyways. Uh, he says, kudos to anyone who can still bullpost when this has been a straight line down for two years. So you have more conviction than me. We haven't had two consecutive weekly green candles since May 2023. And he's showing a chart of the ETH Bitcoin ratio, the ratio we were just talking about, David. It's been in this uh descending channel here over the past uh two years. Uh, and we haven't had two consecutive weekly green candles since May 2023. Um, kind of bad.

bullish, bullish.

Like at some point the ratio gets so low that like a basic like unopinionated mean reversion becomes the status quo. And like we're kind of kind of getting there.

Sentiment's kinda bad out there on ETH still, although David, and we'll we'll talk about this more direct upside.

I feel

fine.

I feel like things are turning around, right? I th I think things are turning around, uh but we'll have to see. How about uh crypto market cap as a whole?

2.4. We're almost at that 2.5 uh watermark, which is totally arbitrary, but I'm still paying attention to it. So $2.41 trillion on the week.

Well, if we want to get bullish, let's flip over to the layer two, some good things happening in L2 Lynn. Of course, this layer two update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle, which is uh a fantastic layer two. You should definitely check out. Um, okay, where should we maybe start this? I think this was a fantastic tweet from the Grow the Pi folks. They put out fantastic L2 analytics. And I think this really this data point pushes back against this narrative that L2s are parasitic for ether the asset and for Ethereum. And here's what I mean. They they tweet this layer twos have more value locked in ether and in stables. There is $11 billion worth of ETH on layer twos right now. This is split between like Arbitrum, base, OP, mainnet, and like on down to the other layer twos. What I think this shows is that's $11 billion worth of ETH being consumed in these layer twos as a monetary unit. Well, you and I would say is like ETH as money. Others would call this kind of like uh, you know, store of value or uh, you know, right being used as economic bandwidth or collateral. So I think there's an untold story here of ETH actually being used as money in these layer two economies and that being a source of demand. The market doesn't see that right now as clearly. They're looking very much at uh ETH from a, you know, layer like from a fees perspective, and they're seeing fee revenue drop on Ether. I think they're not paying as much attention to this story, which is.

ETH emerging as a uh a monetary unit inside of these L2 economies. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I I think the bare perspective here is that there used to be all of this ETH, this massive amounts of ETH, how much? Like 10 billion, 11 billion dollars of ETH that used to be on the Ethereum layer one, and now it's not on the Ethereum layer one. Now it went elsewhere. And so the Ethereum layer one is like being left behind, right? It's not capturing the fees, it's not capturing anything. And a lot of people just don't see the perspective of money like.

May maybe we need to find a different word for people that don't like the money word. Like high quality liquid asset is apparently a term used in TradFi that kind of means the same thing that we're saying when we say ETH is money. High ETH is like the high quality liquid asset of these layer twos, and these layer twos are using them. Um uh but also I is like this this tweet is positioning ETH versus stable coins. In my mind, it's like ETH and stable coins. Like these things are making each other much more liquid. Uh, the more stable coins on Ethereum there are, the more liquid ETH is, uh, and vice versa. Uh just I want more. I just want more total value put on all of these chains.

Yeah, I do think these layer two economies are still in their infancy too. Um there's a lot of cool things happening there. But there's another story in L2 land that I think is uh interesting. This is a tweet from Anthony Sesano. Blobs almost at target. Going to be interesting to see what happens when blobs enter a period of sustained price discovery. And then he posts a uh Dune Analytics dashboard here. Can you explain this to a lot of people don't understand what this tweet means, what the context is, like what even blobs are. Can you explain what Anthony's saying, what the significance is?

So every 12 seconds, we produce an Ethereum layer one block. In one block, there are uh there's three blobs. There's blobs, there's space for three blobs. Layer twos can use one of these blobs to post their data for all of the uh recent transactions, the the proof of the transactions into Ethereum Layer One Blob Space. So every 12 seconds we have space for three layer twos to do this. Uh you can layer twos don't need to post a blob every single slot. They can just choose to use blobs as they see fit. But it's one of the bandwidths it's a it's a component of bandwidth on the Ethereum layer one. We have layer one block space where you can do actual like normal execution transactions, or you can post blobs to blob space, and there's space for three blobs.

And blob space, David, is like a um fast lane for layer two specifically.

Yeah, because the the data that's being posted to blobs is aggregate of hundreds, thousands of user transactions on the respective layer twos that are consuming blob space. Uh right now we have been under target, as in there has been like maybe an average of 2.7 blobs consumed per Ethereum block, but that number is approaching three. And once that number hits the target, it's kind of like an EIP 1559 mechanism. Once we start being three or above, all of a sudden we start to induce blob fees. Uh, and so it starts to cost more money. Right now, blobs are uh blobs are fee are free. They're you're not being charged to the layer two for anything. This is part of the component of just like, oh, layer twos are per parasitic to Ethereum, um, because they're not paying any fees. Oh, once they hit the three number, uh, then the blobs will actually start to cost money. Uh, and then layer twos will start paying for blob space. Uh, I think people are starting to get like bullish about this, as in like, yo, like we're gonna start to capture, like, we have two fee revenues, right? We have layer one execution fees, that's EIP 1559, and then we have blob space fees. Um, and so everyone's like, oh, we're getting price action, we're gonna get some fees coming in for layer twos.

I think like, whoa, guys, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. We we want to scale blobs very far. Like, we want to see price discovery when there are 256 blobs per block, not three. Uh, and so it's it's too soon to get excited about blob fee capture

because we want we need like 100x more capacity than what we currently have. Uh so I think it's a little too soon to start like being excited for fee capture because we have scale, but we need a hundred times more scale, and we get that with a hundred times more blobs.

One thing I'll add to that though is I I think it that's not the only reason that people are bullish. It's not just from like because of fee capture that that comes with blob space uh contention. I think they're also bullish that this blob space filled up so quickly. I mean this this is a tweet saying L2 blob demand is starting to reach the target. I didn't really expect this until like 2025. The fact that this has happened so quickly really shows the induced demand in the layer two ecosystem and all of that picking up. One interesting question that that falls out of this is okay, how many transactions per second can we support with the existing like um proto-dank sharding blob space that we have on Ethereum? There was a um a series of blog posts that it seems like Vitalik is writing on the Ethereum roadmap, and one of them this morning uh that was published actually answers this question. So apparently, with uh the current amount of blob space that we have, if you're just considering ERC20 transaction, if everything was kind of on a layer two roll up and they used Ethereum for data availability, so we're not talking about Vladiums or anything else, about 174 transactions per second is what we can support throughout the entire uh roll up economy. So, I mean, it's still quite shy of.

Vitalic's North Star um like target, which is like uh a hundred thousand transactions per second across the LT rollup ecosystem. Now with with Peerdas, which is kind of the next upgrade and expansion of Ethereum blob space, uh, we can get close to a thousand TPS in terms of uh you like roll up. But again, PeerDas

Gives us a count, a blob target of eight to sixteen. So going from three to eight to sixteen. Yeah.