ROLLUP: Bitcoin ETF Updates | Larry Fink Crypto Pilled | Ethereum Roadmap | Airdrops Incoming

Have you seen the CNBC like people this week? Like all the anchors? They are so bullish Bitcoin. And like all of these other traps, like Jamie Diamond comes on, Gary Gensler comes on, and they're like, uh no, that's actually not how Bitcoin works. Like they correct them and it's like so great. CNBC has completely 180 pivoted on crypto. And why? It's because they have an asset to sell.

Bankless Nation, it is the third week of January, and it's time for your weekly roll up. David, we got so much to cover. What are we starting with?

The Bitcoin ETF one week later. Was it a flop or was it a smashing success? We'll got the numbers to report back to you on that one.

Also, we have a good banker or bad banker episode. We've got Larry Fink getting crypto pilled. He wants tokenization. We'll talk about that. And on the bad banker side, we have Jamie Diamond, who reveals the secret risk to Bitcoin that only Jamie Diamond knows. Tantalizing. What could that be? What else we got, David?

After that, we got some updates about the Ethereum roadmap. The blobs are coming, the blobs are coming. And we also got some airdrops to discuss as well. We're gonna laugh about the SEC for a little bit, and we're also gonna talk about the Solanophone part deuce as well.

Okay. Because it's kind of it's kind of airdrop season. I don't know if you noticed. And

It is definitely

Jupiter, which is the biggest decks on Solana, just announced the date of their JUP token launch. That is upcoming. You know what that date is, David?

uh tell me.

Last day of January. January thirty first.

What day is it? It is the 18th, that is in 10 days.

Yeah, so that's gonna happen. I mean, this is just like airdrop season, and a lot of this is happening in different layer two ecosystems and on Solana and other places. And I just wanted to shout out an opportunity for bankless citizens. That opportunity is to go quest for some airdrops, and you do that with a bankless citizenship. So once you get a bankless citizenship, you have access to a tool that we have developed. It's called the Airdrop Hunter. And what the airdrop hunter tries to do is predict these airdrops in advance and the things that you might need to do, the ways to explore these chains and protocols and apps, uh, so that you might qualify for an airdrop. And guess what, David? You know what was on there? The Jupiter Exchange. It was on the Airdrop Hunter. We've got some quests.

On there for a long, long time. We have this cool little thing in there where you can see how many other citizens are hunting airdrops. 673 citizens have hunted the Jupiter airdrop up to the point that the date of the airdrop was announced, which is not typical of an airdrop. I can only assume that if they have announced the airdrop, the snapshot has been taken. So congrats to the 673 citizens that have hunted the Jupiter airdrop. I know like airdrop hunting, uh, we try and make it precise. There's like farming, and then what there's what we do, which is hunting, which is the actual steps, the ways to increase your on-chain footprint, the diversity and variety of things that you can do, which is also simultaneously learning how to use crypto. So that's actually a nice um synergy that we have with the airdrop hunter, where you get to increase your on chain footprint, you get to hopefully hunt some airdrops. But also it they're also just walkthroughs for like their demos for apps.

Fun! It's fun to do stuff on chain.

And crypto pays you to learn about crypto, guys. It's that season again. Anyway, there's a 10% off code if you want to become a bankless citizen and go access the Airdrop Hunter. It's not just about Jupiter, it's about what next. There's over like

Or there's

60, 70 quests on here. Or not quests, but different opportunities you can pursue and all of the quests that accompany it. So go check that out in the bankless show notes or bankless.com/slash join. Again, the code is podcast24 if you want a 10% off discount. All right, David, let's talk about markets today. And thanks to Kraken for these glorious charts. We're looking at Bitcoin. What's Bitcoin showing us?

Uh Bitcoin shown us down because it was a sell the news event surprise. The Bitcoin ETF. Yeah, so so selling the news down 10%. Start of the week at 46,380. Double digits sell? Yeah, yeah. Double digits. Yeah, down to where about at $42,000. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not like the Bitcoin ETF was a secret. I think people knew about it. Um I mean, Bitcoin has his his price performance has been uh pretty crazy. Uh so yeah, it was it was a sell sell the news event. And I think some people are like, bruh, what's going on? ETF was supposed to be bullish. Uh A, that's not how markets work. But also, the point about the ETF it's bullish over time. Uh like hold on. It's age is like wine.

Don't get your bullishness like right now, okay? Sometimes you have to wait for your bullishness. And by the way,

It's not it's not an event, it's flows.

we got a lot of that bullishness since uh the summer of this year, anyway. But like some people will look at these charts and just assume that the Bitcoin ETF was not successful. We'll talk about that in detail later, but like it was kind of successful. Let's talk about ETH though before we get there. Um ETH on the week. What are we looking at? Down?

Down five percent started the week at two thousand six hundred, currently at twenty-four eighty, down five percent, which means the ETH BTC ratio is up six percent. We are almost up to point zero six, which I would still consider low. Uh, but in recent terms, uh the ETH ratio has been recovering, especially this week.

Yeah, I think we're getting some of that um, again, pent up ETH ETF.

Now people are just gonna do the whole like oh now ETH ETF and then they're gonna sell the news on the ETH ETF in like May.

We talked about that uh a little bit last week while you're out, um, you know, slaying horror cruxes, David, with uh Anthony Susano. And uh yeah, he he agrees too. Like ETH ETF next. Uh crypto market cap, what are we at on the week?

Same 1.73 billion.

I want that too. I want a two.

Yeah, two of rice now. What when's last time we hit two, by the way? When was that?

Uh uh oh god, like before Terra Terra Luna, right?

Last time we were at two. We haven't been at two since

February of 2022.

Yeah, Terra Luna. Yep. That's right.

Around that time, Taylor's March, right? We hit we hit it in March as well.

And then

2022? Yeah, it's Terra Luna. Yeah, I'm calling it. Yeah.

uh the first time we hit two trillion, by the way, was April 2021. So like that was that was kind of the the top of the top ish of the bull market, right?

Top top of the Ethereum bull market. Yeah, that was like yeah, the the top of ultrasound money.

The early uh bull market.

Ultrasound money meme has been down only since like April uh 2021.

Let's get to uh layer two metrics with the layer two update brought to you by Mantle, which is uh a new and upcoming layer two that we are enjoyers of. Um what's layer two be showing us on total locked value on layer two? So we get another all time high?

Uh I saw earlier this week at 22.22 billion. So that was an enjoyable number. It's at 21.8 right now, but yes, all-time highs.

Yeah.

Very bigly.

You know, the last couple weeks has been all-time high. Um look at this from Grow the Pie. New all-time high for TVL across layer twos, uh a gigantic three billion increase. I guess this was the all-time high. This was from January 15th. So oh, so that that did happen. Okay. And by the way, 58% of this uh in Arbitrum.

Arbitrum is kind of just a gargantuan. One of the things that's been really determining the ETH market lately is this whole Celsius shenanigans. Um Celsius cancer, I should say. Uh Celsius Celsius was like dumping hundreds of thousands of ETH onto the market. At the same time, Sailor was buying a bunch of Bitcoin, which is like why the ETH BTC ratio has just been absolutely decimated. Uh so I saw this interesting tweet thread from Zero X Bobo Shanti. Thank you so much. Uh who put a tweet together uh saying uh with over 40 hours of research gone on into investigating the Celsius balance sheet, I'll explain why I believe that it is wrong that the remaining five hundred and eighty four thousand ether that Celsius has is going to be sold.

Wait, wait, wait. So hold on. The facts are they have 500,000 ETH still, and people are worried that they might continue to dump on us that additional 500,000 ETH?

584,000, 1.4 billion dollars are in their wallets. I don't want that. And so so far in 2024, they've transferred 92,000 ether coinbase and Falcon X, uh, which I if you read the tweet thread, they'll explain what that is. Um, it is a good, thorough tweet thread. We don't have enough time to cover it here, but we will skip to the conclusions where they think, based on legal filings and on chain analysis from uh Arkham, they say 536,000 ether will be distributed in kind for unsecured claims. This is like bankruptcy.

You see claims we're talking about.

Bankruptcy claims, yes. In kind means they're not selling it. They're just like, here's the ETH rather than here's the dollars, which they would have to sell for. 62,000 ETH will be distributed in kind for convenience claims, and 26,000 ETH has been likely already sent to CoinK Coinbase and PayPal to process the custody claims distribution. TLDR is extremely unlikely that Celsius has much more, if any ETH available to sell. If you want the analysis, the details, the investigation from this Twitter account, there's a link in the show notes so you can go uh unpack that. But yeah, 584,000 ETH going to be distributed around uh but apparently not sold, which is good news.

I can keep you updated too, David. I saw some Celsius uh, you know, ETH that they were

Yeah, let me know when you get that. Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't feel even close. They just keep sending me emails about like, don't be fished. Like you know, be care be careful and like legal things are proceeding and all of that. So I think a question here though, David, is uh if they are doing in kind, like they're sending ETH back to you, basically the the claimants, whether the claimants, like people like me, maybe, will go sell this ETH or not, or whether they'll hold it. I mean, like, I know what I'm gonna do. I ain't gonna be selling no ETH, okay? If I get ETH from Celsius, uh you you stake your ETH at times like this, you don't sell. At least that's my take. But I don't know if everyone feels that way.

Yeah, I don't know if it's really an important question because like who are the Celsius creditors and why are they meaningfully different from the average ETH holder? Like maybe they have some tax uh like taxes or debts that they have to cover and they've just had locked up capital. So yeah, some amount of capital lockup will result in some amount of selling, but I don't I'm guessing

marginal.

The only difference is they are unlike average ETH holders in that like one, they're just the subsec set set of like retail and probably like um

Yeah.

I don't want to say like less sophisticated retail. I'm putting myself in that bucket, okay? There is not

They're not on chain. Yeah.

yeah, they're less on-chain than than many ETH holders. And the second thing is they've just

They like