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First Week Of November
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Inside the episode
It's The Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup! In this episode, we dive into the rise of AI agents on blockchain, a surge in Bitcoin inflows ahead of a Trump-favored election, Ethereum “blobs” entering price discovery, and speculation around Microsoft potentially buying Bitcoin.
Transcript
Bankless Nation is the last week of October. Okay, this is uh the Halloween edition of Bankless. Uh did you did you wear a costume this week, David?
No, uh we have done costumes every other year. We are not doing costumes this year. Oh wait
Oh wait, you're not in your cost I I'm in my costume.
Are you Ryan Sean Adams?
No, I'm uh an ETH bag holder. Uh you can tell by the
Well, we're wearing the same thing.
One of us is gonna have to change.
Yeah, I guess. Well, you know, we can both be ETH bag holders. We live in different cities, so you know uh no one will be worried about that. Lot of things to talk about, but uh one of the things we're gonna talk about is something a little bit spooky, maybe, David. Uh do you like that? AI spookens.
A little spooky.
Yeah, they're they're on-chain and they're off-leash. We once had bots, now they've like evolved into these things called agents. And I think both you and I earlier this week were trying to figure out whether this is just like a new meme coin game that we could just like dismiss as noise or whether it was a big freaking deal. So we'll talk about what's going on in crypto with AI agents this week.
Yeah, base, Ethereum, Solana, they all have their AI agent platforms active in their blobs block space. Uh so I think this is gonna be a theme across chains. Uh meanwhile, Bitcoin inflows are flowing. Uh, someone has opened up the floodgates. All of this ahead of the US election, which is increasingly pointed towards a Trump victory, obviously good for crypto, and the markets are currently reflecting that.
By the way, I'm so happy that this is the last roll up um where we're talking about the election. Hopefully. Hopefully we'll know about the election.
Election's gonna happen, and then the next roll-up we're gonna talk about that.
Yeah, we're gonna talk about it, but we wanted to like talk about it. Like who's gonna win? It feels like the same thing every week. Also, the blobs continue blobing. The big question is what happens if Ethereum blobs go into price discovery mode? Can this fix ETH this cycle?
Burn back. Meanwhile, there is a governance vote in Microsoft, uh shareholder vote about whether or not Microsoft wants to buy Bitcoin and follow MicroStrategy's uh footsteps and put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So we're gonna talk to you guys about the vote. And also, more tether fud. This time the FUD is making it into the weekly roll up. We usually ignore the tether fud. This FUD we're gonna talk about, but maybe it's you know, maybe it's the same as all the other FUD. Who knows? We're gonna get to all of this and more. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at
Bitcoin. Tell us about the prices because I've heard that it's creeping towards all-time high. Actually, you know what? We should preface this by saying we are recording the weekly roll up. This is something we don't usually do, but we are recording the weekly roll up a day early. So we're actually recording on Wednesday, October 30th. And this is because, you know, like I wanted, you know, Halloween off. I got some stuff to do that day. So this could be completely out of date. The price can be completely out of date by the time you guys get it on uh Friday morning, uh November first. But
Okay, so we don't know for for the listeners listening to this whether we hit Bitcoin all time highs or not. At the time of recording, we're real close, though. What is it looking like?
According to CoinGecko, the all-time high of Bitcoin is $73,740. This week we hit $73,570. So uh on the Kraken chart. So the Kraken chart got $200 away from Bitcoin all-time high. That is how close we are. Uh we have since fallen. Uh we are currently at $71,700, but Bitcoin is up 9% on the week. Uh, so it's really good week for Bitcoin. We are we are flirting with all-time highs. Uh Bitcoin is less than $1,000 away from all-time highs, which is pretty, pretty damn cool. Uh Ether also had a good week. Uh start of the week, $2,475, up 7.8% to where it is now at 2,670. Got over 2,700, uh, fell back down a little bit. And it is also just a few thousand dollars away from all time highs, just the same as Bitcoin. Both are the both are just both are just a few thousand dollars away from all time highs. You know, so close.
Wow, that would be funny if it didn't hurt so bad. But uh, I guess, you know, ETH bagholder uh costume on the week for Halloween. We should just finish the pain and talk about the the Bitcoin ratio here. What's that looking like on the week?
Uh.0372. So it has continued to go down.
The uh interesting thing if you want to compare Bitcoin to Ether is on March 12th. So this was sort of a last almost all-time high moment. Maybe this was an all-time high for for March. I don't recall. Bitcoin was 69,810. At that time, Ether, the asset, was 3,879. Okay, so like ratio is a lot higher. Bitcoin was maintaining its pace, or Ether was maintaining its pace with Bitcoin, I should say. Today the delta is like we're at the around the same amount, around $70,000. And Ether is only $2,500 or so. So a big difference. Why is this? It's just like big Bitcoin ETF adoption has been really strong.
Really strong. I think like the Bitcoin m uh brand is like really penetrating. Uh and and also
Like look at the polymarket odds. Donald Trump. The Trump bump. The Trump bump part of it. Trump bumps very large. Yeah. Let's let's go look at the Bitcoin ETF flows. Go back, let's go back to the 23rd of October. $192 million in on the 23rd. On the 24th, $188 million in. On the 25th, $402. On the 28th, $480. And yesterday, the 29th, $870 million net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs. Almost a billion dollars in a single day. We are so we are at all-time highs in AUM across the Bitcoin ETFs. And all of this is just like the two weeks leading up to the election, kind of tracking the Trump odds on polymarket and all the other prediction markets. As Trump is going up in likelihood, uh Bitcoin ETF flows are going up, Bitcoin price is going up. So the the fact that Bitcoin has kind of turned into a Trump derivatives market, Trump election derivatives market is uh working in Bitcoin's favor.
Art of
So this chart that we have on screen is really interesting. So uh this is indicating that the ETF is actually leading the spot market Bitcoin price. So here's a chart of ETF holdings are breaking up before Bitcoin, and you could see this in orange. This is um US Bitcoin spot ETF balances, and it just shoots up, and then kind of the Bitcoin price is is following. So maybe there's some Trump uh bump here, but maybe there's also it's just the ETFs have been incredibly successful products, and this is some institutional demand. I know uh when we were talking to the BlackRock folks, they said a lot of the demand for Bitcoin ETFs is just like basically already crypto bullish people who are just sort of you know moving their 401ks. They already own Bitcoin or they're already in crypto and they're just like moving some of their retirement accounts from the grayscale trust into these products, or just like you know, from other stock uh indices or all other mutual funds into this. But I'm not sure. I think this could be like a new source of demand here, potentially, uh going to the election. I mean, the the flows are just incredible here.
Yeah, that all of those statements have been about uh the past. Historically, all of the inflows to date have been this way. The hope is that uh just because all of you know crypto natives are putting Bitcoin in their retirement accounts, the hope is that we're just doing that first, uh, ahead of all the big money that we thought was coming in. Uh it turns out all that big money has not come in yet, which is in my interpretation bullish because they haven't come in yet. Mine too. That's they can still come in. Well,
I mean look
still more money out there.
So uh you know how big college endowments are, university endowments are just like silly large in the US. This uh they're starting to come into to there's just a trickle, but this is uh Emory University reported sixteen million dollars worth of Bitcoin, the first endowment to report a Bitcoin ETF position. This is from Eric Balciounas. So endowments kind of trickling in. It's only like a small fraction, it's like less than far far less than a percent of um the total AUM. But it's
to see that start to trickle in is uh notable. And that is net new demand. You you you have to say that. I mean, certainly these endowments are not uh crypto natives.
It's interesting that they own 2.7 million shares of GBTC.
As in grayscale BTC, which to me lends to the idea that they've actually been holding this for a while. Because why would you buy GPTC now? Why are you buying the one that has a 2.5% fee when all the other ones have like a 0.2% fee? So to me, uh Emery actually probably has been holding GPT C for a long time.
Well, now they're reporting it. So this is a new report. They're they're suddenly reporting it, maybe. I guess it's not saying how long they've actually held it for.
Right.
And
Because they're learning that they're holding it.
that this is all reflected in the Bitcoin dominance chart. Look at this, David. We are at 60% Bitcoin dominance. For people who aren't familiar with that metric, what is Bitcoin dominance? That's basically like Bitcoin is a portion of the total crypto market cap. And it's 60% of the value of all of crypto is Bitcoin right now.
Yeah. Yeah. So the value, yeah, the value of all crypto is 60% contained by Bitcoin. Uh it has if Bitcoin dominance has historically been downtrending over the years, but it goes in cycles. It goes up, it goes down, tends to go down, but uh re reaching 60% where it once was uh is definitely a pretty big milestone.
Yeah, it tent it tends to um go up in the early innings of a bull market and then go down in kind of the the the second part of a a bull market. So what's the total crypto market cap on the week?
Coming in at $2.5 trillion, hitting that $2.5 trillion mark. We haven't been here in a really long time. This is what happens when Bitcoin goes up 3% or 4% or 5%. Like that trillion dollar number moves quite a lot. I don't know. It doesn't really matter if Doge or SHIB or any meme coins go up 3,000%. It just doesn't matter. But when Bitcoin goes up 5%, uh then you really see that reflected in the total crypto market cap. So next stop, $3 trillion. You think we can get $3 trillion by the end of the year?
Uh look, it depending on the election uh event like results, a hundred percent. I think
I think you could get there before December.
I think three trillion is bearish uh for all of crypto.
By the end of the year, you mean?
Yeah, for the end of the year, even
Yeah.
yeah. It's just
Okay, okay, all right, all right, all right.
Three point five trillion.
do I think yeah? Yeah, I think that's three point
yeah, I think that's
On the trillion dollars.
yeah. Well well yeah.
If Trump gets elected.
Right, sure. Sure. I mean, with if Trump gets election, like elected, I just don't even know what the ceiling is. Like I think I mean what it does a lot. We'll we'll wait for that next week. We'll we'll wait to talk about that, uh, all the implications of that once we know.
For the record, the all time high of the total crypto market cap of crypto is just over three trillion. So we are point five trillion dollars away.
From the all-time highs for the industry.
What are some movers on the week, David? Some uh meme coins at the at the top here that are contributing to that $2.5 trillion? What are we looking at here?
Three big movers of the week. SPX, which broke into the top 100. It fell out of it at the time of recording, but it was up 24%. Popcat up 24%. And then Doge, which actually does have a meaningful market cap. I do have to take back what I said earlier. The market cap of Doge is $25 billion. And Doge is up 20% of the week on the week. I think people are using Doge actually as Trump exposure because Elon Musk, who's very pro Trump and is very like much aligning himself with the Trump brand, keeps on tweeting about the Department of Government efficiency.
Because he wants to make the government more efficient and those initials are Doge. Right. Uh and so if the idea here is if Trump gets elected, then Elon has more exposure and Elon keeps tweeting about this D O J D O G E uh meme. Uh and so as a result, Doge is up twenty percent.