ROLLUP: ETFs Back? | Robinhood Acquires Bitstamp | Biden SAB-121 Veto

Let's talk ETFs once again. David, the Bitcoin ETF is back. We also want to talk about uh the Ethereum ETF. When are we gonna actually get that and uh what's that going to do for prices?

It's the first week of June Bankless Nation, and it is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. June. I'm feeling good, David. This has uh been a pretty exciting week. What are we talking about today?

The Bitcoin ETFs wake up from a nap. How much money did the Bitcoin ETFs take in this week? And also, of course, murmurings about the ETH ETF are definitely crescendoing. But when, Ryan, are we gonna get the ETH ETF? I was promised an ETH ETF.

So was I. Also, uh, on the back of that, Van Eck dropped a 2030 ETH price prediction, David. That's uh I think even among the ETH bulls, it's gonna make them blush. Because let me tell you, it is bullish. It's a lot of

Yeah. We also have Biden vetoing the Sab bill. He did that um last Friday, like kind of like after hours. It could have been an easy win, but he decided to veto. He had the layup and he didn't take it.

Just fumbled millions of votes.

Yeah. The big question is is the Democrat pivot dead, or are they still gonna give us some crypto wins?

And then a Starknet wants to become a Bitcoin layer two, but also not leave Ethereum. How do they do that? And also, Robinhood acquires a major crypto exchange, probably one of the biggest acquisitions in crypto that I've seen in a very long time. Very big. Big freaking deal.

So much news to cover. But first, but before we get to all of that news, a message from our friends and sponsors over at

All right, guys, let's talk about the markets this week. Thanks to Kraken, as always, for the prices. And they're looking pretty good. Tell me about Bitcoin, David.

Bitcoin started the week at 69,400, up 3.6% on the week. Almost got up to $72,000 for our high. We're currently at $71,100. So what's above $70,000? That's a good question. 72 something? 73 something?

Yeah, 72, 72,800. It was 72,800.

We're we're we're close again to Bitcoin all-time highs. I every every time we hit Bitcoin all-time highs, like uh people get excited. We get media coverage, right? It's kind of like reflexive, uh at least that's my hope. Um ETH price, not quite close to all-time highs yet. What are we like 25% down from all time highs, something like that?

We're still a thousand dollars off of all time highs. Up one point two percent on the week. Started the week at three thousand eight hundred dollars, just still just a little bit, a little bit above that. Um, but still prices are up, not down. So that's what we're happy about. Uh total crypto market cap, two point seven seven trillion dollars. I would call that flatty up, flatty up.

Floody up. Um

Mm-hmm.

Let's talk about layer twos in this section sponsored by our friends over at Mantle, which is a layer two you absolutely should be using right now. Uh David, big news this week. Base entered number two, the number two, layer two by total value locked. I know there's some who think total value locked is a meme. I for one don't. I think it's

It's a

I think I think it is uh a a marker of of progress and traction. And so it's a big move. Base taking the spot from the OP mainnet, still trailing Arbitrum uh by about half. So Arbitrum sitting uh uh on top with uh 19.3 billion and then base except.

19 billion dollars. I mean, definitely congratulations for base for for flipping optimism mainnet. This has always been the optimism strategy, is like optimism mainnet. I kind of think is uh taking the Ethereum Foundation strategy of operating by a uh design by subtraction mindset. So it's happy to see its own like child chains, its own um let everyone else

Else do the work is what I call it.

exactly. It's a really good strategy. Uh but yeah, you you can't really ignore the absolute gargantuan of the nearly 20 billion dollars that Arbitrum has TVL. Overall, 47.8 billion dollars on layer twos, creeping up and up and up, still waiting for the biggest. That's all time high.

Yeah, that is all time high. Uh not $50 billion. I'll celebrate at $50 billion. I'll also celebrate at $100. I'll celebrate along the way too. Also, what's been pretty cool to see over the last like month or so is just the on-chain profit for these layer two chains. This has been the thing that Ryan and I have been beating the drum about for years and will continue to beat the drum about for years. It's extremely easy to be profitable as a layer two. So revenue from layer two gas fees minus the cost of posting state routes on the layer one. Base took in almost $7 million in profits in May. Just May. This is one month. $7 million in one month. Optimism, the uh Optimism Mainnet took in $1.57 million. Scroll took in $1.3 million. Arbitrum took in $800,000. And Linia took in $612,000 in one month. Profitability.

That is uh pure profit too. No issuance, no additional tokens. Of course, more getting unlocked, but no addition uh additional inflation that are being paid to uh validators. But you like maybe of course issuance is a meme. Uh and not quite sure. There's been debates about this uh recently.

All of all of the things that you thought were real and Fundamentals Ryan are actually just memes.

Well, it this is it's it's really cool to see healthy businesses, very healthy businesses, being birthed on on just like uh value added reselling of Ethereum Block Space. That's what they're doing. They're basically adding execution, adding value, and able to like um make money on this. It's pretty impressive. And I think this is the sort of thing that's gonna attract more and more layer twos into crypto, right? I mean, everyone else is looking over their and seeing like what 7 million a month for base? I want to do that.

And I can deploy a chain using the OP stack for free?

Hey, that sounds pretty good. Uh okay, let's talk about Uniswap volume on Arbitrum as well. As well, while we're looking at uh layer two. So monthly Arbitrum volume on Uniswap has doubled compared to last year. So May 2023 for benchmark, we were at uh about 6.8 billion. And now 2024 in May, we're close to 12 billion. So um pretty impressive. Although I will say, David, um

I I would just one one more point. That is twelve billion dollars on Arbitrum. That is twelve billion dollars on Uniswap volume on Arbitrum. That's just one of the layer twos.

Yeah, and I know this is maybe uh an unpopular sentiment among some right now, but I feel like Ethereum strategy just like might be working, David. So look at these two charts. Um, ETH still fee king. This is uh this yellow line right here is um Ethereum fees, right? And so, and the the pink bars at the bottom here, this is a token terminal chart, are the top layer twos combined, all of their fees, the fees that we just talked about for base and all of the other layer twos, plus the Solana combined fees. And Solana has been selling some block space here recently.

Solana has been C positive.

It's still about like that all of that combined is about one fourth of the total Ethereum fees here recently. And so Ethereum is still the king in terms of generating fees. And also on layer twos, transaction fees are under a cent, which has been a design goal as well. So you've got fee generation on the Ethereum layer one, and you've got transactions, at least on layer twos, for under a cent. I think Ethereum doesn't get enough credit for that. I mean, that's what it was trying to do, and it's kind of working, it's kind of doing it.

Yeah, you can actually see uh uh this is all kind of speculative. We don't really know, but like gas fees on the layer one have also been like meaningfully low. We don't really have we you can pull up ultra sound money. Uh Ether has actually been uh inflationary, sadly, for uh 30 days in a row. Uh half a percent of yearly inflation over the last 30 days. So there's actually less demand for Ethereum layer one block space, but we're seeing that turn into profitability numbers on the layer twos, uh, which is kind of interesting dynamic. Um, but I mean that's that's we've been saying like, hey, uh go be on the layer twos. That's where you're meant to be. Uh, and that's uh resulted in like demand for layer two block space. And I guess as a result of that, pretty consequentially, less demand for layer one block space.

David, there's uh three other crypto milestone numbers to talk about on the week. This first one, you probably drew my attention to this. So Eigenlayer just quietly passed 20 billion in this uh meaningless metric, total value locked, which uh I I uh see 20 billion is a lot, right? There's a lot of ETH inside of this protocol.

ETH. That's a lot of ETH, yeah. I think people were starting to just like look elsewhere beyond Eigenlayer after the Eigenlayer token drop. I think people were, I'm sure, were expecting TVL to like leave Eigenlayer. Why would you leave it in Eigenlayer after the token? Uh but the opposite happened. I think it was 14 billion dollars when the um Eigenlayer token airdrop happened. Now we're at 20 billion dollars. Uh why are we?

Points farming? Like what are we doing here?

What

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I still have my Ethan Eigenlayer. Why I still have it in Eigenlayer? I guess it's because I'm I'm assuming I'll get rewarded for that for seasons two and three, even though the parameters aren't out that out there yet. Um yeah.

that must be what the market's assuming because like the AVS is aren't uh aren't live yet. Um

Yeah, and dis despite the negative feedback about like the Eigenlayer token drop, like the APY for depositors into Eigenlayer was like stellar. It was like 70, 80% APY for your time.

I noticed that negative feedback has mostly evaporated. At least it was kind of like a two-week sentiment type thing. Uh, but that's not the only milestone to talk about. So this is big. Etherphy and Pendle both surpassed Uniswap in total value locked as well. This is kind of surprising to me. Of course, both of these are like restaking protocols in that in that category. So, somewhat based off of that 20 billion in eigenlayer that we just uh set up. But passing Uniswap, do you do can you how do you make sense of this?

Yeah, so there are transactional uh applications and then there are like depositing applications. Etherphy and pendle are both like depositing applications, as in like you put your money in there and then you like hold it there. Uh pendle, uh EtherFi is an LRT liquid restaking token. Pendle is kind of an LRT derivatives uh platform. It's a it's a yield derivative platform. A lot of people are using it to speculate on points now. So it's it's kind of like the center point, the center point of all like point speculation. And you put your TVL in and then you hold it there over a long period of time. Uniswap is less like that. Uniswap is more like you just go and trade. You go one token in, one token out. So it's

It's not really an apples to apples comparison, then they're kind of like different functions, yes?

It could be an apples to apples comparison. Like the reason why you're putting your ether in uh into pendulum and etherfy and all your tokens is because of yield. Like you're getting compensated for that. Some people are liquidity providing in Uniswap, and that is the $6.1 billion that's in Uniswap compared to the $6.2 billion in Pendle and Etherfy, EtherFy. But like

Um getting yield out of Uniswap is harder because of this thing called sex dex arbitrage. Whereas Uniswap LPs are getting squeezed by people arbitraging out the pools because it's actually just not a very efficient place to get your yield. I think that there is potentially a renaissance coming for the yield coming out of Uniswap because Uniswap's generating pretty strong fees for its layer, its LPs. It's just hard to be a profitable LP because you keep getting arbed out by MEV bots. Uh there's this startup called Terella Labs that is building a Uniswap V4 hook that does a very similar mechanism to how you know you know how like all the MEV in the MEV Ethereum supply chain ultimately either gets burned or passed to Ethereum stakers.

Yeah.

It's a there's a very similar similar primitive that Cirela is building as a hook where you deposit your Uniswap liquidity through the Cirella hook and MEV bundles and transaction bundles uh through this hook instead of going to MEV bots ends up just going recycled back into Uniswap LP. So Uniswap LPs are passive receivers of the MEV of Uniswap. And so there's an obvious incentive to deposit your liquidity if you're gonna be a market maker on Uniswap, to deposit it through the Cerella hook, because then you actually earn the MEV that Uniswap otherwise would accrue. So

So

I think what you're saying is Uniswap TVL is going to make a comeback because like right now it's not very profitable or yield generating for Uniswap LPs to keep their funds in there. But like there are some protocols that are emerging to make it much more profitable to kind of like fix that problem.

I think a possible future is that this hook design from Cerella Labs produces a renaissance in Uniswap TVL. Uh and also therefore like Uniswap price execution. Like you the one of the big things I remember talking to this about Mike Abolito when we had our podcast with him is like we need to get price discovery back on chain. We needed to get sprite price discovery away from Binance, away from Coinbase, and put it into Uniswap. And this is how you do that. And that that hopefully would come with like a resurgence of the ability of just to being able a passive liquidity provider to Uniswap. Anyways, a little bit of a side quest here.

Uniswap TVL down than right now, but David's forecasting up. Um something else that's up though is uh the price of BNB. Yeah, but you're like old Binance token. Um so it is apparently at all time highs.

All time highs.

And this is not no longer on CZ's watch, of course. So CZ uh just started his uh prison sentence. Did he that was like last week or the week before, something like this? One one thing that we are going to do is we're having uh Richard Tang on the Bankless Podcast. Bodcast. The podcast. That'd be a great name, dude. Uh the the bankless podcast tomorrow, and he is the new Binance CEO. So we want to pick his brain, see who he is, find out a little bit more about him because I don't think the crypto industry has really gotten to know him. But uh yeah, all time highs for BNB. Well, what does that this put um BNB in terms of the the like top?

Number five?

Number four. Number four. Number four?

Oh wow, it flips Solana. Oh wow, it flips Solana by a lot.

Huh.

Interesting.

It's got it's got thirty billion dollars on Solana.

Should we ask Richard about price?