ROLLUP: Ethereum Foundation Sells $100M? | Telegram Founder Arrested | SEC Targets Opensea

Bankless Nation, it is the last week of August. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France. Why? What are the charges? What happened? And what does it mean for the future of privacy with encrypted messaging apps? Also, does the Ethereum Foundation need to be a little bit more transparent when they send $100 million of ETH to Kraken? And why does Vitalik hate DeFi? Or does he maybe not? We'll shed some light on all of this drama.

Also, uh another week, another nasty gram from our friend at the SEC, Gary Gensler. Uh, what lucky company is joining the ranks of companies that are in the targets of Gary Gensler and the SEC? Um

Somebody got a Wells notice, place your bets. Consider which uh awesome, compliant US-based company is now receiving a Wells notice. Place your bets, think about it, and we'll come back to this later on the show.

Also, consider Gary Gensler's feelings on Pokemon cards and NFTs. Does he think they're securities? Uh, and speaking of NFTs, you know, Trump's got a new NFT program he's rolling out. It's like the fourth edition of the Trump card. We'll talk about that.

And the MakerDAO rebrand into Sky is underway. So we will give our takes and all the information about the change from DAI to USDS and MKR to Sky. Also, Sony introducing their Ethereum layer two built on the OP stack. Where did this come from? Why does Sony need a layer two? And also, really bad news for men in the crypto dating department. Yikes, you guys, you guys aren't doing so hot. But before we get too into all of this, are we talking you guys?

I'm married, okay? Are you talking about

I don't I don't want to I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it.

you don't want to be included in that department? All right. We got before we begin, we got a message from our friends over at

All right, shall we get into prices, Ryan?

Oh heck yeah. So uh Bitcoin price in the week, what are we looking at?

Bitcoin price sixty thousand seven hundred dollars up a half a percent. So call that flat. Currently at sixty one thousand at the end of the week. Uh ETH price, start of the week, two thousand six hundred, down one percent to two thousand five hundred and ninety. Also lost ten dollars. Flat. Call it whatever. Call it whatever. Bandic flat. And uh on the ETF inflows or outflows, we are actually on inflows as of the last yesterday. Uh so for the first day in two weeks.

We got you're celebrating one day of inflows, net inflows.

We are on a one-day streak. Could be also two at the end of today. Could be two. The day of recording on Thursday. So uh yesterday, the twenty eighth, we had five point nine million dollars of net inflows, uh, eight point four million into BlackRock, three point eight million out of um grayscale, uh Fidelity got one point three, and everyone else is basically on a one day streak.

No way to sugarcoat this. The ETH inflows haven't been great. ETH ETF inflows have not been great yet. So we're still at uh

Turn it around. I'm still holding up hope.

still early.

It's still

Still so early.

under a month.

Did you check out Bitcoin this week too? It had some pretty red days, like the 28th.

Oh wow. Bitcoin is at a zero day streak. Yeah. Well, okay, so for the last four days. The 23rd, 250 in, 26, 200 in, 27, 127 out. The 28th, 105 million out.

Yeah, so some rough days. Uh maybe those diamond hand institutional buyers aren't so diamond hand, David. They're they're getting a little

Turns out it's just all it turns out all the the ETF buyers are just us in our retirement accounts. Turns out that's just our money.

bit well. Thanks to Kraken for those charts. Obviously, we use Kra Kraken Pro uh and the Kraken Exchange for all of our crypto trading, don't we? And thanks to Kraken for sponsoring Bankless for as long as they have. Um, let's turn it to layer twos for a quick update. Base is absolutely running away with layer twos from from this metric, which is monthly active user addresses. So this blue line is base, and it is just climbing uh kind of like

Only one that's going up.

Yeah, hockey stick growth. Um, what are some of the stats here? Let me see. So

A hundred thirteen point four monthly million active addresses, up twenty percent month over month, up thirteen hundred percent year over year. That's thirteen point four million monthly active as compared to Arbitrum's 3.5, Linnea's 1.3, and Optimism's one.

there was a question of how much is of this is like Sybil. So Travis Kling asked uh in this chart uh isn't this skewed by Sybil Farming, Industrial Grade, Sybil Farming, Airdrop Farming? What if I told you 10 entities controlled uh more than half the wallets? And token turn will replies.

The entire paradigm of all address based metrics. Sure. We've always known it's all been like that since I've ever gotten into crypto. We've known this.

Yes, yes. And also the data that we just quoted is from token terminal that tries to screen some of that noise out. So the reply here is the above.

They did that.

Yeah. Uh good old token terminal. They build behind the scenes. The above chart takes into account unique fee paying addresses. It does not consider whether those addresses are controlled by one or many IRL entities. So they do unique fee paying addresses, but like I guess they they you they don't always know. Uh oh, but they do say please share a list of the 10 entities and uh we'll uh disclude them. So if they find out

So they're calling they're calling Travis out, so he's like, oh, so you know those 10 addresses? Send them our way.

Yes, yes.

Oh that that that's uh monthly user addresses, which is one metric. Another though is total value locked. And here Arbitrum still reigns supreme.

Yeah, a gargantuan. Yeah. Fifteen billion dollars in Arbitrum, followed by Base's six, followed by Optimism's five and a half, followed by Blast 1.5.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh so you know, the another metric to look at, of course. Where where's our friends?

There are five there are five layer twos with a billion dollars. Mantles could the next one at one point one billion dollars.

All right, let's talk about trad markets for a second. Uh Jerome Powell is signaling that rate cuts are all but inevitable. This is kind of what we expected, but he made a speech this week uh and he noted a few things that inflation has dropped from a peak of 9.1% in mid-2022. Do you remember it was at 9.1%? That was crazy. Um to 2.9% last month. And both are edging closer to the 2% target, of course. And he adds this we will do everything we can to support a strong labor market. So notice that the strong labor market, I think that indicates that they're shifting their focus from inflation to jobs reports and jobs numbers, the the labor market.

He also said this. This is a direct quote with an appropriate dialing back of policy restraint. There is good reason to think that the economy will go back to 2% inflation while maintaining a strong labor market. He's basically saying, I'm going to dial things back. Inflation's going to be fine. And also jobs will be fine. So that's next. That's going to happen in September. It's all but inevitable. I think a lot of macro folks are saying inflation is no longer the thing that you should be looking at with respect to Fed policy decisions. You know, everyone's trying to prog prognosticate and try to predict what Powell and the Fed are going to do next. But really the numbers we should be looking at are coming out of the jobs reports. So jobs numbers are now the new inflation, like more important in determining the Fed's next move. So I feel like we might need to incorporate some jobs numbers into this tradfy update macro section moving forward. So I asked, like, what, you know, like what are the best job numbers to track? So maybe we'll include some of that uh moving forward. So that's what's happening on the Fed side. Looks like easy money is back on the menu.

Also, this happened uh towards the uh beginning of this week, which is where we saw like some price increases across the board. Like ETH got almost up to $2,800. Uh Bitcoin got up to like six uh sixty-five thousand dollars. So we had we saw the price action respond here, uh both in equities and and in crypto markets. But uh I think people are like my suspicion is that they are going to cut slowly. It's gonna be a slow move, not whiplash because they learned their lesson last time. It's gonna be a slow cut. Uh so people got really excited, but then they realized that, you know, okay, this it's it's gonna be the easy rate cut cycle era, but it's gonna not happen all at once. That's my indication of the market. Anyways, more into the crypto side of markets. Uh stable coin. Stablecoin supply.

Is almost almost at all time high. It almost grew a whole 1% over the past week to $169 billion almost there. USDT tether has grown 28% this last year from 91.5 billion to 117 billion. USDC grew 44% this last year from 23.8 to 34.4. Stablecoin supply.

To me, it paints the floor for fundamentals and valuation for all our other crypto assets. As this number goes up in price, to me, the floor price of crypto assets also goes up in price. So just really strong growth out of stable coins.

Yeah, it's good for DeFi. D David, you wanna hear a fun fact?

Always.

So, okay, Warren Buffett, he just you know he's been selling his stocks and stacking uh you know uh dollars basically. He sold more B of A stock, Bank of America stock yesterday. He has now now he has about two stable coin market caps worth of cash sitting on the Warren Buffett down shot.

That is not a fun fact.

Like almost 300 billion dollars, Warren Buffett has.

I thought you were gonna tell me he was gonna say he had just started buying stable coins for some reason. I was like, that is a fun fact.

He could convert all of that to stable coins and trend like and tokenized treasuries and biddle fund.

He could corner the stablecoin market.

Okay, here's what an actual fun fact is

Okay.

PayPal's PYUSD hit $1 billion in market cap. Congratulations to PayPal's PYUSD. Well done.

What if people don't know what PYUSD is? That's a stable coin, right? From PayPal?

Yeah, PayPal, yeah, PayPal stablecoin. Uh it has doubled its supply since June. Uh monthly active wallet addresses of PYUSC was at 25,000 in July. Uh and that has been up from 9,400 May. So getting some some traction actually mostly on Solana. Uh it went from uh zero to six hundred and fifty million dollars of stablecoin supply on Solana in the last uh three months, which is closing in on uh tether supply on Solana. Mostly uh apparently allegedly caused by incentives. Uh Commando Drift and Margin Fi uh introduce boosted rewards for PYUSD. So uh when you incentivize things, uh it happens. Uh but yeah, uh PayPal PYUSD cornering part of the stablecoin Solana market.

David, I I've heard Carter say this.

Laughing.