ROLLUP: Is Altcoin Season Here? | Treasury’s Bond War | Robinhood Chain Mania | OpenAI’s Math Controversy

TRANSCRIPT

David Hoffman:
[0:04] It's friday september 11th and it's time for the bankless weekly roll-up the amc ceo declares war on robin hood tokenized stocks calling them contemptible outrageous disgusting detestable inexcusable and vile wow did he really use all of those words uh vlad vlad tena from robin hood simply replies, what's the concern?

David Hoffman:
[0:28] Spawning a war on Twitter. We got some other news as well. What else are we talking about this week, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:33] Treasury. David, while you're gone, there was some war in the treasury markets and Besson has continued to up the stakes on that war. Now he has tripled the long dated bond buybacks to $6 billion, yet yields are still increasing anyway. We got to discuss that. Also, David, I want to ask you about maybe a potential special altcoin season, like a baby altcoin season. We have Zcash, we have Venice, we have Nier. All of these things are up. Robinhood chain is going wild. Some people are asking whether this is altcoin season and whether it's way ahead of schedule and why.

David Hoffman:
[1:10] One of the reasons why VVV, at least of all the tokens, is up big is because OpenAI was caught red-handed stealing the work of a million-dollar math prize that had gone unsolved for decades. It has been solved, and OpenAI is taking credit. Did they actually do the work, or was it one of OpenAI's customers doing the work, and they merely just crossed the finish line with the work that somebody else did? We're going to talk about all this drama and more. We also got some frame transactions out of the Ethereum landscape. This is account abstraction, once again, coming online as a discussion, and now people are fighting ETH because if Ethereum does anything, some people will choose to FUD ETH about it. And Hunter Biden, the story of the year... Launches a meme coin called Laptop. It's the exact movie that you would expect to happen. You don't need to watch it, so we'll just speedrun it for you.

David Hoffman:
[2:03] I know everyone is waiting on bated breath to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop, but you're going to have to wait to the end. We're going to start talking about markets. Bitcoin and Ether, the blue chips of the industry, flat on the week. Meanwhile, the following tokens all hit all-time highs. LiDAR, VVV, and Zcash all hit all-time highs this week, NIR up 30%, Arbitrum up 40%, which brings Ryan asking the question, are we in an altcoin season? Is this altcoin season? Ryan, is this altcoin season?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:35] That was a hypothetical question. I know the answer to that already. But I want to get your answer to that question, okay? I know the real answer. So what do you think? I mean, this doesn't usually happen, or at least that's part of the narrative, right? Bitcoin's supposed to pump first. That's supposed to confirm the early bull. I guess we got a little bit of a pump, right? When you left two weeks ago, where was Bitcoin? It had already jumped to close to 80K, right? When you'd left?

David Hoffman:
[3:03] Bitcoin pumped from like 65,000 up to 77,000 three weeks ago. So we have actually, Bitcoin has been ranging between like 76 and 82, 81 for three weeks now without actually going in any direction.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:18] We got to 81K, but we didn't get to the May highs, actually, above 82, which is somewhat interesting. So we were higher in May. But anyway, we got a bit of a bump. And now we have all of these non-Bitcoin assets pumping. So what do you think? Is that altcoin? Are we in kind of a mini micro altcoin season?

David Hoffman:
[3:39] I'm kind of reminded of a conversation I had forever ago with Mike Ibelito, where he was telling me about one of the macro commentators that he likes the most, who pays attention to the Fed, you know, pays attention to macro, but also invests in crypto. And it was like a it was like a funny bit where he was saying, like, oh, yeah, I think the Fed needs to ease. This is like two to three years ago. The Fed needs to ease. We're going into an easy money era. And therefore, I'm buying pudgy penguins. And like, I kind of think that's what happened in the crypto industry recently. Like we are, like Bessent is going to war against the bond market. We are doing, you know, quote unquote, quantitative easing in our own new way. And therefore, crypto industry participants are buying meme coins. Yeah. And so like the DGens are just going straight to the end. And Bitcoin moves slowly. Ether moves slowly. But some of these tokens that hit all time highs like Leiter, Venice, Zcash, you know, like I said, Nira and Arbitrum are up big. Meme coins are printing new highs in terms of dex volume. I think that's just like a lot of the crypto degens seeing the same pattern of just like, oh, we're going into an easy money era. Let's go to the riskiest table in the casino. Because that's the spinal reflex that we have.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:52] You know what I call that? The DGN debasement trade. Because it's like, it's basically the debasement trade, what you just described. Except it's like going way down market where you can get the 10x, the 25 the 100x style returns.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:09] But I do think it's too early to call altcoin season for anything.

David Hoffman:
[5:13] I'm worried about us getting ahead of our ski tips here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:15] Yeah, it's like, look, Bitcoin dominance is still almost at 60%. So like, have you seen, look at this chart. Do you see anything that has shaken up Bitcoin dominance? You cannot call a big, you know, altcoin season when Bitcoin dominance is near 60%. But... And Michael Nadeau actually reminded me of this. In 2023, which I don't think any of us would think of as a particularly bullish year for crypto. It was like we were sort of rebounding. There was like we were just trying to get over 2022 and FTX. It turned out to be sort of an early bull, but there were pockets.

David Hoffman:
[5:54] It was a repair year.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:55] It was a repair year. It did not feel particularly bullish, right? Not until we got the kind of the BlackRock ETF did things really start to feel bullish in crypto.

David Hoffman:
[6:02] Which was like October 2023, I think.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:04] Yeah, but do you remember all of these pockets of speculation back in 2023? So we had Blur. Do you remember that? That was February 2023. In March 2023, the ARP token actually launched. So we got an L2 kind of revival. We had Bitcoin ordinals. That was also in March. We had WorldCoin launching in 2023 as well. That was in July. We had, do you remember, 2023 summer, Frientech. Remember when that came on the scene?

David Hoffman:
[6:34] Oh, my Lord.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:35] Just a pocket of pure speculation. And the speculation bubble kind of like moved from thing to thing throughout 2023. Toward the year end, we had the Jito airdrop and the Tia airdrop.

David Hoffman:
[6:47] And there were all these speculations. The Jito and Tia airdrops were absolutely the starting pistol for the following year.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:53] They were. But it was this moving bubble of speculation because it was just the crypto natives who were here. I still think it's that. I still think it's crypto natives are here. And this is a bubble, you know, a pocket of air of speculation that's moved to kind of Robinhood chain, but too early to call a full altcoin season. Do you think as well that there can be an altcoin season without Ether the asset, David? Without Ether getting its due, okay? This was a...

David Hoffman:
[7:20] Yeah, I do actually. We had that last time. We've already seen that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:25] Okay, but maybe this time is different. This was a post from Michael Nato as well. He said, Robinhood buying a ton of ETH seems like an obvious move at this point. They'll likely make money on it. And he says, as I think more about ETH this cycle, this is probably the bull case nobody's talking about not the store of value narrative, just institutions deploying and buying and then signaling to the community with ETH purchases. So he's saying Robinhood, potentially, they have the success of the Robinhood chain. How do you get in good with the crypto natives who are buying all the meme coin assets in the Robinhood chain? Will you buy some ETH and you put it on the balance sheet? You'll probably make money on that trade alone, particularly when you get behind it. And that could be a catalyst for ETH. He's also big in this idea of like new wealth creation, you know, and I know you've talked about this in the past, which is like ICO, wealth creation, NFT, wealth creation, meme coin, wealth creation. Yeah, you have to have some wealth creation episode in order for the full bull to get running. Well, the question is, who are the meme coin traders on Robinhood right now? And if they are getting wealthy right now, where are they going to deploy that? And Mike's thesis is, it's actually coming from parts of the ETH community who missed out on PumpFun and all the Solana meme coin shenanigans.

David Hoffman:
[8:44] Yeah, the Unk plumbers won the last battle.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:47] Yeah, you think of the archetype of someone like Eric Conner, for instance, who's sort of like a ETH maxi of maxi. He didn't do much with respect to like...

David Hoffman:
[8:56] Not as much anymore. Not anymore. Ethereum aligned, but he is softened on his ETH position.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:01] But what's he trading on Robinhood now? Boner coin as well.

David Hoffman:
[9:04] Boner. Okay? Boner.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:05] Right? So he thinks that wealth creation event might actually feed back into Ether the asset. Anyway, there's a little speaking of boners.

David Hoffman:
[9:13] I don't know if I want to consider this a wealth creation event. I would like to throw a soft flag at meme coins being wealth creation event. Like ICOs, which in hindsight were terrible. I'm not excusing them. at least had a semblance of, hey, we are going to create something that is going to be good for the world. And meme coins are just, it's a meme coin called boner. It doesn't pretend to be anything. It's not. That's the whole point. And so I would like to not perfectly equate meme coins with the pattern of generative startups, even though our past history of generative startups have been terrible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:52] No, I'm not making any moral claims on these things or any even utility type claims or any good for society claims. I'm just saying it's wealth creation. And if you look over on Robinhood chain, there is wealth being created. There are market caps and coins going up right now. And so, you know, are they going to keep all of their wealth in boner coin or are they going to move that into some other asset that's the wealth creation event.

David Hoffman:
[10:17] The, Ryan, the last thing I said to you before disappearing for Burning Man at the end of the weekly rollup before I logged off was, hey, there's this like meta happening that's kind of like early, but it's like these weird paired tokenized stocks with a meme coin thing. And so people are like putting a meme coin in an LP pool with a tokenized stock. And that was it. And that was the end of the weekly rollup. And then I would gone for two weeks. The last thing I did before I logged off was I bought $1,000 of boner at a $370,000 market cap. And then five days later, I look at my phone connected to Starlink and I'm up $120,000. Wow. And Eric Conner is up $2 million.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:58] Congrats on that trade. Oh my God, that was wild. What enticed you to buy that specific coin at that time?

David Hoffman:
[11:05] Yeah, like how did I pick out boner? I was like thinking about this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:08] Oh, is that the one that's like, that's paired against the HIMSS stock, right? Which is like erectile dysfunction stock or something like that?

David Hoffman:
[11:16] Yeah, there's like boner advertisements all over New York City, and it's all kind of like ED coded, like soft coded, because it gives like if you're a male buying this product, you get some sort of like deniability. It's like not actually speaking the words into existence. It's like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of thing. Okay.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:37] It's like a health product.

David Hoffman:
[11:39] Your question was like, of all the meme coins that I bought, how did I choose to buy Boner of all of them?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:46] And also, what does that say about you? That's my question.

David Hoffman:
[11:50] I'll get to that. I'll put that on the premium feed. Boner. It makes sixth graders laugh. So that's good. That's bullish. It kind of was reminiscent of Fartcoin. Of just like, it's so simple. It's so memetic. like why did fart coin run like two years ago Because Fart, it's Fart. It's like such a mimetic, like you laughed at Farts so many times when you were in middle school and high school. So same kind of category. It's very simple, very mimetic. And then it also fit into the category that I was telling you about before I logged off, which was like, it's paired with a tokenized stock. It's very simple, it's very mimetic. Like Fartcoin ran because we hadn't tokenized Farts yet. Boner ran because we hadn't tokenized Boners yet. And those things came together. And it's like, okay, I think this is valid enough.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:44] A brilliant logic, David. I think you should go full-time meme coin trading with this type of insight. I think you'd do really well in this market.

David Hoffman:
[12:55] Unlike most people who bought Boner, I kind of think that this is a local top on the... Casino if you will and like one of the reasons why i think that's true is like if you look at the pawns token which is like the new meme coin launch pad that thing is down uh like 50 off of its highs robin hood rev activity is down off of its highs uh i was writing an email to the hymns ceo inviting him to come on the podcast just because he was in the meta yeah and i was like trying to like think about this from the receiver side because like sometimes stretch guests you need to like put a lot more effort you know the deal you have to put more effort into like enticing them to come on the podcast and so i'm trying to like put myself into the position of the hymns ceo because he followed the boner twitter account because again boner is paired with hymns and so like would he even be

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:51] Hymns is going up as a result of of boner at least you know i'm.

David Hoffman:
[13:55] Not sure i'm not sure i don't know hymns tokenized stock on robin hood like dislocated because there was so much demand for it. And so the theory is of this tokenized stock meme coin LP thing is that this is going to be really helpful for the equity on the public market because you have a new set of buyers coming in for the speculative meme coin reasons. And so I go and pull open the data. I got to go look at the receipts. And HIMSS is a $6.5 billion company. It has a 30% outstanding short supply, so it's heavily shorted. And so the idea is that these tokenized stock meme coin things will help short squeeze the stock because there's enough demand to buy the tokenized version. And so there will those with the enough buying pressure, we'll do a short squeeze on the hedge funds. Same thing as GME. There is $3.5 million of tokenized hemstock on Robinhood chain on a $6.5 billion stock.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:51] Oh, yeah. It's not even worth his time.

David Hoffman:
[14:53] That is not happening. There is no short squeeze that is happening. Yeah. And so I think that whole narrative is very far-fetched. We're seeing a—this is just this week, so this could be very short-term. We may be just doing a break before chips go back on the table. But I think this is like a kind of a I think we're kind of toppy on this current iteration of the casino and same thing with the kind of the flag that I was throwing earlier so like meme coins are not wealth generative activity this is not new the tokenized stock meme coin LP positions are it's like kind of novel in meme coin land but broadly this is still meme coins this is still the same movie that we've seen this is not going to escape get reach escape velocity out of the crypto industry in the same way that nfts did i kind of think that the meme coin speculative frenzy that we have seen in the last like six weeks is about to be over i don't know if I want to say that so confidently, but it kind of feels that way. Anyways, I sold most of my boner.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:55] I was going to say, I was going to say, I hope you've sold your boner.

David Hoffman:
[15:59] I sold most of my boner.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:00] If this is your true opinion, we'll discuss a bit more about this, including the AMC stock trade. But on more serious matters, let's talk about the global bond market, shall we? So I think when you left- Let's.

David Hoffman:
[16:15] Pivot into the bond market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:16] A hard pivot, shall we use that term? Okay, so the bond war. This is like week four. I think as you were leaving, the treasury put, the Besant put, that trade was starting to be put on. At the time you left, it was $2 billion. You're going to buy long-dated bonds, $2 billion per week, had a way to do that. That went to $4 billion, and now, David, it's at $6 billion. So just this week, we are up 3x. Here's a tweet. the U.S. Treasury announced it is buying back $6 billion in long-term debt, tripling levels seen before the recent intervention announcement. So they keep upping the stakes here in an effort to get Treasury yields down. This was a fascinating clip from Besant. He was speaking at a fireside chat. Let me just play this.

David Hoffman:
[17:07] Whenever people say, oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk, And he goes, wow, it's my dream. I have asymmetric information. I am the house now. So when we intervene with the Japanese yen, I have pretty good insight into what the Japanese, what the Bank of Japan is going to do, what Japanese policymakers are going to do.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:35] Do you hear that, David? I am the house now. Does this?

David Hoffman:
[17:38] I'm not, I'm not bullish. That's an Icarus. He's Icaricing. You are not the house, sir. The market is the house. You are a large player, but you are not larger than the market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:50] There's something reminiscent. We've seen our share of Icarus's in crypto over the years. And he's not Icarus-ing that hard, but he's getting up there. And yeah, it doesn't make me feel good about where bond yields are going on that.

David Hoffman:
[18:04] I think it's very notable that the buybacks tripled and then yields have risen. Yes, they have. And if you listen to my episode with Jim Bianco, he has a perfect explanation for this, is that you want to incent bond buyers by hiking rates. Yes. Because it's giving them confidence that inflation is going to be under control. Besant is doing the opposite. He is doing QE. He is injecting money. He is injecting liquidity, which is going to induce more inflation. And so it's causing bond holders to sell because they are not confident that inflation is going to be under control. And so the more QE that Besant buys, or the more bonds that Besant buys, the more bond sellers are coming into the market, is Jim Bianco's rationale. And if that would predict exactly this effect that happened this week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:54] Well, I think there's an element to that. He keeps rationing it up and he's tripled the buys and this is the 30-year yield. It's a 5.3%. I mean, highest since 2007. It continues to make all-time highs. This is the 10-year. It's also creeping up. All of this has an effect on politics and, of course, midterms. So this is mortgage rates, Mortgage rates, after kind of decreasing to close to 6%, they're back up, heading towards 7%. We also have inflation, as you mentioned, like diesel is at a record almost $6 per gallon right now. Basically, the 30-year and the 10-year and the bond market sets the cost of capital. So you can imagine any kind of loan product, whether it's a car loan, whether it's a credit card, whether it's a mortgage, those numbers are going up with the bond market continuing to go up. And I don't know if you saw this, David, but this happened, I guess, the day before we've recorded. This is Donald Trump injecting his input into this, not specifically about bonds, but the politics of affordability. Here's what he said.

David Hoffman:
[20:09] But what we're doing is because we've done so well and because our country is making so much money that only I can make this promise to you. And here is my promise. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in history we've never had anything like what's happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:56] There you go, David. A $5,000 dividend to every adult in the United States of America. The cost of this would be about a trillion dollars. Of course, tariffs would pay for all of this. You know, tariffs, meanwhile, I think they raised about $150 billion and have been spent, you know, already 10 times that amount. And this is an additional $1 trillion. So Trump with just a direct appeal to populism on the backdrop of basically a top, reissue, maybe the top issue for voters, which is like cost of living, affordability. There's a Reuters poll I saw today, 74% say cost of living is on the wrong track. It's a top issue for both parties. And the cost of capital rising, the bond market rising, does nothing to improve that, makes it far worse. So what's going to happen there?

David Hoffman:
[21:52] Did the markets react after he said this? I guess Donald Trump says a lot of things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:57] Well, I mean, look, he said if Republicans win the Senate and the House, it's kind of a, that's probably not going to happen, right? Like the Senate and the House?

David Hoffman:
[22:06] Not before people are incented with $5,000.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:10] Yeah, you think that's really going to move people into kind of, you know, like.

David Hoffman:
[22:13] No.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:14] Do you think you can actually get voters to just be bribed for $5,000 in order to vote? Especially when it's a promise coming from Donald Trump. You don't know whether you can cash that check, whether that would actually happen or not, or whether it's just rhetoric.

David Hoffman:
[22:28] Yeah. This does trigger my memory of when we all got $1,200 helicopter money from the Biden administration during COVID. And then Brian Armstrong tweeted out the most incredible chart ever, which was a chart of dollar deposits into Coinbase by count. And there was like, you know, you would see a lot of $1,000 deposits. You would see a lot of $5,000 deposits. But like the week of the $1,200 helicopter money, it was like $1,200 checks. The number of $1,200 deposits into Coinbase was just like, it blew up the chart. And I think people, the government, everyone should take note that when the government hands you money, people take it to buy Bitcoin or hard assets generally.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:13] Or the degen debasement assets like meme coins and whatever shenanigans.

David Hoffman:
[23:18] Yeah, but like they're not keeping it in your system because obviously if you disrespect your financial system, people are going to take the money that you are just disrespecting it with and take it elsewhere and remove it from the system.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:30] Here's the thing, though. I know we've been, this whole rally has been kicked off by the debasement trade and sort of the Besant put, you know, four weeks ago, this crypto rally. I don't think that this, the reason for the yields going up is just debasement and just inflation, right? It's AI. And Hasib made this point the last couple of weeks. It's just the cost of capital is going up because AI is so profitable and they can make profit on a token, and they need capital. They need debt instruments.

David Hoffman:
[24:01] An AI token.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:02] Yeah, I should say. An AI token. They can generate tons of cash on that and they need a lot of investment in order to continue that build out. And they will pay top dollar yields to investors. And so the nominal GDP is going up. And in that backdrop, yields will go up and they will continue to go up. Another era to look at actually is the 1980s, where the market was just kind of like humming. And I read a Michael Howell post earlier this week who compared right now to actually 1987. He says, kind of like that. The yields were very high, but we also had GDP and an economy that was like raging and hot. And so sometimes high yields are not just examples of a debasement trade. It can be that the economy is kind of booming and nominal returns and nominal GDP is increasing upwards. So a lot of that is happening, which is why I don't know if it makes sense for Besant to fight this secular trend.

David Hoffman:
[25:03] Look, Besson has way more experience than me. That's right. He has way more information than me. Yes, he is the house now. But like, he is the house. But man, I don't like, it just doesn't make me comfortable to see the government react to the market and try to win a thumb war over the market. Like you don't, the market always wins. The market is the house. You are not the house, sir.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:25] It feels a little panicky. We got to talk more about Robin Hood, including the AMC CEO. You said it was this. He used these words, contemptible, outrageous, disgusting and detestable. What is he talking about? We'll discuss all that and more, but before we do, let's thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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David Hoffman:
[27:31] Ryan, you should never, ever annualize a weekly chart. But if you did, the Robinhood chain is printing Robinhood $1.5 billion of annualized revenue just from the chain. Don't annualize a weekly chart. But the metrics coming out of Robinhood chain is pretty damn crazy. Robinhood chain is now the number one blockchain by revenue.

David Hoffman:
[27:56] Generated $30 million this last week. This last week. Most of this is from meme coin trading, but also because these meme coins are paired with tokenized stocks, that means that it's also tokenized stock volume as well. So that's one of the big unlocks here is that because Robinhood has invested in the whole tokenized stock ecosystem, they are capturing this activity. And really, it's also interesting to learn that I think 70 or 80% of the volume on Robinhood chain, on at least on the meme coin activity is coming from the fomo app and so fomo is acting as a huge conduit of activity uh and the phone the fomo plus robin hood chain combination is generating the most speculative fervor of activity since the whole meme coin mania on solana in like 2023 uh and so once again the meta is meme coins It was MemeCoins last time. It was MemeCoins the time before that. And now with Robinhood Chain and a brand new social trading app, it's MemeCoins once again. But it is pretty cool nonetheless to see a big chain launch and generate a lot of excitement and activity in crypto.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:06] I saw this. Even Pump.Fun is trying to catch up on that pair meta with a stock and a MemeCoin. So they just launched custom pairs, allow you to pair any MemeCoin on Pump with tokenized stock or even commodity, gold, any type of asset. So that seems to be the current narrative of choice. You do not think this has legs, as you said earlier, but it is providing some gasoline and energy to all of the, even some of the blue chip DeFi on the Robinhood chain. So most notably, Uniswap is absolutely pumping. So this is a Uniburn. Of course, they have the FeeBurn now. I mean, for years, it was like Unitoken, when burn, when burn. Now they have it.

David Hoffman:
[29:51] It's active. When fee switch.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:53] 200 million per year in burn. It's getting close to that. At least on the seven day, would you just say you shouldn't annualize a one week chart? Well, if you did annualize the Uniswap burn, at least right now, $200 million. And a lot of that is on the back of this Robinhood meme economy taking shape with stocks and with meme coins. But there is someone we've been talking about who is not too happy about it. This guy's name is Adam Aaron. He is the CEO of AMC. And he said that line, I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, despicable. It's vile. How can this possibly be legal? What's he talking about, David?

David Hoffman:
[30:36] He's not talking about meme coins, which is usually the words that you hear being pointed towards meme coins. He's talking about the tokenized stocks. His own stock, right? His own stock, AMC, is a tokenized stock on Robinhood chain. And that is the practice that he thinks is contemptible. Vlad Teneff, the CEO of Robinhood, he replied to this very long paragraph of text that Adam Aaron, the AMC CEO, put on Twitter. He simply replied, what's the concern? Aaron tweeted his reply. He's like, I'll tell you what the concern is. And then another very long paragraph of text. And then I never really got to the bottom of what he was really concerned about, other than how these stocks don't have shareholder rights, don't have governance rights. And so if you are an owner of the AMC tokenized stock, you aren't able to use that stock to govern over AMC. Does he really care about that? Is that really what he's concerned about? Is that some of his shareholders aren't able to participate in governance? That's what matters to him the most?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:48] It's kind of funny, because wasn't AMC like one of the sort of GME type meme stuff?

David Hoffman:
[31:54] Yeah, it was GME adjacent. Yeah, for sure.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:56] I don't know why he's so angry, because he's been in this game for a while, but he ends this second tweet, multiple paragraphs. I hereby call on you and Robin Hood to voluntarily cease and desist the trading of AMC stock tokens. You must cease and desist this. Vlad was actually on Squawk Box the following morning, asked about this. And I think he gives some details into the structure of these types of tokenized stocks and the rights they do confer and the rights they don't. Let's go play that clip. I kind of hear what you're saying, but I understand Adam Aronson's frustration with this. He's trying to build something. He's trying to continue to build something. And he wants investors who are interested and believe in his product to come to him, not to go through you. He thinks if they go to you instead of going to him, his stock price is not going to do as well. He points out validly that if they're going to you instead of him, they don't get a chance to vote as a shareholder. I can understand why a CEO would be frustrated and upset about that. What makes you think that other CEOs aren't going to think the same thing. Hey, if they're interested in buying shares of my company, they should buy it from me, not buy something that you've modeled to transfer off of it through you, that may in turn hurt my stock price because I'm not getting all the people who are interested in buying my stock buying it.

David Hoffman:
[33:21] I mean, I think that there's two things there. Number one, these are products available outside the U.S. in 120 plus countries. And in a lot of those places, people don't have easy access to U.S. Equities. There's no underlying brokerage infrastructure. There's no Robinhood where you can go on your app and buy shares. So we think a lot of this is actually net new business and the opportunity for these companies to access

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:53] A whole new global... New business for you. What's Adam Aronson get from it?

David Hoffman:
[33:56] Well, he gets access to a whole new shareholder base, people who have exposure to his stock. You do. And because the tokens are backed one to one by underlying shares, there is stock purchase backing these tokens. So I think that's just a misconception, obviously. And just so I understand, because it's one to one, does does the token come with all of the voting rights and everything else that's associated, dividends and the like, with with owning the actual stock? It it comes with dividends. Voting rights, not in this case, because it is a debt security and the shares are held as collateral. But again, that's not dissimilar to how an ADR or an ETF would function, right? If you have an ETF and you get exposure to an underlying, you're not voting in each underlying.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:00] Can Larry Fink vote my stuff? I want to put him in charge, Vlad. I really like his politics. Is that possible?

David Hoffman:
[35:08] We can look into that, Joe.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:10] Yeah, thanks.

David Hoffman:
[35:11] Vlad, can you vote the shares? Um, me personally, I mean, I know I'm saying is Robin Hood going to be voting the share in the same way that Joe's unhappy that Larry's voting shares, though it's his firm is Robin Hood voting those shares. I think that we haven't really announced plans for the voting aspect of that. So, I mean, we can, we'll certainly share more if we have it. But again,

David Hoffman:
[35:47] There is established precedent for creating these types of products. And, you know, they give exposure to these assets to people all over the world. So I do think this is the future. The entire financial industry is headed in this direction. The U.S. is also working on innovation exemptions to allow for tokenized securities out here. And it'll take time to educate the issuers, the market, but we already see the benefits. And I think it's a little bit ironic in this case, because one of the benefits of tokenization is that you have instant settlement. So actually, the underlying reasons behind the GameStop and AMC issues in 2021 would largely be resolved with this new infrastructure. I thought Vlad made fantastic points there. And I actually really think that the concerns from the AMC CEO and even the SquawkBlock hosts are just misunderstood. They're like, okay, Vlad, you get a new investor base, but not the AMC,

David Hoffman:
[36:58] Not the AMC corporation is just strong. It is a conduit. The Robinhood tokenized stocks is a conduit between a new investor base that would not have otherwise bought the stock and AMC. AMC does get the economic connection between these buyers That doesn't get the shareholder governance connections But honestly, who the hell cares?

David Hoffman:
[37:19] And AMC does get all the benefits. Robinhood and Vlad are not running interference or running interception. They are unlocking access on behalf of AMC or any other tokenized stock company and investors who wouldn't otherwise have access, which is the whole rest of the world. The meme coin people get their hands on it first. And that's always kind of distasteful for people who are not in the meme coin world. But the whole idea of like neo brokerages and tokenized docks on permissionless blockchains, enabling access to people who do not have access to U.S. Capital markets is a foundational point that should interest every single U.S. company. And all I'm seeing when I see the AMC CEO get upset is that like you didn't ask us permission, like you didn't ask us if this is okay. But all of the benefits are almost, other than shareholder governance, almost one-to-one given straight back to the company who has issued a public equity. And so I think this is just actually fantastic marketing for Robinhood. And he gets to explain what these things are on Squawk Box. And so maybe this is just part of the process that we need to go through for the world to become normalized to tokenized stocks. And this is just what this looks like.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:34] Yeah, I mean, they're not tokenized stocks in their ideal form, right? So they're outside of the U.S., they're kind of, you know, outside U.S. jurisdiction. And this is because SEC rules, quite frankly. So we can get tokenized stocks that have all of the governance shareholder rights that the MCC, you know, CEO might want. And also, Vlad's point is ETFs don't even have those. I mean, they don't infer a governance right. But the broader point is, like, I have no idea why this dude is so upset. Because it doesn't affect his existing shareholders. It just broadens his base of prospective shareholders. It's like net benefit, there's nothing bad. They cost him nothing.

David Hoffman:
[39:19] The way I think he's interpreting it is that if they are buying the Robinhood tokenized share, they are not buying my actual equity. And therefore, I get none of the benefits because those things are completely decoupled. He's a CEO.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:33] But that's wrong. He's smart enough. He's smart enough to know this.

David Hoffman:
[39:36] It seems to be what he is arguing and what the Squawk Box hosts also don't understand is that these are near one-to-one representations and a $1 purchase of an AMC tokenized stock does equate to a $1 purchase of the AMC equity.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:52] It's funny, you could find meme coins distasteful, but that was not what his rant was about at all.

David Hoffman:
[39:57] No, it wasn't about the meme coins at all. Anyways, I hope that this actually does a lot of positive marketing for tokenized stocks. And that just adds fuel to the fire of this whole innovation that crypto finally has arrived that we've talked about for like a decade now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:12] Tell me about the OpenAI case. Did they actually steal from a mathematician? What is the news here?

David Hoffman:
[40:18] Okay, so there is this like millennium math prize, a million-dollar math problem. There's a few of these out there, like I think six or something. One of them got solved this last week thanks to the work of artificial intelligence, thanks to LLMs, thanks to intelligence. The drama here, the debacle here is that the two people working on the problem, Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alapataji, sorry, I butchered that last name, were working, they've been working on this problem. They are the two humans working on this problem. And they spent a year working on this problem using both Anthropic co-work and OpenAI codecs. And so they were working on this problem as humans do, but feeding this into OpenAI codecs. They had published something close to a breakthrough. They were coming very, very close to solving this math problem. And then OpenAI publishes the solution to the math problem about the same time as they were getting ready to release their paper talking about how close they were. And so this has created a bunch of drama about why is there a coincidence in timing between these two people who are using OpenAI codecs almost nearly

David Hoffman:
[41:37] Cracking this case, cracking this math problem and then OpenAI does solve the problem and then releases their solution. And so there has apparently been reports, statements from Tristan Buckmaster, the mathematician who is the human behind this, about some sort of negotiation happening between them and OpenAI about who gets the credit. And OpenAI is happy to give the monetary prize to Tristan and his co-author Levant

David Hoffman:
[42:10] But they still want to take credit for actually solving the problem. And the claim is that OpenAI took the inputs that Tristan and his co-mathematician Levant were putting into OpenAI codecs, and they were using that as a jumping off point. And then OpenAI used a ton of compute to basically finish the job and truly solve the problem. There's privacy concerns here. There's provenance concerns here. And also one interesting bit is that the Levant character is an employee at Anthropic. And so in this negotiation between OpenAI and Tristan, the mathematician, they wanted Levant removed from the credit because they don't want anything associated with Anthropic. And so this has triggered a bunch of people in the privacy world and the just like data sovereignty world to say, like, look at what OpenAI is doing, probably also Anthropic 2. They are just consuming data and using it to train their models and inform their own processes. And these people are not your friends. They are not your friends. They will take your credit and they will take all of the fame that they can associated with it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:21] Okay, so the soft allegation here from Tristan is OpenAI basically stole my homework and now solved this as a result of basically my chat logs with OpenAI. And there's a word for this that comes to mind in crypto that we talk about all the time, which is the word front running.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:40] The allegation is that OpenAI front ran these mathematicians, took their proprietary information, they thought this was a private chat. And then actually used it in order to get the prize, capture the notoriety, solve the problem, and front-run their user base. And I think that's a fascinating way to frame it and certainly brings to light, what actually do companies like OpenAI and Anthropic use the chat logs and data for? And by default, David, they could use any of your chat logs for internal training. It's sort of vague as to what they're doing. But like, that's the default. You have to turn that off in Anthropic, in Cloud, I should say, and also ChatGPT, if you want them to not do that. And even then it's like, are they really doing it? It's a pinky promise. I mean, OpenAI came out and said, we didn't actually use any of these chat logs. They said, we cannot rule out that identified data derived from their usage of our product helped improve our models, but they're explicitly saying, no, we didn't steal these researchers' homework. And it's very difficult to prove. Can you actually prove this?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:57] There's such an asymmetry in terms of a user's ability to point at a large tech company like OpenAI and say, you stole from me. And I mean, how are they supposed to collect proof? We're like, where's, you know? So even the mathematicians here don't have evidence of this. But to your point, it really brings data sovereignty into the forefront. And I mean, is this part of the reason why some things are pumping like the VVB token? Like, you know, some of the privacy meta is happening in crypto. It's just like people are realizing big tech does not have your back when it comes to data sovereignty, when it comes to privacy. And, you know, you could go with the anti-tech movement of like, OK, let's just go back to paper. Let's not use AI. Let's not use computers. Or you could go to kind of the crypto data sovereignty expression of this, which is like, hey, use tech, but users retain the sovereignty of their own data. Like that's a message I feel like comes from crypto as part of the ethos and is maybe a reason why VVV is getting the uptick and some of the privacy tokens are doing well.

David Hoffman:
[46:09] There are a couple things I want to underscore here that if you just kind of try and remove the drama, some things are worth stating. One is that it can be true that when OpenAI, so at OpenAI, a team of OpenAI employees created a prompt to solve the math problem in question. What's the name of the math problem? The Navier-Stokes math problem, Millennium Prize problem. So OpenAI team members typed in a prompt to their own model, which I think was also like unreleased. It's not even the new ChatGPT6 model. It's something even more frontier that they have access to that no one else has access to. So they typed in a prompt that was like, solve this math problem.

David Hoffman:
[46:54] The model, it can be true that the model did not look at user data, but at the same time, the model itself was trained on the data anyways. And so the training can happen. So like when the mathematicians in question, Tristan and Levant, when they uploaded all of their drafts to OpenAI Codex, the OpenAI models are able to be trained on that data. But when the OpenAI researchers or users, the team members, typed in the prompt, solve this math problem, it can also be true that that data was not accessed because maybe they were actually, they didn't have their hands on the data. Both of those things can be true. So the LLMs can be trained on the data but when the LLM is being prompted, it doesn't have access to the data. That is the gap that OpenAI didn't really close here, saying like, yeah, we're not using your data but our LLMs are totally being trained on them is the thing that they did not say.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:53] Well, it's them benefiting from their data. And you made the point that that's actually part of the business model, right?

David Hoffman:
[47:58] Totally. That is the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and probably all of the Chinese models. Because if you are not using all of the

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:08] Data accessible to you... Not the Chinese models, probably not. Because Chinese models are just their open source, open way. Anyone can run the inference. I mean, I think it's less so the Chinese models.

David Hoffman:
[48:21] The point I want to make is that if you are in the arms race of model development, you need to get your hands on as much data as possible. That's right. That's OpenAI, that's Anthropic, and that's probably also Chinese models too. You need to get your hands on as much data as possible. And so OpenAI and Anthropic, one of the benefits of being in the position of being a consumer product, a direct-to-consumer product, is you get to have first access to all of this data. If you're not using that data, you are disadvantaging yourself as a matter of principle to protect your user's data sovereignty. So Dario and Sam are like, I don't care about those principles. I will suck up as much data as possible to improve the product because I'm in an arms race. So that's what's happening. And so that's just kind of like the toxic nature of the AI arms race. It is what it is. Also zooming out.

David Hoffman:
[49:13] AI, LLMs solve this math problem. That happened. And so ignoring the drama about open AI or Anthropic and who gets credit and like the humans that did the work, whatever, whatever, whatever. We have a millennium math problem, one of the six math problems that got solved because of AI. And I think it's also worth like, it's shrouded by all this drama and this credit, but it's still cool that AI solving huge math problems. And we are still not yet at the final capabilities of these AI models. And so it's worth stating that we are solving very cool problems and the future is going to be sick. And meanwhile, we have all this drama along the way, but it is very, very cool that AI is solving massive problems.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:55] I mean, but data sovereignty though, right? Like be careful, you put in your chat logs with a cloud or an open AI, right? On their enterprise tiers, apparently, you know, there's the legal contracts where they can't peep into your data. I don't know, there's a lot.

David Hoffman:
[50:08] But we don't know because once the data gets into the weight, The weight, the model weights of a LLM model are a black box. We don't know what data is in there. We just know that the weights are what they are. And once the data goes in there, you have no way to prove about whether your data got used to shift the tuning of those weights or not.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:30] It's all a big question of who's going to capture the value on top of all of the data. And more and more value seems to be captured by some of these frontier labs. And I think people are rightfully worried about that.

David Hoffman:
[50:43] Anyways, Venice, the platform that can't steal your data, is up 40% on the news. Also, Nier pushed through like 20 or 30% up on the week this week. And the Nier AI cloud platform, if you, listener, are interested in not having this happen to you, This is what Ilya and the Nier team have been working on and have been building on, like self-sovereign, user-sovereign AI, user-owned AI. And so it's cool that in crypto, we have the antidote to this problem, all this drama that's happening in the AI arms race. And so Nier AI, Nier sovereign AI, And so the Near AI cloud is built to exactly protect user data. And so shout out to Near and shout out to our partners at Near for helping build that and giving our users protection over their data.

David Hoffman:
[51:29] Ryan, are you ready to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:34] I am, but I think we need a break for sponsors first, don't we?

David Hoffman:
[51:37] We do. And so we'll get right to the hottest story of the week right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:43] Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search The DeFi Report wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

David Hoffman:
[52:30] On September 7th, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hunter Biden will be launching a meme coin called Laptop on the base chain. About four minutes later after the story broke, Hunter Biden posted the ticker and the date on X with a Fox News clip about said laptop. The laptop, Biden said, Hunter Biden said, had been turned into a weapon against him, but he was turning it into a token, a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery. He would go after Trump's meme coin grift, citing nearly a million wallets that had collectively $3.8 billion in losses. Hashtag or ticker laptop, he promised, would be different and compensate all those people who lost money on the Trump meme coin grift. Oh, no. Oh, no. Anyways, after crashing 99%, Hunter Biden had to go to Twitter to defend the launch on X. He blamed predatory snipers and also claimed that no one on the Hunter Biden team or in the Hunter Biden insider circle were able to sell any tokens, which earned himself a A community note, which identified multiple wallets receiving 100 million tokens, 10% of the supply, before the launch, and sold them all.

David Hoffman:
[53:48] Okay, so if I had to just give you a formula, starting with the Libra coin, it's an insider wallet. Blame snipers. Say you're doing this for some positive reason.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:01] Wait, the Libra coin, the Argentina coin.

David Hoffman:
[54:04] The Malay, yeah. Yeah, but I don't want to blame Malay because he was just kind of a useful idiot, unfortunately. But like, we've seen this movie so many times before. We've seen this movie, yeah. Like, say we're doing something good, blame snipers, there's insider wallets that get allocation early, they sell, the person in question says that the team is locked up and can't sell, the token dumps 99%. It's like, if you wanted to write the most normal movie about a shitty meme coin launch and have nothing change whatsoever about the formula, this was it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:41] Yeah, and you just swap out the political celebrity, whatever, with someone else and Vince Walsh repeat. Totally, totally. Depressing, depressing stuff, David.

David Hoffman:
[54:51] Also, why go against literally the world's greatest meme lord, Donald Trump, with a meme coin? Like, you're going to lose. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:00] Um, MetaMask is spinning out of ConsenSys, which is interesting. MetaMask, of course, was part of ConsenSys. ConsenSys, kind of an early Ethereum conglomerate. But they had an enterprise structure with their L2, Linnea, Bezu, all their institutional products. And then they also had this wallet, which is the MetaMask wallet. They are now splitting those two things into separate entities. So MetaMask is now off on its own. They're going to focus on the consumer use cases. Saw MetaMask rolled out like a MasterCard type product. Do you see where the future of that's going? It's kind of like consumer fintech meets crypto wallet. They're boasting. How many users do they have? Like 30 million users? A ton of users.

David Hoffman:
[55:47] The most, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:48] On the MetaMask side of things. And then everything else is staying within consensus. Joe Lubin is actually going to be the CEO of the MetaMask product. Oh, 100 million downloads was the stat I wanted to give. No mask token in the announcement. So don't know if that's coming, if that's ever coming. That has been a rumor for a lot of years. But big news that MetaMask is now splitting out of consensus.

David Hoffman:
[56:16] IPO?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:18] I don't know. I mean, there have been rumors for a long time that consensus was going to IPO. This might be a step towards that.

David Hoffman:
[56:25] Consensus IPO-ing without MetaMask is much more why. Like MetaMask and like one or two in FURA is the whole pie. And so MetaMask, I've mentioned this on the podcast many times before, is a like auditing mess. if you will. They started in 2015. They paid their first employees with Ether. They didn't have payroll. There was no books. It was a complete jumbled mess in the beginning. And I'm sure that that is just kind of unresolved because of how much of a spaghetti, unorganized mess that consensus was in the first few years. I'm sure that they have shaped up, but going back and fixing that, I don't really know how to take a company public. It's far easier and cleaner to spin out the things of consensus that make money and then have liquidity events on those things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:20] Yeah, maybe that's what they're doing. Maybe there's going to be a MetaMask IPO is what you're saying.

David Hoffman:
[57:23] MetaMask IPO, Infura IPO, like IPO these things individually and that's how Joseph Lubin and the consensus equity holders get their liquidity event.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:34] There was some news on the week from the Ethereum world about frame transactions. I think Vitalik put out a post. This is a feature that is going to be a headline feature, not in the next hard fork, not in Glamsterdam, which is supposed to still happen this year, 2026. But the one after that, Hogata, it's called in 2027. And frame transactions are going to be a headliner, a feature of that Hogatah hard fork. Vitalik talked about it. Can you simplify it for us? And you're pretty bullish on it, actually. Can you tell me why?

David Hoffman:
[58:12] Account abstraction. Yeah, we've had account abstraction as a subject in Ethereum land for forever. Even Ethereum layer twos tried to beat the Ethereum layer one with account abstraction. Account abstraction is a smart wallet. It's actually kind of like hard to explain because it's conceptually very different. It is an alternative to externally owned accounts. And so rather rather than having a dumb wallet, kind of in the same way that like Bitcoin is kind of like a dumb blockchain, it's like a simple blockchain and Ethereum is a smart contract blockchain. Externally owned accounts, which is your ledger, your MetaMask, your normal wallet, is a dumb wallet. And account abstraction is a smart wallet.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:52] It's programmable, right? So you could do stuff like you don't have to pay gas in ETH anymore. You could pay it in whatever token you have, including stable coins. An application can sponsor the gas fee, so you could have gasless transactions. You could have pass keys as sort of the private keys doing sign-ins. You can batch transactions.

David Hoffman:
[59:12] You can swap out private keys. You can have the same address, but a new private key, which is how actually much of Ethereum can become quantum proof, quantum resistant. When we were talking about like near two months ago or so, becoming quantum resistant first, it's because they had this structure. Right. And so you can easily swap out a address or a private key and have your front end address be the same. So that's what frame transactions? Limitless as to what you can do.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:38] But that's what frame transactions are, and it's coming in Hokita. Like, I guess I feel like we have been promised or we have talked about account abstraction so many different ways over the last like 10 years in Ethereum, right? Like at some level, I'm like, okay, like, cool. But like, why has it taken so long to get here? And why is this now being prioritized? Do you have any thoughts on that?

David Hoffman:
[1:00:04] It was always prioritized in some sense, like it was always destiny to have merged into Ethereum in the future. Why did it take so long? Because Ethereum is a startup mentality or because Ethereum and the EF development is a nonprofit mentality, not a startup mentality. It would have been far better to have had account abstraction during the wave of mass building in crypto during 2020 through 2022. Having those synergies aligned, having all the builders plus account abstraction would have been phenomenal for the development of not just Ethereum, but the industry at large. It's a shame that it has been taken so long. It has a shame that crypto as a whole and Ethereum as a whole has been has taken so long. Why is it taking 10 years? Why? Because Ethereum is a decentralized system. We needed to argue on standards. We didn't have as much data now as we did then.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:56] I think on account abstraction, though, people forget there were like precursor EIPs to this, like multiple things tried. Do you remember there's the ERC 4337.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:06] Which is just basically a wallet would have to adopt it. That would be more account abstraction. The adoption levels, you know, never really took off. It didn't really become kind of the default choice for wallets. But at least that like tested out the idea of smart accounts and programmability and how that would work inside of the Ethereum network. So I feel like now that we have those building blocks in place, there's more, you know, it's battle tested, I suppose. And so now they can go all in on frames and just make it part of the core protocol. But the big reason I think this is prioritized, David, is because like you're going to need to replace signatures due to quantum. The signatures in Ethereum are not quantum secure. Those have to be replaced. Ethereum also, the EF came out this week and said, by 2029, we want to have the entire Ethereum stack quantum secure. Okay, so that's a lot of things to replace. This is one of them. This, I think, is why the EF has prioritized. I don't think it was because of better UX. I think they haven't cared about that as much as other things. I think it was really quantum signatures that kind of pushed it as this, like, we have to have this in order to get to our deadline in 2029. That's how I read it.

David Hoffman:
[1:02:27] Yeah. I do remember talking, I can't remember which EF researcher it was, when the first iteration of account abstraction got merged for 4337. Account abstraction had been discussed in 2016 and 2017 and 2018, and then it got put onto the shelf, and then it finally had its first implementation in 2023 with 4337. And like one of the researchers, the quote that like resonates in my brain was like, this just proves that there was no good reason for why we put account obstruction on the shelf in the first place. We could have had this forever ago. And that was in 2023. Yeah. So like once again, hit beat a horse, beat a dead horse to answer your question. Why did it take 10 years? There's no good reason. Yeah. Other than like there was no forcing function other than quantum.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:03:13] Right. Right. Well, I guess glad we have quantum as a forcing function. I'm not sure. I'm not sure the reason, but getting it next year, that is the big news.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:03:24] David, let's end with this. So next week, the Clarity Act, it's do or die week. They vote on cloture. Odds on Polymarket are about 15% right now. People think it's going to fail because-

David Hoffman:
[1:03:37] 15% that it

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:03:38] Passes. That it passes. So the odds of failure are 85%. The reason is because the ethics language hasn't really been, that bridge hasn't been crossed. Probably the Democrats also just don't want to throw another bone to crypto or to Trump, any things on his agenda prior to midterms. So I don't think this is going to happen. Are you bothered by this?

David Hoffman:
[1:04:03] Hey, 15% is not zero. 15% is like... It's possible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:04:10] We'll see where it goes next week.

David Hoffman:
[1:04:12] It could happen. Bankless Nation, thanks for sticking with us another week. Hopefully, this is the start of a very long and glorious bull market. And if it is, we will be here along the way. Crypto is risky, however, but not risky enough. The institutions are landed, so we are going even further west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you were with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.