ROLLUP: SBF 25 Years | Coinbase vs. SEC | Blobs Demand | Blast Controversy

I'm glad it's over. It's done. We don't have to talk about it anymore. Is this the last weekly roll-up for Sam Bankman Freed? I hope so.

I could be a very

Well could be.

Bankless Nation, it is your Friday weekly roll-up end, the last one of March 2024. What do we got for him, David?

Blobs trying to take down the Ethereum layer one. Why? Why are they doing this to us? We also got base fees moving up. That's base the chain, not base fees. Uh, I thought layer twos were cheap now. What the hell's going on? Over $100 transaction fees were just seen on base in this last week. Also, North Korea is back. A $62 million exploit on a BLAST app leads to an existential crisis about whether or not BLAST is centralized. Ryan, what else we got?

Uh you said they're back, but I don't think North Korea ever left, David. That's uh that's the problem we had.

The ballmark gets that back, and now North Korea is back with us.

You know who else is here though? This time Larry Fink is here, okay? And uh he racked up some more wins this week. We're gonna talk about that. Also, he weighed in on the Ethereum ETF. I want to tell you what he said, David. And Coinbase is moving more of their stuff from their private ledger to on chain. So we'll talk about that.

Athena announces their token. One of the most hyped token drops recently. Also, probably the biggest news of the week SBF gets sentenced. So we actually know how many years SBF is going to be sentenced in jail. How many? We'll let you know. Years or

Decades, David.

uh decades. Decades. Okay. Okay. That's a tease. Nikes. Uh, and then probably the most hilarious moment of Zen that you all have ever heard on the Bankless Weekly Roll Up or ever in crypto. Probably the funniest skit uh is at the end of the uh of this uh podcast. So thanks for joining us here. We're gonna cover the entire weekly news in crypto. Uh, but first we're gonna talk to our friends and sponsors over at what do people say about the Bitcoin price?

Well, they're saying that it's up on the week, I think. I don't know, you do prices. This is the first time I've looked at it. Here are the Bitcoin charts for listeners here. Uh what are we at on the week?

Bitcoin start of the week at 65,200, up eight and a half percent to where it is right now. Oh yeah. Nailed it. Uh $70,700 at the current uh current time of recording. Almost back up to the all time highs. That whole like dump week that everyone thought we were going into a bear market last week is gone now. Um uh we went back up. Um so all the bears are wrong once again. Uh bears go back to hibernation. We don't want you here.

Yeah, they're they're gonna be so weak. They are so the bears are so weak this entire bull market, man. Look at them. Like

getting mouth

They had like they didn't even have seven days, man. They had like five days of victory and then they're gone now.

and we're almost up to all time high. So what is the official out all time high? It's uh 73 something, 73.

I will tell you it is

Yeah, you tell seventy four

okay. Um can we look at flows? Because that's the the driver, right? And uh we had some last time we were talking about Bitcoin on the last weekly roll up, we had negative flows

for the first time. That felt bad. I'm talking Bitcoin ETF flows. Where are we this week?

Actually, still negative, but kind of just like marginally so. Fidelity actually had the biggest inflows this week. Uh there it's about flat. Um last week it was very red. It was very uh weighted towards the out uh flows out. Uh this week it's about flat. We're you know hanging, hanging just right where exactly where we were. Um you can only assume that this is going to resume up only, you know, just like seven days, not that much time.

You know who's been a big winner of these flows all along? It's uh this guy right here. This guy I'm showing uh Larry Larry.

Our ally,

Yeah. Ally question mark. Okay, here he is on Fox News.

I I'm very bullish um on the long term viability of Bitcoin. I was gonna say did that surprise you that surprised me how much that's gone up. I mean, look at it it's it is we we're creating now a market that has more liquidity, more transparency. And I'm I'm pleasantly surprised, and I would never have predicted it before we filed it, that we were gonna see this type of retail demand.

You thought you'd do good, but not this good.

I thought yes.

iBit is iBit is your ETF over at iShares.

It's about to overtake Grayscale, which was in the business uh certainly a lot longer. You look at the gains since January eleventh when it first came about.

Have you ever seen this much inflow this quickly into

IBIT is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs.

The fastest growing ETF in the history of ETF. Look at this guy's face right here. Larry Larry Fake. Let's enlarge this face. That is a happy man on his face.

a happy, happy man.

He is very happy. This overperformed his expectations. He didn't think it would be such a big deal. And uh I think he's pretty much crypto pilled and crypto bowled. He he he tastes profit, David. That's what's going on in this clip.

There's a chart that we're looking at here which shows the uh Bitcoin price in log uh overlaid the actual uh Bitcoin going into institutions. Uh and it starts last bull market. Because if you remember, Ryan, last bull market, it was like it was the bull market of the uh the cycle where all the institutions are gonna put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. It turns out it was a super strategy. Yeah, it's just

Yeah.

Who did a fantastic job actually just like being the sole institution putting Bitcoin on the balance

It was one guy.

sheet's one guy, yeah. But no now BlackRock's here. Uh and the size of the hockey stick that once the actual real institutions come in to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, it's hard to it's hard to express how big it is.

Yeah, I guess that's a hockey stick.

As a rocket launch. As a rocket launch. Yeah. It goes from 200 units to 80,000 units of Bitcoin, like really, really fast. This is the year. This is the cycle where the institutions actually came. I remember in 2017, Ryan, everyone was talking about, oh, the institutions are coming. You gotta buy these ICO tokens now because the institutions are totally gonna come and buy our bags. Uh and then turns out they didn't come. And then in 2021, it's like you gotta buy, you gotta buy all these NFTs because the institutions are coming. Turns out that didn't happen. It is actually happening for the first time in my crypto career. The institutions are actually here.

Hotline from Matt Hogan this week. You know how the uh institutions used to say like the thing was get off zero, seriously, like one percent, allocate one percent. He said three percent is the new one percent.

Right.

Not enough for large asset managers to just have one percent in crypto. You gotta have three percent.

1% sparish.

Yeah, one percent is bearish. Uh let's talk about the ETH price. Is that bearish or bullish on the week?

It's bullish on the week, start of the week, $30,440 up three and a half percent to three thousand five hundred and eighty dollars where we are right now at the time of recording. I'm sure it'll be uh sometime something different by the time you listen to this, though. Because like why the hell do we

Three percent though. Only three percent, Dave.

three percent's flat?

Yeah, that feels flat to me now. When you look at Bitcoin, it's like uh eight and a half percent. I think the big question is are we going to get some of that institutional ETF magic inside of um Ethereum? And David, I don't know if you saw this, but Fidelity filed officially an S1 form for their spot Ethereum ETF with staking included. So I saw this and I wondered. I asked, is this a big does this improve our chances of getting an Ethereum ETF done by May? What's the answer to that?

Definitely not. And I have I've got another uh conspiracy for you this week. Are you ready for the second conspiracy about ETS in two weeks?

Yeah, sure.

Okay, so this one is that why are all of these like almost every single ETH ETF has a staking component included in it? And people are like, why are you doing that? That's like risky, not conservative. Like we don't even have the ETH ETF approved. Why are you guys trying to get staking in the ETFs? That's like hard mode. Why aren't you going for easy mode? The conspiracy is that uh everyone is assuming that we're gonna get a denial uh in May, a May denial. But then what happens is that we are we like grayscale, whoever Coinbase is going to sue the ET uh the SEC for denying the ETH ETF and for the SEC for being arbitrary and capricious. And then the SEC is going to be forced to approve the ETH ETF later, and they're gonna have to approve them in whatever form they are uh they are filed under with staking. Yes. And so they are they are.

I don't know.

Yeah. You think so? I

I'm thinking it's a bridge too far, David. I don't know

don't think it'd be first straight. I don't okay bear.

Don't call me a bear, but uh I don't know about that. But here's somebody who's on your side, at least with respect to the conspiracy theory you've got to do. This was my last

Last week's conspiracy