ROLLUP: A New Era For Crypto | Bitcoin All Time High | Polymarket Dominance | Where Do We Go Next?

This afternoon, I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world. And we'll get it done. And the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris's anti crypto crusade will be over. It will end. It'll be done.

It'll be done.

On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman.

There it is, David. The absolute loudest cheer on the firing of Gary Gensler. Gotta say on the week, Gary Gensler's reign of terror is over. It's over, man. And we're at all time highs. I think those two things are related, David.

And these clips that you just heard, that was from uh the Bitcoin conference a number of months ago. But it's just a reminder for what is going to happen, or at least Donald Trump says will happen, when he enters office on January twentieth, twenty twenty five. So we still have a couple months. Technically, Gary Gensler still has a couple months to shoe in some Wells notices. That's technically still possible.

Yeah.

I would not put him put it past him. The guy is getting the boot. He could cause some chaos on the way out. But nonetheless, like you said, the reign of terror is definitely going to come over. And then the day that we get a Bitcoin president, Bitcoin gets an all time high. Brand new all time high, which is pretty exciting. Regardless of your personal politics, you have to say that like it's a huge win for crypto in America.

Well, I think everyone listening, you know, I I'm sure a lot of uh folks voted uh Trump, who are are bankless listeners. I'm sure you like a fair number also voted the other side. I mean, regardless of which way you voted, you gotta be happy about this outcome of Gary Gensler is leaving office. And you you you said um you Trump was talking about he was talking to a Bitcoin conference, of course. Yes. Let's also keep in mind he has like ETH. He has like five million dollars worth of ETH.

Donald Trump is an Ethereum DeFi project founder.

A DeFi project founder is the president of the United States, the president elect.

This is so crazy. It's so crazy. All right. So let's just start there. Okay. Uh the big news is, of course, U.S. elections, and it was a complete red wave sweep. Okay. So let's talk about the presidency. Is the case that Trump not only won the Electoral College and all the votes from that, he also won the popular vote, which was completely unexpected by a lot of people. I don't know what polymarket predicted, but completely unexpected.

Market predicted Harris would win the popular vote by like 60%, 60, 40%. And for the abroad listeners, the non-American listeners, the way the there were three things at stake uh every uh election. There's the president, there's the Senate, and there's the House. And what Ryan means by red wave is that the conservatives, the Republicans, won all three of those. And now whether or not they were going to win all three was up for debate. There were some the polymarket was leaning towards that outcome. Uh, but a complete red wave was a surprise. Uh and then the cherry on top is that even though the Democrats, Kamala Harris, was expected to win the popular vote, and the why the popular vote is not equivalent to the president is like, you know, that's our electoral college system. We know it's weird. Uh, the regardless, Kamala was expected to win the popular vote 6040. And even that, the cherry on top, the insult to injury for the Democrats was that Donald Trump also won the popular vote. So to say that Donald Trump and uh being more right is in vogue is like kind of an understatement. Like the people are looking towards Donald Trump's leadership in America.

The one thing I should call it qualify is like officially, officially, the Republicans have not won the House yet. Officially, officially. I guess like the final numbers are not in, but it's looking like they're going to win the House as well. So that would be a complete clean sweep. Of course, Trump in his uh victory speech called this a the golden age of America. He also spent a few minutes praising Elon Musk and uh thanking him for donating $120 million to the campaign. I don't know if you saw the Kamala Harris concession as well, but uh she conceded, you know, said said it was over. Uh we got a free and fair election. There was no dispute. I mean, that is another plus side on the back of this, too.

I would agree. Moving on to the Senate, the Republicans flipped control over the Senate, which was the expected outcome. So there are now more Republican senators than Democrats. And again, this means that we we, the crypto industry, have a much favorable uh legislative body for any possible future legislation that we want to push through in the United States. There was a key Senate race in Ohio. Bernie Moreno, the Republican, defeated Sherrard Brown. This was very important for the crypto industry. Sherrod Brown is the current chair of the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees the SEC. He is a Gary.

Tensler's boss.

This is Gary Gensler, one one of Gary Gensler's boss. Yeah, he he has been the major roadblock for getting many things done in crypto. He voted against Sab 121. He has been a big ally of Elizabeth Warren. This was also one of the races that Fair Shake, the crypto, the pro crypto super PAC, spent the most amount of money on out of all of the Senate and House races. Spent like something like $20 million on it. And the signal here is that this was.

specifically a crypto um a crypto issue, a crypto race. Uh and so this has been called uh by Alex Thorne, who we had on the podcast to kind of unpack all this, a big shot across the bow for every anti crypto member of Congress.

Wow. Well I mean they literally painted a a target on his back

Yeah.

and then like went and spent in the selection to just like make sure that he didn't win.

Yeah, this guy, uh Sherrod Brown, who's gone now, was a player in Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Uh and so Operation Choke Point 2.0 lost a uh a big uh key player today, this election.

And the House, as we said, it's looking like that's going to flip uh red as well. Some commentary from Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. He said, Welcome to the new members of America's most pro crypto Congress ever. There were 219 pro crypto candidates in counting that have been elected to the House and the Senate. That number is a major takeaway for everybody who's worked in kind of the crypto lobbying space. 219 pro crypto can't candidates that were just elected to the House and the Senate.

I remember entering the bear market post FTX thinking like, whoa, what wrath, what regulatory wrath have we just brought upon us? And that was two years ago.

And now I would say, like, we got that wrath, and but now the pendulum is shifting so far in the other direction, just as a reaction to the unfair wrath that we got. Uh I got I like this tweet from Victor Bunin who tweeted out Crypto One. Next we're going to free Ross, fire Gary, end Operation Chokepoint 2.0, pass common sense uh stablecoin legislation, enable end-kind redemptions, turn on staking in the Ethereum ETF, shutter the SEC lawfare investigations, and provide regulatory clarity for crypto. I think there is a just a great big, wide open, clear path for the next steps for what we want out of the next four years of leadership in America. Uh we can now get things done. Now it's our turn to actually get things done.

Uh yeah, at least on the crypto side, that that's uh certainly true. And a lot of questions, I think there's gonna be a hand-wringing, a lot of hand-wringing on like where the Democrats went wrong this cycle. This is um Paul Graham commenting, so a notable investor. Their biggest mistake, he's talking about the Democrats here. Their biggest mistake was antagonizing the entire crypto community. And this was entirely unnecessary. There wasn't some other constituency they were trying to win points with by doing it.

This is Paul Graham noticing this, who's not see he's peripheral to crypto, but he's not actually

He's not a crypto person.

he's not a crypto person. He's a commentary.

This is something that you and I had mentioned uh like preceding this. You know, other when when Kamala Harris was the nominee, okay, could this be an opportunity for Kamala Harris to pivot? She actually never pivoted, right? And I remember thinking like what this whole anti-crypto army thing and like um not speaking in kind of pro-crypto terms at all. Like it would be very easy for Kamala Harris in the campaign to kind of nullify everything that Trump said by being like, we're pro-crypto too. Why would you not be pro-crypto, pro-technology, pro-America? It's all the same thing. And I remember thinking, this has got there must be a method to the madness here. They must see something I don't. They must see some collection of votes, or there must be some reason that they're doing that. It turns out, David, there was no method to the madness. There was no strategy here. It was just old fashioned Ivory Tower hubris that led them down this path. I feel like it wasn't Trump who who won so much as the Democrats decided to lose. Like they were completely ignoring not only crypto, but other large constituencies in the U.S. voter base.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Paul Greywall, the chief legal officer from Coinbase, says, I hope the SEC understands what happened tonight. On many, many issues, the voters said loud and clear that they want change. Crypto is no exception. Stop suing crypto. Start talking to crypto, initiate rulemaking. There's no reason to wait. Uh I think we're gonna look back on this election, and uh Gary Gensler was a key player in this election uh for losing it for the Democrats. Uh and the Democrats just not hearing those signals at all from the crypto, the crypto constituency, which they also underestimated. Emily Choi, she tweeted out a headline saying the crypto industry spent over $130 million on the election and it paid off. And she comments, we're just getting started. Uh interesting to know. Did you know, did you see the Harris campaign is actually ending $20 million in debt, Ryan? No, you see the headline this morning. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

Ah

I don't know, but uh Brian Armstrong and other Fair Shake pack uh members and or commentators talks about how like FairShake is already accepting donations and spending money to win the midterm elections in two years. Like we're already gearing up for the next one.

It was fantastic, uh, ROI. And this is why I think crypto is uh definitely here to stay. Alex Thorne made the comment: what does this mean in the broad strokes? Can you hear that? That's the sound of thousands of crypto and blockchain founders booking tickets to the United States, looking up office space. He's saying there's going to be a flood of founders and entrepreneurs who are going to come back to the US for crypto. Crypto is now turning towards a uh friendly jurisdiction, which I think is a big freaking deal. Do you remember all of the Wells notices that we got this year? All of those will just like evaporate in a puff of smoke. I think they're going to be gone. So many of the things that Gary Gensler, the CFTC, Operation Choke Point, FDIC, Treasury were doing to push against crypto and to try to squeeze it out of existence. That's going to be not just stopped. It's going to be actually reversed. We're actually going to get tailwinds in our direction on the regulatory front. And I'll just point out we have never had that before in crypto. We have never been in crypto. Crypto has never existed at a time when the US had a crypto friendly regulatory regime. The way the US was crypto was internet friendly in the 90s, I think this is the opportunity to swing crypto friendly in the 2020s, the first time ever.

Uh and if anyone knows um a job for someone who is good at uh gaslighting and just bureaucracy, uh Gary Gensler, open to work. He's look looking for work.

Maybe we could ship them to Europe, Dave.

He would fit in so well over there. Another big player out of the election this week was, of course, Polymarket. Uh Ryan, um, you were watching the election, I'm assuming. I'm assuming you had, I'm gonna guess that you had mainstream media on your television and you were in some way, shape, or form, iPad, phone, computer, laptop had also Polymarket open.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the way I've traditionally done it. You have you know like mainstream media, some sort of ABC, NBC, whatever, like caught calling election results in real time. And then I had my phone with polymarket just like hitting refresh.

Right. Yeah. I think most people who are listening to this podcast probably had some form of that setup. But having Polymarket open was such an asset. It was so cool to see because you are watching the the results come in, you're seeing some numbers show up on the screen. But Polymarket is just giving you such a clear picture, so much faster than what's on your television. Hours ahead. Hours ahead. Like, so uh I remember listening to a podcast, I think it was the Daily, and they talked about when uh they were talking about when the Kamala campaign realized that like

Something wasn't so great. Yeah. And they said like it was at 11 p.m. Eastern time was when was when the comp when the campaign realized that the votes in the swing states were not coming in. I'm like, what do you mean, 11 p.m.? Polymarket was reacting before 8 p.m. Dude, I market swinged heavily towards Trump at 8 p.m., three hours ahead of when the Kamala campaign realized it.

At 7 30 Eastern, Georgia was start on polymarket was starting to swing. And you could see it, oh, polymarket settling, Georgia swinging. That was the first uh like swing state. And then by eight or eight thirty, I was like, it's over. I can go to bed. Poly marketing.

And and the reason why is like pe people say you know poly market, prediction markets, all probabilities. But when you start to see a market resolve at the tail end, right, that's an indicator. It's like it's just there's this divergence in the charts. And in a market's like, okay, this market's resolving because you see like Trump jump up to like 80% odds and Tacamala, you know, drop down to like less than 20%, and it resolves. And it's so cool to watch this in real time. It's much faster than any of the mainstream media organizations are able to call these elections. It's just a different tool, it's a different type of intelligence and truth.

And we can talk about like whether you think like MSNBC, NBC, ABC commentators are biased. But also when one of the conversations was like they the swing states, they're just waiting for the very end to call these swing states, even though they are obviously leaning Trump. Well, MSNBC humans, they cannot call states until the very until it is completely objective that the state is one for one side or the other. So they they can't undo a call. They can't they can't think that it's going to advance they're more conservative. So like they're kind of hamstrung by their own mechanism. Whereas Polymarket is an alternative mechanism that just moves so much faster. Shane Copeland, the founder of Polymarket, tweeted out, I just got word that the Trump campaign headquarters literally found out that they were winning from Polymarket.

History was made today. Wow, that's so cool. That is so cool.

Yeah, and uh actually the polymarket forecast, this is the the chart of the US map, the polymarket forecast, right? You could see red states, blue states, you see the actual results

They are the same thing. This is the Polymarket forecast on October 25th. So 20 uh 10 days ago,

ten days before.

PolyMarket had the actual results nailed on the city. Much different than

The poll data. Like if you if you cast that map and poll data, it would be just like completely different. And PolyMarket kind of nailed it. Um all-time highs for PolyMarket. Some stats from yesterday. Got 20 million website views, yeah, 300 million in volume, one million concurrent users across the web and app at peak. I mean, safe to say crypto has a mainstream application. It's built on Polygon, by the way, which I think the future of Polygon is to become a layer two, you know, roll up on top of Ethereum. So very bullish, and people don't even know they're using crypto. Of course, ironic, David, that um, you know, you US citizens cannot actually bet in these markets. That's part of the irony of this whole election win.

not legally, but I think there's plenty of US citizens. Another tweet from Shane saying uh with a picture.

2020, running out of money, solo founder, headquarters in my makeshift bathroom office. Little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world, and he's tweeting out what kind of looks like.

This is a j

I'm not in the office. He's super janky. He's got his laptop on like a laundry hamper. Yeah. He's got his keyboard on his like knees. I mean, hey, that's what a uh a gritty founder looks like. Congratulations to Shane and the entire polymarket team. Uh also, behind the scenes, like you said, Ryan Haseeb uh put out this tweet. Can we just take a second to shout out Polygon for handling all the polymarket load right now? Volumes going crazy, zero downtimer issues as far as we've seen. So uh there are certain uh polymarket activities that are all done on chain. Basically, all of the market actions, activities, placing an order, taking an order, you know, all the all the things that may are going to a market on polymarket are done on chain on Polygon. Uh so both polymarkets like back end, it's it's back end, front end, all of its servers stayed online. Good job, guys. Did not go. Polygon, the blockchain, also stayed online. Probably one of like uh crypto's most trafficked events ever. Yeah. Uh well done. Well done.

pretty impressive. Uh meanwhile in France, I don't know if you saw this, but France is planning to ban user access to polymarket, according to a report.

Okay? So

Oh my God, they would.

literally the government in France thinks that like institutional trust is in an all-time low and the solution for that is to ban prediction markets.

Like a very bad idea. And these are the types of ideas coming out of bureaucrats. So um good to see kind of the U.S. uh swing in a different direction. Bye-bye, Gary Gensler is a summary. Bye-bye, Operation Choke Point. I don't think we've ever existed in a world where the U.S. government is openly supportive of crypto. This is like uncharted territory. We're gonna get into the markets in a second, but we got a word from our friends and sponsors over at let's move to the uh the markets, okay? We got uh all time high week over here at Bankless. We we don't often get those, so let's let's celebrate it for a second. We hit all time highs for Bitcoin. Was this before or after the election results came?

After right after the election, like like one 30 minutes an hour after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win. Okay. We got $76,000 on Binance, $76,460 on Kraken, and $76,500 on Coinbase. CoinGecko is reporting this at $76,250, so kind of like a median between all of those. So somewhere around $76, like $200,0300,000. That's our new all time high. Is our new all time high for Bitcoin? For Bitcoin. Wow. Pretty cool. 75, nice number. Not too far away from 100,000, man. Like we could see 100,000 by the end of this year.

Did you know this, David? Fun fact. Each US election week has set a Bitcoin price floor that's never been revisited.

Yeah, wow.