ROLLUP: Bitcoin to $57K? | Wall Street Bets on Hyperliquid | The Tokenization War | Zcash Drama

0:04 Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of October. It's weekly roll-up time this week. Everyone gave a Bitcoin price prediction. We're going to run through all of them. Bitwise targeted $1.6 million by 2036 with a bare case of $131,000. Just a slight deviation between those. Willy Woo ran 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations.

0:28 The median output came $1.5 million by 2034. But the the 2028 target is somewhere between 240,000 and 413,000. We're going to talk about all these. Mike Nadeau from the DeFi report, he gave a target between 200 and 375,000 in a couple of years. But Jason Kalkanis, notable crypto investor, says dump it all now because $50,000 is coming.

0:55 Somebody is very wrong about this. So we're going to run through all the price targets. And also the big topic of the week was that Hyperliquid gets buy-in from ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is partnering with TradeXYZ to bring Hyperliquid to America, to U.S. markets. Stanley Druckenmiller, who is an investor in ICE, tweeted out an endorsement of Hyperliquid.

1:20 Apparently it's his only tweet ever. Elon Musk retweets that tweet saying interesting. And then also the New York Stock Exchange gets in on the pro hyperliquid dogpile this week, too. Hyperliquid has won the week. A very big week for hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is up like 17%, touching all-time highs, both in dollars and in Bitcoin terms.

1:39 I think it's a big week for tokenizing stocks in general or like crypto having markets for stocks for sure. But there's been some pushback about that that we'll get into as well. Also, Venice is breaking one million in VVV per month. David, I want to ask a question to you about token buybacks. And what you think about them in the context of Venice and some other assets.

2:00 We're going to debate about buybacks once again. Also, tell me about Zcash. There was some controversy in their dev fund. I want to get the news from you on that and some news from Athena as well. But, you know, I think we should start today's episode since we're going to get into all of these Bitcoin price predictions.

2:17 Let's start with the bear case first. for Bitcoin from none other than, as you said it, Jason Kalkanis. He is a co-host of the All In podcast. I think it was about three years ago, maybe, he tweeted out, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI. The famous pivot to AI tweet. I kind of wish I followed that advice at the time.

2:38 Actually, crypto in that moment, Bitcoin in that moment, did very, very well because not long thereafter, BlackRock filed for the Bitcoin ETF. So it was actually kind of... Not quite as well as Anthropic, let's say, or some of the AI stocks. Nvidia, maybe, at that time could have outperformed Bitcoin.

2:56 You would have done well to not pivot to AI. You would have also have done well to pivot to AI. Both categories won. AI won a lot more, obviously. He's doubling down on that take in a big way. So he says this, A brutal year for Bitcoin is just getting started. Give me three minutes to explain. What the fuck does he know?

3:13 Give me three minutes to explain why you should dump it now. He lists ETF outflows. They're a signal. They're going to continue. He says we're going to test the 57K Bitcoin low, the June low, in the next 12 months. He knows this for certain. Why? He lists all of these reasons. Again, it's three minutes to tell you.

3:32 I'm not going to waste three minutes on this. But basically, he says Bitcoin is an unproductive... asset. It doesn't do anything. Why buy Bitcoin when you can have productive cash flowing AI assets that actually add value in the real economy and generate productivity, generate cash flow? Why in the world would you do that?

3:53 And so this is, of course, coming from an AI investor. I think he's been pretty bearish on crypto in general for a while now. But it also reads to me like he's And I'm kind of like, I read this and it kind of makes me bullish. Yeah, this is coming at the same time Shamath has also pivoted on Bitcoin.

4:15 So you can go back to Shamath's statements around Bitcoin. He's like, yeah, it's going to the moon. It's going to the moon. It's going to a million dollars a coin. It's going to the moon. Three million dollars a coin, blah, blah, blah. For like a decade, you know, he's been, Shamath has been very pro-Bitcoin for a long time.

4:28 And he's saying the same thing. I think Calcandis might actually kind of be just like echoing Shamath here. Shamath is like, yeah, I actually think it's going to be hacked and go to zero, basically. Yeah. Really? Is he saying like quantum risk and such or like AI? I think it's implied. I don't know if he said the keyword, but I think it's implied that just because of just tech vulnerabilities these days, I think he's kind of lumping Bitcoin in with that.

4:53 And then Jason, who's, you know, is happy to poke at people on Twitter. I think he knew exactly what he was doing with this tweet. But like saying that Bitcoin will never break its all time high ever again is kind of like famous last words. All right. Well, AI investors doing victory laps. We'll go to the bull takes on Bitcoin, but the bear takes is that it's going to drop below 57K in the months to come.

5:16 First, maybe we should talk about the FOMC. They had their little meeting, as they do. Their little meeting, huh. They have left rates unchanged at this point in time. So it was a 10 to 2 decision. There were two dissenters saying that rates should actually go up. 10 individuals on the FOMC saying, let's keep the same.

5:36 So let's keep it the same. One, they said they're going to wait for some more economic indicators. They want to see inflation numbers, which, by the way, we have those. They just came out today, but they weren't available for the FOMC meeting. And they reasserted their commitment to deliver on price stability.

5:55 So keeping rates the same. Now, we should say that the markets are predicting, the prediction markets, Polymarket, a Fed decision in December to increase rates at about 80%, to raise rates at 80%. Is that downstream of the inflation numbers that we just got this morning? I think it's downstream of that, and it's also downstream of the Fed decision to not raise rates at this particular FOMC.

6:19 Okay. They just kind of punted it out? It seems that way. That's how the market is interpreting it right now, but no rate raise this time around. And that was pretty much expected by markets. Yeah. So this morning's PCE came in for September going the wrong way. The headline is 3.6% year over year. It's in line with forecasts.

6:43 It's just like the direction of PCE inflation is just not going ways that feel comfy. So there's just been three months of acceleration. So headline year over year inflation went from 3.3 to 3.4 to 3.6%. At the same time, you can just look at the oil prices. Oil is, I checked it this morning, $111 a barrel.

7:04 A few dollars off of its recent highs, but still $111 a barrel is as expensive as it's been in recent times since the Iran war conflict. And so the longer that that stays elevated, the even more, even further inflation you can bake in. And I think there's also just been rumors and mumblings about a renewed escalation in the Iran war conflict once the midterms get over.

7:25 So the midterms are coming up next week on Tuesday. Finally, we can get those behind us for whatever that does to the market, bearish, bullish, or just nothing. At least we'll have certainty. We can get that out of the way. Yeah, once we get out of the way. But then there's where it's like, okay, great.

7:39 Now once the midterms are over, Trump has no cost to escalating the war in Iran. He seems to be like lasered in on Iran. He doesn't want to let up on that. And so are we going to start bombing Iran once the midterms are over? And so... That's going to, if that does happen, that'll send oil even higher, which is going to send inflation even higher.

7:59 So just like plenty of worry to climb as we do climb this like wall of worry, especially with regards to inflation. Because, you know, you just can't imagine that like being an asset investor is going to feel super comfy as inflation goes any higher than this. Yeah, it's been sticky upwards quite a bit.

8:16 I remember, like, earlier this week when we recorded, I guess that was last week, we recorded with Michael Howell. He had a take when you asked him about inflation. You were like, hey, are these numbers real or do you think it's higher? He was like, it's higher. And if you want to see why I think it's higher, it's not real.

8:32 Yes. Look at the consumer confidence data. He said in our episode, I'd say the real measure is consumer confidence survey data. I mean, that's what the low consumer confidence is telling you. Inflation is a problem. So consumer confidence has been pretty much down only. Since 2020. Yeah. Since 2020, we had obviously the COVID dip and it stayed low.

8:56 2022, we sort of got a recovery and then it sloped downwards. You know, Kyla Scanlon has called this kind of the vibe session. It seems like economists can't really get their arms wrapped around the reason consumer confidence keeps ebbing down, but it does. Other than affordability? It's probably affordability.

9:17 That's what Michael Howell is saying. It's just like economists haven't really figured this out yet. Your basic starter house is something like $600,000. I mean, that's got to impact how you feel about buying things. It did tick up, though, on the month. which was interesting. So we had the first big consumer confidence jump in, first up for the first time in four months.

9:39 So 91.7 versus 81. I don't really know how that number is derived, but I think that's kind of, it's just kind of like a one tick up on side of a very long, slow descent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this goes into just inflation. It's like people feel bad about the economy, which is weird, though, because consumer spending is actually very, very high.

9:59 Maybe that goes into affordability. It's because like, well, consumers are spending all of their paychecks, but spending is high, which is bolstering the economy. Yeah, I guess you'd have to cohort that, you know, spending is high among what like group? Is it sort of the wealthy kind of the top 10% or is it more evenly distributed?

10:17 Let's get to Bitcoin price, though. We have four predictions on the week. I don't know if everyone looked at the market and said, OK, we're in early bull. It's time for our Bitcoin bull market predictions. But a whole bunch of people drop predictions on the week. Where should we start? We can start with Willy Woo.

10:36 Willy Woo is a pretty notable Bitcoin on-chain data analyst and price predictor. So he reads a lot of on-chain data for Bitcoin. He tweeted out a 10,000 possible Bitcoin futures, a random walk simulation trained on Bitcoin accounting for power law degradations of return. And so in the 28th to 50th percentile, so that means like the bottom 28 to the median 50 percentile, the return, the predicted return is between $240,000 and $413,000 for the 2028 top percentile.

11:11 in December of 2028. So that's a little bit more than two years from now. $240,000 to $413,000. That's pretty bullish, I would say, for what ought to be a conservative investment. What this does not include is, if you believe that there has been just like a structural regime change in crypto, that happened maybe one to three years ago, and crypto is just more pessimistic and not going to return to its previous levels of acceleration and momentum, which is what Jason Kalkanis is saying.

11:44 If you believe that there has been a structural rewriting of crypto to the downside, then that would be too bullish. But if you don't believe that, and maybe that was just an anomaly, and the non-sovereign store of value 21 million hard cap digital gold thesis is actually as strong as it's ever been, then this would actually be conservative.

12:02 And it's actually that $413,000 2028 December top that would be the normative thing to hypothesize. Yeah, Willie was quick to say these are not his price predictions. This is Monte Carlo simulation data, right? So he runs 10,000 of these simulations, and what you just quoted was kind of the 28th to 50th percentile, sort of the base case between these simulations.

12:26 Right. There are simulations that certainly were lower. Here's another scenario for you, David. December 2028, Bitcoin is 116K. All right, that's one possibility. Or a more bullish scenario where at the same time, just at the beginning of 2029, Bitcoin could be 1.4 million. All right, so. So that's your range.

12:46 That's your range. 116 to 1.4. I mean, honestly, like December 2028, $116,000 Bitcoin. Like no one's going to be like shooting off fireworks about that. But like, hey, you know, a doubling. Less than a doubling. Yeah. We have some ranges for Monte Carlo simulations from Willy Woo. We also have Galaxy, Alex Thorne, Galaxy Digital, effectively calling the bottom.

13:12 So I don't think Alex put out price predictions from Galaxy here. But he did say, now is the time to add and hold Bitcoin because his tweet was all about confirming the bottom. There's a chart maybe to pull up where, let's see, we are... 916 days into the halving cycle and past the window where every other prior cycle has bottomed.

13:40 So if we still need, as Calcanis believes, to go below 57K Bitcoin and have a deeper bottom than June 2026, that would be the first time this has ever happened this late into the season with respect to the halving. Yeah. I think the theme between the Willy Woo data, this data from Alex and kind of what people are talking about is like, I do think like there's something to say that like the regime, the structure, the market structure around Bitcoin and crypto broadly has changed.

14:14 Is it drastic and massive and we need to completely revisit our priors about all assumptions about Bitcoin price? Not maybe that crazy, but the identical four-year cycles is probably not going to work out. So something between those two ends of just like, it's not going to be as it was. But it's not going to be too far away from what it was either is probably kind of where I'm landing.

14:37 And so like, sure. the four-year cycle, like the window, it has always been, the bottom has always been in the past. Does that therefore project like a frothy bull market? Not necessarily, because we didn't really get one last cycle either. That's right. We don't know where the top is. One bit of confirmation is, Galaxy's tweets and them saying that this is the early bull market that we have, the bottom has already been confirmed, also meshes with Michael Nadeau's takes, which is if we can keep below, he thinks we'll keep below the 50-week, excuse me, above the 50-week moving average, which right now is 76K Bitcoin price.

15:15 Yeah. And Alex Thorne says the same thing. Look for that as an indicator. If we stay above that, we've never at this stage in the market in the early bull cycle fallen below that in the past. Like we didn't in 2023 when we were early bull recovering. We didn't in the previous cycle. If we don't now, that's the number to really look at is the 50 week moving average.

15:36 Michael Nadeau has some price predictions as well. Now, his targets are a bit more conservative than the Willy Woo Monte Carlo simulation, but his bear zone target for a top for this cycle is 200k Bitcoin, which seems like relatively not exciting to me. And then his more bullish take- It's 80,000 now, 200k Bitcoin doesn't sound exciting.

16:00 The top of the cycle? I mean, like, that's, you know. The Pico top? That's bearish. It's a bear bull take. But his bull bull take is about $375K. Oh, okay. He generally leans to the more conservative side of things, I would say. So that's another price range for you. Okay. Okay. Okay. All of this happens at the same time Jason Kalkanis is saying, Bitcoin will never reach all-time highs ever again.

16:25 And kind of like how I alluded to, Jason Kalkanis likes to drag people on Twitter when they're down. Like, he's like, oh, the crypto bros are down. Let me get a free cheap shot in. And that's kind of how that feels. And to your point, I think it is kind of indicative of just like, it's kind of bullish.

16:41 It's kind of bullish what you say in this. Can I give you the fourth and final Bitcoin price prediction? This is from our friends over at Bitwise, Matt Hogan. Right. Okay. So you want their bull case number by the year 2036? Yeah. 2036, I'll be dead by then. Do you want their bull case or their base case?

16:58 Give me the fucking, give me the bull case. Bull case for Bitcoin 2036, $3.6 million per Bitcoin, David. Does that get you excited? I can't get excited about 2036. I don't know where I'll be then. I think that's roughly like $70 trillion or something like this, maybe $75 trillion. $70 trillion market cap.

17:25 We just don't even know what a dollar will be then. That's based on this table here. And there is a bear case here. The bear case is only 130K by 2036. So it's quite the range. I would fucking kill myself. The base case is 1.6 million. So let's stay there. But this is based on... Could you imagine crypto Twitter in 2036 and Bitcoin is $130,000?

17:50 No, there'd be very bleak times, dark times here. Oh my Lord. This is based on the base case, an annual growth rate of about 34%. You remember JP Morgan? They said 10% per year. So this is like 3X that. And it's based on if you take emerging market currencies, if you take gold, the store of value, offshore wealth, all of these different wealth reserves, sovereign assets, all of these things, and just assign a percent of Bitcoin penetration to that.

18:20 That's how these numbers shake out. And so if you are more optimistic and bullish on those assumptions, you get a bigger number. So that's exciting. To me, those kind of feel like these older crypto cycle assumptions in which like Bitcoin was going from like 0.01% market penetration to like, 0.1% market penetration.

18:40 And then we were all as an industry going to like 0.1%, 1%. And then after that is five. And like, I don't know where we ended up, but it was like maybe between one and 2% is where we are right now. And so that's part of like the whole structural re-rating of crypto is like, what is the market penetration of Bitcoin?

18:54 Because it's, I think it's in the last two to three years, it's been slower than what our expectations have been. And so that kind of needs to resume. Part of, and also part of it is, A, price is the best advertisement for Bitcoin and price is not doing any advertising for Bitcoin. And right now, like some of the news of the month, I would say, is that Saylor's, Michael Saylor, the biggest buyer of Bitcoin is not buying Bitcoin, at least this week from October 19th to today.

19:26 Michael Saylor has bought zero Bitcoin. And the trend is also down. So September, like the last week of September, he bought $140 million of Bitcoin. The next week he bought $28 million. Next week he bought $21 million. Next week he bought $22 million. And then this week he bought zero Bitcoin. zero million dollars of Bitcoin.

19:44 And so this is Taylor. This is the biggest buyer of Bitcoin out there. Give him some time. Give him some time. Be patient, guys. It's nice that he is not the main character, but this goes back to the same blue chip curse that we've been talking about. Who's the next biggest buyer of these assets? How do you take Bitcoin from a single-digit trillion-dollar asset to a double-digit trillion-dollar asset?

20:08 Because it's got to be something else. And so that's probably also one of the reasons why like the structural re-rating of the crypto market regime is like potentially different now because I don't know how we go to a $10 trillion asset. Who's going to buy? I mean, maybe it's all of kind of the gold buyers once we have fusion reactors that can turn all of our power plants into gold binding facilities.

20:34 It could be something like that, dude. We are not exactly close to that, but that is a good point. But we're talking 10 years out. We're talking 2036, okay? So who knows what could happen between now and then. I think your point about where the big buyers definitely has a, like, there's a question mark for Bitcoin.

20:52 Another crypto asset where there's a question mark, of course, is Ether and Ethereum. I know you've been making this point recently. There's been a big divergence, you tweeted this out, in Bitcoin versus ETF flows over the past two weeks. This is... you know, kind of a newer trend. But look at the outflow numbers.

21:10 Actually, you've seen these before since you tweeted this, right? So usually these things have some amount of correlation to them. So when they don't correlate with each other, it's pretty notable. So Bitcoin grew, Bitcoin ETFs grew about half a percent in total AUM over the last two weeks. ETH ETFs lost 6% in total AUM over the last two weeks, which is like a pretty notable divergence.

21:33 This could be just a rotation, you know. It could just be noise, but it's pretty far on the far side of noise. Yeah. Ether is definitely looking for its narrative story once again this cycle in order to kind of punch through this ratio trend line that we talked about last week. Yeah, yeah. All right, we're going to get into the news of the week.

21:55 The owner of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, just partnered with TradeXYZ to launch a CFTC-regulated U.S. venue with Hyperliquid. Stanley Drucker-Miller is somehow part of the story. And then also we have a full-page newspaper ad begging CEOs to keep their stocks off the blockchain. Please don't list.

22:14 Please don't tokenize. We're going to talk about all that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Your checking account isn't public, so why should your crypto be? As AI gets more powerful, your privacy gets weaker. Connecting your identity to your financial history on chain or off is the easiest it's ever been and will only get easier from here.

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23:28 And I'm basically always looking for the same thing, just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets, where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially, and still control all of my funds. And I've never really found it. And I'm just always switching wallets, juggling gas fees, or getting eaten by slippage.

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24:19 Trade XYZ, which is the biggest HIP3 deployer on Hyperliquid, which, what does that mean? They are deploying markets on Hyperliquid. And so third-party deployer on Hyperliquid to- Like, stop. Stocks primarily, right? Stocks, real world assets, commodities. They did oil on hyperliquid. They did gold on hyperliquid.

24:35 They've done the pre-IPO markets on hyperliquid. And these are all synthetics? Like, they're perps. Correct, correct. So TradeXYZ and the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, are partnering together to build a CFTC-regulated U.S. venue for 24-7, 365 perps built on hyperliquid.

24:55 I think the way to think about this is, like, kind of a competitor to... well, I guess it's a competitor to the New York Stock Exchange or to NASDAQ. So you can go to the NASDAQ and you can buy assets, or you can go to this new exchange to do perps, oriented towards retail investors, actually, interestingly enough.

25:14 And so... pending CFTC approval. This is going to become a new major onshore US exchange with KYC. You know, all the things that you would expect to have where you would trade on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. And it's pretty cool. This is how Hyperliquid is in theory coming into the United States market.

25:33 Hyperliquid is up like 17% on the news, basically touching all-time highs right now. Wow. Both in dollar terms and on Bitcoin. Yeah, $96. I mean, is this not, this is a huge endorsement for a number of things. First of all, it's a huge endorsement for Perps, which again is a product, a financial product pioneered in the crypto world.

25:53 I don't know. Joe Weisenthal, sort of like two weeks ago, he had Jeff from Hyperliquid on and sort of, I was wrong about crypto. Purps are amazing was his tweet after that. Okay. So it's an endorsement for that. Secondly, it's an endorsement for real world asset price discovery on crypto rails. Right.

26:12 So this long tail of assets. Again, this is different than the NASDAQ. So NASDAQ is listing like spot, right? This is CFTC regulated. So these are perps. This is 24-7, but this is price discovery on real world assets. I won't call them tokenized real world assets and they're like synthetic perps, but it is like you can get price exposure to these things on this platform.

26:34 So it's kind of competitive. The tokenized element is like the next step down the tech tree. You start with synthetics and then you unlock tokenized like perps later. So that's a later thing. But this is absolutely what you would expect to get down that path. Yeah. And I guess the third thing, it's all on chain, right?

26:53 It's on all non-custodial. It's all using some level of crypto wallets and crypto rails. Of course, this is hyperliquid. So this is EVM chain. So it's a massive endorsement. It's a win for Ethereum. Yes. Heath Price rockets up on the news. But okay, how is Stanley... Heath Price up 2% on news that the Intercontinental Exchange is building on the EVM.

27:17 That's the headline. How is Stanley Druckenmiller... Okay, is this a real tweet from the actual Stan Druckenmiller? Yeah, apparently this is actually Stanley Druckenmiller. Are you sure? With the generic... The generic Twitter PFP logo has never been changed. This account has no logo. It has no bio. It does have the blue check mark.

27:35 Is this really Stan? Apparently, it's actually him. Apparently, it's actually him. Tweeted out five hours ago, I'm excited to be an investor in TradeXYZ as a partner with ICE to bring 24-7 perpetual futures on hyperliquity to the United States. As a market participant, I'm looking forward to using their innovative product to enhance my investment process.

27:53 I'm going to go ahead and get out on a limb here and say Stanley Druckenmiller did not write that. Somebody else wrote that. I might say he didn't even press the send button on this. I don't know. Yeah, I think Ansem's reply here, I think, says it all. They really got big bro to tweet. Stan, copy and paste this and go recover your Twitter password to log into Twitter for the first time in eight years and tweet this.

28:20 It doesn't matter. Kind of a big deal. And not the only big bro to cover this. So Elon Musk retweeted Stan Druckenmiller with his character. Like, interesting tweet. On this tweet. So Elon knows about it, too. What the fuck is Elon doing here? I don't know. I don't know how to take there at all. What is he doing here?

28:42 I mean, you could zoom out and say he's got a lot of supply to sell between SpaceX and whatever he's doing with Tesla. There's talk of merging those two entities together. Yeah. There's a lot of equities. That's going to happen, yeah. There's a lot of issuance, a lot of real-world asset for him to want to sell to the market.

29:00 So maybe he's interested in this as a... potential market for net new buyers. Maybe that's a stretch, but... So Shoku, who takes his lead at TradeXYZ, he follows up on the Elon tweet and goes, Hi, Elon. I would love to find a way to get our perpetual futures integrated into X. It would be a killer product.

29:22 And you know X is trying to go after Robinhood and try to be like the money app that Elon founded PayPal trying to build in the first place. So you could imagine an X money integration with this U.S. compliant version of Hyperliquid inside of X. You could see that. Hyperliquid. Adding money into the most degenerate corner of the internet.

29:42 And you said, as you said, hype at all-time highs here in terms of the Bitcoin ratio. I don't know if it's at all-time highs in USD price as well. It is a dollar shy of dollar all-time highs. Incredible. Yeah, it hit $97 back in September of 2026. I think that's when Donald Trump said hyperliquid on Twitter.

30:04 You know how you've always tipped the hat to Bitcoiners who have just massively memed Bitcoin into existence in a very big way to the point of getting a United States strategic reserve? Yeah. You kind of got to say the same thing about hyperliquid. Like, hyperliquid people got the president of the United States to say hyperliquid on air.

30:22 Well, who got Stan to tweet that, right? Also, hyperliquid people. Yeah, they got Stanley Druckenmiller to tweet. Elon Musk. Like, the hyperliquid mimetic army is doing a phenomenal job. Yeah, pretty incredible. Now, David, you have news to announce from our friends and sponsors over at Nier. There's a hackathon coming our way.

30:42 What's going on? That's right. This is happening on Monday. So if you want to join the Nier hackathon, which has a quarter million dollars in prizes, that starts Monday of next week. It goes through November 1st through the 14th. So two weeks of hacking and then judging happens on the 16th to the 18th.

30:57 There's a bunch of different tracks. This is probably the biggest, one of the biggest hackathons all year, if not the biggest one. A bunch of different tracks, tons to do with the intersection of AI crypto, which is obviously where Near works. Lots to do with Near Intents, lots to do with privacy, which I'm probably excited for, and also private AI.

31:15 Ilya, Mert, Avichal, Kane, Hasib, Eddie from A16Z, these are all of the judges. So pretty stacked judge lineup and like I said, a quarter million dollars of prize money out there. So if you want to join this hackathon, there's a link in the show notes for you to get started. Near a hackathon.com. Okay, on the ICE stuff, and whenever I say ICE, I have to specify this is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, which people may be more familiar with that term.

31:42 The one that's relevant to us. The one that's relevant to us. Okay, so earlier this month, it wasn't just the hyperliquid perps kind of deal. Earlier this month, I don't know if you recall, David, but they partnered with the crypto exchange OKX to list a whole bunch of tokenized stocks. So this is not perps, but these would be tokenized stocks, some of the major stocks, NVIDIA, Apple, SpaceX, available 24-7.

32:06 They were targeting 60 stocks at first. It was a joint venture, 50% owned by OKX, 50% owned by ICE. putting the stocks in a Uniswap V4 pool on something called the X-layer, KYC'd wallets only. Okay, so this is part of the tokenization story and parent company, the New York Stock Exchange was involved in this as well.

32:28 Well, a bunch of the issuers I just named, so Microsoft, Elphabet, Goldman, Coca-Cola, they're not too happy about being listed in this way. And this was listed not in the Perf's way, which is CFTC, but under the SEC exemption rule. Do you remember that new SEC exemption rule? So that's how they had permission to list this from the SEC.

32:48 And as part of that rule, apparently, these issuing companies can complain to the SEC. They have 30 days to do this, to write a complaint to the SEC, and get themselves delisted from this. So of the 63 or so companies that were listed by ICE slash OKX, 30 of them, over 30 of them asked to be delisted, okay?

33:14 And this is also on the back of this, David. I don't know if you get the Wall Street Journal delivered to your house. Yeah, I get it mailed to me every single day. So you must have seen this in your mailbox. It's printout of the Wall Street Journal, and it's a big one-page ad, a full sheet of newspaper here.

33:34 Attention, public company CEOs. Your stock, their tokens, your stock. Your problem. Crypto will soon tokenize, in air quotes, your shares on unregulated venues. Act now to protect your company and your investors. What can you do? You only have 30 days. You got to contact the SEC and ask them to delist your company from exchanges like OKEx slash ICE.

33:59 So apparently all of the CEOs read the Wall Street Journal and were like, oh shit, we better delist. And that's what a bunch of them did. It's wild. This is downstream of the SEC's innovation exemption. This is the innovation exemption. So it gave companies who are going to get their stock tokenized the ability to veto that, but they have to do it with inside of 30 days.

34:22 So if they don't do it inside of 30 days, then there's no going back on that. And so there's a little bit of urgency and it's the option to veto it is free. And if they want to un-veto it in the future, I guess they could. But like, it's kind of a weird, weird quirk in that like they maybe they maybe they do want their stock tokenized.

34:43 So they just don't know when they want to do research. And so they are taking the safe route and vetoing it. Why there's an ad in the Wall Street Journal. Who's paying for this ad? I was trying to figure that out. Do you see at the very bottom? It's like kind of clipped up. At the very corner, you can see who it is.

34:58 And it's like a, what is it? It's the Common Sense Leadership Fund. Which is some conservative, like, PAC. Some kind of PAC, right? In Arlington, Virginia. That's sus. You know who else is in Arlington, Virginia? Like, all of the FBI and the NSA and the CIA and all of them. But whatever. So it's all the PAC money, all the political PAC money.

35:21 Oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But yeah, it's not something that you would expect to be anti this specifically. So you kind of have to wonder who is doing this and where is the motivation coming from. Yeah, I mean, there's a take where maybe the motivation, like the fight here in Wall Street, it seems like ICE and New York Stock Exchange is all over this.

35:41 They want to do this, of course. But maybe there's other venues who are running some of the rails that stand to lose, like the NASDAQ, maybe the DTC. They want things tokenized, but in a different form where they could still win, they could still profit. This doesn't quite check the boxes. So they're looking to slow things down in order to give them some time to kind of react and come up with their own competitive approach.

36:06 I'm not sure. Maybe that's it. It does seem to me, though, that you would get a large enough contingent of Wall Street and even issuers to defect from this because you're not losing anything as an issuer. Provided these are regulated venues, which they are under the SEC exemption, you only stand to gain.

36:29 What do you gain? You only stand to gain. More holders, more investors. Yeah. more saturation, higher, like you would assume, higher share price because you have more exposure and more liquidity and more markets. And so it's only of benefit for issuers over the long run to actually adopt this type of thing.

36:49 So this feels like it's just a battle, but it feels like the war to me has already been won. Like this has got to be inevitable. Yeah, it feels very much like the same energy of the big banks who are building in crypto at the same time that they are like in Elizabeth Warren's pocket trying to get her to slow down crypto and hire Gary Gensler.

37:09 Because they're like, you know, we know this is the future. Just we are slow and we need time. This feels very much of the same thing because on the ad, it says like unregulated venues where you don't know who your investors are. That's wrong. According to the exemption, it's on extremely regulated venues.

37:26 I mean, no, it's on Uniswap, but it is with whitelisted KYC wallets. And the only, like, threat there would be is, like, okay, like, your stock is trading on the blockchain. So, like, who are the anti-blockchain people? I can't really... I don't really know how that gets out. It's people that want some time to catch up.

37:43 I think you're right about this. This is Anatoly tweeting in response to this about the 33 companies opposing having their stocks listing. They should go private then. If they want to be publicly traded, then they should allow the public to trade them at the venue of their choosing. Yeah, exactly. Well said.

37:59 And this is pro-investor, pro-user, and even pro-issuer. I don't know who's losing from this. Yeah, what was super funny was Robinhood listed a JP Morgan token on the Robinhood chain that J after JPM objected to this. And again, the reason why this is okay is because JP Morgan objected to the SEC exemption, which is about putting tokenized stocks onshore, but the Robinhood entity is offshore.

38:26 It's an offshore structure. And so they don't have any say. And so Robinhood was like, oh, this is what goes back to my take when I was listening to the No one cares about the onshore versions of these because they're white listed, they're KYC white listed. And so it's the offshore versions that are going to dominate in terms of the investor base in the market and the liquidity and everything.

38:47 And this is exactly my point is like the objections on the offshore versions. They don't care. They don't care about the objections. Well, and one win here, and this is Hayden Adams highlighting this, is price discovery that happens after hours and during times when the stock market has not yet woken up and is not active.

39:05 So he tweeted this out. Google, this Alphabet stock, just dropped 10% on-chain across the board. TradFi is closed for trading. So he tweeted this out when Google markets were closed. No stonks allowed. Uniswap and tokenized stocks are where price discoveries happen. Yeah. More and more, Dave, this could become the case where price discovery actually happens on-chain, and then the off-chain markets have to follow up with this.

39:32 And this could start to happen pretty quick. Remember how quickly it was that prediction markets just kind of entered the vernacular? It was sort of this niche, just like only crypto user type thing. And then you just saw prediction markets everywhere across media and podcasts and stuff. Now it's like commonly cited if you want to get the price of something.

39:50 If you're on a Sunday, you want to get the price of whatever in the stock market and you're in media or your finance or anything, you're probably going to start looking on chain, looking on hyperliquid, looking on Uniswap for where price is actually getting set during the after hours time. Yeah. I don't quite think that this is true.

40:12 I think Hayden's embellishing a bit here just because the Google Alphabet stock, when it posted its earnings and the market didn't like it, and so it traded down 10%, that actually didn't, the price discovery was not happening on chain. It was after hours trading on the stock market. So the stock market is officially open from 9.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. or whenever it is.

40:34 But then they have it after hours extended, right? They have extended after hours being extended even further in both directions. So this was the tokens on on chain catching up with normal after hours trading, which is just getting more and more liquid over time. But the after hours aren't 24 or 7. I still think that like price of Google was reflected on chain.

40:53 Like before it found its way in sort of the off chain traditional markets. I think he's right about that. You think the on chain Google... price-led the trad after-hours market, I think that is a very big take. I don't think that liquidity... I don't think that, like... Yeah, maybe saying price discovery is sort of too much.

41:16 Maybe what I'm saying is sort of... Well, but maybe what I'm saying is price discovery. It depends on what you mean by price discovery. I don't think... on-chain markets are like big enough to move off-chain markets, if that's what you mean. Like that's definitely not the case. It's very tiny slivers of liquidity.

41:32 And also the very large firms doing Google price discovery based off of its earnings are not pushing markets around on-chain. But if you are on a Sunday, right, and you're looking for the price of the stock market because Trump has just bombed Iran, then you're going to be looking on-chain or on hyperliquid.

41:54 Like, it's going to be crypto markets that you're going to be looking at. I agree with that. That's what I mean by prices. I agree with that. That's right. Okay. The other thing, I have further bones to pick. Do you see when Hayden is typing in Google into Uniswap, I think? There are seven different versions of tokenized Google.

42:11 Yeah, that sucks. And there are different prices on different chains. This is untenable. We need to fix this. Yeah. It's the thing we did with stablecoins too, isn't it? Crypto. Yeah. With all these stablecoins. People are just like, a dollar is a dollar. Right. Yeah. Okay, coming up next, we're going to talk about the Robinhood chain.

42:30 They made $8.3 million a day on average in September. Last Saturday, it made just $32,000. What's Vlad going to do about it? Also, the Zcash or DevFund is at the heart of a Dow drama debate. So put on your 2021 caps because we're doing Dow drama this week. And also this week, Athena releases a 12% yield on your dollar product.

42:51 But where does the yield come from? We're going to talk about all that and more. But first, some of these fantastic sponsors that makes the show possible. Dollar stable coins taught Latin America how to store value on chain. Ripio is taking that same idea and bringing it to the currencies people actually use every day.

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44:03 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.

44:20 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.

44:35 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. Robinhood reported earnings this week. Crypto revenue, $120 million, up 20% quarter over quarter.

44:54 And you would think that that gain would be the Robinhood chain. And you would be right. You would be wrong to extrapolate that any further. A lot of people are very stoked about how much money Robinhood is making from the Robinhood chain. I think this is the first quarter that they reported earnings.

45:10 Yes, with the Robinhood chain, which came in at about $50 million of revenue, which boosted Robinhood. Incredible. Boosted Robinhood's crypto P&L line item way more than expected. But if you extrapolated that out any further information, don't do that uh robin hood is basically not making any money anymore for from robin hood chain about thirty thousand dollars a day but that's a 99.6 percent decline from its peak when it was making something like uh almost tens of millions of dollars it's so interesting right so an analyst looking at quarterly earnings uh you know typical trad five financial analysts they they see things retrospectively and they're like oh my god a 50 million dollar a quarter let me

45:53 What they're going to have to do in order to extrapolate that is just look on chain where you can actually see the revenue coming in. Yeah, you can extrapolate it right now. This is sort of a flash in the pan. Yeah, totally. But that doesn't mean it can't come back, David. I mean, it could come back.

46:08 It could come back. It could come back. So this is a clip from Vlad talking about the Robinhood chain saying they're going to try and bring it back. Let's go listen to Vlad. And so now we're spending a lot of time, you know, investing in how to make that even bigger, how to support the community. We know we've been hearing from a lot of builders that, you know, we could be doing more to support the community.

46:30 And I think you should expect to see us really ramp that up because, you know, we want to make it the best developer ecosystem as well as the best sort of global on-chain community. So, yeah. Yeah, you should expect to see us ramping the investment because you just don't see growth of a new ecosystem like this.

46:51 It's an uncommon thing. He said earlier in that conversation, too, that they were pretty blown away by how much revenue and traction they actually had and Dex volumes and all of these things. So I think it caught the entire Robinhood team by surprise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The level of flurry that happened when Robinhood Chain opened up was pretty big.

47:10 It kind of turned sentiment around in crypto. It kind of created the bottom and crypto prices rose, including Bitcoin. There was a tweet that the Robinhood Chain ecosystem, the people holding a lot of the meme coins on Robinhood Chain, They didn't really like this tweet. It was a $700,000 trading prize sweepstakes.

47:31 And so if you traded specific assets, so like Sui, Graham, which is Telegram, HBAR, which is Hedera Hashgraph, Ondo, Plasma, Injective. Is that Stellar or Plasma? XPO? That's Plasma. stellar is stl that's right okay right yeah yeah uh anyways um and so like you you trade these assets on robin hood crypto and then you get entered into winning potentially seven hundred thousand dollars and so this is them like yeah we're bolstering the robin hood crypto offering with this incentivized trading sweepstakes thing and then like all the the people holding meme coins on robin hood is like this is not what we want this is not at all what we want wait why were they so angry about that i don't get that Because it's out of alignment with what the actual activity is on Robinhood chain that generated the $50 million of revenue.

48:23 None of this activity generates any sort of revenue, chain revenue. It's trading fee revenue inside of the Robinhood app. but it is not chain revenue or chain-related activities, which just came from how they made money in the first place. So Eric Conner, spicy as ever, tweets out, Robinhood actually had the nerve to tease this, lol, lamount even, no public support at all for the chain for weeks now and promoting absolute garbage.

48:50 Then, apparently, they reached out. Robinhood Crypto reached out to Eric, and he tweeted out, okay, they reached out and went to chat, good sign. No one has hit the perfect combo of corp chain plus on-chain vibes yet. And so this is what I think the people holding the meme coins are really hopeful for, is that Robinhood, the main Robinhood core app with all of its massive distribution, supports the Robinhood ecosystem in ways that are more aligned.

49:16 I think they're kind of hoping for a new hero out of big after base. which fumbled, which I don't even think base fumbled. That's not my characterization. But nonetheless, they're kind of looking for support. Some things did happen. So AI, which is a meme coin, Priors, which is a startup, and Torch, which I don't know.

49:34 These are all tokens, were added to Robinhood crypto, added to the Robinhood exchange, just 15 minutes within each other. And so they're starting to list some assets on the Robinhood exchange. Let me make sure I understand. So the crypto Twitter meme coin bag holders basically want Robinhood to list and pump their bags.

49:54 And they're saying that this is also good for Robinhood because that's where the 50 million in MEV revenue, this is how Robinhood chain makes money is on MEV. That's where I came from and we're your real community. And so you should support meme coins and quote unquote our bags. I don't know if it's specifically support meme coins, but it's...

50:13 The activity that we want, which is... Yeah, support activity at the very least. Trading activity on Robinhood chain. And so I think you can go back to that Robinhood chain revenue chart. And if that goes up, then the trenchers are happy. And if that's meme coins, then that's meme coins. But if that's other activity, that's great too.

50:31 But the people on Robinhood chain want money to be flying around Robinhood chain because it's a casino, you know? It feels good when money is running around. That's great. That's great. Yeah, you know, like, whatever. I guess here's, I think, what it comes down to. It's like Robinhood was blown away by the quarter of revenue that they had.

50:52 And I think that's going to fuel further investment into Robinhood chain in the future. So I think for the next 12 months, they are going to be ramping up to capture more of this moving forward. Yeah, it's how they do it, I think, is going to be interesting in matters because the trenchers are just very temperamental and sensitive.

51:13 And you can't you can't do it in like the silly, stupid way, which is you take the meme coins that have done well on Robinhood chain and you list them on Robinhood crypto. And then you try and get the Robinhood retail people who don't know what they're buying to buy these new Yeah, sometimes I feel like it's like meme coin bag holders saying like, hey, like do the right thing.

51:32 You know, like help us fleece your like retail users. Totally. Let us dump on your retail users, which is like a terrible way to do this. Yeah. My take on this whole thing is like we've seen this movie before of you have the on-chain trencher like meme coin people like asking the leadership of a chain for support.

51:50 You know, we are your community. Like support us. And like, I don't know, I don't think anything's broken. So like my take on the whole thing is that Robinhood chain opened up, you know, the casino opened, everyone rushed in. Robinhood didn't do anything. They were just like, hey, our chain's online.

52:06 You can go use it if you want. And what did people do? They minted a fuck ton of meme coins. Robinhood didn't tell them to do that. So, you know, the money came in, started like flying around. Some people won, some people lost. Yeah. And the game's over. Some people have taken their winnings and left.

52:23 Yeah. Other people are left holding the bag. And that's the way that it was. Nothing broke. There's nothing to fix. We've seen this movie 10,000 times before. That's what happened on base. They blamed Jesse. They blamed Brian. They blamed the bad comms. Maybe the comms could have been better. But there's nothing broken about the fact that some people on meme coins just lose.

52:44 It's angry that price went down. Do you remember we saw this in points meta? Yeah. Airdrop meta, whenever you drop an airdrop, people are pissed because they got free money because it wasn't enough money, whatever. Like, you can't be ultra responsive, I think, to this type of user class if you're Robin Hood and you're thinking about the long game.

52:59 But speaking of long game, tell me about Zcash's long game when it comes to their treasury because their treasury has blown up. Maybe you should explain the mechanic because Zcash... With respect to its like dev treasury, maybe that's what you'd call it, it's public goods. It works differently than Bitcoin and certainly differently than Ethereum.

53:21 What's the controversy here? So ZCAS has a block rewards function. So 20% of the ZEC that's minted every single block gets siphoned off. And then that 20% gets split into 8% and 12%. 8% goes to the ZCG, the Zcash community grants. And so that's a five-person grant committee. So, you know, a council of five people that gets to point 8% of Zcash block rewards towards grants.

53:51 12% goes to a lockbox that also gets paid out to grants, but those grants get allocated based on Zcash coin holder vote. And so 20% of Zcash block rewards goes to grants. 8% is from a five person committee. 12% is from Zcash coin holder vote. I just say that in itself is surprising if you're coming from the Bitcoin community, which any kind of like block reward subsidy going to anyone besides miners, that's heresy.

54:17 And same also in the Ethereum world, which had its initial kind of ICO, but has always said no to block reward whenever that's been proposed in the past. And there has been proposals. Like, the Ethereum, different proposals came along on Ethereum and, like, the community's like, no, no, no, no, this is a bad idea.

54:34 Bitcoiners are right about this. Don't make political decisions about the nature of the money of the asset. Like, just no one should have that power. And in my mind, like, thank God, at least for Ethereum and certainly for Bitcoin, too. Yeah. Okay, so the drama this week got started when there was a grant given to an organization called Zexy, so Z-E-C-S-Y, but it's like sexy but Zcash, for a booth at an adult, like, conference convention.

55:08 Exotica. So there's a Twitter picture surface of these two booth people, like, showing off their booths. Crypto Twitter did not like it at all. They were like, what is this? Why? I don't want my Zcash being spent on this. Like I'm a Zcash holder and we're spending money to do adult porn conventions. There was like it was like a $550,000 grant to this organization to do a bunch of events.

55:32 Five of them were adult themed industry events. It's like you're spending my taxpayer money on stupid things. Yeah, yeah. Whether or not it was stupid, I think there's a very good case that this grant was actually, actually like a valuable grant. But like the fact that there's political fighting about it at all is indicative of the point.

55:52 I don't think people really debating the merits of this. It's just like the Zcash fund got so big because Zcash did a 50X now that there's such a big pile of money that people are fighting over what to do with that money. How big is it? It is $125 million. So it used to be smaller, obviously, but then Zcash had its incredible price performance.

56:14 Q1 spending is spending about $6 million a year on grants because that's just the size that they've grown accustomed to. Because of the Zcash appreciation, the treasury has 20 years of runway, but that is being added to by that 8% stream. So that's like $68 million a year going into the fund and they are only spending $6 million a year.

56:37 11x what it's been. So it's growing so much larger than it's spending. And so people are like, okay, the different critiques are coming out or different options are coming out as to what to do about this. Sean Bowe tweeted out, it's just too big. The Zcash fund, the grants, was never supposed to be at this size.

56:59 And so there's, Sean Bowe is advocating to end the 8% and redirect that to the network sustainability mechanism, which is like the solution to long-term block rewards. So Zcash has the same exact security mechanism as Bitcoin. The worry is that that's a bad security mechanism. So there is this network sustainability mechanism to add ZEC to the long-term tail emissions of Zcash.

57:24 That would be like an annual issuance. or something. Exactly. Some have argued Bitcoin should have a 1% annual issuance instead of cap at 21 million, right? Yeah. Maxime Dassault, who works at Winklevoss Capital, also is in favor of just ending it as well. Josh Swihart from Zotel wants to end both the 8% grant committee but also the 12% coin holder vote.

57:48 So just kill both things And then the ZEC Hub, which is the pro grants, has advocated for a soft landing. So kind of like a slow wind down, a halvening. So it approaches zero in 2036. So like keep it for now and let it wind down. all of this is kind of very predictable. There's political fighting over coin holder funds.

58:11 That's not really what money is for. There's broadly directional support to shutting this whole thing down. How it gets shut down still needs to be the subject of even further Dow drama. Whether or not this was right in the first place, I think, could be debated. I think at smaller sizes, grants like this actually do feel appropriate.

58:31 But when Zcash is in a tens of billions of dollars size, all of a sudden, like, no, no, no, like there's too much of a liability. Yeah, but without the public reward, like the block rewards to public goods, do you think Zcash would be where it is? I mean, hasn't that funded a lot of the, what's Zuko's firm?

58:49 Electric Coin Company. Electric Coin Company. That's part of the founder's reward. So that was different. So that ended, the founder, the 20% founder's reward ended and was replaced by this. I see. In 2020. Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, it's interesting to see that experiment play out. I know some people in Ethereum have wanted to see it play out on Ethereum.

59:10 I'm glad it didn't, but I guess we get to see how it plays out in Zcash. I think it works at small sizes, not at big sizes, is my take. Venice, throwing up some numbers again. Speaking of big sizes... Venice breaks $1 million of VVV burn in October. This is something I've been tracking very, very closely.

59:29 This happened yesterday, so October 28th, so three days left. Venice crosses $1 million of on-chain VVV getting burnt. Did you know, Ryan, that Venice burns, VVV burns, are increasing at a rate of about 1% a day? 1% a day, that's 34% month over month. That's a crazy high rate of growth, in my opinion.

59:50 And the burns are coming from a few different places, right? It's like some percent of top line revenue. It's like, what are the places where the burns are coming from? Three different sources. And so when somebody comes to Venice and they do a paid subscription, there's three different tiers. So depending on the tier, you'd sign up for Venice and you burn $1 for the bottom tier, $2 for the middle tier, or $5 for the max tier.

1:00:14 And that goes directly to buying and burning VVV on chain. Also 5% of API credits. So if you buy $1,000 of API credits. $50 goes buying and burning VVV on chain. And then once a month, there is a discretionary burn, which is the PNL, the founders, the exec team of Venice, just look at their PNL for the month, being like, well, we have made this much profit.

1:00:37 Let's take this amount of cash and buy VVV and burn it, TWOP it. And then the remainder of the cash that we have goes to like a buffer for the company, but then also can reinvest it into hiring more and growth. So it's a hybrid of a stock buyback plus reinvesting in growth. I mean, I like it. It's better than what we had.

1:00:57 However, I still feel like there are some flaws with buyback and burn. It's like right now, the token meta, there's two types of tokens. There's tokens that have no revenue, which are basically uninvestable at this point in time, or they're store value assets or meme coins or whatever. and then there's tokens that have some revenue attached to them, which Venice clearly falls in.

1:01:17 Most of the tokens that have revenue attached to them are doing some form of a buyback and burn, which is good because that's value accrual directly to shareholders. It's similar to a stock buyback. It's almost similar if you run the math. It's almost similar to issuing a dividend, but in a more tax-efficient way.

1:01:34 But I'm somewhat divided on that, too, because the buyback and burn amount Number one, it's not contractual. It's just very arbitrary. There's not like a set of laws that, you know, Delaware laws or something that are like fiduciarily Venice token holders and Venice management team has to return. a certain amount of value to token holders.

1:01:57 So token holders have kind of this squishy guarantee and like management or the project, maybe there's some norms for this, but they can change their mind on how much they burn and why. And in fact, this is the other argument, you kind of want them to change their mind because if the company, if the entity has some sort of capital expenditure to invest in, I would rather them invest and generate returns with their capital the way other companies have done in the past, like Amazon, right?

1:02:29 I don't want them to return their capital back to me as an Amazon shareholder. I want them to reinvest that so that we can compound together and we can grow. And so particularly at an early stage, you don't necessarily want a company to return funds, buy back and burn its revenue and give that directly to shareholders.

1:02:49 So I'm somewhat divided on it, and I don't really know where I fall. Like, this is a good evolution. It's healthy. At the same time, like, tokens are still in this weird place. They're not quite like stocks, are they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the market would be more accepting of companies, tokenized companies, not doing token buybacks if the token was equity.

1:03:16 But if the token was not equity, then the market is like, okay, if it's not equity, then what is it? Show us the money. Show us something. Then you have to prove something to me. Because of our history with shitty tokens that didn't return anything to token holders? Definitely. Definitely that. But also even outside of that, If it's not equity, then the typical investor would then ask, okay, well, then what is it?

1:03:40 And then the only way that you can really prove to the market what it is is by proving that you value it. And so you could imagine that if Venice, for example, did not do any burns, but it still had its token, Then all then the market would would regurgitate it. It would just throw it up and be like, get this token out of here.

1:04:01 Like you don't value it. Why should I value it? But in theory, they could be in this world where like, well, we're just reinvesting in growth. Right. We're going to like save all this money and we're going to buy a data center and then we're going to have like free compute and then we're going to buy back our token.

1:04:14 But like because it's not equity, then you don't really have any insurances. And so like in the world of tokens, you need some proof. You need some on-chain proof that the equity actually does value the token. And the only way to do that, as I understand it, is buybacks. Yeah, it's still evolving though, isn't it?

1:04:33 It's still evolving. Dude, you had some good news on Athena that they were offering 12% yield on stable coins. But where is the yield coming from? Yeah, okay, so this is inside of Athena Pay, and so this is Athena's new Neobank. It's an app, download dollars, you can get 12% on your dollars inside of Athena Pay.

1:04:55 This is Athena Earn Plus is a new product. Hmm. It's leveraged E&A rewards. So there's some nature of leverage here. I haven't actually poked my head too far down into this, but I would assume it's safe enough for them to offer this inside of like a retail app. But it's like leveraged basis trade. I would assume.

1:05:16 I would assume. We've already been Alex Mashinsky'd out of, you know, enough funds in crypto. Let's make sure this is good risk adjusted return here. 12% is a big deal, dude. That is a lot of money. That's great. As we close this out, I wanted to get your take on the Anthropic IPO. So that's coming out.

1:05:35 And $1.5 to $2 trillion is probably some of the lines of what the market cap will be. And the financials came out for the S1 filings. Looked pretty good, actually. Better than a lot of people expected. But market cap is just like... It's so high. And then there's the other take, which is, can you afford not to be an AI?

1:06:11 Can you afford not to be an ant? I know you posted this. For the first time ever, Google search as a percent of revenue is now below 50%. That's for Google. Okay, so this is like the killer business of the past 25, 30 years of the internet has been Google search. And now you're seeing it erode in the face of AI.

1:06:32 This has been a money printer for Google for decades. And now it is getting eaten by AI as we speak. Yeah, so what's your take on all this? Are you going to buy Ant? I wish this Google chart went further back in time. If we went back, I think, four years, it would be 85%. Wow. Would be percent of revenue from search and is down below 50%.

1:06:56 The reason why this is significant is like, you know, you and I and listeners were raised in a particular era. That era of the internet is dominated by this chart. Like search revenue has defined the topology of the internet, how the internet looks and feels as a user. There were links, there were websites, there was advertising, and then there was Google to sort it all out and, you know, match you with where you wanted to go in advertising.

1:07:20 That was the internet. Do you remember in like, I don't know, elementary school, middle school, when you were doing like research for some essay and you would go down to like the third page of Google sometimes? Deep research. And then, you know, in the 10s, you stopped ever going to the second page. And then in like, you know, the late 20 teens and early 2020s, you would never go below the first three links ever.

1:07:41 Yeah, yeah. Now you're just never going to Google. There's no page now. There's just no page. It's just like you just go and you open up ChatGPT or Anthropic. Yeah. So to your point, it's like, yeah, no, do I want to own the thing that is making this most resilient revenue chart of all time dead below 50% for the first time ever?

1:08:00 It's like pretty compelling. No, I'm not a buyer. No? No. At $2 trillion? It's because it's Jason Kalkanis' bags, and you don't want to support him. Yeah, fuck that guy. I don't know if he's the owner of Pre-Pri-E owns Anthropic. A couple of reasons. A, there's a number of companies, so not just OpenAI or Anthropic, but DeepSea, you know, Quen, There's like, it reminds me of the L1 trade where there's just too many.

1:08:27 There's too many. And like maybe if the difference, so I own SpaceX and you can make the same thing claim about SpaceX. It's just like it's coming in at a two plus trillion dollar price. thing. Why would you buy that? There's only one. There's no second best for SpaceX. Right. So that makes me feel better.

1:08:44 Okay. And so they have a monopoly on space, basically. So that makes me feel good. That's just not true with the AI labs. And so A, there's dispersion across a handful of winners. And also B, we don't even know if the revenues are durable. for these AI frontier labs. Yeah. Like that might not be where value gets captured.

1:09:05 We're taking like last quarter, you know, whatever it was, like was it 16, 17 billion in revenue and we're just like extrapolating that. And we're just being like, this forever plus, you know, 50% gains every quarter. It feels like 2021 when Ethereum block space was being sold for $70 a Uniswap trade and there was so much infinite money to spawn the new layer one and the new layer one was like owning the world.

1:09:32 And that ended up actually not being the case at all. And actually block space commoditized. It got super commoditized. Like my base case is that tokens are free in the future. And so the investment you want to make is like, okay, if tokens are free, then what captures value? And Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI and like DeepSeek, they're going to have to answer that question.

1:09:53 And right now is if you are selling tokens, like it's a great business model now, I don't know if that's going to be a great business model in 2030. I think you're right, but it might take a reset for that to happen, as it did in crypto, which is like, this could still run for a while. And then, boom, reset.

1:10:10 And then everything kind of like comes back in a day. I'll buy it then. Not a buy or an, there you go, on the week. Bankless Nation. You know what the deal is, crypto is risky, you can lose what you put in. But this is The Frontier, it's not for everyone, and we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey.

1:10:26 Thanks a lot.