Primary Topic
This episode covers a variety of topics including the comparison between stocks and crypto markets, key highlights from the EthCC conference in Brussels, Trump’s unexpected involvement with BTC, and the release of an Ethereum documentary.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- The EthCC conference in Brussels highlighted themes such as Ethereum's scaling solutions and security improvements.
- Trump’s involvement in the BTC conference signifies the growing political attention towards crypto.
- The Ethereum documentary, originally titled "The Infinite Garden," is set for release, promising to shed light on Ethereum's journey.
- The GOP's platform now includes support for crypto, emphasizing the right to self-custody and transact freely.
- The market shows a divergence between the bullish stock market, driven by AI, and the stagnant crypto market, influenced by regulatory and liquidation pressures.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction and Market Overview
A discussion on the overall market sentiment, comparing stocks and crypto.
- Ryan Sean Adams: "It is time for the bankless weekly roll-up."
- David Hoffman: "Ethereum usually happens in Paris, but this year we are in Brussels."
2: EthCC Conference Highlights
Key themes from the EthCC conference, including pre-commitments and base rollups.
- David Hoffman: "ECC always feels like going one year around the sun."
- Ryan Sean Adams: "Base rollups have a very exciting future in the Ethereum landscape."
3: Political Landscape and Trump’s Involvement
Insights into the GOP’s crypto-friendly platform and Trump’s participation in the BTC conference.
- Ryan Sean Adams: "Republicans are adding crypto to their official party platform."
- David Hoffman: "Trump was not at EthCC in Brussels."
4: Ethereum Documentary Release
Details on the upcoming Ethereum documentary and its significance.
- David Hoffman: "This has been a long time coming."
- Ryan Sean Adams: "Excited about the Ethereum documentary set for release."
5: Bitcoin ETF and Tokenization
Updates on the Bitcoin ETF and the growing trend of tokenization in traditional finance.
- Ryan Sean Adams: "Blackrock hit a major milestone."
- David Hoffman: "Goldman Sachs is now throwing its hat into the ring."
6: Market Analysis and Closing Thoughts
Final thoughts on the market trends, upcoming events, and actionable advice for listeners.
- Ryan Sean Adams: "Bitcoin had its first 25% drawdown after 427 days."
- David Hoffman: "We never miss a weekly roll-up."
Actionable Advice
- Stay Informed: Regularly follow key conferences like EthCC to stay updated on industry trends.
- Diversify Investments: Consider balancing investments between stocks and crypto to manage risk.
- Political Awareness: Pay attention to political developments related to crypto as they can impact regulations.
- Educate Yourself: Watch documentaries and read up on blockchain technology to better understand its potential.
- Secure Your Assets: Ensure you have a reliable method for self-custody of your digital assets.
- Utilize Tokenization: Explore opportunities in tokenized assets for diversified investment portfolios.
- Monitor ETF Developments: Keep an eye on ETF approvals as they can significantly influence market dynamics.
- Engage with Community: Participate in events and discussions within the crypto community to network and learn.
About This Episode
Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup
People
Vitalik Buterin, David Hoffman, Ryan Sean Adams, Donald Trump
Companies
Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, Ethereum Foundation, GOP, Bankless
Books
None
Guest Name(s)
None
Content Warnings
None
Transcript
Ryan Sean Adams
Bankless nation. Happy second week of July. It is time for the bankless weekly roll up. David, this is the last weekly roll up without the ETh. ETF, right?
David Hoffman
That's what I heard. That's what this one. This is the one. This is the most likely. We.
Ryan Sean Adams
For real this time? For real this time, yeah. Well, we're gonna keep saying that until it actually is the last weekly roll. Up without how many times? Until it's annoying.
Well, we definitely have an update for you there. And David, you are in Brussels. You're recording from Brussels today. So you're at a conference, right? Yep, that's right.
David Hoffman
ECC usually happens in Paris, but when Ethereum goes up against the Olympics in an in person conference, we lose. So we're in Brussels. We got booted off to Brussels, which there are already some stories about Brussels. We'll talk about them in a bit. I've seen some tweets.
Ryan Sean Adams
I want to hear about those stories. But what else we got on tap? Bullish week for tokenization. We're going to talk about the Blackrock builder fund passing a threshold, as well as other people coming into the tokenization play. Bitcoin had its 1st 25% drawdown after 427 days without one.
David Hoffman
So is it over? Can we go up now? When can we go up? Can we go up, please? What else we got, Ryan?
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, please go up. Republicans are adding crypto to their official party platform. This is actually a pretty cool statement, including the right to go bankless. David. And also, Trump might be.
Crypto conference. Was he at ETH CC, David? I don't know. Maybe you could fill me in there. Trump was.
David Hoffman
Trump was not at Eth cc in Brussels. He should have been. He missed the best crypto conference. And finally, ethereum got another based roll up. We're very excited about the based roll up space.
Ryan Sean Adams
And actually, why don't we just start there with our friends and sponsors over at puffer? Puffer unify. Puffer started off as an LST platform, which adapted into an L RT platform. And their whole unique thing is they're leveraging te esdheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh. Trusted execution environments just to add just a really strong layer of security around ethereum.
David Hoffman
Staking around restaking, and then also for the security around their incoming based roll up. So the puffer unified chain leverages puffers restaked validators, of course, to sequence the puffer chain. Transactions on unify can interact directly with other base roll ups, including non puffer based roll ups like tyco no bridges, a unified liquidity and app layer. This is one of the paths of ethereum to solve its fragmentation. This is this whole thing.
Base roll ups, pre commitments have been just a major topic here at etHcc. One of the big themes they get fast 100 millisecond pre conformations on the puffer unify chain. Also with the native yield. This chain actually has not launched yet. So if you are a developer, they want you to fill out the form that is linked in the show notes.
That's bankless cc puffer builders. There's also a lite paper for you to read for all you researchers out there who just want to keep up in the world of Tes base sequencing layer twos. This has definitely been one of the themes of like, LRT projects. Also expanding into a layer two at face value. Like why is an LRT doing a layer two?
Is probably a question that many people have, but once you dig into it, there's a lot of synergies there and puffer is definitely leading the way here. Yeah, very cool. I think based roll ups have a very exciting future in the Ethereum landscape. So exciting to see puffer expand into that. And speaking of that, you were talking about ECC and some of the topics.
Ryan Sean Adams
So what are the vibes at Ecc? David, give me the download. I've been watching a little bit on Twitter, but I gotta confess I haven't. I saw Vitalik tweets and Vitalik videos, that sort of thing. But I don't think I have a sense of like, what it's like to be on the ground.
David Hoffman
Yeah. And I would say other ETh CC's, it has been easier to identify a pretty like, core theme, just a phase a check in of Ethereum. ECC always kind of feels like going one year around the sun because it's so consistent. It's middle of July in Paris, this time in Brussels. Uh, the content sphere is a little bit more spread out than usual.
Uh, pre commitments, pre confirmations is a big theme. Base roll ups, very adjacent to that is a very big theme. Uh, how to approach MeV on various layers, um, applications, layer ones, layer twos, app chains, how this all ties together. Uh, and then, uh, also ZK proving, uh, is showing up a little bit more. But these are so like the whole base roll ups conversation is also happening on the back of like the paradigm people, Georgios and Charlie providing alternative paths to scaling Ethereum that is maybe directing.
Ryan Sean Adams
Throwing shade at base roll ups. Yeah, throwing shade at base roll ups, saying, like, we don't. That is an unsolved problem and that's really complicated. And so people are talking about just this kind of like, pretty, really deep level infrastructure as it relates to Ethereum fragmentation, kind of like kicking the tires all around it. So I would say maybe if I was going to draw out one theme of the content of ETH CC, it has been just the refragmentation, the defragmentation of Ethereum with a specific bet on base roll ups and pre commits, then Vitalik also kind of set his own meta of content because he is doing like ten over ten talks.
David Hoffman
I asked him this morning, he's doing ten talks. As of the Thursday morning, he has done six talks and four panels. And he says he's not done yet. These are just his words. I just, I asked him because people were talking about, like, how many talks did Vitalik do?
And I watched one of these talks and I just assumed like, oh, he's probably like, doing the smart thing, which is like, presenting, like, putting together one talk and giving it in ten different spaces. And I asked him that. It's like, like, are all of these talks different? And yes, apparently all of these talks are indeed different. He said he spent most of Tuesday writing the slides for every single one of his talks.
So he's just, like, running around Ecc, firing off presentations, like, no notes, just his slides and, like, throwing banger talks are pretty great. Do we have a clip of Vitalik running in the rain to get to a talk here? To a conference? Yeah. So these are the two tweets that had a pretty good theme to them, which is that one of them says, when Vitalik Buterin makes an entry like this into a web three event in a stormy brussels reign, it, like, stormed the first day I was here.
There's no stop, you know, there's no stopping Ethereum. And this is Vitalik, like, running over a puddle, like, double landing on both feet, like, ready to go. And then there's, like, another one of, uh, Vitalik coming in a little bit late to his talk, but just like, running right in into it and then starting his talk, banging out his talk and then running away from it to go to his next talk. Uh, just like Vitalik doing talks. A ton of talks this time.
Ryan Sean Adams
Here's, here's a follow up from Mike. This man changed the history of innovation and blockchain and he's a billionaire without a bodyguard. Maximum humility. He just kind of lights up a room when he enters it, doesn't he? So such an Ethereum vibe there.
Actually, speaking of Vitalik, like one of the quotes, I don't know if you saw this talk, David, but I saw the story published in the block. I haven't seen anything recorded of what he said. Be interested in looking at some of the talks, but Vitalik Buterin pushes for Ethereum to respond to 51% attacks in a more automated way. Apparently this is one at least the block picked up on, is the ability, rather than to solve a 51% attack at kind of the social coordination level. You know how messy that gets, right?
With all of the various stakeholders and parties trying to decide, is having a strategy to automate that a bit more. So it's kind of like executed in code or like ready to go. I don't know if that was part of the substance of his talks or if that was just like a side note. Anyway, do you have any highlights of what Vitalik's talking about here? This one.
David Hoffman
This is where we can invoke the word intersubjective. So this is an inter subjective fault of Ethereum. He says we can fix in an automated way, in the same way Eigen layer is doing the same thing with restaking. And I was at this particular talk, all of his talks, generally, the theme of his talks are like, okay, here are some. Here are the next frontier problems for Ethereum.
And also we also know what the solutions are, so let's move forward on them. Kind of just suggestions for layer two design, all that kind of stuff. There's also a panel that I walked in on with Justin Drake on a restaking panel with David, say, from Babylon. And so, okay, great. Like, I know, I know a pretty good amount about Ethereum staking in Eigen layer.
Let's learn about restaking in Babylon. Let's learn what the differences is. I get into the panel and it's Justin Drake just arguing with David, say, the founder of Babylon, about the bitcoin security budget. He's just doing the Justin Drake thing of like, bitcoin's not secure. They didn't get into restaking for.
How did that go into the conversation? It was interesting. I mean, I'm always compelled by Justin Drake's arguments. And so Justin Drake was doing jiu jitsu with this guy, and it kind of felt like he had one arm behind his back in a good way. But that's just me.
Ryan Sean Adams
Babylon. If people remember, that's basically an eigen layer for bitcoin. They're behind. I think they've got more research to do. So they're not deployed.
They're not yet. But that's the idea, is bringing restaking to bitcoin. So I imagine that was interesting. There's reports of people being robbed in Brussels as well. What's up with that?
What is going on? Yeah, I'm hearing, like, two to three stories, unique stories a day of, like, something bad happening. Either, like, one, a bankless employee, by the way, like, was, like, taken, like, not far away. Like, taken a couple blocks away by her taxi driver. And he's like, oh, the card machine doesn't broke.
David Hoffman
Pay me cash. Also, we happen to be at an ATM, and, like, a different bankless employee had to, like, go over there and, like, strong, just, like, be a presence to, like, allow her to get out of the taxi. So, like. And I've heard of multiple stories of, like, shady taxi drivers. Another friend got her purse stolen.
This is a tweet that went viral of a guy who is now limping around Brussels because he was mugged at 07:00 p.m. which is broad daylight in Brussels. Luca Netti got his passport stolen from his hotel room. All of the conferences I have ever been to, there's always been conversations of those, like, oh, we're in Bogota. Be safe.
And Bogota was completely fine. Like, I have never gone to an ethereum conference where there was, like, crime and, like, robberies and then anything, except it's for some reason, happening all over Brussels in the middle of Europe with the EU center of Europe. So that's been a theme of Brussels this year. Speaking of crime, Suzu is here. For some reason, I didn't know that Suzu could go to Brussels.
Suzu was at Ravi, apparently, just, like, raving at Ravay. Do we have a picture of this? No, I do not have a picture of it. One of my friends said she also interviewed him for her podcast that she's doing, because she's doing a bunch of podcasts. So I kind of figure that I think we have an extradition treaty with Belgium.
Apparently, he's not ready to be extradited or anything. Apparently he can go to Europe. So that was interesting. We also had the bankless party as well. So on Monday of ECC, we just had the bankless party for bankless citizens, a bunch of Ola podcast guests, and some just friends of bankless.
Sadly, I missed it because I missed my connection in Chicago. So while everyone else was partying at the bankless party. I was in Chicago doing nothing, waiting for my flight. So that was a bummer. But overall, it's been a great time.
Been a great, awesome man. Well, I know you're a bit jet lagged. You know, we had to coordinate to find a good hour to record this. So thanks for being here. Another week for the bankless nation.
Ryan Sean Adams
We never miss. We have never missed a weekly roll up. Let's talk markets for a second. So, bitcoin, what's the price in the week? Started the week 57,300.
David Hoffman
Ending the week 57,800. Up about a little more than half a percent. So up e flat, I'll be flat. So the bearish factors, I guess, I mean, people in general, I don't know what the vibes were at ECC. I know it's more research focused, Dev focused type of conference where we talk about serious things like based roll ups, fixing fragmentation, all of these things.
Ryan Sean Adams
But I'll tell you, the crypto narrative has felt very bearish lately. We're not enjoying this flat. Summer flat down. Summer flat is down now. Yeah, it is.
So bitcoin had its 1st 25% drawdown. This is after a streak of 427 days. Okay, so we're 25% down, at least we were at some point during the week on bitcoin. But I guess the flip side is this was an incredible run. 427 days of a streak.
And it beat the 2020, the 2012 record, by 63 days. So I guess another way to look at this is like we had an incredible run and we were due for a correction. I mean, 423 days essentially up before and now down 25%. It's not the end of the world. But people are blaming the german government.
Apparently they keep selling their bitcoin. Recall we talked a couple roll ups ago that, you know, Germany had a few billion, I think, in bitcoin seizures. Right. So they just sold another 362 million on the week. And they still have more.
They still have 1.3 billion that they might sell. Numbers. There's very large numbers. This is a. This is a tweet in German, so I can't.
My German's a little rusty. Hit translate post. Hit translate. Let's do translate posts. Okay, so this is a german MP, I believe, who is saying that instead of holding bitcoin as a strategic reserve currency, we are selling it.
And we shouldn't be doing that in Germany. We should be a bit more like the US, which apparently it, like the US, is debating whether they should sell some of their seized bitcoin or keep. Hold it, which is news to me. That's news to me as well. But maybe they're pointing at the Americans who are thinking about this.
But, like, it's a good point. Why are we selling all this bitcoin? We have this bitcoin. That's what I said when we were dumping. When we were dumping our bitcoin.
David Hoffman
Just, just take it from one department and put it in the treasury. Just give it treasury. Exactly. The MP added, instead of selling, I recommend developing a comprehensive bitcoin strategy. So, like, why sell when you can, when you can hold and maybe support the euro at some point in time?
Ryan Sean Adams
So anyway, Germany's dumping on us. This was known, but apparently the markets don't like this dumpage. There's also Mount Gox, of course, that news is out there where the distributions are finally happening, and that's still in the news. They are happening in two more months. So, according to the agreement with Mount Gox trustees, bitstamp has 60 days to distribute the token.
Kraken has 90 days to bitgo 20 days. So there's a lot of bitcoin that still could be sold as a result of Mount Gox. So this type of sell pressure and the prospect of sell pressure is contributing to the flatty down market right now. Yeah, there's a lot of just overhang. I think everyone has, uh, oversold the mount Gox sell pressure.
David Hoffman
I think I gave this take last week. Uh, I think the Mount Gox sell pressure is not as much as people are at least fudding about. Like, maybe the market has digested it, but, like, in terms of perception, uh, that's much less sell price. Like, the German. Germany's, like, dumping $1.3 billion of bitcoin on us after they've dumped, like, $600 million of bitcoin that sell pressure, GHC cell pressure, um, I don't really think is all that real.
Anyways. We got some bullish factors, too. Uh, so the bitcoin ETF's are absorbing a lot of this. Uh, so while bitcoin is being sold by all of these entities, on, like, July 8 by ibit, the Blackrock ETF took in $187 million. So $187 million a by pressure.
The next day, total buy pressure of the ETF's came in and at a quarter billion dollars. So we're, we're painting in some numbers of inflows into the bitcoin ETF's finally waking up again. Not no longer dormant. We'll see how long this, this holds but we're pulling in a lot of this cell pressure bitcoin into the ETF. It's actually super impressive.
Ryan Sean Adams
This is James Safer summing up bitcoin. ETF's doing the exact opposite of dumping during this, this dumpage. And the first 20% drawdown since the launch that they're buying, they're doubling down. So last week, 650 million in net inflows on the week. I got to say, I'm impressed with Tradfi here, David.
Like, it seems like the crypto natives and traders are the paper hands here and tradfi is just diamond handing it. They see the dip and they're, and they're buying. So, like, well done. I mean, this is a more robust set of purchasers than I think crypto anticipated. And it's great to have that, that support from a price perspective, hopefully.
David Hoffman
Yeah. On July 4, when I think what it was, the peak dumpage, I just looked at the EtH price. I think it got down to like two thousand eight hundred s. And I was like, this is stupid. And also, it's the day of freedom.
So I'm going to buy the freedom currency bought in solidarity with the EtH price. Feels good to buy $2800 eth. The freedom currency. Yeah ether it's the freedom sovereign everyone's be your own bank it's a freedom currency freedom day freedom currency. I thought you were trying to make a dollar as the freedom currency kind of joke.
Ryan Sean Adams
But I was like, oh, yeah, get off the show. No, ignore that. It's funny. When I was looking at the spot bitcoin ETF charts, I noticed these gaps in the charts. I was like, wait, what happened those days?
Oh, it's because the markets closed the weekend. Of course. Weekends, those happen. Well, let's check in on our friend eth. So where are we on the week?
David Hoffman
Also uppie flat, starting the week at $3,100, ending the week at 31 at $5,500. Almost got above $3,200 right there. But yeah, there's that dip down to 2850, which ya boy bought. Your boy bought right there. Right at that needle, right at the bottom.
Ryan Sean Adams
I can see on the screen. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I got down pretty low. And now we're back above 3000. Um, yeah, it's hard to, like, feel good about these, like, relatively low eth prices.
David Hoffman
I would like it to be higher. Uh, but nonetheless, uh, I mean, this is the buying up. We know we're about to get the ETF. When we got the ETF announcement, it went from these prices up to almost $4,000. And now we are back down to these prices.
So you get to buy pre ETF announced ETH price after the ETF is announced, which I think is just a blessing. Yep. You get another roll up to purchase, and it's a great opportunity to do that, thanks to Kraken for the price charts, of course. And that is the place. If you're going to go buy some crypto, buy some eth, go do it at Kraken.
Ryan Sean Adams
Create an account, if you haven't already. Let's talk about the ETF for a second. So it's not here. We said that in the intro. So what's going on?
What's going on is more paperwork is being filed. So here's Eric Baltunis, and he's going through a whole thread of all of the various s one s. That's the final paperwork from all of the issuers. You know, you've got Vanek, you've got Blackrock, you've got bitwise on and on, et cetera. The quote from one of the issuers is it's close to the finish line.
I think that about sums it up. We're, like, very close to the finish line. So it could happen anytime. It could happen before the next roll up. I'm sure it will, David.
This has got to be the last roll up where we don't have an ETH ETF. There's also a little bit of news from one of the issuers, is an issuer that is, I think, top of mind, because they've had the trust, which is grayscale. So they have billions of dollars of ether right now, and a big, I guess, source of cell pressure might be, could that ether drain out of grayscale and, I don't know, go on the open market? But they're taking steps to prevent that, to patch that hole. What is grayscale doing with the minitrust strategy?
David Hoffman
Yeah, so the minitrust is basically another version of their ETF, but this one with extremely low fees. And so we saw the G BTC outflows out of the grayscale, bitcoin ETF's, and this was just the reason why we could not go up in price right after the bitcoin ETF was approved, because the grayscale, the ETF's were just getting. They were just selling because the fees were, like, 2.5% when everyone else had fees of 0.2%. And so they eventually rolled out the grayscale GPTC minitrust with a very low fees and you could roll your grayscale ETF into the minitrust without taking a taxable event. You say it eventually.
Ryan Sean Adams
It took them like months, right? Yeah, eventually. Like multiple months. Now we are getting the grayscale Eth mini trust, apparently right out of the gate. And so they are trying to plug their own wound before it even opens.
David Hoffman
And so this is a difference between the bitcoin ETF and the Eth ETF. When the ETH ETF launches, we will have this mini trust. And so anyone selling as a result of the very high grayscale prices will, in theory, just not sell anymore because they have the option to roll into the minitrust without paying capital gains tax and also enjoying low prices. So it allows holders to be holders. And so this, we'll see how much this plugs up.
Sell pressure out of the grayscale fund when the ETF gets approved and starts trading. It's only bullish. It's like, in this most bearish format, it is equivalent to the bitcoin story. It can only. There's only a bullish addition to the ETH story.
Ryan Sean Adams
This is a chart I was just looking at prior to recording here. This is the ethy discount, or premium to Nav, which we've talked about in the months before. It was not April. We were 25%. Whoever was buying premium today in 20 in April.
David Hoffman
Well done. Congrats on your game. Yeah. Remember, we shouted this out. This is a nice arbitrage opportunity.
Ryan Sean Adams
But I gotta say, not even we were anticipating that we'd get an ETF so soon. And anyway, now that arbitrage opportunity has basically completely closed, whereabout, like within a, the actual spot price. So ethy was trading at a discount to spot price of, uh, Ethereum. And now it is no longer. Um.
Dude, run us by the total crypto market cap. Where are we at on the week? 2.27 trillion. Wow. That's low.
David Hoffman
I haven't seen 2.2 in a while. Um, bearish. Wow. Okay. Sick.
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. Uh, also on layer two beat, we are hitting a 20.6 x scaling factor. 20 ethereums are happening on ethereum layer two s, uh, brought in by some of these new layer threes. Uh, on the scene, Xi has, is consistently, is posting, like, hundred transaction per second days consistently. I don't even know what Xi is.
David Hoffman
I guess I need to go investigate this. I don't even know where it settles. Arbitrum. Arbitrum. Train with arbitrum.
Any trust. Cool. We'll have to investigate that. But, yeah, that's been on like the layer two beat for like a number of weeks now anyways. Just blasted through a scaling factor to new all time highs and Ethereum scaling on layer twos.
Ryan Sean Adams
We've got more market stuff to talk about, including the reason why maybe stocks are up, but crypto is flat. We got to talk about that. There's a conversation to be had here. Could we be wrong is the question I have for you, David. Also, tokenization seems to be really taking off in a big way.
Blackrock hit a major milestone. Goldman Sachs is now throwing a hat into the ring, so we'll talk about that and then eth gas fees, they are down. So this is bad for fee revenue, but is it good for Ethereum or bad for Ethereum overall? So lots more to talk about. But before we get there, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange for 2024 that is Kraken.
Go create an account if you want. A crypto trading experience backed by world class security and award winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere to trade crypto Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in. Just a few clicks and there's an award winning client support team available twenty four seven to help you along the way, along with a whole range of educational guides, articles and videos with products and features like Kraken Pro and Kraken NFT Marketplace and a seamless app to bring it all together. It's really the perfect place to get your complete crypto experience.
David Hoffman
So check out the simple, secure and powerful way for everyone to trade crypto. Whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned pro. Go to kraken.com banklists to see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications.
Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading defi ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the web three gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal Arbitrum IO. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum orbit chain? Arbitrum orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput.
Whether you are a developer, an enterprise, or a user, arbitrum orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum experience web three development the way it was always meant to be secure, fast, cheap, and friction free. Visit Arbitrum IO and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Have you ever felt that the tools for developing decentralized applications are too restrictive and fail to leverage advancements from traditional software programming? There's a wide range of expressive building blocks beyond conventional smart contracts and solidity development.
Don't waste your time building the base of basics from scratch, and don't limit the potential of your vision. Cartesi provides powerful and scalable solutions for developers that supercharge app development with a Cartesi virtual machine, you can run a full Linux OS and access decades of rich code libraries and open source tooling for building in web three. And with Cartesi's unique roll up framework, you'll get real world scaling and computation. No more competing for blockspace. So if you're a developer looking to push the boundaries of what's possible in web three, Cartesi is now offering up to $50,000 in Grantsdehenhezen.
Head over to Cartesi's grant application page to apply today, and if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure you're vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. We're going to talk about stocks in just a second because they are all time highs, basically, and we got some good inflation numbers on the week here, which partially contributed to that, the anticipation of that. So we're at 3% inflation. That was a bit better than analysts expected.
Ryan Sean Adams
So of course this leads to. Of course this leads to more speculation that perhaps Powell is going to dip into that easy monetary policy and begin bringing rates down. But let's talk about stocks for a minute. Have you seen this chart, David? This is the QQQ chart.
It looks kind of like a crypto chart. What, the eth chart? During the good days, yeah, during the good crypto days, Nasdaq has been on an absolute tear, and I don't know if you've seen this, but this is a correlation chart between bitcoin and Nasdaq and s and P. And we are at lows that we haven't seen in terms of the correlation between stocks and bitcoin that we haven't seen since November 2023. So about a year ago.
So stocks and crypto assets over the last two months have become increasingly discorrelated. Maybe some of the reason for that is stocks don't have Germany dumping on them. Stocks don't have amount Gox unlock. That's part of the reason. But I think we also have to be open to a broader reason.
And a question I have for you is, do you think we are overly, do you think we could be wrong about this bull cycle? It seems like AI is getting a lot of attention. Do you know the narrative from VC's 18 months ago was like, pivot to AI? Well, it seems like stocks have really pivoted to AI, and they're getting a ton of the attention, a ton of the inflows here. If we look at the biggest stock gainers of the S and P 500, the top ten biggest stocks, a number of these are kind of like the tech stocks contributed, 77% of the index is total returns.
So these big tech companies, these big AI plays basically, that are driving the stock market up to this point in time. And they've outperformed crypto in a lot of ways, at least recently. You think we have something to worry about here. Usually when we are meaningfully decoupled from the S and P and the stock market, it actually is like in the negative way, as in they're going up and we're going down. I've never seen us, like, be meaningfully decoupled to the upside, maybe except for a few acute circumstances.
David Hoffman
I don't know why that is. AI is like the at least winning the attention game. I think, as you said, just because, like, it's easy to understand AI, it's still hard to understand crypto. That is maybe another theme of eth CC that I've noticed is like, all the contents of are getting like, more technical, not less. We are talking about even deeper infra and even like, more niche parts of, like, scaling strategies and stuff like this.
We are not talking about consumer apps and, like, it's definitely in, in getting more insular in our world, in the crypto world. Like, people aren't coming in. Like, you can see that in crypto media, like YouTube numbers. Meanwhile, like, this AI content sphere is exploding. It might just be an attention game.
Also, at the same time, I think this industry is kind of splitting between the four year cycles. I think part of this industry is trying to stay on the crack cocaine addiction of the four year cycles. And then another part of the cycle, another part of the industry is like, okay, we're professional now. We have tokenization, we have ETF's. We're going to smooth ourselves out and get off of this rodeo and just be incrementally better every single month.
And between, I don't know, that's just kind of, I think, contributing to some of the bad vibes also. Definitely the bad vibes are like, we don't have the bull market and there is a bull market somewhere else and it's in the tech stocks. I'm getting a little jealous here, maybe. Yeah, we're getting jealous. People are.
Ryan Sean Adams
My base case is still, be patient, slow summer, and then we're going to pick back up in fall. And Eth. ETF is monumental. And crypto hasn't had its full bull cycle. And I'm with Raoul Paul.
David Hoffman
We have a bull market. I think we have the ETF inflows. Well, sure, sure. But I actually think we'll get a banana zone, as Raoul Paul likes to say. I still think that's coming.
Ryan Sean Adams
That's still my base case, but it's not inevitable. There is some sort of risk in my mind, like something to watch out for is like, well, what if we missed this cycle? Right? It's like, I want to be open to that potentiality as well. That kind of like, AI sucks all of the oxygen out of the, out of the room.
And this cycle, we just haven't hit the consumer use cases here. Like, we are too insular, we're too focused on our infrastructure, and we're not really developing like new use cases. That said, let's get to tokenization because this is a major narrative and major use case that is just heating up. That tradfi. Yeah, they're falling over themselves.
Excited about. So you remember the biddle fund, which is the tokenized treasuries brought to you by Blackrock on Ethereum. So it's Blackrock opening a bank branch, let's say, on Ethereum mainnet, that just hit $500 million, which is a major milestone and is going up. Only look at this. This is the tokenized treasury market.
Now it's getting close to massive growth. A year ago we were less than 100 million. And so we are a little bit over a year ago it was like massive growth in tokenized treasuries. And you could see it's really accelerated recently. David, I went over recently and I signed up for one of these tokenized treasury platforms and I deposited a little bit into bittle, so I got the full ux experience.
I got to tell you, there's a lot of paperwork still involved. This is not like going through KYC, right? Yeah, yeah, KYC and like accreditation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's like paperwork. And at the end of that you get like, yeah, your wallet can do some tokenization things.
David Hoffman
You're added to the whitelist, right. It's this weird hybrid token contract. Yeah, yeah, it's this weird hybrid. But it's easier than going through kind of like the buying t bills in a brokerage, at least like for me, for someone who's crypto native. So I think there's a lot of potential here.
Ryan Sean Adams
And Blackrock certainly thinks so. I know when we were going through our ETH narratives, we were like, what's the big one that's going to sell for Tradfi and tokenization in both of our pitches came to the forefront. I think that's here. I think that is going to do big things. And once the ethereum ETF comes out, I think all of these major Wall street tradfi shops will start talking a lot more about tokenization.
David Hoffman
Yeah, I think that's right. 500 million is a pretty good milestone. I would like to see it hit a billion. And I think it's just heading straight there. Like the growth on it is not slowing down at all.
And once Blackrock gets in, people, FOMo, blackrock putting in a billion dollars on chain is going to cause people to follow on and do the same thing that they're doing. It is worth shouting out that Franklin Templeton did get there first. Franklin Templeton has done the tokenization play, the real world asset tokenization play on Ethereum. But when BlackRock does it, it's different. Coincidentally, Goldman Sachs announced this year that they plan to launch three tokenized funds this year.
We didn't get too much details about where the funds will be, but my default is ethereum layer one. That just makes sense. They say the primary focus of these funds is the us fund sector, the european debt markets as well. And then they also want to create marketplaces for tokenized assets, which is a pretty strong investment into the world of tokenized assets coming out of Goldman Sachs. A pretty interesting report from McKinsey says that they are forecasting two to $4 trillion market cap of just real world asset tokenization by 2030.
So a little excerpt from their report here, which was definitely worth reading, there's a link in the show notes saying we estimate that the tokenized market cap across asset classes could reach about 2 trillion by 2030, excluding stable coins. So not cryptocurrencies, not stable coins. So 2 trillion of stuff tokenized that aren't dollars. And then they say the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios range from 1 trillion to about 4 trillion. And then they kind of list off an order of operations of what could be tokenized.
Cash and deposits, which they excluded from the total total comes to number one. We already have that. That's stable coins. Mutual funds and ETF's coming in. Number two, loans and securitization bonds and exchange traded notes.
That's kind of like wave one. Alternative funds, alternative assets, unlisted equities, precious metals, which we actually have. We did get some gold tokenization earlier, like last month. Publicly listed equities. These are stocks, intangible assets and derivatives would be like the last of the things to come.
But they all, they start to predict some of these things will all happen by 2030. So tradfi getting really bullish tokenization. Yeah, this is just tradfi swapping out their infrastructure, right? Replacing kind of like the fax machine and mainframes with something new and more open, more permissionless, with more innovation. David, one thing that has also happened, we talked about the scaling factor of layer two as being like 20 x, and that's a great thing.
Ryan Sean Adams
A byproduct of that is eth gas is low, very low. I don't know if you've gone on main net recently, but it's pretty cheap to do things. And of course, there's a bull case for this and a bear case for this as always. Right? So the bull case for this is, hey, fees are cheap again, that's fantastic.
And they have just the fee markets. We fixed the fee market. Ethereum is expanded into blob space. You know, traffic is kind of migrated to layer twos. Layer twos are incredibly cheap.
This is, look at this is the rent paid from layer twos to layer ones. Do you see it in March? Just like falling off the cliff. It looks like the chart breaks, actually. And the reason is, of course, Ethereum upgrade.
With the most recent Ethereum upgrade, we had blob space, really cheap transaction fees. We call it the hov lane for layer twos, essentially. And the fees layer twos are paying to Ethereum just dropped off a cliff ever since, which is great for consumers because transaction fees are super cheap on layer two s. Now that's the bull case. The bear case is where'd all of our revenue go ethy asset is no longer deflationary, at least right now.
And so where's kind of the revenue for this? So I don't know if you've seen some of these comparisons, but there've been some reports recently we've talked about Ether, the triple point asset. And one of the, they call one of the points on that is cash flowing asset, a productive asset, something that distributes cash flows. Well, ethers cash flows haven't been as high as they have been previously. In fact, Tron is catching up in terms of the cash flows that it is producing.
And for the month of June, it was actually verging on higher than Ethereum. Here's a report from Michael from the DeFi report, who I'm actually going to have on next week. David, while you're out and chat to him about this, he compares Sol and the fee revenue that Sol is generating through mev and transaction fees to ether. And ask the question, should Sol that Solana be trading at an 83% discount to ether when their fees aren't like an 83% discount? I don't know if you have any takes on this, and this is kind of an unresolved question that I'm going to be, and I think we will collectively be digging into more of.
But ETH fees as it's outsourcing its execution layer to layer twos, e three s are going down, at least in the short run. Do you have any takes here? Yeah, just to put one more metric on it, we have printed about 100 4150 thousand ether since the middle of April because we have not just been able to sustain high layer one gas fees. I think this was kind of like a big conversation as to what would happen once we spin up the layer twos. And we also introduced 4844, we introduced blobs.
David Hoffman
My kind of default scenario was that layer one gas fees would hold steady and stop increasing and then demand for layer twos would also go up. So induced demand, but we would still transact on the layer one. It does actually seem that like people are just migrating away from the ethereum, layer one. And I actually like finding that in myself. Like, whenever I'm using Ethereum, it's actually generally like a layer two most of the time.
And so I've seen some of my own behavior shift onto. That was always the plan, though, away from the Ethereum. That was always the plan? Yeah, that was always a plan. We would say like, yeah, like the layer one is not for users, it's for chains.
And I guess we just don't have enough chains to displace the loss of users. But in terms of priorities of like what we want, like I prioritize layer two free transactions over prioritizing the fee bird. Like that we want, I want to grow GDP, not grow revenue. And when I see like layer two activity at all time highs at 20 x scaling factor which like it blew through ten, went straight to 20 to me. I'll take the gambit of a lesser value accrual to ETH asset if I can get more activity on more block.
Ryan Sean Adams
I agree with you there. I think that is Ethereum's long term game and certainly what it's playing to make layer two fees as cheap as possible and accrue all of the GDP and prop up ether as a monetary asset. But we'll see how that plays out. The market's trying to figure out the pricing of all these various assets in comparison. We have more coming up and this is big.
So crypto has been formally adopted as part of the republican platform. So what does that mean? I mean, it actually includes the right to go bankless. So we'll talk about that. Also, a long awaited Ethereum documentary is about to get released.
I think you've got the inside scoop on that, David. I want, I want to hear. And Celsius wants its customers to return money to them. It's going in the wrong direction here. And before we get to all that hot, juicy news, we're going to go hear from our friends and sponsors over at mantle.
David Hoffman
The ecosystem with the multibillion dollar treasury that goes in farms, airdrops so cmeth holders don't have to. I bet you didn't know that, Ryan, but they do that for you. Let's go hear from them. Right now, new projects are coming online to the mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening?
Maybe it's because mantle has been on the frontier of layer two design architecture since it first started building mantle Da powered by technology from Eigen Da. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the mantle layer two to capture some of the highest yields available in DeFi and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion Mantle treasury in the mantle rewards station. Maybe it's because the Mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to build with, giving you grants, liquidity support, and venture partners to help bootstrap your mantle application. Maybe it's all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in crypto, or you're a user looking to claim some ownership on mantle's defi apps, click the link in the show notes to getting started with mantle.
Launching a token don't let complex legal and tax issues slow you down. Toku provides specialized support to optimize your launch and ensure that you, as a founder and your team and your investors get the most tax efficient outcomes. The Toku team understands the crypto space inside and out and will ensure your token launch is fully compliant while maximizing tax efficiency. Toku can connect you with the best attorneys if you need them, to make sure that you have the best advice, and Toku can help to optimize your taxes so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Tokus guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics.
Token launches don't have to be complicated talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation the Uniswap extension is almost here, the self custody wallet created by the most trusted team in Defi Uniswap labs. Designed to make swapping feel effortless, this extension lives in your browser's sidebar, letting you swap, sign transactions, and send or receive crypto without ever losing your place on the Internet. Plus, with human readable transaction messages, you'll always know exactly what you're signing. Navigate a multi chain world effortlessly with support for eleven chains like ethereum, mainnet, base, arbitrum, and optimism. No more chain switching or token importing.
All your assets are right where you need them to be. The Uniswap extension is designed to level up your swapping experience with other Uniswap Labs products as well. Easily onboard to the extension using the Uniswap mobile wallet to begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth, seamless synergies with the Uniswap web app. So go and sign up for the waitlist today and download the Uniswap app and claim your free username to get added to the extension waitlist. The Uniswap extension is available later this month to everyone, just another way uniswap is helping you swap smarter.
Ryan Sean Adams
David did you know 2024 is an election year in the US anyway? I am. There's one thing that I'm aware of. I wish I wasn't aware of it some weeks, but this is a good outcome, at least for crypto. So the GOP platform, that is the Republicans in the United States of America, they have rolled out a paragraph, they put together their platform documentation.
This is what the party stands for. This is our party platform. They had a section in there called championing innovation. And the very top of that section, there's a paragraph about crypto. So it said this, Republicans will end Democrats unlawful and un american crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a central bank digital currency.
We will defend the right to mine bitcoin and ensure every american has the right to self custody of their digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control. That paragraph is actually exactly what we want. The right to self custody means the right to go bankless. Of course we should have that. It's great that a major political party is enshrining that and to transact free from government surveillance and control.
Well, that's very interesting. That has implications for privacy, technology, and some of the court cases we're hearing about tornado cash, the right to mine bitcoin is great, too. And then ending the Democrats unlawful crypto crackdown. So it's acknowledging that regulators have overstepped that Operation Choke point has been a thing. I don't know.
Great paragraph. You couldn't ask for better. This is Nick Carter saying they're going to end the crypto crackdown. No CBDC, the right to mind, right to self custody, right to transact freely. Couldn't really ask for anything more.
David Hoffman
I was talking to some of my more liberal friends about this, and because I remember having a conversation with them way back when, when Donald Trump was first saying some positive words about crypto, and the reaction was like, well, he can just say anything he wants. He basically has a blank check. He doesn't have to actually fulfill anything. Where are the party, where's the party platform? I would like a party platform, and this is that.
Ryan Sean Adams
Okay. We actually got in, in writing party platform. And so this is like a very meaningful step forward. You said we can ask for more. I guess for a little bit more.
David Hoffman
Like, it's kind of. What do you want? I would like a crypto, like section. Like, more bullets. It was a lot, like, kind of packed into that.
That sentence. Yeah, but the right things. But there's strong, it's a very strong foot in the door. You can't hate. I get it.
Ryan Sean Adams
I do have some advice for the Democrats, though. If they want to check this and, you know, counteract this from the Republicans, make it say the same thing, just copy and paste the statement and do that. And then you neutralize it. And if you don't, kind of telling. It's kind of stupid and also kind of telling but, like, why are you letting the Republicans have an advantage for you just like these?
Just say the same thing. Like, what's wrong with this? Like what? Yeah, especially that last line. The right to self custody, their digital assets and then transactions from government surveillance and control.
Yeah. Oh, God. I feel like there's a tornado cash element in there. Like transact free from government, say, surveillance and control. That feels freeing of tornado cash to me.
David Hoffman
Yeah. Well, I mean, but, but to your friends points now, now it's a matter of holding them to it, of course, and holding all of our political leadership to this. This is interesting, David. Donald Trump is going to be speaking at the conference, bitcoin 2024. That bitcoin conference is this, this is.
July and at the end of this month, when is that? That is in like two weeks. Crazy. Two weeks. I think this is absolutely massive news.
Ryan Sean Adams
Right? This, this gives you a scope for how much on the radar, like in kind of 2024 election. Your crypto actually is. So it didn't show up in the Biden v. Trump debate.
Maybe it will in future debates. Biden barely showed up to that debate, though, I gotta say. Like, I mean, it was, they didn't talk about a lot of subscribe golf. I think this is one of the top ten things. Would you say 1015 things, though, in.
David Hoffman
Election crypto history or just issue. No, no issues in the election. In the 2024 election, I think crypto is in the top dozen things to be kind of wedge issues. This is where I'm different types of things to talk about. Like, it's high up there.
Ryan Sean Adams
It's on the list anyway. I think when, like, Republicans and Democrats are going head to head, they are not going to talk about crypto, but that actually under serves how big of a crypto of a thing crypto is. Like, I think, like, basically every single bitcoin, not every single. I think a lot of bitcoiners are, like, politically, like, reserved. Like, think about Eric, the Eric Voorhees types.
David Hoffman
Yeah. They're libertarian class, highly libertarian. They, like, resent the concept of voting because they hate the two party system. They don't. Yeah, but then, like, but then Donald Trump comes and like, they, Donald Trump is going to pull so many non voting bitcoiners out of, like, the corners of the, of America.
And it is like, going to be this party that, like, runs under the radar of, like, general polling because they've always been, like, an anti voter. I agree. I agree. Donald Trump, Orange, orange president, orange coin. You know, it's like, it works.
I. So here's. Here's a fascinating poll done by Grayscale. It's actually a Harris poll conducted on behalf of Grayscale. So this is funded by Grayscale, operated by the Harris poll.
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So 2024 us election, some of the key takeaways. 47% of voters, of all voters they survive surveyed expect some of their investment portfolio to include crypto. That isn't a lot. That's a lot.
And this partially, I think, from the ETF, the bitcoin ETF. A lot of people who are like, I don't know, it could be illegal. I don't know how to buy this thing is like, oh, it's my schwab accounts. Fidelity. Okay, great.
Yeah. Like, I want that. All that upside. I don't want just the people who use, you know, crypto exchanges, the crypto. Bros.
David Hoffman
To get all that up from 40% last year. So 40% this year, 40% last. We gained 7% of all voters now own more crypto. Yeah, well, they. And voters.
Ryan Sean Adams
People don't like to vote against their bags. Like, we know this, right? No, absolutely not. That is a direct financial relationship. Do you have to your ballot?
This is also, I think, telling crypto is a bipartisan topic. So there's similar ownership rates among Republicans, 18% and Democrats, 19%. Democrats even have more crypto than Republicans. 18% of voters are more interested in investing in bitcoin and other crypto assets. Thanks to the bitcoin ETF.
This is hugely legitimizing. And 20% were compelled by the having. Oh, cool. That's great. Well, they got some education to do.
Some other stuff going on in Congress, by the way. I don't know if you know, but as we're recording this, as we record this on Thursday, comes out tomorrow. So you guys might have more information about this. You know, the Sab 121 bill that the repeal of that that got passed, made through the House, made through Senate, and then Biden Banhammer vetoed it. Well, there's a way to un veto a veto, right?
You have to get. You can trump a veto. Two thirds majority in the Senate can trump a veto, right. So that'd be. We did not get that in the first vote.
David Hoffman
So some people will have to change their votes as a result of, like, a new information that they've had in the past, like, months. And as far as these things go, it wasn't even close. Right. A whole bunch of Democrat senators would have to totally throw Biden under the bus and be like, we don't respect your veto. So very unlikely to happen.
Ryan Sean Adams
But what if. I'm just saying, what if that vote is happening actually today, and if that happened, like, call it a 0.1% chance. That would be absolutely crazy, David. I don't even want to think about it. So it's.
But. But, like, it's. It's in front of the senate. And the nice thing about this, it gives all of the senators another kind of, you know, are you. Are you pro crypto or are you anti.
David Hoffman
That's what I'm interested about. Put you on the record, how many people like the vote is maybe will change and what, in what direction is it going to change and by how many people? Even if we don't get there, it would be cool to see, like, three more senators, four more senators come over to the. To the crypto side. Yeah, exactly.
Ryan Sean Adams
Okay. Celsius. You remember old Alex Mashinsky in Celsius, scammed a whole bunch of people. My guy that. The t shirt that says to not trust banks, he was right.
He didn't tell us that. He didn't tell us that he was the bank that he used to notice. In the disclaimer on the back of the t shirt. But anyway, Celsius is suing their users. You might ask for why.
Like, why is Celsius trying to get some. Some claw back? So, apparently, within 90 days prior to a set of savvy users, who knows? If they read the tea leaves, they. Saw something in advance, but savvy or lucky or something.
Lucky or something. Maybe they knew something. Who knows? But they withdrew some of their funds from Celsius, as. As one does.
Right. I'm a little bit nervous about this. You know, I'm going to withdraw my crypto, keep it or withdraw and sell it or something like this. Celsius is looking to claw back, um, the funds from those who withdraw withdrew, I think, within the past 90 days. I believe 90 days before it froze withdrawals, not only are they looking to claw back funds, they are looking to claw back funds in kind, but you pay them back in dollars.
David Hoffman
So if you withdrew bitcoin at, like, the 2020 $5,000 bitcoin price that it was at, you now owe them $65,000 bitcoin in. That's the bill that you now have from. Wow. Right. How long ago was that?
That was over a year ago. So now people are receiving bills at somewhere between two to four times the value of what they withdrew. Yeah. In dollar man. Like 18 months later.
Yeah, like, that's that. Maybe they gambled it away on djing coins. Like that is just too long. Did something. Yeah, 100%.
You can't expect if you wanted to do this, you needed to have done this immediately after not a year and a half. Yeah. And so imagine like your Celsius experience and like, you know, like if I got out or I got some portion of my funds out, and then you get this nasty letter to your house or email. They probably sent it in multiple ways. Just saying, yeah, you owe us x thousands of dollars.
Ryan Sean Adams
Right. For the funds that you withdrew 90 days to us going bankrupt. Wow. And if you want to fight that, you have to go hire a lawyer. It's just like screwing over retail yet again.
So anyway, that's going on. Apparently. This is pretty common in bankruptcy cases, by the way. Right. So like there is this window, if you go to other bankruptcy cases that have been like this, not in crypto, but like there's this window of time where you can claw back some of the funds.
So this is not without precedent. It's not coming out of completely left field. The one thing that is incredibly weird is to ask for the crypto assets themselves that have appreciated by massive amounts two to ten x since the time that the bankruptcy, that's going to be. Core because there's probably a lot of retail people who are very upset about this, but there's also a few whales who can definitely fund a campaign against. Yeah, I'm sure they'll class action it.
I'm sure they'll figure it out. Anyway. It's kind of annoying. It wasn't a year and a half ago. It was a year ago, by the way.
David Hoffman
Yeah. Time does not fly, I guess, in this industry. Yeah. Well, here's something that's been in progress for a while, which is the ETH documentary, at least. This is one of several documentaries, I think, being created about Ethereum, but this is one I was particularly excited about.
Ryan Sean Adams
So a trailer is coming out pretty soon. Anyway. Give us a scoop. Yeah, so this used to be called Ethereum, the Infinite Garden. This is Kerry Warpensitive documentary, which many Ethereum community members are in it.
David Hoffman
We. I don't know if we are in it, but we were filmed in it. Cameras came to my house and then they recorded a weekly roll up with you and I. That's right. I don't even remember doing that.
That was like San Diego, bro. Yeah, they've, they also have some footage of like an interview I did a Vitalik in 2021 at ETH CC. So three years ago. So they've been just like at every single Etherium conference, like just collecting footage. They did this fundraise via mirror where they raised $3 million in ETH.
Mariano Conti and a few other people are like producers of this because they minted the NFT by donating to by donating to just the fundraising effort. It's finally coming out. It's finally coming out. So July 23 on Zora is the official trailer where anyone can mint it to support the distribution. And then there's also rewards for being a top 20 minter.
So if you're a top 20 mentor, you get a ticket to the in person pre premiere. There's a bunch of other rewards as well. I am very excited about this. I would love to. I've been waiting for this.
This has changed form over the years. Like I said, it started off as like the Infinite Garden. Now it's like Ethereum stories. The website is Ethereumfilm XYZ, the official premiere September 18. Available on traditional streaming platforms in the winter of this year, which is pretty cool.
Ryan Sean Adams
What do you think we're going to get? Streaming platforms? Do you think we'll get Netflix? Hulu? I hope we get one of the big ones.
David Hoffman
Netflix. Yeah, we get some wide distribution behind this. That'd be great. Moving on to raises. A bankless ventures raise happened this week.
This is Rome Protocol, who raised $9 million. This is a Solana Ethereum hybrid protocol. Pretty interesting. This roam uses Solana as a decentralized shared sequencer for Ethereum rollups. So Ethereum rollups can use the level of decentralization that Solana has for their sequencer to sequence transactions, process transactions, and then create a proof to submit it to Ethereum.
So Ethereum layer two, Solana the layer one as the sequencer and then back down to the Ethereum layer one. So confirm transactions faster. You can enhance your privacy and scalability, reduce blockchain costs, leverage composability for cross train transactions. That's what a shared sequencer does. So multiple roll ups can use roam and they can shared sequence between each other.
Pretty cool. It's like kind of taking the components of both ecosystems and smashing them together. Pretty excited about it. Will this bring peace and harmony across all the tribes and unify them? No.
Ryan Sean Adams
Solana, Ethereum. We're all getting along here. We're all collaborating on this solution. Yeah, we'll still fight on Twitter, but we're also, I do think, in the fullness of time, crypto projects just do meld together. Yeah.
David Hoffman
The modular world will also be a highly composable one. And that's what's happening here. The components all kind of fit together. Once this coming out, David, when it's. Mainnet, I am unsure I'm under.
Ryan Sean Adams
That's because Rome wasn't built in a day. Did you just ask that question? Just to say that? Oh, you get to the week, you know I did. You walked right into it.
David Hoffman
I walked right into that. We were looking at the shout out to the event that you were talking about earlier, but I. I guess you were on a flight. You were on some dead flight, right. From Chicago.
So on Monday, the first day of ECC, Monday we bankless to a party at a cute little cocktail party on a rooftop. I was not there. I got so many pictures of friends at my party. Well, I was in Chicago and they're like, hey, where are you? And I'm like, I am in Chicago.
I am sorry. Neither you nor I went, unfortunately couldn't make it. But a lot of bankless citizens there and members of the bankless. I heard it was a great time. I heard it was a great time.
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, glad to everyone who made it out. Thank you, bankless citizens, for supporting us and for being there. I always say this great opportunity to meet in person, yet I'm almost never there. I will be at permissionless in October. Very excited about that.
So that's happening. David, let's end with a moment of Zen. And since this will be the last weekly roll up without Ethereum ETF, absolutely 100% guaranteed. We got a guarantee. Okay, so we've got the David Hoffman guarantee.
We should go celebrate by watching a bitwise ETF commercial, which a new one popped out this week. So enjoy that. I will end with some disclaimers, of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west.
This is the frontier. It's not for everybody. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Hello, I'm Ethereum.
And I'm big tech. Oh, losing a user. We are really going to miss you. But that stays, too. We like to make sure that they don't take anything with them.
So her posts or photos or followers. Yeah, they all stay here for safekeeping. With me, users can keep all their things when they leave an app. Yeah, but then we'd have nothing to remember them by.
Miss you already. You play guitar? No, why would I do that?
David Hoffman
No, why would I do that?
Ryan Sean Adams
No, why would I do that?