ROLLUP: 2025 Crypto Meta & Predictions | ETH Roadmap Updates | DEX's Hit All Time High | Vitalik Adopts Moo Deng?

Bankless Nation, welcome to the first Bankless weekly roll-up of the year of our Lord 2025. David, we're here. We made it. It's been a long time since I've seen you, man. I think this is in our four years of doing this episode, entering the fifth year, or this podcast, and doing the fifth year of doing this podcast. I think the last two weeks have probably been the longest that we haven't even interacted over Zoom virtually anywhere.

I think we sent each other four or five messages in Discord over the last three weeks. I've been in Argentina and then in the holiday break, swim straight into the New Year's break. This is the longest that we have ever.

just been chill. I feel like that's good for our mental health. Really good. It's been really good. How did you do? I took, I took kind of a screen break. So I kind of like disconnected. And then I just like today, I kind of redownloaded, you know, fired up the OS again and I got up to speed on crypto and we're here to bring it up. But like, you got to, you got to take a break from time to time. All right. Because like, yeah, it felt really nice. It felt very grounded. I felt more human again. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

I think that we just spend so much time looking at charts on screens, like absorbing information, and it felt good just to be like normal. Yes. And just to be the most normal I have ever felt. Three weeks. While I was out, I put a one minute long time constraint on Twitter on my phone.

And one minute is just long enough. If somebody sends you a tweet, you can open up Twitter and look at the tweet. But then one minute later, if you start scrolling, you're one minute later. OK, your time time's up. Time's up. Done for the day. That was really nice. So if you go to my Twitter feed right now, there's just seven retweets over the last three weeks and zero tweets.

It's very sparse. Which is the first time I've ever done that. I can't believe you're allowed to do that, apparently. You can go off screens for a little bit. But now we're back. Yeah. Taking the pain so you don't have to be on Twitter all the time. Big list listener. We got a really busy week. Actually, we're going to start with the curated list of our 10 favorite predictions for 2025 because everyone wants to know what's going to happen this year. We got 10 fantastic things to look forward to. What else we got?

The crypto AI sector did not get the memo of the holiday break season. Many tokens are up 3x from their pre Christmas prices, which is extremely recent. This is like 10 days ago. So that's pretty nuts. And then also some less fun news. The IRS is about to force all DeFi brokers to KYC their users, which, as we know, doesn't make any sense in the crypto world. So we're going to talk about this. Who is actually viewed as a DeFi broker and what might they need to do?

Also, Blobs became the top-eath burners, which is pretty impressive over a seven-day time period. DEXs hit their record highs in December. Do Kwan is about to be sent back to the US, into US hands, and Vitalik Buterin adopted Mu Dang, you know, the cute little hippo. That's Vitalik's now. Vitalik owns that.

He's supporting him. Before we get into all that news and more of a message from our friends and sponsors and our lawyers, the Rodman Law Group, our bankless lawyers, I want you to know that they are the best damn lawyers in crypto. And I believe this sentence wholeheartedly, best damn lawyers. Dave Rodman and Rodman are crypto native lawyers. I was hanging out with Dave Rodman at DevCon in Bangkok, walking around the venue while he was rocking

the tornado cash t-shirt, which I think is pretty damn based. Robin Law has been helping out bank lists for all of our lawyer needs. If you are a startup or, you know, even an individual who's operating heavily in this space, you kind of need a lawyer preemptively, even preemptively, having Dave Robin, just a phone call away, a telegram message away. When we need him, for example, when Justin Sun sends us a cease and desist for writing a various statement about Tron.

It was really nice to have Rodman Law. They know about crypto. They are in the trenches with crypto. They know how to be pragmatic, which is what many lawyers in crypto don't know how to be about pragmatic in crypto. And so they are offering you a free consultation with Rodman Law, banklist.cc slash Rodman Law to schedule a free consultation with the best am lawyers in crypto.

They really are. Best amylation crypto. Go establish a relationship with Rodman Law Group. Even if you don't think you need a crypto lawyer, you actually do need a crypto lawyer. You need a crypto lawyer before you need a crypto lawyer. Yes, exactly. All right, David, let's get into markets this week and the price of Bitcoin. So what did it do over the holiday break? Where are we on the week?

We are up 1.3% on the week, starting the week at 95,500, ending the week, 96,800. So flat, flatty up, flatty with an up bias. Ether doing something similar, a little bit more green than Bitcoin this week started the week at $3,333, up 3.8% on the week to 3,400.

and $50. Still either kind of slammed down from where it got above 4,000, which makes everyone feel good. Now we're at the bottom end of the 3000 range, trying to get our head over 3,500. Okay, let's look at the one month on Ether. Look at this. Do you remember this? It was early December and we were above 4K and I was thinking

I was thinking December for the holidays. I thought Santa Claus would leave us some all-time highs in the stocking. I thought we'd be closing it on 5K about right now and then just like none of that materialized. So here's to 2025. Maybe this course corrects in 2025 because the ETH ETF flows have been pretty hot lately. Large. Maybe they are front running some of the price appreciation that we hope to see in ETH. Tell us about those flows.

Yeah, so on the December 31st alone, Ether, the ETFs drove 57 Bitcoin into the ETFs and 10,710 Ether, which is $5.3 million of net inflows into Bitcoin. And Ether had $36 million of net flows into the Ether ETFs. That's on December 31st.

Overall, December was a huge win for the E3 ETFs, just really outpacing Bitcoin, really punching above, way above his weight. And we're finally really getting into some very positive numbers on the E3 ETFs, coming in at $2.6 billion in total net inflows.

Uh, it was just pretty damn crazy. That's good to see. I mean, all of that happened. I think like it started. I mean, we were negative for most of, uh, most of November, weren't we? And then it kind of turned around toward the end of that month. And now it's positive. Quickly turned around. And now we are way more positive than we've ever been negative. Really.

Really, the momentum changed to really, really fast. It feels nice going to the year, speaking of ETFs. So Bitwise did this cool thing. Bitwise filed for a Bitcoin standard corporate ETF, Bitcoin standard corporations ETF. And really, the incentive here is to incent the stocks of companies that have adopted the Bitcoin standard. So they're creating an ETF, an industry that's full of these companies. Look at these companies here.

All the companies that own, in order to get into this club, get into this ETF, you have to have on your corporate treasury the Bitcoin standard, which they define as holding a thousand Bitcoin or more. So it's a thousand Bitcoin times the price of a bit, you know, a hundred million dollars or more worth of Bitcoin on the treasury. If you have that on your corporate treasury, then you get into this club of the Bitcoin standard corporation ETF that Bitwise is going to roll out.

Yeah, and I guess the investment. What exposure are you getting? You're getting exposure to companies that put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but the companies could be anything. It could be tech company. It could be totally. It's weird. It's like, it's like, it's kind of odd. You kind of getting exposure to like, you know, companies led by laser eyes.

It's kind of that, right? It's like manager's. Well, I don't know, maybe there's, you know, the theory that if you're, you know, the CEO of the company, the co-founder of the company starts like lifting, like you're doing squats and like bench presses and stuff, they get like gym fit, then like that's bullish or like bald is bullish, right? And like people have run correlations with this. Maybe it's, maybe it's something like that. Like you have legalized, you can see the future. I don't hate it. You're stacking Bitcoin. Anyway, this club right now is composed of, you can see it's about

It would be about 22 companies right now with microstrategy at the top. No one can touch microstrategy. 444,000 Bitcoin. And then a assortment of other companies that Coinbase, of course, has some Bitcoin on Treasury, but other companies like Tesla, you might recognize Galaxy Digital, of course. Some of these are crypto companies, some aren't.

similar scientific, I don't know who they are, but again, it's like this whole own Bitcoin and your corporate treasury kind of incentive meme plus an investment thesis kind of neat. Interesting. I would love to see how this tracks over the year and how Bitcoin-pilled company leaders compared to non-Bitcoin-pilled company leaders, because I guess that's the signal that we're going to give them. As usual, I'd just rather own Bitcoin than these companies. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Teach their own.

Where are we at on the ratio, David? Ratio is we are kind of still in no man's land. We are higher than the lows. We are not higher than the recent highs. We are at 0.055. So still kind of waiting for some action on the ratio. Really no signal here. Total crypto market cap. We are above 3.5 trillion coming in at 3.57 trillion dollars. Still looking at that four trillion dollar number. Yeah, that was nice hitting that four trillion briefly. OK, tell me about that.

Well, no, almost 3.9. 3.9. Yeah, pretty close. We didn't hit $4 trillion, so we got that to look forward to. I'm sure it's coming anytime, maybe in January. All right, tell me about some movers of the week that I missed over the holidays. This is brought to you by our friends over at Uniswap with a weekly reminder. Go get the Uniswap wallet. It just pops out in your browser. It's fantastic extension. Okay, what were the tokens that you were looking at on the week?

The two big movers of the week. And these are the top two movers. Usually I go to Coingecko sort by seven day and kind of like pick out a collection of the quality tokens that aren't like flukes. But these are actually the number one and number two seven day movers of the week coming in number one. AI 16 Z up a hundred and fifty percent.

on the week to $2 billion market cap, followed by virtuals up 60% on the week at a $4.6 billion market cap. AI 16Z is the token associated with the ELISA framework, which is really kind of bleeding the charge and producing AI agents.

But virtuals got this AI agent launch pad to make it super easy to launch your AI agent. This is where AIXBT comes from. This one's on base. AI16Z is on Solana. And so just it was the last 10 days. In addition to the 10 days before that and the 10 days before that was driven by AI token movement.

It's super impressive. And this at a time when the rest of the crypto market was kind of flat. This is over Christmas. Imagine how infuriating that is in which like the biggest movers of the week of the meta is happening when you're in the holidays. And I am, I am just gone. I'm not paying attention. Hey, AI. I found out about the tokens like yesterday. These? No, you know about these. Come on. I knew about them, but I didn't know that they had moved to three X their prices since like December 22nd.

It's super impressive. And this is maybe gets into a prediction that we'll talk about. What are AI agents and this whole narrative going to do in 2025? But did you listen to that episode we did with Jensen while you were out from? To that one. Yeah. Did you hear how he described virtual? Yeah. It's like a digital state for AI agents, right? When I heard that line, I was like, Oh, Ryan, that nerd sniped the hell out of Ryan. Yeah. It was over.

Yeah, like he knew exactly what to say to me to get me to like, you know, like be uber bullish on this. I should have bought more though. But anyway, there's always more time, right? David, right? Yeah, this is the biggest opportunity cost. Instead of researching tokens in the trenches, we just do podcasts and we forget to buy.

Yeah. Well, you know, sometimes we buy AI mindshare near late is 60% of all mindshare. This is according to Kaido AI, which tracks kind of different narratives. So completely dwarfing meme coins at this point in time. It's a very hot narrative. Getting into the layer two's, uh, related to update brought to you by fracks, crypto's decentralized central bank, which is now a fractal layer two. I've always enjoyed the fractal ecosystem. Uh, okay.

So starting to look at 2025, the roll-up horse race base has crossed $15 billion in TVL up 10% on the week, zeroing in on arbitrum at its whopping $18.6 billion. So $3.5 billion behind arbitrum.

Of course, I think many people have said basis will inevitably become the number one role by TVL. We are looking at not that far away, especially like virtuals itself adds three, four billion dollars of TVL. Is it token on base? Not all of the token is on base, but a lot of it is.

And so I think base is really getting the AI meta tailwinds here. Base usage as well is just a chart that is up into the right, just steadily increasing the daily activity on base. It's just a straight straight line. Base usage also has just been up into the right for such a long amount of time, just consistently.

It's not really ever dipping. But I think we've done something like a 3X, 4X of activity on base since the middle of last year. And so this chart is only looking to increase. You can also see that spike of AI activity at the end of December and also to right now.

Yeah. I think that this, this, um, uh, layer two beat.com, you could go there and you look at the rollups, right? Go to the rollups tabs. You look at them. This is kind of the roll up horse race. And this is sort of the starting line beginning 2025 and the two big KPIs to take a look at are total value locked, which is

like all the assets on the chain, which is some almost like the mass of the chain, right? How big it is, how trusted it is, that number matters. And then also the UOPS, which is basically user operations per second. This is

kind of like TPS transaction throughput, but also sort of measures kind of like the complexity of a transaction as well. So it's a bit more of an accurate. So it's basically how many transactions are going through, how much throughput is there on this chain. These are kind of the two big metrics to take a look at for all of these.

Arbitrum still hanging out to its number one slot in terms of total value locked. But it's also like base, as you mentioned, catching up to it. It's also being dwarfed right now, at least the past day in terms of UOPS. So user operations on Arbitrum is 15 on base, 155. Okay.

Yeah, and then you got third OP main net fourth zk sink era fifth blast six stark net seventh lit Linnea eighth scroll ninth world chain and then 10th circuit I think that this is going to be one of the most interesting kind of

leaderboards to watch because it almost feels like up to this point, getting to 2025 has just been like the pregame, right? We're just now at the starting line of, okay, we have the tech and we have some traction. Everything's beta. And now like it's going to go and it's going to be incredibly competitive for the rest of this bull cycle.

What is it? Mainnet beta. They've all been in main net beta. Yeah, exactly. It's always in main net beta. Tell me about blobs, David, because it's been two and some, two and some resources here. Top 10 top eth burner, the top eth burner in the last seven days have been blobs ahead of Uniswap, which is nuts because, you know, at the end of the day, what do blockchains do the best? They trade tokens.

But now the Ethereum blockchain, what does it do best? It burns blobs. So over the last seven days, 490 ETH has been burned due to blobs over 480 ETH burned from Uniswap. Dan Smith from Blockworks Research says blob fees hit a share of REV. That's real economic value hit a record high over the weekend, making up 9.9% of Ethereum's daily real economic value base purchased 40%.

The blob is followed by Tycho at 15% and world chain at 11%. So basically huge blob burner. Interesting. This is kind of cool because this is a prediction that a lot of people in the theorem have made that one day blob fees would actually dwarf all other like fees generated on top of the theorem. And what are what roll up centric roadmap is?

Yeah. Blob fees are essentially, uh, layer two is roll ups, consuming Ethereum block space. That's what blobs are. So now they're big consumers and I'm just great to see that thesis play out. Another thesis that's been great to see play out is decks volumes. And David, they just hit record highs in December, not record highs for this cycle. Record highs. Period. They've never been higher monthly trading volumes soared to over.

462 billion highest ever for DEX volumes. The leaders in decentralized exchanges for the last month in December were Uniswap with number one, 106 billion, Pancake swap, 96 billion.

People forget about buying a smart job. It's always done numbers. It's big in the east. And then Radium on Solana with 58 billion. So that's where we end December of some record high decks volumes. I bet we'll exceed those records this month and the month after and many times. You do have to give a tip of the hat to the AI agent meta because of how damn bankless it is. It's bankless by default.

So DEX volumes are going to get tailwinds because of AI agents. TVL on chain is going to get a tailwinds from the AI agent meta and centralized exchanges are going to really lag because in the same way that we saw this happen in DeFi summer and NFT mania is like, this is you get benefits, you get premiums by being on chain.

100%. You're so right. I actually didn't make that connection. But what you're saying is AI agents, they're not going to open up a Coinbase account or a Kraken account. They can't. Well, they can't, right? I mean, not really. And so they're just going to use the on-chain decentralized exchange resources. And so everything that benefits AI agents and that upsurge, that'll all accrue to DeFi.

That's right. That's right. All right. Coming up next, our favorite predictions for 2025. We've gone around the Twitter sphere and the blog sphere. So you don't have to and collected the 10 best predictions that we think are also true in 2025. Or at least, are these worth noting? And then later, Ethereum is getting a full year of upgrades. What's on tap for the incoming Ethereum upgrades in the ones.

that come after that. So we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a message from our fantastic sponsors that make this show possible Uniswap, the place where AI agents love to trade on chain on whatever chain you're on, actually, whether it's on Ethereum layer one or base or arbitrum. But it's also got a mobile wallet, browser wallet for all you humans out there that are listening to this as well. So we're going to go here from Uniswap right now.

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10 predictions for 2025. All right. We curated these from many of the thought leaders around crypto because every sort of thought leader puts out a, you know, their list of predictions. And we took the best we thought from, from many of them. So why don't we get into the first one here, David? So you picked this one. Vance Spencer framework. What's the prediction? Vance Spencer predicts that the SPX, which is just an index on the S&P 500, goes to 7,500. Where is it right now, Brian? 5,800?

You know, it's funny. I had to look this up, but it's something around there. It's something at 5,800 that range. So I mean, going up to 7,500, that would be a pretty big increase as far as stocks in the stock market and the stock market followed by AI delivers on its promises. And since the AI delivers on its promises line is being paired with the SPX to 5,700. I'm guessing he means that that's like AI in the traditional

FinTech equities space. This is something that is happening this cycle, Ryan, that is unique to all crypto bull markets that have come prior. This bull market, the crypto AI bull market is happening in parallel to an AI bull market happening in the real world. And so the AI bull market is coming into crypto. Now there's these two parallel bull markets happening. Yeah, I think Vance is basically saying that it's a bullish year for stocks and primarily led by the Mag7, right? All of these AI stocks will continue to over and perform.

All right, that's number one. Number two, this is a D from Blockworks. So stablecoin market cap hits 500 billion. It is currently, and a reminder at 210 billion. That's the take here. Either Stripe or Robin Hood launch their own stablecoins as a pairing take and Walmart or Amazon begin accepting stablecoins for payments. stablecoins, 500 billion. That feels pretty safe to me. What do you think?

Oh, it's that's big. It's more than a doubling and doubling something that's already at 210 billion is a big doubling more than doubling. So like that's that's a pretty bullish prediction. I don't I don't I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm not saying I don't think that's a free space at all.

Yeah, I guess that's maybe that seems aggressive, but I don't know, man. Given the yields that we're seeing in DeFi these days, given kind of, you know, what I expect to be a favorable legislation, we could even get a stablecoin bill in 2025. You know, all the FinTechs are going to front-run that. If we do hit it, it's going to be a buzzer meter at the end of the year.

Yeah, you think so? I mean, like, think of all the fintechs. They got to get in this. Like Stripe just acquired that, you know, DeFi. Yeah, that could take a while. That could take a year to really get rolling here. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, I'm very bullish on the stablecoin market cap.

I'm just from 500 billion. It's just like a big goal. That's the prediction. Coming in at three, this is an official prediction from Coinbase. The next administration's projected deficit spending, if it materializes, should translate into greater risk buying, crypto buying, as more dollars circulate in the economy. So the Coinbase is making the prediction that the fiscal policy

of the next administration is actually going to overwhelm any amount of federal reserve action, which is, I think, what Lyn Alden predicted when we had her on the podcast, not terribly long ago. Yeah. Okay. So this is, it's funny. This is a much more formal prediction, like phrasing. So it takes a second to interpret it because it's aimed at institutions, I guess, deficit spending. So Congress, the executive branch, the US government is going to continue to overspend.

That's not going to change on your job. That should translate into greater risk-taking as more dollars circulate, so more liquidity, so more risk-taking. Basically, the prediction is risk on assets for 2025 and then crypto goes up. Government spending money, we're going to get some inflation, crypto and risk on assets are going up.

That feels pretty reasonable too. All right. Let me give you number four. And by the way, Mike Ipolito had about 27 great predictions. One of my favorite lists of the year, but this was one of them. The US will reemerge as the dominant global hub of crypto. He adds founders will move back and open offices in New York. US conferences will be larger than their Asian counter.

Uh, parts. So, you ready for permission this time? Yeah. So I guess, you know, everyone comes back to America for crypto on the back of the, the, the Trump win, the victory. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. I think we've already seen indications of a lot of companies coming back homes in the United States or coming to the United States for the first time. Coming in at number five, this one's from Galaxy Digital. Five NASDAQ, 100 companies and five nation states will announce that they have added Bitcoin to their balance sheets.

or sovereign wealth funds. Ooh, nice. Okay, so this is four. Five new nation states. Five new nation states. It matters a lot who those nation states actually are. Definitely. It's one thing I would say. Yes, yeah. It could definitely see that happening. All right, this is number six. Delphi Digital Crypt. This is a long one. Let me kind of like this one. I like this one a lot. Okay, so the base prediction is crypto splits into two major

verticals and everything else gets sidelined. So two major verticals and everything else gets sidelined. What are these two verticals? The first is web three natives. And these are defined as traders that are deeply embedded in the crypto market. These are people that possess a nuanced understanding of crypto's unique characteristics and engage in high risk trading, including meme coins, AI agents and pre-sales, the elements reminiscent of the Wild West. So these web three natives, Wild West, that's the first major vertical. Bull market frost traders. Yeah. Okay.

We've always had that, but let me go on. Yeah, in bull markets, yeah. All right. And then the second major vertical this year is regular investors. These are institutional and retail investors. They often differ in their risk management approaches and generally adhere to more fundamental investment and trading strategy via crypto as an alternative to the stock market.

Okay. These are the two major verticals. And then they also point out the prediction continues. There will be a number of people who are sidelined. And the sideline people are early stage DeFi, real world assets and deep in protocols that don't secure leading positions in their segments or at least on their chain. So there's always going to be sideline investors, but they're basically saying there's going to be kind of these degen frontier crypto natives that are trading. They're following the hot ball of money.

Yeah, and that's the growth stuff, right? That's the next big thing, the next wave, whether it materializes fully or not. And then there's going to be a new class, I guess, of regular investors, but fundamentals types of investors. So it's de-gens and it's fundamentals. Highly, I phrase this. Highly passive.

And then if you're not in the hot ball of money, which they're saying, early stage D5 real world assets deep in, then you're getting left behind. Your pie is not going to grow this year. Do you have to pick? You think you have to pick either be a web three native or a regular investor? Can you just split your portfolio? I've always liked to split your portfolio. So you know my strategy. 10% of my net worth.

Gamble to hell with it. When I make wins, you put it into the long-term super passive side of it. Yeah, you do both. Not just one. You don't have to pick one lane here. Also from Delphi Digital, this is Tommy from Delphi. He says, agent-driven transactions will make up 10% of all on-chain transactions by end of year 2025, and also a follow-up prediction. There will be a wave of buy-in

by San Francisco traditional AI developers into crypto AI due to tokens, which afford them the ability to break out of web to AI labs and raise capital and community overnight, which has always been the power of tokens, permissionless capital formation outside of the system. And so tokens pull the predictions that tokens create a gravitational pull for AI talent out of San Francisco out of Silicon Valley and into the Wild West of crypto.

Yeah, I think these are pretty solid predictions. That first one that AI agents transactions will make up 10% of all on-chain transactions by end of year. How much do you think we are right now? Do you know the latest on that? It's probably less than 1%, right? It's got to be even though it's starting to increase. AI agents have just only been a thing for the last couple of months. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. It's got to be less than 1%.

All right. This is prediction number eight from EJAS, which is our resident AI expert doing the weekly AI roll-up. AI roll-up with us. So EJAS says this, an AI agent platform will enter the top 10 in crypto by market cap right now to get in that club. That's the plus 35 billion club to make it its top 10. So in AI modules.

After it's banger week last week, doing and hitting an all-time high is currently at $4.4 billion market cap. EJAS is looking for almost a 10x on that. It's not on the beyond virtuals, but that is virtuals is in the lead at the highest market cap. What are the $35 billion?

What are the big AI agent platforms? Let me see if I can name them. Given my, I did a rollup where you were out, David and I learned a lot. So, there's- Dude, they're so informative. There's virtuals. There's AI 16Z in that platform, right? There's also, what's my missing? Those are the two big ones.

There are actually quite a lot. There's a pretty big long tail as well. And so I think there's a lot incoming. There's my shells, which is an AI agent platform. There's kind of going to be one per chain. There's one on the crypto.com chain that I'm forgetting the name of. But I think these things are turning from

like kind of a premium service, which is where virtual started into kind of a commodity because a lot of people are competing to become these are this is being called the layer one trade of the cycle, which is AI agent platforms. Yeah, I think that's a good take and I could totally see that coming true.

Let's get to number nine. This actually was mine from Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. He puts out a list every year, and I've read these for like 10 years. It's usually pretty interesting. I just pulled off one from his list. TikTok turns all videos into meme coins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world.

The actual TikTok is the TikTok does this? Yeah, the TikTok. That's what he said. Okay, but hold on. I think you could say just leave the prediction as is and say it's TikTok actually, right? Or you could just substitute another large social media entity kind of doing this. And I think it makes no sense.

This feels like a, it almost feels, it felt to me like it was a 2021 prediction. You know what I mean? Like the end of 2021 going to 2022, NFTs are huge and people would start making these types of predictions. That was not the time because I think we had massive regulatory overhang.

at that time. It's like, are NFT securities? Well, the guy in charge of securities says they are. His name is Gary Gensler. And so now that he's gone, now that we have really cheap transaction fees, just all across crypto, you can almost see that we have like the fertile ground for this prediction actually happening. So I present that to you. What do you think?

No, I can see that. Yeah. I think it kind of remains to be seen how clear the skies are, regularly speaking. Are people really going to take the maximum freedom that people are saying that we have with the Trump administration? Who's going to go first and start to do really bold stuff? Yeah. TBD on when that happens and how far they go. Yeah.

All right, Ryan, this next one is also yours. So I'm going to need you to give it to me. All right, cool. Well, since we didn't have an ETH price prediction on the list, you got to give an ETH price prediction. David, I've been seeing a lot of ETH price predictions from kind of the large institutions. And let me tell you, they're uninspiring to me. People are saying, hey, next year, we could see 7K ETH, 8K ETH.

That does not excite me at all. And in fact, I think people are still, they have a 2024 overhang of a bearishness on either of the asset, because it had an okay year, but like not a great year. It's certainly not a Bitcoin year. Gloomy tinted glasses. Pretty much. And so I felt like all of those bullish ETH predictions were weak. I wanted to get my own. I think 10K ETH is the absolute base case. All right. That's like, if, I mean, if we barely get a bull market,

I think we're looking at something between 15K and 20K ETH. And if people think that like, that's like a, you know, I make these predictions every year sort of thing. Yes, I do.

confession. You got to be only only have to be right once. You only have to be right once. Honestly, it's only a matter of time until we see these numbers. So like, why shouldn't it be the 2025 bull cycle is my take? You see Blobspace heating up, you know, fees revenue, you know, going crazy, the AI meta, all the layer two is heating up. There's a lot of things in place for for either this year. And if it fixes a few things narrative wise, I think it's off to the races. It might even not even need that fix could just be the institutional buyers and ETFs that propel us to 10k

It doesn't take that much. I mean, we just saw this happen with Bitcoin. I mean, it feels like a pretty obvious trade to me. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah, to this day, like I've said, we have still not yet seen a complete bull market with both proof of stake and EIP 1559. And now I also block fee burn. So we still have not seen how price sensitive ether is to marginal flows incoming to buy.

And then the last prediction, this is a bankless sign prediction. I think we have consensus between myself, Ryan, and our AI expert at bankless EGS. We do the AI rollups, which if you're not listening to AI rollups, you need to be listening to the AI rollups. If you want to be one of the active traders on the frontier in crypto, it is the meta. Then that is a prediction that we are making here. Crypto AI agents dominates the 2025 meta and then hits $250 billion in market cap, where it is coming in right now at $17.3 billion.

The prediction here is that it's going to $250 billion for AI agents. This is inspired by EJAS, our co-host of the AI roll-ups, but I'm co-signing it. Ryan, are you co-signing it? I think I could co-sign this, right? Again, it's not for sure that this is going to happen, but I feel like this is the best upside prediction that we have going to 2025. Most specific, the most bullish.

Yeah, and you know, you're 10% DJN portfolio, you know, that's where I would allocate almost all of that. I would put like 9% on this specific narrative and on that number because to go from 17 billion to 250 billion, that's like a far more. 10% into the 100%. And then you take that and you put that into your fundamentals assets. Or if you want your fundamentals, yeah. A hundred things that are not going to go down 99% and might only go down, you know, 75%.

And what this assumes, of course, is that this gets kind of a narrative upsurge, the same narrative upsurge that DeFi did previous cycle, where honestly DeFi hits similar numbers. And it got way ahead of itself. It got overinflated. It went too high, of course. And that's basically what Anticipate could happen with AI agents. So this is a huge number to watch. And it came from nowhere, by the way. So it's at 17 billion. What was it three months ago? Like under 100 billion? Something close to that, right? So incredible.

And then we have not a prediction, but a bonus take about predictions. This is, I thought this was funny from David Phelps, who tweeted out, MFers will write their top predictions for 2025. And then everyone will be like, AI crypto will take off next year. Like my man, the goal is not to predict what will happen six months ago, which I thought was funny.

It's so he's just saying everyone's extrapolating in their 2025 predictions, the thing that's like right now, the decency bias. So take these predictions with a grain of salt, probably will be blindsided by something absolutely crazy that hits us in 2025 and hopefully to the bullish upside and there are no one's list. That's usually what happens.

That's right. Coming up next, the IRS decides to AML KYC all defi over the holidays, a little Christmas present from the Taxman. And we're getting an RSA PSA on some other weird tax stuff that happens, because you all know RSA is the tax guy. Thank you. That's right, Ryan. That's right. And then also our favorite, doe quan, coming back to the United States. Just not not in a good way. Not in a good way. Yeah.

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participate today at meth.mantle.xyz. All right, and we're back. We have some drama, some bad news coming out of the world of taxes in crypto. Ryan, what do we need to know? Okay, so let me get you up to speed, David. So this is what I

kind of have digested with as I came back. So over the holidays, the IRS finalized a tax rule requiring all DeFi brokers. I put that in air quotes to collect user trading information. So what this does, David, is it could be a de facto AML KYC for all DeFi front ends. And that would start in 2027. So not starting 2025, but 2027.

Do you remember all the proposed rule stuff that came out that the IRS was basically going to do this? Everyone crypto commented. We had somebody on the podcast to explain this to us. We all commented on the rulemaking. The IRS received, I don't know, 40,000 different comments, some of which were AI generated. One of mine was saying how much we didn't like this rule, basically. Do you remember that? That happened sometime last year. Okay.

Well, over the holidays, they basically clarified their interpretation of the rule. It's kind of as bad as we would expect. What they're going to do is require all DeFi brokers, which are DeFi front ends to issue 1099s to anybody who uses the platforms. So they didn't just make this up, Gary Gensler style. You know how Gary Gensler, his operating model was just like, oh, I own this, that's a security.

This actually came from some legislation. You remember the Biden infrastructure bill that was signed in 2021? Well, it included some language around the expansion of broker reporting requirements that would hit crypto. Okay. And it didn't quite clarify what a broker was. It was pretty clear that

Any exchange that had custody crypto assets would be defined as a broker and have to issue 1099s. But it's super unclear as to whether DeFi would. And that's when vague legislation, what happens is regulators like the IRS interpret that vague legislation in the way that they wish to interpret it and they put out a rule. And this is the clarification, that rule. And it's kind of bad news. They're saying that this rule applies to DeFi. Does that make sense so far?

I'm tracking. Yeah so what they're trying to do is get as many people as possible to fill these things out. You see what's on the screen here.

They're trying to get people to voluntarily fill out a form. Well, okay. So this is a 1099. So anytime you make an exchange, you have some proceeds from a sale of stocks or something, then like the E-Trade or the Schwab, they issue you a 1099 for the proceeds of that exchange. So you know, as a taxpayer, like, okay, well, my proceeds were like 5K for the year or something, right? NIRS gets a copy of that too. And they say, oh, taxpayer, David Hoffman.

You know, the Robinhood says you owe five K. So we expect to see five K for you. So they issue it to you as the taxpayer and the issue it to the IRS. You can see from the IRS is vantage point. They basically want more of these things filled out because the more of these they have filled. It's seeing like a state. They want next is to fill these things out.

They want somebody to fill it out, right? And their model is because they know if more people fill it out, they'll get more tax compliance. And they prefer big centralized institutions to kind of fill them out for everybody else, because then they don't have to go to every individual citizen. And if they fill out your form, yeah, if Coinbase doesn't fill out the form, then they can just, you know, take Brian Armstrong to jail. So Brian Armstrong is going to make Coinbase fill out the form.

It's way easier. Yeah, it's way easier. And so some people see this and they're like, well, the IRS is coming out to crush crypto. And maybe there's an element of that. I mean, there's people in the US government that really just don't like crypto. We've seen some of that in Gensler. That's probably true to some extent, but like a more simple explanation is basically seeing like a state. The IRS just wants more of these forms filled out. And so they.

Yeah, this is how it works. So they'd, they'd prefer that Uniswap fills it out. They'd prefer that MetaMask fills it out. They prefer that like some sort of centralized entity fills it out so they can get more, you know, attacks, more people paying. The argument about decentralization and permissionlessness just doesn't, they just don't care. They're like, I don't care about your decentralization fill up the goddamn form.

Exactly, right? Exactly. And so who is viewed as a DeFi broker? It's still kind of unclear. This is Gabe Shapiro saying it looks like nearly all DeFi web app providers will be covered. Some wallets will as well, right? So you can imagine Metamask swap certainly being covered. You can imagine Uniswap being covered probably unlikely that something like Etherscan is covered by this. Right.

What this means in terms of a compliance is that for every single person who uses, you know, Uniswap let's say, or a MetaMask, Uniswap or MetaMask on the front inside of things would have to fill out the name and address for each customer. So security type information, right? It's kind of like an AML KYC type check.

because they need to know who to send the form to. So they need to know who's actually pressing the buttons and making the trade. So what this does do. It's untenable for the design of these systems. Of course, it just de facto AML KYC's everything that's like any kind of verb, any kind of action you're trying to make in D5 becomes all AML KYC.

This is the monopoly on violence that the nation state owns running up against the self sovereignty of decentralized blockchains. Yeah, it's an immovable force runs into an unsoppable object.

Right. And it's, again, it's rulemaking. So it's, remember where this came from? Some vague kind of legislation and then IRS is interpreting a certain way. So it could be interpreted differently, but this is how they choose to interpret it, at least for right now. So what do DeFi front ends do? Well, they can either just accept that they're a broker and kind of comply. So that would mean like all the web front ends that use for DeFi, they would not just connect wallet. They would have to like have you

make an account, make an account, fill out your information before you click the button and trade, right? Or that's option one, or they could just block US users. Because this only applies to US taxpayers. What do they do? What do you think they're going to do Ryan?

Right. Or are they going to make all of their users give email, password, you know, address, YIN number? Or is it in a bad spot? It depends, right? It puts them in a bad spot. And, you know, or they could just abandon all of the front end, upgrade ability and everything entirely and go full decentralization, right? So you can imagine a world where like Uniswap doesn't actually host the Uniswap front end itself.

There's some way that users really run this locally or something like that. You become more like a broker if you're taking a fee on the actual trade. So maybe if you're not taking a fee on the trade, then maybe you're not a broker. So you could go full throttle, fully decentralized. And what this means for users, of course, is that you have to share your KYC information similar to an exchange. So the rule goes into effect.

after January 1st, 2027. But the good news is David. Yeah, 2027. The good news is two years away. And the good news is crypto is fighting back. This is the Defy Education Fund. Today's announcement by the Treasury and IRS to finalize their broker rulemaking is yet another attempt by the outgoing administration to undermine the crypto industry and basically TLDR. We're fighting back. This is Kristen Smith from Blockchain Association. We already follow filed a lawsuit. So they did all this over the holidays.

which is kind of cool that crypto is like not taking this lying down. This is Jake Travinsky. The crypto industry sued the IRS less than 24 hours after it finalized its anti-D5 broker rule. And basically the crypto industry is saying, you know, according to the administrative procedures,

you shouldn't be interpreting and making a rule in this way. It's like, you don't have the power to do this and kind of kicking it back to Congress. And then also, we have kind of the Trump Uno card, which is maybe when Trump comes into office, he goes and reverses. Yeah. He tries to reverse all of these things. And so we got that going for us as well. Okay. So my main takeaway is I'm going to wait for further news.

I think so, probably. It's just kind of bad that they think it has to be like this because it doesn't have to be like this. This is what I've learned has always been the case with crypto regulation is that it starts basically as bad as possible. And then the crypto community starts rabbling and we get it walked back slowly incrementally into a more favorable position. It kind of seems to be that what this world is like.

Yeah, I think we've got some ability to do that going and we've gotten really good at rabbling. That's right. That's right. David, tell us what we can expect from Ethereum in 2025. I knew you've been tracking kind of the road map than your term for Ethereum. So what's happening?

Yeah, so the EIP mempool of which Ethereum EIPs are getting added to which hard fork is starting to settle as we get closer to Petra as we move forward in time. So, things will always be shifting and this is not the final state of things, but there's a little bit of an update here. Petra, which hopefully goes in this year in 2025. Some of the key EIPs that are currently going to be in Petra

Max EB max effective balance this allows for if you're in validators to have 32 Ether or more And so as you accrue ether that newly accrue ether is not just a reward to be claimed But also itself becomes staked and this can consolidate a bunch of validators down like so if you're more running

If you have 32, what's 30? Like, the USA have 10 validators. You have 320 Ether. You're running on your machine. You're actually running 10 validators. That could actually be consolidated down to one validator. This actually reduces a lot of messaging overhead and actually does impact the scalability of the Ethereum layer one.

because there's less messaging going on. So people have enjoyed this EIP for a variety of reasons, both for just stake or quality of life, but also for some reducing some bandwidth. So that is most likely definitely going in account abstraction for EOA wallets. EOA wallets, that's externally on account. That's most likely what your wallet is. So allowing an EOA wallet to also act like an account abstracted wallet.

That's going in blob throughput increase from an average of three to an average of six. So doubling blobs in Petra along with increasing call data costs. These are the current consensus things for going into Petra. Notably, not peer-dass.

And Peerdass is a massive upgrade, kind of like a 10x upgrade to Blob Space. That Peerdass is a data availability sampling. It's kind of the next zero to one moment. It's the next order of magnitude moment for Blob Space. So we're getting and doubling of Blob Space in Petra, but unfortunately we're not getting Peerdass in Petra. We're going to have to wait for Fusaka, which is the next hard fork after Peerdass, after Petra to get Peerdass.

So that probably means we won't get pure das in 2025. We will probably get pure das in later 2026, which means slow. The only additional blob space we'll get is that increase you said from, you know, three to six, three to six, which is a doubling, which is a doubling.

Yeah, but will that be enough? That's the question. Yeah. Well, it'll send Blobspace burn back down to zero for the foreseeable future. But I mean, what was our, one of our predictions is that AI agents represent 10% of transaction volumes on chains. Well, that's not, it's not eating away at pre-existing transactions. That's 10 additional percentage points of transaction volume. So the AI agent meta, I think, will come with a massive consumption of Blobspace.

Moving into some Bitcoin stuff, MicroStrategy wants to accelerate its 21-21 Bitcoin plan. So the news is not that MicroStrategy bought more Bitcoin, but I'm sure that it will. The news is that MicroStrategy would like to accelerate its purchasing of Bitcoin. So last year, there was a 21-21 Bitcoin plan where MicroStrategy was going to put in $42 billion through debt instruments and equity to expand its Bitcoin holdings. It's now announced a special meeting for shareholders to vote on speeding up

the streamlining and capital raising efforts to make sure that we can put in $42 billion. So okay, Michael Taylor just wanting to front run himself. So no one else front runs him. So that is going, that's going to be put to a boat. David, I've seen FOMO before it. This is kind of what FOMO looks like, right? I mean, like, Michael Taylor just self-referentially making himself bullish.

Okay, Montenegro, the Justice Minister, signed Doquan's extradition to the United States. So you guys remember Doquan, previous Pigless podcast, a guest. By the way, we have four or five previous Pigless podcast guests that have gone to prison or on their way. That's because we have everyone on the podcast.

Yeah, well, I told my family this over the holidays, and they were like, what? What are you doing over there? Anyway, he is being extradited to the US. So Dokwan was, of course, the founder of Terra Luna, the collapse. There was some question as to where he'd be prosecuted. So he's being held on a fight between a tug of war between South Korea, of which he is an original citizen from. I believe. But then the United States, where he went to school, got his first job. Yeah. He went to Stanford. Dokwan was a Stanford. Yeah, he did.

And the U.S. won that tug of war. And so... That's the prize. Toquan has come to the U.S. to get prosecuted. So that's going to happen. I don't know how many years he's up for. If he was under prosecution in South Korea, the penalty could be between 20 and 40 years. I don't know if that'll be less significant or more in the U.S. I'm sure he's happy to get out of the Montenegrin jail system, which I cannot imagine is all that great.

I don't think the United States rail system is that great either. I bet the South Korea is pretty good. As far as the trails go. You said happy. I don't know if like happy is a adjective I'd use to describe doe quan situation at like at all. I mean, it's got to be pretty pretty shit. I don't think you want to be in the Montenegrin jail system.

All right, David, now we got to get to the most important news of the week, which is Vitalik Buterin is adopting a hippopotamus, right? Moo dang, it's a hippopotamus, right, of some kind? That is right. Moo dang, yes, correct, your correct rhyme. Moo dang is in fact a hippopotamus. But it's like a tiny hippopotamus. I don't think she's tiny anymore. Yeah, she's a hippo.

It's a regular hippo. Oh, no, she's a pygmy hippo. I didn't know that. Yeah, tiny hippo. Oh, I thought she was just a baby hippo. No, that's why she's so cute. Well, she might also be a baby pygmy hippo. I'm actually not sure. Someone could fact check us. She's becoming just a normal pygmy hippo.

Anyway, the news here is Vitalik Buterin is sponsoring Moudang with a generous 10,000 TBH. What is TBH? I bought. I bought funding for the adoption, adoption, meaning like basically adopting Moudang. Vitalik's not taking Moudang home, right? It's just paying to support Moudang in the Thailand. I was ready for it. That's about $300,000 for anyone who was curious.

All right. So, you know, thanks to Vitalik for doing that, supporting wildlife and the zoo, the zoo thanked him as well. Vitalik responded, actually. Thanks for the warm welcome to the family and your work for wild animals. I'm happy to be the adoptive father to Moudang as she grows up over the next few years.

and support her with my donation, maybe more, as I set aside 88 ETH for Moudang plus friends. So it's not just Moudang, it's also Moudang's friends that are the benefit. Moudang up 25% on the week to a $300 million market cap. Here we are. What is that? You're talking about a meme coin now, right?

Yes. So Vitalik has, he received some proceeds from the moodang meme coin. I believe he's like sold all the proceeds as well. Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah. So he's trying to be a little bit more of like an activist.

Philanthropist meme coin regen influencer type. I think that's his strategy here is like, he knows that he's a subject of meme coin shenanigans. And he's trying to learn how to make that productive and be making an alliance with, oh, you send me meme coin.

I donated charity because I did something your meme coin goes up. And so that is an alignment of what Vitalik wants, which is capital for charity and alignment with what the meme coin community wants, which is Vitalik to acknowledge the existence of their meme coin. It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. So do you know Tyler Cowan?

economist. Well, previous thankless guest. Okay. So he started a new podcast, which I just sent you an episode that I think you should listen to. Okay. Yeah. It's marginal revolution. Okay. So it's his, it's him and another economist and they just talk about different like geeky, iconic subjects.

Okay, so anyway, one subject that we're talking about is who should receive the Nobel Prize in economics? And Tyler Cowan goes, I think Vitalik Buterin should receive it. He said like the whole economics world has not paid any attention to crypto. And yet here's Vitalik Buterin using applied economics and actual mechanism design and creating an entire like economy, open finance, DeFi economy, and economists aren't even paying attention.

He should be the recipient of a Nobel Prize. The economic system of Ethereum is incredible. It's incredible that it works. And it works. And it's doing amazing things. And I'm a big plus one for that. I would love to see it. I don't think we see it in 2025, but I think we'll see it sometime this decade. I think that happens before 2030 is economists start to wake up to this and start to recognize what's going on in crypto. So nothing to do with mooding, but it does have something to do with Vitalik David.

We'll send them off with this. This is the end of the roll-up. Thank you guys for being with us in 2025. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. We're your headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Big List journey. Thanks a lot.