Banklessation, welcome to the weekly roll up today. On the episode we got Hisib Kreshe, as my co-host for this episode. Hisib, how are you doing, my man? Good to see you. I'm doing well, doing well of yourself.
Really good, really, really good. There's always just a mountain of news to go through, and I'm really happy to have you here, my man. Let's talk about what we're going to talk about this week. Trump watched Trump signed a crypto executive order called strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology, which included a bunch of things, including a working group for a national crypto stockpile. Hesterpers and the SEC revoked SAB 121, which gives, of course, the green light to bank custody crypto.
This open source AI platform Venice launched his token and made a huge number of people very happy this week, but also some drama around the coinbase listing abstract chain went live with their main net and Gary Gensler gets a new job. See, before we get into any of this news in specific, how would you give this week a vibe? What was a vibe of this week just in a sentence?
chaotic. I think it's been a very chaotic week. Yeah. It's one of these weeks where the outside world is really shaking what's going on in crypto. So it's, you're feeling like you're inside the snow globe and seeing all the stuff getting, getting floated up. That was the vibe this week. Is that a combination because of Nvidia and then also politics? Yes. That's, that's kind of, I feel like that's going to be the theme of the year is that a lot of stuff that's not related to crypto is going to be shaking up the crypto world.
Well, both Nvidia and politics are top of this agenda. So let's go ahead and get right into it. But before we do, I want to talk about our friends and sponsors over at the crypto tax calculator. It's tax season. We know that's a lot of stressful time for everyone in the bankless community and probably you listener as well. But that's why we like the crypto tax calculator because it takes away a lot of stress out of taxes. I have an accountant that I just, you
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and find those codes and those links. All right, Haseb, let's get into markets. Let's start with NVIDIA. The big headline that I think rocketed around the world is NVIDIA sheds almost $600 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in U.S. history. That's 17% off of NVIDIA. This was on the backs of this Chinese AI lab deep-seek that unveiled this new open-source model that it claimed only took two months
And less than $6 million to build people are going back and forth on the validity of that claim. But what is basically well understood is that the performance of this new chat GPT competitor is extremely strong and extremely real. DPC got to the first place of the Apple Store charts in just a few days, which is pretty crazy. It is currently number one at the time of recording.
And then David Sachs, of course, who is the crypto AI czar, says deep-seek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive. I'm confident in the US, but we cannot be complacent. Has Eve, when you saw this news come across your desk, how did you interpret it? What was your reaction?
Honestly, one of my first reactions was, so I saw the deep-sea car one paper when it originally came out seven days ago, eight days ago now. So I saw Wall Street had a very delayed reaction to this announcement. So nothing actually really changed between when the paper was actually released. Even the numbers, so people were talking about the $6 million model to train, that was actually a predecessor to R1 called, it was their V3 model, and that was released in December.
So it's one of these things where you realize markets are just not efficient. Like it just took Wall Street people over the weekend to actually understand what the fuck just happened, like what actually hit them. And I think the biggest thing is that there's so much misinformation that's out there now about deep seeing of people who just do not understand what it means to have, first of all, how AI labs work and like how much CapEx goes into actually building an AI lab, people really fixating on this idea that took $6 million to train.
It took $6 million to train the final iteration of the model in GPU hours. But how much did it cost to acquire all the GPUs? How much did it cost to pay all the salaries? How much did it cost to do all the other training runs that failed? The reality is that $6 million is built on top of a mountain of cash. Almost certainly they spent over $100 million on all this stuff end to end. Now, to be clear, that's way less than opening, I was spending way less than meta spending. That's very significant because it means that AI is a lot cheaper than we thought it was going to be. That's good.
That's good for you and me. That's good for almost every product should be thrilled. Exactly. Exactly. It's bad for producers. Yeah. The Nasdaq is overwhelmingly weighted towards producers because, you know, Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world now. And yeah, it's really bad for Nvidia because in the same way, you know, when the oil prices come down, it's bad for Exxon, but it's good for us. It's good for everybody else. Good for the world.
So, I think, by and large, this deep-sea thing is actually great for all of us, but the reality is that the balance sheets of the Fortune 500, the balance sheets of the NASDAQ, do not contain people spending money on AI, because it just hasn't shown up yet as a line item on most people's balance sheets. It's only a cost right now. No one's making money on AI yet. Everyone's paying money to create AIs. But I think in the long run, this is only a good thing.
I mean, this thing is open source. It's literally more open source than meta is like they release all the intermediate models, not just the final model that they release like they did for llama. So deep state, I think is an unalloyed good for the world, super, super awesome, super bullish for AI generally, super great for the consumer. But just like with anything you have to overlay it with geopolitics and fear and FOMO and all this stuff.
I think markets really got this one wrong in having a generally bear sentiment on the entire market and on risk assets. Huge mistake. Definitely right that Nvidia stock should go down, but absolutely wrong that anything else should make you less bullish on where this technology is going.
Yeah, it would notably a number of crypto AI projects have already integrated the R1, the Deepseek R1 model. Venice now has Deepseek R1 in its product. And to me, it's a little, I'm happy that we are seeing the creations of these AI labs, which are very expensive, very hard to produce. As you said, tons of CapEx, maybe it costs $6 million to train, but again, like you said, that's built on top of the shoulders of OpenAI and many other people, hundreds of millions of dollars to get to that last $6 million
and then it's open source. And so while OpenAI is truly closed and so is meta and cloud and all these other LLMs, we have this arms race going on between China and the United States, but then if it continually ends up in the hands of the open source community just three, six, nine months later, and we get all these things for free because of this arms race competition, I'm pretty happy with the way that that kind of unfolds.
It's deflationary. It's deflationary, pure a sense of the word. And as a consumer, you could not want anything more from technology than to deflate the price of goods. If you remember, back early in the AI arms race, there was an internal document at Google that got leaked that basically said there's no mode in AI.
And that it doesn't like open source is so good and it's getting so much better so quickly that even though the frontier labs are always two to three months ahead on the state of the art, open source catches up really fucking fast. And we've just seen that with our one. Our one is as good as a one.
Literally, okay, so 03 is supposed to be the new open AI model, which is definitely better than R1. But R1 is basically one 20th of the cost of 01. And it's getting the same performance. That's crazy. That's incredible. And that's awesome for everybody involved. What it tells you is that, so one thing, it means that the modes that these AI companies were supposed to have are not what we previously imagined. And also means the mode for NVIDIA is probably not what we previously imagined. But what it is, is very good for decentralized AI.
It's very good for open source, very good for homebrew. And this is the most, this is the part of the pool that we play in. You know, on the crypto side, we are all about the democratization of technology and what that can happen when that goes into hands of individual users and entrepreneurs. A world where OpenAI owns all the intelligence or Google owns all the intelligence is a world that sucks for us. There's nothing for us to do because we've got all the crappy models, you know, sitting here in the reject pile. That's not the world we're living in right now. So that is something I'm as an investor and as a crypto person, very, very excited about.
Hisib, you said this is something that the markets got wrong with the response to invade the Nvidia price tanking 17% on the back of DeepSeek. We did a podcast with this individual, Jeffrey Immanuel, who wrote this short case for Nvidia stock. He released this on Friday.
And when we did the podcast with him, he talked about how this article, which it's a 60-minute read. It's very dense. It's very technical. This guy clearly knows his stuff. He was telling me about the Google Analytics for this article, where it started off just 50, 100 people reading it as soon as he published it. But over the weekend, it just ballooned to 2.5 million views, starting in the New York Manhattan area and then quickly moving to Silicon Valley.
And I can't remember the name of the town that Nvidia is in, but also a lot of right in the right where Nvidia headquarters are. And so he is actually taking the credit for the market movement because it happened. He wrote it on Friday and the market processed it over the weekend and then it's done Monday. I think it's correct, by the way. I think it's correct. I saw this over the weekend. I think it was probably the spark that started it. Yes.
I don't know that it wouldn't have happened anyway at some point when Wall Street finally ingested what this meant, because clearly it has implications for NVIDIA, right? If the AI movement is all happening within the US, then NVIDIA is good. NVIDIA is in great shape. If people are not open sourcing,
Top tier models that are more efficient than opening eye models, then okay, that's great for Nvidia. Nvidia wants everything to be closed and wants everything to be sold to commercial enterprises that are going to be charging huge markups on their models. This is not the world that we're living in now.
And Wall Street would eventually figure that out. I think that being said, I agree that Nvidia's stock should have gotten hurt. And obviously it did, right? But also the market realized that overreacted. So it went down 70% on Monday and then it went back up 9% the next day, which was not only the biggest single market cap loss for any company ever in a single day,
But then it was one of the biggest market gains for a company any given day because it just rebounded so much the next day. Now it's still down from the high quite a bit. But I think the lesson of the story is that it dragged down a lot of other stuff with it, which is what I think was incorrect, right? Taking what the
what the prospects for Nvidia and basically their moat in hardware and saying, okay, this should affect how you think generally about risk assets. That is what I think is a mistake because I think it's actually good for all of the risk assets that AI is cheap. I think it's great for all of us. We actually don't want a world where AI is expensive. Right. Totally.
All right, let's get into the crypto native markets. Let's talk about Bitcoin. Bitcoin started the week at $101,000.5, and then it's up 3.3% on the week to where it is now at $105,000. Ether, not doing as great, started the week at $3,200, ending the week at $3,250.
And then of course, I think something to pay attention to is the Bitcoin Ether ratio. I don't know how closely you pay attention to the ratio has he, but it did very briefly go below the point zero three number. It is at above the point zero three right now, almost at point zero three one, but it did hit.
0.0299, which is where Udi Wirthheimer and the famous breaking ETC breaking down below a 0.03 watch party. That was that famous level. Give me your sense of the crypto markets right now. Bitcoin's still pretty high, either doing the same thing it's been doing for two years. Just give me your sense of the markets to see.
Yeah, I mean, there was a big sell off triggered by the deep-seek fears over the weekend, and it doesn't feel like alts have really recovered. It seems like mostly everything's been bleeding for the last month. So the only thing that really has had any kind of signs of life or Solana, even Solana is way off the high. So it hit the two eighties right after Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and Melania. And since then, it's just been, it's done the best of all alts, but
Most also across the board have just bled and haven't really seemed to be able to find their footing with respect to what there is to look forward to in this market. Did you see this tweet from Ben Cohen? I thought this was super interesting. He goes, the reason why the vibe is so off despite $100,000 Bitcoin is because the advanced decline index ADI of the top 100 cryptocurrencies have been in a downtrend.
since 2021. Now the Advanced Decline Index, that's not really a metric I see cited too often, but I think the general vibe is of the top 100 coins, most of them are in a just a downtrend for the last two years. And so there are some that exceptions, like you said, Solana, Dogecoin is an exception, Ripple is an exception, Bitcoin is an exception.
But other than that, everything is mostly on a pretty solid downtrend for the past two years. And that's why Ben Cowan is citing the vibe just feels off vibes feel bad. So I'm calling this the middle of the market, which is, you know, these are startups. These are startups that you and I invest in. This is people's jobs. This is, you know, the BD in the industry. And the middle of the market has not really felt the same price appreciation that some of the outliers have like Bitcoin, Solana, all these other ones. What's your take on this?
Yeah, there is definitely a bit of a vibe session going on right now where if you look at absolute terms, the biggest crypto assets, which are Ethereum, obviously not Ethereum, but Ethereum has been bleeding. But if you look at Bitcoin, Ripple, Solana, B&B, those are actually doing fairly well. And then the big middle of the market is just really hurting. A lot of things are down even from March last year.
which is a little bit crazy. That was when the ETF launched and we were like, oh, well, maybe that's going to get us to this great bright future. A lot of things haven't hit their high even after Trump got elected. They didn't hit the high from March last year. So it does feel like, OK, it's more than just macro. There's a general lack of enthusiasm about what's going on in tech crypto outside of Solana.
And I think that's likely to continue for a while until there is some real energy around it. The reality is that Bitcoin and the meme coin complex are really taking up most of the energy, which is one, Bitcoin is this big macro political story. And then meme coins, now it's become a political story. But before that, it was just kind of this frenetic up and down retail consumer frenzy.
And besides that, there's not nobody really wants to hear about crypto on the technology side. Yeah, exactly. I mean, when's the last time you heard anyone get excited about ZK or anybody getting excited about privacy coins or anything like that? I think people are just tired about promises, like crypto loves to write promises. And we don't really fulfill promises too much. And I think people like crypto outsiders and even crypto insiders are just kind of fatigued about all the promises that we write.
I think that's right. I think there's also an element of, it's not that I think, when I look at all these founders, they did build the thing, but they didn't get everybody in the world to use the thing. And that's one of the virtues, of course, of Solana is that they've been so focused on just getting users on the chain and getting adoption and getting into people's hands. And very few entrepreneurs are actually well equipped to be able to do that. A lot of them don't really have the distribution advantage that a Binance or some of these big exchanges that really know how to get things in the hands of consumers.
have. So you've got the basis of the world, you've got the salinas of the world that really have that direct relationship with consumers and can tell that bigger story about, hey, here's why this thing is going to go in your pocket and become a part of your financial life. Most people don't have that ability. And so I think you're seeing this kind of this difficulty of entrepreneurs who really have some of them really have the goods.
But there is not able to really reach people's wallets. And I think that that does wax and wane over the course of a cycle, just because people are more interested in trying new things and people care more about some of these technology stories that are that are undergirding this, this, all this stuff. But I agree with you. Most people feel like, Hey, I haven't seen anything. All I see is a, you know, tokens go up. So all right, I'll play tokens go up.
Right. I'll play the token go up game. Despite the bad vibes, you're at $3.7 trillion in total market cap for the industry. I think that's just one, maybe $200 billion off of the all-time highs, where you are nearing the market cap all-time high. I mean, that's definitely helped by the fact that Bitcoin is also at all-time highs, and then also
Ripple is just $80 billion, $80 billion from flipping Ethereum. I'm keeping an eye on that. We're going to skip. Sorry. An FTV. Not an FTV. An FTV. Yes, an FTV. A very different number on the Ripple side. We're going to skip the Bitcoin and Ether ETFs this week because not too much action happened there. But nonetheless, there was some action in the ETF land. Bitwise filed for a Dogecoin ETF, which
I always thought that this made sense as the third possible ETF to come into the fray. I know a lot of people want this a lot of ETF and I'm sure we will eventually get one, but Dogecoin just has the Lindy. It's been around for forever. And then we also on the on the backs of that saw Tuttle capital filed for 10 different leveraged
crypto asset ETFs. So a 2X long XRP, 2X long Solana, 2X long Trump coin, 2X long Melania coin ETFs. These are all ETFs, Cardano, Chaining, Polkadot, Bonk. So, I mean, I agree with the Bonk, or excuse me, the Dogecoin ETF, that one makes sense. And then we see a splattering of some leverage long meme coin ETFs. So a tale of two very different stories here. Gimme your takes on the ETF side of the story.
I don't know that I have that much of a take. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What do you think about the Dogecoin ETF though? Dogecoin deserve it? It makes sense. I think Dogecoin is liquid enough, global enough that, yeah, why not put an ETF around it? I think on some level,
The SEC just doesn't want to. I don't know that it's like, oh, well, this is a non-register security. I think it's just that I just please don't make me do this. I think at some point once the because that's the thing is that once you list Dogecoin, how are you not going to list everything? Are you going to say no to all the other meme coins? So I think there's some just kind of
dragging their feet, most likely when it comes to Doge. I think Solana, there's probably more appetite of like, oh, hey, there's a real thing. I can see why it's important to give retail investors access to this in a ready vehicle. But I would kind of suspect before we get a Doge ETF and before we get a Solana ETF, I'd expect we'd probably see a micro strategy.
for Doge or a micro strategy for for Solana. Like I actually think if those were tape, you know, some kind of zombie in the NASDAQ decides, you know what, we're just going to buy a bunch of, you're just going to issue debt and we're going to use it to go buy some Doge. Um, I think it would actually be super well received. And that would be the first way that you could go into a brokerage account and get exposure to doge, get exposure to Solana. And I expect that's probably the order of operations is that that probably happens first before we actually get the ETFs.
Why haven't we seen that? I have heard discussions of, oh, I'm building the microstrategy for a theory more. I'm building where this is the microstrategy for Solana. Why haven't we seen anything like that?
Um, well, so one, there's not a lot of Michael Sailor type people out there. It's crazy leader. You kind of need to be chest thumpy. You got to know how to like high people up on Wall Street. It's a different scale than hyping people up in crypto. Um, and the, the, so there is actually this thing in a Canada. That's like a salon of micro strategy. Yes. I was looking at it yesterday. It's like soul CF.
But they do a bunch of diversified investments in cannabis and like other, yeah. And so like I thought I was looking at this last night, funny you bring this up. And like I'm of the mind that if they pivoted 100% to Solana and they sold all the other stuff and they just only were concentrated in Solana bet, then I'm interested. It's currently at a big premium to Nav. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge premium to Nav, which is kind of like, okay, at this point,
How much more of a premium now do you expect it to have when it goes full Solana, you know, it's already at like what is it seven eight X right premium to now Something small yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that's not small right if you're seven Yes, but it's that yeah, it's very large premium to now, but this market cap is only fifty million dollars And so like it doesn't have that much juice to fire into buying soul
Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. So, yeah, but that's the thing. Canadian capital markets versus US capital markets, very different. So US is just so freaking big that if you can target US retail and get them to say like, oh, I can finally buy out of my 401k, some Solana or some Doge or whatever, I think that thing would go crazy. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, the price has moved in the last like two weeks or so since they are buying Solana. So I think people are making that speculative bet. Let's go into the FOMC. We had an FOMC meeting, which the recap says central bank is in no hurry to cut rates again. So the Fed is keeping the interest rate target currently to where it is at.
4.25 to 4.5%. It warned that inflation remains somewhat elevated. Analysts agree that the pause in the rate cut signals that the Fed is going to make a more cautious approach. Powell said that there will be a more patient approach to policy adjustments, and they will need signs of clear progress on inflation or weakness in the job market to change their stance.
But also during the speech, the drum pal also made a comment about Bitcoin, basically kind of reiterating what the repeal of SAB 121 just says, which is banks are perfectly able to serve crypto customers. And we as the Fed are like totally fine with that. Has he followed FOMC meetings at all? What's your take here?
I mean, I usually just see what happens afterwards. Unless it's a particularly spicy meeting, I think everyone kind of knew what the answer was going to say. That's not going to cut. They're going to take a kind of conservative stance of like, hey, we'll wait and see. So I think this FOMC meeting kind of a nothing burger. Exactly. Yeah, par for the course. All right. Coming up next.
The crypto executive order that Trump just signed, what is in it? Because it's more than just a national stockpile of crypto, although that was the main headline. The Czech Republic will vote on adding Bitcoin to their central bank reserves, and a different central bank holds $500 million of exposure to not Bitcoin.
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By becoming a layer two, SELO leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow. Follow SELO on X and witness the great SELO happening where SELO cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer two era and continuing its environmental leadership. Trump signed the executive order strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology. This happened last week. And we also have a crypto and AISR David Sachs, who is just standing over Trump's shoulder saying telling Trump exactly what he's about to sign.
I've had that experience. And Trump says, this is going to make the crypto go up, right? And David's tax goes absolutely under your leadership, sir. And I thought that was just hilarious. Okay. So what is the executive order?
Okay, so the first one is it establishes a working group will design a federal regulatory framework for digital assets, including stablecoins to provide clarity and support for innovation in that sector. And it also mandates an evaluation of the feasibility of creating a national digital asset stockpile. It is not mandated to create a strategic reserve of crypto. It mandates the evaluation
of the feasibility of creating a national digital assets stockpile. So as a couple of steps removed. But there's also a good number of other things that are in this executive order. I think I just want to read them out. I just read the first one. The second one, protecting and promoting the ability of individual citizens and private sector entities alike to access and use for lawful purposes, open public blockchains without persecution.
including the ability to develop and deploy software, to participate in mining and validating, to transact with other persons without unlawful censorship, and to maintain self custody of digital assets. Pretty much encompassing thumbs up to everything we do in crypto. The next one promoting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through the development of dollar backed stablecoins worldwide.
Next, promoting fair and open access to banking services for all law-abiding individual citizens and private sector entities. And last, prohibiting the establishment issue is circulation and use of a central bank digital currency within the jurisdiction of the United States. Pretty much an overwhelming plus one to everything the crypto industry wants, stands for, believes in, and definitely a direct refutation of 2.0.
I would actually take the other side of this. I think this executive order was kind of underwhelming. I mean, everybody, you saw markets kind of dipped a little bit after the signing of the executive order in large part because one, markets are really anticipating executive order when we didn't get one right when Trump did his first flurry of executive orders. Crypto markets tanked a little bit because they were like, wait, what about us? I thought we had all these day one things you're supposed to do. And then the executive order itself, if you read the executive order, right, all it says is that, okay, I'm creating a committee.
Right. And here are the things that I want the committee to focus on, is focus on, you know, no CBDCs, none of this, none of that. So the CBDC thing I think is kind of bullshit because it's a little bit of like nobody's been trying to do a CBDC anyway. Even Biden was like, don't do a CBDC. Nobody wants to do a CBDC. This is not a, wow, thank you Trump for saving us for all the evil CBDC creators.
So then, okay, they want them to investigate the concept of a crypto stockpile, which is like, okay, so we still don't know. So we have nothing. They're just going to sit together in a room and there's going to be a council and the end. So the answer is wait longer. So what you saw with Polymarket was that the likelihood of they're actually being a strategic Bitcoin reserve or a crypto reserve or whatever.
in the first 100 days plummeted to I think it was like 14% after this executive order got signed, basically meaning like kick the can down the road. That's what this executive order means. There's nothing specific here. There's nothing that he hasn't already said on the campaign trail. It's basically, here's a committee. And it's kind of also what Biden did, right? Biden was like, oh, I'm going to hear by executive order, I would create a committee and that committee is going to talk about stuff and never do anything.
So are you saying like the creation of a committee is kind of a way to just like defer and be like, look, I did something. I created a committee. Yeah. This is the definition of not doing anything. So it is an acknowledgement that like something will eventually happen. I'm not ready to do anything yet.
committees will meet and they will talk and TBD. So that's, that's where we're at. So I mean, to be clear, it's not a ref, it's not a, um, repudiation of his campaign promise. Right. It's a kick the can down the road, which is fine, but that's what it is. Would you agree with the idea that it is the weakest possible form of Trump being able to say that I've kept my promises?
Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it, right? But it's definitely not what markets we're looking for. Markets are looking for something more concrete. Now, I think we're likely to see that more from the SEC, from CFTC, from Treasury. They're more equipped to actually make rules and change the way that crypto is affirmatively regulated or treated, or the same thing happening from the IRS, but it doesn't look like we're getting it from an executive order. So that's kind of, I think, why markets are a little disappointed because Trump could do that by executive order and he seemingly hasn't.
On in the European side of things, check central bank meeting on Thursday to vote. That's today at the time of recording to vote on allocating up to 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. This is an article in the Financial Times, which David Bailey screenshot it because it's behind a paywall.
And so the Czech Central Bank wasn't expecting the Czech Central Bank to be looking to add 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. 5% is quite a lot. And on the other side of things, Norway's central bank has revealed that it owns $500 million of micro-strategy, not Bitcoin, but micro-strategy. Interesting choice.
And so I think this has led to people back on the United States, like Senator Cynthia Lumis, who's retweeting the central bank of the Czech Republic news. If you're not first, your last, America must make a decisive action to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and secure its place in the 21st century. CZ even tweeted out, imagine being the last government to buy on this news. Do you think that we as the United States need to engage in the
Bitcoin, musical chair, central bank game. What's your position on this? My position is a little complicated. It's obviously good for my bags. Right. I have Bitcoin exposure, so I would love to see lots of lots of Bitcoin demand coming from wherever. It doesn't really matter where it's from. The reality is, this is not the vibe right now in DC.
The vibe in DC is not let's spend more money. The vibe in DC is let's spend less money going and buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet as opposed to what most people think the Bitcoin reserve is going to be, which is just a moratorium on selling the Bitcoin that the government already sees is in criminal seizures.
which to be clear, the executive branch can do without Congress intervention. You don't need to bill, you don't need anything else. Trump could sign a thing tomorrow, an executive order that just says we're going to do that. But actually going out and affirmatively buying Bitcoin, like what the Czech Central Bank is proposing, that's insane for the US to do. There's no way it's going to happen, like absolutely no way. There's not the will for it in Congress.
And Congress controls the purse anyways. Congress controls the purse. You want to do new spending. When you're new spending, that has to come from Congress. Trump cannot just do that on his own. He can stop things from happening, like stop these auctions that normally the Department of Justice does when it seizes stolen Bitcoin or like Silk Road Bitcoin or whatever. But yeah, he can't he can't go and just be like, yo, let's diversify the government to some Bitcoin.
I think, Hasid, that's a very rational response. I think that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, yeah. Look, at the end of the day, it's also a question of what do you think the Fed is supposed to be doing? So this would be like the Fed going and taking some of the gold on its balance sheet and putting it into Bitcoin. I don't think the Fed wants to do that. It just said so far. Yeah, I don't think the Fed wants to do that. I think Congress could tell the Fed to do that. It's usually not what Congress was supposed to be doing is like,
basically, you know, essentially, like, backseat driving the Fed and telling it how to manage its reserves. Normally, we don't assume Congress knows what the hell the Fed should be doing because it's Congress and the Fed is independent. But in principle, yeah, that could, I guess, probably the Congress could decide, hey, new law Fed has to have 5% reserves in Bitcoin.
I think it would be it would be kind of a bad precedent. I think for Congress to be doing that and just saying like, Hey, we're going to decide what should be in reserves because we're bullish on this asset or something. Right. Like, look, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think everybody, every entity in the world should be, you know, kind of going and deciding to buy my bags. I think it will like it does eventually make sense, but the reality is like Bitcoin is super volatile asset. Right. The other thing I think Lynn Alden pointed this out in an interview earlier this week is that
I also don't think it really matters that much. The US dollar is not what the US dollar is because of what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. It just doesn't really matter what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. People buy US government debt not because of what our central banks hold in reserves. That's true for most other central banks in the world. People want to buy our debt because we're the US, because of our enormous military might and our tax base and our incredible economy.
I honestly don't think markets would care that much if we bought some Bitcoin or we didn't buy some big people. I'd be like, wow, we need to do this for the strength of the American Republic. It's like, that's not really true. Okay, good. Good takes. I like those takes. I like those takes. Let's turn to Heser Perce and the SEC, Heser Perce tweeted out on the January 23rd, which was last Thursday, last Thursday night. So this did not make it into last week's roll-up. She says on Twitter, bye-bye, SAB 121. It's not been fun.
and then links to an SEC link of staff account and accounting bulletin number 122. Basically, repealing SAB 121, rescinding SAB 121, which was the accounting rule that forced banks to treat Bitcoin and other crypto assets as a liability on their balance sheet, meaning that if they wanted to custody Bitcoin, they would have to custody $100,000 of Bitcoin. They would need an additional $100,000 of just liability in order to backstop that.
making it terribly capitaly and efficient to even serve that as a product. That is gone now. That is gone. We tried to repeal this last in the last congressional year, gained bipartisan support, Biden vetoed it at the last minute. But what does this mean for crypto? Banks can now custody crypto. They have the green light to custody crypto. And I haven't heard of any new banks just immediately opening their doors to this because this is now repealed. It's only been seven days.
news. I mean, it's just, it's just such a breath of fresh air that like everybody wanted this. This was one of the most obvious gensler overreaches was like, why, why would you make this rule? This is the craziest rule anyone's ever heard of is that in order to custody assets, you have to have offsetting equity. No other assets treated this way. If you're custody in paintings, if you're custody in, you know, firearms, like whatever, normally you custody something, all you have to do is hold the asset. That's it. That's what custody is.
but they're like, no, no, no, custody of crypto is so dangerous that you need not just a hundred Bitcoin. You need a hundred Bitcoin worth of dollars also on behalf of that customer. I'm like, what? Do you know what custody is? Why would that make any sense? Like it's just, it's just pure middle finger to the crypto industry. And it was, it was almost like,
You know, it was the only thing that was bipartisan even under the Biden administration that yet this is crazy. This isn't crazy. The only person who supported this was Elizabeth Warren. Both Democrats and Republicans were like, okay, I don't know about the rest of crypto, but like this one is, is, is ridiculous. Right. So just having this, you know, there's still a lot of work to do of like, okay, what does a actual SEC look like in a sane administration? But this thing was just like, okay, time to turn the page. I think that's what this represented more than anything.
How do you think this rolls out? Well, in my Wells Fargo account, will I be able to see a Bitcoin balance? How do you think this actually rolls out into? I don't think they want to be custody in Bitcoin or crypto for retail investors. I think this is more of an institutional custody thing. For them to hold crypto for retail,
Like they have to get comfortable with a lot of other stuff, like they just have to have their own infrastructure and stuff like that. So I think this is more affecting like State Street, that if you remember a long time ago, State Street is one of the biggest asset custodians in the world. They wanted to launch a cryptocurrency product and basically SAP 121 dropped.
And they were just like, oh, shit, like this literally makes it impossible for us to do this in any kind of business efficient way. Maybe it does eventually open the door for banks to do this for consumers. But I think for most of them, they were just using their parties, right? So they would have, OK, your point base is holding them on your behalf and Coinbase is not a bank. And so therefore, it's not subject to SAP 121.
Last thing in politics section, Scott Besant was sworn in as the Treasury Secretary. This was known. This was accounted for. This is not a surprise. It is a pro crypto appointee. He had a long career at the Soros Fund Management, including a partner and chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management.
He knows how to manage funds. And he's definitely pro-crypto. He has said crypto is about freedom and the crypto economy is here to say this is, like I said, one of the many pro-crypto appointees of the Trump cabinet position. Any takes on the appointee here?
Very pro. I mean, treasury is one of the most important roles. Obviously, treasury oversees FinCEN, which is one of the most active overseers of illicit activity in financial markets. So how, like the stance the treasury takes is really important to what happens to us in crypto, especially when it comes to regulation and enforcement.
But just generally, Bessin's a really brilliant guy. Everything I've ever heard about him has been super positive. So it's a big difference between someone like Yellen, who's kind of pure career bureaucrat versus somebody like Bessin, who's much more aggressive, comes from the private sector, has financial experience. And I think if you look at the cast of characters that Trump has put into some of these agencies,
It's really bimodal. There are some who are incredibly effective, like really competent people who everybody's like, yeah, this person's a gangster. And then there's a bunch of clowns. And it's kind of, it's kind of like a toss up of what you get for each agency. You know, so you got the cash hotels and then you got Scott Bessins. So for treasury, it's like, okay, thank God, we got somebody who's like really competent and like a good communicator and spark. And then some other agencies though, you have some crazy people and you know, look, you just got to call it what it is, but
Glad to see the treasury is well against one of the competent ones. One of the competent ones because it's really important role. Well, I know you were just dying to know and about the next steps for Gary Gensler and I know bank listeners are just trying to figure out what Gary Gensler's next steps. He will return to MIT to teach.
It's a headline here, former SEC chair, Gary Gensler, named Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where Gary Gensler will join both the global economics and management group in the finance group with a focus on artificial intelligence, finance, financial technology, public policy back at MIT. So I'd like to thank Hizib if you can't do, you teach, and Gary Gensler is now returning to his role as a professor at MIT.
I mean, what's really interesting is that I have never seen a public servant who normally a relatively unsexy office, which is the SEC, becomes so widely reviled by young people everywhere in the world. Compared to when he was originally a professor at MIT, he was a professor before he ended up becoming SEC chair.
And, you know, before that, he was CFTC. He was, I believe you're a CFTC chair in a previous administration. And CFTC is, again, generally pretty unsexy. Like, it's not the kind of thing that's going to get you in the press all the time. As an SEC chair, one of the most hated people of any public office I've ever seen. Honestly impressive. And now, like, he, I don't think he knows what he's in for. Going back and teaching, you know, underbrads. These kids.
Like just hate this guy. It's like incredible. There's so many memes about him. So I'm just so curious of what his lived experience of being on campus is going to be when everybody out there who's under the age of 40 thinks this guy is just an absolute clown. There's going to be at least one kid who is in his class at MIT who is also on crypto Twitter in the future.
Oh, there should be so many. I want to bring one of those kids on as a guest. If they go through a semester of Gary Gensler's class, I would like to talk to that kid. Oh, man. I mean, the finance MBA group at MIT, all those guys are slinging meme coins in their in their afternoons. Like I guarantee you.
All right, Haseb, we're going to get into some crypto native launches this week. Venice AI launched and made a big splash abstract. The abstract chain launched with their mainnet focus on creators and then Trump Media launched truth.fi as well as some of the meme coins. I got a Haseb Trump meme coin take that I want to get your take about here live since I got it in the tweet form. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. So we're going to go here from fracks and the fracks stable coins. Got some of the best deals in DeFi. It's like if
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One of the big splashes last week was the token drop from Venice. Venice is at Eric Voorhees project. I kind of think of it as like a, like a, think of it like duck, duck go, but for LLMs. It's like a private search except now using LLM. So it's just like Eric Voorhees older project shape shift, but before it had user sign up, you could just use the product without doing KYC. Eric Voorhees loves to not collect user information.
So he made Venice, which is a kind of a chat GPT competitor alternative that does not collect your user information. And they launched their VVV token, the Venice token, on a base, airdrop to over 250,000 wallets. The criteria for receiving the token was kind of interesting. If you own some of the AI tokens on base, like AI XBT, Virtual's token, Arrow, DGen, or also you're just a Venice user, you got some of the Venice token
Upon launch, the token price soared up to $2 billion, fully diluted, maybe about $300 or $400 million. And then it fell down a little bit, some volatility on launch. But then the Coinbase assets Twitter account announced that the token was trading live on Coinbase, which I think raised an eyebrow in the community as to how that token got listed on Coinbase so fast inside of 12 hours, especially in contrast to some longer term base projects like
Virtuels, the one that has spawned AI XBT, which the VVV token was airdropped to and has been a token on base for well over a year now. And so well, and this was also a pretty fat airdropped users and airdropped people got tens to $20,000 just from holding some tokens on base. So congrats to the Venice team. But then also, what do you think about kind of the drama or the controversy or just really this news event as a whole?
Um, well, a couple of thoughts. So one, I think that obviously there was a lot of drama around the time about, okay, why isn't Coinbase supporting the base ecosystem, which really is coded for just why, why aren't they listening virtuals?
My guess is that it's probably a securities law thing is that virtuals just looks too much like unregistered security stuff of like, okay, yeah, XPT, it's got a developer. There's like, you know, only a few things that are actually on there that are trading meaningful volume. And this thing, you know, virtuals recently announced that they're doing like a buyback and burn type thing or something like that, where they're doing like some real actual, you know, revenue from the underlying trading interface.
That, like, so all this stuff, I think, you know, to be clear, I think virtual is probably doing the right thing for themselves as a startup. But Coinbase, you know, there's no rules yet. Like, just remember, yeah, okay, there's been a new administration, but no rules, no rulemaking. And they're bound by their guidance that they've received from the SEC, unless the SEC changes their course or changes their communication. They're not allowed to say, well, well, Trump is okay with it. So, you know, I kind of know that it's cool. So my guess is that they're not, they're never going to say that in public, but that's probably what's going on, of why they're not supporting virtuals.
Now for Venice itself, look, I love Eric. I think Eric is a G and I'm very interested in what's going on in this whole space. But I'm not a big fan of the storytelling here around Venice. Like the reality is that Venice, I think, is a little bit trust me, bro. I think I think it was you're talking about the claims that is a private private LLM.
Yeah, so I think it was the other Eric Wall. It was Eric Wall, I think, who came out criticizing some of the claims that Venice was making publicly. Because Venice, if you just look at their documentation, basically what they say is, look, we run these models on our own, they say they get the compute from decentralized sources.
They don't really say what they are. There's no proof that they're getting from decentralized sources. Could just be them themselves, getting GPUs on the cloud. We don't know. And then they say, we use SSL, which, to be clear, everybody in the internet uses SSL. That's not unique. And then they say, we don't retain the data.
And it's okay, how do I know you don't retain the data? There's no receipt. There's no like, oh, we use Intel SGX. We use trusted hardware. We have some kind of private computation. We have MPC. There are a lot of answers you could give that would be satisfying to a crypto user. You're definitely not storing my data. They don't have any such thing. They just basically say, we don't store your data, I promise. Which, to be clear, is fine, right? That's like a duck duck go kind of thing. Duck duck go just tells you, look, we don't store your data, I promise.
And that's good enough. But to my mind, like, OK, if you're dropping a token and you're like painting this as a crypto project, what's the crypto element?
As far as I can see, this is just literally like DuckDuckGo for AI serving AM models. So I think he's heard that feedback, and I think there's probably some roadmap there that he's probably yet to announce as he's ingesting a lot of this stuff. But I think that's a lot of the reason why after the initial airdrop, you saw this growing degree of skepticism about, is this really the big story about
decentralized AI and private inference, like I don't use actually that much on the technology side yet to be able to prove that out in a way that is beyond just, hey, you can't trust deep-seek, but you can't trust me. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think the skeptical muscle of the crypto community is very, very strong. We know how to be very, very skeptical. So I think that's fair. So like kicking the tires of things.
Abstract mainnet is now live. This is a pretty anticipated layer two from the Ethereum ecosystem. This is a ZK sync, the ZK layer two that uses Celestia for DA offers native account abstraction. And it really is just hyper focused on abstracting everything that makes a blockchain to blockchain and just tries to make it as usable as possible. I don't have too much here. It's just brand new. So now people are going on to abstract and playing around and kicking the tires and any takes any quick takes about abstract.
Thumbs up. More crypto is always good. Cool. Abstract is also a part of just kind of an extension of the Pudgy's ecosystem. We did a podcast with Luca Netz where we briefly touched on abstract and the philosophy there. Also out of the Pudgy's ecosystem is a partnership with PES. That's right. The PES candy dispenser.
And so the Pangwins Twitter account tweeted out. We're excited to bring Pangwoo to life with one of the largest candy brains in the world and join the Peds lineup alongside Pokemon Disney and others. Really trying to flex the meme of Pangwins weight alongside Disney, saying, look, it's Disney, it's Pokemon, and then it's also the Pangwins. Do you have a penguin to see? How do you like the Pangwins?
I do not. I do not have to think. I don't I don't I don't have any. Did you fumble the penguins at the depths of the bear market in 2023? Because I definitely did. I fumble everything in crypto. I only do long-term successes short-term fumbles.
Also launched this week, Symbiotic, which was basically the big eigenlayer competitor. It's been developing, and it's been tested. The mainnet is now live on Ethereum. They tweeted out, after two years of development, five independent audits and code competitions were first to launch a feature complete shared security protocol with slashing.
The restaking meta, I feel like, is in the rear view mirror. I think that was a very big part of the first half of 2024. Now people don't really talk about it too much. Overall, what's your take on either symbiotic or the state of restaking right now?
Yeah, it definitely feels like there's something of a low. I think there's just a, there's not as much interest in financial engineering of staking and restaking and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but I think the market is waiting for receipts. And it's like, okay, you know, show me, show me where all the demand is for AVS is, show me where all the demand is for shared security. I do think it, there's a good chance that it does materialize, but it's one of these things that it was kind of overhyped.
And that always scares me as an investor. When I see there's two high expectations, almost always there's going to be a calm down and markets don't like calm downs. And I feel like that's kind of what happened with Eigen layer and to some degree with symbiotic is that there was just too many people who thought things were already ready. And it just takes time. I don't think there's a reason to be bearish on any of these concepts. It just means that like, hey, it takes time to build an ecosystem, takes time to make shit work. That's been true for every ecosystem that we've seen in the successful is that you got to mature. You got to earn your stripes.
I do think one of the reasons why it got so hyped back then is because there was just nothing else to do. Like in 2024, we had the Bitcoin ETFs and then we had then we just kind of rotated around like infrastructure, uh, Metas and restaking just with it was a net new primitive. It is a real thing. Uh, but then everyone else was just like bored looking for things to do. And I was like, all right, I guess we'll just turn to mania. Yeah. I mean, that's the, the, the meme coin meta really started in like November of 23.
Yeah. So it wasn't true that people had nothing to do. People had plenty to do. It was, I think- Not everyone likes meme coins though. That's true. But okay, well, if people had nothing to do, what are they doing now? Who doesn't, who don't like meme coins? Yeah, yeah. Well, now we get to- Maybe that's a decent explanation then. I could buy that. I could buy that.
All right. Speaking of meme coins, this is a tweet that I got on your wall. You said this was a tweet about the Trump and Melania meme coins. And when these things were released, they were touted as just a mass onboarding event, hundreds of thousands of new wallets. These stats from moon pay, which is where people without crypto assets are.
moonshot, excuse me, moonshot with it. That was where people would go get the Trump meme coin if they didn't already have like a Solana wallet, or they didn't even know what a wallet was, because you could buy it with a debit card, right? And so moonshot users just exploded. Solana activity also exploded. But then 10 days later, after they launched with the Trump meme coin, we're able to look at some of that data. This is you retweeting Rob Haddock from I believe chain. No, this is, oh, this is a dragonfly guy. Oh, he's your GPs, your partner. Excuse me.
And just looking at the chain Alice's report about the Trump token, and you tweeted out disappointing data here, seems like less than 1% of the users who came in through Moonshot to buy Trump or Melania are doing anything else on chain. If this was the Olympics, the tourists are not doing anything else in the city before they leave basically 1% GDP retention. Just elaborate a little bit more here about just your takes and reflections about the Trump meme coin launch.
Yeah. So honestly, this was kind of what I expected. Um, I was surprised to hear a lot of other people saying like, Oh, this is a great mass onboarding event. This is going to bring a lot of people in. Um, I remember having a debate on another podcast where we were talking about, you know, whether or not this was really going to be a good first impression for people into crypto. And, um, I think it was, it was, um, I think it was Robert Leschner who was saying, you know, everybody gets into crypto through one speculative moment. Maybe it was the ICO bubble for you. Maybe it was DeFi summer for you, but for everybody, there's like some speculative thing that gets you in the front door and
Everyone starts that way and then eventually you find your way into the broader world and you start doing other things and like that's that's how everyone starts. You seem to get your photo. Yeah, exactly. And so this is no different than any of those. This is also this kind of onboarding event. And my feeling was that no, this really feels different, right? This feels like one, it's not about crypto. It's about this dude.
You know, like Trump kind of made it about him and not about crypto or a technology. Like very clearly moonshot itself abstracts the technology away from you. And he's like, no, no, you can't, you don't want to touch the lana. You don't want to touch private keys. You want to touch any of that stuff here. Use a debit card and we'll charge 1% fees for you to do all your trading and never have to leave the app. Right. That's basically moonshot.
Now, when people told me, this is the counter argument that I heard that I didn't believe at the time. I thought this is crazy. He said, no, some percent of people will take their keys out or they'll transfer to like a phantom wallet or something and they'll go explore the on-chain economy.
You know, these are like the people who come for the Olympics and they travel through the streets of Paris and they go to the Boulanger reason. Like, you know, why not? You know, they want to see what's around basically a rounding error of people did any of that. Now, it's only been a week. And so, you know, some people are like, well, you know, maybe it's too early, you got to give a time. I think the right way to understand is that no, no, this is a funnel.
And if people aren't converting in a week, they're never going to convert. Like these people, most of them lost money. And maybe this is part of the story is that if they made money, maybe they would have stuck around and be like, oh, what else can I do? I can make money here. I'll make money there. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so if you think about DeFi Summer, I think this is the best counter argument. They're like, well,
If the Trump coin had gone up, then it would have been a good onboarding event, but it went down. So it's a bad onboarding event at the end. But I think it's just the irrational optimism about this thing. I think that net net, the Trump token is going to end up burning more people than it ends up onboarding into crypto. And that burning, it takes a lot of work to undo that damage. That's my take on the Trump token. And I've been pretty public saying that I think it's been a bad thing for crypto writ large.
And I think we haven't paid the real cost yet. So, okay, it went up and went down, but the Trump team hasn't unlocked yet. They unlock in three months. In those three months, then they're going to start selling a lot of this token. They own 80% of the supply. And we know what happens when a dev owns 80% of the supply and they sell and sell and sell and sell. It's just absolute carnage. And I think that's what's going to happen. And the people are going to be holding the bag are not crypto natives.
The crypto natives, they all understand FTV. They all understand the supply charts. They all look at the bubble charts. They all like, they understand all the stuff. They're the ones reading Twitter all day. Right. And saying like, Oh my God, look on chain. The guys are selling. It's the normal people who came in through moonshot. Who just think it's funny. I love my president by the Trump meme coin. Exactly. I love my president. I want to support him. You know, of course, he's probably in good hands. Right. You know, it's those people who are going to end up getting hurt. Right.
And I was talking to some of my non-crypto friends who all saw the Trump meme coin news. And I think they anticipated and they naively anticipated like, oh, everyone in crypto thinks this is great. And then when they asked me about it, they're like, David, you know that this is a terrible look, right? Like this is a bad look. And so I think universally people outside of the Trump meme coin circles are like, that looks bad. That's a bad look for crypto.
And even internally, people are like, this is a bad look for crypto. Now, previously, meme coins have been touted by like many in the Solana community or just the meme coin trader community that meme coins are the onboard the retail onboarding mechanism. This is the culture coins will take crypto mainstream because they're just so relatable and accessible.
How do you think that this relates to that take? Is this now that this is here? Let's be really clear. Trump, the Trump token is not a meme coin. It's a celeb coin. We have had celeb coins, right? You remember mother, you remember like all these other guys. We know what celeb coins are. Celeb coins are there's one person.
who's responsible for keeping this token up, they own a huge portion of the supply. And there's not a meme. Like, what's the meme? Trump is not a meme. It's his fucking name. He's got his face on it. He is kind of a meme, though. This is not the meme of Trump. This is the man. This is the man he owns.
Like MAGA, do you remember MAGA token or Trump token? Like the previous Trump token? Those were meme tokens. Those were actually memes. Because they weren't made by him. Right. They weren't made by him. He didn't own it. It was just people being like, Oh, isn't it funny if we're going to make a MAGA token and it'll go up and down instead of the prediction mark. That was funny. People talked about it. It was like community owned. And there was no single person who was going to win or lose, right? It's like a big Ouija board and we all control it together. That to me is
A game. It's a game that we all understand what we're playing, right? What Trump is doing with with Trump token. That's not a game. That's him making the rules of the game. It's him saying, you know what? Put your money in this piggy bank and underneath it is an open bottom and his hand. That's what Trump token is. Okay. Right. That's totally different from the meme point. I have no problem with meme points. I think they're basically zero sum and they're just a game. You want to play that game?
Totally. It's a better game than a lot of other games out there. But what Trump is doing with Trump token is a totally different ballgame. And I think it's in a way, fatuous and gives away the entire game to allow him to tell us, yes, I think that you own 80% of the supply of
is a meme coin. That's not a meme coin. That's a celeb coin with your name on it. I do really like the delineation between a celeb coin and a meme coin. I think that's kind of an all-hall moment for me. I really like that. Because previously, any single person who has the influence over a price always kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies. And that is not what meme coins are. Meme coins are, like you said, everyone has their fingers on the Ouija board. I really like that metaphor.
but Haseem, what about the possibility that you can use the meme coin to buy Trump watches and Trump sneakers? Does that change your position? I was worried. I might not be able to buy watches and sneakers with my Trump token. No, it changes nothing. I mean, this is again, this is like the celeb coin playbook, right? Is it? Okay, tokens started going down. I now have to give it some semblance of value. You know, so I think the same thing that Iguizalia did with mother is that I'm going to create an MVNO.
which, okay, who, what? So I'm gonna get an MVNO and you can pay your bill for this MVNO using my meme coin. Okay, now it's like, okay, you can buy watches and sneakers from my online store using my meme coin. Okay.
I could also sell your mean court for money and use it to buy the watches and sneakers. That's a problem. To me, this is obviously a distraction from what the main thing is about this mean court is that he owns 80% of it and he's going to dump it in three months or start dumping in three months. Totally.
Yeah. So let's look on it. I've said enough. I'll start writing that. Totally. But okay, one last Trump watch thing and this is actually the last thing of the episode is the world will be financial continues to just dollar cost average into a bunch of ETH. And so this is just Jesse Eckle tweeting out transaction after transaction. Some like 12 hours ago, three days ago, five days ago, a week ago,
of 4.7, 5.2, 4.9 million dollar clips of ETH just going from cow protocol actually of all places into the World Liberty Financial DeFi app. I think everyone loves to say like this is Trump buying ETH. It's not actually Trump buying ETH. But then I also don't know who is behind World Liberty Financial and where this money is coming from. Overall, just what's your take about the activity, the on chain activity of World Liberty Financial?
Yeah. I mean, so for one, I think, uh, was so very clear. We, we, we do know who the world, like go to the website. We know the team. Yeah. But we don't know what their customers, we don't know where they're cut, because they're my understanding is they have customers who give them money and then they go invest in it on chain. That's why understanding how this thing works. Uh, no, no, no. The product is not live. So they did a crowd sale. The crowd sale was doing very badly before Trump got elected. Trump got elected. Justice on gave them like 60 million or something. You know, some very large amount of money. And then all of a sudden,
The entire, I think, $200 million raise was filled, which I have heard, kind of a rumor. I've heard that a lot of this was Saudi money that came in and basically was like, oh, here's a way that we can maybe buy access or something. I don't know, total rumor. So I don't know if they knew that's substantiated. But the idea that suddenly a clip of 100 plus million showed up very, very late in the game after Trump launched his meme coin
And after the election, so even after the election, this thing was basically dead. There was like 10% of the crowd sale that was filled. Now they're taking that money and using it to buy crypto assets, which is great. Like you said, it's not Trump. It's obviously Trump affiliated. We know that Barron is very closely involved. So this is like Barron's pet project or something. And I guess Donald Trump Jr. is also involved. So it's like a Trump family thing.
Trump himself is on the governance board over his advisor. He's an advisor. Yes. Supposedly. Supposedly. Although normally as president, he's supposed to divest from all your financial interests. Doesn't seem like he's doing that making more. Exactly. So, like, you know, launching a meme coin two days before you're inaugurated is a pretty gangster move. Both of the most presidents are doing two days before they're inaugurated. So, um,
In no way is this an ordinary process of what we expect from a president, and I think this is part of the course. So, you know, obviously, right, we're playing this game of like, oh, what asset is world of financial going to buy? But it's not Trump. It's, you know, three steps removed from Trump in terms of the actual decision making. Like these guys are crypto natives.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see my man. It's been a pleasure having you on the weekly roll up. I couldn't do it without you. I need a buddy to go through the news with me and you've really been helpful here. I believe you might have already done a, this is the second podcast of the day for you. Maybe you, maybe you're doing chopping block tomorrow, but if listeners are not familiar with chopping block, tell them about it and we're going to go hear more of you if they just like.
So every week, me, my partner, Tom Schmidt, and then Tarun Chitra and Robert Leschner from formerly compound slash robot ventures. We do a podcast together every week, kind of like this, where we just talk about the news and what's going on in the world. So you can find on the Unchained podcast, run by Laura Shen. We do it once a week. And we work a bunch of VCs, so we have a very different perspective on the market than most of the people who are more trading oriented. But if you're into that, that's what we talk about.
Yeah. It's one of the few podcasts I have that I do not skip on a weekly basis. So I always appreciate other people making crypto content out there because I think more crypto content needs to be out there. And so tip of the hat to you, sir, we'll get all those links in the show. Yeah. Cheers. Just any last thoughts about just like, you know, we're in the last day, almost the last day of January in crypto. What are you looking forward to in 2025 in crypto land? What are you paying attention to? What's Dragonfly investing in? Just open, open ended question here.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's been a lot of malaise in this market. Obviously, we've been whipsawing a lot from, okay, is Trump going to do this? Is Trump token? What's going on? I do suspect that the rest of the year is going to be a little more calm. I'm always a little hesitant to say that because this month has been absolutely just insane. But I do think like, okay, now all eyes are going to be on. What do the agencies do? Is there going to be any specific rulemaking? And when do we get a strategic pick on reserve? Almost certainly it's not going to happen soon now that we've had this executive order of, hey, committees are going to figure this out later.
So I think things are going to be a little more calm, which I think is good because the market could use some calm. And the reality is that in most crypto markets, bull cycles and bear cycles, like all the stuff that we see that's set up for crypto is really, really good. Everything is super bullish, right? Like things really cannot be better from a regulatory perspective, from a demand perspective, from a vibes perspective, macro is looking pretty solid. And so I think what all this should tell you is that be patient.
Like, not everything's gonna happen quickly. Just because Trump got elected doesn't mean that, okay, hey, everything's gonna go to the moon all of a sudden and everything should be ecstatic. So I think on some level that impatience often finds its way into crazy assets, crazy narratives, you know, things going up and down really rapidly. As a VC, having been through many, many cycles and having invested through the long and short of things, number one advice that I give to entrepreneurs and also gives it to anybody who's in this world is be patient. You know, more things can happen in a couple of years than you think.
And fewer things tend to change in a month than you think. So I'd say chill. I think it's going to be a good year, but it's going to take its time. Wise wisdom from a guy who knows a thing or two about investing in crypto. His eve. Thanks so much, my man. Thanks for having me. Bankless nation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.