📱

Get Our Mobile App

Take your business learning on the go!

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Markets Are Ripping! Crypto Still Isn’t? Here's Why...

Bankless1:03:31

Transcription

Bankless Nation, we got a green week this week. It is the third week of April. Very green week. It's a very green week. Markets are up big. We got, um, just days ago it seemed we were down 10% on the S&P, and now going downer. Yeah, it was trending down. And how are we now today at all times? All-time highs, all in a week's period. Who knew?

I mean, I think that's begging the question for crypto, where we go next, up or down. We've got, uh, we're going to name some names on today's episode. We got some bulls that we're going to name and some bears that we're going to name. We're going to call people out. I actually don't know which side I'm on right now, David. So, that's a, it's a strange feeling for me.

Meanwhile, Sailor's Stretch, his new STRC, not that new, but new into the zeitgeist, is printing billions of dollars. The market clearly likes it. It's putting a very healthy bid on Bitcoin. Is this the best instrument Sealer has ever created? Will it be the catalyst to send Bitcoin to all-time highs? Or alternatively, will it be our demise? Like bear or bull? Bear or bull.

It's kind of like AI, you know, it could be like the next iPhone or could kill us all. We don't know. That's the fun.

Also, World Liberty Finance had some drama in the week. This is, remember Trump's DeFi project? It was caught doing some on-chain shenanigans. We're going to explore that and, uh, ask the question, is this the new cycle FTX? Did, um, World Liberty just pull a Sam Bankman-Fried? We got Justin's son weighing in on that. Notable morality commentator, Justin Sun.

But we do have some fundamental, serious good news. You know, putting on the serious hat at the moment. The SEC just gave DeFi a broker exemption. Very material for a lot of the companies, protocols, apps that we know and love. We'll talk about the significance of that and what we can do now. And also, the Bitcoin community taking quantum seriously, putting forward a quantum plan to free Satoshi's bitcoins, making progress on the big quantum threat to Bitcoin. All of this and more. We're going to talk about it one by one by one.

But first, we got to start with the markets, which are greener than green. Like we said, uh, just 10 days ago, we were down. The S&P was down, uh, a whopping 9.67% from its highs. The highs that it painted in January 28th of this year was the highest that the S&P had was at, which was exactly 7,000. And Ryan, as of today, we are at 7,036 on the S&P 500. So, we are up to into new all-time high territories as of today, the day of recording, the 16th, and also the 15th. Two all-time highs in a row.

We got NASDAQ on the all-time high, too. So, both indices. And Joe Weisenthal makes the point, basically the entire Iran war selloff has been erased. I guess quite obviously, because we're at all-time highs. You know, this dip here in the S&P chart looks a lot like this dip over here. The trade war dip. Yeah, the trade war dip in April of 2025, doesn't it? Although that dip was steeper, but they both have this kind of this V-shaped recovery right now.

Yeah, the, the trade war dip was pretty significant. That was 20% from top to bottom, peak to trough. So the Iran war dip was just 10%. And this is what I've been saying, I think, on every roll-up and also on Twitter. It's just like the market is just like, ah, Trump's causing some chaos, but we'll get over it and we'll move on. And that seems to be the case. And we didn't totally price in so much chaos this time around.

So, you, you feeling good about your predictions on David, that holding up? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Uh, yeah, like I think the market does what it does. It's like, oh, could Trump's doing the tariff wars? How far is it going to go? Same thing with the Iran. Let's talk about the Iran progress. I guess some of the, some of the reason for this recovery was Iran war deescalation of some form. So, give us the deal. What happened? Because last I had understood, we were in some sort of, um, a, uh, mediated ceasefire.

Yes, uh, ceasefire did, uh, the ceasefire started two weeks, ceasefire, which gave time for Iran and the United States to come to the table and talk. Uh, we came to the table and talked. Didn't last that long, 21 hours, one single day, before, uh, Vice President, uh, Vance, um, just talked to them and it's like, oh, we cannot come to.

21 hours, can you imagine that? Yeah, 21 hours straight seems like a lot, but still, also just like one instance of a day of talks, and then we're like, okay, we can't clearly can't come to terms. So, then, but the ceasefire was maintained. So, this is just because we, between us and Iran, the United States 10-point plan, the Iranian 15-point plan, just because we couldn't close that gap, didn't mean the ceasefire ended. So, we are still under the ceasefire. We just have not come to negotiating terms about how to proceed after that two weeks.

That was on Friday, that negotiation. That was on Friday. Yes. Uh, notably, the big line out of the, uh, Vance, uh, talk, this like three-minute address that he gave giving in the postmortem was that, uh, the United States called it bad news, but way more bad for Iran than it is for the United States. And that was kind of how that was left. The next action that was taken was Trump says that we are actually going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz because we were trying to figure out how to open the Strait of Hormuz to let oil flow out of the strait to minimize economic pain across the world. And Iran was really holding on to its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. And so Trump did something that I don't really think anyone saw coming, at least most people did not see coming. He just blocks the Strait of Hormuz. Like, you guys are going to block it, we're going to block it.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's just like, if our ships can't get out, then no one's ships can get out. That's right. Except it's one small detail. It actually is, according to international law, illegal to block passage in international waters. And so Trump and the United States Navy are kind of just strong-arming Iran. And they, we push our Navy boats through the strait to prove that you could actually go through it. And now we are securing the strait to allow for ships who are not going to Iran. So, any country going to the UAE, to Saudi Arabia, those ships can go to those ports so long as they are not going to Iranian ports. So, actually, it's a complete, you know, 180, UNO reverse card to Iran. It's like Iran was saying, you know, you, we're not allowing anyone ships but ours. And now Donald Trump comes in with our military and says, "Oh, we, we're more powerful than you guys. Actually, the only ships going through the Strait of Hormuz are the ones everyone else's and not yours." And that's the state of play.

Is that the good news? Is that why the markets recovered? Was that a deescalation? So, it was a, yeah. Well, we are not escalating back into the kinetic war. That, that ceasefire is being maintained. It's all about the boats in the Strait of Hormuz. And one of the reasons why I think specifically the American indices have done so well is there have been a ton of oil tankers that have rerouted towards the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America. And so, a lot of demand for Middle Eastern oil is being rerouted as demand for American oil. Something that happened this last week is American oil exports hit all-time highs. So, we are exporting oil at levels never seen before at prices that are like way higher than where they were pre-Iran war. And so, this is being perceived by the markets as very good. And, uh, oil prices are coming down from the Iran war highs, still higher than when we went into the war. Um, but there is the, the oil markets are sort of just rebalancing and being reallocated. And I think, in addition to that, being kind of a pretty strong win for the United States and, you know, United States revenue and like a domestic boom potentially, it's also, I think people are saying, like, oh, this looks like, um, somewhat of a stable equilibrium here. Like, this is something that we can plan on going forward.

So, there's no peace deal in place, correct? This feels like a stable equilibrium, and the pressure is still being applied quite heavily now on Iran. That's right. I guess, you know, the, the principle of wars is, um, often times the winners of the war are those that can just sustain pain for the longest. Correct. Yeah. And so, now, this is Trump and the US applying more pain to Iran because there's a real economic cost, isn't there? There is a very significant economic cost. So much of Iran's incoming money, capital flows, comes from, uh, the Strait of Hormuz, specifically their ability to sell crude, Brent crude oil. 90% of Iran's $10 billion annual trade goes through the, the Gulf. Oil and gas accounts for 80% of government export earnings and 24% of the entire country's GDP. All of that is gone. So, that is an immense amount of pressure on the Iranian regime, just taking away basically their biggest chips, and they're negotiating chips, but also their ability to fund anything. 80% of their money is gone, of their inflows of of capital is gone. Not just that, not just oil, but, uh, food is also being imported into Iran using the strait. So, food inflation is at 105% year-over-year in February of 2026. Rice prices in Iran is up 7%. And so, now, if you're paying attention to just the, the outcome of the Iranian conflict, your eyes are going back to the hyperinflation of the Iranian real. So, there has been now material inflation because the costs of everything is going to be so high. And you're looking at the, the Islamic regime's inability to finance the IRGC, the Besieg. So, there's a big chokehold on around the entire country because they don't have access to A, buy food, or B, sell oil. So, oil prices down in response to this. And, uh, President Trump, we've got a, a Truth Social tweet here. President Trump saying, China has agreed to not send weapons to Iran. So, maybe the market interpreted that, you know, in a positive direction as well. And then there's some more news that the US and Iran, they're still talking. They're still, uh, they're extending the ceasefire for two more weeks as a possibility. And President Trump here saying, the Iran war is very close to over. So, I guess the market is just smooshing all of that together and saying, "Okay, we feel good. This is going to be recovered. This is going to be wrapped up soon." Oil is, is it, oil is not flowing though, right? Oil is flowing out of Saudi Arabia, the, like the rest of the Gulf. Okay? It's not flowing out of Iran. So, Iran production is stunted. This is why this, this economically hurts China. And also why, if you are paying attention to like, how does this war like wrap up, China is likely also going to put pressure on Iran because China wants the Iranian oil. And so they want Iran to wave the white flag so that China can get its flow of of cheap oil going as well. I got to say, I've been surprised by this recovery. Uh, Polymarket, the odds right now, US and Iran, a permanent peace deal by what date? There is right now the highest probability is, uh, 50% chance by May 31st. By the end of April, only a 33% chance. But by the end of June is 64% chance. And this is probably all in the fine print of like, what does a permanent peace deal actually look like? Yeah, but notably, I say the important thing about this Polymarket is the direction of travel because all of the dates on the table have double-digit green changes as of a week ago. That's right. That's right.

Okay. So, where does this leave markets in general? You show us some assets, David. I know you've got, uh, TradingView pulled up. So, uh, tell us what you're seeing in the markets.

All right. So, we started talking about the S&P. Here it is, back at June, at the all-time highs, and we're just, just poking above that. And we went from the trough of the bottom of the Iran conflict to the peak where we are now in 16 days. 16 days from down 10% to to new all-time highs. So, equity indices looking good. If I pulled up the NASDAQ chart, it would look just like this. It's basically the same chart.

So, all-time highs in the equities markets. We'll pull open WTI, that's West Texas Intermediate Crude. Uh, and so you can see we're still at wartime prices, but it's on the low end of that $91 a barrel.

What do you mean by wartime prices? Because before this whole thing started, what were we in, like the 60s? Yeah, it was, it was as the United States military was moving towards Iran, we went from 55 to 60-ish dollars a barrel up to 65. And then when the actual conflict started, that's when it went from 65 all the way to like 110 at the peak. And then it's been between $85 and $106 for the entire, like, the month of March and April. We're at $91. And so, we're still in the high zone. Like, we're, it's still high because of the war, but we're on the lower end of the whole entire war pricing. So, this is something that I'm watching. If we can see oil break down below this, then like, this gives even Donald Trump even more tolerance and flexibility with what he can do in Iran. Um, and then let's see here, is 10-year yields. 10-year yields are up recently, up in the last, uh, two days. This is another constraining factor for Trump, right? Those yields get too high and you know he starts breaking. If you could scroll out for a second, dude, I would love to see where did these go during the, um, tenure yields go during the, the tariff scare in April?

The tariff scare was from here to here, I believe. Okay. Yeah. So, they, they spiked from what? From 3.88 to 4.7. Yeah. Uh-huh. And they didn't go quite that high. They went to. They've been more muted. They went from four to 4.5. And when they were at 4.5, that's when Donald Trump was like sweating. That's when things did not look very good. I think this is the big one. This is the big constraint. Maybe even bigger than oil price.

Yeah. Since the, the peak of where they were at 4.5, they have come down to 4.3. Could come down more. It's still high. Like, we still have a huge debt burden. The direction of travel here is very important. Um, but it has trended down and it needs to continue to trend down. Uh, we can look at some, some crypto prices. So, this is Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't look anything like the S&P index, Ryan. Uh, it has just trended down.

It's not at all-time highs, I noticed. No, definitely not. But it, it has gone up during the war. Uh, so there's that. It is still kind of in this range that I think everyone is kind of watching this right now between the $65,000 and $75,000 range. We are poking at the $75,000 Bitcoin number. We all want it to be to to break through. That is Michael Sailor's Michael Strategies Stretch product. The reason why it punches through this range that it's been trading in for over two months now. It could be.

There's a lot of momentum in Stretch. We'll talk about that later. Uh, we can also talk about the ETH price, which is kind of doing the same thing. It's been ranging between 1,900 and 2,350, which is exactly the price it is right now, 2350 in that same sort of range.

But Ryan, can I tell you my favorite chart? Yeah. That I don't want to spend too much time on, cuz I don't want to be too excited about it. Take a quick peek. Okay. Just a glimpse. Take a quick take a glimpse. We'll put it on. We'll put it on. If the same range that Bitcoin has been trading at and Ether has been trading at, you can see that same range behavior in the ETH BTC ratio. Oh, that'd be the only time I say those words. But it has been trending up since the start of the Iranian conflict. Has been trending up. Poking, poking through it at 0.03.

Even more of a wartime asset than Bitcoin. Huh. That'd be weird. It is at least a more of an Iranian wartime asset, specifically during this time. During this time period, very specifically. Yeah. So, I find all of these charts to be very interesting, and they all kind of tell their story. But overall, it's, I kind of think it's hard to paint, it's harder to paint a bearish picture than it is a bullish one in my opinion.

It certainly makes me a bull this week. This week. This makes you a bull. You're coming out. You're coming out as a bull. You're coming out of the closet. No way. No way. You're kind of, I'm kind of. Are you full bull or you, you just partial? I'm not, I'm not full bull yet. Never go full bull. I've seen you full. But like, I don't know, man. Like, there's a pretty, I, I like the market, in my opinion, is pricing in a pretty firm US victory in Iran. I think it's pricing in an Iranian white flag waving at some point in time. They're just going to have to give up a lot of stuff. Meanwhile, just like fundamentally, we, the United States economy is going to get a big boost because we are exporting more oil at higher prices than we were going into this war. That's very big for us domestically. Uh, I think the US dollar gets a boost as a result of that as well. There's, there's enough evidence to maintain a bullish picture.

I'm going to confirm some of your biases with some statements by some other bulls. You ready for that? Hell yeah. All right. I got three bulls for you who agree. The first is, uh, Raul Paul, and he's been saying this for a little bit, but. Paul's always bullish. Okay. Well, he happens to agree with you at this moment in time. Total global liquidity is rising. Global M2 is rising. US total liquidity is rising. US M2 is rising. China total liquidity is rising. ISM is rising. There's a lot of things that are rising, including David's bullishness. Try not to overthink it, is what he says. So, don't overthink it. You know, there's a contrast point that I've been trying to get at the root of because Ralph Paul in Real Vision keeps saying liquidity is rising, whereas, uh, my liquidity quant, Michael Howell, has said it's already peaked and it peaked, uh, late last year, and it's now falling. It's now, uh, slowing. And so, I've been trying to get at the bottom of that. Ralph Paul says he honestly doesn't understand where the discrepancy is. So, this is like a to-do for me to understand why their their measures and metrics are different. I still give a bit more weight to Michael Howell's because it's longer-lasting. It's more comprehensive. I get the sense that Ral Paul's global liquidity stuff, it maybe, um, has more metrics that are sort of US-centric. Although, I, I don't know all the details there. So, I, I will caveat with that. But Ral Paul joins the bull camp, has been in the bull camp, and he said that, um, the, uh, the NASDAQ has a 97% correlation with the total global liquidity. So, if total liquidity is going to all-time highs, then the, the NASDAQ is obviously following. That doesn't necessarily mean that crypto also follows, but I think he, he also still believes that. Michael Sailor is another bull, but again, he's in the camp of I'm only always accumulating. I'm always bullish on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going, as he said earlier this week on our podcast, to 20 million by the year 20, what? 21. 21 million. Of course, it got to be 21 by the year 2050. I think that was the prediction. We did the podcast with the Van. Yeah. I can't, Jeez, those numbers just, um, you know, didn't, didn't, uh, sink into my brain. Matt Hogan, he, he gives the case that, um, Bitcoin is kind of the bunker coin. Chaos is a ladder. If you look at this chart, David, which is Bitcoin and S&P and gold from the start of the war in Iran to now, Bitcoin has outperformed those other two assets by quite a bit. Bitcoin up 11.7%, up about 19% from the February lows. So, his comment is, nations can't trust each other. They can't trust financial rails. The world gets a bit more chaotic, a neutral asset like Bitcoin wins. So, those are the, those are the bulls that agree with you. You want, you want some bears?

I'm actually, so I'm glad that they agree with me. There's some analysis here that I'm slightly skeptical of, which is like the post-war performance of Bitcoin is positive because Bitcoin is a chaos asset. Is like, well, it also had just fallen by like from 140 to $70,000. It's allowed to go up 19% after that, and I don't know if we can correlate that to the war.

Okay. So, so does that mean you're getting a little, uh, bearish from after those bull takes? No, no, it means that I don't agree with that analysis, but I'm still bullish independently of that. I mean, that's what on the bear side, someone like, um, Michael NATO would say this is just kind of a, a mean reversion tactic. He thinks actually global liquidity tells a different story. It's tapering off. It's going down. There's a macro slowdown. But also the, the main thing that he waits in his analysis of why he's, he thinks that we haven't dipped, we haven't seen the final dip yet is the on-chain cycle data. This, this has been a much milder winter with respect to on-chain holdings and all of the activity there than previous winters. It doesn't usually, bare markets don't usually end like this. Yeah. If you think that this is going to be an easier bare market, I've heard that before. I said that last bare market, and then it wasn't. Yeah. And it might be slightly easier, but this would be just way too easy. Now, again, bulls will say that's cuz Stretch, that's cuz Michael Sailor, which we'll get into. Uh, Ben Cohen, uh, tends to agree with him. He thinks that even if the S&P goes above all-time highs, which now it has, that doesn't mean the S&P is kind of in for a bullish 2026. We could still be headed down. So, those are some takes. I, I thought the, the biggest indicator for me, or the like bubble indicator for me, was actually this. This is, um, Have, have you ever had Allbirds? The shoes? You ever? I know of them. Yeah, I know they're famous for like, San Francisco Tech Bro. Yeah. So, I bought a, I bought a pair. I did this in 2020. Okay. Um, during co, uh, apparently I, I didn't keep track of their stock. This was just a shoe company. They IPOed in 2022, a $4 billion valuation. They then proceeded to lose 99.5% of their value over the next four years. They closed all their US stores. They sold the brand. They just this week renamed to New Bird AI. And the plan, get this, the plan was to pivot to GPUs and competing, um, by renting out GPUs, AI GPUs, competing with AWS, basically. On this news, they're pivoting to like a CL core weave play, renting out AI data center stuff. That's what they're doing. Do they have any of their core business that is like means that they're competent in what they're doing? That's fine. That's, they're in San Francisco. So, there's that. That's fine. But they're up 450% on the back of this news. Uh, no, I think they're up 800% because that's an old, uh, snapshot. It went up. They, the price doubled after that screenshot.

You're making my point even, even more starkly. And this reminded me when I saw this. Do you remember where you're going with this? Where am I going? Long Island Blockchain Tea Company. Long, long, what was it called? Long Island Tea Blockchain. Yeah, they had like hard iced tea or something. Uh, Long Island Iced Tea. In in December of 2017, they rebranded to Long Island Blockchain. Their stock went up 200%. Three weeks later, Bitcoin hit all-time high. And then after that all-time high, the absolute pico top of the 2017 cycle. It was the pico top. That was followed by. That was around the same time that Katy Perry did her, uh, crypto token nails. Yeah. Yeah. Top marker, top marker. And of course, three weeks later, we hit the top, and it was all over. Bitcoin trades down 87%, you know, 12 months later.

So, that's not crypto. That's AI. That's that's an AI problem. I'd be worried if I was an Nvidia holder, not a, not a Ether or Bitcoin holder. There's other things like Ether are clearly not in a bubble.

Can you explain consumer sentiment then? Like, so, um, this is, here's a tweet. The share of consumers saying their financial situation is worse compared to a year ago due to higher prices jumped to 54% in April versus 47%. It's now the highest on record. There's, uh, another consumer sentiment put out by the St. Louis Fed. We are at, this looks like COVID lows. Do you remember during this time period, 2020, actually, this is post-COVID lows, 2022. Uh, Kyla Scan was talking about the recession where, uh, the vibe session, yeah, the economy looked good, but the vibes were off. Consumer sentiment was down. She called this the vibe session. What's happening now? Are we in like the second round of the vibe session? Yeah, I, I don't know how to weight this, but it's, has to be one, one part reality. Like, it's, it's never been affordable to be in the bottom 50% in America. Like, we, we have had wealth discrepancy problems throughout this country. That's like a reality of the thing. Like, the job, I don't think the job market is amazing right now from my understanding. And then on the other side of things, I'm like, social media just makes this way worse. Everyone just talks about how bad their vibes are, and it's, that is also contagious. And that's why it's a vibe session, not just like, you know, bad consumer sentiment.

Yeah. Something about uncertainty to have skewed these numbers and, and, yeah, AI uncertainty, I think, is also showing up in this chart. I think that's a good point.

So, there you go. So, uh, Kevin Worsh is going to be the incoming Fed chair, likely. He just has a, a Senate vote and, you know, one direction of of travel is where are the Fed rates going? Donald Trump came out and said, hey, look, as soon as my guy Walsh comes in, interest rates are going to drop. President Trump says interest rates will drop once Kevin Worsh becomes Fed chair. I don't know if Kevin has any autonomy on that situation. I will tell you, Polymarket is not reflecting that. Still, there's a 41% that we get 0% increase in Fed rates in 2026 or decrease, no change. Uh, there's only 27% that we get a 25 basis point change. Um, so that's interesting. Some people. And notably, these, these percentages did not change despite Trump saying that.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, like the market's not believing it. I mean, these Polymarkets has actually been, uh, pretty good on Fed rate cuts, like when people have run the analysis. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's $20 million of volume that is a liquid market, uh, when it comes compared to other prediction markets.

But I don't know if you saw this week. So, um, Fed, Kevin Worsh had to disclose his finances this week. So, it's like a 70-page document. And this, this is Perry, someone, someone in crypto Twitter tweeting out, Kevin Worsh owns 30-plus crypto projects. And you're bearish? And he lists all of these holdings, like, look at these things, Compound, dYdX, Blast, Layer, these are some Era, Solana, Kinetic, there was Friends, Friends with Benefits is on here. Okay. And so, bunch of crypto. FWB, I mean, they're still around, but wow, that's a blast from the past. Getting very excited that the incoming Fed chair, um, was going to be like, it was holding all of these assets. So, just to put a little, I guess, rain on that parade, um, it represents a very small percent of Kevin Worsh's net worth. So, his net worth is like, he's doing quite well for himself, $200 million or so, between $130, $200 million.

All of those tokens, I bet Kevin didn't even know he had them because they were through that surprise. I've been to some FWB events. Great. You've never seen Kevin? I don't, not only have I not seen Kevin there, it's not his type of people. It's the wrong cohort. Yeah. So, um, and unfortunately, nothing disclosed that he owned Bitcoin or ETH directly. Oh, I see. Okay. So, I would have liked to have seen some of that. Still, he, he's probably going to be the most crypto, obviously, he will be the most crypto-friendly Fed chair that we've ever had.

What does it mean to be a crypto-friendly Fed chair? Uh, I don't know because like Jerome Powell really didn't do anything to curtail. I don't know. I don't know if the Fed chair, I mean, I can understand that him and personally and intrinsically, he's crypto-friendly, and then he is also Fed chair. I don't think there's a lot of overlap between those two things. You want, I, I think you'd want the Fed chair to not be anti-stablecoin or anti-Bitcoin or anti-Ethereum. Other than that, I suppose, I suppose it doesn't matter too much. But he's not going to be like, Bitcoin is crashing, I got to lower interest rates. I don't think he's going to do that.

No, he's not the guy. We'll have to wait for, you know, a few generations later for that. We got a lot more coming up. Michael Sailor, is he the guy saving us from crypto winter right now with this new Stretch asset? It offers 11.5% yield. Coffeezilla does not like it, though. We'll, uh, talk about that controversy. Also, World Liberty Finance, are they running an FTX-style rug? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless isn't just a name. It's a genuine belief that you shouldn't need permission from an institution to use your money. MetaMask has been around since the beginning of Ethereum, and they carry the same DNA we do. MetaMask was my first wallet, and well, if you haven't opened up the app recently, let me tell you, they've been shipping, creating the one app to finally replace your bank and exchange. You can trade just about everything right from within MetaMask. Leverage PEs via Hyperliquid, prediction markets through Polymarket, tokenized stocks like Nvidia, and you can swap tokens gaslessly and across networks and even spend your crypto with your MetaMask card at real merchants all around the world. It's better than institutional services, but from a self-custodial wallet. And this is what we've been talking about for years. Money that's open and is happening. So, give MetaMask trading features a look at the link below. If you're already holding Sol, here's something you may want to pay attention to. Galaxy 1 just launched Solana Staking, and you can earn up to an estimated 6.5% in variable staking rewards on your Sol with no platform commission fee charged throughout December 31st, 2026. While many other platforms charge up to 35% commission fees on staking rewards, Galaxy 1 offers you 0% platform commission through December 31st. Other fees may apply. You should see the terms. This is powered by Galaxy Digital's own validator infrastructure, one of the largest Solana validator operations in the world, and now available to individual investors directly within the Galaxy 1 platform. Once you stake, rewards accrue and compound automatically. No active management needed. You can track everything in one place, including balances, rewards, and tax reporting through TaxBit. Getting started is straightforward. You can buy Sol directly in the app or transfer it in. If you want to put your Sol to work, you can now start staking on Galaxy 1 today. Click the link in the show notes to learn more and get started. Not investment advice.

Okay, Ryan. So, over the eras, Michael MicroStrategy, otherwise known as Strategy by Michael, otherwise known as Michael Strategy. Michael Strategy, they've released all of these different equity instruments. They have Stride, Strife, and they're all different structuring to basically borrow from the future in a particular way, targeting a particular investor. Preferred shares, too. It's not like the MSTR common shares. Yeah, some of them are preferred, some of them are like junk bond. Uh, it's all over the place. Yeah. There's this one that they've issued that they've released that is just dominating. And on our podcast episode with with Michael Sailor, uh, he he said like, "Oh yeah, we tried all the different ways and it's Stretch that is the winner." Like, we, that's that's our iPhone. That's the debut product. That's the thing that's going to like take us to Valhalla. Stretch is now over 40% of all of the market cap of all Strategies preferred stocks that they release. The, the equity instruments the strategy has issued 7.8 billion of preferred shares in total. Over three billion of that is now Stretch alone. And that number is increasing. The trading volume of, like, uh, 6.3 billion to Stretch right here. Oh yeah, it has gone up. It has gone up. Yeah. So, we're looking at over 50%. Over 50%. Yeah. Um, it's also trading at basically as much as MicroStrategy's common equity is in trading volume. It's basically equal to that. Five months ago, it was just 10% of the volume. Now it's almost equaling volume because that stock gets some volume.

Yeah. So, just as a recap of what Stretch is, Stretch trades at $100. If it trades above $100, Strategy issues more Stretch and sells it into the market to lower the price. If it trades below $100, there's, I'm sure market making going on to push push it back above 100. For the reason why it will go back above 100 is that if it ever consistently trades below 100, Strategy will increase the yields that it pays, making it more desirable. Right now, it pays 11.5%. 11.5%. Um, Strategy can continuously sell like inflate more shares of Stretch at the market and constantly be selling, which is why this thing represents a constant flow of capital into Strategy, which allows them to buy Bitcoin on the back end. So, for Strategy's purposes, it's a very tight loop between any excess demand of Stretch above $100 and them buying Bitcoin because they instantly get to pocket that difference by Bitcoin with it. And this has in the zeitgeist of, you know, financial commentators, people are talking about this thing. It has it has strong opinions. A lot of. Very strong opinions. Yes. Yeah. There's this Twitter account called, uh, STRC Live that that shows various, uh, STRC purchases and what happens. And this is an example. At Tuesday this week at 8:27 a.m., $41,000 shares were purchased. $4.1 million of Stretch was purchased. It didn't even, you know, no price slippage there. It didn't even, you know, up zero, up barely a cent. Um, and that directly converts to 153 Bitcoin. That 4.1 million converts to 153 Bitcoin that, uh, Michael Sailor and Strategy can purchase on the back of that. What's happening is people are buying the Stretch to get the 11.5% yield. It's not really moving the price, and Michael's saying, "Thank you for that. Thank you for your dollars. Thank you for your cash. I'm going to go buy Bitcoin with that." And that happens pretty continuously and fairly instantly gets converted to demand. So, that is a case where you can kind of see it maybe blunting some of the, the crypto winter, then, right, if there's this sustained bid for Bitcoin.

I mean, the, the big question is, how many investors or how much capital is there in the world that is interested in 11.5% yield year-over-year? Now, it's not risk-free, but I think a lot of people will take this unknown risk, this risk that Strategy will simply not pay, or because they're not obligated to pay. And some, many people are like, "Yeah, they're probably going to pay me. I'll take the 11.5%." And that's a very, like, 11.5% is huge, dude. Like, a relatively un, like, unknown risks, but I think the market is perceiving it as low risk. Low risk 11.5%, like, wowzer. There's no free lunch though, right? Like, who's losing from this interaction? Um, Vance Spencer makes the point, Sailor's best year ever was 2024. He bought 320,000 Bitcoin that year. He's on pace this year, 2026, for 400 to 600,000 Bitcoin. The case for new all-time high is relatively straightforward, he says. Then Nick Carter follows up with this and he says, "Okay, but every dollar of Stretch issued subtracts a dollar from MSTR common shares. The higher the ratio of Stretch to MSTR, the more tenuous the situation becomes." Good for Bitcoin, though. And then, uh, Vance says, "Sir, I don't give an F about that MSTR common."

And and Nick follows up with you and Michael both, which I think is the punch line. Nick, Nick is making the point that some of this excess demand for Stretch is coming at the cost of MSTR common shareholders. Now, it all benefits Bitcoin, of course, but at the cost of common shareholders. And of course, because these are preferred shares, they're higher on the capital, um, you know, stack. And so, if there was some sort of forced liquidation, preferred shareholders are going to receive the benefit and, you know, common shareholders will be more caught kind of holding things, right? Their shares will go down. And Nick, Nick's point is that it's not, it's not a high fidelity mechanism. It's $1 of Stretch issued subtracts more than a dollar of Master common valuation. And so he's saying this is a, this is a lossy transfer of value in order to to do this drop. My big query, quandary, concern, Ryan, is is that like, there's no limit to what the amount of Stretch that can be issued. He, it's, it's literally a money printer. He could print 10 bajillion shares, but there needs to be a limit. I mean, his financial quants, the people at Strategy have to limit this because the ratio, ratio to Stretch to MSDR can't get too high or things get lopsided and the teeter-totter wobbles like, you know, too far in one direction.

There, I have not talked, I have not heard in the discourse of some constraint on the level of Stretch issuance because the more Stretch that's out there, the more a Strategy is obligated to pay. It's like the government debt. It's like they have a big amount of debt because they have all this Stretch out there. If they are just hammering the ATM on the market and constantly issuing shares, they're hammering their obligation to pay and have yearly bills to pay. And at some point, that has to become overly burdensome. Well, I wonder if you are critical in the same way Coffeezilla is critical. So, Coffeezilla is a notable YouTuber. He quite often talks about, um, rug pulls, scams, at least when he's interacting with crypto. I don't know what his general content is about, but he, uh, he weighed in with a video on STRC this week. Let's play a clip.

Now, what is the problem with that? Well, ultimately, Stretch is nothing like a savings account. It is a stock, meaning the company has no obligation to pay you that money back. Like, you give them $100, they have no obligation to pay back. Why haven't people realized this? Why haven't people realized there could be a risk of this stock going down and them ultimately not getting their $100 back that they put in? My entire problem is that they are leading people like a pied piper with this kind of ludicrous idea. Their pitch is of a money market and a bank when that's just not what this is. And this is a snowball of yield that will accumulate for this company, which admittedly does have tons of Bitcoin. They have this massive treasury, but Bitcoin, it's very well known, does not yield anything. So eventually, Stretch will have to be funded by what exactly, right? They have a cash reserve, but that'll eventually run out. Bitcoin doesn't yield anything, so you'd have to sell it at some point, which would put a negative pressure on your entire treasury. Or they can try to keep issuing shares in perpetuity. But how are they going to do that? Well, maybe they just keep raising the yield of Stretch. Doesn't seem like that would work forever. You can pretty quickly realize that, hey, this is maybe not as sustainable as they're claiming it is.

So, I think Coffeezilla's main critique here is that it's being pitched or sold as a risk-free money market account, you know, except it has 11.5% interest. And he's saying, look, there's some, there's some risks there. That's too simple. The risk by the investor, by anyone who buys this thing, aren't properly understood. It's not like savings in a bank account. It's not like a money market because the stock itself, the asset itself can go down. It's, it's a share at the end of the. Principal can go down. Yeah. The principal can go down. And he is right about that. Although it is called a preferred share. I feel like, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's someone there, some people in retail who don't actually know what they're purchasing. But I, for someone like me, and hopefully for Bankless listeners, they know that this is a preferred share. This is not a bond. There is, there is no obligation to pay. Yeah. But it is preferred to the common equity. So, it's mixed. The ri, the risk is mixed. It is mixed. I just can't hate the product cuz he's right about maybe the way it could be advertised. But if it's advertised in the correct way, I don't really. AI video of the babe in the bikini who was like, I made all my money with Stretch. Like, but he did that to rage bait people, not to market to normies. Yeah, I think so. Right. And, um, it's kind of the same thing. So, you know, retort to that is, um, what is, what is dollars in a money market fund? This is a Bitcoiner saying this. Oh, you need cash flow for retirement? Just continue lending your money to a government going insolvent, covering up for pedophiles, and drone striking the Middle East. That way, you can get 8% less than STRC and feel a lot safer. Of course, that's a, a bombastic kind of like take on this, but, the point that's not being made is wherever, if you have money in a money market, you're taking currency risk. That is the currency risk of the US government. If you have preferred shares in STRC, you're also taking currency risk. That's the currency risk of Bitcoin. Like, you should know that that's what the product is. If you're comfortable with the currency risk, it's not a bad product. In fact, I know I was talking to you on the debrief of like, oh, do you like Stretch? Would you buy it? Like, my take on this now is like, I wouldn't buy MSTR. I, I kind of like Stretch and I kind of like Bitcoin.

Stretch and Bitcoin. Yeah. FMS MSTR. Stretch and Bitcoin. The Strategy barbell is Stretch and Bitcoin, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I, I don't know. I can't hate the product. I, I don't agree with Coffeezilla's take here. I hating the product is going back to my original point, just downstream of how willing they are to hammer the ATM and issue a ton of shares that they can't get out of hand.

It could get out of hand. And so this is up to the discretion of the management company.

Let's talk about Ethereum's Michael Sailor. That is Tom Lee, cuz he just hit a milestone on the week. He now has 4.1% of all ETH total supply. It wasn't that long ago. He came on Bankless last summer and he told us he was going to go for 5%. Then he.

called it the alchemy of 5%. And we were astounded. I was like, 5% is so high. I thought maybe in the fullness of time, in some universe, he could hit it at Terminus, right? Like, he's hit it in less than a year. Okay. And he plans to hit 5%. He made it like this year. Yeah.

And this means, of course, that he's making 60% of that is now staking. So they're making about, you know, between 250 and 300 million per year on staking. If ETH hits 10K at some point, David, that's over a billion dollars in revenue every year just from letting the ETH sit there and stake.

I will say that there is a tale of two cities going on here. You have the strategy for Bitcoin. You have BMR for ETH. You know, two DATs doing kind of similar things, buying their respective assets. Strategy is doing Stretch issuing a crap ton of debt. Bitmine, no debt. Hasn't yet.

No debt. We're only no stretch to buy, however, obviously, but like, still no debt. So like, there are divergences in strategy, no pun intended, happening here. One thing I do think it's safe to say is that Bitmine has won the Ethereum DAT horse race, and that was not clear last summer. I mean, there's a lot of contenders there. Not to say there isn't some other strong contenders here, but the Ether machine, they're no longer going public, so they're staying a private company. Ethzilla has kind of dropped. They are pivoting their strategy from Ethereum DAT. So the big DATs are Sharlink, ESBET, and Bitmine. And Bitmine has, you know, 4x more than Sharp Link than ESB right now. So they've definitely pulled ahead in this race.

Coming up next, we're going to talk about World of Liberty Financial, the Trump family D5 projects, and some of the shenanigans, the ways that they are cleverly making a lot of money at World Liberty Financial token holders' expense, question mark. And was Justin Sun a victim here? Poor, poor guy. We're going to talk about this, and we're also going to hear from the SEC's statements about DeFi interfaces and how they are not broker dealers, which is just great for our industry. So, we're going to get to all that and more, but first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

In 2024, emerging markets generated over $115 billion in annual yield for investors with yields ranging between 10 to 40%. These are some of the highest, most persistent yields on Earth. The problem, DeFi can't access them. Bricks changes this. Built on Mega ETH, Bricks takes emerging market money markets and solver carry and turns them into composable primitives you can access straight from your wallet. While DeFi investors earn 3 to 6% on stable coins and T bills, institutions have been harvesting 10 to 50% yields backed by sovereign monetary policy. BRICS connects these worlds with institutional grade tokenization, local banking rails, compliance across jurisdictions, and real-time stable coin settlement. Bricks does the heavy lifting so DeFi can finally access real collateral and structured products on top of real-world yield. Even the best carry trades can be within reach. Bricks brings DeFi's promise to the emerging world and brings emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with Bricks.

Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There are new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So, let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi Report wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

Okay, so the question this week, did World Liberty Finance Financial, I should say, just rug a DeFi protocol, and was Justin Sun a victim? Here, here's the allegation, a tweet. They're pointing to a screenshot of the World Liberty Finance website. It's saying the World Liberty Financial, it's on their about page, why they exist. It's to break barriers for the unbanked. Our mission is to unlock financial access by replacing the limits of the traditional banking system with an open infrastructure. Stock photos from developing countries.

It seems like it, David. Yeah, it seems like it. And of course, World Liberty Finance is the Trump Sons crypto project. It was kind of their brand to do some sort of lending and borrowing protocol in DeFi because they had been unbanked in the past and they were bringing you basically bring you know, bringing the Trump brand to DeFi. So the allegation is that they minted this week millions of tokens out of thin air. That would be the WLFI token. They then used them as collateral to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars, and then they've now distanced themselves from the project. So taken their name off the website. That's what this tweet is alleging.

Anyway, what actually happened is they did borrow 150 million in USDC from a lending and borrowing protocol called Dolomite. Uh, and the collateral that was pledged was their 400 million in WLI tokens. So, which they had just minted. Those would be the tokens they minted when they started the project. So the idea is they mint tokens, right? And then they get real money, which is USDC, pledging these tokens as collateral. David, you know what Dolomite is? I remember learning more about Dolomite when we learned that the co-founder of Dolomite, Corey Kaplan, was an advisor to World Liberty Financial. And so, as it seems, they advised them to use the Dolomite protocol, which is their protocol. To say, hey, there are people who are lending USDC to Dolomite. You can mint WFI tokens, put them in Dolomite, and then you can have all the USDC.

Get the money. Yeah. You you print the fake token, you know, the easy to print token to get the dollars. It's a real token. It might not be worth real money. Right. Yes. Especially when they can mint them at their discretion. That's right. So, Doomite, it's on Arbitrum, by the way. And so, yeah, the problem here is, of course, WLFI can mint their token, zero cost basis. If the token goes to zero and the collateral goes to nothing, they still get to keep the 150 million. It's the lenders who get the bag. They're the exit liquidity. And the problem is even right now, David, if you try to sell 8 million in WLFI tokens, that's a 72% slippage. Just an 8 million.

Okay. So it's like it's already underwater, right? So that's the problem here is there's no risk to World Liberty and they can just keep the 150 million. And who are the Dolomite lenders? These are probably regular DeFi farmers. People with USDC depositing for yield. Yeah, that's right. So they were getting 10 plus percent yield. Most of them had no idea the risk that 80% of this pool was in one entity's position. So these are retail farmers, really, that might be on the receiving end of this very bad debt. So when we saw WFI, World Liberty Financial, the DeFi app on-chain as a project created, I would say that this outcome was pretty close to a worst-possible-outcome scenario where innocent USDC lenders to an otherwise previously neutral DeFi app are not going to get their money back because of improperly balanced and poor risk-managed accounts because Dolomite whitelisted the WLFI token and didn't account for, or were paid off, or something about how you could just mint that out of thin air and then drain the. This is, as far as I'm concerned, this is an attack on the protocol.

Well, does it remind you a little bit of FTX in 2022? You remember that Alameda? So, this was Sam's hedge fund that was supposed to be separate. They had held a massive amount of the FTT token. You remember FTX had an FTT token that they basically invented. They minted, and they used FTT as collateral to borrow billions. Now, they did this off-chain. They didn't do this in DeFi. So we didn't like discover everything that was going on. It's crazy that we can see all of this activity just in plain sight. And then what happened is FTT price dropped after Coinbase exposed that Sam was using customer deposits in improper ways. The collateral was worthless as FTT price dropped, and all the loans were called, and then Alameda couldn't repay as part of the downward spiral of this thing. And so this is smaller scale, but it's still a similar play. It looks like it reminds me very much of the FTT case.

It's quite blatant. One of the potential victims of this is Justin Sun. Justin Sun was an investor in World Liberty Financial in 2024, 2025. He invested $75 million. Uh, he moved 9 million of that to an exchange and then because maybe for some shenanigans, for some reason, like it was, they didn't want him to do it. His telling is they didn't want him to move the money, and so they froze all his.

They froze all of his tokens. Yes. For all of his tokens. And so because they could do that in the smart contract, they had that ability. They basically have total control over the smart contract. So Justin Sun, I think, is like trying to sue them or something to get his tokens back. And now this is also happening. And so it kind of adds fuel onto the fire. I don't know if Justin Sun was uniquely harmed in this particular instance. Why? How actually, why is Justin Sun relevant here? He's just relevant because he's complaining about it again, and there's back and forth with the WLFI account. And you look at this, does anyone? This is WLFI, the World Liberty Financial Twitter account. Yes. Does anyone still believe Justin Sun? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLI isn't the first. See you in court, pal. That's why there's going to be a court case where we get to see.

I'm bringing my popcorn. God. It's going to be great. Yeah, it's brutal. Now, WLFI calls all of this FUD. It's wrong. Here's what's actually happening. They basically describe their maneuver as an anchor borrower. So they're doing this maneuver so they can generate yield that makes the protocol more attractive for their depositors. Also, they claimed that their tokens were nowhere near liquidation. That's true. You know, it's 400 million collateral on 150 million. So liquidation hasn't technically happened yet. It's kind of a you shredding your cat type scenario. And if it got close to liquidation, they'd just put more WLFI tokens in.

Print more shitcoins. Sure. The problem with all of that is, of course, if you hit a downward spiral, none of that works. You have thin order books only. You know, 8 million in liquidity sends the books down 70%, right? That won't work in that scenario. So, but that is their retort, I guess. All of this brings about the question of, um, what do you think, David? Has Trump been good for crypto or bad? I mean, we could talk about the meme coins. Bankless knows there've been meme coins. There's this project in DeFi. Do you remember was it a, you know, the Saudis that bought 500 million? Stable coin. Uh, well, it was WLFI token. What was it that did this? The Saudis. I think that's right. That was a journalist coverage that happened in February of this year. There's just like a lot of scandal and corruption, it seems, and grifting activity. And yet, at the same time, we have Paul Atkins, we have the Genius Act. We have some definite positive moves for crypto. So what's the net? What's the net?

There's been two distinct phases. The first half of Trump's presidency has been overwhelmingly good, and then the second half has been like, "Okay, I did all the good stuff. Now I get to grift. Now I got to pay the grift tax." And so, like, if I think when you ask this question, the zeitgeist is like, "Oh, now it's bad because he's doing the bad things." So I think the momentary pulse is people will say that it's not bad. It's like, to me, it's like close enough where it's kind of a toss-up. My followers, 70% net good at this point in time, or 30% net good, excuse me, 70% net bad. Yeah. And I'm saying that's the expected outcome because he's done all the bad stuff recently. There's like recency bias in here.

Let's talk about something good he did, which was appoint Paul Atkins as chair of the SEC. They came out with guidance this week, which is great news for DeFi. The SEC said DeFi interfaces aren't broker dealers. So all of this guidance comes down to what the SEC defines as a covered user interface. What is a covered user interface? Thank you for asking. Website, browser, extension, app, anything that assists with making a blockchain transaction in a self-custodial wallet. And so if the things assemble code for you to make a transaction, that is a covered user interface. It goes even further than that. It actually carves out, Ryan, a pretty granular definition of what a covered user interface is. It has 12 points of what a CUI is. It makes nine points about what a CUI isn't. If you go and read the report, the line that is drawn is basically down the principal-agent problem. Like, is a covered user interface trustless or is it trusted? And if it's trustless, it's a covered user interface. If it's trusted, it's a broker. It's very smart.

Yeah. It's very intelligent. It's doing the right job. And so, like, some of the big questions it has is like, does the interface route transactions fairly and neutrally, or does it bias certain exchanges? Do they sell transaction order flow, or are they making opinionated choices on behalf of the user, or are they giving the user maximum choice and autonomy? And if it's always like the user has the maximum choice and autonomy, it's generally a covered user interface. And if it's not, it's a broker dealer. But what does this cover? Things like Uniswap and SushiSwap are covered. MetaMask, Phantom, Coinbase Wallet. These are our opinions. This is not stated. So, like, this isn't like a legal opinion, but this is what it seems reads to me like. Phantom, for example, order routers and aggregators like 1inch and CowSwap might be a little bit unclear because they might be a little bit more opinionated. So, TBD. But overall, there are well-defined lines between what is a broker dealer, what's not, and how an app or a project or company might be in that criteria or not. And this is a big deal because Gensler's SEC, of course, was claiming that DeFi frontends were broker dealers and therefore all of them were illegal. Do you know? And so we've come so far from that. I remember actually, remember Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022 was saying today that he was saying part of his core claim is that the SEC and the US government would never allow DeFi interfaces to exist without being registered as broker dealers. And he was going to go to DC, Washington DC, and go lobby and fix this for us, of course, because they would never allow. Now, here we are in 2026, and we have some of this guidance, some of this clarity. Alex Thorne makes the further point that this is another example, the SEC showing that it can just move crypto market structure along without Congress. It's giving the clarity that we need in crypto without the actual Clarity Act. So I'm glad of that because I'm not sure if that act is actually going to progress further this year. It's probably a 50/50 at this point.

Yeah. Are we freezing some Bitcoins? I don't know yet, David. But Jameson Lopp has put out, he's a Bitcoin developer. Sorry, he's a Bitcoin community member. I'm not sure if you would call him a Bitcoin developer, but he's got some developers behind him who have proposed BIP 361 to freeze all the quantum-vulnerable wallets. So, here's the website with the full description. But as we've covered, about 30% of all Bitcoin has an exposed public key that could be taken if a quantum computer is powerful enough to go take it. This could happen stealthily. We wouldn't necessarily see it coming. We would just start seeing keys get yanked. That's 7.1 million Bitcoin that's at risk, and over 2 million of that are probably Satoshi keys, probably lost keys. And so Jameson put together a three-phase plan. Okay, let me spell this out, and you tell me if you like this. The first phase would be three years after activation. So say this BIP gets activated in 2027. No new funds could be sent to that 7.1 million Bitcoin in exposed public addresses. So those would be kind of locked out. You couldn't push new Bitcoin into them. Then phase two, which would be about five years after activation, all the signatures would be invalid. So all of the coins would essentially be frozen. So you'd have five years to move your Bitcoin from one address to a quantum-safe address. And then phase C, which wasn't completely defined, is there might be a way to do a ZK proof where you could actually prove you had the seed phrase and unlock some of that Bitcoin. So that's the plan. It's tangible. Remember we were asking about, like, oh, of the 7 million, how do you decide what's gone, what's not? Well, Jameson's proposal is just you lock them all and you force everybody else to move.

Yeah. And then those that haven't moved are, you know, coins that can't be spent, that are permanently lost, that are Satoshi's coins, that sort of thing. What do you think of this plan?

It is pragmatic and doesn't ring Bitcoinery by because of that fact. It's like, in order to solve this problem, Bitcoin. It's the part C that's pragmatic to you. I think this is just, if you look at just A and B, it's basically what Nick Carter was saying, which is burning. Yeah. Yeah. It's the C part. It's this extra. Ignore C. That was the kind of the TBD part anyway. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. It's the burn. Yeah. You just burn it. Yeah. I mean, you listen to my conversation with last week. He's like, "Yeah, the social contract is not violated here." And I kind of take that point. I understand that point. I think it is somewhat violated, and the property rights are somewhat violated, but I also take that point. And Jameson said, "Look, I don't even like this proposal. I wrote it, but I don't even like it, but because the alternative ideas are even worse." Yeah. Yeah. Like it is going to be something like this. It's like it's not going to make anyone happy.

Exactly. So it's a straw man. He put it out there, and now the Bitcoin community can comment on it. Actually, there's a new post Nick Carter just put out about this and the three paths, but it's basically burn, let quantum treasure hunters go find it, or Nick Carter's favorite approach, which is, you know, the US government goes claims. Yeah, he would like that. He would like that.

It is fun. Ryan, I will say I do enjoy maybe there's a little bit of schadenfreude. Maybe schadenfreude is not the perfect word, but just like watching Bitcoiners have to flex this muscle that is so weak, like coming to consensus about stuff on a governance thing that has no governance. Yeah, exactly. It's like watching an infant learning to walk for the first time.

Yeah, it's good. I do think they'll figure it out, though. I mean, proposals like this, this is the Overton window shifting. This is how you do it. Nice job, Jameson Lopp. Nice job, Jameson Lopp. I agree. And also Nick Carter, you guys have been on the forefront of this.

All right, well, let's end it there, guys. You know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.