Solana’s Controversial Vote, Ethereum’s Leadership Move, & Crypto’s Macro Crisis

Transcript

bankless Nation welcome to the weekly rollup each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the new news and this week I have the pleasure of being joined by Ethereum Community Chief Anthony Sano anthony good to see you my man how are you hey man i'm good good to be back after a little while uh here on the rollup mhm yeah yeah i uh we you have been our regular substitute teacher whenever like Ryan or I would need to take just a week off and we just always tap in Anthony Sesano ryan's been taking an extended sbatical just to spend some very much quality time with his kids uh so I've been doing my best to like go around just like it's so easy to come back to Anthony Sesano so I had to get some differing diverging uh voices out there

uh but it's really good to just like tap you in formally it's like it it was it was inevitable that I would bring you on and it's good to have you back here my man yeah yeah definitely yeah and I think it's it's a good thing to get broader kind of I guess voices on the show definitely like everyone knows my brand knows what I'm going to talk about like know knows what kind of turn I'm going to take so yeah it's been great to see you kind of branch out uh there and get other people on the show so we got a lot of news to talk about this week athena and Securitize are launching their own chain called Converge which I think that's an ironic name and I'll give that my take about that uh Robin Hood partners with Kishi where the uh

prediction market competitor to Poly Market uh then two ETH people are going to talk about the Salana governance debate uh the two ETH people are me and Ryan uh and then of course we got some excuse me and Anthony uh and then Ethereum has some updates as well that we're going to talk about and Kraken makes a 1.5 billion dollar acquisition just announced about an hour before recording so that's going to be the news that we talk about but I just kind of wanted to zoom out and do a quick vibe check anthony just how you feeling about where we are it is March 20th 2025 we got Donald Trump making cryp crypto strategic reserves is we have a actually competent SEC crypto sentiment is completely dog [ __ ] uh and Ethereum is going through a transitionary period taking longer to go through that

transitionary period but still going through it nonetheless overall like how would you kind of color this phase of crypto yeah i think I think why people are I guess uh the sentiment on crypto Twitter you could say I guess is like not great is because I think people had these really high expectations of things obviously with Trump winning everyone was like "Oh you know everything's going to be great for crypto now we're going to get Gary Gendler out the SEC is going to be friendly we're going to get all these good regulations and they're going to let us do whatever we want and there's going to be a crypto reserve." And for the most part we got like most of that right we got most of that in place but I think what a lot of people maybe miss is that like those things can

happen but their effects on particularly the market can take a while to play out right and when you have the opposing force which is basically a lot of the uncertainty in the macro environment right now and the geopolitical environment you have the positive force of all this positive stuff happening for crypto in you know in a vacuum I guess and then you have everything else outside of that which you know if you read the headlines if you read the kind of the media and everything like things seem not great I guess globally right now in terms of geopolitics and the macro environment and stuff like that so you have these two forces going at each other uh and it seemed like for a little while there the negative forces were were winning in you know in a pretty big way because prices came down a lot on

things but we've leveled out at this point i don't know where things are going to go from here but maybe we trend sideways for a while i think the market's just digesting a lot of this stuff and the ecosystem is digesting a lot of this stuff but I think with cryptonatives what really hurt was that everyone was expecting a regular crypto cycle you know BTC goes up alltime high price discovery ETH does it next and then we have like a quote unquote alt season right but I think this time around what we had is we had BTC obviously be be very strong ETH not be as strong as people expected it to be and then meme coins right there was no alt season besides memecoins really and that caught a lot of people off guard a lot of money was extracted out of the ecosystem and now we're at where we're

at today so I think it's it's managing expectations um that that's my main takeaway here but generally on you know outside of the markets and on the fundamental side of things I'm extremely bullish like especially as I mentioned all the positive stuff happening in the US on the regulatory side but especially within Ethereum there's been a lot of developments over the last few months in the Ethereum ecosystem which I'm sure we're going to get into a bit later you know the Ethereum Foundation leadership changes Etherealize making a really big move bringing Danny Ryan on you know those sorts of things those again are huge things that have happened but take time to play out in the market so I think that if people zoomed out a little bit reset their expectations they would be a lot happier yeah that's my take on it as well my take is just basically

that there's a huge dislocation between the fundamentals of the industry and sentiment and if we talk about sentiment you know that's that's an emotional conversation like why we were basically asking why the question why are people unhappy uh and happiness always is a divergence between expectations and reality we expected one outcome and we got a different outcome but the expectation the outcome that we definitely did get is very strong fundamental growth in the industry bitcoin strategic reserve uh a crypto pro- crypto president uh a pro crypto SEC and CFTC process wherever we need where we needed it to be which is you know in the government leadership positions of the of the United States including in Congress where we're about

to get a market structure bill and a stable coin bill but nonetheless like prices are down and this is coming just from from twofold in my opinion like Donald Trump's chaoticness for like whatever he's doing that is creating a ton of uncertainty in the market up to the point of like actual trade wars which of course is is bad for the market so we have prices down for that and that's just not even a crypto story that is just all all markets are down other than bonds um and then in addition to that we've actually just had sustained high interest rates for a really long time over two years now and crypto has never been inside of a sustained high interest rate environment ever uh and it's just continuing to be higher for longer when it comes to the interest

rate so we had the FOMC meeting this week happened yesterday the Fed decides to keep interest rates at the target rate of 4.25 to 4.5% they said that they could still see two rate cuts coming in 2025 although not as large as we've seen in the second half of last year uh they said that they are expecting higher inflation and lower economic growth uh and this is all just leading to just a harder money environment i remember Anthony when you and I were getting into crypto it was in the ZERP era the zero interest rate era and that marked uh so much of the narrative that about why crypto is the way that it is like uh just poor monetary management by our leadership by our by our money over our

money's ours and that was the era of crypto and that era is over these this zer era is over and I do think there is some like relationship between this entering of a hard money era and the decreasing dopamine of the crypto speculators because what is bad for casinos is high interest rates and hard money uh and so I think people's sentiments of just like okay cool we've gotten everything we need as an industry to grow you know we have a crypto reserve we have um pro- crypto legislation but prices are down and that dislocation is creating terrible vibes u but I think that's kind of to be expected when we have this like ZERP era being purged out of like the DNA of

crypto speculators yeah yeah exactly i think so and and you know I've been saying this on my show for a little while now is that when money is hard as you say when it's hard to come along when there's not easy money it's very hard for risk on assets which crypto is still you know mo for the most part pretty much everything outside of BTC is a pretty big risk on assets i would even argue BTC could still be viewed as relatively risk on uh it just doesn't do well in that environment and it definitely doesn't do well in a very high global uncertainty environment which I think is what we've been in for at least the last couple of months as you mentioned a lot of the stuff that Trump has been doing you know people talk about a new world order not in the

conspiracy kind of tinfall hat sense but in the fact that the US definitely seems like it wants to withdraw a lot of its influence from the rest of the world so what does the rest of the world look like in 10 years from now because of that so there's a lot of uncertainty there and people don't know exactly where to place their bets so when there's so much uncertainty usually people will be like well I'm going to sit in cash for a bit especially since rates are so high I can basically sit in cash and earn a pretty decent yield on it it's not like it's 0% rates right and then see where the chips kind of fall and see where things fall and then maybe I'll reenter the market once things stabilize a bit so I think that's the general kind of consensus right now but

you know if you want to go counter consensus and make some bets and do it now like you might be able to make a generational bet right this is where these kind of big investments can happen too so it's about how much risk you want to take on as as as per usual with these markets yeah I I think that's right i think right now the place in the market both the equities market and the crypto markets is we've already just been completely pummeled you know even Bitcoin Bitcoin is still in the what is it $85,000 range but 85,000 still now feels low compared to like where it was even though that is incredibly high but then the rest of the market is just down so bad eth is below $2,000 it's at $190 right now uh Salana is at $130 so the rest of the market is just wrecked and I

think and also if you're like an Nvidia holder you're probably feeling the same thing like Nvidia is down like 30% or something off of the highs and so I think the current phase of the market is like like okay Donald Trump has paused chaoticness he it can't go down anymore like ETH is already below $2 like it can't go any lower than that right and so I think we're just kind of waiting for confirmation that Trump's trade war era is over and he's going to like let the stock market have a breather and no one really knows if that's true or not like maybe he just resumes being chaotic uh but I do agree with what you said which is just like the current prices of crypto assets and like tech risk assets mr market is giving you a deal right now

and you know you can choose whether to take it this is a tweet from Chris Berniski who says yesterday's close was meaningful for a bitcoin crossing the 20-day and 200day simple moving average with conviction now to see if we can hold it we're not out of the woods yet but I like what I am seeing uh and so with with Bitcoin over $84,000 uh Chris is saying "Okay we are in a good spot if we can hold this right now." So I think markets are starting to like settle to these new lower prices we're going to hang around here for a little bit and then we're going to like slowly uh creep upwards if Donald Trump can like you know stop being chaotic that's kind of my take yeah yeah I think so and I think I said you know earlier how people's expectations may need to be managed here

with with timelines and everything like that you know the markets can go sideways for quite a while and they tend to actually do that and people don't realize how long they can go sideways for because during the sideways period it's usually boring so you kind of tune out most of it and then once prices start going up again you forget the fact that we just had 6 months of sideways price action and now you're like "Oh it's going up again i'm happy." And then maybe it turns into like a little mini bull market or something like that but we'll see um you know I think what's on everyone's mind right now in particular is is the four-ear cycle dead you know the four-year crypto cycle i've been saying for a while actually that I thought think it's dead i don't think it's going to be the same kind of cycles

going forward especially given that the alt season kind of phenomenon seems to have changed pretty dramatically from everything pumps to okay whatever's the hot flavor of the kind of season pumps uh we'll see if that that maintains going forward but I think that is actually what kind of ruined most people over the last 6 to 12 months is that they had expectations for certain things and it just didn't happen the way they expected yeah and I'm kind of a fan of the four-year cycle being over because it's too you can't just have that forever like it's too easy at some point it needs to just go away uh okay so let's get into some more crypto native subjects but before we do we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Ronin ronin is one of the leading web 3 gaming ecosystems focused on growing

gaming and consumer adoption uh they are taking the walls down off of the train used to be a permissionless chain going full permissionless uh and now you can go explore that permissionless ecosystem by using the Ronin wallet so check it out at banklist.cc/ronin_wallet there's also a link in the show notes okay Anthony one of the big uh news of the week was this converge chain which is a partnership from Athena Labs the makers of the uh USD stable coin and securitize and securitize is kind of like this tech service provider that is used by BlackRock to issue the build fund securize has been around for forever they've just wanted to make onchain securities between these two companies they are making Converge a brand new chain a brand new blockchain uh and they

label this they brand this as the settlement network for traditional finance and digital dollars uh and then tweet continues and says "Our vision is to provide the first purpose-built settlement layer where Trady will merge with DeFi centered on USDE that's the stable coin from Athena and USDTB i actually don't know what that stable coin is all secured by DNA." Oh Treasury bonds okay so so staked st okay staked dollars dollars and staked dollars and then secured by ENA so this new layer 1 blockchain the staking token is ENA which is the token of Athena Labs that's like the the governance token of Athena Labs it is also a permissioned validator set so it is not permissionless you can't just stake like

you stake on Ethereum or even on Salana you actually are it's a whitelisted group of entities uh which is apparently just a bunch of institutions and centralized exchanges centralized known entities with like basically reputation on the line they stake ENA and they validate the blockchain I think any user can come to the blockchain any user can come to converge so it's not a permissioned chain but it's a permissioned validator set uh and during the explanation about like the design choice about this uh it was explained to me by Rob from Dragonfly and also Carlos from uh from Secure Ties that this has been requested by institutions in order to get them comfortable with having this place that they can control where they

feel comfortable issuing digital assets uh you know digital securities you know like real world assets and and securities and so this is the compromise that this design has made we're going to give over the keys of this blockchain to institutions so that they feel like they have sufficient control over their own ecosystem where they can feel comfortable to create issue real world assets assets that um you know you would find more in trady that we all want to have on blockchain uh but then they just need they just need their own domain to feel control and then the explanation here is that once it's on converge technology like wormhole or any other you know cross crosschain interoperability layer will be able to take those assets port them over over to Ethereum port them over to Salana port

them over to to wherever blockchain there there's demand for it uh so that's kind of the the simple rundown of the news what's your take um I thought it was a a kind of weird announcement I guess cuz it's an L1 right like a as you said brand new chain an L1 but I would even struggle to call it a blockchain as you said it's permissioned it's pretty locked down it's extremely like it's completely centralized and I also wonder like why they didn't just do this as like a just a centralized database instead you know cuz making it a blockchain with consensus and everything it just adds additional costs and overheads but it does make sense and I suspected that it was definitely due to the institutions requesting this um themselves because they are very new to

this and they obviously want to get comfortable with it they want to have total control over things but the thing is is you can still have total control over it even as like an L2 and I feel like the L2 model is just better generally from a number of different reasons you mentioned things like bridging you know assets across the L2s work better with bridging than L1 to L1 does um you you get to basically lower your cost dramatically as well i know that maybe the was like well we could use ENA for staking and maybe we can kind of get I guess a more valuable ENA through that because there is like this perceived L1 premium on tokens so yeah overall like I saw the all the reactions to it it was mixed you know it was very mixed people like is this really needed

you know this doesn't really make any sense shouldn't we just be settling onto Ethereum instead and and they can still retain centralized controls through the token standards like Circle does with USDC or Tether does with with USDT right so overall I'm going to say I'm in like a wait and watch kind of approach here but this doesn't really excite me to be honest um I'm not in this industry for for this sort of stuff like yes I'm excited about real world assets and things like that but I don't know if this is the right kind of instant in instantiation of that i think that hopefully if the institutions get more comfortable they'll realize that there are better ways to do this than than this way uh so we'll have to yeah we'll have to see how that kind of plays out i do see the argument that there are some

benefits towards being a blockchain rather than just a database this is an EVM chain and so there are some DeFi apps that they're going to launch on day one like day one apps right Morpho Maple Pendle uh Horizon from a uh and so that's going to be these like financial uh text stacks that are just built on this converge blockchain on day one and and also it's permissionless access so uh even though there are there's a permission validator set you know you the user can still go to this chain and use some of the assets here and in theory what's the point of the permission validator set then if It's permissionless right like what are the why do you need a permission validator set if you're going to let people anyone come like I don't I don't buy it's not it's not working no I I'm I'm I'm

waiting to get to that point and I'm trying to give them some benefit of the doubt uh okay so also in their announcement they say there are three distinct pillars that are operating par parallel a fully permissionless user access to a DeFi ecosystem which in theory there would there would be more like a larger diversity of like you know tokenized equities tokenized securities real world assets so so maybe that's why people would come to this um permissioned blockchain a permissioned validator set blockchain uh but they also said that there are permissioned apps where tradi can interact with KYC parties and that is like one of the features of this that might get more um institutions comfortable with the blockchain and then third new permission apps built by sec on securitized tokenized assets and so the permissioned

network side of this thing is like really a big emphasis because it's not just at the validator set but they want to also build permissioned apps but I would take this and this is what Rob from uh Dragonfly was explaining to me he said permission validators is an unfortunate truth of bringing more institutional counterparties on chain we hear it across verticals and so he's saying that he's gone around to institutions and say they have said to him that we need permission validation permission validator in order to get comfortable and I'm like okay I understand that that is what they are telling you but why are we listening to them in the first place because they don't know what they want because when have institutions ever been right about how to build on a blockchain the reason why I incorrectly labeled this a permissioned blockchain in a tweet was

because this is what institutions were asking for back in like 2017 we're like okay blockchain not Bitcoin you know we're going to make in we're going to do IBM Hyperledger we're going to make a permission blockchain and it's going to be a settlement network between like permission parties and that is what the industry listened to and tried to build for them and no one cared about the end product because what is truly valuable in this industry is public permissionless ledgers where individuals uncceded individuals and KYCed institutions all operate in the same sphere the thing that we are trying to fix in crypto is that the previous array of financial institutions are siloed servers and each Wells Fargo has a siloed server black Rockck has a siloed

server jp Morgan has a siloed server and all of these siloed servers have very high transactional costs because each one has a server and we need to figure out how to get these servers to communicate and that just creates a bunch of intermediaries and a bunch of friction the cool thing about crypto is that we are inverting that relationship where we are all building on the same server the world computer and this is why there is this cutthroat competition between Ethereum Salana uh Bitcoin whatever to be that same unified server and now I'm being told that uh institutions are just going to be a little bit more comfortable creating their own server we'll call it converge uh and it's going to be permissioned and I'm like no that the whole point of this is to all converge on the same chain not

diverge away onto different chains and I would like to contrast that with the uh uh announcement that came out of Coinbase called privacy pools and so this is an announcement that came out of Coinbase this week i actually didn't have this in in the agenda but I think it's very useful to explain coinbase introduced Coinbase verified pools a trusted way to seamlessly trade on chain basically using a Coinbase KYC attestation which is like a token that's in your wallet that Coinbase uses to attest that they have your KYC you and only you and other KYC users are able to provide liquidity through a unis swap v4 hook and all traders in that unis swap v4 hook can trust that uh Coinbase knows the counterparty so I actually don't buy

that we need a permissioned validator set because you can just build that logic into the app layer as Coinbase has proven that they were able to do with Uniswap V4 hooks and so stop listening to the institutions and what they need because they don't understand blockchain just build it into the app layer if you want KYC logic build it into the app layer because we know that we can do that that's why we have apps in the first place i will end my rant anthony what do you think about all that no no i mean I totally agree with you and I guess yeah I was alluding to it earlier that it doesn't need a whole new chain um but also on the permissionless point like I I can't call a permission chain permissionless and that also goes like people may think I'm a hypocrite here

but that also goes for L2s with centralized sequences like I've been pushing for these L2s to obviously decentralize um you know and and I think that they will i think that the major ones definitely will um but when you have literally like an L1 blockchain with completely permissioned validators and you say it's permissionless well it's not because those permission validators can censor anyone they want and can do anything they want on the chain so really you're saying that oh you can come here and play but at any time we can you know rug you like you know you know we we can change you are beholden to the validators exactly exactly so so it it may be permissionless until it's not like I think that might be a better way to put it rather you know if you look at something like Ethereum L1 I mean it's

truly permissionless right it has thousands of unique node operators a lot of people would have to collude in order to censor you and they wouldn't even succeed for many many reasons which I won't get into now um and and yeah it's permissionless validator set as well and it's everyone can run their own full node so yeah I I just as I said like I'm in a wait and kind of see approach with this but I don't think it's the right approach i think as you mentioned Coinbase's approach is is the correct approach and will be the winning one uh you know long term yeah yeah and I think that's a good argument about like layer twos layer twos and a stage zero centralized sequencer capacity have similar f like um failings as this but the point about being a layer two even if you're stage zero layer two and

Austin Federa from uh formerly Salana he said like well the actual like nomclature of a layer of a stage zero layer 2 is actually not that different from a layer one with a bridge like point taken but the idea of being a layer two in the first place means that you are on the path to going into becoming a stage two like that is your path to be and so if you if you like stop at stage zero forever then yes understood the point but Yeah no like a commit commitment towards being a fully permissionless layer 2 uh being on that path is is what matters here yeah yeah definitely and and yeah converge doesn't seem to be on that path right they just said web permission validator set you know have fun yeah yeah yeah anyways um

it just throws in the face of like what the hell are we even doing here like why are we doing this i mean I can I can see like if I'm playing devil's advocate like I can see it from from their point of view they want to get a product in you know they want to get institutions involved with products they want to bring them on chain if they're asking for this and it's non-negotiable you'd rather land the partnership than you give it up right so I understand that like I and and I I think it's it's that's probably what happened to be honest but at the same time I would love for them to be in the background keep pushing these institutions hey there's a better way there's a better way you know but we'll see because there's financial incentives too involved right so right

yes because now Athena is a layer 1 so like not only is it a stable coin likemaker Dow but now it's a layer 1 as well uh and so they also get the layer 1 premium uh and so I think uh that incentive can't be ignored anyways we can stop we can stop ranting about Verge uh we're going to talk about the Robin Hood partnership with Kishi we're going to talk about the Salana governance updates and then we're going to talk about uh Ethereum we're going to get to all of that and more but first a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain that's exactly what Mantle is building powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable onchain financial hub as part of their 2025

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transitioning from a mobile first EVM compatible layer 1 blockchain to a high performance Ethereum layer 2 built on OP stack with IGEN DA and one block finality all happening soon with a hard fork with over 600 million total transactions 12 million weekly transactions and 750,000 daily active users cell's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top layer 2s built for the real world and optimized for fast lowcost global payments as the home of the stable coins Cello hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies including native USDT on Opera Minipay and with over four million users in Africa alone in November stable coin volumes hit $6.8 billion made for seamless onchain FX trading plus users can pay gas with ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds but

why should you care about Cello's transition to a layer 2 layer 2's unify Ethereum L1's fragmented by becoming a layer 2 Cello leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening where CO cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership you may have already heard about Infinex infinex has in my opinion the nicest crosschain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere it is called Switch Swap and Bridge and we're going to show you what it looks like first we're going to log into my Infinex account with a pass key now there's no seed phrases in Infinex this was a one-click setup with biometric pass keys but in addition to that my Infinex account is fully non-custodial

so bam I just logged in it was two clicks and I'm already into my Infinex account so let's go make a switch i'm going to go switch my USDC that is on base and I'm going to buy Barachchain which is a completely different chain uh so we're going to switch this i'm going to press that button and then Infinex is going to execute this order this crosschain order for me and now it is done but actually I'm not really feeling bearish anymore so I'm going to go from Barra uh to penguins i'm going to buy a penguin on Salana so I'm going from the Barra chain to Salana see no transaction signing no gas to worry about you just switch across whatever chain that you want with Infinex that was so easy go check out Infinex and try your first switch today robin Hood continues to

expand their product offering with a prediction market now with Kishi Kalashi uh Kalashi is this kind of like aggressive polyarket competitor a non-crypto polymarket competitor and so they actually Robin Robin Hood's crypto but it's mostly not crypto and Kishi's not crypto at all and so this is I think just us kind of keeping an eye on our non-crypto competition uh and so with Kishi now integrated into Robin Hood Robin Hood now actually has a prediction markets hub within its app uh via Robin Hood derivatives first it will center on politics economics and sports uh but of course Robin Hood's plan is to just provide markets to anything uh Robin Hood wrote in their press release "We have been in close contact with the CFTC over the past several weeks and look

forward to continuing to work with them to promote innovation in the future derivatives and crypto markets." Uh Kishi and the CFTC have litigate been litigating in court whether Kishi can offer contracts betting on US elections i think that was like the Elizabeth Warren uh like tirade over Kishi where she thought she just really didn't like betting markets as it related to uh politics um I think that has now in the been in the rearview mirror uh Vlad Tennov when he announced this he said he wrote as on on Twitter uh as a former mathematician and physicist I am motivated by the search for objective truth how can we make sense of all the information out there and who can we trust prediction markets are the application of capitalism to the pursuit of truth um Robin Hood rose about 8% uh

in the equities market after the announcement any takes with all this Anthony yeah I mean maybe a broader take here i think there's two major companies in the US targeting that have traditionally targeted different market segments there's Coinbase that has been all in on crypto then there's Robin Hood uh that has been all in on Tradfi but over the last kind of couple of years accelerating in the last year you've had Robin Hood go come to crypto and come more aggressive into crypto right they want to be in crypto they want to offer you know more and more crypto products they want to do more and more crypto stuff and then you have Coinbase on the other hand going more Tradfi being like we want to do more Tradfi stuff we want to bring real world assets onchain you they did the verified pools thing that

we just covered so it's it's an interesting dynamic right now where you have TRDFI wanting to be more crypto and crypto wanting to be more TRDFI and those kind of two things are converging I guess for lack of a better word there um and and kind of uh uh uh meeting um meeting in in the middle which is which is interesting to see there but in terms of like prediction markets there was obviously a lot of fanfare around them during the election because that's usually what happens you people love to bet on the election there were some pretty big markets there uh you know poly market was obviously the the leader in that one and and this this competitor here kind of came a bit later but as you said is quite aggressive um when when it comes to it like I just view it as an

another betting market to be honest like in general like I don't know I I'm I'm maybe not like redpilled on prediction markets just yet because they just look like betting markets to me at the end of the day and a lot of them have not really been able to get to the truth and there's a lot of issues with resolving certain markets because there's always like a something in the wording that someone harps on about and yeah so I'm wondering like if if we're just going to get like these centralized prediction markets will be the the things that take off because then the centralized people behind it can just resolve the markets however they see fit cuz in a decentralized context and one of the original Ethereum projects had a really tough time with this what ends up happening is that you go through like

multiple rounds of trying to get to the the truth of the of the truth right you got to keep going down this rabbit hole of truth and then if no resolution happens you're basically gridlocked because you're trying to do it in a decentralized way so that that's I guess the an interesting part of prediction markets to me but I do think that they're going to keep growing i do think people love to bet on anything um you know in crypto obviously we have various different ways of betting on things outside of prediction markets but in terms of like information markets and and and betting on certain things especially things that happen outside of crypto so in crypto you can bet on like tokens right that's in inside crypto you're you know buying a token betting it's going to go up but outside of crypto that's what prediction markets do

they'd look at the information outside of crypto the the stuff happening there and saying "Okay we'll bring this into crypto and then all the crypto people can bet on this as well and and you we'll see the wisdom of the crowd uh there." But as I said I'm yet to be convinced on how accurate this kind of stuff is versus normal betting markets yeah there needs to be some sort of like sufficient liquidity sufficient number of market participants really in order to make prediction markets work and I think we saw that we saw prediction markets truly work with the um election between um Donald Trump and uh Kla Harris because there was that one French trader who just like started doing phone calls and sponsoring polls to get information direct to the source and then he just they just made a very large concentrated bet because he thought the

market was wrong and that's exactly how prediction markets ought to work but that was at the like literally the most number one ever in the world in history most liquid most bet after most participated in prediction market and I think in order to make prediction markets works we need that size prediction markets have to operate at size uh and I think like we're we're going there uh Poly Market even though it came down off of the post-election highs uh the volume's still pretty good and it's way higher than it was before going into the 2024 election and I think like you could I think it's you fair to be like maybe a little bit nihilist about the current state of prediction markets because they are just betting markets but there is a top of the rabbit hole there with prediction markets that

is the futarchy rabbit hole where prediction markets can actually start to be a little bit more um prescriptive about future outcomes uh and there's just like a whole entire world of futarchy where there's like prediction markets you can imagine prediction markets inside of like a Dow or even a corporation uh that is being allowed to be bet on by employees or team members or stakeholders and that can actually create like a uh an outcome a directional outcome for the decision- making of some organization uh and so I think there's there's that we're actually kind of just like kind of scratching the surface of prediction markets and we just have to start with building out liquidity in this world and then we open up doors to uh this whole ver theorized vertical called futarchy

which that's like the optimistic case yeah yeah yeah no I'm I'm definitely open to being convinced and and you know shown the the power of these things but I yeah I just think up until this point it's been relatively niche and small and really I mean it had its breakout obviously with the election stuff but yeah I I think if we can get to that point of what you just described I I would probably be convinced at that point if if if we can get there all right this is the point in the agenda where two Ethereum people talk about Salana's SIMD228 proposal uh so this is the biggest probably proposal that's ever existed in Salana uh and then there's other people out there who are saying this is actually the biggest governance event in crypto history um we'll we'll talk about SIMD too well Anony's Anony's

L i think there's an okay argument about that maybe I'll skip to the the fact the or the the claim as to why that's true something like um 70 74% of all Salana voted on this uh proposal so the so take the market cap of Salana take 74% of it that amount of uh capital voted on this proposal now there's no like slashing or there's no like um yeah but that amount of capital is concentrated in very few validators it's true that's true that's very true very very true like you know so it's like top 20 validators have like 33% of the stake so yeah so individual humans or individual entities much lower um but like it it is still like 74% of a very large market cap organiz ecosystem

so you could you could kind of see why why this is like a big deal in terms of like crypto governance but also crypto governance goes way beyond onchain governance and I I I you know you know what I mean like if you're just looking at the onchain portion of it you're missing like a whole ocean of off-chain portions of of discussions and everything i don't know this this was I don't know not I'm not just saying this because it's Salana i just don't think this is the biggest i think Ethereum has always had the biggest governance kind of debates around things um you know I think like our issuance debate like if we were to have a proper one even even the small bits and pieces we've had with with the recent kind of issuance discussions they blow up like massively um so yeah but uh I didn't follow this

too closely i just Yeah I saw the aftermath and I was like okay okay so this is a this is a monetary conversation for Salana but it's also kind of a cryptoeconomics conversation as well because of course if you tinker with the monetary um policy of Salana you're also tinkering with the economics of validators uh okay so what did SIMD228 propose for Salana it wanted to change Salana's issuance curve decay to be able to flex up or down so Salana has like a Bitco delay decay function in the issuance rate it just like the issues less over time um now there is a more uh call it precise uh version of monetary policy that was proposed by 228 uh and this new mechanism it would have reduced

current inflation by 80% and then also targeted 50% stake rate so if there is uh more than 50% of salana staked it would decrease issuance if there's less than 50% Salana staked it would increase influence so this is something like stake targeting uh the arguments in favor of this was increased network security due to the dynamic uh in increasing inflation if staking participation dropped too low also preventing overpaying for security by just decreasing the overall amount of issuance uh and then by decreasing is issuance you're encouraging people to unstake uh which allows for soul to flow into defy so it was think thought as a subsidy to like salon's defi ecosystem those are the arguments in in favor arguments against is that smaller

validators will be less profitable because smaller validators really depend on that high sole inflation in order to be profitable so this is kind of like chopping off the tail end of smaller validators and uh because only only like more only larger validators could be really able to to be profitable here uh and then the higher yield is an important component for ETF buyers in Europe even though that's nominal um and those are really the the big things um the result of the voting is that 74 of these stakes apply voted against this uh proposal so the the proposal was uh failed so this is meaning that Salana inflation will continue to be high and so from my point of view as like a a money person I'm like okay uh increased

Salana inflation less good for the moneyess of Soul less good for the DeFi ecosystem of Soul and so that's like a negative but then also I'm happy that the longtale of validators of Salana are still profitable because that means that Salana will be able to be more decentralized than it would had it been able had it actually passed this so I'm kind of like of two minds of this it's like it's less good for Solless Money but I don't even think the Salana ecosystem really cares about Solless Money uh and it's better for the decentralization of Salana which is something that like I don't really think they can really afford to decrease that much already like I'm already not satisfied with the state of decentralization in Salana and so at least we are keeping viability of like

longtail validators uh and so the monetary policy of Salana will not change i think this is probably going to be iterated on and reproposed but as as of now there's no change to the Salana monetary policy anthony what's your take there's a lot to unpack here i think um and I'll I'll try not to be too Ethmaxy about it i think first and foremost you can't claim to have economic security on your chain if you have no slashing like as a proof ofstake chain i'm I'm I just I strongly believe that because there's no punishment right so it's it doesn't it doesn't equal any economic security in in in my eye well maybe not any but like it's just very low especially compared to something like Ethereum that actually has uh slashing in place and that goes for all the chains that don't

have slashing all the proof ofstake chains i just I don't consider it to be uh you know the equivalent there but but the thing is you you you talk about smaller validators the the the problem with that is that the Sina Foundation runs a subsidy program where they give soul to the longtail validators in order for them to be profitable even with the high inflation now I don't know the current state of that program because there's not much transparency around it it's like government handouts for the pores of the Salana validator set yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly so um and there's as I said not much transparency around that people found that on chain based on information that was given a while ago about this so there's all these these kind of things going on when it when it comes to this um and you know

as you said like the high inflation obviously is not good for for monetary properties here i don't really buy the argument that if you were if you had less soul stake that would just flow into DeFi i actually think people would just sell it because if the problem with a high staking rate is that why is it high to begin with right and there's a lot of different reasons but what's the number one one reason well I think it's because the inflation rate is high right you see what whatever the the issuance rate is i think it's like what 7 or 8% or something like that it's quite high you see that as a normal retail user you're not accounting for the inflation you're just seeing 7 8% you're like "Oh I can earn this on on Soul right like I'll buy Soul and I'll I'll stake it."

And it's not just Soul it's it's the other proof ofstake networks that have high inflation rates as well right so like I don't really buy the argument that if the inflation was lower that soul would unstake and then flow into DeFi maybe some of it would like a very small portion of it but I do think that the stake rate is so high because people don't care to do anything else with th that that those tokens they're just staking it and this is true across pretty much like most of the delegated proof ofstake networks out there cardano has a really high staking rate last time time I checked same with like polka dot and a bunch of other chains uh that that that use this kind of similar mechanism here whereas it's very different in Ethereum which doesn't have delegated proof of stake and ETH is used as a

proper money within the ecosystem is used within the DeFi ecosystem is used as collateral and people love using ETH and that's why one of the reasons why um ETH staked is at what whatever it is like 30% or something like that these days right it's it's very very small percentage there ETH ETH issuance is lower as as well that that kind of discourages staking there but ETH's use as a money and as a as a kind of like a collateral asset within DeFi has been very strong for a very long time so I think as I said there's a lot of different kind of moving parts here um and it was kind of funny to me that that this was I don't know how long this was in the works for but the timing was just poetic where the soul price suddenly started going down a lot and they're

like break you know break glass in case of emergency this proposal but I think this proposal had been worked on for quite a while i just thought the timing was was was funny but yeah I think the small validators point is probably the most important in that because Salana is a very uh expensive network to run because the hardware requirements are are quite high uh you're going to naturally get centralization because of that and then at the same time you're going to need you know subsidy programs and you're going to need uh the high issuance to to offset that as well so it just doesn't really make for good economics doesn't really make for a good uh you know sustainable chain in my opinion um but hopefully I wasn't too eaxi about that because I do think that Ethereum isn't perfect but it's it's pretty good right now the way uh the way

Ethereum works on on on its economic side yeah I know one of Anatoli's points to like kind of counteract like FUD about Salana's decentralization where he made this point was like well over the years Salana actually has become meaningful meaningfully more decentralized because more validators have come online more like Salana's validator count is growing over time time and so he's saying it actually went down by like a thousand over the last 18 months yeah so that that was exactly my point so like that is expected behavior when soul price goes up because simply it's more economical when soul is price is higher to be able to spin up a validator like more when soul so soul price goes up more people can put up validators as soul price collapses and you see this in the same thing with the

Bitcoin mining set of of miners when prices go down things centralize and that has always been uh the critique of proof of work is like okay sure you can afford more a more diverse set of miners when Bitcoin price is going up but when Bitcoin price is going down it converges it collapses down on the most efficient miners and that's the same thing that's happening with proof ofstake validating when you juice up the the hardware requirements and so uh yes there has as soul price went from $7 post FTX up to like $250 $250 almost $300 you would expect more validators to come online because that there's just more fees to acrue it's more economical but as prices converge and collapse then the validator set also collapses and if you keep your

hardware requirements up the natural convergence towards centralization is just accelerated versus if you just keep your hardware requirements down ethereum has the same convergence towards profitable only profitable validators and so it has the same effects that Salana has but since Ethereum has like 1/100th of the uh hardware and bandwidth requirements the impacts of that effect are just so much slower so it allows time for other uh other like mechanisms to come in and take over and allow for people to join the network mhm and it's it's funny that you mentioned revenue um you know cuz stakers don't just get the inflation they also get revenue from whatever the chain chain generates that's true for every chain um I remember I had like debates with uh you

know Salana people a while ago now maybe like over a year ago where they were discussing well you know fear revenue will eventually get so high that we'll just cut soul inflation down because the fear revenue will make up for that but what ended up happening was that the fear revenue did go quite high for for a little while there obviously because of the memecoin mania but now the fear revenue is is very very low so maybe this proposal would have passed like 6 months ago because everyone was looking at the fear of avenues being like "Oh they're so high." Right but I remember looking at them and I actually said this to you David we were talking about this where I said "This looks exactly like ETH did during the NFT mania where so much money is just like extracted out by the MEV mafia uh and that comes from the

fear revenue and then it just collapses which is what we we've seen here." So I wonder if this proposal would have passed 6 months ago because the validators might have been like well if inflation's going lower but hey we have a lot of fear revenue coming in that will make up for it because that was as I said one of the things that I debated with Sana people a while ago and my my my kind of side of the debate was guys I think like most fear revenue is just going to get internalized by apps because most fe comes from me so you actually just need a sustainable tail issuance but the problem for Salana is that it's incredibly expensive to run chain compared to Ethereum so they need more tail issuance which yeah which which is not good for for money right or not good for for the

longerterm kind of price of the asset in a different world of Salana news Salana is actually getting soul futures uh from CME and this is the first step the first known step that we have seen uh both bitcoin and ether go through before they get their actual ETF so first first Salana futures ETFs and then uh uh and then is that an ETF maybe not an ETF but anyway so Salon's getting futures uh and then actually excuse me it launched did launch uh the the day one volumes were well below of Bitcoin and Ethereum uh uh volume so on the Bitcoin futures debut in December of 2017 uh $12 million in volume in day one launch when Ethereum futures debuted in February of 2021 it had $31 million on day one launch and

then Salana had $12.3 million of trading volume on day one uh but nonetheless that is the first foot in the door uh for Salana to get an ETF um which I think this administration is much more open to the idea of ETFs uh and so that that and then also since we're just on Salana happy for fifth birthday Salana that happened on March 16th uh so congratulations Salana for being 5 years old they're still in mainet beta that's why I'm laughing i don't even know what mainet beta means at this point no I think it I think they're just running with it as like a meme at this point like but well it'd be hilarious if they finally took it off and the chain went down again that it would just be it would just be like CT would would go nuts over that mhm in the

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next on your web3 journey all right let's get into uh some home field territory Anthony we're going to talk about some Ethereum things uh this tweet uh is not news but I thought it was a nice tweet this is Matt Hang from Paradigm tweeting out ETH ACC ETH acceleration uh and then in this tweet uh we have Danny Ryan on the far right uh Tomas who is the incoming co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation Onsgar Georgios Brian Armstrong Matt Hang from Paradigm and I actually don't know uh this lady on the left um she's tagged in the photo um she was tagged in the photo and this is Alana alana from Paradigm alana from Paradigm the COO of Paradigm coo of Paradigm uh apologies Alana uh and uh and I just really wanted to to like use

this tweet as like an opener up of like this Ethereum conversation tomas incoming new executive director co-executive director along with Ha i think that's the big news um we have a 2B scheduled podcast with Tomas and Hao not totally confirmed we haven't gotten the 100% confirmation yet but I'm pretty sure it's happening uh and then also Danny Ryan i do a podcast with him tomorrow uh and Vivec about Etherealize uh and then since we're on the subject uh Tim Beo will be coming out on Monday I believe uh to talk about the future of Ethereum overall Anthony there's been a just a lot of churn in Ethereum a lot of changing up of vibes and sentiment and leadership overall what's your take yeah I just love that we went from [ __ ] on Salana to now pumping up Ethereum but this is good this is this is my vibe

like we can do this right um so I mean obviously like I'm just going to be biased here but at the same time I'm going to give my reasoning behind it i think over the last few months Ethereum has repositioned itself for success like as a TLDTR there and it's done this in various different ways i think as you mentioned you know the new co-directors of the EF are going to bring much needed kind of refreshing energy to the Ethereum Foundation um especially with you know Tamas already being so active on Twitter he's putting his calendar out there on public it's like it's just raw dog in the calendar man like that's crazy i would never do that but he's he's doing it um and and and he even did it as like a [ __ ] post reply to Kyle

Sanmani cuz Kyle Smani was like uh no one in the EF takes any criticism from anyone seriously here's the tweet kyle Samani tweets out I can confirm that the EF leadership is not interested in hearing direct dissenting opinions from their loudest critics and then Tomas replies "Hi Kyle appreciate you bringing this up we're opening to hearing different perspectives critical or otherwise here's some additional availability for the critical ones and then adds his Calendarly publicly on Twitter just on Twitter here's my Calendarly please come and talk to me yep that's just insane right so so that's the kind of vibes and energy that that I'm I'm liking i'm liking seeing because uh it really especially because it's in public right it really gets the gets the people going if you will there but it's not just Tomas it's not just Shiae at the EF but it's also

Etherealized right they've made a huge name for themselves in a very short period of time as everyone probably knows by now uh they brought on Danny Ryan as a co-founder along with uh some other people as well so there's four co-founders I think in in total vc Grant U and the fourth one I've forgotten the name right now they're going to but yeah there's there's four co-founders and and obviously Danny Ryan was you know everyone's pick for the EF kind of leadership position but I actually think that he's much better suited to Etherealize than the EF for what he wants to do and wants to achieve and at the same time he has a close relationship with the EF so essentially Etherealize and the EF are like the dynamic duo with Etherealize targeting all the stuff that the EF is not

equipped to target and the EF doing all the things that Etherealize is not equipped to do so that just makes me incredibly uh bullish on that front there but I also think generally on maybe the core development front the core research and development front there's been a real push obviously to accelerate things even with the L2s uh and accelerate the right things because you can say well let's accelerate things and then be like oh let's accelerate better censorship resistance for Ethereum it's like okay yes that's good that's critical we want that but but we can wait for that what we can't wait for is scale we we need to accelerate things like blob scaling right the gasimate scaling so there's been a rep prioritization around what to actually kind of focus on as part of that Ethereum acceleration effort and from what I've seen everyone seems to agree

that we should be focused on increasing blobs increasing the L1 gas limit and just scaling Ethereum as much as we can capture as much market share as we can and worry about you know things late other things later that's my general take on that but yeah the vibes have improved greatly like I I'm sure people have felt that over the last couple months even though the price hasn't done much the vibes have been uh have been really good there and I think that's definitely due to these more kind of like public changes in um in leadership but also you seeing more EF people be more public as well which is great to see because people want to hear from the source um and and and core developers generally even the ones that work outside of the Ethereum Foundation uh like you had up on your screen there

Terrence who works at Pryabs who is part of Offchain Labs which builds Arbitum um they you know they're just tweeting more tweeting more stuff out publicly and getting uh getting that energy out there mhm yeah there's a tweet from Uma Roy which has turned into Ethereum cop copy pasta which I'm trying to find right now but it was basically just talking about uh the vibe shift at the EF and how it's starting to like permeate outwards uh and I think you you can kind of see it in in different um different corners of of Ethereum land it's actually worth noting that uh Tomas has actually not started his job at the Ethereum Foundation for whatever reason he was going to start I think on the 14th and he got punted by a week so he actually starts next week uh I can't find this tweet from Uma um uh and so there's like

early like it feels like um I the era of Ethereum uh the EF uh was like we we did that that was like you know mission accomplished we did the whole um addition by subtraction thing uh and that thing went to its logical conclusion and now we can like check that box uh and now there is two new EDDDs who are going to come in with a different like mentality a different mandate uh and that and because of that new change of leadership there's been like a re reorg reorging of like just how Ethereum communicates with itself uh and so like it is worth seeing like there's a little culture set from the top now there's new culture uh and this is all happening so early because like I said Um Thomas hasn't even started his

his uh job at the EF and then one more thing in the Ethereum land the Ether Guild has launched and so the Ether Guild is Ethoney HQ on Twitter uh is this kind of community effort to supporting Ethoney think of this as like this community grassroots guild of people who all want Ether to be a monetary asset uh and this is uh we we talked about this actually at the bank list summit uh Ether ismoney.xyz XYZ uh is kind of like this layer 2 beat for um for Ether the asset uh and so it kind of gives you metrics uh and stats and figures about Ether the asset and how it's being used as money where it's being used as money and this is just a kind of community effort uh with a large uh push from the um uh grow the pie

folks uh really really chat team over there as along with some community body of adoption from uh Anthony Sono here uh also Ryan this was a Ryan brainchild uh and so if you want to support ether the ether guild uh the there is a link in the show notes so you can get started uh and you can also join the guild you can apply to join the guild uh basically if you believe in ether's money uh that is you any comments or commentary about this yeah I mean I I like how the ether is money effort that uh Ryan started uh kind of evolved uh here into the ether guild because the ether guild is being broad strokes now they're basically trying to bring the different I guess uh areas of Ethereum together the ether is money area the Ethereum as the world computer kind of area the kind of

regenerative stuff the public goods funding stuff that Ethereum does just bringing this all together under the Ether Guild and and doing that in a community-driven way they have these concepts of quests that people can go on and complete different things and just you know adding a bit of gamification to it as well um but there is definitely a very heavy focus on the ETH is money side and and and and eats value kind of acrruel properties and stuff like that which is another thing that I didn't mention earlier there's been a a real big community kind of outcry that more focus needs to be put on ETH the asset rather than just Ethereum the network and it I think I've seen some people calling for it to be basically some organization or some kind of team to literally just be out there uh kind of

spreading the message of ETH itself not even talking about Ethereum just talking about ETH the asset because typically when we talk about ETH and Ethereum we talk about them together right and we do put a pretty heavy emphasis on the network because the network is honestly the most interesting and exciting part right like the network it makes the money exciting it's it's not the kind of like other way around um so I think there's been a pretty big push there and I think Ether Guild wants to be part like a main part of that as well um but I'm hoping to see more of that going forward especially more of that from EF people i know Ansgar recently put out a a tweet about this where he said that he's been relatively quiet on the ETH front but he wants to be louder about it

going forward once the L1 kind of rep prioritization stuff that they've been doing with the road map is kind of finalized there which I think it's going to be very soon actually they've they've gotten to the point where they feel pretty pretty good about it pretty comfortable about it and that L1 rep prioritization effort is like probably the next fiveyear road map essentially for for Ethereum so yeah pretty pretty important stuff going on yeah there there's never been complete holistic community consensus in the Ethereum community about Ether the asset and promoting Ether the asset there's like some some of the developers in Ethereum who got into Ethereum so early like 2015 2016 because they saw Ethereum the vision and really just saw Ether the asset as a means to an end of elevating the world computer uh and I think my

message to them and my message to the broader Ethereum community is that if you believe if you're here for Ethereum the computer and Ethereum the network supporting Ether the asset is 100% aligned with that goal the Ethereum computer i think you have seen with the decay of the Ether market cap you have seen a decay of the coordination incentives around Ethereum the computer when it when the Ether market cap is lower you get stupid stuff like converge building a new layer 1 instead of building a layer 2 on Ethereum if if the Ether market cap was higher you would see more layer ones being interested in becoming layer 2s on Ethereum you would see more apps being grown you would see

the Ethereum the computer grow higher and so I think that Ethereum uh the Ethereum is a world computer mission people we are 100% in alignment with and I think that we need to also have the perspective that a valuable ether is helps that mission more and so it's like it's not like Ethereum the world computer is a first class citizen and ETH is money as a secondass citizen they are both first class citizens what would you say to that no I I mean I completely agree it's it's a message that we've been pushing ing for a very long time now and I I I'm I'm quite puzzled sometimes by people who are saying you know are indifferent to ETH as an asset or or saying that ETH going up is you know gross or cringe or not something we

want to see i think the only negative to ETH going up is that the people who don't own ETH are going to be sad like I don't really there's no other negative to it like the the more ETH goes up the more secure the network is the better coordination we have the more economic bandwidth we have within the Ethereum economy to use the more attention Ethereum gets the more people want to build on Ethereum like there's literally no negatives here and I've been saying this for like a long time now it's probably like 6 years at this point that I've been saying this that there's just no negatives here for ETH going up and funny thing is is that ETH going up means the Ethereum Foundation has more money like if you if if nothing else convinces you that should convince you so um I think I think that's important

there but I I I I think it's there's also a a related but interesting discussion topic we don't have to get into now i know I know we're coming up on time here but just for something for people to think about is that I think in in Bitcoin the reason why the BTC's digital gold narrative stuck is because anyone who didn't believe that was purged from Bitcoin and the reason why it's easy to purge people from Bitcoin is because it doesn't do anything else there's nothing else it does nothing else whereas in Ethereum like not that I want to purge people but you actually can't be purged because there's so many different areas of Ethereum if you don't care about Ether's money or Ether as a store of value or whatever you can go do something else in Ethereum like and and be free to do that no one's going to

stop you from doing that no one's going to shame you for doing that whereas in Bitcoin if you don't believe in BTC as digital gold you are [ __ ] out of luck there's nothing else you can do with with Bitcoin right so I think that's an interesting topic that I don't think gets brought up enough i want to quickly delve into the Ethereum app layer this is a cool project that uh I saw get announced this last week called Megapot uh and I think the the pitch behind Megaot the idea behind is a global internet lottery uh and I think maybe people just started thinking about Pool Together recently which is a no loss lottery pull Together is this is not pull together this is straight up a mega pot this is a straight up lottery as in like you buy a ticket if you don't win you lose your

money whereas with pull together you would get your money back uh and so this is the idea here is that this can be a global lottery larger a supererset of all previous uh previously existing lotteryies not not the jackpot not megaillions like not whatever which are also I would say very toxic because the expected value of a ticket like you pay $1 for like the expected value of returning 23 cents uh with this one you actually get to either buy a ticket well a $1 ticket to win $100,000 or something very very skewed like that or you act as a LP and you can be the house and so you as this is not something that you can do in like the Megaillions or mega jackpot or whatever the

tradies you actually never get to be the house that's the the house is the company and so with Mega Pot you either get to speculate as a DJ or be the house as a LP i thought that's kind of cool did you see this announcement anthony yeah I did and and and the thing is is that I've actually been saying for years now that I don't know why someone didn't build a proper lottery so obvious it's it's a no-brainer i think maybe the main blocker would be regulations and not wanting to get in trouble with law enforcement over this but you can do it anonymously too right you can and and the code can be on chain so anyone can verify it so they know they're not going to get rugged um but yeah I'm glad to see this finally happen because it's such an obvious thing this has been in

like the early ideation of Ethereum since 2015 the fact that it's taken 2025 to somebody to actually like build this is kind of like crazy to me yeah yeah definitely yeah i'll add the disclaimer there that uh the Mega Pot is a bankless ventures portfolio company we're a minority investor uh in it as well uh last news of the week just really quickly this came out right before we got started kraken to acquire Ninja Trader for $ 1.5 billion it's a $ 1.5 billion deal i actually had no idea what Ninja Trader is no I had no idea what is apparently it's a leading US f retail futures trading platform i think this is largely a licensing play maybe and also a user acquisition play uh but the idea here like why did they they do this is

they Kraken wants to unlock global regulatory licensing and growth especially in the futures market so now crypto futures and derivatives can be provided inside the United States uh big big I think this is makes it the biggest deal i think we had that 1.1 or 1.2 2 billion bridge acquisition by Stripe for stable coins uh this is now the number one M&A deal uh that crypto has ever seen yeah that's that's massive like 1.5 bill and for something I never heard of but I guess it's a US only product that's probably why I haven't heard of it i mean I'm in the US and I still had no idea yeah you've got no excuse all right Anthony really appreciate you coming on to the weekly rollup this week and helping me go through the news uh Anthony uh you do the Daily Guay which

is one of the few podcasts that I listen to on a daily basis or you know whenever you don't rug the Daily D daily community and you skip an episode uh if people like the sound of your voice like your takes where can they go find you on the internet yeah just uh Twitter's the easiest place sass0x on there uh you can find me pretty easily i'm sure you'll link it in the show notes and you can find my podcast there which is called The Daily Guay uh I do Ethereum education like related kind of episodes three days a week now it used to be daily but it's just too much doing it daily there it's a crazy ecosystem so happens uh three times a week but as David said sometimes I'll miss an episode but hey it's totally free not monetized at all so yeah you can go

consume it whenever whenever you see fit bankless Nation you guys know the deal crypto is risky you can lose what you put in but nonetheless we are headed west this is a frontier it's not for everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot