ROLLUP: Bitcoin on the US Balance Sheet? | Trump's US Crypto Stockpile | Banks Can Now Custody Crypto | Venice AI's Massive Airdrop
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Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up. Today on the episode, we got Haseeb Qureshi as my co-host for this episode. Haseeb, how are you doing, my man? Good to see you. I'm doing well. Doing well. How about yourself?

Really good. Really, really good. There's always just a mountain of news to go through. And I'm really happy to have you here, my man. Let's talk about what we're going to talk about this week. Trump Watch. Trump signed a crypto executive order called Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology, which included a bunch of things, including a working group for a national crypto stockpile.

Hester Peirce and the SEC revoked SAB 121, which gives, of course, the green light to banks to custody crypto. This open source AI platform, Venice, launched its token and made a huge number of people very happy this week, but also some drama around the Coinbase listing. Abstract Chain went live with their mainnet and Gary Gensler gets a new job. See, before we get into any of this news in specific, how would you give this week's

A vibe. What was the vibe of this week, just in a sentence? Chaotic. I think it's been a very chaotic week. Yeah, it's one of these weeks where the outside world is really shaking what's going on in crypto. It's, you're feeling like you're inside the snow globe and seeing all the stuff getting floated up. That was the vibe this week. Is that a combination because of NVIDIA and then also politics? Yes, that's kind of, I feel like that's gonna be the theme of the year is that a lot of stuff that's not related to crypto is gonna be shaking up the crypto world.

Well, both Nvidia and politics are top of this agenda. So let's go ahead and get right into it. But before we do, a moment to talk about our friends and sponsors over at the Crypto Tax Calculator. It's tax season. We know that's a lot of stressful time for everyone in the bankless community and probably you listeners as well. But that's why we like the Crypto Tax Calculator because it takes away a lot of stress out of taxes.

I have an accountant that I just pay, so I don't have to think about this, but they use crypto tax calculator. And so if you just want to reduce your suffering this tax season, you can use bankless 15 to get 15% off. Or if you're a bankless citizen, there is a link inside the discord to get 30% off. You can go into the show notes section.

and find those codes and those links. All right, Haseeb, let's get into markets. Let's start with NVIDIA. The big headline that I think rocketed around the world is NVIDIA sheds almost $600 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in U.S. history. That's 17% off of NVIDIA. This was on the backs of this Chinese AI lab, DeepSeek, that unveiled this new open-source model that it claimed only took two months

and less than $6 million to build. People are going back and forth on the validity of that claim. But what is basically well understood is that the performance of this new chat GPT competitor is extremely strong and extremely real. DeepSeek got to the first place of the Apple Store charts in just a few days, which is pretty crazy. It is currently number one at the time of recording. And then David Sachs, of course, who is the crypto AI czar, says DeepSeek R1 shows that

that the AI race will be very competitive. I'm confident in the US, but we cannot be complacent." Haseeb, when you saw this news come across your desk, how did you interpret it? What was your reaction? Honestly, one of my first reactions was, so I saw the DeepSeek R1 paper when it originally came out seven days ago, eight days ago now. So I saw Wall Street had a very delayed reaction to this announcement. So nothing actually really changed between when the paper was actually released.

Even the numbers, so people were talking about the $6 million model to train. That was actually a predecessor to R1 called, it was their V3 model, and that was released in December. So it's one of these things where you realize markets are just not efficient. Like, it just took Wall Street people over the weekend to actually understand what the fuck just happened, like what actually hit them. And I think the biggest thing is that there's so much misinformation that's out there now about DeepSea of people who just do not understand why,

what it means to have, first of all, how AI labs work and like how much CapEx goes into actually building an AI lab. People are really fixating on this idea that it took $6 million to train.

It took $6 million to train the final iteration of the model in GPU hours. But how much did it cost to acquire all the GPUs? How much did it cost to pay all the salaries? How much did it cost to do all the other training runs that failed? The reality is that what it means- That $6 million is built on top of a mountain of cash. Almost certainly they spent over $100 million on all this stuff end to end. Now, to be clear, that's way less than open AI spending, way less than meta spending. That's very significant because it means that AI is a lot cheaper than we thought it was going to be. That's good.

To be clear, that's good for you and me. That's good for almost everybody in the economy. Consumers of AI products should be thrilled. Exactly. It's bad for producers. Yeah. The NASDAQ is overwhelmingly weighted towards producers because, you know, NVIDIA is one of the biggest companies in the world now. And yeah, it's really bad for NVIDIA because in the same way, you know, when the oil prices come down, it's bad for Exxon, but it's good for us. It's good for everybody else. It's good for the world. So I think by and large, this deep sea thing is actually great for all of us.

But the reality is that the balance sheets of the Fortune 500, the balance sheets of the NASDAQ, do not contain people spending money on AI. Because it just hasn't shown up yet as a line item on most people's balance sheets. It's only a cost right now. No one's making money on AI yet. Everyone's...

paying money to create AIs. But I think in the long run, this is only a good thing. I mean, this thing is open source. It's literally more open source than Meta is. Like they release all the intermediate models, not just the final model that they released like they did for Lava. So DeepSync, I think, is

an unalloyed good for the world. Super, super awesome. Super bullish for AI generally. Super great for the consumer. But just like with anything, you have to overlay it with geopolitics and fear and FOMO and all this stuff. So I think markets really got this one wrong in having a generally bearish sentiment on the entire market and on risk assets. Huge mistake. Definitely right that Nvidia's stock should go down.

But absolutely wrong that anything else should make you less bullish on where this technology is going. Yeah, notably a number of crypto AI projects have already integrated the R1, the DeepSeek R1 model. Venice now has DeepSeek R1 in its products. And to me, it's a little...

I'm happy that we are seeing the creations of these AI labs, which are very expensive, very hard to produce, as you said, tons of CapEx. Maybe it costs $6 million to train, but again, like you said, that's built on top of the shoulders of OpenAI and many other people, hundreds of millions of dollars to get to that last $6 million mile. And then...

It's open source. And so while open AI is truly closed, and so is Meta and Cloud and all these other LLMs, we have this arms race going on between China and the United States. But then if it continually ends up in the hands of the open source community, just three, six, nine months later, and we get all these things for free because of this arms race competition, I'm pretty happy with the way that that kind of unfolds.

It's deflationary. It's deflationary in the purest sense of the word. And as a consumer, you could not want anything more from technology than to deflate the price of goods. If you remember back early in the AI arms race, there was a leak. There was like an internal document at Google that got leaked that basically said there's no mode in AI.

And that it doesn't like open source is so good and it's getting so much better so quickly that even though the frontier labs are always two to three months ahead on the state of the art, open source catches up really fucking fast. And we've just seen that with R1. R1 is as good as O1. Literally. Okay. So O3 is supposed to be the new open AI model, which is definitely better than R1. But R1 is basically one 20th of the cost.

of 01 and it's getting the same performance. That's crazy. That's incredible. And that's awesome for everybody involved. What it tells you is that, so one thing it means that the moats that these AI companies supposed to have are not what we previously imagined. And also it means the moat for NVIDIA is probably not what we previously imagined, but what it is, is very good for decentralized AI.

It's very good for open source, very good for homebrew. And this is the part of the pool that we play in. On the crypto side, we are all about the democratization of technology and what can happen when that goes in the hands of individual users and entrepreneurs. A world where OpenAI owns all the intelligence or Google owns all the intelligence is a world that sucks for us. There's nothing for us to do because we've got all the crappy models sitting here in the reject pile. That's not the world we're living in right now.

So that is something I'm, as an investor and as a crypto person, very, very excited about. Haseeb, you said this is something that the markets got wrong with the response to the Nvidia price tanking 17% on the back of DeepSeek. We did a podcast with this individual, Jeffrey Emanuel, who wrote this short case for Nvidia stock. He released this on Friday.

And when we did the podcast with him, he talked about how this article, which it's a 60 minute read. It's very dense. It's very technical. This guy clearly knows his stuff. He was telling me about the Google analytics for this article where it started off just, you know, 50, 100 people reading it as soon as he published it. But over the weekend, it just ballooned to 2.5 million views worldwide.

starting in the New York, Manhattan area, and then quickly moving to Silicon Valley. And I can't remember the name of the town that NVIDIA is in, but also a lot of right where NVIDIA headquarters are. And so he is actually taking the credit for the market movement because it happened. He wrote it on Friday and the market processed it over the weekend and then it dumped on Monday. I think it's correct, by the way.

I think it's correct by the way. - You think he actually did that? - I saw this over the weekend. I think it was probably the Spark that started it. - Yes. - I don't know that it wouldn't have happened anyway at some point when Wall Street finally ingested what this meant, because clearly it has implications for Nvidia, right? If the AI movement is all happening within the US, then Nvidia is good. Nvidia's in great shape. If people are not open sourcing,

top tier models that are more efficient than open AI models, then okay, that's great for NVIDIA. NVIDIA wants everything to be closed and wants everything to be sold to commercial enterprises that are going to be charging huge markups on their models. This is not the world that we're living in now. And Wall Street would eventually figure that out. I think that being said, I agree that NVIDIA's stock should have gotten hurt. And obviously it did, right? But also the market realized that overreacted. So it went down 70%.

on Monday and then it went back up 9% the next day, which was not only the biggest single market cap loss for any company ever in a single day,

But then it was one of the biggest market cap gains for a company at any given day because it just rebounded so much the next day. Now, it's still down from the high quite a bit. But I think the lesson of the story is that it dragged down a lot of other stuff with it, which is what I think was incorrect, right? Taking what the prospects for NVIDIA and basically their moat in hardware and saying, okay, this should affect how you think generally about risk assets. That is what I think is a mistake because I think it's actually good for all of the risk assets that AI is cheap.

I think it's great for all of us. We actually don't want a world where AI is expensive. Right. Totally. All right, let's get into the crypto native markets. Let's talk about Bitcoin. Bitcoin started the week at $101,005 and then it's up 3.3% on the week to where it is now at $105,000. Ether not doing as great. Started the week at $3,200, ending the week at $3,250.

And then, of course, I think something to pay attention to is the Bitcoin Ether ratio. I don't know how closely you pay attention to the ratio, Haseeb, but it did very briefly go below the 0.03 number. It is at above the 0.03 right now, almost at 0.031, but it did hit 0.

0.02999, which is where Udi Wertheimer and the famous ETHBTC breaking down below a 0.03 watch party. That was that famous level. Give me your sense of the crypto markets right now. Bitcoin's still pretty high. Ether doing the same thing it's been doing for two years. Just give me your sense of the markets, Hitsib.

Yeah, I mean, there was a big sell-off triggered by the deep-seek fears over the weekend, and it doesn't feel like alts have really recovered. It seems like mostly everything's just been bleeding for the last month. The only thing that really has had any kind of signs of life for Solana, even Solana is way off the high. So, you know, it hit, you know, the 280s right after...

right after Trump token launch, Trump and Melania. And since then, it's just been, you know, it's done the best of all alts, but most alts across the board have just bled and haven't really seemed to be able to find their footing with respect to what there is to look forward to in this market.

Did you see this tweet from Ben Cowan? I thought this was super interesting. He goes, the reason why the vibe is so off despite $100,000 Bitcoin is because the advanced decline index, ADI, of the top 100 cryptocurrencies has been in a downtrend since 2021. Now, the advanced decline index, that's not really a metric I see cited too often, but I think the general vibe is of the top 100 coins.

most of them are in a just a downtrend for the last two years. And so there are some that exceptions, like you said, Solana, Dogecoin is an exception. Ripple is an exception. Bitcoin is an exception. But other than that, everything is mostly on a pretty solid downtrend for the past two years. And that's why Ben Cowen is citing the vibe just feels off. Vibes feel bad. So I'm calling this the middle of the market.

which is, you know, these are startups. These are startups that you and I invest in. This is people's jobs. This is, you know, the BD in the industry. And the middle of the market has not really felt the same price appreciation that some of the outliers have, like Bitcoin, Solana, all these other ones. What's your take on this?

Yeah, there is definitely a bit of a vibe session going on right now where like, look, if you look in absolute terms, right, the biggest crypto assets, which are Ethereum, obviously not Ethereum, but there has been bleeding. But if you look at Bitcoin, Ripple, Solana, BNB, those are actually doing fairly well. And then the big middle of the market is just really hurting. Yeah. And things a lot of things are down even from March last year.

Which is a little bit crazy, right? That was when the ETF launched and we were like, oh, well, maybe that's going to get us to this great bright future. You know, a lot of things haven't hit their high even after Trump got elected. They didn't hit the high from March last year. So it does feel like, okay, it's more than just macro. There's a general lack of enthusiasm about what's going on in kind of tech crypto outside of Solana.

And I think that's likely to continue for a while until there is some real energy around it. The reality is that Bitcoin and the meme coin complex are really taking up most of the energy, which is one, Bitcoin is this big macro political story and then meme coins, I mean, now it's become a political story, but before that it was just kind of this frenetic, up and down kind of retail consumer frenzy. And besides that, nobody really wants to hear about

Crypto.

- I think that's right. I think there's also an element of, it's not that I think, when I look at all these founders, they did build the thing, but they didn't get everybody in the world to use the thing.

And that's one of the virtues, of course, of Solana is that they've been so focused on just getting users on the chain and getting adoption and getting into people's hands. And very few entrepreneurs are actually well-equipped to be able to do that. A lot of them don't really have the distribution advantage that a Binance or some of these big exchanges that really know how to get things in the hands of consumers have.

So you've got the bases of the world, you've got the salons of the world that really have that direct relationship with consumers and can tell that bigger story about, hey, here's why this thing is going to go in your pocket and become a part of your financial life. Most people don't have that ability. And so I think you're seeing this kind of this difficulty of entrepreneurs who really have some of them really have the goods.

But they're just not able to really reach people's wallets. And I think that does wax and wane over the course of a cycle just because people are more interested in trying new things and people care more about some of these technology stories that are undergirding all this stuff. But I agree with you. Most people feel like, hey, I haven't seen anything. All I see is tokens go up. So, all right, I'll play tokens go up. Right.

I'll play the token go up game. Despite the bad vibes, you're at $3.7 trillion in total market cap for the industry. I think that's just one, maybe $200 billion off of the all-time high. So we are nearing the market cap all-time high. I mean, that's definitely helped by the fact that Bitcoin is also at all-time highs. And then also Ripple is just $80 billion from flipping Ethereum. I'm keeping an eye on that. We're going to skip...

Sorry? NFTV, not a market cap. Yeah, NFTV, NFTV. Yes, NFTV, yeah. Very different number on the Ripple side. We're going to skip the Bitcoin and Ether ETFs this week because not too much action happened there. But nonetheless, there was some action in the ETF land. Bitwise filed for a Dogecoin ETF, which...

I always thought that this made sense as the third possible ETF to come into the fray. I know a lot of people want the Solana ETF, and I'm sure we will eventually get one. But Dogecoin just has the Lindy. It's been around for forever. And then we also, on the backs of that, saw Tuttle Capital filed for 10 different leveraged

crypto asset ETFs. So a 2X long XRP, 2X long Solana, 2X long Trump coin, 2X long Melania coin ETFs. These are all ETFs, Cardano, Chainlink, Polkadot, Bonk. So I mean, I agree with the Dogecoin ETF. That one makes sense. And then we see a splattering of some leverage long meme coin ETFs.

So a tale of two very different stories here. Haseeb, give me your takes on the ETF side of the story. I don't know that I have that much of a take. Okay, what do you think about the Dogecoin ETF though? Does Dogecoin deserve an ETF? It makes sense. I think Dogecoin is liquid enough, global enough that, yeah, why not put an ETF around it? I think on some level...

The SEC just doesn't want to. I don't know that it's like, oh, well, this is a non-registered security. I think it's just that, please don't make me do this. I think at some point once the, because that's the thing is that once you list Dogecoin, how are you not going to list everything? How are you going to say no to all the other meme coins? So I think there's some just kind of,

dragging their feet most likely when it comes to Doge. I think Solana, there's probably more appetite of like, oh, hey, there's a real thing. I can see why it's important to give retail investors access to this in a ready vehicle. But I would kind of suspect before we get a Doge ETF and before we get a Solana ETF,

I'd expect we'd probably see a micro strategy for Doge or a micro strategy for, for Solana. Like I actually think if those were taped, you know, some kind of zombie in the NASDAQ decides, you know what, we're just going to buy a bunch of, you're just going to issue debt and we're going to use it to go buy some Doge. Um,

I think it would actually be super well received. And that would be the first way that you could go into a brokerage account and get exposure to Doge, get exposure to Solana. And I expect that's probably the order of operations is that that probably happens first before we actually get the ETFs. Why haven't we seen that? I have heard discussions of, oh, I'm building the micro strategy for Ethereum or I'm building where this is the micro strategy for Solana. Why haven't we seen anything like that?

Well, so one, there's not a lot of Michael Saylor type people out there. You have to be a little crazy leader. You kind of need to be chest thumpy. You got to know how to like hype people up in Wall Street. It's a different skill than hyping people up in crypto. And so there is actually this thing in Canada that's like a Salada microstrategy. Yes, I was looking at it yesterday. It's like Sol CF. Yeah.

But they do a bunch of diversified investments in cannabis and other... Oh, is that right? Yeah. I don't know that much about it. So I thought... I was looking at this last night. Funny you bring this up. And I'm of the mind that if they pivoted 100% to Solana and they sold all of their other stuff and they just only were a concentrated Solana bet, then I'm interested. Right. It's currently at a $50 million market. But it's already trading at a big premium to NAV. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's a huge premium to NAV, which is kind of like, okay, at this point...

how much more of a premium nav do you expect it to have when it goes full Solana? You know, it's already at like, what is it? Seven, eight X premium to nav. Something like that. Last time I saw something small. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, well, no, that's not small, right? If you're seven X, yes, but it's that it's very large premium to now, but this market cap is only $50 million. And so like, it doesn't have that much juice to fire into buying soul.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. So, um, yeah, but that's the thing. Canadian capital markets versus US capital markets. Very different. Right. So it's, US is just so freaking big that if you can do, if

If you can target U.S. retail and get them to say like, oh, I can finally buy out of my 401k some Solana or some Doge or whatever, I think that thing would go crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The price has moved in the last like two weeks or so since they are buying Solana. So I think people are making that speculative bet.

Let's go into the FOMC. We had an FOMC meeting, which the recap says, central bank is in no hurry to cut rates again. So the Fed is keeping the interest rate target currently to where it is at 4.25 to 4.5%. It warned that inflation remains somewhat elevated. Analysts agree that the pause in the rate cut signals that the Fed is going to make a more cautious approach.

Powell said that there will be a more patient approach to policy adjustments and they will need signs of clear progress on inflation or weakness in the job market to change their stance. But also during the speech, Jerome Powell also made a comment about Bitcoin, basically kind of reiterating what the repeal of SAB 121 just says, which is

Banks are perfectly able to serve crypto customers. And we as the Fed are like totally fine with that. Hasib, do you follow FOMC meetings at all? Like, what's your take here? I mean, I usually just see what happens afterwards, unless it's a particularly spicy meeting. I think everyone kind of knew what the answer was going to be. Exactly. If it's not going to cut, they're going to take a kind of conservative stance of like, hey, we'll wait and see. So I think this FOMC meeting, kind of a nothing burger. Exactly. Yeah. Par for the course. All right. Coming up next, the crypto executive order that Trump just signed. What is in it?

because it's more than just a national stockpile of crypto, although that was the main headline. The Czech Republic will vote on adding Bitcoin to their central bank reserves. And a different central bank holds $500 million of exposure to not Bitcoin, but microstrategy. Everyone place your bets as to what central bank you think that is. And we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors.

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By becoming a layer two, Celo leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow. Follow Celo on X and witness the great Celo happening where Celo cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer two era and continuing its environmental leadership. Trump signed the executive order strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology. This happened last week.

And we also have crypto and AI czar David Sachs, who is just standing over Trump's shoulder telling Trump exactly what he's about to sign. I've had that experience. Yeah.

And Trump says, this is going to make the crypto go up, right? And David Sachs goes, absolutely, under your leadership, sir. And I thought that was just hilarious. Okay, so what is in the executive order? Okay, so the first one is it establishes a working group.

will design a federal regulatory framework for digital assets, including stable coins, to provide clarity and support for innovation in that sector. And it also mandates an evaluation of the feasibility of creating a national digital asset stockpile.

It is not mandated to create a strategic reserve of crypto. It mandates the evaluation of the feasibility of creating a national digital asset stockpile. So that's a couple of steps removed. But there's also a good number of other things that are in this executive order. I think I just want to kind of read them out.

I just read the first one. The second one, protecting and promoting the ability of individual citizens and private sector entities alike to access and use for lawful purposes open public blockchains without persecution.

including the ability to develop and deploy software, to participate in mining and validating, to transact with other persons without unlawful censorship, and to maintain self-custody of digital assets. Pretty much encompassing thumbs up to everything we do in crypto. The next one, promoting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through the development of dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide. Next, promoting fair and open access to banking services for all law-abiding individual citizens and private sector entities. And last,

prohibiting the establishment issuance, circulation, and use of a central bank digital currency within the jurisdiction of the United States. Pretty much an overwhelming plus one to everything the crypto industry wants, stands for, believes in, and definitely a direct refutation of Chokepoint 2.0. Haseeb, what's your take?

I would actually take the other side of this. I think this executive order was kind of underwhelming. I mean, everybody, you saw markets kind of dipped a little bit after the signing of the executive order in large part because one, markets are really anticipating executive order when we didn't get one right when Trump did his first flurry of executive orders. Crypto markets tanked a little bit because they were like, wait, what about us? I thought we had all these day one things you're supposed to do.

And then the executive order itself, if you read the executive order, right, all it says is that, okay, I'm creating a committee. Right. And here are the things that I want the committee to focus on is focus on, you know, no CBDCs, none of this, none of that. So the CBDC thing I think is kind of bullshit because it's, it's a little bit of a,

Like nobody has been trying to do a CBDC anyway. Even Biden was like, don't do a CBDC. Nobody wants to do a CBDC. This is not a, wow. Thank you, Trump, for saving us from all the evil CBDC creators. And so then, okay. Like they want them to investigate the concept of a, you know, crypto stockpile, which is like, okay, so we still don't know. So we have nothing. They're just going to sit together in a room and there's gonna be a council and the end. So the answer is wait longer.

So what you saw with Polymarket was that the likelihood of there actually being a strategic Bitcoin reserve or a crypto reserve or whatever in the first hundred days plummeted to, I think it was like 14% after this executive order got signed. Basically meaning like kick the can down the road. That's what this executive order means. There's nothing specific here. There's nothing that he hasn't already said on the campaign trail. It's basically, here's a committee.

And it's kind of also what Biden did, right? Biden was like, oh, I'm going to hear by executive order. I'll create a committee and that committee is going to talk about stuff and never do anything. So are you saying like the creation of a committee is kind of a way to just like defer and be like, look, I did something. I created a committee. Yeah. This is the definition of not doing anything. So it is it is an acknowledgement that like something will eventually happen. I'm not ready to do anything yet.

committees will meet and they will talk and TBD. So that's, that's where we're at. So, I mean, to be clear, it's not a ref, it's not a repudiation of his campaign promises, right? It's a kick the can down the road, which is fine, but that's what it is. Is it, would you agree with the idea that it is the weakest possible form of Trump being able to say that I've kept my promises?

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good way to describe it, right? But it's definitely not what markets were looking for. Markets are looking for something more concrete. Now, I think we're likely to see that more from the SEC, from CFTC, from Treasury, right? They're more equipped to actually make rules and change the way that crypto is affirmatively regulated or treated, or the same thing happening for the IRS, but it doesn't look like we're getting it from an executive order. So that's kind of, I think, why markets are a little disappointed because Trump could do that by executive order and he seemingly hasn't.

On the European side of things, Czech Central Bank meeting on Thursday to vote, that's today at the time of recording, to vote on allocating up to 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. This is an article in the Financial Times, which David Bailey screenshotted because it's behind a paywall. And so the Czech Central Bank wasn't expecting the Czech Central Bank to be looking to add 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. 5% is fantastic.

quite a lot. And on the other side of things, Norway's central bank has revealed that it owns $500 million of micro strategy, not Bitcoin, but micro strategy. Interesting choice. And so I think this has led to people back on the United States, like Senator Cynthia Lummis, who's retweeting the central bank of the Czech Republic news. If you're not first, you're last. America must make a decisive action to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and

and secure its place in the 21st century. CZ even tweeted out, imagine being the last government to buy on this news. Do you think that we as the United States need to engage in the Bitcoin musical chair central bank game? What's your position on this? My position is a little complicated. So obviously it's good for my bags. We have Bitcoin exposure. So I would love to see lots and lots of Bitcoin demand coming from wherever. It doesn't really matter where it's from. The

The reality is like, this is not the vibe right now in DC. The vibe in DC is not let's spend more money. The vibe in DC is let's spend less money. Going and buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet, as opposed to what most people think the Bitcoin reserve is going to be, which is just a moratorium on selling the Bitcoin that the government already seizes in criminal seizures.

which to be clear, the executive branch can do without Congress intervention. You don't need a bill. You don't need anything else. Trump could sign a thing tomorrow, an executive order that just says we're going to do that. But actually going out and affirmatively buying Bitcoin, like what the Czech central bank is proposing, that's,

for the US to do. There's no way it's going to happen. Like, absolutely no way. There's not the will for it in Congress. And Congress controls the purse, anyways. Congress controls the purse. So if you want to do new spending, you want to do new spending, that has to come from Congress. Trump cannot just do that on his own. He can stop things from happening, like stop these auctions that normally the Department of Justice does when it seizes Congress.

you know, stolen Bitcoin or like Silk Road Bitcoin or whatever. But yeah, he can't go and just be like, yo, let's diversify the government to some Bitcoin.

I think, Hazeeb, that's a very rational response. I think that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, yeah. Look, at the end of the day, it's also a question of what do you think the Fed is supposed to be doing? So this would be like the Fed going and taking some of the gold on its balance sheet and putting it into Bitcoin. I don't think the Fed wants to do that. It just has a vibe. Yeah, to be clear, I don't think the Fed wants to do that. I think Congress could tell the Fed to do that. It's usually not what the Fed, what Congress must be doing is like,

basically, you know, essentially like backseat driving the Fed and telling it how to manage its reserves. Normally we don't assume Congress knows what the hell the Fed should be doing because it's Congress and the Fed is independent. Um, but in principle, yeah, that could, I guess probably the Congress could decide a new law Fed has to have 5% reserves in Bitcoin. Um,

I think it would be kind of a bad precedent, I think, for Congress to be doing that and just saying like, hey, we're gonna decide what should be in reserves 'cause we're bullish on this asset or something. - Right. - Like, look, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think everybody, every entity in the world should be, you know, kind of going and deciding to buy my bags.

I think it will, like it does eventually make sense, but the reality is like Bitcoin is a super volatile asset. Right. The other thing, I think Lynn Alden pointed this out in an interview earlier this week is that,

I also don't think it really matters that much. The US dollar is not what the US dollar is because of what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. It just doesn't really matter what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. People buy US government debt not because of what our central banks hold in reserves. That's true for most other central banks in the world. People want to buy our debt because we're the US, because of our enormous military might and our tax base and our incredible economy.

I honestly don't think markets would care that much if we bought some Bitcoin or we didn't buy some Bitcoin. Wow, we need to do this for the strength of the American Republic. It's like, that's not really true. Okay, good. Good takes. I like those takes. I like those takes. Let's turn to Heserperst and the SEC. Heserperst tweeted out on the January 23rd, which was last Thursday, last Thursday night. So this did not make it into last week's roll up. She says on Twitter, bye bye, Saab 121.

It's not been fun. And then links to an SEC link of staff accounting bulletin number 122. Basically, repealing SAB 121, rescinding SAB 121, which was the accounting rule that forced banks to treat Bitcoin and other crypto assets as a liability on their balance sheet. Meaning that if they wanted to custody Bitcoin, say they would have to custody $100,000 of Bitcoin, they would need an additional $100,000 of just liability in order to backstop that

making it terribly capital inefficient to even serve that as a product that is gone now. That is gone. SAP 121. We tried to repeal this last in the last congressional year, gained bipartisan support. Biden vetoed it at the last minute. But what does this mean for crypto? Banks can now custody crypto. They have the green light to custody crypto. And I haven't heard of any new banks just immediately opening their doors to this because this is now repealed. It's only been seven days.

Hasib, what was your reaction when you saw this news?

I mean, it's just such a breath of fresh air that like everybody wanted this. This was one of the most obvious Gensler overreaches was like, why? Why would you make this rule? This is the craziest rule anyone's ever heard of is that in order to custody assets, you have to have offsetting equity. No other asset is treated this way. If you're custodying paintings, if you're custodying, you know, firearms, like whatever, normally you custody something, all you have to do is hold the asset. That's it. That's what custody is. But they're like, no, no, no, no. Custody of...

Crypto is so dangerous that you need not just 100 Bitcoin, you need 100 Bitcoin worth of dollars also on behalf of that customer. I'm like, what? Do you know what custody is? Why would that make any sense? Like, it's just pure middle finger to the crypto industry. And it was almost like...

it was the only thing that was bipartisan, even under the Biden administration, that yeah, this is crazy. This is crazy. The only person who supported this was Elizabeth Warren. Both Democrats and Republicans were like, okay, I don't know about the rest of crypto, but like this one is insane. - Ridiculous, right. - So just having this, you know, there's still a lot of work to do of like, okay, what does a actual SEC look like in a sane administration? But this thing was just like, okay,

Time to turn the page. I think that's what this represented more than anything. How do you think this rolls out? Will I, in my Wells Fargo account, will I be able to see like a Bitcoin, like a Bitcoin balance? How do you think this actually rolls out? No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think, no. I don't think they want to be custodying Bitcoin or crypto for retail investors. I think this is more of an institutional custody thing. Mm.

Like, you know, for them to hold crypto for retail, like they have to get comfortable with a lot of other stuff. Like they just have to have their own infrastructure and stuff like that. So I think this was more affecting like State Street. That if you remember a long time ago, State Street is one of the, you know, the biggest asset custodians in the world. They wanted to launch a crypto custody product and basically SAB 121 dropped and they were just like, oh shit.

Like this literally makes it impossible for us to do this in any kind of business efficient way. Maybe it does eventually open the door for banks to do this for consumers, but I think for most of them, they were just using their parties, right? So they would have, okay, Coinbase is holding them on your behalf and Coinbase is not a bank and so therefore it's not subject to SAP 121.

Last thing in politics section, Scott Besant was sworn in as the Treasury Secretary. This was known, this was accounted for, this is not a surprise. It is a pro-crypto appointee. He had a long career at the Soros Fund Management, including a partner and chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management. So he knows everything.

how to manage funds. And he's definitely pro-crypto. He has said crypto is about freedom and the crypto economy is here to say this is, like I said, one of the many pro-crypto appointees to the Trump cabinet position. Any takes on the appointee here?

Very pro. I mean, treasury is one of the most important roles. Obviously treasury oversees FinCEN, which is, you know, one of the, one of the most active overseers of illicit activity in financial markets. So how like the stance the treasury takes is really important to what happens to us in crypto, especially when it comes to regulation and enforcement. But just generally, Besant's a really brilliant guy. Everything I've ever heard about him has been super positive. Yeah.

So it's a big difference between somebody like Yellen, who's kind of pure career bureaucrat, versus somebody like Besant, who's much more aggressive, comes from the private sector, has financial experience. And I think if you look at the cast of characters that Trump has put into some of these agencies, it's really bimodal.

There are some who are, you know, incredibly effective, like really competent people who everybody's like, yeah, this person's a gangster. And then there's a bunch of clowns and it's kind of, it's kind of like a toss up of what you get for each agency, you know? So you got the cash Patels and then you got Scott Besson's. So for treasury, it's like, okay, thank God we got somebody who's like really competent and like a good communicator and smart. And then some other agencies though, you have some crazy people and you know, look, you just got to,

call it what it is but glad to see the treasury is right well it gets one of the competent ones yeah one of the competent ones because it's a really important role

Well, Haseeb, I know you were just dying to know about the next steps for Gary Gensler. And I know bank listeners are just trying to figure out what Gary Gensler's next steps. He will return to MIT to teach. There's a headline here, former SEC chair Gary Gensler named professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where Gary Gensler will join both the Global Economics and Management Group and the Finance Group with a focus on artificial intelligence, finance, financial technology, public policy.

policy back at MIT. So I like to think, Haseeb, if you can't do, you teach. And Gary Gensler is now returning to his role as a professor at MIT. I mean, what's really interesting is that I have never seen a public servant

who's normally a relatively unsexy office, which is the SEC, becomes so widely reviled by young people everywhere in the world. Compared to when he was originally a professor at MIT, 'cause he was a professor before he ended up becoming SEC chair. And before that, he was CFTC. I believe he was CFTC chair in a previous administration. And CFTC is, again, generally pretty unsexy. It's not the kind of thing that's gonna get you in the press all the time.

As SEC chair, one of the most hated people of any public office I've ever seen. Honestly impressive. And now, I don't think he knows what he's in for. Going back and teaching undergrads for MBAs. He's going to teach kids. Like, you're going to hate this guy. It's like incredible. There's so many memes about him. So I'm just so curious of what his lived experience of being on campus is going to be when everybody out there who's like under the age of 40 thinks this guy is just an absolute clown.

There's going to be at least one kid who is in his class at MIT who is also on crypto Twitter in the future. Oh, there's going to be so many? I want to bring one of those kids on as a guest. If they go through a semester of Gary Gensler's class, I would like to talk to that kid. Oh, man. I mean, the finance MBA group at MIT, all those guys are slinging meme coins in their afternoons. Like, I guarantee you.

All right, Haseeb, we're going to get into some crypto native launches this week. Venice AI launched and made a big splash. Abstract, the abstract chain launched with their main net focus on creators. And then Trump Media launched Truth.Fi, as well as some of the meme coins. I got a Haseeb Trump meme coin take that I want to get your take about here live since I got it in the tweet form. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. So we're going to go here from Frax and the Frax stable coins. Got some of the best deals in DeFi. It's like if

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Think of it like DuckDuckGo, but for LLMs. It's like a private search except now using LLMs. So it's just like Eric Voorhees' older project, Shapeshift, but before it had user signup, you could just use the product without doing KYC. Eric Voorhees loves to not collect user information. So he made Venice, which is a kind of a chat GPT competitor project.

that does not collect your user information. Uh, and they launched their VVV token, the Venice token on a base airdrop to over 250,000 wallets. Uh, the criteria for receiving the token was kind of interesting. Uh, if you own some of the, uh, AI tokens on base, like, uh, AI XBT, virtuals token, arrow, DGN, uh,

or also you were just a venice user you got some of the venice token upon launch the uh the token price soared up to two billion dollars fully diluted maybe about um maybe about uh 300 or 400 million dollars and then uh and then it fell down a little bit you know some volatility on launch but then the coinbase assets twitter account announced that the token was trading live on coinbase which i think raised an eyebrow in the community as to how that token got listed on coinbase so fast inside of 12 hours

especially in contrast to some longer-term base projects like Virtuals, the one that has spawned AIXBT, which the VVV token was airdropped to and has been a token on base for well over a year now. And this was also a pretty fat airdrop. Users in airdrop people got $10,000 to $20,000 just from holding some tokens online.

on base. So congrats to the Venice team. But then also, what do you think about kind of the drama or the controversy or just really this news event as a whole? - Well, a couple of thoughts. So one, I think that obviously there was a lot of drama around that time about, okay, why isn't Coinbase supporting the base ecosystem, which really is coded for just why aren't they listing virtuals?

My guess is that it's probably a securities law thing is that virtual just looks too much like unregistered security stuff of like, okay, AXPT, it's got a developer. There's like, you know, only a few things that are actually on there that are trading meaningful volume. And this thing, you know, virtual has recently announced they're doing like a buyback and burn type thing or something like that. Yeah. Where they're doing like some real actual, you know, revenue from the underlying trading interface that like, so all this stuff, I think.

To be clear, I think virtual is probably doing the right thing for themselves as a startup. But Coinbase, there's no rules yet. Just remember, yeah, okay, there's been a new administration, but no rules, no rulemaking, and they're bound by their guidance that they've received from the SEC. Unless the SEC changes their course or changes their communication, they're not allowed to say, well, Trump is okay with it, so I kind of know that it's cool. So my guess is that they're never going to say that in public, but that's probably what's going on of why they're not supporting virtuals. Now for Venice itself,

um, look, I love Eric. I think Eric is a G and I'm very interested in what's going on in this whole space. But, um, I, I'm not a big fan of the storytelling here around Venice. Like the reality is that Venice, I think is a little bit, trust me, bro. Uh, I think, I think it was, um, you're talking about the, the claims that as a private, uh, private LLM. Yeah. So I think it was, um, who was it? Uh, uh, the other Eric, um,

Shoot, what's his name? Eric Wall. It was Eric Wall, I think, who came out kind of criticizing some of the claims that Venice was making publicly. Because Venice, if you just look at their documentation, basically what they say is like, look, we run these models on our own. They say they get the compute from decentralized sources. They don't really say what they are. There's no proof that they're getting from decentralized sources. Could just be them themselves getting GPUs on the cloud. We don't know. And then they say, we use SSL.

Which to be clear, everybody in the internet uses SSL. That's not unique. And then they say, we don't retain the data. And it's okay. How do I know you don't retain the data? There's no like, oh, we use Intel SGX. We use trusted hardware. We have some kind of private computation. We have MPC. There are a lot of answers you could give that would be satisfying to a crypto user of you're definitely not storing my data.

They don't have any such thing. They just basically say, we don't store your data. I promise. Which to be clear is fine, right? That's like a DuckDuckGo kind of thing. DuckDuckGo just tells you, look, we don't store your data. I promise. And that's good enough. But to my mind, like, okay, if you're dropping a token and you're like painting this as a crypto project, what's the crypto element?

Like, as far as I can see, this is just a, this is just literally like DuckDuckGo for AI, you know, serving AI models. So I think he's heard that feedback. And I think there's probably some roadmap there that he's probably yet to announce as he's ingesting a lot of this stuff. But I think that's a lot of the reason why after the initial airdrop, you saw this growing degree of skepticism about, is this really the big story about AI?

decentralized AI and private inference. Like I don't think there's actually that much on the technology side yet to be able to prove that out in a way that is beyond just, hey, you can't trust DeepSeek, but you can trust me.

Yeah. Yeah. And I do think the skeptical muscle of the crypto community is very, very strong. We know how to be very, very skeptical. So I think that's fair. It's like kicking the tires of things. Abstract mainnet is now live. This is a pretty anticipated layer two from the Ethereum ecosystem. This is a ZK sync. It's a ZK layer two that uses Celestia for DA, offers native account abstraction. And it really is just hyper-focused on abstracting everything that makes a blockchain a blockchain and just

tries to make it as usable as possible. I don't have too much here. It's just brand new. So now people are going on to abstract and playing around and kicking the tires. Any takes, any quick takes about abstract? Thumbs up. Crypto is always good. Cool. Abstract is also a part of just kind of an extension of the Pudgy's ecosystem. We did a podcast with Luca Nets where we briefly touched on abstract and the philosophy there. Also out of the Pudgy's ecosystem is a partnership with Pez.

That's right, the Pez candy dispenser. And so the Pudgy Penguins Twitter account tweeted out, we're excited to bring Pengu to life with one of the largest candy brands in the world and join the Pez lineup alongside Pokemon, Disney, and others. Really trying to flex the meme of penguins' weight alongside, you know, Disney, saying, look, it's Disney, it's Pokemon, and then it's also the penguins. Do you have a penguin, Haseeb? How do you like the penguins? I do.

I do not. I do not have the penguins. I don't have any NFT group affiliations. Did you fumble the penguins at the depths of the bear market in 2023? Because I definitely did. I fumble everything in crypto. I only do long-term successes, short-term fumbles.

Also launched this week, uh, symbiotic, which was the, uh, basically the big eigen layer competitor. Uh, it's been developing and it's been test net is the main net is now live on a theory. They tweeted out after two years of development, five independent audits and code competitions were first to launch a feature, complete shared security protocol with slashing. Uh,

The restaking meta, I feel like, is in the rearview mirror. I think that was a very big part of the first half of 2024. Now people don't really talk about it too much. Overall, what's your take on either Symbiotic or the state of restaking right now?

Yeah, it definitely feels like there's something of a low. I think there's just a, there's not as much interest in financial engineering of staking and restaking and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but I think the market is waiting for receipts and it's like, okay, you know, show me, show me where all the demand is for AVSs. Show me where all the demand is for shared security. I do think that it, there's a good chance that it does materialize, but it's one of these things that it was kind of overhyped.

And that always scares me as an investor when I see there's too high expectations. Almost always there's going to be a comedown and markets don't like comedowns. And I feel like that's kind of what happened with Eigenlayer and to some degree with Symbiotic is that there was just too many people who thought things were already ready. And it just takes time. I don't think there's a reason to be bearish on any of these concepts. It just means that like, hey, it takes time to build an ecosystem, takes time to make shit work. That's been true for every ecosystem that we've seen really successful is that

You got to mature. You got to earn your stripes. I do think one of the reasons why it got so hyped back then is because there was just nothing else to do. Like in 2024, we had the Bitcoin ETFs.

And then we just kind of rotated around like infrastructure metas and restaking just, it was a net new primitive. It is a real thing. But then everyone else was just like bored looking for things to do. And I was like, all right, I guess we'll just turn to Mania. Yeah. I mean, the meme coin meta really started in like November of 23. So it wasn't true that people had nothing to do. People had plenty to do. It was, I think. Not everyone likes meme coins though.

That's true. But okay, well, if people had nothing to do, what are they doing now who don't like meme coins? Well, now we get to say that AI coins are not meme coins. Maybe that's a decent explanation then. I could buy that. I could buy that.

All right. Speaking of meme coins, this is a tweet that I got on your wall. You said this was a tweet about the Trump at Melania meme coins. And when these things were released, they were touted as just a mass onboarding event. Hundreds of thousands of new wallets. The stats from MoonPay, which is where people without crypto assets are. Moonshot. Moonshot. Excuse me. Moonshot. That was where people would go get the Trump meme coin if they didn't already have

like a Solana wallet, or they didn't even know what a wallet was because you could buy it with a debit card, right? And so moonshot users just exploded. Solana activity also exploded. But then 10 days later, after they launched the Trump meme coin, we're able to look at some of that data. This is you retweeting Rob Haddock from, I believe, Chain. No, this is, oh, this is a Dragonfly guy.

Oh, excuse me. He's your GP. He's your partner. Excuse me. And this is looking at the Chainalysis report about the Trump token. And you tweeted out, disappointing data here. Seems like less than 1% of the users who came in through Moonshot to buy Trump or Melania are doing anything else on Chain. If this was the Olympics, the tourists are not doing anything else in the city before they leave. Basically 1% GDP retention. Just elaborate a little bit more here about just your takes and reflections about the Trump meme coin launch.

Yeah. So honestly, this was kind of what I expected. Um, I was surprised to hear a lot of other people saying like, Oh, this is a great mass onboarding event. This is going to bring a lot of people in. Um, I remember having a debate on another podcast where we were talking about, you know, whether or not this was really going to be a good first impression for people into crypto. And, um, I think it was, it was, um, I think it was Robert Lesher who was saying, you know, everybody gets into crypto through one speculative moment. Maybe it was the ICO bubble for you. Maybe it was DeFi summer for you, but for everybody, there's like some speculative thing that gets you in the front door. And I

everyone starts that way. And then eventually you find your way into the broader world and you start doing other things. And like, that's, that's, that's how everyone starts. You seem to get your foot in the door. Yeah, exactly. And so this is no different than any of those. This is also this kind of, you know, onboarding event. And, and,

My feeling was that, no, this really feels different, right? This feels like, one, it's not about crypto. It's about this dude, you know? Like, Trump kind of made it about him and not about crypto or a technology. Like, very clearly, Moonshot itself abstracts the technology away from you and is like, no, no, no, you can't, you don't want to touch Solana. You don't want to touch private keys. You don't want to touch any of that stuff. Here, use a debit card and we'll charge 1% fees for you to do all your trading and never have to leave the app, right?

Right. That's, I mean, that's basically moonshot. Now when people told me, this is the counter argument that I heard that I didn't believe at the time, I thought this is crazy. Is that no, some percent of people will take their keys out or they'll transfer to a, to like a phantom wallet or something. And they'll go explore the on-chain economy.

You know, these are like the people who come for the Olympics and they travel through the streets of Paris and they go to the boulangeries and like, you know, why not? You know, let's see what's around. Basically a rounding error of people did any of that. Now it's only been a week. And so, you know, some people are like, well, you know, maybe it's too early. You got to give it time. I think the right way to understand is that, no, no, this is a funnel. And if people aren't converting in a week, they're never going to convert. Like these people, most of them lost money.

And maybe this is part of the story is that if they made money, maybe they would have stuck around and be like, oh, what else can I DJ about? Oh, I can make money here. I'll make money there. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so if you think about DeFi Summer, I think this is the best counter argument. They're like, well, if the Trump coin had gone up, then it would have been a good onboarding event, but it went down. So it's a bad onboarding event at the end. But I think this...

I think it's just the irrational optimism about this thing. I think that net-net, the Trump token, is going to end up burning more people than it ends up onboarding into crypto. And that burning, it takes a lot of work to undo that damage. That's my take on the Trump token. And I've been pretty public saying that I think it's been a bad thing for crypto writ large. And I think we haven't paid the real cost yet. So, okay, it went up, it went down. But the Trump team hasn't unlocked yet. They unlock in three months.

In those three months, then they're gonna start selling a lot of this token. They own 80% of the supply. And we know what happens when a dev owns 80% of the supply and they sell and sell and sell and sell. It's just absolute carnage. And I think that's what's gonna happen. And the people that are gonna be holding the bag are not crypto natives.

The crypto natives, they all understand FTV. They all understand these supply charts. They all look at the bubble charts. They all like, they understand all this stuff. They're the ones reading Twitter all day. Right. And seeing like, oh my God, look on chain. The guy, you know, the devs are selling. It's the normal people who came in through moonshot. Who just think it's funny. Like, yeah, let's buy the Trump meme coin. Exactly. I love my president. I want to support him. You know, of course he's, I'm probably in good hands. Right. You know, it's those people who are going to end up getting hurt.

And I was talking to some of my non-crypto friends who all saw the Trump meme coin news. And I think they anticipated, they naively anticipated like, oh, everyone in crypto thinks this is great. And then when they asked me about it, they're like, David, you know that this is a terrible look, right? Like this is a bad look.

And so I think universally people outside of the Trump meme coin circles are like, that looks bad. That's a bad look for crypto. And even internally, people are like, this is a bad look for crypto. Now, previously, meme coins have been touted by like many in the Solana community or just the meme coin trader community that meme coins are the onboard, the retail onboarding mechanism. This is this culture. Coins will take crypto mainstream because they're just so relatable and accessible to

How do you think that this relates to that take? Is this now that this is here, do we think that that is invalidated? - Let's be really clear. Trump token is not a meme coin. It's a celeb coin. We've had celeb coins, right? You remember Mother, you remember like all these other, we know what celeb coins are. Celeb coins are there's one person who's responsible for keeping this token up. They own a huge portion of the supply and there's not a meme. Like what's the meme?

Trump is not a meme. It's his fucking name. He's got his face on it. He is kind of a meme though. No, no, no, no. This is not the meme of Trump. This is the man. This is the man. He owns like MAGA. Remember MAGA token? MAGA token. Or Trump token, like the previous Trump token. Those were meme tokens. Right. Those were actually memes. Because they weren't made by him. Right.

They weren't made by him, he didn't own it. It was just people being like, "Oh, isn't it funny? "If we're gonna make a MAGA token, "it'll go up and down instead of the prediction mark." That was funny, people talked about it. It was like community owned. And there was no single person who was gonna win or lose, right? It's like a big Ouija board and we all control it together. That to me is a game. It's a game that we all understand what we're playing, right? What Trump is doing with Trump Token, that's not a game. That's him making the rules of the game. It's him saying, "You know what? "Put your money in this piggy bank

and underneath it is an open bottom and his hand. That's what Trump token is, okay? - Right. - That's totally different from a meme coin. I have no problem with meme coins. I think they're basically zero sum and they're just a game. If you wanna play that game, totally. It's a better game than a lot of other games out there. But what Trump is doing with Trump token is a totally different ball game. And I think it's in a way fatuous and gives away the entire game to allow him to tell us, yes, a thing that you own 80% of the supply of

is a meme coin. That's not a meme coin. That's a celeb coin with your name on it. I do really like the delineation between a celeb coin and a meme coin. I think that's kind of an aha moment for me. I really like that. Because yeah, I've just previously, any single person who has the influence over a price always kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Uh, and that is not what meme coins are. Meme coins are like you said, like everyone has their fingers on the Ouija board. I really liked that metaphor, but Hasib, what about the possibility that you can use the meme coin to buy Trump watches and sneakers? Does that change your position? I was worried. I might not be able to buy watches and sneakers with my Trump token.

No, it changes nothing. I mean, this is, again, this is like the celeb coin playbook, right? It's like, okay, token started going down. I now have to give it some semblance of value. You know, so I think the same thing that Iggy Azalea did with Mother is that she was like, oh, I'm going to create an MVNO, which, okay, what? So I'm going to get an MVNO and you can pay your bill for this MVNO using my meme coin. Okay, now it's like, okay, you can buy watches and sneakers from my online store using my meme coin.

Okay. Fine. I could also sell your meme coin for money and use it to buy the watches and sneakers. That's not a problem. Right. Right. So I, to me, this is obviously a distraction from like what the main thing is about this meme coin is that he owns 80% of it and he's going to dump it in three months. Right. Or start dumping in three months. Totally. Yeah. So let's look on a, I've said enough. I'll stop writing. Totally. But okay. One last Trump watch thing. And this is actually the last thing of the episode is this,

the world to be financial continues to just dollar cost average into a bunch of ETH. And so this is just Jesse Echol tweeting out a transaction after transaction, some like 12 hours ago, three days ago, five days ago, a week ago of 4.7, 5.2, $4.9 million clips of ETH, just going from cow protocol actually of all places into the world Liberty financial DeFi app. I think everyone loves to say like, this is,

Trump buying ETH. It's not actually Trump buying ETH. But then I also don't know who is behind World Liberty Financial and where this money is coming from. Overall, just what's your take about the activity, the on-chain activity of World Liberty Financial?

Yeah. I mean, so for one, I think, uh, let's go very clear. We, we, we do know who the world, like go to the website. We don't know their customers. We don't know where they're cut. Cause they're, my understanding is they have customers who give them money and then they go invest it on chain. That's my understanding of how this thing works. Uh, no, no, no. The product is not live. So they did a crowd sale. The crowd sale was doing very badly before Trump got elected. Trump got elected. Justin son gave them like 60 million or something, you know, some very large sum of money. And then all of a sudden, uh,

The entire, I think, $200 million raise was filled, which I have heard kind of a rumor. I've heard that a lot of this was Saudi money that came in and basically was like, oh, here's a way that we can maybe buy access or something. I don't know, total rumor, so I don't know if any of that's substantiated. But the idea that suddenly a clip of 100 plus million showed up very, very late in the game after Trump launched his meme coin,

- And after the election, so even after the election, this thing was basically dead. There was like 10% of the crowd sale that was filled. Now they're taking that money and using it to buy crypto assets, which is great. Like you said, it's not Trump. It's obviously Trump affiliated. We know that Barron is very closely involved, so this is like Barron's pet project or something, and I guess Donald Trump Jr. is also involved. So it's like a Trump family thing.

Trump himself is on the governance board over... He's an advisor. He's an advisor, yes. Supposedly, supposedly. Although, normally as president, you're supposed to divest from all your financial interests. Doesn't seem like he's doing that. Trump is just making more financial interest, not less. Exactly. So, like, you know, launching a meme coin two days before you're inaugurated is a pretty gangster move relative to what most presidents are doing two days before they're inaugurated. So, um...

In no way is this an ordinary process of what we expect from a president. And I think this is par for the course. So, you know, obviously, right, we're playing this game of like, oh, what asset is World Liberty Financial going to buy? But it's not Trump. It's, you know, three steps removed from Trump.

in terms of the actual decision-making. Like these, these guys are crypto natives. Yeah. Yeah. I see my man. It's been a pleasure having you on the weekly rollup. I couldn't do it without you. Uh, I need a buddy to go through the news with me and you've really been helpful here. Uh, I believe you might have already done, uh, a, this is the second podcast of the day for you. Maybe you, maybe you're doing chopping block tomorrow, but if listeners are not familiar with chopping block, tell them about it and where can they go hear more of you if they just like the sound of your voice.

So every week, uh, me, my partner, Tom Schmidt, and then Tarun Chitra and, uh, uh, Robert Leshner from formerly compound slash robot mentors. Uh, uh, we do a podcast together every week, kind of like this, where we just talk about the news and what's going on in the world. So you can find it on the unchained podcast, uh, run by Laura Shin. Uh, we do it, we do it once a week and we were a bunch of VCs. So we're, uh, we have a very different perspective on the market than, uh, most of the people who are more trading oriented. But if you're into that, that's what we talk about. Yeah.

It's one of the few podcasts I have that I do not skip on a weekly basis. So thank you. I always appreciate other people making crypto content out there because I think more crypto content needs to be out there. And so tip of the hat to you, sir. We'll get all of those links right back at you, man. Yeah. Cheers. Just any last thoughts about just like, you know, we're in the last day, almost the last day of January in crypto. What are you looking forward to in 2025 in crypto land? What are you paying attention to? What's Dragonfly investing in? Just open, open-ended question here.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's been a lot of malaise in this market. Obviously, we've been whipsawing a lot from, okay, is Trump going to do this? Is, you know, Trump token, what's going on? I do suspect that the rest of the year is going to be a little more calm. I'm always a little hesitant to say that because this month has been absolutely, it's just insane. But I do think like, okay, now all eyes are going to be on what do the agencies do? Is there going to be any specific rulemaking? And when do we get a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Almost certainly it's not going to happen soon now that we've had this executive order of, you know, hey,

committees are going to figure this out later. So I think things are going to be a little more calm, which I think is good because the market could use some calm. And the reality is that in most crypto markets, bull cycles and bear cycles, like all the stuff that we see that's set up for crypto is really, really good. Everything is super bullish, right? Like things really could not be better from a regulatory perspective, from a demand perspective, from a vibes perspective, macro is looking pretty solid. And so I think what all this should tell you is that be patient. Like,

Not everything's going to happen quickly. Just because Trump got elected doesn't mean that, okay, hey, everything's going to go to the moon all of a sudden and everything should be ecstatic. So I think on some level that impatience often finds its way into crazy assets, crazy narratives, you know, things going up and down really rapidly. As a VC, having been through many, many cycles and having invested through the long and shorter things, number one advice that I give to entrepreneurs and also give to just anybody who's in this world is trust.

be patient. You know, more things can happen in a couple of years than you think. And fewer things tend to change in a month than you think. So I'd say, I'd say chill. I think it's going to be a good year, but it's going to take its time. Wise wisdom from a guy who knows a thing or two about investing in crypto. Haseeb, thanks so much, my man. Thanks for having me. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed West. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.