Bridge's $1.1b Exit, Crypto's Voting Power, and a Token Unlock Playbook | Roundup

The reason it hasn't worked is not because stablecoins haven't worked or Stripe's not smart enough. There's a lot of inertia to getting a new thing done at a company, and sometimes you have to make these really big, bold, like burn, burn the boats type of moves as a founder.

I feel like I don't want to touch something that doesn't capture fundamental value. I just— I'm sorry, but I don't feel comfortable owning it inside my portfolio.

SKALE is the blockchain that is simply built different. Other L1 networks have costly transaction fees, clunky user experiences, and lack true adoption in AI and on-chain gaming. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @ScaleNetwork. That is scale with a K. Hit the link in the show notes to get started. Hey everyone, excited to share with you that Cronos zkEVM has launched its Pioneer Program, offering early adopters a chance to earn not only loyalty points but also potentially win part of a $30,000 ZK CRO giveaway. If you're interested in being an early adopter, visit zkEVM.kronos.org/bridge. Big thanks to Kronos for sponsoring today's episode. The inaugural Aggregation Summit is a can't-miss 2-day event from November 10th to 11th in Bangkok, Thailand. Organized by Polygon Labs, the Ag Summit is bringing together top crypto builders, researchers, and leaders to discuss the fragmented ecosystem of today and how aggregation can get the industry together. Head on over to aglayer.dev to book your tickets or join the main stage livestream on the 11th of November. Hey everyone, Jason here. There's a reason why Ledger is trusted to secure more than 20% of the world's crypto assets today. Check out their newest devices, the Ledger Stacks and the Ledger Flex, featuring the world's first secure touchscreens. Take your security seriously. Hit the link in the show notes of today's episode to check out their latest devices. Trust me, you won't regret it.

What's up everyone, how we doing? Uh, welcome Santi, what's up GM?

We're in the same city finally.

How's the New York trip?

Love it, love this.

Oh man, should we zoom in on— how do we, uh, look at that, look at that cleanly shaven man everybody.

This is as, as, as probably I did Fully, yeah, that my barber back in, back home, he just went at it.

Yeah, he did really butcher me. Anyways, I don't know if it was butcher, but he, I mean, clean shaven, clean. Well, I guess if you're fundraising, you need to, it's like, you know, you come to New York, you look like the New York Yankees, tighten it up a little bit.

Sorry for your loss yesterday, by the way, folks. You know, it was tough.

I'm a Red Sox fan, so I'm— oh, are you?

Me too.

Yeah. Yeah. Why are you?

Because I went to school in Boston. I live like I could see Fenway Park from my house.

Nice, nice, nice, nice. Great Netflix show going on called The Comeback, which is about the Red Sox, Yankees, and then the 2004 ALCS, which Red Sox were down 3-0. Anyways, how's the fundraising trip? You're here to fundraise?

Well, I'm here to run the marathon on Sunday, but I did, I did get in earlier to just have a bunch of meetings And yes, fundraising, meeting potential hires, got office space yesterday. So very exciting stuff.

Let's go.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, New York's such an important city. I think a lot of the, a lot of the team's going to be based here. Most of the strategy is going to be based in the US, just, you know, looking at targets. So that's all ongoing. It's just kind of paralyzing everything. So yeah, incredibly busy but very exciting. The marathon at this point is an afterthought, to be honest.

Yeah, it's funny. Last year I feel like everybody was really into the marathon and like run— like training very hard. Like not just you, a lot of my friends and even people at Blockworks, like everyone's training really hard this year. Still the same amount of people running the marathon, but nobody's taking it that seriously. So what does that say about society or where where people are at.

Uh, sir, I mean, n of 10, so the data, the data sample is pretty, uh, small. I was thinking about tweet about this. I mean, just if you have the opportunity to run the New York Marathon, you should. It's like the best. I've done all the majors. I've done, God, so many marathons, but I, I make a point to come here every year and run it because it's just amazing. It, it, the, like, Boston's great, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Chicago, run about same SF, Malibu, I've run a bunch. New York is just on a whole new level. And I just love coming here because it's the greatest city in the world and the experience is unparalleled. It's just unreal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Any interesting fundraising meetings or probably can't talk about them yet.

Can't talk about it. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been reaching out, so I appreciate that. A lot of my time has been spent focusing on just DD on potential targets. And I'm just like, my brain's there. Fundraising is like, I'll have some meetings here and there. But it's a lot of the people that I've worked with in the past, I feel most comfortable going with initially. And it's very informal. It's just, you know, conversations. And, you know, of course, people seem to like the strategy. It's, but until I close the fund, you know, as I tell people, I'm either going to raise what I want, or I'm going to raise zero, and I'm going to put my money to work. And, you know, yeah, nice. Live or die, uh, but I'm gonna do it.

Uh, target, target goal of $1 billion?

Yes.

Cool. Or more.

I mean, the strategy's uncapped, but I do think as a first fund it would be, uh, as I've thought about it, uh, I, I think that would be a, uh, sufficiently large fund to execute on the strategy and be dangerous. Yeah, in the good sense of the word.

So we interviewed last night Zach, who's the founder of Bridge, Bridge.xyz, which just got acquired by Stripe, obviously for $1 billion. And we talked about the deal. It's the first public appearance. Let's go, La Colombe, sponsor us, baby.

We need—

maybe this would be— how many La Colombes do you drink in a day these days?

Don't ask questions you don't want answers to. By the way, also, this would be— La Colombe would be a reason to move back to New York.

So La Colombe, if you are out there, Trump could use a sponsor. Yeah, for sure. Actually, we get roasted for having too many sponsors on the show, but, you know, like, we could— okay, we had Zach. Yeah, we had Zach on the pod. It was— so it was the first public appearance that he's done about the Stripe acquisition. So the deal hasn't actually closed. It's with Lina Khan and the regulators right now. But we talked about the acquisition, but I mean, the show ended up basically turning into a pitch for Inversion Capital. It was really an amazing— it, you know, it was— I've heard your pitch obviously for it, but it was amazing to have that in my head and then hear him outline the benefits that stablecoins actually bring to the market and actually can bring to these legacy companies. And he walked us through a couple of examples and whether it's treasury management or payroll or I think the most exciting thing that he talked about is like, look, we're kind of doing what happened with the internet and with the iPhone, which is like you just apply it to these old use cases. But like the new use cases, the really crazy cool stuff hasn't even come yet. So anyway, I mean, just a really good episode that'll be out on Tuesday, folks.

People should definitely— it's one of the more invigorating kind of energizing conversations, of course, because I'm thinking of like breathing this constantly. But I go back to the early days of DeFi, stablecoins are just— the minute you use them, people talk about it. It's a Trojan horse. It's a killer use case. It is just such a powerful thing. If we just stopped innovating and that was it, it's just an amazing use case. Anyone that's traveled, anyone that has done cross-border payments, anyone that has a company that does international, basically is international, really, really appreciates that. One of the things that Saks said that I really liked was how he described the current financial system, which is a lot of fintechs, including Stripe or Square, where he was previously, or Brex, some of these fintechs that have— he said they've innovated on the margin, which I took to mean the current financial system is very antiquated and you can only do so much. We've hit a limitation point. At which like even Stripe, as I think about why they acquired, um, Bridge, is they sort of realize like you can only innovate so much with, with a, with a patchwork of, of antiquated systems. The next level of growth, the future, is really, you know, operating in these permissionless ledgers. And it's like from scratch, right? It's just— and stablecoins really are that. And, and I think that's why, you know, if you were to— you asked him some great questions around Why would Stripe acquire them versus build them? They just launched 18 months ago. Like, you know, Stripe's a really good, competent team. They could have done this themselves. But I think Stripe just sort of woke up one day and the Collison brothers are incredibly smart in this way and they've been talking about stablecoins. And I think they just realized like 3 years ago, probably too early. Today they woke up and they felt a sense of urgency because Bridge has gotten so much traction. So quickly. And Zach was just describing how many of the, you know, developers were just innovating and pushing them, doing all these crazy use cases that I think Stripe saw through that and, and felt this kind of woke up one day and said, felt this sense of urgency and was like, we need to get this now. Otherwise we're going to, we're going to lose a very big competitive advantage that they have already.

So Stripe has actually tried to do things with stablecoins twice in the past, and both times it hasn't worked out. And the reason, from my understanding and talking to friends at Stripe and stuff like that, the reason it hasn't worked is not because stablecoins haven't worked or Stripe's not smart enough. There's a lot of inertia to getting a new thing done at a company. And sometimes you have to make these really big, bold, like, you know, burn the boats type of moves as a founder, I feel like. And this to me was the Collison brothers doing that. They said, you know, everyone's talking about how they overpaid and stuff like that. First off, I don't think they overpaid.

I think this is like an Instagram-Meta acquisition where in the future we'll look back and know this is incredibly cheap.

But I think the big reason why they did it was because I heard the way that the deal went was there was a deal team and they had the DCF and they're building these models. And Patrick said, fuck your models, we're paying $1 billion for this company or whatever the real amount was, $700 million or $1.1, whatever. We're paying a large amount that nobody on the M&A team thinks makes sense. We're getting this deal done. I've got voting shares, push this thing through. And, you know, for him, I mean, that's just rumors of what I kind of heard. But for him to do something like that, the reason I think that he did it is to plant their flag in stablecoins. You get this huge press release, big announcement. Stripe is here to play in the stablecoin space. And I think it's a— I think it's a brilliant acquisition. I think it's Bridge has these low-level APIs, right? They— Zach talked about this on the, on the episode, but they haven't really created APIs for one use case. Uh, they've done— it's the exact same way that Patrick and John talk about their, their business. And yeah, I just like it a lot.

So yeah, a lot of what I— to your point around inertia, I've been spending a lot of time talking to kind of the implementation partners, the tech stack that a lot of which I've invested in, but also, um, that I'm going to implement, you know, The First 100 Days kind of playbook. And it's just really interesting to hear and go deeper into why we haven't seen as much of an adoption. Makes you wonder, was the timing off? Is the tech not ready? Is there just— where is this like lack of appetite to— because we know clearly works. It's just why. And one of the things that I've heard kind of over and over is most businesses, especially if you're doing B2B or B2C, is this idea that merchants are very sensitive and unwilling to risk. They'd rather pay 4 or 5%, even more, to then add any amount of friction into the checkout process, into the equation, right? But I guess the point that I'm trying to make here is why now? Because there have been very, you know, over the last year, I'd say, very important innovations that have facilitated and just made the UI/UX incredibly seamless that I would challenge people and say, and go as far as to say, if you look at Blackbird, for instance, and their pay flow, it's just actually on par or easier than traditional payment methods if you are using PayPal. And a lot of that's account abstraction, gasless transaction, batching. All these things really do matter. And I don't think we could have, you know, I don't think 3 years ago It was a very different experience is what I'm trying to say. And a lot of times in crypto, people don't come back. People don't revisit the thesis. People don't have this idea of what crypto is. And you just have to keep hacking away. I do think that when Stripe, with the muscle and the distribution of Stripe, just totally different game because Zach was describing this friction, right? So it's really incredibly exciting to see how that plays out.

Very much so. All right. A few other— few news stories I wanted to get to in this roundup. So one was Coinbase. Coinbase had earnings and the market reacted pretty poorly. And I want to make the argument that that was just a really overblown reaction. I very much disagree with it. Celestia unlocks happened this week. and it was one of the biggest unlocks in the space in a couple of years. And so I think just the Celestia unlock is less interesting, but more interesting to talk about these, you know, what was the market reaction? How will the market react to, to other unlocks? There was a big Poly, the market thought it was a big PolyMarket story. I think it's a total nothing burger of a story, but there was a wash trading story about PolyMarket. And then there were actually a couple layoffs this week. So maybe we can start with the layoffs. So this week, DYDX, ConsenSys, and Kraken all publicly announced layoffs. There are a couple other more quietly announced, quietly done layoffs that have not been publicly announced yet. But DYDX CEO Antonio Giuliano said that 35% of the core team was let go. ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin said ConsenSys had cut 20% of the staff. That is 160 positions at ConsenSys. That is, let's see, for dYdX, I think it's about, I think they had probably 50 folks. I think that's about 10 people. And then Kraken also had layoffs. So Kraken announced a new co-CEO. What is his name again? Arjun Sethi. He was at Tribe Capital, I'm pretty sure, before. I think he's also one of the largest independent shareholders of Kraken. I think, don't quote me on that. And yeah, they— Kraken had layoffs as well, so laid off somewhere between 15% and 20% of the company. So this is interesting, right? Because it gets to this idea of are we in a bull market? Are we in a bear market? David and I were— David Hoffman and I were debating on stage at Permissionless. He said we're in a bear market. I said there's no possible way we're in a bear market.

Bitcoin, Bitcoin hit all-time high this week.

Bitcoin hit all-time highs. It's just that ETH is not moving. I'm sorry, David. So it kind of gets to this question. I think that this is, this is interesting for two reasons. One is actually really, really one, one, one thing. First off, I don't think we're in a bear market. I think we're in a bull market. Bitcoin's about to hit an all-time high. Other things are hitting all-time highs. You're just seeing a bigger dispersion than we've ever seen in the industry between things that go up and things that go down. The really interesting thing was actually one line that Joe Lubin said, and then Antonio said a very similar thing. So, uh, he put a little bit of blame on the SEC. He said, look, with the government coming down on us, such attacks— this is a quote— such attacks from the U.S. government will end up costing many companies that have been investigated, sued, or sent Wells notices many millions of dollars. But there was an interesting line here that I'm starting to see in Telegram chats with founders and group chats that I'm in with different founders. This is a quote from Joe Lubin. He said, looking ahead, I see a next generation not dominated by large monolithic companies. Instead, smaller, agile AI supercharged companies with Web3-based coordination tools will operate more efficiently. To stay competitive in this fast-growing space, we need to reshape ourselves and be more agile. More effective, even higher performing. It's very related to something that Antonio talked about, if anyone listened to the DYDX episode, and he posted in his blog post about this. He said DYDX is moving to a model that has flat hierarchy, less meetings, no management structure. And actually Zach brought it up on the Bridge podcast too. He said, look, we've got about 50 employees today. We have zero managers. We have zero management at the company. It's a very different way of of building a company. And it's, I mean, the thing that kind of took the internet by storm, at least in the tech world, probably 6 weeks ago or 4 weeks ago was, was this founder mode, right? Paul Graham wrote about it, but really came from Brian Chesky. And so I just think that this, I mean, it's something that is quietly behind the scenes being talked about in every single founder group chat I'm in, because people are building their hiring strategies for next year.

Right.

They're talking about, you know, people owe their budgets to the board, they owe hiring strategies to the team, people are doing their financial reviews and people are wondering how many, uh, what really is the benefit to just layering on more and more and more people at these companies instead of staying really agile and just saying, how can we get more efficient, more efficient, more efficient? So, um, yeah, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this.

Oh, that's well put. I think I'll just add Gary Tan, who is the president of Y Combinator, had a few interesting tweets that I saw a couple weeks ago which talked about the cohort, uh, the new cohort, uh, the batch of Y Combinator, and how they were really just even leaner and meaner because they were leveraging a lot of tools like particularly AI that allowed them to just not hire as many people. There was also a tweet, I don't know how much— lend as much credence to it or not, but I found it interesting, which is a lot of these companies are building a lot of these solutions in-house, uh, using AI tools and ripping and kind of replacing existing SaaS solutions. I don't know how much of that is true. It's, it's something that is worthy just to pay attention to. Um, you know, I think about it a lot as well in terms of these transformations, like how much can you replace your CRM, your workforce management? Uh, you know, these, these are large companies that, you know, historically, if they been very much embedded into pretty much every organization. The penetration rate is still quite low. A lot of businesses, particularly medium-sized, don't really adopt technology, and especially family-owned businesses. But now you can do a lot with just build a lot of these solutions in-house with like, you know, a lot of stuff that's open source, right? So I don't have as much of a kind of really good, like, view into how real or how how much of that's actually happening in practice, but it's definitely interesting. Um, you know, it's kind of like the McKinsey reports that everyone's talked about, or these consultants that say, hey, look, it's gonna be a massive transformation in labor market over the next, you know, decade with AI, right? So maybe that's part of that.

100%. 100%.

I also think, Antonio, like, I also think about, like, um, what Musk did at Twitter. Like, he went in and just fired, like, a a lot of the organization. And, you know, it's like Twitter still works. It's actually a better product. So it's like, how much of these companies are actually bloated? Just because most companies I just think are bloated, or, you know. And so you go in there and just— I think Antonio, that's probably what he saw, right? Taking the Musk playbook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just gonna— I mean, it's gonna be really interesting to see what ends up happening as these, I think, as I think this strategy will end up mostly working, mostly working, I would say. And I'm not sure it's, I'm not sure it's going to be the Consensuses of the world who lay off 20% of their people and still have 1,000 employees. And it makes them much better. Because it's like, there's a lot of, again, like the Stripe example, there's a lot of inertia inside of these companies. What I'm really excited to see is the the new founders who come in and build these companies and just don't end up hiring people. They just get better and better and better at using AI.

So, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. It's something where I'm— we're thinking a lot about it at Blockworks, right? Because we create so much content. So it's like, what is— what is the role of AI there? So I don't know. All right. Coinbase earnings.

Yes.

Did you take a look?

Of course. Last night. Yeah.

All right. Coinbase announced earnings. Let me see if I can pull up a little summary tweet here.

All right. But yeah, go for it. This is—

Yeah. So Ryan Rasmussen, who's head of research at Bitwise, just put out a good summary tweet. Coinbase Q3 2024 earnings. All right. Revenue came in at $1.2 billion. This is down 17% versus Q2. Net income of $75 million, which is up over 100% versus last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA of $449 million, down 25%. Cash is up to $8.2 billion, which is up 5%. I don't think it shows it in here, but about 25% of their balance sheet is now in— I think it's 25% of their cash is now in crypto, not, not in fiat. They did a— they authorized a billion-dollar share repurchase. Base transactions are up 55% versus Q2. And then front and center in this PDF, in this image that they always release, there are now 1.8 million people, uh, stand advocates of Stand With Crypto. The market didn't like it. Um, they didn't like seeing, uh, you know, here I can just pull up the, the stock's at $2.01.

Uh, market just opened now, but it was down 5% after earnings.

The news stories: Coinbase shares fall as muted crypto trading leads to third quarter miss. Coinbase stock falls on earnings miss. Coinbase revenue may be hurt by lower trading volumes and regulation. Coinbase stock dives on earnings miss. So that was the analyst— that was the street's reaction.

Yeah, I saw one of the JPMorgan analysts updated his model last week ahead of earnings, and like the price target was like $191. The stock stock's at $200 now. It's up 16% year to date. Yeah, it's sort of a tale of two cities, right? It's always interesting how the market responds to this. And, you know, but, but I do think that, yeah, I mean, the share buyback's pretty encouraging.

Yeah. What are your— do you have a general thought? I mean, I know long-term thesis on Coinbase, but any, any updated thoughts on this, on the particular earnings report? Yeah, on earnings or like current thoughts on Coinbase?

Can we quickly just zoom into the earnings call around what was the commentary on Base? Because Base has been seeing incredible amount of growth and we can maybe link some of the stats, but usage is up. I think revenue, probably sequencing revenue has also gone up substantially. I mean, it's becoming a non-trivial component of their, of their P&L and earnings, I'd say. So let's just look at that for a minute. And also, While you do that, I'm going to try to look at what was the commentary from the management team on it.

Yeah. So I just pulled up our dashboard on Base. I mean, you can see transaction count, you can see addresses, you can, you can look at their financials. I mean, let's see the key numbers that they put out for Base was $2.5 billion in TVL, 2x the growth on new contracts deployed quarter over quarter. Up 55% increase, uh, in Base transactions quarter over quarter. I don't know if they put the revenue in there.

Other transaction revenue was $34 million in Q3, down 35% quarter over quarter, primarily driven by lower Base sequencer fee revenue. The number of transactions on Base increased 55% quarter over quarter as users and developers took advantage of lower fees. Medium fees in Q3 were less than, uh, $0.01. Um, so that's a cent. We believe that more developers would choose to build their products on Base as the cost to transact becomes lower. This quarter we saw developer engagement continue to increase and the number of new contracts deployed more than doubled from Q2. So that was their commentary on Base. Subscription revenues, which is something that is also interesting, has been going, uh, you know, becoming a non-trivial component as well. That was, uh, came in at $556 million. Down 7% quarter over quarter. They were pleased with the results even though it was slightly down. Um, what else? Uh, stablecoin revenue, which is also pretty substantial, $247 million, up 3% quarter over quarter. This is something that we, you know, would be interesting to see. We've talked about extensively during the pod, you know, every exchange is going to launch a stablecoin, every perhaps application, you know, even in the episode with Zach yesterday is going to launch their stablecoin. We're What does that do to USDC and their stablecoin revenue for Coinbase? Right. They talk about here primarily so stablecoin revenue $247 million, up 3%. The primary drivers of growth were higher average USDC on-platform balances. That's interesting. Grew that grew 7% quarter over quarter, $6.6 billion in stablecoin balances on the platform. So, you know, potentially that money flows into crypto, you know, as more risk-on appetite post-election kind of thing. Be interesting to track how that 6.6% evolves over time. Higher average USDC market cap grew 5% quarter over quarter. That's also interesting. Um, those drivers were partially offset by lower effective interest rate, so that makes sense. They're rate cuts, so, um, we understand that. Um, so at the end of Q3, they had $8.1 billion in on-platform USDC balances. That is $8.1 billion on the platform. That's pretty good. USDC market cap reached $36 billion, the highest total since early 2023. Year to date, USDC has been the fastest growing major USD stablecoin. Our platform incentives combined with deeper integration of USDC across our products has been contributors to both market cap and on-platform balance growth.

All right. Can I give you my take on all this, Santi? I think everybody is— Yeah, but go ahead.

No, do it. I'm going to read through it and just give the skinny to people. But please give us your take.

I mean, I think everybody's mid-curving the hell out of this. Everybody— this whole Coinbase earnings call is overblown. The people don't trade in the summer. People don't— people don't trade in the summer. And people— I mean, people don't trade when the market's just in this like consolidating period. So you combine the summer with like this kind of crypto choppiness.

They, they also—

Coinbase also hasn't had many memes on the platform like this is a— this is just a really overblown earnings call. I think Q1, I think, I think next year Coinbase is going to have a monster year. When you think about like where Coinbase sits in relation to the entire market, I mean, if you're bullish crypto, you got to be bullish Coinbase right now. It feels— what's the market cap? Market cap is $50-ish, I want to say. Yeah. Okay. It's sitting exactly at $51 today. Yeah. You're looking at a $50 billion market cap for the best public company and the fastest— they're two of the fastest growing industries in the world, AI and crypto, and Coinbase is the leading company. It's just— I mean, I'm biased. I own Coinbase. I'm biased, but like, it just feels extremely cheap. And then, I mean, congrats to Jesse and the whole Base team. Like, they had insane growth. Easily the— I'd call them the winning L2 of the year so far. Yeah, I just think, I just think they've had like, I don't know, feels, feels like a very mid-curve take to be selling Coinbase right here.

And the markets always play the short-term game. A couple more interesting salient points from the earnings call. Stablecoin volume, this is USDC and all combined, reached $22 trillion year to date. More than doubling year over year. Okay. We talked about USDC market cap also growing 11%, fastest growing USD stablecoin. Another interesting thing, obviously Coinbase rolled out CBBTC. That will also be interesting to track as more activity in the Bitcoin network, particularly in DeFi and other on-chain applications grows. There's a whole host of L2 sidechains that are, you know, picking up steam from Babylon to Arch and a few others we've had on the pod. Um, also probably capitalizing on, uh, WBTC's just kind of what I would call fumble. Uh, your point around Base is correct. Base is now the number one L2 in both transactions and total TVL. Uh, that grew 55% quarter over quarter, surpassing all other L2s and 4 times higher than Ethereum. That's the L1 over the last 30 days. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, ultimately, I think people are just coy and waiting for the election result. And litigation is ongoing, yes, you know, you mean like, so that, that continues to be a sticking point. But encouragingly, you know, the, the, the analysts keep it at neutral, and I think this tells you the market sentiment towards crypto. Maybe this is a good transition into ETF flows because that's also been, uh, something people have been paying attention. There was a lot of ETF flows yesterday. It's a tale of two cities, right? You have Bitcoin having record inflows Ethereum basically getting zero. So, uh, there's also filings by Cayman Capital and a few other folks, I mean, on the Solana ETF. Uh, Bitwise, I think, and great— I believe it was Bitwise continues to have, um, you know, just changes to their registrations on other ETF products like with Ripple and a few others. Like, this is over the last couple weeks that I've just observed. So yeah, um, we'll see. All eyes on the election. I think the market both with Coinbase and just generally is going to do much. There might be some vol, but I think people just on the sidelines, like, yeah, constantly waiting.

By the way, I mean, great point on the ETFs. If people miss this, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF had its largest ever inflow day in history yesterday, $875 million in a single day, uh, which means the Bitcoin ETFs took in more over the past 2 days, Tuesday and Wednesday, than the gold ETF took in during its entire first year. So yeah, just tough not to be excited about this going into the election.

MicroStrategy announced also some purchases.

Yeah, they announced— oh God, what was it? I think Saylor announced plans to buy $42 billion worth of Bitcoin over the next 3 years. For context, $42 billion is about double the amount that all of the ETFs have brought in so far since launch. Um, let me fact-check myself on that. Yeah, raising $42 billion to buy, yeah, more Bitcoin. Um, so yeah, $42 billion over the next 3 years.

JP Morgan update on the Coinbase, very timely. Thank you, uh, Kenneth, uh, Worthington, who was the analyst over there. They kept their price target the same.

Kenneth Worthington. Yeah, Kenneth Worthington. That is just a Chad analyst name if I've ever heard it.

Their, their summary was Q3 2024 results fall short of expectations, but Coin continues to execute on its longer-term plan. Potentially more friendly regulatory environment on the horizon. That'll be nice.

SKALE is the blockchain that is simply built different. Let's face it, other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier. SKALE has solved this problem with a gas-free, scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees. SKALE was awarded the most active gaming chain in 2023 by CoinGecko and hosts 5 of the top 25 games on DappRadar. You should definitely check out SKALE. I was using it the other day. It really is incredible to use. That's SKALE spelled with a K. Hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale.space/ecosystem to get started today. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. I wanted to quickly talk about Cronos zkEVM, a next-generation zero-knowledge layer-2 blockchain network focused on scalability, security, and innovation. Secured by Ethereum, it further expands the Cronos ecosystem using zkSync tech. Cronos zkEVM has launched its Pioneer Program, offering early users loyalty points for engaging with Cronos zkEVM and its dApps. Join the first quest by depositing CRO in the Cronos zkEVM bridge to receive zkCRO and loyalty points at mainnet launch. And that's not all. In addition to receiving zkCRO and loyalty points, you could also win part of a $30,000 zkCRO giveaway by depositing in the bridge. The more you deposit, the better your chances of winning. Visit zkEVM.chronos.org/bridge for more info. Now let's get back to today's show. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Just wanted to remind you about the Aggregation Summit going down this, uh, November 10th to 11th in Bangkok, Thailand. This is a can't-miss 2-day event with some of crypto's top builders, researchers, and leaders discussing the fragmented ecosystem of today. And how aggregation can bring the industry together. Ag Summit was designed by Polygon Labs to be a space where ideas are discussed in collaborative, creative formats, from spicy fireside chats to even game shows. You get to experience a wide array of events at this year's inaugural Ag Summit. Head on over to aglayer.dev to book your tickets or join the mainstage livestream on the 11th of November. Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stacks and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. These wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens, which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Choose the most trusted name in hardware wallets Take control of your digital security today at Ledger.com or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check out their latest wallets.

Let's talk election because I feel like we've done a pretty good job of not talking about the election so far on the roundup. But there's a, there's a— so here, first, let's pull up Polymarket. Let's see where the, the odds are sitting.

All right, uh, 66 for Trump last check, Kamala 30-something, 33.

65 versus 35. Um, so, uh, Fortune did a big piece. Um, who is the— Leo Schwartz at Fortune wrote this piece, exclusive election betting site, uh, Polymarket gives Trump a 67% chance of winning. But is rife with fake wash trading, researchers say. The researchers in this case were Chaos Labs, who I know you're an investor in. They run by Omar. They do great work. And then Inca Digital. So Chaos— I'll read a snippet of this. Chaos Labs— separate analysis by both firms said, said that there was a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of the trading volume on Polymarket's presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a significant portion of the volume on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading. What are your thoughts on this, on this report, on this thing?

I'll caveat and preface that I'm both an investor in Chaos Labs and I led one of the earliest rounds in Polymarket, and Parafi is one of, if not the largest holder of Polymarket, and I have vested interest in both. So that is bias and disclosures out of the way. There's two, two arguments. One is people in crypto are more inclined and kind of are expressing their views not rationally, but just their desire, so to speak, for Trump to win. He's, you know, but the other counterargument to that is, well, but they're also rational investors, like they're not going to lose money. And there's an arbitrage potential opportunity of, you know, the market's off, right? So I'm not, I'm not really sure how to explain it. Like, there is a big delta between these markets. You would think that there shouldn't. And this delta, as I understood it, like it was very tight, tightly correlated, like the spread between predicted Robinhood, some of the others and Polymarket was not far off, but it has just recently really blown out of proportion.

First of all, I love the— that reporters are starting to work more with like the Chaos Labs and these data providers. I think that's a really cool thing. I really didn't like the framing of this article because the title says Polymarket gives Trump a 67% chance of winning. So it's about these odds, but is rife with fake wash trading. So what you're doing there is you're saying the wash trading is making the odds skewed and there's a really— but that's not actually how wash trading works. Wash trading shouldn't impact prices very much, right? Wash trading can create false market perceptions, like the volumes can be wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean price manipulation. So I think I just, yeah, I don't like saying that what this is— the title implies that wash trading has created price manipulation leading to Trump having this 67% chance of winning on Polymarket. Later in the article, down the article, the author acknowledges that you know, that's not how wash trading works. It doesn't actually change the— usually it doesn't manipulate the price or the odds here. But again, like, I don't think anyone's reading this article. It's behind a paywall. You have to pay for Fortune. Like, nobody read this article, so they just see the headline.

A lot of these are woke, you know, publications. So New York Times, Fortune, they all skew, you know, Democrat, I believe.

So I like the premise of doing investigative journalism. I like— I mean, I will always support someone doing investigative journalism and it's a really hard business model. And we're, we're in that, we're in the same business, right? But like, I just really don't like trying to discredit something like this on a false premise. And what's here, what's actually happening is here's what's actually happening. Polymarket's definitely, or probably, I know nothing. I'm sure you know something and can't say, say, but like Polymarket will probably launch a token. And just like anything that is going to launch a token, there's all these farmers who come in and there's no fees on Polymarket. So what do you do when there's no fees and a future token coming? You, you, you wash volume, right? Just like you would on any DEX or crypto exchange or whatever. You just wash a bunch of volume to rack up user activity to then get a token. So that's what's happening here.

It's not—

what they're quietly doing is implying that there's like fake volume coming in to move the odds. That is not what's happening. There's just airdrop farmers coming in and washing a bunch of volume. Yeah.

So, so Omar, he's supposed to join, he'll join next week, but I'm reading his tweet thread, right? There's a couple of observations that he makes that I think are just worthy to present without commentary. So their— the Trump Yes tokens have traded $0.01 to $0.10 higher in Polymarket than similar tokens on Kalshi, a US-only prediction market that recently received regulatory approval. So it's really on August 17th that this spread really blew out. He posted this 6 days ago, by the way, if you want to show it on the screen. There it is. There it is. Thanks. Yeah, that one. So what the data shows, according to them, A single person on August 17th bet across 4 distinct accounts, Fred, you know, in Polymarket, and began accumulating a massive Trump Yes stake. That day, this particular trader's activity over these 4 accounts accounted for 28% of the market's total volume on Polymarket. He purchased roughly $700K of Trump Yes net shares. There was also a piece on the New York Times talked about this. So this single 4-trader cluster accounted for 28% of the polling market's activity.

Uh, and that's, that's one, that's one trader's behind all 4 of those.

One trader's— I think he's French. One trader account for, you know, 28%. So, um, it really was 4 of these days were concentrated around mid-August. So when polling markets implied Trump odds begun diverging significantly from the polling-based Census. Um, so of course this moves the market in Polymarket, we know that. Um, so Polymarket's current 1-cent market depth, uh, that is the size of an order needed to move the market price by 1 cent, is currently around $100K. I think that's interesting. So it's a large market, but the market depth is particularly, you know, in this case he's making the argument it's not as, as kind of robust. Um, so, and it was quite shallow in August. Okay, um, this particular trader since August has bought or sold more than 100K size with a single transaction on 60 different occasions. He also mentioned that again and again. Omar, why are you repeating yourself? Making a fool here. Um, so what's the gap? He— this is a TL;DR. Um, the impact of a whale trader, Omar argues, cannot be understated. If one entity represents 25% of the total market and at times 20% of the the daily volume, it will have an outside influence. And further, you know, the illiquidity of these markets, you know, can move the price. However, you know, this is probably the most important point. He says there's no trivial way to arbitrage this spread, which is a point I made earlier. Under Koshi's current fee structure, price takers in the election market pay a fee of $0.02 per transaction. So that potentially is a, you know, gets in the way of arbitraging this. And furthermore, Polymarket is only available in theory to non-US users, where Kalshi is only available in theory and practice to US users. So that might account for the kind of the ability to, I guess, get in the way of like arbitraging this out. And then last, Matt Levine also wrote about this. Any would-be arbitrage runs the added risk of an adverse market resolution if a candidate disputes the election result. And that is probably the most important. So in summary, and I don't know how much of this explains it because your pointer on wash trading doesn't explain the difference. The difference of the spread might be just a particular preference of a user, non-US versus US. And if the spreads are that wide between these markets, in theory, in an efficient market, that should be arbitraged out. But because of this, two things. One, US users versus non-US users, different people can access the platform. The fees to come in and out of this are mitigators. And the third risk of— think of before in the prior election, Polymarket had an issue because obviously the election result was contested and the resolution of that market was controversial. And so if you want to arbitrage these markets, you might not— it makes you think twice is what I'm trying to say. So I don't think— your point is a really good one. Wash trading doesn't explain the spread. The lack of being able to arbitrage that spread for these 3 reasons I just outlined that Omar and Matt Levine talk about would explain the spread. It's a material spread. So anyways, um, I don't— that's really it. I don't have a point of view here.

Cool. By next Roundup, there'll be a president, so we'll see. Uh, gonna be a crazy week.

Have you voted? No, I still haven't voted yet.

Why not?

Because I'm lazy. Goddamn, go and vote. So you are, um, what I consider pretty politically well-versed. I know we don't like to talk about politics in the podcast. Uh, give me your 2 to 3 or longer view on the election to summarize it all for people that are, you know, been living under a rock. What are you paying attention to? What are— what do you think the results are going to be? Just give me all. I'm putting—

I mean, I have no idea. I have no idea. I think it's crypto people pay really close attention to Polymarket, like we just spent 15 minutes on a podcast talking about it. The 65% Trump versus 35% Kamala makes it feel like Trump is obviously going to win. I think it's going to be ridiculously close. And then what's going to happen is Like, I think it's literally a toss-up. And then I think what ends up happening is— but I mean, both, both sides are already prepping for an all-out war to contest the election. So this thing's not like— it's— I think there's an idea that the market is waiting for the election to calm down and to get some certainty and then things rip. And I think we— I don't think that could happen. I don't think that'll happen until maybe January, maybe even into February, because November and December, it's— there could be even more uncertainty then than there is today. Um, I don't know if it'll be that drastic, but like, I think it's going to be— we'll, we, we'll never see— we've never seen a, a contested election like we have seen for— than we will see for this one. So that's the first thing that I think I'm kind of prepping for mentally that I don't think people are thinking too much about. Um, and I think I mean, I know both sides are going to do that, right? If Kamala wins, Trump's team, their Republicans are doing an all-out war contesting the election and same vice versa. So that's going to— I mean, that's going to get pretty messy. And I think that won't bring the market certainty that people are expecting. That's one thing. On the, on the like next couple of days, I mean, it's basically just people have mostly made up their minds. I mean, there's very few undecided voters anymore. Now the important thing is getting people to the polls. For both sides. So if you— yourself— getting me to the polls— no, I'll vote. I was— I was—

you don't strike me as a non-voter.

Yeah, I just vote. The interesting thing about that is there's two extremely different campaign teams. So usually in politics you have like basically a carbon copy of the operation and the team. On both sides. Just one is, you know, red and one is blue. It's like blue team versus red team right now. Trump, Trump's team, if you look at the campaign team, is extremely different than Kamala's team. Oh yeah. Like in their operations and who they've hired. And I mean, so he's trolling, he's like in a garbage truck because like Biden called him garbage. Like, right. So Trump's strategy right now is like, you know, yeah, McDonald's, the garbage truck stuff, these huge rallies. And I think there's actually probably more people who are interested. I mean, there's a lot— he's done a great job of getting people interested. He doesn't really have the ground game that Harris's campaign has, like, like Harris in the key states, like they are on the ground. They know they are. They have years of experience of how to get people to the polls, I will say. So it'll be interesting to see if like, yes, Trump has gotten a lot of people very interested in Trump. Can he actually Like, you can have a 22-year-old or, you know, or an 80-year-old who loves Trump but doesn't get off their ass to go vote. So it's really important that both sides right now are getting people, their people, to the polls, not just, hey, I'm a Trump guy, or hey, I'm a, I'm a Kamala guy.

Well, if you listen to, um, Elon Musk's, uh, speech, uh, uh, the, the Trump rally in New York, Madison Square Garden, which is super electric. I saw some clips. He— his point was go and vote, like get out and vote and vote early, um, and let this be a landslide result. Um, so I mean, I think like the, the weight and gravitas of Musk, I think, is very important. How— to your point, how much of that translates into people getting to vote, it is just a— to your point around friction and inertia, it is just a game to get people to vote. Trump's— Trump's— Trump is tweeting at Mert. I mean, I never thought I'd see that. Uh, Mert, congrats. He, I think, ratioed Trump too. Pretty, pretty amazing. Look, I mean, we talked about this before, um, uh, the swing states historically have been tight, like less than 100,000, uh, 150,000, like difference in these, uh, in the outcome. Best believe that there are at least 100,000 people in some of these states that love crypto. And, you know, imagine the headline. That would be probably the most bullish headline for this industry. Imagine the outcome of the result comes down to swing states, very tight margin, 100K voters, and these voters, most of them are pro-crypto, and they just identified more with Trump because he's just been very clear and pro-crypto. And if— imagine the headline like Trump wins key constituent base, the crypto, both PAC from a fundraising standpoint, but also more importantly, younger voters like Obama won the younger crowd, won the immigrant crowd back in the day. Right. And that was the headline. So younger people, you know, he really did that grassroots campaign. His— I think that was probably the Democrats who are going to do a better job of that. But imagine if this election is won because of the crypto voter. That, I think, unequivocally just places crypto— it sets an immense precedent of how important crypto is that has captured the zeitgeist of a generation. It sets— I mean, that, that would be— yeah, that would be pretty amazing if you ask me.

If you ask me. Too bad you can't vote.

Um, well, you know, I will say I'm wearing, um, I am in the US, so I don't know if people can see, but I'm wearing an American flag, baby.

Can you see it? Yeah, I can see it. I wanted to be in the US, not just for the marathon, but I want to be here.

Uh, I think it's gonna be a historic election.

Yeah, I'm really excited about it. Nice, nice. Um, there's a trash article in The Atlantic Here, I'll show you. Shocker. The Atlantic posted "The Worst of Crypto Is Yet to Come" and made the argument that the only reason that crypto has come back over the last 2 years is not because anyone built their way out of a bear market with all odds stacked against us, but because we've spent a lot of money on super PACs. And it's just like this. I mean, it's just You know, it's just more reasons. I don't know why this stuff still bothers me. I'm like, what a stupid article.

Well, I canceled my subscription to The Atlantic a couple years ago. Needless to say, there you go.

Um, all right, last thing I want to talk about is the Celestia unlocks. So, um, there were big Celestia unlocks yesterday or Tuesday. Um, There was about a billion— oh man, I think I'm going to get this right. Yeah, as 180 million TIA hit the market, which is roughly, you know, at the time was like $900 million.

So Celestia was hovering above $5-ish or $5. So that's—

yeah, no, higher. $6. It was at $6 a week ago. Sorry. Yeah, $6. So it's down about 25%. Yeah. So it was a huge unlock. About $1 billion of TIA unlocked represents about 80% of the current supply got unlocked this week. Funding rates on TIA were crazy negative in the past couple of weeks. And I mean, it's actually positive today if you look at CoinGlass. I guess that's what VCs closing out their perp shorts as they, as they unlock them. But yeah, I'm just curious how you like when you look at this big of an unlock hitting the market, TIA is down from $6 down to $4.70. To me, I'm like, this is kind of what I've been talking about for a little while, which is I think some of these unlocks are overblown like that. Yes, that's down, you know, 20%, 25%, but like it feels a little It feels like the market absorbed it better than people thought it was going to absorb it. But I'm curious how you— although I guess maybe the counterargument is this is, this is the real chart. It's really down from— look at Arbitrum. Yeah. I mean, look, I—

yeah, it's down quite a bit.

Down from $20 down to $4.70. There are—

I think they did some— one of the things that I was tracking was secondary market activity and transactions for TIA. There was some, a lot of movement there over the last 6 months. There are some, I think, treasury transact— there's some like treasury diversification transactions at higher than the current spot, and even before the unlock, like $6. I think there was, there was some movement there, which likely, you know, to your point around it wasn't as bad as you would have thought. I think a lot of it is just secondary market healthy secondary market allowed for some of these orderly transactions before the unlock. And I think these shares are not— potentially VCs that are weighing the money of de-risk, and so that creates a more orderly unlock, I'd say. It's still down quite a bit. Arbitrum had to— we'll see. I think it's too early to tell. I wouldn't be shocked if this goes down to $3. I would also you know, because as people continue to sell and, you know, there's this idea of like, all right, I'm not going to sell maybe in the first week, but I'm just going to continue to drip out. And this is constant sell pressure. I don't know. You could also argue that the market has been soft for, you know, a lot of these projects. It's, it's really much a Bitcoin-Solana meme game. Ether's flat. And also, you know, you can talk about specific idiosyncratic things about Celestia, right? You know, it's, uh, you look at like DA revenue, it's not much. So is this, you know, do these things trade on fundamentals or not? And I mean, certainly I think though that that's something that I'm observing, you know, like what's the DA revenue like? Yeah, I understand the modularity thesis, it's important. We've talked about it, we've had Nick White on the podcast, we've talked, we've talked about it. The question is, yeah, block— like, go up to that, you have your dashboard, which is really good here. Total block fees are $51,000, like, you know, There's a mass amount of data. It's important. There's not much revenue. So it makes you wonder what's the viability of this project. At some point, fundamentals, I believe, do matter. And you compare that against Maker, vastly different story. Celestia's trading at a higher value now.

Let me take the counterargument. Counterargument is that— all right, so if you look at the Blockworks Research Celestia dashboard, you can see Celestia data posted to the blobs. By namespace. So you can see like things like, you know, Manta and Lyra and Eclipse and B3 and things like that. I mean, that chart is up and to the right. Here's the, I think, bull case for Celestia. The market still doesn't trade on fundamentals. No one's valuing this thing on a cash flow basis or a, you know, a multiple of revenue. Uh, there's big volatility in the short term because there's these obviously unlocks. The bull case is probably, uh, blob space demand is on fire. It's on the rise. L2s are launching. You know, every day it feels like modular stack is expanding and Celestia is basically positioned themselves as the go-to DA layer.

Got to imagine it's a go-to DA layer, but there's no value capture. Okay. But like, if you're like, compare that, compare that to Jito's revenue, man. Like, pull up Jito's fucking revenue record. Like, you mean, like, again, like, maybe it's not the right comparison, but like, I definitely, you know, I mean, like, Solana just continues to post. And capture a lot of this MEV and transaction fees and tips. Like, I don't know, like, I never want to invest in some— look, none of this is investment advice, but you ask me, I don't want to touch something that doesn't capture and does fundamental value. I just— I'm sorry, but I don't feel comfortable owning it in size in my portfolio. Chris, if you're listening, from Placeholder, I know he's uber bullish Celestia, uh, and there's others that are not. We can have a pod. I think it'd be a great discussion. I do want fundamentally understand why this thing is worth how much.

Let's get, uh, let's get— let's— we should do a pod with Nick and Chris.

All right, well, let's do just napkin math. Spare me a minute. I'm gonna pull up FDVs for these projects, and I know people are going to say, why are you looking at FDV? Well, sorry folks, this is how my brain thinks. So if you don't like it, close down the tab now and stop listening.

Jito. Here, I've got, I've got it right here.

Jito market cap $300 million. FDV, $2.3 billion. Okay, $2.3 billion. Celestia, FDV, $5 billion. All right, almost over a 2x discrepancy in fully diluted val. To be fair, Celestia has 30% of float. Jito has less. Jito has 13% float. Okay, all right, fair point. But still, 2x different. But you don't mean 2x difference and fully diluted. Jito's making vastly more money than Celeste.

I get that, I get that. Maker, lastly. No, I—

okay, I'll stop talking. Maker. No, you got me. This is black alone coffee, by the way, ladies and gentlemen. Locked in. Maker, Maker, billion dollar market cap. Vance from Framework, if you're listening, you should come talk about Maker. Fully diluted val, $1.1 billion, 97% float. All right. Maker is making how much money here?

Financials monthly, last month, $230 million.

Well, Maker makes in a day what Celestia makes in a year, so to speak, kind of thing. Or more. Like, I don't know, ladies and gentlemen, but I don't want to own something in my book that has that is trading at $5 billion and is making less money than, you know, I don't know.

All right. Let me just take the counter and then we'll have— we'll wrap this up and we'll have Nick and Chris to give us the uber bull case for Celestia, which is Celestia is the go-to layer right now. Token's been whacked because of these unlocks. The unlocks just happened. L2s are launching every single day. Blobspace demand is on the rise. ETH blobs are just starting to see like early price discovery. The blobs are probably going to get more and more expensive as more L2s come online. And if I am Celestia, I'm thinking about— you've got your kind of modular stack. You got to eventually expand outside of just DA and give people the ability to launch like, yeah, to kind of compete with the OP stacks and Initias and you know, Avalanche L1s and ZK Elastic Chains and Arbitrum Orbits of the world. So that's probably where I would guess Celestia goes. So Celestia announces maybe that they are competing with the OP Stack. Like, I don't know, that's, that's the counter.

Sounds, sounds a lot like I need to believe many things to happen and basically priced to fucking perfection. I don't know, man. I don't need to believe many things for for Solana activity to continue to, you know, perform and it being the most, you know, friendly chain and integrated. And, you know, I mean, like, sounds like a Jenga tower of assumptions, you know. Celeste has to do this and then maybe, maybe they'll do it.

Nick, Nick, Nick, please come on.

Great tech. Again, there could be great tech, but the value accrual may not be there. There's plenty of examples of that. Now, maybe in the future Certainly possible. If it's great tech, it's embedded, they have the possibility to then, you know, capture more value in different ways. You know, a lot of companies like Uber had this issue. And I'm cognizant of that. And it takes years to turn a profit. It's a good product. Eventually, you have the optionality. If you're really embedded, if every L2 is using you, then presumably you can, you're in a position of strength, and you can lean into that to make more money. But currently it's not making money. For that reason, I would be cautious.

That's all I'm saying. Uh, all right. Last thing on this note, and then I have one more thing to share, is, uh, our friend Simon over at Moonrock Capital posted this note on Scroll. So I know you're an investor in Scroll, so I don't know how much you can talk about it, but Simon said, I really don't want to hate on Scroll, but to me it was a textbook example of a launch using an outdated playbook that doesn't work anymore. VC raised at an inflated valuation. Pointless airdrop farming meta, and the worst is Binance listing for 5.5% of the supply. That's about $70 million at least flushed down the toilet. Sexes are the only winner. Again, investors pissed, community pissed, retail wrecked. The one thing that they didn't focus on was the only real North Star metric an ecosystem should have: actual apps on top that people genuinely want to use, creating lasting value. It's unfortunate, but it was all too predictable that this approach would backfire. I don't need you to comment on Scroll because I know you're an investor there, but I would just—

I would challenge the last point though, that the only real north star— his point that they weren't focused on that, I would completely like challenge. I think Simon, uh, go and talk to the Scroll team. I think you'd be generally surprised, uh, of the quality of the builders there. I think they're, um, they've done a very proactive effort and less playing the point meta game. I'll just say that the Binance 5% fee we talked about Yeah, I think my point, my opinion on that is fairly clear. And it's just a— I don't think it's a Scroll problem. It's an industry problem, right? I mean, the fact that they have to give 5.5%.

Yeah, Binance is just hosing people right now. But it's bonkers.

And by the way, like, I don't have a sense of like this 5%. Is it fair or not? But Sandy had a post about that and she explained the reasoning.

But I mean, it's— yeah, so it's not Scroll. It's not a Scroll thing. It's a— everyone is being forced to give between like 2 to 8%. Of their tokens. Yeah, of their token supply to Binance right now. It is highway robbery. So I don't know, that's why we talk about these ICOs coming back. Like, that's behind my excitement about these ICOs coming back.

Last point I'll make, which every time we talk about regulation is what's the intent of the law and who's getting hurt. And I think you could argue that in the current state of affairs, people are getting hurt far more than in a world world of ICOs where— yeah. All right.

To wrap it up, I want to just shout out the Blockchain Association just launched this dashboard. It's the Regulation Enforcement Dashboard. It tracks the SEC's anti-crypto crusade. They update it in real time. Um, wow. Maybe not. I don't know how they would do this in real time. Self-reported data. The figure updates as legal proceedings continue. It shows the amount spent in defensive litigation, $426 million. The number of SEC enforcement actions brought against crypto under Gensler, 104. Uh, and it's just a good— it's a good dashboard. And it shows this big report about, um, uh, like how they think about voter perception on SEC enforcement. So it's timely with the election and talking about regulation and Yeah, just shout out to the Blockchain Association doing good work.

All right, folks. Well, thanks for listening. Go out and vote. If you're in the US, you're able to vote and eligible, please go and vote. It's important. Jano, that includes you.

I don't miss voting. I always vote.

I know, I know, I know. Anyways. And again, if you're running the marathon, drop us a comment, drop your time, your corral, what have you. And maybe we'll love to see some of you folks out there running. Or on the sidelines. If, if you do see me, please cheer me on because I will be struggling. Struggling.

Do you have your— struggling, struggling. Do you have your bib number?

I do, I do. My bib number, people can track me, I guess. No pressure. My bib number is 4851. Let's go. 4851.

So there's an app that you can download, right?

Yeah, there's a, there's an app you can download. Results are online so people can comment. And I don't have a, I don't have a time in mind. I'm just going to go out there and have fun.

Nice. I'm going to read a post that I wrote to wrap this up. I wrote this 4 years ago, sent this email to the company. And I think it's relevant today. All right. I wrote, it's time to vote. September 2020. I said, whatever your politics, we can agree that the upcoming election is critical. I said, team, voting in the US is hard. There are 50 states with 50 different systems. Nearly every other modern democracy holds elections on weekends or makes Election Day a national holiday. But not here in America. Let's look at what that does to voting. Just over 36% of eligible voters showed up to the 2014 midterms. The lowest turnout in 72 years. The 56% participation rate in 2016 puts us 26th among 32 developed nations in voter turnout. The importance of the upcoming election can't be overstated. We'd like to do everything in our power to encourage you to vote. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3rd. If you plan on voting in person, take as much time as you need, uh, before November 3rd. There are a few actions you can take. Check your voter registration here. If you're not registered to vote, register here. Etc., etc. Whatever your politics, we can all agree this upcoming election is critical. So just a little closing.

Go complain. You can't complain if you don't vote. And the bedrock of any democracy is civic participation. And so go out and vote. Great.

Cool. Cheers, folks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. We'll report back with a new president.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for watching today's episode. Just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor, Scale. SKALE really is one of the best chain experiences out there today, and I've used so many different chains. There's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases. Hit the link in the show notes to explore the SKALE ecosystem.