Everybody talks about how this technology is going to free us from intermediaries. Come on, that's not an honest statement. All that this technology is doing is creating new intermediaries.I have to say that a lot of the intermediaries that have been created in crypto are even more centralized than the ones that they're talking about. And I'm not going to get into names. There's no point.That being said, the reason why I really like this technology is that it removes the barriers and the moes around competi ...

We believe that the laws of physics do not agree that you can run all of the world financial services on a single ledger. And what I mean by that is when you think about Ethereum, Salana, and some of these other ledgers, effectively all transactions go through a single consensus mechanism. And as a result of that, it really forces the design to do a few things.first of all take a lot of the activity offchain because there's a lot of activity that why would I run it through the most expensive database in the ...

The second you have the world real world um unfortunately you open yourself to censorship resistance by the issuer doesn't matter that you put it on a decentralized infrastructure and Ryan David do you guys use stable coins. >> Yeah, of course >> you do. Cool.Okay. Well, the issuers of those stable coins, I'm pretty confident have in the smart contract a feature that allows them either to freeze your stable coins or to in some cases even burn them out of your wallet. So what does it matter that it runs on p ...

Poly market of the week segment. Ryan, we're going to be doing this every single week. We're going to pull out a market that we find interesting that's relevant to this week.This Poly Market of the Week this week is will Infinex public sale have a certain level of total commitments into it. Ryan, are you paying attention to the FUD around Infinex on Twitter this week. >> A little bit, but not as much as maybe I should be.What's happening. I don't [music] know if you need to be because the story around the F ...

Bankless Nation, it is the second week of January, the first week I've been back. It's time for the Bankless Weekly rollup. We got a lot going on.A prediction market trader placing a large bet on Maduro's capture 4 hours ahead of his actual capture and a bill from Congressman Richie Torres saying, "Uh, I don't like this. This looks like insider trading inside the government. What is going on?" We'll talk about that. I think that's going to be a reoccurring theme uh for this year as we figure out what to do, ...

The headline is I think it'll be a good year for Ethereum. I think it'll be a bad year for Bitcoin. I think it'll be a quiet year for Salana. And I think it'll be a slog for Hyperlquid.Here's why I think that it's really hard to build one of these ecosystems. I have a pet theory that I don't think that anything is truly genurpose. I think people used to describe Bitcoin as that.Now they think of it as an app chain, which is the money app chain. Um, I think you're increasingly starting to see bifurcation in ...

One of the themes of the year that I would call out is cognitive dissonance. And I think that there are a lot of people who are saying, "Wait a second. This doesn't make sense. The US just did a massive bear hug of crypto. We got genius this year. We've got clarity potentially right around the corner. I thought my bags were supposed to be going up." And I think what's confusing people is because a regulated route is emerging. I think that a lot of this kind of wild west very irrational market is starting to ...

There's an entire handbook from the US Army called money as a weapons system. >> Arab Spring in 2010 that was an an outcome of basically the US inventing social media in 2003 with Facebook and then it culminated and we have Twitter and now we have the overthrow of governments. I wonder if something like that could happen.If there could be a stablecoin style Arab Spring in some country and this causes revolutions, right. It is a perfect example because that could happen. This is established doctrine in milit ...

There is no question that there is a quote unquote desire for ddollarization. The United States ability to use the dollar as the global reserve currency has bestowed upon them this exorbitant privilege, right. And and and it is true.It's it's it's basically global senior and which is the ability to print money for anything you want if you want to get real simple about it. And as a result, that has engendered a number a lot of hate against the United States ability to do this. And because the whole world use ...

Market Performance & Sentiment - Ethereum's performance this cycle may disappoint ETH holders due to a "Bitcoin maxi cycle" and lack of retail interest [1] - Bitcoin topped on apathy, similar to 2019, suggesting a lack of euphoria compared to 2021 or 2017 [2][5] Macroeconomic Factors - Ethereum's performance is heavily influenced by the macro economy, which it cannot control [3] - Macroeconomic uncertainty, such as rising unemployment, negatively impacts Ethereum's performance [4] Future Outlook - A return to looser monetary policy is needed for Ethereum to perform better [5] - A durable improvement in Ethereum's performance is not expected in the first half of 2026 [5] Risk Assessment - Ethereum is a riskier asset compared to stock market index funds [3]