ROLLUP: Crypto’s Nasdaq Problem | The CLARITY Act | Saylor Selling? | ETH L1 Scaling

**Ryan** (0:04)
Bankless Nation is the first week of May. We've got another all-time high week with the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, dragging Bitcoin, Ether and the rest of crypto up with it. I think the question though is with all the corporate earnings, with all the stocks at all-time high is are things getting a little too frothy out there? And I think the price of crypto might depend on the answer to that question.

**David Hoffman** (0:26)
Not just that, though, but also the Clarity Act got over a huge hurdle this week, which also caused a bump in the crypto markets. The fight's not quite over yet. There are still some hurdles that we need to get over. What is left to get Clarity signed by the new date of July 4th?

**Ryan** (0:41)
It's also layoff season. It seems like a big announcement from Coinbase, laying off 14% of its staff. By the same time, we've got fundraise season, two multi-billion-dollar VC raises deployed directly into crypto. What's the counter-ballast here?
What's going to outweigh the other? Also, David, Michael Saylor, is he selling? Did he say that?

**David Hoffman** (1:02)
Speaking of raising funds.

**Ryan** (1:04)
Yeah.
We also have an update on the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, the US. Strategic Reserve, and David, Ethereum Layer 1 It might be back, David. And that's a thing that you wanted to happen. You were talking about scaling the L1.

**David Hoffman** (1:16)
I do want the Layer 1 to come back.

**Ryan** (1:18)
It looks like it's scaling. There was a meeting of the devs in the Arctic Circle. This is real, actually. And out of that comes more ETH scaling. We'll talk about all that and more. But first, let's get to crypto prices on the week. They've been okay, a little bit down at the time of recording. What are we looking at?

**David Hoffman** (1:36)
Yeah, the morning of recording, but really the week was pretty good for Bitcoin, up 4.5% this week. We cleared $80,000 yesterday with confidence. We got up to like $82,000 at the peak yesterday.
A little bit below that at the time of recording, but still overall a good week. ETH up 1.2% on the week, a little bit more of a modest week for ETH. Like Ryan said, the markets are kind of like coming back a little bit off of its euphoric highs yesterday. If you were on Twitter yesterday, there was just green euphoria everywhere.

**Ryan** (2:05)
Oh really, on your timeline?

**David Hoffman** (2:06)
In the trad market, not in the crypto. In trad markets, in trad markets, yeah.

**Ryan** (2:10)
Well, I do think trad markets are really the story here.
This chart was really the chart of the week for me. This came from the DeFi report, Michael Nadeau, and he points out that 2026 is the most correlated Bitcoin has ever been to the NASDAQ. This is correlation by year. You're seeing a chart here. So we are more correlated right now with the NASDAQ on Bitcoin price than we ever have been.

**David Hoffman** (2:36)
I have a question for how this chart works. If the NASDAQ goes up 1% and Bitcoin only goes up by like a quarter of a percent, but that relationship is consistent, is that still strong correlation or is it less correlation if Bitcoin is going up any number that's different than how much the NASDAQ went up by? Does that make sense?

**Ryan** (2:57)
No, I'm not sure I understand your question, but correlation means that obviously Bitcoin price goes up or down related in a correlated way. Yeah. In this case, the correlation is coefficient is.

**David Hoffman** (3:10)
I guess my question is like, if the magnitudes are different, because the NASDAQ is going up more aggressively than Bitcoin is, but they are still both going up.

**Ryan** (3:18)
Yeah, this chart doesn't measure that. It doesn't measure the magnitude. But it does say when stocks go up, when NASDAQ goes up, Bitcoin follows.

**David Hoffman** (3:27)
That is confidently happening.

**Ryan** (3:28)
Yes. And by the way, 2024, the correlation coefficient was 0.1, and now it's 0.48. So this basically means that our destiny is in the stock market's hands right now.

**David Hoffman** (3:41)
Does this kind of mean that we're kind of like cucked by AI?

**Ryan** (3:44)
A little bit. It feels like buying Bitcoin right now feels like, at least in 2026, a worse play on the NASDAQ at this moment in time. It's not going to stay like that, but that's what the regime... That's the regime, Ryan, unfortunately.

**David Hoffman** (3:56)
You're getting price exposure to the NASDAQ, but you're not getting as much as returns of the NASDAQ.