ROLLUP: Is Altcoin Season Here? | Treasury’s Bond War | Robinhood Chain Mania | OpenAI’s Math Controversy

David (0:04)

It's Friday, September 11th and it's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. The AMC CEO declares war on Robinhood tokenized stocks, calling them contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable and vile. Wow, did he really use all of those words?

Vlad, Vlad Tenev from Robinhood simply replies, what's the concern? Spawning a war on Twitter. We got some other news as well. What else are we talking about this week, Ryan?

Ryan (0:33)

Treasury. David, while you were gone, there was some war in the treasury markets and Besant has continued to up the stakes on that war. Now he has tripled the long dated bond buybacks to 6 billion, yet yields are still increasing anyway. We got to discuss that. Also, David, I want to ask you about maybe a potential altcoin season, like a baby altcoin season. We have Zcash, we have Venice, we have Nier. All of these things are up. Robinhood chain is going wild. Some people are asking whether this is altcoin season and whether it's way ahead of schedule and why.

David (1:10)

One of the reasons why VVV, at least of all the tokens, is up big is because OpenAI was caught red handed stealing the work of a million dollar math prize that had gone unsolved for decades. It has been solved and OpenAI is taking credit. Did they actually do the work or was it one of OpenAI's customers doing the work and they merely just crossed the finish line with the work that somebody else did? We're going to talk about all this drama and more. We also got some frame transactions out of the Ethereum landscape. This is account abstraction once again coming online as a discussion. And now people are fighting ETH because if Ethereum does anything, some people will choose to fight ETH about it. And Hunter Biden, the story of the year, launches a meme coin called Laptop. It's the exact movie that you would expect to happen. You don't need to watch it, so we'll just speed run it for you. I know everyone is waiting in a bated breath to talk about the Hunter Biden Laptop, but you're going to have to wait till the end. We're going to start talking about markets. Bitcoin and Ether, the blue chips of the industry, flat on the week.

Meanwhile, the following tokens all hit all time highs. LIDAR, VVV and Zcash all hit all time highs this week. NEAR up 30%, Arbitrum up 40%, which brings Ryan asking the question, are we in an altcoin season?

Is this altcoin season?

SPEAKER_3 (2:34)

Ryan, is this altcoin season?

Ryan (2:35)

That was a hypothetical question. I know the answer to that already, but I want to get your answer to that question. I know the real answer. What do you think? I mean, this doesn't usually happen, or at least that's part of the narrative, right? Bitcoin's supposed to pump first. That's supposed to confirm the early bull. I guess we got a little bit of a pump, right? When you left two weeks ago, where was Bitcoin? It had already jumped to close to 80K, right? When you'd left?

David (3:03)

Bitcoin pumped from like 65,000 up to 77,000 three weeks ago. Okay, okay. And so we have actually, Bitcoin has been ranging between like 76 and 80 to 81 for three weeks now, without actually going in any direction.

Ryan (3:18)

We got to 81K, but we didn't get to the May highs actually, above 82, which is somewhat interesting. So we were higher in May. But anyway, we got a bit of a bump, and now we have all of these non Bitcoin assets pumping. So what do you think? Is that altcoin? Are we in kind of a mini micro altcoin season?

David (3:39)

I'm kind of reminded of a conversation I had forever ago with Mike at Bolido, where he was telling me about one of the macro commentators that he likes the most, who pays attention to the Fed, pays attention to macro, but also invest in crypto. And it was like a funny bit where he was saying like, oh yeah, I think the Fed needs to ease. This is like two to three years ago. The Fed needs to ease. We're going into an easy money era. And therefore, I'm buying pudgy penguins.

And like, I kind of think that's what happened in the crypto industry recently. Like, we are, like, Besant is going to war against the bond market. We are doing, you know, quote unquote, quantitative easing in our own new way. And therefore, crypto industry participants are buying meme coins. Yeah. And so, like, the degens are just going straight to the end. And Bitcoin moves slowly, Ether moves slowly. But some of these tokens that hit all time highs, like, LIDAR, Venice, Zcash, you know, like I said, Neera and Arbitrum are up big.