ROLLUP: Is the Bull Market Back? | Treasury QE | Trump Pumps Crypto | SEC Token Rules

**David Hoffman** (0:04)
We just had one of the most legendary days in the crypto markets in a long, long time. Bitcoin has probably the biggest green candle I think I've ever seen since before 1010 Everything in crypto is up and up for a handful of different reasons. It's a double digit week for so many crypto assets. The big question I think I want to ask in this episode is, is the bull market back? Was that it? Was that the starting pistol for the next bull market today, this day yesterday at the time of recording Wednesday, August 19th? Do you remember when BlackRock filed for the Bitcoin ETF and Bitcoin popped like 12%?
It was just like a moment that everyone was like, this is it.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (0:43)
Yeah, that seems like such a long time ago.

**David Hoffman** (0:47)
This deck is, it feels a little reminiscent of that, of just like this is it. It's a this is it moment. Not completely, but it feels a little bit like that.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (0:56)
Well, I think that is the question to ask is like, did that move just break the backs of all the bears that were still out there and then had such momentum? But first, in order to answer that question, I think we have to ask the question and answer the question, like, why did this even happen on Wednesday? It just seemed like out of the blue, but we did have some-

**David Hoffman** (1:15)
Out of the blue, left field.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (1:17)
Out of left field, but QE, Treasury QE may be back this time. We'll define what that is and what Besant said, what the Treasury is doing. That was a key catalyst of these markets. Also, the White House, Trump gave a speech, basically pumping crypto and also-

**David Hoffman** (1:34)
Spent all day pumping crypto.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (1:36)
Yeah, and also the SEC released a regulation of crypto assets. Here's actually how Matt Hogan put it, which I think was great. In the last 24 hours, he's talking about earlier this week, the SEC released regulation crypto assets. The 402-page document that we'll get into. The Treasury launched yield curve control. The White House prepared for a meeting with top crypto executives to discuss tokenization in the Clarity Act. It's hard not to be extremely bullish, both Bitcoin and crypto right now. And indeed, the market was bullish. We got Bitcoin up double digits. I think ETH was up like-
Was it up like 20% on the week or something crazy?

**David Hoffman** (2:16)
Dude, the president said hyperliquid, on air, on live TV.
Bitcoin goes up because of QE. All of this stuff happened. Venice crosses $100 million in ARR, and the winner on the week is ETH, actually. ETH is up like the most. So we're going to talk about all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk about Iron Claw from our friends and sponsors over at Near. Iron Claw 1.2 just dropped. We probably all remember Open Claw, like personal agents to do your bidding, except Open Claw was super insecure, leaking passwords, deleting documents, revealing API keys was a mess. Iron Claw is Near's fix for rogue AI that's misaligned with his users. Protects your secrets in a vault that the model never sees, all in pursuit of creating user-owned AI, user-owned agents that are safe to use with crypto. So 1.2 just dropped that lets your Iron Claw plug into all your day-to-day apps like Slack and Telegram, just to give it the context that it needs to be a really useful assistant. It is also MCP ready, so you can now connect your Iron Claw to any MCP tool, which is perfect, Ryan, because out of the Bankless universe, we have the Bankless MCP.
Do you know how much, you know how many podcasts we've done, Ryan?

**Ryan Sean Adams** (3:29)
We gotta be, I know we're over 1,000, are we over like 1,100?

**David Hoffman** (3:33)
We are over 2,000 podcasts.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (3:34)
Wait, we're over 2,000 podcasts? You've been busy.

**David Hoffman** (3:38)
We've been doing this for six years. Oh my God.

**Ryan Sean Adams** (3:41)
So that's a lot of transcripts, right?

**David Hoffman** (3:43)
That's a lot of transcripts. Direct from the source, data that like AI labs don't have. And AI labs famously just haven't trained well on crypto data. So I don't know if you go into, if you notice going into your like your cloud or your Venice or your OpenAI, whatever it is, and you ask crypto questions, usually it's pretty constrained with how good it can answer. It can answer the basics, but you can't ask anything beyond the basics. And then you get pretty poor answers. Yeah.