ROLLUP: Wartime Markets | Kraken Gets Fedwire | Trump vs Banks | AI vs Pentagon | NYT Says Crypto Is Dead

**Ryan** (0:04)
Bankless Nation is the first week of March. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. We've got a war going on, and so what are the wartime markets look like? How did the markets react to the conflict in Iran? We also have to talk about the flight to safety asset. What was it? Was it gold? Was it Bitcoin? Was it something else?

**David** (0:23)
And then Trump domestically has taken a side on stable coin yields. Choosing crypto over the banks? Some very loud tweets, both from Trump and Trump Jr. About the Clarity Act and how the banks need to fall in line. Some real good drama on the timeline this week.

**Ryan** (0:39)
More bad news for the banks too. Kraken is going bankless. They get a bank license of some sort, access to Fedwire, and I think that's pretty bullish. A historic first.

**David** (0:49)
Can you go bankless by becoming a bank? Does that work? They don't have any banks anymore. They are one.

**Ryan** (0:59)
Yes. I mean, this is a long-standing bankless prediction, let's say. I mean, we always thought the crypto banks, the exchanges, we called them crypto banks from the very beginning, would become more bank like over time. Now, they're actually becoming banks at this point. That's pretty bullish, though, for crypto, I'd say. Also, Erik Voorhees, AI Crypto Privacy Project. We're going to talk about that. Is this the AI plus crypto fusion we've been waiting for?

**David** (1:22)
Also, Aave loses a key contributor just after it lost another one just a couple of weeks ago. Isaac XBT catches a criminal who stole $46 million from the government. And then, of course, the bottom signal of all bottom signals in New York Times writes a crypto is dead article. So we're going to read that article to you on the show. But before we do, we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Figure. Figure is the number one non-bank HELOC lender in the United States. HELOC Home Equity Line of Credit. If you own a home, you probably know what that is. They're bringing institutional-grade DeFi to you. They have crypto-backed loans offering like 8.9% at 50% LTV with your Bitcoin held in segregated MPC custody, not pooled, not re-hypothecated. So they also offer liquidation protection for volatile markets, if that's your deal. But I think the really cool thing from Figure, Ryan, is the democratized prime. So instead of Wall Street funding Figure's home equity loans, you can't. There's this token, YLDS. It's the first SEC-registered yield-bearing stablecoin. You take that token, you lend it into Figure's loan pools. YLDS earns 3.8% as a base, but then lending it out gets you all the way up to 9%.
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**Ryan** (2:47)
That's the deal. A tokenized landlord here, huh? A defi landlord. Is that what you are? I think something like that. David, let's talk about the big news on the week.

**David** (2:57)
Saturday morning, February 28th, all of the US woke up realizing that we had gone into conflict with Iran. We had killed the Ayatollah Khomeini, not like a few hours into the conflict. It was a joint conflict with both the US and Israel doing targeted strikes all over the entire country. Ayatollah Khomeini killed in just a few hours, but the conflict has been going on and on and on. It continues today. If we were five, now six days into it, the Iranian response, they just launched missiles and drone attacks against the United States, Israel, and then also a lot of the allies in the region. So Qatar, the United States, Arab Emirates, the Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, kind of just like spraying their drones all over the region. The Revolutionary Guard, the way that this started to impact financial markets, closed the Strait of Hormuz, which is the large artery of oil that comes out of Iran, shutting that down, which when that happens, the perceived price of oil is about to go up. So the markets had to digest that. About 20 percent of globally traded oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz.

**Ryan** (4:05)
Yeah, that's not just Iranian oil, is it? It's like oil from the entire region, right? The entire region, that's right.

**David** (4:13)
Yeah. Oil jumped to about $80 a barrel. Some speculators, some analysts speculated that prices could go up to $120 if the Strait remains blocked or dangerous.

**Ryan** (4:25)
That was up from like $65 per barrel, right?