--:-- Bankless Nation, it's the third week of October. We started with Uptober. We moved to Redtober. Now we have entered Black October. That's what they're calling it. Blacktober, the worst cybersecurity week ever. Two bugs in PHP. The NSA is telling organizations to go offline while they figure this stuff out. I think something like 15 critical vulnerabilities in different companies, web services, coding languages. I don't even know. The whole internet is imploding right now as we speak. Is crypto next or did crypto already go through this bullshit in March of this year? Are we next or were we the canary in the coal mine? How is crypto positioned is my question. In addition to that Armageddon that's going on, also Trump is planning to strike Iran again. I think our bags are down as a result. Nonetheless, though, David, I want you to tell me about a week of overperformance down the market a little bit. There are some tokens that picked up on the week. Zcash had a good week. Leiter had a good week. Venice gets an ETP in the European stock markets. I guess that's like an ETF. That sounds kind of good, right? That's good. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And we have the unexpected white swan for Bitcoin, a fusion startup, announces their plan to alchemy gold. You know, we talk a lot of shit about Bitcoin trying to overcome the quantum hurdles. Like, Bitcoin, you're slow. You're just slow and clumsy. You can't get over quantum. But, you know, Bitcoin can software update. You can't software update gold. So if they figure out how to alchemy gold with fusion... That's it. That's it for gold. I'm actually super excited about this story. I want to talk to you about this story. It's very interesting. It hasn't been done yet. None of this is priced in. So the white swan is on the horizon, maybe still many years away. But we got to talk about what the implications would be if every fusion plant became essentially a gold mining apparatus. It's not a miner, it's a gold fuser. Exactly. All right. October. We had a modicum of October this week. We had it for about four hours when Bitcoin got above $84,000. It hit $84,800 this week. Was that Wednesday? That was Wednesday. That was Wednesday. So for like half of Wednesday, it was looking good. We had recovered from Red October. We were back into October. Then we get three negative news headlines that just took all of the wind out of the sails. One, U.S. and Israel are apparently attacking Iran soon. Those attack reports got leaked this week. WTI and oil prices, Brent crude, are as high as they have been this entire time, $115 for a barrel of Brent crude oil. Yikes. That is not going to be good for inflation numbers. That is not going to be good for inflation numbers. It's already not good now. The longer this goes on, it takes time for this number to work its way into inflation. But nonetheless, it's been higher for longer in this second phase of the oil prices than it has been in the first. You know what? It's not going to be good for Republicans at the midterms either. because voters are going to be on their way to the polls, and they're going to look at the gas price, and they're going to be like, F this. I'm voting for lower gas prices, which means the Democrats. Yeah. Iran State Television reported that seven oil tankers caught fire after they struck them on Thursday, overnight Thursday, so that's last night. Iran says stuff like this. I'm sure the number's not seven, but we don't know if the number's zero either, so we're still trying to get that verified. But this is what causes insurance companies to... To be like, yeah, we're not ensuring that you're a massive oil shipment through the Strait of Hormuz. It's just way too risky. So that happened. In addition, I saw some more jitters in Asian stock markets. We talked about that a little bit last week. Has that just continued into the week? Yeah. We had Meta report earnings and like the, they are doing the CapEx investment thing, but out of like a normal amount overall, there's just jitters about CapEx slowing down, like the AI CapEx build out, just slowing down as people who are on leverage or on debt on margin trying to do the build out are slowing down their spending. And so that's leaving organizations like Meta who are cash flush and either like a revenue positive business or the... going to be the last ones to really be pushing the AI capex bend up the hill. Yes. So I guess it's more continuation from the core news last week, which is like AI debt concerns and AI growth concerns, right? So that's the second thing. We got Iran oil prices. The second thing is the AI growth and debt concerns. What's the third thing? And the third is the internet is just apparently exploding as AI swarms just attack everything that they can get their hands on. We're still in a little bit of a fog of war. So all of this kind of got, we'll talk about this in a bit, but like the NSA tweeted out the, So, like, if your website uses PHP, you need to be standing by with your finger on the trigger for a software update because shit's going to go down. The Japanese prime minister tweeted out something to the same effect. Like, the prime minister of Japan had, like, 80 million views on Twitter on X. And so... Yeah. World leaders saying it, the NSA saying it via tweet. I mean, that's pretty unprecedented. I don't think we've seen times like that. You know, that's the whole thing is unprecedented. People are calling it just the worst month in cybersecurity. Absolutely. We'll talk about that in a bit. Let's get into crypto, though, because crypto once again felt like it was moving up under its own steam. before all of this stuff happened, before like the three negative catalysts came. And I want to know, what I want to know is, is crypto going to move up when it is finally left alone? I know you were talking to Mike this week. What did Mike have to say? Mike says we're in a good spot. I mean, this is the early bull market playing out. We're still above the 50-week moving average, right? If you zoom out, you look at the seventh day, even on the week, Bitcoin is down maybe 1%, ETH down 1.5%. So it wasn't a bad week. I think one interesting thing from his report this week is sort of... Comparing Bitcoin and the NASDAQ over time, because it has been true that since the Bitcoin bottom, July 30th of this year, Bitcoin has far outperformed anything else. And so is crypto largely. So about 40 percent compared to NASDAQ, 1 percent. So, decorrelated from NASDAQ. And there are times in Bitcoin's history, what I have up here is a Bitcoin-NASDAQ ratio chart. There are times in Bitcoin history where it's completely uncorrelated from NASDAQ and the QQQ and other times where it almost behaves like a levered NASDAQ option. And so, timing is everything here. Like, when you zoom out, actually, and if you had purchased at the bottom... of 2017 versus the NASDAQ, so 2017, the beginning of 2017, before the big bull run, Bitcoin would have appreciated about 7,000% versus the NASDAQ. If you had bought in 2021, kind of the bottom there, you would have had almost 900% appreciation versus NASDAQ. In 2025, you would have had a 310% appreciation versus NASDAQ. And now we're up 40%, right? we can guess that this will go higher. It looks like if we are in the early bull phase, Bitcoin and crypto writ large will appreciate versus NASDAQ as it has in the past. Again, assuming we are in the early bull phase. So that's the good news. I guess maybe some of the bad news, though, is if you were a top buyer. So say you bought Bitcoin at the top of 2017 and everything was super hot. You were basically from 2017 to now. The exact same. You were just as good. In NASDAQ terms. In NASDAQ terms. Okay. Bitcoin and NASDAQ performed at the same level at the top of 2017. You know, you would have been about equal. Well, if that's the worst case scenario, the worst case, if you just were the unlucky fellow who top ticked the 2017 Bitcoin price, you performed equivalently to buying the NASDAQ index. If that's the worst case scenario, that's not terrible. Let's say if you bought the 2021 top in Bitcoin, the 2021 top. Yeah, right, yeah, right. Okay, so you're actually 30% behind the NASDAQ at this point in time. Yeah, there was a lot of 2021 buyers. Maybe you make it up later. But anyway, it does show that, of course, something we've always known is that crypto is a much more volatile asset class. And it does totally make sense. I mean, it makes sense that some people just buy and hold forever. That makes sense to me. But it also makes sense to play some of these cycles. Yeah. There's this big difference between buying the top and buying somewhere in the middle or the bottom of each cycle in terms of your net performance. Yeah, which is why we watch stuff like this, because we can start to map where the bottom is. And we are saying the bottom was sometime recently in the rearview mirror. Yeah, well, I can't do that, but my quant, Michael Nato can. At least that's what I'm counting on. Yeah, yeah. David, do you see this this week? JP Morgan added Bitcoin to its famed report. This is the first time since 1999. Every year it releases the support. JP Morgan, biggest bank in America, one of the biggest banks in the world, reports on all of the assets that are worth holding and which ones will overperform. And for the first time, it listed Bitcoin. It mentioned Bitcoin for the first time ever. Yes. And not only mentioned it, but actually put it at the top of the heap. Wow. You see this chart? Wow. Wow. Wow. I actually didn't know that J.B. Morgan produced a famed report. I'm not a consumer of bank famed reports, but yeah. I mean, I take the point that JP Morgan's a very big bank and probably a lot of people read this. Yeah, so this is actually Michael Saylor synthesizing JP Morgan's report and putting this in graph form. But in terms of all the asset classes that JP Morgan's long-term report outlook, return outlook covers, and this is when they say long-term, they're talking 10 to 15 years. So that's long-term for JP Morgan. They listed Bitcoin at the top, 10%. annualized performance over the long-term, 10 to 15-year period. Next to that was U.S. real estate. So REITs, that would be 8.2%. Stocks, 7.5%. Bonds, it's pretty bullish bonds. 5.6% returns. Gold, 5.5%, and cash, 3.2%. All right. So anyway, I don't know- 3.2% long-term returns in U.S. cash? How did that work? I don't know. That calls into question everything else. Maybe this is why I don't read this report, but it is notable. I want to actually give you some of Jamie Dimon's greatest hits in terms of quotes. Because this is- CEO of JP Morgan. CEO of JP Morgan. In 2017, this is what he said about Bitcoin. It's a fraud. Worse than tulips. It won't end well. You might say, well, that was way back in 2017. How about his more updated views? 2023, at a Senate hearing, nonetheless, Jamie Dimon, I've always been deeply opposed to crypto and Bitcoin. If I were the government, I'd close it down. This is him at Davos in January 2024, referring to Bitcoin. I call it Pet Rock. I mean, I also call Bitcoin Pet Rock. Pet Rock, but now Pet Rock is in the lead in terms of investment for his own report at 10%. Yeah. To go next to your pet shiny rock. Yeah, your gold, Bitcoin and gold. Matt Hogan was psyched about this. He said this. First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then they add you to their long term capital markets assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best performing asset of the next decade. Here it is. Compound return of 10 percent. Nice. Nice. I mean, it's stuff like this that I think gives crypto investors the confidence who listen to this podcast to see this report from Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan. Be like, OK, sick. Bitcoin is going to go up, you know, 10 percent a year for the next 10 years. That's great. Let me go buy the shittiest altcoin I've ever seen. Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, crypto investors are always on the frontier, right? Speaking of shitty altcoins, we're going to talk about ETH BTC. Don't you dare. Oh, this is the downward trend line on ETH BTC that people have been watching. For a few weeks, it was starting to break out, ETH BTC on this trend line. ETH BTC went from down below 0.03 to 0.033. Yeah. It's not there anymore. It has fallen back down. This trend line continues to plague ETH BTC. ETH BTC is at .0293. It's going to break at some point. Like, it has to break at some point. Break up. Break up to the upside. Yeah, because it's like, it's breaking down right now. It's been breaking down for the last five years. Like, once again, just plagued by it. I was hopeful it would break up just for the sentiment of, like, half of crypto Twitter. But it doesn't seem like it's happening now. I kind of think that this is the range that ETH BTC is in, somewhere between .02 and .04. Yeah, .02 to .04. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. 0.02 is too low, but like anything higher. I still take the other side on that. I think that it has suffered over the past five years for three reasons. The first is bad narrative. So I think it's done a stupid thing and it hasn't positioned itself as a store of value. So Ether the asset not being a store of value, it's just had a... Eh, not good enough, no. It still depended some of the store value-ness. I mean, but, you know, like, it's just bankless. And I think that it positioned in a way that was, like, sort of the ultrasound money meme. That narrative got messed up because people thought it was all about fees to Ether the asset, and that can't be the way. It's not the way Bitcoin is valued. It's not the way Zcash is valued as a store of value. It shouldn't be the way Ether is, and the community went all in on that. Also, L2s were a side quest. We talked about that. That's the second thing. The third thing is I just think there's fewer use cases of blockchain than everyone expected five years ago. And I think the use cases are finance and the big king use case is store of value. Now, I'll give you the contra on this. I still think Ether, the asset, is one of the best positioned digital store of values moving forward on a go-forward basis. Yeah. And I think you could look at all of those weaknesses and say, okay, well, when the narrative returns and people realize the fundamentals of this thing, it actually is a pretty damn good store of value. And it has the key store of value things like multi-sig, safe infrastructure. It has privacy, you know, the privacy protocols like Railgun, Xerox, privacy, all of these things. It has some of the features of Zcash. It has a roadmap that's going to be quantum resistant. So it has a lot of the fundamentals in place. It's just the narrative really hasn't kicked for it. And I think that's the thing that's actually holding it back. But at some point... It's going to have a run. There's something schadenfreude in me when I see the implosion of the internet. And I'm like, actually, this is kind of what Ethereum was supposed to be, like, supposed to replace. Like, the original vision of Ethereum with, like, Whisper and Swarm and IPFS was like, yo, the internet, let's, like, rebuild the internet. And I'm watching the internet, like, crumble. I know that's being dramatic. I don't really know the scope of what's going on. But like a part of Ethereum's like social contract was like, we're going to like rebuild the internet on cryptography with hardened, with everything super hardened. And so it's too big. It was too big of a scope and it was never going to happen. And I think like now kind of the environment that it was built for is actually happening. And so I do kind of consider that. At the same time, I take your point of like, it's actually like fundamentally it's in one of the best positions. But what about... when you control for the market cap of it. And so it's got a very, very high market cap. It's also well-positioned, but it's got a high market cap. I mean, we'll be talking about gold a little bit later in this episode, but like what gold, 20 trillion, 30 trillion, something like that. And fusion could knock out gold. I mean, there is a massive market for digital store value assets that can make it through this AI era, I think. And it's not just going to be one. I don't think. I think it's going to be a portfolio of those assets. And all I'm saying is I think Ethereum is positioned well. One thing that the side quest for L2s actually did for Ethereum that is net beneficial, I think is underrated, is it very much enshrined the EVM as a standard. And it has now a large group of well-funded, world-class developers working on the EVM. And that wasn't necessarily guaranteed to happen five years ago, seven years ago, before the L2 roadmap. But now you have Coinbase hacking on it. Now you have like Monad, all of these teams, even Hyperliquid, it's all EVM based. So the amount of dev firepower that's gone to the EVM is an underrated aspect of success of the L2 roadmap, I think. This is true. This is true. All right, next up, we're going to get into the movers of the week. I got to talk to Ryan about what this Pearl thing is. Also, Leiter held its Q3 investors call yesterday. There's a bunch of tidbits of information to get out of that. We're going to talk about Zcash, VVV, and also this silent dino coin from the pre-2017 era that's quietly pushing all-time highs. We're going to talk about all of that and more. And then we're going to talk about Internet Armageddon. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. I've been trading crypto for almost a decade, and I've used so many different wallets, exchanges, aggregators, or front ends. And I'm basically always looking for the same thing, just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets, where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially, and still control all of my funds. And I've never really found it. And I'm just always switching wallets, juggling gas fees, or getting eaten by slippage. But near.com feels fundamentally different to me. I can do anything I want from any chain and keep all of my activity confidential. Crypto, tokenized assets, perps, payments. I can even earn yield confidentially. One account, over 30 chains, confidential by default. It's the way that crypto ought to work. And it's powered by Near, which has moved over $30 billion cross-chain, uses post-quantum signatures, And that's run over five years on mainnet with zero downtime. Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back on near.com using the bankless link in the show notes, not investment advice. Dollar stable coins taught Latin America how to store value on-chain. RIPIO is taking that same idea and bringing it to the currencies people actually use every day. With wrapped fiat, RIPIO is putting more than a decade of experience powering crypto infrastructure for leading companies across Latin America behind a suite of six local currency stable coins covering Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. Each is pegged one-to-one to its local currency and fully backed by reserves held in regulated financial institutions with independent attestations published for each token. But wrapped fiat is not just designed to sit there, it's built to move. The suite is live across 10 EVM chains with liquidity and integrations already spanning platforms like Morpho, Uniswap, and Chainlink. Users can move between local payment rails like Pix and Spey and matching wrapped fiat one-to-one in real time with zero fees on both on-ramps and off-ramps and no FX conversion. Local rails in, on-chain in the middle. And for builders, Ripio offers APIs, webhooks, widgets, and a sandbox just from day one. Start building with wrapped fiat today at platform.rippio.com. Ryan, have you heard of Pearl? I have heard of Pearl. Yeah, it's been on my radar for a bit, and I'm late to actually diving into it and researching it because it's been one of the tokens of the Zeitgeist of the last two weeks. It's up 30% this week. I think it was up even more last week. Pearl, there's been a swath of kind of what I would call 2017 style coins, which are like, let's take Bitcoin, but fix it style coins. One of them is Qantas, like Naval invested in it. It's a quantum secure post-quantum Bitcoin. 21 million units. What does this drop? It's a store of value. It doesn't try not to be anything other than Bitcoin, except it's quantum secure. Qantas is that. Perl is kind of similar. It strips out the Bitcoin proof of work and replaces it with basically AI inference. So you pay Perl tokens for AI inference, but AI inference also secures Perl, the blockchain. So there's like a feedback loop there. And it has been the best performing, What do you mean by AI inference? Do you mean like basically like GPUs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the idea is that the same computers that, like, do inference also secure the Perl blockchain. As a byproduct, they can mine Perl. Yeah, it feels a little bit like merge mining. Remember merge mining? Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's merge mining with, like, AI inference and Bitcoin. But still... 21 million. The goal of Pearl is to be a store of value asset. I think so. I think so. Okay. Yeah, I need to get the team on the show and actually talk to them about it more deeply. Market cap of this thing is fully diluted, I should say. 4.5 billion. Not small, dude. It's not small. Pretty chunky. Pretty chunky. Sure. But I mean, there's just like market cap that's available in the market, 750 million or so. So a lot, I'm sure, to be mined. But yeah, the current pearl, everyone knows like, okay, 21 million units, but it's being traded at a $4.5 billion valuation. Yes. What's the Qantas market cap, the FDV of Qantas right now? When I saw that, that was like in the billions as well. Yeah, it's definitely in the billions. QNT? No, it's that red-orange one. QTC. Yeah, the spooky October-themed one. I don't know what's going on with CoinGecko, but the max supply is $21 million. It says that. $21 million times the price is $1.9 billion. I don't know what the difference is between the market cap and the FDV. I don't know what that calculation is. But this is trading at $1.9 billion. So there are two Bitcoin clones that are trading in the multi-billions of dollars. That is not something I kind of ever expected in this day. Well, that feels like 2017, right? Right. Yeah, it does. It does. But they're actually holding up. Okay, so that's Pearl. That's the mover of the week. Congrats to all Pearl holders. You're up 31% this week. Leiter up 25% this week. Leiter had its Q3 investors call yesterday. Some of the big headlines were they are going to file in November for both a DCM and a DCO license with the CFTC. And DCM is basically the derivatives platform, like a marketplace. And then the DCO is what allows, it's like their ADL rules. So it's their liquidation rules, the things that allows them to do things. basic derivatives, clearinghouse-related activities. So they're going to file for that in November. On the call, there was a quote from Vlad where he said, as soon as we have these licenses in place, we'll be able to integrate it in different part of Robinhood's U.S. offering as it makes sense for their product, both on the perps and options side of things. It'd be nice to get the Robinhood confirmation, but like Vlad, the founder, basically saying like, oh, yeah, once we get these licenses, then we are in the main Robinhood US app, which is as anyone who's holding lit is kind of like one of the main entrees that we're looking for in terms of the catalysts. It's so cool that there's an earnings call for this. I got to say. Yeah, they do a really great job. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, what is lighter right now in terms of market cap? It's in the low billions? It's like one to two billions? Low single-digit billions, yeah. It's refreshing to get a company and an asset you can buy in the low billions. Yeah, fully diluted $3.5 billion, market cap $900 million. It's just like... The stock market these days, companies waiting later and later to actually IPO. Everything's staying private for longer. Even something like SpaceX was a private for like 12, 15 years, something like that. Yeah, totally. You can't get it until it's in the trillions. I wish there were more token businesses like this in crypto where investors could buy at the lower market caps and in much earlier phases. And they were public and open. They had earnings calls. This is a great model. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we are here to drive value to our token. Every quarter, we are going to talk about the work that we have done to drive value to our token. And we're also going to give investors who are holding our token clarity about what we are trying to do. It's great. Yes, and it works when there's on-chain revenue, especially. When there's not, when it's like, eh, we don't know what the token does. It's a utility token or whatever. Then it's much less interesting. So I love this new crop. Yeah, yeah. The last quote that I really liked from the call was spot perps and options all margined together. That's kind of the gold standard that Leiter is really going for is just the one single derivatives platform with the spot market that all has one single unified margin account. That's also a ZK circuit layer two on Ethereum. To me, it just kind of feels like the final boss of all exchange infrastructure inside of crypto or outside of crypto. You have to imagine that you're like the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, and you're looking at the powerhouse of Mac minis that Lighter runs to do its circuit verification. Be like, dude, we have nothing like that. That's a win for the L2 roadmap as well. It totally is. It's not a win for Ether yet, but it's not a win for the roadmap. It's not a win for Ether asset. The other company who does a phenomenal job of reporting data in public, Venice. Venice is the third best mover of the week, up 20% this week. OneShares launched its Venice token ETP, an exchange-listed traded product backed by VVV. So it's an ETF in U.S. terms. This is on the Swiss stock market. has a fee. Anchorage and BitGo are the custodians and has a little bit over almost $1.5 million in AUM. I think this is kind of funny because Venice is a token. It's a private company with a token, but now it's on the stock market. And so this is like Venice's IPO moment. This is how they IPO. They IPO with the Venice token going into ETPs or ETFs that trade on liquid stock exchanges. Duel. Everything's becoming dual track. Hopefully that's the direction of travel. Totally. Zcash up 14% on the week. But honestly, I actually kind of think the interesting story is Monero. Is that the dino coin you were referring to? The dino privacy coin with strictly inferior privacy assurances is at all-time highs. Not breaking all-time highs, it's at previous all-time highs. But like Monero and also Tron are these tokens that no one really talks about or has in their portfolio, but have just been on a slow march. Yeah, we're embarrassed about to have them in the industry, but they are just monsters in terms of price performance. Monero is up like 20% this week, but I mean, this chart is just an absolute monster. Well, it came out of that era, too, of the let's fork Bitcoin, but add one feature, right? And so it's like, well, forking Bitcoin, same, you know, monetary schedule, you know, proof of work, everything else. But the one feature is sort of privacy, right? And so that's what Monero has been doing ever since, I suppose. Was Monero a Bitcoin fork? I don't know if it was technically, but you know that whole era, that whole vibe. Yeah, it was of the same. Yeah, Monero is not a Bitcoin fork. Yeah. Okay. But I take your point. Like a simple blockchain meant to do one thing. Yeah, similar to Qantas, right? It's just like Bitcoin, but just like one more feature. Just one more feature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's talk about Black Tuesday. Black October. Black October, I should say. The worst week for cyber security maybe ever. It felt like actual Y2K or something. Yeah, it feels like we're doing Y2K. Yeah, but for real, you know, like not just the, actually things seem to be breaking. So when did this start? How did it come across your desk? The first tweet that I saw was from the NSA, not an account that I follow, let me tell you. But they tweeted out, Effective immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. Basically saying, hey, if your website's running PHP, you are extremely vulnerable and you need to have your finger over the trigger to do this update that patches this hole. It kind of spiraled after that. The Japanese prime minister tweeted out an urgent request that I would like to act on you to act on tonight, talking about the PHP vulnerability. And that was just PHP. This topic is a bit above my pay grade, but overall, yesterday was just a complete nightmare for cybersecurity. Railway, Node.js, LiteLLM, GitLab, OVH, Cloud, CLI, OpenClode. I don't know what these are, but these are all technical things that apparently all had vulnerabilities found. Just libraries, right? Open source code libraries. Sure. Sure. Sure. Well, I mean, PHP alone, though, so much of the internet is based on PHP, right? Like Wikipedia, WordPress's whole platform. I saw some estimates like 30% to 40% of all websites, you know, might have this type of a vulnerability if not patched. And the crazy thing about this vulnerability is it's a vulnerability in sort of the code base itself, right? In PHP itself. Most vulnerabilities we see are, you know, vulnerability with a single app or a single, you know... I guess website, this is just like everything based on it. And it's still a sophisticated exploit that kind of requires somebody to work with an AI in order to exploit probably. But the exploit itself was found via a GPT 5.6 soul. So that is a model. Which is by the way, the model from OpenAI that you have in your Cloud app. It's like the consumer... Version is consumer grade, yeah. Yeah. So this was found via OpenAI. They have a patch the planet program. It's a good thing they do. Working with AI security firm in California, they discovered some of these bugs a couple of months ago, actually. And so they've been coordinating quietly in the background towards this announcement with the PHP Foundation and everyone affected. But two months, it's been known by at least somebody. That's a long lead time for some black hat actor in order to front run that. And once if they can attack a website or an app with this vulnerability, they get some level of root access to the server. So you swap out the website for a wallet trainer or for, I don't know, some sort of malicious code that infects your computer. So it's a pretty big deal. Yeah, yeah. It just feels like we're in a big fog of war because we don't know what the white hats of the world, the open AI, anthropic, U.S. government, NSA, who are they talking to and how are they patching the world's most critical stuff? Because like right now, if you go on Twitter, it feels like the world is on fire. But I'm getting the idea that these organizations, you know, OpenAI, NSA people, have been knowing that this stuff like this is coming down the pike for a long time. And they've been like fixing the worst of it. And now it finally just actually, the virus day actually comes. There's a pretty interesting, call it copypasta on X of a story. Who knows if it's real or not, but I think it does a very good job kind of illustrating the significance of what's going on. And so this is an account called IT Unhinged. Security called me today at 6.12 a.m. Patch every PHP server immediately. I asked what happened. Two critical vulnerabilities, remote code execution, no authentication required. Cool, how many PHP servers do we have? According to our inventory, we have 12. According to reality... Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. We have three running old internal tools, one under somebody's desk, two inside vendor appliances, a forgotten employee directory from 2016, and a server named phb-old-do-not-touch. Naturally, that one runs payroll. Then we found a phb 5.5 box. I asked who owns this one. The documentation said Brian. Brian left in 2019. Yeah. We called Brian. He said, oh, wow, that's still running? Excellent. By 8 a.m., leadership joined the incident call. CEO asks, can the hackers actually get in? And the security team responds, potentially yes. CEO says, without a password. Security responds, yes. CEO says, then why do we need passwords? Which is not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9.17 in the morning, somebody suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused because their campaign is going live. So for the next hour, the company officially decided to maintain a landing page for 20% off of webinar registration, which is more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally passed everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server host name temp. PHP 2014 uptime 4,500 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block access to it, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Oh my God. Security has it classified as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half of our employees. The emergency patch took over four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took 11. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers. Everyone is afraid to turn off. I think that it does a good job illustrating the stick, stones, and duck paper version of the internet that we have been standing upon for all of our time. And kind of what I was referring to earlier, which is like, you know, Ethereum wants to like rebuild the internet in this more secure, hardened, very adversarial environment way. Now, the internet is an adversarial environment. You know, you have to always, like Facebook is getting attacked 10,000 times a second. But that was before AI, like the level of adversarial nature of the Internet is that's coming down the pike because of AI agents and AI swarms is going to 10x. And you have to just like tip your hat to blockchains, which are code systems that are supposed to thrive inside of adversarial environments. Yeah, I think that there's the hope. And of course, we feel good on the week being in crypto, being like, ah, the rest of the internet's affected, but crypto is fine, that we have been sort of in a hardened environment that has been exposed to all of these attacks for so many years. And, you know, we're more hardened, we're more anti-fragile. Yeah. were built to outlast them versus the rest of the internet, which is a bunch of duct tape and poor IT guys trying to figure out what does what and try to keep up with the world. But it's very clear that as these systems get more and more capable and honestly just have the time to suss through all of the code and libraries and find these exploits that these types of events are going to happen more and more one ai researcher said it feels like march 1st 2020 for cyber as of course the precipice of of covid right when we were just like it was just starting to land in the narrative in in consciousness like what was happening oh this is not a cold like what okay this is something different. This is something new. And so he compares it to that time period, which is also part of the story. This week it's PHP, exploits and vulnerabilities in this code base that have been in existence since 2012 and just so obscure no one noticed. Next week what might it be? We're hoping it's not our crypto systems because we're so hardened and great, but who knows what it could be and that's why he's hearkening this to like March 2020. I did see a tweet that was like, So here's what you need to do. You need to get a Starlink in case your internet service provider goes down. You need to have three months of cash in your pocket at all times. You need to go buy groceries. And I'm like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That feels a little too doomer for what we're going through in this present moment. Well, there is a question. This was a tweet from Madison Mills. What about our vaults? You know, the world's banks, for example. This is a scoop from her. Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond. So what will respond faster, do you think? Sort of the hardened crypto ecosystem to these types of events or traditional banks? Because at some level, they're up against similar types of threats nowadays. I know crypto, it's bearer assets, whereas, I don't know, banks, maybe they could just like restore the ledger from a backup or something. But I do think that there's something to this. And I wonder how long it will be until we see some sort of AI agent heist from a bank. And I'm kind of curious as to what that might look like. Yeah, yeah. Also, at the same time, AI agents inside of customer accounts are... What if that's my muse? What if that's my opening? How do they know that it's actually not me just telling the bank that, hey, send money to this person because that's what I need to have done? Differentiating between good bots and bad bots is not possible. So where are we at the end of this? Are we like from a crypto perspective? Obviously, the entire internet is going to need to go through months of hardening as these AI agents get smarter and saturate more and more places. And that's going to be a rough process. So that realization is now hit. What about crypto? Yeah. Like, are you? It's hard not to be excited about crypto because like we've already chewed glass. Like we're already over the chasm to some to some degree. What's the worst thing to do? A billion dollar hack? That happens all the time. Like, I don't know. I go back and forth on this because if there is an AI agent heist from like people's bank accounts, like there's, you know, stealing money from bank account doesn't work very well because there's KYC everywhere. Exactly. Like the money can't go places. They can literally just take it back. That's not true with crypto. Like if there is a heist of crypto, which happens all the time, the money is gone. At the same time, like our systems are more hardened because of that fact. I don't really know. I think I just need to kind of sit and watch and watch this one play out. But it's hard not to at least see why crypto fits the future of the internet more than all of these like paper and duct tape systems that we were like talking about a second ago. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that, too. All right, coming up next, David, we got to talk about the OCC. They just gave crypto a big win. This comes in the implementation of the Genius Bill. The banks are pretty pissed. We'll talk about that. Also, a startup that turns mercury into actual gold via alchemy. This is a fusion startup. What's going to happen to gold? It's a Bitcoin catalyst we never saw coming. Yeah. Is Peter Schiff freaking out? I guess we'll talk about all that. Before we do, let's thank the sponsors that made this possible. Bankless Nation, we've built something for you. Introducing the Bankless MCP. 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The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search The DeFi Report wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. We haven't really talked about it much on Bankless because it's a bit out of our scope, but there has been a pretty wild fusion and fission, like kind of startup VC froth market. Like there's a lot of excitement in the fusion and fission space. Still very early, like earlier than quantum startups by a lot. But like Sam Altman, for example, has invested in like a fusion or fission startup. It's one of the talks of the town if you're into frontier technologies. There's this startup called Marathon Fusion that tweeted out that they are targeting the alchemy of gold. Demonstrated high rate alchemy, trying to turn mercury into real stable gold. And we know that this is possible. We know that it is possible to take mercury molecules and then turn it into gold. The reason why we don't do that is because it's like wildly economically inefficient, as in it takes like 10,000 times the cost to produce the gold to power that operation in the first place. But with AI, with frontier technology, with more power, we can actually just, that is just turning this into an engineering problem. Yeah, the tweet from Marathon Fusion was they turned mercury into real stable gold, beating CERN's record by a factor of 10. OK, I'm the first thing. Set in 2025. So CERN, whatever the hell CERN is, set that record in 2025. So a 10x in a year and a half. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, of course, this is a trace amount, just kind of like very, very tiny amounts. You have FUD in the market, yeah. Nick Carter tweeted this out. He said, this is gold's quantum FUD, but it's way worse because you can't software update gold. And so Fusion had not really been on my radar too much with respect. back to, okay, what are the threats to gold's monetary premium? You know, other things had been in the past. For instance, people talk about asteroid mining. And as space gets cheaper, that will certainly become feasible. But that still feels very much decades away, which is probably why Ray Dalio talks about gold and extols the virtue. If you're worried about debasement, use gold. Why not Bitcoin, Dalio? He says, well, Bitcoin can be hacked. There's this quantum risk, all of these things. I wonder if Ray Dalio has considered gold. The fusion risk, David, because in looking into this, and again, this is at a high level, I think Nick Carter could actually be right here. It's not the first time I've said those words, by the way. Not right now, but we're talking possibly 2030s even where this technology starts to become real and the physics itself is real. So you can turn mercury into gold, okay, through a fusion reactor. All you need, it produces this as a byproduct. So all you need is gigawatts of fusion, essentially. That's all you need. I've got that in my closet, actually, gigawatts of fusion. Yep. But this is a real possibility. And by the way, Nick thinks this could be accelerated by AI. But if you had a mid-sized fusion plant, say mid-sized 1.5 gigawatt, something like this, gigawatt hours, the same size as some of our fission nuclear plants, as a byproduct per year, in addition to producing that energy and that power, it would produce about three tons of gold. Yeah. Okay? So three tons of gold as a byproduct. And if you scale that out and you said we had all, let's say all of the nuclear plants that we use fission on today, and you said we had the same amount, only fusion plants, okay? We would be adding a meaningful amount of gold supply every single year to the market. So maybe doubling the amount of gold supply in the market. And Nick is actually right. There's no difficulty adjustment on that. So if we unlock fusion, for every gigawatt of fusion that we produce, we can actually produce gold as a byproduct. And as those gigawatts scale up, more gold supply will also scale up and we'll have more gold in the market And this technology, while not ready today, could start to be a force in the 2030s. And certainly 2040s, like it seems very reasonable. And I know people say, well, gold is gold. Like it'll always be. It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It always has a monetary premium. I mean. That was true of silver. It only works because of scarcity. Exactly. Okay, that was true of silver at one point in time, and then the Spanish found silver mines in, you know, in the new world. This is the one thing that punctures Lindy. The Lindy is the Lindy because of the scarcity. Right. And it's not something that could be updated or patched, you know, the way Bitcoin can by way of quantum. Anyway, it's not enough for me to kind of look at my portfolio and being like, oh, sell all gold. Let me market down my gold. Right. But it is a factor. And maybe Dalio doesn't have to be concerned about it because it's not going to happen in his timeline. But I think if you're a millennial, if you're like 40 or under and you're thinking about investing. You have a retirement timeline to put your portfolio, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Three things. There's one statement in their tweet that I think we should all pay attention to. Quote, we've reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems. With AI, engineering problems are now simple. You just need to throw AI at it, and then with time, you'll get it. The other thing is, like, asteroid mining is also real. How can you look at what SpaceX is doing with launching rockets and then capturing them with chopsticks and being like, oh, yeah, they're totally not going to go and mine gold asteroids? These are two separate engineering problems that can flood the market with gold. And... Gold is a long duration asset, as you've said. People buy gold for like long-term storage. And so therefore, and markets are forward looking. So all this engineering problem, all it has to show is some kernel of success somewhere. And all of a sudden the market's going to start pricing that in. And this has happened in the past with like silver. Again, New World silver, the Spanish, you got a century of devaluing of silver when massive amounts of supply came in the market. I kind of think what this means is that if you are thinking about store of value as a single asset, I think you've got that. Like, I think that is the incorrect view of what store of value actually is. I think store of value is a portfolio of assets, both digital and physical, that the state can't inflate or seize. I mean, like nation states. And it has to be a portfolio. I don't think you can go all in on gold or all in on silver or all in on Bitcoin or all in on Zcash. I think it's a mix with some expected value outcome for all of these different assets. That's my conclusion. I think you can go all in on Zcash for that. You can. Yeah. All right, shall we get into staple coins? Yeah, sure. Not store of values. Okay, so the OCC has finalized its Genius Act rules. Okay, crash course. We pass the Genius Act. It's a law. The law takes effect January. If you think that you have been operating under the Genius Act up to this point, you are wrong. Really? The Genius Act takes effect in January. It's always been this way. Okay. And so the OCC has finalized its Genius Act rules. And the banks are pissed. The banks are pissed. Why? I don't know why they're pissed. They shot themselves in the foot by not compromising on clarity. And because the proposed limits on stablecoin rewards are gone. It's unresolved. So the whole bank versus crypto fight over yield kind of remains in its gray area. stablecoin issuers cannot pay interest on stablecoins. They cannot pay interest on the yield that they get from their T-bills. They cannot pass that along. But they can do what they've already been doing, which is give stablecoin rewards, which is a huge loophole, which is the thing that the banks were pissed about, which is why they tried to come back to the table after the Genius Act was established to fight in clarity. Clarity failed, and so we have the rules that create this loophole in the first place. So the banks did not get the crackdown. So the OCC just formalized the loophole. Correct. Leaving the door open to Coinbase giving yield back to its customers, let's say, on USDC. Yeah, it says that they will assess arrangements, like reward arrangements, case by case. Existing programs have not received blanket approval, but the status quo is tolerable. It's like the status quo is the status quo. And so rewards are being paid and that will continue. And you know this is a win for crypto because all the bank lobbyists are pissed. This is the American Bankers Association. The genius rules undermine what we're trying to do. Banking advocates pushing back against OCC's finalized rules. So if the banks are angry about it and they are rent-seeking, then that means U.S. consumers benefit and crypto benefits as well. This is good for us. Yeah. Last few things, Alpenglow is live on Solana mainnet. That's the biggest software update to Solana probably ever. Finality goes from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Fault tolerance rises from 33% to 40% if you care about that. But it was a success, went off without a hitch. Now vote transactions aren't on-chain, which I think is kind of nice because that always was annoying to me. that they would put votes as transactions and count it as TPS. That was always bullshit. But congrats to Solana for, I think this is like, if Ethereum had his like, there's no correlate. There's no correlate. I'm not going to try and do that. No, I think it's a different project entirely. I don't think Ethereum is trying to get to 150 milliseconds at all. Yeah, I was trying to say, no, this is like Ethereum's merge or EIP 1559 because they're very, very big upgrades, but still, it's just not the same. It's just not the same. On the Ethereum side of things, Aerodrome and Velodrome merged to just Aero. So Aerodrome and Velodrome, two separate projects from the same team, one on the OP mainnet, that's Velodrome, and then one on base, which is Aerodrome. I don't know why they did this because I was a big Velodrome holder. I always found it confusing. I don't know. I don't know why they did this. I was bummed because I was a big Velodrome holder because I really liked the project. And then they were going to deploy on base. I was like, sick, this is going to be a huge catalyst for my Velo tokens. And then they deployed Aerodrome on base and they just minted a brand new token. I'm like, wait, what am I holding? Well, the good news is if you held those Velodrome tokens, they become Aero tokens, right? They become Aero, yes. Okay, so if you are a Aero or Velo holder, you will need to upgrade to a new token Still called Arrow. That's true. Okay. If you're an Aero or Velo holder, you need to pay attention to something. But it's now just Aero. I'm reading this. All existing Aero and Velo token holders will need to upgrade to the new token Aero. But specifically, I think you can redeem both for Aero tokens, right? Yeah, but one token is called the same as the other? Aero? Sure. Okay. It's all Aero now. But Velo becomes Aero. They should have just been one token this entire time. Well, I mean, I hope we... I guess, enforce better norms around tokens in the future? I remember there was a time where we didn't really understand tokens, or I'm not sure, but do you remember, like, Gnosis, I feel like, was guilty of this in the past, too, where they just, like, issue a token every single time they do a new product. New smart contract, new token. Yeah. Yeah, imagine if Amazon did this. Instead of buying, like, Amazon stock, they had, you know, Amazon for shopping, they had Amazon for, you know, cloud. And you don't get that all compounded together in one single asset. Yeah, like Facebook buys Instagram and then issues Instagram equity instead of Facebook equity. That's part of the reason that tokens have been so uninvestable and confusing. But anyway, this is good news. We're going back to interest healing. We're going back to something that's much more normal and aligned with what investors want as far as outcomes. Yeah, so congrats to the AR team. I know you guys have been working on this for a long time. That'll be it. Ryan, I don't know. The internet might not work a week from today. So I don't know if I'll see you in a week, but if the internet is still working, I'll see you for the fourth week of October weekly rollup. That sounds great, man. I think it'll be fine. So I'll see you then. Crypto is risky. The internet is also risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are head west of this frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.
