Bankless

Ryan and Ejaaz are joined by Jansen Teng, co-founder of Virtuals, a decentralized platform that has launched over 11,000 AI agents and generated more than $35 million in fees. Virtuals isn’t just another protocol—it’s an entirely new kind of “digital nation” where AI agents hold their own wallets, strike deals with other agents, and even hire humans to accomplish their goals. We dive into how thes...

How do you find an asset with 1000x asymmetric return? How do you find the next bitcoin? Our guest today is Dan Morehead, founder and managing director at Pantera Capital. He has been buying bitcoin since 2013 when the price was just $65. His fund is up over 100x since then. There’s a lot to learn from Dan’s story, about early bitcoin history, but also the pattern recognition required to identify...

Joining us this week is Anthony Sassano! We'll explore whether the current price downturn signals the end of the bull market or just a minor hiccup in the cycle, analyze the Fed’s latest rate cuts, and assess institutional adoption trends keeping crypto’s momentum alive. Big L2 developments are making waves: Kraken’s Ink chain hits mainnet early, Deutsche Bank ventures into zkEVMs, and ENS selects...

Ejaaz returns to break down the latest surge in AI Agent innovation alongside Ryan this week, covering the rapid evolution at the intersection of crypto and AI. They explore how AI agents are making onchain payments to each other, autonomously ordering real-world goods, and even running their own Ethereum validators. They also dive into the new frameworks and partnerships—like ai16z’s collaboratio...

How can economic bubbles be good for the world? Byrne Hobart is a financial analyst known for his newsletter "The Diff" which covers tech, trends and economics. Byrne has been on the periphery of crypto for longer that this podcast has existed In this podcast we discuss the book he has co-authored, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, where he makes the case for why human progress has stagnate...

What are the best investing opportunities in Tech for 2025? Elad Gil is one of silicon valley's legendary investors. He's backed 40 unicorns including Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma and Stripe to name a few. He's super active in AI and hosts the no priors podcast which is like Bankless but for AI. In this conversation, Elad explores the state of AI and how the industry is evolving, what he thinks about C...

This week on the Weekly Rollup: Bitcoin briefly plunged to $93K amidst $1.1B in crypto liquidations, marking the largest single-day event since 2021, with $815M wiped from long positions alone. Meanwhile, Ethereum ETFs hit a record inflow day of $428M, and Layer 2 solutions like Mantle are driving the ecosystem forward with nearly 1M ETH bridged to Base. On the regulatory front, the crypto world s...

Ejaaz is back with David to break down the latest in the explosive world of AI Agents. This week, they uncover how Truth Terminal’s roadmap could revolutionize autonomous on-chain transactions, why ai16z's Eliza framework is poised to reshape multi-chain agent deployment, and how zerebro’s creative push into music and art is expanding the reach of AI in culture. They also discuss the growing insti...

What is the role of AI in crypto, and how will it shape the future? AI agents are taking the crypto world by storm, introducing unprecedented scale and efficiency to Web3. At the center of this revolution is Shaw, the creator of the Eliza framework and ai16z DAO, a groundbreaking initiative that’s reshaping decentralized investments. The ai16z DAO has rapidly gained traction, becoming the #1 trend...

2024 was a breakout year for crypto, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana outperforming traditional assets and spot Bitcoin ETFs attracting $31.7 billion in record inflows. Coinbase surged toward S&P 500 inclusion, stablecoins doubled, and tokenized real-world assets began their rise. Nations embraced Bitcoin as a reserve asset, and AI-driven memecoins fueled fresh mania. Bitwise calls 2024 a prelud...

What is Ethereum’s North Star, and does it even need one? There has been angst in the Ethereum community, growing over the last year, as Ethereum has become squeezed by its competition. Bitcoin’s story as money is growing in mainstream society. Solana has captured the hot ball of money in crypto. And Celestia’s data availability continues to progress at a faster rate than what is found at home in...

Bitcoin hit $100K! To kick off the show we dive into the wild ride that brought us here—from Satoshi’s first block to retail mania today. NYC Mayor Eric Adams says, “I told you so,” after his Bitcoin paycheck gamble pays off. We unpack Marc Andreessen’s revelations on Joe Rogan about political debanking and welcome a new SEC chairman with a pro-crypto agenda, BYE GARY. Plus, Hyperliquid’s massive...

Ejaaz is back to go through the latest news over the past week in the wild world of AI Agents.  This week, Ejaaz and David dive into why and how Virtuals hit a $1B market cap, and also Zerebro is launching a decentralized LLM, Ai16z is making a comeback with Eliza V2, and so much more.  Will AI agents continue to dominate the mindshare of crypto Crypto Twitter and beyond?  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM...

Last month, Andrew Huang (Conduit) and Uma Roy (Succinct) announced OP Succinct, a groundbreaking collaboration that blends Succinct’s SP1 zkVM with Conduit’s Rollup-as-a-Service platform. This new zkEVM promises 1-hour finality, breaking away from the traditional 7-day delays seen with optimistic rollups. In this episode, we unpack what makes OP Succinct a game-changer and how it challenges the c...

Is the Beam Chain the endgame for Ethereum? At Devcon, Justin Drake presented what he called his most ambitious proposal to date! Beam Chain, a roadmap which fell very flat in public discourse. In this episode we fill the gaps of this reaction and we discuss the rise of Credible Competition to the three major components of Ethereum Roadmap. Execution, which competes with Solana, Data Availability...

Memecoin mania spiraled out of control this week, with shocking livestream rug pulls and Pump.fun disabling its livestream feature due to disturbing behavior. Meanwhile, Base and Farcaster hit record TPS and inflows as memecoin trading heats up. In Washington, Trump nominated pro-crypto Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. What does this mean for crypto policy? Plus, a surprising investor joins Tr...

AI agents are reshaping the crypto landscape, from gaming to decentralized venture capital. This week, we explore groundbreaking developments in Crypto AI, including breaking news out of Ai16z’s meteoric rise (and fall?), GOAT, AIxbt, Virtuals, Zerebro, and Base vs. Solana.  Ejaaz Ahamadeen joins us to break down the trends, drama, and future of autonomous agents in crypto. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIU...

The Director of Research at Coincenter, Peter Van Valkenburgh joins us for our final talk at the Bankless Summit with a story that hits close to home about privacy and surveillance. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED...

Ethereum Foundation researcher Mike Neuder joins us at the Bankless Summit with a really bullish articulation of what ETH and Ethereum is in 2024. Mike Neuder explains why ETH is permissionless, why ETH is money and therefore why ETH is permissionless money.  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium    ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MO...

Matt Cutler is the founder of Blocknative and the combination of a fantastic storyteller and a fantastic data analyst. Blocknative is not his first company, It’s his fifth. Matt’s first company was an internet company that he started in the 90s well before the dot com boom and he founded a company in every major internet era since. In today’s Bankless Summit talk, we hear from Matt’s experience an...

Bitcoin soared to new all-time highs as MicroStrategy led massive BTC buys, and BlackRock's ETF options hit $1.9B volume. Meanwhile, a 13-year-old executed a rug pull, sparking chaos and meme token wars. On the regulatory front, SEC Chair Gary Gensler announced his resignation effective January 20, 2025, coinciding with President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. Trump teased a "Crypto Czar," whi...

📣DONATE TO ROMAN’S CASE https://juicebox.money/@defend-roman-storm  Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm faces decades in prison after being arrested last year for creating open-source privacy tools on Ethereum. His case could define whether code is speech, if developers are liable for bad actors, and if Americans have a right to digital privacy. With the full force of the U.S. government against h...

Mteam explores why the future of Ethereum Rollups is inevitably based. Many people said this was the most impressive technical talk at the Bankless Summit. I don’t know what you were doing when you were 17 but I was certainly not doing anything like this. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TR...

Arjun gives one of the best non-technical talks at the Bankless Summit that everyone in crypto needs to hear. Do you know why you’re here? Arjun explains the first principle concept of Crypto-Anarchism.  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2...

For the Bankless Summit’s inaugural episode, Justin Drake shares his reflection on the Beamchain talk he gave earlier in the week at Devcon Bangkok. Additionally, Justin adds some much needed context and important (and very bullish) facets to the Ethereum Roadmap from his perspective.  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPON...