Bankless

North Korea isn’t just hacking crypto anymore, it’s studying it, infiltrating it, and turning DeFi’s weakest links into a state-run revenue machine. This time around, Ryan and David sit down with Ari Redbord of TRM Labs to unpack the Drift hack, the $6B DPRK crypto crime machine, how stolen funds move through THORChain, Bitcoin, OTC desks, and Chinese laundering networks, and why the fightback may...

Stocks and AI are ripping to new highs, and crypto is getting pulled along for the ride. Ryan and David break down whether this rally is real or too frothy, what the CLARITY Act still needs to survive, why Coinbase layoffs are colliding with billion-dollar crypto raises, and what Saylor selling Bitcoin would actually mean. 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotif...

Spoiler alert: This episode contains spoilers for the documentary Finding Satoshi. Bill Cohan and Tyler Maroney unpack their new documentary Finding Satoshi, a four-year investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. They explore why Satoshi’s identity still matters, the cypherpunk roots of Bitcoin, the public interest behind the mystery, and what the search reveals about privacy, money, pow...

Markets are ripping despite $120 oil and an escalating war. Ryan and David break down why the AI boom is drowning out macro risks, whether a wave of trillion-dollar IPOs could mark the top, and how DeFi just bailed itself out after its biggest hack ever. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION...

$MEGA token is live, but the bigger story is what the launch says about the future of L2s. Co-Founders Shuyao and Lei join Bankless to unpack why MegaETH tied its TGE to app milestones, why USDM and proximity markets could become core revenue streams, and how the team is thinking about appchains, AI agents, security, and Stage 2 decentralization. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY2...

Rory Johnston, the “oil quant,” joins us to explain why the Hormuz crisis could become the biggest oil shock in history. Oil markets are already screaming. Supply is trapped, inventories are being drained, and the market may still be underpricing the scale of the disruption.  If the Strait stays closed, Rory says the path to $200 oil is no longer crazy. It may be the next stop. This is oil, geopol...

Has Bitcoin already bottomed, or are investors still looking at the wrong signals? Jordi Visser joins Bankless to argue that AI is destroying software moats, reshaping inflation, and pushing capital toward scarce assets, with Bitcoin at the center of that shift. We get into his “AI is the new QE” thesis, the scarcity-versus-abundance portfolio, why the S&P may struggle in an AI regime, what a more...

Markets are hitting new highs, but crypto just took a major hit. Ryan and David break down the $300M KelpDAO exploit and why it exposed deeper flaws across DeFi and Layer 2s, including Arbitrum’s controversial decision to freeze funds. They also explore whether AI will drive deflation or inequality, unpack a new bullish ETH thesis, and debate why the biggest risks in crypto may be building beneath...

A $280M DeFi exploit exposed the hidden fragility of crypto’s most trusted systems. Dan Elitzer and Odysseus break down how the attack happened, why bridge risk and protocol composability made the damage so severe, what Arbitrum’s intervention means for immutability, and why DeFi now needs an aerospace-grade security mindset to survive the AI era. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOT...

Ethereum may be one of the most underappreciated assets. In this conversation, Michael McGuiness and Vivek Raman lay out the case for ETH as “productive money”, a monetary asset with the store-of-value properties of gold and Bitcoin, plus the ability to compound through network activity. We unpack the $250K ETH thesis, why traditional DCF models miss the bigger picture, and why Ethereum’s role as...

Austen Allred joins Bankless to unpack Kelly Claude, the AI agent he has given an LLC, bank accounts, a token, and even a human employee. They explore how Kelly finds software opportunities, ships apps to the App Store, learns through orchestration and factory-style workflows, and why crypto rails may be the missing layer for agent-to-agent commerce. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOT...

Markets are ripping back to all-time highs, but crypto still isn’t following suit. Ryan and David break down the V-shaped recovery driven by Iran de-escalation, why Bitcoin is still stuck in range, and the growing bull vs bear divide across macro and onchain data. They also unpack Saylor’s STRC “money printer,” the World Liberty DeFi controversy, and the SEC’s surprise ruling that just gave DeFi a...

Why has the dollar remained dominant despite rising debt, geopolitical strain, and growing challengers? Barry Eichengreen joins Bankless to trace the history of global reserve currencies. From Spanish silver and the Byzantine solidus to sterling and the modern dollar, Barry explains the conditions that make a currency rise, endure, and eventually fall. We explore fiscal discipline, rule of law, mi...

Has crypto already bottomed, or is more pain still ahead? Mike and Ryan break down the bull and bear case in full, from Bitcoin fair value and market structure to global liquidity, AI demand, and the macro risks still hanging over markets. Mike explains why he thinks the setup still looks more like a bear market than a new uptrend, even if the odds are close. It’s a sharp episode on how to navigat...

Michael Saylor thinks Bitcoin is headed to $21 million, but the real story in this conversation is how he believes it gets there. In his first appearance on Bankless, Saylor breaks down Strategy’s evolving capital machine, why STRC may be the most ambitious instrument the company has built yet, how he thinks about quantum risk without panic, why his view on Ethereum has become more constructive, a...

Markets are rallying on a fragile Iran ceasefire, but the real risks may be getting closer. David and Haseeb break down Anthropic’s secretive new AI model and why it could expose vulnerabilities across crypto, from smart contracts to core blockchain infrastructure, plus the growing divide around “Q-Day” and how urgent the quantum threat really is. They also unpack Iran’s unexpected use of Bitcoin...

Can Ethereum become one economic zone again? Martin Koppelmann and Friederike Ernst from Gnosis explain how real-time proving and the Ethereum Economic Zone could reconnect fragmented rollups, unify liquidity, and give specialized chains seamless access to Ethereum’s settlement and security. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🔮POLYMA...

NYSE and Securitize are laying the rails to bring real, issuer-backed securities onchain.  Michael Blaugrund of NYSE and Carlos Domingo of Securitize break down how blockchain-native equities could work in practice: transfer agents, tokenized issuance, interoperable trading infrastructure, 24/7 markets, and what it will take for public stocks to move from legacy rails to crypto rails. T They also...

What if Bitcoin’s biggest strength becomes its fatal weakness? Nic Carter joins Bankless to unpack why the latest quantum papers changed the threat model, why a 2029 migration window could leave Bitcoin dangerously behind, what a real post-quantum transition would require, and why the fight over Satoshi’s dormant coins may become the most explosive governance battle in Bitcoin history. --- 🎬 DEBR...

Google just dropped a major quantum warning for crypto, claiming a breakthrough that could accelerate the timeline to breaking Bitcoin and Ethereum’s core security. Ryan and David unpack what changed, how real the threat is, and why the industry may need to act sooner than expected. Plus: Trump signals three more weeks in the Iran conflict and markets shrug it off, a $285M Solana DeFi hack exposes...

Three macro forces are converging that almost no one is pricing in correctly. Jeff Park returns to Bankless to lay out what he calls the "certain truths" shaping markets for the next two decades: collapsing demographics across every major economy, wealth concentration that now exceeds even the Gilded Age, and a labor market being structurally hollowed out by AI before robots even arrive. --- 📣SPO...

We examine the proposed Clarity Act and its impact on stablecoin yields and crypto finance. Ryan and David discuss geopolitical tensions in Iran and their effects on global markets.  Highlights include Tom Lee's ETH staking venture, the NYSE's stock tokenization, and emerging quantum computing developments. We also touch on Coinbase’s stock dip, Tether’s auditing, and Fannie Mae's acceptance of cr...

MIT economist Christian Catalini joins Ryan and David to unpack his new paper, "Some Simple Economics of AGI," which argues that the scarce resource in the AI economy is no longer intelligence but verification: the human capacity to check, judge, and certify that AI output is correct. Christian walks through the two cost curves reshaping every industry (cost to automate vs. cost to verify), explai...

NEAR founder and Transformer co-author Illia Polosukhin joins us to break down why today’s AI agents still fall short, what’s missing to make them actually useful, and how IronClaw could unlock secure, private, autonomous AI. We also explore Illia’s bigger thesis: AI becomes the interface, blockchains become the backend, and both reshape how humans, agents, and digital markets interact. ------ 📣S...

Quantum used to be crypto’s distant sci-fi problem. Justin Drake says it now has a clock. In this episode, we unpack what “Q-Day” actually means, why Justin thinks 2032 is the date the entire industry should be planning around, and why Ethereum is targeting 2029 to get post-quantum ready. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR...