Bankless
The Ultimate Guide to Crypto Finance. DeFi, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies. Level up. Go bankless.
Episodes
Ben Lakoff and Arnav Pagidyala from Bankless Ventures lay out how they’re thinking about crypto investing heading into 2026.
The conversation spans four persistent pillars of every cycle: DeFi, tokenization, capital formation, and speculation and how each is evolving as crypto matures.
Topics include the next wave of on-chain lending, equity perps, DeFi neobanks, verticalized tokenization platforms, compliant ICOs, prediction a...
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December 24, 2025
Ryan and David skip a quiet holiday weekly rollup and instead break down the biggest 2026 crypto forecasts from Bitwise, Coinbase, Galaxy, Grayscale, CoinShares, Fidelity, a16z, and Pantera. They lay out the clearest consensus, stablecoins as real payment rails, tokenization scaling beyond pilots, and ETFs expanding institutional access, then hit the big debates around regulation, prediction markets, token value capture, and the gr...
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December 23, 2025
Is the crypto cycle already over? Ben Cowen returns to break down what a post-euphoria cycle looks like, why Bitcoin may have already topped, and how 2026 could play out across crypto, stocks, and macro. We explore the case for a prolonged bear market, why a true alt season may not arrive, and the narrow scenarios where Ethereum could still make a fleeting run at new highs. From Fed policy and labor markets to AI stealing investor ...
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Joey Krug (Founders Fund partner, former Pantera co-CIO, and Augur co-founder) returns to unpack whether the “crypto-native era” is fading as institutions and mainstream apps adopt crypto rails without adopting crypto culture.
We dig into prediction markets’ breakout (and why Polymarket finally found product-market fit), the coming regulatory fights around market structure and “insider” edges, and what’s next for founders buil...
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Crypto prices are down, but the most important players are still building. In this week’s Weekly Rollup, Ryan and David break down Coinbase’s push to become a financial super app, JPMorgan’s first tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, and why regulators are quietly opening the door for onchain settlement through DTCC pilots.
They also unpack Solana’s Firedancer finally going live, the growing fight over tokenholder rights at...
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December 18, 2025
Trading is no longer just a financial activity; it has become a spectator sport. In this episode, Threadguy explains how Gen Z’s internet-native fluency, built through sneaker markets, NFTs, and meme cycles, translates into a new kind of market intuition: attention, momentum, and mimetics. We delve into “Entertainment Finance,” where perps, prediction markets, and live trading are starting to resemble streaming and esports more clo...
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The Fed cut rates and announced $40B/month in T bill purchases. Is that the signal to buy back into crypto? Mike says no. In this episode, we explain why “QE light” is not real easing, the key indicators Mike needs before flipping risk on, and what Bitcoin’s onchain market structure suggests about where this cycle could go next.
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Bitwise’s Matt Hougan and Ryan Rasmussen return with 10 big predictions for 2026.
From the case for $1M BTC (and why the classic four-year cycle may be dead) to a world where ETFs soak up more than 100% of new BTC/ETH/SOL supply.
We get into Bitcoin volatility vs. mega-cap tech, crypto equities vs. tech equities, and why Polymarket could smash past its 2024 election-era highs.
Plus: stablecoins as an “escape valve” that emerging...
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December 15, 2025
AI is becoming the most powerful surveillance machine ever built and most people are feeding it their deepest secrets without realizing who can read them. Proton founder Andy Yen joins Bankless to explain how Big Tech captures your identity, why AI chat logs are a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and what a self-sovereign, user-aligned future could look like.
We explore how AI models profile you, why subscription business models...
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The final Fed meeting of 2025 delivered a surprise rate cut, but the real story is how the market is reacting. In this week’s Weekly Rollup, Ryan and David unpack what the new policy shift means for crypto liquidity, why regulators across the SEC, CFTC, and OCC are suddenly embracing onchain markets, and how Tom Lee’s massive ETH accumulation is reshaping sentiment.
We also get into Ethereum’s growing momentum from ZK advanceme...
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December 10, 2025
ICOs are suddenly back, but this time the projects are real, the mechanisms are better, and retail isn’t shut out. Ryan and David break down why MegaEth, Monad, Aztec, Zama, and Infinex are launching public sales all at once, how onchain auctions are fixing 2017’s mistakes, and what regulatory clarity means for U.S. participation.
They also dive into the rise of internet native capital markets on Ethereum, the shift away from a...
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What was really happening inside the SEC during the Gensler years?
Today, we sat down with Corey Frayer, former senior crypto policy advisor to SEC Chair Gary Gensler and now Director of Investor Protection at the Consumer Federation of America.
We dig into how the agency thought about securities law, DeFi, Uniswap, stablecoins, SAB 121, and why platforms like Coinbase and Kraken ended up in the crosshairs.
Corey defends the Ge...
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At our Bankless Summit in Buenos Aires, four standout talks captured the frontier of crypto’s next chapter. Lincoln Murr lays out why x402 is emerging as the missing payment layer for the agentic internet. Shay Ketsdever explains how bots already run modern markets, and how programmable auctions and privacy can turn the bot economy into something that benefits people instead of exploits them. Michael Dong shows how real-time ZK pro...
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Bitcoin hit a rare signal this week, dropping to its cheapest level relative to gold in nearly 15 years. Is that a buy signal or something deeper in the macro picture? Ryan and David break down what the BTC–gold anomaly really means, how liquidity, rates, and Trump’s surprise Fed Chair pick factor in, and whether the market is entering a shallow cycle instead of a true winter.
We also cover Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, Vitalik’s ...
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This episode showcases four of the most important talks from our Bankless Summit event in Buenos Aires for Devconnect, each capturing how Ethereum is evolving as it enters the real world. Tomasz K. Stańczak reveals the EF’s new priorities around developer acceleration, founder support, institutional engagement, and unifying the L2 ecosystem. Ansgar Dietrichs explains why Ethereum is shifting from long-term exploration to near-term ...
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Michael Nadeau called the top before the 10/10 crash. In this episode, he sits down with Ryan to explain why. They break down the onchain data that flipped him risk off, Bitcoin’s decisive break below the 50-week moving average, and why global liquidity and rate cuts may not rescue this cycle. Michael shares the price zones where Bitcoin becomes compelling again, how long-term holder behavior maps to past tops, and the framework he...
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If crypto wins without privacy, did we actually win?
In this episode, Ryan sits down with Aztec co-founders Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews to unpack their eight-year quest to build a private world computer for Ethereum, covering the Aztec ignition chain, zero-knowledge-powered “private intents,” and how you can route trades across L1 and L2s without exposing your strategies or balances. They dive into ZK Passport (turning your NFC ...
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Ethereum is transparent by design, and that’s a problem if you don’t want your entire financial life on display.
Rand Hindi, co-founder of Zama, joins us to explain how fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can turn Ethereum into an encrypted, confidential blockchain where contracts stay composable and UX feels exactly the same.
We get into why blockchains were public in the first place, why “anonymous addresses” were never enough...
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Happy Thanksgiving! Ethereum is heading into one of its biggest upgrades of the year. In this week’s Weekly Rollup, Ryan and Anthony Sassano break down the Fusaka hard fork, what it ships for L2 scaling and gas limits, and why Justin Drake’s real-time ZK proving demo could reshape Ethereum sooner than expected. They revisit the four-year cycle debate, unpack Tom Lee’s “supercycle” conviction, and catch up on Monad’s mainnet launch,...
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Monad just launched Mainnet!
That’s why Ryan sits down with Monad co-founder Keone Hon today.
We ask the blunt question: do we really need another general-purpose L1?
Why not just build this as an Ethereum L2 instead?
Keone explains how Monad’s parallel, pipelined EVM works under tight consumer-hardware constraints (32GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 100 Mbps), delivering ~500M gas/sec, 400ms blocks, and fast finality while preserving decentr...
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