The SEC & CFTC STEAMROLL

Summary

• Ansem says the regulatory backdrop flipped bullish on two fronts in one morning: a CFTC no-action letter covering DeFi software that enables on-chain activity, and an SEC “innovation exemption” for tokenized U.S. stocks on-chain. His read is that developers will not be blamed directly for how software is used, while greater global stablecoin activity could strengthen the dollar. He also says Hyperliquid was legalized in the U.S. through a Kraken arrangement around the same time.
• Ansem’s tell that the market is skewed up: the CLARITY Act got denied and nothing broke. “When you have bad news and price doesn’t react that poorly to bad news, that’s typically a sign that we’re skewed to the upside” — sidelined buyers may outnumber reactive sellers, and he says Zcash is up about 20% since the denial.
• Zcash remains the show’s flagship call — up 5x since Ansem flagged it around $300, now described at about $1,500 and roughly a $22B cap — and he frames it as 2017 Bitcoin. The thesis is a pure-play private store of value with no execution or application-building risk, worth potentially 10% of Bitcoin’s roughly $1.5T value. Both hosts urge “yes” on the Polymarket ZEC-$2,000-by-Dec. 31 market, which Banks describes as around a coin flip.
• Robinhood is the episode’s core equity thesis: Banks says it is on pace for $1B of revenue from its chain alone, on top of what he estimates as a roughly $4.5B-per-year traditional business, with Vlad Tenev “doing God’s work” as crypto’s new main character. Ansem’s call is for a $200B-plus market cap by the end of next year if HOOD captures younger users — plus the retention hook of roughly 7% yield on cash via USDG/Morpho, where one 22-year-old trader parks eight figures.
• The launchpad game “is definitely not solved at all”: Pump’s strategy is owning end-user distribution, and the next innovation wave is curating coins that survive beyond low caps. Ansem’s analogy is DeFi summer — Yearn, Compound and Synthetix reaching multibillion-dollar valuations — repeating around RWAs, mobile speculation and stock-paired memecoins.
• FaZe Banks banked a live, on-air trade after Vlad tweeted “Dividend Hounds”: the token was up about 15,000%, while Banks said his position went from roughly $1,500 to $35K. His thesis, written 16 hours earlier at a $180K cap, was “next time he says it, surely this rips.” He sold 80% live. The discipline lesson both hosts endorse: “if you’re screenshotting an unrealized P&L to show people and flex it, just sell” — euphoria tops markets because “everybody’s already balls deep… who else is left to buy?”
• Long.xyz founder Nate calls tokenized stock pairs “the last meta”: nearly $1.5B in RWA volume on Robinhood, no bonding curves, a 24-hour ticker lock, and the NVIDIA-paired AI token as an “on-chain BlackRock” that he thinks can reach crypto’s top 10. He is marketing by winning in public — #5 on FOMO’s leaderboard, up $6M all time, with 150K followers there versus 20K on Twitter — and broke alpha on-air: a native iOS app for Long, plus permissionless ZK-based pre-IPO pairs through Lighter and a conditional path to AI holders receiving NVIDIA voting rights.
• Guest Malik Jackson, a Super Bowl 50 champion and 10-year NFL veteran, delivered the wealth-preservation counterweight: “build a team” first, keep 10%, and put 90% into a trust or investments. He also suggested “a board for my life.” His agent-assigned financial adviser was caught up in a Ponzi scheme after his first four years; Malik says the adviser was headed to prison and had managed his money largely through a debit card without building credit or making investments. The exchange puts Malik’s career earnings at roughly $130M before tax and about $70M–$72M after tax.

Deep dive

1. The CFTC no-action letter and DeFi frontends

• Ansem’s summary of the no-action letter: the CFTC “essentially said that they’re taking no action against… DeFi software that enables activity on chain” — addressing the era of sued frontends and founders “afraid to enable X, Y and Z.” His interpretation is that software can navigate the on-chain landscape as users choose and developers “won’t be blamed directly for how their software is used.”
• His macro read on why Washington is becoming more favorable: the U.S. realizes that greater global use of dollar-backed stablecoins could strengthen the dollar.
• Timing stacked: Ansem says Hyperliquid was legalized in the U.S. around the same time, with Kraken enabling the arrangement — a partnership he says he had called weeks or months earlier.

2. SEC’s innovation exemption for tokenized stocks

• The SEC announcement was framed by Banks as a five-year innovation exemption for tokenized U.S. stocks. Ansem says the change addresses the prior uncertainty over whether tokenized equities could be used by U.S. or international users.
• Crediting Vlad Tenev’s recent public push, Ansem says holders will be able to redeem tokenized stocks in kind for actual brokerage shares and exercise shareholder rights, as Vlad had described. He expects that to pull developers into tokenized-equity products and drive more on-chain activity.
• The pie-expansion argument: U.S. investors already have easy brokerage access, but tokenization could give people elsewhere instant, fractionalized access through a crypto wallet — “if you’re going to be the one that expands the pie, it also shows how crypto can benefit the existing traditional financial system.”

3. Vlad Tenev is this cycle’s main character

• Banks’ framing: every cycle has a face — Michael Saylor in the last cycle, “FTX and SBF” before that — and now “Vlad’s the GOAT,” with Banks saying he cannot see an outcome where things go poorly given Robinhood’s brand and team.
• Ansem flags the irony crypto natives remember: Robinhood delisted Solana in 2023 amid uncertainty over whether it was a security and halted GME trading during the GameStop saga. People therefore saw Robinhood as occupying a gray area in how it represented retail. Ansem says Vlad has taken that “chip on his shoulder” and now speaks aggressively for broad access to stocks, coins and protocols.
• Banks argues that Robinhood’s traditional business — which he estimates at roughly $4.5B annually — could add a new revenue line by enabling crypto speculation while keeping its distance from individual assets. He points to terminals and launchpads charging high fees because users chase the possibility of 1,000x-plus returns.

4. HOOD to a $200B-plus market cap

• Banks says Robinhood is “on pace to generate a billion dollars in revenue just on their chain alone” and that the opportunity was not priced in. The discussion puts HOOD shares around $110–$115, with a roughly $150 all-time high, while Banks describes the company as trading around a $90B–$100B valuation. Ansem calls for a $200B-plus market cap by the end of next year.
• The conditional: legacy brokerages own old, sticky customers, so Robinhood must win the younger cohort — which is why Ansem thinks it is going heavily into crypto, RWAs and tokenized stocks while incumbents are less focused there.
• Banks’ retention anecdote: an unnamed 22-year-old trader keeps almost all his cash on Robinhood for roughly 7% yield. Ansem says the yield on USDG is powered by Morpho. Banks calculates that 7% on $10M is $700K a year and says it makes him consider moving money into Robinhood. He also admits he is down on his own position after selling before Ansem’s call and FOMO-buying back in.

5. The CLARITY Act failed and the market shrugged

• Asked whether the market overreacted to the CLARITY Act’s denial, Ansem says, “we didn’t really go down that much.” His rule is that when bad news produces little downside, “that’s typically a sign that we’re skewed to the upside” — the sellers reacting to the headline cannot move price because many buyers remain sidelined.
• Exhibit A, in his account: “Zcash is up I think 20% since Clarity got denied.”

6. Zcash: the second coming of Bitcoin, with a possible $150B target

• The track record in Ansem’s earlier discussion: he says he called Zcash around $300, that it is now around $1,500, and that the roughly $22B-cap asset is up 5x from his call. Banks says it is “looking like the second coming of Bitcoin,” while Ansem says he is up a smooth six figures.
• Ansem’s analogy is 2017 Bitcoin — around $1,000 at the beginning of that year, around $3,000 when he first bought, and $20,000 by year-end — with Zcash receiving consensus from both OG crypto participants and newer users. The thesis is a simple private store of value that “gets memed,” with no execution risk or applications that need to be built. His implied target is 10% of Bitcoin’s roughly $1.5T value: “If Bitcoin can get to one trillion plus, why can’t Zcash get to that same kind of value?”
• On Polymarket’s “ZEC $2,000 by Dec. 31” market, Banks describes the odds as around a coin flip and the market as roughly $600K. Ansem says, “I think you slam yes on this.” They also revisit their first-episode Anthropic-versus-Bitcoin market, which they say was called near the bottom at roughly 13%–20% and is now around 25%. Their point is that Polymarket offers trades that are otherwise difficult to access: “speculation is the future… this is the kind of shit we need to be able to trade.”

7. Launchpads print money and the game is not solved

• Ansem says launchpads are among crypto’s most successful business models. Looking at Pump.fun over the discussed period, he says the amount it made as a company was matched by the amount distributed to coin creators, and that revenue persisted even during the bear market. As long as that remains true, he expects more launchpads and more innovation.
• His focus this cycle is curation: launchpads monetize coins at low caps, but the prize is finding the incentive structure that helps coins perform over the longer term and aligns them with holders. His analogy is DeFi summer 2020–21, when Yearn, Compound and Synthetix reached multibillion-dollar valuations; he expects new protocols to emerge around RWAs, mobile retail speculation and stock-paired memecoins. “The launchpad game is definitely not solved at all.”
• Innovators he names include Long.xyz, with no native token, deeper liquidity and higher starting market caps, and Stomp.fun, which he says is doing interesting things.

8. Why platforms try to do everything: own the end user

• Banks notes that Polymarket, Phantom and other platforms are beginning to offer overlapping products, including perps and social trading, and asks whether Pump.fun is losing focus on its launchpad. Ansem’s answer is that the end goal is to own user distribution: once a platform controls where users trade and spend time, it can build more products around that locked-in audience.
• He sees the mobile app as a way for Pump.fun to capture new users who trade on phones, including users trading tokens that did not originate on Pump.fun.
• On the complaint that Pump.fun “always innovates last,” Ansem reads that as deliberate conservatism. Its core new-pair trader base continues to use the product and the launchpad already makes substantial money, so it changes the product only when it believes a change is necessary rather than risking its core users.

9. Live on air: Dividend Hounds runs 15,000% off a Vlad tweet

• Mid-episode, Banks erupts after Vlad tweets the words “Dividend Hounds.” Ansem says the token is up 15,000%; Banks says his own position moved from roughly $1,500 to $35K. The token was inspired by Raz’s Discord discussing Vlad’s dividend-hound language and the idea of replacing a stock character with a hound dog.
• Banks’ thesis, written 16 hours earlier at a $180K cap, was: “Next time he says it, surely this rips. Am I missing something? It feels like a free 10x money glitch.” He sells 80% live and says this is how information like that should be traded.
• Ansem admits he is “fucking stupid” and does not know what he is talking about, but is participating in the trade. After Banks sells, Ansem says he is not selling; Banks reminds him that he had previously round-tripped a $2M AMC position down to roughly $300K and suggests taking some profit.

10. Where the marginal bid for majors comes from

• Ansem’s cycle mechanics: repricing in majors creates a wealth effect that first reaches crypto natives, who then move further down the risk curve on-chain. In this part of the discussion he describes Zcash moving from around $200 a few months earlier to $500; elsewhere he discusses the separate $300-to-$1,500 flagship call.
• Majors also hit the news cycle harder when they rise, bringing fresh retail into Coinbase, Robinhood, FOMO and Pump. The capital bidding majors can then move into lower-market-cap on-chain assets. Ansem says the same pattern appears every cycle and happens quickly.
• The accelerant this time is that retail speculation is unusually aggressive: people have made money in AI stocks, momentum trading is popular, and social trading turns a public thesis into distribution.

11. Traders aren’t the new athletes — they’re a new content category

• Ansem rejects the direct athlete comparison: “you’re definitely not going to be able to repeat LeBron,” while trading can be self-taught. Trading combines entertainment and education in a way he does not think had existed in content before, putting successful traders in a different category.
• The monetization implication: traders who make correct calls, help followers make money and compound wealth from small amounts will be valuable to sponsors because they own the attention of a younger cohort entering its earning and spending years.
• Banks’ production thesis is already in motion: he brought Justin Staple, director of the FaZe ESPN 30 for 30 and a recent Kanye documentary, to document the era. He points to Sentos hitting $800K on AMC live and Banks’ own live trade because “you can’t replicate it” and it is hard to capture in real time.

12. The screenshot rule, why TA works, and Ansem’s superpower

• The shared rule is stated categorically: “If you’re screenshotting an unrealized P&L to show people and flex it, just sell.” At minimum, trim while keeping a moon bag. Banks says he violated the spirit of that rule during AMC: he felt euphoric but convinced himself his situation was different, then was down roughly $50K–$60K in a day when the broader market fell about 20% two days later.
• Ansem’s mechanism for why the rule — and technical analysis generally — works: if everybody is euphoric, everybody is already allocated and up heavily, so “who else is left to buy?” Markets bottom on fear for the reverse reason: everybody has sold and is liquid, so “who’s left to sell?”
• The change-of-mind case study: Ansem says he was very bearish when Bitcoin was first hitting $60K and expected $40K. After closing shorts on a bounce, he saw the retest hold while sentiment remained bearish and flipped toward a long, accepting that his earlier view could be wrong. Banks calls this ability to change his mind second to second a superpower.

13. Ansem’s one-stock answer: Meta as an AI distribution winner

• Asked which one stock he would hold through the bull market, Ansem says Robinhood is interesting but focuses on Meta. His thesis is that open-source AI models may catch up to the leading labs; if so, companies with the most distribution could benefit most.
• Meta has substantial distribution, can tailor advertising with better AI, and Ansem says it has not spent “a shit ton” on AI while also working on open-source models. He calls it an under-discussed large-company opportunity.
• Separately, Ansem says the initial version of Ansem.io was a launchpad or index for on-chain coins, but its launch structure made coins easy to snipe. He is changing that structure and expects to share more information around the beginning of the following week.

14. Malik Jackson’s first advice to NIL millionaires: build a team, then a board

• Super Bowl 50 champion and 10-year NFL veteran Malik Jackson, now founder of Care League, leads not with asset allocation but with structure: “build a team around you that you can trust.” His example is to keep roughly 10% of a $1M windfall for yourself and put 90% into a trust or somewhere it can earn money, potentially including property near the college where you play.
• His sharper idea, framed as something he wishes he had done, is “build like a board for my life” with his parents, agent, financial adviser and one or two trusted friends. A group with aligned eyes can expose bad actors more quickly.
• Ansem adds that people receiving more money than ever before may not be able to rely on their old advice network. A mentor at or above their level can provide objective guidance, and paying for expert protection can save money later. Banks connects the point to Rich Paul and LeBron: a 10%–20% fee can be worthwhile if it protects and multiplies the remaining 80%–90%.

15. The Ponzi-scheme adviser and Malik’s portfolio

• The cautionary tale: Malik says his agent assigned him a financial adviser who, during his fourth year, was caught up in a Ponzi scheme and was going to prison. For roughly his first two to four years, Malik says he managed money through a debit card, built no credit and made no investments while the adviser took fees. Malik says athletes should be smarter, but hired professionals should also be accountable for what is done or lost.
• The earnings exchange puts Malik’s lifetime NFL earnings at roughly $130M before taxes and roughly $70M–$72M after taxes. He also describes a six-year, $90M Jacksonville contract with $45M guaranteed.
• Holdings and investments he names include Rubrik, Glass House, Cross Culture Ventures, TrueBridge Capital and MLB/NBA team investments. His largest stated purchase was a $16M life-insurance policy in 2019 with a $400K premium. He describes one investment growing from $100K to $2M and another in which $1M returned about $5M.
• His focus areas are real estate, which worries him somewhat given interest rates, and technology, which he calls a golden age. He says crypto is not even 5% of his allocation because there are too many coins and he does not know whether it is regulated. The chat suggests Bitcoin, Zcash, HYPE, VVV, HOOD and Solana; XRP is met with a joking permanent ban.

16. Why Malik roots for no team — and the Brady confidence doctrine

• Malik says he became less attached to teams after a strong Jacksonville stretch ended with him being benched for undrafted players, which he believes was connected to the team needing to make room for its quarterback. Seeing the business side made it hard for him to root for a team; he instead roots for friends still in the league and follows English Premier League fantasy soccer.
• The GOAT sparring includes Malik’s objections about the Patriots, the Tuck Rule and Myles Jack’s disputed non-down call. Banks says his father’s final NFL game was the Tuck Rule game but still calls Tom Brady the epitome of confidence and work ethic: Brady believed he was the guy, took over after Drew Bledsoe’s injury and never gave the job back.

17. Long.xyz’s Nate: tokenized stock pairs are “the last meta”

• Nate’s thesis is that stocks and crypto are converging: the stock market is more mimetic than people think, while crypto is more useful as a compounding machine than many people think. Crypto’s prior ceiling was reflexivity within its own majors; onboarding even 1% of what Nate estimates as a roughly $50T stock market would represent about $0.5T. Memetics, liquidity pools and coordination could then become tools for retail stock traders and crypto-native participants.
• His PVE-versus-PVP framing is that PVP is constrained by limited liquidity and flows inside typical launchpads, while PVE brings in external abundance and net-new flows. Banks agrees that blurring the categories could improve crypto’s “scam” reputation but argues that crypto’s eventual endgame may look more like GTA 6: open economies, peer-to-peer trading, digital real estate and the NFT vision arriving too early.
• Nate agrees that crypto will increasingly function as a backend for other products, but says RWAs can become the final market-wide meta. Long is closing in on $1.5B in total RWA volume on Robinhood, according to Nate.

18. AI, the on-chain BlackRock: mechanics, near-death and a top-10 call

• Long’s three design choices are no bonding curves, so early supply control cannot simply pump an asset; a 24-hour ticker lock, which gives memetic RWAs scarcity; and culture. Nate says the first three or four weeks were “pure pain” and “war mode every day,” with no coordinated launch involving KOLs or big holders. The community found product-market fit organically.
• The AI/NVIDIA-paired token was created by “a really cool random dude,” later entered CTO mode, and now sends fees to a vault. Nate says it fell toward $200K after previously reaching about $1.3M, then bought with $777 — “a lucky number” — to demonstrate that sustainable assets could be built without bundles or supply control.
• In Nate’s hypothetical pair mechanic, if activity on Robinhood paused for two days while NVIDIA doubled, the first swap afterward would reprice AI at roughly twice the USD-denominated value. He describes this as a subtle 24/7 compounding effect and calls AI “almost like an on-chain BlackRock” that continually compounds more absolute units of shares. He gives a bullish, “almost delusional” view that AI could become a top-10 crypto asset, citing Dogecoin’s roughly $88B valuation as a comparison.
• Evidence that the meta can reach the real world: Nate says NVIDIA fell for the first seven-day stretch since 2022 during the week before earnings while AI still grew. He also says the CEO and founder of the roughly $8B public company behind BONER became almost the asset’s main KOL, while Yahoo Finance reportedly showed the asset’s rise without explaining the crypto-driven activity. Nate sees thousands of public companies that need the mindshare and coordination crypto is good at generating.

19. Winning in public as go-to-market — and the on-air alpha

• Banks realizes the marketing loop in real time: Nate is up $1.3M in 24 hours on a $6.1M AI position, is #5 on FOMO’s leaderboard and is up roughly $6M all time, with 150K followers on the social-trading app against roughly 20K on Twitter. Nate says there is “no better way” to market Long than to be doxxed, trade transparently and demonstrate that he is not fixated on the paper number. He says he would give equity or something similar to the anonymous Dumb Crayon Eater if that trader ever reveals himself.
• Through Lighter, Long wraps perp positions — including 3x NVIDIA long positions and pre-IPO perps for OpenAI and Anthropic — as ERC-20s using ZK proofs, without a backend worker. That enables pre-IPO pairs and could eventually support custom baskets. Banks proposes a ZEC/BTC long-short basket; Nate says he may make it the first “Ansem Picks” basket.
• On the “board seat” concept becoming literal, Nate says Robinhood’s stock-token contracts are fully upgradeable and sees no strong technical limit to delegating voting rights through a pool or AI holdings, while acknowledging that collaboration and adjustments would be required.
• The show-exclusive product disclosure is Long’s planned native iOS app. Nate says it will focus on curation and a new form factor for trading stocks rather than resembling FOMO, Pump.fun’s app or existing trading apps. Its distribution goal is to bring people who have never traded crypto into the space.