Bankless
ROLLUP: $300M DeFi Hack Fallout | Arbitrum Freezes Funds | AI Deflation Debate | Productive ETH
24 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What recent events have impacted the crypto market?
Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of April, time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. We got the most consequential DeFi hack, I think, in history? Yeah, big words. I think they're true. I think they're true because there was so much fallout. It reverberated all around crypto and all around DeFi, including our Layer 2s. A lot of questions were raised. This was a $300 million hack.
We'll talk about who's to blame. Was Arbitrum right to freeze some of the funds? And what does this mean for DeFi and for the rest of crypto?
Zooming out to all the markets, still bullish, still all-time highs in equities just last week. Can that be sustained? We're also going to be learning a little bit more about Fed chair, incoming Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, and what he believes about AI and how it is going to be factored into Fed policy. It's interesting to have a Fed chair.
thinking about how the Fed as an institution will need to adapt to the AI world. And then also, we've got, according to the words of my co-host, and also me, the best ETH thesis since ultrasound money and the triple point asset. We're on to a new one. Yes. Productive money, the best case for East. We're going to talk about this whole thesis and why we think it's the best.
Oh, yeah. Productive money. There you go. Also, if we get to the end of this and we still have some time, David, I want to get into a rant, okay?
Ryan's got a rant.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the KelpDAO $300M exploit?
It kind of feels like the U.S. government is trying to KYC, let's know your customer, all of our devices. There's some bills I want to talk about. I feel like the surveillance state is the final boss here.
Does that mean I need to like link my driver's license to my iPhone?
Yes.
And have that registered with this date?
Not just your iPhone, like your MacBook, your like any device. Anything connected to the internet? Anything connected to the internet. I think we got to talk about this and what's at stake if we lose this battle because it's not great. But let's get bullish for a minute and let's look at the market. So David, I know you love sharing your screen. You love showing me some charts. I
I've taken over the charting section of the Weekly Rollup six years into the Bankless podcast and finally figured out that David should do the charts. What do you want to show me? Oh, we are looking at the S&P, which is at all-time highs again for the second week in a row. Last week, we were right above 7,000 at like 720, 7,020 points. We're at now 7,100 in the S&P.
And so the equity has continued to look good. We can take a peek at NVIDIA. Not at all-time highs, but pretty close, pretty close.
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Chapter 3: How did Arbitrum's decision to freeze funds affect DeFi?
And if you kind of go down the list, Amazon, basically at all-time highs. Apple is at near highs. And so if you're a tech equity investor- You're probably doing okay in recent times. The markets are kind of just resuming their normal thing, which is just going up and to the right.
Chapter 4: What is the 'productive money' thesis for Ethereum?
Not universally true. It's not universal good news. We have oil going up, which we don't want. We want oil to go down. Yeah, it's up on the weak.
Chapter 5: How is AI expected to influence deflation or inequality?
Last week, I think I called it wartime lows, wartime being high because we're in war and a war around oil, but lows in the sense that it's a lower end of the prices that oil has seen during the war.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of the recent prediction markets expansion?
We are at now war middle price. Warm prices. And so we're up on the week. We're about up 10% on the week on the oil prices for both Brent and WTI. That's about what? Upper 90s price per barrel? Yeah. So $100 for a barrel of Brent and then $95 for Wexessus Intermediate Crude. And so what does that tell us? It just means oil coming out of the Strait of Hormuz is increasingly constrained.
That is not resolved. And then also, importantly, inputs into inflation. Inflation numbers are going to be downstream of oil prices. Oil prices are... I was hoping they were going to go down this week again, seeing as the conflict of war in Iran has somewhat found some sort of... equilibrium, I guess. We'll talk about that in a second. We'll get there. And then 10-year yields also going back up.
So again, they were going down. Now they have kind of trended back towards like the middle highs of wartime 10-year yield prices.
Yeah, 4.3%, I believe, on that. How about our crypto assets, David? I think you said Bitcoin was up.
Bitcoin up 5% on the week, so we're almost at $78,000. We almost touched $80,000 this week. We're a little bit down from that, but up 5% on the week, so a healthy week for Bitcoin. Flat on the week for Ethereum. And that dichotomy is going to be because of the hack that we're going to talk about here in a second.
Oh, you think that's Fallout from the DeFi hack?
Almost certainly. Because of how significant this was in the Edge's word, like the idea of trust in DeFi, I think that is showing up in the ETH-BTC price. We talked, Ryan, about the ETH-BTC ratio last week. Yeah, you were bullish. And how it was trending upwards. Thanks for cursing us, David. Because we don't want to jinx it. We jinxed it? We jinxed it.
You take credit for that, not me. I said never look at the ETH to Bitcoin ratio again on this show.
We won't look at that anymore. But the thing that I'll – no, just zooming out and talking about like what does all this mean? A, the war markets are painting a not short continuation of the war. Like there's more of that. But the equities markets and even with the crypto markets,
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Chapter 7: How does device-level KYC impact privacy and security?
It seems to be when they are left to their own devices, they inch upwards. They like to go up. They want to go up. And then we do a war thing and they go down.
Chapter 8: What are the broader implications of the KelpDAO hack on the DeFi landscape?
And there's a DeFi hack and they go down. But like when you leave them alone, they go up. And so that is my, like last week I came out as bullish.
Yes, you did.
I'm maintaining that position just because I assume at some point the bad news will stop or the bad events will stop probably. As my default case, there can always be more than you expect, but it is nice to know that when they are left alone, things still go as planned, which is going up. That's my take.
It does seem like there's still upward momentum here, right? It's hard to keep the balloon underwater a little bit. Let me show you some more upward momentum here in the Bitcoin ETFs. This is Eric Belchunas on Bitcoin ETF flows. He's showing a Bloomberg terminal here and he's looking at iBid. That's a BlackRock ETF.
You see this on the one day flow, on the one week flow, on the one month, on the three month, on the year to date. It's all green. We got green, green, green, green, green, green across the board. This is what he said. Bitcoin ETF flows are back in. in the high life. Every single rolling period for what we track is now positive. Haven't seen that in months.
So Bitcoin ETF buyers, they're hanging in there, David. They are proving themselves to be diamond hands. Eric D'Alessandro's Gen X is being shown there in his statement. Yeah. The only more diamond hands though than the Bitcoin BlackRock ETF holders is actually Mr. Michael Saylor, or Michael Strategy, as you call him. Michael Strategy. You should just name his name to that. He just flippened.
So he just flippened iBit. That's wild. Yeah. So MSTR, that's Strategy, Michael Strategy, owns more Bitcoin than the iBit ETF. So more Bitcoin than BlackRock, which is pretty impressive. I guess they've been kind of neck and neck, but you can see this red line. Michael's... Strategy just passed. I got you saying it. So impressive, fun fact. They're competing to own a little bit more.
Of course, you know, iBid is the aggregate demand of many thousands, tens of thousands of investors, whereas... Well, I guess so is strategy. But anyway, two big orders here.
The conversation of is strategy a big Ponzi kind of continued this week. Oh, did it? We talked about CoffeeZilla last week. There was a debate from maybe some guy at strategy or just a big Michael Saylor bull went and tried to challenge CoffeeZilla to a debate. Peter Schiff.
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