🔥 Treasury War Intensifies, Robin Hood Chain Heats Up, and the Hunter Biden Laptop Token Implodes

📊 Markets: Is This an Altcoin Season?

Bitcoin and Ether remained flat this week, trading largely sideways in a range. Bitcoin has been stuck between 76K and 82K for three weeks without breaking out, failing to reclaim the May highs above 82K. Meanwhile, the following tokens all hit all-time highs this week: Lighter, Venice, and Zcash. Near surged 30%, and Arbitrum rallied 40%.

So, is this altcoin season?

Not yet. Bitcoin dominance still hovers near 60% — you can't call altcoin season when BTC dominance remains this elevated. However, there are pockets of speculation emerging, reminiscent of 2023, which was a repair year for crypto following the FTX collapse.

"In 2023, we had pockets of speculation that moved around — Blur in February, the ARB token launch in March, Bitcoin ordinals, World Coin in July, and friend.tech in the summer. Toward year-end, we had the Jetto and TIA airdrops, which served as the starting pistol for the following year. It was a moving bubble of speculation because it was just the crypto natives who were here. I still think it's that — crypto natives are here, and this is a pocket of speculation that's moved to Robin Hood chain. Too early to call a full altcoin season."

This week's narrative is simple: crypto degens are making the "debasement trade" but skipping Bitcoin and Ether entirely, heading straight to the riskiest table in the casino. With Treasury Secretary Bessent going to war against the bond market — effectively engaging in a form of quantitative easing — crypto participants are buying memecoins and high-beta altcoins as their spinal reflex to easy money conditions.

One theory: wealth creation events are needed to fuel a full bull market. ICO wealth creation, NFT wealth creation, and now memecoin wealth creation. If degens on Robin Hood chain are getting wealthy, the question becomes: where will they deploy that capital next? Some speculate it could flow back into Ether, particularly if institutions like Robin Hood signal to the community by adding ETH to their balance sheets.

💣 The Treasury War: Bessent Triples the Buybacks, Yields Keep Rising

While crypto was away for Burning Man, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared war on the bond market — and he's losing.

Bessent announced the US Treasury will now buy back $6 billion in long-term debt per week, tripling the levels seen before the intervention (up from $2 billion to $6 billion). Yet despite this aggressive intervention, Treasury yields continue to climb.

The 30-year yield hit 5.3%, the highest since 2007. The 10-year yield is also creeping upward. This has real-world consequences: mortgage rates are back near 7% after dipping close to 6%, and diesel is at a record near $6 per gallon.

At a fireside chat, Bessent said: "Whenever people say, 'Oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk.' Well, it's my dream. I have asymmetric information — I am the house now."

This is Icarus talk. You are not the house, sir. The market is the house. You are a large player, but you are not larger than the market.

The more QE Bessent buys, the more bond sellers are coming into the market. Why? Because bond holders are losing confidence that inflation will be under control. Jim Bianco's thesis is that Bessent is injecting liquidity, which will induce more inflation, and bond holders are selling in response.

Meanwhile, another factor is at play: AI-driven demand for capital. The buildout of AI infrastructure requires massive investment, and companies are willing to pay top dollar for debt instruments. Nominal GDP is rising, and in that backdrop, yields will continue to go up. This is reminiscent of the 1980s, when the market was humming and yields were high, but the economy was booming.

It doesn't make sense for Bessent to fight this secular trend. It feels panicky to see the government react to the market and try to win a thumb war over the market. The market always wins.

On the political front, Donald Trump announced that if Republicans win the House and Senate, he will issue a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen in the United States. The cost would be about $1 trillion. Of course, tariffs would pay for all of this — though tariffs have raised about $150 billion and have already been spent 10 times over.

Cost of living is a top three issue for voters — 74% say it's on the wrong track. The bond market rising does nothing to improve affordability; it makes it far worse.

🚀 Robin Hood Chain: Generating $30 Million in Weekly Revenue

Don't annualize a weekly chart — but if you did, Robin Hood chain is printing $1.5 billion in annualized revenue. The chain generated $30 million this past week and is now the number one blockchain by revenue.

Most of this revenue comes from memecoin trading, but because these memecoins are paired with tokenized stocks, it also includes tokenized stock volume. About 70-80% of the volume on Robin Hood chain is coming from the FOMO app, which is acting as a huge conduit of activity.

This is the most speculative fervor of activity since the whole memecoin mania on Solana in 2023. Once again, the meta is memecoins. It was memecoins last time. It was memecoins the time before that. And now with Robin Hood chain and a brand new social trading app, it's memecoins once again.

Even Uniswap is pumping. The fee burn is now approaching $200 million per year (if you annualize the 7-day chart — which you shouldn't, but people are). A lot of this burn is on the back of the Robin Hood meme economy taking shape with stocks and memecoins.

🎬 AMC CEO Declares War on Tokenized Stocks

AMC CEO Adam Aron is not happy about tokenized stocks. He called the practice "contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, despicable, and vile." He's specifically talking about AMC stock being tokenized on Robin Hood chain.

Robin Hood CEO Vlad Tenev simply replied: "What's the concern?"

Aron's concerns seem to center on the fact that tokenized stock holders don't have shareholder governance rights. But Vlad made a compelling case on CNBC:

"These are products available outside the US in 120+ countries. In a lot of those places, people don't have easy access to US equities. There's no underlying brokerage infrastructure. These tokens are backed one-to-one by underlying shares, so there is stock purchase backing these tokens. This is net new business, and the opportunity for these companies to access a whole new shareholder base."

The tokenized stocks do come with dividends, but not voting rights, because they are structured as debt securities with shares held as collateral. This is not dissimilar to how ADRs or ETFs function.

The concerns from the AMC CEO and even the CNBC host seem misunderstood. Robin Hood is not running interference — they are unlocking access on behalf of AMC and any other tokenized stock company to investors who wouldn't otherwise have access, which is the whole rest of the world.

This is actually fantastic marketing for Robin Hood, and maybe this is just part of the process we need to go through for the world to become normalized to tokenized stocks.

🤖 OpenAI Accused of Stealing Mathematician's Work

There is a Millennium Prize math problem — a million-dollar math problem that got solved this past week thanks to artificial intelligence. The drama: OpenAI may have front-run the mathematicians who were working on the problem.

Two mathematicians, Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alapati, had been working on the problem for a year using OpenAI Codex and Anthropic's Claude. They published something close to a breakthrough, and then OpenAI published the solution around the same time.

The soft allegation is that OpenAI used their chat logs as inputs to train its models and then solved the problem using their proprietary data. OpenAI denies this, saying they "cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage helped improve our models," but they explicitly say they didn't steal the researchers' homework.

The issue is data sovereignty and provenance. Once data gets into the model weights of an LLM, it's a black box. We don't know what data is in there. We just know the weights are what they are. And once the data goes in there, you have no way to prove whether your data got used to shift the tuning of those weights or not.

This brings to light the question: What do companies like OpenAI and Anthropic actually use chat logs and data for? By default, they can use any of your chat logs for internal training. You have to turn that off in Claude and ChatGPT if you want them not to do that — and even then, it's a pinky promise.

If you are in the arms race of model development, you need to get your hands on as much data as possible. And so OpenAI and Anthropic — as a matter of being in a direct-to-consumer position — get first access to all of this data. If you are not using that data, you are disadvantaging yourself as a matter of principle to protect your users' data sovereignty.

On the bright side: AI solved a Millennium Prize math problem. We are still not yet at the final capabilities of these AI models, and the future is going to be incredible — even if there's drama along the way.

In crypto, Venice (the platform that can't steal your data) is up 40% on the news. Near pushed through 30% up on the week, with the Near AI cloud platform built to protect user data. Crypto has the antidote to this problem.

🪙 The Hunter Biden Laptop Token: A Predictable Disaster

On September 7th, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hunter Biden would be launching a memecoin called Laptop on the Base chain. Four minutes later, Hunter Biden posted the ticker and the date on X with a Fox News clip about the laptop.

The laptop, Biden said, had been turned into a weapon against him. But he was turning it into "a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery." He would go after Trump's memecoin grift, citing nearly a million wallets that had collectively lost $3.8 billion, and promised that Laptop would be different and compensate all those people who lost money on the Trump memecoin grift.

After crashing 99%, Hunter Biden had to go to Twitter to defend the launch. He blamed predatory snipers and claimed that no one on the Hunter Biden team or in the Hunter Biden insider circle were able to sell any tokens — which earned him a community note that identified multiple wallets receiving 100 million tokens (10% of the supply) before the launch and sold them all.

If you wanted to write the most normal movie about a terrible memecoin launch and have nothing change whatsoever about the formula, this was it. Say you're doing something good. Blame snipers. There are insider wallets that get allocation early. They sell. The person in question says the team is locked up and can't sell. The token dumps 99%.

We've seen this movie so many times before. It's depressing stuff.

🦊 MetaMask Spins Out of Consensus

MetaMask is spinning out of Consensus, which is interesting. MetaMask was part of Consensus, an early Ethereum conglomerate with an enterprise structure including their L2 Linea, Besu, and institutional products, and the MetaMask wallet.

They are now splitting into separate entities. MetaMask is now off on its own, focusing on consumer use cases. MetaMask rolled out a Mastercard-type product — think consumer fintech meets crypto wallet. They're boasting 100 million downloads.

Everything else is staying within Consensus. Joe Lubin will be the CEO of the MetaMask product. No MetaMask token was mentioned in the announcement, though that has been a rumor for years.

There have been rumors for a long time that Consensus was going to IPO. This might be a step toward that. MetaMask is far easier and cleaner to spin out than trying to take the entire Consensus entity public, particularly given the auditing challenges of a company that started in 2015, paid its first employees with Ether, and had no formal payroll or books in the beginning.

🔐 Frame Transactions Coming to Ethereum in 2027

Vitalik put out a post this week about frame transactions, which will be a headline feature in the Hogat hard fork in 2027 (not in the next hard fork, Glasgowstanbul, which is still scheduled for later this year).

Frame transactions are account abstraction — smart wallets that are conceptually very different from externally owned accounts. Rather than having a "dumb wallet" (like a Ledger or MetaMask), account abstraction is a programmable wallet.

With account abstraction, you can:

• Pay gas in any token, including stablecoins
• Have applications sponsor gas fees (gasless transactions)
• Use passkeys as private keys
• Batch transactions
• Swap out private keys while keeping the same address (which is how Ethereum can become quantum-resistant)

Account abstraction has been discussed in Ethereum land for 10 years. It was always prioritized in some sense — it was always destiny to merge into Ethereum in the future. But why did it take so long? Because Ethereum is a decentralized system. Standards needed to be argued. We didn't have as much data then as we do now.

The big reason this was prioritized now: quantum. Signatures in Ethereum are not quantum secure. Those have to be replaced. The Ethereum Foundation announced this week that by 2029, they want the entire Ethereum stack to be quantum secure. That's a lot of things to replace, and this is one of them.

📅 Next Week: The Clarity Act Vote

Next week, it's do-or-die week for the Clarity Act. They vote on closure. Odds on Polymarket are about 15% right now that it passes — people think it's going to fail because the ethics language hasn't been bridged, and Democrats likely don't want to throw another bone to crypto or Trump's agenda prior to midterms.

15% is not zero. We'll see where it goes.

Thanks for sticking with us another week, Bankless Nation. Hopefully, this is the start of a very long and glorious bull market — and if it is, we'll be here along the way. Crypto is risky, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. 🚀