Stablecoin Rails, Fungibility, and Market Structure

In this episode of Bits + Bips, hosts Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins tackle a packed agenda: from the fairness of Binance’s listing fees to the ways in which DeFi didn’t perform well during the “Black Friday” crash, why Tempo’s $500 million raise might have been a political ploy, and the growing war over stablecoin dominance.

The trio debates whether Bitcoin is undervalued compared to gold, why Ethereum’s 10-year track record gives it an edge, and whether today’s Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) are just froth, or the permanent backbone of institutional crypto.

Plus: Austin makes a bold prediction about the stablecoin that will dominate by 2040.

Sponsors:

• Mantle

Hosts:

• Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida

• Austin Campbell, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting

• Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund

  
  

Links:

Binance Listing Fee Drama

• Unchained: 

• Binance Listing Fee Fight: What’s a Fair Price to List on the Top Crypto Exchange?

• Binance Claims It Does Not Profit From Token Listings

• Jesse Pollak (Base) chimes in

Tempo & Dankrad

• Fortune: Exclusive: Stripe-backed blockchain startup Tempo raises $500 million round led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Greenoaks

• Ethereum core dev Dankrad Feist joins Tempo

• Reactions:

• Ryan Adams (Bankless): Tempo will optimize for itself, not ETH.

• Nick Almond: Not a death sentence for ETH

• Breadguy: Big loss. Dankrad was a major L1 scaling advocate.

Black Friday

• Dan Wilson: 3 big lessons post-crash

Gold vs. BTC

• GOLD/BTC up ‎23.5% in past month

• Bitcoin Is Undervalued vs. Gold

DATs

• Bloomberg: Huobi Founder Li Lin Set To Launch $1 Billion Ether Accumulator - Bloomberg

• CoinDesk: Ripple Set to Enter Corporate Treasury Business With $1B Acquisition of GTreasury

Timestamps:

• 🎬 0:00 Intro

• 💸 3:39 Binance listing fees — fair price for distribution or pay-to-play?

• 🏛️ 10:19 What is the best way to go public?

• ⚔️ 11:57 How exchanges really compete behind the scenes

• 💥 15:00 “Black Friday”: why Chris calls it catastrophic — but with a silver lining

• 🧱 24:52 What the industry must fix to prevent another meltdown

• 💵 30:15 How Tempo’s $500M raise represents peak frothiness

• 🚨 39:12 Is Dankrad’s exit from the Ethereum Foundation a red alarm for ETH?

• 🔮 43:07 Austin’s bold prediction: which stablecoin wins by 2040

• 🥇 46:17 Is Bitcoin undervalued compared to gold?

• 🏗️ 52:21 Why DATs are here to stay despite the market carnage

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