Digital Asset News covers SEC tokenization plans, Trezor data breach, and crypto market outlook
Solo presenter Rob covers SEC crypto regulatory moves, a Trezor customer data breach, and broader market conditions.
Summary
Digital Asset News opens with a market overview noting the S&P 500 and NASDAQ hitting near all-time highs, Warren Buffett deploying $32 billion in Q2, and improving inflation data — while Bitcoin remains stagnant around $63K. He reports that the Clarity Act is effectively dead after Republican senators sided with banks over stablecoin yield provisions. The most significant development is the SEC moving to act unilaterally where Congress has failed, planning both a "Regulation Crypto" framework for token-based capital raises and an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks to trade on blockchains around the clock. He also covers a Trezor data breach exposing nearly 12,000 customers' personal details — including home addresses — through fulfillment provider Shipmunk, raising serious concerns about physical "wrench attacks" on crypto holders.
He also presents a fee-burn price model generated with Claude's assistance, showing that a 2x fee-burn scenario across major protocols could push Solana to ~$1,000, Ethereum to ~$5,200, and Bitcoin to ~$141,000 — cautioning that these are illustrative projections, not predictions, but arguing that dismissing tokenization and fee-burn dynamics understates long-term upside.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Market Overview: Stocks Near All-Time Highs, Bitcoin Stagnant
Rob: The S&P 500 just hit its all-time high, so congratulations to S&P 500 and traditional stockholders — I am one of those. I'm actually more excited about my traditional equities portfolio than my crypto portfolio these days, because we all know this is the down year for crypto. What is surprising, actually quite surprising, is that this is a midterm year yet the gains are monstrous, especially for AI. We can see that in the NASDAQ as well, which has also hit near an all-time high. I think the all-time high was back in January — almost $100.98. Now we're at 96, so pretty close.
These things look pretty good. But even better news: Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have deployed cash. This was a topic we talked about roughly a couple of weeks ago. They've actually deployed $32 billion out of their almost $400 billion stash, and this was just in Q2 2026. Things are doing well.
But there's always somebody who says the party's almost over. That was Michael Burry, who roughly three years ago said to sell everything — and during that time the market went up like crazy. Now he is saying you need to get out even more, as he doubles down and shorts pretty much everything, saying everything's going to collapse. He even said Berkshire Hathaway was good but it's not an attractive investment anymore. We'll see who is right moving forward. I am a little cautious. If you have any gains, any profits, maybe it's a good idea to take some off the table and not risk everything in a YOLO.
As for crypto — Bitcoin is not doing so great. Pretty much stagnant, even though everything around us is popping off. Bitcoin at $63K, down 0.6% in 24 hours. Ethereum down 2% in seven days, 1% in 24 hours. A little bit of green here and there, but not too great.
Goldman Sachs Enters Bitcoin ETFs
Rob: As for whether there's an AI bubble or not, who knows? But Goldman Sachs gets into it — better late than never — as they acquire Neos, including a billion dollars in their Bitcoin high-income ETFs. Goldman Sachs was a staunch opponent of the ETFs and didn't really think there was going to be too much going on there. If they're going to get in, might as well do it near the bottom of this bear market. I still think we have a little bit lower to go as far as Bitcoin goes. And if there's any kind of bubble happening in traditional markets, when the traditional market sneezes, Bitcoin catches a cold and altcoins essentially get the worst disease you can think of — there will be quite a drop. So we'll see how it all plays out. Good for Goldman Sachs — that's actually good for us.
Inflation Data and Fed Rate Hike Odds
Rob: Macroeconomically, we're looking pretty good. As of yesterday, CPI came in 0.1% lower year-over-year. Core CPI hit expectations, and core CPI year-over-year also hit expectations. And if we take a look at the core PPI — the producer price index, which is a precursor for the consumer price index — July PPI just came out today: inflation falls to 4.7%. If PPI is going down, it means it doesn't cost as much to make and transport goods and services. Because of that, you can expect it to feed through to CPI eventually. We've fallen to 4.7% even though the expectation was 4.9%. Core PPI inflation fell to 4.2%, in line with expectations, and month-over-month PPI was flat.
Why is that important? Because of the Federal Reserve and rate hike odds, which are declining further — even though just two weeks ago there was talk about them raising rates. Funny how that works.
The Clarity Act Is Dead
Rob: The Clarity Act is dead. On this channel, I haven't been very positive about the Clarity Act. I have absolutely no faith in the Senate, no faith in Congress, no faith in any politician pretty much. We needed a super majority for the Clarity Act to pass. I said it probably wasn't going to happen. It was supposed to happen in July — remember that? Then it was supposed to happen last week. And now it's, "Well, we'll do it in September." And now Republicans that were backing it have shifted: US banks are pushing to restrict stablecoin yield, and several Republican senators who represent rural communities that rely heavily on local banks for loans are now supporting the banks, meaning they're not going to vote for the Clarity Act. They argue stablecoin rewards could drain deposits needed for farm, home, and small business loans. I'm not here to debate it. If that's what they're going to do, just kiss the Clarity Act goodbye. Can we just stop talking about it?
SEC Plans Tokenization of Stocks — Two Major Initiatives
Rob: Let's talk about something positive: the SEC. Really good news. The SEC plans rules for tokenization of stocks. There are two parts to what they're talking about. One sounds a bit iffy, and the second part sounds pretty good.
The SEC is preparing to do on its own what Congress could not do. The SEC will roll out two crypto initiatives in the coming days. First: a Friday open meeting to propose Regulation Crypto — a framework letting projects raise capital through token sales without full securities registration. That sounds like an ICO. In the United States, we don't allow ICOs. Now there are ways around it, but they're going to try to allow that to actually happen. New projects — maybe existing projects as well — raise capital through token sales without full securities registration. I think people are going to get burned, but no one's your dad and the SEC isn't your dad. It's up to you to figure out if this works for you. People are smarter than what the government gives them credit for. Just be aware that's going to happen.
And then — and I think this is the big thing — an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks, with details possibly dropping Friday. The exemption would let tokenized versions of stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia trade on blockchains around the clock in fractional sizes. This is actually happening in other parts of the world, just not here in the United States. Tokens typically track a stock's economic exposure but carry no voting or dividend rights, though some protocols are working on solving that — which is what justifies the lighter regulatory treatment. So it's just going to track the price. That sounds fine to me.
Robinhood Chain and the Tokenized Stock Boom
Rob: This is piggybacking on the biggest on-chain growth story. Tokenized stocks have been the engine behind Robinhood Chain, whose real-world asset volume jumped fivefold this summer, and there's been a major push across Base as well. When we get these stories, there's a lot of speculation: now that this is happening and you've got Robinhood Chain, the price of these chains should go up. But as we talked about yesterday, it doesn't work like that, because even though they're capturing value, they're not really capturing the value — it's all about the fees.
Robinhood Chain — this is from three days ago — reached 200 million transactions in 30 days, outpacing Base from Coinbase at its peak. The TVL, the total value locked, has climbed to somewhere between $300 million and $800 million since launch. It's almost a billion dollars. Not bad. The chain's stablecoin supply continues to set records, which typically signals real usage rather than speculative inflows.
So you think to yourself: great, what are the chains I can invest in? But there's a problem. The absence of a native token is a deliberate choice by Robinhood. By using ETH for gas and avoiding a governance or utility token launch, Robinhood sidesteps regulatory exposure and ensures the chain's growth metrics aren't inflated by token farming incentives.
So you'd think Ethereum should be doing great because of mass adoption — but you have to look at what the actual revenue coming in is. For all that work, Robinhood Chain tops Ethereum L2 revenue with a whopping $3.6 million in its first month. I'd love to have $3.6 million too, but that ain't moving the needle. It's great, but it's not that much.
If we take a look at DeFi Llama and the fees being generated, the number one fee generator is Tether across a bunch of different chains — Tron, Ethereum, Solana, and others. Circle is the same way. Across all chains in the last 24 hours: $57 million. Not too bad, and you can see growth across all the chains. Just one chain isn't going to really do it.
We can break this down further. Solana: $9.6 million. And the number one fee generator on Solana is Pump.fun — $100 million in 30 days. Good for Pump.fun.
Fee Burns and Token Value: A Price Model
Rob: I think Matt Hogan said it best: tokens don't capture value automatically. However, Hyperliquid sends 97% of fees to buybacks. Pump.fun burns 36% of supply — some people would argue that's a waste of tokens, but when you have fewer tokens and more demand, price goes up. Uniswap burned 107 million UNI via automated buybacks. Aptos has a hard cap on supply. And Solana has a current proposal — this is a good one — to increase the fee burn by 12 to 14x. Hogan said the market hasn't repriced this yet.
I took a look at that and put it into Claude. I wanted Claude to generate what Hogan was talking about — a fee burn slider to evaluate the price across Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. And when people say, "Rob, it doesn't matter about these real-world assets," I get it. But it's not just you using Robinhood. It's global payments, real estate tokenization, stock tokenization, bond tokenization, futures, derivatives, options — not something crazy, just a little bit here and there. And then speculative premium sensitivity, because that's what crypto is built on. And then the narrative premium — you can go crazy with that, because that's really what it comes down to.
Just doing a 2x — nothing too big — with a fee burn factored in, that would take Solana into the $1,000 range, Ethereum to $5,200, and Bitcoin to $141,000. Again, this is if all of these hit. I'm not saying it's going to. I'm just saying don't dismiss it by saying it's only for payments or only for real-world assets. I think there's going to be a chain that encompasses a lot of those use cases, and the winners are being built right now. I can't tell you exactly which ones they are, but take a look at those.
Trezor Data Breach: Nearly 12,000 Customers Exposed
Rob: To finish up before we get to the Q&A — Trezor. This is the Coin Bureau guy's favorite cold storage device. I never had one, but people love it. Unfortunately, when you're around the block long enough, mistakes happen. Trezor disclosed its first customer data breach since 2013, affecting almost 12,000 hardware wallet buyers. That's you if you have one. An unauthorized actor accessed order data through fulfillment provider Shipmunk, exposing customers' names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses.
Why is it such a big deal? Wrench attacks are on the rise. Before people say, "Well, they won't get me because I've got guns" — trust me, I'm with you, I'm in Texas right now. The chances of you actually getting wrench attacked are pretty low. However, the chances of you being targeted for some type of scam really ratchet up. You've got to be very careful with all your emails, everything that comes in, all your phone calls — especially if you're a Trezor customer. Actually, this applies to everyone.
I'll tell you a story. There was a wrench attack — it was in France or South Carolina, one of those two, I know they're vastly different. What these wrench attack people did was they parked their car on the curb of this guy's house. They knew he had crypto because of a data leak. One of the guys knocked on the door and said, "Hey, I'm really sorry, I ran into part of your rock wall — if you can come out and take a look, we'll exchange information." The guy said, "Sure," came out, turned right by the garage, and three guys in masks were waiting. "Okay, go back inside. Now let's get your hardware wallet." Not everybody answers the door with a gun. That's pretty much how it is.
Again, the chances of this actually happening to you are very low. But all these different things happening as far as scams go — you are now more exposed, especially if you're a Trezor customer.
Diversifying Storage: The Key Takeaway
Rob: As I've always said, and I know this gets repetitive but it has to be said: diversify your investments and diversify your storage. I use iTrust, Tangem, Ledger, and I've just gotten into some ETFs. People say, "I'm just going to put everything in one cold storage." You can do that, but remember — ColdCard got hacked for almost 2,000 Bitcoin, roughly $116 million. So for me, I'm just going to spread things around instead of putting everything into one thing. I never used ColdCard, but the Bitcoin OGs and Bitcoin maximalists were like, "This is the one, bro." I guess they had to roll some more dice.
Diversify as much as you can as far as storage. The same ones I use — Tangem and Ledger — are the same ones Larry Fink and Michael Saylor use via Coinbase Prime. Also diversify investments. I've got a Roth IRA with iTrust, and right now I can put Bitcoin, some crypto, and gold in it. As of today, they just launched stocks and ETFs. So if you're into a Roth IRA, traditional IRA, or if you're into stocks and want to use their custody storage facility, you can start investing in Nvidia, Google, Tesla, S&P 500 ETF, gold, silver, and I believe platinum as well.
Why would you do a Roth IRA? Barbell Financial said it right: his Roth IRA is up $100,000 in three years. He's 36 right now — imagine 25 to 30 years of that. And he doesn't have to pay any taxes on it because it's a Roth IRA. This is exactly how Peter Thiel did it. He stuck his PayPal stocks into a Roth IRA when they weren't worth anything, and it's now worth over $5 billion. He's over 59 and a half years old and he's collecting from it tax-free.
If you think Bitcoin is going to go up and it goes to a million dollars — if you bought one today at $60,000, you know how much you'd pay in taxes if you're in California? Roughly $348,000. And one thing with iTrust that Peter Thiel can't do: if you put crypto like Solana or Ethereum in your Roth IRA, you get staking rewards, and those are tax-exempt.
Q&A
Rob: All right, let's get into the Q&A.
Rob, do Bitcoin ETFs appreciate at the same rate as Bitcoin during a bull run? Well, it depends. If it's a spot ETF, yes. If it's a futures ETF, it should track closely but there can be differences. Getting rusty on the details there.
Sean Louise asks: "Hey Rob, the SEC delays its 24/7 tokenized stock exemption again, this time to protect the Clarity Act. Maybe they're working together." Sounds good to me. It doesn't matter. If the Clarity Act somehow follows through — and I hope I'm wrong about it being dead — then the SEC and the CFTC will work together: "Okay, you oversee this, you oversee that, let's push this forward." I think that's the more likely outcome. But on a midterm year, why would the Democrats give the Republicans, especially Donald Trump, any kind of win going into the midterm elections? People say, "Well, their constituents want it." A lot of them don't. We think everybody loves crypto, but go no further than the Super Bowl ad not too long ago — when it was revealed it was a Coinbase ad, not a singalong commercial, and everybody booed. I think there are a lot more people who got burned in crypto than made out in crypto. And if you're a Democrat, I'm pretty sure you don't like Donald Trump, so I don't think they're going to let him have a victory.
Jimmy says: "I think the solution to avoiding wrench attacks is to buy your hardware wallets using your friend's name and address." Smart move. Very good. Buy two, give one to your friend as a gift, and then when the guys in ski masks show up at his house, he's very confused.
Rusty makes a good point: you can put a small balance in your standard wallet or one-passphrase wallet to act as a decoy, while keeping your main funds under a different passphrase. If you don't know what a passphrase is — I never liked that term, but I understand why they use it. The passphrase is essentially the 25th word after your 24 mnemonic words are put in order. You can set it to whatever you want. So if someone puts in your 24 words, they get a decoy wallet with a small balance. But with the 25th word, they get the real wallet. This is what we have to do to stay safe.
Andy says: "Home address is bad. I had a visit a couple of years ago." Wow. And he adds: "Cold storage is a joke. The companies behind them are telling criminals your name, address, phone number, and email address." I don't know — I think that would be essentially jail time if they did that deliberately. But the point about cold storage security theater is fair. ColdCard — I could not believe that's how they had you secure your mnemonic phrase, with entropy and rolling dice. Some days I kind of feel like that's where we are, and that's why I tell people who are new: just get an ETF or just keep it on the exchange to start. And then if something goes wrong with the exchange, well, that exchange sucks. But in the beginning, I don't even try to tell people anymore because it's a constant battle to remind them: hey, I know this last year sucked, but this is when all the money's made and it's going to be better. And people are like, "Shut up." And I'm like, yeah, fine. I'm like a lazy outfielder now — if there's a pop fly, I'll catch it, but I'm not diving for it anymore.
Regarding the price prediction website — what Rusty is talking about is on the website under Tools, go to Profits, which takes you to priceprofits.com. I put this site together — well, Claude did everything for it. The hosting is essentially free because Claude used Cloudflare. What we did was take a look at the most ridiculous price predictions. You've got people like Peter Schiff, Cryptoher — those guys are actually pretty reasonable. And then some crazy stuff. Here's what Rusty's talking about: the hedge fund managers and the big names. You've got crazies like Samson Mow saying Bitcoin's going to a million in 2026. And then there's the wall of shame for people who missed big time. What we added is the ability to drag and drop and see the price action. If you want to add somebody, click the Submit a Call button and put in the information. What's great is these guys can't erase their accounts because we keep a record and use the Wayback Machine. Good luck changing your price prediction.
You guys will probably beat out most of these predictions. So many people are in here — that's why I put in the drag-and-drop part so we can see who's the most reasonable. Let's see: "More Mail" says 58K by July 20 — I think that actually hit, so congratulations. Dr. Gonk: 40K by September. Caban, Attakus, Johnny Crypto, Raven, Syndic, Hurt Tomer, and a host of others. Fat Sonic: 49K by October 2026, probably worth it. Echo: 69K. If you want to put in your price prediction, you guys will beat these guys hands down.
As for the Hall of Fame — well, we have nobody there because everybody's wrong. Except Peter Brandt is looking pretty good. Peter Brandt thinks we'll be between $40K and $60K by September to October. Dr. Profit: $40K to $50K. Cryptoher: $30K to $45K. They're closest to reality. The wall of shame: Raoul Pal — not so great. Samson Mow — he'll be there. Seagull: a million by January 2029. I hope so. Cryptoera: $30K to $45K by year end — I think that's pretty much doable.
NFA Live — Ben had some prior things going on, so we pushed it to next week. But if you'd like to see NFA Live in person, there is a conference going on in Miami, November 20th through 22nd. Come down. A lot of good speakers. Take a vacation. I'll even buy you a beer — depending on how well the market is. If the market's good, Corona. If the market's not so good, whatever's cheapest.
Darth Mike says: "I think we're already at the bottom and October is going to be October." Man, I hope Mike's incorrect because I still have a good amount of capital waiting to deploy. If it doesn't hit, it doesn't hit. I've been buying Bitcoin every Monday on Cash App. Seems to work out okay.