Michael Saylor acknowledges utility of Solana, Ethereum, and DeFi ecosystems at Bitcoin conference
A Digital Asset News episode covering Michael Saylor's evolving stance on altcoins, stable coin growth data, and a security warning about an advanced phishing attack targeting Robinhood users.
Summary
The host of Digital Asset News opens with observations from the Bitcoin conference, noting lower attendance and fewer politicians and original Bitcoin figures compared to prior years. The central focus is a clip of Michael Saylor — who previously dismissed all crypto assets other than Bitcoin — now publicly acknowledging that the Solana ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem, and the broader DeFi ecosystem all serve as engines driving demand for Bitcoin. The host presents stable coin volume data showing stable coin volume at approximately $7.5 trillion as of March 2026 (part of a $10.3 trillion combined total across payment systems), approaching near-parity with the ACH system, and compares blockchain performance metrics across Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, ICP, and Cardano. Tom Lee and Bitmine are noted for making a significant Ethereum purchase, signaling growing institutional appetite for ETH as a treasury asset. The episode closes with a security warning about a sophisticated phishing attack that spoofed legitimate Robinhood emails by passing DMARC and DKIM authentication checks. The Q&A section includes extended viewer discussion of XRP and Ripple — including the host's skepticism about XRP utility and whether banks must use the XRP token versus the Ripple ledger — as well as a rebuttal to Tim Draper's Bitcoin conference remarks about the US dollar collapsing to zero.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Conference Attendance and On-the-Ground Reports
Host: We need to talk about the Bitcoin conference, what's going down, and what was just said by Michael Saylor yesterday. If you're not at the conference, congratulations — that's a lot of you — because this is what we have right now. A digital asset investor was just kind of perusing and walking around, and it had a real "I've seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" kind of feeling.
I was there last year and it was packed. This would be the first or second day — yesterday might have been whale passes, but this would be like the initial kickoff. I remember being there and it was a heck of a lot more people, and it just seems like that is where we're going.
I've got a friend there named Joey — shout out to Joey for giving me great information about what's going on at the conference itself. He states this: AI, quantum, and stable coins seem to be the hot issues right now. Not surprised. Barely any politicians compared to 2024 and 2025. Barely any OGs. We actually talked about this yesterday — how some of the original Bitcoin players are saying, "I'm not going to that. That's trash." And it seems like there's almost a little civil war going on.
Joey also says that it got brought up again that they are thinking the Clarity stuff will finish in May. Of course, the Clarity Act — everybody's hot on that one. I don't think it's going to pass, but I've been wrong before. It sounds like they believe it will take a little longer to finish, but they're looking at the end of May, perhaps a little later. So thanks again to Joey for the great intel.
Michael Saylor's Evolving Position on Altcoins
And that brings us to the topic of today's video: Michael Saylor. As everybody remembers, Michael Saylor in 2013 said, "Bitcoin's days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling." And I think that's all of us, right? We all got into Bitcoin and just thought to ourselves, "Doesn't make any sense," and dismissed it. Michael Saylor dismissed it. Smart guy — and we just kind of dismissed it. That's what usually everybody does the first time around. I very rarely hear of people saying, "I heard about it and I immediately had to buy as much as I possibly could." Maybe that happens as far as FOMO goes, but that was Michael Saylor in 2013.
Moving forward into 2020, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy actually bought Bitcoin, put it on the map, and they've been buying ever since. And during this time, Michael Saylor would come out and pretty much talk about us altcoiners — yeah, us altcoiners, me too — about how wrong we were. He would always come out and say there's no second best. You've all seen this type of meme. What he said was, "Bitcoin's the best crypto asset." Okay, Bitcoin's the best crypto asset. I've got to tell you, it's a great asset. I have the majority of my holdings in Bitcoin. I believe it's a great store of value, a great hedge against inflation long-term, and I believe it is digital gold. Those three things I am 100% certain on in my mind.
For Saylor, it's only Bitcoin. There is no second best. There is no second best crypto asset. There's a crypto asset, it's called Bitcoin. And that's just a statement — that's just how it is. Everybody has their beliefs, and that's how it is.
Well, as far as the Bitcoin conference goes, just take a listen to this. I think things are changing, and people evolve. Nothing wrong with that.
Michael Saylor: "The Bitcoin community hasn't had a lot in common with the crypto community for the past few years, but now the interests are crossing. Tokenizing stable coins and staking them to generate yield, using digital credit that drives demand for Bitcoin, means that the Solana ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem, the DeFi ecosystem, every protocol, every digital token idea, every perpetual source of leverage, all of the DeFi exchanges — all of them are going to be engines driving demand for Bitcoin, which the Bitcoin community—"
Host: Now, he's not here to say, "I'm selling all my Bitcoin for altcoins," but he's saying there's a real use case. There is utility and it actually does function. So when he used to say there's no second best, I think he's evolving his opinion, and that's where we're all at. And to me, I didn't have it on my bingo card that he would be saying, "Hey, these altcoins are here" — like I've been talking about forever.
Stable Coin Volume and the BEST Rails
As far as stable coins, which Michael Saylor just alluded to, there's the BEST — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. Now, this is in flux. I think Binance is falling out — maybe it's just going to be taken over by Base — but it'll still be the best as far as the mnemonic, the acronym. Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. They're crushing it.
And not only are they crushing it, but look — as of roughly four or five years ago, in April 2021, stable coin volume versus other systems moving funds back and forth between banks was $6 trillion. Six trillion just in April. Then you had Visa at $1 trillion, and then stable coins way down lower at $923 billion. PayPal only $84 billion. Remittance at $666 billion.
In 2023, there was actually a little bit of a decline. Stable coins went from $923 billion to $690 billion in 2023. And now, fast forward to March 2026 — the latest data — it's almost in line with the ACH system. $7.5 trillion for stable coins, ACH is $8.3 trillion, Visa at $1.3 trillion staying steady. And of course, we've talked about this forever: $10.3 trillion total volume. USDT and USDC are essentially the big players. It just keeps going again and again.
So I, for one, applaud Michael for saying, "Hey, there's actual real utility," and not essentially calling out everyone who invests in something else. I still think that certain altcoins do well. Does that mean the other 20,000 altcoins are going to do great? No. They suck. They're worthless. Most of them are just gambling tools, and that's fine. That's my theory. Yours could be totally different. That's what makes everything great in the cryptosphere.
Blockchain Performance Comparisons: Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, ICP, Cardano
And Cryptogolfer sent me this one — shout out to Cryptogolfer. As far as the debate of which one's better, Solana versus Bitcoin: first of all, they're totally different, right? Solana can keep going forever as far as circulating supply. Bitcoin is hard-capped at 21 million. We've already mined 20 million. We've only got 1 million more to go, and that's going to take decades. So take this chart with a grain of salt because they do different things.
Bitcoin: store of value, hedge against inflation, digital gold. It doesn't have to be fast. Neither does gold. That's why people own it. And of course, you can see here the real-time TPS, max TPS, transaction volume. Solana is crushing it — that's just how it is. Solana is good for payments. Ethereum somewhat, layer 2s maybe, Tron also good.
I linked this website from Chainspect so you can compare everything to whatever you want. It can be Bitcoin to Ethereum, Ethereum to Arbitrum, it could be Fartcoin to Bonk — I don't care what you do.
But there was one thing I'd like to show you. Let's pick Solana versus Polygon. Real-time TPS: 765 transactions per second for Solana, 130 for Polygon. Max TPS: blows it out of the water. Max theoretical transaction volume, block time — you want that to be low. Finality — you want that to be lower too. And actually, Polygon does beat Solana there. Total transactions, the validators, how decentralized it actually is — 751 validators. Pretty good.
Let's compare Solana to Ethereum. Real-time TPS, max TPS, max theoretical — crushing it. Just crushing it. Solana. Very nice. And that's because I have a big fat bag of it. You have to understand I'm quite biased.
However, I was doing some back and forth here, and I don't own any Internet Computer Protocol or ICP, but ICP crushes Solana on real-time TPS, max TPS, and max theoretical transaction volume. Makes you wonder why ICP is so low in market cap, but that's what it is.
And I'm getting some comparisons to compare it to Cardano — why not? Solana to Cardano. Real-time TPS: 765 to 0.29. Max TPS: 624 to 11.62. Volume — this is awful. Block time, finality: two minutes. Which, I've got to tell you, if you're a bank and you're looking at this, you're like, "That's crazy fast." This is crypto. Nakamoto coefficient though — I know people who love Cardano. I like Cardano. I've got some bags of it. Hopefully it works out for me. I've also got bags of Solana because I like to hedge my bets. Nakamoto coefficient — which one's more decentralized? Cardano. How many validators? Cardano's got more. How much is being staked? Solana, and so on and so forth.
So people will say, "Well, that's great that it's decentralized, but who the hell is using it?" And that is the point for investments. You can invest on ideology, and that is great, or you can invest into some data and just go, "This is where we're at." I've linked that in the description. You can use it as much as you want.
Tom Lee and Bitmine's Ethereum Purchase
To finish up — it's not just Saylor who's doing good moves for companies and their own digital asset treasuries. Tom Lee just made their biggest Ethereum buy, and they now own 5 million ETH. This was actually from yesterday.
Congratulations to Bitmine and Tom Lee as they own 5 million ETH. But that's just a drop in the bucket. If you take a look at Ultrasound Money, the current supply right now is 121,651,175 Ethereum. So congratulations to Tom for his 5 million — that's a lot — but as far as the grand scheme of things, it's not like Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, who own roughly 830,000 Bitcoin right now. They're almost at a million. I think they're going to get there within a year.
Security Warning: Advanced Robinhood Phishing Attack
And lastly, a little PSA — a public service announcement. Be careful out there, because all this stuff that we talk about is fantastic and great, but what happens if you lose everything?
I'm always talking about going to the source. Don't invest more than you can lose. Don't leave things on exchanges. Don't use leverage. Take profits along the way. That's worked out pretty well so far.
However, I've talked about when you get these emails — you check who it's from, and it's very simple. If it says it's from john@coinbase.com and you click on it and it actually says it's from some random address at bestbuycryptowesomeness.org, you're like, "That's not from Coinbase."
Well, check this out. This just happened yesterday, and it involves Robinhood. A new Robinhood phishing scheme — and it's kind of beautiful in a terrible way. The attacker creates a Robinhood account using a Gmail trickery email. Same inbox, different address. Sets the device name to HTML. Robinhood's unrecognized activity email renders the device name unsanitized, which is an injection of HTML. The result is a real email from no-reply@robinhood.com.
That's the crux of it. They made it look exactly like it's from Robinhood — no-reply at Robinhood. And when you click on that, you're like, "Oh, it's from Robinhood." And then you could do a DMARC/DKIM check. If you don't know what that is, there's a link in the description where I show you how to go through that and actually check it. Well, apparently the way they were able to pull this off, the DMARC and DKIM actually passed — and it was from Robinhood. So this is an advanced type of attack.
You can try to outsmart it, or you can just go to the source. Obviously, you never click on anything in an email, you never go that route, because things like this can happen and the hackers are only getting better. That's just how it is. And if you do it the other way and just say, "Oh, I trust it," then of course you get compromised, your crypto gets drained, and it's all out the door.
So always go to the source. Disregard any emails. Disregard any phone calls. Disregard any snail mail. Just put in a support request for Robinhood or Coinbase directly — go to the source — because I think a lot of people lost a lot of money on this one.
Live Q&A
Host: Let's get into a little Q&A and answer your questions.
Someone in the comments asks why we never talk about XRP, saying XRP is the one to take Bitcoin down. Anything is possible.
Tom Lee is a clown? I actually like Tom Lee. I don't like him doing all his ridiculous price predictions, but he's entertaining.
Tom Lee bought the top again? Well, I don't know if he did. I bought near the top, so what are you going to do?
William says, "I had extra money for an IRA at the beginning of last year, end of 2024. Terrible time to buy." I don't know — every time I think we're going to keep going down and that I should wait, I end up getting proved wrong. So I've just been buying every Monday. See what happens.
Tim Draper was talking at the Bitcoin conference about how everything should be in Bitcoin and the US dollar is going to collapse and go to zero. And I'm like — you know, all fiat throughout the entire human history has gone to zero at some point, but I don't think the US dollar is going to zero anytime soon. So we can get into whether the yuan from China is going to take over. Have you seen what's going on with their real estate right now? They've collapsed 20% year-over-year. And that's going to be the one that takes it over? Or the peso or the euro? I just don't think that's going to happen.
Obviously, we're going to be biased toward the investments we put into. I put a lot of money into Bitcoin and digital assets. I put more money into real estate and land. You do short-term, medium-term, long-term rentals or flips, whatever you do, because you think that's going to work out. You put money into the S&P 500 or precious metals or any kind of equities. And of course, you can be biased toward it because you did your research and you put your money into it. Is it the right call? Who knows? Only time will tell.
Someone asks again why we never talk about XRP, saying it's the only top-three crypto to have been given actual legal clarity and that Ripple is killing it with creating more and more actual use cases. The thing is — correct me if I'm wrong — but do banks have to use XRP, or can they just use the Ripple ledger? And it's the same thing with Chainlink. Like, that was my question and no one really answered it. There's a lot of integration, but do these institutions and companies and SWIFT and everything else have to use the Chainlink token, or can it just be backed by the technology itself? I'm not sure.
But I will say one thing about Ripple and XRP: back in 2017 when I got into it, it was going to take over everything. There were all these partnerships going on. It sounded so great. But then I look at the volume and I'm like, what are we doing here? And then of course Ripple Labs came out with their stable coin — what's the volume of that? For me, I just never got back into it after 2018. These are my theses. It could work out great. I'm just not going to talk about it on this channel because I don't own it.
I'm just wondering — is the XRP army propping up the XRP token, or is it all these partnerships and bank usage and real-world utility that is propping everything up? That's my question. You can tell me all day long about how great it is. I'm not going to buy it.
XRP always pumps out of nowhere — good news dumps, bad news dumps, no news, massive pump. Go figure.
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