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This episode features discussions on significant developments in the cryptocurrency space, including the U.S. government's plans to establish a Bitcoin Federal Reserve and the introduction of cryptocurrency as prize money in sports events. The hosts also delve into CoinDesk's influential 2024 list, highlighting key figures shaping the crypto landscape, with a focus on emerging trends such as tokenization of real-world assets and the intersection of crypto with AI technology.
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Key Topics Covered:
- U.S. Bitcoin Federal Reserve Plans: The incoming U.S. administration aims to establish a Bitcoin Federal Reserve, potentially positioning the U.S. as the largest holder of Bitcoin globally and signaling a significant shift in the perception of Bitcoin as a legitimate reserve asset.
- Cryptocurrency in Sports: The Showdown golf tournament in Las Vegas is set to award its $10 million prize pool in cryptocurrency, marking a notable integration of crypto into mainstream sports and signaling a broader acceptance of digital assets in competitive environments.
- Influential Figures in Crypto: CoinDesk's 2024 list highlights key personalities shaping the cryptocurrency landscape, reflecting major themes such as the rise of tokenization, the intersection of AI and crypto, and the ongoing evolution of decentralized infrastructure.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- “This is a bit like creating Fort Knox back in the day with gold... it really establishes Bitcoin as a core part of the emerging financial system that we're moving into." - Benjamin Schiller (00:07:30)
- "I think anything that gives someone access to this type of digital asset for the first time creates curiosity and onboarding." - Josh Krieger ( 00:15:20)
For the full transcript, see further below.
People and Resources Mentioned:
- Benjamin Schiller LinkedIn
- CoinDesk Website
- Crypto.com Website
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About Our Guest:
- Bio: Benjamin Schiller is the Managing Editor for Opinion and Features at CoinDesk, a leading cryptocurrency news platform. He has been with CoinDesk for six years and plays a significant role in curating the annual list of the most influential people in the crypto space, which has been published for over a decade. Schiller leads a collaborative process involving around 30 reporters and analysts to identify key figures who shape the narratives and developments within the cryptocurrency industry.
- Website: Benjamin Schiller, CoinDesk
- Twitter: @btschiller
- LinkedIn: Benjamin Schiller
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Full Episode Transcript:
January Jones: Welcome to Hot Topics on Edge of NFT. I'm January Jones here with my co host Josh Krieger, and today we're joined by Benjamin Schiller, Managing Editor for Opinion and Features at Coindesk. We're going to hit some hot news topics and then get into Coindesk's list for 2024's most influential people in crypto.
Ben, are you ready for this?
Benjamin Schiller: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Josh Krieger: Glad to have you, Ben. Coming up is the U. S. plans for Bitcoin Reserve. Crypto paid golf, Bato's art revolution, and, as mentioned, Coindesk's influential 2024 list.
January Jones: It's another production of Edge of Company, a rapidly growing media ecosystem, empowering the pioneers of Web3 tech and culture.
Josh Krieger: Let's get started. What's first, January?
January Jones: Well, the incoming U. S. administration has reiterated the campaign promise of setting up a Bitcoin Federal Reserve. That announcement seemed to set some sales behind Bitcoin again, with it reaching 108, 000 this week.
That would put Bitcoin with gold, oil, and foreign currency as the only holdings for U. S. reserves. But technically, the Federal Reserve cannot currently hold Bitcoin. Ben, how do you think this is going to play out?
Benjamin Schiller: Well, I think it's a really interesting topic. And I mean it's something that wasn't really on the radar until the middle of this year when Donald Trump went to Nashville for the Bitcoin conference, and he announced this initiative along with Cynthia Lamas, who's the senator from Wyoming.
She's the main backer of the initiative in Congress. So it's kind of two sides of this. There's the existing Bitcoin that the government holds because of seizures that it's made from criminals and terrorists and other people like that. So it has an existing stockpile already. But Cynthia Lummis wants to create a much more ambitious plan that will actually end up with the U.S. holding 5 percent of all Bitcoin issued. So that's 5 percent of the 21 million coins that will only ever be in existence, which would make the U. S. The state of the U. S. The biggest holder of crypto anywhere in the world includes any individual holder or any commercial holder. And it really obviously sends a message to the world that the U.S. Really believes in Bitcoin, that it really believes that it's a store of value and that it can really hold the same function as gold. So this is a bit like creating Fort Knox back in the day with gold when we had that but for Bitcoin and it's about really putting a floor under Bitcoin and really, I think, establishes Bitcoin as a core part of the emerging financial system that we're moving into.
Josh Krieger: Yeah I agree. I was there for that announcement at BTC national, and it definitely Excited the folks in the room of course the crypto industry stands to benefit greatly. If something like this was actually to happen, I think a lot of folks I talked to are skeptical about the legality of it and the logistics of something like this.
Coming off if it did occur, I think it would create a seismic wave of activity globally. Obviously, there's been some early adopters like El Salvador to this concept of, pegging to bitcoin and I think at that point It really does change the game because you not only have institutions that are huge holders through these etf vehicles, but now you have government entities and of course, that would create naturally the larger institutes are not as active sellers, right?
So this idea of the reserve certainly would be bullish for crypto prices. Ben, have you looked into sort of the legality of this and the feasibility, whether this would actually be something the government could pull out?
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah. I mean, we've asked you to bring the Quite extensively about a coin desk.
And as I say, they're kind of different ways of doing it. I mean, Trump could, , in theory, issue an executive order on day one or early in his administration to make other people think we need an act of Congress. To establish it. And I think that the latter is probably more likely for it to have lasting constitutional sort of legitimacy here.
So I think we're going to see, as I say, Cynthia Lummers. Propose the Bitcoin act in the first 100 days. That's what she's promised the first 100 days of the next Congress. And it will be established with a new act of Congress. Cause I think there are some, as you say, like some legal problems with doing it with an executive order and an act of Congress would obviously be cleaner and more durable.
Josh Krieger: Well, it'll be interesting to see how A more Republican driven Congress. reacts to this, right? I'm not sure if the party will be in support more broadly with it, but certainly they have the votes now to pull off something like this. This is one of those wait and see interesting topics for Q1, which is going to have a lot of interesting potential consequences for the industry.
January, what else is going on?
January Jones: Our second topic today takes us to the golf course, where the Showdown, an annual golf tournament in Las Vegas, is awarding this year's 10 million prize pool in cryptocurrency. We're seeing all kinds of cryptocurrency. Pop up in sports and betting NFTs. And now we're seeing it awarded as prize money directly, which is a first for most of this industry.
Josh, you follow a lot of the sports news. What's your take?
Josh Krieger: It's really interesting. I don't know what. It inspired them to choose cryptocurrency as the word. It seems like from a tax perspective, hopefully both the person giving the gift and the recipient hold their crypto for longer than a year.
Not financial advice, but it seems like the practical choice. At this point, but it really is an exciting development, I guess, for both golf and crypto we've read stories and heard about more bonuses being provided in crypto. And, , I think for the mainstream sports world, it's definitely a signal of change in terms of price payouts that are evolving and provide more flexibility and potential long term value for players, I personally am a believer of dollar cost averaging into bitcoin and have personally done that for a long time again, not financial advice, but I think anything that Give someone access to to this type of digital asset for the first time Creates curiosity and in onboarding.
That's been my experience over the years some of the ogs in our industry They were known to pull out their wallet and start sending You know crypto to people they met at events and it's happened to me more than a few times so I think it's just interesting and certainly not a bad thing for the industry.
Ben, what are your thoughts?
Benjamin Schiller: Well, I think the tournament is sponsored by crypto dot com. And I think that's why the prize money is in crypto. Cause obviously they have an incentive to encourage people to use crypto and for crypto to be seen as currency, seen as prize money. I think the interesting point here is that in the last bull market, We saw a lot of sports related crypto sponsorships.
Infamously FTX, which is a company coinless coin does knows a lot about, cause we kind of brought them down. They sponsored some arenas in, in, in Miami sports arenas, they put their logo behind home plate of the world series and stuff like that. And I think this is a signal that crypto is kind of back.
In the public domain, the prices are up and these companies are looking not only to attract crypto native crypto people, but really a more mainstream audience. That's why they're obviously going to it to a sports tournament because it doesn't get much more. Mainstream than that.
Josh Krieger: Yeah. You're, what you said reminded me of a conversation I had with a company that offers payment processing in, in, in crypto and features that are more consumer focused.
And they said they weren't gonna put any money into marketing until Bitcoin crossed a hundred k. So I think it kind of goes back to that point. This was a symbolic and significant milestone for the industry, which is making all the companies in our industry think about mainstream marketing mechanisms.
And I think to your point, this is a signal probably of a lot of. Marketing campaigns that include cryptocurrency coming up in 2025.
Benjamin Schiller: And I think we're seeing it more and more, I mean, I'm a big soccer fan and a lot of the teams in the Premier League in England are now sponsored by this exchange or this wallet or this token project.
So I think we're going to see more and more of that.
January Jones: Well, this year has been nothing short of transformative for cryptocurrency and coin desk's. Most influential 2024 list tries to capture the pivotal personalities shaping the space. We have Ben Schiller with us today who leads the team behind this list.
But before we dig into some of the personalities, Ben, can you tell me a little bit about the extensive process you go through at CoinDesk to make these selections?
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah. So just to be clear, I mean, this isn't some kind of finger in the air sort of job where we kind of decide a few people on a list.
There's kind of a two month process here where we all gather together all the reporters and analysis is about 30 people at CoinDesk. And we come up with a long list of about a hundred names, and then we whittle that down to a list of 50 names and then a top 10. List within that and what we're really trying to do is to tell the story Of the year in crypto.
So these names are very reflective of some of the major storylines in crypto. That's whether that's politics obviously or and if Ai or deepin or you know The kind of resurgence of Bitcoin. These are all big storylines that are reflected in the choices that we made for the people on the list. And I can go through some of the people in the top 10 to give you a sort of sense of that.
We have Andy Avery who's the founder of true terminal, which is an interesting AI. Crypto project and some mean coins influence Lamas. So we talked about earlier with the strategic reserve, Donald Trump. Jing Wang is one of the founders of Optimism, which is a leading L2 or layer two project on Ethereum.
Larry Fink, he's a kind of stalwart of Wall Street, a very Key player in bringing Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs to approval this year and to wide adoption. And Shane Copeland is the founder of Polymarket, which is one of the leading crypto denominated prediction markets. And they had a very interesting kind of growth this year around the election with their prediction markets offering more accurate forecasts for the election than traditional polling.
Those are just some of the people on the list and you can kind of get a sense of the kind of wide ranging group of people on him.
Josh Krieger: Yeah, really interesting list of folks and probably a fun and arduous process to decide on the themes and the individuals with so many different folks actively contributing to the space.
I didn't hear anything about gaming, at least in what you just mentioned. And. I'm curious if that narrative you think will carry forward into 2025 and what are the other sort of evolving themes for this upcoming year that we can anticipate?
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah, that's a really interesting observation, actually, and there's not much gaming on the list.
And I think that's reflective of the fact that according to most people, at least blockchain gaming is still something. That hasn't really taken off. Having said that, actually, there are a couple of people on the list that are in gaming. One of the big storylines from this year in gaming was on Telegram the so called Tap to Earn.
Games were very popular, including one called Hamster Combat, which sort of, I think, has three of 400 million participants now. But I think there's a general thought that crypto gaming hasn't really taken off as much as people thought it would. And this could be the year.
And I think a lot of the kind of stars are aligning for gaming to have a bigger year this year than it did last year or here before now.
Josh Krieger: Yeah, I mean I read the game seven report Which we've also talked about on the show, and I certainly think this could be a good year for gaming as well. There's a lot of interesting competing narratives Like you mentioned and I'm curious.
We're like you know decentralized infrastructure real world assets stack up in, in your mind relative to these other narratives that are also important.
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah. Real world assets. That's a massive one. I mean, there's some regulatory issues around that kind of have been a bit of a bottleneck, but talking of Larry Fink at BlackRung, I mean, one of the most influential people in the world.
He thinks the big play with crypto is in tokenization, is in this idea of taking either traditional financial assets and tokenizing them on a blockchain or even taking actual real world assets like, a building or something you might have in your home and tokenizing it and putting it on a block, a blockchain, and giving it a value and a tradability like that.
I think there's a huge opportunity there. And again, it's a bit like. Crypto gaming has been talked about for a long time and hasn't quite taken off, but it's definitely an interest on Wall Street and generally when Wall Street wants to do something, it kind of, it gets its way. So I think we will see more and more real world assets starting with traditional financial services and then going into actual physical real world things.
Josh Krieger: Yeah I agree. I think it was in Bangkok that particular individual. Announced they were doing a real world asset project with durian where they bought up a lot of the durian farms in Malaysia, and apparently durian has a 30 percent yield historically. And it's one of those rare delicacies that goes up in value.
Not financial advice, but my feeling on this is that real world asset projects where there's a scarce resource that has potential to have consistent. Yield over time is a really interesting use case for that type of mechanism if we can get over the regulatory hurdles.
January Jones: Ben, going back to the list, you mentioned too that this is the top 24 are new people every year.
And you've been doing this for 10 years at Coindesk, right?
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah. I mean, this is my sixth year at Coindesk, personally doing it and Coindesk has been doing it for 10 years. And it's quite a well known franchise, most influential. So it comes out. first week of December every year. And people want to be on it and that they're always asking us why am I not on it?
I thought I was influential, but it's not a popularity contest. We're trying to kind of, reflect the themes of the year and the big kind of personalities that that kind of defined it. There's a deep pain on the list. decentralized physical infrastructure is a massive new category in crypto, which I think has a very exciting feature in 2025.
AI on the list. It's obviously impacting everything. And I think the kind of collision of crypto and AI is a really interesting area of development. Whether that's in, in meme coins or in, in trading or in the idea of having agents to act on our behalf to do crypto things is a kind of really growing area and it kind of gets around some of the problems with the usability of crypto.
It kind of obviates the need to do everything yourself if you can get an agent to do it for you. And I think we're going to see a lot of that in the coming year. Polo six is also. Big on the list. Obviously, we talked about Trump already. We couldn't really leave him out because he has really revolutionized crypto, at least in the United States already.
And he's not even in power yet. And what else is on the list? I mean, Bitcoin has really had a resurgence this year. I mean, a couple of years ago, people were talking about the lack of use cases for Bitcoin and the fact that there was a lack of development in that space. And now this year Bitcoin is at 70 percent dominance in the crypto market, which is kind of phenomenal when you think about where it was two years ago, when everyone was thinking about Ethereum taking over as the kind of main locus for development.
And I think this has really been the year of the revenge of Bitcoin, remember?
Josh Krieger: Absolutely. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if that holds true. Historically in these cycles, things move on to Ethereum and then altcoin season. Will that happen? Or will all these Bitcoin LSUs Like bit layer, one of our partners in the many others, Babylon building, the future of Bitcoin where there's a yield without having to necessarily go into alternative digital currencies.
Of course, on the flip side, a lot of Bitcoin. Maxis don't want anyone to touch their Bitcoin and they don't want to expose it to outside of cold wallets. A lot of interesting, fun conversations to have and I guess that's one of the reasons we're all in the media, right?
We get to be on the edge of all these things as they unfold. You mentioned AI, and I think that's a good segue to our last story for today. Jennifer?
January Jones: Yeah, Josh, this is something you brought to my attention. BOTTO. It's described as a decentralized, autonomous artist that uses blockchain to create art through community governance.
So basically, it's a bot that makes art. A community of 15, 000 people, they say, vote on what's the best art every week. And that goes into its portfolio, let's say. And so digging into it, it's pretty fascinating. It has a kind of real persona. If you look at the website, it looks like a portfolio.
It's wrapped with Sotheby's. It's a curious state of art. I guess art making and last week we talked to Ed from super chief gallery, seeing this collision too. But when you have an AI maker, I mean, do we have a maker? What do you guys think?
Josh Krieger: Yeah, this one, I just randomly found a coin market cap and it really caught my attention.
Obviously the truth terminal came out as Ben mentioned. And then we also had of course the token goat that, that. At one point, I think it was close to if not, it didn't cross a billion dollar market cap. And now we have Bato who is selling art for 10, 000 plus on super rare occasions.
And there's a token associated with it. And, a pretty active and vibrant community. I think this is really interesting in terms of a signal for what sort of unexpected things that we can anticipate in 2025. The art is beautiful, I gotta say check it out, I mean, it's not like we talked about A.
R. art on the show a long time ago, I think we had Fetch on the show if I'm not mistaken, talking about A. R. art, maybe a year and a half or two years ago. The quality of the art, the sophistication of the persona. And the community behind it, I think we're right in a new phase of this AI revolution at this point.
Ben, what are your thoughts?
Benjamin Schiller: Yeah, I agree. I think it's really fascinating. We actually interviewed the founder of Bodo last year. I think his name is Mario Klingman. He's a resident in Munich, Germany. And he spoke to our writer, Jeff Wilser about it. And it was interesting, kind of this combination of like, human and ingenuity and obviously AI.
Dexterity is like an interesting crossover and obviously it raises questions like, is it art? Is it, should we worry about artists if AIs are creating the art and is it really as good as a human being might create? And I think the answer, as you just said, Josh, is that it really is as good and it really is beautiful and it's something that Sotheby's is representing and they don't represent everything.
I think it's a really interesting kind of experiment in community meets AI meets Traditional art meets crypto. So it's kind of got everything in it.
January Jones: Yeah I don't know. I don't really agree. I think the token aspect is interesting, but if you look at the art, it's derivative, right? You see it, and you immediately think of artists that it's referencing.
So I think that's what's something we have to keep in mind. I think we talk about AI making art, and that's why I set the question up like that, because is it? Making art. Or is it showing us what we already know in a new way? Because it is just people that can make art that's Genuinely connected.
Josh Krieger: Well, it's good. Yeah. I think that it is a good question. And of course the counterpoint here is that isn't all art derivative. I mean, I think that you look through the centuries of artists and they always seem to get a little bit of inspiration from prior artists, and I think the same is true with movies, right?
There's 21. One. Potential plots for any movie, in the world, so I'm not sure if that's the case or not, I think we in humanity may just have limited capacity to create based on what's been created before until there's a revolutionary that comes out and does something completely wild and completely different.
And then that shakes everything up. And then the creative sphere shakes up as a result. And those people do come to life like Picasso, for example. And. I think time will tell whether or not Bado invents a new style of art versus more of a derivative. So it's an interesting point of view, January, and I kind of see both sides of the coin.
January Jones: Yeah, I mean, tape a banana to the wall and see what happens, right? You just never know. Yeah. All right, well, that wraps up our show today. . We talked about the Bitcoin Federal Reserve possibly coming on for the United States. The crypto payouts at the Showdown Golf Tournament, Coindesk's most influential 2024 list, and Bato doing art with community votes.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. Connect with us on social media or drop us a comment.
Josh Krieger: Absolutely. Thanks for tuning in to this week's journey through the hottest Web3 topics. We'll be taking off for the rest of the year, but back January 2025 with some exciting announcements.
We'll I'm Josh here with January and our amazing guests, Benjamin Schiller. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben, and we're signing off. Stay curious, stay innovative, and we'll catch you next time.
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