DH
David Hoffman

David Hoffman

Things David Says on Podcasts

Co-founder of Bankless, a media company covering Ethereum and crypto markets, and general partner of Bankless Ventures, an early-stage crypto investment fund he launched in 2023. Hosts the Bankless podcast and newsletter with Ryan Sean Adams, and has guested on shows including Unchained and The Logan Bartlett Show.

Where to Find Them

David Hoffman hosts Bankless , hosts and writes Bankless , hosts Limitless: An AI Podcast and writes The Plantastic Podcast . They have also been a guest on Unchained (3 times) , The Wolf Of All Streets , Raoul Pal: The Journey Man , CoinDesk Podcast Network , Animal Spirits Podcast , On The Brink with Castle Island , The Logan Bartlett Show and Inflection Point .

Recently: “The Complete Zcash Roadmap | Sean Bowe and Dev Ojha” on Bankless (November 2026); “$VVV Community Call | October” on Bankless (November 2026); “Inside the $6 Billion Binance Hack | Ari Redbord” on Bankless (October 2026); “ROLLUP: Bitcoin to $57K? | Wall Street Bets on Hyperliquid | The Tokenization War | Zcash Drama” on Bankless (October 2026); “Wall Street, Regulation, and the Future of Money | J. Christopher Giancarlo” on Bankless (October 2026); “What Is Bitcoin Telling Us? | Michael Howell, Macro Analyst” on Bankless (October 2026).

What They Said

“My base case is that tokens are free in the future. And so the investment you want to make is, okay, if tokens are free, then what captures value? And Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI and DeepSeek, they're going to have to answer that question. And right now, if you are selling tokens, it's a great business model. I don't know if that's going to be a great business model in 2030.” — David Hoffman, Bankless

The hosts were discussing whether to buy into a reported Anthropic IPO at a valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion. Hoffman had just said he is not a buyer and compared AI labs to the crowded layer-one trade in crypto; this is his core argument for why AI lab revenue may not last.

Bankless · 2026-10-30 Permalink → Listen →
Bankless Around 1:09:18 into the episode
David Hoffman

It feels like 2021 when Ethereum block space was being sold for $70 a Uniswap trade. And there was so much infinite money to spawn the new layer one. And the new layer one was like owning the world. And that ended up actually not being the case at all. And commoditized blockspace

Ryan Sean Adams

commoditized. It got super

David Hoffman

commoditized. Like my base case is that tokens are free in the future. And so the investment you want to make is like, okay, if tokens are free, then what captures value? And Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI and like DeepSeek, they're going to have to answer that question. And right now if you are selling tokens, like it's a great business model now. I don't know if that's going to be a great business model in 2030.

Speaker 3

I think you're right, but it might take a reset for that to happen as it did in crypto, which is like, this could still run for a while and then boom, reset. And then everything kind of like comes back to the bottom. I'll buy it then. Not a buyer then. There you go. On the

Ryan Sean Adams

week.

David Hoffman

Bankless Nation. You know what the deal is. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. It's not for everyone. And we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“The market doesn't want a whitelisted tokenized stock. It wants a permissionless tokenized economic rights. No one cares about voting.” — David Hoffman, Bankless

Hoffman was recounting an SEC question-and-answer session about bringing tokenized equity trading onshore, having just noted that the tokenized stocks that exist today are offshore and closed to US investors. His objection is not to the rules themselves but to what buyers are actually after. Ryan Sean Adams pushes back immediately, arguing no company wants shareholder votes in the hands of anonymous token holders.

Bankless · 2026-09-18 Permalink → Listen →
Bankless Around 27:21 into the episode
David Hoffman

…further. Like, we're still cool with the offshore tokenized stocks. And I'm not talking this. Does this pertain to the existing tokenized stock things that we already have? And they were like, no, no, no. So, those are offshore, and United States investors are not allowed to ask. We pretend they

Ryan Sean Adams

don't exist, right? We pretend

David Hoffman

this is about getting all of that activity onshore in a compliant and regulated way. And that's great. I think the KOIC whitelisting burden is going to be just a non-negotiable to the market. The market doesn't want a whitelisted tokenized stock. It wants a permissionless tokenized economic rights. No one cares about voting.

Ryan Sean Adams

But there's no way a company wants a permissionless company with shareholders wants token holder shareholder votes in the hand of some hacker from North Korea. That's probably true. Yeah. So that's why these more legitimate tokenized shares with all of the sharedholder rights, including governance…

David Hoffman

seven years. This is Hester Purce's efforts coming to fruition.

Ryan Sean Adams

Thank you, Hester. People must remember enough and thank her enough. Permission. Also, I guess for the TSV to receive this exemption, the AMM has to be on a permissionless public blockchain. I think there's some language in the actual provision about this in the actual token exemption. Smart…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Crypto & Web3 Startups & Venture