Bankless - Anthony Sassano & Eric Conner | Luna Demise, Bear Survival, Bullish ETH Merge

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

Anthony, Eric, and David dive into the downfall of Luna, takeaways from this week, bear market survival, and why they're bullish on the ETH merge. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave  ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  ------ Resources: Anthony Sassano https://twitter.com/sassal0x  https://twitter.com/thedailygwei  https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDailyGwei  Eric Conner https://twitter.com/econoar  https://podcast.ethhub.io/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to this very special Saturday morning edition of the Bankless podcast. Every once in a while, me and my buddy, Anthony Sizzano, from the Daily Gway, we just hop into a live stream, no agenda, and just chat about the current events. There were a lot of the current events to talk about. I think you can know what we begin with. And so we just kind of recap the Terra ecosystem, but we do change subjects eventually after about 30 minutes and go into the merge. And if you have not watched the Hal Press interview that we did earlier this week, it was extremely bullish, so we talk a little bit about that. I give it a quick TLDR, although it is not to be missed. And then Eric Connor decides to hop into this dream.

And so Eric Connor from Into the Ether, longstanding Ethereum community members, who might recognize him, comes and finishes off the last third of the show. Really fun conversation, really enjoyed it, tons of fun, tons of energy. I hope it is a nice thing to chill and relax to after kind of a, down, bad week, but hopefully we can all shrug it off together. And so I hope you guys enjoy this fun, very fun conversation right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative

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A token proposal is being deliberated as we speak in the Across Forum where community members will decide on the token distribution. You can have your part of Across's story by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair, launch of Across. If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across. dot T.O to bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. Yeah, Anthony. What's up? Hey, man. What's up? You know, survived another week. How about you? Yeah, yeah, survived another week. I think my brain didn't survive the week, though. I don't know about you, but I am feeling very mentally exhausted, that's for sure.

What's doing it to you most? It's like Twitter doom scrolling. Usually my doom scrolling I do on on Instagram, not on Twitter. Really? Instagram doom scrolling? That's, uh, my Instagram is just like, uh, random pictures of kind of like computers, watches and cars. So it's not doom scrolling.

It's kind of like wealth scrolling. Um, no. Poor timing, dude. Yeah, yeah. That's really poor timing. No, no. I think, um, I, I think what, what did it to me, most was just the speed at which it happened, right? We basically ran through like a crypto's 2008

moment in like three days. It was just insane, right? And I think that's what fries my brain the most is when like, and it's especially happened during like DeFi summer a lot when things would have just happened really, really quickly, right? You spend like all this mental energy trying to keep up and just catch up. And then you would just get like completely blown out by it. And then you do it all again the next day, right? So yeah, it's just the speed of it, I think, for me. Yeah, it's just reminds me of like the classic line when people are hung hungover and they're like, I'm never drinking alcohol again. And then a week later, there's just like another farm to like ape into. That's what D5thomer felt like. If we're, if we're doing the

whole like crypto is speed running the history of money and finance thing, we just like sped, just bed ran like had hyperinflation event. Right. We went through like usually hyperinflation events take, I mean, it can take months, right? But this one took like 36 hours. Like we did just like Weimar Germany in like 36 hours. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what I think shocked a lot of people. It was like, yeah, a lot of people called this and kind of like had been calling it for a long time. But I don't think anyone expected it to unwind as fast as it did. Like it literally went like, I mean, what? The Lunar token went down like 99% in 24 hours or something. That was just insanity. Right. And it wasn't just like some small shit coin either. It was like it was worth tens of billions of dollars. It was a top 10 coin. And then it just collapsed. And everyone's just like trying to keep up with it. They're trying to. to keep up with kind of like, I think they're in disbelief because they're trying to actually process the fact that this is actually happening. This is not a meme. Like, this is not kind of some dream that everyone's having. It's an actual reality that we're all going to have to adjust

to. And of course, that bled into the wider markets. It wasn't just terror. Like everything came crashing down. And then people were trying to short the other stable coins, which was like peak stupidity. I was like, what the hell? Like, what is this? So, so yeah, just absolute insanity, man, seriously. I, I think that I'm still going to be processing this for a while. I mean, was my craziest week in crypto. I don't know about you, but definitely I haven't felt like that before in crypto. Yeah, I was thinking about that question. Is this a craziest week in crypto? And it's, definitely is in a like catastrophic sense. I would say that like crazy as in just like I'm having to process so much with still, still defy summer. But, uh, yeah, barring that, which is like a completely

tangential thing. Uh, yeah, I would say like this, this had like the most amount of just like news per hour of any single week. And, like, comparing it to, like, the last year's cycle, like, oddly, also in 2018, right? Like, 2018, the downside of the peak mania, halfway through 2018-ish, is when BitConnect blew up. And, like, I think BitConnect was a top 10 coin, like, at one point in time. It was. And it went to absolute zero at some point in time. And it took basically, like, 36 hours.

But the reason why no one really cared about that, well, people cared, but we all just expected it. Everyone was like, BitcoinX took way too long to implode. It made people question reality as like, why hasn't this thing imploded yet? And then one day there was some bad news and three days later it went to zero. And so like the pattern fits. And it was a top 10 coin and then it just went to zero. And it was $3.8 billion market cap when it went to zero,

which just, A, like, tells you how big the crypto market has gotten in the last cycle. Because if, like, Terra was also a top 10 coin, it went to zero, and it was something like over 40, it's like 42 billion dollars at the time Luna was. And so, like, the scale of the thing is, like, proportional to the crypto markets, as in, like, the crypto markets allowed BitConnect and Terra to get to the same size as a relation of the total crypto market. it and then it also went to zero roughly around the same time of the peak right like as the markets were fleeing as like the game was up as like the dance of chicken was like all right who's going to sell who's going to sell and then like you know roughly halfway through 2018 Bickneck crashed and roughly halfway through 2022 uh terra crashed i mean those are the patterns i'm seeing yeah yeah no the patterns are definitely very similar i think the main difference as you mentioned is like

the scale of it like obviously terror was much bigger but I think it wasn't just like the lunar token, Terra was like a double whammy, right? Because like there was a lunar token, but there was also the stable coin that was attached to it, right? And then on top of that, there were all the people going through these kind of like neobanks, which are like front ends for Terra that had no idea what they were doing.

They just saw this API number like, oh, I can earn 20% on my dollars. I'm going to put it in here, right? And then they didn't read the fine print because if you read the fine print, it says you can lose all your money potentially because that's just, you know, classic legal speak. No one ever expects that to actually happen, but it happened this time. And I think that that's what caught a lot of, a lot of people. And obviously, a lot of people have lost a shit ton of money. I mean, not just individuals, not just kind of like

everyday people, but massive funds and, and kind of like prop trading phones and market makers. Like, there, I mean, I think that like most people in crypto were hurt by this in one way or another. Everyone was hurt by it indirectly because the prices went down because of this, I think. But yeah, it was just such a shock to the system, I think. But the thing is, is that just kind of for positives in this. I think Heath fared quite well, like in it all. I don't know so far at least. I think that the Ethereum has gotten a lot of tail wins from this. I think like and I think that, you know, the people that have kind of like been hurt, maybe they're not going to come back to crypto for a while, especially the ones who were just like in it for the yield. They weren't even

maybe holding Luna. They just had like the UST. And that's sad. It's kind of like set adoption back kind of quite a while there. But it really does validate like the Ethereum thesis, I think, of building, you know, decentralized, secure and sustainable kind of infrastructure rather than just doing it in a cowboy fashion. And I remember, I don't know if I've said it on bankers before, but I've said it on my own show plenty of times where I say to people, you have to reframe the decentralization argument as security.

So instead of asking, do you care about decentralization, you ask, do you care about security? And now you ask any terror people about this question now, they're going to say yes, right? But if you ask them if they cared about decentralization before, they may have just given you a non-end so or not really paid attention to it. But, you know, no one cares about it until they need it. And then when they need it, they really, really need it. Right. So I think that's the main takeaway for me from all of this. That's for sure.

And this has been the drum that has been beat by like a number of like core crypto people for a very long time. Like this was a conversation back in 2017, 2018 when it was EOS and the zero transaction fees of EOS versus like the trend, the, the blockchain fee. model of Ethereum, right? Like, we've seen this rodeo before. I was actually talking to, there's also like this whole prioritization of scale over security, both works at the layer one layer and also the app layer two, right? And so I was talking to

our guy, our analyst, a bankless Ben, and talking about the patterns here. And I said, like, dye supply always lags dye demand, which is like the, it's, if there is demand of dye, it'll prop up the value of the stable coin, and then people will admit more dye, but with real collateral.

And so, like, dye only scales out its supply of dye if there is actual real bona fide demand of dye. And, like, in the same thing with, like, Ethereum, this block space demand for Ethereum lags behind demand, right? So when transaction fees are high, it creates the need for layer twos, it creates the need for scale. But it doesn't answer scale first, right?

And neither does die. Die doesn't mint excess dye and then give it to the market. Ethereum doesn't mint excess blocks. and give it to the market. These things lag demand because they prioritize security. But then on the flip side of things, the Terra UST supply, they just minted that thing like fucking mint mint, mint U.S.T, buy Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin, like short, like without creating any amount of demand.

And this is what Solon is doing when it's minting infinite block space. It is just the money printer block space, and it causes the chain to go down over time. And so these like bull market chains, which is like my new word for, Monolithic blockchains, these bull market chains are just minting out supply, selling their product for a discount, devaluing their product because that's the competitive advantage. They're like the off-brand blockchain. So they're devaluing their products and just like injecting it into the market and say,

cheap, cheap, cheap, buy it, buy it, buy it. But then when the bear market comes, like, they have no real sustainability and they have, like, infinite supply. And so, like, it exists in the app layer. It exists at the core protocol level. And, like, in hindsight, it just makes total sense that things that devalue, their product to go out to the market can't sustain themselves in a bear market. Yeah, well, exactly.

And I think that's why like our, maybe our points fall on deaf ears a lot of the time during the ball markets is because this is, this is stuff that it's not immediately apparent to most people, especially new people. They've got no idea for the context around this. They haven't been around. They haven't experienced, you know, a bear market or anything like that. To them, it's kind of like all the coins are going up, you know, and if you say anything against that, you're just a dirty fudder, dirty eath max.

see we don't want to listen to you sort of thing right um and that's what exactly what happened with you i mean you guys uh you and ryan um were some of the champions of calling out terror right like the show that you did just a few weeks ago um and everything like that and you guys were called out relentlessly for it especially by dog himself right like my emotions definitely i felt that yeah yeah exactly and you know this is one of the reasons why i try not to get too involved with it as well as because i don't want to have to deal with like all that crap even even though I know that, you know, I'm, I'm right. I don't want to have to kind of like deal with the crap that gets swung at me. And yeah, just seeing you guys go through that, I was like,

holy shit, this is insane. And I think that's what a lot of people miss is that we're not, like, now that everything clubs, we're not dancing on the graves of people who lost money, we're dancing on the graves of Doe Kwan and his lunatic army, who literally didn't listen to anyone, you know, kept insulting everyone who ever brought up anything wrong with the system and acted like kings and gods and nothing could, you know, I think nothing bad could happen to them. And that's it. Like, yes, it may be, may be in a little bit too much. But I think, I think social signaling is very, very important here,

because that's the only accountability and recourse we really have in crypto is social signaling. Because there's no, I mean, the government might go after DoConn himself, but there's no government to bail out anything here. Like, they let everyone let Luna go to zero and UST basically go to zero because there's no bail out. Like, who's going to bail out? The only bailout comes from the private enterprise. And eventually the private enterprise was like, no, no, no, man. too toxic. We're not going to touch this, right? It doesn't matter if it was, quote, unquote,

too big to fail or something. There's none of that in crypto. Things will fail and they'll fail very, very quickly. And I think to prevent this sort of stuff happening in the future, you really have to social signal. You really have to get everyone on board with this. So next time there's an Algo stable coin that comes out, you have everyone calling it out, right? Like, there was people calling terror out, but it wasn't the majority. And a lot of people were scared to call it out because they had this massive army that would swarm you as soon as you did. So we need to break past that. Like if we let that, that dominate the industry, then this stuff's just going to keep playing out again and again.

And as a lot of people have already mentioned, it's going to bring with it a lot of bad regulation, right? And it's going to set crypto adoption back years. So, I mean, again, kudos to you guys for calling it out for so long and kind of like putting up with all that crap because that's not something that I really, really can do. Like I really hate, I try to avoid conflict most of the time with these, especially with these armies, man. They just come from nowhere. I don't even know. I don't think a lot of them are real people. They have to be bots, right? Like it's just insane. Some supply.

Yeah. And the bots have to like find real people to convince themselves to like mix themselves in with the rebuilt real people. So the bots can be like, or the bots, not the necessarily bots, but just like the civil attackers, right? Just like one guy with like 10, 15, 100 accounts or something like that, which you would consider bots. Like, well, I think there's two things I want to say to that.

Like there also there were a lot of like VCs that were very much a part of this whole thing. And like at the same, at some point, there's like so many people ended up supporting this ecosystem that you just have to say that they were duped. Like, it's like some people just like took the Kool-Aid. So like, I'll go stable coins. They work this time. Like, this time it's different.

Like, we're that funds in it and this funds in it. So, like, I'll be in it too. Like, we're all promoting its legitimacy. Even though, like, at the base layer, like, there's like a bunch of like hot air here. And, and, like, I had a, I did a podcast with a VC who taught and I asked about like, okay, what are the fundamentals of VCs like as a concept? It's like, why are there VCs? And one of his answers was that, like, well, VCs provide legitimacy, right?

And so, like, when you onboard with a VC, when you take money from a VC rather than a bunch of angels, that VC has network connections, that VC can do things for you. Like, the best VCs create the best premium because they have the best returns. And so the competition is based on what VCs can provide the most value to blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, like, if we're talking about, like, the fallout collateral damage of these things, like, the market needs to reassess the value of various VCs in this industry. because some VCs were on one side of this trade in this industry, and the other VCs were not, right?

Like Fred Erisim from Paradigm tweeted out the guy from the 2008 crisis movie, The Big Short, who's like, I can't remember his name, the guy that also was in the GameStop. But Michael Berry, I think his name is played by Christian Bail in that movie. Exactly, yeah. Like, who knows if they were actually short or are they just tweeting on a meme? I don't know, but it kind of implies that they were taking the other side of this trade, as in shorting Luna.

and there were some VCs that were very much in promotion of it to the point of chilling it, right? Like, how some of these VCs do? And so, like, we need to, like, reassess which VCs were on, like, the right side of history. And especially Turun Chitra, which is actually where I was going with his next. He was on the Laura Shin's, like, All In-styled podcast. And he talked about how people that make Algo Stable Coins just inherently must have this God complex. and they don't look at history and they just ignore history

and they're like, I've just created alchemy like I am the stable coin god I can mint coins out of thin air like look at this magic I'm like a billionaire I will bet on like the future price of my token and a $20 million bet that I make on Twitter

because I'm a fucking chat and if anyone denies me and if anyone doubts me like I'll just like throw my stable coins at you and like this is Doe Kwan man and like he I'll go stable coins and I'm getting I'm learning about this too in like the last week.

So it's not like I knew this ahead of time. But like the whole Algo Stablecoin thing is the same thing as like the Zimbabwe dollars. The same thing as Ymar Germany. It's just a straight up hyperinflation event sped up in real time. And Doe Kwan should have known this because he did basis cash on the app layer. But then like it's because it was on the app layer it failed. And so he had to go make a separate L1 so it couldn't be economically attacked by flash loans or all that other shit or whatever. And then he just starts playing God, right?

And so like there's so much like hubris and status and legitimacy that's involved in these things that are inherently faith based at the end of the day. Anyways, and rant and rant. No, no. I mean, I think, I think from all of that, the main takeaway for people should be that just because someone is a VC or is a fund or works at a fund or whatever and has money doesn't make them more intelligent than you, right? There is no, there's not much correlation between money and intelligence. That's one thing I've learned definitely being encrypted over the last few years. there are billionaires who are really dumb. Like, and that might seem counterintuitive.

You might think just have, how can a billionaire be dumb? Well, put it this way, guys. Crypto has created so much wealth in such a short period of time. There are people that could have become billionaires by literally just throwing, you know, maybe six figures into either at the ICO, for example, right? There's also a difference between like, like, intelligence and ability to make money at the same time. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I think, you know, that that should be like one of the main takeaways from this. And also, these things. can go on longer than you think they can. I mean, you know, I think the reason why that picture was shared of Michael Burry on Twitter, one of the reasons, I don't know if that was short

or not, was that in the movie, it shows how Michael Berry was betting against the housing market really early on, and the housing market kept going crazy, right? And he was betting against it for such a long time. And everyone was calling him out. They were saying, man, it's still growing. Like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. Like, this is a crazy trade. You're pissing away our money. And then the same thing happened here, where people were calling this out for a very long time and then it kept growing and growing and growing and everyone was like oh okay well it's gone to such a big size now it's too big to fail right like it's it's not going to fail it's all well and good and then people were waiting they were like no it's going to fail like we're going to get our Jews

eventually like it's it's basically mathematically programmed to fail which it was um and it did it failed exactly how the bears said it would it didn't even deviate from that because it was programmed like all you needed to do was read the white paper to see exactly how this worked and it did that and And the funny thing is, though, is that the Terra form labs, the main team behind Terra, could have wound this down a lot, kind of like a lot more gracefully than what happened, right? They did nothing. They actually let it go to zero. They could have paused the chain.

They could have paused minting. They could have done all this other stuff, right? And they didn't have any contingency plan. They had no idea this could happen. That's what I'm saying. Like, so that's kind of like we were talking about with Doe Kwan and kind of like him feeling like a god and him feeling like nothing would go wrong. And he was like, you know, had all this alchemy.

He could just print money out of things. they had no plan for when everything went to shit inevitably and because of that everything went to shit like it actually went to zero like coin gecko did one minus 100% on um on on on on lunar because it rounded it to the nearest zero which was a zero um i was like what the hell this is crazy um but yeah no i i think that it's right and the thing is is that you talk about kind of like people not learning from history um yeah i mean the algor stable coins within the crypto context actually went back really far. I think as far back as 2014 or even earlier than that, right? Before Ethereum was the thing. Yeah, exactly. So this is, this is definitely not new.

But the thing is, is that these things are very easy to grow in a bull market. When everyone's throwing money at you, they're very reflexive on the upside as well as to the downside. And you can easily kind of like pump your token like this, right? And make it work for a little bit. So I think because of those facts, this isn't going to be the last of them that we see. They're going to take other forms. People are going to be like, oh, it's not like the other Algo stable coins. This one's actually. you're going to work, right? And it's not, and we're just going to see this play out again. But that's why I said the social, social signaling is so powerful because you keep signaling

that these things, you know, they can't work. They're, they're just kind of like fundamentally broken. Now more people will believe you when you say that because it's not just crying wolf anymore. The wolf came to fucking eat the chickens, right? And it ate a lot of chickens. Right. I don't know. There was like the optimistic, cautiously optimistic take that like, okay, when the $50 billion algo stable coin ecosystem goes to zero, then we learn our lesson. Like, you won't learn it at $10 billion, you won't learn it at $20 billion.

But okay, at $50 billion, we'll learn the lesson. How do you feel about that? Have we learned the lesson? Because there's going to be new people coming in who haven't learned this lesson at all next cycle, right? I did say that, like, okay, the last bowl market, we did have, like, a top 10 coin do the same thing. It was an actual Ponzi.

Yeah. But it's one of the differences about this whole Ponzi collapse is that, like, this one was pumped by, a lot of just like ecosystem people. I mean, as you and I pump Eath, but like at least ETH doesn't blow up though. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, also, like, Aethes can't just go to zero like that at all. I mean, ETH has fallen a lot in the past, but it can't do that unless it was like, I mean, I don't even know the scenario where ETH would go to zero. Unless there was like an infinite mint bug,

but then it would just get reversed. But we would fix it, you know, whatever. And like, that's what you were saying about, like, the terror ecosystem could have mitigated this. And like, yeah, even in worst case Ethereum scenarios, like, we can still mitigate that. Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing is, is that you're right. They would have had no plan at all.

Like, they should have had a worst case scenario of plans. Like, hey, guys, like, what happens when it goes into a death spiral? But I truly believe that Doe Kwan and probably his closest kind of like people with him the company didn't believe that it could death spiral. They actually believed that they had created something that was basically a perpetual motion machine, an infinite money printer. And that obviously wasn't the case. I think his ego is infinite.

Like I actually don't think he's learned his lesson. I've been seeing his tweets. He's not remorseful. It seems like he just wants to try and get it back up and running and kind of like, you know, restore his God status. Yeah, and do it again, right? But it's not going to happen. It's the same with every other one that we've seen.

Like Daniel Sester, right? You guys called that out as well, the Frog Nation crap. Like the same thing happened there. A bunch of others. Andre, Cronj is a bit of a different scenario, but he eventually got to that status like, you know, but he is a bit of a different scenario. yeah it was it was definitely adjacent but there's so many of these things right and and i think that

people just need to stop creating cults like let's stop creating cults of personality around these people guys like it's just it's not healthy it doesn't lead us anywhere good um but yeah man like i don't know craziest kind of like week in in crypto for me just because of the speed and and you know just the mental kind of like uh mind fuck of it all was just insane and i think the legitimacy thing is the last thing i wanted to talk about um you're right in that like I think what ended up happening was that because it kept growing and because it didn't fail like it's the tractor said it would for such a long period of time. At least in crypto, you know, a year is like an eternity, right? And, and then all these kind of like VCs and funds and legitimate

people piled on because I think it was partly due that they didn't want to miss the train, but they also didn't want to get kind of like attacked, right, for going against the grain. Because they're like, oh, you know, as we're discussing, it's really hard to put up with this sort of stuff. Like it's actually, it makes you feel really bad. You feel it when you're getting attacked by this mob. So I think a lot of them either defaulted to just being neutral and not really saying anything about it or going in on it and being like, I can join this train too. I can make money.

I can, you know, have everyone loving me because of it. And the people that did that, they've, yeah, they're like massive kind of like, taking massive reputational hits here. And I don't know, like I think they're going to be the most affected by it in the long term because the people in this industry know those people and they remember things. They keep the receipts, right? And they definitely don't let this slide. but on the retail side of things, yeah, I mean, I don't expect the retail investors to learn too much about

about this sort of stuff. Yeah, you did mention about how this was going to set us back and like hinted at regulation. So I want to talk about that next. But before you do, guys, every now and then, I pull my friend Anthony here into a live stream. Every Friday, sometimes Thursday, it used to be consistent, but that was during COVID. And since non-COVID, it's been a little bit harder. But every now or then we do this. I'd say about once a month, maybe once every six weeks.

I don't know if you guys are living under a rock, but if you are living under a rock, you can follow Anthony at his DailyGway YouTube channel, which I just posted in the chat there. He does these YouTube videos, a ridiculous amount of days, almost every single, every single day, except for Sunday? Every single weekday. Every single weekday. Yeah, no, Saturday and Sunday, yeah, just weekdays. I ask you that every single time, because I always forget.

But, like, there's one of the few podcasts that I listen to every single day in his YouTube channels right there. He also does a Daily Gray newsletter, which he puts out also every fracken day. So he's one of these guys that produces a lot of content like bankless, which you can also go ahead and subscribe to. Okay. I've gotten better at this, by the way. The shilling is done. Okay, so how far is this going to set back our industry and regulation? I think those are perhaps the topics next.

People, I've heard this line that like, okay, it's set back the crypto industry like one to two years. And I think my gut take was like, ooh, wow, really? That seems like a long amount of time. And so first question there. Also, I'm kind of down for that. Like, I'm kind of down for a slow-air market. Like, how do you feel about these things? Look, the timeline on it is basically impossible to say.

Like, anyone giving timelines on this sort of stuff is just guessing, pure guessing. There is no rhyme or reason to any timelines you could give, right? Because, for example, we could go to all-time highs again and adoption would pick up like exponentially again, right? because I think the main thing that drives adoption in crypto is prices going up. Like we have enough evidence to support that. So I don't think you can actually put a timeline on how long this is kind of like, like, quote, unquote, set adoption back or anything like that. What I think is true here is that it is set an adoption back in the sense that it's going to suppress the prices for a while. It's going to put us into this deep bear market.

And it's going to bring with it more regulation and increased scrutiny, which is going to make teams probably ships lower because of the fact that they're going to be more scared to ship certain. things due to regulations due to kind of like law enforcement and things like that. And we're probably going to get less innovation out of that too because everyone's going to be scared of, does this look like a Ponzi? Or does this look like, you know, terror? Can I get in trouble for this? And this is probably most true for the docs teams. Maybe the A&N teams keep kind of doing what they're doing. And I think that people are going to be cautious about jumping into these things for a while as well because they might be like, you know, is this going to blow up like terror again? Like I don't want to put money into this.

I don't want to lose my money. I don't want what happened to terror folks to happen. me. So those are kind of like the effects that I see happening. But timelines, I don't know. It's impossible, man. I don't think anyone can give a timeline on this sort of stuff. Yeah. But how do you feel about that being a good thing or a neutral thing or bad thing? Like I think the good take is a bad thing because we want crypto to take over the world, but taking the perspective of like a first cycler, especially perhaps a first cycler that just got hurt, right? Like maybe they were in Bitcoin and Eath and they only have seen a 65% drawdown instead of being in Terra or or in being a 100% of drawdown or in an alt layer one and being an 85%.

Like for the first cycle out there who's like looking at crypto prices being like F, I'm pro good thing for that part of the population. Yeah. I mean, most first cyclers are already gone, I think. Like they leave, right? I mean, in terms of kind of like if they're, if they're here for like a first cycle and they just kind of like speculate and they lose money and they leave, right?

But if we're talking about like first cyclists who actually stick around and wait for the next cycle to come around. I think they're like from my experience talking to some of them. They're actually very excited, right? They're very excited because they're going to be able to buy things at a cheaper price. Of course, they're going to be able to scoop up some value kind of like out there, right? And they also, I think, have the same belief that I have in that. This industry isn't ready for mainstream adoption.

Like nowhere close, right? I'm sorry, but like there are so many issues with what we're building still. The scale issues is a major one. U.I.U.X. Like, I'm sorry, but like, how are we ready for mass adoption? I mean, you know, Paulinear actually goes on about this a lot. And they're pretty steadfast about this, but they say they're still very disappointed in this industry because we've built so many Ponzi's and so many money games and things like that.

But we're not actually building anything that's mass adoptable because we're still waiting for scale, right? And that's here and coming and improving over time. We're still building out the coin infrastructure, still upgrading things, blah, blah, still getting Ethereum through the merge and things like that. But like even on the UIUX side of things, like it's still very hard. And the funny thing is that when we were making progress on this with the neobanks, a lot of them just went to anchor because that was the top yield and they've wrecked their users.

So like it was getting better. And now we've kind of like been set back by that a little bit. And regulators are definitely coming for those neobanks. They're fucked. Like honestly, like this is anything that that kind of like does that and sits as a front end on top of things, it doesn't actually make the risks like readily available to users is far. like in my eyes. Yeah.

And they should be regulated, right? Like, like, they're a centralized entity. If you can be regulated, you should be regulated. If you can't be regulated, then you shouldn't be regulated. And this is a very fair take because a ton of, like you said, layers around anchor just, like, effed a lot of people who put in deposits thinking, wow, like 20% savings account, amazing. Take all my money.

And, like, you know, like, some people are, a lot of people are going to get sucked in by that. Where was I going to go with this? Going back to like the whole first cycle or like prices thing, like the ones that stick around, there's this very savage quote out of the Bitcoiner camp that I like, what's the word, Chauden-Frodenly love, which is people buy Bitcoin at the price,

they deserve it, which you can extrapolate that to ether, right? But like, it's basically a timing in the market as in just like, people who got in early deserved it because they saw the vision early. But also if we're going down into, to a bear market and people are like, you know, losing their wealth because it's their first cycle and they're getting hurt, but they stick around. Like they're going to buy ether,

Bitcoin, their preferred asset at the price that they deserve it, right? And so it's great to hear that like people are coming into this bear market like excited, especially when there's like like, I think we're in the golden age of building right now. The layer two summer, which is not at the sound of things going to be like a price summer, but it's going to be a best. building summer is perfect. If we have the golden age of building on layer two, which is literally surface area for further, like surface area for high growth defy apps with tokens and user acquisition

onboarding capacities because of low fees. If that golden age of building happens during a bear market, it means the people that stick around and believe just have this opportunity for, I don't know, how many years are people saying this Tara thing is going to set us back? One to two years. And so we're going to have like the golden age of Ethereum building because people can't fucking like differentiate Ethereum from the rest of defy. And so like the people who

have that information asymmetry about the secure, sustainable layer to app layer building, which also has bridges in between those things. So there's surface area there to build stuff as well. Like there's going to be so much opportunity while people just forget about the crypto industry once again as they do every four years. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the reason why at least the first cycles that I talk to are so excited is because like I've given like my personal story many times in my community on my show about how like I stuck around. I doubled down during the bare market and like not just myself but like so many of the people that you see that are that are really successful today did the same thing. And I give like the reasons why it's like really

good to do that and why it kind of like it can work out for you. It's not guaranteed to, but like it can work out for you and why you should stick around. And I think that's why they're just so excited, right? Like some of them obviously are going to be underwater on there. Eath buys already because maybe they got in later and they bought like three four K. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I explain that to them. I'm like, and I put a percentage number on it because I say to them like, hey, you know, if you bought it 4K right now, um, and, and it and sorry, 4K back a few months ago and the price is 2K now, you're down 50% of course, right? And I say to them, I did the same thing in October, uh, 2018, where I bought ETH at $220, thinking it was the bottom and then ETH went into $80. So I was down more than 50%. And the thing is people don't realize the intuitiveness of kind of like, the numbers and the percentages like just because the numbers are much smaller it doesn't mean the percentages were different like it's the same thing it's the same amount of money lost so so kind of like from that perspective I think that's what my my viewers and my listeners people kind of like who are in my community are really um I really paying attention to that sort of stuff so that's why they're

excited about it but I think there's not many of those people like the majority do not stick around for the bear market they leave and they leave they're like oh my god why did I leave right so I think there's a lot of that going on, definitely. And no, I think that's exciting for those people. I, you know, I hope they do stick around. Like, they get jobs too. Like a lot of them getting jobs within crypto, which is something that a lot of us couldn't do back in the day because it wasn't that many jobs to go around. But now there's heaps, right? Yeah. So, you know, I think it's exciting. On my camera has gone out of focus. We go. We're back. We're back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The differences between these bear markets, I think, are very, very stark.

It's so much more surface area to build stuff. Like going back to the 2017, 28, bare market as when I started this when I decided like I'm going to be in this crypto thing like I can't remember why I was bullish about Ethereum like there was nothing in 2018 that was like worthwhile to stick around for like defy wasn't a thing NFTs weren't a thing and and like why the hell did I stick around I don't really know but that lends itself to like people those people buy crypto the price of their choice people buy ether at the price that they deserve it right like there are the people that stuck around saw the potential. And so, like, ether's a little bit higher now.

But, like, the amount of surface area and jobs and, and just cash is in this ecosystem right now because there have been a ton of money being raised. So, like, there's going to be a lot more jobs and a lot more room for jobs for people to come into this market and stick around and then actually just buy the dip for two years straight. Hopefully not that long. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I think in 2018, there was a spark, basically, like a small little. kind of like spark that we all kind of potentially saw like there's something here we don't know exactly what it is but there's there's definitely something here um and i now i think in 2020 there's a raging wildfire there's no spark it's kind of like we know what we're going to build we know what works we know everything that's coming uh we're not everything but we know like you know what we're building what we're doing um and i think that's like a key difference but yeah also the fact that it's just much easier to get a job now so more people are going to stick around for that like 2018 was basically impossible to get a job in crypto it was so hard dude i was so i was so

I was lucky enough to get three jobs in crypto and two of them blew up after like six months. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, exactly. Okay, there was getting a job and then there was getting a sustainable job, right? One that didn't, wasn't going to run out of money or blow up or anything like that. I mean, I got my job in mid-2019 with kind of like set. And they hadn't raised, I think, since their first raise or whatever. And they kind of needed to raise, but the market was like super quiet. And then, you know, all that, the rest is history from there. But yeah, joining a crypto startup back then was much riskier than it is today. Like today, they have so much money. Like it's just stupid amounts of money. Right. And real products and real customers. Like these are the differences here. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So I think, um, you know,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the cyclist this time around are going to have a way easier time than, then, then, then, then we had. But that's good. I like that. I, I don't, this is a doctrine. Yeah, I don't want to experience 2018, 2019 again. Like, it's, it wasn't a fun time. That's for sure. Right, right, right. Um, um, oh, did you, okay, changing subjects here, unless you have anything else you want to touch on. Um, did you watch the, uh, the Hal Press Super bullish Ether video that we did on bankless? I'm like halfway through it, yeah. I've heard really good things about that from my community as well.

They've watched it too. But yeah, I mean, if you want a TLDR for people, I guess. Yeah, I think the quickest thing I'll TLDR is that he just makes the illustration that the Ethereum is at this particular equilibrium right now because of minor cell pressure. Like all proof of work blockchains are. And because like every single day, the equilibrium of the ETH price has been like set towards a particular amount of million dollars of cell pressure every single day to to secure the blockchain.

And as soon as we go and do the merge, it flips on its head where it goes, I can't remember the numbers. I think it's something like $15 million a day of cell pressure, which is like, not small. $15 million of day of cell pressure every single day is like, you know, you've got to tally some numbers up over the time. And then when the merge happens, it flips. So it goes from $15 million of cell pressure to $15 million to buy pressure. And so over the last how many years of Ethereum, seven years of Ethereum's lifespan,

like it's just come to this equilibrium of just figuring out how to live inside a market that has $15 million a day of sale pressure and then all of a sudden it flips and goes to buy pressure just like the snap of the fingers right and so like and so one of my questions for him was like okay how many how long will that flip turn to like uh manifest in the actual price of the thing like his answer was basically like pretty fucking fast uh and so this guy has uh calls out for $8,000 ether in this December, bro. This December. Yeah. That's not his only position, but that's like his most position. But like nuts, dude.

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm, yeah, obviously super bullish on 8th, but 8,000 by December seems, I mean, it's a good bet like if it happens because like he's probably going to make a lot of money on that. If it does materialize. But, yeah, I mean, the speed at which things happen is kind of hard to tell as well, I think of this industry. Because it's like suddenly, sorry, slowly than all at once. It's kind of. like the motto, right, for a lot of these things. But I think the main takeaway I've had, as I said, I've only listened to half of it, but the main takeaway I got from what he was talking about was that he looks at these things as like just businesses, right? Like cash flow, businesses with expenses, all that sort of stuff.

And he kind of like articulates the point quite well in that these other blockchains, even if they're proof of stake, they're leaking so much value because they're paying validators to inflation, but not offsetting that with a fee burn that can actually offset that. Yes, they may have a fee burn implemented, but they're not burning enough to kind of like be sustainable, right? Whereas Ethereum is. Ethereum is net deflationary literally every single block once the merge goes through. And we've been at deflationary on proof of work days, which is just like insane, right? And yeah, that minor self pressure gone. There's no withdrawals directly after the merge for like at least six months, right? Which is a gimmick, but like for six

months it matters. I mean, I think, I think it's a narrative, right? It's a narrative that'll push the price higher in my mind. But, but definitely I think that he articulated all that quite. well, and I mean, he's betting his whole fund on ETH, right? That's what he's doing. Yeah, he's betting his entire fund on Eith. Like, he's my type of person. And he watches the all-core devs call, bro. He actually, like, which is actually crazy to think about as in like,

the Ethereum ecosystem builds in the open, right? Like, it builds transparently. It builds inside out. And so there's like this one guy who has like, I don't know, $30, $50 million fund. I don't know the numbers. But he was like, yeah, no one else is doing this. but I'm going to listen to the Elkhore devs call

and just like expose myself more and more and more to as the merge comes and so he's we asked him is like, is anyone else doing this? He goes like, no one else is doing this. I don't know why, right? It's like some people tune into the investor calls. Some people turn into, tune into the Federal Reserve notes

and other people tune into like how much progress the Ethereum client teams have made on the merge. And that's this guy. And like he's aping the entire fund into the merge. His prediction is that like, And this is a guy who's like, he's got skin in the game, right? And so like, he's not you and me who are like, you're pretty balanced about this. Sometimes I get a little bit over my skee tips.

And I'm like, guys, merch coming soon. Merch coming soon. But I'm inside of the Ethereum ecosystem. And he is outside of the Ethereum ecosystem with the fund on the line, like neutral, unbiased third party. And he's like, August. I think it's August. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is that matches exactly with my expectations that I've had for a while now, which is cool to just see that kind of like validated there. But I think, yeah, there's kind of like listening to the call itself and then reading like the headlines. Like for example, yesterday I put out a tweet announcing that Robston was going to be kind of like run through the test net.

Sorry, the merge on June 8th or approximately June 8th, right? That's the headline. That's like a tiny bit of that, you know, whole core devs call. And you can get so much alpha by just listening to the call itself, right? And kind of like getting all the nitty-gritty details, not just around the merge, but around kind of like everything else. And I think that's, you know, what he's trying to do, which is, which is awesome. Like, you know what?

The funny thing is I don't even listen to the calls, because a lot of the time that happen when I'm sleeping. But I do read the notes and keep on top of it. But yeah, there's even more alpha to be had by just sitting there listening to the calls and like embracing kind of like the whole, the whole thing, the whole Ethereum thing. So, yeah, I mean, I think he's, he's going to have a very good time over the coming years with that bet. Definitely.

I mean, obviously I'm biased, but I think he's making an amazing bet then. And I'm glad to say that because it sends a signal to the kind of ecosystem to other money managers that, hey, you know, you don't have to bet your whole fund here. But there is, there is something here definitely. And he articulates it in such a way that maybe you and I don't from like a traditional finance perspective, which is what we need. Because it's all well and good for me to give the bull thesis for Eith. But I give it as an Ethereum. I give the kind of like in the weeds stuff. I don't articulate it.

Exactly. I don't give the analogies that he was giving. So I think that is extremely important because most people are not crypto natives. most of the money in the world is 99% of it is not in crypto right so to get it into crypto we need people to articulate it in such a way that normies can understand right and people normies in the crypto context can understand and i think that's exactly what he's doing so yeah i mean i'm i'm keen to finish the rest of it but a lot of alpha in that you know that show just in it's of itself yeah it was definitely our first episode with him and it was our first time like engaging with this guy so like

the episode it was like a very long episode for for what we did it was like an one in three quarters hours, but we're definitely going to have him back on as we get better talking to this guy and communicating with him and seeing how he perceives things. Because, like, there's value in the crypto-native pitch because, I mean, I'm all for tearing down old standards of doing things and, like, replacing Tradify with BetterFi, but also at the same time, the fact that we can retrofit ether fundamentals on to tried and true fundamentals of the old world, and it's not like they just, like, it's not like their thing is just made up.

Like, those are real metrics with real analysis and real fundamentalists. that a lot, the majority of wealth in this world understands and the fact that we can retrofit ether into those models and it comes out with an output that makes a ton of sense and not only makes a ton of sense, but it's really effing bullish. Then all of a sudden, like, the old money can couple to the new money via this common understanding, right? Like, one of my favorite lines is that the bold most bullish thing for ether is to be understood, right? And we can take ether metrics and plug them into old algorithms to spit out a very bullish and, answer that is interpretable by trillions of dollars, right?

Like, that's as, that's as collapse as I can get the whole, the whole thesis. Yeah. And I think on that understood notion, so the bet on ether, I think, or the bet on, like, just assets in general, like investing in general is that there is information asymmetry. There is kind of like an understanding or an information arbitrage to be had here, where you have access to this information before the majority of people. and you know, you are making the bet that that information is going to continue being dispersed. It's going to continue kind of like flowing into the rest of the world, the rest of the money.

And that money is going to eventually understand and kind of like come into ETH. And that's how obviously the price appreciates over time, over the long term at least. So that's kind of like the bet. And I think that it's a really good bet because over time, Eith and Ethereum have become more understood, right? It went from basically not being understood at all in, you know, 2018, 2019 to being the, you know, people, you know, even like the most kind of like ardent, like not anti-Eath people, but the people that wouldn't really support Ethereum or Eith are now collapsing in. And I'm saying, I was wrong.

Heath actually has kind of like value, all this sort of stuff, right? So I think that's the most bullish thing, I think, for me. But, but yeah, I mean, we could talk about being bullish on it all day, of course. Oh, and I think we shall, right? Are we, are we got a surprise guest? Yeah, he's not coming in yet. I kind of jumped the gun on that, but he should be here in a couple moments. Okay.

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But you should also subscribe to the link that I put in the top chat, which is Anthony's Daily Way YouTube channel, which he puts out daily videos about the Ethereum ecosystem. And it keeps us up to speed and also critiques the things that should be critiqued every now and then. And so, yeah, you should subscribe to his channel there. Let's see. Where do we want to go from here? I mean, so many. What's on my mind, actually, right now, outside of all the craziness of the last week,

is just how close to merge is. I know that we were just talking about. But like, come on, man. Like, it's May and we're expecting it in August. Like, it's so close. That's three months. That's three months. Exactly.

Exactly. Like I was just because like the shadow folks are going well. They announced the TestNet. As I mentioned before, the Robeson TestNet forked on the cold ebb's call today. Like it's so goddamn close. Like I feel it. Like I can, I can see it. Like it's there.

I just want to grab it and kind of like, yeah. So I'm just like, I'm ecstatic. Like I just, I can't believe that we're just like almost at the finish line after so, so long. And I don't think people realize how close it is it. There are still people who think that it's not going to happen at all. Like, yeah, what? Like, how does that even make any sense? Did you see Corey clips?

You know Swan Bitcoin? It's like this Bitcoin Neobank Savings-only Neobank. Corey Clipson, the CEO, who I interviewed on P-O-V crypto way back in the day. He was a nice guy because he had to put on the nice I'm a CEO face. He tweeted out, something, something, here's the secret that Eith Maxis don't want you to know. Ethereum is just a more convoluted, like ridiculous version of Terra. And like, I read that tweet. And it would have been one thing if it was like 10, 15, 20 likes it, but it had like 2,500,

likes and I was looking at this tweet and like, what do I do with this? Like, how do I even begin here? Because you can't fight that fight on Twitter. People that, 2,500 people liking a tweet that says Ethereum is just as convoluted, is more convoluted than Terra. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to fight that fight on Twitter? Are you serious?

But like the information asymmetry is only getting worse. Here's Eric. I mean, doquine. Here's Doquan. Doquan. It's Doquan. What's that? man.

Yeah. What's up, guys? How's it how you doing? I think you're all the other mics. Not on. I think it's your good mics on. Here we go. Yeah, there we go.

That's much better. Eric Conner's in the house, man. Dude. So we want an 8-Kalbush podcast with David as guest. Yeah, if you guys remember, Anthony and I used to do a podcast together like four years ago. Yeah. We might be some list.

We have a lot in like four weeks now. Oh, God. We've got to do it next week, man. Like, we've let it go on too long. Yeah, I think we have some angry listeners out there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe you guys can just do it here, huh?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can be the host. Yeah. Eric, you know what I'm loving? I'm loving the most lately. Like, you'll return to Twitter has just been, hey, guys, I'm back.

If gone to 10K, shit post, shit post, shit post, shit post, shit, post. Like, it's just constant shit posting. it's just such a great return, man. I bet you have fun, right? Yeah, I'm loving it. I mean, you guys know I love a good bear market. I'm not going to shy away from that.

So they are your favorite times. Right, exactly. The second I saw some desperation on Twitter, I decided it was time to hop back. But it was a good hiatus. You could just like smell the blood in the air and he's like, I'm coming back. You had to.

Yeah, I mean, we need some comedy out there during bear markets. So no one take my post too seriously these days. But, you know, I do truly believe, though, that people are overreacting. Like, I just, I mean, yeah, I know we hit 1,700 or whatever, but we're still at, like, 2K. Like 18 months ago, we were all crying and we were at like 80. So, I don't know. I'm not fully buying into the bear market stuff, but, I mean, I know some people bought a lot

higher than we're at, but. No, it was over two years ago. It was like two year, four months or something. When was it last two years, two months? Yeah, yeah. Well, the phase zero launched. of 2020. So, and that's right when he started taking off.

So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, also we hit 2000. We hit like 1700 last May. Right.

And so like it's been one year since we've hit these prices. It was the one year anniversary when we, like May 12th was like the first big crash to 1700 and then we did it again. It's like, like it's so poetic how that happens. Like literally the one year anniversary. like um but yeah no i mean i'm with eric on that like i know it's easier for us to say since we bought eath like it a lot a lot cheaper than what it is today but i don't know like i feel like people are acting like the world is ending like i mean guys if it goes down 94% again from its

all-time high it's like 300 bucks if that happens i feel like uh i mean i'd be panicking like pretty badly i'd be like in a corner being like what happened how did it all go wrong because you bought? Is that what happened? You know, I didn't do my typical like YOLO. This is the bottom buy. I was talking to Anthony a little bit yesterday. I bought a few NFT dips, mainly because I just see NFTs as like leveraged Heath. So and there were a couple desperation plays out there I saw going on. So, you know, I did deploy some capital. But I haven't yet. So that's the thing, though. Like I don't make my like blood in the streets yellow, Eath bottom by slash calls unless like it's. It's. really blood in the street. And to me, 2000 is not bloodish. What Anthony was just talking about is blood in the street. Like if we're talking like three, four, five hundred and people are like, you know, it's funny. People are just spoiled these days, right? Like 55% off the highest, not that bad. It's just not. Right. But does that mean we're going down more? I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't think so. I think Eith is, you know,

Bitcoin only went down, what was it, like 80% when Eith went down 94, whatever last cycle. And I think every cycle of the big guys will go down less. I think ETH came out stronger out of all this drama. Of course, it's going to suck and like we're going to bounce around Chop City for a while. But I don't know. I think Eith max pain downs in like the 70s percentages, but which will happen if the macro environment stays ugly. That's one thing people need to remember, right? That's certainly true.

But also at the same time, we're seeing an acceleration of just like the biggest bear market signals as a result of this whole terror thing. Like, funds are blowing up. People are losing all their net worth. Like, we're doing the suicide hotline thing on the pin on top of subreddits. Regulators. Regulators are coming in.

Like, these are all the same conversations and the happenings. Like, right now, the suicide hotline is, like, contained into one ecosystem. But, like, dude, it was pinned across, like, many, many ICOs, like, our cryptocurrency throughout all of 2018 and 2019. Oh, yeah.

And, like, and this is where funds, would blow up on leverage over and over and over again. And so, like, I'm wondering if we just, like, brought some of the bear market pain forward a little bit because of this whole Luna crash ecosystem thing. Yeah, that's my take. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with you. I think also, like I had tweeted this the other day, but it seems like every freak out, quote-unquote, bare market event to me is less and less systematically scary. Like, for me, I've witnessed four big ones. Like, Gox was the first one for me.

and like everyone thought that could be the end of Bitcoin. Then the Dow hack, everybody thought was the end of Ethereum. Then we had like, you know, Black Thursday where, oh shit, did we scribbed this whole defy thing? And like, you know, it all going to zero. And to me, like a Ponzi collapsing. Yeah, I get it. People lost a lot of money.

I mean, I feel bad about that. But like, Ethereum itself is just not really affected by this. Like funds blowing up does not affect the future of Ethereum, right? And that wasn't the case in like past, you know, collapses that we've seen. Yeah. Go for it, Anthony. I think, yeah, I was going to say, I think the current debate right now, at least in my circles is, was May 2021, the start of the bear market was November

2021, the start of the bare market, because people are saying, oh, well, the new all-time high in November was just a dead cap bounce. Yeah, we went to a new all-time high, but it was still technically, if you look at the chart, like a dead cap, right? And I can see both sides of this. So if you fall into like the May 2021 top camp, we've already been in a bare market for a year, right? But then if you fall into the November one, it's six months. I actually think the November one was driven by the macro environment going nuts, like its last hurrah before like all these Fed kind of rate rises and stuff kind of started coming out, right? And the really big inflation numbers. So I don't know, I don't know where I sit on that one. I'm leaning towards more towards May

being that kind of like top because the thing is we blew off really fucking hard in May, right? Within a week, we went down from 4.4K to 1700. Like that was a massive blow off top. People got absolutely destroyed on leverage. We had a huge volume candle. Like it was one of the biggest in history, right? So I think if you're, depending on what camp you fall on is, is kind of like, it determines like how you feel about the current market. Like if we're going to stay at 1700 as the bottom or if we're going to go to Max Payne triple digits. Like that's, I agree with Eric. That's like max blood in the streets, you know, I would pull out all the stops to buy as much as I could at that price point, right? But like, you know, I don't have much ammo left at this point.

Just keep buying, but prematurely... Some of those figurines. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Max, I'm not sure about the liquidity on those markets right now. Yeah, you might just start saying the room get very bare and like, because the eighth is in triple digits. But no, I think that's like, yeah, depending where you fall on that kind of like opinions,

kind of spectrum there is how you're going to feel about the current kind of market, I think. Raoul, when we had our interview with him, gave a take that I think I'm leading into, which is that inflation came from asset price appreciation, all the people that had assets in the stock market and crypto assets started buying a bunch of houses and just like being super price insensitive. And like I heard some stat from some article, so of course it's true, that one fifth of all

mortgages in the United States in the year 2022 or came from crypto wealth or 2021 came from crypto wealth. So you know that like a lot of this asset depreciation is coming from just or this inflation is coming from asset appreciation. So if you take that fact, the fucking crash of the tech stocks, which were the big growers, and then overall the crash of the market and the crypto market is just killing demand. And so the source of inflation came from asset price appreciation.

And now that we're back to like pre-inflation levels, Rao Paul thinks that the inflation is already dead, but since CPI is the lagging indicator, the Fed can't act on it because they have to wait for the verifiable like numbers to show up saying, yo, inflation's actually dead. Even though it's already been dead for months. And like one very small anecdote that I've been thinking about lately

is I'm moving to Brooklyn, and so I bought a bunch of patio furniture coming to San Diego to put on my patio, and, like, relatively nice stuff, but, like, now I've got to sell it, and so I'm telling it one year use, and I have it, like, 50 to 70% off, and, like, they're not going. I'm actually kind of stressed by it. And I don't know what to do with this shit, but, like, yo, like, one-year-old patio furniture, five to 50 to 70% like, and no one's going for it. And so, like, yo, demand's dead, like, verifiable, like, there's your data.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Just one anecdote, but verifiable data point. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get liquidated on your patio furniture. Yeah, no, no, you go ahead. No, no, you go, Eric. Okay. Now, I was just going to say, like, going back to the markets a little bit, I think people are pointing to Luna as this collapse, which obviously was a factor, but it was, like macro, the stock market was getting ugly to begin with. I think we were headed generally in this direction no matter what and it just kind of accelerated. I mean, if you look at the S&P 500 graph, they've had six straight weekly red candles, which is like pretty unheard of for the S&P 500,

right? But one of the funny things like, you know, you go mainstream and like Wall Street Journal, CNBC, they're all talking about the great crypto crash. Meanwhile, like if you look at some of stocks year to date, like PayPal is down 50% year to date. Netflix is down. Metas down 40. Like there are a lot of tech stocks down more than eth is from, you know, know, over the last 12 months or whatever. So that's a new paradigm for sure. That used to not happen. And that spooks me a little bit on the macro side, but also maybe the selling's wearing out, you know, at the same time. A lot of those stocks also have wiped out like their entire pandemic gains. Like they're back to March 2020 prices, basically, whereas Eath is still up like over 20x

since its bottom back then, right? So just looking at it like that, I think is amazing. because everyone's like, oh, you know, crypto's like super volatile, super risky stocks are like where you need to be. I mean, okay, a lot of the long tail of crypto assets definitely just giga-rest, like the down 90-plus percent, right? But like when I talk about crypto investing in it, I'm talking about like, you know, ETH, right, at the end of the day. So I think when you look at it like that, eight is faring, you know, amazingly, which is,

which is quite a cool thing. It's something to keep in mind, I think, for people as well. Like, if people were in other assets that got destroyed in crypto, like, I'm sorry, guys, but that's just what happens every single time. Like, you know, you're speculating on things that are inherently worthless a lot of the time. They've got no value accrual at all, right? They've got no value. Like, valueless governance token.

They're just new too. And so like, new and super risky, right? Yeah. Exactly. Super risky. And like a lot of them also, what a lot of people forget is that they have early investors unlocking all the time, right? And dumping like huge amounts of tokens onto the market and liquidity mining programs,

things like that. I mean, we all saw this play out already in DFI summer. Like we learned our lessons. And that's why I think. I don't know, I don't speak for you guys, but for myself, like, I don't speculate on many of these tokens anymore. Like, it's just, I know what ends up happening. They all have the same graph. Like, it's just insane, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's natural for like the coin market cap or now coin gecko, like the tokens, the further down the, the tokens are, the more the capital flies up, right? It flies up to the quality assets with the most liquidity that are the most stable. But over, like, I think Bitcoin and Ether are down like the same percentage.

I think Ether was down 65 and Bitcoin was down 64% from the top, which is just fantastic in comparison to last cycle. They're down about the same right now, though. I think they got a little bit wrecked on that sell off there. Right. Yeah. The ratio, the ratio charge is priming for post-merge breakout.

I mean, it's like perfectly lined for it. I don't take opinionated positions. very often. I usually just buy ETH, but I did put ETH into compound, borrow Bitcoin, bought more ETH and put that back into compound to trade the merge. I did do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's coming. People are just sleeping. I mean, it's going on Robs in a month or something like that. It was they said on all core devs today. Yeah. Approximately. Yeah. Yeah. So about a month. I mean, it's going to catch people, I think off guard just like phase zero launched it, just like one five, five nine did. Most people, I don't think this stuff's

priced in. I don't think the market's educated enough to really understand it. And I think the one thing that's really going to catch people off guards is what the staking yields are going to look like once you add in transaction fees and MEV. What do you think that number is going to be? I've been estimating ballpark 15 to 20 percent just randomly. I think consensus has come down on that. I think consensus has settled around 7%. Well, it depends. Well, it depends, right? Because I think it say we get up to 15 percent, people are going to flood it.

So I like I think equilibrium will probably end up settling around where you're saying 7% something like that. But early on we might see before people kind of catch on to what it is. But yeah, it's tough to say. I haven't done any real number crunching on it. Yeah, the numbers that came out to like 13 to like 17% a while ago were based on two assumptions. Like that was during DFI summer when there was like two to 400 per like day grade prices. So a lot of just like transaction fees. but then the estimation also came from a 70-30 base fee tip split,

which was also hypothesized and then kind of was true a little bit, but then kind of it's dwindled to the new equilibrium now, which is 90-10. And so there's 90% of a transaction fee goes to the base fee and only 10% goes to the tips. And so with the reduction of the gray price for gas prices as well, like the new kind of consensus I've heard lately is like about 7% post-merge. The one big thing I haven't seen good analysis around,

I've asked on Twitter a little bit, just haven't got there, is what to expect on the MEP side. Like how much R minors are truly pulling in on the MV side right now? I don't know. It's hard to, I saw a couple links and it just was kind of complex to go try to calculate. My gut take is that that gets you back up to like 13 to 15%. If you are the best MEP minor, I bet you get up to 13 to 15% again. You've got to be doing some real shady shit.

Well, I mean, people are just going to release open source software to just run as a and you just basically take it, right? Kind of like flashbods. I think that's right. There's also the dynamic that MEV actually doesn't stay in the layer one, and the layer one actually stays like relatively efficient with arbitrage, but the MEV actually moves up to the layer two's where there's a lot more transaction volume and a transaction demand.

I think Hazu gave that take. Or no, it's actually Kyle Somani gave that take, where layer twos eat up all the MEV, which I mean, his claim was that it's bearish for the layer one, which I don't agree with at all. But I actually just think that's especially bullish for layer twos, though. Fun fact, that was optimism's initial profitability plan was just take all the MEV themselves and be profitable before they like that's become like the new table stakes for all layer twos

is that you generate revenue from the layer two. But I think optimism very quickly realized that like, oh, well, if we want to beat other layer twos, we have to basically incur all of this revenue into public goods. because that makes that starts the feedback loop right and so like that was them going through their thinking process of the whole thing i think um yeah no i think the the layer two thing uh like it's it's it's right like they're going to be the transactional layers right so they're going to generate so much of this kind of like fear of when you and mav and stuff and and i think the token in that sense makes sense because the token will be staked or something like that and people run validators and

and sequences and things like that and earn and fees like that but the thing is is that and the point that Samani gets wrong here is that these layer two have to pay Ethereum layer one like in in Eth, right? And that Eth, most of it gets burned. So it doesn't take away from the and ETH is also the unit of account and like the money of these layer twos. Like it's not the native token of these layer twos isn't going

to be the fee token for pretty much any of them. I know people point to Madik as being the fee token of the playing on POS chain, but that was just like a byproduct of an old kind of design and the POS chain is obviously not a layer two. So I think for their layer two is they just just use

ETH, right? And Maddo be the staking token, things like that. So the same is true for pretty much all the layer two tokens, I think, there. But yeah, I think the post-merged staking yields is, yeah, hard to calculate because of the M-AV component and how that's all going to shake out. But yeah, we could see 10 plus percent just based on that. And then, as Eric said, we're going to see a flood of ETH come in, like, staking because 10-plus percent near risk-free yield, pretty much risk-free yield on, don't nominate in ETH? Like, come on. Like, I mean, you know, there's going to be a flood of, of kind of like people coming in for that, I think. I think the last topic perhaps to talk about

before we wrap things up here is how to get exposure to the merge that isn't with ether. So there's like Layer 2 tokens like Madik. There's two tokens on Layer 2's like the Liber token or the Magic token. And then there's you're trying to farm AirDrops themselves. There's Lido and Rocket Pool. Did you guys have any thoughts on how to gain exposure

to the merge without just like buying Ether? The obvious thing? Eric, you go. You probably have different things to me. Yeah, I would say personally, I would make plays on the infrastructure side of things. So I think right now it's still a little complex for people to enter, whether it's like Coinbase or running their own node. Coinbase is a complex when people don't want to put it on Coinbase. And I think people are really yet to hear about, say, like a rocket pool.

I'll just use Rocket Pool as an example. I'm not like promoting them or whatever. And just I own zero RPL tokens. So I have no incentive in saying this. But I think people are kind of waiting for the merge to happen. That's going to be like a huge news event and people are going to flood in because of yields and stuff. And, you know, rocket pool has been building for years.

And all of a sudden people are going to say, hey, either I don't have 32 ETH, which is very understandable or, hey, I don't want to like worry about running this node infrastructure myself. And I think we're going to see a big push of ETH and users and popularity into a rocket pool or other infrastructure type plays that just make this easier for people. right because like look i'm running my own eth two e2 phase zero nodes but shit's complex like it is not easy like if my machine blows up i look i got my private key somewhere but recreating what i did 16 months ago it's not the easiest thing in the world and so i think that'll get better but

most people are going to want to just click a couple buttons um you know via their metamask hardware wall whatever and just stay can be done so i i think the popularity there is going to rise Yeah. Look, it's kind of like hard for me to say with respect to the tokens themselves, like LDO and RPL and things like that. Like I do hold some of those. So just like, but they're not like a huge part of my portfolio. But I think ETH is just such a easy thing to bet on and such a like, I guess, shelling point, not just for people within crypto as kind of like a bet on the merge and on staking in general, but outside of crypto. So like the big money outside of crypto is not going to be buying these staking tokens. They're going to be buying ETH if they're buying anything, right? Is your answer after I told you it couldn't be?

Yeah, no, I'm getting, I'm getting to my answer. It's wrapped. Yeah, yeah, it's wrapped. Yeah, I'm getting, I'm getting to my answer. I think that when looking at tokens, it doesn't matter if it's a staking token or a defra token or whatever. You can't just look at like the narrative as, as anything more than a trade. Like maybe these things will pump into the. on the narrative, but then they're probably just going to bleed out, like, if they do that, right?

You can't, so when investing in tokens, you can't just look at one thing and be like, oh, I'm going to hold this thing for three years because there's a merge narrative. Like, no, you have to look at, you know, what's the distribution, what's the supply like, how much more tokens are coming to market, what's the value accrual, all that sorts of stuff. You can't just base a long-term investment on a narrative that's going to play out over a few months, right? So I think from that perspective, like, I'm just going to give ether's my answer. I don't care if you said I can't give Eve.

I'm giving me an answer. Like, that's my answer. That's my final answer. Lock it in. That's it. So that's my view on betting on tokens, basically. All right, guys. Eric, thanks for coming into the stream, man.

It's good to see you. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for the invite. This is my first comeback in a while on any kind of podcast or video chat. We need to do the EPAP podcast next week, man. We've been leaving them hanging for too long. We should probably get back on that, yeah. Yeah, let's do it.

I wonder who's not doing that. No, let's book it in. We're good. We're good. Yeah, cool. All right, guys. Good stuff. Cool. Thanks for stopping by Eric. For the YouTube listeners, you guys know what to do. Like and subscribe and all that stuff. Here is Anthony's daily. Eric was like, I'm out. Here's Anthony's Game, YouTube link to subscribe to that if you guys don't follow him. So thank you, everyone, for tuning into this semi-regular Friday Bakelis Daily Wide Live stream.

See you next time we do it. Bye, Anthony. Thanks, everyone.