Bankless - Bankless x UpOnly Therapy Stream

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

After one of the worst weeks in crypto history, Ryan and David join forces with Ledger and Cobie from Up Only to bring the industry some much needed catharsis. The four chop it up about how big of a deal this really is, how we’re going to move forward as an industry, and general advice to get through this. Hang in there, anon. We’re in this together. ------ 📣 Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  💠 NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo  🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ----- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to another crazy episode covering the FTX and SBF drama. This was a live stream that Ryan and I did with the two guys over at Up Only, Ledger and Kobe. And we did this because we thought we wanted to bring the two biggest podcasts in crypto together just for some industry catharsis. I'm pretty sure the entire industry tuned into this one, something like 20,000, 30,000 people while we were live streaming this last night at about 10 p.m. Eastern Time. So we talked for about two hours, just shooting the shit and talking about how big of a deal this is, how we're going to move forward as an industry. And Kobe, of course, shares his age, old wisdom is all the stuff he's seen before through the cycles. And we kind of talk about how we can pick up the pieces and move forward over what is perhaps one of the worst events of the 2022 collapse in crypto prices and all the contagion that has fallen out.

And so I hope you guys all are doing fine. I know a lot of people are hurting. Hopefully, this conversation can entertain you and allow you to relax as we navigate this together. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with the two guys over it up only. But first, we'll talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With the recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home.

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letting the fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, There's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. Can we start, dude? Oh, yeah, we're live, brother. Oh, what's up, guys? What's up? Yeah. Wow, bankless after dark. Yeah, without Kobe, just with Ledger.

What's up, Ledger? Well, he's still in the shower. He's coming, right? Ledger. Allegedly, yeah. Yeah, he's just showering. Unless we're going to get two rug pulls in one day. I've heard he's finalizing the next up-only sponsorship, so he's busy. He's busy.

He's doing that deal. He's buying FTX right now. For one dollar. We can all buy FTCX. That's no longer a problem. Wait, it's only a dollar? It's only a dollar. Why are we so stressed out over a dollar?

I don't understand. Because you're buying a $6. You also might have to pay billions of dollars to make everyone whole to pay their debts. Listen, on our stream, we got a corner on the bottom left, and maybe Kobe will be there. Maybe Justin's son will be there. Maybe another special guest will be there. know. I think if Justin Sun gets there before Kobe, Justin Sun gets to come back

another time after that. Justin's son. Did you guys see in this? I'll share my screen for people who don't know. He just announced that he is planning to bail us out. Oh, you just rugged up only. You rugged MindStra. Oh, did I really? You can't share. You can't share.

I'm sorry. I didn't plan for that. We should have restart it. We have Two different form factors of live streams coming together right now. Oh, man, sorry. Yeah, don't, look, just tell the audience. They're smart, smart, smart audience. Go subscribe to Up Only right now.

What should we tell them? Uponly. Up only. No, that's not right. Go to Twitch.com. Go to Twitch.tv slash Up Only TV. Something like that. Who cares?

Best podcast in crypto. What are you drinking, David? Oh, I am drinking a naked. famous with a habaniero in it because like I said while we were getting the stream ready to go Sam Bankman-Fried made himself very famous but he's been swimming naked

this entire time and that is my drink. What are you drinking, Ledger? Sorry I was DMing Justin son the video link. I'm stuck in the waiting room. Wait, is he really coming in? I need more people on Twitter. Here's Kobe. I need more people on Twitter pressure. Kobe is

What's up? Hey, what's up? Scroving up my scenes. coming in fashionably late how you doing david you've upgraded your background is it a green screen uh no this is uh brooklyn not a green screen it's brooklyn last time you saw me i was in san diego nice how you do it looks cozy it's very cozy and nice yes are are you already live yeah we are oh we're alive brother yeah yeah we're live on both channels and you already messed up my stuff when two streaming platforms come together, bad things happen. Well,

yeah, it wouldn't be an online stream if you didn't spend half your time like fucking Are you doing it? No, sorry, I was like, I literally just woke up.

Good morning. Good morning, yeah. Where did you leave things when you, uh, went to sleep? Like, where was it?

Um, what do you know? Yeah. Um, Oh, yeah, shit. I haven't even looked at like what's happened since. Well, Binance had walked away. Yep. And, like, Sam still hadn't said anything.

Z had just tweeted the, like, I tried sad face thing. Yeah, that's about it. I think the only thing that's come after that is, like, people have concluded that there's something like a $6 to $7 billion hole in FTC's balance sheet. I don't think we've... Wait, I thought we were up to, like, 8 to 10. Do we know? Wall Street Journal said it was a... about eight, right? It was like, could be as large as eight.

Could be as large as eight. How did that happen? That is a big hole. How do you get an $8 billion hole in your balance sheet? I mean, I don't know. If you're asking me how to lose money in crypto, I can tell you. That's what it's what I mean. And I mean, it seems like they just did fucked up stuff with customer deposits, right?

Like they just either loaned them out or directionally traded them or like, you. used them for their own personal reasons. Do you think it was all Alameda? Because imagine, okay, Alameda should have blown up along with A16 or 3-0's capital and the rest of them. But they got, they got, yeah, that's not invoke A16C right now. But they didn't because FTX gave them a big-ass buffer. They didn't give them like a multi-billion dollar buffer.

So like would have FTX still have. gone under without Alameda? Because I feel like that answer is almost yes. Yeah, I'm on, I mean, I don't have. The only thing I can think of is plausible, but I have to admit that I just like constantly reveal myself as naive in these things because like maybe they just gave them $8 billion, dude. Like we don't work.

They could just done that. They could have gone, oh, it'll be fine. They'll make it back. They were really great traders. But they could have also. Wow. Imagine if they got like a Bitcoin or Ethereum did not. nominated hole when the prices were much lower.

So let's say they had a missing, like 100,000 ethelth hole or something. But Ethereum was worth like $300 at the time. And they were like, okay, cool, we can plug this hole, no drama. And then suddenly Ethereum is worth $5,000. And in order to try and cover the hole, they've done stuff wrong and made it worse, perhaps. I can maybe buy that. But that means that they've been in trouble for like 18 plus months now. Okay, but it's so, well, that's the thing, right?

Like, how, like, how did SBF get himself in this situation, right? Like, was this, is this kind of a person who's a con man from the beginning? Do you think he began with this end game in mind? Or do you think he's like a lot of people who kind of go down this path where, you know, it's a shortcut here, to shortcut here. And gradually he kind of slips into the position that he's found himself in in early November. Like, is he purely nefarious con man or is this? I can't think he accidentally stumbled into like losing $8 billion. But pretty impressive.

I mean, man, I don't know. I I don't know like I watched the Theranos documentary thing recently and it seemed like she started with good intentions and then things just like slipped away

and then at some point she like turned and was like I got to keep I've got to be evil in order to like keep this like rolling so maybe it was a fork and then she chose the evil path

yeah yeah I I just don't like it's impossible to know the like some people were telling me all this stuff and happened really recently. So Alameda had a big problem in like September. And I don't know if you saw that.

There was a tweet that said like Sam, he was saying, we're just moving, we're rotating some wallets. And there was like the $8 billion of FTT moved at the end of September. And he tweeted, oh, don't worry about it. We're just rotating some wallets. But this was the point when a bunch of the collateral was like, um, borrowed against perhaps. And in which case, it's like, you know, they were fine until really recently and then almost instantly blew up. But I don't know.

I find it easier to suspect that like, it was, it was fucked for a while. And then like the tide going out reveals that it was fucked. Like if it's fucked for a while and you try and like fix it, but like make it worse. And then the tide goes out and you just not in control. of that. Maybe maybe that makes sense. But, I mean,

who fucking knows, dude? What, second, third biggest exchange? There's another element here that I'm confused to buy, which is now they're talking about

the FTX hole alone. So is lending money to Alameda part of the FTX hole or is that the Alameda hole? Right. Like who, you know what I mean? Because if it's $8 billion, not even counting money they lent to Alameda,

like they did other, that's even dumber. That's what I was saying. That's what I was saying. It's not just Alameda. They would have gone under regardless of Alameda. Yeah. If it was not just that counterparty, what, what did they do with the money? Well, they bought, they bailed out half of the industry when there was blood on the streets during, during, that was, that was a $250 million line of credit. Yeah. Weren't they buying a lot of things? But it doesn't add up. It doesn't add up. You can't get a billion dollars worth of that. So if you're at $8 billion, then what the hell happened?

When you're making $10 million a day or more, or whatever, Kobe did the napkin math on based on trading fees, it doesn't make any sense. And if that's the case, then there's got to be some really serious fraud. Maybe it was just really simple, and they went right, okay, so we make, you know, low mid eight figures a day. If we borrow a billion dollars of customer deposits to Yolo into, you know, like his personal Robin Hood steak or something.

You know, by Robin Hood, it's good for like alignment of our companies, whatever. It actually only takes FTX, however many days, like three or four months to re-earn that money. So, like, what's the problem there? And you do it once and you like, cool, it works. We're now whole again. We actually just managed to accelerate our business because we use those customers deposits to achieve our business goals. and now those cosmos deposits are replenished, maybe you do that a few times,

trying to be, like, efficient with your, all the money that's available to you. And suddenly, like, you've done it one too many times, and the tide goes out, and there's a bank run, and, like, you know, like, there was literally a gigantic bank run for this to even be, like, properly discovered. So they could have operated much closer to,

insolvent, like the insolvency line where they just don't have deposits left. If this didn't happen, it could have gone on for years. And maybe they could have even ended up whole without us knowing, but probably not. But on top of that, they've been raising like crazy for the last year. They raise a ton of money at super high valuation. So they also lost that money too. Yeah, yeah, it was like, what, $2 billion in the last year? Yeah.

Yeah. raised their actual capital raise was two billion yeah i didn't realize it was that high i think that's right i think that's right was it's memory i think they've raised billions of dollars collectively well they the one raise was like the meme raise that's 420 million 69 000 or something stupid right but the um i don't know what the cumulative was don't know what they spent the money on at least blockfire in a sports stadium you can get you can probably get to a billion again block five is a line of credit right like it wasn't

it was an option all right the stadium is paid annually and it's probably eight figures at most a lot of the chat is speculating they did do a big thing with TSM yep only podcast sponsorship wasn't that expensive I don't understand where it went So Sam apparently has 660 million

The personal credit that he was filing bankruptcy for Was that accurate? I don't even know what's real. Was that real? I heard that was fake. I thought that was someone impersonating tier 10K or whatever is like. Okay, so that was the tier 13 fake one.

Yeah. What about the other character in this in this whole thing uh CZ I mean do you think he mastermind this from the very beginning you think he was planning this was this like downfall of my competitor like pure McAvelian art of war shit where he's just like trying to knock out SBF trying to acquire the assets for cheap and then like maybe now it just got out of hand it's like it went too far because I I can't think that this feels good for Binance, which is certainly terrible for the industry.

I don't know how far this sets us back. Like, I don't know, back to 2019, 2018, 2017. I think the question is, like, did CZ know the FTT weakness in FTX and also Alameda? Did they know when he started tweeting? Yeah, and what was his plan? Right. Like, did he want this to happen? I don't think he, I mean.

I don't think he wanted to something. He thought he was poking. He thought he was poking a vulnerable bear and he was poking a scarecrow that was rotten. Right. I think that's right. I think that's right. I think, yeah, I think you wanted to like, like, put them in line. Like, be like, look, look what we can do to the sentiment around your exchange.

Like, remember who's the boss type thing? Big time. And then accidentally exposed a hollow show. A gigantic hole. Yeah. But, like, if he did actually mastermind this. like that's kind of crazy that's like one of the most insane

like business chess moves that I guess I'll get to see in real time in my life but like maybe that's the thing maybe we never get to know I don't think we always have to we always wonder so we always look at CZ

oh I don't know about CZ side of it but in terms of we'll know a lot about the FTX side of oh big time oh yeah but yeah the CZ side. That's up to CZ and Bitboy. Someone should tweet at BitBoy. Come on. I really don't like that guy. I mean, I really didn't like our guest yesterday either.

Kobe, you've never directly interface with Bit Boy, right? I spoke to him for the first time ever. Do you remember when the lawsuit was happening with Atosie? Yeah. So when he was suing Atosie and then I all... offered to fund Otosi. Atosy's defense. I emailed Bitboy then while that was ongoing before he's like officially pulled out saying like,

just want you to know, Atosie's in hospital right now. His wife's due date is like literally today. So like all this is happening at the time his child is being born. Like I will fund him unlimited to take that stress away. and like here is why like I don't think that you should do this and then he sent me a very thoughtful response and then we've emailed a couple of times since

maybe like two or three emails exchanged the latest one he just asked me what I thought of the token promotion business model in general like is it even redeemable and I sent him like a short essay about like how I think the token promotion promotion business model is just like only the only people that want the token promoters the token

promotions from YouTubers are people that want the price to go up in the short term like you never see like are they going we need to go to like crypto banter and get a like a token ad. Instead they just built something that worked and um um yeah so I said it like a small like here's what I think on it and then he made a video which was him basically reading out the email as though it was his own words, which was, yeah. I mean, I thought it was pretty good that he did it and said like this stuff is bad,

even though he did that stuff in the past and it owned up to all that stuff. But, yeah, other than that, I spoke to him maybe three times. Okay. Well, that's more than that. Yeah, I mean, we did spend a full conversation with him for hours. Yeah, we had like an hour.

Other than that, yeah, yeah. We had one email and then we had the show with him. Yeah. I feel like I kind of understand. him a lot more after that. Like I understand like what he is doing in the space and like what his motivations are. What is it? I think I think that boy really likes attention.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think that that motivates him in a way that yeah, I don't know, maybe money motivates other people. He has a background in like internet marketing, which I kind of makes sense. And I feel like he was like, oh, this crypto thing, I can do internet marketing via viral videos here. And then the ethical consequences of what the hell he was doing came up way, way later. And he was probably too far gone in terms of what type of monetization strategies existed. So I kind of understand how he got there.

But I don't understand him per se, other than I see what you're saying from an attention perspective. I don't know. I mean, I can't connect with it, man. There's no, he could, he should be able to live. look at those deals and recognize there's there's no winner with what he was doing with like the token promotions of like you know shit jam token you know like it just doesn't do you know it's like he um yeah like like i agree with that i i think at the end of the day i walked away from that and thinking that like oh i mean bit boy is just kind of like a a regular guy like he's not a devil

he's not an angel he's just a regular guy and one of his comments when we were talking to him was like I just started creating content that my audience wanted. And they wanted to hear about the latest like shit coin that was going to moon overnight. And so that's what I gave them. And so he was like, what's the harm in that? There's demand for a product and I serve it up. And like our point is just like, yeah, but there's a difference between what people want and like what people need. And these are nubes and you have like a responsibility.

if you have a platform of your size. I don't know. I'm hopeful he's getting some of that. He seemed kind of like actually he came on the episode and he was very, I don't know, contrite, like chastened. Like I thought we were going to be in the, in the octagon with like, you know, WWF wrestler and we weren't. He just came on and he was, I mean, he apologized at one point.

Okay. So the most interesting thing, Ryan, is like our chat right now is we have like 50% people who are like, a Bitboy was right. He called out FTX. BitBoy's awesome. And then the other half of the chat is like, Bit Boy's a clown.

Don't ever talk to him again. Why can you guys talk about something else? He posted a video today where he was just like, zero remorse for the victims and all this. Was this the one in his bathroom? He's like in a bathroom or something? I don't know. He's like wearing his Gucci suit or bathroom or something.

Yeah, that's it. But he was, it's one thing to say like I told you so. this guy was a scammer. I knew it. I had proof. That's fine. But he claimed this like euphoric level victory.

And there are no winners here. Yeah. BitBoy is not a winner here. CZ is not a winner here. CZ acknowledges that. I don't know what CZ actually feels, but his public stance on it was at least like fair and and reasoned. And BitBoy's emotions took over.

The guy cannot control his emotions. and he cannot recognize the fact that they're victims based on these outcomes. The outcomes from his promotions, oh, I swam down like the easiest, fastest lane with the strongest current that I could to make money. I didn't do anything wrong. It's like, okay, that's the same reason that Martin Screlly pisses me off. The dude who's like selling pills for $750 a pop because he could. It doesn't make it right. There's an ethical way to do business.

there's an unethical way to do business. And that's your choice that you have to live with as an individual. And swimming down the easy lane for max profits is, in my opinion, not a worthy choice. The theme of 2022, perhaps, or at least all of those people who do that getting insolvent. I don't think he went into a token promotion business to like maliciously steal from a lot of people. But I think when you're making a lot of money doing a business model, that's probably not great for your users.

it's easy to not acknowledge that while the going's good and maybe even lie to yourself and say like actually everyone's winning the market's going up everyone's kind of winning yeah there's some losers but we do good due diligence and we disclose and blah blah blah blah blah so like you know whatever the only comical um the only like really comical part of this for me is that like if instead of having FTX as a sponsor for opponently we just shield loads of shit coins and done like token promotions a different fucking token every episode.

We'd look better now than we currently do. I mean, you never know, right? True enough. We look like shit right now. I'm not trying to say we don't. But here's what's crazy. It's like, so you guys have had like one sponsor consistently.

Bankless has had like many. Like we have multiple sponsor slots, right? A few handfuls. And like I'm just like saying to David. Like we do our best to select our sponsor and like our sponsors. And we clearly we do not. I mean, we turn. a ton of sponsors away or like we're shady like you're shady you can't we can't support that but like

just law of numbers in crypto i mean you never know and it doesn't have to be a a crypto exchange hack it could be just like anything somebody wrote some sloppy smart contract code there was like a bridge that was flawed there was some kind of multi-sig that you know was a an attack vector that we didn't realize north korea freaking attack like who knows what could happen and that is, um, it's just a lot of responsibility. Well, it's the same thing. It's like, why the hell are we in this industry in the first place? We're in this industry because it's an industry about money.

Uh, so all sponsors are downstream of something of that nature. Uh, so there's no way out of that risk, no matter what. Guys, the chat's blown up about, um, yeah, we, we know SBF retweeted Justin's son. We know that that's true. I've DM'd Justin. Can you pass the tweet, though? Is he saying we're figuring out a way to make Toronto. whatever the rest of them are, blah, blah, blah,

holders, whole? Or is he saying they're putting together a solution to create all of FTX relief, basically? Because he says, further to my announcement to stand behind all Tron token holders, Tron, BTT, JST, Son, H, HT, holders on FTX. We are putting together a solution forward with FTX to initiate a pathway forward.

So like, I don't know why. Is he just saying like we're figuring out with them how to make our own bags good? I don't know why SBF would retweet that if it was just about Tron and TRX. It only makes sense under the context that Tron and Justin son is helping FTX. Does it? I don't even know anymore with SPF, man. I don't think Sam's got control of his Twitter account anymore. Ah.

I think that is in the hands of crisis. management team. Yeah. Crisis management team. Do you all think Sam had an emergency escape hatch plan? My question is, is SPF on the run just like everyone else of 2020? It would be on thing. My wife thinks this industry is freaking nuts.

So is mine, Ledger. Like, she was just talking about this. So she's like, is it dead this time? Yeah, how are you guys' wives lately? Yeah. I mean, my wife thinks it's weird enough that y'all call me Ledger. and that they call someone named Jordan Kobe

and like she's like what? Who? Why do y'all do that? And then now I'm like, well, this guy is on the run and he came on a podcast

and this guy, you definitely know. My wife works in the medical field and she hates Scarlie. And she's like, and she watched the show for the first time ever to see that clip.

And yeah, it's like, it's mayhem. I ran into some people, how you doing it today? And I'm like, I'm all right. My industry blew up a little bit over the last 72 hours.

I got totally rugged in terms of what I thought was true and what was actually true. Look, it's embarrassing. It is. It's insane. Like, we live in absolutely la la land of total insanity where the stakes are billions of dollars that very few people can comprehend, even the people within the industry, apparently. Even the people that are supposed to be the leaders are freaking, morons, like taking extraordinary risks, the same risks that Gainesi takes, you know?

Gainesi's smarter than them. I would put Kobe in charge of crypto, like just capital C, crypto country. Kobe can be in charge. And he's just a degenerate gambler that's been doing it since 2013 and survived. It's like this survival bias, survivorship bias. So he's damn good at it. He's lived through all this out. And I'm like, put the guy in charge.

Like at least I don't think he's going to. rug everything and steal it off. The thing I find in saying, I don't know if you read the multi-coin investor letter, but they said they had access to the FTX Q2 balance sheet information as part of their ongoing due diligence. And they still lost like what 20% of assets, like assets under management on the exchange. So like can they not read a balance sheet or was the balance sheet wrong? Like was it like fictional?

I think not reading a balance sheet is definitely something to be considered. That's definitely a possibility. Yeah. Like maybe, right? But if you then write in your investor letter, we did the due diligence, we looked at like the Q2 books and then investors go look at the Q2 bucks and there's a gigantic hole. It's not going to look great.

But it makes me wonder, like, were they giving incorrect books or did the problem happen afterwards? Did the books actually look fine in Q2? the books, I don't know. And if you can have like in a proper insider information and do like inside of due diligence on FTX box and still get rugged by FTCX, I mean, that's kind of crazy. I'm sure. In our chat said, um, Kobe did, you see that Sam said he'd come on up only. Yeah, this was on November 7th.

He said he'd come on up only forever ago. Well, that was, that was before, uh, basically FTX went to zero. I think he was, he was interested in talking to CZ. because he was real, real interested in bending the knees before he actually, you know, was exposed naked. Yeah, he was saying he'd come on up only, you know, he's willing to talk, saying basically we're not even acknowledging these rumors anymore

back to business from the FTCX account. And it was all a sham in the background is trying to raise $6 billion to cover the hole. Yeah. Yeah. And then like he said to us, we got playing to a group chat with him after he said he'd come on.

And he was like, yeah, cool, we'll do it today. on November 7th, maybe on November 7th or 8th. And then we were like, great cool, we'll do it this time. I'll like wake up on time. And then we like get to it and it's like, oh, we're actually going to have to push it back. And then was like the radio silence. Right. It's like right down to the line they were just like lying about it.

I'm like, oh yeah, we're just, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. I'll go do a podcast and say how everything's fine. Well, that's on theme with 2022. Like everyone is like that. up until the moment where everyone realizes that you all have to like show confidence until the very last moment i mean but to your to your point kobe like so um i i just looked at the day um a few hours ago because i couldn't believe it but it was only 11 days ago that vorhees and

sbf had this debate and spf was lecturing the crypto industry on regulation yeah well He did a speech in Congress or in, I don't know, where you go sit in the wooden bit. He purged. And there's all the people that are working in the government. They're in like a circle and you'll sit there. That bit. He did that. And he did a speech about how like the financial crisis couldn't have happened because they were like borrowing and like, you know, reborrowing and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Whereas everything on FDX is like that couldn't happen on FDX. And that was last year literally in Congress. like you just went and sat there and either a lied to congress about all the shit or all the problems happened afterwards um and maybe maybe it's just like me being naive again and been like why would you go sit in congress and like intentionally tell lies to like your government um if you just knew they were false it must have happened later on but on. We saw the same thing with, oh, I just uploaded, that sound just went straight to the stream. We just saw the same thing with Three O's Capital, where they were like super confident and trying

to, trying to talk about how like, you know, a few more liquidations than up only. And then that was them, right? And so it's just an insane amount of projection that they have to produce, that they have to give, because they have to give confidence, right? We saw this with, with Alameda, the CEO, saying like, oh, yeah, we'll buy all the FTT tokens at $22. You have to produce confidence. And so it's just like an insane amount of projection that's like required because that's like one of the last bits of ammo that they have left to shoot. Yeah.

I'm, I'm reading this, this multi-coin, this multi-coin letter. So how down bad is multi-coin right now? they so they had it was like what 10% of assets under management were affected were on ftx yeah but then you got to think about this alone a stake the ftx stake their sole coins like the general thesis was like sam coins right i saw the i saw the actual letter but then the block post is basically the exact same thing as the letter like the the one on the block is accurate um so it should say what the added stuff is but in terms of percentage of everything. I wouldn't call them wrecked, but like their stake in Solana. I mean, they haven't sold

enough of it for that to not be wrecked. It's down tremendously. Is it crazy to you guys? Like, you know, all of the crypto gods of 2021. I mean, I think of like the main ones, like it was, it was Suu, Kyle Davies, was three hours capital, right? And then it was like, uh, Doe Kwan, right? And like, uh, definitely Kyle Simani, multi-coin, like, fund of the year. Danny Sesta. Danny Sesta. God. That was earlier this year that he fell.

But yeah, he was a god in 2021. But even people like Andre Cronier, right? I mean, he's still kind of active and phantom all of these things. I heard of sponsor up only now, too. Really? Take it. And then the last one kind of standing was SBF. And I mean, where are they now?

like are there any gods from 2021 still standing Justin's son no he was a god before God he was a god he was a god he's one of the old gods old gods yeah the new gods are dead new gods are dead

when did bybitt start 2019 bybed just kind of like casually chilling running a fucking exchange with no KYC just like staying out of the news cycles I don't even know what like what is that I don't even know what that is. It's just like FTX, except it's

like yellow instead of blue. And it's just no not like registered anywhere, no identity text, no MLKYC, no I think it was like, I think you could do like 200 grand, 200 grand a day

if you don't have KYC or something. I don't know, I didn't use it because it seemed like kind of dodgy and then they did a bunch of like token launches with like, you know, like the moon carl. They helped him launch a token called Caster, which like launched and was like,

all time high was on day one and it's just a straight line downwards ever since, like it's never made. It's just like actually just like a graph of a straight line downwards. The chat brought up. You know what, like trying to like figure out what the worst thing in exchange has done. If that's the worst shit they've done, maybe they're right maybe they're one of the better ones i i i do wonder if um like where do you go now

right like ftx at least had the best user experience in my opinion from like the um website and app point of view not from the like you don't have any real money there point of view that user experience is very bad um yeah yeah that's that's a problem finance i find really confusing um coinbase um is like really slow and um like i appreciate coinbase at this point like at this point for some reason i feel like some sort of like patriotism about coinbase well also they have been trying to do cool stuff recently in the last like i guess year and like more so i think they lost their way a little bit 2020

it kept raising their fees on the platform where everyone else was lowering them and like they were not feeding the product that was good for traders, which was Coinbase Pro. They just were doing things that weren't connected to the community. My critique on Coinbase is they hired a ton of Normies to run a crypto business because they had to, because they had to scale so goddamn fast. And there weren't enough crypto natives to hire. And they needed to hire faster than they could find crypto natives.

So they hired a bunch of normies. And like you can't make Normies care about crypto. So you can't make normies care about their job. I get that piece. But how come? how come FTX move so quickly on things? Yeah, that's going. I was attracted.

Oh, because they were spending all customer deposits. They had a bigger budget. Yeah. I was attracted to platforms. And that's why I liked Blockfolio when they reached out and wanted to figure out a way to work with them. We got rogged on that. Like, Blockfolio became FTX app, became FTC. So we really didn't opt in to FTX.

It just became impossible to say, what is the FTX app even? but nevertheless. Yeah, the hilarious thing is we're actually sponsored by FTXUS. That's our real contract. Our real contract is Blockfolio, Inc. Right. That's right. I believe so. It's owned by FTCS.

Apparently. I don't know. I'll ask Brett. Who knows? Up only did not rug at anyone. FTCS is completely solvent. But, right? Cesar Blue? I think so.

And if any future bank that sponsors, Rob Spankless, we're also not responsible. I guess my point though was... I know, for real. Ed, come back. So the thing that I liked about it was I could tell a normal person in my life, like how do you DCA in the crypto, right? And recommend this way that's not got crazy fees

when you're trying to do it. That gives you a reasonable way to swap in and out of majors. It doesn't have every shit coin available right away is not 100x leverage I asked Sam and CZ the time we did one versus

I mean what a stream I had technical issues naturally but like just in the concept of that and like my biggest question for them is why is your default leverage 20X is bullshit like that is wrong

I think it was 100X then I think well default was 20x and both of them were like it shouldn't be and yet There it was. And I don't want to tell a regular person to go to this platform where that's the default. That's on by default.

You're at this tremendous risk. And I liked the simplicity of connect your bank to an app, get it easily, have a Robin Hood-like experience, if you will, where the money goes in. You do normal things. And Robin Hood, not that they do it well. Like they can buy weekly options without being accredited. But it's just insane. Like make this stuff simpler for just. just onboarding people to products that aren't going to make you destitute from your bad gambling habits.

Yeah, I think that's where I think Coinbase lost their way a bit around their IPO, was that they seemed to start making decisions that were based on the share price, rather than decisions based on, like, the previous Coinbase ethos. And I think maybe they've gone back to it a bit now. they've launched some tokens for the first time. They've launched like Coinbase East, which is like a wrapped-staked East, like ERC20,

which is I think the first token they've ever launched. And they did like Defi front ends all within Coinbase, right? So you can interact with any defy app with. That's some real innovation, the MPC wallet, multi-party computation. That's some really cool shit that I think a lot of people don't appreciate.

Yeah. But for a little while in the middle of, love last year or maybe even this year they were just like releasing like bottom of the barrel shit coins that you wouldn't even find on buy nuts right like really really really like liquid terrible here's a third thing that coin base ventures backed uh that doesn't exist to anywhere else but here it is a liquid market on coin this here's a token you've never heard of before yeah well i mean it's hard because like um we need a fiat on ramp like we need a crypto exchange of crypto bank in order to actually like start doing this.

I think I think like one thing that's obviously I don't know. We've learned this a number of times this year, but it's just not leaving your funds on an exchange. Yeah. Right. To actually go bankless. Yeah. To actually.

And that's look, that's a thing that. I mean, I know we learned like Mount Gawks a long time ago, but it's just like 2022 has just been, that's been hammered into this generation's head. Like all of the things that have happened, we know not to leave our funds on an exchange, right? We have to avoid that. But that's the other thing is I do think that, you know,

crypto hasn't done a good enough job making these your experience easy. So I still can't tell a norm, back to your comment of like ledger anormi getting into crypto, you can't be like freaking like, and here's a wallet and here's, you know, buy this hardware wallet, you know, 24 words. And if you remember them, if you forget them, you're dead. You lose all of your money. Like, the user experience just hasn't really caught up.

It's kind of worse. It has a guy. For me, it's gotten worse. For me, it's gotten worse. For like Metamask and Ledger. Metamask Chrome, Leger combo has been rugged me for like a year in a row now. You know who? You know the wallet that impresses me continuously.

Small, scrappy. Maybe good, maybe not. but from a user experience perspective is Rainbow Wallet. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking with Mike Mordermis next week. Yeah, you need, like, look, you need to be able to, and it may not be everybody's preferred thing,

but you back up your wallet to like an ICloud type service or something, and you do the face thing for your authentication, and like you're rocking and you're rolling. Maybe that's your hot wallet. Maybe you have another way that's more secure, whatever, whatever. But you need it as easy as some of your, mobile apps, but you have the self-custody component still involved. And I just think they make things easy.

It gets hard at times, and then you're like having to import your rainbow wallet to Metamask so that you can do a transaction with the same knots, cancel the transaction, blah, blah, blah, but it's, we need more apps. They're trying that, right, that are really trying to be consumer level. The deep irony is if you stored your coins on FtX, you lost them, not your keys, not your coins. If you stored them in a hot wallet, you got your board apes stolen by someone sending you a link on Discord.

If you bought a hardware wallet, they leaked your address to the entire internet so now people can come steal your hardware wallet and beat you up. Like, there was no good paths. The best path is to just stick everything on Binance and go, yeah, whatever. They're the biggest exchange.

If they go down, it's all dead anyway. So, there really wasn't like a good thing. And like, didn't both hardware wallets have data breaches or something went wrong with both? I don't know. This is where the Horcrooks method becomes mandatory. What's the Horcrooks? You just spray and pray your assets across a number of different. Oh, like centralized.

Oh, yeah. Put it in Coinbase, put it on your ledger. Seven soul, seven places. Did you not read the books? Come on, man. You're like, isn't it nine? You put a lightning bolt on your head And you're like every kid at the movie theater

For Harry Potter Ryan, were you ever Harry Potter for Halloween? I was never Harry Potter for Halloween You'd make, yeah I'm sad, yeah Another Glasses I'm sad that Ledger made a joke Before I realized it, yeah

Ledger, you've become Bit Boy. I'm sorry, I'm bullying Glass is broke Nice glasses Harry Potter. Oh, man. He did apologize for that. Thanks. Thanks,

well, we kind of made him. That was the whole purpose of that. If I come to bankless and say sorry. Maybe it's Cracken. Maybe Cracken's like the last, the last hope. Like,

they always just seem to be in the background, chilling, trying to do the right thing. They have like the only massive exchange with proof of. reserves, like Merkel Tree, cryptographic proof of reserves. They seem like generally very mission aligned.

I know J. Powell just left as he remains like an advisor or something, but you know, they seem decent. I mean, it's just like, Cracken, Gemini, Binance, Coinbase. Okay, coin.

Oh, I don't even know. It gets, it gets off of my... Too far off the Donnell this of the Long Tail. Are we worried about the Winkle v. In their travel traveling band? I haven't seen their band playing in a while. But they...

Well, you've seen it once, though. On Instagram. Yeah, I didn't actually see it. Yeah, which is, they're in New York. It's why I grew the beard. It's me. Are you bankless? Look you guys.

Mosh pitting. Listen, if they're going to like play... gigs for like college kids, at least they're not in DC lying to Congress. Yeah. Creating an even larger enemy. The thing is, right, if you had like a decent actor go to D.C. And try and mediate things, I'm sure that is a better strategy than like fucking nothing, right? No one in the industry talks to them and we all just try and hide.

surely a good actor who is being sensible and fighting for the right type of stuff that the industry needs is a good thing but the worst possible outcome is that the person doing it taking photos with them like taking photos with this head of the CFTC and like members of Congress and all this shit then turns out to be running a Ponzi scheme exchange now they all go this guy made me look stupid at my job. It's the worst. We must crush him in return. We can't look like we accepted money from him. We can't look like we can corrupt.

We now need to like retaliate severely. Yep. Surely that's significantly worse than just doing nothing. I mean, guys, he gave, he donated $70 million to political campaigns. Of customer deposits. Yeah, of customer deposits. It may be more than that. You know, Ryan, Ryan, who apparently was left in the dark and all this,

Ryan's Salam or how you pronounce it. Selkis, are you talking about? No, no. No, number two at FTCS. He like, just think of Sam. Think of the absolute opposite. And that's Ryan. He was, he was,

wait, wait, what is the opposite of a Sam? Yeah. So, uh, I can't, I don't have a mental. He eats, he eats red meat. I want some getting, I want saw I'm getting an IV as a hangover cure. And, in Miami, like a, like a frat boy type of guy.

Okay. All right. apparently he was left in the dark in all this but he was profiled as well as Sam because his spouse is running ran for Congress I don't know if she won or not but he donated like 25 million dollars to Republican causes he was like a top five Republican donor while Sam was a number two or whatever Democratic donor they're both from FTX they both like whether Ryan I don't it doesn't appear that Ryan is care it really seems like a very small number of people. at FTX were aware of this. Like, I've had employees reach out to me. Like, I'm in the dark. They're helping me with support tickets for people trying to get money off FTXUS. It's crazy.

But Ryan was also a large contributor to Republican causes. They were some of the biggest players in this world of politicians giving money on both sides. It's not good. All right. Let me ask you guys like a crazy like Joe Rogan type of question here. It's like, what are the chances that? Can you do Joe Rogan voice? I can't do Joe Rogan voice

David also like Pull your shoulders up I can't do that What are the chances That this like SBF was a plant I mean all of this to your point Kobe seemed like so scripted All right like

This whole industry is scripted We're all in a simulation Where did he come from? I mean he rises from nowhere 2018, 2019 builds He did come from nowhere The fastest growing exchange in the world. How? How did he go from zero to what, like $22 billion? How did that happen? How did he infiltrate DC and become like the spokesperson for crypto and DFI?

Right. And now, after he's earned the trust of all the politicians, the whole thing turns out to be smoke and mirrors. Right? Like industry wrecked. I don't know what happens in the wake of this. Is there like any chance in your in your mind? that there's something the only thing that adds credibility to it is his parents are like deeply right deep state like legal lawyers he turbo wrote them

his parents yeah and like his mom like created like some like get out to vote coalition or some shit which means his mom's Hillary Clinton and you know like I I think it's like probably not true but I thought that

God. It was probably not true that they were insolvent. What is reality anymore? The chat is convinced he's CIA, so. I think it's much more likely that he had a really fast-growing exchange. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Maybe it says. He had an exchange.

It was really fast-growing, totally by, like, a mix of, like, luck and aggression. Like, you know, if you're willing to trade customer deposits, maybe you're willing to be a bit more aggressive on stuff that other people aren't, and like that sort of insanity or psychopathy translates into like business success. At some point he fucked up and had this hole in the balance sheet,

but like you can't tell your parents, can you? They'll be so disappointed but they're fucked up really badly. So he's like political elite parents are going like, you should go to Congress and you should talk, you should donate to these guys, you should donate to these guys. Yeah, they were telling him never getting crypto in the first place. Yeah, like, yes, mom, yes, dad, I'll definitely do that.

And like in the back of his mind, it's like, fuck, guy like, all he wants to do is make his parents proud. He just can't tell them that he got, and that's why it snowballed out of control, because he was, he has mommy issues. How old do you think SBF is? It's possible. How old? He's under 30, right?

29. He must be about 30. He's exactly 30 years old. He's born in March, 1992. How old is Vitalik? 28. Did you see the tweet of Vitalik posted? He's so sad.

he replied to someone like SBF's net worth plummeting to like $1 billion yeah and Vatalik replied and just said that is much more than that is still much more than I have and that was the only words of the tweet and I was like his net worth plummet's 95% to a billion dollars one billion dollars

great this is SBF I don't really know what effective altruism means but I feel like Vatelic embodies that much more yeah but I can tell you effective altruism means I read the book. I read the book when I was in university or maybe after university in my early 20s or something. And parts of it are like extremely enticing and I could understand the attraction to the book, right? It tells you stories about certain charity initiatives throughout history that were basically completely ineffective and it gives us the example of something called the water wheel, which was apparently in the book.

Bush administration era, this huge popular initiative to like help, like, poor countries in parts of Africa have access to clean water. And they went and they removed loads of these hand pumps, these water hand pumps, and they put these like, like these big wheels that you push around in. But it turned out if you pushed the wheel constantly for 24 hours, you got about 18 hours worth of water because this wheel was like completely ineffective and like they hated using this wheel. It was like demoralizing and degrading. It was like a like a playground item to push around. But all of the like I think it was the first lady was like all in on this initiative

going and like taking photos with these water wheels saying look we're saving we're saving the poor countries. Like a merry-go-round. Yes, someone in chat was said. We're saving the poor countries. But in practice they were just burning. money, making things worse and not helping. And that was an example of, like, ineffective altruism where people get excited by how, by the cause of, like, I'm going to look so great

solving this problem that, like, is emotional. And another example is, like, plastic in the ocean, where it's everyone's favorite topic. So there's so much money being poured into it that it becomes, like, used ineffectively. And the most effective, like, reduction of suffering was, was really unsexy stuff like deworming of children in like parts of the world where like if you dewormed kids like there was a 50% increase in people passing at passing school and then that policy paid for itself within three years because the tax dollars from the people that would go into the workforce from this initiative would then pay itself off and there's this buck that like kind of says so you should focus on like impact with

doing good, you shouldn't focus on what feels good, you should focus on actual reduction of suffering. But the book, the book gets a little bit strange in that Will Askell, the guy who writes it, uses this like logic to go into the argument that actually, therefore, the best way you can reduce suffering is to go work at Goldman Sachs, steal everyone's money, and use that money in the most effective ways for reducing human suffering because if you go work at charity, you're doing a small amount. Whereas if you steal or if you acquire multi-billions

and then use them really effectively, you're actually reducing human suffering by a lot more with your life, with your time. Because you're good at making money in Wall Street. Exactly. You make money and then you use that really effectively. Book of the chapter on not blowing up in the process.

And yeah, and like that is exactly what, That's the playbook. SBF read this book and ignored all the bits about human suffering and was like, okay, got to make $30 billion to reduce human suffering

by stealing everyone's money. Great, let's go. But genuinely, it's quite a good buck. I always thought the whole effect of altruism was like guillotine insurance. It's like, oh yeah,

you just liquidated all of the industry, but you, have this banner of effective altruism. You're talking about, you're talking about for SBF specifically. Yeah, yeah. You're not talking about like, I like, not generally speaking. Effective altruism like conceptually. I'm, I'm like a big fan.

I mean, that makes sense. Well, it got SBF on the same Harris podcast. Well, be worming. Like, yeah. Well, yeah. Probably, you know, I refuse. I refuse to accept that process doesn't matter. Right.

Like, I think, like how you make the money, do you mean? Yes. I think process matters. If you say, like, there's a, like, biblical reference. If you give someone a dollar and what do they do with it, you give someone $100 or $1,000, what do they do with it? Shekels or something. But you know what I'm saying?

Like, what you do with the dollar is going to reflect what you're going to do with a thousand of them or a million of them. And if you say, like, I will do good work, just give me lots and lots of money in whatever way is possible. And then I'll do good work. with it. You need to do good along the way. You need to show that you can be responsible with the resources that you've been entrusted with along the way to then be entrusted with the resources when they're larger. I refuse to believe that just get it all while it's hot in whatever way

possible and then do good later. You just won't. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I like that a lot. I do agree, I do agree that it is like he sort of, I think he read this book called Doing God Better and then sort of used it as a shield as like, I can't be evil because look at what I'm doing on the other side and like took the most perverted just like the most perverted way you can read the book and go, oh, okay, that makes me a good person. That justifies the stuff I'm doing because that book says it's the like best way to reduce human suffering. whatever. I reckon the dude that wrote that book's in complete shambles. He's like his life life's work. It's like been made a mockery of. It's like what the, I mean,

specific because of SBF? He's his personal advisor for a bit. Oh, I did not know that. The guy that wrote the book. Wow. You know the dude that was texting Elon on his behalf was the dude who wrote the book. So like SBF was a poster child for the effective altruism movement. But every article was about that it's like the whole PR strategy was correct to volgesties yeah yeah and I mean anything that was like actually decent in that book is just like right now by association I think David was uh you were

always skeptical and I see yeah I was like all right like I used to be like like he hasn't said he'd do it right now he's still in kind of the phase cobi you were talking about earlier where he's like like at Goldman Sachs making all the money right and I'm like David you can't you can't call him out on not

giving it away yet because it's always been a strategy to make the most money possible and then to give it away later. Right. It's super convenient, like, process to go back to, to, to Leder's point. It's like, yeah, you need to do good with $1, then do good with $10, and then do good with $100. You get to pre-mine all the glory.

Right. Yeah. So when we were talking about this on the weekly roll-up, I was like, yeah, I also plan to commit to not give away 99.9% of my wealth. Like, I will also do that. I mean, at the time, like, 10 seconds before I die, here it sounds for it. Jack, Jack from Twitter kind of did this. Like, he didn't laugh about it in advance.

He actually did it. He actually, he actually did that. Well, you don't remember. It was a couple of years ago. He transferred like half of his wealth into an entity that would, like, grants away. And he picked the causes. And there's like a API that you can, or an RSS feed or something you can pull. And if you go look at it, just every few days, he's like, we gave two million dollars here.

We gave two million dollars here. And they're all, they all look great. This is the Cardano. He doesn't have a lot about all the time. We put it on posters around. This is the Cardano problem, right? Like, Jack just did it.

It was news for a day and then it was done. The Cardano thing is like, yeah, we're going to have smart contracts. We're going to have smart contracts. We're going to have smart contracts. And then it's like so disappointing if and when they ever occur.

Right. But you talked about it all that time. You implanted it in the minds. The person that just does it. It's forgotten. Like you said that, I had to be reminded that Jack was just actually alter... You're right. It's kind of the way it should be. Sequence is the all-in-one developer platform you need to build Web3 games and applications.

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By the way, speaking of Charles, you know, he popped up in my timeline earlier today. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, he said this, his comments on things, just on some twid, some thread criticizing SBF. And somebody tweets out and he says, at least you found the real villain before you can give Charles Hopkins in credit for being an actual good billionaire, calling Charles an actual good billionaire and Charles jumps in. It's really amazing the level of bile and criticism that I've gotten throughout the years. Been almost 10 years, waiting on the great Charles Hoskinson criminal scandal. But please, tell me all about Laura's new book.

You know, for Charles, it's always about Charles. It's always about Charles. I don't know when I expected a Charles criminal scandal, did they? No, because that would mean that he would actually do something. Well, I mean, he does things, David. They had a great booth. Apparently is an official statement from Huobi that they will help TRX holders on FTX with one-to-one. Can anyone find this?

One-to-one? One-to-one. So that means if you migrate. For TRX holders, apparently, from this. Oh, thank God the TRX holders get bailed out. Fantastic. Wait, wait, TRX holders? Tron holders?

If you have TRX on SBF, oh, I'm sorry, FDX. SBF, FDX, what's a different? abbreviation. RSA. I can't see any official statement about it, but is that the thing? Is that the thing that Justin's son was

excited about? Oh my God. Have you sent the picture of Justin's face Photoshop front of Superman saving a baby that was posted by the Hawobi Exchange in response to Justin.

Justin created it. Justin's own exchange He was like, cut my face on. And the baby, it's not a baby, it's like a toddler or something, but the toddler looks really uncomfortable.

You gotta admit, in terms of interviews we've done, we've never given somebody so much direct heat and they just roll with it. And he's like, Justin's son. Yeah.

And then you guys have talked to Justin's son? Yeah, he was amazing. Yeah, he was incredible. the show. Kobe was like, he was confronting him about sleeping with someone's wife or something like that. Justin's like, how did you know about this?

No, there was this saga in, it was the May 2021 crash, where there was this rumor that they were trying to liquidate, someone was trying to liquidate Justin's son, and chain because he'd slept with their wife. So it was like some crypto whales wife and slept with Justin Sondon. And there was this rumor.

It was like obviously just like a meme rumor that someone come up with. with. But he came on and we like asked him about it quite early on in the show and he was just like laughing and was like, yeah, it's true. I can't tell you. Wired had written, Wired had written this like 10,000 word article. Some journalists spent two months on this and just his son quote tweets it and it's like, lull. What is this guy? Like he just, it's the full embrace. It's the full of the stupidity of our space and he just makes billions. Guys, I remember...

Prince and Ethereum Clon makes billions. Keeps his billions. In 2018, I thought like Justin's son was like the peak scammer. Like, the worst scammer this industry. And now I'm looking at 2020... The best scammer of this industry.

Yeah, and I'm like, this guy, I mean, he seems like like an angel. No one truly hates him. And I think... Isn't that just because it was like... Like, if like the time... the time since your transgression is long enough,

people don't care, right? Like, CZ was the biggest villain in crypto for such a long time in, like, the depth of my day. It's the victimless crime. Totally. Yeah. Well, CZ and then Justin's son

were working together, like, kind of in the back alley to do token promotion stuff on Bynance, right? Yeah. That's what I've heard. Well, Justin's, like, the Tron white paper was, like, parts of it was just copy pasted

of the Ethereum white paper. The IPFS side, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, like, did an ICO raise billion dollars, however many, however much. And then just chilled. But because, like, he's now just chilling and having a nice time, people just go, oh, that was ages ago. He doesn't need to scammers anymore.

And he's kind of entertaining. He's like, we've also completely redefined to a much worse degree what a scammer is. Like, the scammers have gotten worse. They've gotten worse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, isn't Justin's son, like, he? He's like a huge, like whale, right?

I mean, he's like a huge defile. Dude, I still subscribe to his wallet. I'm going to find it right now. All right. Doesn't he, like, rumor is. Okay, wait, sorry, Ryan. How old do you think Justin Sunnis? I'm looking at the Superman photo.

He's looking pretty good, pretty young. I'm going to say, I'm also going to say 30. I love you two? No, is he? Is he 30? Yeah, 32. 32. He's the oldest one I mentioned so far.

also right like he yeah he did like uh he did an ico for some chain which is just an ethereum clone and it's not super um like not remarkably interesting to me personally it's a copy pasted white like the white paper was copy pasted the chain was copy pasted the whole thing yeah but then like you know they moved to proof of stake and they did a bunch of stuff and then their fees are always insanely low he kept working on it this whole time and now it's like the biggest chain for like tether or something it's like the biggest chain for like usd payments so they like how actually carved out a niche and create a bunch of values. So then it's like, well, you know, if you build something of value, even if the beginnings

of it were not incredibly honorable, is that actually a scam? Yeah, it kind of grew into legitimacy. He, uh, his defy, his main defy wallet, it only has like $250 million in it now, but it had like a billion plus $2 billion, $3,000. Doesn't he have more Ethan Vitalik? Yes, he does. Oh, yeah, he's he's unbelievably well. More Ethan Vitalik.

Multi-billionaire. Well, because Vitalik only gives away money. He doesn't earn anymore. Justin's a multi-billionaire on chain. Except the pre-mine scan. Well, Justin's also quite good at trading. I don't know if you followed his like, like, macro-directional stuff, but he generally buys the bottom and sells close to the top.

Like he sold all of his Ethereum at like for, four, for around this time last year. Yeah, that'd be nice. I don't know. When we follow his wallets, David. And when we talked... This bear market is the first time I've actually bought bottoms. Well, you don't know this is a bottom.

Yeah. Yeah. I bought it 887. 897. I feel pretty damn good about that. It's not bad. So, yeah, Justin, Justin was, came on the show and he was talking about his D5 movements and his litigation.

He was like, oh, I was actually asleep when that was going on. It was like, well, you had a thousand dollar margin at risk. he was like farming crap left and rice like yeah that's when i hired somebody to actually make sure that i'm like managing stuff because before that he was just managing billions on like leverage defy yield farms yolo and the crap out of the whole thing so fun fact uh tron is now worth more than salana that makes me sad really that makes me sad good deal for salana i mean what's the price of salina I haven't looked for price. I have,

I am now, uh, chill with Solana where previously I was, plus not. No, Tron's number 16, Solan's number 13. FTV or not? I'm on, uh,

Queen Gecko. Sorry guys, I'm a boomer Quincee. Price of Salana is gone from, holy crap, in three and a half, four and a half hours. Salon is gone.

Uh, low of 11, 46 to 15, 12, 11. 11. Where are you looking? I don't know. I don't know. Let me see. It's kind of crazy that Tron and BNB are also basically the same things.

I have to change all my trading views stuff. They're all FTX. It's literally fake internet money over there. Screw you, Sam. Like, honestly, you got to make me change my trading views. Industry has to reconfigure itself. Trading view, come on, make the indexes. We need more indexes.

Salon are going to yet hit harder. I think some unlocks coming. Yeah. on the pike do. I don't know. Somebody came in and did, like, to change some delegator thing today. Was it,

okay, so when three hours capital got liquidated, that was the bottom. Like, it was the bottom within, like, 24 to 48 hours of the big news, like spreading throughout crypto Twitter

and everyone, uh, being worried about contagion. Oh, contagion's coming. Contagion's coming. Turns out, no,

the bottom was right then and there. So, like, that's, if we're going to repeat that, like, I'm not a trader, but like, gut take is that the bottom of the prices

is going to be happening the day of the worst news, which is FTX being insolvent. That's my quick take. Don't tell me you're not a trader. I got to go to our direct messages. Trustless. Is he giving you trading?

I was good trading on the way up. It wasn't trading on Tuesday. It's one of my most severe regrets because at the time I actually had a bunch of money on Binance U.S. where Maddoch existed. And my DM, February 15th, 2021. I do not want to time stamp the price. All caps. Maddick. And I was like, screw you.

It was at 20 cents at the moment, or I think even less. 11. It was 11 cents. I like stopped out at 10 cents or something. I was like, all right, David, let's roll, baby. Stop out of 10 cents goes $2. I was mad. I was really mad at you. Sorry, buddy. Yeah. Anyway, I forget what I was trying to bring up there. back pain. David, you are a traderman.

You called the, you called a Salana bottom, I think, on our Tuesday live stream. You're talking about that was. God, I did?

That doesn't sound like me. Yeah, I just, I re-listen to that part of that episode. Good for me. The problem was the bottom. No.

The problem with Solana is that still have all these like quiddity issues, people that can always fall back on what they have vesting in Solana to just get rid of it. And you have the $3, I'll buy all you want, mean, which is strong, right? It's very strong. Those things, they've got to be magnets, right?

Totally. And I think Solana is very well positioned to be the Etha of Last Cycle because ETH of Last Cycle had all this ICO cell pressure. like at a mountain of ICO cell pressure, never mind consensus and Joe Lubin. And that's Solana of this cycle where they have all of the insane investor lockups and just the dumpage from FTX

and all the associated contagion. $3 is exactly 99% off the top. I know that's going to be juicy. In some ways, you've got to imagine that the Solana founders feel very bitters about this FTX stuff. because obviously it's horrible for the industry and

it's like bad for them reputationally because Solana was kind of like the Sam coin, the Sam coin that enabled all other Sam coins in a way. It was the like Sam was sort of the poster boy for Solana. Yeah, the OG CM coin. Well at the same time the removal of that

narrative can only be good for Solana. in the future, right? Right. And it started a lot back. If you're in three years and like you still have FTCX looming over you as Sam looming over you as the like the biggest thing about your chain. Yeah. This just like removes it as a problem for them.

And sure, maybe there's a lot of FDX own salana that needs to get sold and maybe there's you know, all that stuff. And there's maybe ongoing reputational damage. But at least it's like out of the way. it's behind you and you can move on and like Solana can do its own thing and like try and build its own sort of um future without being like cross-parnated with FTX and SPF stuff one of the biggest bits of FUD of Seoul is the concentrated ownership by all the VCs so if we can get it out of their hands it's the same thing as like ether back with all the ICA concentrated

ICO ownership. What has more multiples upside with ETH-like development moat than Solana, especially if you get it at three bucks, right? Three to 30 is a 10x. That's a thousand to $10,000, ETH where we're going to be like our eyeballs are going to be bleeding all four of us if ETH goes to 10,000. We're just going to be unbelievably euphoric. So, okay, so.

So that's Salana 3 to 3 to 30 is the same thing. So when you're looking at that relative pair, if you get $3, you just, you just buckle in and you buy Salana at $3, right? I don't, I don't. So when Ether capitulated down to $80, that was an $8 billion market cap for Ethereum. Salana right now is at a $5.5 billion market cap. It touched five earlier today. so we're already like if you want to compare these things uh one cycle apart like we're already salon is almost like half of what ether was last cycle i'm not saying this

a lot of potential yeah eth's highs of last cycle were much higher than salana's highs of this cycle right like if east last cycle went crazy because of the iCO stuff but it was like very deeply used for something and it was used for something for the first time and like maybe that thing was an illegal fundraising platform but it was like there's product market fit for smart contract chains here to do something. Whereas, like, the proving point for Solana is like, what, the price went up a lot. And, like, I mean, personally, like, for me, I've never been bullish on Solana. Like, probably, you know, to my, like, you know, would have been nice to buy at three.

But there is a price at which I am bullish on Salana. What price? For me, it's not this. For me, it's closer to three. It's not 15. It's closer to three. Like, so right now, Solana, too, another way to look at it is it's off 94% from all-time high, which is basically what Eith traced last, yeah, last cycle, right?

Down 94%. I still think it's got a ways to draw up before this is fully washed out. There's a big yellow box on my chart from three to four, which was the high of September 2020. Yeah. It's basically the whole gap up from Samcoin fame. Yeah. I mean, that really propelled it.

That was rocket fuel. And so we got to go back. We got to go back. We got to go back before we can get forward. Yeah, I think it's the coin of last resort for too many people still. I think that's fair. I do agree, though, David, like, you know, it does. does have an ecosystem of builders, right?

There is a real community there. That's network effects. Network effects is the most powerful thing in crypto. Bitcoin's actually draining network effects right now, and Eith and Solana are building them. Salana is building them faster than Eith. Heath is the dominant, has the dominant network effects in the ecosystem.

Dude, Bitcoin, Bitcoin community is divided once again. I don't know if you want to open up back. Bitcoin's got big problems, man. Bitcoin has got big problems. that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Man, we've all got big problems. Okay, well, actually, you know, being in Ethereum D-Fi for all of 2022 has felt like the world is just ripping apart around me. And me and all my little ETH friends are on this tiny little, like, Oasis, like, watching an Ethereum D-Fi all-O-A-WASIS. And Oasis, it went straight downwards for the previous, like, two and a half years. Well, yeah, but everything. else broke, Kobe.

Like everything else. You're talking about a defy token price, which is dead. No, no, no, no. I'm talking about just like the ether that I have in the apps that I have it in. It's like, yeah, the price is going down, but they're still functioning as designed. Meanwhile, Solana is halting. Meanwhile, FTX is insolvent. Meanwhile, three errors capital, like, nuked everything.

And so, like, yeah, like, we're down bad in correlation with the market. But, like, I still have my ether. if you get David drunk enough You're the only person I know this has ether I've been saying ether since 8-1 Yeah but you are right I'm one of the few people that says that yeah I say too

It surprises me that ether's down relative to BTC this week Like it doesn't feel that way Because just the relative price of Bitcoin's been dancing In the 1516Ks And eth is over $1,000 it just feels stronger But it's actually down on the week I feel like if we were back in last cycle the fact that ETH BTC is performing so well is very indicative of Ethereum strength.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Heath is down 76% all-time high. Bitcoin is down 77%. That is insane. I mean, it makes sense now because I believe in Ethereum's fundamentals, but like if you compare this to last cycle, that is unheard of. Kobe's in his mind drafting tweets from his Bitcoin Maxi alt account. Are you still a believer, Kobe?

I've been playing Maxi-All account for a while. I've got 100,000 followers now. It's my favorite thing to write on. I'm beloved in my community. Kobe, who was it that did the tweet of like Kobe wakes up and picks up his mask for the day and puts it on? Like, it's the truest tweet I've ever seen of you. You know, for a little while I had a lawyer account

where I was commenting on the Johnny Depp, and beheard defamation law. suit just making stuff up. Got quite a lot of followers on that one as well. I mean, Twitter's an art. I don't know, man. Like, I think, I think, like, this whole, like, whoa, is Solana the good bet for next cycle? It's, like, how's everything doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

There's just decisions you don't need to make now. Like, you can think about it now if you're bored. Like, if you want to spend your time thinking about that stuff and make a plan for however long in the future, like fair enough but I think just like re-evaluate it when the time is right like I think in the last two three years the optimal strategy was like find a thing that's going up the most and chase it like okay so Mike seems to go up quite a lot Solana seems to go up quite a lot and then it just kept it kept outperforming everything for the entire cycle and then it was over and then there was some stuff that didn't go up very much and it underperformed and it

underperformed the entire cycle. And like, you probably couldn't have guessed what they were three years prior to that. So just like wait and see so much stuff can change between now and then. And, you know, maybe we'll all be trading Aptos and Suey and stuff. I heard they have a lot, had a significant percentage of money on FDX. I think they both discredited that rumor, both their labs. There's a good rumor though. You probably started that.

You can imagine does Kobe starting and ending rumors with its own alts? I make up a rumor that Caroline used to date Sam as a joke. He said that on the show. It spread like fucking wildfire. And then someone said it in a group chat and I was like, no, let's not try. I made it up. And then someone was by no, it actually is true. And I made up a rumor.

And then Ashley just turned out So actually be real Yeah That's amazing Jesus Cobbio just opens up Pandora's box And can't get the rumors back in How many

How many months of winter Did SBF set us back? All of 2023 months All of 20203 Well I mean months can be I mean More than 10 Yeah it could be more than 12

You could I think it's quite bad I think it's probably several years. Several years. You're talking 24 months? I'm asking specifically what SBF you think added to the crypto winter. Added?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In addition. He added several years? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the poster boy of... Trad, crypto. Yeah, like the DC crypto movie. Even if he wasn't like, you know, the person,

pushing for that, he'd sort of become this, like, he'll be the most recognizable crypto face to a lot of politicians, regulators, etc., I think. And he went and blatantly lied to their face, it seems, or told them, Yeah, like told them something and then like had the same problems later and made the same mistakes later. Like, or just lie to their face. Let's go with the lie to their face. As he did to everyone else only days ago. But if he lied to their face, they won't welcome whoever else with open arms.

They're not going to go, oh, these people have like, you know, good, like, you know, good faith. discussions with us, they're just going to say, their mindset for several years now, if it wasn't already, is going to be these people are just lying to us and trying to pull the wall over our eyes. And they're not going to care about the distinction between, like, a centralized exchange operating as a bank and, you know, a fully transparent, on-chain, self-custodied you know, protocol. That gets exploited. They're just not going to care about the difference.

They're just going to say, like, that's all the same thing to me. That's crypto. And that is very bad. And the, like, the guy that donated hundreds of millions to us was also doing, like, the worst possible thing. Plus, if you think about the amount of people who will have lost money there, the amount of people that will have narrowly avoided losing money there, the amount of builders that will have treasuries there. So like, you know, how many projects are secretly dead now

because they've lost everything and we don't know yet? How many industry participants will have had a relationship with Alameda and FTX that their business is now significantly wound down? The knock on effect of that, all these people lose their jobs because their businesses go, they go out of business. And the progress you need in, you know, innovation or like building or whatever gets significantly delayed because of, because of that. So trust is down, like actual progress in the industry is moved backwards. And not just from like Mount Gox being like, kind of like you use the exchange.

it feels like it's kind of broken and you know it's like this like overseas thing it's not like you know and then it's operating at a time of like silk road being the biggest like bitcoin app um so like it makes sense that that goes down it's the wild west sam was pretending not to be like the opposite of that he was like we're the people are getting our shit together trying to look i guess as coin-based looks um a little bit but like cozying up maybe more to traditional power structures. So I think it's like a, well, probably smaller industry-wide impact than Mount Gox, much worse timing and probably much worse knock-on effects.

If like an exchange dies really early, it's like, you know, no one knows how to do custody yet. People don't know what's going on. If it dies like after 10 years after Mount Gox went down, it's I think that trust is harder to repair it's bigger or smaller than a tether itself fell don't say that

oh much smaller don't you say that it's so far yeah and it depends how tether would fall like if it came out that tether had four billion unsecured to Alameda that they can't get back

and there's like you know a 5% I don't know how much of the market cap of tether is but let's say there's a 5% haircut on all tether assets or something, then I think that's not the end of the world. If it's like, you know, oh, tether's backed by nothing,

that would obviously be like catastrophically large. Several years. I think it's several years. I have a couple things to add, I guess. You know, if it's several years, guys, we're all going to need new sponsors. We'll sponsor up only if, the uploadly sponsors bank list.

How about that? Bro, we can print free money that way. That's circular economy, right, guys? I don't think that's how it works. I don't think a lot of this industry knows that, Ledger. A lot of people don't know that. What do you add? Yeah, a couple of things that I think are just

worth noting there is I think the VC market just went on major ice. probably um you know i run a i co run a startup and uh plug the everything uh it's flip that xyz flip flip flip xy z thank god we have runway right but like we don't have infinite runway nobody almost nobody has infinite runway every single company with anywhere from whatever runway they have three months 36 months I don't care what it is. They're thinking, how can we survive?

And this is the willingness of the VC market to go take risks at this point in that way is low. So you've got to figure a whole different dynamic. It's all the metrics that you used to think mattered don't matter. It's new metrics. It's new baselines. It's new demands. This is not the startup market. This is the money's market.

The money, the liquidity is at a premium. And that is going to impact projects big and small. I mean, the way you're describing this, this is order of magnet. And this kind of was hitting me today of how much larger this is than anything we've seen this year. This is bigger than here, capital in terms of legitimacy for the space.

Yeah. I think those froze the space for months. Yeah. I mean, this is bigger than Doquan's Elgo Stablecoin. In a ranking of criminals, Doquan actually probably comes of the bottom now. Like, all he did was build something that made no sense. I was extremely confident in it. Doquan was the happy idiot.

Right? Well, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, right? Maybe he was very aware it made no sense and was doing a lot for him in the background. Who knows? But like, like, it seems like SBS is by far the worst. And then three hours is probably next worst because it's somewhat similar to FTCs,

but without customer deposits. I mean, SBF's going to jail, right? I mean, this is the thing that's going to happen. I mean, I hope so as well,

but like, he's got political elite lawyer parents and donated a lot of money to politicians. I think one of the reasons why this is so much worse is that it's just the next one. Like the one that's after Terra Luna is going to be worse than Terra Luna. That was Three Hour's Capital. The one that's after three hours capital is going to be worse. And it always stacks because it's just like another shot to the heart.

Like E2, Brutus, like you two, Sam. And so like at this point, we were joking when we started the live stream today is like it feels like the final season of the game of Thrones of crypto blowups. But then my mind goes like, all right, what could be next? I don't see much more, but I don't think you know We can really know that until after the fact. Did you think FTX would blow up?

No. No. Like if KuConn had gone down, I would have been like, no, yeah, that doesn't make sense to me. But that's why, like, who's left after FTX? This has to be the final season. It has to be the final blow up. We had Tara Luna. We had 3AC.

We had Celsius. We had the good. Michael Saylor is not getting liquidated, right? Everyone keeps forgetting about them. Yeah, we had the good actors of like Block 5, right? Like the ones caught up, but significant. now we have FTX, we don't know what the hell it is. We have the people that are the collateral damage of FTCS.

But FTX, in my opinion, was the climactic finish of the blowups. Right. If Vitalik turns out to be a scammer, then I'm just rage-bting space. I'm going to, I'm going to grad school. I mean, the chat's yelling sailor. Like, Sailor? I don't think Sailor can get liquidated. It's a slow, it's a slow bleed finish.

Like, it's a multi-year, which could happen, right? Like, a crypto winner, he can't service the loans. I mean, but what about Tether? You were talking about Tether. Ledger, do you think that's... It's over. I mean, yeah. Tether's Mount Gox level.

I don't know. I think FTCS was Mount Knox level. FtX was Mount Cox level. Well, but okay, here's a tweet from... I mean, I wasn't hearing the Mount Cox days. I came a little bit after it, but Dan McArdle was... He now works at Masari. He started Massari.

He started Massari with Selkis. A comp. Mount Gox blow up. That was 6.5%. of market cap, total crypto market cap. FDX blow up, 0.8% market cap, less than a percent. Yeah, but like you're talking total crypto market cap, right?

Which the majority of is fake, because that includes like oxy and serum and the bags that Alameda have borrowed against. That's not real. Like, that's what I meant earlier when I said, like, it's much smaller in terms of scale than Mount Gox. Like the Dow hack was like 30,

of all Ethereum or something, right? Yeah. We don't have, we don't have shit on that scale anymore because funds are way more spread out. But the impact of this is going to be, I think, much bigger than like either the Dow Hack or Mount Gox or a bit for next hack or, right. There's a lot of intangibles. Like, that's market cap is one thing, but legitimacy is, legitimacy size is massive. Is there, is there any silver lining here?

Are you guys planning this? Why, why are you guys playing? Are you planning to stick around? Well, like, I've been doing this for 10 years, mate. It's like part of my identity. It's like third of my life. What else am I going to do? A third, just a third?

Why so low? Well, because I'm old as fuck. What's the other two thirds of your life, Kobe? Well, the first 10 years, I was a kid. Oh, sorry. I thought you meant like one. I thought you spent one third of your daily time doing crypto. I'm like, you do two thirds of your time, not crypto stuff?

I mean my entire life. Yeah. I don't know. I'm like it, it feels to me a little bit like, um, like my mental model of the crypto industry goes back quite a long way. Goes like moves backwards in time quite a long way.

Because I had like, I was always very paranoid and like skeptical of everything. And like every exchange is going to die. Every coin's going to go to zero. Um, like it's all fucked. The only thing that is important is Bitcoin, right? Like Bitcoin is like this, like, almost pure thing that has not been like perverted by market participants or whatever. And then like Ethereum came along and then Ethereum was like an illegal go fund me for 2017. And I was like, I don't know if that feels super great either. Surely there can be something more important than just doing illegal. fundraisers. And then defy started to kick off and I was like, okay, cool, this is the turning

point for the industry. Like there's real stuff happening here. Like people are building important products that are better than their centralized counterparties, right? Like, it's actually a better product. And then these like venues started popping up that had good user experiences for the first time and they felt like a safe like product to use for the first time. And like actual institutional money was in the space and like backing people that seem to know what they were doing. And my mental model of the crypto industry switched to like, oh, it's grown up a little bit. Not a lot. It's still obviously completely stupid.

But it's not the Wild West anymore. It's not all just like shambolic nonsense and like whack-em-all exchange life. But turns out, it's exactly the same. In my mind, it like, if people are just, like, printing, like, fake money, borrowing against the fake, borrowing real money against fake money, stealing user deposits, and the exchange dies, exactly the same as it did 10 years ago and periodically throughout those 10 years. And the only real difference is now, like, there are some things that are genuine products, that are kind of cool.

So I, like, try and focus on that stuff a lot more. to remain optimistic about that stuff, like building protocols and platforms where, like, that are sensor resistant that allow self-custody, allow you to, like, own your own stuff rather than having to rent it from a bank

or a crypto bank or whatever. Stuff like that is getting built, and it's important. Token prices of it all sucks. Like some of the, most important and useful things were the worst performers of the last few years. But those things are kind of cool, right? And like someone will build or maybe already has built it if it's like DYDX or GMX or all those other ones.

Like versions of FTCS that don't require you to give your money to some dude. And like that stuff's important, I think. and that stuff will remain interesting. And you just got to see how much of that happens because the ball market comes around. People forget about that stuff. People take shortcuts again and focus on the money

rather than the point of everything. And like every single bear market I've been through around this time, one year from the top or two years from the top. By the way, today's like basically exactly one year from the top on the top. It's one year since Barry tweeted, it's going to be a big week. And it was a big week.

It was the top. But like one year or two years from that, every single time, it feels like it's fucked. It feels like, okay, it's like there's no coming back from this one. Like it's actually fucking over this time. It always feels like that. And you feel it like viscerally for a few months. And then it washes out. Things go sideways for a while.

the world doesn't explode and you can start to like people can start to rebuild um yeah who knows i think my take on on that interpretation of a this last bull market is like oh we found some legitimacy and that oh we've discovered defy we discover some real things that solve from real problems uh and then the bull market started and then crypto started to like return to its roots and return to what it was familiar with from previous bull cycles, which was like fork and fair launch, launch a token, and just get more degenerate, right? And so we start with legitimacy at the very beginning of a bull market because that's what triggers the bull market in the first place. And then as the bull market goes on, like the collective IQ just goes lower and lower and lower until we back where we are back in like 2013, where we're just like forking Bitcoin 17 times. And that's probably maybe if you carry that forward, that's how like the next bull market will start.

We'll build something real. Some new innovations will come. We'll build out through this bear market. And then we'll just like go back. We'll Benjamin button it and just go backwards into just like 80 IQ food coins. And that'll be the top. It's 80 low or high. Probably high.

For next cycle, it'll probably be still pretty high. Ledger, what about you? Are you going to stick around? You can take your advice, your wife's advice? and like, I don't know, I don't know what she's telling you to do. If she's like, she's okay with me being in this space.

I don't know if I'm okay with me being in space. Really? Like, has this been pretty, like, shaking for you? It's not just crypto, but what we consistently live, man. It's life, like everyone's an idiot. We need rational actors. There's no, where are the rational actors?

I don't understand. How is there not an adult in the room? The adults get crowded out by the children. And the children don't deserve the power, but they have the power. They're the populists. They're the irrational risk takers. They're the ones that don't deserve the keys, but they end up capturing the power of the keys.

And it pisses me off. from a crypto perspective, I fell in love with the idea of a trustless and programmatic blockchain. Bitcoin took a while to connect for me, but Ethereum connected with me right away because it was trustless, at least in my naive eyes at the time, programmatic blockchain.

And we saw that come to some real fruition with Defi Summer and that changed everything for me to where I was, starting to get dejected after a few years of your trading coins that are supposed to have decentralized concepts on centralized exchanges to you can actually do things on chain and even NFDs really clicked with me in that regard of you're doing things on chain you're taking control of the programmatic elements of a public blockchain and I can see through the jpegs and into the the deed that a 721 represents and what that can become 10 years from now or 20 years from now.

And those things excite me. And then the freaking monkey brains take over again and they throw shit all over the place and they make a mess. And then like hopefully some adults clean it up when it's all done. And it's in the next bear. And then their bags underperform all the dog shit that get spread out over the next bull cycle. And it's like it's depressing. So yeah, it's like a thankless job.

Not that I've participated well in it. Like I've been one of the monkeys. monkeys. But it's a thankless job to like express the reasons why you should be here. And people in the chat are talking about how Andreas is who they admire. He's not taken like the full by the horn's stance of profitability. He's taken the moral high road along the along the way. And very few of those really shine and last. The reward is in the quick. fix and hope you jump off the train, right, in time before it implodes in the next cycle. And we got to get past that stuff. We got to get to true value. And I haven't seen that. And it pisses me off.

And I would like to see that. And I don't think we've really seen it yet. And, you know, this is only two cycles for me. It's a second cycle where it ends in some pretty tremendous disappointment, like the climactic finish of who are these times. Yeah, but who are these children? And Where's the good stuff? We need the good stuff. We need the real change, not the dog coins and not the JPEGs and not the clone coins and the scammers and the dickheads and the criminals running off on the private planes. Like we need the builders and the change makers and they're not being rewarded or incentivized to be the good things. And we need them to be able to show up, to be rewarded to show up.

and we need them to take control and do something. And I haven't seen that yet. That's disappointing. You don't have any kids, right? I have two kids. They have two kids. Ryan here is... Yeah, they're both NFT founders.

Ryan's got three kids. Do you guys as kids, like the presence of your kids, like impact how you think about the degeneracy in this industry? Yes. I mean, for me, it impacts how I think about, like, the future. Like, I mean, the reason I'm, like, the reason I'm in crypto is because, um, I believe in what we're building you. You want to do the maximum public good. Yeah. Effective altruism.

That was, I don't know. It was the poster of SBF. The reason I'm in crypto is to do the maximum public good. Is that what he really says? God. There's like a poster. There's like, there's like, you put it up on the streets. In San Francisco, yeah. I mean, but like, but this is the problem. It's the Alex Mashinsky. saying you can't trust the banks, right? Like on a t-shirt or the SBF saying, I want to do the maximum public good. I mean, this is the problem.

So I've been asking, you know, people lately have been in crypto for a while. It's like, just, you're experiencing crypto, has it made you more bullish on humanity and more jaded? And the answer I consistently get back is like, yes. Yes. And I guess I feel that too.

And this is definitely a moment where we're kind of in a, in a troth in a valley where I'm just, I'm like, like you guys, I'm feeling pretty jaded about what's going on. Like, how did this is such a self-inflicted wound? How did SBF and the so-called adults like screw this up so royally? I mean, this is like catastrophic failure. How did we even get here?

How did this happen? And it's greed, it's degeneracy. It's not being satisfied with being a, you know, multi-millionaire and a billionaire. You have to be like $30 billion rich as dude on the planet. It's that sort of thing that is dragging us down. And I think, ledger, you're right, like, the right people aren't getting rewarded, right? SBF is still worth more than Vitalik Buren. Like, what?

Like, how does that happen? So yeah, it's depressing sometimes. Maybe this is just kind of a low point. Maybe this is the bottom signal right now, this entire episode. What's depressing is what is it a bottom signal of? The world? Like Putin's being a dickhead. Trump is an idiot.

Like shouldn't exist. Like Biden's been in public office in 1971. Like what is going on? Like none of these people deserve to be there. Like it's all ridiculous. The absolute freaking apes are in charge, and they make no sense. And there's like billions of real people who are eating the consequences of this. Do you think this is what like the early internet, you know, fathers of the internet?

You know, it's like, yeah. Create the internet. And you're like, we're going to give access to knowledge to the entire world. Right. I mean, just such a utopia type of vision. And now fast forward and look at all the ways we're using the internet for negative. It's done untold good, but like, I mean, are we any smarter like than we were, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago? I mean, it just, it does feel like crypto is kind of repeating some of these mistakes.

And yeah, I mean, I do get jaded when I look at that. when I look at things like FTX. At the same time, guys, I mean, there are so many builders in this space, and there's so many projects that are worthwhile. And I don't know, Kobe, you probably have the long term perspective. But when you say so many, you mean like 10, right? I mean, honestly, right? Like there's uniswap, there's AVE, there's what else?

Come on, help me, guys. Yeah, I think that's all of them. Oh, wait, you can't touch that anymore. It's kind of a good point in a way, though, because, like, and to tell this story, I'll have to do somewhat of an anecdote or tangent because I don't know how to explain things simply, because I'm not very smart. But not long ago, I got into a little fight on Twitter about NFTs and I called them alt coins with pictures. And in defense of NFTs, a bunch of people point to, like, three or four artists that have built sustainable careers. of selling like a one of one over time and their prices have gone up over time and they have genuine collectors and they're like NFTs are not all kinds of pictures is not a scam. It's not all just like speculation casino because look here at this like slice. This slice is

interesting pure. It doesn't have any of those things. It's everything that the NFT space is supposed to be these are real artists who have managed to connect to an audience and monetize their work and and that's beautiful. It's not selling pictures of like, bored apes for millions of dollars or whatever. And at the time, I was like, how can you just ignore everything else, right? You're looking at this 1% of the industry

and going, of your industry or hobby or whatever, and going like, this thing, these things are great because look at this slice and I'm going to ignore everything else, just deny that information. And now I thought about it a little while afterwards And I was like, well, when I meet friends who are anti-crypto Or not into crypto and stuff

I wonder if that's what I sound like to them Because I'm kind of like, well, Bitcoin, Ethereum, look at Uniswap, look at like, Ah, look at MakerDAO, you know, And like, this stuff is really good. This stuff is like, you know, know, pure and like it, you know what I mean? I sound exactly like that NFT guy. And I'm not like ignoring, like, all the other stuff.

I obviously see it and I know that it exists. But I do certainly attribute to it like that is, that's not the important stuff. That's noise. That's like, you know, like, you know, that's not the industry. And really, maybe that's like 80% of the volume of the industry or something. Maybe it's like a lot of the industry is propped up on that stuff. and the biggest players participate in that, like Binance has 80% market share or something,

and they released their own Ethereum copy-paste clone. Like, you know, like the top 10 on Coin Gecko is not the things that I think are like, like people with good intentions building something that's important. It's like weird stuff. So I do wonder if we turn a massive blind eye to a lot of the stuff or just disregard it as noise

because we see parts of the industry that are important, but those parts of the industry are not the parts that are like flourishing and growing. It's just you can focus on them and go, these things are good. Yeah, I don't know. I think

there's a lot of people that build a career on being like critical of everything in crypto no matter what. they call everything a scam, a fraud, blah, blah, blah, and find something bad to say about everything. And then there are people who build a career of being completely uncritically, like, favorable about everything in crypto, saying everything's good, you know, free markets, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah. And I wonder a little bit if, to people I sound a little bit like the latter, rather than the former, like, I think there is like a, there's a healthy line. the more in the middle have been like optimistically skeptical. And it doesn't feel like that space is actually very popular. I surround myself with people that like are in that space, but I don't think that it is actually a good representation of the industry, perhaps. So, yeah, I think a lot of the disconnection about how other people see the industry,

how we see the industry, and when these events happen, why it's disheartening, is because it just reveals to you again all of the parts of the industry that you're like you're just attributing as noise and unimportant. And actually it's really important that make the most significant events of every year within our industry by fucking up something like catastrophically.

So I don't know. I think maybe there's something to do with that but also maybe like we just sort of kind of ignore. in real time. What can you do about it? What can you do? This is something I've battled with as well.

I once argued this guy on stage about something. I can't remember his name, but I had to, it was one of those guys, Kobe, that you identified as people that build a brand off of just like shitting on crypto and that's like what they do and they always come out when prices go down.

And I started off this debate with my opening statements of like, there's always two people in the, the world of crypto, there's the crypto idealist who zoom forward 50 plus years into the future and talk about the future crypto utopia that crypto is going to bring and how great it is. And then there's the crypto skeptics who look at crypto as it is today and say like, oh, like, well, clearly the whole thing's a scam. The whole thing like through and through and through. And like honestly, Kobe, I actually find that you actually fit that middle ground pretty

damn well where you see you're here for all the right reasons. but like you can call out a bunch of fucking noise when in the middle of a bull market, which a lot of people are willing to drink the Kool-Aid. When you were talking about the whole like NFT industry where you're called it like all coins with JPEGs. It was right. It was super right. It was super right.

And that was like kind of the same reference I was going with like, oh yeah, as soon as we figure out, crypto industry figures out this new primitive, we like regress back to our former selves and start to do what we're familiar with, which is trade altcoins. but now they've got pictures associated with them. That's how I felt in Ethereum in 2017 with like the ICO movement. And it was like, oh yeah, Ethereum's full of ICOs. And I was like, but I'm seeing Ethereum as like, well, no, smart contracts. ICOs are just the thing today.

Smart contracts are the future. But it takes like such a long conviction, a long term like time horizon to be able to exist in that future state. It's tough, man. And this is what we do as an industry is like we zoom forward 50 plus years. It's a super cycle. We're going to teleport there. Like, oh, no, just kidding. Interest rates go up.

Every anybody needs to pay back their debts. All the monkey pictures that you paid a million dollars for are now worth nothing. I mean, it's the inevitable, like laying the foundations of things that are real. And then we just speculate. on top of new things. This was what the bull market was. In the first half of 2021, it was a real foundational bull market.

And in the second half of 2021, it was like GameFi and like weird knockoff fiber NFTs. But those same things will be back in greater numbers, next cycle, and they'll be stronger. And then we'll just do this whole thing all over again. Man, you say super cycle type stuff. It's just oppressing to me.

Oh, God. I don't know about you guys, but I mean, I got duped by this supercycle meme for sure. Yeah, Kobe's been consistently when I try to still believe in something, Kobe brings this healthy skepticism to my chats, like the very little time that we talk that's not on the air, but even on the air. We really basically never talked, but it's not on the air. but when we do it's often like him bringing this like skeptical lens to something that I'm okay with right like that I trust inherently or something I just realized when you talk about super cycle or whatever else or like meeting your heroes type of stuff it's like my first cycle I was really dumb

my second cycle I was capable and stupid that's now and like I feel like by the third cycle maybe I'll be capable but also like kind of paralyzed by skepticism and listen you You guys are all talking very confidently about this promised next cycle. Well, I'm not saying when it'll be. I'll be more bald, more fat, whatever, like saggy your cheeks. I'll be like that telegram, AI version, a sticker of me when I'm like 75. I just want to note this is the first time in history that people have been extremely confident that another cycle is promised to us. I remember thinking that last cycle.

You thought another one was guaranteed? I was thought like, oh, everyone's talking about the next cycle. Is it really going to happen then if everyone's talking about it? I remember thinking about that last time. I'm a believer that it's inevitable that we get another cycle. But I'm not going to call a time on that for sure. But I like, and I could be wrong on that. What if it's in 20 years will you like whip up the podcast again?

No, we'll be podcasting. We'll be podcasting every step of the way. My God. Growing up freaking old together, David. But I mean, we're not old now. Older. I'm still on my 12. How old is Gary Vee?

He's old. Everyone guess. Everyone guessed them. Forty-fourty-three. Yeah, I was going to say 44 or whatever. I have to type an age. How are V friends? Oh, wow.

He is 46. 46. The more, well, like, with Gary Vee, he, like, his streams and stuff. But I think maybe it was also because it was all about like, like, cringy JPEGs and shit. So I was always like, I feel like this is what Ledger's going to be like in like 10 years. I just watch him like, wow, this is the,

this is the future for Ledger. There's the future just like, pushing 50, been like, check out this rabbit I just minted guys. That's what I see. Gary, yeah. So totally unreal energy. You know, let just got books.

Yeah. And then like jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook. Like he wrote a whole book on this concept. Jab, jab, jab, right hook that this is a book? Yeah, I think so. I don't want to read it. Gary, Gary V was like a web guy influenced her way before NFTs. Are you all not familiar with his previous works?

Is. He's been on the podcast. He was a full-on web guy. Well, I guess I was, too, but it was. Comment from the chat. Gary V. dresses like a middle schooler, but I love him. Yeah. I mean, he's the, he is the dude with the skateboard.

Yeah. I love kids. How do you do fellow kids? All right, guys. Guys, should we think about winding us down and you have any parting words of wisdom? How about for people who just, um, just feeling really bad right now? I mean, we just told them they were going to get multiple years of crypto winter. Multiple years of bankless podcast is all I'm hearing.

We have a, I hope we have the stamina acid, dude. Yeah. Just staking, right? We just stake it, it's free money. That's how that works. I mean, for most people, for most people, more years of crypto winter is probably better. I think for the majority of people listening, it would actually be the optimal strategy

to have like five years or something. It would be optimal for them. Probably not the people listening that have got full net worth invested now. It probably sounds like quite bad. But like if you get a longer time to, you know, DCA accumulate, figure out your positioning and stuff with like a clear mind.

I think that's probably optimal. Like I had a job, like full-time job for the entirety of the 2017 cycle all the way through the ball market. I could have not had a job. I could have, you know, only done crypto. And I kept a job and it allowed me to have like a very clear head about the whole thing or as clear as I could have had. Whereas if I was all in doing it.

it all the time. It would have been quite bad for me, I think. And like the fundamental parts of the mission and the purpose behind Bitcoin and Ethereum and the very short list of stuff that I think crosses the chasm of legitimacy is not like

that is not, to me, that's not been doubted by any of this stuff. And in fact, it's like, it is the opposite of that. It's like proven over and over again that like these centralized systems that require you to rent your own assets back from them will not be, not always be honest with your money and you should not have to trust someone else just to like access a financial service or, you know, use, use your own. money, basically. So that part of my thesis for the importance of the technology and, you know, things that we have remains true today. And that has sort of been like at least my guiding

principle for 10 years. Yeah, it might get really bad in the meanwhile. But until that part, until that seems like it's no longer important, like I think that. I think that, that's the thing to focus on. Maybe it was all speculo, crypto tokens, and like, there was a hundred-year bull run, and interest rates went to zero, and people invented Bitcoin because there was nowhere else to put your worthless dollars, and we had a 10-year supercycle of crypto-coins right before economic policy regime change, and it never recovers and never goes up ever again. But in that world, like, A, what can you do, and B, what else are you going to invest in anyway. So I think just like do you find the mission of having peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer,

sensor-resistant technologies that allow you to the freedom to self-custody or assets important? And do you think that a centralized exchange blowing up, a hedge fund blowing up, a poorly designed Ponzi scheme mechanism, or a different crypto bank blowing up in any way puts doubt on that thesis? For me, it doesn't. I think that's important. And I'll think about that. But I don't know if you saw in chat, SBF's apparently playing league right now.

What? Because it shows you, the game, he's playing Kindred. On what platform does it say that he's playing that? It's golf stream. Blown off steam. Who knows? Jesus.

That's got to be a meme. If that's real, that is. life. What would you do after your multi-billion dollar head of fund blows up? Don't answer that. Well, I mean, that makes sense, Kobe. What about you, Ledger? David, what do you guys?

Chat, chat was asking for some hope. Leave us with some hope earlier. I think COVID hit on a point that's right, which is like the chain hasn't failed us, you know? the things that were the worst were the vulnerability points of human actors. Human failure centralized entities that were unsatisfactory solutions, whether they're trying to meet regulatory criteria or subvert it either way. it was human failure over chain failure. There was app failure and there was hacks and stuff like that.

But overall, the base layer with the chain showed lots of promise this cycle. Kobe mentioned about who can stomach it for another one. What I've recognized in myself and others is can I go in with conviction again in the same way? And if I can and if I'm right, then the upside is huge. huge, right? Like you go in with conviction, a significant percentage of your net worth to do it again. And it actually works. The upside is not just life-changing. The upside is insane. If you're wrong, there's this perpetual disappointment opportunity that could be really depressing if you go in with that conviction. If you disappear, you might be all right, have changed your life of it. And

It was a fun ride, but then maybe you missed out on it on being right. So you got to determine why are you here? Are you here for this financial freedom component? Are you here for something deeper? And can you stomach the outcome no matter what the outcome is? And I think you have to decide for yourself, like whether you can stomach the potential outcome ranges, whether you want to participate in those. And why are you actually here?

and I my personal priority list is family first and then like function second right like I want the I want my family to be secure and then I want to build well I want to be able to build and do and invest and talk whatever the hell I'm given whatever platform or opportunities I'm given I want to do those reputably that I can look back upon and be proud of my effort. And I think that there is still an opportunity to do that within crypto, so I intend to do it. But if I feel like that's no longer possible, I just won't anymore. I don't think we have to give up on those things.

Like this is a super bottom signally type of speech. But I think that we still have an opportunity for good. I don't think it's a guarantee. I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done. I think a lot of people need to do work. We need to talk about the importance of the chain. And the, like the Eric Borhe's argument versus the Sam argument. Like, trust in that, which can be trustless, don't trust in me because I'm, I can

wear a suit. My shoes untied. Yeah, we got to get back to the basics And we got to wear solid fundamentals and carry on Back to the basics David, do you self-conviction on the space? You're buying? I think the main thing to think about is that

During the 2017 to 2018 crash, we basically had nothing to stand on as an industry. We had Bitcoin, we had this theoretical use case of Ethereum. that was about it. And then we built some stuff during the bear market that caused a bull market to happen later. Things like Uniswap, things like AVE, synthetics, a few more governance tokens. Now we got some Dow stuff.

We got some cool NFT stuff. And we've locked in some very real progress with some very real things that are moving the needle, even though that there's like maybe 5% of the total crypto industry is that the real stuff. the 95% is just like leverage of that real stuff in pursuit of financial gain again. It's just what crypto is going to be. But we've locked in 5% of really cool, legitimate, like, internet changing things. And that was an, you know, infinity level improvement from the bull market prior going from like 0% to 5%. I think if we just play this out, like we don't go from like 5% to 10% next time.

we go from like 5% to 25% or 5% to 50% if it were if I'm being optimistic. And so my, my bull case for like if this is a five year bear market and you need the conviction to just grit your teeth and dump your paycheck into crypto because you want that generational wealth, it's like not a linear improvement of legitimate things that crypto produces. It'll be an exponential improvement. And so we'll, we'll be able to, I think the people that are here with conviction, that are doing good stuff and building real things are going to only have more ammo than all of

the scammers who get washed out every single year. And so like the real people doing the real things will always have a stronger foothold than the scammers that come and just like do the cool thing that happens every single ball market. And so I'm, I'm optimistic for next bull cycle that and every bowl cycle subsequent that there's always a tilt, a slow, small, small tilt towards the legitimate builders because we have the last year's last cycles bull market legitimacy to stand upon. And so that that was that's what makes me optimistic is that like we'll be we just it's just about learning lessons. So that's what that's what I'm optimistic for. I agree with that. Yeah. And I mean I guess for me I don't know everything about all the assets in the space,

but I feel like this the recent events have actually proved. in the use case of some of the core assets I have conviction on. I have some conviction on Bitcoin, you know, mostly ether, mostly some of these defy tools, that sort of thing, Ethereum. I mean, this kind of proves the use case, right, like that we can't actually trust these centralized intermediaries. And I don't know, to me, Ethereum in particular has never looked stronger. Like I would be happy to as long as I have some income the means to do it by triple digit ETH all day. And whether that takes one year, two years, three years, five years to come to fruition. I mean, like, is it a totally different feeling to me than buying ETH in like 2018 or 2019 where we

weren't sure about the roadmap? Like, was proof of stake actually going to happen? Was the theory I'm going to scale. Did it even have use cases besides the stupid ICO thing? And we're well past that now. So I don't have conviction on all of the assets in the space and all of the use cases, but some of the core ones I have more conviction than ever. So I don't know how long this is going to take, but guys, this has been fun. Thanks for a little bit of catharsis this evening. Appreciate up only bankless live stream. We'll do these more often. Maybe not just on like calamitous days like this, maybe more routinely. But it's been really fun hanging out with you guys.

Appreciate it. Cheers. Thanks.