Bankless - David and Anthony Discuss the Crypto Meta

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

David speaks with Anthony from the Daily Gwei about the current crypto meta, price swings, and emerging narratives from around the Ethereum sphere. ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 📣 SAFE CORE | Smart Wallet Infrastructure https://safe.global/core  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap 👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ----- RESOURCES Anthony Sassano  https://twitter.com/sassal0x  Daily Gwei https://twitter.com/thedailygwei  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

If the longer you wait, the more people take leverage. So like, so like as, as liquidations don't happen, like, like people just like, okay, I'll take leverage now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're going sideways for so long, which is what happened.

And like the fact that there's no real new money coming in. I mean, I think we, we can obviously see that given that pretty much everything retraced its entire pump after the ripple SEC kind of win. You know, we had that big ass pump. Like everything went nuts. especially XRP. And now if you look at everything, it's back to basically what it was before that happened. And I think that just signifies that really all the money that was pumping up the market was just the same money that was already here. There was no follow through from the new money because

I've been saying this for ages on my own show that during these crab markets, the reason why it crabs is because there's no new money. And this recent thumb seemed to have been, as you were saying, all that leverage just building up from people just essentially being bored, I guess, and being like, oh, we're going sideways. I can't get, I can't get, you know, liquidated in this environment. Well, yes, you can. The number stops, the number stops going down for six months. Take on the leverage, boys. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, but it's, it's always funny to see people's reactions after big moves like this. You know, I saw some, some bears, you know, obviously gloating and things like that.

And they were saying, oh, you know, I'm going to wait until a BTC hits like 15K, then I'm going to buy. And it kind of gives me flashbacks to the bull market where people said, no, I'm not selling my BTC. It's going to 100K, right? It's the same picture. It's the exact same picture. It's just reversed, right? So it's always funny seeing the reactions. And then I think that we're so deep into this bear market that really the only reactions that I see are from the trader types.

The investors are like, oh, well, whatever. I'm just going to keep stacking. There's no panic really. Like I didn't see any panic from the long-term investors that I talk to regularly. it's more of, oh, okay, we dumped, you know, we got liquidated, but hey, we're, you know, we can stack some more. We've got more time to stack. But I think it's also setting the expectation of what the market's going to do.

I think when everyone just accepts that it's just going to do nothing good and it's just going to go sideways mostly and maybe we have these high volatility events, which I actually tweeted about a few weeks ago, I said, there's still going to be high volatility events and you're going to get washed out if you're on leverage. So I think that's just the norm, right, for crypto. Yeah, absolutely. And like, even if I've been feeling. a foundation of bullishness brew

kind of in the same way that you know towards the end of the last bear market like you had a lot of real reasons to get real excited like we had uniswap, we had maker, we had compound, we had Avey we had a lot of these ingredients. Curve had just come out and like for people that weren't in crypto during that time think about like what we didn't have any of those things

and so going from nothing to Uniswap, MakerDAO, Curve, Avey was like a pair of paradigm shift. And so like, we were all, we're all being on chain, even though we didn't even use those words. And we had this underlying bullishness foundation buildup, but no one outside of crypto was paying attention to that. And so that's why you're like, yes, you are excited. You have the alpha. But it's not going to happen right now. Like you have you, there's like at least a years of time before like you have like the bullish sentiment foundation grow before something starts to like poke up and sprout into the mainstream culture. Yeah. And we're just actually

saying briefly off air, I was telling you how I remember at the turn of like the new year in 2019, obviously, ETH had come off its, you know, all time high, 94% down, went to like 80 bucks. And it was a pretty bad time for the prices of everything, really. And then, you know, the year turned and everyone was just kind of licking their wounds, stuff like that. And then I was thinking to myself, you know, all these stuff to be bullish about in the Ethereum ecosystem. We had the early kind of defy stuff going on, as you mentioned, Maker, univop, things like that.

and we had, you know, there were still discussions around proof of stake, what was going to happen with that, the Ethereum roadmap generally. And because you and I were so close to the Ethereum, you know, roadmap and paid so much attention to us, we were like, holy crap, you know, we can see the next five years of Ethereum, but no one else can. And we were, that's the reason why we were bullish at the time and buying ETH at those levels. But even still, it took ETH another two years after that, even a little bit more than two years, to go back to its old all-time high because it didn't actually reach 14. 20, whatever it was, until January 20, 21, which was, yeah, more than two years from that point. So if you apply the same logic to the current market's kind of cycle that we're in right now and think to yourself, wow, look at all these bullish news that's happening. L2s are popping off, right?

We have more altos that we know what to do with. Visa, PayPal, you know, ETFs, all these kind of bullish news. But the thing is, is that like the market isn't pricing that in because, as I said, there's no new money coming in. the fundamentals take a while to play out. Yes, they're bullish now, but it's because we're aware of them. We know it's bullish, but other people aren't aware of it. Other people aren't paying attention to it. And it just takes time for that to kind of filter through. And as you said, sprout up essentially. It's like at the seed seedling stage and then it needs to sprout up. And then

everyone notices the big tree, right? So I think that that's the exact same thing that's happening now. And that's why I keep iterating to people whenever I talk to people about this is that I just, I, I have the biggest vibe of 2019 right now. It's deep within me. I'm just like, I feel like I'm back in 2019 and I feel like I see it so clearly and I'm seeing the woman in the red dress if I'm reading the Matrix Code. That's literally how I feel some days because it just feels so eerie. I mean, obviously I can be wrong, right? Obviously, it's, you know, it's not going to, history is not going to repeat exactly. But I don't know, I just, I don't feel fundamentally bearish. Like, I feel like we washed out everything last year and now we're just in a holding pattern waiting for the kind of seeds to grow.

Certainly. Yeah. And the 20, we had a year of bullishness. Like everyone was bullish during defy summer. And that was like March or April of 2020 until December when Ether started to actually act. So we had we had people making life changing amounts of money from March until December of 2020. And that continued on, but also like making life changing amounts of money. while Ether was below $450.

And the Ether stayed in that same range. It was like $300 to $400, which was just like on the higher side of the bear market, but it was a number that we saw in the bear market throughout for the past three years. So Ether stayed at this like low level for the whole year while people were printing life-changing amounts of money during DeFi summer. And everyone who was in the market was like paying attention, was playing the game, was knew it was on. But it was like the insider bull market.

Like if you stuck out through the bear market, like you got to have all of this like alpha for yourself because like we were printing governance tokens, DFI yield farm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it didn't show up in the blue chips. And Bitcoin was starting to make moves, but Ether wasn't. But like still mainstream. Bitcoin was making moves off of the, I think,

sailor stuff like Elon Musk buying BTC, like that kind of stuff. It was getting the attention because of that. Because I remember Eith BTC was. going down and it was because of that like it was getting more mainstream attention from from those kind of headlines sailor bought his first bitcoin in 2021 well i i was it 221 i i remember 2020 maybe maybe i miss remembering sailor but i know that there was tes i'm pretty sure tesla first bought in 2020 didn't they i don't i okay so the the line i remember going on throughout crypto twitter was that both bitcoin and then like a few weeks later ether made all-time high

highs and no one in mainstream media was talking about it. Like we broke through all time highs. Crypto Twitter was jubilant. And no one outside of the world like saw that that was coming or was even talking about it. It did not register on their radars. And in my mind, in all of our minds, we were like, yo, like we just broke through all time highs. And there's still like not new money coming in or not massive amounts of new money. New money was coming in.

But like not the sailor money. So I just Googled it because I was. curious. So Tesla bought in Feb 2021, but Sailor actually bought in 2020. I think as early as like September or August or something. So that's what I was remembering. Yeah, he was like making waves of doing

these huge BTC purchases and then everyone was meaning that, oh wow, all these companies are going to start buying BTC. And of course we saw some follow through with Tesla, but it didn't really materialize. We saw some companies here and there. Oh, and I wrote this tweet that more companies will own ETH on their balance sheet than Bitcoin because

they were going to need to pay gas on Ethereum. And that triggered every single Bitcoin maximumist under the sun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it usually does, right? But yeah, no, I remember that distinctly because I remember ETH BTC going down a lot, even though ETH, like even though DFI someone was happening. And then everyone was saying, oh, well, you know, you only need BTC and DFI token, screw E. The barbell strategy that didn't end up materializing. And everyone just like got wrecked if they held Dify tokens against like Ethan BTC, right? Because ETH then went on its ridiculous run. People forget that ETH was still like $4,500 when DeFi Summer ended. And then ETH went to

$4,400 in like six months. So yeah, we were doing rotating to ETH. We were doing one of our Bull Markle case for ETH episodes that December because it's like great holiday content. And ETH was marching past $700 the second week of December. And then it would hit $1,100 in January. But it was December that month that was like, the good month for ether where like all of the whole like defy token Bitcoin barbell just idea just went out the window

yeah and suddenly everyone started becoming in an Heath Maxi instead of a BTC maxi because there was that trend of everyone becoming a BTC maxi in the bear market like last bear market which was a very annoying trend but I guess it made sense because Ethereum had come off ICOs and everyone had like written off Ethereum for dead

because they weren't paying attention as we were saying It only had one bubble Bitcoin I already had like three bubbles And so like, you know, there was no precedent for Ether coming back. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then obviously this time around, it's a lot different, right? No one's doubting Ethereum's use cases. We know DFI. This is L2s.

You know, we know we have, you know, some stuff like decentralized social media as well and gaming and NFTs, obviously, right? So, yeah, it's just a very different kind of vibe from that sense. But as I said, I'm getting the exact same kind of vibes of there's so much stuff going on. Price is not reacting to it. But this doesn't last forever. It is definitely a temporary phenomenon. Yeah, certainly.

One thing that I've been really enjoying out of the bankless ventures, like, what do you call them, activities that we do, activities, where we like talk to a lot of deals, like teams on the frontier. And like the nice thing about it is that you get a lot of signal. And there's been a handful of teams that we've talked to who, like, their number one volume or numbers of clients are gaming companies. And like the reason why they have traction is because of gaming companies. and they just spit out like large numbers versus everyone else.

Like, yeah, like, there's gaming companies up here and then our next biggest category of client is like down here. Like the number of instances where people say gaming is like going to, I mean, everyone's been saying this for like a year now and I've always been like even longer than the year. But I've always been like, all right, is that just like a narrative? Because that's a great narrative. Like, is this real?

But like after like talking to all these like teams like are that are servicing gaming clients, like gaming apparently is just like the thing. Yeah, yeah. I think people in crypto, like crypto natives got burnt out on it because a lot of it was Ponzi-esque and obviously Axi Infinity was like the quintessential example of this of something that went nuts. But really when you drilled down into it, it was a lot of kind of people just farming the money, right? And everyone was going on about how people in the Philippines were able to play this game and earn a living. And like that's all well and good. But the problem was that they were only able to do that because it was bull market money. Right. And that's not sustainable for in the norm. But now, yeah, I'm seeing it too. I don't pay that much attention to it just because I don't have the time to. But in the Daily Way Discord channel, we have a gaming channel and I see people talking about it and things like that. And yeah, it is, it is real, right? There are a lot of things happening in behind the scenes. But again, people aren't paying attention because they got burnt out from like the first iterations of what happened. And they just, you know, they don't want to pay attention to it because I think it's maybe a scam or like a Ponzi or whatever it is. And some don't get me wrong, some of it is, right? But that's like anything in crypto. So, friends, it's interesting. It's also a Ponzi. Yeah, the friend tech thing. We can't think of anything other than Ponzi's.

Hey, what should we do with our new blockchains? Oh, let's do Ponziies. The Friends Tech thing is interesting to me because there's like two sides of the coin here where you think it's really interesting because it's like something new to play around with and the, well, not necessarily new because it has been done before. But it's like, I guess, new to some people. But there's the other side of it where it's this trend of the financialization of everything in the world, not just within crypto, where everything is suddenly becoming an

investment. And I've noticed that with like a lot of my hobbies, right? Everything is just suddenly an investment, right? If you, if you have something that's slightly different than something else, you could get more for it. And it's just hilarious the kind of value that people will give to certain items based on memes, essentially. It's not based on any kind of fundamentals, it's memes. And I guess meme is a fundamental, if you want to, if you want to frame it like that. But the logical conclusion of that is speculating on people, right? Speculating on kind of like influences and kind of buying their shares with what you do with Friend Tech and getting access to, I mean, essentially it becomes like a paid group where you get

to access to their chat, but then you can sell your access to someone else. And it becomes this financialization of someone's essentially their time, which obviously isn't a totally new concept, but something that I think that, yeah, as you said, it looks Ponzi-esque and it can also be gameed very easily. But I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting idea for people who want to be involved in that world where essentially people say, oh, what if you could invest in an influencer before they blew up, right? What if you could invest in them when they only had a thousand followers? Then they got to 100,000 followers and suddenly your shares are worth a lot. It's like investing in a company or investing in a sports player or

something, right, as a company, right? So I get that side of things, but I think that the execution needs to be handled very finely or else as us as we said it turns into like a ponzi where everyone's just kind of gaming everything and it's just money in money out and everyone just like gets wrecked there's this one guy who from my twitter one of my Twitter followers who bought one of my shares and his name's leo and i like looked at his twitter account he's got like a hundred or maybe a thousand followers like not not the biggest account on twitter but like he said hey you buy one of my shares I'm like, sure, because they don't have any supply of shares, like the shares are super cheap. And then I see him just like absolutely grinding in his chat.

And he goes from like just like the long tail of friends account, like accounts. And he's like number four, bro. And so he has like 140 like shareholders. I don't know what his market cap is. But it's insane. Yeah, one share is 0.58. Half an e. dude he's it's insane he just goes like Levi yeah 57 holders he's holding 115 people but

he's just been absolutely grinding in the friends tech game and he's been posting out like some of his stats he's earned he like he posted his stats in his chat share price 0.39 to 0.58 in the last day of 50% trading fees earned 0.57 eth in a day I don't know who this guy is but he's just like this friend's tech grinder and he's just been making it happen for himself that's awesome though like i i respect that i respect people who put in the effort to do that but i i also have the cynic in me that thinks you know that's the outlier it's got to me the outlier because like friends tech is fundamentally unsustainable because it's just small accounts buying big accounts right um like that that's just how this works it's also it also goes

back to like the experiments that were done with um monetizing social media obviously twitter has started doing it recently, but one of the first large-scale examples was something called steam it. And this was around a long time ago. It ended up being drama around that it got taken over by Justin Sarner and they forked it off. But the original idea was paying people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The original idea was paying people to post content. And you can imagine what happened, right? It was overrun by bots and trading of kind of like upvotes, stuff like that. And the way that the money was paid, it wasn't paid by the users. It was paid. by the protocol. So essentially the protocol would issue,

would have an issuance curve, right? And inflation essentially and then pay that out to people. And of course, when there's, that's basically a zero cost, right? Because the users aren't paying for it. The cost is born by all the, the token holders. So it's not a cost to the user directly. It's if they're holding the steam tokens, of course, it's a cost to them. But what would happen is it would be gained. And I saw it. It was all transparent because it was on chain, but it was completely games that everyone was trading votes with each other. They were bots dominating everything. And people were making a lot of of money by doing this because it was a, you know, it was a bull market and it was just crazy

stuff going on. And I remember seeing people just like copy pasting other people's content as well and they were just better at marketing it and they were getting paid for it. So I don't know, like that financialization of stuff like that, I don't know if it actually leads to good outcomes. I think it just leads to gamification of things in the worst way as possible. And with Twitter, I think it's rather limited because Twitter didn't start off like that. It kind of bolted it on later and a lot of people don't really care about getting paid for their content. They were putting content out in the anyway, right, before they were getting paid. But also on a long enough time horizon, you can imagine that people just spew whatever they

want on Twitter to get the most attention, which they already do, right, but they do it to such an extreme now because they're earning money from it. If you're earning lots of money from it, you're going to go to the extremes to earn even more. So it's a tricky business, man. It's something that I've thought a lot about and I've never come up with a good conclusion to actually make it to work. Yeah, the gamification, it puts a lot of pressure on the parameters for how you distribute money.

Like if the incentives around Twitter have changed because Twitter is starting to pay people out money for posting tweets, then there's going to be some sort of economic imbalance, right? Like think of all the numbers that goes into constructing a gas fee. Like sometimes we tinker with those things because one is like outsized for the other. And Twitter's going to have to do that to manage the incentives around paying content. but like that's a bull case if they can effectively manage their own economy with their like you know money printer that is like their you know money that they send out for for twitter content creators that that's like the bull case for all of this stuff like the whole idea of everything turning into a financial game like the that the one of the big pushbacks against a crypto industry in this last bull market was like the crypto bros are going to come financialize everything and then and we don't want that because we don't want your finances in our culture right we don't want nfts because we don't want nfts because we don't want nfts because we're because we don't want money in our art. And I think that's, you know, a good worry. And it's like a natural immune response,

but also underserves the equal and opposite idea, which is that culture is finally infiltrating into the world of finance. Like both hold true. You can't have one without the other. And so a combination of just like some arbiter of whatever this economic system is, like the steam, Twitter, whatever,

whatever is going to be the monetary policy issuer for how these things actually economically work out and then also allow for that optimized for like good content right because if it's just bots coming into tweet out tweets to make content then that sucks that that that's financialization becoming ruined but the bull case is that actually you are instilling culture and allowing culture to manifest better because you figured out the economics and all of a sudden Twitter becomes a better place because it's literally full of culture yeah I guess that's the optimistic approach I don't know I've become more kind of like more of a cynic, the more I use kind of like Twitter, just because of the fact that the things that

seem to get the most attention are literally like fake news, right? Things that are just not true, because people want to believe things, right? They want their biases to be confirmed. And especially when it comes to politics, you can put out literal blatant misinformation and people eat it up. Now, the thing is, is that there's community notes, which Vitalik wrote about recently, people want to actually get a deep dive on how community notes works. It was an excellent blog post. But community notes is amazing, right? But if you get community notes and it says this is literally fake, right? This is not a real kind of factual information.

Are you going to get demonetized for that, right? Like, does your tweet not count towards your monetary rewards for the month or something? That should be what happens. But if it doesn't happen like that, there is literally no consequence. Yeah, you get community notes. But by the time you get community notes, your tweets are already viral, right? And people are already seeing it and you get all those impressions and it counts towards, your total for the month. So I feel like if you really want to make it work, you have to

take that into account. You have to essentially punish the bad actors or else you just get overrun by them because then everyone will be like, well, if I can earn money for literally just spreading the most fake news possible and the most viral news possible, then they're probably going to use an AI to come up with something that has the highest chance of getting the most impressions. And eventually what you have is that the culture actually gets overrun by that. And just to your point about the culture, just generally. And that will tie into something else I wanted to talk about, but I don't know if you wanted to say anything to that there. Yeah, take us there.

Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to talk about today, actually, that I've been talking to you about for a, I don't know, a few weeks now. Actually, on and off, I've been kind of rattling the new mental model that I've kind of come up with for blockchains generally. For crypto ecosystems, blockchains generally. And I was thinking a lot about this specifically over the last few weeks because I, I've been thinking about the social layer because a lot of people have been talking about it on Twitter and a lot of people are misunderstanding what a social layer is in the crypto context. A lot of people have social layer blind spot.

They do. They do. And I understand why because it's definitely a thing that isn't obvious and it takes a while of being in crypto to actually understand why it's important. But I was thinking to myself, okay, so there's the social layer side of things. But are there other parts of crypto that people get attracted to and that people kind of vibe with, at different parts in their crypto journey. And I think that I've come up with three categories that it all falls into. So you have the social category, as I just mentioned.

You have the economic category and then you have the technical category. And those are the three things that I think that blockchain ecosystems optimize for in different ways. Now, I account with some examples to illustrate this here. So when you think about Ethereum as an ecosystem, how did Ethereum start? Well, it started with a really strong social layer because it was started based on ideology, right? It was started based on, hey, how can we change the world, right? How can we build these decentralized applications to take power away from centralized intermediaries, right?

That was the whole kind of vibe of Ethereum. It was very kind of like tightening at the start. Obviously, it was very kind of like hacker oriented. And that kind of was Ethereum's beginning. That's what it began. It's social. The technical stuff was like more of an afterthought because obviously the tech of Ethereum, there was a roadmap to upgrade it and make it better, but it was not the greatest tech, right?

It was very simple. And it has remained that way for a long time. now and the economics of it were completely out there's no economical thought put into it at all like it was it was really not thought about but then you look at bitcoin how did bitcoin start well it had a lot of that social stuff as well right but it also had the economic side of things definitely did not have the technical zero technical but it had the social and it had the economics but then slowly over time what happened with bitcoin is that the economics took precedent over everything else right it was all about protecting Bitcoin's monetary policy at the cost of everything else, even at the cost of the

social layer. And that's why we see with Bitcoin, a lot of the social layer turned into just toxic kind of infighting, stuff like that, right, and outfighting too. Right. So the Bitcoin drain, drain. Exactly. And they've kind of optimized completely for that. So there's very little technical. The social layer is not where I think it should be. It's definitely not a very healthy social layer. And the monetary thing is, is their main, main thing. Then you look at, these other layer ones that have come over the years, right? What are they optimized for? Well, they optimized for technical.

They always said, we've got the best tech, right? We've got better tech than Ethereum. We've got cheaper gas fees. We've got this. We've got that. They don't focus on monetary policy. Yeah, exactly. They don't focus on monetary policy at all.

They don't focus on the social layer at all. So all they focus on is the technical stuff, which then feeds into what actually forms on the social side of things because the social layer becomes, or we've got the best tech, you know? And then they're kind of like starting insulting Ethereum. say Ethereum is crap because it's got crappy tech, we've got better tech, and they're over-optimized for that. So that's what I mean by like there's three high-level categories that sit there that kind of dictate what ecosystems become. Now, I then related it back to Ethereum, obviously, because

we're both in Ethereum and I spent a lot of time in it, just covering it. And I thought to myself, okay, like, why do I spend so much time in Ethereum based on this framework? Like, what makes Ethereum special to me. Well, what makes it special to me is Ethereum is the closest ecosystem to hitting all three of those categories in an equal fashion, right? It has a fantastic monetary policy now, in my opinion. Obviously, this is subjective, right, of Bitcoin as hate Ethereum's monetary policy, but, you know, we love it, right? So to me, it has a really great monetary policy. It has a really great technical roadmap, right, where we pushed the technical innovation really to layer two, right, which I believe is a much better way of scaling a blockchain, not just scaling

for cheaper gas fees and stuff like that, but also scaling the technology and integrating better tech within the Ethereum stack. And then Ethereum has an absolutely awesome social layer where Ethereum as an ecosystem has been able to actually attract a really healthy group of people who are in it for the tech, who care about the values of decentralization, the values of freedom and the values of longevity too, which is very important, like building systems that can last a very long time. So that is really the core of why. I am so kind of like in Ethereum. I mean, I think that would be the same for you in that framework.

And that's, I think after explaining all that, that is definitely not something that I would expect someone that is newer to the ecosystem to understand because it is a learned thing. It is years of experience going through the cycles, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't, and then coming to your own conclusion about what you actually want to see. And if we look at other ecosystems that their current state, you know, people talk a lot about Salana, for example. And I'm going to start naming names here because I want to use concrete examples.

I think Salana are over-optimized on the technical side of things, right? They were all about the tech and they still are about the tech, right? But that meant their social layer got corrupted because not these days, obviously it's been flushed out, but when Salana started, their social layer was heavily dominated by profit maximalists, which was influenced by SBF and FTX and a lot of the crowd that they were able to attract via that, right? because those people used Salana's kind of like headlines of, of we've got better tech,

we've got more scalability, blah, blah, blah, as a way to make money, essentially, right? So that was kind of corrupted there. But, you know, it can evolve over time. It can change over time. I still think like Salana, these other layer ones out there, like Cardano, Pocador, all these other layer. I still think they optimize way too heavily on the technical side of things,

and they forget about the social layer, because the social layer then starts reflecting only the technical side, and they forget about the other. important parts of the social layer, which, as I mentioned, are things like, okay, how do we actually do decentralization outside of the technical properties, right? How do we ensure that we can recover from an attack or how can we recover from things like censorship and all those sorts of things? Like, that becomes an afterthought because all they're thinking about is the technical stuff as an ecosystem. And yeah, so that's like my whole framework and my whole spiel that I've come up

with and try to kind of formulate in my head. And as I said, it's very subjective. It's definitely not something that everyone's going to vibe with, but that's pretty much the reason why I spend so much time in Ethereum is because in my mind, it's the closest thing to hitting all three in a nice, equal, healthy, healthy way. 100%. Yeah. And that resonates with a lot of my sentiment as to why Ethereum is the thing that it is. Like, I think one of the reasons why I have the convictions on Ethereum that I do is because I kind of consider Ethereum like this singularity between so many different components of what makes a blockchain a blockchain. And like, you labeled out like the three big,

overarching categories. And like one of the reasons I think why bankless is what it is, is because we talk to so many different types of people. Like, what does a historian think about crypto? What does a cryptographer think about crypto? What does a macroeconomist think about crypto? What does computer scientists think about crypto? Like, how many, like, I can, what does a psychologist think about crypto, right? Like, the point is that, like, everyone has a lens of viewing crypto. and that is the power of crypto. Crypto has something for everyone and you can understand crypto

through your own lens and crypto can bring something to you based on where you came from in your walk of life because it's got something for you no matter where you came from. Like maybe it's a little bit easier if you understand computer science

and cryptography and economics but like if you even understand sociology you start to see some of the tribalism and you talk about that's the social layer right? And so the best ecosystem I've always thought is going to be a harmonization between so many different aspects of what makes a crypto system a crypto system. And it doesn't just stop at tech, right? It doesn't just stop at economics. It doesn't stop at

technicals. It's like all of these different mass variables. And that's why crypto itself is such a nerd snipe is because it's like in order to understand crypto, you need to understand a very wide swath of things about the world. And you also need to pattern match as to how these things fit together. And that is what I would call going down the crypto rabbit hole. And I totally agree with you where like the Bitcoiner world is over indexed on the economics. And then the Solana and you know, layer one world has over index on the tech. The thing is like, it's just saying, hey, we have the better tech. We have the better tech. If you actually miss the economics and the social layer, your tech isn't complete. Because the reason why Ethereum is doubling down on

the technology of roll-ups is that it scales the social layer and the economics layer. It harmonizes those things. And so you can say like our tech is better. Our tech is, you know, for some reason, has some competitive advantage. But if you have a social layer blind spot, you're missing in the ways that this technology actually doesn't scale at the social layer because you can only see the tech. And so like this is why I think like people can come into crypto and like understand 60% of what makes crypto crypto and then you end up as someone who like is a bitcoiner or a solanian person because they have a blind spot to the rest of the of the spectrum and this is why like i put out a tweet that um i said ethereum harmonizes diversity Ethereum has this um emphasis on pluralism

how do we have more tribes with more values exist in the same spot and I don't see any other layer one expouse that as a principle as a value but like pluralism is how you grow a network to the whole world. That is what that is. And that is why pluralism has been a word that the Ethereum community has stated from day one. And so, like, I totally agree with you. It's like there are many variables. And the layer one ecosystem that wins is going to be the one that harmonizes all of them better than anyone else.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, it's not just us saying this either. Like people will come at us or kind of hit back at us and say, you know, you can talk all you want. but like the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And I mean, it is, though. Like people will complain and they'll say, you know, why are people using Ethereum layer two's when they are inferior tech-wise to our layer one blockchain? It's like, okay, well, maybe take a step back and just actually ask yourself that question

and then go do some research to actually understand why. Because there's no point asking that, right, to, you know, to just avoid. You need to just actually, exactly. You need to internalize it. You need to actually deal with it. And I see so much cope over these sorts of stuff. And you just have to deal with it, right? You have to go out there and you have to think, okay, why is this the case?

To me, my kind of answer to that question is the social layer. The reason why Ethereum has, I guess, like arguably inferior tech that is more adopted than something that is better is because Ethereum has such a strong social layer that it attracts people to build within that ecosystem. It attracts people, smart people, to want to be in that ecosystem. ecosystem for the long term. They're not mercenaries. They are missionaries, which is actually something I should have mentioned before. There's that mercenary missionary balance. And I think you only get missionaries if you hit all three of those categories in a nice fashion. Otherwise, you get mercenaries on one side of

things. Like you can have mercenaries in the economics, where they just want to pump their bags as high as possible. You get mercenaries on the social layer. They just want to basically run in governance circles about and philosophy circles about what a blockchain should be and how this should act. These are the governance heavy, heavy chains out there. I'm not going to name names. I don't want to, I don't want to start flame wars. And then the technical side of things as well, right, where you just kind of do the same stuff there. So I think that people just need to kind of internalize these sorts of stuff and realize that it is because of that. It is because of that that very strong social layer. The tech at the end of the day, you know, the best tech never wins

in technology. It's always the kind of things that get adopted based on, I believe, a number of different factors, but I believe like a strong kind of social layer and a strong social presence and onboarding, obviously, developers and stuff like that is incredibly important. So, but, but all of this isn't to say that you can't like grow into this as a, as an ecosystem. Because Ethereum, as I said before, did not start with a good monetary policy and it did not start with a good technical roadmap. Ethereum started with a good social layer, in my opinion, because it started with the right values in mind and attracted the right people from the start.

But the thing is, is that Ethereum's monetary policy arguably did not actually get fixed or get to the point where we all wanted it to be until the merge happened. And that was literally a year ago, well, 11 months ago now, right? So that was a long time, seven years after Ethereum went live or even eight years, if you count the Ethereum ICO, right? And then the technical side of things, really, it's only the last two years where we've basically pushed all the technical stuff to layer two and gotten a lot of technical innovation happening there, two to three years. I mean, there's obviously stuff that happened earlier, but the last two to three years is where it's really started to take off. So you can grow into the other categories. But the thing is, is that it's incredibly difficult to do that because, and it depends where you start from. I think Ethereum is lucky because it started from a good base with the social layer.

It didn't start from the monetary base. It started from the social layer base. Now, it remains to be seen if you can start from the technical base and then grow into a healthy social layer and grow into a healthy monetary policy. I personally don't think most ecosystems are going to be able to do this. There might be one or two that can do this, but again, it's very, very difficult and not something that will happen overnight. It takes many years of kind of like meticulous planning from the community. And that's why it happened for Ethereum, because the social layer fixed the monetary policy,

right? The social layer basically came together and said, we don't think Ethereum layer one should scale for the world. We think we should push this to layer two. And then the social layer attracted the layer two builders to the ecosystem, smart people to the ecosystem to build layer twos. So that's why I think starting at the social layer is the strongest base you can start from. And that's why Ethereum has been so successful to this day. And it remains to be seeing what other ecosystems end up doing.

Yeah, there's a line that stuck with me in my head where if you have governance, you can have everything. And that line was meant for actually decred of all chains. Yeah, yeah, I remember that line. The point is, is that if you can coordinate your social layer, then you can have anything you want. And so, like, the social layer, I think is the hardest one. I think it's the thing that most crypto entrants have the biggest blind spot towards. They think it's just, you know, crypto economics, technology, money, right?

But it's, but then, so like we actually don't do a good job, I think, expressing the value of the social layer. Ethereum does. But, like, you're totally right. If you have the social layer, you can fix. things that are downstream of that, but the pinnacle of this whole thing or the foundation, the layer zero of this whole thing is a social layer. So I came in to go for it. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, I think it's because the dogma of a lot of crypto centers around

this decentralization myth of if you've got a lot of nodes, if you've got a lot of validators, you know, if you've got a high Nakamoto coefficient, which I believe is one of the worst metrics for measuring decentralization. But there's this dogma around that where it's like, If you've got all that, you're, you know, you're decentralized when not, or like, that's all you need. And it started, it started in Bitcoin and it kind of permeated into other ecosystems or perverted other ecosystems. But at the end of the day, what powers these ecosystems are the people, right? The people decide what these things are and what they are not.

And that is going to be true until the AI overlords take over if they ever do, right? And then it's up to them. But for now, for the reality that we live in, you know, Humans run the nodes. Humans run the infrastructure. Humans run the validators and the miners. Humans decide on the changes. You know, with Ethereum governance, it's not on-chain governance. It's all off-chain, soft governance.

But Ethereum's roadmap and its upgrades are all done by humans. And if Bitcoin was to ever do that, like, so let's say, for example, it had a bug, an inflation bug that needed to be fixed with a hard fork. Who do you think is going to fix that? It's not going to fix itself. Humans are going to fix it, right? The social layer is going to fix it. The social layer is going to come together and say, we need to fix this.

Everyone upgrade their nodes. We're now going to run on this new chain that doesn't have this inflation bug anymore. Not the new chain, but like the fork chain, right? So at the heart of it, at the heart of it, ultimately, it's the social layer truth that is the real truth. We can build all the systems that we want. We can make something extremely decentralized from a technical point of view, and that's all well and good. But at the end of the day, what you need to build for and what is the most important thing is like if everything else fails, the foreback is the social layer. If you have a shit social layer,

you're going to have shit outcomes. And that's basically the ultimate truth in my mind. Yeah. I got to read you a comment from the YouTube. Skynet says, David's beard is actually a ZK roll-up of Sazel's beard. I actually had mine trimmed recently. It was a lot longer. Oh, this is pretty long for me, actually. Yeah, yeah. I've got a rant for you. And it is a... a, call it a, so like I come from, uh, my character class coming into crypto is like the, or not character class, but like my background is psychology, sociology. And so I come into

crypto and like one of the most immediately fascinating things was tribes. Like tribes. It's so obvious about tribes. You run into crypto and like you discover tribes. Uh, and so like I've got, and so like that's been like the lens that I see crypto through. And so I've got a audit, a character analysis of like the archetype of the Salana community. that I want to run by you. Ready? Okay. But first, we're going to do some ads to help sponsor this show.

Thanks. Extra thanks to Cracken. Our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023, whether you are dollar cost averaging into crypto to prepare for the bull market or you're taking profits out of crypto, be sure to do it with Cracken. The newly designed Cracken Pro makes it super easy to do both your basic financial transactions while also taking your trading to the next level.

Cracken Pro is truly the trading U.S. that you've always wanted. So if your bull market archetype is the trader class, You need Crack and Pro in your toolkit, but if your character class is more of a Defy Journeyman or a woman, then Metamask Portfolio is the tool for you. Menomask portfolio is your Defi multi-chain battle station. Any asset on any Ethereum Layer 2,

Medamask portfolio will present it to you. So don't get caught for getting assets or missing opportunities. Make sure you're prepared for the Bull Run by prepping your Menomask portfolio. Moving on from tools you need to playing fields to play on, the Arbitram Layer 2 is one of the main arenas in which this bull market will be fought on. Whether your character class is a Defy Dgen, AirDrop Hunter, or Heald Seeker, the Arbitrum Coliseum is where a ton of the action is going to be.

So whether you're on Arbitrum 1 for Defi and NFTs or Arbitrum Nova for Web 3 gaming or a new frontier on Arbitrum, using an Arbitrum orbit chain, there are so many opportunities to sink your teeth into. But as we know, the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap produces all kinds of layer 2s.

And Mantle is one of the newest layer 2s on the scene, with some of the newest technology that Ethereum Layer 2s has to offer in the year 2023. Mantle is built using the O-P stack, but uses eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer one, reducing gas fees by 80% compared to other layer two's.

With billions of dollars standing by by bit-by from BitDAO to invest in Mantle, make sure you stay ahead of the game by building and growing your on-chain footprint on mantle. Let's not forget about the ETH staking character class, and Stater makes it easy. Running a staking pool with Stater just requires four ether for a deposit,

letting you charge a fee to the remaining 28 ether that uses your node to stake their ETH, increasing your yield by 35%. Sater's staked ether token, ETHX, allows you to stake your ether and use it in DFI at the same time. For all you, DFI swappers out there, this one is for you. U2Swap X has opened up a brand new landscape to play in, and it's the world of intense. This is where those who employ the swapping ability get to team up with the evil MEV-Bot army, and they get to band together to discover the most efficient liquidity route through the Ethereum landscape.

Gas-free swaps, M-EV protection, and theoretically optimal pricing. When swappers and MEVers come together, new metas happen, and it's thanks to UNiswap X. So the next time you trade on UNiswap, consider clicking the UNiswap X button to get your MEV protection. And so, if we're truly entering a bull market phase in crypto, which we totally are, then tokens are going to start flying all over the place. So if you're an organization looking to grow with token incentives, then look at no further than Toku. If you want to distribute tokens to your employees, team members, or for payroll,

Toku can help you comply with labor laws, tax obligations, and reporting for whatever country you employ someone. Crypto is entering its regulated era. And Toku can help you achieve your token incentive award goals with compliance. So thank you to all the sponsors that support bankless and all the podcast editors, newsletter writers, and operations managers who make the bankless organization the best that we can be. We truly appreciate your support. And for all the listeners out there who listen to the mountains of content

that we turn out each week, especially this one right here. So let's go on to the show. And we're back. All right. This is my take about the Solana community. Like how did the Solana community come to be? And so we have the Altlier ones, and all Altlier ones start off as an underdog, right?

And then they attract some community for some particular reasons, like Solana was the tech. And to give Salana credit, like the whole single shared global state, like leaning into the monolithic strategy, is a competitive difference that like Avalanche Phantom just does not have. So that's their thing, right? That's their tech,

like single global shared state. And I think a lot of, for a while during the bear market that you and I, were kind of formed in as Ethereum's. A lot of our identity was like built up by being, um, in contrast to Bitcoiners. Because Bitcoiners just bullied the absolute F out of us. Like your guys's monetary policy is broken. You can't run Ethereum full node.

And like even though like those things were fundamentally wrong, like there were kernels of truth there that actually we had to actually go and work on. At some point in time, the Ethereum community, and I remember it was like right during defy summer. And I know this because I had my POV crypto podcast episode. podcast itself with me and my Bitcoiner co-host. And as soon as the bull market started, we just split off.

Like he went and did Bitcoin media. I went and did bank lists. We just doubled down on our own respective ecosystems. But the Ethereum community grew up, and we stopped being in the shadow of Bitcoiners. And because we had technological escape velocity, right? We had things like EIP-1559 to rally around. We had proof of stake that eventually got shipped.

We had layer twos that started to form. We had defy. We had our own home-built narratives. that allowed us to, like, grow up and have our own foundation to stand on and stop being out of the shadow of Bitcoiners. But a lot of us, like, learned to fight on Twitter that way. And then, so, like, that was, like, the Bitcoin was the older brother. It was punching us, and we learned to have to grow a hard shell and, like, bootstrap our way out of that, using, you know, technical growth. And that was social layer growth.

The Salon community, I think there's a little, there's definitely a lot of the same relationship that the Salonah community has to Ethereum, that Ethereum had to Bitcoiners. So it's a little bit of the same. It's also a little bit different. Like, we bully the Salana community. We bully them because we think that their tech is broken and we think that their social layer is broken. And we're frustrated that they don't see that. And so they, I think a lot of them have chosen Solana just to be antagonistic to Ethereum. Not antagonistic, like reactive, reactive to Ethereum.

And like the thing that fascinates me the most about this industry is that culture and people, the code. and the culture resonate with each other like code defines culture culture defines code and like kaisamani and multi-coin capital are like they are like we are the contrarian investors like everyone was doubled down doubling down on Ethereum we double down on EOS because it is contrary into Ethereum okay that didn't work but we're gonna run back the same exact playbook we're gonna just be whatever is contrarian to Ethereum and that frustrates you and me and like the Ethereum community because we see

like what we were talking about with like the harmony between the social layer, technical layer and the economics layer. And like I see like that goes like to the furthest reaches of knowledge. Like Ethereum just harmonizes everything. And so to us, we see people being contrarient to that and being like, what the F are you doing? Ethereum is a singularity of all important variables.

And if you're going to be contrarian to that, like you're actually just working against the values of crypto. That's like our perspective. And so, but then the Solana community is like, learning about our behavior. So like, you know, think like some 15 year old kid. And then you have some, that's Ethereum.

And then you have some like, you know, six, seven year old kid. And they're like seeing their older brother, their older sibling, their older network do things and exhibit certain behaviors. And so like we kind of bully them. But then they just need to learn to ban together and also be bullies. Because this is what just tribal warfare is doing. This is the milieu of crypto. But they are, Ethereum is doing it in my opinion because it has

certain values and beliefs and perspectives around the world. And then, but the Solana people, I think the, the amalgamation of the Salana community, just complete blanket statements, exists as a reaction to Ethereum because that's one of, that's like, the one of the reasons why, like, they are all coming together is because they think Sol will pump from like $25 to $250 and it would go up versus ether. I think a large part of the identity of Solana is specifically to be in contrast to Ethereum, because we created, we accidentally created that because we carried forth our trauma with the bitcoiners and then pass it down the line to the salon of people.

Except what the salon of people is missing is like they have social layer blind spot because they don't see like all the variables that you and I were talking about earlier. They just kind of see like, hey, if we band together, if we like put our flag down and put our foot down and say, hey, you're not going to bully us. Actually, it's your guys' networks that's broken. It's actually the monolithic way that's forward. single shared state, blah, blah, blah, layer twos are never going to work,

et cetera. They're playing the games. They're playing games on Twitter. And like they love to dunk. They love to dunk. They love to like tweets. They love to say, oh, that's a ratio. And they love to say that that's like proof of how this whole thing works. But in reality, they're just being one big tribe, one big monolithic tribe.

And I think like a decent amount of Ethereum actually created that in Solana because we taught them how to fight on crypto Twitter because we were the ones that were bullying them. But it still doesn't change the fact that like they it is a reaction to ethereum and not because they are built under their own merits which is what i would say the ethereum community is and so like i think to salana community salon is going to make it like they they have carved out their own niche and that's going to there's enough of a value landscape there that they're actually going to like be able to ride that and

that's going to work they think that they're going to flip ethereum they're always just going to live inside of our shadow because they can't because they that's i'll stop there but that's kind of my take No, no, I mean, I think, look, you obviously spend more time in the Solana community than I do. I don't really spend any time there. But I think generally your points do apply to like a lot of L1s over the years, if I'm being honest. I think they're not exclusive to Solana because if you look at what a lot of the L1 do, pretty much all of them do, they do try to be contrarian to Ethereum, right? Because that is their moat.

That is their competitive advantage, as you said. That is the thing that they can latch onto and rally around. Now, just I guess to keep it on context with the Salana context, this is what I was talking about before about how because they are going down the monolithic approach, right, they believe in this shared global state. They believe in doing everything at layer one. The technical layer is actually influencing the social layer. Yeah.

So their social layer is influenced directly by the technical merits of Solana rather than anything else. So that's why they've got the monetary policy blind spot. lot, right? And that's why their social layer is only focused on the technical stuff. It's not focused on the other stuff that goes into the social layer that, as I explained before. At least that's my kind of view of things as they have existed. Now, I think this is very true for the other L-1s as well. Like I see this in the other L-1s. They have sprinkles of their own kind of, I guess, niches that they follow. Like, for example, I mentioned before, are these governance heavy chains, the ones that believe in like having never-ending philosophical discussions around how governance should be done.

You know, they've got on-chain governance. They want to debate this. They want to kind of say, okay, we have a good governance system because of this, this, this, and this reason. They go back in history and look at human governance systems and try to apply that to blockchains. I guess we do that in Ethereum as well. We just don't do it at the base layer, right? We do it at the app layer. So it's a different kind of abstraction there. So it doesn't influence everything. It just influences who wants to pay attention to it. So that's, that's kind of why I was bringing up the categories before, because I really do think that those three categories hit on literally everything and explain pretty much everything we've seen play out in these L1 ecosystems. But at the same time, if we want to focus on the L1 ecosystems as, you know, obviously there's the monolithic approach as the modular approach, but there's also a different approach here as well.

There is the approach of what is your L1 trying to be outside of scaling, right? Like what is it trying to actually be? Well, Ethereum is trying to be a settlement layer for VIII. value, right? It is not trying to be a globally executable and scalable execution layer. We've pushed all that to layer two. So, funny enough, you could use the Salana execution layer, which is what they are. They're not going for the sediment layer. They're going for the execution layer. You could use that as an L2 on Ethereum. And from, you know, what I've seen and what I've kind of researched, that would actually work quite well, right? And it would actually hit on the points that they still want. They

still want that globally shared state, they still want that ultra-scalable execution layer, it would still hit on that. And that's not me saying that Solana should become an L2 on Ethereum because they're inferior, whatever, but it depends on what your goals are. If your goals are to do that, then I think that they just works better in that context. But they obviously want to do it their own way. And as you said before, there is a contrarianism there, which I totally get. You know, Ethereum was contrarian to Bitcoin. Ethereum was very different to Bitcoin in the technical aspects where Ethereum was like, no, we're actually going to do things on chain. We're actually going to do smart contracts. We're going to do

defy. We're not going to outsource these to centralize services and exchanges. So there was that contrariness in there. So I do see the similarities and I do see the different tribes that kind of form here. But it's just funny how it all still fits into those three categories and you can actually map out where they all kind of sit. And you could probably do like one of those alignment charts or whatever you want to do and kind of map each ecosystem to it. It wouldn't be an exact science, but it would give you you a general picture of what things look like. And as I said, it can evolve over time. It is not a static thing, but it definitely is hard to evolve. So, but yeah, I mean, I can't comment too

deeply on the Salina ecosystem itself because as I said, I don't, and the community too, I don't spend a lot of time in there. But like just from what I see and from from what I've talked to, especially with you who do, who does spend more time in there and other people, that that's kind of what I say. The focus too much on the technical stuff. The social layer stuff seems to be misunderstood or not well understood by them. And the monetary policy stuff, I don't even need to talk to them to understand that because I can see Solana's monetary policy.

I can see these other L ones. And I can see that they're not sustainable. And I don't think that they're, they're going to be sustainable for the foreseeable future because the monolithic design, I don't think it actually translates well to a good monetary policy. But that's a whole different discussion there. But yeah.

This is what when I was talking about like, hey, if you have like economic blindness or social layer blindness, you don't actually get to fully express the best version of tech, right? You actually need a harmonization between all three in order to maximize all three. And so like the, again, sweeping blanket statements here, like a lot of the feedback and like criticism I get out of the Salana crowd about layer two's is that like layer twos are fundamentally broken. Fraud proofs will never ship. It's like a line that like, again, not every Salon person says, but like a line that I hear like

fraud proofs are never going to work, layer twos are totally not going to manifest. And so they are taking a... Well, they have to, that has to be true for their contrarian bet to be true, right? They need that tech to not be true so that their tech can be true. Similarly for us, we need the monolithic approach to not work and not be true for our approach to be true and to work, right? So it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, but I would also say just like, there are fundamental, like, logical constraints that the monolithic approach has.

Like somebody in a comment says, like I remember totally talking about making Ethereum a layer two on Solana Lamau. Like you can't, you can't, like you can't hold layer twos on Solana and also the monolithic approach in the same breath.

Like you must have everything on one single network at all times. But that never makes any sense because like say you have Solana and you have one gigantic network, you will also be able to scale it by making another Solana settle down to Solana.

Like, you can add more salinas. Like, you can have a salonelana layer two on top of the salon of layer one. Like, the idea of putting the entire globe on one layer one is just not going to work. At least that is the reaction that I am having. And so they need-d-proof. And that's why we believe in the roll-up centric roadmap over the monolithic roadmap, right? That is really the crux of it. We don't think it's technically superior.

But obviously, they do. And I think it's also a bit of a kind of thing of, hey, let's try and, and do it, right? And believing that they actually can do it. Because if for some reason, we're completely wrong and they actually can do it, right, then for them, that's like a history defining kind of moment, right? It's a huge thing for them, right? So it's kind of, they're kind of forced into that position. Because if they just say, we're going to do L2s, we're going to do the roll-up stuff, well, that narrative just gets shattered, right, of being that contrarian. Dude, I've talked to an avalanche person that I won't name names, but like it was very

right after a talk at a conference, and I went up to them because it was a layer two's versus like subnets debate. And they just like after like they said like yeah, we like we can't really do layer twos because Ethereum took all the layer two mind share. That's why we do subnets. And I'm like, did you really just say that out loud to me? The shit? And so like that's why I mean like a lot of like Solana would do layer twos if Ethereum hadn't already captured all of that market share. And so like they are confined into the monolithic strategy because that's all that is left. And so, like, they can't admit that layer two's work in any sort of flavor because that's bearish on like the whole Solana archetype vision for itself.

Exactly. And it's kind of what you see replicated across everything in, I think, in life, really, especially with companies that compete on the same product. They have to always differentiate themselves from their competitors, even if it doesn't make sense. So, for example, Apple removal. the headphone jack, right? Why did they do that? It was a point of differentiation for them, right? It was something that stood them, make them stand out from the crowd. Even if it wasn't

the thing that everyone wanted or needed or was even necessary, they did that, right? And then their competitors kind of followed them with it. And then the competitors got made fun of because they're just like, you're just copying them now. And Apple, you know, obviously is that, but this is one example of something that happens. So, and I think that, as you said, like, Avalanche doing their subnets, it's like, well, we believe it's a strictly inferior system to L2s, but they can't do L2s because if they do L2s, they're just Ethereum. Right. And I think that it also isn't just a technical thing.

It's also like a monetary policy thing, for example. If Ethereum just copied Bitcoin's monetary policy, everyone would be like, well, I'm just going to buy Bitcoin. Why would I buy a ETH? Like, it's the, if it's the same thing. So, but I obviously believe Ethereum's monetary policy is better than Bitcoin's, but other people don't, right? And they kind of like fall into these different categories here. But it's always funny seeing that player, especially on the technical side of things, where things just get done

because people want to differentiate themselves. They think that that's the only way their product can succeed. And I don't blame them for doing that because that is really a kind of prevalent thing that's been going on for, you know, as long as technological innovation has happened. But at the end of the day, you can't fight reality. You can't fight the truth. And the truth will reveal itself on a long enough time scale. And I think when it comes to Ethereum and its roll-up-centric roadmap, the truth is revealing itself. The truth is saying that Ethereum's roll-up-centric roadmap is awesome. Everything that you fuded Ethereum about like the, I remember the seven-day withdrawal period being a huge point of fud for optimistic robs. No one talks about that anymore, right? The shared liquidity stuff

people talk about a lot as well. They still talk about it now, but it's less of a discussion. You mentioned the fraud-proof stuff. I mean, Arbushram has fraud-proofs. They're going to decentralize their fraud-proofs. It's the dumbest fun. It is, it is. And then they start fudding the sequences. So every, and that's another thing, right? When you kind of like have to meet reality, you have to adjust the fud because you can know, like there's a reality shield that goes up and it basically says, well, you can't

fud this anymore. Like with people fighting the merge is never going to happen. Merge happens. What do they pivot to? Right. Withdrawals are never going to happen. Withdrawals happen. What are they pivot to something else?

The same bitcoins that have been fudding Ethereum since 2019 are still fuding Ethereum to this day. And all of the fud that they have given us over the last four years. we've executed on and they are still Bitcoiners. Why? It's because they've picked a tribe, right? They are a reaction to another tribe. And like that's the thing that frustrates me the most about like the Solana camp.

It's because they've they've picked their identity. They've placed their bets and they're doubling down on it no matter what. And at some point the market humbles you. I'm frustrated because like the Salana community won't be humbled by the market I think for like four more years. And in the meantime, like Seoul's probably going to go up to $250 next bull market. But they're still wrong. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

Like, I guess regardless of price, because I don't think price is a good metric, a good measure of success in crypto. Because, I mean, look at the top 10, top 20. It's pretty just stupid, right? But like, I think generally on the tech side of things, like, we can already see the winners. And people will say, oh, well, you know, these other ecosystems will catch up. Maybe they will. Right. Maybe they will.

And that's the contrarian bet that you're making. Maybe we're totally wrong and rollups fade away. but I just don't see that. And it comes a point where it's like you can no longer deny the reality, right? The reality is this. If you keep denying it, you are viewed as a crazy person. And then people just ignore you. And that's why the Bitcoin community turned inwards so much.

And everyone really ignores the Bitcoin maximalists because they look insane. Right. Yeah, because all those with their talking points. The smart ones left. And so it just left the crazy ones. Yes. And the crazy ones kept saying stuff that kept being wrong. And eventually people just, the smart people, as you said,

they clue in and all the people who don't just aren't indoctrinated into that kind of tribe are like, well, you guys are insane. You have said this same stuff for years and none of it has come true. So they just leave. So I think that, again, comes to social layer, right? When you have a social layer like that, it doesn't lend itself to good outcomes anywhere else. Yeah. Although I do have more optimism about the Salana community more than like the current state of Bitcoin

Maxi community. Well, yeah, I mean, I think I think I have more. I have more optimism about any community compared to the Bitcoin one generally, but, you know, that's not a high bar. But yeah, I mean, as I said, these things definitely evolve over time. Communities evolve. They change. They expel the people that the majority maybe doesn't want, right?

And maybe sometimes you expel the wrong people. Like, as I said, the Bitcoin Maximus community, they expelled all the smart Bitcoiners. But, you know, the Salana community, to their credit, they've expelled all that crap from the SBF era, I guess you could call it. And they've managed to build up a semblance of a healthy community from me looking in the inside. I see some semblance there. Yeah, it's definitely healthier. So to their credit, for sure. But as I said, it is an extremely uphill battle.

If you started from a bad base, it's going to be very hard to get to a good base on multiple fronts. And also, you have competition. You're not doing it in a vacuum. You have competing ecosystems that also want to be the one that wins at the end of the day. And they also have communities that are very kind of tribal about their thing. Whether that's right or wrong, it's just the way I think crypto ecosystems work. Yeah, certainly. What do you think is like the biggest thing on the Ethereum roadmap future that is like,

so like the big thing that we had versus the Bicorners is like proof of stake? Bitcoiners for years were like, proof of stake is never going to ship? And then it did. what do you think is like the next version of that that's on the Ethereum frontier? Well, I think we're already seeing it in terms of like the L2 stuff, right? Where as I was just saying before, there's fight around centralized sequences. There's fight around things not having fraud proofs, which I understand like the actual legitimate concerns around fraud proofs not being enabled, right?

Centralized sequencers is not nearly as big of a deal as like the Salonic community thinks it is. Like actually it's kind of one of the perks of the layer two is like you can actually have a centralized sequencer and it's totally fine. Yeah, but that's the thing. Like, they're overblowing stuff in that regard. But yeah, I think that's... It's just got the C word in it of centralized. And they're like, oh, it's centralized.

Yes, exactly. So I think that's totally overblown. The, as I said, the fraud-proof stuff. I understand the legitimate reasons for being concerned with that, like security risks, things like that. But if your thesis is that these are things are never going to have ford-proofs, that's just stupid because we already have an optimistic roll-up in arbitram one that has fraud-proofs.

But and the funny thing is about this is that we have a site that tracks all of this for the L2s. We have L2B.com, which is the most amazing website that could have been created to track this, right? And we don't have L1B.com. We can't track all this stuff for L1s, right? We can't. There's no, there's no resource that exists for these L1s to track these sorts of stuff. But for the L2s, you have this. You can go there and you can read about every single L2.

You can read about their architecture. You can go look at their contracts because there's links to that. And you can digest all this information and actually understand this. But people don't and won't do that, of course, right? Because they don't really care about that. So that's the next stuff that I've been saying. It's all the L2 stuff. The reason why it's the L2 stuff is because that is now the user-facing layer.

The L1 stuff is very besides 48-44, right, which I haven't seen fudded yet. I thought more people would fud this, but I think they're just very behind. I thought more people would fud the fact that the blobs expire after a certain amount of time. And they would use that and say, oh, that means you're never going to be able to know if that, if that, with what that happened was true or secure, wait, that's not how it works at all, but I thought there'd be more fud around that.

Maybe I'm going to create the fud. Maybe I'm making people aware of that now. Yeah, yeah. So it's really just L2 stuff that the fud has kind of moved to. And I think that's actually a really positive thing, because as I said, like the L2 fud is so fucking weak. Like,

it's so weak. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And we have L2B.com, which tracks all this stuff that you can just easily link to people and say, hey, this is actually what it is. You know, this is what's happening here.

and that's basically it. Like I know the L2 team's debate, I guess is a word you can use against each other on Twitter and things like that. And as I said, there are legitimate concerns. But the fud that happens, man, it's just, it's all the same. It's always the same fud. It's always just bullshit. Yeah.

Maybe this is a naive take, but I don't know. As crypto industry grows up and progresses and we become more mainstream, a lot of that just has to get suppressed, like the fudding and the tribalism. It becomes insider stuff, right, man. I remember reading strings of emails from like the Linux developers and like, who do you think's reading those emails? It's not the everyday person. It's tech nerds who care about tech drama.

So like it's the same thing. Do you think the majority of crypto Twitter is reading debates between L2 teams? No. Like the majority of crypto Twitter is looking for shit coins to gamble on, right? like it's it's it's it's i think we're already at that point where it may seem loud to us because we're involved with it we are you know we're amongst that kind of crowd but generally it's not and and like think about all the people who are buying coins on centralized exchanges they don't even know what an l2 is let alone the debates around it yeah the the tweet i sent out yesterday about

addressing the bankless fud like we got so many comments inside the bankless discourse saying like david why did you write this tweet like what was this in reaction to i don't even know what's going on and i'm like don't yeah so like we're fighting with people, it's okay. Yeah, and that's a thing, right? Like, when you're the, when you're the one facing the fud and the brunt of it, you think that everyone knows about it, right? You think that you are the thing that everyone's paying attention to in that moment because there's this drama. But in reality, most people have no idea what's going on because they're not plugged in like we are, right, into that sphere. They're plugged into something else, right? So it's the same with,

with anything, I think, but yeah, it's always, it's always funny when that happens. Like, I, I, I, I, I, sometimes wake up and I see something on Twitter and then I go talk about it in the Daily Way Discord and they don't know what I'm talking about and I'm like, what do you mean? I've seen it all over Twitter and I link it to them and they ask me when I when I ship post about it too or when I'm like meaming about it like, dude, what are you talking about? I'm like, what do you mean? You see this? It's all over Twitter.

They didn't. They just didn't see it for some reason, right? So I think overestimating how much coverage something has is something that we all do, I think. Yeah, certainly. Ember verse in the chat just said Gotta go guys I just thought that the Daily Gway is up So since people are gonna go flock to the Daily Gway

Anthony you want to pull up your YouTube channel So we can all see it I can pull it up I mean I don't Yeah For all the 200 people that have been watching this show And then all the people up on the RSS feed We're going to talk about what Anthony

Cizano does every single day If you like this conversation Anthony talks every single day For 30 minutes, 45 minutes today because he was paying some content debts. Yes. Yeah, I didn't do one yesterday, so I did one. I didn't add an extra long one today to make up for that.

I always do that because I feel bad for not doing it. I'm trying to find the window here that I've got the thing on. I have a million Google Chrome tabs open. It's crazy. Yeah, so Anthony just want to log for like 30 minutes straight in a side of a single breath about everything that's going on on Ethereum. It's called the Daily Gway. It's a YouTube channel.

It's also I get it on my RSS feeds. And then he also writes every single day on his newsletter. Oh, no. Actually, I don't anymore. I haven't for a while. I haven't seen that in a while. Yeah. So I,

it's actually a podcast content always dominates over writing content, doesn't it? It does. But it's also because I was writing the newsletter every day and I was doing the podcast every day. And I was overlapping constantly with what I was talking about. And I understand that not everyone watches the podcast, and then everyone reads a newsletter, but I just was like, I'm repeating myself so much, and it's a lot of work to write something every day. It is. So I might bring it back as like a maybe twice a week thing where I can write longer form pieces or maybe even once a week.

But yeah, I mean, as a fellow writer, you know how intense it can be. I've been on a writing binge, but I am slightly behind. So that's actually going to be what I'm going to do today. I'm going to write the piece that goes out on Monday. Awesome. Awesome. Anthony, this has been great to catch up with you, my man. We are always. should be doing this as more more than we actually do. Everyone enjoys it. That's what I hear from the chat. So appreciate you coming on, brother. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, I guess like happy Ethereuming, if that's a word.

Ethereuming. All right, Banklessation and Daily Gwee Eatings. What do you call your community? Daily Gwheres? Yeah, I know. I never use that. You got to find a name for our community. All right, banklessation and Gwheres. You know the deal. Crypto's risky, defile Crypto is risky. You can lose what you pin.