Bankless - ROLLUP: 1st Week of February (ATH for $ETH & $DPI, Logan Paul NFTs, HashMasks, Saylor Conference)

Starting point is 00:00:01 All right, Bankless Nation, welcome to the first week of February. What are we doing today, David? We are rolling up the news, which is an ambitious exercise these days because the news in this crypto industry just does not stop. We are going through five different sections to make sure that you can stay up to date with this crazy world of crypto. First, we're talking about the markets. What are the markets saying? Then we're talking about releases. What got released? Then we go into news, what is in the news cycle. And then we finish up with some takes that we find interesting around the ecosystem. And then we finish up with what we are excited about me and Ryan. But actually, we have a special new section this week and this weekly roll-up, which is the meme of the week,

Starting point is 00:00:48 which is something that we are going to finish up on moving forward. Mem of the week. I'm super excited to see what you selected this week. As usual, guys, this comes out Friday morning so you can enjoy it with your morning coffee. We used to have this down to like 30 minutes, but now it's taking a little bit longer. But this is the most digestible way to get the crypto news into your brains every week. So we're glad you're with us. David, are you ready? I am ready. All right. Let's roll them up. We're starting with markets today. So we always have to start with Bitcoin. What's going on in Bitcoin land? Bitcoin, $37,000 continuing to range between 40 and $30,000. If you are interested in an alt season or a defy season, this is what you want to see.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Bitcoin ranging, staying in, staying between that range of 30 to 40,000, consolidating there, letting people buy into Bitcoin and slowly fill their bags without pumping the price too much. And then some of that extra value can flow downstream to the low cap tokens. That's what I see happening in this market right now. Yeah, rumor has to David. You own no Bitcoin. Maybe we'll get to that later. That's the rumor going around on the interwebs these days.

Starting point is 00:01:57 All right. A little bit more than rumor. There is more going on in ETH price this week, though. Bitcoin had sort of a flat-ish week, but ETH price did not. I hope if you were an ETH holder, you like all-time highs because we're seeing them on the daily. I remember the 1500s like it was yesterday. And in fact, it only lasted a day. We're in 1600s and beyond.

Starting point is 00:02:17 What's going on here? Yeah, $100 a day added to the ETH price keeps the bears away. That's what we like. Actually, Eith Price has broken all-time highs every single week for the past three weeks. but this week was a little bit different. Previous weeks, it only broke it by $20. First, it broke the $1420 by $20 at $1440, then $1460, then $14.80. But now we smashed through that record.

Starting point is 00:02:43 We touched $1,700 yesterday, and now we are at $16.30. We've ranged between $17 and $1,600 for the past 24 hours. Nice job, Eith, showing a really strong momentum right now. You know, some people will say this is like too much too soon. But I honestly find it fitting, David, because we are about like one week exactly. Heath hit all time highs one week exactly from the GameStop fiasco. And I'm not sure if that's like an accident. Like I think there's there's evidence here that people started to fund exchanges and start getting interested in get interested in crypto as a result of. of what was going on with GameStop and Robin Hood and AMC and everything that's going on in Wall Street bets. Do you think that is a safe link to make? I think that's absolutely right. And I think some of the evidence for that is that it takes

Starting point is 00:03:42 three to four days to get your deposits cleared into Coinbase. And if you wanted to extend three to four days back in or in front of or after the GameStop drama, that was Wednesday and Thursday where we really saw ETH moving on on Coinbase and other exchanges, but also importantly, a lot of defy tokens on Coinbase as well. Avey, we're going to talk about Avey in a second, but Avey kind of like the brand of Defy, along with Uniswob, jumped an insane amount from $300 to $560 earlier today. I think that's a sign that retail investors are here on Coinbase and their deposits are finally clearing. Well, let's look at it from a DefyPulse Index perspective. David, it seemed like just a few weeks ago, this was hovering around 100.

Starting point is 00:04:27 It's jumped up to 413, the DPI, the DFI pulse index has. And total locked value in DFI has also exploded to about $32 billion. Pretty impressive here, like these DFI stats. Yeah, last week there was 26 and a half billion locked in DFI, so we're up $6 billion on that. And then last week, DPI was $290. It's at 413 now, really strong weeks. The best week ever for DFI prices. Yeah, this is kind of the DFI pulse index overtime. And this is an all-time high according to this index around 400.

Starting point is 00:05:07 So is a D-Fi season then, David. I think D-Fi season is just getting started. But yeah, I think we are in D-Fi season. Well, something we looked at last week, and I think we'll continue to do it on the roll-ups, is this ratio, this DPI to ETH price. ratio. Tell us about this and what it's doing right now and why it's important. Yeah, this is something I'm keeping a close eye on DPI, the DFI Pulse Index, of course, is an index for all of DFI. And it's breaking out versus Ether. We're looking at a

Starting point is 00:05:39 versus Ether chart. And so, you know, DPI versus US dollar tells you one story, but I think DPI versus Ether tells you a much more interesting story. When DeFi tokens start outperforming Ether, the base asset of Ethereum, that is indication of DeFi season, you know, quote unquote, defy season. And the DPI index, it's a relatively young asset. It started in September, I believe. And so it's six months old. But we're already pushing up near to the all-time highs that we saw in the DeFi summer where DPI was born. And as the crazy thing is, you know, Ether did its absolute insane run from like $1,300 to $1,700. Yet DPI was green versus Ether in that.

Starting point is 00:06:23 performing ether. Outperformed ether. And that hasn't happened since DFI summer, but it has been happening. Outperformance of ether on the DPI has been happening since early January up until now. And you think that's going to continue in the near term. Well, so the cycle, the tweet that I put out, the cycle is, you know, first Bitcoin, then Ether, then DFi C's, then DFI tokens. And we already saw Bitcoin, you know, it's 2x all time high. Ether is like $2 to $300 above its all time high. And so like there could be room for it still being ether's turn, but defy tokens look like they are ready to go. And so I think the jury is still out, whether it's still ether's turn or defy season. But, you know, things are trending towards defy season right now.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Very interesting. All right. Let's talk Avey, because that has been an explosive asset this week. Actually, before we touch on Avey, you know that another metric we should talk about, David, is the ETH to Bitcoin ratio. That's another ratio that we monitor. What's going on with that? Yeah, this is Chris Berniske, who I know pays attention to the ETH BTC ratio.

Starting point is 00:07:28 He has similar theses that I do. Perhaps I'm actually just kind of absorbing his knowledge. I like Chris, and I think he's a smart guy. So I think it's a smart thing to do. But the Eith BTC ratio is approaching a two and a half year high. We haven't seen these levels since 2017. And of course, the last time we saw a quote unquote alt season, which is now DFI season as a brand, by the way.

Starting point is 00:07:49 And so like two and a half years. And so, you know, ETH hasn't been higher than Bitcoin at this level for two and a half years. And what Chris is saying is that, you know, when Ether breaks these levels, this channel that Heath has been in for two and a half years, it's really indicative of people going risk on and looking down the market cap for, you know, more and more speculative bets. And this is kind of how we anticipated this Bull Run would play out. First, first Bitcoin, as you said, and then Ether would outperform Bitcoin. we've seen that. Now it's happening. It's gaining on the ratio. And then defy would further outperform

Starting point is 00:08:24 ether. So defy would outperform both ether and Bitcoin. It's kind of exactly, it's playing out exactly as we expected it would so far. And I'm like, I'm wondering if, if that model is going to continue to hold or if we should expect something unexpected because this is crypto. Yeah. It's definitely something to pay attention to. This is how I have my portfolio positioned. I'm bullish. I do want to make a note that like people that go too far down the market cap stack that go too far into the speculation of defy tokens, especially if they do it too late in the game, that can be too risky. So understand that when people go risk on, they are taking a lot of risk. And if the market decides to turn against you, you are exposed. So don't go crazy speculating

Starting point is 00:09:11 on defy tokens. You know, keep your foundations, keep your crypto monies. I think that the big question is, where are we in the cycle from a high level? If you're to compare this to 2017, is this more March of 2017, or is this more July or November of 2017? I would err on the side of this being more like March 2017 in that this bull run is just getting started, but it is hard to tell.

Starting point is 00:09:34 It's hard to time these things. That's why you dollar cost average in, have some discipline with respect to your portfolio, and be careful. Don't fall into the FOMO traps. David, speaking of a FOMO trap, Oh my God. Ave, what are you doing?

Starting point is 00:09:51 The Ave token. Wow, where did it start this week and where is it now? Well, just give us the last two days, actually. Yeah, last two days, Avey, two days ago was $300. At the time of speaking, like an hour ago, it touched $550. So rivaling ether in unit price gains from $300 to $550, that is absolutely insane in two days. that's almost doubling the AVE market cap. Insane.

Starting point is 00:10:19 It's worth $6 billion at this point now. Six billion market cap. Yeah. And this is why I think the DeFi season is on. And especially because we're seeing the Coinbase Ave price outstrip the Binance ABE price or the Uniswap Avey price because that is where cash is getting injected into the ecosystem. You know, Ave is kind of like a bellwether for the rest of defy, I think. You know, same thing with Uniswap.

Starting point is 00:10:42 I would also put Uniswap in that category. That's a great point. So people are, fresh Fiat is coming on, you know, Coinbase rails and directing, and injecting itself directly into some of these defy tokens. That's what we're seeing with Uniswap. That's what we're seeing on Avey. They're both listed on Coinbase. Really fascinating here.

Starting point is 00:11:00 David, let's just change topics for a minute. I think this is a super interesting metric that I haven't looked at in a while. This website money hyphen movers. Info shows it. This is the settlement value per day of Bitcoin versus Ethereum. And you can see right now that, that, that, Ethereum is settling $20 billion a day in value. That includes all of its stable coins.

Starting point is 00:11:21 That includes ether, the asset as well. It includes rap Bitcoin. Bitcoin is settling $9 billion a day in in value. So this cycle, Ethereum is like outstripping Bitcoin's daily settlement value by 2x. And I think this will only increase because Ethereum has all of, like all of these additional additional assets beside Eith built on top of it. What's your take on this? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:47 So it's awesome to see that value being settled, just going super high up and to the right. It's also worth noting that the $20 billion a day for settled on Ethereum is only ETH stable coins and WPTC. It is not any defy token, no other. No uniswap. No other of these. Like if those were included, the number would be astronomical. And I think the reason why that isn't included is because it's really hard to calculate. It's really hard to gain truth about this.

Starting point is 00:12:13 This is one of the things that the industry is, is I would say behind on or lacking and in definite demand for is more metrics around token settlements and token values. It's just a hard, very hard problem to solve. And so it's crazy to think that Ethereum is 2x Bitcoin and settled value in just ether, WBT, and stable coin terms. You know what else is crazy because someone might say, justifiably so, well, USDC, that is really, it's settled in the legal system, right, in a coin base, bank because it's all backed by dollar somewhere. So what happens if you strip out

Starting point is 00:12:47 USDC, USDT, that's tether and wrapped eth that has some, well, wrapped Eth doesn't have dependencies. Rapids, yeah, there you go. Well, I'll keep, die, wrapped Eth and ether. All the things that are using ether economic bandwidth. That's the pattern. Exactly. So these are all the trustless, it's the trustless settlement value. There's no external dependency. I guess die has some external dependency. some of its collateral sources, but for the sake of this exercise, we remove that. And Ether, Ethereum is still ahead of Bitcoin and settlement value. So it's actually settling more trustless value per day at 12 billion versus Bitcoin's $9 billion. Of course, every Bitcoin transacted on Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:13:33 is trustless, right? The only dependency is the Bitcoin network itself. That stat to me is exceptional as well. It shows that we're not only scaling economic bandwidth. We're scaling trustless economic bandwidth. And that's key for the decentralized world that we all want to live in. That's the whole point of why we're here. And also included, that could be included in that are tokens like Uni and Ave, which I would include as trustless assets. Totally. Yeah, those cash flows settle on chain as well. So they are crypto-native capital assets. Very cool to see that. All right. Another thing that's cool. Tell us about the wars, the layer two wars. Maybe that's the big story here, David. Yeah, we are getting into the

Starting point is 00:14:15 conversation of layer two liquidity and layer two wallets on the bankless program. We had Vitalik on to talk about his blog post about L2 wallets and social recovery wallets. So if you haven't watched that, definitely check that out. Podcasts coming out next Monday, but it's already available on the bankless YouTube. We're looking at a tweet here that shows five different L2 decks is. So liquidity on layer two's loopering leading the pack with 10 million dollars settled in in trading volume in the last 24 hours NAS social, which I'm actually not familiar with, $1.7 million. Lverage number three at $0.9 million.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Diversify. $1.7 million and IDEX at $0.3 million. L2 trading volume, heating up, heating up. Yes, it's heating up. And these numbers are larger than the like all of the decks trading volumes from 20 17, right? Dexas hadn't even caught up until, until like the last couple of years. And now our L2s are bigger. Dexas are bigger this cycle than regular dexas were last cycle. It's pretty crazy to think about. This is also crazy. Alpha Finance, which is a new protocol. We wrote about this

Starting point is 00:15:25 recently. It's a way to take out leverage and do some yield farming. Interesting protocol. It has now originated over $1 billion worth of loans, and they just launched three months ago, they're doing more volume than AVE at this point. What's crazy about this, David, is this project is three months old, right? Like, you talk about no barriers to entry for defy and for Ethereum. Like, you can spin up a bank protocol essentially that does one billion worth of loans. If you construct it right and you do it well, and you could spin that up in three months time. Like, that's absolutely crazy to me to think about. And it shows you how fast this market can move, right? Like quickly, a brand new project that's three months old can rise to the top of

Starting point is 00:16:16 the ranks in terms of the amount of economic throughput it's transacting. We saw that with sushi swap. That protocol is like five months old, six months old, and it is crushing it in terms of volume. What's your take on this? Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway message is how much room there is for development in in defy right like this the the defy ecosystem is not settled like there is room for a new projects to come in and build and capture a ton of value a ava a feels like a gargantuan in the space and even it is it pretty young it's only three years old you know and and alpha is coming in with their brand new product clearly finding product market fit with leveraged yield farming dgen yield farming um and the and there's no no questions asked as to why

Starting point is 00:17:04 Value locked in defy is going through the roof. Not only are the assets in defy, like doubling in price, but also we are getting more applications to receive deposits. All right, David. That's markets, guys. You're getting a feel for everything is kind of up and to the right. Everything is bullish these days. AVE is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum and just recently released Avey version

Starting point is 00:17:30 two, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using Ovehs, AVE even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of AVE's V2 features is the ability

Starting point is 00:18:12 to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on Uniswap, and then deposit them back into AVE. AVE does all of this for you, all in one seamless transaction, so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAAVE.com. a bankless life, you need to get a monolith defy visa card. Monolith is a one-two punch of both an Ethereum smart contract wallet and an accompanying visa card that lets you spend the money that you have in your Ethereum wallet everywhere where Visa is accepted. When you swipe your monolith visa card at the grocery store or at a restaurant, it actually makes a transaction on the Ethereum

Starting point is 00:18:55 blockchain that spends some of the money you hold in your monolith wallet. It's insanely cool and it's one of the best tools out there for living a bankless but still normal life. Monolith also offers on-ramp services for getting your fiat money into the world of Defi. So it's trivial to top up your monolith card if you ever need to, and your deposited money goes straight into your non-custodial wallet, so your money is never held by a centralized intermediary. Because Monolith is native Ethereum infrastructure, the money you hold in your monolith wallet still has the power of Defi behind it.

Starting point is 00:19:29 Swapping assets on uniswap or earning yield in Defi is at your fingertips. Go to monolith.xyz and sign up to get your monolith visa card today. Let's talk about releases. So what's going on with releases? You want to start with hash masks. Okay, they just came on my radar this week. What are hash masks? Hash masks, the new NFT craze.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Hash masks are, I think, these procedurally generated art. I could be wrong about the procedural generation. but a bunch of new art, kind of like those old pixelated, I can't remember the name of them, the pixelated avatars that people purchase and speculate on it. Oh, the punts, Cryptopunks. Cryptopunks, which can be valued at anywhere anywhere between 1 and 100th per crypto pun,

Starting point is 00:20:15 which is absolutely crazy. We have a new one, a new version of Cryptopunks. I really like the art behind these. Some of the art here is really, really cool. Some of them have unique features that people, that perceive to be valuable and awesome. and that's how people are just subjectively valuing this art and trading them. And it's just blown up in the NFTs.

Starting point is 00:20:36 Okay, so I'm looking at this tweet here. Somebody spent $650,000 in Ether, by the way, either's money, on a hash mask? Yeah. What? Dude, NFTs are hot. People like NFTs. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Like the amount of, like artists around the world have got to be looking at this space and being like, hey, I want to produce art for the crypto, NFT world because it pays really well. Yeah. No, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. I've never, I've always been, no, I'm no longer skeptical on NFTs, but I used to be because I was always like, you know, digital art. Like, how does that work? But like, people kept on buying them. And like to the point of like, you know, $0.6 million, like I'm no longer skeptical because people are doing it. Like, you know, the money's there to prove it. Absolutely. Very cool project. Very interesting. We continue to monitor the NFT space. I think it's going to have a big year in 2021. Metaversal is a great newsletter from bankless that

Starting point is 00:21:35 you can stay tuned to to follow up, follow that market. All right, another hot release this week, David, is Balancer V2. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, Balancer V2 is something I've been long awaited for. Really happy to see it out the gate. There's just a bunch of new features, as you would expect, in V2. There's just more gas. efficiency, different types of asset management tools, different types of oracles, also a protocol fee for the BAL token. There is a fantastic tweet thread that Ryan is showing on the screen if you want to learn more about it.

Starting point is 00:22:07 Just a long-awaited update to the Bancer protocol. So congratulations to the balancer team for getting it out the door. Yeah, it feels like balancers, I think, killer feature is the amount of customization you can do with that. And what this, what Balancer V2 really allows is for people to essentially create their own automated market maker, right? So like you can you can you can tune this in all sorts of different ways. You could create your own curves like like like curve the the stable coin automated market maker or you could spin up something else. So balancer is is really a suite of power tools now for

Starting point is 00:22:41 creating these automated market makers and they've created like a whole way for people to do that. I think that's going to bring a ton of innovation in the space. And there's this kind of this debate, David as to whether we'll end up having one automated market maker to rule them all, kind of like a uniswap to rule them all, or whether we'll have all sorts of different curves and a world of many different automated market makers. And I think balancer is more a bet on the second world. We'll see how that plays out. Yeah, I think we could even use a barbell theory behind the types of AMMs out there where uniswap is the maximally reductive, maximally simple version and balancer is the maximally tinkerable maximum with maximum optionality and maximum

Starting point is 00:23:25 expressivity with how you want your AMM to be designed um there's extreme amounts of value i think in both designs yep every money protocol that can be designed on ethereum will be designed on ethereum maybe that's off and put put through the defy crucible everything that can be designed will be put through the defy crucible and only the things that are valuable will come out the other end There you go. I'm calling that Hoffman's Law from now. There you go. Love it. Love it. Love it. Um, Parsec. What is going on with Parsec? This looks pretty cool. I've got to use your interface. Tell me about this, David. Yeah, Parsec is a new like information terminal, kind of like a defy native Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:24:03 Reading information, I bet, this is unconfirmed, but I bet you the graph protocol is behind some of this information behind Parsec. If you just want to get a one-stop shop for all of your defy information and just get a feed of trades and a feed, just feeds. into your eyeballs. It's a great, great website to go to app. Parsec.finance. That's P-A-R-S-E-C. And so it taps right into Uniswap trades. So big Uniswap trades, big Uniswap liquidity, deposits or withdrawals, the typical buying and selling features and then also charting features, you know, just a place to view all of your portfolio. It's pretty cool. It's so cool, man. This is kind of the dream. It's basically a Bloomberg terminal overlay on top of everything that's built out in

Starting point is 00:24:48 in D5. Pretty crazy. Someone could put this together so quickly and for it to have the functionality that it has. Speaking of functionality, let's talk layer two's again for a minute. Arbitram just put out a fantastic demo where this is, so Arbitram, if you're not familiar with it,

Starting point is 00:25:04 go check out our roll-ups episode with Vitalik. We talk a lot about this type of roll-up, which is called the optimistic roll-ups roll-up. So that's a layer-2 built on Ethereum. This is kind of the promise of, near-term scalability for the Ethereum network. And Arbitrum just put out a demo where all of these crypto-native wallets and applications work out of the box, except they're not running on Mainnet.

Starting point is 00:25:32 They're running on this Arbitrum roll-up that is ultimately secured by Mainnet. This is sort of a playground sandbox demo environment, but it's definitely a promise of things to come. and it's super cool that your native metamask or whatever, you know, while you use just works out of the box with a roll-up like Arbitrum. Super exciting to see Layer 2 coming in this way in like a very real tangible way. Yeah, I think the Santa Monica Pier metaphor is really, really useful here. For the international listeners who don't know what the Santa Monica Pier is, it's a famous pier off the coast of California.

Starting point is 00:26:09 And this is kind of how I envision L2s, where you have the highway, the Pacific Coast Highway, famous highway in America, and is very busy, very congested, lots of traffic. But then you park in the parking lot, you take that long walk out the dock down to the Santa Monica Pier. And so it's like a mile long walk on the dock. And then you're in the Santa Monica Pier where there's a ferris wheel, there's roller coasters, there's like carnival games. There's all these fun things to do in the Santa Monica Pier. And that's like my version of like an L2.

Starting point is 00:26:37 And that's what this like Arbitum L2 is where like some L2s are very, very specific in what they do. But this arbitram L2 looks like, it's just a place to do very many, many things. And that's what the power of optimistic role of brings. And it looks like that there's going to be just a lot of fun things to do on Arbitram. Speaking of Hoffman's law, David, if it can be built, it will be built. Goldfinch. So this is something that needs to be built on top of decentralized finance. Loans without collateral need to be built on top of decentralized finance. We have AVE, we have compound. Of course, those require collateral in order to get a loan. But we need the idea of credit in DFI. There's a lot of projects doing that.

Starting point is 00:27:20 Here's one, Goldfinch. What would you say about this? Yeah, this is just the crypto is always, the meme is that it's speed running the history of finance and money, right? And at some point, that progress runs into uncollateralized loans, as we know of just like, oh, credit. When people call like, oh, I got a loan from my bank. This is what they're talking about. We need to be able to offer people loans without asking them to lock up more than their loans worth of value. I mean, to your point, like historically, that's kind of collateralized loans is sort of how it worked in like the 1800s, you know, like no one, there was no notion of credit. You didn't have a FICO score. There's no credit card for you. It's just like, oh yeah, I'll give you a loan, but how are you going to collateralize

Starting point is 00:28:03 that loan, right? Yeah. And so like when we talk about like financial freedom and financial tools, kind of unfortunate that like in order to get a loan from this space, you actually have to have more collateral. Like this kind of antithetical to the idea of the loan. So having access to loans that you don't actually need capital for, I think is a really, really important tool. And so the way that this works is that it's actually based on trust. This is based on reputation. This is how loans work. So there are underwriters in this system. There are people vetting your ability to pay. I don't think there's any way around uncollateralized loans in defy without that trust or, you know, risk tolerance to the system. Importantly, they are starting with emerging markets.

Starting point is 00:28:45 You know, sometimes in like defy degenerate, DGens and yield farming and all this speculation, we kind of forget about, we forget about the plot. But the plot is financial tools for all. And that includes emerging markets. So very happy to see Goldfinch starting their, their platform, starting their growth in emerging markets, getting loans out to people that don't have financial tools and also don't have capital to lock up in AVE or the ether to pay for gas prices. Yep. We're going to see a lot of uncollateralized loan solutions, I think, in 2021. It's definitely going to be a theme.

Starting point is 00:29:16 David, speaking of a theme of 2021, this is Michael Sonashein from Grayscale. He came in the show not too long ago. He says, many of you asked, and we delivered. Grayscale released its valuing Ethereum report. What does the report say, David? You know, this report is short and punchy. And I can give you the TLDR of it. It's ETH as money.

Starting point is 00:29:43 Heath as a store value asset in D-Fi. And then the second part is ETH as a capital asset. And then the third is ETH as a consumable, transformable commodity. I think I've heard this one before. Yeah, I was going to say, we've tended to talk about that. It sounds exactly like the triple point asset thesis, which is our very, value proposition, the bankless value proposition for Ether, the asset. We've been talking about this for a long time. In fact, it kind of came, the Genesis was a presentation you gave about a

Starting point is 00:30:14 year and a half ago, something, about Ether as the best money as a triple point asset, how it has these three different properties. What's happening, David, is we've said before, is like you and I kind of operate on the layer zero, sort of the mean layer, the narrow, the narrative layer and helping to create mental models for this. And not just us, the entire group of people who are investing these protocols and members of the community who are developing content here operate on that level. And what happens is it tends to leak out. And now what we're seeing is it's leaked out to the next rung, which is crypto establishment institutions. And then the suits, right? Or they're suit friendly, at least. They're kind of a bridge to the suits,

Starting point is 00:31:00 but they also hang in our world in crypto, and now they are propagating the same narrative and the same meme. And we think, of course, all memes are more than just like fairy tales and ideas. They have to be forged through the fires, right? They have to hold truth. And I think we're seeing the triple point asset does hold truth. And that's why it's getting propagated to the next layer. After this layer, David, it's all the institutions.

Starting point is 00:31:25 So next you see Stanley Drunken Miller talking about ether as a triple point asset. set, right? And like eventually we see all of the institutions speaking the same thing as they did with Bitcoin as a digital gold. So this thesis, David, that I'm going on about this because it's so freaking exciting. I think I was going to leave it for my like, what's exciting this week's segment, but I'm jumping the gun here. Like this is how the narrative propagates and we're just seeing the narrative link into the institutions. And from there, it's just going to go wild. And then like pretty soon the Ray Dalios of the world are going to buy into it too. as they are starting to buy into Bitcoin as digital gold, ether, the asset is really just one cycle

Starting point is 00:32:07 behind and maybe just a half cycle because it's catching up faster. It's catching up. Yeah, this is this is not something I don't think we could have done at bankless. I like to joke how there are no ties in the bankless nation. Like we don't really wear suits. We're very informal. We make jokes. But people like Michael Sonnonshine, you know, they they rub elbows with the people like Stanley Druckumel. You're absolutely right. And so getting the triple point asset thesis into something more digestible and tangible for people that, you know, have billions of dollars of net worth under their under their control. I don't think we could have done that, but that's exactly what our role is in the first place, like you said, to be the M0

Starting point is 00:32:45 of memes of mental models and thoughts and theses about how to understand this space. And, you know, I think it's just validation that we kind of got it right when Michael Sunshine is putting out the official gray scale valuing ether piece. And it's basically the triple point asset. Someone wise once said the most bullish thing for it, Ethereum is to be understood. This is ether as an asset being understood. Super bullish. Very exciting. All right. Got to end releases right there. We might come back to this topic. Let's talk the news. What's going on in the news? Tell us about another, I guess, institutional friendly company that has an index called the Bitwise index. What is that index? And what's the news here? Yeah, the Bitwise.

Starting point is 00:33:30 top cap crypto indices takes the top 10 crypto assets and makes an index out of it. So it's very much a centralized version of the DPI, except for all of crypto, not just DFI. But the cool thing is is DFI tokens are getting into the top 10 crypto assets ever, right? And so this is the great repricing event. Like this is how I kind of think about our industry as a whole. Every four years,

Starting point is 00:33:54 the whole entire world remembers about this crypto thing. It turns its attention to crypto. It reprises the whole industry. and then it forgets about it for four more years. But this is Defi getting priced into where it belongs with the rest of crypto. Both Ave and Uni are getting included in the Bitwise top 10 crypto assets, the index portfolio well deserved. And I only expect them to continue their march up that crypto top 10.

Starting point is 00:34:19 And the important thing is, is that as a result of this, there is a ton of buying pressure on any of these assets that get included because these indices have to buy them. I know a guy that works for a crypto trading firm, and they have certain rules and regulations that they can only access assets specifically in the Bitwise top 10. And so now that Avey and Uni are a part of that, they are allowed to trade and put Uni and Avey on their balance sheet because they are included. And so this is just super bullish for Defi.

Starting point is 00:34:50 Yeah, you're so right. And the BitWise top 10 used to make me so sad in 2017. because so a lot of institutional investors approach this space and they're like, I've heard of Bitcoin, right? But what about Ether and all of these other assets? I don't necessarily want to pick winners. Therefore, I want to invest in the top 10 projects, right? So, because I know there's more than Bitcoin. I'm just not sure what else there is.

Starting point is 00:35:12 And an index helps me capture it. But I used to be so sad in 2017 because if you went and purchased this index, you're buying a bunch of shit. XRP, LTC, like EOS, O. Pete, Lightcoin, Eos, all of this junk that quite clearly, if you're in this space, you know that these projects have no staying power. And yet somebody who's purchasing the index is forced to buy these alongside good assets like Bitcoin and Ether. It made me so sad. But now, DFI projects are rising into the top 10. And it's a much healthier index this cycle.

Starting point is 00:35:46 That's what you're talking about, David. The great repricing. We're seeing it happen. It's also happening in grayscale. That's the next bit of news. Grayscale may have laid the ground work for more potential crypto trusts. And two of those trusts, if this filing is correct, one is potentially a trust around Uni, that's the Uniswap token.

Starting point is 00:36:07 And the other is AVE. That is AVEs token, of course. So defy assets in a grayscale like trust, that means you could purchase defy assets in a brokerage account, just like you're purchasing ETHE. We've talked about ETHE. it's upside and downside has a lot of downside, better to go crypto-native. But availability in a retirement account in a U.S. brokerage account is valuable in some ways. That's pretty bullish for defy.

Starting point is 00:36:34 These assets are breaking into the institutions. And it just makes total sense as to why Avey went from $300 to $550 in two days. Like someone is doing a bunch of buying, probably because they need to put it on the balance sheet in gray scale in bit wise and then also people are buying on that on that same speculation like bullish. It cracks me up David because this is like this kind of opportunity doesn't come around a lot where retail actually gets to front run the institutions. But because of the mechanics, because of the way this industry was born, that's exactly

Starting point is 00:37:12 what's happening. So first you could outrun the institutions with Bitcoin, then Ether. Now they're starting to catch on with Ether. And then defy. Retail has had an opportunity at each of these asset classes to front-run the institutions. And they've been able to do that. And it's super exciting. The institutions are still trying to catch up. Yeah, absolutely. And this is why it's important to be a defy user, because AVE and SNX, those only got added to Coinbase, I think, four weeks ago. And so, like, if you bought, you, you had to have bought them on Unuswap. There's no other place to get them. And when they were only on

Starting point is 00:37:48 Uniswap, Ove was under $100, like, Uni was under, or S&X was under like $10 or $7, right? And so like front running the institutions means that you need to be a defy native person, right? You need to understand how to use Uniswap. And that's just trying what we teach on the bankless program. Absolutely. It is definitely the work at bankless kind of like paying off and your work. You have to, if you're, if you're serious about this space front running that opportunity, no one's going to tell you exactly how to do it, right?

Starting point is 00:38:18 it takes time every week, sometimes every day to actually understand this space. And I think those who have been doing that have been well rewarded. And we'll continue to be Visa Q1 earnings call reveals details about its crypto strategy. David, this is the FinTech defy mullet, as we've called it in the past. Visa thinking about how it can start bypassing traditional legacy financial rails and building on top of crypto rail. in particular stable coins. This reminds me of our Jeremy Aller podcast we just did earlier in the week, just came out this week. Visa in their quarterly earnings report is talking about how they can use their payment network, make it crypto-friendly, and essentially, you know, like use the same gateways with stable coins rather than traditional bank coins.

Starting point is 00:39:13 Pretty bullish on the space. I think Visa is going to play a big role in the. advent of crypto here. Yeah, we don't have too much details about this, the specific details of what's going on here. We just know that Visa is talking about it, talking, and it has plans to include it. But like, at the end of the day, it's the protocol sync thesis, like USDC transfers on Ethereum are faster and have much stronger assurances than any other ACH or wire transfer on the payment networks on the banking rails. And that is just a quality of life improvement for companies that work with asset transfers. It's so fascinating. I don't know what

Starting point is 00:39:48 they're going to do here, David, whether they're going to roll their own stable coin, whether they're going to adopt something like USDC or maybe they like buy a circle. You know, Visa is certainly big enough to buy one of these existing more crypto-native groups and get into space in a big way. And I think they will. David, you want to take this next one. Michael Saylor, what's he doing this time? Michael Saylor, pumping Bitcoin as a good bitconer does. Michael Saylor and MicroSrategy hosted an online conference and online webinar to teach other institutions all about Bitcoin and what it means to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, teaching about legal burdens, you know, tax burdens, like compliance issues, rationale and reasoning. And apparently it was an absolute hit.

Starting point is 00:40:31 Apparently over a thousand firms attended Michael Saylars and Micro Strategies webinar. And I just think this is absolutely awesome. Like this is this is just how the Bitcoin or culture works. Like you get red-pilled or orange-pilled to Bitcoin. You understand it. You put it on your balance sheet. You put more on your balance sheet. And then you put more on your balance sheet. And then you start shilling it to the rest of the world. This is why this industry works. It just bootstraps itself. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really bullish news for Bitcoin for the rest of crypto as well. But I think what it means is like this trade has worked so well for Michael Saylor, every single CEO of every corporation in the U.S. and globally is going to be asking the

Starting point is 00:41:15 question, huh, I've got a lot of cash. I don't know what to invest in right now. I wonder if this crypto Bitcoin strategy could work for our organization as well, right? Like, I think there's going to be a cascading effect of what happens here. Dude, Michael Saylor has done more for Bitcoin than anyone has, I think, in the last like three or four years. Yeah, definitely. It's, It's definitely a narrative of 2021 to watch. Speaking of doing things, India is doing things. That's a terrible transition. All right, let me try that again.

Starting point is 00:41:50 No, I say keep it. I say keep it. We're keeping it. We're keeping it. India is doing things, doing bad things. The government, that is, is talking about a potential ban of private currencies. By private, they don't mean like private. Privately owned.

Starting point is 00:42:07 privately owned is what they mean by you by you individual ether no sovereign cryptocurrencies um legally available in the country of india um this is like man i i i have so many thoughts on this but why don't why don't you start what do you think about this this is this is classic you know nation estate grasping for straws to keep control over their money supply right this is what every this is this is what we call like the final boss but you know india is not really really the final boss. It's like a warm-up boss because it's not the United States dollar. It's not the Federal Reserve. But they're trying to ban Bitcoin and public blockchains in order to promote the sovereignty of their own native currency. Ryan, over or under on India,

Starting point is 00:42:53 rolling back this ban by halfway into 2021. Oh, I don't know about 2021. They, like, governments are notoriously like slow to change, right? But they will realize in the next five years that this is a terrible decision. Imagine being a country and like banning the internet in the early 1990s. Imagine the economic opportunity that you would lose in doing that. Now, if all of the nation states grouped together and did it, like we're going to ban the internet in the 1990s, no such thing as an internet, maybe there would be some success in doing that. But if India bans public blockchains, bans crypto, bans Bitcoin and Ethereum. And the rest of the world doesn't, right?

Starting point is 00:43:37 They've got a real problem because the rest of the world is front running their opportunities, putting their citizens ahead, has the opportunity to build their protocols, the Silicon Valley of crypto in their nation states. The only thing that the government of India would do with this action is hurt its own people. So that's kind of the real tragedy here. But I don't know. That's why I think that's exactly why I think. they're rolling it back quickly. I think they're going to discover that it's actually much harder than

Starting point is 00:44:05 they think to ban Bitcoin. And that's actually futile. And they're actually causing more harm than good. Maybe that's optimistic. But I think that's why I'm optimistic on them rolling this back in the short term future. Yeah, definitely. They will at some point, if not in the short run. All right, David, I am staring at a picture of Logan Paul. Why am I looking at Logan Paul and who is this guy? Yeah, for those I don't know, Logan Paul is perhaps the biggest U.T. as in like the number one sub-yutuber. So he's a big deal. It has a ton of following with zoomers and millennials.

Starting point is 00:44:38 And he's issuing NFTs, which is absolutely crazy. I watched this video of Logan Paul advertising. They're like Pokemon-like things. Some are gold, some are silver. And then I think there's perhaps one or very few that are like holographic and colored. And so that's pretty cool. He's issuing them with a Bondly, which is a platform that I actually hadn't heard of, but an NFT issuing platform built on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:45:02 It looks like Bondly is building on other platforms as well, as well as Pocod. But according to all the news articles that I'm reading, these specific NFTs issued by Logan Paul are on Ethereum. Is that what I'm looking at here? No, I don't think that's what you're looking at. It's actually a picture of Logan Paul. And so that is just super bowl.

Starting point is 00:45:22 I was super bullish. I was watching the video and it's like, is this a top signal? And then I was like, no, this is so fucking bullish. Logan's Law has an insane following, like the big, one of the biggest followings on the internet and he's advertising his NFTs. It was a top signal in 2017 when celebrities started issuing their own like ERC 20 tokens, but that ran them a foul of securities law.

Starting point is 00:45:44 With NFTs, you don't quite have that issue. I think we're going to, like this is something we've talked about for a while. I think that this cycle, all celebrities, anyone with an audience or community to capture, like many of them are going to issue these types of collectibles, and we're seeing it already. We saw, we saw Mike McDermis, I think, when Soldier Boy asked, like, yo, he asked me, he just tweeted this out, like, yo, should I, should I mint my own, like, Soldier Boy coin? And like, everyone, especially Mike McDermis, so tip of the hats of Mike McDermis, was like, no, don't, don't do that.

Starting point is 00:46:15 That's a terrible idea. Mint NFTs are products. They are good. They are not securities. Like, you're going to be way better off. Like if you ever want to forget about the NFTs in the long term, like you can. But if you make a currency, you can't. Like it's just a much better deal.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And so like, yeah, no securities frauds or illegal securities this hype cycle. That's a good thing. More surface area, as we say so often for getting people into crypto. You come to an NFT route because your favorite celebrity is selling something interesting. All right. Also, we don't have time to get to this, which is unbelievable. But like there are two other big names in crypto this week. Ray Dalio, he put out a piece on Bitcoin. It seems like he is, his temperature is changing a bit

Starting point is 00:47:00 on the positive side. He's getting a bit warmer to Bitcoin. He put out a really interesting paper about it. Basically saying like, hey, this could be a new store of value. This could be a digital gold previously. He's not been warm to that idea. So that's sort of a flip from him. Also, Mark Cuban did an AMA on Reddit. I caught some of it. But he disclosed part of his DFI portfolio. So it contained Bitcoin and Ether, but it also contained some interesting things like Ave and sushi. So he is going down the rabbit hole as well. I think, David, we're to see a lot of big names in this bull cycle coming into crypto for the first time and sort of revealing their thoughts on it and dabbling in it as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:42 And I think this is just an indication of people coming into this base and being a blank slate, they are not coming in with like preconceived notions of Bitcoin maximalism. And so they aren't being tainted by this concept of Bitcoin maximalism. So they are looking at what's all the cool fun activity that's happening on Theorem, which there is a lot of, and they are getting captured by it. All right, David, that's been the news. Let's talk about some hot takes. Let's start with this one, David. On the NFT note, this is Julian Co.

Starting point is 00:48:14 Actually, don't know this individual, but I loved this tweet. Defires, we prefer wealth, NFTers. we prefer status. And I added, I retweeted this and I added Jake Berkman and Andrew Steinwald, who we had on our NFT podcast forever ago saying, like, as like the canonical NFT experts in my mind, I said like, hey, guys, what's your take on this? Like, do you agree with this? And they both generally gave a thumbs up, like defiers like money and currency and NFTers like, you know, art and status. And I think that's a nice and interesting mental model to kind of figure out like what these things mean to you. Yeah, I do. I do too. Nival talks about those two types of games that people play.

Starting point is 00:48:53 You know, many are actually status games disguised as wealth games. People think that it's about like the wealth or the amount of money, but really wealth at a certain point for many people becomes just a point system for status. And this clear delineation of like if you're buying NFT crypto art, you're not buying it necessarily for the investment. You're doing it as a status symbol. And it's going to be interesting to see the different ways the digital world will have to start projecting these status symbols in like the metaverse maybe, right? And virtual reality as avatars, you know, I think that's going to be a really interesting space to watch. Because now that you have the thing that is high status, how do you show it to the world, David?

Starting point is 00:49:36 I think what you do is you put your $25,000 NFT printout behind you on your wall. I think that's what you do. 25,000? That low? I thought it was 100,000. Oh, well, I'm referencing your ether poster you have on your wall. Oh, so am I, sir. So am I.

Starting point is 00:49:53 It's just for X in value during the course of this roll-up conversation. Guys, I put some new background imagery, and everyone's playing kind of guess the price of what this picture of ether is worth. And I'm not telling, you know, because value is in the eye of the beholder. That's what we just learned. It's a status thing. If you want to put a bid, tweet us on Twitter. I'm not selling. I hate selling.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Sorry, guys. All right, let's get to the second one. Michael Wong, ETH's Future is with ETH holders. ETHs futures with ETH holders. It's a tweet out. What's this take about? Yeah, Michael Wong is actually one of my friends in real life. I went to college with him.

Starting point is 00:50:33 And what he's saying is, well, what I think he's saying is that the control over the Ethereum ecosystem is determined by Eith holders. Now, there's a question of governance because ether is not a governance token. It's just a staking asset. But the security of Ethereum and the long-term direction of Ethereum is determined by eth holders because of proof of stake. And so I think that solves really the agency problem where the well-being of the protocol is upholded or stewarded by the people that have upside exposure to it, which I think is one of the reasons why I think proof of stake is such a fantastic mechanism for securing a block. chain because if it if it doesn't work well, the people that made it fail are the ones that suffer all the losses. And likewise, the inverse of that is that if it does work well, the people that made it work well are the ones that receive all the upside. Ether's, Ethereum's future is with eth holders. I actually think Bitcoiners kind of got this right, right? They've always held their holders in high status. And Ethereum has not always done that.

Starting point is 00:51:33 But ETH holders are incredibly important community members and stakeholders toward the security of the network, right? And they all have a vested interest in seeing it succeed. So I like that take. The emphasis on ETH holders is important. All right, David, let's talk about this one. Oh, my God. I own zero Bitcoin. That's David Hoffman saying that.

Starting point is 00:51:58 You tweeted that out. Wow. Lots of courage. Yeah. So why is this a take? is a really good question. I just read it. I own zero Bitcoin, which is true. And I also said that this is not a new event. I just thought I'd say it. The reason why I think that it's a take is because like, why is a tweet of me saying I own zero Bitcoin getting almost a thousand likes?

Starting point is 00:52:18 Like, why is that happening? And the reason is because people think that this is a brave tweet, which I think is absolutely like me. Like there's this like Stockholm syndrome that Bitcoin maximalists have the rest of the industry and like bullying us into believing that you have to own Bitcoin. It's acceptable to not own Bitcoin. It's okay to not own an asset. You don't need to get bullied by it. And so what I, what I meant to do when I made this tweet is like indicate and signal to people is like, hey, you don't have to believe the Bitcoin maxis. It's okay to not own Bitcoin. You don't have to fall for their tricks. I like that. I like that signal. It's interesting that, you know, these are such social movements. And 2018, 2019 and lots of 2020 definitely felt like

Starting point is 00:53:00 an era of Bitcoin maximalism. There's like there shall only be one money. There shall only be crypto and that crypto is Bitcoin. And what we're seeing is this sort of thing is really flipping the script on that. No, there are multiple store of value assets and Bitcoin might not be your entrance to the space. You might even decide not to hold it versus other interesting crypto assets. So yeah, that's a take, man. It's a good take. I wonder if you're starting a movement there of non-Bitcoin crypto people? Wow. What's that like? What was interesting to me is like after I tweeted this, Anthony Sizzano also retweeted me and quote tweeted and said, I also own zero BTC. And then like 10 people quote tweeted him saying, I also own zero BTC. It's like this great coming out of the closet

Starting point is 00:53:47 moments. Like people realizing or waking up that like, hey, we actually, it's actually okay to say this. Like it's not it's not controversial to say that we don't own Bitcoin. Yeah. It's it's, it's, it's, very funny. And I think definitely worthy of a social movement there. Let's talk about another social movement, David. If you're like any segues, by the way, I'm just like, I'm not going to know a part today. GME drama. So this is the GameStop drama was like a $20 billion ad for Bitcoin. I would also add crypto in general. But like this is the first time we talked about GameStop during this roll up. But man, that was just like such a massive thing that just happened last week. And it is drawing the entire world's attention to crypto, a massive advertisement for

Starting point is 00:54:34 the potential of this industry. What's your take here? Yeah, this is exactly right. Like, I saw so many posts on our cryptocurrency and our Bitcoin saying like, Bitcoin never made sense to me until GameStop. And like, yeah, right. And like Elon Musk, that's he got, he put Bitcoin in his bio right after this, GameStop debacle. Like this, the people need really. world examples for why Bitcoin matters, not just theoretical ones. Because if Bitcoin or crypto or Ethereum, if they only offer theoretical answers and not practical answers, they're never going to get adopted. They actually need to solve real world problems. And the GameStop craze is a $20 billion ad for Bitcoin. Absolutely. Good thing. It helps the world understand crypto, right? Which is the most

Starting point is 00:55:18 bullish thing, as we've said elsewhere in this episode already. Also, Defi. DeCi finance already exist. Like this question of how do we solve the Robin Hood problem, Zirion put out this fantastic image you can see if you're watching on YouTube of all of the different areas of traditional finance. So you've got money, you've got central banking, you've got commercial banking, exchanges, brokerages, insurance. These are all of the actors in traditional finance and did a direct mapping of all of the decentralized finance corollaries essentially saying like, hey guys, you know, you want money, we've got dye, we've got ether, we've got Bitcoin. You want some sort of a banking, commercial banking structure? Well, there's AVE, there's compound. You want

Starting point is 00:56:04 exchanges. We have uniswap. We have D-Y-D-X. So there's this whole ecosystem that has literally been developed from the ground up to solve the Robin Hood problem, to solve the centralized finance problem. And I thought this is a great image to just show that. And I think that message is starting to get out into the world. Those people seem a little intimidated by DFI still at this point. I mean, we all, we all were intimidated by DFI when we started getting into it. But this,

Starting point is 00:56:34 this picture is worth a thousand words, right? Like seeing that like, hey, we have the old version, old Fy. I think I also like the old FI meme. And then we also have DFI,

Starting point is 00:56:43 which is this new thing. And like, are you used to your old FI? Well, we actually have similar solutions in DFI. That's what this picture communicates in picture form. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:52 picture forms are just more digestible. Yeah. All right. Absolutely. Hey, I've got one last take and then we'll get to what excites us. That is this. This is something I read from Ryan Selkis' newsletter, Misari newsletter. And it was really titled Kill Envy. So what's happening now, David, is we are at the point of the bull market, maybe an early bull market, where you're looking around and you're like, oh, my God, what, what defy asset just popped last week? Wow. Uniswap did a, you need a 3x last week. Avey did a 2X last week. And you're facing a barrage of constant fomo, right? So like this fear of missing out, what's the next token going to be? And you're seeing all of these people get rich on something, right? And what that causes, Ryan Salkis is saying, is like this feeling of envy. But the message here is, hey, don't feel like that.

Starting point is 00:57:47 Ignore the phomo. Because if you're in crypto in this moment, if you're listening to bankless, and you're invested in some of these assets we're going to talk about, you already won. You don't have to compete for the ultimate highest score. You'd like, you know, I used to play tons of video games. I don't play as many video games nowadays,

Starting point is 00:58:04 but the thing about playing online, anything is there's always going to be someone who's better than you. Like always. There's somebody who's grinding harder in World Warcraft. There's somebody who could like snipe you faster and Counterstrike. There's always someone better, right? And if you're playing a game of, of competing for that scoreboard, that status game almost of top slot, you're going to lose

Starting point is 00:58:28 a lot of the, I think, fun of what a bull market could be. We're all going to do okay. It's going to be fine. We're in a bull run. Just enjoy it. You are part of the less than 1% who understands crypto at this moment in time. You are so massively early. Don't fall into the envy trap. Don't fall into the FOMO game because what can happen is you start chasing things. When you start chasing things, you wreck your taxes, right? Like at least in the U.S., you got short-term gains and losses to deal with. You're chasing things based on narrative rather than fundamentals. Like it's just not a game that you want to play.

Starting point is 00:59:08 So I thought that was helpful from Ryan and would definitely echo that sentiment. Get out of the FOMO game. You're here. You already won. Just relax. enjoy the ride, like everything we talk about just in general and bankless. And this is just following the bankless, the number one bankless rule for surviving a bull market where you always position yourself in a way where if you lose, you can still play the game.

Starting point is 00:59:33 And fomoing too hard and like getting those dollar signs in your eyeballs when you see a chart pumping. And that's all recipes for potential disasters, right? And fomowing isn't necessarily bad, I would say, but like it's really, important to understand where you are in the market cycle and your own emotional reactions to why you are fomoing. Fomowing in the early part of the market is safer than fomowing in the latter part of the market, but no one knows where we are in that curve. Like no one knows where we are in the market. And so you really have to keep control of your emotions and understand and appreciate that like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Like there have been four crypto bull markets and

Starting point is 01:00:10 only two of them have been with Ethereum. And this is the second, right? This is Ethereum number two. And so like imagine if you fomode in at the top of the market, you took too much leverage, you got wrecked. You're going to have to wait another four years for another life-changing opportunity, right? Like you just burned that one. And like, just like you said, there's no point in trying to, we're already on like a life-changing opportunity. There's no point in trying to get like three life-changing amounts of money.

Starting point is 01:00:37 Don't be greedy. Don't be greedy. Just don't be greedy, guys. Don't be greedy. You can only spend one life-changing amounts of money. Like you don't need multiple life changing amounts of money. You just need one. And you already got it if you're listening to this episode.

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Starting point is 01:02:12 What does that mean? Synthetics is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets, which are assets that are priced via an Oracle rather than bids or asks. Traders can use the Quenta Exchange, which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetics. Traders on Quenta can trade synthetic tokens like SBTC, S oil, or S-DFI. Because Quinta is powered by synthetics, traders experience zero slippage on their trades. No, I didn't mean low slippage. I meant no slippage, because they're not. That is the power of the synthetics platform.

Starting point is 01:02:46 No slippage on your trades. You can also easily short assets with ICINTHs, which are synthetic assets that move inversely to their target asset. Synthetics isn't just for traders. Developers can build on synthetics to access the infinite liquidity offered by synthetic assets. Or investors can stake collateral to the protocol

Starting point is 01:03:05 and earn fees that the protocol collects. If you're a trader and you're looking for a trading platform and not found in the legacy world, check out Quenta.io. If you are a developer or you just want to earn yield on your collateral, go to www.synthetics. where you can stake your SNX or ETH and earn fees from synthetics. All right, David, what are you excited about this week? All right, two things.

Starting point is 01:03:30 I'm excited about the future of DPI and specifically the index co-op. I've gotten a ton of friends texting me because I'm a degenerate with my Instagram stories. I put the WinkleVos tweets about, how they support bank lists on my Instagram. Now everyone's asking me, it's like, all right, like, now I got to get in. What should I do? Yeah. That's getting through social life there. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:53 So, like, you know, I'm usually not in the realm of giving financial advice, but like these people are looking for just like actionable statements. And so they say, hey, like, they say, what should I buy? And here's what I tell them. Here's what I tell. Usually I'm not in the realm of giving them advice. But I tell them one third Bitcoin, one third ETH and one third DPI. And that should just settle them for, for, for, for, for,

Starting point is 01:04:13 ever, right? The defy the defy is the hot thing this season. And thank God we have DPI as an index for DFI to be able to give people exposure to what makes this industry so awesome and optimistic. And what I think is going to be the upside this cycle. Yeah, I don't have to like tell them so like, well, here's my thesis behind sushi swap or uniswap or AVE because like that's just going to bombard them with information. DPI is where you get access to DFI. It's such a simple tool. I'm really optimistic about the future of DPI. It only has. has a $100 million market cap. I mean, it's weird to say that the DPI is undervalued because it's actually just an

Starting point is 01:04:50 index. But like the index deserves to be at least a billion dollars. And so buy DPI if you want exposure to DFI. Yeah, it's really simple. And then like after that, after they've constructed that portfolio, then comes the hard part, right? They have to resist what we're just talking about, David, which is foaming into all of these other things or like being taken by the. crypto markets, the ups and downs of volatility, selling too early. That's another hazard.

Starting point is 01:05:18 So what they have to do is once they construct that portfolios have the discipline to hold and hold for the long term. That's where a lot of people fall off the bandwagon, even after they follow advice, like the type that you're giving. What else are you excited about, man? Yeah. Number two is, as Vitalik got me really bullish on this one, which is the world of layer two smart contract wallets, layer two wallets with social recovery. And, And I think one of the pioneers in this space is loopering. I've gotten a privileged rumor that loopering, the iOS app just got approved and is working on getting out to people's iPhones. And I think that's going to be the injection point for especially all of this like Wall Street Betts GameStop energy where people come into defy and they're like, okay, all these people are surely defy to me.

Starting point is 01:06:07 Let's check this out. Gas fees. Let's go buy a token. Doken on uniswap. Gas fees. Like what the hell is this? $30 to exchange. exchange an asset. I was just on Robin Hood and that was free. Right. And so the loopering is both an

Starting point is 01:06:19 L2 with a mobile smart contract wallet that has liquidity, right? So we are talking very low or zero gas. It even has an automated market maker like a uniswap of loop ring. It's that carnival over the pier that you were talking about earlier. That's exactly right. It's got the uniswap style AMMs on its L2, which is something that you can provide liquidity to by the way. That's a market opportunity. If you think that people are coming into loop rings L2, they're going to need liquidity there. And that could be you. You could be taking those liquidity fees if that's if you are interested in that. All of that just like energy around GameStop.

Starting point is 01:06:53 People need a Robin Hood like experience. And I think the loop ring via looping smart contract wallet on mobile is going to offer that to them. Yeah, very cool. I'm also excited to see what Argent does soon to you. But you're absolutely right. Smart contract wallets are going to be the future here. Ryan, what are you excited about? You know, I already said mine, dude.

Starting point is 01:07:15 It was the gray scale thing. Gray scale is doing triple point asset thesis. But here's the thing I will say as something I'm excited about. Eth is at all-time highs, dude. Yeah, 1700. Like we barely spend any time in the 1500 range. It's just crazy after going through a really long arduous bear market where no one believed anything we were saying.

Starting point is 01:07:38 to be on the other side of that, it feels kind of good. So, ETH, all-time highs. That's what's exciting this week, David. Congratulations to Eith, right? 15, we just blew by the 1500s. You're totally right. Like, just hardly knew it. And maybe this is too bullish,

Starting point is 01:07:54 but I think those, the $100 levels that we are blowing by might turn into $1,000 levels that we're blowing by. Oh, my God. Too much. Too much. Too much. All right. Rolling a bag.

Starting point is 01:08:03 If that starts to happen, I might be calling the top there, but maybe it happens once. We'll see how it goes. All right, David, let's try this new segment. Meme of the week. What's the meme of the week? New segment time. We're trying it out.

Starting point is 01:08:14 Meme of the week. Okay, so this was my meme that I created after I tweeted out. I don't own any Bitcoin because 10,000 bitcoinsers told me to have fun staying poor. So I'm going to do my best to describe. Wait, they said that? You got that reaction? Oh, like a million of them. Are these real people?

Starting point is 01:08:33 Are these like bots? Like, are these real people saying, hey, David? I think they're real people. I think they're real people, which is absolutely crazy. Okay, I think this is a meme that sailor made. The have fun staying poor is like somebody that says anything negative about Bitcoin, like the Bitcoin Cyber Hornets come in and flood your DMs. And like one of them says H and then the second one says A and this next one says V.

Starting point is 01:08:55 And then they all spell out together, have fun, staying poor, which I actually think is really cool because that indicates the coordination of the Bitcoin community, the coordination of the Bitcoin. It's great meme coordination. It's fantastic. It's actually really bullish for Bitcoin, but it also proves my point about what I was trying to signal when I said, I own zero Bitcoin. All right. So here's the meme.

Starting point is 01:09:14 I mean, I'm going to try and describe it for the listeners. This is the meme where there is like these two soldiers on top of a hill and then they're in yellow. And there's a bunch of soldiers on the ground laying down in red. And they look like they're dead. And the two soldiers on the top of the hill saying, how do we know if they're actually dead or if they're just pretending? And the second soldier says, I own zero Bitcoin. And then all the red soldiers on the ground start cracking up and they go, ha ha, have fun, staying poor. And then the yellow soldiers are able to identify which ones are still alive. So they stab them.

Starting point is 01:09:46 I don't mean to indicate any violence is just not what the meme is. It's funny because even though they know they're about to die, they can't resist saying it. They just got to say it. Have fun staying poor. It's just something about the culture, man. All right, good. Well, we should continue to do these. Look for the meme of the week. Can people tweet us memes? Bankless HQ on Twitter has become, and Instagram, by the way, has become a meme generation engine. And like we're trying to capture the best and tweet them out, make around, that sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:10:18 So what should people do? Tweet at us if they've got a good meme for next week. Yeah, if you think that you got a meme that deserves to be meme of the week at Bankless HQ, either on Twitter or on Instagram. And you should also be following us on Instagram because that's where we have the meme sandbox going. We're testing out our memes. The best memes that do really, really well on Instagram, make it to the bankless Twitter.

Starting point is 01:10:39 And all the other ones that are just fun to send around on Instagram are on bankless Instagram at Bankless HQ. So you guys should all be following that. All right, David. That's Ben rollups, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to do risks and disclaimers this week because it almost sounded like you were giving financial advice, which I know you weren't doing.

Starting point is 01:10:56 I would never ever not do that. So ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. So is DFI. Guys, you could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 1st Week of February (ATH for $ETH & $DPI, Logan Paul NFTs, HashMasks, Saylor Conference)

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