Bankless - ROLLUP: 1st Week of March (3LAU & Grimes NFTs, PayPal Crypto, Citigroup Report)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you, thankless Nation. It is the first week of March. This is Friday morning. I hope you're enjoying this special edition of the roll-ups, first edition of March with your Friday morning copy. David, what are we doing today? We're rolling it up. We're rolling up the first week of March. As we all know, the cryptocurrency industry moves so incredibly fast. And so we try and distill a full week of crypto news into one single episode. It's an ambitious endeavor. We try and condemn. We try and condemn as much information and as short a time as possible. Sometimes we go a little bit long, but we're going to try and condense things a little bit better this week. So Ryan, shall we get into it? We should, David. But first, before we get into it, we should mention that consensus

Starting point is 00:00:55 tickets are on sale. So this is a virtual conference you can attend. I'll be there. David is speaking there. Ray Dalio is speaking there. So he's in good company. The thing I wanted to mention is that you can get $20 off when he used the bankless code. They've got an early bird special. So if you're planning to attend a crypto conference this year, this should be the one you attend. Everyone goes, a fantastic event and get $20 off with the code bankless. We'll include a note in the show notes. David, you ready? Let's start with markets, my friend.

Starting point is 00:01:26 You ready to start with markets? Let's do it. What are the markets saying? Well, tell us, Bitcoin. What is the price of Bitcoin right now? Where have we been and where are we going? Yeah, at the time of recording, Bitcoin is at $47,500. Ryan's got Missouri on up. It's got $48,000, you know, a different depending on where you look.

Starting point is 00:01:46 But we touched over, got back over $50,000 this week. But maintaining strength, I think, has been a little bit of a struggle for the main monies, the Bitcoin and Ether. We are falling down a little bit today. But, you know, on the Ether price action, we both touched $1,600 and the $1,400 in the same day. So things are volatile. We're definitely, planting a floor, I would say, but we are struggling to get much higher than that. Still feels like we're in a bit of a dip, but maybe, as some have said, a dip for ants. This is not a substantial dip. Not sure when it will end, but it definitely still feels very much like we are in a secular

Starting point is 00:02:26 bull run. Let's talk about the price of ether. What's going on here? Yeah, from the low, low price that ether hit of $1,400 earlier this week, earlier this week and last week, it got all the way back up to $1,150. Now Ether is back down to the price of $1,537, kind of all over the place. Again, having that strength off the floor, off the bottom of the dip that we saw, but also not really able to continue its strength, really. So it's still kind of stuck in this range. We will see what happens. And it has dipped harder than Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:03:01 but you've officially called the bottom floor of Ether for now at 1,300. And that's a holding up fairly well so far. So cross your fingers for David, guys. He's making calls here. We'll see if you're right or not. I do believe that you cannot go below $1,300. We'll see about that. That's a dangerous call. Okay. Defi leaderboard. Let's talk about total value locked in defy. That has dipped a little bit. It was kind of plateaued at this 40 billion mark, which, oh my God, 40 billion still incredibly high versus a year ago. but the parabola has flattened a little bit lately. What's going on here?

Starting point is 00:03:38 Yeah. So again, both. There's three things going on here. There are continuing deposits of assets into DFI protocols. Those assets are increasingly increasing in price except for the last week. And also, DFI pulse is adding new applications into their metrics. Right. So I think today they just added tornado cash.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So tornado cash is the new metric. I think there's $300 million that tornado cash has. Yeah, 304. Congratulations to the tornado cash for getting on the board. Well deserved. I expect a number to only go up with tornado cash. And so, and that's part of the- There's 300 million locked in tornado cash? Right. And so what's going on is there's a liquidity mining mechanism where if you put your ether into tornado cash and leave it in there, which is good for privacy

Starting point is 00:04:26 because there's a bigger crowd that people can hide amongst with tornado. Auto Cash is mixing services. So they reward you with the torn token for how long you leave your ether in there, which is pretty cool. Super cool. All right. What's going on with a D5 Pulse Index, the DPI, which is the top 10 defy token projects. Price of that is 413 at the time. I'm looking at it. It's a little bit up on the week it looks like, unlike Ether price. What's going on? Yeah. And I'm going to start saying some trader words, but don't ascribe me to being any sort of trade a professional, but it looks like DPI has done a triple bottom. It's touched the 400 range, the low 400 range three times in March already. And March is only like five days long now.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And so again, planting a floor at $400, not really able to extend above that floor, but definitely not going below it either. So there's both like the mixed signals in the markets right now, signs of strength, but not able to continue that strength. And DPI is showing that as well. Now, we started looking at this metric into the new year, the DPI to ETH ratio. And this basically tracks DPI's strength relative to ETH. So it tells us whether we're in DFI season or not, as we've called it from a cyclical perspective. So, David, are we in DFI season? What's happening here?

Starting point is 00:05:47 Yeah, Ryan, if you zoom out for that three-month or six-month time frame, the DPI versus ETH trend is extremely strong. Wow, yeah, look at that straight line up and to the right. There's a lot of volatility in intraday or intra-week movements, but ever since 2021, DPI has been an up and to the right trend versus ETH. The trend is your friend. This hasn't, this has been a really sustainable growth, which is the thing, which is the cool thing. This isn't a blow off top. Things are just modestly marching up into the right when in terms of DFI versus ETH, which I think is a metric that offers much more signal than DPI or DFI

Starting point is 00:06:27 tokens versus the dollar. People, DPI is an indication of people's ability to be risk on. And it's in DPI versus ETH is people's interest in being risk on versus ether, right? Which is already kind of a risk on asset anyway. So it's really a taste of how risky people are interested in being because defy tokens are more speculative than ether. And just marching up into the right. David, you want to talk about the Neupil or should I talk about the Neupil? I think you're going to have to talk about the new pole. Okay. This is, This is a metric. We'll get back to Defy Revenue in a second, but this is a metric I like. So many of you have probably seen the Wall Street cheat sheet that looks something like this, where you go through this

Starting point is 00:07:08 parabolic cycle of first there's hope in the market, then there's optimism, belief, euphoria, and then it drops down to complacency, anxiety, denial, panic, and anger. Eventually it levels off in depression. When the bull market comes to an end, you're in the bear market. Everyone thinks, It's dead, never coming back. You get back to disbelief and then you repeat the cycle all over again. Well, the N-U-P-L is an interesting metric from GlassNode Studio. So this is net unrealized profit and loss. So we'll get into all of the mechanics of this metric.

Starting point is 00:07:45 It uses something called realized gains, but it's basically kind of tracking the cost basis of all ether. holders and using sort of a metric to measure whether they're up or whether they're down. This is based on when the ether has last moved inside of their their ether account. So think of it's kind of as the cost basis of all ether holders. What I find interesting here, David, is they use that Wall Street psychology kind of frame of reference where they've got like in the red, in the bear market that you're seeing. They've got capitulation in the orange.

Starting point is 00:08:26 you see hope and in yellow optimism and then green is belief and then and then blue is euphoria and they sort of chart this over time which is super interesting and right now according to this metric we are in a stage right before euphoria which is the the belief stage so we're in that green zone territory above like a bit above this metric number we'd get into euphoria we've seen that according to this metric three or four times back in 2017. So we're going to monitor this from time to time and kind of update you on this. But when we start to get into sustained blue level territory, that might be an indicator that the market has topped that we're inside the euphoria phase and things are getting

Starting point is 00:09:16 a little bit nutty. We are the stage right below euphoria according to this metric. I think it's something to track something that's quite interesting because it was fairly predictive in the 2017 bull run. That makes a ton of sense. And I think my only comment here is that when if and when we go from green to blue and go into that euphoric mode, that actually is not an indication to sell, at least in right that one present moment because it's about sustained time in that euphoric moment. If you go back to 2017, we first get into the blue, the euphoric moment with a $100.

Starting point is 00:09:51 ETH price, right? And so maybe a little bit north of that. But then, and then we got, and then we fell back down into the green, but then we got back into the blue at $300.00. And then for the third time, we got into blue at the max, the absolute peak at $1,400. So in 2017, there was, according to this, metric, we were in the euphoric mode for three times before it was the actual top. So if people are looking at the green that we are currently in and it's like, oh, man, there's only, there was only one more stage left, it's about time in that stage as well. Yeah, well said, good, good for, good for pointing, good that you pointed that out. I think that's definitely important to realize. All this metric is saying probably the bottom line is we have not yet hit the euphoria stage.

Starting point is 00:10:37 So we are still relatively early in the bull run. We're certainly not the earliest phase, but we're definitely not in the later half is what this metric is telling us. David, let's talk about the defy index fund that Bitwise release. We had Matt Hogan on the podcast for State of the Nation, which is just like an absolutely- Oh my God, it was so good. So good. Such a good state of the nation. So listen to that. He came on Tuesday so you could get it on the podcast or on YouTube that way. But like his message was the financial advisors are coming. It was his message. And there's $40 trillion dollars, at least in the U.S., locked that the financial advisors manage. And he talked a little bit about the defy index that Bitwise has released.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And it turns out this is a headline just from yesterday that this has been their fastest growing crypto index product ever. So the financial advisors are coming, David, and they're coming to defy and they're investing in defy tokens. Super bullish, I think, for this space. I think the interesting thing about this is that financial advisors aren't the fastest to move, but they're also not the slowest to move either, right? They are relatively independent. And if one individual financial advisor wants to pull the trigger on something, they can do that. And so when I see the headline, fastest growing week ever, my head's at, well, how many

Starting point is 00:11:57 people are on the sidelines kind of waiting for other people to make the move? And now that other people are taking the move, like, I think there's going to be, you know, quote unquote, the floodgates open. And you know what Matt opened our eyes to? I think David on that podcast is that the narrative really makes sense. And why does the defy token narrative makes sense? It's because financial advisors are used to investing in capital assets like stocks, assets that have some sort of cash flow related to it.

Starting point is 00:12:23 This is a graph from the block. We'll include a link in the show notes as well of daily defy revenue. So once again, this is not like 2017 where the tokens available produced no cash flows. They were just like utility tokens, futility tokens, as we've called them. Now our tokens are producing real cash flows. No wonder financial advisors are starting to take interest. What would you say about this chart here that I'm showing from the block of daily defy revenue? Yeah, it's so consumable. This information is consumable and easy to look at. And for a financial advisor, I think they should be impressed about how the fact that they

Starting point is 00:13:06 don't have to wait for a centralized entity to issue a quarterly report. Having live data is a huge value proposition that I think regardless of the specific defy protocol, the fact that defy at large is issuing real-time reporting should be able to offer financial advisors, you know, the peace of mind when they make these investments. So we are hitting about 25 million in defy revenue per month, a total of 210 million. These are, especially when you consider growth, these are not numbers to sneeze at anymore. David, there's one last thing. I I think we should cover in the market section. And that is this tweet from Robert Lesnar.

Starting point is 00:13:47 I'm going to get you to maybe explain this and the significance of what Robert's saying here. Yeah, I actually didn't understand the significance of this before I saw this tweet. And I had to go and ask my more educated friends about what this means. So here's what I've learned. Robert says, this is currently the most important market data in cryptocurrency markets. It drives the cost of funding across stable coins and assets, the profitability of many businesses operating in this. space, defy markets, and in some cases, spot, spot prices. What Leshner, what Robert Leshner,

Starting point is 00:14:18 founder of compound, by the way, is what he's talking about is the GBTC and ETHE premiums of gray scale. That is a significant source of revenue for many, many yield-bearing companies, right? Like, think of who's that, who's the big. Walk-Fi. It would be one. Yeah, it would be a great one. Celsius would be another NXO. Right. And so people are, like many, many businesses have their revenue, a significant amount of their revenue from putting Bitcoin into gray scale to accessing that premium, right? So like if the premium, the the the GBT to BTC premium is 50%, somebody would put in one Bitcoin in, wait six months and get 1.5 bitcoins out. Like great, great business model. But it dried up and now it's even negative. And so people literally this revenue stream just

Starting point is 00:15:04 got deleted from so many companies that depend on it. And so we are going to see a big contraction in a company's ability to generate revenue from this path. And the fear is that this could actually lead to selling because now they have to sell assets to make ends meet. That's why Robert Lesnar is drawing attention to this. Yeah, I think it's interesting because people always ask the question of, okay, BlockFi is delivering like 7, 8% yield, annual yield on stable coins. How does that work?

Starting point is 00:15:36 Where does the yield come from? Well, one of the places that yield comes from is this arbitrage opportunity between the gray scale premiums, right? So because there's this massive difference between the spot price of Bitcoin and ETH and the price of gray scale shares, institutions are able to arbitrage that and they deliver that in the form of interest to centralized platforms like BlockFi. And of course, that filters down into the defy ecosystem as well. Now, I think there's two kind of questions about this. First of all, it's interesting to understand that. But the first is, will these premiums be sustained, right? Like, low.

Starting point is 00:16:16 This is the first time they've ever dropped into negative territory in recent memory. And is that just a blip or will it hang out in negative territory? If it's just a blip, it doesn't really matter for kind of the long term. If premiums go back up, it doesn't matter. The other thing I think to consider is I've, my understanding is as well, there is a nice our opportunity when premiums are actually on the negative side. So there might be other ways to restore those high interest rates in D5. But it is interesting to think about the question of like, okay, where do these interest rates come from? Because they are manufactured from some

Starting point is 00:16:53 sort of arbitrage opportunity somewhere. And the grayscale arbitrage opportunity is one of them. It's just how markets become more efficient. David, that is markets. We should take a minute to thank the sponsors that made this roll-up episode possible. AVE is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum and just recently released AVE version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using 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

Starting point is 00:17:33 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 Avey's V2 features is the ability 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

Starting point is 00:18:13 AVE.com. That's AAVE.E.com. Guys, we've entered a bull market. Now is the time to start building your crypto empire, and you should do it on Gemini. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. It's available in 50 countries, supports more than 30 crypto assets, including defy tokens like dye, Abe, uni, and YFI. I love their defy token support. You can buy crypto safely and securely on Gemina's mobile app or their exchange. You can know that your assets are protected with industry-leading security. And they're not only protected, they're also insured.

Starting point is 00:18:49 I've been a loyal Gemini user since 2016. The Winklevoss Twins are the founders. They've been on the podcast. They believe in the bankless vision. They are helping to on board the world. So get ready for the bull market. a free account in less than three minutes at gemini.com slash go bankless and get $15 after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's jemini.com slash go bankless.

Starting point is 00:19:17 All right, David, release time. Let's get to the first. Google finance has added a crypto tab to their Google.com slash finance sheet where you can see all of the metrics. You can see what's going on in the U.S. and Asia, SMP, NASDAQ, Russell Index, Dow Jones, and now Crypto, just feels like it naturally fits there. I think it's kind of cool. Mainstream adoption. Yep. And that's the story. Crypto is getting in front of people's eyeballs more and more and more probably because people demand it. This is the first year I've heard crypto actually mentioned on NPR when they're going through like the roundups. It just feels like it fits. This is something we would have never seen in 2017. David, I'm going to round out a few of these.

Starting point is 00:20:01 and throw them at you. And then let's get some comments. So the first is ZK Sync has announced ecosystem investment round, a new investment round. So this is a layer two based on ZK. I believe it's ZK rollups, not optimistic rollups. This is from Matter Labs. They've got a pretty massive series A investment for the tech that they're building. Let me get to the next one.

Starting point is 00:20:26 Sushi is going multi-chain, multi-chain rather. So, and they're taking like this shotgun approach to it, which is sort of interesting. So sushi, of course, is sort of a uniswap clone originally, but they've developed into an interesting automated market making defy exchange in their own right. And they're just shotgun gunning approach their deployment to other layer twos and other chains, including Phantom, the Polygon chain, which is formulimatic, X-Dye chain, Binance smart chain, moon bean, moon, moon network, which I'm not, that's something on Pocod looks like. It's an interesting approach. They're like, we're going to, we're going to deploy sushi across all of

Starting point is 00:21:07 these. We've got Alpha Hymora, who has embraced, as it says in the headlines, a multi-chain future. They're starting with the Binance chain. So they're deploying Alpha Hormora on the finance chain. And then we've got MetaMask, which is a wallet that we all know and love and use. they are creating an API so that it could be super easy using MetaMass to switch different chains. You can go from Ethereum Mainnet to the Polygon Network to some of these roll-up chains like Arbitrum and Optimistic and Scale Network and X-Di and more. And then lastly, I think, but not least, we've got Xerion, which is a Defi portfolio viewer that we know and love. We had them on a recent AMA. they said they were going to do this, they are now supporting the viewing of assets, not only on

Starting point is 00:21:59 Ethereum Mainnet, but also on the layer two Polygon network. David, that was a lot of headlines there, right? But I think what we're getting to you is a theme here, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this. And that theme is this. We are moving from just Ethereum host of all Defi activities to something a little different to re-architecture a bit more of a multi-chain world. What's your take on all of these things? Yeah, the polychain world or the polychain thesis has always been one that has been interesting to me because there's many different ways to view a polychain world. One of the ways to view a polychain world is through the East Maximilus lens where you have the Ethereum L1 and then you have all of the EVM-compatital Ethereum L2s. That's optimistic roll-ups. That's ZK roll-ups. That's Matic. And that's a story that we have here.

Starting point is 00:22:50 a story of many different people implementing Ethereum's L2s. And those are also different chains, right? And a ZK roll-up or an optimistic roll-ups is a blockchain. And that is in that with MetaMass, you can now select these different networks that aren't the Ethereum L1 as you see fit. And then we also have the story of sushi swap basically spanning out, like you said, shotgun method to every single relevant blockchain that has users, right? Any blockchain that has users that makes it worth their time to make this effort. Even some that don't. Do you know if moving? Yeah, perhaps some that don't too. Yeah. But then also Alpha moving on to Binance, which definitely definitely has users. And so the interesting story is that, you know, some teams and some companies, some tokens don't have to be Ethereum native

Starting point is 00:23:36 perpetually, right? There is value in going and finding different users on different blockchains. And all they have to do, all sushi has to do is generate revenue on other chains. And that's good for sushi. importantly, Sushi the token is issued and relies on Ethereum, right? And so you own Sushi the token using the main Ethereum chain. But there's no reason why these other teams can't go and generate revenue for their application for their business by going and generating revenue on Binance Smart Chain or Matic or wherever. At a high level, I think it's important for people to realize that there are really two separate chains that we've talked about throughout all of these.

Starting point is 00:24:14 The first is a side chain. And a side chain is basically something that is not, at least from Ethereum's perspective, side chain is all relative. But from Ethereum's perspective, anything that is not secured by the Ethereum main chain consensus would be considered a side chain. So the Binance smart chain would be an example of a side chain. X-Di, for example, that would be an example of a side chain. It has its own validator set.

Starting point is 00:24:39 A layer two is better defined as something that derives its security from a side chain. from Ethereum consensus, the value of ETH as an asset, and the Ethereum main chain. So, you know, the Polygon network kind of plays a little bit in layer two. It's mostly a side chain, but a little bit in layer two. But these roll-ups that we've been talking about that are coming out, like optimistic roll-up, the roll-up that we just mentioned from Matter Lab, ZK-Sink, those are all layer two chains that are secured by the Ethereum mainnet and the value of ETH as an asset. So when we talk about a multi-chain world, at some level, we've always had a multi-chain

Starting point is 00:25:22 world, right? I consider Coinbase, Binance, Gemini. These are all side chains, essentially. They have their own ledgers. These are side chains to Ethereum and Bitcoin and other crypto networks. So we've always had a multi-chain world. And now we are having more of a multi-chain world with some of these DFI protocols expanding to other chains. I think the interesting question is, are we going to live in a

Starting point is 00:25:44 world that is more L2 and layer two dominated? Or are we going to live in a world that is more side chain dominated? Or is, as Andreessen Horowitz said, in their recent press release, Chris Dixon wrote this about their investment in optimism. We don't know. So we're betting on all of them, is basically what they said. What's your take? My take is that in the short term, during the bull market, we will live in a many different blockchains, many different L1s world with plenty of side chains, right? Binance smart chain, it's going to work during the bull market. Pocod, perhaps even Pocod works during the bull market.

Starting point is 00:26:19 I think, and that's because there's just more people than what Ethereum capacity can handle. And so there's overflow. There's spillover. This is why Ethereum L2s are also going to work. There's going to be general spillover. Then during the coming bear market, if that cycle does continue to play out, things will contract. There will be fewer users.

Starting point is 00:26:36 and people will contract back to Ethereum, in my opinion, as the economic hub of the internet. And then that will give the opportunity for Ethereum-specific L-2s to benefit because they are closer to Ethereum. They're closer to the heart. They're closer to Manhattan. So short-term, all chains will work, long-term, mainly just Ethereum L-2s. Or I'm just a taxi. Maybe.

Starting point is 00:27:01 Or maybe you're a Protocol Sync maximalist, David. and that is a thesis through which we see the world. The most credibly neutral base protocols tend to win over time. We'll see how that plays out, but we'll continue to talk about it. David, this was a DeFi protocol that just was released last week. We talked about it on the roll-up Alchemics, and you explained it. I don't think we need to explain it again. You could listen to the previous roll-up to hear,

Starting point is 00:27:26 but what I'm amazed at is this new protocol only a week old, and it's already got over $100 million in dye in it. This just the space moves so incredibly fast and capital moves so quickly. Do you have any takes on Alchemics? Yeah, I got a take on Scoopy Truples his Twitter name. Best name in Twitter, by the way. It's so fun to say, Scoopy Truples. It's how I say it in my head.

Starting point is 00:27:47 But yeah, for those, the TLDR of Alchemics is it's loans that pay back themselves via interest earned in DFI, right? So you pay out $100 loan and then the principal or the interest will just pay off the loan. So pretty cool protocol. And I think it's going to be a pretty important money, Lego. All right, David, this is another hot D5 protocol called B Protocol. I know you talk to them for Meet the Nation earlier this week. I'm not sure if that episode is released yet, but can you tell us what B Protocol is?

Starting point is 00:28:16 And the headline here is B Protocol and Compound, their integration is live. So what's going on with B Protocol here? Yeah, B Protocol, Meet the Nation coming out sometime next week for those that want to go and dive deeper into B Protocol. Basically, B Protocol is like your safety net for liquidations, for MakerDAO or Compound or in the future, AVE, they're going to integrate with AVE. And so this is a response to the Black Thursday events, which actually is almost coming up a year on our one year anniversary of Black Thursday. Wow. Yeah. And so quick history lesson, Black Thursday, Ethereum blockchain was extremely

Starting point is 00:28:49 congested because Ether price went from like $270 down to like $120 in a very short amount of time. Maker Dow vaults were needed to get liquidated, but Ethereum congestion was so high that bids weren't getting in. And so somebody was able to liquidate those vaults. for $0,000, which was bad because then there's no collateral left over. Some people had their, basically their vault just completely drained. It wasn't an exploit. It wasn't an attack. It was just a failure of liquidations.

Starting point is 00:29:18 And this is what B protocol is doing. It's a guaranteed liquidator. And so what you do with B protocol is instead of going into compound or Maker Dow, you go to B protocol and you deposit your money into compound or Maker Dow through the B protocol wrapper. And what that does is that gives B protocol the rights to liquidate your positions according to the same exact parameters of Maker Dow or compound or the underlying borrowing and lending protocol.

Starting point is 00:29:46 But they get priority on liquidations versus the external liquidators. Wow. Right? Super cool. And they actually save a bunch of money by not having to compete with miners on gas fees. And so that's where a little bit of yield comes from. And so because the liquidators of the B protocol system don't have to compete with other miners in gas auctions, that savings actually goes back to the users, which is a pretty cool platform. Super interesting. David, I'm going to have to watch that full meet the nation with B protocol because one thing I have questions about is like what are the security implications of wrapping your collateral in a B protocol token. I'm sure you cover it there.

Starting point is 00:30:30 but what a super interesting primitive, just in general, that like I wouldn't have ever thought could be devised and just like the creativity of these financial systems. It's pretty cool, man. Let's get to NFTs. Every week there's new NFT releases. This week has been no exception. Kings of Leon are releasing album NFTs right now. That's a fairly, you know, it's a fairly mainstream band, right?

Starting point is 00:30:58 Kings and Leon have been around. I'm a Kings of Leon fan. So they're joining the NFT fray. You know, this is just an example of another group from the music scene, jumping aboard crypto here. Absolutely. And again, the always the through line is this is a new way for artists to monetize themselves. They're not doing this because, well, maybe they are doing it because of hype,

Starting point is 00:31:22 but they're doing it because they're going to make some money, right? And this is going to just be a magnet both for capital and for other artists, right? So, you know, if anyone's a king of Leon, like has a Kings of Leon connection, we would love to bring them on the show. So let us know. Oh, yeah. Let's bring Kings of Leon on. And what I love about this, David, is we're reading about NFTs and crypto in Rolling Stone, rolling stone. No big deal.com.

Starting point is 00:31:45 No big deal. All right, David, let's wrap up releases with this. Compound has introduced another chain called Gateway or the compound chain, as the original white paper described it. So what's compound doing here and how does it fit into the conversation of a multi-chain world that we were talking about earlier? Yeah, this one's a little unique. This is a side chain, I guess, because it has its own consensus mechanism. It's not secured by Ethereum. It's secured by cash validators.

Starting point is 00:32:16 And cash is the new currency token for compound. It's a stable coin. And so this is a application-specific blockchain that links into Ethereum and other chains that is specifically built for compound. Very unique pivot, I guess, from compound that has a lot of, you know, ethmaxis like me, scratching their heads as to why they're doing this. I don't really get it. I don't really get why we want an application specific blockchain rather than going on to something like optimistic roll-ups, like where everyone else is. But Robert Leshner, and I'm not ready to bet against him. So I'm just kind of sit and I sit in my hands and wait and see how this

Starting point is 00:32:53 thing plays out. What's interesting here is they built it on substrate, which is a, a Pocod technology. Now, they didn't choose to connect it to the rest of the Pocodot network. That would, of course, incur fees to reserve a spot on the Pocodot network. So they haven't done that yet. But I find that interesting. And it basically allows you to do something that you couldn't just do on native Ethereum, which is like borrow against, borrow dots, for example, a non-Etherium asset using ETH as collateral. I guess this is what this is supposed to provide. But I'm not sure how security works, to be honest, if it's not secured by the Ethereum Mainnet, and if it's not secured by Pocod, either, it's just secured by its own set of validators backed by this cash token. So a bit of a different take here, and we'll see how that evolves. David, let's leave releases and get to the news. As always, there is a lot of news. Let's start with this one. City Group has come out with a paper where they actually said, Bitcoin is at a tipping point and could become, this is in quotes, the currency of choice for

Starting point is 00:34:03 global trade. I guess they mean global trade between competing nation states. What's, what's this report saying? Yeah, this report is massive. It's 108 pages and it's very positive about Bitcoin. It's a huge improvement from some of the reports that we saw back in 2017. And yeah, look, Bitcoin mentioned over 658 times. Ethereum mentioned 21 times, I believe. Also very positively, it's a report about Bitcoin for people interested in Bitcoin, but they couldn't help include some Ethereum talk because of how relevant it is. And so that's pretty cool. The fact that big institutions like Citibank are talking positively about Bitcoin is obviously bullish. Look at this, David. I'm doing a quick search for Uniswap because I have not read this full report.

Starting point is 00:34:50 Swabs in there. You can talk about 11 times. Really? Yeah. So the bankers are going deep on this stuff, huh? Is that what we're saying? Type in wrapped.

Starting point is 00:35:01 Wrapped? Wrapped. We got three. Yeah, wrapped Bitcoin. Wow, they're doing their homework. Good job. Welcome, bankers. Thanks for tuning to bankless.

Starting point is 00:35:11 Whoops. All right, PayPal. Hide that from your boss. Yeah. Not safe for banker work, at least. All right. PayPal to buy crypto custody firm curve. I've not heard of this crypto custody firm. So it may be a smaller one or it's not like Anchorage, which is one that I've heard of or Bip, Bip pay. Bicko, Bicko. Thank you. But they are getting into the crypto assets space. They bought this for $500 million. So first of all, wow, nice premium on crypto based company these days. But also, this is part of the D5.5. mullet story that we've been talking about. So the defy mullet is finance, traditional finance, fintech in the front, and

Starting point is 00:35:58 defy in the back, crypto in the back. That's what PayPal is doing here, investing in the new financial infrastructure. It's kind of what I see playing here. I think that the banks are going to get checkmated by this kind of thing because if fintech is the front end, things like PayPal, for example, or things like Venmo or Square, right, and they're using traditional banking infrastructure as the back end. They just do a swap that out for crypto infrastructure. Where does that leave the banks is always my question? But this is super bullish, I think, for crypto that fintech is getting involved here. And having a blockchain in the back, right?

Starting point is 00:36:37 Ethereum or Bitcoin in the back, quote unquote, is where they're supposed to be. Like, these things are not supposed to be in the front face of users. Like we don't want to tinker with ACH or Fedwire, right? That's not cool. Only nerds like us like the team. or with Ethereum and the blockchain directly. If we want to go mainstream with this, we need big trusted companies like PayPal to do the defy in the back defy mullet, right? Where all of the UI and Ux developers that PayPal employs,

Starting point is 00:37:04 which is a lot of them, they're all of a sudden going to make Ethereum and Bitcoin and all these defy protocols very easy to use by just obfuscating them and showing them the PayPal front end. Every fintech is going to get their defy mullet on. We're seeing it already. this is another tweet from Mike Dutus about PayPal, and this is a direct quote from the story. PayPal's crypto unit is experimenting with smart contracts, testing Ethereum and other

Starting point is 00:37:30 blockchains as potential candidates to help the company improve payments and other transactions. They're just jumping right down the rabbit hole. I think we'll see more of this in the future as well. David, something that happens, I feel like every week, we'll put it in that category, is Micro Strategy invests more of their cash into Bitcoin. They've just done another $15 million investment this week. Not much more to say there, is there? No, the week goes by.

Starting point is 00:38:00 Other than the consistency is impressive, and it kind of leads me to believe that Michael Saylor and Micro Strategy will never actually be done filling their bag, and they will permanently be taking their U.S. dollars and buying Bitcoin with it. Like this is what, the seventh, eighth or ninth purchase of Bitcoin by micro strategy? At some point, this is just them are saving. You know what this looks like to me? It looks like what we recommend is you dollar cost average into crypto.

Starting point is 00:38:26 There's dollar cost averaging their company balance sheet into crypto. It's half to gradually. Sometimes it's $15 million. Sometimes it's $900 million. Sometimes they borrow it. You know, it's not even like they just borrow it from directly from the Fed and bondholders. Nice to be able to do that if you're a corporation. Another thing that tends to happen on a weekly basis is something that happened this week.

Starting point is 00:38:49 A defy protocol was hacked, $14 million. Furrow combo exploited. I've not personally, I've heard of this, I've not used it directly. But I'm not sure. Did you read the details of this hack or what actually happened? This exploit was unique and has never been done before. And I think it's unique to how or what FruCumbro is. It's apparently a drag and drop

Starting point is 00:39:13 Defy building block system, which is kind of cool. But apparently somebody was able to trick the protocol into thinking that the application that they had deployed was AVE when it wasn't actually AVE or something. I remember this. Very unique. The last thing that tends to happen every single week is the Fed talks about talking about the U.S. digital dollar.

Starting point is 00:39:36 When are they going to stop talking and actually do something, David? Yeah, like once again, the Fed says we're looking into digital currencies. At this point, just fucking do it. Just get there. China is doing it. They're like trialing it. The first time we talked about the Fed looking into the digital dollar, ether, that was like, you know, in 2020.

Starting point is 00:39:56 And Ethereum was a younger system then. Like we forget how young. We're all younger. And it has developed way more in the last like, you know, X number of months than the Fed has. The Fed's still looking at the digital dollar. Meanwhile, crypto dollars on Ethereum are through the roof. Like, if it hasn't happened by this point, honestly, it's not going to happen. David, let's get to some of the things that are happening in NFTs, because this is another

Starting point is 00:40:21 thing that's going to be a recurring theme. I feel like for the next few months on the roll-ups, that is NFTs breaking new records. The musician Grimes, so this is Elon Musk's girlfriend, I believe. She debuted an NFT auction, sold out. 20 minutes, about $6 million. Got another one. Blow brings in the biggest NFT crypto art auction ever.

Starting point is 00:40:48 So setting records here, almost 12 million, 11.6 million in this auction. Got another one here. Ubisoft is incorporating NFTs into its game. So major game publishing company working with so rare. They're doing sort of football, soccer in the U.S., collectible, and Ubisoft is launching a game built with their NFTs. And lastly, well, this is Spencer Nune, saying that NFTs are on the verge of going mainstream,

Starting point is 00:41:19 and he's got some metrics behind it. But David, all of this news on a weekly basis, this week included, feels like Spencer's right. NFTs are going mainstream. The fantastic thing about NFTs is that they are magnets for celebrities, and celebrities are magnets for people's eyeballs, right? So the amplification power of this whole revolution is massive because it's celebrity's jobs to be public and get as much exposure to their NFTs as possible. So celebrities are taking NFTs mainstream for us. And that's because NFTs are a way for them to monetize their own labor as we have been saying.

Starting point is 00:41:56 That's a really good point. I mean, where crypto is effectively leveraging all of the attention and all of the fan base that these celebrities have in order to amplify its mention. in order to amplify its attention on this space. Spencer has seven signs that NFTs are on the verge of going mainstream. David, should we cover these? Yeah, I think we can blow by them pretty quickly. Number one is that obviously sales are through the roof. $91 million worth of crypto art were sold in February,

Starting point is 00:42:27 which is 8X the previous month. So that's pretty crazy. The second is that there are now over four artists who have sales, in artwork value of over 10 million. So Spencer says this is a sign that artists have unprecedented earning potential. Once you see another artist make 10 million on NFTs, you're certainly going to fomo in to that if you are a creator, if you are an artist. David, what's the third one? NBA Topshop up to $300 million in all-time sales. That's on the flow blockchain, and there's a deeper conversation as to whether NFTs on the flow blockchain are going to work out.

Starting point is 00:43:03 Can't settle to Ethereum. Kind of a problem in my mind. But still, either $300 million or $300 million. Bringing more people into the space. The fourth is the sales of Cryptopunks. These are the original NFTs. 2017 and for years. Yeah, Vintage 2017 or earlier even.

Starting point is 00:43:21 They surpassed all-time sales. This is all-denominated in ETH, which is another interesting point in and of itself. All-time sales of over $105 million. So the more authentic. The original NFTs are doing quite well in this NFT boom market. David, what's the fifth? Hashmax 825 hash max in NFTX. NFTX is a NFT, a NFT-EF-type product with index fund that allows investors to get

Starting point is 00:43:49 exposure to crypto art. And there's just more and more hash masks in NFTX. NFTS continuing to be like overall buying pressure for NFTs. David, did you hear Mark Cuban call them hash marks on our podcast? podcast. The guy knows branding. It was awesome. Yeah, well done, Mark. Freudian slip there. All right. OpenC, which we're having on a bankless asking me anything next week. They just surpassed 50,000 users. This is an over a hundred, over a thousand annualized growth. So this is definitely a sign of a vibrant secondary market for NFTs. So OpenC is almost like an eBay for NFTs where people can resell NFTs that they've purchased. What's the seventh? Cap this one off for us. Yeah, socks. One of the first tokens redeemable for a real world item, Unis socks. As these one socks, one pair of socks is now trading at $130,000.

Starting point is 00:44:47 These are actually ERC20s, but the connection is still the same. You know, scarce digital goods that, well, this one's actually redeemable for real life goods, but I would still categorize it in the NFT camp. There's only so many of them. The Uniswap meme is extremely strong. and to the point that people are evaluating that uniswap meme at $130,000 per token. I don't know how many total tokens there are, I think maybe $10,000. Market cap is very high for socks.

Starting point is 00:45:14 David, this is the one that got away from me. I remember being like, I'm not going to pay $150 for a sock. Come on uniswap. Come on Hayden Adams. I'm not doing that. Jokes on me. They're worth $130,000 now. Got to love crypto.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Evolve funds files for an ETH, ETF. This is a Canadian firm that is filing for an ETH ETF. This is right on the heels of the Bitcoin ETF that they just followed. And I think maybe the story here is that first Bitcoin will get its ETF and institutional adoption. But right on the heels of Bitcoin is ether. And this is what we've seen across the CME futures across all institutional preferences so far that Bitcoin is really paving the way for Ether to get into the institutional adoption as well. Any takes here? Yeah, here's my hot take. An ether ETF is more bullish for ether than a

Starting point is 00:46:07 Bitcoin ETF is bullish for Bitcoin. And that's just because of relative market cap sizes. If you are somebody who's interested in buying in Bitcoin ETF, you were probably also interested in buying an ether ETF. And $1 into an ether ETF means more for Ethereum because the market cap of Ethereum is much lower than Bitcoin. So it means more. It will push the price up more. That's my hot take. I've got a second hot take on that, which is the Bitcoin expands through institutional adoptions. So crypto banks, as we've said, Ether can do that too, though, which is the interesting thing. But it's not limited to that because it can also expand as defy collateral as well.

Starting point is 00:46:50 So it's got these two paths to growth, whereas Bitcoin has just the one, which I think is kind of unique and bullish eth. There's a hot take on top of your hot take. Bitmex, Arthur Hayes, expected to surrender to U.S. authorities. He was kind of on the lamb, I believe, but now he's expected to surrender. What's your take on this? It's going to happen. Now it's finally happened. No, end of story, I guess.

Starting point is 00:47:17 End of story. End of story. It's probably, yeah, Arthur. Arthur is definitely going to be back in the crypto scene. I'm sure at some point, we'll see what happens next with that story. I'm not ready for that to happen. All right, David, let's get into. some takes. We've been dropping the hot takes, but now let's formalize it in our take section.

Starting point is 00:47:35 This is a message from Chris Berninski. What is Chris saying here, David? Yeah, he is giving a warning to crypto entrepreneurs to be patient and let the deals come to you, basically. So let me read this out real quick. If you're an entrepreneur raising money in crypto, try to get more than one term sheet before committing to a lead. The market is competitive and flush with capital. That is to your favor. More than one terms of service or term sheet, excuse me, will help get you the best deal and neutralize predatory behavior. What he is saying in the crypto space is that good entrepreneurs with good products are the scarce goods. And as an entrepreneur, you need to know that. And so don't just

Starting point is 00:48:18 sell out for the first deal because capital is not scarce in crypto. People need to deploy capital and they don't have very many places to deploy them to. That's also just a warning or message for people interested in entrepreneurs, the environment is friendly to you. Go build something. Like, you can get money for it. So go out and get that money. So thanks, Chris, for just being a heads-up play. So Chris is saying labor is in charge of this market. In particular, David, I think labor that knows how to develop smart contracts and defy protocols. And in order to know those things, you had to be leveling up on this stuff like two years ago, right? You could join now, but you're not going to command the premium that a D5 veteran.

Starting point is 00:49:01 And a veteran is like two years, one year even developing the space commands. Not that long. Yeah, this is the value of front running the opportunity. And when we say that, we don't just mean investing in assets while they're low and expect them to go high. We do mean that. But we also mean front run the labor opportunity. If you know crypto at this stage in the game, you are ahead of most of the world.

Starting point is 00:49:24 Use that to your advantage. You can do that during the, the bull markets is what Chris is saying here. Here's another take. Anthony Sassano. It's really fascinating to watch Binance Smart Chain speed run Ethereum's DeFi Summer. What's he saying here? Yeah, so he's talking about like the crazy farming APYs that you can get on Binance smart chain right now, the crazy token movements, new tokens, new assets. Anthony's saying that it's very much like Ethereum's DeFi Summer, but now it's happening on Binance and it's happening at a faster rate, which makes sense because we've already done DeFi Summer once.

Starting point is 00:49:57 And so now the Binance change is doing it. It's just going to do it even faster. Binance trains saw BNB skyrocket in price and saw many new assets come and also skyrocket in price also got their first rug pulls. So pop their rugpole cherry. Like congratulations, Binance. And so yeah, that Binance smart chain speed running defy summer. All right. Here's another take. The EVM is the moat. While we're doing Anthony Sasano takes, this is his second take here. The Ethereum virtual machine is what he's saying, is the moat. Is he saying that's the moat for Ethereum, the Ethereum virtual machine? What's your take here?

Starting point is 00:50:32 Yeah, so Binance Smart Chain, also an EVM-compatible blockchain, right? And so many, many things are EVM-compatible blockchain. Notably, EOS was once an EVM-V-Batible blockchain. But what Anthony is saying is that because everything is an EVM-compatible blockchain, that's actually beneficial to Ethereum. While in EOS and Binance Smart Chain, they're like, hey, you can come deploy your contracts on Binance or on Eos, right? And so then they do. But it's actually just adding network effects back to Ethereum because Ethereum set the standard and everything began on Ethereum in the first

Starting point is 00:51:07 place. So compatibility to try and steal users or volume or activity from Ethereum to your chain by implementing the EVM is actually just increasing Ethereum's network effects. That's Anthony's take. Yeah, definitely. I can see that take. Although I would say it's definitely not the only moat for Ethereum. Anthony's probably not saying that, but would you agree that the EVM, the technology component is not the only moat that Ethereum has? It might not even be the strongest moat. I think that ether as an asset is a moat in of itself.

Starting point is 00:51:40 I think the Ethereum community is a moat. I think credibly neutral protocols, builders behind them are also moats in this ecosystem. I'm not sure necessarily stronger moats, but I totally agree with the take that others adopting the EVM enforces the EVM as a standard. Pocodot, for instance, they're not going with the Ethereum virtual machine, right? Cosmos Adams, they're not, they don't have an Ethereum virtual machine right now. And, you know, that has maybe decreased their adoption speed as a result. Next.

Starting point is 00:52:18 Yeah, I don't have a follow uptake on that. That's fine. All right. Sorry, Tyler, cut. The segue, no segue, no smooth segue here. I can start this one off since there's no segue. Go for it. All right, Ryan, on to the next take, which is mine.

Starting point is 00:52:38 And my take is that I am a full block maximalist. And so this has been going around, especially as many, many people come into the space and they aren't, they don't have some of these conversations that we've been having on bankless for a while now. They see like, oh, Pocodot, scale. Like, oh, like, you know, buying a smart chain, new chain, like doesn't have fees. It's good. And so my take is that I'm a full block maximist. And that means that I pay attention to blockchains that have full blocks.

Starting point is 00:53:04 And that's a simple, the calculus is pretty simple. If your blockchain has full blocks, it's being used. And people are paying fees to use it. Therefore, and fees are importantly not gameable. It's not a gameable metric. Unless you are interested in burning money to fake that metric, full blocks and blockchains with high fees, which is only Bitcoin and Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:53:23 are how you get a very strong signal out of this, base. And so as soon as Pocodot or Binance Smart Chain or whatever block, insert your blockchain here has full blocks, I will start to include it in my mental models and we will begin to talk about it on the bankless program. So stay tuned for future blockchains with full blocks. All right, David, while you throw it down right there. This is kind of what you're talking about, right? So we've got Ethereum and it's kind of at the top of with $15 million average seven-day daily revenue. And then, we've got Bitcoin in second place with $6 million.

Starting point is 00:53:59 But I will say, and then we have a bunch of D5 protocols, we've got Binance chain here with $100,000 in average fee daily revenue. Are you saying if that starts to rise up the ranks and get closer to Ethereum and Bitcoin, that that will make you more bullish on something like Binance chain relative to Ethereum or Bitcoin? Yeah, it's a step in the right direction. However, there are issues with Binance's 21 nodes, which are largely run by Binance, right? So when Binance pays for fees on Binance smart chain, they're actually just paying themselves.

Starting point is 00:54:31 So there is actually a way, because they're the ones collecting their own fees, it's okay for them to wash trade because the fees, the money that they're paying, they just collect. So there is a nuance there that is worth parsing out. Yeah, absolutely. But definitely your point that fees are the way you determine whether a blockchain is used or not is a good one. All right, David, let's go with this last take. I think this is Ashley saying, ETH Maxis, pretending this is ETH Maxi saying this.

Starting point is 00:55:02 Bitcoin is a worthless meme coin. Also, ETH Maxis. NFTs. Oh my God. NFTs are the best thing ever. What is she saying here? Well, I think this means that I'm actually not an ETH maxi because I don't think Bitcoin is a worthless meme coin, but many ETH Maxis do.

Starting point is 00:55:17 Like they point at Bitcoin and go, oh, it's a pet rock. It doesn't actually do anything. Can I ask you? I want to get back to that thing of Eith. Maxis because I don't actually believe, David, before you get here, it's like, who's an eth-mask maxi? I don't like, I- Antiprosynthesis. Okay, so there's one. There's one guy on Twitter. That's a pseudonymous account. He's an eth-maxie. I keep seeing all of these tweets about eth-maxis. In fact, I'm called an eth-maxi. I know I'm not an eth-maxi because I believe in

Starting point is 00:55:47 other assets that are not Ethereum and other chains that are not Ethereum. I'm definitely a bankless maximalists and a decentralization maximalists in the space because I think those values are how we are very important. Those are the things we need as a foundation for this space. But I don't believe that there's only one chain that can exhibit those values. So I don't even think you're in eth-maxi. You said you were in eth-maxy early in episode, but I don't think you actually are. Like this is a meme that I feel like has been foisted upon a group of people without substance. But what's your take? Yeah. I'm, I, I, It's a semantic issue, right?

Starting point is 00:56:25 Because I'm not an eth-maxi because I own assets that aren't ether, right? And that's the difference between Bitcoin Maxis and Ethereum Maxis. And I don't really think Ashley is like poking fun at Ethmaxis. I think she's just doing it for the memes. It's a good meme. It's a good joke. The point about the theory behind why there can't be Ethereum maxis is that Ethereum is that Ethereum is an economy. No one is like an economy maximalist.

Starting point is 00:56:51 I mean, I guess we're or we're all economy maximalist. And by definition, ether can't work as an asset without many, many, many other assets as well, having value on Ethereum. And so just like this one token to rule them all attitude is just not relevant. It's invalid when it comes to Ethereum. But it is also a very easy way to just ascribe homogeneity amongst an outgroup. So if you don't consider yourself an Heathhead and Ethereum or whatever, you'll just point at all the people that you do consider to be in the outgroup of, you know, the Ethereum believers. And then you'll just call them ETH Maxis, and that's how it works.

Starting point is 00:57:31 I got it. So sometimes when people use the term, ETH Maxis, what they're really saying is, like, fans of Eith, like people who believe that Eth is really important and really great and that it's better in some dimensions than other chains. It's kind of what they mean. Oh, yeah, sounds like me. Yeah, right? So, like, I guess in that, using that term, you would be an Eith Maxillus.

Starting point is 00:57:50 But I think what's interesting here is that Ashley is saying like Bitcoin is a worthless meme coin. And then she's also pointing out that Ethereum Maximus or Ethereums, people are Ethereum fans, are going crazy over NFTs, right? And NFTs, what are they? They don't have cash flows. They are useless memes, are they not? Do you see that there's kind of, I guess, a contrast here or something that doesn't line up, I guess, in the way that they? think of these things? Yeah, I mean, there's, we could go, we could talk about this forever.

Starting point is 00:58:26 NFTs are valuable because there's belief that other people will buy them. You know, there's one way to value these things as in this strictly the value of the art, but I wouldn't say that that's why, you know, NFTs are being bought for millions of dollars these days. They are being bought because people think that they can sell them to other people for higher prices in the future, which is what Bitcoin is. Yeah. That's also what ether is.

Starting point is 00:58:46 Like, as soon as we have a conversation about like, especially, with Bitcoin with perfect scarcity, it automatically turns into a pyramid, not scheme, but pyramid game, right? And NFTs are also a pyramid game where the value depends on you being able to sell it to someone else in the future for a higher value. And at that point, if that's the only fundamental thing about what is true about the value of that asset, then that's when people say like, oh, it's just like a worth that's meme coin. It's just a Ponzi game. It's just a Ponzi scheme or whatever. But all scarce assets have this Ponzi nature to them. Their only reason that they're going to go up is, and people are going to buy them now so that they can sell them to other people for a higher

Starting point is 00:59:27 price later. I do think it's the case that Ethereum's have traditionally been, like, it's taken them a long time to admit that, that memes actually have real value and that you can have things that are store of values because everyone believes their store of values or things that can have value because collectively society believes they are valuable. Ethereum historically have been a bit slower to admit this, whereas Bitcoiners are just like, yeah, of course. Number goes up. Like they got it day one.

Starting point is 00:59:56 They got it day one. Absolutely. All right, David, those are the takes. We should stop and tell our listeners about the fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. And then we will be back with the meme of the week. Synthetics is Ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol. 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.

Starting point is 01:00:24 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 the... that is the power of the synthetics platform. No slippage on your trades. You can also easily short assets with iSynths, 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

Starting point is 01:01:01 liquidity offered by synthetic assets. Or investors can stake collateral to the protocol 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're are a developer or you just want to earn yield on your collateral, go to www.synthetics.io, where you can stake your SNX or ETH and earn fees from synthetics. If you want to live a bankless life, you've got to get yourself a monolith defy visa card. Monolith is a one-two punch. It's both an Ethereum smart contract wallet and a visa card that lets you spend the money you hold in your Ethereum account anywhere Visa.

Starting point is 01:01:45 is accepted. This is super cool. You can swipe your card at the coffee shop, at the gas station. When you do, you're paying with crypto all without a bank. This has been the crypto vision since day one, and it's here. Monolith also offers on ramps for getting your fiat into the world of defy. So it's trivial to top up your monolith card. Whenever you need to, you can top it up with ETH, die, or DFI tokens. And because Monolith is native defy infrastructure, the money that you hold not only never touches a bank, but it retains its defy superpowers.

Starting point is 01:02:22 So you can swap assets on Uniswap, you can earn yield and defy protocols. You've never had a visa card like this before. Go to monolith. comyz now and sign up to get your monolith card. That's monolith. All right, David, we're back. What are you excited about this week, my friend?

Starting point is 01:02:44 Okay, so I didn't want to do this because I wanted to keep this alpha for myself. But one of my favorite digital artists out there is releasing his NFT, his digital art NFT. And it has some bankless influences on it. It is a picture of this Gitcoin robot, the theme behind Gitcoin. And he's fighting the monster that is Moloch over some sort of cityscape, right? Really, really cool. And there's also some trophies that are going to, that are.

Starting point is 01:03:10 going with it. This is amazing. It's so dope, dude. It's so dope. This is the first time I've seen this. And so like I'm going to be paying attention to this when it goes live for bidding. And I might, and this is why I'm okay. I don't really find myself an NFT fan. I don't really find myself like interested in speculating on art. But I want this for the art. I want it for the art. So I'll be fucking placing some bids depending on how high this this thing goes. I'm probably going to get it out priced, but I really, really want this thing. And so I might buy it. We'll see. Bad move to talk about it then in a bankless roll up, my friend, because now the word is out. When is this Friday, the fifth. The auction goes for two days. So if everyone can forget about it over the weekend,

Starting point is 01:03:54 that'd be great. Let's cut this piece. Let's cut it. Cut this out of it. It's not going in. Oh, man. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Great piece of art for sure. Yeah. And also the artist, kitty is donating revenue to Gitcoin. So not only is this art for art sakes purposes, you can fund an artist who I believe deserves to be rewarded for their art, but you're also funding Gitcoin, which also deserves to be funded. So you can feel good about it. Actually slaying Moloch while you are buying a picture of Moloch. That's fantastic. Yeah, wow, good point. Good point. All right, Ryan, what are you excited about? You know, this is really quick this week, but I'm super excited that we actually have tokens with

Starting point is 01:04:34 cash flows, this bull run, right? So we saw on the block chart where we saw defy tokens with revenue over time. That's amazing. We just put out a piece actually by the time you listened to this yesterday. So on Thursday, Lucas Campbell from our team put together 14 different token metrics that you need to know when you are evaluating a token. I felt so much, David, in 2017, like we didn't earn it. We didn't earn the bull run.

Starting point is 01:05:04 The tokens that were pumping in price had nothing behind them, like no substance. This time I don't feel like that. We have a real decentralized finance economy with real cash flows, with real users. This is a big deal. And, you know, if it's your first time in the crypto bull run, if you weren't here in 2017, just know this is different. We didn't have this stuff in 2017. So I'm super excited about it.

Starting point is 01:05:29 And this is something that Chris Berninski has talked about ever since I read his crypto assets book in 2017 that valuations in this space will play out over like decades, we'll get better and better at it as an industry. And I'm definitely seeing a level up on how to value crypto assets this cycle that we didn't have in previous cycle. So kind of geeky, kind of nerdy, whatever. But look, it's it's what I'm excited about this week. It's another theme of the bankless podcast that we keep on harping on is that being understood is extremely bullish. And when I hear Matt from Bitwise saying that investors can understand defy instantly, specifically because of live real-time data that they can analyze and verify and

Starting point is 01:06:18 reduce their career risk where something's like, well, why did you invest in that defy token? It's like, well, look at this live report of all the revenue that they're making in real time. Like, that's why I invested in this token. It's doing billions in volume. It's doing billions in volume, right? And so like the investability of this thing is so awesome. And yet if you want to get access to like, what does it mean to get access to defy that gives you real time data? Like how do you get exposure to that? And the answer is either DPI or ETH or it's just ETH because Ethereum is the economy that enables the real time reporting of valuation metrics. Yep, absolutely. Well said. We're bringing in new cohorts into the space and everyone is learning about.

Starting point is 01:07:01 it. Meme of the week, David. Mime of the week. What is our meme of the week? Favorite time of the week. The meme of the week is a scene from Wolf of Wall Street where Jonah Hill is on the phone with his boss right after Leonardo DiCaprio tries to get him into whatever the, I can't remember the story. Anyways, he's on the phone with his boss saying, me quitting my job to work for the decentralized present and future. And then there's Ethereum looking over his shoulder, watching him quit his job. And then the caption is, hey man, have you heard of this Ethereum thing?

Starting point is 01:07:34 Something about sovereign finance and lots of memes. Anyways, I quit. Is it possible, this is a great meme, but like, is it possible to actually quit your job and go work for Ethereum right now? Like, I know you and I are doing it, but, I mean, to be fair, we started like a year and a half ago or so. What are the opportunities now for people? Are there more opportunities or they're fewer? There are, oh my God, there are so many opportunities. And I think that the most obvious opportunities are specifically in two realms, a defy protocol treasuries, millions and millions and millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions of millions of dollars available for funding for anyone that can contribute value of any kind to a protocol, right? Like you have to, if you, if you have value that you can provide to a protocol, I guarantee a protocol will pay you for that value in some way. Right. And that's what's so awesome about this is like there's no more like credentialing. You don't need to go get a degree. You just need to show this protocol that you can contribute value.

Starting point is 01:08:38 And so like all of this like, you know, four years of education and two years of education after that so you can, you know, give your credentials. Like no, the community's like, you know, that guy's doing good work. Pay that man some money. It's much more casual. It's much more just like buy the seat of the pants. And I think much more fun, much more freeing. And that's just defy protocols. The other side is NFTs, which is funding artists. We've talked about this a number of times on the bankless program, but funding artists and giving them vehicles to monetize their creativity and their labor, I think the design space for allowing creators to fund themselves with NFD is just getting started.

Starting point is 01:09:12 And those are just those two things. You can carve your own path. I quit my job and my career path of trying to become a physical therapist. And I started just writing blogs for this company back in 2017. and that's just how it started. I just started creating. I just started producing something that people valued. And so if you don't know what to do, go and figure it out because, like, honestly, it's up to you.

Starting point is 01:09:36 You can get it done. Anyone listening to this, you can be employed by Ethereum or an Ethereum protocol or pick your blockchain of choice by the end of this bull market. And so if you want to, that opportunity is available to you. You just need to actually act on that. Here's the other thing I would say is you could start this out as a side of. hustle, right? So you don't have to just like do the Jonah Hill thing and call your boss and tell them you quit, right? That's like, that's a fun way to do it. It makes a great meme, but you don't have to. I mean, you could start using your spare time, your hobby time, your weekends, your moonlight hours,

Starting point is 01:10:11 doing something for a protocol, getting involved in these communities and understanding actually what they need. Do they need more users? Is this marketing? Do they need more education materials? Do they need videos? Do they need like coding? Do they need some financial analysis? Any skill that you can bring to bear to help one of these protocols achieve its end goal will be valued by the defy and crypto community and economy. And you don't have to go zero to 100 right away. Just start doing something, the midnight's in your hobby time.

Starting point is 01:10:44 And that's a great place to even see if what you're producing provides value to the community first before you go all in. 100 million people employed by Ethereum by the end of the 2020s. 100 million? 100 million people by the end of the decade. Wow. There you go. 100 million people. Starting with the listeners.

Starting point is 01:11:06 Starting with the listeners. Starting with the bankless nation. We're going to be in the Ethereum, in the crypto economy, not only buying the assets of this economy, but working for this economy. That feels pretty fun. We should do risk and disclaimers. Guys, ETH is risky. Defy is risky, crypto is risky.

Starting point is 01:11:24 None of what we said was financial advice today, but we are on the journey West. We're glad you're with us. Thanks for joining us on Bangless.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 1st Week of March (3LAU & Grimes NFTs, PayPal Crypto, Citigroup Report)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.