Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of April (Coinbase IPO, FEI Protocol, DeFi Shopify, ETH 2 Merge, BTC ETFs)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Bankless Nation, welcome to this edition of the Bankless Weekly Roll-ups. We got a unique episode here today because Ryan is on vacation and so we are bringing in a substitute teacher, Anthony Cisano. Welcome to the Bankless Weekly Roll-up. Thank you for getting tapped in here, brother. Hey, mate, yeah, good to be here. Good to step in for Ryan even though we don't look anything alike. You know, it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:00:36 I think we're both like super Ethereum balls, so this should be a fun show. That's exactly right. If this is your first weekly roll up, happy Friday morning. We're bringing the energy. We're bringing in a full week's worth of news in Friday morning. Get your coffee ready because we are coming at you with everything that's happened in the last week of crypto. Starting with markets, what's happened in the markets in the last week, then what got released in the last week, the news, what's happened in the news cycle, and then some ecosystem takes. Who had some interesting opinions?

Starting point is 00:01:05 And then finally, we will finish up with what David and Anthony are excited about. And of course, last, but always the most favorite, the meme of the week. Anthony, are you ready to get into it? Let's do it. Before we do, however, I have an announcement out of the bankless world to get your bankless badge. There is a perhaps multiple long weeks of giveaways coming. We are going to give away a BAP, which is one of these shirts. So if you've ever wanted one of these shirts, we're going to give one away to a raffle in a raffle to a bankless badge holder.

Starting point is 00:01:38 We're also going to give away an ether, a whole ether, to a bankless badge holder as well of some NFTs. I'm talking with my buddy who's got a coffee startup for multiple year-long coffee subscriptions. The bankless badge is something that you want to own. Anthony, do you have a bankless badge? Yes, I do, David. Yes, I do. Good. You're going to make it, brother. All right. Let's go ahead and get right into it.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And Luke, if you want to cut it right here, Luke is our editor. He's hearing that. And so I can share my screen and go over here. to do that and then I'm sharing this screen. Thank you for bearing with me, sir. Share screen. Boom. All right, guys, we are starting with Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Bitcoin is at the kind of high price of $58,300. Again, the last week it was just over $60,000, I believe, and then it even got down to as low as $52,000. And now we are back up towards the north side of that end, $58,300. Anthony, any comments on the Bitcoin price? Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin just seems to be continuing to go sideways as the rest of the market is starting to, I guess, like, catch back up, right? Bitcoin had an incredible run over the last few months or even like, I guess, the last year or so. And I think it's, it's basically just consolidating in this area, giving some other kind of,

Starting point is 00:03:06 kind of coins, crypto coins, crypto tokens, a kind of like chance to catch up and everything like that. But yeah, I don't think it's going to start like this forever. I mean, you know, doesn't just apply to Bitcoin, but I think over the next few weeks, we have so many bullish catalysts coming up, one of those being, you know, the biggest one being the Coinbase direct listing that, you know, I can't see Bitcoin kind of like staying under 60K for much longer. Yeah, look at that, look at that 30-day chart, pretty all over the place, but overall flat over 30 days. And usually in bull markets, Bitcoin does not stay flat for very long. We have plenty of Coinbase related things to talk about in the rest of this weekly roll-up.

Starting point is 00:03:43 So we are going to, that will be a reoccurring theme of this specific roll-up. All right, ether price, ether price, over $2,000, almost $2,100 at the time of recording. We have a new high of ether price at 2151. Anthony, what are you thinking about the ether price? Yeah, I mean, as I was just saying, now that Bitcoin's been going sideways, other things can catch up. And ether's definitely been gaining, especially on the eighth Bitcoin ratio. So that's why we see Heath back over $2,000 here. And, you know, Heath in particular, from what I've seen, looks much more bullish than Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:04:18 at least over the short term. And I think it's about time, right? Heath needs to, needs to, you know, I think Heath is still undervalued here. I think it should be higher than where it is. So I'm very happy to see Heath making some real strides here while Bitcoin continues sideways. Yeah, right. In that same time period I was talking about where Bitcoin over the last 30 days has been relatively flat, Ether has definitely been having a pretty strong uptrend.

Starting point is 00:04:40 It started 30 days ago at $1,800. ending it at just under $2,100 in the 30-day period, and definitely showing that trend that happens when Bitcoin stays flat. And then, of course, Anthony, I know you like this token, the DPI $436. I believe that's up from last week, but just by a smidge, just by a smidge. Anthony, tell us what's happening with DPI. Yeah, so I think it's funny to see the way the market's kind of,

Starting point is 00:05:12 I guess maybe changed a little bit. You know, there's this thing called an alt season where a lot of the other kind of coins rally and while Bitcoin stays kind of sideways. But I think we're now seeing kind of like a divergence where we have like an old season and a defy season. Because the old season seems to be a lot of these other kind of like, I guess like chains and a lot of these projects, like just random projects just going up in value where defy has stayed flat. But I think we're due for like a separate kind of defy season where people realize, wow,

Starting point is 00:05:40 okay, you know, DFI, you know, isn't going anywhere. It's here to stay. Like, I need to buy up these tokens that are part of revenue generating protocols. But, you know, it's funny because you can look at DPI against USD, which is, you know, relatively flat and then against ETH, which is actually down against. Because, you know, you do want to measure DPI against ETH for sure because of they're in the same kind of arena. But I think, you know, sooner or later, it will reverse against ETH as well.

Starting point is 00:06:05 And then ETH will probably go flat for a little bit, go sideways, sorry for a little bit. and we'll have DPI kind of catch up here. So it's a good measure, I guess, of the overall DFI market through USD, but also kind of how bullish DFI is against ETH itself. Yeah, totally. And I've been watching this downtrend versus ETH ever since March. So DPI has been trending down versus ETH since the very beginning of March where it hit the high of 0.28 ether per DPI.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And now it's gone all the way down to just over 0.2.1. And I've been using this as an indicator of like exactly what you said, defy season, which is a good point. And that's something that we have not yet brought on as a topic on the bankless weekly rollup is the differentiation between defy season and altcoin season. And what we're seeing, what I'm seeing out of altcoin season is basically rotating into things that I consider the worst, worst aspects of crypto, things like ADA, LTC, denticoin. And I'm very happy to finally being able to differentiate between what is alt season versus what is quality capital asset tokens season. I'm glad we have a differentiator there. Yeah, exactly. And I think the reason why it works in cycles is because people tend to rotate money around.

Starting point is 00:07:23 So you'll see that the money rotate from Bitcoin down to the others, you know, and ETH down to other things like D5. That's why I'm saying when ETH finishes its run and starts going sideways through. bit, I think we can really see a defy season there because a lot of the kind of like Heath natives and Heath people would rather go into defy and they don't they're not going to buy all this other stuff that's kind of going up right now. People who are buying like Ave and Uni and and YFI are not buying Dentacoin. Those are different cohorts of people. Related to DPI is the index co-op. Something I want to bring up here is index co-op, a hundred and fifty million dollar TVL total

Starting point is 00:08:00 value locked under DPI. Anthony, what does this mean? I mean, it just shows the pure demand here for the Defi Pulse Index, I think, you know, index products typically haven't been super popular within Defi because of the fact that everyone, you know, I guess like likes to just buy into whatever they, they kind of can find and try and like get like a 10x or something because, you know, the DPI isn't going to give you a 10x in a month, right? Maybe over the long term, it'll kind of give you that because it's supposed to be volatility dampened. But the fact that we've still got 150 million TVL here from mostly, what I would say like the defy native crowd because it's not on kind of like any major centralized

Starting point is 00:08:36 exchanges yet. I think that just speaks to the demand for this product. And I think to get to like 1 billion plus kind of TVL without a kind of like major price rise in defy would require some some fresh blood from these centralized exchanges because I think the audience is very different there. So I'm hoping, you know, the index co-op and I know they're working on this can get the DPI onto some exchanges like coin base or something like that where we can kind of like open this up to to a more, I guess like retail non-Defi crowd and give them exposure to the defy as well at the end of the day. Absolutely. Yeah. Basically what a $150 million market cap means is there's been a $150 million worth of buying demand on the DPI asset, right? When you go to Uniswop and you type in DPI and

Starting point is 00:09:18 you purchase it, you are increasing the price of DPI, which means that the way that that gets arbitrage is that more assets come under the DPI index, right? And what's pretty cool to me is Lemonade Alpha, he's a part of the index co-op community, the co-op perhaps, and he's doing the math of the streaming fees that comes out of DPI, and that's $1 million in annual revenue for the index co-op treasury. Pretty cool. We will be talking more about the index co-op throughout this weekly roll-up. Last subject in the market section, David Mee-Hal, who's been an absolute machine in generating these really easy, really digestible websites, has made another one. He's the one that made the crypto fees website that Ryan and I talk about all the time. And now he has made

Starting point is 00:10:02 a openorgs. info, open dash orgs. info, which is, uh, he and has his tagline, DOWs are the new companies. What's on their balance sheet? And this is something that we've been saying on the bankless program over and over and over again. Dows have money and they want you to go and produce labor for the DOWS to produce something that the protocol wants. Uniswap, sponsor to bankless. Literally the sponsor the call to action at the end of the bankless Uniswap sponsorship is go submit an application. Go get a grant from Uniswap. All of these treasuries have a bunch of money that they want to pay you. Anthony, what's your take here?

Starting point is 00:10:41 Yeah, I mean, just looking at these numbers is crazy, right? And actually, if you look at something like Uniswap, that's just the vested amount. So Uniswap has a vesting on their treasury over, I think, three or four years. And if you take the fully diluted value, I think it's like $15 billion plus. So they already have $5.2 billion vested here, which, as you said, yes, they can invest in like a bunch of different things out of the treasury. They're already doing so. You know, we make our way down the list. And it's just absolutely insane to see how big some of these treasuries are.

Starting point is 00:11:10 And as I said, some of them are vesting. The index co-op is the same. It bests over three years. And so, you know, the total vested amount is $52 million right now, which I think is really cool. Because this, I mean, speaking of like the index car, I know we're going to talk more about it. But, you know, that treasury also goes to paying people to work for the protocol, essentially, to paying contributors in index tokens. So I think a bunch of these other kind of DAOs are doing that as well.

Starting point is 00:11:34 And that's the real power, I think, of this. It's not, maybe not so much like investing in, like, ecosystem stuff, but, like, giving actual kind of monetary value in the form of this token to people doing work for, for the organization, which truly does make it an open org or a DAO, right? you know, or a DO, maybe not as autonomous as we would like it to be, but a decentralized organization where anyone can come in, contribute work, and get paid in these tokens, which I think is the really, really cool aspect of these treasuries. Right. We know the Web 2 gargantuanes in Facebook and Google and all those people. If you want to get a hint at what the Web 3 gargantuanes might look like,

Starting point is 00:12:13 go look at the size of these treasuries. Speaking of that Uniswap ad, we need to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries,

Starting point is 00:12:42 just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion.

Starting point is 00:13:11 This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. Metamask is your go-to wallet for the Bankless journey. If you're going bankless, you need Metamask, period.

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Starting point is 00:14:04 What makes swap so useful is what happens behind the scenes. It compares Dexas, aggregators, and market makers to find you the best price, with the lowest network fees and the least slippage. slippage. This means you can swap a wider range of tokens, and swaps can even automatically split up your trade to give you access to better liquidity. You don't even have to think about it. Try it out. Download Metamask for desktop or mobile now at metamask.io and start swapping. All right, guys, and we are back with releases. The first thing that both I'm pretty sure Anthony and I are excited about is our good friend DC investors release his new, his new, new, new

Starting point is 00:14:46 newsletter, The Catalyst. D.C. is really big in the world of NFTs and overall in DFI. We had him on the Bankless podcast with Anthony and Eric Connor for the Bull Case for Ethereum. Fantastic podcast. Go ahead and go listen to that. But also, D.C. is releasing his new newsletter, The Catalyst. And so if you want to follow D. D.C.'s thoughts, go and give that newsletter a follow. Anthony, have you followed the Catalyst yet? Oh, of course I have. I mean, D.C. investor has been writing things for a long time, actually. He, he used to be very active on Reddit. Still is active on there, but, you know, pre-Twitter days was much more active. And he wrote a lot on there.

Starting point is 00:15:22 And I used to read a lot of there. And it's funny because, like, when you read something on Reddit, you never kind of, I guess, look at the, I mean, sometimes you look at who's saying it, but, you know, a lot of the time you miss it. I don't know if maybe that's just me. But then I went back and I saw, oh, my God, like all these amazing things that I used to read were from DC Investor. So, yeah, definitely go subscribe to this. It's not like a daily thing or anything like that. I think it's a, it's a just whenever he feels like writing something thing, which I think

Starting point is 00:15:47 is, it works really well. I mean, his first piece was on kind of like what, I guess, like, what, what, what the ecosystem looks like as part of, I guess, like a multi-chain future and like, you know, what it, what it takes to get there sort of thing and how that's, how he thinks that's going to play out. So, yeah, if you're just sitting in, in just random thoughts, I don't think it's just going to be NFT. I think it's just going to be anything that's on his mind, you know, when he wants to write about it, then definitely go give this a subscribe.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Awesome. All right. on to the next. There is a new protocol getting released. What is this called? This is called Cryptex, Cryptex Finance, and they are doing a synthetic asset, a collateralized synthetic asset that is tracking the value of the total market cap of all of crypto. And the actually the interesting thing about this is not only is that synthetic asset really, really cool, but the team behind this I think is also worth noting about. But we will get into that team later. The Cryptex system uses Chainlink oracles to get an aggregate of five different total

Starting point is 00:16:49 crypto market cap prices or valuation. So like the total crypto market cap from coin market cap from Coin Gecko, these people have APIs and they are reporting the total value of all crypto assets combined and the cryptex.cptex.finance protocol, which has his own governance token already, is trying to generate a synthetic asset that's collateralized by, by die and ether and other ERC20 tokens to produce this new synthetic asset. Anthony, what can you tell us about this? Yeah, I mean, I saw this last night just before, kind of went to bed here. And it reminded me of, like, I guess, what's happening with the index co-op, of course, like just the index product and things like that. But it's good to see kind of like teams tackling, I guess, like a, I mean,

Starting point is 00:17:34 I wouldn't call it like super different, but like something, something that's very unique. Like the total crypto cap is obviously something that a lot of people will, will quote, right? A lot of the time, they'll talk about it. They're like, oh, yeah, just got the $2 trillion. Like, look at the growth of crypto. And there was no real way to track it that I know of before. And now you can just buy this synthetic token and you can track, you know, you can basically track the entire growth of the crypto ecosystem. So if you, if you just want to, want like a really safe token because realistically this is not going to increase like a ton in value over time right because you know the market total market caps already at two trillion

Starting point is 00:18:07 if we go to like 10 trillion you get an 80 percent kind of gain there but if you if you think about it right that is like an 80 percent like to get the 10 trillion from here is going to take a while i think and an 80 percent gaining crypto is is just like very very kind of like small so it's literally i think a very safe asset so if you just want really safe exposure you think crypto in general crypto in general is going to grow. And you think it's going to become like a really big asset class, bigger than what it is now. I think this is the product for you. So really great product for that.

Starting point is 00:18:37 I mean, I could see it being part of anyone's portfolio. If you just want something that dampens the volatility in your portfolio and still gives you kind of like that exposure to the growth of crypto, then this is definitely something that I think it will should take a look at. Yeah. If this asset was created a year ago in January 2020, it would have been, I'm going to make up some numbers, but the accuracy will still be there. it would have been $20, and then today, if that $20 would have turned into $200.

Starting point is 00:19:04 So a 10x over, just a little over a year. Again, and kind of like how I said at the beginning, the interesting thing about this to me is the team. Preston Van Loon is one of the leads behind Prismatic Labs. And there are some other, like, core Ethereum blockchain developers on this team. Anthony, do you have any comments on that? Yeah, for sure. And actually, I just did some headmats. Sorry, I want to correct what I said.

Starting point is 00:19:30 It's not an 80% gain from $2 trillion to $10 trillion. It's like a 5x. I was working, I was working back saying like if it was $10 trillion to $2, it would get minus 80%. So still very good, like very good exposure there. But yeah, anyway, no, that's what caught my eye as well. It was like, you know, Preston Van Loon has been heavily involved with the ETH2 effort for quite a while now.

Starting point is 00:19:49 You know, one of my favorite people in the space, of course, and working on kind of like Ethereum Protocol work. But yeah, I mean, that's what I always look at, I guess in general. for these new projects is like who are the people behind it now. Now I know there are a lot of good projects right now that have anonymous or at least pseudonymous developers behind them, but they usually come with a name as well. I know for example, you know, Alchemics has Scoopy Triples who's been around for quite a while. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, it's not like someone just came out and created a protocol and then, you know, they're just totally anonymous, which is obviously like a quote unquote

Starting point is 00:20:19 rug pull risk. So yeah, always looking at the team, looking at kind of what they've done in the past and kind of like, you know, where they're kind of head is, I think, in this space. And that's something I remember back in 2017 that was always like chanted on the Reddit's and on Twitter saying like, hey, if you're trying to evaluate a project, go look at the team. And me as a crypto nube, I'd be like, okay, I looked at the team. Like, I still don't know anyone. And like the only reason why I'm able to do this now is because I've been in this space for three years.

Starting point is 00:20:46 I know who these people are. And that's the difference between maybe people coming in on their first cycle versus maybe their second cycle is like, oh, you understand and know people that have stuck around. Because the people that stick through the bear markets are people who you know are convicted and have the right beliefs about this place. And that's why I feel good about Scooby Triples. Like he's anonymous, but he's been around. Like he's not totally anonymous. He's more pseudo anonymous. Like he has a brand. He has an identity. And people like Preston Van Loon have all that same thing, but he's actually not anonymous. And so that's definitely some of the benefits.

Starting point is 00:21:21 of being in the space a longer time. You start to pick up on names and people, and it's easier to evaluate things. Yeah, exactly. All right. Moving on to D-YD-X on Layer 2. We did a state of the nation with both D-Y-D-X and Starkware about this. So for those that missed that state of the nation,

Starting point is 00:21:41 go back and tune into that. It was really fantastic. But Layer 2 is actually starting to get deployed. Something that has always been a theme lately on the Bankless program is like, oh, we are one to three months away from this scaling protocol coming. Like, nope, this one is here. You can actually go trade on layer two with D-Y-D-X right now and escape all of the gas fees of Ethereum

Starting point is 00:22:03 and only pay a small trading fee that you are used to paying when you trade on normal brokerages. Anthony, are you stowed for this or what? Oh, dude, like this is just like some of the most bullish news. I mean, I think the most exciting thing was that they went from like an alpha to like an open public kind of layer two in a matter of weeks, right? Didn't have to wait very long at all. And, you know, it's a full kind of suite built on Starkware's technology,

Starting point is 00:22:27 which is some of the best in the industry for Layer 2 scaling. They're already doing, I saw one of the stockware co-founders say that within the first 24 hours, they already did $10 million of volume, which is crazy, right? Because, you know, you think about people still have to onboard into this kind of stuff, right? They have to get their assets on this stuff to kind of like learn about it and do some trading or whatever. And it becomes like a compounding or an exponential growth after that. So I do think that we're going to see some some incredible growth here rather quickly because, I mean, something like DydX didn't even really work on layer one because it was an order book based exchange, right?

Starting point is 00:23:03 On layer one, those things don't really work. We had the AMMs kind of exploding usage because they work much better. Now, and this is what layer to enable is not just the fact that we can get like cheaper, much cheaper fees and faster transactions, but we can also actually use a product like this now and grow it to rival decentralized incumbents, which is what excites me the most. All right, Anthony, I said we were going to talk about index stuff further on in the show. And here's where we talk about that. Something new out of the index team is the metaverse index from the index co-op.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Anthony, what can you tell us about the metaverse index? Yeah, so this has been in the works for quite a while now, something that the community was very excited about. It basically came from the community. The index co-op community came up with this idea that the metaverse, all this kind of concept of virtual worlds, you know, within like a digital asset space, like NFTs, you know, collectibles, you know, in-game items and stuff like that, you know, the community kind of came together and said, well, you know, we should create an index for this. Like, this is a huge theme

Starting point is 00:24:04 right now. People want exposure to this, but there's so many tokens. They just don't know which one to buy and they don't know what's going to be around in the future, of course, or, you know, kind of obviously no one knows what's going to go up in value or not. So this basically, the Metaverse index takes 15 different tokens and there'll be more added in the future, but 15 different tokens in the Metaverse kind of ecosystem and just puts them into an index and you can just buy this and just it's the same as like the DPI, automated kind of, you know, rebalancing once a month, you know, automated performance. You don't have to do anything. You can just buy and sell it. And yeah, I mean, I'm super excited for this. And fun fact, the logo was

Starting point is 00:24:41 also designed as part of like a competition as well. So we did an open competition where people could design different logos and there are a lot of really cool ones. But this one kind of won out. And I actually really like this one. It kind of, I think captures it quite well, this new kind of like virtual world that you can kind of go into. And yeah, I mean, I just think in general, like I'm biased here, but the index co-op is so great because of the fact that they work together and they're very cohesive and they can bring

Starting point is 00:25:06 these products that are now at a $2.5 million market cap to life relatively quickly. And that's already streaming revenue to the index co-op treasury. as well. So it's just been great to see this evolve and kind of go live. And the index co-op releases aren't stopping. This is actually something that we are doing here at bankless with index co-op. The bed index, the Bitcoin Ether DPI is going to be a great meme. Get ready to hear a bunch about it on bankless. Get ready to get in bed with bankless. Ryan and I think that this is a great index just for really covering all your bases. You know, Bitcoin, how can you argue with Bitcoin? Ether, how can you argue with Ether? And then DPI is

Starting point is 00:25:50 Ethereum's app layer. And it's kind of been the bankless thesis. Basically, this is basically all of what crypto has to offer. And so if you just want passive, like no thought exposure to the cryptocurrency industry, we think the bed index will be a great index to have. And it is going into a governance decision for the index co-op. It doesn't yet exist. We want it to exist. If you are an index holder and you think that this index should exist, go vote for it. And that's, that's the purpose of the index token is it's a governance token. So if you think the bed index should be a thing, go ahead and vote for it. I think the cool thing about what we could do with the bed index is not just have ether, just dormant ether, but have staked ether. The,

Starting point is 00:26:35 the concept of our ETH from Rocket Pool comes to mind, where it's ether that is, it's kind of like it's got the passive income of staked ether baked into it. And then there's also other things that we could do with the DPI. Like there's other, like with the AVE token, which is a pretty decent amount of the tokens inside of AVE, you can actually stake those AVE tokens into the AVE protocol for 4%. And so the social contract that we are trying to make happen with the bed index

Starting point is 00:27:02 is making sure that the bed is as trust-free and attuned to the principles of Ethereum and decent. centralization yet is also being highly productive at the same time. So that's the goals of the Brett Bed Index. Also, not the only index being added to a governance vote in the index co-op. Synthetics debt mirror index. It's also up for governance vote. The index team really making just churning out new indexes.

Starting point is 00:27:30 Nice job, guys. Yeah, I mean, this is great. I mean, I've been following this stuff in the forum and on the Discord and definitely trying to churn out products, you know, much quicker here and not just any kind of products, products that people actually want. So I definitely agree with you that the bed index is going to be super popular, you know, especially as a bank list, you'll have like an audience to basically, you know, get on board with it.

Starting point is 00:27:52 Get them kind of like. Get them into bed. You know, do the, yeah, exactly. Get them into bed. That's right. And the debt mirror index is also a one that I'm really excited about because it basically protects SNX stakers from this kind of volatility that they find themselves in within the debt pool.

Starting point is 00:28:08 So it essentially allows you to kind of damp. and that volatility there. So both of these products, I think, are going to be absolutely massive. So I'm very excited to see them go live. All right. We talked about Scoopy Triples. The reason why I say that name is because it's so fun to say. But Scoopy Triple's founder of Alchemics is now proposing Alchemics Dow.

Starting point is 00:28:26 Anthony, I actually don't know too much about this. And I know you talked about it on the Daily Gway. And maybe you could give us a little prelude of what is in here. What's the Alchemics Dow? What's the goal of that? Yeah. So I guess like this post just details what they want. want the Alchemics Dow to be and what they want it to look like and kind of like their

Starting point is 00:28:44 commitments and their vision and mission sort of thing as well. So the Alchemics down, I mean, it's going to be very similar to other Dow's within the ecosystem. You know, as we showed before, there's a, the Alchemics has a lot of, a lot of money in their treasury already, right? You can see there. Almost a billion. Yeah, almost a billion, right? So, you know, it's definitely time for them or almost time for them to just transform themselves into a Dow. They have a very strong community already. I mean, I, I look to Discord. They're just doing so many things on there. It's really cool to see. But the Dow will obviously include governance. So token holders will be able to, um, to vote on different things and vote on different kind of like parameter changes and

Starting point is 00:29:21 stuff like that. It'll obviously, um, accrue revenue as well from from the product. So token holders will have a have a claim on that revenue. They did tease in the post more stuff about, you know, if you're an Alchemics token holder, there's actually more coming for you. So more bonuses sort of thing. And I think they're going to work with other protocols to kind of, I guess, maybe come up with like some sorts of revenue for Alchemics token holders or other sorts of things there. And then what they also did in this post is they spoke briefly about their layer two plans. And what I really like is there's a quote here somewhere where they basically said, you know, they are there. It's it's.

Starting point is 00:29:57 They say by harnessing, sorry, where is it? While layer two solutions come in several shapes, we can't arbitrarily pick any layer two because we have zero knowledge about which solution will emerge as the winner. We're optimistic that daps converge on one during the development of alchemics Diao. So there's like three puns in there. But basically, and then they go on to say, by harnessing the throughput of layer two solutions, Alchemics Dail will be inclusive of all Ethereums without sacrificing our ethos

Starting point is 00:30:22 of decentralization first. So they are extremely Ethereum aligned and obviously really want to stay true to Ethereum's ideals. And that's, I mean, that's a major reason why I backed Alchemics and why I hold AlkX tokens is because I know that they're like this and the project itself is very sound. So any teams that are just like super Ethereum or Lyme like this is something that I want to be involved in. But yeah, this post got me really bullish because they already kind of know what they want to do.

Starting point is 00:30:48 I mean, they're already one of the top DeFi protocols. And for them to kind of launch this Dow and give token holders a claim on the revenues is going to be really, really awesome, I think. Yeah, I guess I should disclaim that. I also hold Alchemics tokens. And so I'm biased as to perhaps the agenda, putting the agenda, agenda together, but I have been chanting this same drum over and over and over again. It's like protocols that actually put collect fees, which there are many protocols that do not collect fees

Starting point is 00:31:18 for the token holders, I think are setting a new paradigm, quote unquote new paradigm for what could be. And one of my biggest criticisms of the equity stock market is that, you know, it's, it's just, it seems to be a game of greater fools because there's no meaningful difference if the equity isn't paying fees, then you're just trying to sell that equity to somebody who can pay for it at a higher point in time. I'm hopeful that tokens on Ethereum will not fall into that same trap and will instead be evaluated by the actual fees they are collecting to their protocols. There's also a second Alchemics update, which is their transmuter, which is one of the core contracts that makes the Alchemic system work got an upgrade. It took a number of hours for this upgrade to complete, but the transmuter is

Starting point is 00:32:05 how Alchemics turns, it turns A L, oh boy, Al U.S.D, which is their synthetic U.S.D into, or excuse me, it turns Dye into LUSD so that the loans can automatically be repaid. And that is basically what the Alchemics system does. It is a, you deposit your money and you get a loan based on the future yield of your deposits. And it does that by depositing die into yearn. And so it's also very integrative. what can you tell us about this transmuter v.1.1 migration. Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty big upgrade here, I think.

Starting point is 00:32:43 If you scroll down to the second tweet, they explained that the transmuter, and it's probably grown since here, now holds over 200 million die, which is, as you said, deployed to your own finance here. And the effective yield on that at the time was 37% on your die deposits. And you put it well, what they do is they basically pay your loans automatically for you. So, I mean, this kind of like, I mean, it's fine. because when you think about it, this is something that naturally lends itself to defy and is very programmatic, right, we can do this in smart contracts. When you really grasp what's happening here,

Starting point is 00:33:13 where you get a loan against your stable coin. So, you know, there's no risk of kind of liquidation here because of the fact that it's a stable coin kind of loan. And then you're paying back the debt. So over time, essentially, your loan is being paid back by the yield generated on your principal. I mean, when you really grasp that concept, I know it's been funny because, like, I think it's mind-blowing, but I've been seeing a bunch of like traditional finance folks kind of attack this and say that this is like a Ponzi or a scam. But it's not like all of it is accounted for. All of the money is accounted for. The yield is coming from a yearn vault, which is doing, you know, a bunch of different things to generate that yield.

Starting point is 00:33:46 But it's all real. It's not like we're printing money out of thin air. Like if there is no real dollars to come in and back this up or if there's no kind of, I guess, like, you know, demand for for borrowing assets or for like buying the tokens that are being paid out sometimes, then that's, it's just not going to work, right? So I think a lot of people fail to grasp the fact that there is a lot of, it's all backed by real assets at the end of the day and real demand. So, yeah, once I really wrap my head around Alchemix the first time, I was like, holy shit, this is going to be huge.

Starting point is 00:34:15 Yeah, every time I think of loans that automatically pay themselves back, I'm like, oh, those poor students with all those student loans out there, they would really, they would sure, sure would love to have that. But there's a difference between uncollateralized loans and credit loans. So that is a categorical difference. Anyways, moving on, some drama that happened in. in the last week. I guess we'll actually get to the drama second,

Starting point is 00:34:35 but Fay Labs released the Faye Stablecoin, which is an algorithmic stable coin, which is kind of a new frontier in the world of Defi Innovation. A lot of teams are trying to tackle the uncollateralized algorithmic stable coin. And there's a spectrum of to what degree that the collateral is or isn't there.

Starting point is 00:34:57 And this one had this kickstart, like a Genesis event where people could come and put their ether into a contract and they would be minted these new Faye stable coins and that ether would then represent the liquidity that backstop the Faye token so I guess it was to some degree collateralized and then the incentive behind this is that you could also be able to access the tribe governance token everyone likes governance tokens and so because this was like kind of an open release and you know permissionless and what Ethereum is really

Starting point is 00:35:27 really good at is capital a capital formation a lot of money got allocated into this tribe contract. And in my opinion, things started to break down or have been breaking down. But not completely, I would say. I would just say that it didn't, it wasn't the smoothest start because people's expectations were so high. People got this release and was like, oh, I'm just going to ape into this because it's a brand new governance token, forgetting that when everyone else also apes into it, that like this perhaps is getting a little bit out over the ski tips. Anthony, I know you're a little bit closer to this system than I am. Did I explain that okay?

Starting point is 00:36:04 Yeah, you did. You did. And, you know, I think I should say that I'm a small seed investor in Faye Protocol. So just to get that out of the ways of disclosure. But I mean, yeah, this was like the talk of crypto Twitter for the last week or so. Like so many people were kind of, I guess, like hating on it because the sale didn't go exactly, you know, as planned. And for those who don't know, the TRDI is basically the sale finished and then the Faye peg was not at a dollar. So basically immediately fell below peg. It hung around the 95 cent mark for quite a while. But the kicker here is that people wanted to sell their Faye to get their ETH back, right?

Starting point is 00:36:39 Because they were just going in to get the tribe governance token. But the way Faye works is that the further away from the peg that it is, there's this thing called direct incentives. And what that means is that you're penalized exponentially by selling Faye here. So yeah, you can see here for a band tag put out a chart that basically says, if the Faye price, I mean, as a simple example, if the Faye price was 95 cents, you couldn't sell Faye and only take a five cent kind of haircut here. You would be taking an additional 30% haircut because the protocol would burn 30% of your Faye before giving you the EF for it. And this is a

Starting point is 00:37:15 mechanism that is supposed to discourage selling when Faye is under PEG, but this only works if there's demand for Faye. Now, because Faye as a stable coin is brand new, it is not integrated into pretty much any DFI apps. It is not, you know, it is, it is, not something that people want to hold or that there's demand for. And naturally, there was just this absolutely massive kind of cell pressure, which kept pushing the peg down. And now eventually the Faye team turned off the burn mechanism so that people could exit. But the, but the coin is still off peg. Like Faye is at like, what, 70 cents now or something like that. So people are still taking this massive haircut. But you can see like how rapidly it dropped from like the 90s to

Starting point is 00:37:51 the 70s when, when the, when the, I guess like the burn mechanism was turned off. Because people just want their ETH back. You know, ETH is running up as well, right? Like, you'll probably like to yourself, okay, well, I'll take this 30% hair cut on ETH, but like I'll make it back because Eid's going to go up or, you know, or something like that. I'd rather hold my Eth than, than Faye. But, you know, from that point of view, and as I said, I am kind of biased because I'm a small seed investor. I don't think this is like a death for Faye or anything. I actually just think that the fact that there was just too much supply and like basically

Starting point is 00:38:20 zero demand for the token is the reason why it ended up in this situation. But I do think the mechanism can work, you know, in the right conditions, given that there is not like this massive over-overhang of supply. So I think that's what the team is trying to do now is basically get to a point where supply and demand reaching equilibrium, Faye gets back to Pegg, and then all is kind of, I guess, well and good there. But yeah, very interesting kind of thing to follow along with. And at one point, the burn mechanism was on and the penalty got to 100%.

Starting point is 00:38:47 So if you sold your Faye, you would be left with zero. You wouldn't get any E. It would just burn all of your Faye. So obviously they had to turn it off at that stage and kind of go back to the drawing board and see what they can do here. The nature of uncollateralized table coins is inherently a balancing act, and that balancing point is always at the most chaotic point right at Genesis, especially when there's a contract, a brand new contract,

Starting point is 00:39:12 which you get this brand new governance token, it incentivizes ape culture. This is what ape culture is. People just ape in, and people that are aping in to way too much ETH, because, like, how much ETH was it? It was like $670,000, 639,000. thousand ether, not dollars, ether. And people were looking to make a quick buck. And algorithmic

Starting point is 00:39:33 stable coins probably not the best place to make a quick buck. This is a long-term game that, like, to what you say, the mechanisms probably sound over time. People that are just having short time horizons just kind of need to get washed out so the people with the longer time horizons can stay. And they're the people that's really going to balance the Faye price. How do you feel about that take? yeah I think so and it's funny because like it really is what you said like ape culture where people didn't read how this work because if you knew how it worked you wouldn't have abed in like this because I didn't like I saw it and I had people asking me they're like you know should I go in I'm like you know I obviously I can't really say much because of my biases and kind of like my

Starting point is 00:40:16 conflicts of interest here but I said to all of them like do your own research just read up on what this is before you put your money into it um Because, yeah, I mean, this is exactly what happened. And, you know, I wouldn't say that I thought this was going to happen, you know, to this extent or anything like that. I mean, I didn't expect there to be over 600,000 ETH going into this sale. But people thought that they could put their ETH in, right, and then get this tribe token for free. And then also get their ETH back out by selling Faye. And that's not what happened.

Starting point is 00:40:43 So now there's a lot of trapped Eth here, which I don't know, you know, maybe that's bully short term for the price. You know, there's a lot of ETH taken out of circulation effectively here. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely. basically apiculture and it's also scary because it kind of like shows that we're in like such a frothy market right now like extremely frothy and it kind of gets like you know how long can that go on for maybe it can go on for a while i don't know um but yeah it's still the fay protocol now has still almost a billion dollars to play with um as part of one of its mechanisms called protocol controlled value as you can see here so now what it can do is it can basically keep

Starting point is 00:41:19 re-wading itself to get fay back to peg until eventually all the sellers are kind of exhausted they're out and then the eth left is basically just people who want to stay in and support the project and be part of the i guess faypool yeah to put this into perspective 640 000 ether there's roughly 115 million ether and total total supply and 640 000 of that which is over 1.3 billion dollars got deposited into this contract so obviously like for something at genesis that's a big big mountain of capital to have to try and balance at Genesis. Anyway. And you know what?

Starting point is 00:41:56 You know what's funny? Thinking back to the last kind of project that got such a big kind of amount of money in it so fast was maybe the Dow. And at the time, it wasn't $1.3 billion. It was more Eath. I think it was like $20 million. But because Eth was only worth like $10, it was much less on a dollar value. But it's just funny to see now like how people just still do this, right?

Starting point is 00:42:18 You know, the contract here could have just easily as been as damaging. as the Dow. There could have been a critical bug in it, right? Where, you know, this ETH could have gotten drained. So imagine if we saw like the Dow 2.0, you know, in 2021. That would have been a very interesting to see. Right, right. We probably wouldn't have gotten rolled back. That's for sure. We probably would have looked that the way that it was. Yeah, exactly. And there's no way it would have gotten rolled back. All right. So Polygon continues to make a ton of integrations. And this one's a little bit different, actually. Polygon and Connected partner to build the multi-chain future. Connected, we recently did a Meet the Nation with Connects,

Starting point is 00:42:58 very founder, I think, co-founder, Arjun Buktani, and he took us through the history of Connects. And Connects has really been pioneering the world of state channels, which is one of the earliest primitives for scaling Ethereum. And state channels is just basically like a bar tab, right? Where Anthony's the bartender, I'm the beer drinker, and I come and I give him my credit card, and then we make seven transactions, because I bought seven beers. And then we, we close out the transaction at the end of the day and that's one transaction that settles on the visa network. State channels are the same concept, you know, effectively infinite levels of transactions between two parties and then they settle on the main chain after that. Connected has really

Starting point is 00:43:36 pivoted into something new, which is state channels across L2s. And that's where this relationship between Polygon and Connects comes in, where Connects is helping bridge assets and liquidity across various L2s and Polygon as one of the most recently integrated L2 network. You can't even go a week without seeing somebody integrate with Polygon, now Connects is working with Polygon to get assets and liquidity moving from L2 to L2 and even chain to chain using the Connect state channels. Anthony, Anthony, anything to add here? Yeah, disclosure I'm an advisor to Polygon quickly there.

Starting point is 00:44:13 But essentially, this is really cool to see. I mean, as you said, this is kind of like bridging different L2. two's different kind of chains together. And Connect's is basically at the heart of that because they've been working on this for quite a while now. This is, I think, a critical issue, not a critical issue, but like a big issue that is going to get solved by Connected is that we have these L2s all spinning up, but a lot of them are siloed right now.

Starting point is 00:44:35 So how do we connect them, right? And I think, you know, Connected is similar to other projects out there, like, I guess, Thorchain and things like that. They want to do this cross-chain kind of exchange and stuff like that. And that's what Connected is doing here. they're connecting polygon, you know, to, I guess, like, if you're a main net, to other L2s. And it's doing it in a trustless way as well. So the Holy Grail is creating like a bridge that is like fully trustless.

Starting point is 00:45:00 And it's very hard to do. A lot of the bridges typically these days are very, very centralized. They're not actually trustless. So if Kinex can nail this and kind of scale it as well, because I think scale is always the kicker here. It's like, you can nail it, but like doesn't scale. Because if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. So if they can do that, then I, I think that's going to be a huge win for them as a platform and a huge win for the ecosystem

Starting point is 00:45:23 because just having liquidity seamlessly go between L2s, between side chains, between chains is going to be a game changer, I think. Absolutely. All right. We're going to burn through some of these because Anthony and I like to talk. But Coinbase active users grew in 117% in Q1, 2021 revenue topping 1.8 billion. And the reason why this is, of course, relevant is because Coinbase recently released its S1, which disclosed basically all of the information about Coinbase's internal books, right?

Starting point is 00:45:56 Because Coinbase is going public in roughly two weeks. And even less than that, I think. It's awake. Yeah, it's not even awake now. It's like the 14th of April, I think. So close. Yeah. I feel like people aren't talking about that enough.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Some people are definitely talking about that, but not enough. Anthony, any comments on Coinbase public listing? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. The fact that, you know, they obviously wanted to bring out their Q1 earnings before the public listing was not an accident. Because if you look at their kind of results here, it's absolutely, you know, phenomenal. They have some of the most insane growth out of any company you would see. Like in terms of percentage growth, this is just absolutely insane. And because they're going to be listing on, you know, doing a direct listing, there's going to be a ton of new kind of investors now that haven't touched crypto before that are going to be buying Coinbase's stock.

Starting point is 00:46:46 I saw one of the financial institutions basically re-rate Coinbase's stock price up from, I think it was like $190 to $440. So basically, you know, more than double debt, which means Coinbase is going to open at a $200 billion plus market cap more likely. And there's going to be so much froth around this. This is like if you think about it, Silicon Valley based company, right, unicorn out the gate, like massive unicorn, like obviously like 200X or unicorn in an extremely hyper growth industry being crypto. You know, the prospects here are just absolutely insane. So this is going to be one of the biggest events for crypto ever, I think, in terms of like general awareness, froth. I mean, you know, it's going to affect the rest of the crypto market as well.

Starting point is 00:47:26 So trading this is going to be like pretty volatile, I think. The markets are definitely going to be volatile around this event. But it's the first time a lot of, I guess, like people outside of crypto are going to get exposure to crypto because Coinbase's revenues are directly tied to the performance of the crypto markets because it's all volume based. the more trading volume, the more fees that they make. So if the crypto markets are quiet, Coinbase is quiet. If the crypto markets are hot, Coinbase is hot.

Starting point is 00:47:51 So by buying Coinbase's stock, you are directly getting exposure to crypto, you know, and the crypto markets and the crypto volatility there. So, yeah, I mean, I can't see this being a small event. That's for sure. Yeah, absolutely not. Coinbase made $1.8 billion in revenue, meaning they were in profit in the quarter by somewhere between $700 and $800 million. And get a load of this. This is absolutely crazy. For all of 2020, total trading volume on Coinbase was $193 billion. And in Q1 of 2021, only was a total

Starting point is 00:48:28 trading volume topped $335 billion. Let me repeat. $193 billion in revenue or in a trading volume all throughout all of 2020. And then in just Q1, we are at $335 billion. That is crazy. And I don't think it matters what the valuation of Coinbase is at day one. Everyone is buying that no matter what. We are in a late stage credit cycle. There's plenty of cash going around. Coinbase is the only asset on the stock market that gives you pure exposure to crypto assets in general.

Starting point is 00:49:03 People are going to ape into coin no matter what. And we have some takes to talk about further on in the take section as well. Anthony, that was just releases. and I wasn't too good about my categories, but now we're going to go ahead and get into Ethereum news. Mark Cuban says on a public interview on his cryptocurrency portfolio, I own a lot of Ethereum because I think it's closest to a true currency. Hot take from Mark Cuban, one that I would agree with. Yeah, very hot take.

Starting point is 00:49:34 And obviously Mark Cuban's been very active within the, I guess, Ethereum space. You guys hang on on bank lists to talk a lot about like the NFT. stuff that he's been heavily involved with. But yeah, I think he just like, he's he's like us, right? He sees the utility of an asset to be the thing that gives it the most value. And I think that I totally agree with that, right? That's why I don't really hold any Bitcoin is because, I mean, you can do stuff with your Bitcoin on Ethereum with kind of like, I guess, tokenized Bitcoin, but that didn't exist for a long time. And also a lot of that is centralized. So, you know, Eath being such a productive asset and you can do so much with it. I mean, the NFT economy is

Starting point is 00:50:10 priced in ETH, all this kind of stuff, and you steak, you eat, you put it in defy. I think that's the reason why, you know, Mark Cuban kind of likes ETH as well, is that the utility value is just so much greater than Bitcoin. Even though I think you showed it just before, he owns more Bitcoin than ETH still. But I think that's just pure on like a portfolio construction perspective, where it's like a market cap weighted thing. Right.

Starting point is 00:50:32 But if he's doing it market cap weighted, he's actually overweight ETHIA, which is good, which is very nice to see. Yeah, wait, not even toast. 60% Bitcoin, 30% Ethereum and 10% the rest. And off the top of my head, I don't know the valuations between Bitcoin and Ethereum. But I think Ethereum is roughly one-tenth the size of Bitcoin, and Mark Cuban's portfolio has, if the ether weighted at one-half of his Bitcoin allocations. I think it's one-fifth now, actually, the size of Bitcoin. It's been gaining.

Starting point is 00:51:00 Nice. But it's still, it's still overweight. He's still overweight, if you're doing a market-cap-weighted kind of index there. And not only the big name to get interested into Ethereum, Toby Lutki, I think, is how you pronounce his last name. The Shopify CEO tweeted this out the other day. Hey, Defi, Twitter. What are the commerce-related opportunities that you are most excited about?

Starting point is 00:51:21 What role do you want Shopify to play? So, Shopify CEO, getting his hands into the world of Defi. Anthony, what's your opinion there? Yeah, I mean, and this wasn't the only tweet that he put out. He also put out another tweet. I don't know if it came before or after this one where he basically said he was diving into Ethereum smart contracts, which was absolutely,

Starting point is 00:51:42 Awesome to see. I mean, as you said, Shopify CEO, right? Someone who has, I guess, oh, there it is. He put it out before. He was dabbling with smart contracts to understand our EFC20s work. I mean, given the fact that he's the Shopify CEO, you're probably going to see maybe down the line some integrations, direct integrations with kind of crypto here. And it's just, I mean, Shopify is the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. It is a huge company. I'm pretty sure they're public and they're worth like billions and billions of dollars here. And obviously e-commerce just got like a massive boost in the last year because of the pandemic. So, you know, if he integrated some kind of like Ethereum sort of stuff within Shopify, that would be absolutely huge, I think, in terms of like integrations.

Starting point is 00:52:27 I mean, and, you know, this just follows on from the Visa news, right, where Visa was just settling on Ethereum. Imagine Shopify doing settlements on Ethereum and things like that. I mean, yeah, I just, I saw this and I was like, this is just crazy. Ethereum's going mainstream. more and more people are going to be aware of Ethereum and everything that it can do. And it's just, yeah, I mean, it's just really great to see. And the thing that comes to mind is that Toby, the CEO of Shopify, has 190,000 Twitter followers, which is very respectable.

Starting point is 00:52:55 But also, what about all the other CEOs who aren't on Twitter? Like, this guy just made a tweet because he's on Twitter and he likes to use Twitter, obviously, he has almost 200,000 followers. How many CEOs of companies, related companies, are thinking about these same things and just don't really engage on Twitter? Anthony and I are on Twitter an unhealthy amount. So of course we see this. What about all the things we aren't saying? What's below the scenes?

Starting point is 00:53:17 Question mark. All right, moving on. There is one week left to update your nodes for the Ethereum Berlin upgrade countdown. Got one week to do that. That is your PSA. If you run a node, you got to update it. Anthony, anything related to that you want to say? Just update it.

Starting point is 00:53:35 And if you're not running a node, run a node. Absolutely. All right, moving on. We talked about this. Polygon is really just killing the game when it comes to L2 integrations. Here is a graph from the block tweeted out by Cammy Rousseau of the Defiant, where this graph shows value locked of Ethereum scaling solutions by type, right? Many different scaling solutions. There's plasma, ZK roll-ups, optimistic roll-ups, ball-ups, ball-upilium. Plasma, according to this graph, is really outstripping the rest. While the others have respectable growth, plasma is really in the lead.

Starting point is 00:54:08 and all of that plasma value locked is basically just Polygon. It's just Polygon. Anthony, what can you say about why Polygon has had such outside success versus any of its other competitors? Yeah, I mean, and I think Mahalo, one of the Polygon kind of co-founders, actually put a clarification here that the TVL is split between Polygon Plasma and Polygon POS chain. So it's not just the plasma chain. But, I mean, there's kind of different.

Starting point is 00:54:38 Francisiana. I'm actually having debates with Mahalo over this and definitions and stuff. We're both trying to come to like an agreed upon definition of what counts as like a layer two and like what that actually means. So a lot of these stuff is actually quite murky right now. But essentially the difference between these two technologies is that with Polygon plasma, you can go through the Ethereum main chain to withdraw your funds, for example, because it's a plasma chain. It just uses the Ethereum network to process deposits and withdrawals and things like that. Whereas the Polygon POS chain, which is sometimes called a side chain, is using Polygons own validators, of which they stake magnetic tokens and it's kind of like that they're slashing involved. It's like a true proof of stake system. And they also commit themselves to Ethereum as well.

Starting point is 00:55:23 So from that point of view, there are differences there. And it's all about trust assumptions. But I think, you know, the TVL across both of them is huge, right? It's bigger than the other scalability solutions for Ethereum right now. But as you show, you know, ZK roll-up is gaining. You know, you can see it in the red or the kind of like reddish color there. And that includes stuff like loop ring, D-YDX. It's going to include immutable X and things like that too.

Starting point is 00:55:48 Optimistic roll-ups right now is really just synthetics because they're the only app live on optimism right now on main net. And then Validium is a form of kind of ZK roll-up here as well. But it's distinctly different. So that's why it's kind of, I guess, like plucked out of there. And that's still very, very small right now. but this is going to grow exponentially, I reckon. As we progress further, it's just going to get more and more, kind of like, I guess, like TVL locked in these things.

Starting point is 00:56:13 All right, last little bit of Ethereum news. A tweet out of Justin Drake says, early polling suggests possible support for a 2021 minimum viable merge target. The merge comes after EIP-1559. It's self-slated for the London Hard Fork in July or August. And then he says, minimum viable, meaning no transfers, no withdrawals, no stateless, no major EVM change. And he posts a screenshot of an unknown telegram group where he asked the question, it's a poll,

Starting point is 00:56:43 safe, minimum viable merge in 2021. It's possible, it's desirable, let's ship it. And then 86% of people agreed, whoever's ever in this telegram group agreed with that statement. I'm assuming this telegram group is a decent amount of like Ethereum core devs. Anthony, what does this mean? Yeah, so what I guess like what minimum viable means here is as Justin has described it, it literally just means like the minimum viable kind of, I guess like a state we can get to for the merger, which essentially would be just the getting rid of proof of work.

Starting point is 00:57:18 So essentially the ETH one chain would get off proof of work and be validated by proof of stake by the currently known ETH two chain. Then post that, like after that merger goes through, you enable transfer so you can have like ETH two transfers to ETH one. It's all one Ethereum, but you can have transfers from, you know, the stakers on that are staking on the beacon chain right now to, to kind of like ETH one there and withdrawals and things like that. Statelessness obviously is going to come later.

Starting point is 00:57:43 That's basically the stateless client effort, which people can kind of Google and look up. And then, you know, no major EVM changes. So there would be no changes to on the ETH one side. This would just be getting us to proof of stake and getting off proof of work, which I think is the whole point. I mean, the major point of the merge at the end of the day, because we want to get off proof of work as soon as possible. And this, you know, for those who are kind of like keeping score here,

Starting point is 00:58:06 this is a massive issuance reduction as well. We go from a roughly 4% per year, each issuance reduction under proof of work to a 0.5% currently under proof of stake. So this is bullish for both of those reasons, getting rid of proof of work, getting rid of minors, and getting that issuance reduced by a large amount. So very excited for this.

Starting point is 00:58:26 To me, this is the emergence of sound money culture, really coming up out of the Ethereum community and saying, hey, like, we know we had this plan, but like we can make ether sound money, ultra sound money sooner. And so let's get that done. And sound money culture in Ethereum is alive and well and starting to actually manifest itself in governance decisions about the way that Ethereum moves forward into the future. That's, I think that's great. I'm a big fan of sound money culture. Same, side. All right, moving on to NFT news. receiving Ethereum news onto NFT news, almost the same thing, now just a subset of Ethereum

Starting point is 00:59:03 news. Ethereum startup immutable aims to cut NFT costs with new layer L2 scaling protocol. So Immutable, released Immutable X, which is an open platform to scale NFT. So disclaimer, I'm a seed investor into Immutable X. So I guess we're just passing out, passing disclaimers back and forth. Gauzin Chained is a really fun trading card game out of the Immutable team. And it's very much like a combination of Magic the Gathering, where you, you own physical cards, and that's kind of like owning cash, right? You own the physical cards. But it's also a combination of like Blizzard hearthstone,

Starting point is 00:59:37 where you get this trading card game, and you're playing online, and you get all the benefits of a digital game, but you don't actually get any of the benefits of owning the actual cards. Gauze Unchained is the best of both worlds, where you both own the assets and it's a digital game because they are NFTs on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:59:52 The problem is that immutable with Gauze and Chained, they were trying to make this marketplace for trading cards, and the cards, were itself for between $1 and $5, yet the fees to trade these things were between $5 and $30. So it really just hindered their ability to make the game

Starting point is 01:00:07 that they wanted to make. And so what they did was they made Immutable X, which is an L2 scaling solution, specifically engineered for NFTs on top of Starkware. And so I think this is going to be really hot. It's the combination of NFTs and scale, which both of those are hot,

Starting point is 01:00:23 and Immutable X just getting released now. Anthony, any takes here? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, this is really cool to see. This is built on, on StarQuest technology. You know, this is going to solve a lot of the pain points of NFTs, I think, especially for, for God's Unchained here. And, you know, this is an early release as well. So the, what you can trade right now on there is one of the, I guess, like,

Starting point is 01:00:47 card, kind of card expansion packs they brought out called Trial of the Gods. If you maybe participated in Gods Unchained as part of the Genesis event with Genesis cards, those aren't available just yet. to trade but they will be. So it's still early days here, but it is live. And you know, you can trade like lightning fast, you know, zero fees because they're, they're, they're kind of like, there will be fees eventually, but they'll be like very small, but immutable is kind of like paying those fees for, for everyone right now. So yeah, go check it out if you, if you haven't yet. I think it's going to blow you away just how fast it is. Yep. And this is the future of scale on Ethereum. It's, it's

Starting point is 01:01:21 finally arriving. Same, same platform that, uh, DY, DX, we were talking about earlier, Starkware, also powering Immutable X. So we're going to start to see announcements like these more and more and more. In the other world of NFTs, Super Rare raises $9 million to fund the future of art collecting. For those that don't know, Super Rare is an NFT issuance platform, kind of more specifically focused on kind of fine art, very, not simply, not open to everyone. You can't actually just go there and just mint an NFT. They want to kind of curate it. And they have raised $9 million in a seed round. Congrats to the guys at. super rare. I'm going to move right on, Anthony, because we have, we're going, definitely going

Starting point is 01:02:01 over time. Nine rare crypto punks from Larva Labs own, are now on Christie's. And so, Christie's is now has crypto punks. It started with Beeple and it's moved on to some other things. And now we have Cryptopunks. What a crazy story that we have Cryptopunks on Christie's. Anthony, what's your take here? Yeah, I mean, this just validates Cryptopunks even more, right? like chrisd is a huge auction house for for all sorts of art and things like that so you know and crypto punks have been obviously in the scene for quite a while now but it's cool to see that you know this these these these punks belong to uh lava labs uh so the creators of crypto puns so obviously they've come along and they're like okay well you know you know we've got these punks and we want to do it in like a big way we want to sell them because obviously they want to be paid for their work because they're the original creators of it and that they're going to auction it off here so i think this is going to get quite wild they haven't an alien to kind of auction off here, which is crazy because aliens are the rarest Cryptopunks. There's only nine of them. So they have one here, which is, which is absolutely insane. And, you know, I actually saw as I kind of woke up today, that the Cryptopunks

Starting point is 01:03:07 kind of flaw, the floor price raised from like 32,000 to 41,000 because someone just came along and just bought them all up because this is going to bring so much fresh attention onto crypto punks. It's going to be insane. I mean, I'm really bullish to see kind of like how, how this is on Christie's y'all. I wish I had a DC investor's tweet pulled up here where he pulled people will we see crypto punks on Christie's in 2021 and I think like 40 people 40% of people said no and DC was like you guys are all wrong and that was a number of months ago so tip of the hat to DC getting that right that's why we shield his his sub new step stack at the very beginning perhaps maybe getting overheated on the other side of things however is

Starting point is 01:03:49 Tom Brady, Super Bowl champion of many, many times over again, I'm not too much of a football fan, is now launching an NFT company. Anthony, do you think the NFT world is getting a little too hot? I mean, it is, yeah, pretty hot, right? It is at a point where, like, most of the stuff in the NFT world is not going to have secondary market value. So if you're buying these things, then you're going to have to pretty much come to terms of the fact that there's a high chance that you're not going to get your money back. It is not like a token where you can just dump it into uniswap and get something back if there's some liquidity. NFTs are very different in that. You actually have to find a buyer. If you buy a piece of artwork and you want to sell it, right, you have to go and find someone

Starting point is 01:04:28 that wants to buy that off you. You can't just go to Uniswap and dump it into a liquidity pool. Right. You have to buy, you have to find someone. So from that point of view, yes, it's super overheated. You know, I don't follow American football at all. I know who Tom Brady is, but I don't know how big of a star he is, but this is just like, you know, people like to say just top signals, but at the same time it might be adoption too. Like I know there's a lot of sports memorabilia. So maybe they're just like taking the physical memorabilia and creating like NFTs out of it, which I think is fine and actually a natural fit.

Starting point is 01:04:58 So I wouldn't really, maybe I wouldn't call it a top signal. It's maybe just an adoption signal, right? I like to use that term these days. Yeah, the thing I would like to know is to what degree is Tom Brady the actual founder of this thing? Or what degree is this just is he just a name? And he probably made board and advisors. So he's really, I mean, I would say he's just like, yeah. He just, yeah, you think that my name on it. Yeah. Maybe that's what's going on here. Anyways, in that case, like the world of NFTs, I continually to grow out at the very least. Another fun little story is the overly attached girlfriend meme. This is one of my favorite memes a number of years ago. It's kind of phased out of popularity. But these old memes are going for insane values. And so the actual overattached girlfriend. I don't know what her name is. I just call her the over, oh, I guess her name is Leanna. She sold this meme for 200 Eth.

Starting point is 01:05:46 someone bought to a this meme for a four hundred and sixteen thousand dollars um them that's pretty cool anthony any comments here yeah i mean it's funny to see like all of these kind of people who had memes created out there are created of them to come back and monetize it now right and i don't i blame them for at all for doing this the market is extremely hot why wouldn't you if i was a meme i mean i guess sometimes i'm a meme but if i was a meme as big as overly attached to girlfriend i would definitely be monetizing it as well because you know i mean mean, not only is she getting like money out of this, but she's also staking her claim on this meme too, like digital representation of her being like, I am in this meme. This is, this is kind

Starting point is 01:06:26 of like my original kind of, you know, picture here. And if you want to own this piece, you can buy it off me essentially. So I think from that point of view, it makes sense. But at the same time, I mean, I don't know if this is an adoption signal or a top signal. This one stumps me. Like, I don't know what, I mean, I wouldn't buy this meme for $400,000. I wouldn't buy any meme for $400,000. But I guess it's a percentage of your net worth. So if you're really rich, maybe $400,000 isn't much to you so you don't care. So maybe it works like that for some people. Yeah, to me, the question mark that I have is like this meme is definitely like retired.

Starting point is 01:06:57 It's a retired meme. So like that's still worth almost half a million dollars. I guess to someone it is. Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And on to Bitcoin News, Graysdale's intentions for a Bitcoin ETF. As we know in, we've talked about this at a number of times on the bankless weekly rollups. GBT premium is under the actual assets that Grayscale has in its treasury. And they are making this statement that they are committed to rolling GBT into an ETF,

Starting point is 01:07:27 which would actually just immediately nix the fact that GBTC is trading under the actual value under their assets. The interesting part to me is that they made this infographic called Lifecycle of a Grayscale product, which is one, launch private placement, two, obtain public quotation on second. secondary market, which means like make this thing available. Three, become SEC reporting, and then four, convert it into an ETF. So is Grayscale just turning into an ETF churning machine, question mark? And they outline this for a number of their different products that they have, where they are starting all of these new Grayscale trusts, the basic attention token trust,

Starting point is 01:08:04 the chain link trust, the Decentraline, Filecoin, LivePier, Stellar Lumens Trust. And then some of them have moved on into what they call public quotation. This is where Bitcoin cash is. This is where Lightcoin is. Ethereum Classic. The Digital Large Cap Fund. And then the SEC reporting, which is just GBTC and ETHE, the Grayscale Bitcoin and Grayscale Ethereum Trust. And then they have this last panel, which is unfilled, but they're trying to get every single one of their products moved into this ETF category. Probably starting with GBT and Ethereum ETHE not too far long after that. So pretty interesting development out of the Grace Care World. Anthony, what? your take here. Yeah, I mean, the ATFs kind of like thing has been talked about for a while for Bitcoin. I would be very surprised if we don't get Bitcoin ATFs this year. I mean, look at what's happening in terms of like, I guess public companies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Coinbase now, you know, going going live, like going live on direct listing and things like that. Like traditional finance and the old world is merging with crypto. And the ATF is one of the

Starting point is 01:09:08 biggest mergers that can happen. The ETF is an amazing product for a lot of people. You know, the greatest scale of products, as they currently exist, are not great a lot of the time because they either traded a discount or at a premium to their net asset value, whereas an ETF, it does not. And if it does, it gets arbitraged away. So it's very fair for people. So, yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see a Bitcoin ETF go live or multiple ones go live because then ETH is next in line, right? And ETH is coming straight up after it. And it's not going to take, you know, years and years and years because ETH already has futures on CME, which is a pre-requisite or or, or, I mean, I don't. I don't know if it's a hard prerequisite, but it's definitely a spiritual one to getting an

Starting point is 01:09:46 ETF. So, yeah, I think there's going to be a handful of Bitcoin ETFs coming out. There's not just going to be one. And GPT, I mean, Grayscale, GPTC is definitely a top contender there. Totally. All right. Anthony, I'm about to burn through the rest of these. So raise a hand if you want to lay a comment, but I'm just going to go really fast through these. Grayscale, or not Scale micro strategy, bought another $15 million worth of Bitcoin at an average price. price of $59,000. Again, they have this little graphic that they have been using and using and using. And so this is just going to be, again, a reoccurring theme. Grays or RICO strategy is going to dollar cost average into Bitcoin perpetually.

Starting point is 01:10:25 J.P. Morgan adjusts its Bitcoin price to $130,000. I always think announcements of raising price targets is hilarious because targets are supposed to be met, not raised, but whatever. So big institutions getting really bullish on Bitcoin. There is a class. class action lawsuit filed against a ledger for their data breach, which we talked about a number of months ago. There was a breach of the user's information. Now there's a class action lawsuit against ledger. Also, Shopify for completely unrelated to crypto, but again, a customer data breach as well. And then lastly, the FTX is officially becoming the name of the Miami Heat.

Starting point is 01:11:11 I don't know. A stadium in Miami is now going to be called FTX Arena. Again, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, but Sam Bankman-Fried literally just planting his name on an arena in America. Cryptos taking over the world, in my opinion, perhaps not the best move because it's, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried is not somebody that wants to have all that many headlines about him, but I guess he doesn't really care about that. All right, guys, we're about to get into the takes. who has had some interesting takes and a small teaser, a lot of them are about Coinbase. And then we're going to get into what David and Anthony are excited about. But first, before we do that, we're going to get into it, these sponsors that make this show possible.

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Starting point is 01:13:00 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. 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 that is the power of the synthetics platform. No slippage on your trades. You can also easily short assets with ICINTHs,

Starting point is 01:13:43 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 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.io, where you can stake your SNX or ETH and earn fees from synthetics. Let's get into some takes, Anthony. I think this is going to be where you're going to have a fun time here.

Starting point is 01:14:22 The first three takes that we've got lined up are all about Coinbase. And so Eric Connor, your good friend Eric Connor, says, don't buy the Coinbase IPO after multiple insiders already got better pricing by DPI instead. Anthony, what's your take here? Yeah, I mean, if you do a relative kind of market cap basis between Coinbase, which might, you know, highly likely it'll open a $200 billion cap and Defi, there is a massive gap there. And Defi, you know, UNSOP is already doing more volume than Coinbase on some days. So, and that's just one app, right?

Starting point is 01:14:56 And then you've got the rest of the defy ecosystem. And obviously DPI tracks that. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe I'd take a position from Eric is that like do both, but like wait more DPI, maybe, because that'll give you probably more, more growth prospects over the long term, I think. All right. Continuing the bashing of Coinbase IPO or the listing, which I don't intend to do, but I thought this was a cool take too.

Starting point is 01:15:19 Uniswap gave me 400 voting tokens valued at $12,000. Coinbase gave my information to the IRS. I don't mean to be shitting on Coinbase. I just think it's a funny just a position. Yeah, yeah, it's a funny tweet. I mean, I really would like Coinbase to AirDrop their stock. They're kind of like equity or stock to people who use the platform. But I think there's a lot of regulatory kind of issues there, and it would be a nightmare for them.

Starting point is 01:15:45 I'm pretty sure they probably thought about it and talked about it and probably thought, we don't want the regulatory issues. This is going to cost us too much. Let's just, let's punt on that. Yeah, never, never ever been done before. However, they do have KYC information of all U.S. customers, and if they are public, they can give it away. The hurdles aren't all that high, but I would imagine that there's a bunch I don't know about how incredibly complex that would become. All right. Last Coinbase take, Ryan Selkis says, do you really want to sit on the sidelines in this dip when 1,000 Coinbase millionaires are about to rotate out of stonk and into cryptos?

Starting point is 01:16:20 I thought that was pretty funny. Coinbase is going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history and there's going to be a lot of unlocked coin-based equity being accessible and turned into capital from people with coin-based equity. And he said, Ryan Selkis, founder of Mizari, says that this rotation out of Coinbase donk into cryptos is going to be epic. I think that's going to be a good take, good take. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it remains to be seen how much will rotate into crypto, but I think crypto covers stable coins now too. So maybe people just go into stable coins and then yields farm with it. That's, to me, the same stuff. Like, that going to stablecoins is fine, I think. Sure. Yeah, maybe it'll just add a bunch of stablecoin liquidity to defy. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:17:03 All right. Our first non-coin-based take, this came out not too long ago, and I wanted to highlight this as a learning lesson for just what it means to be in a bull market. There was an announcement made that balancer would be integrating with Al-Grand and helping add balancers at Defi app to Al-Garand. and this turned out to be basically a fake announcement. And fake announcements are a very strong symptom of a bull market. Announcements are just the blood of bull markets because people are clamoring for attention. So people will do what they want to do to get attention.

Starting point is 01:17:38 Turns out this didn't actually happen. Balancer just gave Algarand a grant, not even to build Balancer. I'm not even sure why they gave them a grant. And somebody at Algran turned this into a big hype story. And so Jeremy, I'm not going to be able to pronounce his last name, sorry Jeremy, gave this TLDR and a tweet thread that's saying it kind of broke down this story saying, you know, this was a fake story that got turned into something that it wasn't and that's a lesson to be learned. Anthony, any takes here? Yeah, you mean, you said it well. It's partnership season, as I like to call it,

Starting point is 01:18:14 where people just love to announce these things to pump up their token price. You know, I'm pretty sure the Algorand price would have probably gone up on this announcement, right? Because Balancer is a top defray protocol and people will be spinning the narrative that, oh, look, top Ethereum defray protocols are migrating to, you know, this Ethereum killer. And look at the headline, aims to be Algorans Unisop. Like, come on. Like, this is just ridiculous. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, just hype and this is how you get caught out as well.

Starting point is 01:18:38 Like if something pumps on like news, I've always seen like the short term, it tends to just drop back down because it's not like real buyers. It's just speculators being like I'm going to pump this up on this news and then I'm just going to dump it like, you know, in a little while. So yeah, just be safe out there with these sorts of things. Be safe. Yeah. And the last take actually comes from you, but I was the one that tweeted it. Ethereum's event horizon only grows larger. And this is something that we talked about on our Friday weekly live stream, which,

Starting point is 01:19:08 by the way, for those that haven't tuned into those, Anthony and I do these every single Friday, except actually for this Friday, because I'll actually be gone. But that's why we have Anthony on the weekly roll-ups instead. But Anthony, you said something about Ethereum's event horizon. Could you explain that metaphor to the listeners? Yeah, so essentially, I can't remember exactly the context of what we were talking about, but I think, you know, once you're like in the Ethereum ecosystem,

Starting point is 01:19:31 it's just like very, very hard to escape it, right? Just like it's basically impossible to escape a black hole, Black holes event horizon in space, it's very hard to escape Ethereum's pull on you. Like even if you're a fan of, I guess, like other chains and you want to spend time in other ecosystems, Ethereum is still going to kind of like draw you in, right? It's still going to keep you in its ecosystem no matter what, because there's just so much opportunity to be had. There's so much cool stuff going on.

Starting point is 01:19:57 You know, it's very hard to not be involved. And I would even go as far as to say that, you know, a lot of people who identify as Bitcoin maximalists using Ethereum, they're just not talking about it. because if you if you want to make like even just make money right and and you have bitcoin the opportunity to make the most money right now is putting your bitcoin on ethereum and yield funding with it like you're not going to get that from the centralized kind of institutions like blockfi and stuff like that which you know bitcoin maximus also love but it doesn't matter so it doesn't matter who you are and you can do it all anonymously you don't have to tell anyone you spin up on ethereum

Starting point is 01:20:29 address no one knows you are right unless you kind of link it to it to something they could link it to you But most of the time, it's very hard. So from that perspective, yeah, Ethereum just has this incredible pool on everyone in the ecosystem. It doesn't matter if they hate Ethereum, if they love other chains. I think their Ethereum killer is going to kill Ethereum. There's just too much opportunity in Ethereum land. And that's what pulls people in, I think.

Starting point is 01:20:52 Yeah, absolutely. All right, we are now getting into what we are excited about. Again, usually it's reserved for what's David and Ryan's excited about. But today we have Anthony. And so I'll start because I usually do start. And what I'm excited about this week is perhaps the acceleration of the merge. That is insane. And I alluded to this when we were talking about the Justin Drake tweet.

Starting point is 01:21:13 But what is happening in my mind is a bunch of Ethereum developers and community members are planting a flag. And they are saying, yo, it is time for sound money culture. Let's get sound money up and out the gate. We have this proof of stake thing and it's ready to go. Let's use it. let's prioritize it. Let's have some urgency. And let's get this ultrasound meme actually into reality.

Starting point is 01:21:37 And the fact that this is manifesting in both the values and prioritization of not just the community, but the actual Ethereum developers, I think is really, really cool. And that gets me excited about the future of Ethereum. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would definitely mirror that as well. But I would say that just to be a little bit different is that the thing that I am most excited about outside of that is the layer two adoption.

Starting point is 01:22:01 that's been happening lately and will continue to happen into the future. I put a tweet out a few weeks ago and I still believe this is true today. And I basically said, layer two is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. And what I meant by that is that all the technology is here, right? It is popping up in pockets in silos across the ecosystem, but it's just not evenly distributed. We don't have bridges, right? We don't have people adopting them just yet.

Starting point is 01:22:23 But that's going to come. It's going to come in waves, essentially, as the famous quote. We are coming in waves, right? That's what's going to happen. and people are going to adopt it. More and more people are going to go to layer two. There's going to be bridges. There's going to be more liquidity.

Starting point is 01:22:35 There's going to be more TVL. And that's going to happen much faster than people think over the next few months. I mean, I used the kind of example that in May of 2020, Uniswp's 24-hour volume was $10 million. Now it is consistently over $1 billion a lot of the time or at least close to $1 billion. That's the same thing's going to happen to layer two. Today, it's 10 million like on D-YDX. In a few months, it can be a billion, right? And it can probably grow even faster because of the fact that we already have a massive defy user base, right?

Starting point is 01:23:04 And then we already have a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that may have been priced out of layer one that will now be able to experience Ethereum defy again at layer two. So yeah, that's what I'm super, super excited about. And I think that, you know, the merge is just as exciting and just as critical. But I think, you know, scaling, I mean, the merge is like a part of scaling where we want to get rid of like a proof of work or a proof of mistake and then add sharding after the merge. merge as well. So the merge is like a prerequisite to sharding, which obviously adds more scalability to Ethereum. So that's what I'm most excited about right now. Yeah, the list could go on. We could talk about what we're excited about four hours. And in fact, we actually do on the Friday Daily Gway bankless live streams. Again, not happening tomorrow or I guess today when you

Starting point is 01:23:48 are listening to this, but literally happens every other Friday that other than this one. So tune into those when we do those are a ton of fun. And well, the other thing that I'm excited about is the meme of the week. Here it is. The meme of the week from CryptoWife, who's had a number of other fantastic memes out of this Twitter account. Her Photoshop skills are absolutely insane. She says, guys, I think we're ready.

Starting point is 01:24:14 Ask me where we're going. And it's Vitalik, Tim Beko, and Justin Drake in astronaut suits, Ethereum-themed astronaut suits, and they look like that they are just ready to fucking send it. And that's the meme of the week. Yeah, yeah. And then there's this one, five, five, nine in the background, right? Little subtle kind of a shill there, I think.

Starting point is 01:24:32 But yeah, crypto wife just killing the meme. I absolutely love her meme. So, you know, keep it up, whoever you are for sure. But yeah, I love this one as well. This is, this is great. All right, guys. Congratulations, Anthony. We made it through this marathon of the weekly roll-up.

Starting point is 01:24:49 Thank you for tapping in and being a great substitute teacher for Ryan. Do you want to give yourself a little bit of a self-shill? Where can people follow you? because when I'm putting the agenda together for the weekly roll-ups, I basically just follow Anthony around the internet. It's like, oh, Anthony's talking about this. Anthony's talking about this. And so if people want to go straight to the source, where should they go?

Starting point is 01:25:12 Yeah, yeah. So just easiest way to follow me is on Twitter at Sassel ZeroX, which I'm sure you'll link in the description there. But also I do a lot of that, you know, a lot of stuff at the Daily Gway and Ether. You can just Google both of those things. I do daily newsletter, daily YouTube recaps of the Ether. Ethereum ecosystem and then at Ethub is a weekly newsletter and weekly recaps with my co-founder, Eric Connor.

Starting point is 01:25:33 And then, yeah, that's basically where I spend most of my time. So, yeah, as you said, like, you probably troll through a lot of the things that I cover and everything like that. I try to stay, like, at the bleeding edge of stuff. It's very hard these days because there's so much stuff happening. But, yeah, that's the self-shield for everyone. Fantastic. And again, thank you for being my news partner this week.

Starting point is 01:25:51 All right, guys, risks and disclaimers, ether's risky, crypto is risky. DeFi is risky. risky you could lose what you put in we are headed west we've got our astronaut suits on we're on the frontier it isn't for anyone everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey that's the first time i've actually ever said that thanks ryan and and as a final send-off get your bankless badge we want you to get your bankless badge cheers awesome

Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of April (Coinbase IPO, FEI Protocol, DeFi Shopify, ETH 2 Merge, BTC ETFs)

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