Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of March (Beeple NFTs, EIP1559, Stimulus Checks, GBTC)

Starting point is 00:00:07 Happy second week of March. This is your roll-up. David, what are we doing today? We are rolling up the second week of March. It's always an ambitious endeavor in the world of crypto to condense a full week of news into as short time period as possible. And this is what we try and get done on the weekly roll-ups. We talk about the markets, what has happened in the last week of the markets. We go into news, what is in the news cycle in the last week. And then we go into releases, what got released in the last week. And then we finish up with some ecosystem takes. had some good opinions in the last week of crypto. And then we go into what David and Ryan are excited about. And last, and my personal favorite, the meme of the week to finish things off. Yep, you come

Starting point is 00:00:49 for the roll up. You stay for the meme. That's how it goes. David, you ready to get into the roll up. Let's roll it up, Ryan. All right, man. Hey, before we do, one thing we should mention to our listeners is that consensus is having a conference. This is a bull market conference. And there's only like five more days. I think by the time you listen to this, it might be four more days to get a ticket at a reduced price with a bankless code. You can get that for $79. So make sure you check that out. I will be going. David, Ray Dalio is going to be there. You know, what if he announced he was buying Bitcoin at this conference? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but like, what if, you know, you want to be there for that? I want to be there for that. You know, it's more likely that he would because he's going, right?

Starting point is 00:01:30 Like, why would Ray Dalio go to a crypto conference if he isn't intrinsically interested in crypto? Question mark? Wow. This is how rumors start. We don't know, guys, of course. But check out that conference. It's going to be a lot of fun. David, let's get to markets.

Starting point is 00:01:43 What is Bitcoin telling us this week? It's not telling us that Ray Dalio purchased, but it's telling us something good. I have a feeling. What's the price? Yeah, Bitcoin is really pushing, again, up a previous, up against a previous all-time high. It is at 57,474. What is that previous all-time high, Ryan? If you go out into the longer time frames, I think it's something like $58,000, $1,000.

Starting point is 00:02:07 We have got to be really close. Yeah, there it is. We're really close to the peak there. So we're almost climbing up a risk again. A little over $58,000. And we are just under that. Just a one more $1,000 pump out of Bitcoin. And we could be seeing Bitcoin all-time highs once again.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Ether is not doing us any favors this week. It's, you know, it's just hanging. It's just hanging. Under 2000. I'm going to celebrate that ETH 2K again, but not going to be this week. Where are we at and what's going on? Yeah, Ether Price, I think it's moving up off the floor pretty strongly, struggling to keep itself above $1,800. At the time of recording, $17,100, I always messed that up.

Starting point is 00:02:49 $1,796 is the ether price. And I think it's in a little bit of a holding pattern, but we are definitely moving up to $2,000. $4K by May, question marks. 4K by May. Well, look, your last call of it won't drop below $1,300, kind of held. So congrats on that, sir. Perfectly held. It went down to 1,297 and then just got right back up there.

Starting point is 00:03:15 It did not like the $1,200s. Sir, sign me up for your hedge fund, sir. When are you found out? David's making the calls here. All right, we'll make some calls. We've got total locked in D5. That is holding steady as well. Over $40 billion, though.

Starting point is 00:03:29 that's a lot locked in defy anything you want to say about that or should we skip to dpi more defy protocols more assets deposited into defy protocols eventually we are going to resume this climb up this mountain and you know next stop a hundred billion dollars maybe i'm just a permable you know what you are a permable but it's crazy to me do you remember we had that conversation with vance from framework like way back over the summer and he was predicting total locked value and he said something like a hundred billion would be like the low estimate of total locked value. And now here we are at close to 50 billion, right? Well done, Vance. Another guy who could, you should start a fund with Vance, David. Fantastic podcast episode,

Starting point is 00:04:10 the bull case for DFI. A hundred billion dollars locked in DFI at the time of recording was a little bit absurd. But now we're only a little bit over a doubling away from that. And there's so much left in this bull market too. Dude, our previous podcasts were fire. Like if you listen to those even like the bull case for NFTs has held up very strongly we recorded that back in the fall uh anyway go check out bankless archive you guys can see some of those predictions bankless doesn't age i dare any listeners to go and find find something that has aged poorly i dare you wow someone will now so you just uh you just taunted all of twitter um all right tell us about dpi that's at 450 so once again this is the d5 pulse index we talk about it

Starting point is 00:04:55 week because it's important. These are the top 10 defy protocols. We're hanging out at 455 or so. A little up on the week, actually. Not bad. Yep. Started ended at last week at $420. Now we are at $450 in the defy index. Again, slow march up into the right for the defy index. Let's look at it versus ether, Ryan. All right, here we are at DPI versus Eth.2.251 DPI for versus Eath. And we are seeing that channel play out in the longer time frames. DPI versus Eth over the course of 2021 doing a really good job of staying in a channel down versus Eath on the week, but still in that upwards trend up and to the right. And again, DPI versus Eth is the indication that people are being risk on. Ryan's having trouble navigating charts. He broke the chart. She clearly doesn't

Starting point is 00:05:49 look at the charts. Look, man, I'm a long time, long term permable. So I don't care what's going on in the minute by minute, David. But like, what is this telling us? Are we still in DFI season? Yeah, we are still in defy season. Go ahead and hit that year to date, YTD in the bottom left corner. And we can see what it's been looking like. There we go. Yeah. So again, a local down in the last week, but in that solid up into the right trend. Very good. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about this dashboard. We like showing dashboards. We like showing data in the market section. This is the MEV Explorer. You're going to have to explain this. Minor extractable value is what MEV stands for. What is it? Why is it important? It looks like it's going up. But unlike our

Starting point is 00:06:38 other numbers, going up has been a good thing. This is not necessarily a good thing. We don't necessarily want this number to go up. Get into this for us, David. Yeah, it's a nuanced conversation. I wouldn't say that MEV is exclusively a bad thing, but if it's unanswered for or unaccounted for, it definitely can really mess with your blockchain. A minor extractable value is the value that you can extract if you are a person that has the right to order transactions. And in proof of work, those are the miners, right? So miners are collecting transactions throughout the ecosystem. When you broadcast a transaction, it goes into what is called the mempool, which is where all the miners listen to, and they start pulling out of all the transactions with the highest gas fees,

Starting point is 00:07:18 and then they include them in a block. But what sophisticated miners can do is they can, order transactions as they see fit to maximize their own returns because they also get to inject their own transactions as well, right? And so miners can tinker with trades if people are putting in trades into uniswap, USDC for die or ether or whatever. Miners can take that spread between the input and the output of those trades. And they can take that for themselves because they're the ones ordering the transactions. And we see this in bidding wars when bots try an arbitrage or compete for the rights to take this spread. And what ultimately happens is that these bot arbitrage just bid up the value of the gas into up to the value of the transaction that they

Starting point is 00:08:04 would have received, right? And so if through an arbitrage trade that they would have gotten $100, they'll bid up to $99 worth of gas. So ultimately it just goes to the miners. And this can be destabilizing for a blockchain. If a block in Ethereum gets mined and it has a hundred eth worth of fees, well, Ethereum only issues two eth per block. And so Ethereum, the blockchain, won't be stable for 50 more blocks until the issuance of ether catches up with the fees issued by that one block. Now, EIP-1559 is a fantastic mitigator of this, but there are plenty of other things to be concerned about because this is a destabilizing event for blockchains. And why this is in markets is that this is an important metric that people need that is not found in legacy finance.

Starting point is 00:08:50 This is not something that has correlates. I guess we could talk about like the extremely high frequency traders. Exactly. One correlate I would say is sort of the flash boys, high frequency traders who literally park their servers like as close as possible next to the NASDAQ servers and have an advantage that way by getting their orders in before everybody else. This is somewhat similar to that, right? That's exactly right, right, except now there's a new party, now it's the miners or in future, the proof of stake validators. And this is going to be a metric that traditional finance is going to first be intimidated about, but I think will really increasingly come to love because of how much rich data,

Starting point is 00:09:32 amongst other things, is provided to them through this metric. And so paying attention to MEV is going to be a decades-long experiment, and it's going to be one of the most fascinating economic experience, experiments that humans have ever gone through. Yeah, it'll follow us, too, into this multi-chain future. It'll follow us to layer two. When layer two, validators have the ability to reorder transactions. We'll see MEV there.

Starting point is 00:09:56 So it's something kind of, I guess, pernicious in some ways. It's something that we definitely have to monitor. It's harnessable. It's harnessable, though. It's harnessable. It can be used for good. Anyway, we've talked about it enough, but we'll look at this metric from time to time and the weekly roll up.

Starting point is 00:10:11 I think the key takeaway is, it's going up. Miners are finding ways to extract value out of reordering transactions, and we should continue to monitor that in the future. MEV is a double-edged sword, and it's up to consensus mechanism designers, mechanism designers, to make sure that that sword is a weapon for good, not for bad. Well, Slay Moloch with that sword, shall we, sir? Indeed. All right.

Starting point is 00:10:35 David, this is an interesting take. Take by Sani from AVE. Is Defi undervalued? Well, Coinbase is worth $100 billion. that valuation demonstrates maybe how undervalue defy is. Look, David, if you compare the Coinbase valuation right now, it's $100 billion, hasn't released its IPO yet, it will. But this is what it's trading for on secondary, like prediction type markets, right?

Starting point is 00:10:58 So it's a fairly good proxy. $100 billion, one crypto bank, all of Defi put together, David. You know how much that is? How much? I'll tell you. $85 billion. It's less. All of defy is worth less than one single size.

Starting point is 00:11:13 solitary crypto bank. Are these the aggregate of DFI tokens? Is that how we measure it? Yes, aggregate of DFI tokens right now. So the total value of DFI is about $85 billion market cap, according to Coin Gecko. Valuation of one crypto bank, $100 billion, feels to me like DFI has a long ways to catch up. Maybe it's undervalued at this point. And if you look at the banking, global banking system right now, global banking market cap,

Starting point is 00:11:38 Lucas from our team put this together, $6.2 trillion, whereas the market. market cap of defy is only 85 billion. So we are very early on is the point. One thing I'd like to say about this is defy tokens don't have the overhead that Coinbase is in traditional banks have, David, right? Like, they don't have offices. They don't have many employees. Like a T-unswap is a team of like 15 people compared to Coinbase, which employs, you know, thousands. And then big banks like crypto, like JP Morgan, they're employing tens of thousands, right? So market cap has got to flip it at some point, too. We are in the early days.

Starting point is 00:12:18 Any takes here? Yeah, I think the reason why Coinbase is valued at such a high level versus defy is because Defy is harder to understand than Coinbase. And a constant theme that we talk about on bankless is it's bullish to be understood. And people are understanding Coinbase sooner than they are understanding Defi. And that is my explanation for the discrepancy between these two valuations. And that's also the alpha that bankless listeners should be paying attention to because if you understand Defi, you can be bullish on it and express that. And if hopefully we're right, cross our fingers.

Starting point is 00:12:52 But like the discrepancy between these two things should definitely not just equalize. Another reference to Van Spencer's podcast with us, the Bull case for Defi, is that people that build Defi protocols, they're not going for the typical C-Corp, you know, a public IPO valuation. They are going for many hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of value created. And there's no way that that equates in the legacy world. We are trying to create something substantially new and value generative. And the valuations of defy protocols at maturity should be orders of magnitude larger than the typical company IPOing on the stock market. David's bullish. Defi is maybe undervalued.

Starting point is 00:13:37 It's a little bit. It's up to you to use these protocols and determine for yourself. That's part of the bankless journey as well. Don't just take our word for it. Go use this stuff and see for yourself. David, let's skip to this. We mentioned this last time on the roll-ups, but Grayscale is still, this is the GBTC product and the ETHE product.

Starting point is 00:13:57 They are still trading under NAV. And traditionally when we've talked about these products, these, of course, can be purchased in traditional brokerages like Fidelity. You can buy GBTC. That is not actual Bitcoin. It's a trust. It's a proxy for Bitcoin. It comes with its own management fees. But it's always traded over spot. Same thing with ETHE. It's always traded for more than the value of its underlying. No longer, David. Now, last week, he's trading for 15% below spot price of Bitcoin. I asked crypto Twitter, like what's going on here? Because we talked a little bit about it. But like last time, but we didn't talk about it in detail. And David, you know, the most interesting answer. I got a lot of different answers. Some people are trying to figure out what's going on. But the most interesting answer to me was that actually, GBTC is facing some

Starting point is 00:14:50 competition these days. So micro strategy. What is that? Well, that's a stock that you can buy in your fidelity account that can be a proxy for the price of Bitcoin. There's rumors of ETFs on the horizon. There's increasing competitive pressure on GPDC, and so it is trading at a discount as a result of this increasing competition. So net, David, I feel like that's a good thing for the space. Like we want competitive pressures for these proxy financial products. And you know, the thing we want most of all, David, is we want the SEC to let retail get access to an ETF because it's a complete rip-off right now. And all they have to do is hit that button to approve, and they've been holding back all this time. It gets me upset every time I talk about it. Any takes here?

Starting point is 00:15:43 Yeah, there's a huge story here. I think what my opinion as to why the premium is below the nav, as in like when you buy something, you buy one Bitcoin's worth of value, you actually only get 85% worth of a Bitcoin because of Grayscale. the people have been arbitraging the gray scale premium for forever and there is a six months commitment that you must do and so when you deposit your bitcoin into gray scale with the intention of generating of capturing that premium so previously the the gbtc premium was 50% over nav meaning that the value of the market cap of gpTC was 50% higher than the bitcoin that was backing it the reason why this premium was so high because of demand people wanted it it. And so people will come in, submit their Bitcoin, and in six months, because of the rules of

Starting point is 00:16:31 regulation, six months, they would be able to turn their one Bitcoin into 1.5 Bitcoin's worth of GPTC, sell that on the open market, and it's for dollars, take those dollars and buy 1.5 Bitcoin. So you magically, poof, turn one Bitcoin into 1.5. This has been a massive arbitrage opportunity for so many companies. And my opinion is it got flooded. Too many people tried to take the same premium. And as a result, people, when they sell GV's, you know, They push the pressure down. And it's a really sad story for the typical uninformed retail investor who wants to go buy Bitcoin in their brokerage and their ways that they are comfortable with. And they buy GBTC at 150% premium. And now it's 15% below the value of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:17:17 Meanwhile, actual Bitcoin has gone up. And so during times where actual Bitcoin holders have made money, GBTC holders have lost money. And this is the fault of the SEC. not grayscale in the slightest. It is the SEC's fault for not protecting consumers by approving an ETF. This is what an ETF is supposed to do. And instead, we have these shitty inefficient mechanisms to try and get Bitcoin exposure. Just approve the ETF. Come on.

Starting point is 00:17:45 Let's get this done. It's really, it's causing the rip-off, like a mass rip-off of retail investors. And it's really a shame. Absolutely. I'm sure there's tons of people from the SEC listing to the, this right now that heard that message, David, and are rushing to approve the ETAF. Just do it. David said so. David says so. David wants it. Look, retail wants it. It's very clear from a demand perspective. David, the last thing we should mention is our favorite Gitcoin grant

Starting point is 00:18:14 organization. This is a grant organization funding public goods on Ethereum. They have just launched their latest grant running, grant. They just launched their latest grant funding round. That is hard to say. And there's a matching process here. Tell us about that and how folks can get involved. Yeah, Gitcoin is a beloved platform of the Ethereum ecosystem. Getcoin, I consider a public good, but it's importantly distinct from typical public goods because it is a public good that funds other public goods. And what is Ethereum other than a layer of hosting public goods of money and finance on the internet? And so using Gitcoins really important. And so if you like something, if you like to use an application or a protocol,

Starting point is 00:18:59 and you would want to help fund that, Gitcoin grants is for you. The cool thing about Kitcoin grants is that your dollar is amplified, right? And so if you use something for free, but you would like to contribute value to it, you can donate a dollar. And because of quadratic funding,

Starting point is 00:19:14 which is something that everyone listening should be familiar with, I think it's a little bit too much to explain all of the details about, but I'll do my best, is that there is outsized matching. And so if you donate $1, you could get matched up to $10 or $100.

Starting point is 00:19:28 And how much you are matched by is determined by how many other unique people are also donating to the same thing that you are donating. It's a very clever mechanism. And it's a way to fund things on Ethereum that otherwise wouldn't have gotten funded. So if you like to use stuff in Ethereum, either protocols or you want to see protocols built out, last Bitcoin grant I donated to tornado cash because I want privacy on Ethereum. I also am going to intend on donating to Kinext Network this cycle because I want that L2 liquidity mesh network to be built out. If you believe in something, donate to it.

Starting point is 00:20:05 Now is the time. You've probably made a decent amount of money in the last few months. Throw a few dollars at Gitcoin. Yep. Every dollar, depending on the project you fund, could be worth like, we're not talking small amounts, a dollar, you get $20 matching, $50 matching, $100 matching. That is the power of quadratic matching, as David was saying. So check that out, guys.

Starting point is 00:20:25 Before we get into the releases section, which we're super excited about, we want to tell you about the fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different cryptocurrencies. assets, including many of the hot defy tokens, and it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid dye markets.

Starting point is 00:20:59 Gemini just launched their Earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in Defi, where you don't want to worry about defy exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases. but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something,

Starting point is 00:21:32 I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. Alve is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum. and just recently released AVE version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes

Starting point is 00:21:59 using AVE even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Avey, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my port-werect. of a number of different defy tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option,

Starting point is 00:22:30 but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of AVE's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets. Trade them on Uniswap and then deposit them back into AVE. Avey does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction, so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAVE.com. All right, David, let's get to releases. This is one I am super excited about. What I'm showing here on Twitter is Hot Protocol. And this is showing a metamask connection. And we're moving from one layer two to another

Starting point is 00:23:14 side chain or another layer two. From Arbitrum, the layer two roll up to X-Di, we're actually moving funds in this transaction. That's what you're seeing. If you're viewing this on YouTube. David, explain what is going on here with Hot Protocol. Right. So the problem that is being addressed is that liquidity can be fractured across various L2s. And that's bad because we want liquidity to be centralized or centralized into specific exchanges. And Hot Protocol, I don't know if this is true, but I'm assuming what they are doing is some sort of payment channel mechanism where they have liquidity providers on both sides or they have or they're actually sending it routing it through the L1, I don't think that's true. I think what must be going on is a payment

Starting point is 00:23:57 channel. And they are just connecting assets across various L2s. So somebody has, but die on both sides of X die and arbitram. And then somebody wants to trade ETH and they want to get Eth on one side, die on the other. Marketmakers on both sides of the L2s are allowing people to just swap assets. So they're not sending their assets. They are just swapping assets. And the assets can be either the same or different on both sides. That is a really important tool to make sure that liquidity across L2s and overall L2 usability stays really, really accessible. So getting onto an L2 can take a lot of gas, but with something like hot protocol, you can stay on various L2s and experience all L2s without actually having to go back to Ethereum, because if you end up going

Starting point is 00:24:45 back to Ethereum, you're going to have to pay another gas fee. And that's $100 every time you want to go on to an L2 or so, which while it's still an improvement on 100% L1 transfers, it's still too much for people that want to be able to use Ethereum. So this is helping them with that. Yeah, very cool stuff. And of course, we want to be precise in our language and sometimes we're not always precise, but it's important for listeners to know that the difference between a side chain and an L2, the difference is this. A side chain to Ethereum is not secured by the Ethereum protocol or ETHAAAA, a layer two and L2, as David was saying, absolutely is. And so this is a transfer from Arbitrum, which is a roll-up, which would be L2, which would be secured by the

Starting point is 00:25:31 Ethereum chain to a side chain, X-I, which has its own validator set and is not secured by the Ethereum chain. We'll repeat that every once in a while, so you guys get the flavor of that. But David, this also reminds me of your conversation with Connects. There is a whole Meet the Nation video on YouTube about that where you talk to Connects. Can you give us the TLDR of that conversation because it seems very related to this topic of chain-to-chain interoperability without having to go back to the main chain? Yeah, Connects has been with Ethereum since 2017 working on payment channels because we understand payment channels to be an extremely useful piece of technology. But Connects has really kind of struggled to see where payment channels fits into Ethereum. except for lately with this exact same problem.

Starting point is 00:26:22 So the conversation I think was really cool because it was one part a lesson in Ethereum history, it was one part a lesson in cryptography, it was one part a lesson in liquidity, and one part a lesson in L2s. And so there was a bunch of information all wrapped into one. And basically where Connects has landed is the system for matching orders across L2s,

Starting point is 00:26:45 across any L2 that is EVM compatible. and even stuff that isn't EVM compatible, including Bitcoin's Lightning Network. So if Bitcoin's Lightning Network does ever actually achieve adoption, we could match Bitcoin's Lightning Network with a payment on an L2 via Connects, which is pretty crazy. And so there's a bunch of cross-protocol interoperability and communication that is viable due to these payment channel levels that acts as like this mesh network middleware layer between all of these various L2s. It's super cool to hear state.

Starting point is 00:27:18 channels actually having almost a rebirth moment just as we need them. We need this this chain-to-chain interoperability and state channels may be a solution for that. Super cool. Listeners should double check us if state channels are actually part of Hop Protocol. I'm not 100% sure on that. So take note. That is true. Okay. This is another interesting, I think, update from Maker Dow this time. And this is they are announcing optimism. So this is optimism roll-up, die bridge with fast withdrawals. This is a theme that I think we'll hear. It's really like layer two season.

Starting point is 00:27:53 I think we'll see a ton of DFI protocols over the coming weeks and months start announcing what their layer two initiatives are, what their layer two solutions are, where they're going to deploy next. We heard that last roll-up. This is it again. This is Maker Dow, though, a pretty long-standing defy protocol making an announcement

Starting point is 00:28:11 of how they're going to handle this. What's the TLDR for us? Yeah, the TDLDR for me is that we are solving problems before they actually even arise, right? And so we are allowing tokens, starting with die, on and off of L2s with immediate or relatively fast withdrawals. Near instant is what they say. And this is a similar problem to what we were just talking about, but it's fixing the problem of getting on and off L2s from the L1, which, at least with optimistic roll-ups, getting off, getting on is instant and does cost money, and getting off can take up to a week or even longer,

Starting point is 00:28:45 depending on the construction of the optimistic roll-up. And so fixing that problem is already being addressed, even before optimistic roll-ups have actually been deployed to Ethereum. And so maybe it's a cart before the horse, but what really my takeaway is that we are having compounding progress in the Ethereum ecosystem. Yeah, super cool, definitely. This is another D-5 protocol.

Starting point is 00:29:07 This one's called Super Fluid, and they are announcing that they've deployed, not on Ethereum Mainnet, but interestingly, they've deployed right on side chains, basically, or layer two, with the deployment to Polygon and X-Di. And David, when I looked at what Super Fluid is doing, I thought it was super cool because this is an idea that a protocol called Sablier had, which was like streaming payments. So almost a new DeFi Money Protocol unlock where if I want to send you 100,

Starting point is 00:29:39 I could stream that to you over a 24 period of time. Or let's say I want to pay you as a contractor, David, and I owe you $2,000 a month. I could stream that to you over the 30-day monthly period of times. Like the idea of streaming money is super cool. It just wasn't actually practical on Ethereum main net because of gas fees and because you know, Ethereum Maynet is not really great for these period of peer transactions that are small amounts. but it works super well on something like Polygon, something like X-Dye,

Starting point is 00:30:12 and that's where super fluid is deploying it, handles subscriptions, salaries, rewards, any composable stream of value with continuous settlement and per second net netting for what, for extreme capital efficiency? This is a cool new unlock, David. I'm super excited to check this out and actually try it out. Yeah, listeners should understand that this starts with money, but it ends with everything. and that's why they have composable stream of values. So think about equity distributions or vesting periods

Starting point is 00:30:44 where you get unlocked in tranches and it's just rigid and we can smooth that out. Vitalik I know likes to talk about streaming payments for compensation for people that allow people to use their Wi-Fi. And so you could pay someone a penny for every megabyte you download using their Wi-Fi, meaning you can go anywhere in the world and somebody might be able to let you use their Wi-Fi if you just pay them with streaming payments.

Starting point is 00:31:09 The use cases for this are infinite, infinite. Any type of asset, any valuable asset, any sort of logic about time. I think time is actually the really strong component here because it allows you to link assets and time. I think that's kind of cool. Yeah, absolutely. Something you cannot do, again, in the traditional space for sure.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Last, we should talk about this release, and it's a release that is actually upcoming, But the announcement is that some pretty large VCs, Andresen Horowitz, Framework Ventures, we were just talking about Vance earlier from Framework. Coinbase Ventures, Angelus, DeVal, a bunch of people are investing in the Faye Protocol. This is, David, a new algorithmic stable coin. We talked about algorithmic stable coins a lot in the past. Empty Set Dollar would be an example of this.

Starting point is 00:31:59 Also, Maker Dow is kind of an algorithmic staple coin. but it is collateral-backed, whereas MP-Stet dollar is not. This Faye protocol seems to kind of mix a bit of that collateral-backed world, but rather than being backed by vaults that are put in place by individual users, it's actually backed by a protocol. So it's almost like protocol collateral-backed. There are a ton of specifics here, and actually the mechanism design gets pretty complicated, right?

Starting point is 00:32:27 But again, this is back to the idea that what is a stable coin trying to do? it's trying to be stable over time. It's trying to have a predictable stability mechanism attached to it. This is an even more complicated way to do it. And we're innovating. Again, back to the theme we've talked about on bankless David, which is every money experiment on Ethereum will be tried. Any conceivable experiment that can be tried will be tried.

Starting point is 00:32:53 This is just another one. I'm not sure if I'm bullish or bearish on this, but in the category of algorithmic stable coins in general, something's got to work. We're just trying too many experiments for it not to. Yeah, that's exactly right. I dove into this white paper trying to get my head wrapped around this to be able to explain it. And I saw some pretty crazy math equations that are well beyond my interest. My takeaway was that there are things being tried on Ethereum that are increasing in complexity and increasing in sophistication. And I'm kind of reminded that the bare bones, DFI protocols, well, we don't consider them

Starting point is 00:33:30 bare bones. But they, I think in the future, they could be considered the bare bones defy protocols, the defy protocols that are based off of addition, subtraction, and division. Like un-swap. It's super simple. Whereas like defy protocols based off of like calculus or whatever was more complicated than calculus, I didn't do very well in math and school, is coming. And that is a potential feature. And so can't wait for all the crazy calculus defy apps to come. Yeah, they're definitely increasing in complexity. This is interesting because it actually has a launch event where it's going to be distributed. People can park Ethan in it to get some of the Faye Protocol. We'll have some stuff on the newsletter about that. Maybe an alpha leak as it launches. We will see.

Starting point is 00:34:13 David, all right, that's releases. Let's get to news. Here's the big news. This isn't crypto news. This isn't just crypto news. I mean, this is like global, U.S. news, but it's also global news. The Senate has just passed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bills. Much talked about. Everybody gets another $1,400 stimulus check. Of course, you have children. You get even more than that. David, what's going on here? What are some of the, I guess, key points and takeaways? Yeah, this is a huge victory for Biden, who was kind of leading the charge with trying to get stimulus checks into the hands of Americans. And so this will be the third, yeah, the third stimulus check for Americans. First was $1,200, then another $600 one came, and then next a $1,400 stimulus check came.

Starting point is 00:35:04 This is in stark contrast to 2008, where I don't think any Americans got stimulus checks. And so we are learning that we have the power of the money printer. The people learned that, and the people demanded it. And so while it's one thing that I'm glad bailouts are going to people, not just corporations, we also have to be reminded, at least to us in the United States, of our American privilege because we have the global reserve asset that everyone else wants, and the money printer of America is printing it out for Americans as a gift because they are Americans, whereas the rest of the world doesn't actually get access to that money printer

Starting point is 00:35:40 even though they want the dollars. So American privilege being expressed here. Everybody has, every other country has their own money printer. Some work better than others. the U.S. arguably has the one that works better than them all right now. But the problem with money printers, of course, is that if they are abused, that might no longer be the case. He could run out of ink. I guess we're using that metaphor. You know, the interesting thing about this, David, is whatever regime, whatever political regime is in control is going to hit the money printer button, like no matter what, this whole modern monetary theory that is in full swing in full effect, I think the last 10 to 20 years, what we've seen is money printing that's gone to

Starting point is 00:36:22 capital. Essentially, those that control the capital. Last 10 to 15 years, I'd say it's more capital, right? So like, you know, we've talked about this on bankless, the can't salon effect, basically. If you're in close proximity to the money printer, you get it first. And so we've seen this in asset appreciation, these stocks, real estate, this sort of thing. But now labor, the people, as you said, are starting to get control of the money printer and bending it to their will. This is what UBI is. And like, I'm not here to say that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think it is a thing that is happening.

Starting point is 00:36:59 And anyone listening to this should absolutely understand that the money printer trend is not going away. We've had the first, I guess, chapter of this whole money printer that's gone to capital. I think the next chapter is going to go to labor, going to go to the people. We're not going to see the end of these checks that are going to U.S. citizens or citizens of any other country. Their central bank is going to continue to do this. It's going to be a major theme of the decade. And in the backdrop, stands crypto, which is not based on central bank monetary policy. Something I think about a lot.

Starting point is 00:37:37 Very, very true. I wouldn't, again, like the usage of the money printer, I don't think is ever a good thing. I guess that makes me a little bit of an Austrian, but you're totally right. We've been using it and we're going to be using it. And so now the fact that we're giving the fruits of the money printer out to more people, I guess, is better, in my opinion. I'd still be a fan of destroying the money printer, right? Like, it's like the one ring that should be destroyed, right? Like, no one should have that power.

Starting point is 00:38:05 But we do have that power. So if we're going to have that power, let's distribute it to as many people as possible. That's the ethos behind proof of stake, too, by the way, is staking rewards. can be done by anyone anywhere, anyone with a laptop, right? And so that's the same kind of energy. And the Bitcoin energy is the opposite. They're saying, like, no one should have that power, so we delete it. Right.

Starting point is 00:38:24 And America is coming to terms with like, well, the American citizens have figured out, well, we have this power. How can we harness it? And then the wealthy elite have been like, damn it, they found out that we have this power. Like, now they know. Oh, no. That's my story.

Starting point is 00:38:39 Now that's my TLDR of what's going on. Yeah, yeah, very much. I think, look, the difference between this, form of money printing and the money printing that we saw over the last 10 years is this is fiscal, right? This is not just the Fed chair like, you know, adjusting rates or providing quantitative easing. This is Congress and the executive branch, like on behalf of the people voting to increase money supply and put that in the hands of the people. So this is a whole new chapter, you know, and look, it's all part of the same story. Let's talk about another story that is super

Starting point is 00:39:14 important. This is a crypto-native story, but we've been tracking it for a while. This is EIP 15-59. In stark contrast. Yes. What a segue. So in crypto, we're not trying to print more money, actually. We're trying to burn money, apparently, right? Bitcoin is the story of a fixed supply money, but ether is becoming a story of actually a negative issuance, possibly, a burning, light the furnaces, my friend. EIP 1559 has been approved to go in not the next hard fork, but the hard fork after, which could be slated for a July release of Ethereum. And that would put this thing EIP 1559 into the protocol. For folks that haven't been paying attention to what EIP 1559 is, could you give a

Starting point is 00:40:05 quick summary and tell us why this is so important? Right. EIP 1559, instead of making a transaction in Ethereum, and that transaction fee going to validators or miners, instead it just gets burned. And there's a number of reasons behind this. One, it's just more game theoretically stable if you just burn that fee. And the important juxtaposition here is that transaction fees on Ethereum, it reflect demand for Ethereum's block space, which reflect demands for Ethereum economy, right?

Starting point is 00:40:36 And so Ethereum as a protocol, when it collects fees, that is like the Ethereum system collecting revenue. That is the GDP of Ethereum. The revenue that Ethereum collects is directly correlated with the GDP of the Ethereum economy. And because we are now burning this, ether, the asset, the scarcity of ether, should also be tracking the GDP of Ethereum. As the GDP of Ethereum grows, we should be burning more and more ether, making ether more and more scarce. So this is in stark contrast to the United States economy, where our GDP, except for during COVID, our GDP, has never been higher, yet we are still issuing money at an all-time high rate. Those two things are backwards because if the American economy, if the American nation state was efficient, it would be

Starting point is 00:41:23 able to generate revenue from its own GDP. This is what a nation state does. This is what Ethereum does. It generates security to fund itself, to fund its growth through the GDP that it taxes. In the United States, we tax our citizens and then we also print money. Ethereum taxes the people that use it, and then it burns money. And it importantly, burns, it issues like a stock buyback on ether the asset because the more and more ether that it can pull away from the secondary market to make ether more and more scarce makes Ethereum and Ether than ether harder to attack under a proof of stake paradigm. There's your EIP-159 lesson like banged into the two minutes.

Starting point is 00:42:03 That was awesome, man. And guys, go check out the opening note that David wrote about EIP 1559. It's a great summary. So basically what we're doing is we're taxing transactions. and we're giving that back to ETH holders in the form of a burn. Good times to be an ETH holder. The last thing I'll say, David, is I don't think the market has woken up and realized that this is an actual protocol going into a store of value commodity asset like ether.

Starting point is 00:42:29 I don't think the market understands what EIP 1559 is. Guys, I think this is alpha. This is if you are in this space, do you see anybody talking about this? Oh, well, here's the closest thing, actually. actually. This is Bloomberg. This is the Bloomberg front page the first time I've seen an Ethereum related article. But David, this is what they, this is their headline. Cryptocoin, outperforming Bitcoin is about to see supply reduced. David, crypto coin. I guess they're talking about ether. Are they? Cryptocoin. That's my favorite crypto coin. It turns out they are.

Starting point is 00:43:09 But this is the first, like, I guess narrative that we're seeing of EIP 1559 escaping into mainstream. So it's still stupor early. The market doesn't understand this. The market has just wrapped its head around $21 million fixed supply Bitcoin. Wait till they figure out EIP 1559 burning supply ether. Dude, so EIP 1559, extremely elegant upgrade to a blockchain. It just is so perfect in every single way. yet the best thing about EIP 1559 is not anything about the code it's about the narrative it's about

Starting point is 00:43:44 the story that is told which is the best fucking thing about it oh it's so crazy it's so crazy David we're going to do an entire episode about EIP 1559 guys and we have a fantastic guest who's been an EIP 1559 like the best analyst the guy who understands is the best Hasu who's a pseudo anonymous, I guess, analyst and thinker, researcher. Crypto-economic researcher, I would call him. Yes, we are camping an entire episode on this. It is that important. So stay tuned to Bankless Podcast.

Starting point is 00:44:15 Make sure you check out that episode coming. Last thing on EIP 1559. Not everyone's a fan. Not everyone's a fan. Miners do not like it. Can't please everyone. We can't, well, this is Ethereum miners. And this is a headline saying Ethereum miners plot a hash power, show of force against

Starting point is 00:44:32 EIP 1559. So there's undercurrents of threats coming from minors. Of course, miners revenue is going to get cut as a result of this. 20%, 30%, I mean, they're doing pretty well. And they've been doing pretty well. Okay. So that's the backdrop of this. That's the context.

Starting point is 00:44:49 But I've had actually a lot of people reach out to me, David, and like, are you concerned about this that it won't go through? Are you concerned that minors might fork? My response to that is no, I'm not. at all, not even in the slightest. I think miners think they are, some miners think they are far more powerful over this ecosystem than they are. If they fork, that's great for ETH holders, right? Thanks for the free coin. See you later. I'm going to sell it. I'm going to buy some more ETH. That's it. And a story, right? I think that the threat of minor fork is definitely overinflated.

Starting point is 00:45:28 In fact, I think a lot of this might be saber rattling. We'll see if they fork or not. but it could very well be just saber-rattling if they do fork in the end. I'm not concerned about it. What's your opinion on this? Yeah, it's absolutely saber-rattling. And the reason why, like the title of this, a hash power show of force. And what that means is that a bunch of miners are going to all signal with their hash power

Starting point is 00:45:51 saying, hey, we do not approve this. And this is just the wrong paradigm. Ethereum doesn't answer to hash power. That's not what it does. It's not Bitcoin. This isn't Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin. Bitcoin. This is Ethereum. First off, proof of stake is coming where your hash power is just going to get deleted anyways. And so, like, goodbye. And also, cool, you can, anyone can fork a blockchain.

Starting point is 00:46:14 It doesn't matter if all of the hash power goes in one direction. If all of the community goes in a different direction and starts valuing a different fork, hash power is going to go to the fork that is valued because that's where revenue comes from. It doesn't matter if you have, if 99% of hash power is signaling in support of something, if all of the value goes into a different fork, then miners are just going to go back to that one. Like the hash power is not the, the saber. It's not a weapon. You're like, no, it's a bluff. We've, we've, and look, man, we've seen this play out already time and time again, even in the Bitcoin ecosystem, right, with kind of these other minor instigated forks or other party instigated forks, like Bitcoin cash and all of

Starting point is 00:46:56 these things. And it's the community that decides what Bitcoin is the same. Same with Ethereum, in fact, more so because now we have assets that are issued on top of Ethereum. We have a whole defy ecosystem that gets to choose which chain is going to be the chain that it supports, right? And so miners have very little power here. I'm not worried at all. EIP 1559 is going to go through. And it's going to be great, I think, for the stakeholders of the platform who are users, DAP developers, people who believe in a decentralized, future.

Starting point is 00:47:30 and want more economic bandwidth. I'm super bullish. It's going to be fine. Don't worry about the miners, guys. All right. Let's talk about this, David. Beeple is setting some more records. Dude, you know what?

Starting point is 00:47:43 70 million. Beable Art sold for 70 million on Christie. 70 million. You know, this is the... Today. This more. Yeah. This just happened.

Starting point is 00:47:52 This is the third largest art sale from a living artist in human history. The third largest. Yeah. like this is happening in crypto right now. Wow. And this is like almost, it's on the brink of breaking all traditional records. Look, we've done a lot of NFT content lately. We just talked to OpenC and ask me anything.

Starting point is 00:48:16 That's fantastic. You can check it out on YouTube. We talked to Nifty Gateway. We just had Blow on the podcast. So there's tons of material here. But how would you, what would you summarize, David? Like, what's going on here? Dude, it's pretty overwhelming. And like people keep on saying like this market, the NFC market. He just had a deep sigh. There's so many things to talk about. And they're like, I feel out of my element. And many, many people are talking about how it's, it's, this is the top. It's too frothy. And if you're telling me that like, a all time high record or third highest or whatever is setting the records and it's crypto and it's just such a short amount of time into this, that makes me concerned. But also, it keeps on.

Starting point is 00:48:58 going up, right? And so it keeps, I don't know, but like, I'm optimistic that NFTs are going to innovate and improve in ways that ICO tokens didn't and in way that defy tokens did. And I'm optimistic about that. I'm optimistic about just being able to make NFTs more legitimate because there are kind of just like dumb NFTs out there. I'm optimistic. But damn, is this accelerating really quickly, really fast? You know, congrats to people. I was listening to a clubhouse conversation of many, many artists that were all trying to get their heads wrapped around NFTs. And I can't remember who was speaking. But they said that, and I don't know Beeple, trying to get him on the podcast. So if anyone knows him, connect us. But they said that Beeple

Starting point is 00:49:44 is the best representative to represent NFTs and Ethereum for the space, just as a testament to his character. So that makes me feel very good. So congrats people and thank you. Yeah, super cool. And it pays to be an innovator here. And people certainly an innovator doing stuff when no one else believed it got all the way to Christie's and the third largest sale ever. And it does feel like this is just getting started as weird as that sounds. We'll see what happens. But this could put a dampener on it, David. There's been a lot of talk. Oh, no. Yeah, there's been a lot of talk in, I guess, NFT, Twitter, right, which is sort of a subset maybe of crypto Twitter, but also intersects with like creator Twitter and art, like all of these. other communities that were not as plugged into about the problem of crypto art. And the summary is the problem is some artists are starting to get their head wrapped around proof of work, in particular, Bitcoin proof of work, but also Ethereum is now based on proof of work.

Starting point is 00:50:46 And the energy consumption behind proof of work. So at least one artist said that it's a disaster. I issued a first NFT, but now that I realize it's environmental impact, is kind of the, you know, the summary. I am no longer issuing an NFT. And so this is, of course, caused a, I guess, a tremors in the, the NFT community. And there have been responses and other responses. Give me a quick take on this, at least your take, David. Is this overblown?

Starting point is 00:51:18 Is this real? Could this curtail the NFT market in a significant way? Yeah, I've never been compelled by the energy, sustainability argument. behind proof of work and in blockchains, even with Bitcoins. We have to realize that Bitcoin is something that is doing a very useful and good thing, and that, unfortunately, that thing consumes energy, but so do so many other things in our world that we also like. It also consumes energy.

Starting point is 00:51:47 The counterpoint that I've heard to that is like, well, we also know of this thing called proof of stake, so if we can achieve the same results, but without the energy, why not, you know, say no to proof of work and say yes, proof of stake, which I'm also compelled by. But at the end of the day, the artist connecting NFTs to energy consumption is just too far, too disparate of a connection to make. Like, I just wrote an article about the cultural revolution that I think could come as a result of artistic creation and artistic expression, specifically empowered by NFTs and what those things can do for the world.

Starting point is 00:52:22 And there are tradeoffs to everything, I guess. And I guess if we could make those tradeoffs better, that's always better. But if proof of work, Ethereum, which hosts economic activity based on NFTs, allows for this cultural revolution, along with all the other innovations behind defy, like, it's worth it. Things cost things. And at the end of the day, like, the reason why electricity with proof of work is so targeted is because it's such an easy target, right? Like, you can see the miners, you can see them just sucking up all the electricity.

Starting point is 00:52:55 and we don't know how much like the Federal Reserve or the inflating money system or like the battleships that the United States employs or the aircraft carriers or the F-35 that costs like $10 billion a plane that we don't really use like all of that cost stuff and that's the system of the U.S. dollar. And so I think it's just a bunch of do about nothing. It's interesting. So I am sympathetic to a lot of elements of that argument. and I think probably Nick Carter from Bitcoin, like, makes them best, right? And that, you know, everything you just said, basically. I will also say, though, that I'm compelled by the argument that, well, basically, you're saying that their, you know, proof of work does consume energy, right?

Starting point is 00:53:45 And that that is worth it for society and that we're not seeing all of the other energy consumption devices. And I would say probably some of the... like Nick would also say, and by the way, some of this energy consumption is actually producing and accelerating the move to more renewable energy sources, right? So I think that's all part of the argument. But the thing I think that is interesting as well is that that may be true for proof of work, but as you were saying, like, if you compare proof of work to everything else, that's really not the argument.

Starting point is 00:54:21 what you should be doing is comparing proof of work to a better mechanism potentially, like proof of stake. And when you do that and you say, well, is proof of work worth it or not? And what are we trying to get from proof of work? Well, with Bitcoin, you're trying to get an ultra-hard, ultrasound digital money. Well, if you could do achieve the same end with proof of stake and it, like the energy consumption is almost like it's nil compared to proof of work, then why not? where is then your argument for proof of work, which is ultimately, David, where I see

Starting point is 00:54:56 Ethereum coming down on that side, right? So this whole conversation about NFTs on Ethereum, well, Ethereum is not going to be a proof of work blockchain for very much longer. Like two years? That would be a long, like I think the merge happens a lot sooner. And so this entire commentary is going to be nil anyway. We'll be issuing NFTs on proof of stake blockchains like Ethereum moving forward and it won't even be a factor. So it's all temporal, in my opinion, but that does not discount. I do think that this narrative, David, you're seeing echoes of this NFT narrative, but it's going to persist in other ways. Like a company like Tesla, putting Bitcoin on its balance sheet in the future, Bitcoin is going to have to wrestle with this

Starting point is 00:55:42 anti-proof of work narrative in a way on whatever side of the argument you're on in a way that proof of stake chains do not, and that could give proof of stake chains like Ethereum a narrative advantage regardless of what the data actually falls down on, what side it falls down on. I don't know who this artist is that made this blog post or if they are a big deal artist or just a minor deal artist. I don't really know. But I do know that NFTs are a democratizing piece of infrastructure that can help creators monetize. So instead of going and working their nine to five job, perhaps that job is minimum wage, perhaps they're living a less than than comfortable lifestyle than they really deserve because they can't find ways to monetize

Starting point is 00:56:28 their own labor. If NFTs can do that, the cost of the proof of work costs of that $70 rareable minting transaction is completely justifiable. Like think about the other downstream implications of this. If we can harness the energy behind NFTs and employ a generation who is otherwise doing meaningless work in their nine to five gargantuan job that they felt was meaningless and it sucked on their soul let's consume some energy and get that done like it's worth it it's worth it yeah absolutely look guys i think the bottom line is it's uh it's way too soon to cancel nfts let's not do that just yet we got more work to do it's getting better don't cancel nFTs yeah so anyway that's a that's a narrative we will keep you updated on as well all right regulation narrative we

Starting point is 00:57:16 actually have some good regulation news this week. Right. U.S. lawmakers, well, they haven't done it yet, but they're introducing a bill to clarify crypto regulations. One of the key clarifications here would be what is a security and what is not? Can you give us some clarity? We've been asking for this for a long time. That would definitely help in the U.S. if this bill goes through.

Starting point is 00:57:36 I'm more excited about this at the state level because this is even more forward-looking in the state of Wyoming, which has been a very crypto-friendly. state, Wyoming passed a bill through, I believe, maybe the first phase of the bill process, or is it totally passed? Oh, it's past the Wyoming Senate Committee on its way to being passed by the Wyoming Senate to essentially recognize Dow's. These are decentralized autonomous organizations, so smart contract systems, property management systems on Ethereum, to recognize them and give them legal status under the the Wyoming law structure, legal structure.

Starting point is 00:58:19 This is super cool. This is like this is the kind of thing that regulatory regimes, if they really cared about pushing things forward, this is the kind of thing they could do to help accelerate the innovation and the crypto economy. And ultimately, it'll be good for any regulatory regime that does this and any state or country or government that institutes these crypto,

Starting point is 00:58:46 friendly law. So I'm pretty bullish on this, David. What's your take? Yeah, the legal recognition of Dow's is something that is pretty sci-fi and also nicely harmonious between the legacy nation state and the sci-fi versions of social organizations. We don't have to conflict. We don't have to fight. We can cooperate and integrate. And that's what I see happening here. I don't know if Caitlin Long had anything to do with this, but she is a huge proponent out of the state of Wyoming. If that was anything to do with her, Caitlin, thank you. Thank you for your work. We appreciate it, come on the podcast, all this stuff. Yeah, fantastic. Absolutely. Yeah, she's doing great work in that state. And so are many of the Wyoming lawmakers.

Starting point is 00:59:27 David, let's talk about this. This is back to NFT land. A report from somebody who is an MBA top shot user talks about his experience. Yeah, we like Defi Ted. I've been engaged with him. Do you know Defi? Oh, okay. I don't know Defi Ted. I believe he's in the Bankless Nation. Okay, so a real person here, Defi Ted, shout out. He is relaying his experience on medium of having his funds frozen on NBA Topshots. And you can go through the coal thread. He provides kind of the history of it's like $40,000, something like that of funds he could not withdraw from NBA Topshots, which is interesting because NBA Topshots in the flow chain definitely talks about itself

Starting point is 01:00:12 as a layer one, right? But it does not have the same level of decentralization baked into it as, as Ethereum does. And I think we want to get some of the folks from NBA Topshots on Bankless. Actually, we'll do that in the near future to kind of get their take on this and get their take on whether flow is an Ethereum killer, the future of NFTs. What makes an NFT an NFT, David, I think is a really important question. How decentralized does it have to be to be an NFT? Do you have any hot takes here?

Starting point is 01:00:44 Yeah, again, to take this to the extreme, like I can spin up my centralized database and start issuing unique digital assets that trade on that centralized database. And then I can call those things NFTs. That's not what flow is. Flow is a blockchain. But it's not Ethereum. It's not Bitcoin. It's not maximally decentralized.

Starting point is 01:01:00 And I think that Flow is committing to a huge loss in potential by not having their tokens settle on Ethereum. because part of the digital nature of this ecosystem is the reduction of dependencies, the increasing levels of assurances that you and the user has your asset. And if the flow blockchain can censor your NFT, is it really an NFT? If it doesn't have maximally decentralized and trustlessness assurances about the ownership of said asset and the true link between the NFT and the art, then the question of the NFT gets thrown into question.

Starting point is 01:01:39 the nature of the NFT gets thrown into question. This is kind of hard because where would you put this, right? Is the question, right? So is this a side chain? Is this similar to like a coinbase or Binance for NFTs? That's not that's not how flow advertises itself. It advertises itself as a layer one chain for NFTs essentially, right? But if you can't withdraw your funds from it, if you have to ask permission, if there's any sort of censorship involved, if there's not, a decentralized validator set, then what are you actually dealing with here? What are you? Yeah, what are you? So look, we talked about this a little bit on the AMA with Devin Finster from OpenC and

Starting point is 01:02:25 kind of the where we came down is basically like, this is going to be up to the market to decide. How decentralized does the market want its NFTs to be? Protocol Sync thesis would say the most valuable NFTs, the most valuable assets, everything will have to be on the most credibly neutral settlement layers right now. That is something like Ethereum. But also, these other chains will play a role. Maybe some of them will settle to Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:02:48 But from what I hear you saying, David, is you would prefer that flow was not a layer one chain at all, that it would be some sort of a roll-up chain, some sort of a layer two with settlement on Ethereum. So I hear that too. Yeah. I think when people make an L1 blockchain, they, I hope. hope they are informed about the magnitude of that decision. If you are an L1 blockchain, you are competing to be money.

Starting point is 01:03:16 If you are an L1 blockchain, you are competing to have nation-state level resistance. There is no alternative to that. You have to be self-sovereign and you have to be able to protect yourself from external attack. Because as soon as the flow blockchain has a meaningful level of value to it, it will invite people to come and attack it. And this is the whole point of crypto-economy. economic system design is it needs to be able to withstand attack. And if you are an L1 blockchain, you need to be able to do that. Or you can just deploy to Ethereum and outsource all of that

Starting point is 01:03:51 energy to ether the asset and proof of stake. The whole point of Ethereum is to make state level, sovereign level resistance to any application that exists on top of it. So just go on Ethereum. Plus, you get to tap into the power of defy. The whole centralized blockchain application-specific centralized blockchain thing, doesn't make any sense to me. Well, we are going to have, hopefully, Rome from NBA TopShots on the program to discuss that very thing. I'm sure he'll have some responses to that, but we will talk about it. It's an interesting conversation. I think one of the most important ones. David, let's talk about this. We'll just do a quick drive-by here. J.P. Morgan is launching cryptocurrency

Starting point is 01:04:31 exposure basket, but these are just basically Bitcoin proxy stocks. So this is buying Microstratory Square, riot jp morgan is putting this into some sort of fund or uh index where you can purchase this um look man like why not buy bitcoin if you're going to do this like why are you buying proxy equity stocks that might have some relationship to bitcoin why not just like buy bitcoin yeah bitcoin's it's once in a lifetime opportunity of value value capture and value generation and so i'm going to buy infrastructure around it like what no just buy the just buy the stock that own some of it on their balance sheet. Yeah, no. Just go for the asset. I don't get it. Well, some people want this. It doesn't make any sense to me. They're probably boomers. Whatever.

Starting point is 01:05:18 This is for people who want to purchase in a way and they can't custody crypto. It's definitely not for folks that are on the bankless journey. But good to see JP Morgan, I guess, you know, providing some sort of proxy asset exposure to the class. People are going to want it. Yeah. Logan Paul. We talk about that. at Logan Paul, I guess. Just one, maybe one thing here. So I'm not sure that. Okay, so is this the tweet? Yeah, that's the tweet. Yeah. SFI Finance. So this is a DFI protocol. It's kind of cool. It's a cool DFI protocol. Has legitimate investors and legitimate users. Has legitimate investors is sort of really interesting. But I saw a Logan Paul tweet that said something like, I just bought,

Starting point is 01:06:02 or I'm super bullish on SFI, which is Saffron's protocol. It was right after Coinbase Venture. the venture arm of Coinbase announced that they had invested in it. And Logan Paul was like, look, Coinbase is investing in SFI or something like that. Yeah, yeah. So I saw this and I was like what, what Logan Paul? Like what's going on? Is this like a Cuban case? How did he jump all the way to SFI?

Starting point is 01:06:20 That's extremely niche. Right. Well, like, but we brought on Mark Cuban and it turns out Mark Cuban had been playing in D5 for months. Like he was legit. He was cryptid native. He knew what he was doing. It turns out that the case with Logan Paul is not this. It turns out that SFI.

Starting point is 01:06:36 Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. But this is backed by some blockchain data. So also alleged, but also with some possible evidence that possibly someone paid Logan Paul 30K to tweet that out. Right. Whether or not this is true, David, whether SFI, somebody from SFI, somebody paid Logan

Starting point is 01:06:56 Paul to tweet this out, whether or not that's true, I think there's a lesson here for us. What do you think that lesson is? I think that lesson is that crypto is a dark forest and there are monsters that can eat you every step of the way. And so if you saw that Logan Paul tweet and he's like, oh my God, Logan Paul's tweeting about SFI, I'm going to go buy it. Somebody who, if they did allegedly reward Logan Paul for that paid tweet, they got their bags pumped and that was worth it for them. So you've got to be careful. You got to be careful. You have to be super careful, especially when you see these celebrity tweets and it's going to get crazier and crazier in the

Starting point is 01:07:28 bull run. David, okay, that's news. Yeah, good practice run. We've issued some takes so far. Let's issue some more takes. This is one from Zero Hedge. I just like the title of this article. And the entire article is fantastic, but everything is broken is the title. By Tyler Durton. By Tyler Darden. Everything is broken. Broken lines, broken strings, broken threats. Everything is broken. He quotes a Bob Dylan song. And then he gets into all of the things that are broken, broken credit. And he talks about the credit market and the debt markets in the U.S. Broken retirement. Boomers cannot retire. and God help Gen X and millennials and Zumers in retirement, a broken stock market that doesn't

Starting point is 01:08:11 actually track value. It just tracks monetary policy yield curve price pumps, broken data in the whole system writ large, a broken unemployment system. Institutions are broken is the summary of this article. David, is everything broken? Well, it's pessimistic to say everything is broken, but we are allegedly in a late-stage fiat credit cycle, which means our money isn't working. We have extremely entrenched institutions with wealthy elites not allowing any new institutions to come or those institutions to morph or evolve or adapt. They are staying as the same old institutions because they're funneling value into the elites that own them. Things just seem to be aging and decrepit as social infrastructure.

Starting point is 01:09:00 So perhaps everything is breaking or broken or something. Either way, there's a bunch of stuff that just is not working right. I think it's the case that it also depends on, you know, for generation, your stage of life, how you view the world as far as whether you see things as broken or not. Does that factor in? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the younger generations, me particularly, would be more inclined to think things are broken because younger millennials and zoomers are just kind of quote unquote,

Starting point is 01:09:30 fed up with the system because the system doesn't incorporate them into the world. And so things aren't working for them. They aren't working for the systems. Everything is just misaligned. Well, let's talk about the next take here, which I think is maybe related to this. And this is I take I just thought out, I was thinking of, is people that get rich off of crypto will just reinvest in crypto. And that's how multi-generational sectors are born. When I was thinking of this tweet, David, I was really thinking about Silicon Valley, you know, and it started with Hewlett Packer back in the, you know, 1960s and the 70s. That's where Silicon Valley comes from, right? The silicon chips that they created. And then those who were successful from these early

Starting point is 01:10:15 chip manufacturer investments then went on to invest in and put capital into the microprocessor revolution, the PC revolution, right? And that formed Silicon Valley, who later invested in the infrastructure of the internet, which became all of our social media companies today. So it's like the PayPal Mafia. PayPal Mafia, they created a sector. Well, we're seeing the same thing happen in crypto. There are a lot of people in crypto doing well right now. We've had many cycles of this, right? But if you were in early, you're doing fairly well right now. Some people have even gotten rich off of crypto, shocked as you might be to hear that. And what are they doing with their funds? Well, they're just reinvesting it. They're doing.

Starting point is 01:10:57 everybody who's gotten rich on something that they care passionately about does, which is they become venture capitalists. They become investors. They invest in the next generation of this technology. Yeah, art. It's very much like it's similar to how galaxies are formed, right? There are multiple generations of stars, and you get the first generation that really breeds the birthplace for the second generation of stars, and it keeps going, right? The resources get recirculated. The resources get recirculated. And by the way, the materials get richer and richer every time because the materials after a supernova explosion are like, you know, different on the periodic table of elements. And that's exactly what's happening in crypto, which is why I think we're seeing this very

Starting point is 01:11:42 rich organic soil of activity. When crypto people get rich, they are plowing that back into crypto. And that is how crypto becomes a multi-generational cycle of, of, investments. We're just in cycle one, man. This is just like the very first cycle. There's going to be multiple waves of innovation, investment. And like, I'm already seeing it. All of these new defy protocols that are coming up and they're just like they're being invested in by the people who did well on the previous cycle. Any thoughts on this? Yeah, going back to that zero hedge article that we just came from where it says everything is broken. This is how we fix everything. This is the opposite of that. This is why we keep talking.

Starting point is 01:12:26 about new institutions that are going to fix the old ones, new digital institutions built on Ethereum, built on crypto, that fix all the problems by necessity, right? And I'm not saying that they're these perfect new institutions, then they're just a complete upgrade. We're going to adopt these institutions because we don't have any other choice. There aren't any other institutions out there that are solving our own problems, right? And so I'm particularly bullish on just like the adoption of these new digital institutions that we are trying to, erect on Ethereum. And you're totally right. Like when people make a bunch of money off of an asset, they fall in love with that asset. They marry that asset. There's this phrase called like

Starting point is 01:13:05 being married to your bags. Perhaps I'm married to ether. And when people, when crypto makes a bunch of money for people, they're not going to like, oh, well, now I can go back to the legacy world. Like, no, no, they're going to stay in crypto and they're going to help fund and cede it. Right. And so I shouted this out. Or buy art from it. Or buy art from it, which, again, Again, funds artists, which funds jobs, which funds families, right? At the end of the day, and this goes back to what I was yelling about last weekly roll-up, listener, have you done something this week to find a job in crypto? Because if you haven't, why not?

Starting point is 01:13:42 Because these new institutions need your help to build them. And if you build them and build them faster, this whole revolution can just be a lot easier. And so, you know, people getting rich off crypto and then recirculating that value, oh, this is a really good point. that I want to talk about. The reason why all the legacy institutions aren't working, it's in my cultural revolution article, I talked, I harped on the boomers saying like the boomers didn't pass down the wealth, but actually wasn't the boomer's fault. That was actually an inaccuracy. It's the, it's the wealthy elite, which also happens to be boomers, but specifically the wealthy elite boomers, which are fucking over all the other boomers, just like the rest of us. And the reason why our legacy

Starting point is 01:14:20 institutions aren't working for us, it's because the value that they are creating isn't circulating. it got captured. And this is the lesson that we need to learn from that. If we build new institutions on Ethereum or new social organizational structures that produce value for the world, they will be adopted. But if they don't recirculate that value,

Starting point is 01:14:40 we will just do the same things that we did over again. It's not about new institutions just by themselves. We need new institutions, but we need new institutions that can recirculate the wealth intrinsically, perpetually, so that they don't calcify,

Starting point is 01:14:54 so that they don't become rigid and fix and only benefit some of the early adopters that just manage to get rich off this whole ecosystem. Then is the fee burn a problem? Could be. Could be. Could be. Like, these problems aren't solved.

Starting point is 01:15:08 I believe Ethereum is magical, but it has plenty of problems that are ahead of it if we want to truly be revolutionary. Yeah. And the interesting thing here is I think that everyone out, many people outside of crypto see this speculative nature as a bad thing.

Starting point is 01:15:23 but the speculative nature, like the ability to generate wealth in the space is actually what, it's the heartbeat of this space. It's drawing the crowds into the space is all of the opportunity. And there's definitely something to that. David, this goes off maybe my supernova take here. Beautiful. Right? So this is, this is ETH expansion from Genesis.

Starting point is 01:15:48 I hope they make an NFT of this. Sorry, podcast listeners. Go watch the YouTube. Yeah, go watch the YouTube. look okay how would you describe this this is almost like a big bang a big bang event right from like like a very small point and what we're looking at is i guess the ethereum network expansion from genesis looks very much like maybe the the start of the universe all right david i'm about to play a clip from somebody at the today show and some some anchors who are trying to get their heads

Starting point is 01:16:18 wrapped around this nfts revolution that we've talked so much about this is um This is somebody from NBC on The Today Show talking about NFTs and describing it to the other anchors. You own it. Yeah. It's an internet thing. Wait, complicated, but... A non-fungible token. Now, Savannah has a very important question.

Starting point is 01:16:40 No. Yes. My question is, huh? No. But really, what do you do with it? Like, if you have a digital file that you paid $2.5 million of. Yeah, but then what? You can't hang it up.

Starting point is 01:16:52 I know, well, I guess you can say it's kind of like, and then you show it to your friend, you know, you're like, here it is, I have it right here. And they're like, yeah, me too. And it looks the exact same. But I paid for it. I paid $2.5 million for it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:03 Oh, you're an idiot. You can resell it. I'm going to, you guys. A little confusing. We don't want to shoot the message. By the way, that's so crazy. That was, that was an entertaining. And it goes on from there.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Yeah. Yeah. So, you know what this reminded me of? is there is there's this clip of well yeah is that who wait yeah where they're all trying to figure out what the at sign is

Starting point is 01:17:32 is the at sign the internet is that oh my god no no tell me tell me about that I remember that clip I was actually thinking of a clip of Bill Gates and he was on the Tonight Show with David Letterman and he was trying to describe like the potential of the internet and this is like 199094 and 95

Starting point is 01:17:48 and he's describing it to letterman and he's like well the ability to like, you know, stream music online. You can listen to your favorite songs and Letterman keeps going like, what, like the radio? Like, I already have that. I don't need that. But what were you talking about? Yeah, I was talking about that Katie Kirk, Matt Lauer, which is also the Today Show, by the way.

Starting point is 01:18:07 So this is the same exact show. Because he repeats. Yeah, I think it happened in like 1990, somewhere in the 90s where they're talking about the internet. And so they're asking about like the at sign. Is that what the internet is? Like, where is the internet? Oh, is it the dot com?

Starting point is 01:18:22 Is that what the internet is? What's the internet? And they just couldn't wrap their minds around it. So this kind of feels like the reprise to that, which it was pretty hilarious. They're asking good questions. So like you buy this $2.5 million NFT and then what? I don't have an answer to that. But they were also answering them too.

Starting point is 01:18:39 He's like, well, you could resell it. And you could definitely resell it, right? That shows that there's a market for it. So, yeah, super fascinating. But there's definitely echoes of the early internet in people trying to wrap their heads around this NFT thing. I don't think this is going to be the case for like Zoomers or or even like younger millennials, right? We're just going, they're just, newer generations are just going to natively get this.

Starting point is 01:19:00 You mean there's going to be new digital institutions that the younger people are just going to accept because they're different and better? Weird. Weird. That feels like an article. It feels like an article you just wrote. Let's get to our last section. But before we do, we want to tell you about the fantastic sponsors who made this roll up possible. Synthetics is Ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol.

Starting point is 01:19:21 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, 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

Starting point is 01:20:08 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 Quentin. 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. If you want to live a bankless life, you need to get a monolith defy visa card. Monolith is both a one-two punch of an Ethereum smart contract wallet, as well as an accompanying Visa card that lets you spend the money that you have in your Ethereum wallet

Starting point is 01:20:49 wherever visa is accepted. a fantastic tool that lets you use Ethereum for what it does best, which is holding and managing your financial assets, but also keeps you connected to the rest of the world's payment rails. Monolith also offers on-ramp services for getting your Fiat money into the world of defythe. So it's trivial to top up your monolith card if ever you need to, and your deposited money goes straight into your non-custodial wallet. So your money is never held by a centralized intermediary because your monolith wallet is native to Ethereum. Monolith helps you transcend both the legacy and the crypto worlds because the money that you hold in your monolith wallet has the power of defy behind it.

Starting point is 01:21:30 Swapping assets on Uniswap or earning yield in defy is at your fingertips. But with Monolith, so are the groceries at your grocery store or the coffee at your coffee shop. Go to monolith.xy Z to sign up and get your Monolith Visa card today. All right, David, let's get into what we're excited about. What are you excited about this week? Oh, I'm excited about this digital cultural revolution that's upon us. Just no big deal or anything. I wrote this article, came out on the Banquist newsletter on Wednesday,

Starting point is 01:21:59 titled The Digital Cultural Revolution. It's one of the longer articles I've ever written. So I've done you a favor, and I've read it for you. So you can go consume that on the bankless YouTube. 18 minutes? 18 minutes or so, read? 18 minute read, and I think it took me, reading it out loud is different. It's a little bit slower.

Starting point is 01:22:16 So I think it's a 35-minute-long video. Wow, well worth your time, though, guys. At 2x speed, it's 18 minutes. Yeah, there you go. The TLDR is that the social institutions that we've known aren't doing us any favors. And the culture found in crypto is unique and offers really like a strong tailwind towards why this industry I think is going to be adopted. Crypto culture is fucking awesome.

Starting point is 01:22:44 And maybe I'm biased, but it resonates with young people. It resonates with the digitally native. and it also is really hard-hitting for the people that can't really find their place in the normal outside world, the outside world, who are struggling to find a way to contribute value back to the world, because social institutions are entrenched and they are not passing down wealth to the people that need it, the young people. And there's this unfortunate reality that happens when so many people try and find ways to achieve their goals and try and find ways to contribute to society, and then they don't actually,

Starting point is 01:23:20 and those goals end up getting thwarted. This is a lesson in psychology. When your goals get thwarted over and over and over again, you stop trying. You end up becoming, you learn to be helpless. And this is a state of learned helplessness. It's bad. We want to avoid that.

Starting point is 01:23:35 And we need an environment that allows younger people to achieve their goals. And there's nothing more, like, rich and fertile than the crypto ecosystem to make a name for yourself and build something up and then contribute something of value, whether it's art for NFTs or community members in DeFi protocols or, again, $200 million in DAOs available for funding. You can go make a name for yourself and then get convinced Dow's to pay you money. This is how labor works. And so the culture behind crypto, I think, is going to offer a very compelling new host, a new landscape for digitally native generations, the zoomers and the millennials, to come over and start building stuff.

Starting point is 01:24:16 Yeah, you wove together, I think, a number of different themes, an interesting way in this article. We're talking about the cultural renaissance because you're not just talking about a cultural renaissance, right? And like the aging and the falling apart of our and the failings of our institutions. But you're also talking about like this opportunity renaissance, right? Where there's all of this opportunity for young people in institutions, and then these new institutions that are forming in the kind of their proto phases and their birth phases. and their birth phases that is not present. These opportunities are not present with the established institutions.

Starting point is 01:24:52 Everything is calcifies, is hardened. I think this is why, like many young people, like, choose not to vote. I think that's a mistake you should vote, but like they choose not to because of this learned helplessness that you're talking about. But these new institutions, these crypto institutions, this infinite white space that we've been talking about, is much more malleable. and it feels like much more open.

Starting point is 01:25:15 It feels much more free. And I think culture is a reflection of all of these things. It's a reflection of these new institutions and the new opportunities that come as a result of creating this whole new digital economy. And it seems to me that culture just falls out. It falls out of that. But it's, you know, in your article,

Starting point is 01:25:38 you're talking about all of these sort of memes about, you know, how lonely people all. and how depressed they feel about their life circumstances. Crypto is the opposite of that, dude. It's so optimistic. So optimistic. It's almost optimistic to a fault, I feel like. If we make mistakes on bankless,

Starting point is 01:26:01 it's because we're like overly bullish about things and overly optimistic or like the timing isn't correct. But it's very different than I think the, the cloud of helplessness that persists over some of the younger generations in our established institutions. So that was my takeaway from it. It's like a great article, dude. Thank you. And I hope people take that article and run with it because it's supposed to inspire people to, you have the opportunity to do something new in a new realm that is asking for people to do something in it. So it's really a call out to people that are interested in helping build

Starting point is 01:26:42 this world because it needs to be built out. I use this line in the article saying there's two people, there's two things that are missing from this world. It's people and structures and those structures are getting built every single step of the day. Those are the defy apps. Those are the NFT infrastructures. Those are all the things that help people do things. But we also need more people. So we need your help to build out the world. We can make a better price. A world a better place. Ryan, what are you excited about? look i'm just going to say it eip 1559 is what i'm excited about it's finally approved it is the third leg of the stool for ether's value proposition and um look it's full steam ahead man maybe

Starting point is 01:27:20 this summer we'll see sometimes hard forks can get delayed of course but possibly this summer ethereum will have its scarcity engine installed and activated uh and i think that anybody who was doubting or pessimistic about the the value of cruel mechanisms of ether as an asset. This just kind of slays that argument because block space demand, Ethereum is already the highest demanded block space network that has been built. It is generating the most revenue from transaction fees, pouring that into the scarcity of its asset. Look, dude, that's going to be just a powerful mechanism, but also, as you said earlier, a powerful narrative. So that's what I'm excited about, man. It's common.

Starting point is 01:28:06 So question to you, the most bullish thing is to be understood. But when EIP-1559 gets integrated into Ethereum, it doesn't mean that the world automatically understands it. How long are they, how long is it going to take for them to catch up? You know, I think actually price follows narrative in these kind of circumstances and narrative follows price, right? So look, think about the name, EIP 1559, right? Like, what is that? What a terrible, like, what a terrible name for mainstream consumption. And the Ethereum community hasn't really come up with something better.

Starting point is 01:28:43 So we're like, we're like rallying around EIP 1559. But, but when ETH price starts to go up, the outside world mainstream will start to look for explanations as to why. And that's where the feedback loop of narrative to price comes in. So that is in that EIP 1559 thing. Yep. And they'll, they'll explain it this cycle. And they'll go figure it out. cycle and then it'll start to make sense and we'll even come up with better terms better memes it'll

Starting point is 01:29:09 no longer be called eip 1559 or if it does it's because geek speak has somehow translated into mainstream speak i think we lose the term eip 1559 and actually the bullish case is that we just start to call it ethereum once it gets integrated totally that could be the case i've also seen that this weird thing where uh sometimes geek speak actually becomes the mainstream speak yeah like like gifs right was that like, you know, like NFTs. It's surprising. I do hope NFTs start to become nifty, start to be called niftyes. I think that's a better name.

Starting point is 01:29:41 Also, huge food to nifty gateway, if that becomes true. Yeah, they're definitely betting on that. We'll see. All right, David, time for the meme of the week. Let me show the meme of the week. I know, guys, you've been waiting for this all week. This is another bankless week. Bankless meme week.

Starting point is 01:29:58 Bankless Instagram is where this was first published. What are we looking at here? Tom and Jerry, do you watch that? cartoon as a kid? Yeah, I did. Not enough clearly, though, because I had to retract my memory as to which one's Tom and which one is Jerry. Turns out what are we looking at? Tom is the cat and Jerry's the mouse, just if anyone else needs that help. Thank you for clarifying. All right, what are we looking at? Tom, Ben, who is like this big, bulky, muscular figure as the cat, and he's reaching out to Jerry, and Tom is labeled ETH L-TUs reaching out to Eith Killers. And the caption here is,

Starting point is 01:30:32 competitors are stuck in a rat race. I think this is saying that basically L2s are going to win against these ETH killers. It's kind of a maximalist tweet. I don't know what is this David? Super duber maximalist tweet, but it's okay because I think it's the correct one. The whole point about this is that economic activity on Ethereum, of which there is a ton of, is closer to Ethereum L2s than it is to ETH killers. And so if Ethereum L2s offer the same things that ETHs,

Starting point is 01:31:02 Heath Killers do? Well, economic activity, we'll just go to the L2s because it's closer to Ethereum. It's closer to the nexus. It's closer to the heartbeat. Now, we should point out that in the actual show, Jerry always ends up winning. So this tweet may have actually backfired. We can't talk about that. Okay.

Starting point is 01:31:19 All right. Don't read into this tweet too deeply, guys, if you've watched the show. Look. All right, man. That has been meme of the week. This has been another roll-up the second week of March, almost in a spring. time definitely springtime for crypto really exciting new growth on the plants everywhere new growth in defy assets new growth all around optimism about the future optimism about digital culture look dude

Starting point is 01:31:45 the plants in in your office are looking pretty good too i don't know if you've added something recently but it's definitely flourishing under your care well done thank you sir guys risk and disclaimers of course eat is risky crypto is risky bitcoin is risky all of these defy protocols are you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of March (Beeple NFTs, EIP1559, Stimulus Checks, GBTC)

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