Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of May, 2021 Vitalik Rugs For Charity | Elon & Bitcoin | Balancer V2

Starting point is 00:00:07 Hey guys, happy Friday. It is the second week of May and it's roll up time. David, how are you doing today? Absolutely fantastic. In a different spot in the world this particular week of May. I'm in San Diego today. So that's why you see this different Airbnb background. It's looking nice. Are you sure that's not a synthetic background? This is not a green screen. This is not a green screen. No, this is a real place, a real physical place in the world. Funnily enough, I have all of my same equipment with me. I just brought it all down. But it's a new spot. Same. equipment, same roll-up, same weekly roll-up that we are going to get into it right now. Well, David has gone portable. This is awesome. So if this is your first weekly roll-up, we do markets, we do releases, we do news, then some takes, we talk about what we're excited about, and stay tuned to the end for the meme of the week. I think we've got some special stuff on meme of the week. This comes at you every Friday. Check it out on YouTube. That's the best

Starting point is 00:01:01 place to view it, but also on the podcast, if you are more audio-inclined. Hopefully, this comes at you in the morning for your morning coffee. So enjoy it on your Fridays, the best way to download the week that was in crypto. David, before we get into markets, we got to mention consensus invest. The conference is coming up. This is Consensus 2020 Coinbase Conference. This is the big one, the big conference, crypto conference to attend. And you know that because it's got some really fantastic people. It's got Ray Dalio, Brian Brooks, from the O.S. David, who are some of the other people? Lynn Alden, I think I saw mentioned. Yeah, and I'm actually speaking there twice. Not as big as Ray Dalio or Lynn Alden, but I have two talks that I'm talking about,

Starting point is 00:01:49 talking about ultrasound money and the, I think the evolution of the investment thesis of ether over time, starting with the triple point asset and kind of how that's gotten wrapped into ultrasound money, but also the state of defy and under a panel of, do we really need banks anyways? And the current state of the defy ecosystem. So it can be a lot of really interesting conversations from a lot of very interesting people. So the date on that, guys, is May 23rd. That's when you want to have your ticket before then. So you can get access to that event. It's going to be a fantastic event. You know, David, in previous years, consensus really hasn't had that much in terms of defy and Ethereum content. But I think that's totally changing this year. And it's really exciting,

Starting point is 00:02:32 along with kind of the narrative shift, we're getting a lot more bankless style content in consensus. So it's really exciting to see as well. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in previous years, Defi wasn't as big as a thing as it is now. And so this is actually going to be the first Coin desk event where Defi is really kind of a mainstream topic. And so I'm excited to see the conversations that come out of that because it's always a place where different heads come together and like sync with each other. sink each other's heads and we get to get perspective from people that, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:06 you wouldn't really typically get that perspective from them in other circumstances. There's a link in the show note, guys, or you could go to bankless.cc slash consensus 2021, pick up that ticket. David, are you ready to get to the markets, man? Absolutely, Ryan. I think this is going to be the hottest section of this weekly roll-up because the markets are extremely hot. Also, you know, up and down in directions, so many different things to talk about. So, yeah, let's go ahead and get right into markets. We'll start with Bitcoin. I'm going to show you a sad chart, David. This is where the Charlie Brown music comes in. Cue that. 48K right now. So under 50K, Bitcoin has kind of dropped quite a bit. Two billion in liquidations from the recent price drop with Bitcoin below 50K. Tell us the story here. What's happening? Yeah, I think this price movement really has come on the heels of that Elon Musk, Tesla,

Starting point is 00:04:02 tweet, which we're going to be talking about coming up, but we'll talk a little bit about it here. Tesla announced that they are no longer accepting BTC, and Elon Musk said that it was because of energy concerns and just like popular demand to decline to use BTC specifically as a use of energy consumption. There's a lot of speculation as to like what is really going on. Is that really the through line? Is Elon playing like 5D chess or is he just making erratic moves? Either way, it really took a lot of momentum out of Bitcoin sales. And we saw a price as low as $47,500 is the recent low in Bitcoin price. And like you said, a bunch of liquidations. People really didn't see this coming. People are really, really bullish Bitcoin. But there seems to be some

Starting point is 00:04:47 narrative headwinds that Bitcoin is facing right now. That's giving it a little bit of a trouble. It's almost David, like live by the narrative, also die by the narrative. So when that narrative Switches and Elon Musk is no longer in the news for purchasing Bitcoin on Tesla's balance sheet, but instead he's saying it's wasteful and we're going to move away from Bitcoin as a payment option and you kind of die by that narrative. And the whole crypto market has felt that we should jump to Ether as well. So what happened with the price of Ethereum this week? Because it was having a absolutely tremendous week. Bonkers. A bonkers week. All right. all-time highs and then the Musk rugpole tweet.

Starting point is 00:05:32 Right. Yeah. So I asked Sue Zhu in our state of the nation last week, like, do you think that this ether price appreciation, both in dollar and Bitcoin terms, is perhaps one of crypto's largest events ever? Because that's what I think. And he agreed. And so there is a through line here that this ether run up in this specific week,

Starting point is 00:05:50 up to the high that it got to, new all-time highs, of 4,350. $96 is the new ether all time high. Wow. Perhaps one of crypto's most monumental events ever. I think that's a perspective worth taking. And then, of course, we get the Elon, quote unquote, the Elon rugpole. You know, it was too strong of a rug pull to even though there's a case to be made that like when he said it that he was looking at other cryptocurrencies, more green crypto cryptocurrencies, all the ethos are like, oh, he's talking about Ethereum, right? He's talking about Ethereum, right?

Starting point is 00:06:24 And while we did dip off of that $4,350 high, and now we are at the low, low price of $3,650. So what is that? That's almost a, that is a $700 drop. Wow. A $700 drop in the price of the- You remember when ETH price was $700? Yeah, it's astounding that we can even just like dip $700.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And like it still feels very, very high just because of how fast ether has run. And also the ETH, BTC ratio is actually doing a pretty good job, like keeping its head above water. And perhaps that's because of the narrative of the green energy debate versus proof of sake and proof of work, that people are starting to, you know, weight that into the market. Yeah, let's talk about that ratio in just a second. I do think that the Elon Musk tweet is very bullish ether in the long run, at least. It'll take the market a while to sort this out. And of course, Ethereum hasn't fully switched over to proof of stake from proof of work. But we've talked about it, David,

Starting point is 00:07:27 so often in these roll-ups, like it's only a matter of time before the proof of waste narrative. Whatever you believe about Bitcoin's energy consumption, almost doesn't matter. It's the narrative that matters. And once that narrative breaks into mainstream, the amount of waste energy consumption that Bitcoin has, and if it's phrased as waste versus other cryptocurrency networks like Ethereum, like number two in the market cap, 99% less energy consumption, 99.9.9% less. I think that is going to have a heavy weighting in investors' minds, just that narrative coming out. And we do need the merge to actually happen because, you know, we actually do need Ethereum to be green. Ethereum is just under a wasteful paradigm just as much

Starting point is 00:08:16 as Bitcoin is. The only difference is that in our roadmap, we have this green proof of sake future. The only way that that narrative lands is that if it actually becomes true. And so we actually need that event to happen. That's true too. And that event looks like it's going to happen possibly nine months, maybe 12 months. The difference with the Bitcoin community is like, no, proof of work is great. We're doing this forever. So that's different. The other thing about this bullish move all the way up to all time highs of 4356 is it seems to be institutions maybe driving this rally a bit more. That's certainly what the three arrows folks said.

Starting point is 00:08:54 We've seen lots of chatter about that in crypto Twitter as well. So we'll have to see to the extent that that comes true. David, let's talk about the ETH Bitcoin ratio, because you alluded to that. And man, it's just going up and up and up. What's happening here? Does not stop going up. Yeah, hit a high of 0.08,

Starting point is 00:09:16 which, again, are levels that we have not seen since, you know, I think in like the very late stages of the bull market in 2017. Yeah. There are very, very few time with like total time in which ether has been higher in Bitcoin terms than Bitcoin. And so like again, uncharted waters, uncharted territory. This is why we're calling this like one of crypto's most monumental events ever. Things, it's really hard to gain in Bitcoin terms against Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:09:44 It's really hard to appreciate versus Bitcoin. And ether has just rocketed off of this. this 0.03 floor all the way to 0.08 extremely quickly. In the Vitalik podcast, this is nothing to do with legitimacy, but we talked about equilibrium flips and all of a sudden things happen slowly and then all of a sudden they happen very quickly. I think that that could really illustrate what's going on here. There seems to be this equilibrium flip going on between Bitcoin and Ethereum where people are starting to integrate. Perhaps a smart contracting layer is where it's at. Perhaps proof of stake is the future of crypto.

Starting point is 00:10:18 people talking about the flippinging too, once again, rather than not, and not just like, Heath Bulls who were talking about the flippinging inevitability in 2019 and 2020. And everyone was like, yeah, sure, whatever, guys. Now people like Three Arrow's Capital, you know, Suezoo, both. And Kyle Davies from Three Arrow's Capital were like, yeah, the flippinging's inevitable. And when? This cycle. That means Ether flippins Bitcoin, this cycle. So this ratio is something we're to come back to. Ratio gang website, 46% of the way to a market cap flippinging. Of course, Ethereum, Ether has flipped Bitcoin in all sorts of other metrics, but the official flippinging, I think, is the market cap flipping. And there's 46% of the way there. I think that's going to

Starting point is 00:11:03 be pretty monumental if that happens this cycle in crypto. It'll be the first time Bitcoin was ever surpassed by another crypto asset. What do you think, David? If that happens, you think it'll be short-lived? There's a conversation. There's definitely a case where if ether flips Bitcoin, it's just for a flash, you know, just for a moment. Long-term, definitely in the absolutely Ethereum is flipping Bitcoin and that's going to be the way it is forever.

Starting point is 00:11:30 I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of energy behind the trade where if people start to see that Ethereum is like really getting close, like 80%, like 70 to 80%, like 70 to 80%, I think people are going to front run the flipping. and just, like I said, equilibrium flip, it's going to be kind of a rush to the gates. And I can kind of see it, like, once it even becomes close,

Starting point is 00:11:52 I feel like once Ethereum is like 70 to 80% of the way to flipping Bitcoin, it's almost already guaranteed at that point in time. Like, people are going to not want to miss out on their last chance to get a good price on ether in Bitcoin terms. And so I think once we hit 0.7.8 or 70 to 80% of the flipping thing, the flip is just inevitable. It just is going to keep on. ongoing and the snowballs only get to accelerate. We are definitely getting closer. Okay, let's talk about

Starting point is 00:12:18 defy. So some of the metrics, of course, assets under management. We're hovering at about 80 billion at this point in time. Numbers continuing to go up, you know, down a little bit, I think, on the week. Any thoughts here? Yeah, new highs of $85 billion total locked in defy. I remember when we crossed $1 billion and everyone was just super excited. It was blowing up Twitter. It was made news. And we haven't really had an event like that since then because $2 billion came really fast. $5 billion came really fast. No one was excited at $10 billion because it just felt so expected. Are we even excited about $100 billion?

Starting point is 00:12:58 I'm ready to see if crypto Twitter and DFI Twitter really blows up about when we cross the $100 billion market. Is it really going to be that monumental? Because at some point, this is kind of expected. David, if you tweet something out about $100 billion, I'll retweet it, man. retweeted. I got you back. Don't worry. I think it's big. I think it's big. All right, let's talk about the Defi Pulse Index as well. That's kind of flat on the week. It was, it was up before Elon Rugpole. What's happening here? Yeah, we got a new high just over $650. I think it was about a high of $65. Now we are down to the price of $543. So a big decline off of that

Starting point is 00:13:36 peak. Defy tokens, defy assets really had a very strong showing yesterday and the day before. Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, Defy tokens were actually appreciating versus ether. And DPI versus ether, which is where we're going next, found perhaps a floor. Am I calling a floor here? Are you going to? I tweeted out, I'm calling the ETH DPI floor. And then I followed right up with that saying there's a very good chance I don't know how to call a floor.

Starting point is 00:14:05 So take that with a green salt. What floor did you call? Point, point one three, point one three, ETH per D. And we are now at 0.15. And yeah, look at that. Like, look, look at the point three level is where we saw at the bottom of the DFI bear market after DFI summer, quote unquote bear market. I think I think this level holds. I think the DPI is. All right. So are you saying ETH remains flat? Well, defy goes up. Or are you saying both go up, just defy goes up faster? Or are you saying ETH goes down and DFI goes up? Oh gosh, am I too, am I, do I have my bear or my bull goggles on if I say that ether goes up and also DPI goes up more? I think you always have your ball goggles on all the fucking time. Excuse my French. But yeah, I think ether's ether goes up and DFI tokens go up even more. I think Dify seasons around the corner. Because we know institutions are allocating into ether. Like how can you not allocate into ether and not believe in DFI, right? So like, why would they also not allocate to things like Unisor?

Starting point is 00:15:13 swap, things like Ave, perhaps even things like yearn. If it's institutions, I suppose so. Although we saw Defi summer, everyone was like, yeah, defy's a big deal, ether, not a big deal. It'll be like Bitcoin or stable coins on Ethereum will be the reserve assets and that narrative starting to shift. But that was a narrative we saw in summer of last year. Yeah, that's exactly right. No, I think institutions are allocating into ether and I think defy, blue chip defy tokens, prestige defy tokens are next. We've got to get through some other seasons first. Maybe ETH season we have to get through.

Starting point is 00:15:46 Maybe not. Maybe it's simultaneous. But garbage season. David, let's flip to this really quick before we come back to Ether, because we've got some more stuff to talk about ether. Garbage season is what some are calling it. These are some of the dog coins that have absolutely skyrocketed. So what are these and what's going on?

Starting point is 00:16:07 I don't know if these are all from the same platform or same protocol, but everyone's like on the tailwinds of Doge doing crazy Doge stuff. Everyone is making like new doggy tokens. So we got Shibu token, Leash token, Akita token, like new doggy token. Elon, there's Elon, right. Yeah. And so like the crazy thing is, first off, a lot of these market caps are extremely vapid, like extremely low liquidity, extremely low unit prices, making extremely

Starting point is 00:16:38 inflated market caps. And so the market capital are these things aren't real. It's not a very good metric for measuring these things. But what is real and what is astounding is the amount of volume on uniswap trading these doggie tokens because you can't fake that. They're paying gas fees and they're playing uniswap exchange fees to trade these doggy tokens. And they are some of the highest volume assets on uniswap over the last like two days. Perhaps the reason why gas fees have been so insane this last week upwards of 250, 300. I even saw 400 gray at one point in time.

Starting point is 00:17:09 Is it because of goddamn doggy tokens on Uniswad? I think it could. I think it could be garbage season. God damn. We'll talk about this, but like Vitalik, that may be our second rug pull of the week. Vitalik's big move to like wreck the doggy coins. We'll talk about that in a minute. But like, so, I mean, what's your, what's your overall take?

Starting point is 00:17:28 Like, why is this, why is this happening? I mean, and is this just speculative mania? Is this feel like late stages of a crypto bubble when we, have assets like these just pumping. I saw a story this week from the block, which is basically like how someone turned $100 into $2 million by betting on one of these doggy tokens. It's stories like that that start to saturate and everyone's like, oh, well, it's easy to become a millionaire. I'm going to just buy this asset. Are you worried that this is like late stage bubble that we're seeing here? Yeah. First off, when they say that this person put in $100 and now has $2 million,

Starting point is 00:18:07 dollars. If he market sold, he or she market sold, they're $2 million, they would not get $2 million out. That's part of the inflated market caps. You would have an extreme amount of illiquidity discount that you would not be able to get. You would still get it. You'd probably still get a ton of money because these things did go up in price. But again, the market cap appreciation of these things are extremely vapid. But to the point about like what's going on here, what's the through line here? If you are a believer of late stage fiat credit cycles, money doesn't matter anymore. If the money is a farce, then people will invest into farces. And because the money is a farce, the investment works.

Starting point is 00:18:44 That's the late stage fee out credit cycle theory, all and any investments work because there's so much money sloshing around that you literally can't put your money into a bad place without getting a return. There's too much dumb money sloshing around and every single opportunity is an investment. And also part of the late stage fiat credit cycle is that people know, that their nine to five job with their salary in dollars, which is not keeping up with inflation while inflation is rampant, either actually at the CPI level or an asset price inflation, they know that they can't make it in life. They know that their salary, they're doomed to a

Starting point is 00:19:21 nine to five job. And so there's risk in not aping into like things that are trying to get them to be a millionaire because they believe that it's their ticket out. We saw this energy with GME. We saw this energy with yolowing into Dogecoin. That's the late stage Fiat credit cycle is that you've got to ape into something that can make you a millionaire or else you're doing your nine to five for the rest of your life. I think that's exactly right. And there's this populist undercurrent that says, and if we all ape into the same assets together, then we all do really well. It's very much that Wall Street bets absurdist nihilist culture coming into crypto in the form of doggy coins. Super interesting, the cultural expression of these things. David, let's flip back to an

Starting point is 00:20:03 asset we do believe in for another minute. Great transition. He's like back to ETH, okay? Because, dude, like, Eth all-time highs, crazy week. Ethereum market cap actually grew larger than all the largest banks in the world for the first time. Look, man, I think that's worth a minute to celebrate. Bigger than J.P. Morgan, bigger than Bank of America, bigger than ICBC,

Starting point is 00:20:29 China Construction Bank, bigger than our favorite Wells Fargo. Ah, nice. Ethereum bigger than all of them. Not all of them put together yet, but all of them at a market cap of almost half a trillion dollars at its high. I think that's pretty awesome, dude. Yeah, if it was all of them put together, it would be something like $2 trillion or something, very rough napkin math.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Ether definitely deserves to be bigger than all banks put together. Next milestone. Next milestone. All banks get together. Yep. That's true banklessness. The other thing that's an absolute monster is not just market cap, price appreciation, but fees. So the revenue that the Ethereum network is driving based on block space demand.

Starting point is 00:21:15 So fees have like two sides to it. On the one hand, it becomes more expensive to put transactions through. And I think as users of Ethereum, we've all felt that, especially this last week, trying to get some transactions through a cost rather than a transaction that might cost. $10 costs like $30. Right. A Unisop trade costs upwards of $200 that week this week. Yeah, that's crazy. And that is why we need layer two.

Starting point is 00:21:41 The flip side of that, it just means there's a tremendous amount of block space demand. And so the Ethereum Protocol, of course, is producing a massive amount of revenue. ETHs annualized fees based on yesterday, that was May 10th, amounted to $32 billion. $1, absolutely crazy. Ethereum managed to process more fees in an hour than Bitcoin for the whole day. Like, block space demand off the charts. This is a Justin Drake chart up only. This is charting Ethereum daily transaction fees from 2016 all the way up to 2021 now.

Starting point is 00:22:22 It's a logarithmic chart and it's up into the right. Oh, my God. I just, dude, I just notice it's a logarithmic chart. Yeah. Of course, Justin Drake, of course, it's logarithmic. Just monster fees here. I want to maybe end with this. This is another valuing ETH model that our friend Justin Drake put together. And I think he put this together, David, because he's doing like the world podcast tour now. So I think you'll hear a lot of Justin Drake on other podcasts, maybe more mainstream finance. Graduated out of bankless. They started here, though. So yeah, but this is another, I think, a model that he put together on the value of Ethereum. And we'll include this in the show notes. People can click through this.

Starting point is 00:23:10 But what's crazy, I think, is some of these assumptions. There are really two basic assumptions you can make when you model out something like Ether. one is just the value based on transaction fees. So this is similar to how a capital asset, like a stock might be valued. How much profit is it generated? What's the price of the asset I'm buying? How much earnings is it generating? And then you get like a price to earnings ratio based on that.

Starting point is 00:23:40 So stocks are valued this way. The second lever that Ether has as an asset is a monetary premium, which is just some degree to which, the asset should be valued above and beyond that because it's used as a money, store value, the change unit of account. To put this into triple point asset terms, we're talking about the P to E ratio is specifically just the capital asset side

Starting point is 00:24:04 of the triple point asset equation. The monetary premium, I would say, is what happens when you integrate the other two parts of the triple point asset, the demand, the lockup demand for ether and defy and also the consumable demand for ether as transaction fees. I would say, like, as a rule of thumb, one of the first half is we're just talking about ether as a capital asset, and then you add the monetary premium by adding in the value, the theoretical value of the other two's. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:24:29 That's exactly it. And so what's interesting here is if you look at just the PE ratio. So a typical stock might be a high growth stock. I don't know what Google is from a PE ratio perspective, maybe close to the hundreds. Something like Netflix, as recently as last time I looked at it months ago, was 180 or so. that's what you're paying for a stock from a P.E. ratio perspective. If you just assume ether at a P.E. ratio of 50, given the revenue it's generating, then the fair market value with no monetary premium would be 13K. This is just based on a super conservative, like low growth,

Starting point is 00:25:10 blue chip price to earnings ratio of 50. The fair market value. A tried in true valuation metric, by the way. Yes. In, in stocks, in any capital asset, the market value would be 13K, right? If you assume a higher growth tech stock valuation, not even something crazy. I saw, dude, I saw Zoom months ago, P.E ratio of 4,000. Oh, that's great growth. Okay, so. Ever since we started bankless, Zoom has not gotten any better. Right. A P.E ratio of a hundred. the long term ETH valuation would be 130K. 130K.

Starting point is 00:25:55 This is just PE ratio. This is not a factoring monetary premium. So if you factor in monetary premium to a, like what Justin calls the best guess scenario of a PE ratio of 50 and a monetary premium factor of four, then the fair market value of ETH would be 51,000. right. Anyway, he's got a range here that ranges from like a conservative dial to a heavily optimistic dial. And I think it's super useful for, you know, financial investors to actually

Starting point is 00:26:30 see the two levers that, as you said, that ether has as an asset, both the capital asset quality and both and also its monetary premium quality because you have to factor both of those things in. And my God, it looks like ether, even at 4K, even at all-time highs, is still underpriced. Stupid under price. Yeah. And just to ground the listener, the Google PE ratio currently in 2021 is 57.

Starting point is 00:26:56 Or excuse me, that's the Amazon PE ratio. Google PE ratio, 20201 is 25. And we know that, everyone knows that Defi innovates an extremely fast pace because it's asynchronous innovation

Starting point is 00:27:09 going in all different directions at all times, right? And so like there's no comparing Ethereum progress, rate of progress, and innovation to a centralized company. It's like this emergent structure, permissionless building, anyone can build a money Lego.

Starting point is 00:27:22 The more Legos, money Legos that come, the more room for more many Legos that are, that there are. And so I would personally, if you agree with that narrative, you would think that Ethereum's PE ratio should factor in lots of growth because Ethereum grows really, really fast.

Starting point is 00:27:36 So I'm personally in the camp of like 100-ish PE ratio as pretty fair. The other thing, again, bear market or bull market goggle, are on today. The other thing to think about is that the whole triple point asset, the title of that piece I titled Ether, a new model for money. As a monetary premium, Justin Drake did a very simple like 4x, like whatever, like random number, like call it, call it 4X. If that is a, if there's precedent for that, that's great. What there's not precedent for is a triple point

Starting point is 00:28:07 asset with monetary premiums coming from every single asset class. In theory, if you believe in the triple point asset theory, ether as a monetary premium, should, have the best monetary premium multiplier of any asset in history. That's what the triple point asset thesis is. So not only should we be bullish on the PE number and kind of wait at high, we should also wait very highly the moneyness of ether in the monetary premium. And so like, well, what happens when you have a PE ratio of a hundred, but you also have like a strong monetary premium multiplier? That's when you get like literally a $2.1 million ether value. it seems absolutely ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:28:48 It makes no sense. I don't think Ether's going there at all until like something weird happens to the dollar. But it's a good thought process to have about like, well, Ethereum grows really, really quickly, therefore high PE ratio. Ethereum's moneyness is really, really strong, therefore strong monetary multiplier. Uncharted Waters, new paradigm, crypto renaissance. Got to remind you guys, of course, this is not financial advice. Just theory.

Starting point is 00:29:14 Your boy was a psych major. That's right. A lot of this is psychology, David, so this is all relevant as well. Guys, we are going to take a minute to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, and we'll be back with releases. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans,

Starting point is 00:29:40 Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswop grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury.

Starting point is 00:30:15 It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project.

Starting point is 00:30:38 Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. Avey is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum. and just recently released AVE version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using AVE even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and eth. I'll choose a variable interest rate because

Starting point is 00:31:19 it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of Avey's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on Uniswap, and then deposit them back into Avey. 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. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's A-A-A-V-E.com. All right, guys, we are back with releases.

Starting point is 00:31:51 David, Diffinity, the decentralized internet computer has finally launched. What does this mean? Yeah, this is very, very hyped, very old project, 2018, 2017-18 project, finally coming into Mainnet. Lots of hype back then, lots of hype now. I'm not too well informed about the technical merits of DFINITY, but the people that I pay attention to as kind of like my litmus test for what's real and what's fake. Say that the actual technical merits of DFINITY

Starting point is 00:32:20 are interesting and worth paying attention to. There is the classic scale via centralization argument of DFINITY. The way that they get scale is by having supercomputers. I think that there's a decentralization roadmap over time. So right now, this is definitely, I would bucket this in the Ethereum Killer Camp. And they also are having this very, very marketed

Starting point is 00:32:43 launch. And so again, not necessarily what we would call aligned with the bankless ethos, but it is very big news. And so congratulations to the DFINITY team for getting your project out the door. Yeah. So this is this is a project that's been talked about so long and it's really been built like almost like a closed way. So even the code is not completely open source, but talked about in 2016. And I remember being part of the DFINITY community early on. And there was actually an air drop that they talked about in 2018. And being in the U.S., I couldn't actually participate in an airdrop. You had to be, you couldn't be a U.S. citizen.

Starting point is 00:33:19 So I actually got my cousin in Canada. I was like, hey, cousin, check out this air drop. And he was like, what is this? What am I doing? Anyway, signed up for it in 2018. He finally got his tokens now, his ICP tokens. Valuation when this thing launched was 170 billion, something like that. So he was instantly pretty excited.

Starting point is 00:33:43 about that when he realized they finally like unlocked. What's interesting about this, David, is I do think that they are trying to compete for a different narrative, which is like they want to be the storage and AWS, the decentralized AWS. So not like monetary settlement layer, but like take for example this, the uniswap front end, right? That needs to be hosted somewhere. that could be hosted on Filecoin IPFS. That could also be hosted on DFINITY, right? So kind of a different use case. Decentralized social networks is something that they've also talked about.

Starting point is 00:34:23 I do think they're less coming for Ethereum as a killer and more coming for like a decentralized AWS. Now, whether they can pull it off or not, it does seem very centralized. Like in order to be to run machines in this ecosystem, you're kind of running that in a data center, if you will. So it's all built on top of that. So there's some centralized components,

Starting point is 00:34:46 but it is an interesting technology as part of the full spectrum stack, and we'll have to see where it goes. So kind of exciting, I think, kind of interesting. But like the valuation, man, wow, 170 billion for this thing. To me, it's just a lot to prove. Yeah, yeah. It's a worthwhile story to follow.

Starting point is 00:35:06 and I'm not one to discount the value of progressive decentralization. That's a decentralization model followed by a lot of defy teams. It's different when we talk about an L1. But also at the same time, perhaps you could say the same thing about that's how Ethereum became decentralized. It started off, it started off pretty decentralized. But always the nature of progressive decentralization, things always started off centralized. And so, you know, I hope for the best.

Starting point is 00:35:38 Kind of some corporate marketing, though, behind this. I don't love it. Yeah, corporate marketing is weird. All right. Let's beat Balancer V2. Balancer, Automated MarketMager. What's going on in V2? Yeah, this is actually a pretty big update from what I understand.

Starting point is 00:35:54 And the cool thing about Balancer V2 is the absolutely massive amount of gas efficiency, gas savings that you use. Now when you use V2. also there's a new front end which in my opinion was much needed and the really the the big takeaway is that instead of many many many different balancer pools for all like the canonical like typical assets there's actually just one balancer contract now it's actually one pool and what it really does is it separates pool like assets from AMM logic and so that has like um i'm not too savvy on the technical details but the you can use the best you can use the best

Starting point is 00:36:34 balancer AMM and the assets that you are trading against all live inside of one contract. And the AMM and the assets are actually separated. And so they get a lot of gas efficiency there. I would also imagine that they get a lot of liquidity there because they are able to pool all assets together. And they don't have to route around different contracts, you know, for every single balancer pool. There's also some other improvements. We did the, we did the Stani plus Fernando fireside chat, moderated by Dan Ellitzer a while ago where idle assets deposited into Balancer get yielded in ABE. This is a really very strong technical implementation that is really just all about what Defi is, which is capital efficiency, capital efficiency, capital efficiency.

Starting point is 00:37:17 And so really a monumental upgrade to Balancer. Congratulations, Fernando. Congratulations to the Balancer team and all bow holders as well. Yeah, absolutely. To me, the Balancer V2 story is, it's sort of they built out a platform for long. launching other automated market makers. So it's not just one automated market maker. It's like a automated market making machine. So it can partner with AVE, it can partner with NOSIS protocol. And it's super cool to have that design space out there. David, let's talk about some other design space. And that is layer two design space. Arbitrum is an optimistic roll-up layer two. That in conjunction with optimism, I would say, are the most hotly anticipated optimistic

Starting point is 00:38:05 roll-up layer twos that I at least am aware of. And they just announced May net opening to developers May 28th. This is super cool. What's the story here? Yeah, there was actually a very good podcast on the Zero Knowledge podcast. If you want to get into a deep dive into Arbitrum, I thought that is a very helpful way to understand arbitram. The fact that we have a concrete date is also extremely exciting. We've been saying it. It's like L2's coming. L2's coming.

Starting point is 00:38:34 Sometimes L2s are actually here. DYDX is on an L2, but it's really optimism and an arbitram that are really going to be where like, oh yeah, L2s are canonically here. Go use them now. They say it's open to developers on the 28th, but in the podcast they said that it's really open to everyone, but it's really the developers who have the,

Starting point is 00:38:55 know how to actually use that first, right? Like there's no front ends built out, no, nothing. And they actually did a very good job. Also in the podcast, they said that they're not allowed, they didn't allow anyone to actually access Arbitrum before anyone else. And so all teams are getting access to Arbitrum L2 at the same time. So there was no kingmakers. They didn't bestow like early access upon certain DFI teams.

Starting point is 00:39:19 So there's going to be like a rush into Arbitrum, I think right on May 28th. Last week on the weekly roll-up, we talked about how OK Exchange is going to enable deposits right into Arbitrum. And so I think they've done a very good job like getting business development work out the gate as well, even before launch. And the other take to have is that if Arbitrum is here on May 28th, optimism can't be far along. Optimism, early June, question mark. Yeah, hopefully. And the cool thing about both Arbitrum and optimism is, of course, it is an entire EVM. that's Ethereum virtual machine inside of a roll-up.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And we've seen what an EVM in another layer one can do. An example of that is Binance Smart Chain absolutely blew up in terms of usage. And that's what these roll-ups are, which is why this technology is so hotly anticipated on the D5 side. So, man, I'm super excited about it. They did say a word of caution at the end of this post. So we should let listeners know about this. We're doing our absolute best to get Arbitram out, but the dates in this post, are based on the best information currently available.

Starting point is 00:40:26 So, guys, don't be surprised if dates get pushed out. But the fact that they're throwing something out there, May 28th feels promising. We're getting close. Cool. Congratulations to the Arbitrum team. David, let's talk about this leveraged index. So index co-op put this a leveraged index mechanism together with ETH, not too long ago. The FLI, ETH 2X, FLI.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Now they're doing it with Bitcoin. What's the story? Yeah, I put a tweet out right after they announced this saying like, oh, you thought that the index co-op, the FLI index token from the index co-op stops at ETH? No, here's Bitcoin and also broaden your horizons as to what index co-op can do. And so cool. Now we have a 2x Bitcoin token. I think it would make sense for them to have a 2x DPI token. Let's just recycle their own products. Also, I would love to ape into that right now personally. But like, what is, what is? it. What are the basics of the 2XFLI in general? Yeah, I need to actually get into how that works. There is some underlying rebalancing of WBT and tokens. I think it's some sort of perpetual swap. I need to understand that. It's just you're taking a margin position, right? And so you're incurring some additional liquidation risk on the downside if the asset price goes down. But if it goes up, you're doing 2x.

Starting point is 00:41:50 So it's a nice, I guess, way to juice your returns. If you're living on the wild side of crypto and just like, eth price volatility, Bitcoin price volatility is not enough for you. You get to go 2x up and 2x down if you want that. If you really just want to live on the edge, if typical crypto volatility isn't enough for you, index co-op has a product for you. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:42:13 The interesting thing is that this is, I think, really competitive with leverage applications like DYDX, trading applications like DYDX, because what a token is, is a manifested, instantiated position where you can go into DYDX and get a 2X long position inside of the DYDX platform. You can just do it by buying this BTC or ETH, FLI 2X token right on uniswap, so the ease of access is there. But also, it's composable because now that it's, now that your position is instantiated inside of a token, that token can go do things.

Starting point is 00:42:46 you can go use that as collateral in other places. And again, capital efficiency, capital efficiency, capital efficiency. And so, like, this is perhaps like the future of leverage. It's as single token assets. When 3x leverage, win 4x leverage. It's not only the future of leverage. It's like the future finance, dude. I'm just like, how can ETFs compete against something like this?

Starting point is 00:43:07 Something that's composable that can be put in all of these other applications within defy. Like this is, you know, ETFs are dead, man. This will eventually kill them and eat all of them. We're just watching that play out in real time. David, should we get to the news? Oh, gosh. Here we go.

Starting point is 00:43:24 Into the news, into the belly of the beast of this particular weekly rollout. Let's do it. Let's start here. This is a tale of two rug pulls. Yeah, we're going to start theming the weekly roll-ups, and that's the theme of this week,

Starting point is 00:43:34 is the tale of two rug pulls. It really was the big story this week. The first, we talked about a little bit, which was the Elon Musk tweet, and here it is for people who haven't seen it, Tesla has spent vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. This is Elon Musk tweeting this out. Look at the likes here, David.

Starting point is 00:43:51 Almost half a million. That's a lot of likes. Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin, important to note. But we are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin's energy transaction. That's that narrative that's coming back to bite Bitcoin for the first time. The reason why Bitcoin is down so much on the week, I think we can point to there. Anything else you want to say about Rugpole 1, David? Yeah, Eric Connor had a good take where he said,

Starting point is 00:44:19 it's probably just true that no one was buying Tesla's with Bitcoin. Like, that's probably why. If they were actually receiving decent revenue from Bitcoin, they probably would still be accepting it. That's probably what's going on. The other takeaway is that, you know, we are currently looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin's energy transaction.

Starting point is 00:44:38 That's the whole point of proof of stake, the whole point of Ethereum, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, Ethereum, not actually there yet. And so question mark, what he's actually referring to is Elon woke to proof of stake Ethereum. I would imagine he is. He understands Ethereum. Look, man, what's Elon even doing here? Because he's been all over the map.

Starting point is 00:44:54 Like, you didn't know this besides before like two months ago or whatever when you decided to start taking Bitcoin. Of course you knew this. Cryptobobob had that take. Like, Elon Musk is doing less due diligence than I am when I ape into a doggie token. Like, of course he knew this. So like, then you have to ask yourself, okay, well, why this reaction? and it must be that narrative like just internal pressures are building on him,

Starting point is 00:45:18 the board, you know, whomever maybe funds that that purchase Tesla stock and no longer want to because of this. Pressure must have been building for him to release something like this. That's kind of what I think. But like even so, it feels very erratic, right? Erratic, like nonsensical, like jumping all over the place. Like, what's Elon going to do next? He's on SNL, shilling doge.

Starting point is 00:45:40 like Elon like I know it's ridiculous to make this request of Elon but Elon please calm down calm down but also come on bankless also come on bankless and then and then get hyped on bankless we'll talk to you we'll talk about Elon all right um second rugpole this is Vitalik dude okay you got to set up this story because yeah you know a major theme of the week of course is garbage season all these doggy coins pumping and uh Vitalik put an end to that right like almost in one swift move. Set up the story. What happened here? Right. So it's a common aping activity to send Vitalik's address, which is publicly known, your bags, because then it's like, oh, Vitalik has these bags. Like, oh, bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish. Makes no sense,

Starting point is 00:46:27 but people do it anyways. For some reason, I would imagine it was the creators of these doggy tokens sent Vitalik an absolute fuck ton of these doggy tokens. 50% of their supply in some cases. Right, which is ridiculous. Probably thinking that he just wouldn't do anything, and he usually doesn't do anything with these tokens that people send to him. But there is some maliciousness about these doggie tokens. There's a centralized creator, centralized pre-mine, some early people got access to them.

Starting point is 00:46:58 And people are calling this like retail speculation, retail mania. But I actually don't think so because why is retail, because you have to buy these things on uniswap, and the amount of transaction fees, specifically because of the dokey tokens, was absolutely insane. Retail is not paying, I don't think retail is paying $200 to ape into docky tokens. I think those are other crypto whales, crypto traders who are just doing the speculation game. And I think that that's why we're cool with this rugpole. A, because don't send your money to someone for free and expect them to keep it just because they are generally.

Starting point is 00:47:33 So tell us what, what happened then with that? So, McAllic get all these coins. They're in his eth address. And it's like from a market cap perspective, it's worth billions. Of course, market cap does not equal liquidity, as we talked about earlier. But these are just collecting in Vitalik's public Ethereum address. So then what happened? Right.

Starting point is 00:47:52 And for some reason, there was actual demand to actually provide liquidity. So there was actual ether being traded hundreds of ether in these liquidity pools. And Vitalik's market dumped it and then sent it all of the received ether, which is actual money, not doggy tokens, and sent it to various charities, right? So he sent 13,000 ETH to Givewell. He gave 1,000 ETH plus all Elon tokens, Elon, which is a doggie token, to the Methalusa Foundation. I don't know what that is.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Methuselah, I think that's anti-aging, yeah. Oh, that makes sense. Vitalik's very into anti-aging. AI safety, artificial intelligence safety, like, oh, thank God. Doggy tokens, protecting us from the robot. 500 eth to crypto relief. Not sure what that is. 500 eth to Charter Cities Institute.

Starting point is 00:48:40 He also sent a bunch to the COVID India Foundation. And so Vitalik just donated. Technically, on a nominal level, he donated like billions of dollars to charity. But again, like $1 billion isn't coming out of this because of the illiquidity of these tokens. It's definitely going to be millions, though, right? Definitely millions, absolutely millions.

Starting point is 00:49:00 Double-digit millions, maybe. Vitalik rug pulled these doggy tokens and all these people that were, you know, trading and hyping up these doggy tokens and really put, I mean, I think the mania was going to end regardless, but Vitalik was the person that absolutely ended it and just put his foot down. It's like, this is absolute nonsense. Now all the doggy tokens are like nuking in price. And so Vitalik rug pulled a bunch of DGEN traders in the name of donations to some people, some people are angry at him for this.

Starting point is 00:49:27 And by the way, some of those token proceeds also went to Gitcoin. So funding Ethereum public goods as well, super cool. But a lot of people, not a lot of people, some people are angry at Vitalik for doing this. What's your take on that? Well, don't get angry at Vitalik for, you're allowed to sell the app. You gave it to him. Yeah, you gave it to him.

Starting point is 00:49:46 Maybe you didn't give it to him, but like, why are you upset that you aped into this random doggy token and then it dropped in price? Like, what were you expecting? There's a reason why we called you DGEN, D-Fi-Dens. Like, your actions have repercussions. Yeah, to me, and I think Anthony Sassano said something about this is like a chaotic good move. It's definitely a good move, right?

Starting point is 00:50:07 And like it benefits public goods rather than the creators of doggy tokens. Right. I'm all for it. I just think it's like an awesome moment in history in crypto to see this play out in real time and just something that can only happen in crypto, right? Meme tokens go to billions of dollars, get sent to Vitalik's address for some reason. Vitalik's like, what do I do with it? Okay, I'm going to market sell. it. Price goes crashing, but in the end, who benefits? Public goods. Fairty's benefit.

Starting point is 00:50:37 We benefit. We benefit public goods. If it goes to public goods, we all benefit. So if you miss out on the doggie pumps, you're actually getting it back to you in the form of like anti-aging research. Maybe we can all live longer now. Exactly. Maybe the robots won't come kill us in 30 years ago. All right. David, let's talk some more Ethereum stuff. This is super cool, I think. Oh, Vitalik again. Maybe he's just doing everything. I don't know. Right. how he has time to dump his doggy tokens when he's proposing on uniswop governance that uni become an oracle token. What is this about? Yeah, I think people are still really in trying to integrate this into their brain. I remember Justin Drake a while ago,

Starting point is 00:51:18 very long time ago, months ago, sent this like proposal around this EIP, which would instantiate the value of ether into the actual Ethereum protocol. And so there was actually disagreement between Vitalik and Justin Drake, where Justin Drake wanted the Ethereum protocol to have a little bit more features. And getting the actual price of ether into the protocol level is advantageous for a number of different reasons. Vitalik disagreed. He wanted that role to be served at the app layer. And this is a continuation on that train of thought, where Vitalik says that Uniswap can be the protocol that offers Oracle services to the actual Ethereum protocol specifically for the ETH USD price. And so this actually,

Starting point is 00:51:58 If you want to extrapolate this out, this puts uni not just as a as a as a defy exchange token, but also as an Oracle token, not unlike link, not unlike a chain link, mainly for specifically on-chain, verifiable information. But what he's proposing is that Uniswap becomes a more robust Oracle service for ether prices and other prices. This is a little bit of a complex post as the nature of Vitalx post, so I need to get into this a little bit more. I don't know how Uni actually what the difference is between Uniswap oracles right now and what Vitalik's proposing. And so I actually reached out to the guy who runs the Chapman University Crypto Crypto Club.

Starting point is 00:52:43 And he is going to be writing something about this. And maybe we'll get that out on the bankless newsletter. Yeah, that's super cool. I think one thing that it does is he's proposing that the Uniswap, the UniToken act as like a backstop for some of these things. So if there's like a disagreement, final settlement is, you know, occurs through uniswap governance vote in the same way that auger, you know, settles disputes and acts as an oracle. So it's kind of a slow time delay. This is the making process. Something to that effect is my high level understanding of it.

Starting point is 00:53:13 But like what's cool about this, David, is this is the secret ingredient, right? Store it out. We've talked about this formula a lot on banklaws. Most recently in our ChainLink podcast with ChainLink God. Store a value, right? That's some sort of collateral plus price feed equals what? Anything. You can have any asset when you have that. You could model the S&P 500. You could model gold. You could model silver. You could model the price of, you know, of real estate in a certain area, all sorts of things when you have that combination. And this gives a censorship resistant price feed Oracle at least for the ETH US dollar pair,

Starting point is 00:53:53 which would be super cool. So just a really exciting proposal. I think probably bullish for Uniswap too. Right. Yeah, that's what I was going to get into. Vitalik has never ever spoken so directly about a specific token on Ethereum, at least not with a formal report. And I'm reminded of our podcast with Joel Mnegro where we talk about the ability,

Starting point is 00:54:17 what capital is is the ability to direct resources of an economic system. If all of a sudden uniswap oracles become immensely powerful, this is a fundamentally different valuation model for uniswap above and beyond exchange fees. It's now also dictating possibly extremely important Oracle infrastructure for Ethereum. So a completely brand new value capture mechanism for the unitoken. I don't think the market has integrated this at all. I don't even know how it would even begin to do so. but if this proposal is taken seriously by uniswap governance,

Starting point is 00:54:53 I think this is extremely bullish for uni. So much more responsibility, too, to the uniswap team, Hayden Adams and crew. Remember when we had Hayden on and we asked him, hey, you've got a treasury with like $7 billion, $8 billion now, right? Your treasury is now bigger than the treasury of the EF, the Ethereum Foundation. How are you going to be stewards of the public good that is the Ethereum protocol, right? And I think they're stepping into that role a little bit. But this is another, I guess, ask for them to step into it even more.

Starting point is 00:55:28 Be the Oracle, be part of the Oracle solution for Ethereum. I think it's super cool to see that evolve. Anything else, David? Yeah, disclaimer, Uniswap is the sponsor of Bankless. I said the grads program, yeah, as well. Van Eck filing for Ethereum, ETF. David, any quick takes on this? Yeah, there is an immense amount of backlog for Bitcoin ETFs to the point where it's actually just like,

Starting point is 00:55:53 this is my interpretation of events where there's so much demand for Bitcoin ETFs and the SEC has been so slow that there's just this massive, just pent up demand for Bitcoin ETFs. And I think there are, once they finally figure out how to get the Bitcoin ETF out into the world, the many of them, they're probably going to not make that same mistake again. And so once Bitcoin ETFs happen, I bet you Ethereum ETFs happen extremely quickly. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a good take. We'll leave it at that. Another interesting stat this week, $1 billion in volume for Starkware. That is a Ethereum Layer 2 solution. Part of that is from DYDX, which is absolutely crushing it on layer 2. Another part from that is from Diversify and immutable. That's immutable X. Also, on the synthetics Quenta side of things, Quenta has

Starting point is 00:56:42 surpassed $1 billion in U.S. in U.S.D volume. Quinta, mostly on ETH main chain, but also has a transition path to Ethereum layer two as well. I think these two stories are kind of related, both the $1 billion mark, both sort of successful DFI protocols now in the process of transitioning to layer two. Any other takes on that? Probably a good time to be a traitor. Those people probably worked out, yeah. Hopefully you were short. Let's talk about this, which is interesting. Someone swipe theuniswop.com domain names.

Starting point is 00:57:24 So I guess Uniswap, the foundation, the protocol of the people behind did not own that. Someone swiped it and started pointing it where to sushi swaps, Dex website. Who did this, David? I don't know. I would imagine that is somebody who is very proximate or very close to sushi swap and probably has made a lot of money off of sushi swap or sushi token because who else would be incentivized to purchase Uniswop.com. I would like to know how much that was purchased for it. I bet it's got to be in the millions and millions of dollars. This is one part like kind of just like poking fun,

Starting point is 00:58:00 but also one part like kind of malicious. Like this is a little mean. This is a dick move. It's a little bit of it's a funny. It's very funny. I'm having a good time. I'm lolling. It's a little bit of a move. Does this just continue the beef between Uniswob versus Sushi Swap? Like the beef that started with the vampire attack, you know, we got like East Coast, West Coast, Biggie versus Tupac. Is this what's going on here? I think, again, I think it's all fun in games between Sushi Swap and Uniswap, more or less, but also at the end of the day, there is real value at state. There is real market cap. There are investors behind these things. Some rivalry. Well, while there is, it's like fun rivalry, but also this is like, this is a real move.

Starting point is 00:58:39 Like this isn't just like, ha ha, ha, no, like, this is a real, like, this is a punch. This is a shot fired for sure. Yeah. Who knows who did it, though? Of course, hard to chase these things. Why earn dropping woofie. Okay, man, you got to unpack this. I guess the context here is doggy token week, garbage season. But why earn is not a garbage D5 protocol and YFI is a legitimate capital asset. What is this story? What's going on? Right. And so part of the, the doggy token mania is they're extremely low unit prices, right? There's so many, there's so many units out there. Quadrillion supplies, we're talking about. Quadrillions of supplies, right? And so like one doggy token was like 0.001 penny. And like it just really just messes

Starting point is 00:59:24 with people's psychology because they think that's really bullish. Like, oh, if it's 0.001 penny and it goes to a penny, I'll be a millionaire. It makes no sense. But it taps in like we see this every single bull cycle. People are trying to learn how to understand fully. diluted market caps versus market caps versus unit prices. You know, don't buy Bitcoin. It's too expensive at $60,000. It makes no sense. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:59:46 But what, what Bandtech did on the YARM team is he just made a contract for a one-to-one swap and all of YFI token into Wiffy token. You know, Wiffy sounds very similar to YIFI. And all it did is it just re-denominated YFI to have, I don't know how, it just moved the decimal place. And so it made YFI, which is a very high, high value asset at a single unit. It's something like 70. It hit a peak of $90,000 right after

Starting point is 01:00:15 doing this. And the reason why it hit a peak is people were buying into this narrative that like, oh, it worked. People are going to buy woofie token because of the low unit price. And because it's a one-to-one swap, there's going to be a lot of buying demand for YFI. FI. Completely unrelated to fundamentals of yearn or like revenue from the urine protocol. This is just trader psychology. This is just being a part of garbage season. and it absolutely worked. All Bantig had to do to get a 30% increase in the price of YFI was create a contract that redenominated it.

Starting point is 01:00:49 And YFi was the absolute outperformer of DFI tokens this week. It goes from like breaks through its previous all-time highs of like $55,000, hit $60,000 and goes all the way to almost $90,000. And I think it's backed down to somewhere around like in the low $70,000. So still much higher than it previously was. And again, all you had to do was re-denominate your. your token to have a different decimal place. It's sad that this worked at some level, right?

Starting point is 01:01:14 Like these wolfy tokens were like nine cents, but also, and so like I guess the the first level of analysis in something like this is, well, this is YFI using a cheap gimmick to get people to buy their token, right? And like, that's first order analysis. But also second order analysis is Wi-Fi is a legitimate defy asset. It's producing cash flows. It's arguably been undervalued for the last several months, like fantastic team around this thing. And rather than buying useless doggie coins that are just going to pump and dump and get rug pulled, why not buy Woofie? Because that is an actual

Starting point is 01:01:57 capital asset. So maybe Wi-Fi is saving people from themselves. I don't know, question mark. Any thoughts on those takes? Yeah, you can see in the article at the time of writing woofee last changed hands for nine cents implying a roughly three percent premium over yfi right because the buying pressure buying demand goes into wiffy and then people can arb that trade by putting yfi into the wiffy contract and then and then arving that um kind of kind of kind of funny kind of genius um and again like if you want to be a protocol maximalist band tag and the other yearn developers their one job is to make yfi number go up so like if they can find different ways to do that then like that's all legitimate at the end of the day you know what my takeaway is is ryan

Starting point is 01:02:38 What's that, David? We should submit an EIP to move the decimal place for ether. There you go. That's all we need. Let's do an ether stock split. Look, you know, actually some protocols have done that. Like, Dot did that. You know, PocaDot did that.

Starting point is 01:02:52 Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I think Ethereum doesn't need that at this point, David. Right. You know, that would be a little bit perhaps illegitimate. But maybe you could submit the EIP and see where it goes. Let's talk NFT stuff. So the one NFT headline is Cryptopon,

Starting point is 01:03:08 sell for $17 million where not on a NFT marketplace, but at Christie's auction. Major mainstream auction house selling Cryptopunk NFTs. Dude, Cryptopunks, this is really the Rolex. David, Andrew Steinwald said this when he came on the podcast, that NFTs are really not about wealth. They're really about status. And I'm seeing the elevation of Cryptopunks in like digital culture status, right? Like, what's flashy?

Starting point is 01:03:38 Well, you show off your awesome crypto punk because it's worth like $100,000 on your Twitter avatar, Discord avatar or something. Are you seeing this? Like in these cultures, it's definitely a status symbol at this point. Right. And I just can't get myself to buy a crypto punk. Because I want to play in the status game, but like they're so high priced. They're so high priced.

Starting point is 01:03:59 So you would do it. So I've never been the type for the right price. Sure. Yeah. I've never been the type to like want a Rolex or something like that. So like I care less. But but I do agree. There's something appealing about maybe, maybe this a bit more for me.

Starting point is 01:04:13 Cryptopunk avatar. Yeah, there's a big conversation. I wouldn't say that to it. So let's actually go into this, right? Like, Eric Connor has his crypto punk. DC has his crypto punk avatar. It's a nice thing to have on crypto Twitter where like we're all in the virtual world, right? We're all living in what Andrew calls the Metaverse, right?

Starting point is 01:04:30 So having a, having a crypto punk avatar is like a status symbol. The thing is. Yeah, it's your, it's your, it's your, it's your, it's your, The thing is, like, you don't need to own the Cryptopunk to make it your avatar. And so there is- Are you going to go steal Eric Conner's NFT? Well, not necessarily. So here's the experiment I want to run. I want to, and so listeners to bankless can know that perhaps I'm rug-pulling a Cryptopunk

Starting point is 01:04:53 sanctity. But, like, what I want to do is I want to screenshot a Cryptopunk, but I also want to Photoshop edit it. And I want to make it not actually a Cryptopunk and do something. different with it. Like maybe I'll make a fake crypto punk, a fraudulent cryptopunk. Then I'll make that as my avatar. Will anyone notice or

Starting point is 01:05:14 care? And I'll be in the Crypto Punk Cool Kids Club with my Cryptopo Now they will because you just set it on roll-up Steve. It's more of a thought. It's more of a thought experiment, Ryan. Why don't you do this? Why don't you create a whole like fake cryptopunks, like replica of all of them and sell them at a discount

Starting point is 01:05:31 and become a millionaire, David? Multi-millionaire. No, because you can't do that because Is there, those are actually, that is truly fraudulent. If you're trying to make on-chain cryptopunks, like, well, you can't make fake ones. You can screenshot them and then put them as your avatar as fraudulently without like putting it as your act. I'm just surprised no one's done this, right? It's the, it's the analog equivalent to you, the guy in New York City who's selling you like fake Rolexes and he's like, hey, look at my briefcase, right? Right.

Starting point is 01:05:56 Mm-hmm. The theme of like the cryptopunks we have at home comes to mind. Yeah, exactly. All right, David, let's get to some Bitcoin stuff, shall we? Bitcoin taproot activation has begun. Bitcoin has been talking about taproot for so long. I've almost forgotten what it actually is. What is tap root?

Starting point is 01:06:17 And why is this a big deal? Yeah, taproot is a soft fork activation, so much like Segwit, for those that were around in 2017, 2018 when Segwit got activated. And so it basically allows for more expressive Bitcoin transactions. And so Bitcoin is actually gaining a little bit of expressivity with these taproot activation. I'm not familiar with some of the technical details as to how this happens. They talk about how there needs to be 90% of miners signaling to have consensus for tap root to activate. I don't know why 90%.

Starting point is 01:06:48 I always thought that softworks were always an opt-in system. And so if like 5% of Bitcoin miners are processing Segwit or Segwit or Taproot blocks, then in theory, like taproot is 5% accepted by Bitcoin. and if you make a taproot transaction, you'll have to wait for that 5% of Bitcoin miners to mine your tap root transaction in order to get that integrated, but really you just need any amount of Bitcoin miners

Starting point is 01:07:16 to actually get your specific types of transactions into the Bitcoin blockchain. I don't know why that we need 90% activation, but that's what we're going for. And so what's currently happening is Bitcoin miners are signaling that they will include Segwit transactions right now or tap root transactions right now. And generally,

Starting point is 01:07:32 Taproot is a very just like there's there's consensus in the social layer for Bitcoin, Bitcoiners that everyone wants taproot. Like it's not a hard fork, it's a soft fork, it's opt-in. It's very much in line with Bitcoin. What do they get for this, David? So a little bit more expressivity, right? This is not like privacy features. Yeah. Not smart contracts. How much more expressivity are they getting? What new things do you think could be built on Bitcoin in a tap route world? Yeah, we should get somebody who's a taproot expert on. bankless to really talk to them about this. But multi-signature transactions are a little bit more cheaper and they're private. There's a little bit more privacy here. And I think it really just

Starting point is 01:08:13 unlocks new options a little bit further up the Bitcoin stack. And so Bitcoin is gaining a little bit of expressivity here. Yeah. So it feels like it's in the realm of incremental improvement, not like adding smart contracts to Bitcoin level expressivity, but incremental improvements making maybe some apps easier to build on Bitcoin in the future. I guess we'll have to see. David, let's talk about this. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust hit record discounts, negative 20% discounts to spot value. That's pretty insane. I don't think we've ever seen this before. No, this is a new low for the premium. Good time to buy. Good time to buy. Yeah, like if you're bullish on Bitcoin, like the trade is to sell your Bitcoin and buy GBT. I mean, you know, tax events, not financial advice. Things can go

Starting point is 01:09:07 wrong. Or just sell your stocks maybe. You know, sell the stuff in your Fidelity account. Yeah, right. Like 20% premium. Like it must just be that there was just a massive flood of Bitcoin into this trade in the first place and people are kind of like panic selling. But like if you're long Bitcoin, this is a free trade for you. This is literally 20% free Bitcoin. You never seen. Also with an ETF right around the corner. Grayscale has a proposal. That's probably why, right? Grace Griskel has a proposal to turn GBT into a Bitcoin ETF, right? And so at that point in time, that premium should just snap right back in theory. Weird to see this during the Bull Run, though, not something you'd expect. But micro strategy is kept at it. They're nothing, if not consistent,

Starting point is 01:09:50 dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin. Michael Saylor and crew just bought another $15 million. Are they buying the dip? Are they buying the dip? Yeah, what was the average price? Fifty-five thousand dollars. gotten a little bit, a little bit better. But they're probably, we're probably still buying right now anyways. Yeah, absolutely. David, let's get to Tom Brady, laser eyes. Is this the one? So, yeah, Tom Brady's a binkiner. Got laser eyes on Twitter. Is he getting paid in Bitcoin? Or is this possibly? Okay. So he just switched. It wouldn't be the first football player. Yeah, I love this as a social signal. It's just really cool. I mean, well done, bitcoiners. Good, good, good job with the laser eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Big W there. All right, David, one last thing. Before,

Starting point is 01:10:31 before we get to some of the other agenda. Crypto Exchange, Binance is now facing investigation by the IRS and Department of Justice. A new report. This is fresh news as of today. David, I guess it's finally happening. The IRS is knocking on Binance's door. Right. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:10:51 Yeah. I am trying to do my best to not feel schadenfreude, but this is what happens when you play with fire, CZ. like you you can't be a bank in quotes right he can't be in exchange in quotes yeah he can't be in exchange in quotes yeah he I think CZ and Binance have always been skirting this line of sort of wanting to maintain custody of assets and being a regulated

Starting point is 01:11:16 institution but like not playing by the rules of all the other regulated institutions is that kind of the take here I mean there's an element of like David shouldn't you be for like free markets Why are you feeling Shotdenfreude? Shotdenfreid at this event. Like, shouldn't you be an anti-regulation type guy? I thought you were a crypto, quote-unquote, libertarian

Starting point is 01:11:39 or anti-authoritarian figure. Yeah, so I am all for free markets. The thing is, is that when you can see the writing of the walls, when you are instantiated in meat space, you have certain commitments to the meat space world, which, in my opinion, finance and CZ, were not fulfilling. They were not fulfilling.

Starting point is 01:11:58 You can't really be in the meat space, but not also play games with regulators. If you are moving billions and billions of dollars, like finances, like someone's coming knocking. Like there's literally no place on planet Earth that you can be where no one can come get to you. Your servers live somewhere.

Starting point is 01:12:15 You're instantiated in meat space. And as a side quest, that's kind of why I'm bullish proof of stake is because proof of stake literally is not instantiated in meat space. It's in the ether. It's in the virtual world. unlike proof of work, which is literally instantiated in meat space.

Starting point is 01:12:29 But David, what if the same... Instantiate is always a risk vector. What if the same report came out that the DOJ and the IRS were knocking on Uniswop's front door, Hayden Adams front door? What would your reaction be there? And what's the difference? Right. The difference is that you can't stop Unoswap because you can't stop Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:12:49 because Ethereum is not instantiated in Meetspace or... And it won't be even less under proof of stake. but also if they put Hayden in handcuffs and took them away, I would be extremely fearful of what is in my mind of extremely authoritarian move because you can't stop Uniswap yet you are doing something in this very extremely hypothetical scenario. They know they can't stop Uniswap, yet they are still penalizing people who are DFI founders.

Starting point is 01:13:17 There's a reason why can't be evil or can't have control or can't shut that down is a liability risk mitigation. mechanism. Yeah. I mean, the big difference in my mind, too, is CZ has access to your private keys. Hayden Adams does not. Right. That's the big difference. When we say, what is a crypto bank? It's a group that has access to your private keys. They maintain custody of your assets. Mediate you and your money. We call these crypto banks, you know, they're called exchanges, but this is what banks do in the regular banking system. They take custody of your assets. That is the thing we're trying to get away from in crypto. That is the thing Uniswop does not do. Hayden Adams and Uniswop team and all of the code

Starting point is 01:14:00 doesn't get access. There's no way for him to access your private keys. That is the difference between Defi and something like Binance to me. And if you have custody of someone's funds, there ought to be some regulatory responsibilities for that. When you don't, different story in my mind. Yeah. The last, of conversation that I think is relevant to have. And I treated this out forever ago where I said at some point in time, somebody is going to come knocking on Binance's door. I don't know who. I don't know when. Is it the United States? Is it China? Somebody's coming knocking. And at that point in time, CZ is going to wish that he had become more politically aligned with the Ethereum community. And something that I got from Anthony Cizano forever ago is like, Binance had this opportunity to be an Ethereum powerhouse. They could have really helped out the ecosystem, rather than carbon copying it and trying to fork it and keep it for themselves and keep the same energy, they could have been something like consensus where they built out a studio, a studio that built out stuff for Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:15:07 They could have been really politically aligned with Ethereum. Yet they chose to co-opt it and try and brand it for themselves. And then we have CZ talking about B&B flipping ether. And now the times come where three letter agencies are coming knocking on the door of Binance. And now he doesn't have any friends, right? You only have the very small, like, Binance ecosystem. You could have been friends with Ethereum. We could have helped you.

Starting point is 01:15:28 Here's the other take on that, though, is like, don't count Binance out by any stretch. I mean, look at the recent hires that Binance is made. These are people from U.S. regulatory regimes that CZ and Binance are hiring to run their exchanges and be on their executive team. This is the play that the traditional banks have made, is basically,

Starting point is 01:15:50 buy your way into political power. And there's certainly enough billions of dollars for CZ and Binance to pay fees, get regulators aligned, like curtail some things and stay in the game. So I definitely expect Binance and company will stay in the game. But we'll see what happens. This is definitely not a small thing. All right, David, we're going to come back with some takes. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Balancer is Defi's most powerful automated market maker. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs of Defi.

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Starting point is 01:18:54 All right, David, let's get to some hot takes for the week. This is the first one. Everyone gets a private key. Brantley.eath tweeted this out. Talk about everyone getting a private key and the ramifications of this thread. Yeah, Brantley Milligan of ENS.N.S. He's a reason why we all have our favorite ENS addresses,

Starting point is 01:19:13 him and Nick Johnson and the whole ENS team. He tweets out, one of the most significant side effects of the rise of crypto is we're finally giving everyone a public private key pair what cypherpunks have tried unsuccessfully to do for years with ideology is happening with crypto because of incentives this has far-reaching consequences and then he makes a tweet thread which is definitely worth worth reading perhaps some some homework for the bankless nation but basically what he's saying is that because we all are all are playing like defy games we all want our tokens we all need our hardware wallets with our ledgers or our metamask we all now have

Starting point is 01:19:46 public-private key cryptography and there's something extra outside of cryptocurrency that is not just about money and assets but it's giving people the power of public private key cryptography there's something powerful in of itself of just about having everyone having a public private key pair the first and best way to do this is i would love to never have to use an email and password anymore and just log in by signing a message so that the service that i'm logging in with and understands who i am because of my ethereum or not even my ethereum address but my public private key key pair that I can sign with my ledger. And it doesn't,

Starting point is 01:20:21 it's not even relevant to Ethereum or it's not even relevant to Bitcoin or any other blockchain or crypto system. It's just about having your own personal private key. That is something that you control. That is like your personal password to life. And it doesn't stop there. The fact that everyone has a public private key pair is extreme, a very important conversation for personal sovereignty,

Starting point is 01:20:42 self-sovereignty, the sovereign individual. And now what Brantley is saying, and because of everyone's playing around in DeFi season and playing with getting their Bitcoin, getting their ether, and importantly self-custodying these things, now everyone has a public-private key pair, and now we can finally unlock the version of the world

Starting point is 01:21:00 that the cypherpunks envisioned for us. Yeah, it really is amazing. Like you said, this could eliminate the need for username and passwords across everywhere we use username and passwords, right, in the messy two-factor authentication with the public-private key pair, you don't need that sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:21:18 You can just do it with your public-private key. The other thing this eliminates, David, I was just signing some paperwork, like, IRL the other day, right? And I was just like, how crazy is it that we are still using physical signature as a proof of authenticity, a proof of identity? Like, why can't I just hit some buttons on a hardware device or a Ubiki or, like, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:42 Metamask dialogue instead. Every time you go to, you know, buy something, you're buying something with a credit card, for instance, and you have to like sign your name. Like, come on, man. Are you really- Yes, I attest to how I am who I am with my signature of a name. That could be anyone's signature, right?

Starting point is 01:22:03 This is not, this is just such a legacy artifact of a paper analog world. And I think all that's going to go away in the future. Brantley's absolutely right. Yeah, I don't know about you, but when I sign something, just a line. Just, yeah, I do smiley faces. I've had zero repercussions for doing that. And I've done that for years. I actually don't have a signature because for years and years, I've only written.

Starting point is 01:22:27 So when I actually sign my name, I'm like, fuck, how do I write my own name? Yeah, just print it. Like, what is it? Yeah, David. All cats. That's awesome. All right. Let's get to the second take.

Starting point is 01:22:39 So Michael Wong here. Michael Wong. No, no validators. No validators, no security, no security, no developers, no developers, no users, no users, no fees. The end. What's the story here? Yeah, so Michael Wong, shout out Bankless Head of Culture, Chief of Culture, Chief Culturalist, some unofficial title that we've bestowed upon him. He's the meamer behind the bankless Twitter account, by the way. Go give him a follow. So what he's talking about is just this bootstrapping recursive

Starting point is 01:23:09 loop of a crypto system. And he's talking about, it's one part, like a good take on why fees need to be fees and why we need fees in the first place, because if you don't have any fees on your blockchain, you have less incentive to run a validator for your blockchain. If you have less incentive to run a validator for your blockchain, your blockchain has less security. If you have less security, developers don't want to build on your stuff. If it's an unstable foundation, they don't want to build on you. If you don't have any developers building on your system, you don't have any users using your system. if you don't have any users using your system, then you don't have any fees.

Starting point is 01:23:41 So it's a recursive cycle, and hopefully it's a positive feedback loop. Once you start to get one of these things, you'll start to get the others of these things. And that's kind of why Ethereum's network effects are so strong, is Ethereum has gone from its zero to one moment of it's hitting this recursive loop of fees validators, security developers, users, fees, validators, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, to me this take kind of starts at the very last line, which is no users, no fees. right. The beautiful thing is that this is a virtuous cycle. So Ethereum is network. It doesn't actually start

Starting point is 01:24:14 anywhere. It's, well, yeah, but Ethereum as a network is incented to get more users to make its block space more valuable. Because when it does that, all of these other things happen. Like, that's where my mind enters this cycle, right? I know the cycle could begin anywhere, but like, that is a beautiful thing because then the network is optimized to provide very valuable block space. What's block space? A uniswob transaction consumes block space. What's the, value of the uniswap transaction on any given day. That's what anyone's willing to pay for that. And that has become very, very valuable per our earlier conversation in the in the markets section. We were talking about the massive amount of fees that Ethereum block space is generating.

Starting point is 01:24:53 This to me is the healthiest sign of a blockchain, block space demand, users paying for fees. Like you've said before, David, and I think we said it again in our podcast earlier this week, state of the nation, on chain, on chain transaction fee maximalism, right? Right. There's an element of that, right? And Ethereum definitely has that and has built up a healthy network as a result of users paying fees on its chain. This virtuous cycle, I think that's also a very good job to articulate why in,

Starting point is 01:25:24 why you and I, Ryan, as people that are trying to promote this bankless revolution, why we only consider Bitcoin and Ethereum as really bankless tools, right? because they are the only two systems that have this virtuous cycle that they have actually bootstrapped into existence, right? Like EOS is a dead system because it never got this virtuous cycle. Like, like, like coin never got this cycle. So there's a difference between crypto economic systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, which I don't consider to be a live system. Like, Lycoin, not alive.

Starting point is 01:25:57 Like Bitcoin Cash, not alive. These things aren't systems. They are just, you know, they're not. They haven't bootstraps themselves into existence yet. They're not a live organism like a Bitcoin and Ethereum. I agree. And you're talking by the way about just layer one specifically. But like, you haven't reached product market fit until you see substantial revenues,

Starting point is 01:26:17 some level of revenues being produced by your block space. And no other chain is really past that. Bitcoin and Ethereum have. Of course, there's things like Doge, which haven't passed that, but have rocketed to like 80 billion. has some good fees right now, dude. Does it? Yeah. It's on the chart.

Starting point is 01:26:35 If you go to cryptofeas. info, it's on the charts, man. There you go. I mean, that's some early crew. Dude, is Doge bankless? Right? Well, I mean, we asked the question of the three arrows guys. Like, um, they seem surprised, but didn't discount Doge's ability to become a store

Starting point is 01:26:52 of value. And I don't think the bankless thesis does either. Would I buy Doge? No. I mean, like, we got to see some sustained activity. Um, but would I discount. count it as a possible contender for store of value? No. I mean, do we need to make a proposal to update the bed index to include Doge?

Starting point is 01:27:12 I don't think so. Before we move on, I'll leave this one last homework assignment, thought experiment to the bankless listener. Where do you think this virtual cycle starts? The virtual cycle, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Start guys. Where's the start? DBD. Let's go to this one. Ethereum has created the most amount of wealth among a distributed and diverse group far beyond any other startup. The ecosystem is great because the community constantly reinvest in new research and projects. The rate of reinvestment is perhaps greater than Silicon Valley. What's your take on this?

Starting point is 01:27:48 Yeah, my mind goes back to when we were talking about Justin Drake's model for the PE ratio and why perhaps it's appropriate to give Ethereum the benefit of the, doubt of having a very high PE ratio, like something around 100 plus because innovation moves at a breakneck speed. And part of the reason why is because we recirculate our investments, right? Like when crypto, defy people make money on Ethereum, they tend to, A, leave it there and also be reinvest it into similar like projects. And so that's why it's okay to integrate extremely high rapid growth into the Ethereum investment thesis. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, the part of this I really like, so I'm not sure if Ethereum creates like super distributed wealth, right? Like, I don't think cryptocurrency is a wealth distribution tool necessarily. I think it's definitely a financial, like, equalizes financial opportunity, that's for sure. But the take on this that I like is, I heard someone say this week, Ethereum is the new Silicon Valley. And what I think is interesting about that take is like Silicon Valley,

Starting point is 01:28:58 didn't start with, you know, Facebook and Google and like the current era that we see as Silicon Valley. It started in the 1960s with Hewlett Packard, right? And that was the original Silicon, right? And then those companies, venture capitalists, people, investors are successful with that era of computing, invested in the next cycle, which was the PC revolution, which invested in the next cycle, which was the internet revolution, which invested in the next cycle, which was the mobile tech revolution. And that is why Silicon Valley grew as a sector is because every generation just invested in the next generation. And I very much see that's what's happening with Ethereum right now. So people that were successful with ether as an asset, they're now investing in D5.

Starting point is 01:29:42 People are successful with the first layer of D5 protocols are now investing in Gen 2. It's happening like it happened in Silicon Valley just at a super accelerated rate. And I think that's super cool. And there's opportunity. The thing that is cool is opportunity for everybody in the world to enter. Silicon Valley, you had to live in Silicon Valley. No longer the case. You can live anywhere in the world. You have internet connection, like start building on defy. That's what's cool about this. Yeah. And you took the words right out of my mouth. And I think that's why Santiago is saying that this wealth distribution is actually perhaps better than at least legacy counterparts. Again, cryptocurrency. It's not the best wealth distribution tool, but think of like the distribution

Starting point is 01:30:29 of ether and which we know is actually pretty good with the genie coefficient is way more distributed than like Apple equity or Amazon equity or typical startup equity, right? It's like Facebook equity, which most of that happened when it was private, most of the growth happened when it's private. Exactly. Like ether was never private. It did a pre-sale, an ICO pre-sale that with a lot of analysis about how fair and distributed that ether in the pre-sell was. Then we had this proof of work distribution. And then that's just ether the asset. Not only that, but we also have, we also have defy tokens, which again, allows for a lot of churn and distribution of wealth, right? Like, you can come in and you can rise the ranks of capital just by one specific defy

Starting point is 01:31:14 token that you find your niche in. And kind of like how we were talking about with Josh Trojanthal on the Renaissance podcast, where we made the claim that, like, you know, the Renaissance, it was fast, but it also began in one specific spot in the world and moved outwards from there versus this crypto renaissance, which is happening equally everywhere. And so that is also a reason to be bullish on wealth distribution. And so, you know, it's not a silver bullet for wealth distribution, but I do think that Ethereum and Crypto at large is better. It's better than previous systems. Yes, Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. Let's go to this take. This is a Wall Street Journal take. And the headline is really the take. The Fed is playing with fire. So I think what's interesting here is David. A report just came out this week that inflation, this is CPI inflation, was 4.2% in the U.S. in the month of April. It's a high number. High number. analysts were expecting the top range, 3.6%. It comes out. It's 4.2%. So things are heating up. And I think,

Starting point is 01:32:17 think there is a narrative that is starting to propagate, not just in crypto cycles, in crypto circles. We've always said the Fed is playing with fire. Nation states are playing with fire. But now it's going a bit more mainstream. Like, careful, the engine's running hot. What's the next move of the Fed and central bankers now? Now that inflation, like we've seen asset price inflation the last 10, 11 years. That's almost been hidden. Mainstream hasn't really reported it. I have no idea why. But like, But now it's surfacing in a CPI, consumer price index. And I think there's an increasing recognition that the Fed is playing with fire. And what do we do if inflation starts to massively increase?

Starting point is 01:33:01 What levers do we have from here? I think the perspective that listeners should have is they are playing with fire inside of a forest that hasn't had a forest fire in over a decade. That's what people should be concerned about, right? Like, is this just April or is this the beginning of rampant inflation? Inflation can get out of control. And so, like, what's May? What's June?

Starting point is 01:33:24 What's July? Like, is this the first of things to come? Do we even know? It's a great inflation here? Question mark. Yeah. And to be like, so the, the, the, Jim Powell and company, they say, look, this is just COVID, you know, ending. And so can't seem.

Starting point is 01:33:39 And so they say this will level up. It's definitely something to watch. David, let's talk about this last one. This is a clip from the Vitalik episode on legitimacy that we released this month, earlier this week on Monday. This is a quote from him, an asset having a community that wants it to be an ultrasound money is a good property for an ultrasound money to have.

Starting point is 01:34:07 Vitalik said this, I think when we asked him the question about, hey, what do you think of this ultrasound money narrative? And his response has been pretty consistent since I think the first time I heard someone ask him that a few years ago, which was you in Tel Aviv when you asked him, hey, Vitalik, is ETH money? I want it to be money. And as a member of the community, I want to know if you think it's money. And what was his response, David? His response was that ether is money if the community wants it to be.

Starting point is 01:34:37 And this is how crypto assets come to be. is a community comes around and rallies behind an asset because of its merits and says that because of these merits, this thing is really, really good money. And all of a sudden, that's how money becomes. Like, it's a shelling point. It's a coordination game. And so this is the only, like, this is almost the only bullish thing I've heard Vitalik say about, about ether the asset, because he has to be very muted about it. He wants to be very apolitical. But he's saying, like, if the community wants ether to be ultrasound money, then it will be ultrasound money. Same answer. The same answer he gave you those years ago. Yeah. Pretty cool. All right. David. It's pretty clear that I'm pretty sure the

Starting point is 01:35:20 community wants ether to be ultrasound money because of how incredibly fast that meme stuck. It is beginning to feel that way, isn't it, David? All right. Let's talk about meme of the week. We've got two this week. We should start with the first one. We're going to fade out with, I think, the second one. Describe this meme for people who can't see it. Yeah. Oh, God, I think this is bad boys. Bad boys? Bad boys too. I don't know. Anyway, bad bad bad boy something. But it's been doctored, of course, because it's a meme and it's now Rug Boies. It's Vitalik dual wielding pistols with Elon Musk behind him. We got the tale of two rugs this week. And Vitalik and Elon Musk, Rugboys. So good. So good. I think a perfect meme to encapsulate the news of the week.

Starting point is 01:36:08 You know what? We're going to fade out with this bonus meme. But before we do, just want to mention, of course, everything that we talked about in the roll-up is risky. Eth is risky. Crypto is risky. So is Bitcoin. If you're on the defy journey, you could lose what you put in. But of course, 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. And with that, let's fade out with the real meme of the week, the big meme of the week. David, do you want to intro us? Yeah, sorry podcast listeners. It's not going in the podcast because this is very much a visual meme. But shout out to Fred, master meme generator. He made this one. Eith has no supply for it. Let's watch. Try to realize the truth.

Starting point is 01:37:10 What truth? There's no supply floor. There's no supply floor. It's even better than a supply cap. It's a decreasing cap. We hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter,

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Starting point is 01:38:34 roll-ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 2nd Week of May, 2021 Vitalik Rugs For Charity | Elon & Bitcoin | Balancer V2

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