Bankless - ROLLUP: 3rd Week of April (BTC & ETH ATH, $COIN, Berlin Upgrade, Gary Gensler SEC, Bull Market)

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, Bankless Nation, it's roll-up time. This is the third week of April. David, how you doing? Absolutely, fantastic. Third week of April and one of the most monumental weeks in crypto history, at least in my opinion, price action is absolutely flying. And meanwhile, we have cryptos ever. Our biggest company is now a public company on the NASDAQ. So many things to get excited about. And we are going to go through all of them on this Bankless Weekly Roll-up. Guys, if this is your first roll-up, this comes at you every Friday, every Friday a.m. Enjoy it with your coffee. This is the fastest way to download the week that was crypto because we hit the market. We hit releases. We hit news, hot takes, and then we end with what we are both excited about. So, David, I am super excited about this week. We are about to get into it. But before we do, we've got to mention some hot announcements that are going on. The first is this, the bankless badge, bankless members. If you're a member of the bank. You're paid subscriber for the newsletter. You've got to pick up a badge. Why do they need to pick up a badge, David? They got to pick up a badge because they need to get one of these bankless apparel t-shirts. There is only 50 of them in existence, and there's only six left to give out. And we are giving out all of them next week to bankless badge holders. And so this works as a raffle. If you have a bankless badge, you can go sign up for the raffle. Starting on Monday, we're giving out one every single day for the whole week, trying to get these out of my closet and into the hands. of the bankless nation. And that, it doesn't stop there because the week after that is another

Starting point is 00:01:45 week of giveaways, ending with a whole entire ether to one lucky bankless badge holder. So if you are a premium subscriber and you have not yet claimed your badge, go scrape your email for the bankless badge invite link coming to you from Lucas at banklesshq.com. Go find that email. Claim your badge. And if you want to be a part of future raffles and future giveaways, go be a bankless premium subscriber. It's going to, you want, you want the bankless badge. Absolutely. Got to get the bankless badge.

Starting point is 00:02:16 This message is for those of you who are existing premium subscribers. Go search your email for that. If you have any issues, email support at bankless hq.com. Just make sure you pick up your badge before bankless badge week. You don't want to regret it. You don't want to miss out on the raffles. David. Raffles are going to be tight.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Raffles are tight. Oh, they're going to be awesome. Yeah. Better every day is what we, is what the promise is. David, we should also mention something really hot that is coming from Dharma, the Dharma Wallet. They've just added a ton of new functionality that we just had to mention at the front of this show. David, I know you're a big Dharma wallet user. Why? Yeah, it's really a new paradigm in what a Defy Ethereum wallet can be. This has a brand new back-end architecture

Starting point is 00:03:02 that really makes the user experience of managing this thing just a hundred times easier. And we're going to get into this, but one of the things I'm excited about is retail season, which I think is coming. And retail season really needs infrastructure like the Dharma app to really be enabled. So if you are trying to get your friends into defy, yet you're worried about them getting caught up on gas prices or gas management or whatever, the Dharma app is the place to send them. Yep. And here's what you do, basically.

Starting point is 00:03:31 So go to Dharma I.O., you download the app. You connect it to your bank account. What you can do is move funds directly from your bank account, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, wherever you bank directly to defy, not just the app, directly to a defy protocol like Wi-Fi, where you can earn 14% or compound, where you can earn close to double digits in just one tap. That is the key thing. Dharma making it super easy to onboard your friends into the bankless ecosystem, particularly if they live in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:04:01 They've really solved that last mile problem. David, are you ready to get into the week that was crypto? Should we start with markets? We have to. We absolutely have to. Let's do it. Well, let's start with Bitcoin then, as long as we're on markets. What is Bitcoin doing this week? Bitcoin has reached a new all-time high of almost $65,000 for 64,715. Nice draw, Bitcoin. Well done. Well done. Really crossing some milestones as well. There are some pretty cool things about Bitcoin at its current price. Right. Bitcoin is currently worth more than the entire Brazilian stock market. And so the Brazilian stock market in the rear view mirror.

Starting point is 00:04:45 And it's also bigger than the British pound sterling, the total market cap of all British pound sterling. Again, in Bitcoin's rear view mirror. Bitcoin just flying by the milestones. Nice drop. So that makes it the sixth largest currency. Not cryptocurrency. currency, the six largest currency in the world at this point, where it's touching like $1.2 billion. That's a pretty phenomenal milestone for crypto and definitely for Bitcoin. But tell us about ETH. Heath is having a good week, David. Yeah, all the milestones that Bitcoin is flying by, Ether is also flying by its own milestones

Starting point is 00:05:19 even faster. We are perhaps on the verge of crossing $2,500 Ether, which is a nice round number to look back at. we are currently at the price of $2,465. The high right now, the high that we touched a couple hours ago is $2,4.985. And we are currently at the price of $2,455. A really, really strong performance of Ether in this last week. And as always, guys, when you listen to this, it could be higher, could be a bit lower. We don't know, but it is definitely flying this week.

Starting point is 00:05:55 And we'll talk about maybe some of the reasons for this, but the macro reason might be it's repeating history. Right. What is Anthony Sassano telling us on these charts and these graphs here? Right. So he's comparing, Anthony Sizano is comparing Bitcoin in 2017 to Ether now. The meme is always that Ether is always one cycle behind Bitcoin. And in 2017, Bitcoin broke through the previous all-time high of $1,000, went up to $1,300, fell back down to $1,000 to touch that support from the 2013-2014 high. And then we all know the rest of the story. it zoomed up to $20,000 after that.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And this is the exact same thing that just happened to Ether. Ether broke the all-time high of $1,400 at the very beginning of this year, went all the way up to $1900, then fell back down to $1,400, and here we are perhaps repeating history in the same way Bitcoin did last cycle. We are moving up, and if you do the math right, ether goes to $10K after this, if we are indeed repeating history. And so broke the all-time, broke the 2017 all-time high, retested it, went back down to it, found support there. And now we are just zooming up, up, up.

Starting point is 00:07:07 And that's a pretty fun place to be. What's kind of fun to you is that, like, of course, the market caps are much larger this cycle than the last Bitcoin cycle that you were comparing this to. But the units are, there's basically 10 times more supply ether than there are Bitcoin. So the units kind of match too, right? Bitcoin, of course, went on that 2017 run at the bottom of like $190 or so to $200, all the way to $20,000 at the very top. And from a unit perspective, Ether might do the exact same thing. Crazy.

Starting point is 00:07:43 I mean, I'm not calling $20,000 because I'm just not that guy. I'll call $20,000 when we're at $17,000. If it repeats history, right, from a unit perspective, it could be similar. Of course, the market caps are much larger now, so that could. have a influence, but hard to ignore these charts. We'll see if history gets repeated. We're about to flip in PayPal in market cap, Ethereum is. It's 85% of the way to flipping PayPal in terms of market cap. That's pretty major. Yeah. And the ETH price action, D.C. had this tweet where he says, like sometimes he feels like the ETH price action is really, really hot. No, it wasn't D.C.

Starting point is 00:08:20 It was Jacob Franek of coin metrics. And then he sees metrics like this, where Ethereum as a whole is still worth less than PayPal. And then he's reminded about how incredibly early we still are, because Ethereum should be worth more than PayPal. Like, give me a goddamn break. All right, David, let's talk about Total Locked in Defi. How's DeFi doing with Total Locked these days? We were flat for a really long time, and we are no longer flat. We were pushing up between $40 and $48 million or billion dollars locked in DeFi ever since February. And we couldn't really break through that $50 billion mark. We broke through it.

Starting point is 00:09:00 We are at $58 billion locked in Defi. I think over $10 billion added in the last week. So that's pretty cool. Also, part of the new order of things is compound. Is now the new leader in total value locked in defy. And is the first protocol to have more than $10 billion locked in its application. We never would have seen this coming in 2018 or 2019. This is such a cool story.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Yeah, it's crazy. I noticed Yarn as well. They just hit $3 billion. So major milestone. What this means is we're creeping up to that, not even a year old. We're creeping up to that $100 billion mark. That means money robots, bankless, programmable contracts in code we trust is going to be managing $100 billion of the world's assets.

Starting point is 00:09:49 That's pretty cool. That's pretty sci-fi. Very exciting. David, let's talk about the DFI pulse indexes. Is that reflecting some of this growth? I'm going to look at the weekly. It looks like we're up on the weekly. Yeah, the DPI has been a fantastic asset to hold, especially in the last few days.

Starting point is 00:10:06 Last week, it was roughly around $470, $480. We are all the way up to $540, new all-time high in dollar terms for the DPI index. David, I think when we started talking about DPI, it was around 80 or so. So we've seen a cool 5X, even as we started like talking about DPI and every roll-up. moving forward. But let's look at this chart. I know you like this. Right. DPI ratio to ETH, the DPI to ETH ratio. What are we looking like this week? Right. So DPI versus ETH has been down versus ETH since March, right? So ether as an asset has been the better asset to hold versus DPI ever since the very beginning of March. We are down to the low of 0.2 ether per DPI.

Starting point is 00:10:52 but in this last week, DPI has really rocketed off that point two level, jumping up to point two, so up 10% versus ether, then it fell back down, and then it did it again. And so what I'm seeing here is that DPI is really not wanting to go down below 0.2 ether per DPI, really finding resistance at that point two level. Is this the final destination of DPI resistance versus ether? perhaps, perhaps in the long term. And what this means is that, you know, people are gearing up for defy season. If this support can hold for further and then Ether can finish absolutely mooning and then quiet down,

Starting point is 00:11:36 perhaps some DeFi tokens will start to take the lead. That's what I'm seeing in the charts. This is all means that Ether is doing well, but DeFi tokens are doing even better. Even Weller. Which is sort of interesting. Yes, even weller. All right, we've got to talk about some of the reasons for this. And one of the reasons might be the launch of coin.

Starting point is 00:11:57 So coin, of course, this is Coinbase's much awaited, not initial public offering, but they are going public and they went public on Wednesday. Maybe this is part of the reason that ETH is flying up. This is part of the reason that DPI, DFI tokens are flying up. We'll talk a bit about that later. But tell us how coin has. responded and how it's done since launch, David. Yeah, so Ryan in that upper left next to the coin ticker go from two-hour time zone to down to like, go 15 minutes, go to 15-minute

Starting point is 00:12:30 time tickers, yeah. And so coin launched at the price of $410 and immediately fell all the way down to $330. And I believe at $330, Coinbase is valued at $85 billion, somewhere around that mark. It looks like it's around $66 billion. It looks like it's around $66 billion. Yeah, and Ryan, in our 2021 bankless predictions, we predicted that Coinbase would, we didn't really put a time frame on it, but I think pretty soon after its launch, it would be trading above $100 billion. And so jury's still out. There are plenty of buyers who are buying coin right now, but it looks like there's also plenty of sellers who are finally getting liquidity on their Coinbase equity. I don't expect this asset to be below $100 billion for a long time. I think this is going to. reverse pretty damn quickly here. Yeah, it could catch on. We talked about this in our Market Monday, that this could become sort of the meme stock for crypto.

Starting point is 00:13:29 It's interesting. Later, we'll talk about how Wall Street bets, for instance, the subreddit that is forever banned crypto is no longer banning crypto. Why? Same day that coin was released because they can get in on some of the action in their Robin Hood accounts. That's probably why. But what's also happening is hedge funds and financial institutions,

Starting point is 00:13:49 are now able to access crypto exposure in a better way, a way at least that works with their existing rails, publicly traded companies, stocks they can invest in. Kathy Woods Ark Investment Fund, which is an incredible fund. They've done incredibly well, gotten ahead of many major technologies. Probably the best performing fund in all of 2020 and 2021.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Kathy's just killing it. Not even by a little bit, by a magnitude. Yes. By the way, we got to get Kathy on the podcast. Anyway, 200, yeah, 246 million worth of Coinbase is what Arc bought on the day that it debuted. So it's going to be hard to see how Coinbase like goes too low in this kind of backdrop with this kind of support that that's coming in the middle of a bull run. What are your thoughts here, David? Yeah, we just have to remind ourselves how long liquidity has been locked up for people who own equity in Coinbase and how ready they are, especially people who are. savvy about crypto, how ready they are to double, triple, quadruple down on their

Starting point is 00:14:53 crypto exposure. So I know Chris Berniske thinks this is true. It's that people that have equity and Coinbase are selling their coin equity so they can access Bitcoin, Ether, defy tokens. And he says that he has the numbers to back that up. And so like there's just a wealth shift going on. Coinbase equity holders are shifting out of Coinbase and shifting into crypto and then everyone who doesn't have any coin base is shifting into coinbase there's just a bunch of a churn in the in the coin asset right now you know what this kind of makes sense to me if i'm a coin base employee right our typical coin base investor with now some liquidity on the coin token i'm i'm generally like a smart money investor right i work at a major crypto exchange i'm not just looking

Starting point is 00:15:38 on kind of youtube videos uh and like finding yeah except bankless and finding that the new hot thing to invest in i'm relatively informed And what we've seen is many of the assets, particularly defy assets and ETH, that Coinbase lists have gone up since the day that coin was listed. So I think there's something to what Chris Berninski is saying with these employees and insiders sort of cycling back into crypto. That's what I would do with part of the proceeds if I was in that position. David, we've got a lot more to cover. Guys, before we do, we want to tell you about the fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. Balancer is Defi's most powerful automated market maker.

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Starting point is 00:18:30 Try it out. Download Metamask for desktop or mobile now at metamask.io and start swapping. All right, guys, we are back with releases. David, this is a really, exciting sort of combination release. This is Ave plus Maker teaming up. What's going on here? Yeah, this is some really cool defy money stuff. This is why we are here, right? Avey, Maker, getting closer together as a protocol. Maker has one competitive advantage that no other defy app on Ethereum has, which is the ability to, it has the rights of issuance, the rights to print money. That's what Maker does. It can print die. It only prints it. It only prints under certain parameters, but AVE wants to tap in, get closer to that power to mint dye

Starting point is 00:19:18 by directly integrating the AVEA protocol, the AVEA money market into the ability to directly put collateral into MakerDAO and mint die on behalf of AVE. So AVEA is, but it's got V2 on L1. It's also got an integration on Polygon, and it wants to be in many other L2s as well. and it wants all of these different ways to access AVE to have the same MakerDAO back end. And so this is going to, in theory, add a bunch of liquidity to die because AVE can guarantee above and beyond and manage collateral into MakerDAO as a protocol. And so all of a sudden, like a lot of liquidity that AVE has can be put into MakerDAO

Starting point is 00:20:04 to help with the die liquidity and die peck and dye blending and borrowing rates. And so AVE and MakerDAO coming together. It's really cool because this is not a user to protocol interaction. This is a protocol to protocol interaction, which is super exciting. It's also a model that we've seen in traditional finance. So think of MakerDAO it's like the central bank and Avey as a commercial bank. Of course, these are both money protocols. So all of this can be automated.

Starting point is 00:20:30 But it's a similar sort of relationship. You've got sort of the underlying money printing bank apparatus, banking apparatus that is MakerDAO. And you've got a commercial bank, which is AVE for lending and borrowing. Super exciting to see this sort of combination innovation here. David, let's talk about why gas fees on ETH are going down. Finally, they're going down a little bit. Why? What's happening?

Starting point is 00:20:53 Yeah, I'm used to gas fees only going up. It's actually a pleasant surprise that gas fees are going down. And so there's this new service called FlashBots that has allowed a lot of the gas auctions that Arbitrage bots fight for to occur off chain. And so what's happening is that all of these arbitrators who are consuming all of the gas base and bidding up average gas prices are just fighting for those for the rights to process transactions in an off-chain manner, which really allows for a more efficient market discovery of what gas should be. And so as a result of that, there's a lot of transactions going in that didn't actually

Starting point is 00:21:33 have to compete with other transactions. And so this is actually just turning into a cut in half, if not more, the amount of gas that people are paying. So really nice, really nice. So what's happening is basically these arbitrators, David, who are kind of running these bots, instead of doing the auction and competing in the Ethereum protocol, they're using flashbots to go off protocol and do these auctions directly with miners. So this is what we've called in the past MEV, minor extractable value, right?

Starting point is 00:22:02 So there's value in the arbitraiser is doing this. And there's value for miners in doing this if they get paid. But rather than that happening on-chain, that's now happening in this kind of side network off-chain. And so it's alleviating the gas demand on-chain, which is good for users in one way. But it's bad for users in another, right? Because there's some front-running going on, right?

Starting point is 00:22:24 Like there's some reordering of transactions going on that benefit arbitragers. Are we also concerned about that? I mean, we are concerned about MEV, but I don't think there's any more MEV happening, minor extractable value happening as a result of this. It's just the fighting for who gets to claim that MEV is happening in a different realm. We are always concerned about the instability that maximum extractable value is what we are trying to call it instead of minor extractable value. However, I don't think this is actually changing how much MEV there is at stake. Yeah, makes sense. And we're definitely going to talk about MEV in the future.

Starting point is 00:23:03 It's going to be a major theme across bankless and crypto. Another major theme, I think, David, is exchanges, crypto exchanges, becoming more like crypto banks, adding more services. This is Binance, launching tokenized stock trading services, starting with Tesla, starting with the biggest meme stock of all, of course, a good place to start. All you have to do is trust Binance, right? So it's not a bankless money system. But what's happening here, David?

Starting point is 00:23:33 Yeah, Binance is just making synthetic assets that are on legacy stock markets. And the difference between the legacy stock market and finance is finance is offering these assets to people who don't live in America, aren't domiciled in America, and don't have access to the NASDAQ or to the New York Stock Exchange. So it's one part, like democratization of financial assets. It's one part very dubious, legally gray financial activity that you may. American regulators are not going to be pleased with. And so this is always an interesting story. Binance is kind of like one foot in crypto, one foot in legacy, yet they are a real company in

Starting point is 00:24:10 real meat space. And that is always interesting to me. There's going to be friction about behavior like this. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be interesting to see. But I think one major theme of bank lists that we predicted since the early beginnings is the rise of exchanges becoming crypto banks, right? Will these be the new banking overlords of our system or will we have more of a defy future? I think it might be a combination of both, but we'll talk more about that in a little bit. This is some cool functionality. Raid Guild has put out. This is a Dow that builds things in the Ethereum ecosystem, right?

Starting point is 00:24:45 So this is a smart invoice, David. So it's like an invoice that's programmable. Are you up to speed on what this does? Yeah, I remember reading about this really quickly, but it's kind of an invoice that turns it on its, that is inside out or backwards, where you can give someone the invoice before labor is done and the invoice, whoever it has to pay, can pay that invoice, but not send the money. So the invoice can be fulfilled and then labor can be done and then the invoice can be executed. And so it's a way for laborers to gain assurances that they are going to be paid for their labor

Starting point is 00:25:21 because they can see that the invoice has been paid and then they do the labor and then they actually receive the money. So it's a little bit like a time lock contract where the person paying for the laborer or paying for the services puts up the money. And so the labor giver or the laborer sees that the money is there and they can feel assurances about that they are going to get paid if they do the labor. And so this is really important when we talk about like global finance between internet strangers. There's a lot of that in the world of crypto is people do work for other people that they don't know and haven't met. And so reducing that those, those trust assumptions by something like this is really helpful.

Starting point is 00:26:00 Yeah, what's really cool is this is another function of something you can do when you have programmable money. This would not be possible in traditional financial ecosystem. But with Ethereum with DFI, you can actually program invoices to execute on milestones, to escrow things. Very cool, new primitive. You know, in time, this will be the way we do invoicing. I'm fairly certain.

Starting point is 00:26:22 David, let's end with releases there and get to the news. we got to touch the Coinbase listing once again. This is from the SEC. So this is the SEC release or the filings, the Coinbase release of, I believe this is their form S1. So this is sort of all of the disclosure information that Coinbase provides investors prior to listing, prior to going public. There's a lot of really interesting information here.

Starting point is 00:26:52 One thing I'll pull out, this was written inside of the filing, but also, came across in some of the interviews that CEO Brian Armstrong did was a statement he made that he expects 50% of future revenues to come not from his exchange business, but from non-trading businesses in the next five to 10 years. Those are things like staking, custody, debit cards. David, it's like banking stuff, not exchange stuff. Banking stuff. Right? Like, back to the theme. we're just talking about with with binance this is coin base morphing into a new type of bank and to be honest like look this is bankless so we prefer complete self-sovereignty over our money but we are sort of one foot on the shore one foot in the ocean in those in those two worlds but i definitely

Starting point is 00:27:48 prefer a coin base or a gemini to my clunky old wells fargo account right like it's just so much more I can do with even a crypto bank. It's very interesting to see them evolve into a fully fledged banking like system. Even though they're not regulated as banks right now, they're becoming banks essentially. Yeah, and they're becoming much better banks. And this is something that like the legacy banks, the Wells Fargo, the Bank for America is that they just do not understand what is happening here or the forces at play. Coinbase is going to be a better bank, perhaps out of the good nature of base leadership, but more definitely because they have to be because their competition is defy. And defy is the best money Ux in history period. Once you learn how to manage, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:37 Ethereum and do Ethereum stuff, the defy bankless world is really just competitive. Like the yields are higher. Everything is just better. And like it's just, and what Coinbase is morphing into is a bank that is closer to DeFi than Bank for America, Wells Fargo, blah, blah, blah. And so as a customer service or as a as a just what their product and offerings are are just going to be orders of magnitude better than Wells Fargo and all the other legacy banks that just don't understand anything and aren't trying aren't they the Wells Fargo and all the legacy banks are having that revolution happen to them the DeFi bankless revolution coinbase is undergoing the revolution they are taking the revolution by the horns and saying we are going to be a new age bank

Starting point is 00:29:24 with perhaps defy in the back, and it's going to be able to just, they're going to give better products and services to their customers. USC staking on Coinbase is, not staking, but like APY is, is 1%, which, I mean, it's not high comparison to defy, but it's still like a hundred times higher than your typical checking and savings account in Wells Fargo. And so these new crypto banks are the new banks. They are the new banks for the young people who are ready to accept them. You know what, David, I love that description. I also would say, let's not stop at a new set of banking systems. Let's also go to Defi. But I think Coinbase, to your point, is aware of what's going on in Defi too. In fact, Defi is written all over their risk section in this filing of what could potentially disrupt even Coinbase. So they're looking at that. One way to your point that DeFi is kind of forcing Coinbase's hand a little bit, maybe a small way. is Coinbase just gave all of their employees or 1,700 employees shares. Just airdropped them Coinbase shares.

Starting point is 00:30:28 This sounds similar to some of the token mechanisms that we've seen in Defi. And I think it's maybe a nod, a recognition of what's going on in Defi. They had to sort of do the same thing. Yeah, we wrote about Uniswap, when Uniswap gave 400 tokens to all of its users. Unfortunately, Coinbase regulatorily and just like logistically, can't airdrop Coinbase equity to all of its users. Also, there's like 48 million Coinbase users when there was only 100. Oh, I wish they figured out a way to do that. Hopefully Gemini will when they IPO, you know? But like this is companies don't do this. Companies don't have to give their

Starting point is 00:31:07 employees equity. Coinbase elected to do this. And this is something that I see like as crypto culture exporting itself into the rest of the world. The values and ethos of what happens when you distribute wealth in ways that benefit more people looks good upon you. And this is a planting a flag for all the legacy companies that never did anything like this for their employees. Coinbase is like, look, we're the hot new thing on the legacy stock market. And we just gave all of our employees $25,000. No matter if they are an entry level employee or they are a C level employee, they got the, everyone got the same number of shares, airdrop to them. This is a new, this is a new, We are moving the overton window of capital into better and better wealth distribution mechanisms.

Starting point is 00:31:54 And I think that this got started by Uniswap and now it's moving its way into the equity market with Coinbase. Nice job, Brian. Nice job, Brian. I hope that the next crypto bank IPO listing rewards some users. That would be awesome. So if the Winklevoss Twins are listing, guys, if you can make that happen when you go public, that would be really cool. Okay. David, let's go to some Ethereum upgrades.

Starting point is 00:32:19 The first is this. Ethereum just had a new upgrade. So this is a hard fork of Ethereum, but not an aggressive hard fork where a third party, this is a kind of a planned community hard fork where everyone decides to update their nodes. What was packed inside of this Berlin upgrade? Yeah, a bunch of just deep coding stuff that I am not familiar with. Some gas prices got remanaged, some new. transaction types are in there, really just some protocol, deep protocol level stuff that I just

Starting point is 00:32:51 don't understand. It doesn't really impact the average user of Ethereum. But as an unfortunate result of these hard forks that Ethereum commits to every now and then to upgrade the network, we actually had some hiccups with one specific client, which resulted in some bugs that people dropped off the network. So that's why you might have gotten some bad reporting if you use Zapper or Xerion, some tokens didn't show up, or EtherScan report. Stale transaction, stuff like that. We had some consensus issues. There's already a update sent out to the Open Ethereum client, which is the client that

Starting point is 00:33:25 was experiencing these bugs. And so if you are running an Open Ethereum client, make sure you go update that to the new patch that was just released. Yep. I believe it's already been taken care of. And of course, this is not like core consensus issues. This was issues with like block explorers and people using the Open Ethereum clients. It's also why we have client diversity, as we talked about the Justin Drake article.

Starting point is 00:33:46 in the Justin Drake podcast, of course. The important thing, if you were a regular Ethereum user, nothing you have to do. Everything is upgraded for you. And we are one step closer to the next Hard Fork, the London Hard Fork, which includes EIP 1559. Yeah, that is not a minor change. That is a very exciting change.

Starting point is 00:34:08 Maybe coming this summer, we'll see. If I get my Ethereum knowledge right, there's some of the updates in this Hard Fork were prerequisites of EIP1. 1559. So that leads into that. So now next step, EIP-1559 in a couple months. There you go. All right. David, consensus, the people behind Metamask, the people behind Infura, a number of early Ethereum projects that have been. So Gitcoin, so important to the success of Ethereum, just raised $65 million. And who they raised it from is super interesting to me.

Starting point is 00:34:40 JP Morgan, MasterCard, UBS. They raised it from traditional finance. What are your thoughts here, David? Yeah, J.P. Morgan has always had a really close relationship with Consensus. They worked on the, JP Morgan had their own private implementation of Ethereum. Then Consensus bought it. They've, they've been shaking hands for a while now. Yeah, and I think consensus is about to really pivot into a new consensus, right? We're about to talk about Gitcoin and how Gitcoin pivoted away from consensus. And I think consensus is pivoting into a studio, an advisory studio or software studio, specifically for for big-name clients like JPMorgan, like MasterCard, who know that Ethereum can help them do stuff, but they don't have the employees or the builders or the knowledge to build it the right way.

Starting point is 00:35:28 So they're tapping into the power of consensus to get that done. Yeah, it definitely reflects a desire from some of these legacy banking and traditional financial systems to get exposure into the crypto realm. So that, I suppose, is a good thing. Let's talk about Gitcoin itself. So they have just, as you were mentioning, spun out of consensus. So what's Gitcoin doing here, David? Gitcoin raised over $11 million, specifically from Paradigm.

Starting point is 00:35:57 And Paradigm is like, in my opinion, Ethereum's best VC fund. Paradigms behind Uniswap. And they're really leading the charge into optimism and solving minor extractable value. They are solving all of the hard problems in Defi. And the fact that paradigm led the round into Gitcoin, which shows that they have a lot of faith in what Gitcoin has to offer. So congratulations to Gitcoin graduated from consensus into their own thing. And I think there's going to be a lot of cool stuff coming out of the Gitcoin team.

Starting point is 00:36:30 They are just doing absolutely fantastic. We should have them on sometime soon too. David, let's cut to DYDX, who we just had on bankless. So cool thing about DYDX is they just launched in their own Ethereum, secured layer two using some super cool ZK roll-up technology. And their volume is just off the charts already. Right. So they did 70 million in volume, their perpetuals volume on the weekly, David. Like what this tells me is there is massive demand for layer two block space and for these decentralized exchanges. Once you release it, once you deploy to layer two, we're seeing the demand is

Starting point is 00:37:10 already there. Yeah, in under 10 days, the Ether Perpetual ETH-U-S-D-Pretual swap is over $14 million in volume in 24 hours. And again, this is a brand-new product. These aren't large numbers comparison to older projects, but this is a brand-new thing, and there's already, like, between... And the other cool thing about this is that because they are on layer two, they can do more assets than just Bitcoin and Ether. So now there's AVE-Un-Swap and ChainLink. And what Antonio said on our state of the nation, if you haven't watched that, go watch that.

Starting point is 00:37:40 that they are going to roll out one, at least one asset per week. And so I just expect this L2 exchange just to absolutely explode. And they're definitely going to start with the defy assets. I'm pretty sure. All right, let's talk about. Myfi next is my bet. Yeah. Let's talk about what else is going on in MakerDAO world.

Starting point is 00:38:01 The central bank, as we were referring to it. The DeCentral Bank. The Decentral Central Bank. They're getting into real world assets. And this has long been a part of the maker multi-collateral dye vision is, can we get some more stability for dye from off-chain assets? Here's one of their first. I think they've had several before. But what is this?

Starting point is 00:38:24 What are they doing here with this real-world asset in Maker backing dye? Yeah. So it's important. Like you said, dye wants to be backed as many different assets as possible because that's how you achieve maximum stability. If we only had dye that was backed by ether and then ether dropped. by 50% that's really threatening to die. So not only should we diversify between other on-chain assets, we should also diversify to off-chain assets. And we are now seeing commercial real estate loans, short-term loans coming out of Maker Dow to help to help ridge the gap for liquidity for

Starting point is 00:38:57 people who are investing in real estate. And so this is very interesting. There's an off-chain underwriter, I believe. I'm fuzzy on the details. It's very legally complex. But people that are needing liquidity that they can't find elsewhere can come to Maker Dow strike a deal with the Dow and the Dow can offer them die liquidity for their collateral. And then there's also the infrastructure set up under the conditions of maybe there's a housing market crash, who liquidates the property to pay back the die. All of that is managed. And so there's one world of off-chain assets becoming tokenized on Ethereum and then those tokens trading around. There's the other world of just off-chain assets only going into credit facilities like Maker Dow and staying there,

Starting point is 00:39:42 and then the value of these tokens being turned into die and sent into defy, which is also almost kind of the same thing at the end of the day. And this model seems to be the model that is being pioneered here and perhaps going to be the one into the future. Yeah, it's interesting with like Maker has taken this approach, where, of course, some of this is settled in meat space, right? So it's not completely trustless. But the same time, there is a lot of meat space assets that are available to, to back die, that could be partially imported into the defy ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:40:11 There's something like 100 trillion, maybe more like 100 to 250 trillion in like real estate assets. Imagine all of that on Ethereum. You could mint a lot more die if you had access to a portion of that real estate capital pool. So this is some of it starting to bleed over. And just some grounding here, there's 500,000 dye being minted on the back of these real estate loans. So dye, I think, is over $3 billion. do it'll die so not a great tiny bit just a tiny bit fit in the door I'm expected to grow yeah all right

Starting point is 00:40:42 let's talk about NFTs David this is cool epic epic games studio behind Fortnite yeah that's um yeah so what what are they doing here they've got some plans for the metaverse for NFTs what uh what are the plans here yeah so uh epic games the team behind fortnight and fortnight just exploded onto the scene I think in like 2019 2020 and fortnight was free but they made an insane amount of money selling skins and like other packages. And so I think what they are seeing is they are seeing the possibility of making NFTs on Fortnite, perhaps tradable skins, tradable unique

Starting point is 00:41:18 assets. I don't know. But it's just obvious that some company that is making a killing selling assets in the game transitions those assets into NFTs on Ethereum. We know that this is product market fit. I have no faith or a complete faith. Excuse me. I have extreme. No faith. No faith. Who this is also good for is those building infrastructure for these big game studios. One of the companies building infrastructure for these studios is immutable. And they have a ZK roll-up base, Starkware technology, the same technology that powers DYDX, which we just talked about. They've rolled that up into an NFT-specific exchange that is secured by Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:42:02 Perhaps that's something that Epic can tap into in the future. and they've just announced a ton of different launch partners too. This is pretty cool. Yeah. And the golden age of NFT gaming is perhaps ahead of us, specifically enabled by Immutable and Immutable X by Immutable. Immutable is also the team behind Gods Unchained, the trading card game. And so they are eating their own dog food.

Starting point is 00:42:28 They needed their scaling solution to build, to make Gods Unchained their game that they made better. And so they made Immutable X. And so they know what they needed and then they built it. And now all these other platform games are coming to deploy themselves on Immutable X. On Immutable X, like gas, there's no such thing as gas transactions. Like it's basically all free. It's so scalable.

Starting point is 00:42:50 Absolutely. And still secured by Ethereum. So super cool. I'm expecting big things here, David, especially these game studios start to enter these legacy game studios. Let's talk regulation. Gary Gensler confirmed, finally confirmed as Joe Biden, SEC chair replacing Jay Powell, who's not like there was a, I think there was an intern person taking that role, but Jay Powell was the last chairman under the Trump administration.

Starting point is 00:43:18 What are your thoughts here? Yeah, so we just had that podcast with Hester Hester Perce, who expressed optimism about Gary Gensler as the SEC chairman. And this is not a world that I'm familiar with, but Hester Perce is CryptoMom. And CryptoMom is giving Gary Gensler the thumbs. up. And so if you don't care about regulation, it's kind of all you needed to know. But we do want faster, quicker regulation coming out of the SEC to help provide clarity for teams that just need to do stuff. Issue tokens. Hester Perth has this three-year clause that allows people to issue

Starting point is 00:43:55 tokens and have them not be security so long as they decentralize within three years. If that gets passed, that's really, really obstinate for clarity for people that want to issue tokens, but feel like they are hamstrung by regulation. So many good things I think can come out of this and I'm optimistic for it. Yes, this three-year safe harbor proposal, which he talked about in the podcast that just came out on Monday on the bankless podcast. She has updated that and she actually put it in GitHub for like people to comment on people to fork. Super cool, super like crypto native of her. Why is she called crypto mom? Because of stuff like this. Just so plugged in. You got to catch that podcast. You get a sense of her perspective on Gary Gensler. I,

Starting point is 00:44:35 I feel like if I'm reading between the lines, Gary Gensler may not give crypto everything it wants. In fact, some things might be not great for crypto, but it will give clarity, which is great. Which is a benefit and which is good. And Hester seemed pretty confident of that.

Starting point is 00:44:51 So we'll see how that evolves. Probably good news for crypto on balance. David, let's talk about some weird news. I don't know why banks are doing this, right? So bankless Twitter tweeted out, whoever controls that account, bankless Twitter, on Coinbase Launch Day. No who even controls that anymore.

Starting point is 00:45:10 I don't even know. I just see the tweets and I'm like, oh, yeah, I agree with this. Tweet it out, the banks are scared on Coinbase Launch Day. And you know what? I think they are scared, David. You know why? Because Coinbase is creeping up in market cap to some of the biggest banks in the world. It's like a shot across the bow. This is a tweet from Cameron Winkle boss. He's saying, you know, He's quoting that Gandhi quote. And he says, like, you know, then they fight you. This is the bank's fighting us part.

Starting point is 00:45:41 HSBC, a major bank, I think the sixth largest bank in the world, is not only banning the purchase of Bitcoin. It's your HSB client. They don't want you purchasing Bitcoin through them. But you can't even purchase companies, stock publicly traded companies like micro strategy that own Bitcoin. They're stopping that too. They're banning that too.

Starting point is 00:46:02 This is a memo. from HSBC to all of its clients that you can no longer purchase micro strategy because they have Bitcoin, crypto on the balance sheet. David, what is going on? Who do these banks think they are? This is so dumb. Like, why control it? Like, there's probably some compliance reasons that some of the lawyers or compliance teams say, hey, we shouldn't do this. But other people are doing it. And like, there's no benefit to this for their customers. Their customers only lose. Like, and why are you fighting it. It just makes no sense to me. I do not get it. Like any, any time a bank fights this, they leave the opportunity for the banks to not fight it to profit from it. Coinbase gets it.

Starting point is 00:46:46 Coinbase grows in market cap, gross an influence. I hope a coinbase is like, yes, please ban everything. Every single bank ban Bitcoin so we can have it all. Like this is just a nonsensical strategy. And it's insulting to the self-sovereignty of people everywhere. And a stark reminder as to why money needs to be a public good. Because if they can control what you buy and how you buy it, then you are under the control of people dictating your lives, which I'm personally not a fan of. I know this about you.

Starting point is 00:47:17 I do feel like they're digging their own grave, David. But you know what? The fact that they have the audacity to do it so blatanty. Right? Like I think they know that they still have some strings that they can pull. They have a monopolistic. private, public partnership with nation states. They have lobbyists in Washington. They have lobbyists in London. They have lobbyists in all of the governments all over the world. There are some strings they could pull.

Starting point is 00:47:45 And if things get nasty and they really want to stop crypto, I think they may try to pull those strings as well. So we'll see if they ramp up and escalate the fight long term. They're digging their own grave. But short term, I think they still think they're in power. They still think they can control us, man. Oh, that's cute. That's cute of them that they think that. I do want there to be at least one bank that tries to do everything in their power to stop this revolution from happening just so we have this example model of what a complete failure looks like in five to 15 years. Maybe it's HSBC. I feel like it's not going to be Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo is just going to be like, eh, we're not doing anything. We're not innovating, whatever. We're good here. We're going to do

Starting point is 00:48:26 nothing. All right, David, we've got some hot takes. We've got to get to you. that are super cool. But before we do, let's talk about the sponsors that made this roll-up possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants.

Starting point is 00:49:11 We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a Unigrant at Unigrants.org

Starting point is 00:49:38 and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide and on Gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets including many of the hot defy tokens and it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid dye markets

Starting point is 00:50:15 Gemini just launched their earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets if you're tired of paying fees in defy where you don't want to worry about defy exploits but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH, so whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time.

Starting point is 00:50:51 You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com slash go bankless. All right. We are back with the takes of the week. Here's a take, kind of a news take, but also a take in and of itself. Wall Street bets, R slash Wall Street bets, of course, that made news like worldwide when the GME GameStop stock fiasca was going on. They have previously not allowed crypto discussion.

Starting point is 00:51:28 David Bankless has tried to get in there, post something cool. Like, hey, check what we're doing in Defi, NguSwap, ban, instant ban. Now they've just released, the mods have just released a post that said crypto discussion is now okay. This has got to be partially as a result of the Coinbase coin listing. What are your thoughts here? Yeah, we've talked to a few times about this in a distant past, specifically during D-Fi summer about the concept

Starting point is 00:51:54 of composable communities the bankless nation and the Wall Street Betts communities are extremely composable. They just don't know it yet. They just don't know it yet. There's perhaps more ape culture

Starting point is 00:52:04 and more D-Gen culture in Wall Street Betts. Really? Oh, yeah, dude. Yeah, they're yolo into GME at whatever, yeah, for sure. More D-Gen than D-Fi? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:15 Oh, yeah. They are Seafi D-Gens. Absolutely, they are. And I don't think they understand the degree of product market fit that Defi has for some of these people. And I really am hopeful that the Wall Street Betts community and the bankless and Defi communities have this fantastic marriage. So if any listener is a part of both, do your best to be in the Wall Street Betts subreddit and talk about this subject. Because they already know what it's like to be censored. they already know the pains of centralization.

Starting point is 00:52:50 They love to degen an ape. Like, what more do they want? And so help spread that message. If you're in the Wall Street Betts subreddit, help spread that message. We're trying to get in there. We're trying to shake hands with the community. We want them to be listeners and subscribers to bankless,

Starting point is 00:53:04 and we want to help them go bankless because that's what they want. They just don't know it yet. I think this is a major step, though, to tearing down the wall. And I think, what, was the wall constructed because of 2017, David? had a whole bunch of these like, you know, useless token projects who are spanning them and then

Starting point is 00:53:23 crypto's a scam, all of this. And so they created this blanket policy. Well, things are changing. The narrative is changing. Now could be the time for more composability. David, I've got to take here. Are you ready for it? Let's do it. Dude, people say Ethereum is hard to use, right? People say that. Have you ever tried to register an LLC on a state website, state of Idaho, state of Virginia, of Washington, like set up an LLC and pay withholdings. Have you ever tried to do that? Yeah, it's pretty goddamn awful. It's terrible. Like these state websites. I want to rip my eyeballs out. It feels like they're built in circa 2000 and like no one updates them. It's like they don't want you to do that. It's like, hey, they make it so difficult. And every single state has a like a certain thing you

Starting point is 00:54:13 have to register. Like their entire companies like gusto and other third party. that just basically take care of that pain for you now. This is the infrastructure we've had to build on top of this. But I'm just comparing that because what are these state registries? Well, they're just basically a legal meat space way to register what? Register a capital pool. That's what an LLC is. That's what a C-Corp is, a capital pool.

Starting point is 00:54:36 Well, I could do the same thing on Ethereum. I do that for breakfast. With one transactions. Like, seriously. Capital pool for breakfast. This is what I mean. So there are some things on Ethereum. that are already 10x better, right?

Starting point is 00:54:51 Like people don't think of Ethereum as competing with like state registries and governments in the LLC and C-Corp, but it kind of does. Right. Right. I can spin up a Dow, capital pool. Multi-sig. Anyone can join it. Multi-sig. I've got my banking structure already built into the system.

Starting point is 00:55:09 I've got like any, I've got an ID system built. Everyone has basically their Ethereum addresses their bank account. It's just a couple of clicks. So it makes me pretty excited about the disruptive capability, even though Ethereum is hard to use, right? It is. It's already better. If you know Metamask and you're kind of a D5 super user, it's already better than what we have today in these state registry systems. It's much, much preferable than all other legacy financial institutions.

Starting point is 00:55:37 Yeah, you said it very well. No more needs to be said about that. Well, let's get some more from Hayden then. Hayden Adams, a bankless podcast guest now, bankless podcast alumni. I'm excited about that. What's his take here, David? Yeah, his take is that the New York Stock Exchange has 2,800 trading pairs over the last 228 years, and Uniswap V2 has 36,000 trading pairs in one year. Two of those I've made, a POV crypto token.

Starting point is 00:56:04 There's a trading pair there, and this other token, BAPT token, also as well. Two trading pairs. I listed two tokens on markets with Uniswap. Imagine me trying to get something listed on the NYSE. Wouldn't happen. Wouldn't happen. And this is exactly to your point. Like all of the stuff that requires paper pushing and bureaucracy is just now it's just a transaction on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:56:27 Just done. Like here it is. Like, oh, you want a trading pair? Sure. You'll just hide. You have to bring your own liquidity. But like whatever. Just build it.

Starting point is 00:56:36 And then you can build it. It just reminds me if people want an analog, right? Like in the early days of media, there were like what? Like four different news stations. That's it. Right? And then we move to YouTube. You have like hundreds of thousands of channels, right?

Starting point is 00:56:51 Like millions of channels, millions of different content producers. Everyone can produce content. It democratized media. We're democratizing finance. We're democratizing asset creation and asset exchange. Everything's going to be tokenized. This is why Uniswap now has 13x or more the amount of trading pairs than the New York Stock Exchange. It's only been around for like two years, three years.

Starting point is 00:57:14 Like it's incredible. Imagine how many is going to have by the end of this bull market. And what's crazy to me is people don't see this coming. And it's like, it's coming. It's happening. Dharma sees it coming because you can, anything that's on Uniswap, you can get into it with Dharma. There you go.

Starting point is 00:57:29 There you go. All right. Let's talk about this tweet, I guess. All right. So this shows how early we are. This is a, somebody called my attention to this. This is somebody on Bloomberg. And they are showing a, a ticker chart of like Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:57:46 Crypto assets and crypto related assets. They misspelled, yes, they misspelled Ethereum. So it's a therium. Yeah, they miss the E at the start. They miss the E at the start. And it feels to me like, so that the anchor is kind of sitting here presenting it, right? Like, Ethereum is still not a mainstream finance name. They're still misspelling it on broadcast TV.

Starting point is 00:58:07 This is how early we are, David. And it should be ether, not Ethereum. This is actually something that bugs me about even people inside the crypto space. It's like, they say like, oh, I bought three Ethereums. Like, no, you didn't. You didn't buy three Ethereums. You bought three Ether. Like, get that. It's a nuanced point, but like it's important. I agree. I agree that's important. I've, I, in like, I used to correct people and I used to be like, what you mean is Ether. But like now I've taken it just like, hey, it's just more important

Starting point is 00:58:34 that we're talking about Ethereum and like, so I don't correct people. But people in the know know that there is Ethereum the Network and Ether the asset, definitely. Which brings me to a question. I actually tweeted this out. And I want your perspective on it, David. This is a survey I tweeted out. How much longer will this bull market last? And so I put four options here, three to six months, six to 12 months, 12 to 18 months, or more than 18 months. And you can see the results here on the screen. 46 percent, the vast majority said three to six months. And then it was kind of scattered to the other answers. What do you think, David? Well, let me finish off going through the numbers. So 46 months for three, 46 percent said three to six months.

Starting point is 00:59:17 30% said 6 to 12 months. Only 7% said 12 to 18 months. And then 16% said more than 18 months. I was in the 7% of 12 to 8 months. So I was in the significant minority. 12 to 18 months, yes, right. And I'm super surprised by people only thinking that this cycle goes for only three to six more months. I guess I'm a contrarian.

Starting point is 00:59:42 We have more than six months less in this thing. Absolutely. Okay. But let me ask you. So 12 to 18 months, that's longer than previous cycles. Yes. So you are a long cycle believer then. I am a fan of the super cycle thesis.

Starting point is 00:59:55 Yes. Two cycles and one. I'm a fan of this. Yep. So this is that the cycles, the bull market cycles, just get longer. That's what you want to see. Longer and bigger and bigger because we are in a late stage fee credit cycle. Money is free.

Starting point is 01:00:09 Money is distorted. And there's so much cash looking for places to go. And crypto assets are the only remaining. unallocated asset class that is specifically antagonistic to the decline of fiat. If there's ever going to be a super cycle in crypto, it's now. This is the cycle that crypto goes mainstream. Maybe in three to six months where all these 46% of respondents saying that's where the bull market ends, maybe that's when we have a very significant 40 to 50% correction.

Starting point is 01:00:39 And then we just keep on fucking going for six to 12 more months. Like it's super cycle. Wait. Super cycle time. Okay, let me ask you, do you believe that this is the last cycle? And here's what I mean by that. There is a thesis that goes around in crypto, which is like, this isn't going to be pattern recognition for the past four to five cycles that we've seen in crypto.

Starting point is 01:01:00 This time it's different. This time we go mainstream. Don't expect your 80 to 90 percent drawdowns on Bitcoin and Ether at least. And maybe even defy tokens. This is the point. We've already passed the point of no return. We're not going to get those types of things moving forward. And so this is really the last cycle.

Starting point is 01:01:19 So what that's kind of saying is there won't really be a bear market after this. Like we'll see dips, but it'll level off. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's completely in line with the super cycle thesis, right? When we were in the bear market in 2018, 2019, I was listening to, and I was still very new to crypto at that time. People are saying like, oh, this new cycle is during the next cycle, there's going to be all the gains again because crypto markets go in cycles. And I was thinking, like, but if everyone knows. knows it goes in cycles. Like, if everyone knows it, it shouldn't be like that. It should do something

Starting point is 01:01:52 different. It turns out it did exactly like what people said. We had, we're just going through a crypto cycle right now. But the difference is, is that crypto is mainstream now. And now there are the world's largest capital institutions buying into crypto assets, Bitcoin, ether, putting on the balance sheet, investing in the space. The difference is that there is no further places to go after this. The, the top of the 2017 markets, we did not breach into the mainstream. We did breach into hedge funds. We didn't have a micro strategy. This time we have all those things. There's no further places to go. There's already like conspiracies about essential banks stacking Bitcoin. Like there's no more there's no further places to go right. And so in six three to six

Starting point is 01:02:31 months we maybe we top out and then have a big correction. But that correction just gets bought really hard and then we just keep on going and then all of a sudden crypto's mainstream. So I didn't vote in my own poll. But do you know what I would have voted for? What would you have voted for around? What guess? You should guess more than 18 months. No, six to 12 months. Six to 12 months. Yeah. I think that, so I think that you could be right.

Starting point is 01:02:56 And there's some probability that what you're saying, long cycle, super cycle, last cycle is right. But I also think that this could get crazier. And we've seen every single cycle of crypto get so insane and so out of whack, so far stretched above. even fundamentals at the time that the valuations don't make sense. Right, right? Like just a dot-com boom, if you will. So I kind of feel like we're going to see a repeat of 2017. Blow on top.

Starting point is 01:03:30 6012 months blow off top. Now, I don't think we'll lose like 95% in ether, and we probably won't lose 80% in Bitcoin. So it'll be muted. But I do think it could play out the 6 to 12 months. So I sort of feel like, and here's the last thing I'll say on that is, as kind of the other perspective on this. If people, like the onus is on people who are saying this time it's different to like

Starting point is 01:03:55 disprove the pattern. And the problem is patterns can become self-fulfilling prophecies, right? So like if all of the crypto-oGs are like, oh, yeah, we've seen this before. We've seen this four times. Like this is what the cycle looks like. At a certain point, they start selling. It creates a self-fulfilling, reflexive flywheel effect on the way down. So I'm not saying for sure.

Starting point is 01:04:14 but if I had to guess, I feel like we've got six to 12 months and then some form of a bear market. But we'll see. I hope you're right, David. You can be right, man. We'll see. Super cycle. That's what I got to say. Super cycle.

Starting point is 01:04:29 All right. Let's talk about this one. So this is Jimmy Rigosa, I believe. What's he saying here? Yeah. So this is an important takeaway for what Ethereum is and why Ethereum has so much sticking power. If any new technology that gets discovered, it actually finds a way to be built on top of Ethereum and tap into the power of Ethereum. Rather than building a competitor, you could actually instead just build an L2 or a side chain that hooks right into Ethereum and tap into all the benefits of Ethereum rather than trying to have to get this new technology bootstrap from day one.

Starting point is 01:05:07 So, you know, Neo-Eostron, they turn into apps in 2017. Solana, Binance chain, they'll turn into apps. apps in 2021. Anything, any innovation that can be built can be placed on Ethereum. And if it can be placed on Ethereum, it was going to be easier to get that thing bootstrapped than just to build a desperate, separate, siloed ecosystem. So Ethereum is the aggregation layer of all technology. And that's the take here. I've heard this a lot in the Ethereum community. It's basically like now we're seeing Solana in Binance Smart Chain and maybe a couple of other Pocod. Maybe this new kind of breed of ETH killer.

Starting point is 01:05:45 But we've seen this movie before. And last cycle, it was the same thing. It was called Neo EOS, Tron, right? These are no longer the ETH killers. So, you know, I tend to believe this very much. I think this cycle continues to repeat. But is this an Ethereum maximalist take from your perspective? Let's go to the next take.

Starting point is 01:06:07 This is one that Bankless retweeted, and this is Vitalik Buteran, on a post in R-Sash, ETH Finance, I think the author of the post, the OPE, was basically saying, hey, I'm starting to hear a lot of Ethereum maximalist type of propaganda. So he compared it to Bitcoin maximalism. And like Safedina Moose and some of the quotes they're saying, there's like, I'm hearing the same sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:06:34 Like, Ethereum is the only one. It will crush all competitors, like, beware and be fearful. And Vitalik is responding to that. And what is he saying in his response? response. Yeah, let me just read this out. Thanks for doing this. We need to be alert to make sure that we do not become the thing that we fight against. I would much rather see people support the Ethereum ecosystem because they agree with its values and social and technological vision and not because we are the strong big thing. Everyone else is a loser and we will crush them. Focusing on the former reinforces the community's moral virtues. Focusing on the latter equally attracts people who have those virtues. The price go up, number go up, virtues and people who do not, and perhaps the latter group, and so it ultimately erodes them. So this is a conversation on values. Do we want people to come into Ethereum because of the technological and cultural merits that it has? Or do we want people to come into Ethereum

Starting point is 01:07:27 because it's going to crush competitors and it's going to win? Which one do we want to promote as a community? And then Vitalik finishes it finishes with. And if the values erode too much, anyone outside the ecosystem really will have a hard time seeing the difference between Ethereum and any other chain. So what's Vitalik is saying is, we should promote Ethereum based on its merits, not because it's going to crush competitors. I wholeheartedly agree with that take.

Starting point is 01:07:53 And, you know, I think what somebody might respond when they read that from Vitalik is basically like, oh, so you're saying every chain is the same, right? And I also, I don't think that's what Vitalik's saying. It's definitely not what I would say, right? The values are really of the chain are really embedded in the protocol. itself. And Ethereum has bankless values, decentralization values, right? It is not a protocol that is

Starting point is 01:08:19 aiming to be built for a small set of validators and folks that can kind of collude together and censor transactions. So I do think that it's important not to become sort of a chain agnostic, because if you're chain agnostic, you're also values agnostic. I'm not values agnostic, right? Like, I'm here for bankless. I'm here so that we can go bankless. not so that we can instill a new set of bankers who now control the Binance smart chain. So I totally resonate with what he's saying. I think is a great point, and only Vitalik can put it in that way. David, should we get to the last?

Starting point is 01:08:56 What are you excited about this week, my friend? Yeah, you want to take this one first run? Yeah, okay. You want me to tell you what I'm excited about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coin. I'm coin release. Coinbase, man.

Starting point is 01:09:07 Like, that's, this is crazy. So what I think we're seeing here is blitzscaling, right? So some Silicon Valley have written posts about blitzscaling in the context of social media. But this is money system blitz scaling, financial system blitz scaling. So Wells Fargo, about 140 or so billion in market cap, right? And we've got Coinbase creeping up on Wells Fargo numbers, right? Like close to 100 billion or so. wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds Wells Fargo.

Starting point is 01:09:41 Here's the thing. Wells Fargo has 45,000 employees, okay? 160 years of Wells Fargo to get to that market capitalization. Coinbase is about to achieve the same thing in nine years, okay, with 1,700 employees. Nine years, 1,700 employees. That is blitz scaling. How are they able to do this? Because they built on crypto.

Starting point is 01:10:05 They didn't built in the legacy finance, traditional. world. They didn't built purely on nation-state-based technology. They built on crypto rails. So that's crazy. Order of magnitude gain. Okay. What's next? What's next is DeFi. What's next is Uniswap. So another order of magnitude gain, you've got Uniswap, which is 38 billion. I would not be surprised, David, if we see sometime in this market cycle an $100 billion unitoken. Like, it's not that far off at this point, right? We talked about how crazy market cycles can get. How many employees? 20, employees. Okay. Another order of magnitude improvement. And they did it in two years, three years. Like this is absolutely crazy. I think the outside world, we've talked about so

Starting point is 01:10:50 often, right, we're talking to Hayden podcast. Why isn't the world talking about the Uniswop story? You know why? I think after some reflection, it's because it's happening way too fast. Right. Like they don't even see it coming. Uncomprehensible. It's uncomprehensible. Like this is not growing in the way that Wells Fargo, they can barely wrap their mind around Coinbase's growth. Banks haven't grappled with that. And now they're going to be faced with the next bank killer, which is DeFi protocols. Good game banks. Right. Like it's over. So that's why I'm excited in the context of the coin launch. The banks can no longer control what's going on. They see coin. They see it's market cap. They see Coinbase. They're going to start getting involved in this. But, you know, the competition is

Starting point is 01:11:35 is just heating up and they're not going to be able to react fast enough to the blitz level of scaling that's happening in defy. And this is, this is just fits into the pattern of history. Technology and technological adoption just accelerates as, as we move forward. Like the iPhone got adopted over X number of years and then every technology after that just gets adopted faster and faster and faster. And that's what we, that's what I see happening in the defy space. And also why, here's what I'm excited about Ryan. And as a result of that adoption, quickening adoption, I'm excited for retail season. Retail season marks the top in 2017. And I think it'll mark the top in this bull cycle as well. But again, it'll be extended. And we just have the infrastructure and the

Starting point is 01:12:18 reasons to support retail. And I am getting, I've been getting texts about crypto for a while. So are we in retail season? We are in the beginning of retail season is what I'm getting for. Like Wall Street Best just opened up to Bitcoin and Ether. And I'm just, I'm getting text from from people that I haven't really talked to that in a while that are asking me about like Chainlink and Doge. And so retail season is definitely getting started. And I think that's ahead of us. And that's why infrastructure like Dharma is going to be really, really helpful to get retail bank accounts connected right into Defi in a way that treats them like a user of Robin Hood with the customer experience. Retail season on the way. I would love to read their responses to those texts where

Starting point is 01:12:59 they ask you about. I said Bitcoin and Ether only. And then and then I got the responsible. Well, what about Chainlink? And I'm like, no, Bitcoin and Ether only. And they're like, what about Doge? And I'm like, Bitcoin or Ether only. And it just took a while. I don't have too much faith. It's just, it's just like, you got to start there and understand why Bitcoin and ether are valuable before you go anywhere else. So it's definitely our advice to people who are new. David, you ready for meme in the week time? Meem of the week. Best part of the Bankless week could roll up. That's why we put it at the end. I'm sharing it. All right. Gains in real life matter too. What are we looking at here?

Starting point is 01:13:34 Yeah, so this is a meeting that's been going around the internet. This was created by the guy behind the bankless Twitter. His name's Mike Wong. And it's got two ladies in the gym, and they are looking at someone, and they're asking, what do you think he's listening to? And the second lady says, probably heavy metal or hard rock. And then it turns into the guy who's also the yes guy, the Chad yes person. I'm pretty sure that's what this illustration is.

Starting point is 01:13:58 And this guy who's lifting 500-pound dumbbell curls. and the text is, and this is alluding to what he's listening to in his headphones, welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and Internet finance, alluding to the guy that's lifting, getting gains, but he's also getting brain gains as well, listening to Bankless. That is awesome. I love this meme. By the way, do you ever listen to podcasts while you work out?

Starting point is 01:14:22 Does this resonate with you? Oh, 100%. I do too. Like all the time. Brain gains on muscle gains, for sure. Yeah, double your gains. Why not? All right, it makes sense.

Starting point is 01:14:32 All right, David, I think that's all we have for the roll-up skies. Risk and disclaimers, of course. Defy is risky. So is Bitcoin. So is ETH. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. It's not for everyone, but we're excited that you're on the bankless journey.

Starting point is 01:14:48 Thanks so much for joining us.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 3rd Week of April (BTC & ETH ATH, $COIN, Berlin Upgrade, Gary Gensler SEC, Bull Market)

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