Bankless - ROLLUP: 3rd Week of November

Starting point is 00:00:00 When you own crypto, what really matters is the security and ownership over your assets. Being a part of the bankless nation means having complete sovereignty over your crypto. The easiest way to do that is with a ledger hardware wallet. A hardware wallet is a little device that manages your private keys for you, so you don't have to worry about proper private key management. Your ledger hardware wallet keeps your private keys private, but still lets you have easy access to your crypto. The combination of my ledger hardware wallet and Metamask lets me store,

Starting point is 00:00:30 or my crypto assets in the most safe way possible, but still lets me easily access Uniswap or all the other Defi apps that I use on a daily basis. If you already have a ledger wallet, you can use the Ledger Live app to participate in some of the money verbs that we discuss in the bankless program. The Ledger Live app is your headquarters for managing your personal crypto finance. It's a great tool to manage the assets you hold on your ledger, as well as receive a portfolio summary of all the assets that you have stored. Using the Ledger Live app, you can buy Bitcoin, Ether, and stablecoins, and have it sent directly to your ledger hardware wallet, skipping over the trusted exchanges and getting your assets into your control. You can even use the Ledger Live app to swap crypto assets natively inside of the app, so you never need to send your crypto assets away from your ledger to make a trade.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Buying a ledger is like buying a fire extinguisher. The best time to get one was yesterday, especially if you're doing something silly, like holding your crypto in a hot wallet that's always connected to the internet. If you haven't gained full control over your crypto yet, go to the link in the show notes and get your ledger today. Bankless Nation, do you want to go fully bankless, but in the real world, Monolith is the Defi account that you need. It wraps your eth address in a bankless visa card, and it does so much more. It closes the loop from Fiat to defy. So you can onboard Fiat to die on Monolith with zero fees. Then you can convert that die to A-Di, which is an interest-bearing savings account.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Again, zero fees. And then you can spend that interest in the real world on a visa card. So you can finally buy your cup of coffee with interest earned in D5. Guys, this is magic. This is the closest thing to the Holy Grail crypto card and Monolith gives you all of it. You need to download the app at monolith.xyz to get your bankless visa card. It's optimized for European listeners. They'll be coming to the U.S. soon. And when you get that visa card, the monolith card, tweet about it when you do. I love seeing it. people unpackaging. Their beautiful bankless visa cards makes me realize that the revolution is here. Search Monolith in the app store. Bankless Nation, welcome to another weekly roll up episode. This is the third week of November. So here's what we do on these episodes. We roll up the week for you. It is Friday morning. We're rolling it up. David always says that. Fantastic way to start your Friday morning. Grab a cup of coffee. Catch a up on the week that was crypto. We take five minutes, five topics. We try to get through this in 25 minutes. First, we talk about the market. That's going to be thick this week. Releases, news,

Starting point is 00:03:16 some hot takes, and then we end with what we are excited about. This gets released every Friday morning on both YouTube and our podcast stream. David, you ready? This is the third week of November year of our Lord 2020. Let's get to the roll-ups. Let's rolling them up. All right. Market time. Bitcoin. That's had a good week in the markets. I'm going to share some price data. I think you're going to be looking at it in just a second. We are over 18,000, my friend. What does this mean? Yeah. And specifically over 18,000, but also since there are new bitcoins out into the market since the 2017 bull run, the combined market cap of Bitcoin is at an all-time high already. So in one respect, we've already broken all-time high. And that actually is the metric, right?

Starting point is 00:04:04 Market cap. It's not like price can vary because supply gets inflated increase over time. So market cap's pretty reasonable. So Bitcoin's at all time high. The total value of the Bitcoin network is at all time high. So congratulations to Bitcoin. It broke through the ceiling. It's there.

Starting point is 00:04:20 And I think people are really bullish about how there seems to be clear skies ahead. Good job, Bitcoin. All right. Let's talk about Bitcoin on Ethereum. Is that up or is that down? It's up. It's always up. It's up by roughly 1,500 bitcoins. We are at a combined almost 152,000 total Bitcoins on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:04:40 All right. What are some other interesting things? So new addresses created. This is a tweet that Glaston put out said they have just observed the highest number of newly created Bitcoin addresses since January 2018. What accounts for this, David? Yeah, part of it has to be new entrances into Bitcoin. That's when Bitcoin price goes up. It's largely a result of more people buying Bitcoin. And we now think because of the macroeconomic environment that a lot of new people are buying Bitcoin. And this is how cycles start. And so seeing that a record new address is, is now holding Bitcoin is indicative of a lot of people coming into this market. So welcome newbies. Welcome to the train. They're on the network. All right. This was an article from Nick Carter. Nine Bitcoin charts already have all time high. So this wasn't only the market cap that we talked about just a few seconds ago.

Starting point is 00:05:32 This is some other things. What were your takeaways from Nick's article? Besides, we're having them on the podcast next Tuesday for State of the Nation, but some takeaways here. Yeah, yeah. We're definitely going to peel back all of the layers with Nick directly on the state of the nation. So stay tuned for that.

Starting point is 00:05:48 But the gist of this is that, you know, everything is correlated and everything is at all-time highs, right? And it would be different if just price was at all-time high and things like active addresses weren't at all-time high. I remember there was that fake-out pump in 2019 where Bitcoin jumped to 14,000. And a lot of these metrics were not at all-time highs, even though price was.

Starting point is 00:06:11 Right now, everything is at all-time high. So that's just an intrinsic message to the fundamentals of the network. Yeah, and it goes through some interesting things that we'll get to on Tuesday about open options, interest in the CME being at all-time highs. Even Bitcoin priced in the Turkish lira is at an end. all-time high, which is an interesting benchmark that he's going to tell us about a little more. Okay, let's get to Heath.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Heath Price. How's Heath hanging in there? I mean, if we are measuring it against Bitcoin, it's been falling behind recently. It seems to be Bitcoin is going through this reflexive cycle of Bitcoin highs, make new Bitcoin highs and Ethereum. And when that happens, other assets tend to get a little shy. Bitcoin tends to suck the air out of the room. And so things kind of just wait and see for Bitcoin to calm down.

Starting point is 00:06:58 The belief is that at the moment that Bitcoin takes a breath, takes a hesitation, the rest of the market will follow suit. And that's kind of where we think Ether is at the moment. It's at $475 being pretty flat. It did break. It's 2020 highs of $489, I believe, with the DFI summer highs. It crept all the way up to $4.95, I believe. But it's kind of, and then there was that crash and now we're holding steady at the mid-470s. Is that, was that a two-year high above 4-90 or so?

Starting point is 00:07:31 Yes, that is correct. Yep. All right. Let's go back to ETH in a second, but want to check out the D-Fi Pulse board that is about the same for a week to week. We're up by 0.3 billion. Oh, okay. 0.3 billion. We'll take it.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Yep. That used to matter a lot more in total locked in D-Fi. But now, you know, 0.3 billion here or there. It was to say among friends. All right. this was an interesting chart as well. Active addresses on Ethereum are going through the roof, it seems like. What's your take here? Yeah, same thing. Just that people are coming into the ecosystem. Active addresses on Ethereum are a little bit more difficult to discern just because there's so many

Starting point is 00:08:14 more reasons to have an address on Ethereum. But nevertheless, like, it's at an all-time high. Like, we don't need to tell you. Like, all-time highs are all-time highs. I keep saying that. Okay. Into the Cryptoverse. So this is our friend Ben. a great post on bankless a while ago. But he actually compares Ether to Bitcoin in like 2015 and 2016. And I mean, this guy is one of my favorite folks in kind of TA. And it's, I think there's some TA folks that are just like, you know, painting things on charts and no, absolutely nothing. Yeah, drawing shapes.

Starting point is 00:08:47 Ben takes a very. Sober? Machine learning, algorithmic, data-backed take on it. and he looks at the long term. So what's he saying in this? He says this is sort of extrapolating his models over to 2014. And he says that the next bubble, so this bull run that we think we have entered,

Starting point is 00:09:09 would put ETH price at $9,900. That's almost at that road to 10K amount. Do you buy this? What's your take? Oh, yeah, the 10K meme is not a meme for just fake memeory reasons. The 10K meme is a meme because it's real. Like, Ethan's going to 10K. We're all going to get it there.

Starting point is 00:09:30 It's interesting. He says the fair value in mid-2023, if you kind of look at his data model here, it's about $900. But, Eath is going to be overvalued by 100% because boat markets swing in the other direction. So he thinks, this model predicts that it would be $900,000, $9,000,000, $900,000,000, by mid-2020-3. That is bullish, my friend. That is by definition bullish. I mean, like, I think his Bitcoin predictions have sort of panned out. And I don't know, it'll be interesting, but good job, Ben, on that. But this is another, I think, interesting data point from Cyrus. So for folks that aren't looking at the visual here, can you spell out what this tweet is about?

Starting point is 00:10:22 Yeah, so Bitcoin and Ether price December 7th, 2017, back in the last cycle, Bitcoin was 17,000, Ether was 470,000. Now in November 17th, two days ago, the prices were exactly the same. And so we've just got three years later, we are full circle back to being at the same price as we were three years ago. The difference is back in 2017, that was the peak of the bull market. And in 2020, it seems to be we are at just the base of the bull market. So what that means, David, is if you held Bitcoin from that date, like three years ago, basically, and you bought Ether, like, it would be the same. There's no difference between those two assets. So like all of the gyration up down, up down in the ratio, everything we're talking about, Bitcoin games, Ether wins, all the fighting, all of it was meaningless. Is that what you're telling me? Like none of it mattered?

Starting point is 00:11:17 So far, yeah. Three years ago to where we started. Yep, exactly. That's exactly right. Also, most importantly, December is a very hot month for ether. And people will remind themselves that after Bitcoin rushed up to 20,000-ish, it kind of fell down to 14,000 while, 14,000, well, Ether ripped from like 470 all the way up to $1,400, right?

Starting point is 00:11:43 Historically, Ether has always done extremely well in December five out of five times. Its best months are all December, and it is no, It is November 20th right now. So I am getting ready. We'll see what Christmas 2020 brings for the price of Eath. Okay, last thing, because we're taking a lot of time on market. But a lot is happening in the market. To be fair,

Starting point is 00:12:03 Defi is going up as well. This is the DeFi Pulse Index that tracks the top 10 or so defy tokens. And how much of that appreciate this this week, David? Yeah, last week ago, seven days ago, it was at $81. It is now at $104. It has done it. Huge, huge bump. People thought DFI was dead.

Starting point is 00:12:24 Turns out DFI was not dead. And last week it outperformed Ether. Very interesting. All right, David, let's get to you releases. So what got released last week? We're really excited about Rocket Pool. And they had a Medasha beta pilot, essentially a beta participation that just concluded there.

Starting point is 00:12:44 Does that bode well for them coming to Maine? I think this post here says maybe a 2021 Q1, Q1 launch of Rocket Pool on staking on the ETH2 mainnet. What would that mean? Yeah, yeah, Rocket Pool just going through Mainnet after main net. The Medalla Beta test net just concluded and they're going to roll out another test net after this, which integrates the RPL token mechanics. That's the whole purpose of the next test net.

Starting point is 00:13:10 The reason why we wanted to just get this in the news is let you guys know, like Rocket Pool progress is happening with Rocket Pool. And I'm really excited about Rocket Pool because it is inherent to Ethereum and it's decentralization. So cool stuff is happening there behind the scenes. But also a lot of people don't have 32Eth to stake, right? This allows them to do it if they have a lot less. All right, let's talk about something else that's cool. So both YFI, the token and BAL, the balancer token, are now available as collateral in Maker Vault. I'll give a quick take on this. I think this is awesome, super bullish, dude, because this is trustless.

Starting point is 00:13:49 capital assets on Ethereum. I am getting and was getting uncomfortable with all of the USDC inside like collateral backing Dye. And this is a very attractive alternative because these assets are all completely settled on Ethereum. There's nothing in some sort of traditional bank account. So I'm super bullish that these assets are emerging and this collateral can be available to back something like Dye.

Starting point is 00:14:18 What's your take? Yeah, I think that's the exact right take. And I think the legacy of Defy Summer 2020 was the emergence of native assets, native defy tokens on Ethereum that have value and therefore can them themselves be collateral. Right. And that's how we retain trustlessness and purity, if you will, in die. Absolutely. And I read summer that I believe the Maker contract is now like the fourth or the fifth largest YFI holder. So a whole bunch is getting put in there. It's like something like four. maybe more. Could be wrong on those numbers, but I think it's pretty close to that. All right, let's talk about another release.

Starting point is 00:14:54 This is the, do you remember Yam? D5Cycise? I remember the first vegetable farm here? We had, they actually just released something. So Yam is still alive and kicking. They release something called the umbrella protocol,

Starting point is 00:15:10 which is actually trying to provide protection of defy acids. I say release, but they're kind of announcing a soon-to-be. be in like alpha, in production alpha, essentially. But what I find interesting about this is that Yam is actually building products. So they've become sort of this, it's a Dow. And they've got, I think, something like three million in assets that have been contributed to their treasury just because whenever Yam trades over a dollar,

Starting point is 00:15:42 a portion of like the proceeds from a rebase go into this treasury. and they're using that treasury to fund interesting DFI projects. Right. Which will probably ultimately have a value capture mechanism to put money back into the treasury. I'm sure that that is involved with this. It's very fascinating. It's almost like a new model for some kind of a Dow organization,

Starting point is 00:16:05 but like different. So I guess they're shipping. They're still like pushing things out there. The last thing we should maybe cover is the EtherSink. Ether. Ether risk. I-esque. Ether risk. Okay. I've always read it. I've never known how to say it. They are delivering something for the real world. David, you want to talk about this? Yeah, this is something that I've always thought would be really, really cool about Ethereum. This is one of these sci-fi futuristic products that I'm pretty bullish on Ethereum in general. I don't know if this is the product that is going to be the future version that I have in my head. But prediction markets and risk markets on Ethereum, in combination with oracles from ChainLink can allow people to purchase insurance on real-world events that can help them secure their lifestyle. And so the Ether Risk team and Chainlink have

Starting point is 00:17:00 offered the ability to purchase crop insurance to people in Kenya. So I'm guessing the way that this works is that like if there's not, the theorized model is like if there's not enough rainfall in your region of the world over a certain period of time, you can buy insurance against that. And so if you are a farmer, you can buy against a drought season. And something like that is being rolled out by the etherist team and chain link. And so that's just really cool. Crop insurance in Defi for areas that would previously not have had access to this type of financial instrument. That's kind of what Defi is all about.

Starting point is 00:17:33 Anywhere, perhaps. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let's flip to news, David. So what you are looking for the front page of Defi, look no further than zirion.io. Zirion is your home base for managing your DFI portfolios. Zirion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the DFI protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis, but all in one central spot. I've loaded up a wallet, and Zirion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time,

Starting point is 00:18:05 as well as a breakdown of all the assets that I own, as well as all of my transaction history that I've ever done in an easy-to-view fashion. Zirion also lets you invest right into DFI's best yielding financial opportunities right from their homepage. Zirion also makes it super easy to access interest in DFI using applications like Compound and Ave in the background. And you can also exchange your assets using the Zirion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Zirion mobile wallet to add your Metamask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet. so you can see your portfolio and engage in defy on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet, and now I'm going to load up my Metamask as well.

Starting point is 00:18:50 And Xerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy. If you already have a Metamask, you can get it right into the Zirion app, and it can sync with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy ether right into the app itself.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Use the Invest tab to look at all the things, that you have invested in as well as other opportunities and coming soon to the zirion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device so download the app it works on ios and android go to zirion.io plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you wyern is defy's first self-building project on ethereum focused on producing products for those who are interested in earning yield in Defi. WIern's various products are all built

Starting point is 00:19:47 to suit each individual investor's preferred level of risk from various vault strategies that leverage defy tokens to the safer earn system which relies on stable coins. Valtz are aggressive yield farming robots, each with a unique strategy that is designed to maximize the yield of the deposited asset. Y earn employees from the most informed developers

Starting point is 00:20:07 in Defi to keep the vault strategies updated with the various yield farming opportunities Ethereum. For customers who are more risk adverse, the Y-earn's earned product may be for you. Earn is a yield-aware dynamic money market that automatically seeks the best interest rates across the various D-Fi protocols and regularly migrates your deposited stable coins between the D-Fi protocols that are returning the best yield at the present moment. Y-earn is a system that is just a little over four months old, so things are still very much an experiment. However, this hasn't stopped people from depositing over $700 million worth of assets into the

Starting point is 00:20:42 Y-Earn system in order to find yield on Ethereum. Perhaps the people that deposited all this money were tired of constantly making daily transactions to follow the best defy interest rates, and maybe the gas fees that they were paying ended up eating too much into their profits. With YERN, it doesn't remove the risk of these various protocols that it leverages, but it does remove the overhead of constantly trying to make sure you're finding the best yield and also so that you don't have to pay for gas to switch up your assets. Check out the products that YERN has to

Starting point is 00:21:12 offer at y-earn.finance that's y-e-a-r-n dot finance which they also have a nice statistics page to see what other people are doing all right uh let's let's flip to news david so what's in the news this is the first one another rich guy invested in bitcoin i've heard this one before yeah all right so who is this rich guy and why do we care i don't care actually about who this rich guy is apparently it's a mexican billionaire but like i just add one to the business billionaires who bought Bitcoin, call him. That's, that's the news. Well, the news is he has 10% of his liquid portfolio in Bitcoin. And apparently he's been purchasing from Grayscale since 2016, and he continues to purchase. And we're just finding out about this. I think there are a lot of

Starting point is 00:21:57 high net worth individuals who already are in crypto assets. And you'll find out a few years from now, basically. All right, Coinbase. Coinbase went down. Man, that reminds me of 2017. Yeah, that's exactly right. In 2017, Coinbase went down all the time and just because 2017 hit crypto companies, they blindsided them. They were not prepared for like the customer support and just the load. But also, Coinbase has had three years to figure their shit out. And they haven't seemed to have done that. So I can't tell if I'm like bullish because like our biggest exchange is crashing because of demand or I'm bearish because our biggest exchange is crashing because of demand. Like what take is there? I don't know. Brian Armstrong,

Starting point is 00:22:38 on come on the podcast. Disregard what David just said there. You're just great. Yeah, that's funny. It feels almost nostalgic to me. And by way, when we said went down, we just mean service outage, right? We're not talking about price here, but we'll see if that continues to happen. All right, PayPal, we've talked about them for the last three roll-ups, basically. They are reaching some serious volume in terms of their crypto sales.

Starting point is 00:23:02 Here's a headline that says PayPal has reached 85% of Binance, at least Binance in the U.S. volume in their first month. This is in crypto sales. Is that right? Yeah, crypto volume. Right, exactly. And so I think that just kind of lends an ear to why getting legacy institutions onboarded into crypto is perhaps even more valuable than building our own alternatives.

Starting point is 00:23:23 Like if we want to reach out to the legacy world, we need legacy institutions to come onto crypto, right? Like they have the network effects that we want. It's just low-hanging fruit right there. And it's going to happen. Make it easy. Like the bullish. case for this bull run is that everyone in the world just has like 10 times better access to

Starting point is 00:23:43 crypto. It's easier to buy crypto now. In our final boss series, as we call it, the nation state doing something in crypto. There is a Dutch, the Dutch central bank has told all Bitcoin exchanges in the Netherlands that their customers must actually prove that they really control their withdrawal address. So that means before you, if you're in the Netherlands, before you withdraw your Bitcoin or crypto from an exchange, you have to do some sort of identification, some sort of KYC, AML. You have to test to ownership.

Starting point is 00:24:19 No other European country requires this. I'm actually not sure because I think that... Oh, Switzerland does. There's Nick Carter. Thank you, Nick. Yeah, thanks, Nick. I knew you'd be there. Yeah, so what's your take on this sort of thing?

Starting point is 00:24:32 Like, crypto banks are becoming regulated, essentially. That's what exchanges are. nation states saying, hey, you got to know who you're sending the money to. We have rules around this. What do you think? Yeah, so they're just making exchanges cover their own ass with their withdraws. So like if I have a Coinbase app and I am buying drugs on the Silk Road and I send Bitcoin from my Coinbase app to my Silk Road address, I actually can't attest to the ownership of that address because somebody else owns that. And so like if I need to send it to my own address and then I can attest that I own that address. And then if I send that money to the Silk Road,

Starting point is 00:25:06 I've a tested or, you know, insert your criminal activity here. I've attested ownership over a Bitcoin address that made a transaction that did, that was associated with in legal activity. So it's really just about the nation state trying to get a grasp on where all the world's value is going. And so like we would expect this to come out of the nation state is also perhaps an infringement on privacy. Yeah, it's also to me anyway, bearish a little bit on Bitcoin network.

Starting point is 00:25:33 Because if you are scaling Bitcoin with crypto banks, and all crypto banks require AML KYC identification, then basically you're going to turn into a world where you've got some limited activity on chain, but all of the real economic activity is all AMLKYC, no privacy, right? Hopefully that is not the fate of Ethereum and DFI. Maybe that's why there's so much Bitcoin on Ethereum. Maybe so, David.

Starting point is 00:26:02 I think you're on to something because that keeps rising from week to week. All right, let's talk. about something else in the nation-state world. The SEC chair, Chairman, Jay Clayton, Jay Clayton, who we heard so much about for the last three years, he has stepped down, and the headline is, the crypto community rejoices. Are you having a party about this? I guess so. I didn't really have a strong opinion about this, but people really think that Jay Clayton was the individual that was getting in the way of a Bitcoin ETF, and now that he's gone, a Bitcoin ETF is closer. And so if that's true, then absolutely. Let's get a Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:26:38 ETF so people can access Bitcoin via the legacy stock market and number can go up. You know, it's a bull market when we've got Game of Thrones celebrities talking about Bitcoin and crypto assets. So this is Maisie Williams who is asking the question, Ari Stark, should I go along Bitcoin? Wow, look at these results. Yeah. Bitcoin is not happy about that. Yeah. that's pretty funny. Yeah. And the reason I think we want to talk about this is signals like this are important. Like Bitcoin is reaching into the mainstream.

Starting point is 00:27:09 Like, and the people that are commenting on Maisie Williams' Twitter about whether she should buy Bitcoin or not are retail, right? This is how we access retail. Also, it's worth to note that like there was a, in 2017 in December, Katie Perry tweeted out her painted fingernails that were all cryptocurrency themed. I remember that. Bitcoin, XRP, Manero.

Starting point is 00:27:28 And like, that was literally the top. Like when you see celebrities with painted crypto asset toenails and fingernails, like hit that sell button because like it's time to get out. Wow. Pay attention. This is not the top, David. It's not the top. We're just going to see more and more of this as time goes on. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:44 We got to wait for her to paint her fingernails and then it's the top. Specifically fingernails. It's fine. All right. What is on your mind, my friend? Tell me what's on your mind. Yeah. So we released something on the bank list of a newsletter this week, which I thought was pretty cool, which is a bunch of me.

Starting point is 00:28:00 a bunch of World War II era propaganda memes. And so the claim is that the Ethereum developers, the Ethereum researchers have done their job. They've built out the network that Ethereum needs to be. Ethereum is built to run on incentives and incentives alone. It can survive in any environment. That's what it's supposed to do. However, there's a difference between surviving and thriving.

Starting point is 00:28:20 And if we want Ethereum to thrive, it's up to the social layer of Ethereum. That's you, the listener. That's me, David. That's you, Ryan. The social layer of Ethereum is the community. community and we need to work on our meme ability, our spreading the message, or spreading the virus, right? And this is, this triggered very quickly a lot of bitcoins. I always like it when I

Starting point is 00:28:42 throw out a tweet that gets a lot of bitcoins in my, in my DMs telling me I'm dumb, because I know I hit on a nerve. And this triggered bitconers really fast. And I think that they know that Bitcoin is only something that they dominate in the narrative. They dominate in the social layer. That's their world. And they see this as like entrance into their territory. And they previously would look on like Ethereum developments. Like look at those stupid Ethereum's developing their chain. Don't they know that the fight is in the social realm? And now now we're done developing.

Starting point is 00:29:13 And now it's time to get into the social realm. And Bitcoiners are feeling threatened. Nicely done, Sarah, a little fire with fire. I mean, when we say memes, we're not just talking about like gifts and images, although that's what these are and pretty effective. but we're just talking about like simple, easily conveyed viral units of information, right? A great Bitcoin meme is Bitcoin is gold, right? Super easy to digest and tell people about.

Starting point is 00:29:40 So absolutely. Great improvements on the social layer, I think. And man, you're triggering people, so it must be doing something right. Hey, we're going to beat that drum a lot on the bankless program. Absolutely. Ryan, what's on your mind? Well, I've been thinking about what's the best way to get exposure to defy.

Starting point is 00:29:57 And there's actually some debate about this. And this is kind of on my mind. And I want to like talk about it. So I tweeted this day. I said, which of these provides the best risk adjusted price exposure to DFI specifically, defy specifically on Ethereum? And I gave three options.

Starting point is 00:30:14 The first is ETH. You just buy ether of the asset. The second is Bitcoin. And the third is, yeah, which we talked about at the front, the DPI DFI, DFI index.

Starting point is 00:30:24 So this is like top 10, by market cap or so defy tokens. So I can share the results. 55% of folks said, ETH is the best way. 13% said Bitcoiners or Bitcoin is the best way. And 32% said the DPI, Defi index is the best way.

Starting point is 00:30:48 So fairly close between EF and DPI index. What's your take? Almost two to one, ETH first DPI index. Yeah, that's true. That's another way to look at it. What's your take? What's the best way to get exposure? I think the important parameter here is risk adjusted. And that's going to be ETH. And it's a difficult thing to measure because we don't even know what DFI is.

Starting point is 00:31:14 Like what are we actually measuring here? Are we measuring the market cap of all tokens on Ethereum outside of ETH? And how do we get exposure to that? And is that ether or is that an index of the tokens? because I feel like the intuitive answer would be an index of a token. But I would like to claim that like Ethereum and DFI are actually synonymous where like applications are in Ethereum, their money Legos inside of Ethereum are Ethereum itself. You stitch all the contracts inside of Ethereum together and you create a single structure that is Ethereum. That's what Ethereum is.

Starting point is 00:31:46 Like the super set of structures of Ethereum that we call DFI, when you add them all together, they are Ethereum. and the value of Ethereum is directly reflected in the price of Ether. And so I would actually expect over a long time with more maturity in DPI that ETH and DPI track each other relatively well. Interesting. Yeah. And I do think that it is, although DPI is a great product, is pretty early to index these things,

Starting point is 00:32:11 right? So the top 10 defy assets, man, most of them didn't even exist a year ago, dude. And they're going to change on a dime. They're going to flop in, like come in, come out. and it's going to take a long time for this to settle in any way, like the S&P index has settled, right? So one way to look at it is if you're betting on DFI on Ethereum, like what's the probability that something like, say, Wi-Fi is still exists in 10 years and is the reigning champ versus what's the probability that ETH is still there?

Starting point is 00:32:45 And obviously, ETH is going to be still there because it underpins the security of the network. So that's also another way to look at it. I would definitely wait towards ETH, though I do think defy tokens are going to have quite a successful bull run. I'm just not sure that an index will capture all of that activity. And to your point, on a risk-adjusted basis, it will either. All right, David, should we talk about what is exciting right now? What are you excited about? Yeah, my take this week about what I'm excited about is using excited in a non-transacted.

Starting point is 00:33:19 typical way, which like I'm excited and it's excitatory. I'm alert about it. But I'm actually, it's not very, it's not a happy exciting. I'm worried about the future of, specifically with COVID and COVID's legacy, because I think it has, it's going to have a very lasting impact upon the world. And the 2020's decade is bleak. It's bleak. People, people think that the year 2020 is just a taste of what's to come in the remainder of the decade. And it's highly likely that we have a very deep, inflationary decade as things as meaning as things contract right we are seeing the demolishing of small businesses and the absolute growth in equity asset prices of massive businesses if you are a big business if you are amazon walmart target or lows or whatever your price your share prices

Starting point is 00:34:08 are doing fantastically fantastically if you're a small business you are closing up for shop and i think that's just a recipe for a dystopia um i think there's going to be a massive contraction in the 2020s decade. And like it feels weird to be in crypto because we are in such an polar opposite industry, right? Crypto is hot right now. And to some degree, the measure of the contraction of the legacy world is actually a function of how much crypto can expand, right? In the crypto world, we're trying to build this arc so that we can get the rest of the world

Starting point is 00:34:39 onto it. And we need to build this arc quickly so that we can save as many people as possible. There's a flood coming. Like the reason why we're building an arc is because there's a massive flood coming. And that actually causes me a bunch of angst and I'm excited about it in a bad way. It just feels like society is almost cracking at the seams under this pressure, right? So we've got this tweet that I put up similar to what you said, like Amazon profit up 100%, but small businesses, 20% are 21% are closed.

Starting point is 00:35:08 Revenue for the rest down 30%. As we go into further lockdowns. As we go into further lockdowns. Like how can a society exist with this level of strain? I mean, there's got to be some form of social unrest coming away. And I think we've seen some of this in 2020. You're saying that like for the foreseeable future, maybe all of the 2020s more of the same?

Starting point is 00:35:33 I think there's no reason to think as to why the year 2020 is unique. And it's actually rather, it's much more rational to think that it is something as just a teaser of what's to come. All right. that's normally what we talk not what we talk about with what we're excited. Usually we're pretty fucking bullish. It's what you're sober about. I guess that's the sober reality of things.

Starting point is 00:35:52 All right, well, let me flip on something that I do think is bullish, maybe bullish for humanity. Please need it. Yeah, you want some good news now? So here's the good news. This is maybe one of my, like the best charts I've seen all year. And for those I can't see it, up at the top, there is kind of a green line that shows ether balance on exchanges.

Starting point is 00:36:15 So the total amount of ether that is held in crypto banks on these exchanges. And there's a pink line that is percent of eth supply in smart contracts. Well, as of the last like three or four months, all of a ton of the ether on exchanges and in crypto banks has actually bled out into smart contracts. So ether in crypto banks and exchanges down, ether in smart contracts and money Legos and bankless money systems for the world up. That is so phenomenally bullish to me because one of my biggest, I love it. One of my biggest worries about crypto is, are we just creating the system that we formerly

Starting point is 00:36:57 left, right? Like new money, same system. New money, like same systems, like new bankers maybe. It's CZ at Binance and our friend Brian Armstrong, come on the podcast, Brian. And we just created new bankers, but they're still the same old banker. or are we really, like for real, creating a decentralized bankless money system for the world? And this is an indicator that we are actually succeeding,

Starting point is 00:37:23 that through defy, ether as a trustless store value asset, is becoming more decentralized. What is more bullish long-term than that? I'm super bullish about that. I'm really excited to see this. This is the bankless thesis, right? And like what banks are just like the archetype of an intermediary? Like, we probably would have called this,

Starting point is 00:37:43 intermediary lists, but that's not a very catchy word. And so we just know it's that. But like we could have seen that we predicted this for forever ago. And it's and I guess all it took was like to be able to achieve yield inside of defy. And all of a sudden the ether float into defy. Right. Yes. Ethereum needs to find ways to make itself useful or else it'll never be adopted.

Starting point is 00:38:06 And if it does find ways to make itself useful, then all the money is going to be in Ethereum, not on the not on the margins, not on the edges. not in your crypto banks, but inside of applications, inside of defy. And one of those defy applications is rocket pool, which is where we can stake ether in a way that is distributed and decentralized. It's not with a centralized staking system. And it's another way to get ether outside from the margins and inside into the world of defy, right? Like we can just build our own internal incentive mechanisms to keep things on the inside. Yeah, exactly. We are, this is why you and I, David, We love Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:38:44 Bitcoin's fantastic. I mean, both of us are Bitcoin bulls. Especially Bitcoin on Ethereum. Bitcoin is great, right? So, but like this is why we talk about Ether and Ethereum so much is because this is what a bankless money system looks like. The problem with the Bitcoin network is it's going to become more and more centralized over time.

Starting point is 00:39:03 If you want to actually do anything with your money, with your wealth, you have to use an intermediary. You have to use a crypto bank. Even if it's just sending funds. unless you're a whale, it can afford big, like, expensive block transactions, right? This is the antithesis of this. This says, like, you can truly be your own bank. You can trade with uniswap.

Starting point is 00:39:23 You don't need a intermediary. You don't need a coin base. And so I do think that is this is the bankless thesis exactly in graph form. You know, the other thing I was thinking about is just the raw power that we have. You know, like how kind of the internet gives you superpowers, right? or like when you first got a smartphone, it was like, oh my God, like, I'm so powerful. I can get anywhere in the world through Google Maps. It's just, it's almost like a cyborg kind of add-on to your human intelligence, right?

Starting point is 00:39:56 Bicycle for the mind. Right, a bicycle for the mind. Okay, Steve Jobs there. So I feel that way about my Ethereum address, right? My Ethereum address is a hundred times more valuable than any bank account I have ever opened. You know that Chris Dixon thing where like, or it may it's not Chris Dixon, but it's Silicon Valley saying is if you're going to build another product, can't just be like a little bit better. It has to be 10x better. That's Peter Thiel.

Starting point is 00:40:23 That's Peter Thiel. Okay. So like zero to one. Okay. So that's what I feel like an ether, Ethereum address is. It's not, and it's not just 10x. In some ways it's like 100x better. It is a super power.

Starting point is 00:40:37 New dimension. I was just thinking about that. I've had to do some stuff with traditional banks this week, David, like wire funds and just like in your bank. Right. Like transfer. And they're like, no, you can't, you can't, you know, there's a limit to how much you could take out of this bank and put in that bank account.

Starting point is 00:40:53 And like, it is so inhibiting compared to my eth address, antiquated. Like I can do so much more with it. And I do think that the 2020s will be a period of time where people start to unlock this potential and realize that as people unlocked their email address and found out all the cool things they could do with that or like the Netskechip browser and figured that out or the internet, it will give you superpowers. This is like a, yeah, anyway, that's the other thing I was thinking about and very exciting from my perspective. It's also a superpower that we can share. Like you getting the superpower doesn't actually stop other people from also getting the superpower. And that's

Starting point is 00:41:33 why you, the listener, should also go and recruit a friend because you should give them superpowers too. Well, it's actually better than that because like the more people who are using eth addresses, the more like superpowers I have, more liquidity in the system, more users, greater network effect. It's like a number goes up. A log scale. Everything goes up. Everything goes up.

Starting point is 00:41:54 Yeah. So get accountability and get a friend into Ethereum. Give them superpowers. All right. So we're talking, recruiting this week has been the theme. Give your friends superpowers. Bring them to Ethereum. David, I think this has been a fantastic weekly roll up.

Starting point is 00:42:09 Third week of November, excited about the future. Thanks for joining us for the weekly roll-up. I hope you're enjoying a Friday morning.

Bankless - ROLLUP: 3rd Week of November

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