Bankless - ROLLUP: All Time High Debate | New ETF Record | Wormhole Airdrop

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Weekly Rollup 2nd Week of March ----- ➡️ Apply to the Cartesi Grants Program here:  https://bankless.cc/Cartesi  ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player:  https://bankless.cc/Podcast  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2     ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | SWAP SMARTER https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo     🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku     🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle     ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 Start 00:46 Fake All Time Highs? https://twitter.com/iamdcinvestor/status/1765320979679699285?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1763324643635835082?s=20  05:18 MARKETS https://twitter.com/GayatriPC_/status/1765441708383486109?s=20  https://twitter.com/kobeissiletter/status/1763553807298875568?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1765121689036427654?s=20  https://www.ccn.com/news/bitcoin-etf-gold-btc-aum/  https://twitter.com/AP_Abacus/status/1763264513220964715?s=20  https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1763910750026793199?s=20    08:25 Biggest BTC Monthly Candle Ever https://twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/1763390416307519840  17:58 ETH ETF? https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1763910750026793199?s=20  https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1763705594949570757?s=20  24:05 Rise of The Memecoins https://www.coingecko.com/  33:55 SEC vs Shapeshift https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/34-99676.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery  https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1765411276497293365?s=20    36:28 Ryan and David Screenplay Acting https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1765463226781774048?s=20  https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-uyeda-statement-a-crypto-world-turns-03-06-24   https://x.com/0xdef1cafe/status/1765466419649540269?s=20  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1763607417105867050?s=20  41:12 Wormhole Airdrop https://wormhole.com/w-airdrop-explained/  https://airdrop.wormhole.com/  https://www.bankless.com/claimables?ref=no-address  47:06 Eigenlayer Passes $1 Billion https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/  48:27 Coinbase Smart Wallets https://www.coinbase.com/blog/evolving-wallets-to-bring-a-billion-users-onchain https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1763583352391500103  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1765481895448428882?s=20  52:14 Record CryptoPunk Sale https://warpcast.com/ecr/0x4a44d2a6  54:19 Saylor Buys More Bitcoin https://twitter.com/JanWues/status/1764788016206286996  57:17 Permissionless III https://twitter.com/Permissionless/status/1765030038905463132?s=20  https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1765040063086231695?s=20  59:32 ETH Denver Uber Driver Recap https://twitter.com/moo9000/status/1765321693503832471?s=20  1:05:29 Moment of Zen https://x.com/songadaymann/status/1765838218388222375?s=20  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Bagel station, happy second week of March. Welcome to the bull market. Have we welcomed them enough times? You've said that too many times. Look, I don't think we can say that too many times, David, because people are excited about this. And it needs to be celebrated every single week of the bull market because we got to enjoy these times, David. We don't know how long you're going to last. That's how long you're going to last. Speaking of which, did you know, David, Bitcoin hit all-time highs this week for like three seconds? It glanced it at best.

Is it glancing blow? Are we going to have the debate about this right now? Is still preserved. We have not cross all time highs. Okay. So I thought that we did cross all time highs because I actually don't know what all time highs are for Bitcoin. 69,000 something. I recall that much.

And then everyone was saying we hit all time highs. Well, no, because all of the Twitter influencers. want to have the binger tweet that goes off and gets 10,000 likes because it did it. Yeah, but like we touched all time highs maybe like on crack in it was 69,100 and something. In my mind, all time highs is 69 420. But really we're not going to like confidently be above all time highs until like probably 70,000. I wasn't saying we were confidently. I'm wondering. I'm asking a question whether it technically counts because if it's above the last all time high, then it technically counts. And I will concede... It technically counts, but it's

cringe to celebrate. No, it's not. If it technically counts, then we did. No, then we did. No. We are in not in spirit, we have not crossed all time highs. But you're saying it doesn't technically count. You're saying it wasn't actually technically hit. And I'm trying to find the truth of that. On like what chart, what's the canonical all time high number? There is none. Well, because like Cracken has their number. Coinbase has its number. Like, Binance has its number. Okay. And the David Hoffman definition. And the David Hoff number, which is the canonical version. You just, okay, you pick the highest one. You pick the highest one. 69, 420. Which we did not touch. So according to David, we did not hit all time high.

According to Ryan, we did for three seconds. People in my Twitter DMs all agree that it's a mulligan. David. David. We did not cross all time highs. That's your Twitter followers. Of course they agree with you. That's like, my Twitter followers are the best followers. Well, we'll let the bankless nation decide whether we hit all-time high or not. But honestly, I'm fine. I'm fine. Doing it again. Another two week because I can start this episode again by saying,

welcome to the bull market. At the beginning of last week, the crowd goes wild. I think it was actually the day before this happened. It was like Wednesday or something. And I think it was like you, Josh, a few other people were all in a bankless call together. And we're like, oh, yeah, we're hitting all-time high tomorrow. I'm like, we're not hitting all-time. Like we are at $67,000 and a half thousand dollars and you guys were like, yeah, we're hitting all-time highs tomorrow.

I'm like, guys, it's going to be next week. Like, it's not happening this week. So we, but to me, that's more evidence that we actually hit all-time high. And you're in denial, maybe, David, because you've already called it. You've already implanted this in your psychology that we're not hitting into next week. Maybe we actually hit it. We did not hit it. Or is this, is this part of your plan to do the quiet, to calm people down?

Yeah, yeah. It would be better for the industry if we were. it later. All right. Well, that's one thing we're going to talk about a little bit, this all-time high question. What else, David? We got some records that broke as well. The spot ETFs broke another record. We talk about that. And also, I want to talk to you about the Ethereum ETF, because some people are saying that we are a little too excited about the ETF, and we should cool our jets a little bit. What else we got? Wormhole announcing their air drop, who is eligible? We got a summary for all the details, but we're going to need more details out of wormhole in the future. We'll talk

about that. Eigen layer surpassed $10 billion, yalzer. And also the SEC is going after shape shift. Commissioner Hester Purse drops a screenplay and eight United States state attorney generals call the SEC a regulatory power grab. The SEC drama does not continue. Before we get into all of those details, we got a message for you from our friends and sponsors over at Cartese. If you don't know what Cartese is, is a modular execution layer that runs Linux. So if you want a chain, an app chain that runs Linux as the virtual machine, an alt virtual machine, Cartese is a place for you. It's a place where you can build DAPs that leverage all the traditional open source

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Why shouldn't our blockchain, I guess, David? That's where we're going. Let's talk about Bitcoin price right now. Now, I will agree with you. We are not at all-time high at the time of recording. What do we add on the week, David? Okay, we started the week at $62,300, up $5,400 on the week. $8.5%.

We are currently at $67,800. Can we talk about this, this big red candle down? Yeah. How we got one billion dollars of people getting liquidated? Okay. So what is up with this? By the way, we're looking at these glorious prices on the Cracken Pro charts, which is a fantastic place to go buy your crypto assets this cycle.

But we, okay, here's where some people called the Alt-Time High right here. And then just after that, we just tanked. Like, double-digit. Such obvious price action. Double-digit candle down. What happened? Why did that happen? Because a bunch of D-Gens levered up, and too many of them all joined on the same trade.

And then it was too frothy, too quickly. And then everyone got liquidated. And then the crazy thing is we spiked right back up. So we went right back up to like $68,000. I mean, leverage is a right of passage. Leverage is a part of the bull market. So like when I say DGens, I don't mean it like in a derogatory fashion. It's just I only mean it when there's too many of them.

We can't all be regents. You only mean it when it becomes a problem. Yeah, exactly. We all need to take healthy turns being DGens. Slow down. Don't celebrate your all-time highs before they happen. Don't take leverage right before all-time highs. Like, come on.

It was funny. The fact that we spiked right back up is like one of the most bullish like price actions I've ever seen. Like a bunch of D-Gens gets liquidated. And then we just resume, like, right where we have lost off. You know, some people are actually panicking about this. And, you know, like I saw some tweets joking, oh, bear markets over. Pack it in boys, that was it. That was it.

See in 2028. This is DC investor echoing your sentiments. Look, I'm no expert, but when something suddenly retraces 15% and then sets a new cycle high the next day, it's pretty effing bullish. New cycle high. You know the words that you need to be using that. DC said it well. All right. Good job, DC.

Also, David, did you know this? All right. So here's something I will say that I am actually knowledgeable about with respect to Bitcoin all-time high is the real all-time high, at least in Fiat terms, inflation-adjusted is actually not $69,000, $69,000 or whatever your number is. the real time all time high when you adjust for inflation is actually 77k bitcoin because we've had a whole lot of inflation since the last time bitcoin hit all time high so i think what that means is we can celebrate it twice dude you're an all time high makes it weird uh okay so it's basically one november of 2021 bitcoin was worth 77 000 dollars in today's dollars yeah look at the buying power right okay so so we have i got the numbers to develop

Highs at 69-420, and then we have real purchasing power all-time highs at $77,000. One of the crazy things that happened, I put out a tweet that was the last two weeks are going to go down in like one of the most bullish two weeks in crypto history, simply straight due to price action. The February 2024 Bitcoin candle was the largest monthly candle in Bitcoin history, going from like $4,250 up to $61,000. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Let's just take a look at that. That's impressive. And the thing is, is like, that's now the floor. Like, we're going to have, you know, Bull Markets repeat themselves, which they do. That, we're going to have at least a few more of those. A few more best, like, February's or best months you meet?

A few more biggest candles ever. Yeah. And so, like, how big is that candle? 42 to 61, so almost a $20,000 candle. We get, I'm calling it, we get at least two more $20,000 candles in Bitcoin this cycle. So just to put some numbers on the uncharted territory that we're in right now, even if we're not at all-time high, we're real close. We are not crossing all-time highs. We are in price discovery. Yes. Bitcoin has only spent five days above the current price. And the current price at the time this tweet was about 65K.

So this is pretty close to uncharted territory price discovery phase. We're in uncharted territory, I would say. Yeah. David, the reason for this, it feels like, is once again, the Bitcoin ETFs because we got another record on this. What are we looking at? Bitcoin ETFs registered the largest net inflows since day one. So new record. So that is the new all-time high, Ryan.

You can celebrate that alt-time high. I will allow you that one. You're so generous. $648 million in one day. That's net inflows. $648 million came in. into the Bitcoin ETFs. All of them, right?

We're not just talking about one. Collectively all of them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like, that's just like, we're just, Bitcoin has $640, 50 million of daily buying pressure. I mean, that's an all-time high record. But, like, we keep breaking all-time highs in daily buying pressure from TradFi.

You know, all-time high? Tell me. Black Rock, uh, ETF just hit 10 billion. And that, that's up only. Has it ever lost any Bitcoin? It's up only. I think it's been all-time high just about every week we've recorded it, actually. that's an impressive amount of Bitcoin and value.

Eric Balchunis says that this is a milestone. He said the 10 Bitcoin ETFs did 10 billion in volume. Now he's talking about volume. Smashing previous record set last Wednesday. Volatility and volume go hand in hand with ETFs, so not totally surprised. That said, these are bananas numbers for ETFs under two months old. Under two months old, it's a newborn. Right.

ETFs are new, brand new. So we can talk about another flippinging. Usually we talk about ETH flipping Bitcoin, but that's not looking like it's happening anytime soon, not with this kind of price action. But the thing that is probably going to happen, hopefully, if you're a crypto ball, gold being flipped by Bitcoin, the gold ETF in the lead with $92 billion in the gold ETFs. Where are we at with the Bitcoin ETFs and the total AUM in Bitcoin ETFs? It's about half that, David.

Half that. Yep. So we're at like 40, 45, getting close to 50. And all we have to do is double the price of Bitcoin and we, like, and they were above gold. Dude, gold is getting flipped so soon. Not only are we going to double the amount of Bitcoins in the ETFs over this coming year. Bitcoin price is also doubling. Yeah, exactly.

It just seems like a lot if you're like, oh, we have to get, you know, like double amount of buying. No, you don't. You just have to get a little bit more, you know, buying. And then price just needs to go up. And it has been going up. I mean, think. about it, though. Like, who, do you know anyone your age? I mean, maybe this is an unfair question

because your social network, I'm sure, is so plugged into crypto. But like, so maybe this is a terrible data point. But just, I just, I can't imagine being like, a millennial. The F is buying gold. And you're just like, you know what I'm bullish on? You know, a story. It's just gold. Give me all that. The only reason why you would be a bullish gold over Bitcoin is if you think the internet is going to have structural problems. If the internet has structural problems, we have structural problems. That's a, at this point, I mean, we are so plugged in. Like, electrical grid goes down, internet goes down.

What are you going to do with your freaking gold? I'd rather have, like, weapons than gold at that point. By guns. Okay, so that's a little update for you. And our friends over at Wells Fargo, David, do you know, they're getting in. this Bitcoin action. Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo. My personal bank, by the way.

I've banked at Wells Fargo since, like, I was a kid. It was my first state. It was my first bank. Really? And it still is. It's funny how, like, I just haven't changed banks. It's always been my... Why would I do that?

I just use it a lot less now. They're all equally shit. I use it a lot less because I am banking less. You know, make less. Yeah. Let's talk about Eith. Enough about Bitcoin. Wait, did you say why we're talking about?

about Wells Fargo? I think I did. They're they're approving multiple Bitcoin ETFs. Yes. Yes. Marilyn Lynch Wells Fargo approving multiple Bitcoin ETFs in their wealth management clients. Yeah. Which have trillions of dollars in assets. And these are just some of the many banks that are going to be doing this. Yeah, because banks have wealth managers on staff. Do you know they'll give you a call? They'll just be like, hey, can we help you invest your money? I see you have a lot of money in your savings account or a checking account. They're like, can we help you? They don't buy some Bitcoin ETFs. I don't get those calls. Well, maybe I'll send some Wells Fargo, Wells Managers your way, give you some advice, David. What are we at on the ETH price this week?

Ith Price, extremely healthy performance this week. The ETH chart is just a straight, linear line. This is so weird to see. It is the straightest, most linear line I have ever seen. Yeah, it looks oddly artificial. Can you hit the one-day candles? We're looking at four-hour candles. It goes back from, it goes back one month, hit one-day candles.

How long is that a line for? my god it is a line from october the traders call that the stairway to heaven that well that is climbing a wall of worry that's what that was like to me okay from october until february we were at one degree one y equals mx plus b line degree uh and now good algebra you like that one uh from february we're on a much more vertical Okay, we started the week $3,863. Excuse me, we started the week $3,430, up $420, nice, to $3,863, up 12%. Another double digit.

Heath actually gained 4% versus Bitcoin on the week, even when Bitcoin had $100 million of inflows just yesterday. Wow. Okay. Is this quote-unquote alt season? I don't consider either an alt-old. If you go look down the market cap sack, it is absolutely all season. Have you seen the absolute shit coins that crypto Twitter is peddling right now?

Is that old season? That's something. That's narrative season for sure. Whatever the narrative deShore is. You haven't even seen some of the degenerate like 2024 election tokens that are like pumping right now. I've heard about them. I saw Coin Gecko added a category called political. Yeah, political meme coins.

It's like Trump coin and there's like four or five others. And I was like, that's an area. I'm not even touching. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Like the Biden one is like Job Bodden or something like this. And like Trump has equally like misspelled an odd and weird. They're on Solana and this is actually having a fantastic price action week this week too. Did you hear, did you read Travis Kling's tweets?

He's just like, the reason for this is a financial nihilism. That's a Dimitri Kofihanes take too. 100% is financial nihilism. Mean coins are the most financially nihilist like financial assets I can imagine, which is why they have so much product market fit with crypto. The comment is basically because millennials, like specifically younger millennials and Gen Z can't afford houses. And so what do they do?

They just gamble it because they're... It is funny. It is funny. And I will say like this, when you give... It's game stop. It's game stop stuff. When you give the people the power to produce financial assets permissionlessly, like what did, what's the first thing that we did on the internet?

Cat pictures. Now we have dog coins, but now people are like, hey, I can make a meme coin about anything. Jacob from Zora had a really good tweet that I liked, which is he said, in the future, meme coins will just be memes. This is just, there's just memes, but now they just have a chart with them

and you can make or lose money on them. Buy or beware is all I got to say, but it is kind of entertaining. Let's put the ETH number in perspective compared to Bitcoin. So the last time Bitcoin was trading at this level, so, you know, 65K and above, ETH was trading at 4,878.

There's a lesson in there, says croissant. What do you think the lesson is? The lesson is that this is just where we are in the market cycle. First, Bitcoin pumps, then ETH pumps and everything else pumps. So we're implying ETH has some catch-up to do, and it will do that catch-up? Well, it caught up by 4% this week. As we approach the ETH ETF, which despite what some of the content further on in this weekly roll-up will say, is definitely coming.

Let's get to that content. Why spoil it? Okay, so the big question mark, I think. The thing that would send, I expect, ETH to beyond all-time highs, I don't know, to the moon, to somewhere else, to somewhere we haven't seen before. The gigamoon. The gigamoon, yeah. It's the Ethereum ETH. All right.

So the question is, when's it coming? The two people I know who probably know the best, have the best estimates on this are Eric Balchunis and James Safert. And by the way, we have invited them on the podcast. They're putting out new estimates when they do. we're going to have them on the podcast and give you the download. But the tweet I have on the screen is a quote tweet, quoting Jake Trevinsky. Jake Trevinsky says, I am a lot less confident about ETH ETF approval this year than many of you are. The reason.

The SEC got a ton of political blowback for approving Bitcoin ETFs, even though the court basically forced it to. Now, animal spirits are in control of the market, and an ETH ETF would only add to that. So the comment is basically, Gary Gensler, took it, you know, politically to the gut because he approved this. The anti-crypto army did not like this. In some circles, not in our circles. Okay. In some circles. Maybe Jake me knows more about this. I do not see the political blowback for approving the Bitcoin ETS. I think like Elizabeth Warren made some comments. A few other people needs to comments, but like I didn't see any of that. But that's Gary's circle. That's Gary's network. You know how we're talking about in your network? You probably don't know

anyone who would buy gold. And Gary's network, I mean, things are a lot different with the people Gary hangs out with and the people that put Gary in power, right? So that's Jake's. And like, so political punch to the gut for Gary, he's not going to do it. And now that the market is pumping, the SEPC probably doesn't want to add to this. And let's recall. Is that a reason for denying or delaying? None of it's been a valid reason. It's however Gary feels. Because remember, he's the, he's the third vote. But it's not. however Gary Fields. It's who's going to sue him if he's being arbitrary and capricious. True. True. And that's kind of maybe the counter to this, right?

Yes. Somebody's going to sue him. It forced his hand the same way they forced the hand of Bitcoin. But I don't know. I mean, I think, I think he's got one shot of delaying it in May. And then he basically has to approve it by November, which is the latest deadline before shit really hits the fan. before the SEC get sued. It's the same logic as the Bitcoin ETF. So there's two layers to this about our general excitement about the Ethereum ETF, right, is the question of will it happen? Yes, no.

And that's some, you know, probability. And by the way, Eric Balchunis and James Safert said the last time they put estimates out was greater than 50% that it would happen in 2024. I don't know what the revised estimates are. The last numbers I heard was 60% in May, 95, 90 plus percent by November. Sure. Okay. So that's layer, but that's layer one of the analysis, David, because layer two is when it comes out, will it matter?

Right. It mattered in a massive way for Bitcoin, obviously. The inflows were beyond what anyone expected. But why does that necessarily apply to Ethereum? And for you and I were like- The same inflows that everyone else? Eric Balchunis again. He says, this is like he's talking about the Ethereum ETF if it happens.

It's like the opening act coming on after the headliner using Gen Z bands. it's like Sister Hazel trying to follow Nirvana. So it's basically like, you know, the opener act. We already had kind of the Bitcoin is the rock star. So, and he justifies that by basically saying, like, look at ETH futures. Heath futures are, are paltry right now in terms of demand. And so he's saying it like it might not matter. It just be like a fart in the wind.

No one cares about this. Okay. The comparison of Bitcoin futures to Eith futures, I think, makes sense. but it would have to be Bitcoin futures pre-Bitcoin ETF. But A, B, that's not what Sandy Call said. Sandy Call said is that the ETH ETF is going to be interesting to investors because it is a tech platform play. And that is what people like. ETH is a little bit more hard to understand.

It has like dollar cost flows, which like Wall Street needs to like wrap their head around. But also at the same time, ETH has one third the market cap of Bitcoin. So, like, maybe we have one-third of the demand that Bitcoin has, but we have three times the sensitivity to price movements that Bitcoin does because we're one-third we, as Ethereum, are one-third the size. I just think for this part of the analysis, though this is Beltunus's take, and he does have a data point, which is ETH Futures. And, like, fair enough, they have it. So I kind of factor that in. However, I will say, I think that people who are bullish Ethereum are going to be bullish demand for the Ethereum. ETF. And if you're not bullish Ethereum, you're more bullish Bitcoin ETF, then you're kind of

like bullish Bitcoin ETF. I remember when the Bitcoin ETF launched, a lot of people said, there will be no demand. And these are generally people who are not in the category of being bullish Bitcoin. So, you know, we'll have to see, I guess. But it's an interesting discussion. It doesn't dissuade me from being excited about this. I'll say that, but maybe give some pause for thought. Eith, Bitcoin, ratio, David. What do we add on the week? Yeah, we're up on the week. 0.0573 up on the week.

How about the crypto market cap? Oh, yeah. God, crypto is getting crazy. $2.6, $2.7 trillion. We are getting a lot amount of price, a total crypto market cap increase because of the number of degenerate shit coins, excuse my language, that are the long tail of crypto is getting a pump

from the fat tail. This is the way that it always plays out, Bitcoin loads up its jet fuel and with all of the ETF flows and then people who want to go risk on get bumped out of Bitcoin and they start looking down tail. And now we have like, we'll talk about the movers of the week. Movers of the week, where are they? Pepe, flokey, Sheba, you know, dog with hat. If you were in any of these, congratulations, you had a fantastic week. Like 100% triple digit up. Yeah. We're excited about our double digit up with a big and 8th and this is triple digit up yeah right now 138% on sheb you knew i mean the question is is retail back

i think you got a clip that that you want to play us but uh before we get to that let's talk about uh layer twos as well which are majorly up on the week and of course our layer two update is always brought to you by mantle which is a new and upcoming also up on the week yeah we enjoy it very much uh so tell me about this look at this david that is uh added like eight billion dollars seven billion in the last seven days. 37 billion dollars total value locked in layer two

we have a brand new layer two blasting onto the scene that's called blast number three roll up by TVL $2.75 billion on day one

you gotta like tip your hat to the player of the game Pac-Man we're gonna get him on the show sometime soon what is this is interesting the reason I love looking at

a blast on layer 2B and it's almost a 3 billion as well is because it shows you the stage like the security stage and the decentralization. It is stage zero in the same way OP MayNet is. But the annotation on Layer 2B is it's full training wheels and there is currently there's no available node software

that can reconstruct the state from L2 data, L1 data. Hence, there is no way to verify that this system is a roll-up. So not quite as strong. There's no exit hatch. There's no exit hatch that has been verified right now. I mean, like the whole strategy with Blass was like go to market get tvL go to market get tvL get users get projects go to market get tvL and they executed on that part of the roadmap like like honestly study it it was immaculate they put they got

$2.75 billion on day one insane did they cut corners though is it risky 100% they cut all corners possible that's why there's 2.57 billion dollars in there yeah and there's it's it's a fine line between wow that was really smart and like oh you guys like you just bad look bad look. And so, I don't know. I mean, as long as they don't get hacked, as long as nothing bad happens. As long as they don't lose anyone's money. As long as they don't lose any of that $2.75 billion. All right. So, Blast now live. Also, on the layer two side, Arbitrum transactions are going nuts. Did I see something about this? Yeah, so go and go to the activity tab on layer two's because we got some nice numbers. Arbitrum Nova. Is this the one? Arbitrum Nova. You want to know why, Ryan?

Yeah. Arbitrum Nova is like the second Arbitrum chain, extremely cheap fees. really putting in a new all-time time. Because it's a validity, right? It's a volitium, off-chain data. Yeah. So 40 to 50 transactions per second sustained. These are real transactions. No vote transactions.

No blah-blah transactions. Real transactions. Who's doing this? Who's doing this? Over a million transactions, I think, in a very short amount of time. It's this brand new project, which is a D-PIN project on Arbitrum. D-PIN stands for a decentralized physical infrastructure network called Airbus. uh air excuse me arbus arbius rbius rbius a i it's a deep-in project working on

a i compute it's an a i compute project it's a goddamn a i project of course it would be do you think that by the by the way i um i i tweeted this out and i was just like hey i'm really like before i've been worried about how much block space we're creating who's going to buy it and the comment that i added this morning was like oh i see who's going to buy it's the a i is just a lot's you think that's real 100%. Bankless listeners didn't listen to our

AI meme coin episode that came out earlier this week. 100% listened to that because, I mean, this is, 2017 was the ICO mania, 2021 was the NFT mania, 2024 AI frenzy. Well, let's get back to the frenzy.

And David, you have a clip that you wanted us to see. And this, set this up for us because I don't know what the way. So I bet you like less than half of bankless listeners will be kind of exposed to this. So just to let you know what's going on, this happened last cycle, this was also about to start happening this cycle.

This is retail. This is what retail looks like. Let's go ahead and watch this TikTok video from Mr. Retail. So y'all seen my video yesterday, right? This was at $100. It has gone up $67 in 24 hours. Actually, oh, hold on. Today's return, $64.

Total return $111.11. That's in four days. I invested in this four days ago, and it's, yes. Do not believe anybody. Everybody doubted Dogecoin and thought it wasn't going to amount to anything, and now look at it almost 20 cent. Whoa. This, this, 3.8 million.

Get it. Get it now before it goes up more. It is constantly steadily going now. Do not listen to these people saying it ain't going nowhere. It's going. It's happening now. $60 overnight. Thought y'all said it won't go to do nothing.

So when he says it's up $67, he put $100 in to Coinbase, bought $100 worth of Shib, it's up $67, and he's stoked, and he's telling all of his TikTok friends to also go buy Shib. This is what we're up against. Cannot go down. This is what we're up against. Here's the thing. I think for a lot of people, Vakai sounds exactly like you and I, David, at the beginning of this episode. And that is the problem. It's hard to differentiate.

Yeah. It's really hard for people to differentiate. So that's why you got to do your work. Maybe we are the same, you know? Maybe we're no better. We just kill ETH and Bitcoin, but mostly ETH. We just like to virtue signal. That's all.

That's the difference here. Sniffer on Farts. A couple other milestones here, Tether, over $100 billion now in Tether. So we just had the Tether CEO, Apollo, on the podcast. It was a great episode. I think we'll have Jeremy Lair on as well. So go check out that episode, but pretty big milestones. And also this has started happening.

So Coinbase is now breaking into the top 100 in the Apple App Store. And this is the first time since early 2022 that this has happened. We have all these TikTokers telling people to go buy a ship. They have to go re-download Coinbase. Oh, my God. There was a time where Coinbase would not be listing Shib, but those are the old days, I guess. Actually, I don't know Shib is on Coinbase, but it probably is. I held like a Coinbase wallet to me.

David, what do we have coming up next? coming up next. SEC sends a cease and desist to a crypto exchange shape shift. Eric Forgey's does not blink. Meanwhile, Commissioner Hester Purr's screenplay about the utter absurdity of the matter. Big air drop coming that Gary Gensler doesn't want you to have. The wormhole token is out, rewarding users across all these different chains. So we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

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So, you know, ShapeShift, which was Eric Forhey's exchange. Mostly now a decentralized exchange, by the way. But there was a point in time where there was some counterparty risk with ShapeShift. Anyway, the SEC filed a cease and desist against ShapeShift, basically cease and desist serving U.S. customers. And it alleged that ShapeShift was operating in 2021 as an unregistered dealer for cryptocurrencies that were securities. And they further said that they would accept a settlement offered by ShapeShift for a 275K fine. So a $275,000 extortion bride. Yeah, basically.

To go away. Good thing. It's just, it's in Fiat, you know, so it's. it's not that much money. And this is pretty... One Bitcoin, too. Yeah. This is pretty similar to the accusation that the SEC is, of course, brought against other exchanges like Coinbase, Crackin and in Binance.

It's all part of the same campaign here. Here's a comment from Eric Voorhe's. What does he say? Eric Forhey says, a quote, The commission's order, however, fails to identify which crypto assets were investment contracts and provides no explanation for its conclusion. We've seen this before. In some, ShapeShift is in trouble because the commission. nearly 10 years after the Shapeshift's platform started trading,

and more than three years after it changed its business model to be at Dow, now contends that some unidentified number of the 79 crypto assets that traded between 2014 and 2021 were investment contracts without explaining why. Notably, the commission does not allege any harm. Shapeshift and his customers are voluntarily transacted, and now the order nowhere alleges that Shapeshift defrauded his customers. The standards are so opaque and arbitrary that the commission itself is unwilling to stand by its own analysis. the environment we have created for the crypto asset markets, especially as it relates to secondary

trading, is untenable. Cases like this do not protect investors. They intimidate innovators and entrepreneurs. We respectfully dissent. This has notes of Hester Purse all over it. Okay. So this wasn't Eric Vohrhe's saying this. This was Eric Vohorhe's tweeting a quote.

Tweeting a quote, yeah. Of a dissent from Hester Perce about this action. Commissioner Hester Purse. And who's the other commissioner? Mark Ayuda. Mark Yuda. Yeah. So did you, by the way, did you read this dissent, the full dissent?

I saw the parts that got secretly on Twitter, which I think you're about to lay up. This was like, so... Are we about to do this? I was going through this story. I was going through this story, and I saw this in the middle of Hester Purse's descent. She actually wrote a screenplay, David, okay? And she teased it up. Do you want to actually do this screenplay?

Okay, who's going to be who? Okay, I'll be the SEC. You'd be a new shape shift. Okay, so this is what Hester Purse wrote. She said, one can imagine the dialogue. for that scene in a future episode that just come in and register episode. So this is a future shape shift.

I'll be the SEC. You are Gary Gensler. Do your best Gary Gensler. I'm very focused. I don't have a Gary Gensler. I don't know what. I'll try. Go for it. You're first.

You're first. Oh, wait. No, I'm first. Okay. Cut that up. Hello, I'm Eric Forhees, and I would like to register as a dealer. Why?

Because I think some of the assets I plan to deal with might be deemed at some point by the SEC to be securities. Oh, which ones? I'm not sure, because I can't really understand which criteria you use to decide whether a token offering is a security transaction, and if it is whether the token

that was the subject matter of the investment contract remains a security in the secondary market transactions. Yeah. Well, if you don't know whether you're dealing in securities, you can't register. And by the way, if some of the assets you're dealing in are securities, you also can't register. So can you help us think through which of the assets are securities?

No. We suggest to read the 2017 Dow Report and it will all be clear to you. You can also look at our enforcement actions if you want. I've read it. I've read about your enforcement actions. I have further questions. Hire a lawyer. I did and my lawyers have further questions. Sorry, we can't help any more than we already have. We don't give legal advice. vice here. That was Hester Purse's screenplay. Oh my God. Give her the Emmy. Give her the Emmy. You actually, you met Hester Purst recently, didn't you? Yeah, she was at East Denver. This is David, David Hoffman and commissioner, Hester Purse. She actually comes to the conference. Boots on the ground in the trenches with the crypto retail. All the people go to the 20,000

innovators and investors and fanatics that are at the going to East Denver. And she was there. with us. You know, she has run out of F's, hasn't she? She's just like, right in screenplays now in the decision. I love that this is published on the SEC website. It's sEC.gov. One thing to clarify about this whole shape shift thing is even though there's a cease and desist out there, it actually can't be shut down because now a shape shift does not take custody of anyone. They're not a counterparty. Right. It's basically like a Dex aggregator. They use like Thor chain and that sort of thing. Yeah, if you want to go cross-chain, it's basically a a front end and obfuscation abstraction

abstraction layer for Thor chain. And if you're staying in Ethereum, then just Dex aggregators on Ethereum. And so it's not a counter. It's now a Dow too, right? I mean, there's no... This is the cool thing. Shapeshift is being sued from the periods of like 2017 to 2021,

but not during the periods of when it's turned itself into a doubt, which is interesting. Well, that maybe that court case is coming, David. Who knows what that'll be... How is he going to round up all the... the Dow participants could be interesting. There's also on SEC news. You know, we were talking last week about Cracken versus the SEC and they revealed some additional information. And they basically filed for the SEC to drop all charges. Well, apparently, I guess it's somewhat related to

this, but kind of different. There are now eight U.S. Attorney Generals, State Attorney Generals, I should stay, from Montana, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas, they have come out with an amicus brief. Okay, and this is like legal speak for basically a legal position criticizing, highly critical of the SEC's stance on crypto. I'm not sure if they directly mention Cracken, but this is some of the subtext here. They call what the SEC is doing with respect to crypto a regulatory power grab. And they say that the SEC has appointed itself crypto regulator and further that the SEC

puts consumers at risk. These are attorneys general of eight U.S. states, right? And they're going to a federal agency and just being basically like, you have no power here. You actually can't do what you're trying to do to the crypto industry. We don't want it. You're actually putting the citizens of our states at risk through your actions. So like, knock it off. If you are a citizen of Montana, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, or Texas. Congrats. Your attorney general is based. We got an air drop to talk about Ryan.

Wormhole just announced their token. W. Speaking of based, that is a based ticker handle. It's just W? Just W. 10 billion tokens, initial circulating supply of 1.8 billion. 82% of W are being initially locked in such tokens will unlock over the course of four years. is an ERC 20 token on Ethereum.

Tell them what SPL. Tell them what wormhole is. Oh yeah. Wormhole is a bridge. It's a bridge if the name didn't imply that. Yeah, you can go and you can go across Ethereum Solana Arbitrum Optimism. Base is where the token will initially be. You can also go across other layer ones as well.

6.17% of the tokens. So 617 million tokens are being dropped to almost 400,000 wall. It's pretty big air drop, very hyped up air drop. There, you can check eligibility at airdrop. Dot wormhole.com or at bankless. No, you can't. No, you can't. Not available.

If you're in the U.S., we're sorry to inform you that this site is not available in your region. If you're in the U.S., use the bankless airdrop claimable. No, it'll just bounce you to this. It'll bounce you to this. All right. Well, we'll get the data. Nogatively. When is claiming not announced yet?

So we do not know the snapshot was taken on February 6th, but this token is coming. going. It's going to be interesting to see the valuation that this lands at. I mean, it's interesting to see all of the tokens that are being airdropped. Starknet is coming in at like $20 billion right now. I mean, we're just getting the crypto industry is just getting

hammered by five to $20 billion air drops. It's so much free money. I'm so exhausted by all of this free money. And honestly, I sort of am. Like, this is, so I will plus one what you were just saying about the bankless Cleanbles app because if you

want to keep tabs on what's dropping and whether your address is eligible or not, all you have to do is go to bankless.com slash claimables, type your addresses, not, don't type them, copy, paste, whatever, put an E&S in, add your addresses to this tool and it will for free. This is a public service. It will for free tell you, alert you, send you an email when there is a claimable opportunity. Now, you got to watch out for third party fishing and scammers and that sort of thing, but if it's coming from the bankless.com website directly, then that's, That is an official, like, claimable that you can go claim. It's a great way to just keep taps on all this stuff.

Yeah, I found, like, two of the most recent optimism air drop that happened, like, last week on my wallets, which I would have never have seen that because I don't touch those wallets anymore. Well, and then with optimism, too, they're just, like, air dropping as they go. Optimism has got this fourth air drop. It's like seasons and, like, it's just impossible to keep up with all of it. All right. What do we got coming up next, David? We're going to talk about the eigenlayer milestone. We're going to explain how Michael Saylor actually has infinite money and also permissionless.

a three. Permissionless three. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, the layer two with all of the yields. Take your etheth with Mantle, put it on Mantle to get your yield if you want to, try it out. There's a link in the show notes. Let's go here for Mantle right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO is the first Dowled Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer one. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation

for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded like Game 7 for Web3 gaming and BuyBit for TVL and liquidity and on-rats. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralized Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-led layer two ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds

of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading DeFi ecosystem, strong infrastructure, infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the web-free gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.io. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum orbit chain? Arbitrum allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput.

Whether you are a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitram.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Selo is the mobile-first EVM-compatible carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. Driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile defy,

and with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest growing Web3 wallets, Sello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Sello is looking to come home. home to Ethereum as a layer two. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the cello layer two to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The cello layer two will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one block finality. What does that all mean for

you? With cello layer two, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Sello is a community governed protocol. This means that Sello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Sello forums. Follow Sello on Twitter and visit Sello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Eiger passes $10 billion, completing the second of my five predictions for 2024, off to a great start. One of those predictions is we're going to burn 1 million aeth, and we are behind on that.

But the trend rate, because gas fees are super high right now, is super, super good. that's basically the news 10 million dollars in my year. You have you have 10 months to hit all your predictions. You don't need to rush it, man. You already got two down. I think you're making great progress.

I got nine more months. I got nine more months. You're making great progress. I mean, you're making great progress. I mean, I should be happy with this. Which is over 5 billion air drop to users in 2024.

That hasn't happened by the end of it probably will. After wormhole, it probably will. This is so, so this is if you translate. Oh, and actually one of those, one of my other predictions,

ETH layer 2 meta shifts towards optimized virtual machines. Shout out sponsor, Ketezi, for bringing Linux to the Ethereum layer 2 space. I'm counting that partially checked. We'll see what happens when both Eclipse and Elypsis and Monad launch. Yep. So this is, by the way, translating that $10 billion in ETH layer into ETH germs. That's 3 billion ETH. So another over three billion.

Three million. Excuse me. 3 million ETH. No one has three billion. There's a supply cap, right? Well, congrats on your prediction, David. Do you know another general prediction that I didn't make? Because I didn't make any predictions.

But I'll claim this as a general bankless prediction, is that wallets are getting a level up this year, this cycle. Okay? They're in desperate need. I mean, it's still really hard to onboard your friends and family. This is a post from Coinbase talking about the evolution of wallets. It includes this really cool demo. this is kind of like wallet as a service.

But look how easy this is. In browser wallet, you just connect with a pass key on your machine or you could, you know, use face ID on your phone and basically just have a wallet. And this is an account abstraction wallet that Coinbase has built. They built a whole SDK on top of the base chain, which is kind of cool. And I had to take this week about, oh, this is Jesse Pollock on this. The Coinbase Smart Wallet is the most important. new product since base and the most consequential consumer wallet launched in the last five years.

It's the last piece to bring billions of people on chain because it just works. See for yourself and you can go test this. We'll include a link in the show notes. It's super easy to use this, this wallet. And this is like innovation that layer twos can do that Ethereum mainnet is just too slow to do. Like adding account abstraction type features, right? That make wallet super easy. And it brings me to kind of this take.

I really want to see. layer two ecosystems that own the full stack for user experience. The full user experience. Yeah. And so I'm talking own the wallet at UX, own the onboarding, own the Fiat to Crypto part of it, own the economics, make it so that users don't have to think about fees at all, make it feel like Web 2, own the apps on top. So launch with some kind of killer apps, a fully integrated U.S.

and make it max consumer-friendly. And I got to say, I think that's what BAS is actually trying to. to pull off with some of these innovations on the base chain. Do you have Coinbase wallet on your phone? I do, yeah. Do you have notifications turned on? No. Okay, you should because every once in a while, the Coinbase wallet will send you

notification saying, hey, do you want to mint this NFT? And it's usually like a Coinbase NFT. Like the last time I saw this, it was the Mint a penny, and then it was also the Coinbase stock earnings. And I am, anytime Coinbase app shows up, and it's always on base, so the fees are like zero. And so anytime I get prompted by the Coinbase app to go like mince something or do something on base, I go do it. You want to know why?

Why? Because base is going to have an air drop. I don't know this. I have zero alpha. I'm completely speculating. I am just shooting from the hip here. But here's how I think this goes. Wait, wait, they already have a coin.

It's called it's a publicly traded company. It's coin. You don't think they're going to do another coin? Coinbase has an asset. Base doesn't have an asset. And in this world, we like to tokenize stuff. My idea. So, you know, so Circle and Coinbase.

used to have this partnership, right? But then they were like, you know, let's just make this simple. Coinbase is just going to own 25% of circle and then we're just going to go off and be our separate companies. And that's the alignment there. I think the same thing is going to happen with base. Base spins out. It's its own separate base LLC.

CEO, Jesse Pollock. Maybe it gets incorporated somewhere else. Or like, will it be like, could it be like the base foundation, basically? Base foundation, yeah. Base labs, something like this. Yeah. And then as soon as it is out, from under the large, just gargantuan that is a publicly traded company, base token. Wow.

Base token. Interesting. Interesting. Not Alpha, just David predictions. I'm speculating, yeah. Anyways, the alpha is to turn on notifications on your Coinbase wallet and mint whatever they tell you to mint. Yeah, well, and start doing things on layer twos in general, particularly layer two's

that you are bullish on. David, okay, are Cryptopunks back, man? because there was a massive sale. Are you going to say it? You're going to tell me they never left. But it seemed like they left the building for a while. But this is... Well, NFTs left the building and Punks had a very respectable floor of 45 eth

at the lowest part of the bear market. I appreciate that. This is punk 3,300. 300. Yeah, that is the alien punk with a headband. This thing. Sold for $16.3 million dollars, 4.5,000 ether, which is the sales. second highest punk sale of all time.

16.3 million dollars for an alien punk. Are the celebrities coming back? You know, like Jay-C, Beyonce, Taylor, who actually bought this. We don't know who bought it. Some anonymous punk bowl. NFTs have not yet had a bull market, like a full bull market.

Other than Pudgies, yeah. There's some glimmers, right? Like Pudgies is kind of a standout, but it's not like last time. Do you think that's coming? Do you think that's still ahead? I mean, in bull markets, we cycle through absolutely everything at least once. Will NFTs have an outsized focus this bull market?

I don't necessarily think so. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe it's just punks that are going to catch a bit this cycle. David. Hold on, and we just had one sale. Yeah, right. I don't know.

I don't know. The JPEGs are your thing, okay? My take is that punks track how cool Ethereum. is. So like if Ethereum is cool, then punks will track that via the ETH price. And so I'm bullish on punks around the ETH ETF approval. Huh. Maybe, maybe one of the, the Tradfi shops will buy punk and it become cool with the ETH crowd. Yo, Van Eck boys. Let's get this done. Get your intern on this. Michael Saylor bought more Bitcoin. Get your intern a punk. Your intern needs a punk. Oh my God. I'd be quite the gift. He deserves it, though, or she deserves it. He does deserve it.

He does it too. Whoever it is. Also Franklin Templeton Instagram accounts or Twitter accounts. Both of you guys, get your guys people's punks.

Michael Saylor bought some Bitcoin this week, of course. But let's just zoom out and try to figure out what in the world he's doing. This is an interesting tweet that I saw this week.

And it's kind of like this infinite money glitch. It's not infinite because it just scales with Bitcoin price, but you know, Bitcoin price is doing pretty well. And we've always said on bank lists

that Michael Saylor's trade purchase of Bitcoin with his like micro strategy kind of like equity play is going to work well this is this is actually how this fiat money glitch works so his playbook is number one if you're ever curious he issues a convertible senior note so he has micro strategy right and this is publicly traded company so he issues convertible senior notes that's debt denominated in us dollars a currency that by design is losing value over time it's true by design the dollar is going to lose money over time and then he buys the scarcest asset in the

world, which is Bitcoin. Then he waits for the U.S. dollar to lose value against Bitcoin, leading to a surge in company valuation. Okay, and that's just step one. And then that valuation allows him to do what? Issue more convertible senior notes. And then he rinses and repeats. So as a point of reference, Microstrategy, the stock has searched by 20% in one day alone. That was March 4th. It was just 20% in that day alone. And year-duty, to date. So in 2024, it's already up 92% and 435% over the past year. He was not drawing in these types of returns with micro strategy as like a business intelligence software company. It's all about the Bitcoin treasury, and that's the play he's making. And he's made it consistently.

And it's almost surprising to me, David, that other corporate CEOs haven't followed him. But I think part of the reason is they don't have as much governance over their stocks as Michael Staler basically does. Because Michael Saylor has enough voting rights in micro strategy. Just do whatever he wants and this is what he wants to do. This next part of the weekly roll up brought to you by ETH maximalism. There's a website on blockchain center.net slash EN for English. There is no second best.

And it is, what if micro strategy had bought ETH instead? if he had bought ETH instead of Bitcoin, he would have $16 billion instead of the measly $12.2 billion that he has with Bitcoin. And if he had stake that Eath, he would have $17.6 billion. Wow. He'd also have more ETH than Eichneler has, David. He'd have 4.5 million. Steaked, which would be pretty impressive. We don't have that kind of, like, Ethereum doesn't have a micro-sailer level.

We just have $1.5.5. 5-9. Yeah. We've got 1-559. Just the burn, you know? Just the burn. That's the best we got. Quiet burn in the background.

It's easy to forget. It's very powerful. It's not in your face. All right. Permissionless 3 is back. All of our speakers that are so far on board, the 50 of them are announced. October 9th through 11th in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bology, Srinivasa, Lucanets from Pugent,

Lejean, from Vali, NIC-Manyan from Celestia. Zachianian from Cosmos. Van Spencer, from Framework. works Santiago from Parify Capital. Sandy Cool from Franklin Templeton. I could go on. Matt Hogan. I think I will. Muneb Seriram. Blau. Mike Dudis.

Keone Hahn from Monad. God, the list of quality speakers is off the charts. And these are just the people that we've announced so far. So permission to be, if you do not have your ticket, get one because it only goes up in price. And if you're a bankless citizen, you have 30% off with your perks and your perks. Bankless.com slash tools slash perks. to get 30% off of your ticket. Me and Mike, we've been working on some of the,

what are we going to talk about at Permissionalists? And one of the reasons why I think Permissionless is one of the best conferences out there is because we have podcasters who are setting the agenda. If you've ever been to a normie, normal conference, podcasters are not sending the agenda. It's bad. We've absolutely killed it with the list this week.

Bitcoin Renaissance, AI Crypto, restaking, like the three big headlining themes. We also got modularity, gaming layer 2s and NFTs. And so there's something for everyone. It's a festival of crypto content. It's going to be a ton of fun. Salt Lake City.

We started permissionless in Florida at West Palm Beach. Then we went to Austin. Now we are in Salt Lake. Why? Because we're going west. Nice. This is the only conference I go to, Crypto Conference.

And it is so worth it. And how could you miss a crypto conference like this in 2024? Like, don't miss the bull market. Right. Right? This is the year. By the way, David, a big special guest. I'm not, we're not ready to announce right now.

Just said yes to coming main stage to commission us yesterday. Really big freaking deal. I'm so excited about it. I think we're going to get some massive names attending this event and speaking. It's all going to be the crypto content that you guys love. So go check that out and get a ticket early. Get a ticket now. David.

Up only. Well, speaking of conferences, okay, you just came back from one at Ethan. Denver. And it was great. Last week, you were mid-Eath Denver, right? You were recording from Denver when we did the roll-up. So rather than a meme of the week, why don't you just tell me about it? So how was ETH Denver? East Denver had outsized focus on side events. I actually only went to the main conference one time during East Denver. But it was as exciting and like super high vitality as ever. I did a podcast with the Alf Alpha Boys inside of ZK Synx podcast. I want to I don't want to call it a podcast booth.

It was more like a podcast arena. There was like 60, 70 people in the audience. It was the first ever live audience I've ever had. Me and the Alpha Alpha Boys. Really good conversation. We're going to have that out on the feed. Probably the bankless premium feed sometime this coming week. Really, really exciting.

All of these side events, like there was an eigenlayer side event every single day. I saw Sereram talking like eight different times. There was a Bitcoin Renaissance day, which was just huge. Nick Carter was there. A lot of the bitcoins were there. Muneb from Stax was there. I hosted a modulithic debate between Muneb from Stax,

Nick White from Celessia, Neil from Eclipse, and then this one individual, I'm forgetting the name, from Gita Labs. Zano, I think. Really, really good. So, yeah, big side event focus.

The bankless meetup was phenomenal. I had like 200 people at the bankless meetup, all drinking beer. It was really, really great. Really, really great. So, David, I don't know if you saw this tweet. This is, again, I didn't attend ETH Denver,

but this was a tweet from what the Uber driver said about ETH Denver. This is Alex, the Uber driver. And I don't know if his first exposure to the ETH Denver crowd. What does he say here? You should read some of this. When I read this, I legit had a tear in my eye. Really? I was like just, yes, it was really really.

Because I've been to ETH Denver every single time and I've seen it develop. and crypto from the outside doesn't really have like a great brand. So this is Alex the Uber driver who went to the R-Etherium Reddit page and dropped in a note to the Ethereum community. And so I want to read it out loud to the Ethereum community. Greetings. I'm an Uber driver in Denver. We recently held ETH Denver a huge conference for our city and I'd like to share my thoughts as an outsider. A passenger asked about my experience with attendees and she found it interesting and asked me to share this on this subreddit.

Firstly, as an Uber driver, I always deal with one asshole a day. I'm glad to report that I did not have a single bad experience with you nerds over the whole week. Not a single passive aggressive remark or worse that I would normally get on the daily. Namaste. I probably drove a total of 300 different people from the conference. I'm very chatty and pretty well versed in this space for a seeming outsider. I would say I discover two types of attendees, career-oriented workers and crypto-fanatics. career-oriented people were interesting

but shared the same skepticism that I do they consisted of developers hoping for the best because their career rested upon it surprisingly a lot admitted a lot of them admitted to big personal losses due to gambling behaviors yeah that's part of crypto I found it weirdly refreshing

to share a somewhat embarrassing experience to a complete stranger as a warning I got the strong impression that they saw crypto as a career path as opposed to a revolutionary technology the mercenary crowd they're just working like career workers right they're here they're here for the job fanatics were more interesting i expected them to share a cult like exuberance which they did the difference is the

following and this is the part that i thought was really cool i was experiencing a call to action as with all colts but instead i only received calls to education i must have spoken to 200 plus crypto fanatics but no one told me what they were working on specifically no company or specific coin or project was shared. No one told me to buy X or invest your time in Y. The only call to action was educate yourself in the space, research your interests, think about how a blockchain could change it, join communities, share your values, find projects that align with your beliefs. Are you all degenerates, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama or what? Is the question, Alex, the Uber driver says. I must admit the philosophy that was shared is refreshing and it seems that everyone is trying to help me

in an indirect way, which I found sweet and non-condescending. I've never judged a group of people as weirdly pacifist and revolutionary at the same time. And this gives me an unreasonable level of confidence. After this experience as an outsider, I have come to the conclusion that crypto is an anti-cult, and I am in. Wish you all the best, Satoshi. Just kidding. I mean, Alex, the Uber driver.

I thought this was so cool. Because crypto, we have a terrible PR problem to the outs. outside world. But at East Denver, we at least won the hearts and minds of this one individual Uber driver. And I think that that reflects very well on the people that make it throughout a bear market who are here for the right reasons to show up in the right spot and believe in what they do. The line, I've never judged a group of people as weirdly pacifist and revolutionary at the same time. That's going to stick with me forever. I really enjoyed this piece. Yeah, that's great. This is definitely he experienced, I think, the best of us.

and the best that crypto has to offer. So I'm glad that our crypto conferences bring that to people. And yeah, I'm glad it. That's powerful for sure. All right. Well, you ready to end it here, David? Let's do it. Yep.

Next week, all time high, shall we? Until then. Next week, all time highs. Yeah. It's a day. The disclaimer has got to let you know. Of course, crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in.

But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. The secondary mind