Bankless - ROLLUP: $ARB Airdrop | Banking Failure with SVB & Silvergate | Ethereum Shanghai Staking Withrawals

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup 3rd Week of March 2023 ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://www.bankless.com/join  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://ba...nkless.cc/kraken  🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🦄 UNISWAP | THE DEFI EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  👻 PHANTOM | CROSS-CHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 1:40 Citizenship 3:30 MARKETS 9:40 CPI Inflation https://twitter.com/RealVision/status/1635619573901688834  12:54 ETH Burn https://twitter.com/ultrasoundmoney/status/1635719284876771350  14:00 DeFi Volume https://twitter.com/AustinAdams10/status/1634737488534073344  https://twitter.com/synthetix_io/status/1633963371434332161  18:45 Arbitrum Token https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1636351836381937666  https://docs.arbitrum.foundation/gentle-intro-dao-governance  27:35 $ARB Airdrop Predictions https://www.bankless.com/the-arb-arbitrum-airdrop-is-here/  https://earni.fi/ 32:27 US Banking System https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1627661003449147393  36:12 Recapping SVB and Silvergate 37:07 Operation Chokepoint 2.0 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1634770876494147584  https://twitter.com/GOPMajorityWhip/status/1636008298481680384  41:49 USDC Price https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1635059024050937856  39:47 Credit Suisse https://apnews.com/article/credit-suisse-banks-svb-shares-ecb-lagarde-94585aebadbf67f9a2307d3560ce502c  45:47 Banking Crisis https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1635112021862785024  46:42 FedNow CBDC https://twitter.com/federalreserve/status/1636110208878379010  https://twitter.com/damonnam/status/1636150037657837568  48:23 ETH Security KuCoin Crypto https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-continues-crackdown-unregistered-cryptocurrency-platforms  https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/09/what-happens-if-ethereum-is-a-security/  50:37 Gary Gensler Proof of Stake https://www.theblock.co/post/220297/gensler-suggests-proof-of-stake-tokens-are-securities  54:50 Ethereum Shanghai Staking Withdrawals https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1636370111333556224  Lido Staking -  https://twitter.com/LidoFinance/status/1635739571227951117  55:50 Euler Finance Hacked https://twitter.com/eulerfinance/status/1635431726364147712?  59:20 Aztec Connect https://twitter.com/aztecnetwork/status/1635319509707030528  1:00:15 Starbucks NFTs https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/9/23633169/starbucks-nfts-odyssey-siren-collection-rewards-program  1:01:10 Fortnite Epic Games Crypto https://blockworks.co/news/epic-games-fortnite-store-crypto-blockchain  1:02:05 Meta Instagram NFTs https://twitter.com/skasriel/status/1635386565487898624  1:04:20 Bankless NFT Collectibles https://market.bankless.com/  1:05:15 Fidelity Crypto https://www.theblock.co/post/220298/fidelity-crypto-quietly-went-live-giving-millions-of-retail-customers-access-to-bitcoin-ether  1:06:25 Releases Uniswap on BNB - https://twitter.com/Uniswap/status/1636034900284383239  Soul Wallet - https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/soul-wallet-crypto-wallet/  1:10:30 Questions from the Nation https://www.bankless.com/join  1:18:00 TAKES of the Week 1:20:00 Banks are Rollups https://twitter.com/0xJim/status/1635290618003066882  1:21:02 Crypto Markets https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1635312852067307520  1:21:47 Tech Entrepreneurs https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1634892046447308800  1:23:10 What David’s Bullish On 1:25:00 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:28:00 MEME of the Week   ---- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Arbitrum has finally announced the long-awaited air drop. Is it layer two season? Are we finally here? Can we say that? Bankless Nation, it is the third Friday of March. David, what time is it? Ryan, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor.
Starting point is 00:00:20 Yet we persevere, nonetheless, into the frontier. With an air drop this week, the frontier has brought us an airdrop. We found an air drop. Big one. We got one. It's one that was much anticipated guys. We're going to tell you about the arbitram airdrop. It's happening.
Starting point is 00:00:35 And we've got all the details. We're also going to talk about some of this fallout from this little banking crisis. That seems to be going on. It happened after we recorded the last roll-up, and it's been going on until then. So talk about that. Now maybe the contagion has reached Europe. David, what else we're covering? The New York attorney says that ether is a security, but should we even listen to them at all?
Starting point is 00:00:58 Gary says staking is also security-ish. We have to listen to him a little bit more. The CFTC says, hold up, hold up. So we'll talk about all those details. And then sad, sad news out of Defy Protocol Oiler, who's a big hack, $200 million defy hack from a beloved bear market building team. So we'll cover those details and more. Make sure to like and subscribe, right and review,
Starting point is 00:01:22 wherever you are listening to this, whether you are listening to this on the podcast or on the YouTube, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, and share it with your friends and family to help those who are not yet on their bankless journey go bankless. Speaking of going bankless, David, this is a question for everyone in the bankless nation who is listening right now. Are you a bankless citizen yet? David and I told you about the release of our new website, bankless.com last week. I think we must have said it about 10 times.
Starting point is 00:01:49 We're trying to get in our quote of a dozen. Launched last Friday. Fantastic. Getting a lot of great feedback from the community. What the section I have open right now is are just for citizens section. So if you were listening to this and you are not a citizen, there is an option to upgrade and become a citizen right now. One thing I'll draw your attention to is something that drops at the time you're listening
Starting point is 00:02:14 to this. It should drop today. That is our air drop guide. Every month we issue an exclusive air drop guide to all bankless citizens that contains some Alpha, our best guesses on which air drops are happening next. And they're still happening. People said the airdrops were dead. Uh-uh.
Starting point is 00:02:35 Not the case. We just got probably our biggest air drop of the year. Of the year? Of the last, like, I don't know, the last long time just happened this week. And the air drop guide has a whole bunch more. I don't know that there's a few dozen anyways. And so if you missed out on Arbitrum or even if you got the Arbitrum opportunity, there are more opportunities to unlock because, as we always say, David,
Starting point is 00:02:59 crypto pays you to learn about crypto. You use some of these protocols. You implement the strategies and you can be eligible for these in the future. Potentially, these are just our guesses. Anyway, citizens get access to this. Our track is pretty damn good, dude. Our track is great. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:14 And you'll hear about it in the feedback inside of the bankless nation discord. Like the bankless premium subscription is designed to pay for itself. And this is just one of the many ways in which it's, does that. There we go. Let's get to markets, David. The price of Bitcoin this week, we up or we down? We are very up. 15%. When's the last 15% green week that you've seen in Bitcoin? We started the week at 21,650. And that was before we dumped. So right when we, this is, this always happens, Ryan. We concluded the weekly roll up last week. Right about here, right? Right about there is when we recorded. And then that big red candle happened. And then it went down
Starting point is 00:03:54 even more. And then it resurged all throughout this last week. So we started the week at like 21,600, hit a low of below 20,000, which is not a number we want to be below. And then as soon as this banking crisis resolved itself Sunday night, Monday morning, Bitcoin had a massive run, a 20 to 25% run inside of half of a day or something. Look at this. Yeah, below 20,000 to almost 27,000, we are currently at $24,700, up 15% on the week from where we started at 21,000. So one of the most volatile weeks in crypto price action probably of the year, ending the week positive over the last seven days by up 15%. So as a tradition, I'm sure by the time you hear this, we'll be down another 15, 20%.
Starting point is 00:04:41 I was joking like, after that candle down, like, we need to just change this section. It's like, all right, bankless nation, please pull out your, open your price tracker. Checker, that's the price of Bitcoin. Recite Bitcoin to yourself. Recite ETH to yourself. Insert here. How about ETH price? That tells a story, though, which is different than Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:05:01 It's also up as you'd expect, but not up as much. Not up as much. Yeah, Eith Price starting the week at 1530, fell down to below $1,400, moved up almost to $1,800, and now is at $1,160. So a very volatile week, overall up $8,000. and a half percent on the week. Bitcoin almost doubled the appreciation of ether this week. David, can you believe that? Let's get to this chart. This is the E-Thing the Bitcoin ratio. And I'm wondering if you're a little salty about this or if you're feeling okay.
Starting point is 00:05:35 I'm perhaps a little bit salting amount. I look at this ratio, man. So Bitcoin, of course, appreciated much faster than the price of ether this week. And so that means the ratio goes down. Where are we on the ratio? Down 6%. So it actually was like doing really, really well. We almost got up to 0.074, we were down to 0.076, which is a huge move for the ratio. I mean, we're used to dollar moves, Bitcoin versus ether versus the dollar, but the ratio does not usually move much. I haven't, I don't remember the last time the ratio moved 6%. But yeah, down below 0.067. So we are touching the lows of the recent times now.
Starting point is 00:06:11 Look at this. I'm learning to become a charter on Cracken Pro, and I'm just as you're going out to see it. Doing to God work here. Yeah, you've really helped. Cracken Pro, of course, bankless sponsor, our favorite place to go chart and to exchange coins. Ryan's only place that he chose. It's great, though. We haven't seen these, this lows in the eth Bitcoin ratio since the three arrows capital liquidation back in June. Wow.
Starting point is 00:06:38 And the reason why the ether price was so suppressed then was because ether's just used as the collateral of the internet just in defy and across, even in Solana, right? And so when Three O's Capital liquidated itself and many others, Ether had so much cell pressure. And it bounced right back above that. But now we haven't seen lows since then. Okay. Well, so this chart really tells a story. I think this might be one of the stories of the week.
Starting point is 00:07:03 Why did Bitcoin appreciate so much relative to Ether? It's not like some catalyst event happened for Bitcoin. This is all on the back of these bank runs and the resolution of the bank runs. But Bitcoin appreciated more almost double. Ether? Why? Yeah, I think that's right. I can only really explain it by the banking crisis. And I think the very simple take is that, oh, banking crises, banks are collapsing. Bitcoin good. Yeah, right? And whether or not this is new capital who are like, oh, the banks are collapsing, therefore I'm going to warm up to Bitcoin now. I don't know how much capital is saying is like coming to that conclusion. The other take is like, oh, the traders of crypto are like, oh, other people are going to think. that and therefore we're going to buy Bitcoin because people are going to think that, oh,
Starting point is 00:07:52 banks collapsing therefore Bitcoin. I think when something so big in the trad world that proves out crypto's use cases that happens, I think the simple take is like, oh, buy Bitcoin. That's my only explanation. That's my only take. Let me throw another take at you. I don't know if this is later in the agenda, but you know, a Binance's reserve fund, their insurance fund, the finance insurance fund that they've been stacking dollars in, usually. It's It has been denominated in stable coins. CZ announced that Binance is going to, I don't know if they've begun this yet, David,
Starting point is 00:08:24 but is going to rather than denominate this insurance fund, if an exchange is hack or something goes wrong, the Binance bailout fund, he's going to move that from stable coins into Bitcoin and Eith. Yeah. And could that be in front running of that, or could that be that sort of activity?
Starting point is 00:08:43 I don't know. I don't know. I mean, over in the long term, if like we just bounce off of this low, because like we haven't broken down lows back down to the three hours capital liquidation levels. If we just bounce back up, then this will become noise. I don't know. I don't know how to interpret this.
Starting point is 00:08:57 What are you doing? You still holding that ratio trade? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I've held my ratio trade down way below this. I've held it down to 0.05. You're not worried. I held it through the three arrows capital liquidation.
Starting point is 00:09:08 Look, by the way. You did. Your boy's not here for the short term. Narrative traders are excited right now, but David continues to hold. How about the global crypto market cap? How are we doing? 1.125 trillion dollars. Wow.
Starting point is 00:09:24 Up bigly. We almost fell below a trillion, but we have not. Yeah, so we're up about a hundred billion just on the week. Kind of nice. Casual. Two lunas. Let's talk about CPI inflation. Got to talk about the quote unquote real economy?
Starting point is 00:09:38 No, that's not the real economy. I guess this is the traditional economy, the non-crypto economy, inflation. So the long-awaited U.S. CPI numbers, that is the consumer price index numbers came in, what are they reading? Annual inflation down to 6%. So recall over the summer, we were at like 9%, 8 or 9%, something like this. And then CPI grew less the last month. So that would be the month of February than in January. It grew less by 0.4% than February and less by 0.5% in January. So my interpretation is that the core inflation is down and it's down a predicted amount, not above or below that predicted amount.
Starting point is 00:10:25 Is that the interpretation? It seems to be kind of in line with what analysts expected, maybe down a little bit more than analysts expected, but like nothing surprising here. So the market wasn't reacting to this this week. It was all bank crisis time. Do you have a take about inflation here for us? So if I ask you to tell me how to feel about this, your answer is you got nothing? I mean, nothing new, right? Tell me how to feel about this, right?
Starting point is 00:10:49 Inflation is, I think, the same story. Trending downwards, but also is probably more persistent than the Fed or anyone else wants to admit, and is probably still not going to be pushed downwards by monetary policy any further. So I'm still in the camp of like, you know, 2%? Nah, that was for the 90s. We got like some three, four percent new normal, maybe like a five percent. That's still the camp I'm in, but we'll have to see where things go. And, you know, we've had macro folks in the podcast like Lynn Alden, who I consider
Starting point is 00:11:27 very good in this area. And she talks about, hey, the next 10 years, we're going to have cycles, volatility of inflation, periods, years where we... Spikes of inflation, yeah. Yeah, we have large spikes and then we kind of ease back down. But when we ease down, don't get comfortable there. we're not returning to like a, you know, 10 to 20 year period of time where we have two-digit inflation. We're going to continually get real inflation in the economy. And by the way,
Starting point is 00:11:52 CPI is just, I feel like it's almost the wrong metric to look at anyway. Yeah. The takes I've been hearing about inflation is that we actually don't know to what degree is it a supply side problem or a demand side problem. So one take I heard recently was that, okay, we're increasing interest rates just to, you know, destroy capital, destroy demand. But also, Also, like, there's the whole supply chain thing and all of that. And so there's the other side of the equation that the Fed doesn't have control over. And to what degree that actual inflation is responding to Fed interest rate policy versus just normal consumer and supply chain and supply side things is still unknown. And perhaps the Fed's involvement here is less, meaning that inflation will just naturally subside just by some of these idiosyncrancies of the COVID era just play out.
Starting point is 00:12:42 We will have to see. That's what the Fed wants to be true. I don't know if that's going to play out. David, let me give you some good news on your eth-bik coin ratio trade. All right, ultrasound money still continues to be ultrasound. Oh, thank God. You can go look at ultrasound.money at the burn. We just hit 3 million ether supply burnt. As a percentage of the network, what's that? Just under like 2%. No, over 2%, I think. Just, sorry, just under 3%. Yeah, just under 3%. 2.7, 2.8, something like that.
Starting point is 00:13:18 That's incredible. Incredible. 3 million ethersons since EIP-159, not since proof of stake. How has blocks-based demand on Ethereum been lately? Wow. Up only. Yeah. So 120 million and we've burned 3 million because of EIP 1559.
Starting point is 00:13:35 That is a significant amount. And EIP-159 burns ether at the margins, right? So the people that still have their ICO ether and are just holding on it, that ether's not being burnt. It's like the active transactors that have to re-up their supply of ether, that's being burned. And so it actually does show up in the price. Slowly, very slowly. It's fundamentals. Yes.
Starting point is 00:13:58 These are what we call fundamentals. David, some interesting volume fundamentals as well. Uniswap volume is a big. This is a tweet from Hayden Adams. Uniswap at almost 12 billion in daily volume, hitting 11 digits, for the first time ever as a crazy amount of volume. I feel like that's silently happening in the background. Well, no, not so silently.
Starting point is 00:14:18 That is people fleeing out of USDA. And then back into USC. Silently happening in the background is what I was picturing. No, it's quite loud. People are like, oh my God, USC is over. There was a lot of that this weekend, by the way. We'll get to it later. But of course, USD depegged to 90 cents.
Starting point is 00:14:39 Never seen that happen. actually below 90 cents. 88 cents, never seen that before. So I guess that's why the exchange activity was busy. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. But it's also not, this is in line with other things. So here's synthetics.
Starting point is 00:14:53 A hundred million dollars in daily volume for synthetic perpetuals, which is almost a 2x bigger amount than it's ever had on a daily. So like synthetics on layer two on optimism coming back with the force. And this has always been a big constraint on synthetics is layer one gasey's, really hamstrung the whole entire synthetic ecosystem. Now that it's on optimism, it is seeing a rise of the Phoenix for synthetics. Metamask swaps also hitting all-time highs over the weekend. So activity is in. Block space demand is in. You know, I'm going to do a quick shout out for our friends and sponsors at MetaMask here. Seems like an appropriate time. Did you know Bankless
Starting point is 00:15:32 Nation inside of your Metamask wallet, there's this really cool feature called the swap. Swap. You could do inside of MetaMask. don't need to go to an exchange. You just swap one asset for another really reasonable prices, and you get that done inside of your wallet. That's what's hitting all-time-wise. It does the whole order routing thing to go through all the exchanges, so you don't have to deal with it.
Starting point is 00:15:52 It's like kayak for your, you know, hotels.com or. Yeah, it's just like kayak. Tobago or whatever that is. Yeah. I act for digital assets. Yeah, right. There's a metaphor. There you go.
Starting point is 00:16:03 And thanks for Medamast for supporting bankless, as always. David, what do we have? Coming up next. Coming up next, what do we have? The Arbitrum AirDrop is what we're going to talk about. So we're going to talk about all those details. Today, in about two and hours and 10 minutes, we're going to live stream with the Arbitrum team.
Starting point is 00:16:19 So that is available for those that are listening to this on Friday. But then we're going to want to talk about the banking crises and all about the fallout from that, the joint statement from the FDIC, signature bank, whether this is an attack on crypto, Tom Emmer's letter to the FDIC, Jeremy Allaire's USC, and Credit Suisse, and Credit Suisse, because the banking crisis hit Europe. And then after that, we got to talk about the New York. attorney general that alleges that ether is a security, but do we even care about that person? I don't even know. Anyways, all of that and more as soon as we get back from some of these fantastic
Starting point is 00:16:48 sponsors that makes the show possible. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Cracken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Cracken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Cracken U.S. is simple, intuitive, and frictionless, making the Cracken. Cracken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto. For those with experience, the redesigned Cracken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs, integrating key trading features into one seamless interface. Cracken has a 24-7-365 client support team
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Starting point is 00:17:46 the way that Cracken does? And if not, sign up with Cracken at crackin.com slash bankless. Learning about crypto is hard. Until now, introducing Metamask Learn, an open educational platform about crypto, Web3, self-custity, wallet management, and all the other topics needed to onboard people into this crazy world of crypto.
Starting point is 00:18:05 Metamask Learn is an interactive platform, with each lesson offering a simulation for the task at hand, giving you actual practical experience for navigating Web3. The purpose of Metamask Learn is to teach people the basics of self-custody and wallet security in a safe environment. And while Metamask Learn always takes the time to define Web3-specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon-free experience for the CryptoCurious user. Friendly, not scary.
Starting point is 00:18:29 Metamask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience. So, are you tired of having to have a new? to explain crypto concepts to your friends, go to learn.menomask.io and add Metamask learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web 3. Arbitrum has finally announced the long-awaited air drop. David, is it Layer 2 season? Are we finally here? Can we say that? I think so. So Arbitrum's releasing their token. Optimism just had their base announcement with Coinbase. Two, count them. ZK. Evams go live next week. This is the Layer 2 summer that we haven't talked about.
Starting point is 00:19:07 about for like two years now. And finally, finally coming. It's happening. It was a summer, just not in summertime. Anyway, the ARB, that's what they called it, ARB, so not R-B. I like that, ARB, will finally, will be used to govern over the Arbitrum ecosystem. And yes, it will be airdropped early to users. It launches next Friday as March 23rd. So the announcement is today. We know what's going to happen. We know some of the details. David's getting into that. the actual token goes live next Friday. Next Thursday, actually. Oh, is it next Thursday?
Starting point is 00:19:42 Okay, sorry, guys. So next Thursday, by the next roll-up, we'll have some actual token information. But David, you know all about this because you've been talking to Arbitrum. We have them on later. Give us the deets. Yeah, so, okay, 10 billion token supply,
Starting point is 00:19:55 11. something something percent air dropped to users of Arbitrum, one point-something percent air-airdrop to Dau's on Arbitrum to give to their communities, a significant percentage being given to the Dow Treasury, something like 45%. So if you count the Dow Treasury, or 43%, excuse me. So if you count Airdrop to Dow's users and the Treasury, which the Treasury is up to the community to decide, that's something like 56-ish percent.
Starting point is 00:20:21 And then investors and the team get something like 45 percent of total tokens supply. How do you like that? Good distribution? What do you think? I'm waiting for the community to respond to that. I know Pellena said that this was a back. distribution, but it's very hard to appease Pellonia these days. We would know. And but I don't know, so I went into the small brains discord and I was like,
Starting point is 00:20:45 yo, how's your guys' reactions to this? Like how do you guys? This is an arbitram community, small brains. Yeah, small brains. Yeah, the treasuredow ecosystem. I just went in there and asked for their gut takes and everyone who's very, very excited. And so this sentiment is good. Strong morale, strong sentiment. I think the community is accepting this. Yeah. That's my take there. That's the supply. Now, how are they actually distributing theirdrop portion of it, David? Who's getting this? How do I know if I'm eligible? Okay, so there's a bunch of different reasons why one could be eligible for the Arbitrum token.
Starting point is 00:21:16 I think you're going to go ahead and hit that button and we can look at this happen live, Ryan. See how many tokens have got? All right, this is a wallet I've been using. Let's see. Be-y! Look at the confetti, 3,000 tokens. I did five things out of the six things. Yes, but those five things also have tiers inside of them as well. So six different things, each one's with internal tiers.
Starting point is 00:21:37 So did you bridge to Arbitrum? So that's pretty binary. Yes, I do. You did, looks like you did not bridge to Arbitrum Nova. So you did not get that qualification. Two different changes. Not with this wallet. Not with this wallet.
Starting point is 00:21:49 All of your 17 other walls. Transactions over time. So you've conducted transactions doing two of distinct months. If you did it with six months, you got more. If you did it with nine months, you got even more than that. So that's like a usage type thing. How often you're doing this? Yeah, exactly. Next one, transaction, frequency, and interaction.
Starting point is 00:22:08 More than four transactions or interacted with four smart contracts as the base tier, and that goes up to 100 transactions with more than 100 smart contracts for the big power users out there. And so there are four different tiers inside of this criteria. Got it. Below that is transaction value. 10,000, 50,000, or 250,000 in aggregate transaction volume. So if you only had $1,000, but you transferred that, $1,000 around 250 times, you would have gotten the top criteria.
Starting point is 00:22:40 And then bridged to Arbitrum 1. So assets bridged if you deposit more than $10,000,000 or $250,000 of assets to Arbitrum 1. And then activity on Arbitrum Nova as well, the other Arbitrum chain. So those are all the criterias. Yeah. So I got 3,000 ARB tokens. And again, they're not awarded right now. So I can't come claim these.
Starting point is 00:22:59 I can go claim them next Thursday. Yes, next Thursday. And you will also delegate to. a delegate for governance, which brings us to the conversation of governance. So Arbitrum is licensing arbitram technology to the Arbitrum Dow. And so this is actually pretty cool. Not only did they launch their token, they've also launched what they are calling Arbitrum orbits, which are Arbitrum layer threes. So if you choose to build an Arbitrum roll up and deploy it on the Ethereum layer one, So separate from the Arbitrum ecosystem, you must first get approval from the Dow.
Starting point is 00:23:39 If you choose to build an Arbitrum roll-up and deploy on Arbitrum 1 or Arbitrum Nova, that is completely permissionless. So you can use Arbitrum technology freely to build on top of Arbitrum pre-existing chains. But if you want to take the Arbitrum technology and build your own independent roll-up that settles directly to the Ethereum layer 1, you must first get Dow approval by token vote. Okay, let me make sure I understand this. So if we were to create a bankless arbitram roll-up and our own, apart from Nova, apart from Arbitrum 1, it has to go to Dow vote.
Starting point is 00:24:14 Yes. The token holders have to give us 51% or more. Right. Okay. So if we want to do that. But it is completely permissionless if we want to build our chain, like a chain on a chain. A layer three. A layer three.
Starting point is 00:24:28 Using Arbitrum tech. Okay. On top of. On top of Arbitram one. That is free and permissionless. or Nova, correct. Brain permissionless. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:24:37 All right. What's the intent behind that, do you think? Well, naturally, the value of the Arbitrum chain gets contained by the Arb token if you build on top of Arbitrum, one or Nova. But if you build an independent chain, you need to justify why you aren't building inside of the Arbitrum network. And so the doubt will determine whether that effort is legitimate or not. That is fascinating.
Starting point is 00:25:03 I think that's very fascinating. Nice experiment. Okay, what else does the ARB token do besides vote? Anything? Do I pay transaction fees for it or is that still ether? Oh, no, that's always going to be ether. Yeah, the other big thing is that there is a multi-sig that backstops the fault proofs for Arbitrum. So Arbitrum fault-proofs are actually operational and running.
Starting point is 00:25:24 So the chain is legitimately decentralized. We are now in what Vitalik would call a phase one of roll-up decentralization out of four, which is live. fault proofs. Are we seeing that on L2B? The wrist? I don't know if they have that updated that fast. Okay. Okay. So that is live and running, and it's backstopped by a 9 of 12 multi-sig.
Starting point is 00:25:48 So it's like, you know, when your kid is like learning to balance on a bicycle, but you keep your hands there. Like that's what's going. So the kid's balancing, but you still keep your hands to catch them there. That's what the multi-suit does. Did I read this group of multi-sig holders? It's called the Security Council. That's correct. It's a security council.
Starting point is 00:26:03 So if they're attacked, then there is a multi-sig way to kind of like do a fast upgrade, some sort of very fast reaction. Yes, right. Yes. But fraud proofs are happening now. Correct. Yeah. That's big.
Starting point is 00:26:18 Yeah. And then also the cool thing about arbitral governance is that this is not Snapchat vote. This is direct on-chain executable governance. And so you don't have to wait for the team to be like, oh, this is what the community wanted. Let's do it. No, an arbitram governance is executable on chain directly. It's pretty cool. Yeah, but okay, but like directly on chain, what does that mean?
Starting point is 00:26:43 What does that mean? As opposed to like Dow governance, which is like, all right, let's do a snapshot vote. Like, oh, this side one, that means we're going to do this. Oh, where it's like just social contract? Yes, exactly. Yeah. No, the arbitram token governance is live on chain. It's binding.
Starting point is 00:26:58 It's binding. That's really cool. There's also this brand new thing called. the Arbitrum Constitution. I mean, you can kind of expect what that is. It's the social contract of the Dow. It also sets some terms. AIP arbitram improvement prosal.
Starting point is 00:27:14 There's the Dow Treasury, Govern chain, non-governed chains, etc, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is all found at docks. Dot Arbitrum dot foundation. And there's now an Arbitrum Foundation that exists. Very cool. They really gave this a lot of thought. I can certainly tell this.
Starting point is 00:27:28 Big rollout. Okay, let's talk about this. We don't know what the price of the table. is at this point in time. But we will, by the next roll-up, are there any guesses? Do you have any estimates on what we might be looking at? I guess you could just do comparables of other layer two ecosystems. What would the value of my 3,000 ARB tokens be? Yeah, so 10 billion arbitram tokens. Coincidentally, Matic and optimism are roughly valued kind of close to each other. Matick is valued at $11.4 billion, fully diluted.
Starting point is 00:28:04 Optimism is valued at $10.7 billion, fully diluted. Optimism has a lot more of dilution to go. The market cap is much lower than the fully diluted value, but the fully diluted value, I think, is the one to pay attention to for the time being. So if we think that Arbitrum is going to be about valued like these two, comparable, like for like one-to-one-ish, that would mean that one-arb token is going to be about $1, $1,000,
Starting point is 00:28:29 10 cents-ish if you think that arbitralum is equivalent to Maddo and optimism. So just above a dollar is what is a reasonable prediction. I think that is the safe base case. Could be more. As a conservative estimation in my opinion is like $1.10. How much supply is hidden? This will be a little more similar to optimism than to Maddoch in terms of the liquid supply that's on the market. Is that right? Yeah. Madik is like they've got, Maddoch has gone through price discovery. It's an old token. That's why. The older the token, the more distribution is in the hands of kind of the open market, the less is locked up and kind of insiders and investors and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 00:29:09 And so the market cap of Maddoch Polygon is 10.3 billion, where the fully diluted value is 11.3 billion. So it's like 90% issued, right? Yeah. Optimism is a fully diluted value of 10.5 billion with a market cap of 750 million. Under 10%. So under 10% totally issued. Arbitrum is coming in with a 12%
Starting point is 00:29:32 AirDrop. So they're going to be a little bit ahead of optimism in total amount actually live circulating and trading. And so they'll still have a lot more to go in terms of price discovery. Optimism's price discovery is there's a lot of price discovery in the optimism token like already baked in. Arbitrum is going to be about a little bit more ahead, but about the same. And so I think there's a lot more. defy and financial activity on Arbitrum than optimism.
Starting point is 00:30:02 I think it's safe to assume, this is my estimation. I have no idea what the market's going to do, obviously. Like a like for like comparable of one to one for Arbitrum to optimism and Polygon is very safe and conservative. I think we could, it would be reasonable to assume a two to one valuation. A two to one valuation. So $2.25 for Arb, depending on how manic the, are the community is and how many tokens they want to purchase on the secondary. Who knows?
Starting point is 00:30:32 And who knows what the initial price might be, right? That's all up to the market to decide. We have a fantastic report that bankless put out if you want to get the details on that. Because I think if you received AirDrop, the not financial advice question is, what do I do with it? Do I hold it? Do I sell it? You definitely delegate it. Definitely.
Starting point is 00:30:49 Well, that would require not selling. So. Sure. But yeah. So you can read about that. I think you have to delegate the claim, however. So, you know, arbitrate. DefyMote, that is a really interesting thing.
Starting point is 00:31:02 I mean, for me personally, not, like, I would not sell my ARP tokens. I mean, like, it's layer two seasons. Just getting started, my friends. And Arbitrum is one of the most promising layer two's out there. Not financial advice. Never is, of course. But we have some videos on the bankless website. You can go check out.
Starting point is 00:31:23 We're talking to their team. We're recording that a little bit later. That should be live by the time. You get this episode. And the last thing I'll say is if you want an automatic notification system of when your Arbitram AirDrop dropped, you just got to go to earn. Earn.e.erne.org. So that is E-A-R-N-I.F-I.
Starting point is 00:31:46 Right. And what's Ernify? Earnify is the ultimate air drop finder for you, okay? It just, it's like a super robot that just alerts you when you have an air drop in your particular address when you're eligible because most air drops people never get an opportunity to claim. So go check that out. There's a, there'll be a link in the show notes. Of course, Urnify is a bankless property now. So we're really excited about that tech and the value it's delivering to the bankless nation. Wow. Cool day. Very good. That was, I so, it's nice
Starting point is 00:32:21 to have fun things to talk about, fun and happy things, but now we're going to have to go on to the sad things. This is a joint statement. by the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC. Those are all the big ones, BigGov, telling us something on March 12th. Well, is that Sunday? Did they issue that on a Sunday? Sunday evening, 615 Eastern. Basically, the last moment that they had to issue the statement before people were
Starting point is 00:32:45 going to get real crazy Monday morning when markets opened up. All right. So what happened? For people who didn't catch our episode that we did on Monday about the banking crisis in general, can you just give us the highlights of what actually happened from the last roll-up until now. So right after we've recorded their last roll-up, Silver Gate, excuse me, Silicon Valley Bank had a run on the bank. And people realized that this bank was going to legitimately run out of money to give to people that had cash in Silicon Valley Bank. And so
Starting point is 00:33:17 that caused just a bunch of just fear because many of startups in the crypto space and just overall startups in general bank with Silicon Valley Bank. Some of the startups that you and I, have been made and invested in have used Silicon Valley Bank as their bank no longer because that bank is gone. But people were very, very worried that this would create contagion. And so this run on the bank would create runs on other banks because the reason why Silicon Valley Bank went under was because of a common theme, a common structure that many, many banks have, which is long-dated securities, long-dated maturity.
Starting point is 00:33:57 securities, treasuries that are like 10-year treasuries, five-year treasuries, long-term treasuries, versus short-term treasuries. And so when they bought these long-term treasuries and then the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates, those long-term treasuries and other securities that were all like long-term time horizons went down in value quite a lot. And so that created a big hole. And then people needed to withdraw their cash at some point in time. And they did it fast. And they did it fast. Well, because people started to realize that there's not a lot of money left so they had to, you know, try and come through the door. It was social media that when the VCs are typing in all caps like, there's a run on
Starting point is 00:34:35 the bank, you know, withdraw your funds. That cascades. Yeah. A run on the bank. Yeah, people don't literally show up, although there were some people actually showing up at the branches of Silicon Valley Bank. But like, people are just withdrawing electronically. Wire transfers doing it as fast as possible.
Starting point is 00:34:50 That's what the run on the bank was. So we had Silvergate, then Silicon Valley Bank. There was another one as well. So this was the surprise in this statement here from the joint statement was that signature bank was also announced in this statement that they have also shuttered signature bank in addition to Silicon Valley Bank. So that was a surprise. The Fed, the FDIC. And so not only did they take control, seize Silicon Valley Bank. And then here's the big thing about the statement is that FDIC insurance, which is usually a quarter million dollars,
Starting point is 00:35:26 they effectively just raised it to infinity for these two banks. So the Fed took over Silicon Valley and Signature Bank and said, hey, if you have money in this bank, even if it's over $250,000, you will totally be insured and we will give you your money back, starting on Monday. And that's what quelled the fears, and that's what stopped the bank run. But it was really the signature bank shut down, which was kind of a surprise, because it wasn't signature that had a run on the bank. It was Silicon Valley Bank.
Starting point is 00:35:55 And so the Fed said that, well, signature bank was also under stress. And so they seized that one as well. All these banks that start with an S, I think, are curse. So just quick recap. So last week, early last week, Silvergate Bank, dead. That was a crypto-focused bank. Next, Silicon Valley Bank, run on the bank. That happened Friday.
Starting point is 00:36:15 Was shut down. The Fed came in. And then all weekend, everyone, the entire market was left to panic, right? Right. USDC, trades office peg, VC shouting. like what's going to happen? What about the depositors? Everyone's panicking because they still have funds in Silicon Valley Bank. And we don't know if depositors are going to have that deposit guaranteed. And then the Fed comes out late in the evening on Sunday. Before markets start, at least traditional
Starting point is 00:36:42 markets start, crypto is trading during this whole time, never shuts down. And they say, nope, depositors, we're going to make them whole for Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, and by the way, we're shutting down preemptively signature bank. That's what this is. So the question is like, signature bank, why signature bank? Was this a targeted attack? Or was signature bank just as weak as Silicon Valley Bank? So when I read this statement, my initial reaction was, well, the reason why they would
Starting point is 00:37:13 take over Silicon Valley Bank and promise infinite insurance to all depositors is because they are the worry of a contagion event of many, many runs on many banks. is legitimate and that's why they would do this. So therefore it does make sense that there is another bank that is also under duress that is not sufficiently liquid to give depositors their money back. So that to me makes sense. It could be signature. It could be anything, right?
Starting point is 00:37:40 Right. Other takes have come out with other information that this was an opportunistic takedown of a crypto bank, which if you take the other side of this perspective, well, we were starting January and February talking about Operation choke point 2.0. and how the Fed and the Treasury was trying to come after politically banking services that would bank crypto customers. And so, well, now it kind of makes sense that they would do this regardless of the actual financial condition.
Starting point is 00:38:09 And so people have passed this back and forth. And so this is part of this story here. Here's Nick Carter's take, which is talking about former Senator Barney Frank of Dodd-Frank, the Dodd-Frank Act, openly admits that signature was arbitrarily shuttered despite no insolvency because regulators wanted to kill off the last major pro-cryptop bank. He is not a crypto person. He does not care about our industry.
Starting point is 00:38:32 So this is like a decently unbiased take is that he said that there's no real objective reason that signature bank had to be seized, which is a big statement from the Frank of Dodd-Frank to say. This is Barney Frank, like pointing the finger at the Fed and the U.S. government and saying, this is a direct quote. I think part of what happened was that regulators wanted to send a very strong anti-cryptome, message. Barney Frank's saying this. This is not Crypto Zealot saying this. We became the poster boy because there was no insolvency based on the fundamentals. Interesting allegation. And the reason why he's saying, we is because he is at Silvergate. He's at signature. Excuse me, signature.
Starting point is 00:39:10 We'll get our S's. There's so many Ss here with these banks. Yes. So officials, Fed officials saying crypto had nothing to do with his signature take down. But then in this article, it's stated that any buyer of signature bank who wants to buy this Distressed Bank must agree to give up all the crypto businesses at that bank. Okay. Oh my God. I didn't know that. Not looking great.
Starting point is 00:39:32 Not looking great. So the traditional way to kind of, I'm going to say bailout, but save depositors as a bank is to have a bigger bank buy it, by all the depositors assets, right? And this is saying that maybe any buyer of signature has to agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank. Businesses fail? Sick. How is this legal?
Starting point is 00:39:55 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. So here is Zero Hedge commenting on that recent Nick Carter take. Crypto is now a political issue. The Democrats want to crush it, and the Republicans, GOP, will use that in 2024.
Starting point is 00:40:08 We'll see what that happens when the elections go around. I hope this doesn't become a left versus right thing. Is Congressman Tom Emmer, Republican, saying, today I sent any letter to FDIC Chairman Grumberg regarding reports that the FDIC is weaponizing, recent instability in the banking sector to purge legal activity from the United States. So Tom Emmer, member of Congress. Also, we are in talks with him about coming on bankless,
Starting point is 00:40:31 so we will talk to him directly soon. I think he's coming on next Friday, David. But that is not all. So here's Jake Schrovinsky tweeting out today, the Blockchain Association, sent FOIA request, that is, Freedom of Information Act request to the Fed, the FDIC, and OCC, demanding information about the unlawful banking of crypto companies. We are collecting evidence of debanking, share your story with us, and he gives an email to do that, debanked at the blockchain association.org, plus a threat. So whether or not that this was a run on signature bank or this was a targeted political takedown of one of the few remaining crypto banks, sounds like we're going to get down to the bottom of it, because we have the blockchain
Starting point is 00:41:13 association with freedom of information because we live in a democracy, and also a congressman going after this as well. So the sleuths are on the case. We will find this out. We'll see if the allegations are true. Yeah, Jake Chavinsky here tweeting, there are troubling reports of crypto companies having their bank accounts closed with no notice and explanation. And this is a disturbing trend suggesting that regulators are trying to cut
Starting point is 00:41:37 crypto entirely out of the banking system, not legal to target an industry like that and to target a specific set of depositors. David, let's go back to the USDC story, though, because that hit crypto. Of course, crypto didn't stop trading. USDC was still trading against other stable coin assets, dropped down to 88 cents. We had Jeremy Aller on the podcast earlier,
Starting point is 00:42:03 but this is his statement that he issued right after that Fed letter was sent out that all depositors at Silicon Valley and Signature Bank would be made whole. What's the story for USC here? Yeah, so I've pulled out three tweets out of his thread that I thought were worth stating. 100% of USC reserves are safe and sound,
Starting point is 00:42:22 and we will complete our transfer of remaining SVB Silicon Valley Bank cash to BNY Mellon. Much bigger, bigger bank. With the closure of signature bank announced tonight, we will not be able to process minting and reductions through CigNet, which is a product from Signature Bank. Signature Network is what it was. It was a product to facilitate inter-customer transfers
Starting point is 00:42:43 instantaneously inside of signature bank. So, like, Wintermute, I believe is a customer of CigNet, no longer because it's down. And so, like, you could have instant bank transfers across clients since that is... Isn't CigNet still up? It's just being operated now by BNY Mellon. Apparently is still up and running, but they are no longer depending on that. So they are now taking on settlements through BNY Mellon.
Starting point is 00:43:07 And then lastly, indeed, the Payment Stablecoin Act, which remains a very active pursuit in Congress, would enshrine a law, a regime where Stablecoin funds, aka U.S.C., would be held with cash at the Fed and short-term T-bills. We need this law now more than ever if we truly want a safe financial system. I think it's worth noting that like two banks that served Circle went down and Circle persists and is trading a dollar.
Starting point is 00:43:36 Just one step ahead. All I got to do. And now it's at BNY Mellon, man. And so like they are just climbing the ladder of bigger and bigger and safer banks. Like USC is an increasingly safe place to hold your money. Well, now basically one USDC is is as good as a bank in a too big to fail financial banking system.
Starting point is 00:43:54 So basically, you know USDA is going to get depositor bailed out. Anything goes wrong. As long as the U.S. banking structure holds. As long as they don't become overly draconian about crypto, yeah. Right. Exactly. Anyway, the full story with Jeremy Aller is actually on the bankless podcast. I learned so much about USDC.
Starting point is 00:44:14 That was one of the hardest. The most hard-hitting 30 minutes podcast is a very short podcast. He was just like drop in the information. Yeah, he was like, here's what happened over the last five years. We asked like two questions in 30 minutes and he answered more questions than I had. Yeah, go check that out. Of course, this is a centralized table coin. This is not a decentralized stable coin, but that is still important in the crypto ecosystem as well. For like, Jeremy is a crypto person. He is our Trojan horse into Tradfye. Yeah, that's how we do it. They're still paying Heath gas fees. They're still burning Eath, aren't they? Yeah, that's right. Okay, so this contagion has maybe spread to Europe. What's the source? story here as we record this, David. Yeah, so Credit Suisse under duress in Europe. Credit Suisse,
Starting point is 00:44:55 perhaps not the most legitimate bank out there. Perhaps did some money laundering. Are you causing a run on the bank right now, David? Perhaps could have facilitated more legitimate financial transactions. I don't know. Okay. Could have been better. Anyways, the shares of Credit Suisse hit all-time lows, but then the stock price resurge because the Swiss Central Bank agreed to loan the bank. bank up to 50 billion francs, $54 billion, to bolster confidence in the country's second largest lender following the collapse of two other banks is the article. So Credit Suisse is not looking great, but they also needed a bailout from a central bank. The weak banks are shaky, right?
Starting point is 00:45:34 But I do think, I mean, central banks, whatever country you're in and are going to bail out deposits. They can't afford to have banking contagion spread across all of their respective countries. So I think that's the story here. There's a story about stock prices of the big bank. banks as well. What are we looking at here? A bunch of lines going down into the right of J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan, Stanley, Goldman Sachs. Not one of them is better than negative 10%.
Starting point is 00:46:00 Bank stock slide. Ryan Selkis had to take here. Well, bank stock slide, what was crypto doing last week? Up 10%. Down 10 to 20% versus up 10% for crypto. Well, I mean, like, doesn't this expose? Is this a narrative trade? Doesn't this exist? I think it's a few things. I think one, it's a little bit of a narrative trade. People waking up and be like, well, how safe is my money? Number two, I think this indicates a more doveish Fed moving forward.
Starting point is 00:46:31 How much can Powell actually increase rates, which is, of course, good for risk on assets like crypto. Here we go. Fed Now. What is Fed Now? And how does that link to the story of what we've been talking about, David? Fed now is like as close as you get to a CBDC without actually making a CBDC. It's not, it's like a, it's not a CBDC in itself, is it? It's like a side chain for digital bank dollars. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a transaction side chain for the Fed. Instant payment service from Fed now starting in July aims to reduce the gap in payment time between United States financial institutions. This instant payment network will settle payments in sec. and support transactions between consumers, merchants, and banks does not rely on blockchain.
Starting point is 00:47:18 So the conspiracy here, Ryan, is that signature bank was taken by the Fed. Conveniently, FedNow service is announced. Just rolling it out. Huh. Huh. Fed now is government tech. Right. It's government signet.
Starting point is 00:47:36 It's a government side chain. It's like Signet made their own private side chain to facilitate these, these, banking transactions and to settle kind of, I guess, crypto payments in the U.S. banking system. This is Damon Nam expressing that Silvergate had Silvergate Exchange Network, Synerature had CigNet, both were private networks for companies to transfer value between each other using digital assets. Where are both now? These companies enabled alternative currencies that threaten a CBDC and Fed Now. That's the conspiracy theory. Maybe if feds were trying to take this new network down before it blossomed into something bigger.
Starting point is 00:48:15 I will leave this up to the imagination of the listener. David, is ether security. All right, this was buzzing last week as well because New York Attorney General alleged that ether is a security. So someone who does not get to determine what a security is, alleged that ether is a security. That should be what the headline is. Okay, so what's the take here?
Starting point is 00:48:35 What's going on? So the New York Attorney General is suing Ku-coin, an exchange, saying that it violated securities laws by offering tokens that meet the definition of a security without registering with the attorney general's office. What were those tokens? Luna, well, no one's going to defend that one, UST, and ether, like just lumping all those things together as if they're the same. And they have argued that ether is a security. Why is ether a security? Well, because the value of ether is dependent on efforts of others, including co-founder of Vitalik Buter and the Ethereum Foundation, which, man, are we talking to a Bitcoin maxi
Starting point is 00:49:12 or are we talking to the New York Attorney General? I can't tell the difference. It's important to realize these are just court filings to try to prove a case. So it's not even necessarily a... It's a statement. I feel like it made headlines because of the name.
Starting point is 00:49:26 It's a New York Attorney General of the name. Not that this is actually... She doesn't have the power to do this, basically. It'd just be like me tweeting, Bitcoin is a security. I don't have the power to... I declare a security. I declare. It doesn't work like that, guys. This is pretty bad, yeah, the statement, you can read the details. And there's some analysis this week of what happens if ether is a security.
Starting point is 00:49:51 It's just, it's not an illegitimate question. Like, what happens if ether is a security? It's not, nothing's going to happen. Well, I guess if somehow the U.S. government all colludes as part of this extended operation choke point to choke off crypto and somehow, you. is able to, like, declare ether security and that is not defeated in the court system, then what happens? The U.S. is eliminated from the crypto race. Like, it's not going to kill Ethereum long term. And by the way, I think that, like, I give the odds of that happening, like, 1%, 2%, maybe. Like, it's probably not worth thinking about.
Starting point is 00:50:32 That's my current take. I mean, I could be wrong about that. It's not worth thinking about, yeah. But it's just a lot of noise. And speaking of noise. Gary Gensler is saying some of this same noise as well. What's Gary saying? He's saying that proof of stake tokens are securities.
Starting point is 00:50:49 And so returns that token holders see from stakings indicate that these tokens are securities according to Gensler and would need to be registered under U.S. securities laws. Whether they're promoting or putting into a protocol and locking up their tokens in a protocol that's often a small group of entrepreneurs and developing are developing, that often a small group of entrepreneurs and developers are developing, I would would suggest that each of these token operators seek to come into compliance and the same with the intermediaries.
Starting point is 00:51:14 Like at this point, this is just the Gary stump speech. Like, oh, crypto is security. I declare a security. Also, Gary can't also, does Gary get to determine who what is a security? No, he doesn't do. No, not even Gary gets to determine that.
Starting point is 00:51:30 What is, what is that determined by courts, right? Yeah, right on that one? It should be. I think Gary can, can prosecute, but then he has to prove his case in court and who are you going to prosecute with Ethereum? How does that even work?
Starting point is 00:51:43 You're going to take Vitalib Buter into court? Okay. Man, I wouldn't like to see that. I would not like to see that. At some level. I would love to see Vitalik. Okay, so when Vitalik brings out, I've seen Vitalik bring out claws sometimes,
Starting point is 00:51:55 like against Bitcoin Maxis or when he does it. Clause in a way that's like, I'm going to rationally destroy your argument in front of you. Right. In a very concise way. And it's, and it's going to, I'm going to, going to verbally pants you.
Starting point is 00:52:11 That's the right way to do it. Vidalic, I've seen Vidalic verbally pants people a number of times. It is just an absolute dream of daydream to imagine that he might be able to do that for Gary Gensler one time. I think this could happen in Congress one day. But anyway, I don't want to put Vitalik in that situation. This is all stupid noise anyway. It's not worth anyone's time.
Starting point is 00:52:32 David, we got a lot coming up next. What are we covering? Starbucks sold 2,000 NFTs inside of 20 minutes. We have a withdrawal date. Did you know that right? In the middle of the Arbitrum AirDrop, like everyone's talking about Arbitrum to date. We also got the date for the Shanghai Fork. I just learned that by reading the roll-up agenda today. So we're going to talk about when withdrawals are going to be enabled. Sadly, we're going to have to talk about Euler and the hack there. And Aztec is sunsetting Aztec Connect, but perhaps for something better. So we're going to get
Starting point is 00:53:02 to all these updates and more as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets. Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange, but you know this because you've been listening to bankless. But did you know that the Uniswop web app has a shiny new Fiat on-ramp? Now you could go directly from Fiat in your bank to tokens in DFI inside of Uniswap. Not only that, but Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, Layer 2s are supported right out of the gate.
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Starting point is 00:54:56 or you can go to phantom.com slash waitlist to get access. Here we go. When is the next Ethereum hard fork, David? When can I withdraw steak deep? specifically at block number 6,209,536. That is your answer. Thank you. Maybe you're asking when is that?
Starting point is 00:55:15 Thank you, Chad David GPT. Very precise. Yeah, that is going to be April 12th. So a little bit over, under one month away from today. Today is the 16th of March. April 12th is when withdrawals happen. We have a date. Lido, however, also has to upgrade its own smart contracts.
Starting point is 00:55:34 to enable withdrawals, to enable withdrawals, right? And so Lido is targeting mid-May to allow forced Ether to come out of the Lido Dow. So that's the news there. So there could be a delay. That's happening in May, even though the rest of the Ethereum Protocol is upgrading earlier. Right. Correct. Gotcha.
Starting point is 00:55:52 Let's talk about some sad news. This is, I think, really devastating for a really cool DeFi builder team. Oiler Labs. What happened, David? What's the news? Yeah, Oiler, it's a money market. of like compound in Ave with some cool new mechanisms, much more governance minimized with new liquidation schemes that all of the big brains out there thinker is pretty cool.
Starting point is 00:56:14 It was definitely growing in popularity. It was dominating in the Staked Heath world. Really great team. Ryan and I are investors in Oilers. So disclaimer, I guess, for that. $196 million drained and die U.S.EC. Staked Heath in WBTC. This is so far the largest attack of 2023. And so they did their best to plug the hole, but not before $196 million. How did it happen? How did it happen? I mean, I'm beyond my capacity to understand the exploit here.
Starting point is 00:56:51 There was a flash loan. Yeah, it was a flash loan to start. And then, yeah, some sort of exploit in the code. It has since been plugged. So that's that vulnerability is now gone. But here's what's crazy. So they had audits of their smart contracts, six audits of their smart contract. And this functionality was existing eight months.
Starting point is 00:57:17 So it had a Lindy of about eight months live with tens of millions of dollars. And this whole amount has been drained. So a lot of defy users affected by this. I should emphasize, like some of the hacks that we've seen of the years are kind of like protocols that are just fast and loose. They don't take security into account. They're not, they're making obvious, you know, tradeoffs and they're obviously flawed. Oilers not one of those. Right. These are one of the teams that are doing it the right way. Right. And it happened to them. Yeah. This is, when you see six audits and it still gets hacked, that's just, man, like smart contracts,
Starting point is 00:57:58 like the only good metaphor I've heard for smart contracts is like they're the seam engine like they just blow up a bunch and then one day they start working this one sadly blew up devastating and I guess we have to emphasize right there's just defy is taking this
Starting point is 00:58:14 on the chin of course this was a mistake obviously there was a flaw in the way that this was constructed and what we always end every episode with is crypto is risky so is defy you could lose everything put in. That's what we say. And this is another reminder of that. Be careful in these new
Starting point is 00:58:34 crypto ecosystems, the new frontier, people get hurt sometimes. So Euler is offering a $1 million bounty that goes to anything that leads to the arrest of this hacker. As of this morning, Ryan, we are watching the funds go through tornado cash, which more or less indicates that the hacker has no intention of returning the funds whatsoever. The likelihood that this is, North Korea is like, I mean, it's, you think it could be a state actor? It's North Korea. You think the FBI is on the case? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:59:05 I mean, they've talked to chain analysis. They've talked to law enforcement. They've talked to Coinbase is like chain analysis equivalent. I mean, the fact that it's immediately going through tornado cash, my money is on this is North Korea. Wow. Upsetting. Definitely. David, what about Aztec?
Starting point is 00:59:23 So they are sunseting Aztec connect. I don't think this is bad news necessarily, but I was confused when I saw this. Yeah. People are like, oh, Aztec, they're getting shut down by law enforcement or regulators. Because they're a privacy protocol, a layer two privacy protocol. Yes. So like tornado cash, but if it was in a whole entire chain. So they are, Sunset, Aztec Connect, and ZK pay, Aztec pay, which is like basically
Starting point is 00:59:50 tornado cash, but better. But they are doing this to build a next generation encrypted ZK roll up. And so they are basically sunsitting this thing that was a really good stepping stone for what is about to come, which is probably like the most sophisticated privacy technology on Ethereum. And so this is just the prelude to that, if you will. NFT stuff. Starbucks sold 2,000 NFTs in 20 minutes. This is pretty big. What happened here? 2,000 NFTs priced at $100 each, sold out in 20 minutes. 2000 digital stamps, journey stamps. I can't say that I know what these do.
Starting point is 01:00:32 Yeah. Did they get you coffee? They don't get you coffee? I don't know what they get. Let me look at these journey stamps. Secondary marketplace. Look at this. Floor price of $650.
Starting point is 01:00:42 Oh, they're very, very pretty. Oh, wow. Those are pretty. It's like the Starbucks mermaid. Yeah, different manifestations. Yeah, what do they get you? What do they get you? Starbucks clout?
Starting point is 01:00:56 If you're not an Odyssey, Starbucks Odyssey member, you can join a wait list. So something about a Starbucks Odyssey. I mean, Starbucks doesn't have great coffee, but they hate, they got great NFTs. Dan, it is too much of a coffee snog
Starting point is 01:01:08 to buy the Starbucks entity. That is exactly right. Yeah. Epic, the creators of Fortnite have also close to 20 crypto games in their store pipeline. That's pretty big, David. Yeah, okay.
Starting point is 01:01:18 So over the last like six, nine months, I've been like, oh, everyone's talking about crypto gaming is the next big thing. And I was like, okay, that's a fun narrative. Like, let's see if it plays out. After going to East Denver, after hearing news like this and talking to some other people about what's going on, like, this, in my mind, has gone from narrative to, no,
Starting point is 01:01:37 this is real. There was a game at East Denver that was absolutely beautiful for those who like Dark Souls. It looked a lot like Dark Souls. That all the assets in the game were NFTs on a blockchain. And like, well, I did not know that far along. well-balanced economic games are fun. Yeah. They're just fun.
Starting point is 01:01:54 Like, even when I'm playing, like, crypto, it feels like a game sometimes. It's just one giant economic game, and it's a lot of fun. It's cool that Epic is doing stuff here. On the opposite end of this spectrum, though, meta is ending NFT support on Instagram. META! Dude, what? Instagram, it seemed like only yesterday you just deployed this. Right.
Starting point is 01:02:15 This is product news from product lead at Meta. Some product news across the company. we're looking closely at what we prioritize, including our focus. We're winding down digital collectibles to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. I'm disappointed by this, David.
Starting point is 01:02:33 Were people just not using it very much? I don't know. Maybe people weren't using it. It's kind of a bummer. I mean, they got in at the top and they're leaving at the bottom. Yeah. The simple take is just tourists are tourists
Starting point is 01:02:49 and settlers are settlers, and it seems like meta is maybe acting like a tourist in crypto right now. Man. Well, they say, at the bottom of this, they say, and look forward to supporting the many NFT creators who use Gold Passet. But like they said, looking forward to support, yeah, who using Instagram and Facebook to amplify their work. Well, but you just took away the feature. They support you, though.
Starting point is 01:03:14 Like morally? I don't know. My take is this is a big opportunity for, Web 3 social. If Web 2 social is going to say bye-bye to NFTs, that's fine. It's bigger opportunity for decentralized networks. This is, by the way, like the same week that Meta and Zuckerberg announced that they're going to build some sort of decentralized social media thing. Right. Some Twitter alternative. All confusing to me. We'll see what plays out. To that fourth tweet, because this doesn't make any sense. Let me be clear. Creating opportunities for
Starting point is 01:03:43 creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a priority. And we're going to focus on areas that we can make impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization opportunities for reels. Hmm. Okay, maybe I am an NFT daydreamer optimist, but this seems to be the opposite of that. Hey, we're going to not do anything in Web 3, and we're going to go back to Web 2 and focus on that to help support our creators. Pretty regressive.
Starting point is 01:04:14 Tourists leave, settlers stay. That's all I got to say. it's a good time to shout out the bankless collectors. We're doing experiments in NFTs. It's working for us, Meta. We're doing it just fine. Look at the top collectors here. Should we shout them out for a second?
Starting point is 01:04:27 Absolutely. Who do we got here? How many podcasts have we actually tokenized yet? I think like six or, excuse me, like 10 or... Every Monday. And then we did five last year, our Genesis collection. Who are the top collectors that? You want to read them out?
Starting point is 01:04:41 Lyward. We've just figured out how to pronounce his name, Liward. 36 tokens. 36 coming in at number one 36 coming in at number two at 32 tokens is landrin.eath. So thank you for guys for being one and two. The race is on. We also got cocker.eath at 20 tokens, vault.didercrux.eath and automagic.eith, 2019 and 18 tokens. So they're the top five collectors.
Starting point is 01:05:08 We really appreciate the support guys. Thank you, Bankless Nation collectors. Fidelity crypto quietly went live giving millions. millions of retail customers access to Bitcoin and Ether. I didn't even notice this happened. This one was quiet. This one was quiet thing. This was a quiet thing.
Starting point is 01:05:22 YuddaSwap was not quiet. This was quiet. Okay, so Fidelity is absolutely massive. 37 million retail accounts. What do they do? They just added a buy button for Bitcoin and Ether inside of their app. Bullish. Where are they custody this, David?
Starting point is 01:05:36 Do you know this? I do not know. I think Fidelity has their own custody thing too, don't they? Or if they're using that or something like Coinbase, I don't know. I do not know. I mean, this isn't Polish yet because the, no offense to fidelity customers, but I will call them the herd. They're not early. Hey, I'm a fidelity customer.
Starting point is 01:05:57 Yeah, but you also have a Cracken account, I'm assuming. So where do you do your buys, Ryan, in Fidelity or Cracken? And so the people that are buying today, like the idea is that when their herd does come, they don't have to leave and they don't have to, they don't have to, they can stay inside of their close, comfy, cozy zone of protection, which is Fidelity. With the buy button for Ether, you know? When Mad Mask integration fidelity? When do you do that? When can I sign in with Ethereum? All right.
Starting point is 01:06:23 What do we got? Releases. Uniswap on the B&B chain. That happened. And that's the story. All right. We also have a raise this week. One dimension sole wallet backed with $3 million
Starting point is 01:06:36 aims to bring self-hosted crypto wallets to the next billion. Big fan of smart contract wallets. I think we are going to see a wallet Renaissance. Do we want to call a wallet summer? Because if we do, it's going to be two years later that it actually happens. But it does happen. It will happen. There will be a wallet summer. Maybe so will be included in that. But we're starting to see a lot of smart contract wallet and wallet funding in general. It's really exciting to see great teams doing this. And this is from a previous bankless guest, right? Yeah. So whoever listened to the layer zero with JJ,
Starting point is 01:07:09 Zhe Zhong Zeng, who dissented out of China because he worked for Baidu, which is TikTok's parent company, and he refused... Isn't it Tencent? Not Baidu? I'm not wrong about that. I thought it was Baidu. Okay, I don't know. I mean, did you listen to the episode, Ryan? I did. I don't remember, though, but... I think it was Baidu. Commenter correct us.
Starting point is 01:07:29 Yeah, but he refused to build an algorithm that could identify Uighurs for Baidu, basically, because the Chinese government wanted to suppress them. And he was like, I don't agree with that. Bad ass. Bad ass. And is building a smart contract wallet. And Ryan and I are investors in sole wallet as well because we believe in it. Fantastic. Jobs this week, guys. Check them out the bankless jobs board. I'll read a few. A marketing manager at Rise, a sales development representative for Web3 and crypto at Rise as well. Uniswap, hire and like crazy, senior product designer. They need an application security engineer and a senior mobile and engineer that is React Native. All the jobs are always available for you at banklist.palat.com.
Starting point is 01:08:15 Go check them out. David, we got questions coming up. We got takes coming up. What else? And what else after that? Of course, what you and I are bullish on, it might perhaps have to do with layer twos. I don't know. And of course, the meme of the week. So all of this and more, as soon as we get back from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling
Starting point is 01:08:49 Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees, with Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbiton's Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app.
Starting point is 01:09:18 With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Hey, Bankless Nation, if you're listening to this, it's because you're on the free Bankless RSS fee. Did you know that there's an ad-free version of Bankless that comes with the Bankless premium subscription? No ads, just straight to the content. But that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you.
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Starting point is 01:10:52 currency, totally agree there. Do you trust it more or less? I feel like I trust the Fed to prop it up like any other bank, but does that go with a vision of decentralization? Zerx, Severus asked this question. So I think this starts off a very big conversation. And one part is, do we trust USDC? The second part is, how much do we want our defy ecosystem to depend on the USDC? So USC looking more and more like a state-backed currency, 100%. Do I trust it more or less?
Starting point is 01:11:26 I trust it to be $1 and to always be able for me to have a claim on $1 or value. value more and more and more. It is becoming closer to being the CBDC that will never actually come about from the central bank. It is doing like this backdoor strategy. It's a proto CDBC. It's a proto CBDC and that's very bullish for it being strong guarantees about always having one dollar, no matter what happens even if like cryptography gets broken. It's close to the base layer of the money printer basically. It's always going to be redeemable. It seems like. And it is doing its job of being $1, no matter what the back end looks like. So I trust that more and more and more every single day.
Starting point is 01:12:10 And I think the market is going to understand that too. Like people who sold USC at $0.80. They're going to remember that if USC ever like loses its peg again. Like it's, U.S.C. is starting to become anti-fragile. It's coming up stronger out of this. Right. So I trust it more and more and more. Does that go with the vision of decentralization?
Starting point is 01:12:30 Well, we watched. I depeg because it was dependent on USDC. A lot of defy apps don't actually ingest oracles for USDC price. They make an implicit assumption that one USDC is $1, which is making defy and all the apps that do that, enshrine USDC as $1 in the same way that USC is trying to become enshrined in the Fed as the proto-CBDC. Makes defy a bit more fragile. It makes defy more dependent on the Federal Reserve and more dependent on the USDA. Is that good?
Starting point is 01:13:10 Well, it depends on how radical you are, I think. And so I'm of the opinion that our current financial system and our new financial system will integrate and hopefully be friendly with each other. Other people are more radical than myself. And they say, like, not one dollar. Like, like, wry, not die, even to this point. Like some people don't like how USC is inside of MakerDAO. Everyone finds themselves on a particular place in this spectrum. I think it is definitely something to be wary about.
Starting point is 01:13:39 But I do think that accepting USDC and allowing for it to grow does offer very big adoption tailwinds from people who we would otherwise not be able to convince about crypto. What's your take on this, Ryan? My take on it is USDC is generally good for crypto because the more USDC that is settled on crypto networks like Ethereum, the more gas fees they pay, and the more our decentralized native currency, currency like Ethereum, ether, the asset, can thrive and grow. Every time somebody transacts with USDC on Ethereum, they pay tax to eth holders, which increases the value of ether. So like backdoor, we win. We don't get that sort of treatment in the U.S. banking system.
Starting point is 01:14:23 So it's totally a net win for crypto. Now, does that mean we should become dependent on it? Absolutely not. But you've got to look at the long game here. The long game is we are only going to have two types of digital currencies. Type one is central bank digital currencies, of which USDC is a proto version of that. It's like that. Type two is crypto, internet native, real non, non, central bank backed assets. The best assets that fit that profile right now are ether and Bitcoin. Those are the only two assets kind of in the running for that sort of treatment. And then you can create more stable derivatives on top of them. And so that's the bifurcation.
Starting point is 01:15:06 As long as we preserve both and as long as our decentralized native currencies get stronger and stronger over time, we are winning relative to the business we are in. So I would much rather see the Fed adopt something like USDC that pays transaction fees to Ethereum than to go the Chinese central bank route of creating their own blockchain network and their own super central bank digital currency and not deploying on a decentralized network entirely. So it's good. It's not perfect, but it's better than them not doing it. So it's a net win for crypto.
Starting point is 01:15:46 Right. I think USDC is more of a Trojan horse for crypto into Tradfi than Tradfi. than tradfi than it is for like the Fed into crypto. I think Jeremy Aller is a crypto person more than he is a banker, although he is a banker. He is more of a crypto person. He's a crypto banker. He's on our side. Well, like, well, look at if you have USDC, how much, so by the way, USDC is a basically,
Starting point is 01:16:12 I count USDCs is just as secure as a dollar in my Wells Fargo account. It's kind of one in the same, except this dollar. It almost was more secure than dollars inside of Silicon Valley Bank. and signature bank. So this dollar is, now it's tokenized, and guess what? I have easy access to trade this dollar at any time on a decentralized exchange called Uniswap. Right.
Starting point is 01:16:34 Back, that's why we saw Uniswap volume up there. So it's another on ramp to crypto. Right. You know, I can't do that with my Wells Fargo dollar. I can't go on Uniswap and do my savings account, dollar trade that with ETH. I can with USDC. We could go on about this, but I think you guys get the point. This is why we are still excited about stable.
Starting point is 01:16:52 adoption, even if it's not fully decentralized. It's still in the win category. You know, you know when the FBI went to Apple and was like, hey, let us through the backdoor of this person's phone and Apple's no F off? I hope that that's what USDC does for its holders, as in like somebody comes in to say, hey, blacklist, this address and USC is like, give me a court order to do that, right? But even if they don't, well, the reason, let's talk about the the reason Apple does that, because if they don't, people abandon the eye, it's bad for shareholders. People abandon an iPhone. If USDC does start blacklisting, guess what?
Starting point is 01:17:29 We abandon it. We abandon it in a heartbeat, right? Trade my USDC for some ETH. It's easy. On uniswap. See, or another stable coin that doesn't do that. See, now the bankers are playing in our world in our game. Market forces.
Starting point is 01:17:40 Yeah. If they adopt crypto protocols, they adopt crypto values. That is the back door here. That's what Dave and I believe anyway. We got another question here. this one is from sneak up yeah can you clearly differentiate zk and optimistic roll-ups and the different narratives they hold oh that clearly prefects is doing a lot of work here yeah so optimistic roll-ups think of them as a fractal off of ethereum they are ethereum but as a layer two they do
Starting point is 01:18:09 everything that ethereum does and they settle down to ethereum as a layer two a zk roll-up is ethereum with zero knowledge cryptography as a layer two. Man, getting to the nuances of this is actually pretty hard. Think of Ethereum with 10x better cryptography and compression and faster and cheaper fees that allow you to have so much computational resource that the limitations for putting almost anything on chain are basically gone. And so, for example, you will see Web3 games, on an optimistic roll-up like Arbitrum or optimism, and what that means is that there are games that have assets inside of them. On ZK roll-ups, you will have fully on-chain games,
Starting point is 01:18:58 where the game engines and game logic themselves are actually smart contracts. That is perhaps one way to illustrate this. That's all I got, Ryan. That makes sense. I think if you are a bankless listener and you want to go down the crypto rabbit hole a little bit, And when I say crypto, I mean cryptography. Go check out an episode we did probably, I don't know, a year, year and a half ago, maybe longer, David, with Justin Drake. It's called moon math.
Starting point is 01:19:27 And that, I think, is the philosophy around this, what David was saying, is there are two types of ways to sort of scale things in crypto. One is economic games that we can play, like fraud proofs. This is what optimistic technology does. And the other is pure math, pure moon math. pure cryptography. And that is what ZK roll-ups do. Anyway, if you want some more context for that, that you'll find it there. But ZK technology is kind of the moon math equivalent way where we get all of the crypto-economic guarantees, but through cryptography rather than having to pay for it. David, we got some takes of the week. Let's speed this first one. What's this?
Starting point is 01:20:11 Jim, I'm going to skip the first part of this tweet. Jim tweets out, banks are Sovereign roll-ups that post data availability to the Fed. I think it's a great take. I think it's a great take. Okay, sovereign roll-ups, as in they control their own ledger. A bank is a sovereign roll-up. It has control over its own ledger, and that it posts data availability to the Fed. So it takes the state of that ledger and tells the Fed about it.
Starting point is 01:20:38 That is a sovereign roll-up with data availability posting to the Fed. And it actually works out quite literally. we were talking earlier about Fed Now technology, which is basically a big settlement chain. That is the chain through which these bank sovereign roll-up ledgers actually post to. They post back to Fed Now. It's, yeah, accurate. David, this is a tweet from you. The crypto class of 21 and 22 have really earned their stripes.
Starting point is 01:21:03 God, I'll say. Yeah. We have, haven't we? Yeah. Three hours capital liquidation, Voyager, Celsius, FTX, a, big, bank crisis of our banks, the banks that we actually care about, now Euler, man, like, in the first half of 2022, I was like, man, these kids got it easy. Yep. And then the second half of 2022 came and like, oh, man, these guys got a rough. Totally. And so I follow up with this tweet
Starting point is 01:21:32 saying in 2025, when you're all millionaires, they will say that you got lucky. Remember what it took to get to there. You know? Not financial advice. Not financial advice. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know how that's financial advice, but it probably is somehow. Ryan Sean Adams tweets out a whole bunch. God, we just, we just have podcasts. We just read our own tweets. We should do more of these. A whole bunch of tech entrepreneurs and builders just learned why we need crypto.
Starting point is 01:21:57 I wonder what they're going to do next. What do you mean by this, Ryan? I do think that's part of the narrative shift that we're seeing here is like you have the startup bank of the United States, of Silicon Valley, basically. And all of the founders of all of these startups just got. temporarily unbanked and then permanently unbanked. Didn't know whether they were going to get rug pulled or not from all of their, like what,
Starting point is 01:22:21 they have to stop and think. These are builders. These are engineers. These are people who want to create a different world and have the skills and talent to actually do that. I think some of them, some portion of that population probably got crypto-pilled last weekend. And maybe some portion of them will understand why we're here,
Starting point is 01:22:39 why crypto exists in the first place, and we'll use some of those skills. to help us build out this crypto future. That's what I mean. This is when you learn, right? When PayPal locks you up. Remember Paul Krugman last week? He was like, he didn't say, now I understand crypto. He got locked out of PayPal, though. Now he knows what the use case is. He's probably going to consider that the next time he assesses what we're trying to do here with uncensurable financial transactions and the value of that. Bullish. There we go. Speaking of bullish, David, what do you bullish on man?
Starting point is 01:23:12 I am bullish, Ryan, on layer two's. But here's what I mean by that. Arbitrum finally releases token. Like the most anticipated air drop of all time in one hour from right now, I don't know why I'm saying this, one hour from right now, Ryan, you and I are live streaming with the Arbitrum team, so all the listeners that is already live
Starting point is 01:23:30 and available for you to go consume. OP stack already has two major chains. Coinbase is building on the OP stack. We have two ZK EVMs, launching in the next 10 days. We haven't even talked about that. Do people know about that? Do they remember that?
Starting point is 01:23:46 Two in 10 days. Two. Yes. Yeah. Main nets. ZK. Evm. Main nets. We haven't even talked about it. Everyone's focused on the Arbitonair drop. People are forgetting about the ZK.EVM are getting launched.
Starting point is 01:23:56 And those are going to have tokens too, by the way. Well, one of them is polygons. So that token already exists. There's also some alpha, an embargoed thing that I'm recording tomorrow. Don't say it. Don't say it. will be released on Monday about layer two's. So that's happening.
Starting point is 01:24:14 Like, man, all of the innovation is happening in layer two's. Like, we said layer two summer was going to happen in, when did we say that? 2020. 2021, I think we called the first layer two summer. And then 2022. We called the second one. Here we are. But we're calling it for 2023.
Starting point is 01:24:29 It is currently happening. We are in, this is what layer two summer looks like. Yeah. Perhaps two years late. Sorry. But here we are. are. It's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm bullish on Larry 2's. Yeah, it's super bullish. I think it's played out how we hoped it might. And down to, do you remember that episode we did about
Starting point is 01:24:51 the modular blockchain thesis? Yeah. That's this playing out. That was a while ago, but it's playing out that way. Cool. What are you bullish on, man? David, I am bullish on regulators that do their jobs. Oh, how many of those are there? Let me introduce you to Hester Purse. All right. She is an SEC commissioner and the antithesis of Gary Gensler. You know, it occurred to me when Bankless put out this tweet. I was like, we spend a lot of time on Gary Gensler in our roll-ups and our content and just as crypto. We really do spend too much time on him. I want to take a minute to just thank regulators who are actually doing their job.
Starting point is 01:25:32 Hester Purse is one of them. She is a certified American badass. She is principled. She is smart. she's willing to engage the crypto community and we are lucky to have her. I'm thankful for this person. That was, I think, re-echoed to me
Starting point is 01:25:47 as we had this interview, we had a conversation with her earlier in this week. That episode is going to come out on Monday. It's already out for citizens. She just calls it like it is. She's very honest. We asked her questions like, what is this security?
Starting point is 01:26:02 She's like, you know, I don't know. And I don't think the SEC has done a good job actually communicating with any clarity on this. She said, sorry, I know this is what you're excited about. No, say it. She said that the SEC is primarily interested in increasing its jurisdictional reach. She just said it how it was. Flat out said it.
Starting point is 01:26:24 She said focused on that rather than what they should be focused on, which is principles. And I just want to be thankful for regulators that are actually doing their job. And this is a broader thing that I think is in, important for us to realize. In the United States, I think across the world, there is a growing frustrated majority that just wants everyone else to behave like grownups. Stop playing the power games and like, let's actually build something for the future. Let's actually build something we care about. Hester, in the conversation, described a scenario, which it just seems so simple, but in some way, it was also a utopia of just like the crypto community and regulators
Starting point is 01:27:07 coming together and having a conversation about a new, imagine that, about a new asset class and how this should be governed and regulated moving to the features. And what parts were really decentralized, what parts were centralized, where the scammers and bad actors were, and how regulators could go side by side in the crypto industry and move this technology of freedom forward. Wow, that can actually happen. And I think there is a majority of people who are sick of our institutions, failing us, sick of the power games, want to get back to, like, building a productive society. And so I'm just happy and bullish that people like this exist. And I, you know, I'm thankful for our good regulators. They don't get enough credit. And I think
Starting point is 01:27:51 they should. Yeah, 100%. As much as people like Gary Gensler make us lose our faith in humanity, people like Hester Purse. Build it right back. There you go. Meme of the week, David. What are we looking at? Meme of the week. This is from CMS Holdings. Doe Kwan makes basis cash and 17 dominoes later at the U.S. banking section is a bailout. Thanks, though. That was his original staple coin, by the way, fun fact, if you didn't realize that. Yeah, that was the one domino before Taroluna. Absolutely. Guys, we got to end it here. None of this has been a financial advice. It never is. Got to reemphasize that crypto is risky. So is defy. You could lose what you put in.
Starting point is 01:28:32 The banking system is kind of risky, though, too. But we are headed west. Everything is risky. It's all risky. This is. This is. the journey that we're on. It's the bankless journey, and we're glad you're with us today. Thanks so much.

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