Bankless - ROLLUP: $ARB Airdrop | Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro | Coinbase Wells Notice | SEC Charges Justin Sun$ARB Airdrop | Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro | Coinbase Wells Notice | SEC Charges Justin Sun

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup 4th Week of March 2023 ------ 📣 Infura | New SDK for NFT APIs For Devs https://bankless.cc/Infura  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://www.bankless.com/dashboard  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  👻 PHANTOM | FRIENDLY MULTICHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist  🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 3:08 Markets 6:47 FED hikes https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/22/fed-rate-hike-decision-march-2023.html  12:30 Volatility https://twitter.com/ColeGotTweets/status/1637645721485598725  13:40 ETHBTC & Wartime https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1638878806105628673  22:50 Crypto VC List https://coinstack.substack.com/p/the-crypto-vc-list-2023  27:48 Do Kwon Arrested https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1638891838881910785  29:38 Arbitrum Airdrop https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1638163831833649152  33:14 Earnifi https://earni.fi/account   https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/arbitrum  37:24 War on Crypto  37:34 SEC Coinbase Wells Notice  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1638655328257548289  https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1638654192138199041  https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1638660032324829184  https://twitter.com/brianquintenz/status/1638747660080533504  https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1638716234027106305  https://twitter.com/RebeccaRettig1/status/1638867335745290240  46:25 Sushi SEC Subpoena https://www.theblock.co/post/221723/sushi-hit-with-sec-subpoena-seeking-3-million-usdt-legal-defense-fund  46:55 SEC Lawsuit Against Justin Sun & Celebrity Promoters https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/technology/justin-sun-sec-crypto.html  47:55 Bank Pressure & Contagion Spreads https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/20/what-ubs-rescue-of-credit-suisse-cs-means-for-markets-and-banks.html  https://www.wsj.com/articles/signature-bank-new-york-community-bancorp-flagstar-bank-crypto-barney-frank-fdic-9b825e2e  56:56 Euler Hack Update https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1636985705858764800?s=20  https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1637864971290697738  https://twitter.com/chainalysis/status/1636739618249867265?  https://twitter.com/proofofjake_/status/1638225829397143555  58:55 IRS Tax Treatment of NFTs https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-issues-guidance-seeks-comments-on-nonfungible-tokens  1:00:15 Magic Eden Bitcoin Ordinals https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-eden-launches-marketplace-for-bitcoin-ordinals  1:01:29 Avalanche Short Outage https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1638711219778646016  1:02:40 Florida Gov. US CBDC Ban https://www.flgov.com/2023/03/20/governor-ron-desantis-announces-legislation-to-protect-floridians-from-a-federally-controlled-central-bank-digital-currency-and-surveillance-state/  1:04:30 New Green Pill Channel  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrX_72ziMAZMb8fwD2HyOaw  1:05:18 Bankless Merch https://137s232gkpwm42ei-26449739831.shopifypreview.com/products_preview?preview_key=b4f7d5e5a88c4e2852bf37665f580cd0&variant=40128096206903  1:06:40 Immutable x Polygon Labs https://twitter.com/0xPolygon/status/1637878834945990675  1:07:44 Microsoft Wallet in Edge Browser  https://twitter.com/thebookisclosed/status/1636759487829917698  1:08:25 Sismo https://twitter.com/Sismo_eth/status/1636371873377423361  1:09:50 PleasrHouse UniBlocks https://twitter.com/PleasrDAO/status/1638858333506646020  1:12:25 Farcaster Web Login https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1638297074365239296  1:12:45 Ledger Browser Extension https://www.ledger.com/ledger-extension  1:13:21 Blockworks ‘GrantFarm’ https://blockworks.co/grants  1:13:48 Raises https://twitter.com/HilmarVeigar/status/1638180896611377154  1:15:05 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs  1:17:55 Questions from the Nation Tadziu Jacksonthedev 1:22:22 Takes https://twitter.com/Fiskantes/status/1637497040933625858  https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1637702828306358272  1:25:13 What David’s Bullish On 1:27:30 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:29:35 MEME of the Week https://watcher.guru/news/belgium-to-require-all-crypto-ads-to-state-only-guarantee-in-crypto-is-risk  1:30:52 Risks & Disclaimers 1:31:07 Moment of Zen https://twitter.com/biancoresearch/status/1638174103038472195   ---- 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 

Doquan was just arrested in Montenegro, David. You excited about that? Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Bankless Nation, happy 4th Friday of March. David, what time is it? Oh, Ryan, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll-up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, especially this week is absurdly crazy. I feel like I say that every single week, but it just keeps on getting crazier.

And so that's what we're going to do today. cover the entirely weekly news in crypto with coffee. Yes. And you have a new vista behind you. Where are you today? You're not in your New York place. I'm very, very far away from New York. I'm in the Dominican Republic.

Nice. I'm not with some pleaser Dow folk and other people around the crypto space. Tropical location. And you're right. There's so much to cover. I feel like the 2020s are just like this. Every week is going to be a little bit crazy. That's how it's felt since COVID.

Maybe before that. I don't know. But let's talk about it. what we're doing. We got some big topics of the week. Number one, the arbitrum air drop has now dropped. Did you claim it? We got a price. We got a price. We got a price. What else are we covering? Both Balaji and Hayes, Arthur Hayes, are signaling wartime for crypto on different time frames, but both agree directionally that this is the big one. So we'll talk about what that means. And also all of the people who think that they are both full of shit. We'll talk about that.

And then on different front lines, the SEC has issued a bunch of Wells notices and subpoenas. These are real facts, not just rumors this time. So we'll talk about all of those. Interestingly, Coinbase got a Wells notice. But Coinbase seems pretty ready for it. So is this the SEC's final push? And then breaking, bankless broke this. You want to talk about what bankless broke, Ryan?

Doe Kwan was arrested in Montenegro. Bankless broke Doe Kwan. Yeah, well, you know what? He kind of broke himself after he broke Luna and Tara. And now he has been arrested, I guess. We'll tell you where. We'll tell you the location and the details when we get to it. All right, David, before we get into it, this is a message for the devs listening to Bankless.

If you are a developer, did you know for you amazing developers out there that there is now an NFT API that is being provided by Infura? Really cool new product from Infura. David, you want to tell them about it? Yeah, so if you are an NFT builder, this is for you. This is a new SDK kit that provides you the tools to write across five different blockchains, all the smart contract templates for ERC 721-1-115 to allow you to aggregate your data across all the chains. So whether you are building something that mince NFTs, buys NFTs, sells NFTs, etc.,

infura's got this SDK to help your builder life get easier. So there is a link in the show notes for you to actually. access all of that SDK information. You can register with Infura and then you'll be able to make an account and get that SDK. And builders. Thank you for being a builder. Make this space better. This is definitely the build market, not the bear market. Speaking of markets, let's get to the Bitcoin price. Are we up on the week or down? Oh, we're up bigly on the week. Start of the week, $25,000. A very respectable $25,000 is where we started. We are up 10%, Ryan. Oh, over 10% since I put these numbers in. We are at $28,200. We were up last.

week too, right? Oh, we are green very, two very green weeks for Bitcoin. I'm, uh, I'm zooming out on the cracking charts here. Cracken pro, of course, you know it. Thanks to Cracken for providing these fantastic charts. Uh, this is another big week back to back, two in a row. We'll talk about Bitcoin a lot because I feel like it's narrative season and Bitcoin is in the spotlight. But before we get there, ETH price, what are we doing on the week? East price starting the week at $1,160. It was up 6% when I wrote these numbers down when it was 1750. but we have just hit a very large green candle. We are all the way up to 1815.

So, okay, this is a moment. Bankless Nation. Pull out your price checkers. Check yourself. That's the actual price. We are recording this at 11 Eastern time on Thursday. So we are almost 12 hours behind you if you're listening to this Friday morning.

So right now, for us, ether price is 1818. For you guys, I don't know what it is. Yeah, well, we're like 24 hours behind you guys, probably. ETH Bitcoin, what about the ratio? That tells a story in and of itself. David, yeah, what about the ratio? Are you sad about this? Because I bet the ratio is, is it up or down from last week? It's down from last week. We are down 5% on the ratio. So we are down to the low, low price of 0.0645. We hit almost as low as 0.062, which is lower than it's been in a long time. Not lower than it was for the three hours capital liquidation. That was really low. But it is pretty unavoidation.

equivocal that Bitcoin has won the last two weeks. Bitcoin smash, Hulk season for Bitcoin. Bitcoin smash. It's going to be okay, though, David. Like, are you upset about this? Or is this just whatever noise to you? Why do you think this is? I've been saying like, this is a 18 plus long-term holds. So like the two weeks of Bitcoin narrative season is not, I'm not, my reserve is not shook. Can we zoom out though? Bitcoin Ordinals does not change my thesis about, about ether. When in doubt, zoom out, David. How far should we zoom out? to make these numbers feel better for you. Should we go all the way back to 2021?

Right. So on the far left of the screen, Ryan zoomed out all the way to 2020 when the Bitcoin ratio was down to 0.025, 0.03, where we're over double that. And so ever since this bull market, when Ether hit the, went from 0.03 to 0.09 or so, we haven't gone down below then.

So you can see the 3-Ros Capital liquidation area in July of 2021. So we are still at this like plateau. But we are at a local low in the ether appreciation versus Bitcoin from the last bowl market. Yeah. Do you remember this whole season here was this after Defi summer where there was, it was a huge Bitcoin narrative. And the question was, did you even need ether as an asset? You could just buy defy tokens plus Bitcoin. Plus Bitcoin.

You got the money and you got the finance systems. And then you get full exposure to the market. That was the narrative. And that's what we were seeing over here. It's funny. You can get into that age old question of, does price drive? narrative or does narrative drive price, which is like the answer to that always to me has been yes. They drive each other. And so we're definitely in a good narrative season for Bitcoin.

Maybe we'll get to that in a little bit. But crypto market cap is up on the week, question mark. It's slightly up on the week. Yeah, we are at just below $1.2 trillion, $1.198 trillion. Okay. Well, let's go over to Powell's World and the central bankers for just a minute. We'll talk about more bank stuff later in the episode, but the Fed just hiked rates by a quarter. So they had a meeting on Wednesday. This was a much anticipated meeting. What are they going to do? The answer is they're going to hike rates by 0.25%. So, yeah, it's not the 50 basis points that some people said that they might do, lower than that. And then they also signaled some things, too. The increases might stop soon. Jerome Powell said

that the committee is considering pausing hikes because this is his quote, events in the banking system are likely to result in tighter credit conditions. That's an interesting phraseology. Events in the banking system. I'll say, yeah, a bank run might be considered an event to Jerome Powell. A crisis is an event. Yeah. Janet Yellen is also weighing in.

She is, of course, Secretary of Treasury, another important monetary institution in the United States. she said that Treasury isn't even considering guaranteeing all bank deposits without congressional approval. So that's been a question mark that people have been asking about. So with the bailout of some of these banks, the deposit bailout of signature and Silicon Valley Bank, depositors made whole, does that mean de facto that the Treasury is going to guarantee all depositor accounts in every single bank? And Yellen says, don't go that far. That would take an act of Congress.

My question to you, David. My question to you, David, we need Congress to give us the thumbs up on that one. My question to you, David, is like, do you think she means it? Do you think it even matters? Do you think that by the time you need to go to request to Congress for something like this? They're going to rubber stamp it anyway? What's your take here? So the take here that I think is safe is that the powers that be, be it Congress, the FDIC, the Fed,

are always going to aim on the side of mitigating paint. the bank term funding program has this one year term on it, as in that facility goes away after one year. But is it really going to do that, or are they just saying that because they want to tamper expectations? The best that they could tamper our expectations, the more that we are pushed towards normal market behaviors. But I think everyone is ready to call their bluff

because ever since the 1933 Great Depression, the monetary policy and fiscal policy of the United States of America, has been to mitigate pain, mitigate pain, mitigate pain. So I think it's safe to assume that they are going to make choices that mitigate pain regardless of what they say. That program that you mentioned, what's that called again, called again, say that again? Bank term funding program. BTFP, you might be hearing that acronym a lot. BTFP, if it doesn't mean anything to you, I encourage you to go listen to you, the Arthur Hayes episode that we published earlier this week was fantastic. David was doing it solo. I was busy.

And Hayes just gives kind of a run-through and explains monetary policy. He explains this new acronym that I think you need to learn about. You need to know this. This is like the quantitative easing of 2023. This is the big, like, I guess stimulus. This is the big money printing event that is actually happening in the background quietly. David said, I don't know if you actually said this, but like it's, they announced this last Sunday, I believe. the BTFP.

Was this last Sunday? I don't know. Sometime in the last week or so. And they said it was only going to last for a year. People like Arthur Hayes are incredibly skeptical. They're like, they're going to do this and they'll do it forever. And it'll never,

it will keep on getting renewed up to infinity. And anyway, he has a much better way of explaining all of these things. The simple way to explain it is that like, okay, the bank term funding program is meant to be used by banks. Banks will therefore use it. and settle into this new equilibrium that is created by the bank term funding program.

Once the banks get accustomed to this program, undoing the program is hard, especially when everyone is ready to call the bluff of like, yeah, one year, not if we use the F out of this new facility that you just created for us and lock ourselves into that new paradigm. And so unwinding the bank term funding program after people get, okay, what is the bank term funding program? All of the illiquid, underwater, long-term bonds that banks bought, they get to borrow against those bonds, even though the mark to market price is down 30%, 10%, whatever, down something bad,

they get to borrow against those bonds at the full value of them at par at maturity. So they get to print free money, essentially. Unwinding this program after they have already engaged in this behavior is going to be hard and deflationary and cause pain, which is why we are going to assume, probably, it's safe to think that they are just going to extend the term on this. So if fully used, the BTFP would print about another $4 trillion. This doesn't happen immediately, but... 4.4 trillion. And we eased, we didn't print, well, we did print. We eased QEE 4.1 trillion dollars in COVID, and the bank term funding program has 4.4 of available money issuance to issue. So COVID, the largest money printing 2020 episode in U.S. history since World War II, we're going to do another COVID,

it seems like. That's what the BTF. COVID. COVID. plus another cherry on top, plus a little more. And then that's not even the end of it, by the way. You got to listen to the full episode on how we get from $4 trillion, 4.4 trillion to potentially like something like $17 to $18 trillion of money printing if the next domino falls after this. Anyway, a lot going on. We'll get more to the banking crisis in a minute.

But let's talk about volatility while we're on the topic of markets. Banks down, coins up, volatility up. What are we looking at? I think this chart really just tells a very different story. Without even understanding what each one of these lines are for the bank, for the podcast listeners, there's about 10, 12, 15 lines on the screen. They're all going horizontal into the right. And then the crisis happens, a banking crisis happens. Some lines go up into the right. Some lines go down into the right. The theme here is the ones that went down into the right are all banks. The ones that went up into the right are crypto assets and volatility. And I think maybe there's also a Chinese bank in here. Chinese banks up into the right. I could be mixing up my charts. But basically, the summation of this chart is that Bitcoin and crypto assets are up. Bankless is up if we want to use our own terminology for this. Banklessness is up.

Banks are down. And also volatility is up. Yeah. Banks are so 2020. You know, it's like this is incredible. This is the bifurcation, right? Bankless assets up. Volatility also up because things are crazy.

Bank stocks go down. That's all part of the story, too, that we've been talking about. this is a take that you tweeted out, which has been sort of a theme of our episodes this week. And it's not the conclusion of the theme, but I think has definitely been a theme of the past two or three episodes that we did. Bitcoin in times of war, Ethereum in Times of Peace. Who tweeted that out? David Hoffman. What?

Bitcoin or Heath Maxwell, has David Hoffman tweeted this out? Is that really what happened, David? This is not the first time I've given out this take. this is a take that I've had in my back pocket for a very long time. And now this is a moment where the market kind of understands it a little bit better. Bitcoin, the philosophy, the design philosophy of Bitcoin is reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce the coat, make it more simple, make it more invisible, make it harder to track, make it more self-sovereign, remove all utility from it because you need to do one thing,

which is hold your store of value. It has this wartime crisis moment mentality in the design philosophy of Bitcoin. The whole idea, even if you could add in extra features, NFT features, and this is why sometimes the ordinals have triggered people. If you could add in Defy features, that would be extra baggage, extra service area. If you added an NFT features, smart contracts, it would be extra baggage that would make Bitcoin less suitable to times of crisis. And so what does Bitcoin do? It does one thing, which is store your money in a way that's outside of the system. Adding in extra features in the Bitcoin philosophy is making it harder to use.

in a wartime crisis moment. And so during times of peace, all of these layer two, smart contracts, account obstruction, NFTs, DFI, NFTI, identity. These are all innovations that happen during peacetime when times are stable and we can invest in innovation and progress and development. And there's a pendulum in humanity between peace and war. And so the claim here is that the philosophical design of Ethereum is suited to peacetime. And the philosophical design of Bitcoin is suited to war. Bankless is known, at least me and Ryan, not the analysts of the newsletter, but at least me and Ryan are known to be Ethereum biased. Some might say Ethereum maxis. I think Ryan, you and I are disposed towards peacetime growth and innovation. Other people

are disposed towards let's make sure that Bitcoin does the thing. that it needs to do in the worst possible moments of time, in crisis moments. And that's not necessarily our disposition. But I think that is a valid disposition. And as the pendulum of the world shifts from peacetime innovation to crisis, capital controls, restrictions, fiat inflation, fiat demise, like all of a sudden that pendulum shifts into wartime. And that is my, I remember last week, Ryan, we were talking about, I said, like, I don't know why the Bitcoin ratio is versus ether.

up so big. This is my answer for that. We have shifting from peacetime into crisis time and Bitcoin, the narratives of Bitcoin, whether or not they're legitimate in the foundations, the narratives in wartime benefit Bitcoin. And that is my take. Do you want my take on your take? Sure. So there are elements of that that I agree with. But I think that the last part of what you said is like what I agree with most and the rest. I don't probably. So I think that, that there is a difference between product market fit and narrative market fit, right? Product market fit is,

does the thing do what it's supposed to do and provide, like, actual utility for what it promises, okay? And that's one component of it, you know, everyone always talks about product market fit when you're a startup, and technology's the same. Does it have product market fit? Like iPhones had fantastic product market fit, for instance, right?

some other products that we thought were going to be revolutionary, never had product market fit. And then there is something else, which is narrative market fit, which is like, is this, are we at the point in the storyline of humanity where this narrative is going to specifically have a moment, whether this is narrative is specifically going to land? I think Bitcoin has incredible narrative market fit for this moment in time. but I actually think Ethereum has better product market fit for actual wartime.

All right. So like if you talk about proof of stake, I would 100% argue that having thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of decentralized validators around the world that can run validators from their own homes, locations, wherever they have an internet connection,

is months more. large-scale mining operations that can be bombed in seas. It is much more censorship-resistant in times of war than something like proof of work, for example. I think that Ethereum provides not only the verb of transact, which Bitcoin provides in a censorship-resistant way, but it also provides the verb of trade. How do I trade Bitcoin for some other asset that I want without going to a centralized custodian? The answer is, I can't. With Ethereum, we have Uniswap.

We have decentralized protocols. So, like, both Ethereum and Bitcoin are bankless, but Ethereum provides more money verbs, more bankless things that you can do, and therefore is a better system in times of war. But here's the difference. It has not captured that narrative at freaking all. And then the culture of Ethereum, I agree with you here, totally, does not lean into that. Right. No, we have unicorns and rainbows.

Bitcoiners are gun people. Exactly. They're like the, you know, the domerism, like, let's quick, let's grab all of the Bitcoin we can because the world's going to end and there's only 21 million and then we'll get kind of these, you know, underground bunkers. And, you know, like, Ethereum culture is just not that at all. There's a pretty popular Bitcoin and Guns. Do you know that one?

Is it really? Yeah. So anyway, what I would say is that what I think we are seeing, is also a narrative trade. We've seen narrative trades in the past, David. Remember when there was narrative market fit for scalability on crypto networks because Ethereum gas fees were way too high,

you got all of these chains that pumped on narrative market fit, not necessarily product market fit. Now, I will say narratives can feed product market fit, especially for a meme energy asset, like a monetary asset. And so that is another wrinkle in this where if enough people believe Bitcoin is money, then it becomes money, and then it, you know, reaches greater product market fit. But yeah, that is the subtlety. I actually think Ethereum is

better in times of war from a practical product perspective than Bitcoin. It just doesn't have the narrative at all for that. I think if I said that Ethereum isn't meant for war, Justin Drake would like roll in his grave. Not that. Yeah, I know you would. but because we have all of these like cryptography tailwinds to protect Ethereum. Maybe there's an episode out there that is like the Ethereum case for wartime. Just to tie off this last bit of conversation, we can move on. Bitcoin, born in the banking crisis, born in the 2008 financial crisis. Now we have another banking crisis.

Imagine there's still more capital outside of crypto outside of Bitcoin than there is inside of it. And all of the tradfai wealth managers, who I will perhaps unfairly claim are 100 IQ middle curve money managers. They're doing the thing they were taught in school, basically. Exactly. Right. And so they're going to think about this banking crisis. And they are going to consider alternatives because that's what Arthur Hayes.

While you're saying is like, you must consider alternatives now. And so they are going to think in their brain, banking crisis, Bitcoin. It even is an alliteration, Ryan, which actually does mean something. It sounds better. And so just like... Bitcoin not banks. That sounds great. Yeah, Bitcoin not banks.

Like, oh, this is what Bitcoin is for. Even Bitcoin, I think it's a lot of tailwinds because it's more of an idea than it is actually an execution. Like, Bitcoin is a grandiose idea for what it is. Oh, yeah. People associate all of the features of crypto into Bitcoin, sometimes naively, before they learn about the actual fundamentals of Bitcoin. But for the people,

people who are on the outside who just understand that crypto exists to the best of their ability, they're thinking, bank crisis, question mark, Bitcoin. And that's all they have to think. There you go. And by the way, if you're listening, but neither David and or myself consider ourselves a maximalist, Ethereum Maximus. If anything, we are bankless maximalist, decentralization maximalist. And so I'm happy to the extent Bitcoin remains bankless, which it is, to support Bitcoin in all sorts of ways. Okay, the crypto VC list. Moving on. This was really cool. Here's a VC list from 2020, the top 300 global crypto VC firms by fund size and investment activity. Ryan Alice has been a guest on the podcast previously. His firm, Coinstack put this out. I wanted to highlight one thing.

Okay, here's a quote from the report, really. Even as the bear market is here at the moment, there's three times as much capital going around as last time. The digital asset, its industry is maturing, and we're seeing much more institutional capital stick around this time. This is a big deal. Okay. In the 2019 bear, there was about $470 million going from VC into like building crypto projects and crypto infrastructure. In this bear market, the late 2020 and 23 market, there is $1.5 billion, a nice little 3x on that. That is like the money, that is going to build and invest in future crypto startups has never been higher and continues to flood in. That was the big finding of this report. And I think is super bullish. We've called this

the build market, not the bear market. And like the capital inflows are reflecting that as well. There's also bankless listeners, a link in the show notes. If you want to see who is moving the most money, like it goes through A16Z all the way to like Galaxy Interactive, all of the largest crypto VC funds. And I found that data really interesting. Anything on that, David, before we move on? Yeah. We've talked, I've gone back and forth. I was like, man, this bear market is not so bad to, oh my God, this bear market is so bad. At least in terms of capital flows into people's salaries to allow them to maintain to work in crypto during this bear market, that has been better than it's ever been. So wow, we've still had the FTX. We've still had the Alamedas and the

Three-Hours capital and the doquans, at least we are still paying people's salaries. That's right. And look, we needed to cool down anyway. It was getting out of hand. So, yeah, so I feel like it's much healthier. David, what do we have coming up next? Oh, my God. We get to talk about the Arbitrum AirDrop. The price has been, I've been watching the price. It's been jumping all around. So we're going to talk about what price is the ARB token? Well, just a few hours later. Bankless listener, you're going to have more information about the price than we will, I guess. So this is the time to pull up the ARB price and you can tell us. But in addition to that, Coinbase and Sushi Swap has received a Wells notice. Sushi swap

received a subpoena, Credit Suisse. We're going to talk about the collapse of Credit Suisse and the banking crisis that has hit Europe. And we also have an Euler hack update. It's good news. We think. So we'll talk about that and more as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, who, according to Bologi and Arthur Hayes, you need to get out of the Fiat banking system. So I would suggest that you use Cracken to go from Fiat to Bitcoin, if that is your asset of choice. So if you're going to flee the financial system, make sure you use Cracken, our strategic sponsor for 2020. Let's go.

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This last bull market had a ton of them. Did you get them all? Maybe you missed one. So here's what you should do. Go to Earnify and plug in your Ethereum wallet. And Earnify will tell you if you have any unclaimed airdrops that you can get. And it also does POAPs and mintable NFTs, any kind of money that your wallet can claim, Earnify will tell you about it.

And you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire. And if you sign up for Earnify, they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new irdrop for it to make sure that you never lose anirdrop ever again. You can also upgrade to Earnify premium to unlock access to air drops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets. And for just under $21 a month, it probably pays for itself with just oneirdrop. So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you'll be. you get. That's e-a-r-n-i.f-I. And make sure you never lose another air drop.

Doquan was just arrested in Montenegro, David. You excited about that? Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. We don't have much information at the time of recording, but we did find this out in Montenegro. This is a translation, I believe. Montenegrin police have detained a person suspected of being one of the most wanted fugitives. Most wanted. Wow. South Korean citizen Doequan co-founded. and CEO of Singapore-based Terraform Labs, the former cryptocurrency king, is that what he was, who is behind losses of more than $40 billion, was detained the airport with falsified documents and South Korea, the U.S. and Singapore are demanding the same.

Wow. Demanding the return of Do Kwan. Interestingly enough, we actually broke this news. I think we were the first ones on Twitter to actually break this. So, yeah, Do Kwan arrested, falsified. documents, interestingly enough, if you go back in time to Doquan's tweet back in September of 2022, one of my favorite quotes now of all time out of Doquan is, it's not like I'm on the run or anything.

He said this. But then, Doquan, tell me, how do you have falsified documents in Montenegro? Interesting. Look at this tweet. September 17th. I am not on the run or anything similar from any government agency that has shown interest to communicate. We are in full cooperation.

We don't have anything to. hide. Wow. Falsified passport seems like you might be on the run, Doe. So I'm going to grave dance a little bit. My first interaction of Doquan was telling him that I don't believe him that he was going to kill Die the Stablecoin. Here's Nick Kunkel, a friend of mine who used to work at Maker, goes, how it started retweeting Doquins, by my hand, die will die, and how it's going, breaking. Doquan arrested in Montenegro. And that's a wrap on that story. Moving on. Arbitrum, they announced a token, and they launched a token. And they launched the token yesterday at the time at the time of recordings yesterday so um this just launched now

i think we have some pricing information but can you recap folks on the high level what uh what about the arb token drop it's finally here what do we got what are the stats what are the big ones okay 12.7 5 percent of the arbitram token will be air dropped to users of arbitram yesterday today today for me and Ryan. This is the inaugural launch of the Dow governance of Arbitrum 1 and Arbitrum Nova featuring on-chain governance execution, not just snapshot votes. I think the maximum air drop that you could get was 10,250. The minimum was 625. I think the vast majority of people got somewhere below 1,000 Arbitrum tokens, and of course, the long-tail approaches all the way to 10,025. Interestingly enough, the details for there is this extra 1.something percent that was airdropped

to Dow's on top of Arbitrum. The biggest DAWS that got the Dow AirDrop were the Treasurer Dow ecosystem, the small brains ecosystem, as well as GMX, the leverage trading per exchange on Arbitrum. Uniswap and Sushi Swap got an allocation, DoPEX and Curve got an allocation. and shout out to the Arbitrm team that elected to do this. Protocol Guild got a large distribution, I think 3 million. Yeah, 3 million ARB tokens. What is protocol?

Public goods. Public goods for Ethereum core developers. Core development of Ethereum fundamentally does not have a business model. So they rely on grants and donations and the EF. And so Protocol Guild is a place where people can donate money to pay for the core development of the Ethereum Protocol and Arbitrum as a part of their area. AirDrop allocated 3 million ARB tokens to the Protocol Guild. That is a great precedent to set, and I'm a big fan of this.

I think one of the coolest things about this, David, is that the wallet addresses, the number of wallet addresses that received this and were eligible for this. 600,000. That's like the population of a fairly large-sized U.S. city. That's a lot of people that were eligible for this AirDrop. Why is that? That's a really large number. I don't know how many number there are in D-Fi, but we all know.

the Arbitram AirDrop was at least attempted to be farmed. We all know that they also tried to prune to the best of their ability, airdrop farmers. The 600,000 number, my gut reflex on that one is like, that's a farmed number. I don't think it. So my take is, even if it's like 4x farmed or 5x farm, we're still talking about, like, got at the low end, 100,000, 150,000. Like, it's a pretty well distributed air drop.

And some people had, you know, multiple wallets for sure. I don't know how well we can know that. I guess you can't. I think we need somebody to do who is like an on-chain analysis expert. We need somebody to come in and do a report. Well, I am excited about it because this is one of the larger airdrops in history in terms of distribution of addresses. It's probably like uniswap, E&S, and this would be probably a number three, I want to say.

I think in terms of dollar value, this is by far number one. Yeah, but also in terms of like the number of people who received it. Can you think of another one? Like, whatever the number is, you know, that we just... JuniceWop got 247,000 addresses. And that was probably like... And N NS came really close to that. Yeah.

Anyway, if you want to check to see if you received the Arbitrum Airdrop, I recommend you go check out Earnify. This is EarnI.FI. You could type in your eth address. You can type in eth addresses to multiple wallets and see whether you are eligible or not. I've got my wallet pulled up here. It looks like I got some arbitram tokens here, $4,230 worth. I can't wait to talk to you about price, David, because I think that that means some good things.

But this is my way to get tax liability, Ryan. Yeah, thank you. This is my way to get notified of Airdrop, so I don't even have to think about it, just put my addresses in. All the tax burdens that come inbound. You owe the IRS one message. Yeah, so go check that out, guys. And speaking of price, though, what is the arbitrarian?

token trading at right now. $1.17. Ignore that down 76%. That's because the inception of liquidity is always completely arbitrary. So we are trading at a fully diluted valuation. If you scroll up, Brian, I can read that number of basically $12 billion.

What was my price prediction last week? Last year, last year, last week, I think it was between $1 and $2. One and two. Pretty wide range. The obvious comparison is optimism here, right? Right. So it is one billion.

more than optimism. So 11 billion versus 12 billion. Not even, actually, it's like $800 million higher than optimism. Look, this is just... We are in such early days of price discovery for Arbitrum. Yeah, this is just... We are like three hours into this,

four hours into this. You know there are very big funds who got an airdrop, which means they are not allocated, exposed to Arbitrum, who have not deployed capital. And so if there are big funds who want exposure,

they probably haven't bought yet. I'm just an extrapolation. There's also investors that will have to sell at some point, but that doesn't start for a year. That's actually, we can talk about that. If you are an arbitramed investor, you are locked up for four years. There is a one-year cliff.

What does that mean? You get zero tokens for the next 12 months. Then at 12 months, 25% of the total supply unlocks for investors. And then every month after that, a linear amount of unlocks for the remainder. of four years. So that is the Arbitrum investor token supply. I'm not an investor. I just know that because we did the show with the Arbitrum team, and that's what they said. There's a question I

have for you, though, is so you got some air drop tokens. What are you going to do with them? Buy, sell, hold, buy more, sell, brother. You're selling the Arbitrum AirDrop in the middle of a bear market. One of the major layer two is you're going to sell that thing in the bear market. Like, what are you doing? No, that is what I am. am doing and not a financial advice of any certain time, but today is not, unless you, unless you need to, like, glow up your life, right? Unless you have bills to pay, unless you have any reason to do anything about improving your own life, which is a fantastic thing to do with any air drop, because this is free money and, like, maybe perhaps you should do that. But if you don't have to do that,

I am holding that shit so hard. Excuse my language. That is not the only option, though. Like, you could glow up your life, of course, but you could also just exchange it for ETH if you think Ether is going to appreciate relative to ARB tokens. Yeah, if you do think that, layer, but ether, the just platform of Ethereum depends on layer two's. And so it's actually like, it's not like this is an application where an application on Ethereum can come and go. Like layer twos and Ethereum need each other. And so this is a more formal relationship with Ethereum. So I'm not going to lump this into like a one-inch air drop or perhaps even an EMS air drop. Like this is a more formal relationship with Ethereum. I'll go back to our old

analogy is like, Ethereum is like the federal government and Arbitrum is like a state in the union, if you will. So this is like a bet on California or something. Right. And you know, the Fed and California are pretty tied together. They're very interlinked economically in all sorts of ways. The theory is like Jupiter and Arbitrum is like one of its moons, you know? Yeah. There you go. Mixed analogies here, but this is not a mixed message like that transition from the SEC. They're coming after crypto in a big way. It seems like today Coinbase received a Wells notice from the SEC focused on staking in asset listings.

This is from Brian Armstrong. And a Wells notice is basically a notice that the SEC is going to take enforcement action against you and your company at some point in time. I am calling this, and I called this on Twitter, a war on crypto. David, some people were triggered by that. War on crypto. He's being hyperbolic. Antipath synthesis said this. Please stop.

Here's my comment. I just want to defend why I think this is a war on crypto. This is not the only action that we've seen coming out of the U.S. government. This is part of Operation Chokepoint, part of choking off Silvergate, part of maybe some action in Silver, Signature Bank. I'm part of this whole plan, it seems like, to choke the entrance and the exits to crypto. And so my reply is this, no, this is, I'm not going to stop. Enough is enough is enough.

It's absolutely ridiculous that the SEC is ruling by enforcement. Gary Gensler is an emperor king. We need to speak out. We need to organize. We need to push back. Unelected bureaucrats don't get to make the rules. And the reason I care, David, is because I live here. I live in this country.

So this cannot stand. Anyway, could you get into more details on what exactly the SEC is alleging here and what they're trying to do with Coinbase staking? I really wish I could, Ryan, but that's one of the issues, is that they're not giving Coinbase the people that they are serving the Wells Notice any of the details. And that's one of the big parts of this story. A Wells notice is actually meant to be delivered in good faith to the company or organization that the SEC is about to sue to inform them of the reasons that they are about to sue them. The reasons that SEC stated to Coinbase is that they have securities on their exchange and also staking. Their staking product is a security. And so Coinbase in response was like, which assets are they?

Which ones are the securities? And they've got no response from the SEC, which is totally asynchronous from what a typical wealth notice is supposed to provide, which is clarity and rationale and reasonings so that the people that they're about to sue can actually like, prepare for an argument. It's like actually a good faith extension, but not this kind. Brian, Brian Armstrong put out a Twitter thread where he said two years ago,

the SEC reviewed our business in detail and approved Coinbase to go public. Coinbase runs a rigorous asset review process and has rejected more than 90% of assets, although I will say they have some, let some weird assets in as well. Going forward, the legal process will provide a public forum

before an unbiased body where we'll be able to make it clear, clear that the SEC simply has not been fair, reasonable, or even demonstrated seriousness of purpose when it comes to engagement on digital assets. So Brian Armstrong saying, we've been in compliance. We are compliant.

We've always wanted to be compliant. The SEC said that we were compliant. We have SEC filings. They went public. They have S1 filings. Right. And then the SEC comes in and says, hey, we're going to sue you guys.

Here's your Wells notice. And the Coinbase is like, why? Yeah. Because you guys said this was okay a while ago. But now you're saying it's not. The rules have changed. We're not going to tell you how they change or why. Also, which rules have changed?

And how have they changed? We didn't have rules before. And then the SEC is like, we're not going to tell you guys that. Yeah, we don't have to tell you guys. This is Coinbase legal. Coinbase received a well's notice from the SEC. After years of asking for reasonable crypto rules, we're disappointed that the SEC is considering courts over constructive dialogue.

Courts over constructive dialogue. But this is some of the fight here. But if courts are required, so be it. We'll defend the rule of a law. Wow, this is Coinbase's, I believe, chief legal officer here saying that they're going to go to court. Okay, you're throwing down? By the way, we just had Brian on the podcast, and this is what he said. We asked him specifically about staking.

We're like, hey, Brian, you know, Crack and Staking has been banned in the U.S. What do you think the fate is for Coinbase Staking? He was like, well, it's, you know, different because of X, Y, Z. And also, if they come after us, we're going to fight them in the court system. that seems to be the approach. Okay, game on SEC. We've got evidence. Here is Paul talking more.

Over the past nine months, Coinbase has met with the SEC more than 30 times sharing details of our business and to build a path to registration. This is like the kid in the front of the class, the straight-A student who's like abiding by all of the rules that they know about. And like the teacher comes in and just like rips up their homework

and is like, this is not what I wanted. Like, I mean, I don't... I just don't understand. you know, why this is happening other than, again, we had Hester Persson earlier this week. And she said explicitly that this is about a land grab for the SEC and Gary Gensler in particular. I use that name. She didn't use his name. But Gary Gensler in particular trying to get land in the sphere of crypto.

I think it's that. And also, David, I think this is part of a broader war on crypto, right? If you, like, just rule by enforcement and you don't provide any clarity, what else, like, what else are we to assume? You know, banks are getting choked off, coin-based staking getting choked off. They're trying to do all the right things. They don't even know what the laws are, so they can't even abide. Now they're getting choked off.

This is a war on crypto, in my opinion. I actually think that this is bullish, believe it or not. Well. I actually don't know if Coinbase sock went down or not. It went down. It went down. percent down after hours, but I don't know what it is now. Who knows? Yeah, that's because a bunch of tradfai people own it. And they're probably not like,

expose God, I'm so mean to tradify people. I apologize. Well, like, it is bad in the short run, right? It means like you're short run. Right. But like here's my case for this, right? Coinbase was not naive that this is happening, right? They were prepared for this. They saw the writings on the wall. The SEC is going for more and more people, deeper, deeper into crypto. They came for cracking, not even a month ago. And so they've been prepared for this. They have legal staff. They understand their arguments. They already have their arguments that they're going to take to court ready to go packaged on a boat. They were ready for this.

The SEC and Gary Gensler's maniacal behavior is he's icurassing. He's doing his icorice moment. He's flying way too close to the sun. He's going against. He became a main character. He's doing the whole influencer thing. He's like out on Twitter like trying to get for engagement, Gary the influencer. He's going to. going up against the most well-capitalized, well-supported, well-constructed organization that is doing everything by the book to the best of their ability. He's going to go to court. The SEC is going to lose. I'm not a lawyer. They're going to lose. And now we're going to get clarity because Coinbase is going to give it for us because they took Gary Gensler to court and

Gary Gensler's going to effing lose. And so not only are we going to push back against the SEC manually over the front lines via trench warfare in the court, we also just got the Fed pivot, bro. So like the SEC is on the defense. The interest rates are on the retreat. That's bullish, man. I, look, I agree with, I agree with the long-term take. And so, okay, so I don't think that Coinbase is going to do the strategy of,

let's settle with the SEC. Because that would be the worst possible outcome, I think, and the easy way out. We'll just settle. We'll pay the fine and we'll move on with our lives. I think they'll take it to the limit to the brink. Yes. We're going to the Supreme Court if we can. But David, this will take years.

This is the pain of the court system, right? Like, we're talking at least two years, maybe even longer, for this all to get resolved. And that's what sucks. Maybe Gary Gensler is just trying to, like, slow things down or something. I don't know what his strategy is, but that's the part sucks. Yeah, by the time, when is Gary Gensler's term up in 2026 or something? That's what I'm saying. he doesn't care. It'll be the next person who's the chair. And, you know, hopefully Hester

purse, you know, 2024, 2025. Please, hold on Hester. Well, she, her term ends in 2025, actually. Yeah. Yeah, I know. So before Gary's. You know, yeah, there's lots we could say there. Brian Quintends, a former CFTC commissioner himself says, the Wells notices are intended to afford targets and opportunity to defend themselves in writing before the charges are filed. That's what you said. The vagueness of this note is deprives Coinbase of that opportunity. It lacks due process, yes. This is Jesse Polack, who we had in the podcast, one of the key brains behind the base chain. I'm proud to work for Coinbase, base, and Ethereum. We remain committed to updating the global

financial system, creating more economic freedom in the world. Well, there you go. Sushi was hit with a subpoena this week. Anything you want to say about that? Yeah, no, I don't know. I don't know any details above and beyond. this title. I mean, sushi swap not too long ago, they posted their like salaries for all of their team members. And so it's kind of indication of like, oh, yeah, there's people are being paid salaries. There's a centralized team here. There's also the sushi token. So like you can kind of see how this would trigger the ire of the SEC. I don't, I haven't read the details. But yeah, they are hit with a subpoena. Same week. Also, Gary is going after influencers himself. Crypto

entrepreneur and celebrity promoters face SEC charges. So just and Sun was named Lindsay Lohan. Justin's son targeted by the SEC, charged by the SEC with securities law violation. So this is like why this is hard. It's like, well, yeah, Justin. I mean, there are definitely scammers that we want our regulators to kind of pay attention to and check out. But then they also do this. So the double-edged sword, I don't know if it's worth it, in my opinion.

Ryan, remember East Denver Week was that two or three weeks ago? and I was like, oh, yeah, the SEC's got like all of these subpoenas and Wells notices that they're ready to fire. I said, and then we said, what was it, carpet bombing Wells notices. Those were all rumors. Here we are. Well, Coinbase probably felt carpet bombed by that last, by what just happened. Here's some banker news. Banks are under pressure.

The contagion is spreading to Europe, Credit Suisse. Gone under a shotgun wedding is the CNBC title. What's happening here? UBS has rescued credit suisse. I haven't been following this story too lately, but Credit Suisse, which has been like a bank hanging by a thread ever since for a very long time,

finally getting under duress because of all the banking crisis, banking issues that are going on with the whole interest rate phenomenon. UBS is rescuing Credit Suisse. Do you know the details of what that means to actually rescue them? Basically giving the money, printing the money,

government funding. Oh, sick. Yeah. UBS and Credit Suisse, the stocks plunged, of course. This is just the contagion spreading beyond like, you know, Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and signature. Is it a contagion or is it generalized just like distressed assets owned by banks? I think when I'm talking about the contagion, I'm talking about that is like the root causes these distressed assets that are underwater, right? All of the treasuries that are underwater.

Long-dated treasuries underwater on bank balance sheets, not just in the United States, but across the world and in Europe. And who has to come to the rescue? The only person that can, the person with the money printer, the Fed, Treasury, it's the U.S. government. And so that's what they're doing. That's all part of what Arthur Hayes was talking about. Also, remember the Barney Frank rumor? There's some more evidence that maybe he was right about signature bank. So Barney Frank, this is the Frank in Dodd-Frank, former senator. He was on the board at Signature Bank. he claimed, he alleged, that signature was closed because the FDIC was targeting crypto. That's what he claimed.

And it seems like we got some more confirmation that that could be the case. Oh, yeah, it was basically cut and dry. It was like, we'll acquire everything about signature bank, but no one's allowed to acquire any of the crypto companies or like take them as clients. I wish I had more in my brain what that details actually were. So bankless listener go investigate that. But it was like cut and dry as like, yeah, everything else about signature. all their customers, all their clients, everything that they own is totally fine for acquisition, except for crypto.

Well, it's actually, so the New York Community Bank Corps flagstar bank is the bank acquiring signature bank. And that's explicitly what they said. They'll acquire, they'll assume all the cash deposits is all the cash deposits except the crypto company, cash deposits. So it was this acquisition that was basically, they said, yeah, we'll take everything except for crypto. And there's evidence maybe that the FDIC or. ordered that the acquire had to divest all of the crypto business. So yeah, that again is not good. And I think the public deserves to know more about it. Speaking of this, David, the last thing we got to cover real quick is this whole biology bet. He thinks that the US dollar is going to hyperinflate 90 days. He came out like after last week,

we recorded the roll up. And he came out this tweet of saying this. We had him on the podcast because, he was saying some very alarming things, basically that this was a bank crisis of epic proportion. This would be the straw that breaks the camel's back, that the US dollar would hyperinflate, and approach zero, that Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. And he called a time on this 90 day,

and he put a bet out around that. Yeah, so we had Bologian. We've been kind of like tracking down this claim and getting kind of the, you know, the pro side and the con side together. But I want to ask you, because we've had a whole bunch of guests on this week. We've been doing kind of these emergency episodes.

Give me your reaction to this Bology take. So he spent almost two hours with us. What do you think? Like, do you think he's right? Yeah, people actually, we were getting some flack for even hosting Bology. People saying, why are you guys, he's just doing this marketing campaign. He's just trying to promote his bet. Like, don't give into the dumerism.

Don't give into the hyperbole. And I'll push, of course, I'll push back against that. And I'll say that it's important to don't, this is Bologi's mistake. He's leading with the bet, which triggers a lot of people. The package, Bolligy has a very, well, he's not necessarily the most coherent individual, but he's very smart. He's got a good message. The package that the message came in, people really did not like.

This $1 million Bitcoin bet inside of 90 days, Bologi was, that was probably not the best way to lead with the thing that you are trying to say, although he did make that bet in this big, grandios bet. if you actually want to get your learn on, if you actually want to get educated as to what Bologi is trying to say, whether you believe it or not, you need to look past that bet

and hear the message that he's trying to say. We did the episode with Arthur Hayes. In my mind, Arthur Hayes' message and Bologi's message are almost synonymous, difference in time frame, difference in severity, but directionally completely aligned. And we are also going to host counterarguments,

anti-dumerism, anti-hyperinflation perspectives. So that is also coming. But since multiple people, Bologi and Arthur Hayes, are pointing towards the same logical conclusion of very significant inflation in the I.S.H dollar that I implore you, Bank, this listener, to look past the perhaps triggering 90-day $1 million Bitcoin bet and just take in what Bologi is trying to tell you. And so I don't really have to take beyond that. I'm still in learning mode. I think we should all still be in learning mode. But that is my response. Yeah, you got to listen to both sides of the argument for sure in order to make an informed opinion. If Bologi is even 5% right, like, it's a pretty big freaking deal. I guess my take is like, Bology was more exaggerated. He put a time frame around this. Hayes was much more like methodical and like approach this as a like a neutral trader on what he thought would happen just as.

he's kind of evaluating the system. And those episodes together formed kind of like a package towards understanding what the threat factor might be in the inflationary case. Next we're having Ben Hunt on, who I think is going to push back against a whole bunch of that. On next week, we're going to have Jim Bianco on as well, who's going to give us kind of the Tradfai take. And I don't know.

Quantity Jim Bianco. Yeah. I understand Jim Bianco. I don't know where we're going to go next with this. But our role in this is to, like we say all the time, we're on the journey with you. We are discovering this. We want to hear both sides and understand whether it's true

and then decide for ourselves and have you decide for yourself. David, what do we got coming up next? Coming up next, we got an update on the Euler Hack update. Good news, everyone. Hopefully, things are trending at least in the right direction. We got some money back. Maybe we're getting more. We'll provide the details about that.

Immutable and Plygon launching a new layer two. A Maddox-staking immutable flavored layer two. We'll get the details beyond that. And so much more, we got some Bitcoin stuff. We got some IRS stuff. Ryan's favorite subject. We got some CBD stuff. We got some bankless stuff.

So all of this news and more, as soon as we get 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 Uniswap web app

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So, are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? go to learn.menamask.io and add Metamask learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. Update on the Euler hack. 3,000 ether has been returned from the exploiter back to the Euler treasury, Euler vaults, which is interesting. I did not see that coming, especially after they put that ether through tornado cash. Yeah, like, why? I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, they could be fearful of going to jail. I made it declaimed last week that it was definitely. North Korea. It was probably North Korea, probably definitely. I guess I was wrong on that one. One transaction of 100 ether was sent to an address of North Korean linked actors, which is confusing. And then also we have North Korea attempting to fish the exploiter trying to get them to basically sneakily give them their private keys, which is nuts. So like this, this has gotten from a very sad story of a very large exploit to a very confusing story of some money returned. I don't know what's going on.

North Korea is involved trying to exploit the exploiter. And then also, importantly, the big punchline here is that using a lot of this communication is happening inside of Ethereum transaction. So people are writing data into the Ethereum transaction. And there was a message from the exploiter to the oiler hacker saying, we want to make this easy on all those affected. No intention of keeping what is not ours, setting up secure communication. Let's come to an agreement.

So all of a sudden, the ex-executive. exploiter, is growing a conscience or at least trying to go to jail? They're definitely, I don't think it's a conscience. I think it's definitely like something is happening in the background. But like, I don't understand only 3,000 Eth is just a tiny fraction of the 90,000 something Eth they stole, right? Why were they? I don't know.

This is confusing. I'm waiting for more data to unfold. Yeah. What's so crazy, though, is that these conversations are all happening on chain and we can like observe the negotiation process. What a bizarre world we live in But yeah, so that's happening What about the IRS?

What are they doing? They are IRS who formalized tax treatment of NFTs As collectibles similar to other art Skook, is this guidance? I'm getting guidance from the IRS? I guess so. That's kind of cool. Is this bullish, bearish?

You're the tax man. It's what we would totally expect, right? Of course, the IRS treats NFTs as property just like they would a baseball card or like art or, you know, know, a classic car or something like that. It totally makes sense. What's, what's interesting about this, though, David, is it's in complete conflict with how the SEC wants to treat tokens and NFTs, which is like, everything's a security, right? Well, it can't be a collectible and a security

at the same time. So I think that's... Unless they deem baseball cards to be securities, which not putting it out of Gary Gensers... You think he wants that? He wants, like, the Mickey Mantle classic thing. Depends on how big the AUM is, if it's big enough, you know? Wow. Yeah. I mean, what I would to the Fed is like just in general, all the fed's like, get your story straight. You have different agencies telling us different things. And then you're like penalizing us when we don't understand what the rules even are. Absolutely ridiculous. Anyway, but good news from the IRS, some guidance, some clarity. It's not that hard. I don't know how that really materially impacts me, but okay. Just keep doing what you were doing. It's right. It impacts. Yeah. Magic Eden launches a marketplace

for Bitcoin Ordinals. Okay. So this was a huge. huge problem in the Bitcoin Ordinals space. We saw all of the vitriol that was pointed at Yuga Labs for doing the thing where they say, hey, give us all of your Bitcoin, we'll custody it, run the auction, and then give you your Bitcoin's back. Yeah. So now we're starting to get infrastructure around Bitcoin Ordinals, which means that Bitcoin Ordinals has further sticking power. So like we're a month two point something into the Bitcoin Ordinals world. More sticking power, more infrastructure, more roots being grown. Ordinals, more case for Ordinals. is here to stay cautiously optimistic. I'll remain. I don't know. I think it's great. I don't really have a take until I own a... Look, I was a little slower to the NFT thing too,

and I'm just going to wait until something speaks to me. It's down pretty bad, David. Well, it was at zero when you bought it. How can it be down? Oh, yeah. That's true. It went up, and then it went back down again. But, you know, I'm a forever turtle holder,

so... Do every once in a while, I'll see somebody with a turtle PFP. No, you won't still? Random Discord. Yeah, the Alpha Discord has a turtle PFP guy in there, and I'm like, that's Ryan. Hey, look, they're going to someday, Tiny Turtles will make a comeback. Sad news on the blockchain uptime front. No, not Solana.

This time the avalanche sea chain has stopped producing blocks for over an hour. This tweet said not yet recovered, but it was recovered. I think within two hours, I believe. So the network went down and then is now back up after. an update was very quickly written and patched. I think this is the first time, or at least the first time in a long time, that the avalanche chain was halted. Again, I think bankless listeners who have been listening to the weekly roll-up

and other podcasts understand our perspectives as what it means for a blockchain to go down. It's not great. Do you want to say anymore? It's back up, though. Hey, there's that. So here's what I was thinking about this. Like, oh, wow, they got that chain back up really fast. Yeah.

And then I was like, well, that just means that they were able to coordinate really, really well. But then I'm like, okay, well, but if they went down for a really long time, I would also be saying that that's bad. And so like, if you're down for a long time, that's bad. If you're down for a short time, that's also bad. I guess I'm just biased against chains that go down in the first place, which has been what I've been saying for such a long time. Chains don't go down. Not layer ones. They shouldn't be. Anyway, a regulatory, Governor Ron DeSantis announced legislation to protect Floridians from a federally controlled central bank digital currency.

This is interesting, David, just some like, I guess, fracturing in the United States of, you know, he's a powerful governor for sure. I mean, he's in the candidate pool for president for 2024. And he is saying in Florida, we shall not have a central bank digital currency. First of all, I don't know how this works if Florida is actually able to do that and be like, you know, we'll take the physical dollar,

but we won't take the central bank digital dollar. So I don't know if this is just a... It's kind of cool. Can they do that? Yeah, but can they do this, right? Like every state, like Florida bucks? I mean, what do you do if it can't be cut off? Can you regulate up as a state?

But I think it's, and Bologi would probably say this. It's indicative of some fracturing in the various political alignment groups around something like a central bank digital currency. I don't think the United States will take, will take that without a fight, at least some factions of politicians. And I'm anxious to see this, how this plays out for what we'd call free crypto money systems, right?

Will it be like a partisan issue where like one party is pro-crypto and the other party is not? Or will it be, I mean, because I see Democrat, Republican, there are wins for both sides on kind of their stated platforms. anyway. But I wonder if one party or the other will kind of take the lead on advocating for crypto and what their intents might be. It's interesting to see. I'm not holding my breath for the Democrats. Yeah, well, you know what? Some of their leaders. Elizabeth Warren's too high up in the power struggle and she is way too anti-crypto. Very anti-c crypto, sadly. David, we got some cool stuff going on a bankless one, just an update

about the Green Pill podcast that we come out with. What's this? bankless HQ, the bankless you're listening to, puts out too much content, so much content that we are creating the Green Pill, which we typically host on our YouTube channel. Green Pills get its own YouTube channel. So if you are a Green Pill fan, you got your own YouTube channel. We're managing this one on behalf of Kevin O'Waqi. So definitely go subscribe to that Green Pillar YouTube channel if you are a Green Pillar fan. If you don't know what Green Pillar is and you like the idea of regenerative economics,

global coordination, how to prevent global coordination failures, or overall are a fan of Kevin Milwaukee, perhaps listen to the Green Pill. But either way, there's a brand new YouTube channel called The Green Pill podcast. Go subscribe. There you go. you can find that on the RSS as well. David, this is pretty cool, man. This is a jacket.

I saw you sporting in the pictures anyway, because I don't go to conference, as you know, at ETH Denver. This is, what's this jacket called? Oh, gosh, Sujikan. Oh, I'm butchering this name. Look at this, man. GQ level. This is David, where, sporting the jacket.

Shout out to Dave Krugman for being the photographer here. Yeah, so if you were at East Denver, you saw we probably rocking this jacket. I'm biased here, but I will claim that it was. the coolest piece of apparel at the sender. And so this is being made by MetaFactory in partnership with MetaFactory for people that want to buy it. It is extremely rare. There is only 60 being made in production.

And it is literally, Ryan, the coolest thing, the coolest pieces of clothing that I own. These pictures don't show it, but it is also reversible. And so if you want to not be wearing crypto, you just want it to be blank, you can reverse it. And it's just a normal black and yellow silk. jacket, emphasis on it is the coolest thing that I own. People can buy this now? Is that what you're saying? It is available now. Yes. You know what this has to me? Have you seen that movie, Ryan Gosling movie, Drive? Yeah. That's, yeah. That's it. It's the crypto version.

Don't turn into a psycho and start killing all the people like he does, but, uh, I haven't seen the movie. Thanks for the spoiler. Okay, sorry. Good movie, though. All right, Immutable and Polygon Labs in releases as well, they team up to expand Web3 gaming. I know we did an episode on this. Any high level you want to say? Yeah, so brand new ZKEVM. It is run by Polygon, Maddox staking to secure the chain. But IMX from Immutable is the gas token. It is also where Immutable does all of its BD. There are layer threes that are available to go on this new ZKEVM layer two. It's a brand new layer two called the Immutable ZKEVM operated by Polygon. So this is like a team up? It's a team up. Okay. So, so,

So immutable was on Starkware tech. And so you're saying, have they moved? And it still is. That chain is still up and running. And now they are doing a generalized ZKEVM with Polygon technology with the IMX as the gas token. That's cool. That's a big win for Polygon. I guess.

Yes. Yeah, a very interesting alliance here. Very interesting. Yeah. We'll see how that plays out. I know there's a whole episode on this. I are invested investors in IMX and Ryan is a advisor to Polygon. Very true.

David, Microsoft is building a crypto wallet. in their edge browser. I haven't used the Windows browser in forever, Microsoft browser in a while, but they're getting into the crypto wallet game. It's a big freaking deal, right? The default browser of Microsoft is getting a crypto wallet, partnership with consensus, I believe,

to offer swaps between Ether, Uni, D, USEC, and USDT. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of crazy. The default browser for Microsoft coming with a crypto wallet. I think it's big. I don't know how many people care about Edge. Yeah. But some people use it, I'm sure. There's some edge lords out there.

All right. It's Sismo. Wow. What do we got? Sysmo ZK. Connect. This is about identity in crypto in Web 3. They have just released something.

Right. So, Sismo, it's ZK identity for your on-chain footprint, if you will. So I have many, many wallets. I have po-ups in some wallet. I have different poaps and other wallets. I have my cryptos. the punk in a third wallet. I don't want all of those wallets to be connected via transactions, but I do have my identity spread across all of these wallets. ZKKKKKKK allows you to sign

ZK badges, ZK proofs, to attest to your ownership of stuff and things and poaps or activities without disclosing your address. Without disclosing your address. Ah, that's really cool. So aggregate all of your wallets and all of the identity properties of your wallets together without linking them. Also without disclosing your those wallets to any way. one that you need to prove what your stuff is. And so they are launching ZK, this is Sismo. They are launching ZK Connect to get this done. That's a really good use case because you know the only way I do it is I funneled through

centralized exchange and then it doesn't really maintain my privacy. It just makes it not public. This exchange knows what you address is. What else do I do? Yeah. Give me bankless tools, David. I'll go bankless. Please.

What more can I do? Well, I got this thing called ZK Connect. out of sister for you. Thank you. I appreciate your help on that. David, you were doing an event in Dominican Republic. This is what it is. You guys were burning socks down there or something? What's going on? No, this was in the Pleaser Dow offices in New York. We were watching it last night. So last night, Pleaser Dow in their Pleaser house, which is their native Web 3 auction house. It's so weird, dude. Three different pairs of Ui socks. I think we're coming up to a total of $160,000. dollars. Why did they do this? Because they are taking the ashes of these uni socks and putting them

into uni blocks, which is these little cubes. So you're going to have like a necklace with cubes of ashes of uni socks. And there are, I think, 2,000 of them. And so they were sold in this Web 3 auction house. Hayden Adams showed up to talk about one of the pairs that was burned was Hayden Adams' actual uny socks, the ones that he wore. He said he doesn't wear anymore because they just soaked up all of his stink. That is so great. I shit you not. Is this peak crypto culture?

I don't even know what this is. I don't know what to date this. Why are these socks worth 160,000 freaking dollars? Because they're associated with Uniswap. They were dropped at the same time of the Uniswap token. Also, Mike Demaris is just the big meme propagator of Uni Sox. He's a big fan of... He's a rainbow wallet.

Rainbow wallet. Yeah. And so he bought a bunch of Uni Sox, NFT tokens. it's on a bonding curve. He's a socks, you get an NFT if you burn the token. If you burn one token, you get to claim the socks.

Because there's only 2,000 of them, and because it was the first of its kind, these socks ended up going for tens of thousands of dollars. He also propagated the meme, redeem you cowards, as in like take your ERC20 token, burn it, claim your uni-sox so you can have your $30,000 pair of socks and wear them.

But the idea is like it pumps up the price of the uny socks because it's a fundamental, like, economic game. Anyways, Pleaser House is the whole production quality of this thing was off the charts. They had this host, Ali Ali Weiss, who I actually went to college with, just roundabout, fun fact, doing this show of this, like, this Web3 auction house, this native crypto culture auction house. And dude, so many people were in the chat participating. Like, Mike was there, Hayden was there. Frog Monkey from formerly bankless, now Uniswap fame was there. Will Price was there. It was like a who's who of Ethereum defy. It was pretty cool.

It was pretty cool. The production was insane, dude. It was really, really, I'm also a member of Pleaser now, so I'm biased. But I thought they killed it. There you go. Burning Sox. I don't know why, but they're doing it. Warpcast, all right?

This is Farcaster, Dan Romero's Protocol. We had him on the podcast, fantastic. It's been on mobile as an app. But now there's a web version, which is pretty awesome. Go check that out. Decentralized Social. networks is going to be a big theme over the next few years, we think. And that is one of the leading ones. Also, Ledger is combining efforts, connectivity to build a wallet. Is that what I'm looking at,

David? A browser extension. So they have entered the browser extension game. Everyone's getting a browser extension these days. Metamask, of course, Coinbase wallet has a browser extension. GameStop has a browser extension now. Zirion has a browser extension. Now Ledger has a browser extension. I know of one more wallet that's coming with a browser extension. Everyone wants a browser extension these days. Yeah. That's great. I'll take more. More competition. Good. Ledger can certainly do it well. They got the hardware behind it. It would be really great to connect directly into that. Blockworks has released a grant farm. So this is a crypto grant directory. So if you're looking to see what grants are available, you can go to blockworks.com slash grants

and go check that out. Anything more on this? It's like a grant aggregator. Every single not every single, many, many protocols have grants out there. This is Grant Farm from Blockworks. It's just a place to aggregate all of the various grants that are out there. So really cool, your resource. I shot Blockworks. Yeah. Let's talk about the big raises this week.

This is the first one, David, in a AAA title set gaming raise here. What are we looking at? Yeah. So if bankless listeners are familiar with Eve Online, the creators of Eve Online, which is apparently called CCP Games has raised $40 million from A16Z to build a blockchain-based MMO RPG set within the universe of Eve Online.

No way. That's big, man. Like Eve is one of the OG MMO-RPGs, yeah. Yeah, with like real simulated economies. Wow. It's a natural fit to put the Eve economy on a blockchain. And so I think people are very, very excited about this. Even Pellania, who's very hard to please these days, has said positive things about this.

So when you know you please Pellania, who's got the highest barring crypto of legitimacy, you know you're onto something. So that's pretty cool. What does Pellini say about it? That it actually makes sense. It's using blockchain tech that actually makes some sense. Now, the thing with a great game, AAA game, is it takes some time to build. So this is a funding announcement.

It doesn't mean it's releasing anytime soon. We could be like three years plus away. but you don't have to wait three years to get a job in crypto, do you, David? Because we have the bankless jobs board here. I'm showing it, bankless.com. Let me read a few. A marketing manager at RISE, a sales development representative. These are non-technical at RISE.

Uniswap Labs needs a senior product designer, an application security engineer, and a senior mobile engineer. There's a whole bunch more. You can read about them on the bankless job boards and get that in your email. There's alpha in the bankless jobs board. We had that there was a uniswop mobile web dev job board months ago before they introduced the unit. There's alpha on the bankless job board. Yeah, get to see who's hiring and get that in your inbox.

Guys, we've got a lot more coming up, David. What are we in for? Questions from the nation. We got two different questions from the nation. The differences between layer threes on optimism and arbitram. We got a Bitcoin versus Ethereum take from Fiscanties. And then we got Ryan and I are bullish on as well as a really good meme of the week. Not actually a meme.

still really funny. But all of that stuff and more is coming right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. The Phantom wallet is coming to Ethereum. The number one wallet on Solana is bringing its millions of users and beloved UX to Ethereum and Polygon. If you haven't used Phantom before, you've been missing out. Phantom was one of the first wallets to pioneer Solana staking inside the wallet and will be offering similar staking features for Ethereum and Polygon.

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So get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta. There's a link in the show notes, or you can go to phantom.com slash waitlist to get access in late February. 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 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 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. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Questions from the nation. This is a question for David. Hello, David. Could you help me understand how hardware wallets work with browser wallets? Oh, we're just talking about that. For example, I was able to connect my ledger to MetaMask yesterday. How does this work? How does MetaMask know or store the private key

from my ledger to function in this way? That is, from a tad zoo. I think I pronounced their name correctly from the Bankless Nation Discord. David, how do browsers and hardware wallets interact, browser extensions interact? Tell us about that. Yeah, super important question. Okay, Why do we have hardware wallets in the first place? Hardware wallets, the actual physical hardware of a hardware wallet, will never allow the private key to leave its hardware. Leave its hardware. It is a secure law enclave.

It cannot leave. You don't even know the private key to your wallet because you are a liability because you are human. So hardware wallets are designed to never let the private key out. You have your seed phrase and you can derive your private key from that, but your hardware wallet will not allow your private key to escape. That is the point. A browser extension wallet or a software wallet is like a virtual hardware wallet, but it is stored on the computer.

So there is a risk dependency there, especially if your computer is connected to the internet. And so your metamask, your browser extension, it's like a virtual hardware wallet. It tries to contain it's the private key inside of the software, but by the nature of because it's on the computer, it is not as contained as a hardware wallet. Now, you can plug your ledger into Metamask

or now into Ledger's own browser extension and others. And that allows Metamask to connect to all the Defi apps that are out there. So Metamask is kind of like a distribution connection service to all the Defi apps that allows your hardware wallet to connect to these things, but it doesn't have the hardware wallet level security. And so does that make sense?

Yeah. I feel like that makes sense. Totally. Makes sense to me. And one general rule is if you're going long-term cold storage, that's a hardware wallet. If you're more active, then maybe a browser extension is okay for those private keys and smaller sums in the browser extension, larger sums in the cold storage where it's more secure. Metamask will actually allow you to extract your private key. So in Metamask, you can actually go and tell Metamask, hey, show me my private key. and then you can go and copy that private key and load it up into a different wallet. In my head, I have done this a few times

for different circumstances. When I've extracted my private key out of Metamask, I know that I have done that for that particular wallet. And so I flag it in my brain saying, like, I've now exposed this private key to the internet. And it is now no longer as secure as another Metamask wallet that I haven't done that in, which is also not as secure as an actual hardware wallet.

And a hardware wallet won't even let you do that at all in the first place. So there's always like different levels of private keys security, and you should understand them in your head. Totally. Here's a question from Jacks on the dev. What's the difference between building an L3 on Arbitrum versus Optimism? Heard a lot about the OP stack of the roadmap, but wasn't aware that Arbitrum had that option. Yeah, Arbitrum has that option as of recently.

This is in tandem with the Arbitrum token drop is that they are launching their layer three surface area. And so this is new to Arbitrum. What is different is that you can take the Arbitrum code. and you can deploy another arbitram chain on top of the arbitram layer two freely and independently. But if you deploy an arbitram chain that settles directly to Ethereum, you need to get Dow approval of that per the open source

or per the license of the arbitram code. Optimism does not have that restriction. Optimism is like, yo, please fork our code base. Please copy it. Cambrian explosion of OP stack chains left and right. Peel, pew, pew, pew, pew. Opie stack chains everywhere. No restrictions on being able to fork and deploy an OP stack

chain. So the main difference between these two things, other than the differences between the code, although optimism and Arbitrum are trying to largely become the same thing, which is Ethereum synonymous layer two. The main difference is the license and kind of the philosophy behind these different chains. Arbitrum is kind of like more commercial, I'll say, and our optimism is more indie, more developer indie. You've got to get Dow approval to fork the Arbitrum code. Optimism wants you to fork their code as much as possible. And that's kind of the second order effects of what that means are that could be a whole entire episode but that's kind of the gist of it. Here we go. Some takes of the week from Fiscanties is talking about Bitcoin versus Ethereum.

This looks like AI generated graphics, but one looks like this kind of stoic picture of, I don't know, a Greek philosopher. Some ancient philosopher, yeah. Kind of reminds me of the Da Vinci Man in the Circle and he was like balanced a little bit like that. It's Renaissance. It's principles. It's like deep. It's foundational, it's immutable. This is like, you know, ancient, ancient, I think is a great word, yeah. And this is the AI depiction of Ethereum. How do you describe this image? Yeah, one part human, one part AI, definitely on the frontier, a little bit of

cyberpunk's 277, I think, is in here. Definitely like one part computer. Definitely futurist. Definitely young as well, I would say. Rather than ancient, I would say young. and not yet fully manifested. I would also say that. I just like the artists.

Artists, we talk about the future. Artists, Ryan, are always on the future more than the rest of the world. And so I like the actual idea of illustrating what these things are via art. Sorry for the podcast listeners that aren't seeing these visuals. Yeah, but you can check them out on YouTube.

This is a take from Anthony Sasano. Creating a better money is not enough. We need to create a better financial system that serves everyone in a fair, transparent, and decentralized way. That's Ethereum. So a lot of, I guess, maybe traction on the Bitcoin narrative side of things. And Anthony is saying, hey, it's not enough to have a better money. We need a whole banking system that is bankless that is associated with that money.

I'd probably echo that sentiment. What's your take on this? I think this is coming in response to my whole Bitcoin for war and Ethereum for peace. Oh, he was talking to you? Yeah. So he hit me up and he was like, dude, you are so wrong about that. I'm like, I know, I know you think that, Anthony. And I think he's right.

I think he's right. I think the case for Ethereum also for a war is also very strong. And I think Anthony would say that like Ethereum is the like you, Ryan, Ethereum is the best suited blockchain for a wartime environment based off its raw fundamentals. And he, Anthony refuses to get caught up in like narrative war games and will always go back to the fundamentals very, very quickly. And so Anthony and others, I think, are asking. for an Ethereum for wartime type of narrative to emerge. And so that's what this is.

Yeah. I just still always think that the Bitcoiners will do this better because they'll have like a Bitcoin and guns type of approach to it. And like, Ethereum and rainbows. They don't have like layer twos and NFTs and like Defy stuff to get distracted by. And so what do they have their time and energy to spend on? Narrative.

Mean. Like Bitcoin innovates on narratives. Written word. Ethereum innovates with code. Yeah. All right, David, as that point in that episode, I got to ask you, what do you bullish about this week? Ryan, I'm just bullish on crypto, man.

SEC is going to break. In the same way Doquan broke, the SEC is going to break. They went too far, too fast, too high, flew too far to the sun. The Fed is signaling a pivot. The end of rising interest rates is here. We have the bank term funding program, which is where we start to issue money once again. Where did this last bull market come from?

COVID stimis. The BFTP is another stimmy source. So we have the powers that be retreating, even though they're coming in very hot, they're also ready to retreat. So that's bullish. Again, we are faced with a banking crisis. And I've said this before, but it's been a while, so I'll say it again. Crypto is slowly and slowly becoming ready to accept mainstream society.

Mainstream society is becoming ready to accept crypto. We are meeting in the middle closer and closer and closer. And so this is happening along with his banking crisis. People are understanding this. we are getting our layer twos. We have two ZK EVMs, Ryan, launching in the next five days. That is the way that we make crypto things look and feel like FinTech. The time, it seems to be crypto's time.

It's been in crypto's time for a while. I will say it always is crypto's time. But there's just more and more evidence that we are shaping up to be just, what am I bullish on? Crypto. Like you can see the writing on the wall. Yeah, I'll echo some of that. I think the banks are falling apart, and we're seeing in the midst of that layer two shipping.

And let's remember what layer twos are and when Ethereum is. Is this promises to be a bankless financial system? It is the antidote for the bank failures. It's trustless, verifiable code, where you can see all of the assets, what secures them, and everyone can be their own bank. You can go bankless. The infrastructure hasn't been ready up to this point. This is the broadband moment of building that banking infrastructure,

and it's coming at such an interesting time as the banks in the traditional world are having trouble and this new banking system is becoming available for the arbitram token, ZK Sync era, Polygon, ZK, EVM, and all this in the last seven days and like I guess, you know, a couple days from now too. One other take I'll maybe share is I think that this Bitcoin narrative that probably sounds crazy to some of you listeners, which is like, you know, the banks are dead, Bitcoin is the only way out. Get to the lifeboats. Quick, quick, quick. That probably sounds hyperbolic to many listeners. And I understand that. I also understand like past runs where that narrative is kind of the seed to understanding. Like in order to, in order to, I still believe

that Bitcoin is very much a gateway drug to Ethereum. Because in order to actually understand the concept of digital scarcity and digital money and money over internet protocol IP, like Bitcoin is a core acid to actually understand. And as the banks are failing, and then the narrative, however shrill it might seem to you, is propagating via Bitcoiners, I think what comes next is we have a season of that. We might have like a Bitcoin run up on that narrative. And then what comes next is this epic flight to a new trustless financial system on Ethereum. And I think we might have a Bitcoin narrative run for a while, but that gets everyone exposed to this concept of digital scarcity and digital money. And then that will open the gate for them to be gateway drugged into Ethereum and layer

two as a new bankless money system that they can now call home. Oh, Wells Fargo does, like, has failed me. The unit of account has inflated. Well, I have this browser extension that I can use. Maybe those bitcoins aren't that crazy. Right. It just opens the door. So I understand like, sometimes you're like, oh, the bitcoins are crazy. Like it sounds crazy. It's happening. And maybe they're gleeful at this. But I think that the net result is we get that wave, that narrative wave will wash over us. It will prime the pump to get people ready for the next wave, which is be your own bank. Take responsibility of your private keys and the property rights that that is entailed to you. And look, we got layer two ready to receive the world,

hopefully. They're not ready yet, but getting a lot closer. And that's what I'm bullish on this week. I'm also bullish. Wow. Wow. Wow. Meme of the week, David. What are we looking at here? This is the first meme of the week. I think that we've had that's actually not a meme. It's an accidental meme. This is just in Belgium to require all cryptocurrency ads to state the only guaranteeing crypto is risk. Simultaneously, we are having a banking crisis. And apparently in Belgium, if you are a crypto ad, you have to disclaim that the only guaranteeing crypto is risk. That is hilarious. Crypto assets are doing better than like the banking sector index if you take away the big banks.

Like, only guarantee. I actually kind of- I will also guarantee you, bankless listener. In addition to risk, you will also have fun. That's right. You might lose money, but you will have fun losing. You might live. There could be risk, certainly.

Actually, I like that. The only guarantee in crypto is risk. Like, I would wear that on a t-shirt, honestly. Guys, we have a moment- The only guarantee in life is risk. Yeah. No, yeah. You're guaranteed to have risk, no matter what.

Guys, we have a moment of Zen coming up. I think you'll appreciate this one. David liked it. I was worried he'd be like, not like my dad's humor, but like it's for everyone. There's three people in this, in this scene, so know that. And you might want to watch the YouTube. All right, go check that out. Otherwise, I'll give the risks and disclaimers. Guys, thank you for joining us. Crypto is risky. Maybe I'll put it like the Belgian ad. The only guarantee in crypto is risk. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. About the 20 bucks you owe me. Oh, yeah. Well, I only got 10, so here's 10. I owe you 10. Thanks.

Hey, Mo, you owe me 20. Well, here's 10, I'll owe you 10. Uh-uh. You owe me 20. Here's 10, I owe you 10. Here's a 10 I owe you. Here's a 10 I owe you. Here's a 10 I owe you.

Good. Man, we're all even.