Bankless - ROLLUP: Axie Infinity, Binance Squeeze, JPMorgan ETH Staking, EIP 1559 (1st Week of July)

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

1st Week of July, 2021. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsl...etter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini  🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/unigrants  ------ 📣 KYBER | Liquidity mine with Rainmaker https://bankless.cc/kyber  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 2:10 MARKETS 2:20 BTC Price 4:56 ETH Price Exchanges https://twitter.com/cryptoquant_com/status/1411973786941804547  Deposit Contract http://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/decentralized-finance/asset-management/eth-in-eth2-deposit-contract  8:03 ETH/BTC 10:10 DeFi Action 13:15 NFT Volume https://duneanalytics.com/rchen8/opensea  16:30 RELEASES 17:45 EIP-1559 https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1412762432079007748?s=20  Fee Burn https://goerli.etherscan.io/blocks?p=1  Fee Savings https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1412995748665298944?s=20  22:35 Beacon Book https://twitter.com/StatefulWorks/status/1412408929267630093  24:30 Balancer & Polygon https://medium.com/balancer-protocol/balancer-joins-polygons-summer-of-defi-with-10-million-in-joint-token-incentives-c09d4db5ae9b  Zapper https://twitter.com/zapper_fi/status/1412889987155173382  Dune https://twitter.com/0xPolygon/status/1409556178443505667?s=20  27:30 Göerli Sidechain  https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1412388910429347841?s=20  31:05 Aave Pro in July https://twitter.com/TraderNoah/status/1411719489947906048  34:16 Raises  Index Coop https://www.coindesk.com/dao-behind-defi-pulse-index-raises-7-7m-from-galaxy-digital-1kx  Zerion https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110675/defi-investing-platform-zerion-series-a-funding  36:20 NEWS 36:30 JPMorgan ETH Staking Report https://decrypt.co/75108/ethereum-staking-crypto-jp-morgan  39:57 Andre on a Tear https://twitter.com/andrecronjetech/status/1411244286146977792?s=21 41:43 Axie Infinity Growth https://twitter.com/amytongwu/status/1412875602030301190?s=20   43:05 China & Stablecoins https://www.coindesk.com/china-central-bank-pboc-worried-stablecoins  44:53 $70m Ransom Attack https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/07/05/ransomware-hackers-demand-70-million-in-bitcoin-claim-massive-us-attack-as-biden-investigates-possible-russian-involvement/  46:35 Circle Spac Merger https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110806/confirmed-stablecoin-firm-circle-public-spac-merger  47:45 Wyoming DAOs https://decrypt.co/75222/americas-first-dao-approved-in-wyoming  50:50 News Drive-By Crypto Cards top $1B https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/07/visa-says-crypto-linked-card-usage-tops-1-billion-in-first-half-of-2021.html  Binance Squeeze https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110510/barclays-customers-in-the-u-k-can-no-longer-transfer-funds-to-binance  Elizabeth Warren Flex https://www.coindesk.com/elizabeth-warren-sec-deadline-crypto-regulation  54:30 TAKES 55:00 Computer without Internet https://twitter.com/chainlinkgod/status/1410359761971736577?s=21  56:25 Spooky Chainlink https://twitter.com/edgararout/status/1412401125463035914?s=21  1:00:20 Creator Economy https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1410585347092729857?s=21  1:03:05 Influencer to Creator https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1412890086635544578?s=20  1:04:53 CeDeFi https://twitter.com/dcfgod/status/1410985736715767817?s=20  1:06:50 Speed & Depth https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1411046562063523841?s=21  1:09:15 Broken Pegs https://twitter.com/stefan__ionescu/status/1412190540700004357?s=21  1:11:50 MEV Negative Externalities https://twitter.com/bertcmiller/status/1412579402345586696?s=20  1:18:35 Transparent Systems https://twitter.com/panekkkk/status/1411347712168153090  1:24:05 What David’s Excited About 1:25:05 What Ryan’s Excited About https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1412799192603533313?s=20  1:29:00 Meme of the Week https://i.redd.it/8b1khwy3uu971.jpg  ----- 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://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Happy Friday morning, everyone. It is the first week of July, and it's roll-up time. David, you ready to dig in? I am ready to dig in to the Friday weekly roll-ups. The best episode in all of crypto, at least I think this is where we go through what's happened in the last week of crypto. We go through the markets, what's happened in the markets. We go through the releases, what got released, and then we go through what's happened in the new cycle. And then we finish off with who had some interesting takes in the crypto ecosystem. And then we finish things off, with what David and Ryan are excited about. And then we finish that off with the meme of the week.
Starting point is 00:00:46 Still not finished until the meme of the week comes. Then you know it's over. All right, man, you ready to dig in? Yeah, let's do it, Ryan. All right, before we do, we got to talk about Kiber's Rainmaker program going on. They are making it rain. Making it rain can see tokens.
Starting point is 00:00:59 This is their long-awaited liquidity mining program that they've just launched $25 million over the next three months. They are dishing out to liquidity providers. We've got ETH, USD, C-Pairs. wrapped Bitcoin pairs, die pairs, everything, and across two chains. Not one chain, two chains, Ethereum and Polygon. That's pretty cool. Love that Khyber is doing this. They are an OG DFI protocol. So click on the link and the show notes. You want to learn more about how you can supply liquidity and start earning some of that rain yourself. Khyber is one of the oldest projects
Starting point is 00:01:35 in DFI, and they are in the capital efficiency game with their dynamic market maker, which changes fees according to market conditions to make sure that you are optimized your LP position. So check that out. David wanted to fit the words capital efficiency. I know, I know you did. David, we wrote a fantastic article on that. David, let's start market time, man. Let's start with Bitcoin price. What is Bitcoin price doing for us? I'm going to scroll out to the five day and see where we started. I think that was like the third or something. Yeah, we started at $35,000. It fell down to $32.7,000. Then we jumped. to $36,000. Then we dumped to $32,000.8,000. So, flat on the week. Basically,
Starting point is 00:02:19 where we started. But also did jump up a little bit. It is nice to have a pretty high in the middle of the week, even though we didn't end there. It's nice to claim some of that high territory, which I said. Yeah, good Wednesday. We had a good hump day. Yeah, a good Wednesday. There was a hump on a hump day. Nice. Do you know what, though? I feel like Bitcoin's in maybe a bit of a rut. I don't know if you feel this way. It's like coming off of Bitcoin, Miami, we had the El Salvador news that kind of spike things a little bit, but that's sort of died down, right?
Starting point is 00:02:46 People aren't really excited. And I'm talking narratives, of course, you're not fundamentals. But the happening is behind us too. Michael Saylor putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet, that hasn't quite spread like wildfire, where the Bitcoin Bulls were saying it would maybe in January of this year. And he takes there, do you feel like Bitcoin's in a rut, too? and how does it get out of this rut?
Starting point is 00:03:10 Yeah, I'm sure Michael Saylor would like a few more allies than he thought that he would have gotten by now. But at the same time, I think Bitcoiners will say that the happening event doesn't manifest in the price until like two years later, right? That is like what the happening is apparently. And so they always will say... Stock to flow, right?
Starting point is 00:03:30 If you believe in that. And so when I talk to my Bitcoiner co-host over at POV Crypto-S-EK, he talked about how like, you know, it's going to take the world a while to integrate the El Salvador news into their understanding of Bitcoin. And so like the price appreciation happens later, right? There's always a lag. Which sounds both true. If we look at the historical evidence of Bitcoin, the catalyst always appear in the charts later. But there's also like, you can also say that that's just an excuse. You know, if the markets integrate everything in the moment of. And so, you know, who knows. But yeah, like, unlike Ethereum, which has like a bunch of positive tailwinds coming its way, Bitcoin just kind of feels like floating out at sea. Like, where's it going to go next? We don't really know. Yeah, there's not another happening for a while, right?
Starting point is 00:04:22 So what is the next catalyst that remains to be seen? But let's, let's tap root. Let me tell you that. It's not. Okay. All right. Let's talk about ether for a second. So price of ether, where are we now?
Starting point is 00:04:35 Where do we start? Yeah, we started the week at $2,170, $2,170 dipped down to $2,000. Then we jumped to $2,400, which it got everyone really excited. And now we are back down to literally exactly where we started at $2,170. There's some good news about this, David, and that is at an all-time low on exchanges, like a two-and-a-half-year low. So people are pulling their ether from exchanges. This is awesome. This is great for banklessness because it means they're either holding it, you know,
Starting point is 00:05:09 privately, self-sovereignly, which is awesome, or they're using it in some sort of a D5 protocol. Maybe they're trading it on uniswap or providing liquidity on something like Khyber, rather than hold it inside a crypto bank. So I feel like this is pretty bullish. It also probably means, David, they're not exiting or not planning to exit to Fiat, which is another good sign. And he takes here. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:31 The eth on exchange metric is always interesting. When there's low eth on exchanges, that always means that, like, price can be volatile, and people generally think it's volatile to the upside, just because, like, if there's no ETH to sell because the ETH isn't on the exchange, there's only people who can buy ETH who want to buy it. And if there are people that want to buy it, because there's not a lot of ETH on exchanges, it moves the price faster to the upside. Granted, DFI is also a place to buy and sell ETH, right?
Starting point is 00:06:00 So a lot of ETH could be moved. moving off of the exchanges and going into defy to be sold on uniswap. So it's not necessarily that there isn't ETH available to sell. It's just not, like you said, it's not available to sell to go back to people's bank accounts. So this is a bearish metric for people who are thinking that people are trading their ETH, like you said, to go to Fiat. However, you could still trade your ETH and go to crypto dollars. But that stays in the ETHERI.
Starting point is 00:06:24 You can go to crypto dollars. And crypto dollars to me feels also somewhat temporary. or at least it is net positive for ether, right? You're still using those transaction fees on Ethereum. He's still using defy. Let's take a look at some of this ETH is definitely going. Yeah. Beacon chain deposit contract.
Starting point is 00:06:43 Dude, happy $6 million, man. Six million in the deposit contract. That's great. There's over $6 million ether in the deposit contract right now. So I guess like the quick math on that is what's just over 6% of all ETH supply. A little bit less. The deposit contract. Yes, a little bit less.
Starting point is 00:07:00 Yeah, because there's roughly 117 million ether, and there's 6 million ether in the deposit contract. Ah, right, so a little bit less. So, I mean, super impressive, though. I mean, I remember, do you remember the discussions we were having in, like, winter or late fall of 2020? It's like, oh, is anyone going to put their deposit?
Starting point is 00:07:22 Are we going to make it? It's a one-way bridge, fan. What was the threshold we needed? Half a million? Yeah, half a million. Are we going to be able to make it? Are we going to be able to get half a million either? These were the questions we were asking.
Starting point is 00:07:34 I think we made it. I think it's okay. It's going to be okay. Let's talk about that ETH Bitcoin ratio. What's that doing? So I'm seeing some ups. I'm seeing some downs, but more ups than downs. In the last week, you're seeing up, man.
Starting point is 00:07:47 And that's really the story. I think the ETH BTC ratio tells a bigger story than the ETH dollar or Bitcoin dollar. The biggest story, maybe the roll-ups. Yeah. And the same story, also being told, we're going to get to this, on the ETH DPI ratio, which is also looking just like the ETH BTC ratio.
Starting point is 00:08:05 We are establishing this floor at 0.055-Eth per BTC, and we could definitely range between where we are now at 0.065 and 0.55. Like, there's definitely room to bounce back and forth here. But what the story that I am seeing is that when it does hit that 0.055 level, it rockets back up. Maybe not rocket, but it's got a very solid,
Starting point is 00:08:28 floor at 0.055, which again is historically a high ETH BTC valuation. And so when I see ether hitting 0.055 and just rejecting it and going back up, that's indicating to me that people are still risk on. This is a, in my opinion, a great proxy for overall the bull market. If you are asked, if you want to ask the question, is the bull market over? I think you should look to the ETH BTC ratio because that tells the story. You know, David, I think you're spitting a lot of wisdom here, man, because especially we're just, talking about the, you know, Bitcoin price in a rut, the doldrums, no tailwinds ahead in terms of narrative for Bitcoin that we can see in the future. But there are a ton of tailwinds ahead for
Starting point is 00:09:10 ether. We're going to talk about some of those when we get to kind of the news and, and some of our takes on that. But like EIP 1559, the merge, all of these things are going to be tailwinds for ETH. So if we're going to have a continuance of the bull run, we need ETH to run. Yep, yep. And we need this ratio to continue going to the direction. And Evan Van Ness will happily say that ether and Ethereum always leads bull markets. And so when we see the ETH-BTC ratio rising, that's where we get to say is like, ooh, this bull market is still looking good.
Starting point is 00:09:43 Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, let's talk about other bull market indicators. Value locked in defy. So that's been hanging up, slightly up. Slightly up a little bit. So $55 billion of value locked in DFI, hanging in the, hanging in the 50s or so, not too bad. Let's talk about defy,
Starting point is 00:10:01 defy tokens as measured by the DPI, the DFI pulse index we should talk about every week. So a little bit up on that. Up on the week. Up on the week, yeah. Defy tokens were catching a bid this week. We started at $260 to start the week, ended at $300,
Starting point is 00:10:19 but also hit a midweek high, again on Wednesday, hump day, of $350. And so I think we should go ahead and go right into the ETH-DPI conversation, Ryan. You've been waiting for this. Oh, yeah. Look at that number.
Starting point is 00:10:31 Look at that point-13. Okay, so I called the bottom at point-13. It broke down below 0.13 for a solid like 8, 9, 10 days. But I think- And you said, to be fair, you said, give it two weeks. If it doesn't break for two weeks, that's what you said two weekly roll-ups ago. Then you're still in the clear.
Starting point is 00:10:49 So you're still feeling okay. It's not, I will admit that I did not call the absolute bottom. So, like, I guess if you want to be really strict about, this and say the number fell below 0.13. Yes, the number fell below 0.13. So I didn't call me. Part of me wants to be strict on this, David, but I'll give you some grace to you. Yeah. Okay. So like let's let's think about things in six months in 2020, say, for example, that defy tokens finally get the bids that they deserve and DPI
Starting point is 00:11:15 resurges back to previous levels and maybe even goes on the bull market that we've all been wanting the defy tokens to go on the bull market for and they break previous legals. Then what are you going to say? Like, oh, David, didn't call the bottom of 0.13 because it was 0.1.2, even though DPI is at 0.3 or something. Like, it's going to be a great bottom call. I'd also say, so if this bull run turns into like ash and sadness, right? And we're ranging in this, you know, 2,000 or so range for Eath. I'd also give Eric Connor some credit for calling like 2,500 E. That's a fair point. Because he kind of deserves that because it shot up above, but not for too long.
Starting point is 00:11:55 So like the spirit of the prediction is intact. So David, the spirit of your prediction is intact. And that's what's important. But we'll see for now. We'll see what happens. We're going to be checking up on you. That is a really good point, I think, about Eric's top call. For those that aren't following,
Starting point is 00:12:12 Eric Conard made the top call of $2,500 for Eath price. And we rocketed above that to $4,300, making Eric wrong. But we have spent a lot of time below $2,500. even in contrast to how much time you spent above it, right? And so, like, while the call was technically wrong, the more and more time we spend below that number, the more and more Eric is in the spirit of things correct, which makes me really angry.
Starting point is 00:12:40 And so I really would like Heathbrice to get it back above 2,500 so I can start gloating against Eric Connor again. There you go. We can do that anyway. All right, let's talk about this. You know, this is a metric I wanted to include in metrics, David, because NFT bear market is what people are saying. Ain't no bear market.
Starting point is 00:12:58 Apparently, that's just a meme. That's just a thing that people say. It's a thing that people say. Because look at this, open C volume. So this is like kind of an eBay, let's say, for NFTs, where all of the NFTs are being sold on kind of secondary markets. Best volume ever in June. Best volume ever.
Starting point is 00:13:18 150 million in volume. Higher than the peak of the mania. Higher than the peak of the main. So, quote-unquote mania, yeah. Like, there are some categories of NFTs that are down. Like, you know, top shots, maybe, a few other categories. But there are others that are up in aggregate. Ain't no bear market here.
Starting point is 00:13:38 NFTs are still plowing ahead full steam. And like, I think that just makes sense. I think when people are saying, oh, there's an NFT bare market. What they are really saying is like, oh, my NFTs are down. My NFTs are down. I'm no longer getting really rich really quickly. NFTs, like this random NFT project that I just aped into didn't make me any money. Like, yes, that side of NFTs is in a bare market.
Starting point is 00:14:01 There are some NFT projects that are going to zero just because the market didn't want them. NFTs as a whole, NFTs as an industry, doing just fine. And so there's definitely a consolidation to quality going on in the NFT market. And we are seeing that play out. But this makes sense, too, right? If you think about like collectibles, which collectibles are in style, you know, 90K for 90s kids, it was like pogs, right? And then it's like at one point in time, it was like beanie babies.
Starting point is 00:14:28 I do not remember pogs. I never figured out what pox are. You didn't know what pogs are. Okay, so like some of you guys listening remember pogs. And like, anyway, collectibles as a whole has not gone down, but individual collectibles and categories of collectibles have had their cycles. Maybe NFTs are starting to reflect some of that. Anyway, David, we are going to get to releases.
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Starting point is 00:17:26 You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, guys, we are back with releases, David. This is an almost release, but it's still accounts because we're going to talk about it's a release of a release it's a release date which is super exciting for eip 1559 we're talking about i haven't heard of that one oh oh you're about to hear about it then there august fourth is the date uh august fourth so that is going to be maybe an ethereum holiday in the future i don't know it's a really it's a really exciting milestone for ethereum and tim beko who
Starting point is 00:18:11 is kind of the, I guess, coordinating lead for this EIP has been checked for Ethereum 1, actually, as well. Yes, he has confirmed this. So it's merged. It's in GitHub. The date is merged. The go live date is set. So unless something big happens between now and August 4th, looks like August 4th is going
Starting point is 00:18:32 to be the day for EIP 1559, which includes the new gas transaction auction mechanism and also the Etherburn, super exciting man, to have a date finally. Yeah. And granted, asterisk, if something goes wrong on the test nets, then it will get kicked out. But if nothing goes wrong, then it's going to be the fourth. That's basically the two paths that we have forward with us. It's really awesome to have a date.
Starting point is 00:19:00 August 4th. Like, holy shit. That's so cool. It's so close. Bankless and Ethub are going to do a live stream. We are talking with Anthony and Eric to get that going. will be an EIP. No matter what time of day.
Starting point is 00:19:12 No matter what time of day. Whatever. We woke up at 4 in the morning to do the ETH 2.0 beacon chain launch live stream and there's no other time that we couldn't do if we wouldn't do 4 in the morning. So whenever that's happening, there's going to be a live stream. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, we'll be there. This is cool.
Starting point is 00:19:29 This makes it real too is when you start to see ether scan showing the fee burn. Look at this to the top here. This is on the Gourley TestNet, by the way. Gourley TestNet. But in Gourley TestNet, and by the way, everything is going well in Gordley TestNet. It seems like there is a fee burn of over 80th so far. Of course, results will be totally different in mainnet, but it's so cool to see that on EtherScan. You can also see, get this, David, on EtherScan, you can see on the transaction, like an overview of the transaction.
Starting point is 00:20:02 You can actually see the transaction fee savings, which I think what this calculates is what you maybe would have paid, before versus what you're paying now. Is that what is calculating or what is this? So I think what's going on here is that with EIP 1559, you can set how much you are willing to pay, and then you will pay the base fee. And that's kind of like saying, just like how you are, when you go into Metamask, when you want to do a custom gas transaction, if you want to really tinker with your gas and make it specific, say you want to prioritize your transaction.
Starting point is 00:20:33 So gas is at 50, and you want your transaction to go in ASAP, so you put in 70. and then you overpay by roughly 20-Gway if your transactions would have otherwise gotten included for 50. With EIP-159, you can put in 70, but if base fee is 50 or the right payment is 50, then you are not paying that extra 20. You are paying 50. And so this is reporting to you as like, hey, you bid up to this amount, but you actually paid this amount, so this is how much you saved. And this is actually where a lot of the confusion about EIP-1559 reducing gas costs came from.
Starting point is 00:21:05 If EIP-159 does reduce gas costs, it's from reducing the cognitive load of users who have to think about the right price to put in their transaction and also perhaps getting that number wrong. But that's where if there's any fee savings, it's coming at the human brain level, not at the protocol level. But that human brain level shouldn't be underestimated, right? Because like if you're bidding like 70 on that transaction and I get the inkling that you're bidding 70, I'm going to bid 71, 72, and it just kind of escalates in a very, rapid fashion. That's how the mechanism kind of incents people to just keep outbidding one another. In this model, it doesn't matter, right? Because you'll get the savings back anyway. Super cool. So just to be clear, EIP-1559 does not save gas fees at the protocol level. It makes gas fees easier to reason about, and that allows you to make more precise choices about how you spend
Starting point is 00:22:00 your gas, which can cause you to spend less gas. it also burns that sweet eat also burns it been talking about uh all right let's talk about this this is the beacon book david super cool this is kind of an nfti an actual physical book this almost looks sorry to me like an almanac of some sorts you know after a team like wins a sports championship like the world series they'll publish a book it'll be quotes from the MVP's all of the players on the team
Starting point is 00:22:29 that's kind of what this reminds me of only it's for the developers of Ethereum 2 and the beacon chain. All of these researchers that have been hard at work bringing this thing to market. This kind of commemorates them. Super cool. Yeah, this is led by Trent Van Epps and other contributors to the Stateful Works Project, which is producing the beacon book. This is an actual book.
Starting point is 00:22:50 You can go and read it. It's online. It's really, so it's a wall of text, but you can actually produce a physical book and purchase a physical book if you want to compete for one of those. They're going to be in high demand. This is a, I think, how would I want? want to describe this. This is like a timestamp of Ethereum progress and development, right? This is going to the Ethereum developers, the actual protocol of Ethereum, people who work at client teams,
Starting point is 00:23:14 people who work at the EF, and they talk about their experience of building out Ethereum, right? This is going to be a one-of-a-kind piece of this art, or book or illustration. It's free for you to read, but purchasing a physical copy as an NFT, so there's going to be competition for that. But this is really just instantiating a lot of just blood sweat and tears of the Ethereum developers, the Ethereum builders to get Ethereum to where it is today. So Trent and the Stateful Works team have done a fantastic job just honoring all of the labor of the Ethereum developers that they have put into Ethereum over the last six years into the Beacon Book. And so go ahead and check it out. Go give it a read. Get your learn on. This will be a great learning moment.
Starting point is 00:23:56 And then if you want to compete for some of the NFTs and some of the actual physical books, go right ahead. Absolutely. Collect a piece of Ethereum history. David, let's talk a little bit about Polygon. This is part of kind of the Layer 2 summer. I know Polygon is a side chain, but Layer 2 summer, nonetheless, kind of a test ramp for all of the Layer 2s that are coming out.
Starting point is 00:24:17 Balancer joins Polygon with a $10 million joint token incentive program. This is kind of what we're talking about with Layer 2 summer, where you have protocol plus the Layer 2 itself rewarding users. and incenting them to deposit liquidity into their protocol on layer two. Dual yield farming is hot. So if you are bullish on bowel and you are bullish on Maddick, you can go and get liquidity incentives using Balancer on Polygon. So congratulations to Balancer for launching on Polygon.
Starting point is 00:24:47 I'm sure that they are also probably going to be building on Arbitrum and optimism too. And so maybe we also see some bowel rewards over there as well. Yeah, it's cool. This is starting to get all of the infrastructure. Sure. I remember probably just a couple of years ago when it hit me that, oh, my God, all of Defi is going to have to re-architect itself on layer two. And like what a lift that would take. But do you know what, David? It's happening. And it's happening much more incrementally than I thought it would. Here is Zapper now supporting balancer labs on X, on Polygon. So you could just zap into a position
Starting point is 00:25:23 the same way you would on Mainnet now on Polygon, which is super cool. This is doing analytics. integrating with Polygon. And the same recipe, the same playbook that they're pulling off on Polygon, that's going to take place in the other notable layer two's like optimism and arbitrum. And it's going to happen really fast from this point on. So it's great to see that infrastructure support pouring in as well. And we have to see that infrastructure report infrastructure being built out on these, on these L2s because like it's one thing if the apps are there,
Starting point is 00:25:57 but like the infrastructure is crucial. I think people underestimate how important infrastructure is. Using Madik before there was a Polygon scan, the fork of ether scan, was kind of like using a black box. Like if your transaction did something weird, it was impossible to go and check out what happened to it without Polygon scan. And so getting all of these classic infrastructure tools up and running for all these L2s is really going to be what makes and breaks an L2.
Starting point is 00:26:24 You need the infrastructure to go along with you. That's also why optimism has been more slow to launch versus arbitram, just because they are just really dotting their eyes and crossing their teeth to make sure that they have the infrastructure to go along with all the apps at the same time. So when optimism rolls out, it should come with a suite of infrastructure. So it really emulates the experience of using Ethereum at the base layer on optimism on day one. That infrastructure, man, really provides such a moat for the EVM as well, right? So if you're launching a layer two or even a layer one, EVM support just gets you some of that infrastructure right over the box.
Starting point is 00:27:01 David, let's talk a bit more about this. Like the distinction between side chain and layer two we've made before. But what about the distinction between a side chain and a test net? We're just talking about goarly test net. Of course, this is a test net for Ethereum Mainnet. This is where EIP 1559 is running and the London hard fork is running. But this from Andre, my friend Andre, from the YFI, you know, DeFi builder extraordinaire. In some of the newest stuff that he's built, he actually added support for gorely test net.
Starting point is 00:27:37 Okay. So like the defy products he's building, like in addition to you other layer twos and side chains and Ethereum mainnet, he's also adding goarly test net as an option. But what that does, David, is that makes goarly. not a test net anymore because it makes the gorely eath it's called makes it valuable potentially what's that distribution like man people you see like i have some somewhere i think unless it kind of expired or disappeared i'm not sure but like a ton of developers have um this go eth and it kind of clouds the difference between a test net and a side chain if there's actual economic value attached to some of these go eth tokens and he takes on this
Starting point is 00:28:21 My gut take is this is weird, and I don't understand why they're doing this. But Andre and then also Bandag from Yern, they're both bullish on this. They're both excited about it. They both think that Gorley could be an L2 scaling solution to Ethereum. It sounds like they know more than me. And so let me ask us what I'm about to say with saying that they might just straight up be more informed about what this could be. But Gorley is an Ethereum fork, right? It's a clone of Ethereum that's meant to be an Ethereum test.
Starting point is 00:28:49 it's not any more scaled than Ethereum itself, to my knowledge. And if it is, it's scaled in the same way Binance Smart Chain is scaled, which is just tinkering with some numbers that really shouldn't be tinkered with. And the reason why you can tinker it with that on Gorley is because it's a test net. There's nothing at stake. It's, if it explodes, it doesn't matter because it's a test net. In my opinion, test nets should be test nets. And there is a, there's terrible Gorley-Eth distribution.
Starting point is 00:29:15 I'm pretty sure there's like two people that have like more than 50, or two addresses that have like more than 50% of gorely. ETH or there's some like terrible distribution of that. If you're starting to use gorely Eath as money or as some valuable asset, the distribution of Gorley Eith becomes really important. And it was never meant to be money. It was never meant to be distributed so that it's become very concentrated. I'm skeptical of using test nets as L2s.
Starting point is 00:29:37 Testes or test nets? L2s or L2s? Yeah, look, it just makes it a different thing, right? And I think this is why some of the people like developers of Ethereum, particularly who have test net deployments, kind of pissed off about this because it kind of ruins the test net. I mean, like, are you going to you, how incented are you going to be now to give your go-eath to someone who's just testing something out, right? If it has economic that. Are we going to start doing like go-eath
Starting point is 00:30:04 improvement proposals now? Yeah, exactly. So, so what it, what it kind of does is it, it, it makes it a different thing than what it was. So if you, if you make, if you make, if you make goarly test net an incentivized side chain system, that you just need a new test net. We have to go create another test net. And I think people are angry about this. I would like some further analysis on this from people who are more privy to these conversations.
Starting point is 00:30:29 But also, you can't stop it, right? And stop it. Like once it starts, you can't stop it. So we'll have to talk about this as it emerges a bit more. Ave Pro coming in July. David, we did an episode, State of the Nation, with Robert Leshner on this, all about
Starting point is 00:30:44 institutions coming to defy. This is the defy mullet thesis. No, no, no, no. DeFi coming to institutions. Ah, ah, yes. Well said. Important distinction. Yeah. So, so what is this? Avey Pro seems like, kind of like compound treasury. Yep. Yeah. So it's a, it's a, the same Avey that we know and love, same thing with compound treasuries, same compound that we know and love. There is just a new interface or a new wrapper around the whole protocol that is, you know, institution friendly, right? And so With compound treasury and with AVE Pro, they solve a lot of just like the issues of using Defi that we all know exists. Like private keys are scary.
Starting point is 00:31:23 Like once you get used to them, they're not, but initially they are, right? And also you need to have certain compliance and reporting requirements. Well, if you just make a wrapper around AVEA and make a clone of AVE, a fork of Avey that uses Avey as the protocol, but only allows certain whitelisted players or certain entities in there who need that sort of control and allow them to use that wrapped version of AVE, you know, protected AVE, if you will. That is, and then again,
Starting point is 00:31:53 it hooks into AVEA underneath, the actual AVEA protocol that we are all using. It's DFI with training wheels. DFI with training wheels. A little bit of a bubble boy defy, which is fine. That's what the institutions are familiar with. And so the fact that we're seeing this
Starting point is 00:32:10 in AVE and compound at the same time it's actually really interesting. It kind of tells you the rate of progress in this industry. Like if, if, and, and we also saw this with, with L2. It just so happens that optimism and arbitrum are releasing both in July, like funny coincidence of a pro and compound treasury are also releasing around the same time. The rate of change, the rate of progress is like breakneck speeds because these, these teams keep on releasing the same products around the same time.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Anyways, the story is that DFI is becoming institution ready. And we are not waiting. we're not waiting on our hands for institutions to learn how to manage their private keys, we're just figuring out how to solve that problem for them and making it easier for them to come to us. So, Defi is building the bridge to institutions rather than institutions having to build the bridge to Defi. And that's just how Ethereum works. Ethereum just solves its own problems. It's really cool, really optimistic story.
Starting point is 00:33:02 This is also going to bring a ton of liquidity, right? A ton of, like, value from institutions. And you know what I love about this, too, David, is like, In this banking system, it's the institutions who need the training wheels, not the retail investors. We can use the power tools at will if we want. I feel like the traditional banking system is the complete opposite. The institutions get the better banking system, and they give all of us retail consumers the training wheel version of the thing. That's an interesting take.
Starting point is 00:33:32 Robin Hood is just financed with training wheels on it. And then here, here retail, have Robin Hood. The way they front run you alone, right? Robin Hood, that's their business model. No fees retail, but we're going to front run every trade and you don't actually see that cost there. Anyway, let's talk about some raises this week. The first is this index co-op, the Dow just raised $7.7 million
Starting point is 00:33:57 from Galaxy Ventures, 1KX, if you other VC companies. Super cool, I think that like a native Dow is now raising from VCs, right? It started off without any outside VC investors, but now outside investors want to jump aboard this. I think that's kind of cool. It is cool. And the other thing that's cool is that there is a one-year lockup on these index tokens with six months linear investing.
Starting point is 00:34:26 And the price that they got them at was pretty competitive. Usually when organizations with not too much liquidity on their tokens, try and sell their token, they give them a pretty good discount. There was not much of a discount on the index tokens being sold to these, into these investors. And so I believe, I'm regurgitating this from Anthony Sazana, which I happen to do a lot.
Starting point is 00:34:48 They were sold for roughly $24.5 a piece, where index token is currently trading at $27. So, and I don't know when these tokens were purchased. Do you know what's cool about this too, David? Is that, like, retail had an opportunity to buy index co-op tokens before all of the VCs for the market. I did. I love it, right? And then here the VCs have to get kind of our table scraps. It's kind of nice. Again, training wheels.
Starting point is 00:35:14 Yeah, if you've been paying attention to bank this, if you've been paying attention to Defi, like you cannot have missed Index Co-op. Index Co-op is one of those tokens that I never feel like, I'm not financial advice, blah, blah, blah, but like I'm just super bullish on index. It's like the Dow is super greased. Like it works. It's had a fantastic product. It's got tons of revenue. Now it's finally getting the attention it deserves from, you know, larger firms. I'm bullish on index, man. Bullish on index, bullish on Dow's in general. Bullish on this kind of capital coordination. Super cool. All right. Also, Zerion raised $8.2 million in a series A fund. Just a defy dashboard. Zirion is, is fantastic. It's kind of a user interface. It's like a banking interface
Starting point is 00:35:54 on top of all these defy protocols. I love what those guys are doing too. Are you ready for news, David? Let's do it. All right. Let's get to the news. Hey, we got to start with a bank, J.P. Morgan. They say Ethereum upgrades could jumpstart a $40 billion staking industry. So they're saying Ethereum, ETH2, beacon chain, that's going to jumpstart a $40 billion staking industry. It's like, yeah, guys, we've been telling you this.
Starting point is 00:36:23 But like, cool. Hey, you guys figure it out. Better start learning solidity. Oh, man. I mean, the banks are saying it though now, right? Better late than never, yeah. If the banks are saying it, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, this is starting to really breach into the mainstream. You know why they're saying it, too.
Starting point is 00:36:40 Look, so the first bank, this is a Swiss bank called Syngum. Signum, thank you. Wow, I've pictured that. Signum. Cignam Bank is offering E2 staking services, right? So this is super cool because it is the first time a bank, a registered financial, bank institution in the jurisdiction of Switzerland is offering a staking service. And this is recognition that ether is, as we've been saying, an internet bond. This is going to deliver yields to people.
Starting point is 00:37:15 This is not my favorite way to stake, of course, right? Because this requires that you give this bank custody of your private keys, although you can dictate a separate withdrawal contract. So there might be some intricacies where you don't like you just give them kind of validating rights. I'm not sure how this is configured, how this is set up. What's cool, I think, is that the banks are coming aboard. And if ether is going to be a global reserve asset, which we think it will, if ether is going to be an internet bond for the world, a non-sovereign bond competing with sovereign debt type instruments and bonds, this kind of thing needs to happen. So it's starting, man. This is Domino one and the rest are going to fall. J.P. Morgan Report.
Starting point is 00:37:59 this bank is now coming to staking, how soon until J.P. Morgan wants to start offering staking. Of course, important that we can still stake at home. And we don't have to use that non-sovereign, or that we don't have to give up our sovereignty and our private keys to a bank. But still, they're coming along for the ride. It's kind of cool. And this is the beauty of staking, is that like any entity, because you can stake at home, any entity can therefore stake, right? This isn't mining. You don't need to have like privileged access to supply chains or just be interested in a multi-million dollar investment to a mining operation. All you need is a one computer to stake and then banks can stake, you know,
Starting point is 00:38:40 funds can stake. Anyone can stake. Anyone can make a staking product. Governments could stake. And that makes staking really, really competitive. And from an Ethereum security protocol, from an Ethereum protocol security perspective, that's really, really good because you want there to be an extreme amount of competition in the staking world. And so I invite all banks to open up, you know, staking products, staking services because I want more stake to happen because that makes Ethereum more secure. And it's also bullish for ether. And so this is one of the many little tiny little flags blowing in the wind that say, hey, ether is going to become the world's internet bond. And it starts with just competitive staking.
Starting point is 00:39:23 And it starts many, many, many different things with many, many different ways. but one of the ways it starts is competitive staking across the globe. Yep, absolutely. David, let's talk about this. Andre, the creator of Wi-Fi and the Y-Earned ecosystem, he's on a tear again. I feel like it's back. I feel like this is why this is in the news section. It's because Andre is back and he is building. So these are a few things he's built.
Starting point is 00:39:46 Lev X is one, protection markets, some sort of on-chain insurance, Avey Delegate. He's just like pushing stuff out. There's about five or six things here. that he's pushed out into GitHub. And, you know, one of DFI's biggest builders is back, maybe, from a brief break or hiatus? What's your take on this? Yeah, and this actually isn't all of the entire list of what he's built.
Starting point is 00:40:11 He also released another project on his own medium that he announced as well. People are stoked that Andre is building again. There's some mixed opinions on this because whenever Andre was building something right after a year and it attracted all the attention. It actually kind of pissed Andre off. And then Andre kind of like went dormant, went quiet just because he didn't enjoy being the person that's like, oh, Andre's building.
Starting point is 00:40:37 What's he building next? What am I going to ape into next? What's the next YFI? And so he looks like he's just releasing a bunch of prototypes, a bunch of code. It looks like it also is just infrastructure for other prototypes. These aren't going to be tokenized products.
Starting point is 00:40:49 None of these have tokens. None of these have tokens. Yeah. And so maybe that's kind of what Andre does nowadays, is help us just build. in little attachments or little add-ons to already existing projects? I don't really know. The day that Andre does build a project with a token is going to be an interesting one if he even decides to do that or not. I don't mean maybe he's lost the taste for it.
Starting point is 00:41:09 We should have him on again, David. That's what we should do. Now he's back. We should have him on bankless again. It's been about a year. It has been about a year. Yeah, you're right. David, let's talk to NFT world. So AXE is on an absolute tear. Look at this revenue. Yep. Pretty crazy. Up and to the right. Axi Infinity. What are people doing with Axi? Axi Infinity is kind of like a Pokemon game, but with on-chain scarcity mechanisms built in. So you raise and breed little Axi creatures,
Starting point is 00:41:37 and then you make them fight. To the death? I mean, to the metaphorical death, I think you, I'm pretty sure you get it years back. You level them up. Each one has different properties. And people are really, they have been one of those,
Starting point is 00:41:51 I wouldn't say dormant, but kind of heads-down building projects with a very committed community fan-based following that would play this game. But it has absolutely taken off in the last, in the last like maybe two, three weeks or so. Broken into the absolute like mainstream news cycle of crypto. We are actually bringing G-Ho on the State of the Nation next week on Tuesday to talk all about AXE Infinity and the explosion of growth that they've seen in the last two weeks.
Starting point is 00:42:16 So if you are interested in this story, we will be reporting on it on the state of the nation on Tuesday. Here's the meme term to remember. Are you ready? Ready for it? Play to earn. Play to earn. That's what's happening in Axi, and I think this is a model that is just beginning that Crypto Game Studios are really pioneering.
Starting point is 00:42:34 I expect to see a lot more. I expect to see more from like even Gods Unchained in the future around that. All right, David, Bitcoin World, there's really not too much to talk about this week. All is quiet in Bitcoin land. So let's hop over to regulation. China's Central Bank worried that stable coins pose risk. to the financial system. Do you think this is also because it's kind of a U.S.D.C.
Starting point is 00:43:00 It's sorry, the dollar seeping into Chinese markets, and they want to protect the sovereignty of their currency and the reserve currency status of the Chinese, you know, won? It's absolutely that. There's nothing that China wants more than to dethrone the dollar and place the yuan there. And so, of course, they don't want, you know, stable coins to exist because stable coins are dollars. They're not yuan, you're yen or whatever.
Starting point is 00:43:29 And so, Yuan, thank you. Important note. And so this is completely antithetical to what China wants. China doesn't like free markets. China doesn't want, you know, permissionless finance. They want you to use their currency on their rails. And while the U.S. isn't 100% aligned with crypto dollars and they also kind of want their own CBDC. They are much more cool with stable coins out of the private market than China is, you know it's funny as the game theory of this is if China hates it, I bet the US will start liking it more. It's like, oh, stable coins, private stable coins, they're great. Now we don't need a central bank digital currency. We'll privatize it all and export that way. The private markets built our CBDC for us. Oh, thanks guys. Guys kind of could be,
Starting point is 00:44:16 it could go in that direction. So remains to be seen. It's, but. there's so much game theory going on about the World Reserve Currency status, particularly with Fiat. Let's talk about this. Ransomware hackers demand $70 million in Bitcoin, and they claim a massive U.S. attack as Biden investigates possible Russian involvement. David, I didn't even catch this story. What is this story talking about?
Starting point is 00:44:39 Yeah, this has been a reoccurring theme over the last few months. There's just been more and more ransomware attacks that have been using Bitcoin as a currency. And so it's an unfortunate PR issue. for our industry. I'm not even going to say just Bitcoin, just for crypto at large. Even though all of these attacks
Starting point is 00:44:55 have been happening with Bitcoin, people kind of associated with crypto at large, because it is. And so this is going to be a fight that our industry is going to have to tackle head on. And also,
Starting point is 00:45:06 there's no reason why this can't happen with crypto dollars or stable coins as well. And so NLW had a really good take on this, is who do you think is going to get blamed? Do you think Bitcoin is going to get blamed? Or do you think Russia is going to get blamed?
Starting point is 00:45:20 Probably going to be both. both, to be honest. But overall, this is an unfortunate reality of the world that we live in. It's a bad PR for our industry. And permissionless finance allows you to do permissionless finance things. Look, you know, one thing I've learned about politicians, they'll blame whoever it's most politically expedient to blame, right? And so one day it might be Russia. The next it might be Bitcoin, depends on what the political aims are going to be. But yeah, it's not great PR, that's for sure. Especially when Bitcoin doesn't have a single representative to defend itself. it's easy to defend or to attack something that can't defend itself.
Starting point is 00:45:52 Yeah, the Bitcoin cyber horn can yell on Twitter saying, this is fud, but like there's no actual, like, Satoshi isn't coming to say like, hey, this is, this is bullshit, don't attack Bitcoin on this one. Also a strength. Also a strength. Right. Double-edged sword there. All right, let's talk about this.
Starting point is 00:46:11 Stablecoin firm's circle is going public via a SPAC merger. This is pretty cool. This is brand new as of this morning. This is a couple hours old. The numbers are crazy. Look at this. The deal values circle at 4.5 billion. Whoa.
Starting point is 00:46:28 I know. We're just talking about stable coins, right? And USC is one of the most popular stable coins. Definitely the most legitimate stable coins out there. Tether is the only other competitor, but doesn't have the legitimacy that USDA does. And Circle is a primary issuer of that. 4.5 billion.
Starting point is 00:46:47 That's a big bet. stable coins. Yeah. Go public. Congrats to Jeremy Aller and everyone at Circle and probably also Coinbase is involved with this one as well. USC just really planting a flag as the de facto crypto dollar, fiat-backed crypto dollar in the ecosystem.
Starting point is 00:47:06 Congrats. This is a really, I feel like a monumental moment for the industry. Like there are many monumental moments, but like... It's a mini-coin-based side. It's a mini-coin-based product. Yeah. Adds to the legitimacy of the industry. All right, David, speaking of legitimacy in the industry, America's first legal Dow was approved in Wyoming.
Starting point is 00:47:25 Wyoming has been a state that's been very friendly to crypto regulation. And overall, I'm really enthusiastic and excited about the approach that they've taken. Even recognizing Dow's as a thing is just amazing. So very bullish on that, although not perfect. I read an analysis from a legal substack, crypto legal. substack that I follow. And there's some weirdness about this, right? So Dow's in this structure cannot be manager managed. So people can't actually be behind it. It has to be algorithmically managed. So that adds some weirdness to it. Yeah, there's some description here, but it just means it's more,
Starting point is 00:48:03 it's more difficult to have, you know, a centralized institution kind of give up control. It has to be completely decentralized at the start. So there's some, some issues there. Also, If you're going to do this in Wyoming, you have to put Dow in the name, right? All right. Like, it has to be called something Dow, right? It can't just be bankless, has to be bankless Dow, which is convenient for bankless Dow, I guess. Not so convenient if you're Ave or Uniswap, and you don't want to be called Uniswap Dow necessarily.
Starting point is 00:48:36 It's also really kills my interest and effort in trying to promote digital organizations or do not Dow. It's not a Dow. But no, apparently, apparently I'm giving up on that fight. Yeah, well, we'll see. Maybe you'll win it in the next round. The bill also requires the doubt to maintain a person, a registered agent in Wyoming. So there still has to be.
Starting point is 00:48:56 So again, it's kind of a first draft, right? It's good that Wyoming is doing this, but it's a little ham-fisted on the implementation. Still, no discouragement. Like, kudos, guys. You're actually pushing the right direction. With some revisions, this could be something really cool. So we'll look forward to the future. They're trying.
Starting point is 00:49:14 They're trying their best. They're trying their best. What I don't like about this is that this is the nation state telling DOWs what they need to do. And the whole point about Ethereum is to not have to do that. I know. Dows belong to Ethereum. They owe no homage to any nation state. I guess if they want the perks of being instantiated in the nation state, this is like the coupler.
Starting point is 00:49:37 There should be like a legal coupler. Yes. That coupler, there should be a bridge to the nation state. And this is kind of a ham-fisted. bridge, but at least it's a bridge. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, something. I am most bullish on pure DAOs, as in DAWS that exist on Ethereum and Ethereum alone,
Starting point is 00:49:57 and the only rules that they abide by are the rules enforced by the EVM. That's the most bankless maxi, the most bankless future. There is absolutely a time and place to be coupled to the real world, and I don't want to discourage anyone to, from doing that. but like the grand vision of Dows belongs to Ethereum. And right now it's going to be a little bit ham-fisted if you try to couple into the real world, right? It's hard. Okay.
Starting point is 00:50:23 A few things we're going to just breeze by, David. The first is this. Visa is crushing it with crypto-linked card usages that top a billion dollars. So this is all the Visa cards at crypto banks are issuing, which are cool. Some of these are coming to market, one from Gemini, one from BlockFi, Coinbase is doing something. Crypto.com has already has something going. VISA's like, hey, we love it. Top in a billion.
Starting point is 00:50:47 This is working. Keep it coming. Bullish. Yeah. David, why don't you do the next one? Yeah, the finance squeeze. Barclays, customers in the U.S. Barclays as a bank in the, or excuse me, in the UK, can no longer transfer funds to
Starting point is 00:50:59 finance. Finance the undomiciled crypto bank, getting the squeeze from nation states. That's all I have to say there. It's like that vice grip. Slow squeeze rather than a quick hit. Why don't you do this one, too, David? Elizabeth. Warren gives the SEC July 28th deadline to, quote, figure out, quote, crypto regulation.
Starting point is 00:51:20 Elizabeth Warren has really started to stamp her feet about crypto as an industry. The thoughts behind this is crypto, or Elizabeth Warren is really bullish on a central bank digital currency, and so she wants to diminish their role of the crypto industry and wants to regulate it in order to, you know, implement her CBDC. Overall, she is really just drumming up a lot of noise about how our industry needs to get regulated. And from what I can tell, she's extremely uninformed about it. I think Elizabeth Warren is a great politician. I think that she does a great job.
Starting point is 00:51:56 I overall support her. I have not heard a single good noise out of her as it relates to crypto and the industry that I pay attention to. And so all of a sudden, I feel very resonant with the, like, the libertarian cohort who just get pissed off at politicians who come in and start regulating other people's industries and other people's businesses while they have no like informed a position about it. That's what I see happening here. There's definitely some intent at play here. And, yeah, there's there's a broader plan here. All right, David, before we get into the takes and we got
Starting point is 00:52:27 a lot for the week, a lot of hot takes. Big takes episode this week. You're going to love these takes, guys. But before we get to them, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset, infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants
Starting point is 00:53:06 program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and will say it again. DOWs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless.
Starting point is 00:53:49 The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. application. On Ave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted
Starting point is 00:54:36 to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features. features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on uniswap, and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVE, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAVE.com. All right, guys, we are back with the takes for the week. Let's start with this one from ChainLink God, who says,
Starting point is 00:55:05 a blockchain without oracles is like a computer without the internet. He got the meme correct this time. his words. A blockchain without oracles is like a computer without the internet. What's your thought? I thought there's a pretty cool way to illustrate the role of oracles when it comes to blockchains. Blockchains only know
Starting point is 00:55:23 what is true according to their internal state. Ethereum only knows about Ethereum so it needs oracles to know things about the rest of the world. And so ChainLink God, who is literally the instantiation of bullishness on ChainLink itself, he kind of compares and contrasts to like, well,
Starting point is 00:55:40 if you just have a computer but no internet, the computer only knows things that are on the computer. But if you connect it to the internet, you can Google what is the weather in Argentina or whatever. And so I think that's a pretty cool way to illustrate the role of oracles and blockchains. Okay, Oracle's super important. I agree with you, Chainlink God on that. What about this take? This is kind of a contrasting tank? Here's the yin and the yang. That was the bullish chain link. Here's the bearish chain link. Give us the yang. What's going on here? Yeah, this Twitter account, which I've never seen before, Edgar Arrout says, Wake up, Chain Link controlling all information inflow on chain
Starting point is 00:56:14 is the worst possible coming dystopia. And then goes through a thread about all the risks of what happens when Ethereum only receives inbound information from ChainLink Oracles and Chainling Oracles alone. It's a centralization risk. Chainlink is the only thing providing external data to Ethereum. And he goes, indisputable history blockchain plus a gaslit,
Starting point is 00:56:39 army of zombies calling it fair private mem I think that's referring to the chain link army and then he also says a private mempool with unverifiable node software that's the chain link chain link uh infrastructure and then egger says think more widely than just token prices which is largely what chain link is currently used for real estate deeds oil prices passage of law marriage deeds all funneled and controlled by a tiny cabal with insane power again referring to chain link here and then and then he kind of goes into the nuances and the critiques of chain link in a kind of a nuanced way, which I won't go into on the bankless weekly roll up here. But he is saying that there is just too much centralization and consolidation on Oracle power to the chain link network. And we need
Starting point is 00:57:21 to diversify some of that power outside to other oracles. Well, I think we should always have some skepticism about oracles, particularly off-chain oracles. This is why I like Ether so much as an asset. Like, Ether's price isn't based on anything external, right? We've called it the most trustless form of economic bandwidth for Ethereum, right? Other assets are not like this. Even something like Maker, Dow requires an Oracle to function. Uniswap is pretty beautiful in that it doesn't require an Oracle.
Starting point is 00:57:54 I love the sorts of defy primitives that, like, come without and don't require an Oracle. So Oracle-less design. But with that said, Oracle's, my God, they're super useful for getting all sorts of different, you know, synthetics and DFI products. And, you know, as this person is saying, real estate deeds, oil prices, commodity price, all of these things on chain. And so they're useful in the here and now. But they could become a centralization vector. And they are dependent on the degree to which chain link is actually decentralized, right? I don't know if I'd prefer to live in a world with many different oracles.
Starting point is 00:58:35 I probably would. I'm not sure all of the details of chain link's level of centralization versus decentralization. But also, David, there's an element that, look, anything coming off chain into the blockchain is going to be centralized at some level. So can you really get around all of these things? What are your thoughts? Yeah. Chainlink is supposed to be a de-chain. decentralized oracle network, as in like, even though there's, there's only one chain link network,
Starting point is 00:59:05 the participants of the chain link network are sufficiently decentralized. Whether that's true in practice is up for a debate, and that is the subject of a lot of debate in the Oracle world. I am bullish on all kinds of oracles. Maker Dow just solved their own problem and made their own oracles, and now other people can use those oracles. Compound has hooks into its own network of oracles using both centralized and decentralized options. Coinbase offers Oracle services. A lot of exchanges offer Oracle services. Coin
Starting point is 00:59:35 Gecko offers Oracle services. The pattern of robustness is that you have redundant and redundant and redundant and Redundant. And dependence on ChainLink is not redundancy. I want to see competition amongst oracles. And I'm not seeing that. I'm just seeing people just hook into ChainLink over and over and over again. All right, David. Let's take a look at this next take. This is from Belaji. The creator economy is becoming part of the crypto economy, he says, because legacy social media platforms have no real concept of digital property rights. This is a hot take. And he goes on, he talks about substack, Twitter, Facebook, they're all great, but they are intermediate steps. Ghost goes further. You can run it at a domain that you control. Decentralized media platforms go
Starting point is 01:00:23 further still. You hold the private keys. He goes on to make. make the point that... Oh, no, that third tweet, I think, is really, really important. He finishes up with, under communism, there was no such thing as personal property. Everything that transpired in the PRC and USSR was downstream of that economic illogic, the root cause. The restoration of private property was one of the keys to unlocking the Chinese economy.
Starting point is 01:00:45 And Nick Carter wrote an article a while ago, kind of a niche article that didn't really make through the mainstream. I read it. I love that one. Which one are you talking about? Where he talks about, like, property rights. Right. But like, yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:58 The success of developing nations and the economies of nations as it relates to how strong their property rights are. And he made the association made the claim that the stronger the property rights, the more innovation and development is allowed to happen because people have assurances as to the assets that they own. So Ryan, you and I are big on Twitter, big degenerate tweeters. We don't own our Twitter handles, even though we made all the work to produce the value of the content for people that follow us on Twitter.
Starting point is 01:01:24 if we actually owned our own Twitter handles, which we don't, we would have longer, better assurances as to what we could do with our Twitter accounts. And that could blossom into something new. And so this is what Bologi is talking about. He's saying the crypto economy or the creator economy is coming. And with the Web 3 world, the world where we own our own social media platforms, there's going to be a blossoming of just like content and innovation and creatorship because people own. the land that they are settling on. I think that's a really good take. Yeah, we are basically renting our Twitter accounts.
Starting point is 01:02:01 Twitter could deactivate us at any time. We can't take the communities with us. They can punish us via algorithm. You too, any social media property that you have. They did it to a president. Right. Any social media property you have is rented property, not owned. So it's like building your house on someone else's land, right?
Starting point is 01:02:20 And in particular, a faceless corporation's land. that has no notion of individual rights. I guess there's a user agreement, but that is not like a charter of freedoms or a bill of rights in any stretch imagination. You must sign in order to have that anyways. Who reads it? Oh my God.
Starting point is 01:02:36 How can you read it? Anyway, that's a great take by Bilaghi. He follows it up with this take. Why don't you read this? Yeah, from internet influencer to crypto creator, the internet influencer was forced to rely on legacy media and social media platforms. The crypto creator uses decentralized media
Starting point is 01:02:52 to become completely independent from them. This reminds me of just how, like, there was once three channels, and now there are like a million YouTubers, right? Like, there used to be this one approved form of information and media, and now there's going to be, like, a bigillion of them, bankless being one of them. And that is a take here. Totally. Everybody can, like, social media allowed everyone to become Oprah Winfrey if they wanted to, right? It wasn't just, like, one place to go for that level of, of influence. But what this also means, David, is all those influencers that the internet has built up over the last 10, 15 years, they're going to find a conduit into crypto and they're going to come
Starting point is 01:03:32 into crypto. They're going to bring their communities into crypto with them. We've already seen this with Gary V. His NFT sales platform is doing pretty well. I read recently that he's already booked a million dollars in terms of, you know, it was like volume or something. There was some metric that was important. Anyway, he's bringing his entire... Clearly wasn't that important. It was something. I can't remember. Too many numbers going out of my head. But thanks for that. Oh, my God. We have a soundboard now on weekly roll-ups. It's going to be my bane. And only David can control it. Talk about centralization. See what I mean? See what I deal with? Anyway, all of these influencers, if there's any
Starting point is 01:04:19 listening still. All of these influencers will be coming to crypto and bring their communities with them. I think that's what this means. That's what Blaji's saying. Here's another take from DCF God. He goes, this is a take on Binance and C.DFI or really just crypto banks. He goes, Binance literally at the point where I need to upload a selfie video of myself doing random shit to get my funds. And so he is trying to withdraw his assets from Binance and he has a withdrawal appeal page ups. He has to appeal to withdraw. And here is the upload statement video instructions. You need to appear in the video and hold the information page of your ID document. Please clearly state the following. Today on month, day, year, I'm applying to withdraw X amount
Starting point is 01:05:03 of X cryptocurrency for my account. I confirm that it is my activity and I am contacting Binance customer service to enable the withdrawal function of my finance account. Here's my email address and phone number. And you have to actually do this. second time for a whole different. You have to do two of these things. And that sounds annoying and troublesome, especially when I compare it to just borrowing or trading or whatever on Uniswap. And all my ledger asked me is to approve a transaction or not, and it's one single button. Stark contrast. Start contrast. Cryptobanks, not looking so hot. Yeah, look, this is not self-sovereign. Finance. The finance is getting squeezed. It's not what we've got for it. Look at this. I mean, this is,
Starting point is 01:05:46 this is terrible. You have to like record yourself saying these things. Like, wow. And that this is not just for the initial sign up process for AMLKYC. This is just to withdraw. Every time you need to withdraw, can you imagine saying this? Yeah, right. I mean, I mean, I don't think that's what's going on. I think if you want to withdraw, most customers can just withdraw like normally input your Ethereum address, which is already cumbersome to begin with going on check your email, like approve it, blah, blah, blah. But I think this might have happened if like, I don't know, I don't know, like, His account got compromised.
Starting point is 01:06:17 Either way, it's like a part of the finance ecosystem and they're making people do it. Uploading a video. It's hilarious. All right. Bellagie again. He keeps dropping the takes this week. This one's completely new though.
Starting point is 01:06:30 I'll read this one. Blagie goes, I'm not the first to observe this, but the speed and depth of innovation happening simultaneously in several fields is just not something that current societal institutions can handle. What Belaji is saying is there is so much innovation happening in this world, not just in crypto, but also definitely in crypto, that people just can't
Starting point is 01:06:50 even come to terms with it. Like, there is massive advancements in AI. There's massive advancements in bioengineering. There's massive advancements in crypto. And Ryan, I think if you click on that text or click on that tweet, he might list, maybe it was a retweet that he retweeted himself. He just listed a bunch of things that, like, societal institutions can't handle right now because they're really complex, they're really hard to understand, and they're really,
Starting point is 01:07:15 advancing at an accelerated rate. And so I'm just reminded of our podcast with Dros Rosenthal about the crypto renaissance. You need to be on the fringes of at least one of these fields that's about to change the world. Because if you don't, then you're behind. And so be a part of the revolution, undergo the revolution rather than it happening to you. And so if you are, it would be unfortunate to be part of this legacy world and have all this massive rate of change happening that you're just ignoring because it's too complex and you can't keep up with it. Change just coming to the world. Again, this is almost a completely a conversation outside
Starting point is 01:07:53 the crypto. Change is coming to the world and you need to be on the ball in the 2020 decade. Absolutely. Yeah, you can't just trust your financial advisor, right? You can't just trust your college admissions like officer. You can't just trust, you know, whoever's saying, yeah, if you just sock away your funds in a 401k and work at a steady job for 20 years, There's going to be like retirement. There is no steady job for the next 20 years. Not one job will last for 20 years. It's going to be completely different.
Starting point is 01:08:21 Yeah. So you've got to get ahead of this. This is not the era our parents grew up in. You know, it's really cool too. So he said current social institutions can't handle this. Crypto is a new institution. Remember when we had Belagian, he talked about like the crypto nation state, actually creating a little literal sort of nation state that is built on
Starting point is 01:08:43 crypto institutions. That's the sort of thing he was talking about. If we're going to handle this rate of chain, we need new institutions. Let's do this one. Why don't you read it out, David? Yeah, okay. So this is a retweet of a Stani tweet. So it starts with the Stani saying that a kind reminder that 60% of die is backed by USDC, which is a little bit of a knock on die. Like, what good is a trustless stable coin if 60% of it is backed by trusted collateral, trusted assets, which is just a dollar. So die is a good take. I can't. good take, yeah. Die is basically 60% USDC. Is that really what we want when we come to a trustless stable coin? Maybe not. And then Stefan from the Rye slash Reflexer project goes,
Starting point is 01:09:27 another reminder that if you simply backed your pegged coin with ETH, you still have a broken peg. And so that is harking back to the days where a single collateral die or back when multi-collateral die was largely just ETH, die had a lot of trouble maintaining the peg. It fluctuated between 95 cents to a dollar and five cents until they really opened up U.S. dollar backing of dye. And so Stefan is saying, there's a tradeoff. There's a tradeoff here. And perhaps it's actually not possible to have a pegged, trustless stable coin without compromising the composition of the collateral that is behind it.
Starting point is 01:10:01 And so what the through line is, and Stefan, he's the CEO of Reflexer. So he's very incentivized to promote Rye as a product. So there's his bias there. but I still agree with him, is he saying that perhaps the pegging is the problem. Perhaps we want a stable coin that's unpegged because then we can have ether as collateral, ether being the only collateral behind Rye,
Starting point is 01:10:23 and then we have our trustless stable coin. Maybe we just lose the peg and we keep the stability, and that's what Rye is. But whatever he's saying, he's saying that, like, well, if you back die with centralized stable coins, that's a problem because you're backing it with centralized stable coins. If you back it with just Eith, well, then you lose the peg anyways
Starting point is 01:10:40 between, because Dye is doing. That's what Rye is doing. Yeah. Back by Eath, we're okay with losing the peg to the dollar. We can create our own unit of account here. Yeah. So the through line is trustless stable coins are hard. Dye has its problems and its solutions. It is still a great product.
Starting point is 01:10:58 But if we really want to have the self-sovere and trustless stable coin that we've all wanted, maybe we got to lose the peg to the dollar. Oh, it's funny to you, because all the algorithmic stable coins without collateral, that any collateral back have failed. Failed. Like all of them so far. They've all blown up and they've blown up relatively quickly. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:17 So maybe there's no way to solve that problem too. There's so much, so many, so much experimentation that goes on in the stable coin space. I'm really excited to see all of it. How about this one? MEV negative externalities alert. This is from Robert Miller. This polygon bot has been active since June 29th and has sent two million transactions failing almost all the time. These failures cost close to nothing, but they bloat the state, while the few
Starting point is 01:11:46 successes pay for the failures many times over. This is MEV at work, but on Polygon, the transactions cost almost nothing. So it's just MEV with no cost and a lot of upside, but there is cost to the public system, the public good that is Polygon, in the form of state bloat. What's your take here? Yeah, so there is a spectrum of scale and tradeoffs, right? And so Polygon has really optimized for a very, very scaled side of the scaling spectrum. And that's why Polygon, transactions on Polygon are actually going to be like a lot cheaper than transactions on arbitrum or optimistic rollups. Transactions on Arbitum and Optimistic Rollouts are going to cost like a number of pennies up to 50 cents, maybe even up to a dollar. They will be an order of magnitude better than the Ethereum main chain, but they're not going to be free and instant.
Starting point is 01:12:39 They still will be instant. They will not be free like how they are on Polygon. Polygon has scaled differently. It's made some tradeoffs. It has even more scale than optimism and Arbitrum. And then you can get even cheaper fees. But when you go that far down the spectrum of scale, then you have externalities. And so because they have made transactions so incredibly cheap, it has been economically rational for this MEV box. to spam the polygon blockchain with random transactions hoping one of them hits. And in the certain scenarios, there's probably some sort of strategy that this MEV bot is trying to do, make trades on quick swap or something. I don't really know. It's not the point. The point is that it's economically rational for this bots to spam transactions
Starting point is 01:13:23 over and over and over again, trying to catch a fish. And every time it catches a fish, it just makes it all of the spam worth it. And this ends up just adding more and more, state into the Polygon blockchain, which means that all the Polygon validators are downloading every single transaction that this bot is doing, downloading that into the state that they are downloading it. And then the whole network has to absorb all of these spam transactions because
Starting point is 01:13:49 the transactions are so cheap. And so this is, the MEV is causing negative externalities, which is what Robert started the tweet off, is adding bloat because of how cheap transactions are. And remember, you pay transaction fees because we need to be. meter resources when we use these public systems. And so the, well, our Polygon is so awesome because it is so incredibly scaled, it has its own network costs to this, which we are starting to see. Yeah, yeah. State is definitely a negative externality. It's a public good that no one pays for in these chains right now. And that is the issue because it can lead to that centralization. Now, finance chain just like removes all the, all the guards on this. And like, they're,
Starting point is 01:14:33 their state has swollen, you know, so much. I think it's above a terabyte now. Yeah, it's very difficult to run Binance validates, but that's, of course, okay is because there's only like 10 or 11 of them, and they're all appointed by Binance. Polygon has the same issues. They have some more guardrails in place for state, and so they're limiting it in other ways.
Starting point is 01:14:54 But the interesting point, I think, is that whether you're a side chain, whether you're the main chain, Ethereum, or whether you're a layer two, like optimism or arbitrae, you're all going to have this state bloat problem, and it's going to be a centralizing factor. Now, I'm waiting to see the first kind of iterations and changes to this. Vitalik, I don't know if you caught the post recently that Vitalik wrote. It might have been the Ethereum Research,
Starting point is 01:15:19 where he proposes a few solutions to Ethereum Maynett state bloat, right? One of them is this idea of like it's not quite state rent, but it's state expiry, where like state expires after a certain point in time. Archive nodes, like distant archive nodes, can still keep it. But if you want to reactivate that state, you have to send a special transaction to reactivate that state. So that's like one idea that's floating out there. You know, there are some other ideas as well that some of these chains have.
Starting point is 01:15:55 I know when we had optimum, when we had Arbiturman, they talked about, you know, some of their concepts that they were pursuing in the future. But the key thing is state can't be free in these chains. And if it is free, it'll just blow it and become centralized. So somebody has to pay for this in the future. Anyway, all these chains will have to work through it. I think Polygon will work through it as well. I think it'll be okay.
Starting point is 01:16:18 But it's just a hidden cost. Somebody tweeted at me at the other day, David, there's like, yeah, I'd be bullish on defy and crypto as soon as gas fees go away. It's like, okay, I wouldn't. gas fees will go away on L2s, but like you said, I wouldn't wait until becoming bullish at that point. Yeah, no, but I also mean like you have, there has to be a cost to this stuff. It can't, these transactions can't be free. We're just used to the whole like Facebook, you know, freemium model where we're like, oh, yeah, we don't pay for our products.
Starting point is 01:16:52 We just get, we just pay for them in other ways. Like you pay for them with your soul. Yeah. Yeah. Just for the people who are newer into this ecosystem and want to understand why this is so important, think of State Blow as literally, it's the size of the chain in like gigabyte terms. And just think about a crypto economic system that is like 20 gigabytes versus 20 terabytes. If you are only 20 gigabytes, your literal footprint on the internet is smaller and you are more anti-fragile, more spreadable, more viral. Anybody can run it. And more decentralized, right? And so a smaller, more lightweight system, which is what Bitcoin went in the small block wars and the block wars for Bitcoin, that was this fight. This was this fight is can we make our blockchain crypto economic system lightweight and easy to manage?
Starting point is 01:17:44 And one of the big critiques of Ethereum is that we allowed our state bloat to grow really, really quickly in the early days of Ethereum. Now we are trying to corral that. It's a big problem of crypto. But overall, we like our systems to be smaller, lighter, easier to download, easier to sync. And the more state you have, the more state bloat you have, the harder it is to achieve those goals. So there's tradeoffs balances. There's your little learning lesson. There we go.
Starting point is 01:18:09 Let's talk about this last one. So this is Jacob. Whether it's MEV performance of UNISWB V3 or economic exploits, let's take a minute to recognize that a transparent financial system means that people all around the world with nothing more than an internet connection. can openly examine flaws and collectively work to resolve. Transparency is the most under-recognized property of decentralization. It is a basic requirement of decentralization. A non-transparent system can never be decentralized. And then he goes on, every critic, every troll, every diehard, anti-coiner makes the system stronger. Critics can criticize precisely because the base system is
Starting point is 01:18:50 transparent. Regulators can call crypto systemic risk because they can actually see how many stable coins exist on chain. Think about how incredible it is that less than 24 hours after an exploit, there are dozens of Twitter threads, post-mortems and blog articles flush with data revealing the precise flaw. What does this look like in Tradfai? A backpage Bloomberg article two years after the event, open public systems allow society to scale. They increase the speed and efficiency of information, coordination, collective learning, and collective resolution. I'm just going to finish this, David. This idea of open decentralized finance is bigger than Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Satoshi. And if preserved, if we choose to value it, above all else,
Starting point is 01:19:38 we'll live far beyond any implementation of it. That's a great tweet thread. That's a great tweet thread. Yeah, I don't even have too much to add. Jacob did just a great job summarizing this. basically systems that are inside out have all of their flaws exposed. And so, sure, there are plenty of critiques about our industry. People critique our industry all the time. It's because it's transparent and they actually can find things to critique about. And that actually makes the system better because our flaws stick out like a sore thumb, forcing us to have to address them rather than sweep them under the rug.
Starting point is 01:20:14 This is the metaphor of, and Dros Antonopoulos made this metaphor of Bubble Boy verse like sewer rat where like crypto is the sewer rat right like it just eats diseases for breakfast because it's become immune to them whereas legacy finance is the the bubble boy like any one little ounce of bacteria that like gets inside the bubble causes the whole system to just like die right and so because we are an inside out industry we wear all of our flaws on our surface everyone knows what our flaws are and we know how to answer to them and correct them and route around them and this is why our industry is anti-fragile and why our industry it's going to to eat all the legacy industries.
Starting point is 01:20:52 Nice. Yep, I agree. Even like, so I've been part of some conversations about MEV and like criticisms of minor extractable, minimum extractable value on maximum extractable maximum extractable value on Ethereum lately. And what the critics fail to recognize is that in traditional systems, right, they're extracting the value, but you just can't see it. So there's nothing to criticize.
Starting point is 01:21:17 There's no data points here. Like, how do we know whether? you know, GameStop had a conversation with Citadel to halt trading or treat one group different than another. Same with Bitcoin, by the way. Like so much activity, M-EV activity in Bitcoin doesn't happen on Bitcoin because you can't trade on Bitcoin. You can't take out a loan on Bitcoin. What can you do on Bitcoin? You can move it from one address to another. All of this activity happens inside of crypto banks. Can they be front-running you? Like, how about Bitmex? Right. I mean, like black box derivatives model.
Starting point is 01:21:51 It's so much better when all of this is up front in the open, completely transparent, even when we have to deal with MEV problems. At least we see what we're dealing with. That is something the critics don't take into account. Well, that transparency with MEV really creates a completely different, like context for what this industry is trying to do with MEV. Like you said, the concept or the same patterns of MEV exist in the legacy financial world. there are people with like fiber optics cables that are measured to exactly the same
Starting point is 01:22:22 as others because people want to get their trades in faster. There's order routing, like deal flow. MEV in the in the legacy world is massive and it's just got captured because no one really tried to collaboratively solve the problem. In the crypto world, we all see MEV and the problem that it creates. And now we are trying to collaboratively solve the problem rather than just like raising
Starting point is 01:22:48 the white flag and saying, you know what? Like, we're just going to let some company win and capture all the value here and we'll just give up. That's what happened. We are actually, because it's transparent, we are actually trying to solve this problem and make a more equitable financial system because you can view it.
Starting point is 01:23:02 Your only choice in the legacy world, even the crypto bank world, is depend on regulators. That's it. That's how the existing system solves it. If we catch you doing something that's against the law, if we catch you, then, you know, you have the threat of the long,
Starting point is 01:23:18 arm of the law. Yeah. Oh, you, you extracted $100 million from your clients and you did it in a way that's against regulations. Here's a $5 million fine. God, how often do bankers go to jail? Remember 2008? One guy went to jail? One? Oh, wow. Good. I'm glad we got him. Yeah, there was a scapegoat. All right, that's it. David, let's let me ask you, what are you excited about this week, man? I'm going to invoke my Anthony Zizano here where he tweeted out, how, the stars are aligning for Ethereum. And so I'm going to play off of what Anthony was saying this week. We got EIP-1559 on August 4th.
Starting point is 01:23:57 We got the merge coming in Q4, Q1, 2022. Got Layer 2 is coming in July. It's July now, by the way. We got Arbitrum and optimism rolling out probably this month. The rebirth or renaissance of NFTs. We got institutional defy now. We got banks staking ether. Like, I don't know, like, what more bullish fundamentals like you want I can ask for.
Starting point is 01:24:23 But, like, I feel like I'm getting all of them. I feel like I'm getting every single bullish fundamental I've ever asked for in my time in Ethereum. And it's all seemed, it all seems to be on the horizon. Like, that's what I'm excited about. Like, it seems to be finally here. Yeah, dude, we definitely have a lot. And I'm going to just, my, my, what I'm excited about is I'm just going to riff on the EIP 1559 because that's something we've been, I remember when you wrote an article on bankless. 2019 called the missing puzzle piece.
Starting point is 01:24:50 The missing puzzle piece to Ethereum's monetary policy. And it talked about EIP 1559. This is proof of work issuance. I'm going to display this because like, Ether's proof of work issuance. Yeah, sorry. This is Ether's proof of work issuance. I spent some time creating this.
Starting point is 01:25:05 And this is annual percentage on the left axis. Start at 20% annual issuance percentage. So block time increases, issuance reduction one, issuance reduction two, and now here we are here, which is August 2021, EIP 1559, goes down. Ether is going to start to be burnt. Don't know how much.
Starting point is 01:25:29 That depends on blocks-based demand at any given time, but it's going to go down. It's going to be burnt until the merge, and then guess what, falls off a cliff. All proof of work issuance ends. We're at about 4.1, 4.2 percent or so. issuance in proof of work. There's also proof of stake issuance on top of that. But all of that comes to an end. And then we get into this new era, David, this new issuance policy, monetary policy era post-EIP 1559, post the merge, which is kind of the ultrasound money era, basically, where we're going to be like less than 1% issuance, likely negative issuance for Ether,
Starting point is 01:26:11 for the rest of the platform's lifecycle, right? That's the plan right. now. So I'm excited about that because EIP 1559 is the first step to ultrasound money. It's the merge later, probably early 22. But this first step is absolutely a monumental event in Ethereum's issuance policy, monetary policy history. It's great for ETH the asset. Totally. This chart of Ether's issuance or ether's monetary policy is a favorite chart of Bitcoinsers to like fud Ether as money or Ethereum's monetary policy because they'll show you here. They show you this chart and be like, look at how irregular this chart is. It's jagged. It's not stable. Who knows where it's going to go next. But if you look at that chart, it tells you a very, very solid trend of just A down into the right and also stabilizing over time.
Starting point is 01:27:07 It was chaotic in the first in the first two years of Ethereum. I will give you that. In 2019 onwards, it has been very stable, and it's now going into the final phases of Ethereum's monetary policy, where we just don't have to touch it forever. Maybe, maybe, maybe, have like, this is not, it's just not even that hard to understand this issuance policy. There's been like two issuance reductions, right? The, the places where it's gone down and risen back up have been, because of a difficulty bomb that's been embedded in the code to force Ethereum to upgrade, to get to prove the stake, hard fork. When that difficulty bomb is, uh, taken away, then issuance goes back up temporarily for a period of time. But it's always down.
Starting point is 01:27:49 It's always down. And it's also stabilizing over time, which is really the important thing. It is becoming exactly what Bitcoin you're saying, or Bitcoin Maxis, sorry, excuse me, Bitcoin Maxis say that ether's monetary policy. They said it. They say it's like the Fed. Right. It's like, which is fucking ridiculous. Excuse me. But it's becoming more dependable, more stable over time. And importantly, extremely low. And so, like, this chart is, again, historically a favorite chart by Bitcoin Maxis to fund Ethereum. And I think it's about to flip into ether people's, ether maxis, whatever, our favorite chart to illustrate the power of Ethereum's monetary policy. Look how low it is and look how stable it is. It's about to become a bullish eth monetary policy chart, not a bearish one.
Starting point is 01:28:34 Minimum necessary issuance. All right, man, we promised everyone the meme of the week. Let's get to the meme of the week. What is it? Oh my gosh. This is this guy's name. Harold. Harold. Harold.
Starting point is 01:28:44 Harold. Yeah. A meme favorite. And Harold's, uh, is drinking a cup of coffee looking at his laptop and he says, I don't want a nine to five job. No one in the crypto world wants a nine to five job. We want to work in crypto. So Ryan, take us to the next panel.
Starting point is 01:28:58 Oh, there's the next panel. There you go. Now, now I'm in crypto. Now I work 24-7. And Ryan, you and I were talking before the show about like how we like, like, resonate with this meme a little bit too much. Never worked so much in my life. I could never imagine myself going back to like a nine to five,
Starting point is 01:29:15 like show up, show up at nine, close the clock out at five type job anymore. I don't know how I would do it. But then also I realize like, oh yeah, now I just like am not really ever turned off when it comes to working. That is a downside, right? Not ever turned off. But like I also, when I am working, don't feel like I'm working as much. I mean, there's some things which is feel like work.
Starting point is 01:29:36 But like, so it's a double edged sword here too. but oh my God, I can relate. Like, too much time on crypto. Markets don't turn off. Crypto Twitter doesn't turn off. Crypto is a global phenomenon. So announcements go out at two in the morning, whether you are awake for them or not.
Starting point is 01:29:52 And so, like, the overall working in the crypto industry, the lines are definitely blurred between like what is work and play. Work and play. Yeah, which is pros and cons. Like sometimes you just don't want to have to be working, but also it's not that bad. Also, it's just not that bad. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 01:30:08 You can definitely set your own schedule. I consume as much or as little as you want. All right, guys, this has been the weekly roll-up. As always, none of this was financial advice. Bitcoin and Eath are risky. So is defy. You can lose what you put in. But we are headed west.
Starting point is 01:30:25 This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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