Bankless - ROLLUP: Base Kicks-Off Onchain Summer

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup Second Week of August, 2023 ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless II in September. https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ 📣 STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKIN...G https://bankless.cc/Stader  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.cc/MetaMask   ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:37 MARKETS 4:07 Layer 2 TVL https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary  15:42 DAI Savings Rate https://twitter.com/RuneKek/status/1688235137178509312?s=20  19:26 Coinbase Q2 Earnings https://twitter.com/ramahluwalia/status/1687268549797019648?s=20  24:28 Paypal Launches Stablecoin https://etherscan.io/token/0x6c3ea9036406852006290770bedfcaba0e23a0e8  https://twitter.com/0xCygaar/status/1688592430315036672?s=20  https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1688716600294383616?s=20  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1688586469370216450?s=20  34:32 Base Kicks off Onchain Summer! https://twitter.com/BuildOnBase/status/1689321221715017728  https://www.geckoterminal.com/dex-rankings  https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/base  https://dune.com/tk-research/base  40:31 Vitalik and Jesse At Permissionless https://twitter.com/Permissionless/status/1687130264089042945?s=20  42:25 Arbitrum Releases BOLD https://twitter.com/offchainlabs/status/1687137574052143116?s=46  https://twitter.com/terencechain/status/1689025407499345920?s=20  https://www.youtube.com/live/4yzPYr5HRfU?feature=share  47:31 Polygon Vs zKSync https://mirror.xyz/0x70DF15b0208eFCeFaA541Da9A0ED6C4A884554Fc/gNi8coqXjd1ybFsQBAG7QARUkPHZECu7ihIRkpiVx2Y  https://twitter.com/gluk64/status/1687263207860166656?s=20  49:31 Is Curve Gonna Make it? https://etherscan.io/address/0x9e2b6378ee8ad2a4a95fe481d63caba8fb0ebbf9  https://etherscan.io/tx/0x23c4799784c91023204bd68a94ec7a963486f2485dc43c13d8b804d5301b8041  https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1688221472815284224?s=20  https://twitter.com/lookonchain/status/1687294816890347520  54:28 Fantom Becoming a Layer 2?  https://www.theblock.co/post/243220/fantom-optimistic-rollups-ethereum  56:11 Hacker Hotline https://twitter.com/samczsun/status/1688613385565528064  58:03 NFT Stuff https://twitter.com/sandeepnailwal/status/1689187495190069250?s=20  1:00:49 Is Biden a Bitcoin Maxi? https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1687120734793986048?s=46  1:01:46 Huobi Insolvency https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1687764670340591618  1:02:45 Gary Pivots to AI https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-03/sec-chairman-gary-gensler-discusses-the-risks-to-finance-in-ai  1:03:59 This is Just Weird... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/21/ftx-lobbyist-tried-to-buy-island-nauru-create-superspecies-lawsuit.html  1:05:06 Wallets 2.0 https://twitter.com/goldfinch_fi/status/1688961804515647488  1:08:05 Turnkey https://twitter.com/turnkeyhq/status/1688910588246933509  1:08:35 RAISES https://medium.com/@puffer.fi/a-push-for-decentralization-puffer-finance-raises-5-5m-to-redefine-liquid-eth-staking-936a61b750f7  1:12:57 Questions From The Nation  https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1138316265962876988  1:15:50 Takes Of The Week https://twitter.com/davidfbailey/status/1689051629146767360?s=46  https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1689634128101310464?s=20  https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1687448061860003840?s=20  https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1687609256269230080?s=20  1:21:43 What Are We Bullish On? 1:25:53 Meme Of The Week https://twitter.com/divine_economy/status/1689650898975481856?s=20  1:26:39 Disclosures ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I think that we will look back and see the reason for why we had a bull market in 2024 and 2025. What's that reason? Layer 2s? Base. Coinbase, specifically putting all of its marketing and weight behind a base layer 2 because they are, like I said, printing money on it. But they are going to take Ethereum layer 2 specifically base because they now have the incentive. They are going to take it mainstream. Bankless Nation, it is the second Friday of August. David, what time is it?
Starting point is 00:00:31 Ryan, it's the Bankless Friday. a weekly roll-up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor yet to be persevere nonetheless into the frontier. How are you doing this week, my man? I'm doing great, man. I've got my, uh, I've got my coffee. We've got our stable coins going. Um, some big news this week. PayPal launched a stable coin on Ethereum. I think that's a big freaking deal. And we've got to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. What else are we talking about? Base gets dropped with already $105 million in total value locked, kicking off on chain. same summer, Coinbase just putting all of their weight behind the base launch. And so we're going
Starting point is 00:01:07 to talk about all those details and more. And then something out of Arbitrum. Tell us about Arbitrum. Yeah, they got a little bit more decentralized. At least they're preparing to. So we're going to cover that with their bold new proposal. David, do you like that one? Bold. You did it in the show. You can't keep on doing it. I can keep doing it. This is a different show. I get one per show. Also, Polygon. You had three last time. Whatever. Let's move on. Polygon and ZK. Sink, they are throwing some punches back and forth, at least on Twitter. We've got to talk about that. There's been some wallet UX breakthroughs, I feel like, recently. This is making me pretty bullish, so we'll talk about that. The SEC isn't done yet. They are striking back. And lastly,
Starting point is 00:01:45 David, is Joe Biden a bit-comer? What? Words I never thought I'd see right. We'll talk about that, too. Before we get in, we've got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Stater. What's Stater, David? Stater is a LSD protocol that helps you stake your ether and also run in staking node if you so choose. So stator, one of the cool things about stater is that the bond, the ether that you need to deposit into the stator staking protocol can be as low as for ether, which is the lowest capital requirement I think that is in the industry. And you get to charge other people a fee for staking their ether when they stake on your node. And so if you want to both stake your ether and then get a little bit more juicy ether yield, you can do it with stator.
Starting point is 00:02:29 There's a link in the show notes to get started. It is steak season. I feel that very strongly. It is ETH season for sure. Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about the other seasons, too. When you get to the market, I got to ask you, what's cracking, my friend? Open up the cracking charts.
Starting point is 00:02:44 Yeah, it's become a thing. I'm doing it. Let's see what's cracking with Bitcoin USD on the price charts. Well, nothing is cracking, Ryan, because we're only up half a percent. 29,300, ending at $29,400, $29,400, $100 in Bitcoin. It's not much. Are you bored? You know, the thing is, like, I would be bored,
Starting point is 00:03:04 except for how incredibly good the news cycle is. Like, the innovations, like, it is, there is a huge decoupling disconnect between what is going on with announcements and innovation and the foundations, the fundamentals, if you will, and the actual prices. And so people are getting frustrated about, like,
Starting point is 00:03:22 PayPal, they just dropped a stable coin on Ethereum, and it didn't even move the price. Well, let's look at it. Don't be frustrated by that. That is alpha. Let's look at it. No price movement here. This is the E.
Starting point is 00:03:35 Price on the week. What are we at? Are we flat? $1,443 to $1,8,000. We went up $7. What? It's flatter than a pan king. I used that.
Starting point is 00:03:45 Yeah. A sheet of paper. That's how flat we are on the week. Don't even ask me about the ratio. It's flat. Next you're going to tell me the global cryptocurrency market cap. It's the same. It was last week.
Starting point is 00:03:58 It's one. $2 trillion. You know what's not flat, though? Two things. Yes. Layer 2 TVL and layer 2 scaling factor is up. So we get to cover these in our market section every week from now on? We have added this to the template.
Starting point is 00:04:12 Like total value locked on layer 2's coming in at $10.57 billion dollars. Working through that $10 billion amount. So because we are adding something to the template, David, I feel like we have to explain these metrics. First time. Bankless Nation, you only get this one-time explanation. and then every single time in the market section. You're expected to know it.
Starting point is 00:04:30 You're expected to know it. Okay. So what is total value locked in layer two? Why are we looking at this chart on a weekly basis forever and more? Yeah, TVL, kind of the same thing as AUM assets under management. It's just like what is the total market cap of assets that are deposited onto layer twos? And if you aggregate all of that together on all layer twos on Ethereum, you come up to $10.57 billion.
Starting point is 00:04:53 Well, actually, technically, it is flat. It's up half a percent over the last seven days. but it's been incrementally growing for all this entire bear market. The other thing that we're going to look at is scaling factor. So if you hit the activity tab on the right, you see a scaling factor of 4.8x, 4.83X. That is how many more Ethereums all aggregate layer two economic activity is adding. So on layer two's,
Starting point is 00:05:21 there are 4.8 Ethereum's worth of economic activity happening that are settling to the Ethereum layer 1, which is one Ethereum. Pop quiz, Ryan, how many times larger is the Ethereum layer 1 in 2023 versus 2015? How many more Ethereum is 2023 Ethereum versus 2015 Ethereum? Are you just talking about kind of like ignore the L2s? Ignoring the layer 2s. Just the scalability of the layer 1. Because the reason why I'm asking this is I don't actually think people appreciate that
Starting point is 00:05:53 the Ethereum layer 1 also scales. And so that is a shifting number. So when we say there's a scaling factor of 4.8x layer 2s to the layer 1, well, the layer 1 is also growing as well. I bet the layer 1 on its own. And these are through primarily client optimization. So the team over at Geph, for example, doing a lot of work to kind of optimize how fast Geth can run.
Starting point is 00:06:18 And there's some juice to squeeze there versus 2015. I'm going to say 3 to 4X. from 2015. Pretty good. The answer is 6x. So Ethereum throughput. That's better than I thought. Ethereum throughput from 2015 to
Starting point is 00:06:35 2023 is six times larger than it once was. And like you said, this is layer one client improvements, networking improvements, just bandwidth, just hardware. As hardware gets better, the Ethereum layer one is actually allowed to increase in scale conservatively
Starting point is 00:06:51 because that's our philosophy. But over time, the block size, the data throughput of Ethereum has gone about 6x from 2015 to 2023. And layer 2s are 4.5x times on top of that. And they are not even at max capacity now. So we are at like between 24 and 30x if you multiply that all together. Yeah, if you compare to 2015.
Starting point is 00:07:12 But like 2015 was like primitive, primitive era. Stone ageing crypto. Yeah, we didn't have much to do on change. Yeah. Remember peepeth? I do remember peepeth. All right, but those are the stats we're going to go over on a weekly basis. So scaling factor 4.83X, remember that number, and assets locked inside of layer 2 is $10.5 billion.
Starting point is 00:07:37 Well, let's peepeth outside of the crypto markets here, David. No one knows what peepet is. Traditional markets. Inflation rose 3.2% in July. That's the year over year. And, of course, I'm talking about inflation of the dollar. I'm not talking about inflation of Eith because that's deflationary, of course. This is a small uptick from 3% in June.
Starting point is 00:08:00 So it's 3% in June, 3.2%. This commentator is saying this is good news, that inflation rose a modest, 0.2% for the month of July alone. That's an encouraging sign that inflation is moderating. So inflation moderating is one of the takes here. This is the stat kind of over time, and this is annualized. So you can kind of see this. Let me look at a different view.
Starting point is 00:08:21 See this? this is all the way back from five years ago where we used to be under 2% around 2%. That's where the Fed likes it. And then, of course, COVID cranked us all the way up over to 9% or so. And now we are back down. But there's a little, look at this, a little bump. It looks like we're going up a little bit. Things go down.
Starting point is 00:08:40 If you teleported me back to the peak of that inflation back when we were at 9% and then you showed me what the future curve would look like, I'd be like, wow. This is good. That's best case scenario. Soft landing is that what you see here? That sounds like successful manipulation of our economy. Manipulation of our economy. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see.
Starting point is 00:08:59 Of course, this is not exactly what the Fed wants, but it's pretty close. We'll see what the August numbers look like. I also think, David, this number is going to get increasingly political. Why? Because the U.S. gets increasingly political during election season, right? Every four years. So we're creeping up to 2024 in a presidential election. So some people are going to say this is a,
Starting point is 00:09:19 this number is too high. Others are going to say it's it's too low. What the Fed says is a good question. I think there's also this debate of, you know, does money printing actually cause inflation? Because what we're seeing right now is, I don't know if you saw the headlines this week, you know, the U.S. is at a $1.8 trillion budget deficit as fiscal government spending this year, right? So that's a lot of spend going into the economy all the while the Fed is. is tightening. And some of that spend goes to like interest payments, that kind of thing. So, you know, to be determined on what inflation, where that goes next. One thing I will say is it does seem like asset inflation is continuing to rise as always.
Starting point is 00:10:06 So there you go. Another thing I wanted to mention this part of the market, David, this is your quarterly reminder that Home Depot, you know, the stock price of Home Depot is actually higher than the total market cap of Ethereum right now. I saw this, apparently I said this back in May because it blew my mind when I was looking at the largest assets by market cap. And Ethereum was trailing Home Depot. It's trailing a few others that make it seem even worse. I hate Home Depot. Nestle as well. It's below Nestle.
Starting point is 00:10:40 It's below Merck. They have a monopoly on the water. So that's Adobe Bank of America. America. All of these things are worth more than ether. Platinum. Platinum is higher than ether. I know.
Starting point is 00:10:52 Palladium is higher than ether. Home Depot, at least you need to like, you know, build houses. People need houses. People don't need palladium. Maybe they do. Well, I don't know. Palladium, I'm sure, has tons of use cases, David. But there's Ethereum number 50 in terms of the world's largest asset.
Starting point is 00:11:11 So we got to wait this to go. You know, how are you feeling, though, in this market? You were talking about it a little bit when we were getting into sort of the market section and the intro. And I think for me, I'll answer for me before, you know, I ask you maybe. Yeah, if you hand it off to me, it's going to be dangerous. I think for me, we might be entering my favorite part of the market cycle. Say more. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:34 Yeah. It's so things aren't annoying yet. And a lot of the, a lot of the stupidity has been burnt off. kind of the frauders and the scammers were sort of found out and the market isn't completely irrational. It's still kind of a builder's market and it's quiet. So we're not getting all the hype and kind of the shilliness. This is sort of the quiet moment where you look at everything that's going on and you were talking about it earlier in terms of the fundamentals and the news and the building that's going on and you realize that doesn't match with the price
Starting point is 00:12:09 because the price is still under 2000, and you're just like, oh, this is a very obvious trade. This is a very obvious purchase. I feel very comfortable right now. The last time I felt this way was 2020, before COVID, by the way. Oh, before COVID? And after COVID, yeah.
Starting point is 00:12:30 Then after COVID, when we realized the world wasn't ending, you know, kind of toward the end of 2020. And that has been consistently my favorite part of the market cycle just before things get stupid. And you're in this kind of like, oh, we're building, we're doing the right thing. You know, like we've, we got hit by US regulators, right? That's not going to get any worse at this point.
Starting point is 00:12:52 Like we bottomed on fading the US and US regulation. Coming out of the hole. We're coming out of the hole on all kind of the scams and the frauds and the centralized exchanges and all that crap from 2020. And now it feels like this, this recovery phase, but hasn't been a quick recovery. So it's not yet stupid. And I love that part of the market.
Starting point is 00:13:13 So I think we'll get some months here. And I'm actually excited about that. I think what you're saying is we're in this like Goldilocks zone in the, in the crypto era where like if you were a tourist, if you weren't going to make it through the bear market, you're gone. You're gone by now. Anyone who still left is here for the right reasons and here for the long haul. And we get to see all like all the announcements and progression and like I said,
Starting point is 00:13:36 fundamental growth of this industry that the rest of the world is not accounting for. And so all of a sudden, like, in the bull market, alpha is hard because everyone is chomping at it. But in the bear market, alpha is easy because there's just not that many people left. This reminds me of a take that I had this week that I tweeted out. So we'll pull it up here. I tweeted out once upon a time, there was this six month period between the 2018 to 2020 bear market and then the 2021 bull market where Eath broke $300 and hit $450 for the first. time three years and multiple times a week you would see people on crypto Twitter tweet out something
Starting point is 00:14:12 like personal news I'm leaving my job and I'm starting a thing the entire set of crypto Twitter we just all knew that it was on it being the bull market and that we had made it and it was just the best time it was great because you would see all of your friends who were like you know had to commit to their nine to five job in order to make it through the bear market then all of a sudden have the foundation to go out and build their own venture. I tweeted out one of these tweets right before going for my last job to bankless. And it was this great Goldilocks moment where like Ether price was appreciating, but there were, it was all us.
Starting point is 00:14:49 Everyone was just, it was all us buying rather than like necessarily like new money because everyone was positioned for it. And so all of the gains were us. And then you realize because like, oh yes, that's because people are about to come in. And then I follow this this tweet with like, little did I know the incoming bull market and scholars got me for life yeah totally
Starting point is 00:15:11 I mean so are you ready for another round of this like I could use a few more months but that's what we get we're at the beginning of that phase yeah we're going to get some time in the Goldilocks period yeah that's cool I'm glad that resonates with you too it's just it just sort of hit me this week this is how MIRP puts it though if you aren't happy single you won't be happy in a relationship
Starting point is 00:15:30 true happiness comes from Ethereum breaking 2K not from anyone else. Hey, Tuesday is pretty achievable. We have happiness on the menu. Yeah, I'm okay. Under 2K though, to be honest, just keeping the Goldilocks period of time. You know what else is going up, though?
Starting point is 00:15:45 Dye savings rate is now live paying out 8% at no additional risk. Hey, that's above T bills. What's the die savings rate, David? The die savings rate is the yield that Dye out of Maker Dau naturally produces. It's one of the core primitives that is part of the Maker Dau building blocks.
Starting point is 00:16:02 we kind of call ether staking the stake the risk-free rate of Ethereum the die savings rate is just the risk-free rate of holding die. So if you're holding die, you can get 8% at no additional risk compared to actually holding die. You're not lending it out.
Starting point is 00:16:16 It's just part of the protocol. Kind of like in the same way that holding a United States treasury is not really any different from holding dollars. And if you're holding dollars, you might as well turn it into a treasury. Yeah, you just park it in T bills.
Starting point is 00:16:27 And it can stay in the DSR. Can it be fungible as well? Yeah, yeah, so, chai, chai money. Oh, yeah. I don't know why they call it chai, but chai is, it's like how there's are Eth or staked ethereum. Chai is the die savings rate version of die. Why and where is that 8% coming from?
Starting point is 00:16:47 It's part of the Maker Dow Protocol. Gosh, back in my Maker Dow days, I would be able to very fluently explain this, but that was like four years ago. There's just a demand for dye and it's creating yield. Yeah, and not everyone is in the die savings rate as well. So that's why the yield is higher than normal. That's what Rune reminds us the rate is so high because they're currently not that many people using the sightings rate.
Starting point is 00:17:07 Only 8% of die holders use DSR currently. So the more holders, the more that goes down. Of course, a reminder that you can access this at SPARP protocol. But not if you're American or use a VPN because we live in a financial prison. Yeah. VPN users, hands off. Yeah. Don't touch it.
Starting point is 00:17:26 VPN. The specific mention of not available for VPN users. I'm pretty sure that's a wink. I'm pretty sure that's a wink right there. I don't know. We can't interpret that, right? But of course, the smart contract is uncensoredable. It's just people have to screen out on the UII side
Starting point is 00:17:41 or else the big bad American government gets mad with all of your financial access. David, another interesting stat I dug up this week. Did you know that WorldCoin is spending money on Ethereum block space? Well, certainly. Not just a little bit, a lot. 500K in the last 40 days.
Starting point is 00:17:59 So if you were to annualize that, which we can't exactly do, but if you were to annulize that, that would be $4.5 million in gas fees. And so my take on that is this. Of course, the bull take comes out. Companies will need to hoard ETH the same way they hoard other essential commodities. Ethereum block space is the new oil. What's really cool to me is something that we've predicted for a long time about Ethereum is companies actually purchasing Ether as a,
Starting point is 00:18:31 a right as access for a block space in the future in the same way that maybe an airline might procure barrels of oil or like futures on oil or something to hedge against future gas price costs. It's very cool to see third parties actually spending on block space and that being a driver of demand rather than just users. And if you're curious about what they're actually spending on, DC Builder, of course, he is a dev over at WorldC Coin. He gets some context here. For context, this is the World ID identity manager contract. The biggest cost here are insertions and not ZK proof verifications, which are mostly happening on optimism.
Starting point is 00:19:10 So this is the part, the insertions part is happening on Ethereum main chain. Most of the other activity for World Coin is happening on optimism. Anyway, it's interesting to start quantifying that and companies actually purchasing block space in this way. Speaking of companies, Coinbase just releases Q2 earnings. This is from Ram Alwaya, former bankless podcast guest, who says, this is the first quarter where reoccurring revenue, for example, USC income, staking in subscriptions, exceeded transaction revenue, as in like trading revenue, 51% to 49%. So coin has cut its reoccurring expenses by a whopping 50% as well as all the layoffs and all that stuff.
Starting point is 00:19:51 And they also still rolled out new products like Coinbase wallet and also base. And so inside of the product innovation section, they say, we are expanding our focus towards crypto use cases beyond trading. Of course they are. That's been their ever since going public. That has been basically their number one focus as a company is to get away from being dominated by trading fee revenue. And so they've opened up new lines of revenue and it's been working. And so as an example, of course, base is an investment in blockchain infrastructure where we expect to drive down transaction costs and increase transaction speed.
Starting point is 00:20:23 Of course, the point of a layer two, but also a way for base to make Coinbase. money. Also that's stated in their regulation section, we're beginning to see a pathway for bipartisan legislation that could enshrine consumer protections in an equitable market structure framework, aka soon the regulatory trials will be over. So it's still pretty early. We are 24 hours into base, but base yesterday generated $213,000 in fees. Wow. That is $78 million in annual run rate. 15% of that goes to the optimism collective. Coinbase buckets the rest. Huh. Yeah. So like brand new business model, poof, out of nowhere. You're like $70 million in annual run rate for Coinbase because of base. And that is again, before the Layer 2 bull market kicks in. I kind of like that Coinbase is a publicly traded company because then they get to explain how Layer 2's work to Wall Street.
Starting point is 00:21:19 All they got to explain is $70 million. Yeah. And they're like, that's all they have to say. Wall Street Anderson are like, wait, you could see that on chain. I don't have to wait for the annual report. Like, oh, well, Wow, okay, that's really cool. I think it'll totally educate them on how to start evaluating crypto protocols and crypto networks. Remember that old website, current website still running. Mario Anacanti, you put it together, dyestats.com. It's just like a live audit of MakerDAO. It's like every theory block, it gets updated.
Starting point is 00:21:47 Somebody should make that for base. Coinbase should make that for base. Base economics, and they can just have this in their investment reports, but they can just link out to it like, hey, are you curious? Yeah, that would be awesome. much money we are printing in this very current moment on base, you should just go to basestats.org to look at that. And one of the themes I think is happening is that like Fortune 500 companies are being
Starting point is 00:22:09 shown the way to mint their own layer two using the OP stack. And that website would go very, very far in helping that narrative. Yeah, I think so. We can pill Wall Street if that's what we want to do. I don't know. I'm still comfortable in the Goldilocks zone of just like waiting. That website can be underwent development for a while. They'll take them while to catch on.
Starting point is 00:22:29 Bankless station coming up next, PayPal is dropping a stable coin. Coinbase is dropping the base. There's a layer two summer party, and you're all invited. And bankless is also dropping something big to help you navigate all of it. Coming up next is all of those details. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange and crypto for 2023 to help you drop some U.S. dollars into some crypto assets.
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Starting point is 00:24:15 So visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. PayPal is launching a stable coin on Ethereum. Guys, this is a really big deal. It's called PY-USD. It's a fully backed U.S. dollar stable coin. It's backed by short-term U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. For all intents and purposes, David, this looks to me a lot like USDC. Here's the contract address. This is very cool to see this on Ethereum live. This is PayPal.
Starting point is 00:24:52 US dollars right here and you can see some of the activity on EtherScan right now. David, do you think this is as big a deal as I think it is? Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine why it wouldn't be. It's just like, well, it's just another USDC clone, but it just indicates that, hey, perhaps the market doesn't think that the, you know, the stable coin market is saturated. Like we can enter the game with further stable coins. PayPal USD, $27 million market cap at the current time of recording.
Starting point is 00:25:20 12 holders 12 total holders I don't think it's actually like live in the app yet but hey we have a contract address and we're watching 182 transfers going around in its very moment I mean PayPal has weight PayPal has size
Starting point is 00:25:36 in terms of users and demand and like we don't know the TVL of PayPal but there is a number of PayPal somewhere well there is I mean when we had Jose on and the you know the public stats are 450 million active user accounts on PayPal. And think about the significance of this too. PayPal really pioneered payments on the internet in the web 1.0 days before Web 2.0, right? And so now here they are in crypto,
Starting point is 00:26:04 innovating on this front and doing this first. This is issued by Paxos. It's kind of the, you know, the bank machine behind it. Pactos, who are, they had to give up BUSD, finance stable coin. And I'll pull in a Harry Potter quote for all the Harry Potter fans, trading a nut for a galleon, giving up buying up buying. and all of its regulatory gray areas in gaining PayPal as a as a client, as a customer. That's definitely a win. That's what you call a dub. So just like USC, you're going to be able to transfer PayPal U.S. dollars between PayPal and external wallet.
Starting point is 00:26:36 So that would be bankless wallets, of course. You could send it person to person, so peer-to-peer. You could fund purchases with PayPal US dollars by selecting it at checkout, right? All right? It's like your different, you know, checkout using PayPal. You can use this as an option. And you can convert any of PayPal-supported cryptocurrencies, of which there are many now, to and from PayPal US dollars.
Starting point is 00:26:59 This definitely feels like a big win to me. There's some comments on it, of course, in the crypto community. This is one from Saigar who says, so the PayPal Staplecoin contract, number one, is written in an extremely old version of solidity. Number two, allows the owner to pause all transfers. Number three, allows the owner to freeze addresses to prevent actions. Number four, allows admins to increase the total supply at will, centralized, but transparent at least.
Starting point is 00:27:24 You can see all of those controls in the code. What do you think here, David? Do you think that these centralization vectors are an issue for PayPal US dollars? All the properties that he just listed allows owners to pause transfers, allow owners to freeze addresses, allow admins to increase total supply at will. These are like table stakes for centralized table coin service providers. You have to have all of those functions. You need to increase the supply because if you get more dollars in the bank, you need to issue more stable coins.
Starting point is 00:27:53 Of course, you have to increase the supply. And then in order to be compliant at all, you have to also be able to pause and freeze addresses. Like, imagine if somebody starts, you know, sending this money to North Korea. Like, PayPal's going to need to do something. So I don't think that there's any pearl clutching about this. This is totally expected. USDC has all of these things. This is why we call it a centralized stable coin.
Starting point is 00:28:15 It's not a decentralized stable coin. it's not a crypto native asset in any way. And some people are saying, well, as a result of that, why are you crypto people celebrating? David, Ryan, why are you so excited about this? Why are you even excited about this? What's your response to that? How many a million accounts did you say? It was in PayPal.
Starting point is 00:28:34 450. Now they have a much more direct bridge to Ethereum and going bankless. That pipe is easier and more direct because of this. So they can go from PayPal to Ethereum. to a decentralized stable coin in like five fewer steps now. And while we would like to all have the world go bankless, that is a spectrum. And people will choose to go as far down the bankless journey as they would elect.
Starting point is 00:29:02 And some people will elect to stay in centralized stable coins. And that is just fine, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree with us. This is a step, right? This is slightly more, just slightly more bankless than the existing status quo of dollars inside of the PayPal platform. And why is it good? Just what you said increases adoption.
Starting point is 00:29:23 So we get more private keys in the hands of more individuals. There's now an off-ramp. We load this into your Metamask wallet. Also, this is a big normalization event, I think, for crypto. Used to be like the, you know, the crypto exchanges, the coin bases of the world, the crackens of the world, who were into kind of the stable coin business. And now this is PayPal.
Starting point is 00:29:42 It doesn't get any more fintech mainstream than this. The last point I would make is this is another example of a third party, a publicly traded company, actually paying gas fees on Ethereum. Every time you pay gas fees on Ethereum, you make Ethereum more secure. And that cannot be understated, I think. Economic bandwidth, the value and the price of ether corresponds to security on top of Ethereum. We don't get any of those attributes and any of those wins with just a bank coin inside of the
Starting point is 00:30:14 PayPal app. which is what we had today. So this is not like a panacea. This is not pure decentralization we're celebrating. We're celebrating one step forward. And that's why it's exciting. So stable coin transfers, Ryan, are the number two most gas intensive activity on Ethereum. As in it burns the most gas after swapping.
Starting point is 00:30:33 And we just saw like the stable, the stable coin contract for PayPal. They're going to start burning plenty of ether too. Yeah. And but also that's going to be a cost to the business. you know how PayPal can turn that cost into revenue? I got an idea, but why don't you tell me yours? Why don't they just do the thing that Coinbase is showing the world as possible and make their own layer two and all PayPal stablecoin transfers they can collect their own
Starting point is 00:31:02 sequencer fees for? Hmm. Huh. That's a good idea, David. A PayPal payments network in addition to the PayPal stable coin. one of the strategies that's hypothesized about the partnership between Circle and Coinbase and the base layer two is to make Circle USD transfers on base free and turn base into a payments network for Circle. And also they're going to generate revenue from that because of the layer two. Why doesn't PayPal just make its own layer two for its own payments network?
Starting point is 00:31:35 That's really smart. That feels like the next step. I mean, yes. You should get a job at PayPal. I should be a consultant for PayPal. PayPal execs if you're hearing this. David is excited about this opportunity, bringing you guys a layer too.
Starting point is 00:31:48 I also think there's another point to all of this is with the addition of PayPal US dollars, we didn't lose any of the decentralized options. We didn't lose ether as an option or die as a stable coin. Those are all still options and you can still use those if you want to use something a bit more decentralized. So this is only adding to the option list.
Starting point is 00:32:09 That's why I'm personally, excited. This is Anthony Sassano summing up his take. Yes, PayPal's stable coin is centralized. No, that doesn't make it any less cool. That PayPal has a stable coin. Ethereum being a settlement layer for all types of value means that different types of assets will exist on the network. And you get to choose which ones you want. Another subpoint that I think is interesting here. I don't think that PayPal would do this without regulatory confidence. I said regulatory cover, but I mean regulatory confidence here. The U.S. government, I think, wants stable. coins to work, at least some portion of the U.S. government does.
Starting point is 00:32:44 Subconsciously it does. Subconsciously it does. And so I think this happens at an interesting time where I'd say 2023 was one of the most bearish years for U.S. crypto from a regulatory front. But I still think that people are massively underestimating the chances that the U.S. government might flip bullish, particularly on this stable coin issue. They might look at it and say, hey, we need a payment rails to expert. the supremacy of the U.S. dollar.
Starting point is 00:33:13 And this is one more step towards that, the stable coin step with PayPal. Of course, not everyone on Capitol Hill feels this way. This is Maxine Waters, who says she's deeply concerned that PayPal chose this path versus the federal path. And Matt Walsh makes the comment, the federal path for issuing a stable coin literally doesn't exist. What planet are we on? So some politicians are still complaining about this, even though they haven't provided
Starting point is 00:33:38 a path to actually register a stable coin with them. Maxine Waters being deeply concerned that PayPal is creating a stable coin while also being the person who blew a kiss to SBF is just like what lizard people are controlling this planet, dude. Oh no, I forgot about that. Yeah, of course he's deeply concerned. Yeah, that does look awkward. This is Mike Selle-A crypto lawyer.
Starting point is 00:34:01 Banking regulators have essentially said banks can only issue stablecoins on private blockchains. PayPal will issue its stable coin on Ethereum. This regulatory arbitrage has put a lot of pressure on Congress to pass a stable coin bill ASAP. The free market always wins. One of my takes in my last article was that crypto is an unstoppable force, but the nation state is not an immovable object. And that is what we are saying here. That's a good take.
Starting point is 00:34:27 Yeah, they could definitely be influenced. I'll just stamp approval and legitimize it before long. David, base ship this week. Drop in the base. Okay. What is happening? What do we need to know? The base layer two is now live and open to everyone with a two-way bridge.
Starting point is 00:34:42 So if you ever make some meme coin gains, you can finally get out. Over 100 applications and service providers are already ready to go inside of the base ecosystem. And there is an NFT to MIT. So if you want to get on base and mint an NFT, mint base day one to join the story of bringing the world on chain, that NFT is available to you. already over 12,000 transactions and $3.6 million has happened not on base, but on Uniswap V3 on base. Wow.
Starting point is 00:35:14 Uniswap V3 is there. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. Uh, so $155 million. Part of the TVL of the 10.5 billion dollar TVL on Layer 2's, base owns 155 million of that all in the last 24 hours, up to 159, 159, uh, six transactions per seps.
Starting point is 00:35:33 second, you know, not at capacity, so pretty good. And so base, we are going to watch the base story with great interest. I think that this, we will look back on and see the reason for why we had a bull market in 2024 and 2025. What's that reason? Layer two's base, coin base, specifically putting all of its marketing and weight behind a base layer two, because they are, like I said, printing money on it, but they are going to take Ethereum layer two, specifically base because they now have the incentive they are going to take it mainstream there was a conference not a conference a festival uh friends with benefits festival over in california and coinbase and base had a very significant presence there and they actually didn't really go around crypto twitter
Starting point is 00:36:17 circles because it's all like culture and music and not nerds and normal people coinbase is taking like base marketing to mainstream culture and so they're just broadcasting and advertising the Ethereum roll-up centric roadmap on our behalf, which golf clap. This is very cool. This is going to be very good, I think, for our metric that we're talking about earlier, layer two total locked value. So you said there's already, look, 100, it's gone up as we've started this episode, almost 160 million total value locked by base right now.
Starting point is 00:36:54 It's cool to see them on layer 2B. And if you were asking the question, which you very well should. Okay. So how does centralize it? It's already number five. Damn, okay. And if you're asking the question, how decentralized is this thing?
Starting point is 00:37:07 Well, Layer 2B has the answer for you, right? It's getting there. There's five slices of the decentralization pie that you need to turn green from red to green for base. Base has two of those on Layer 2B. It needs three more. So some upgrades to state validation, upgradeability itself,
Starting point is 00:37:27 and proposal failure. We need to get those to a state where they're more decentralized. But, you know, the first step is launching a roll-up, and that's what base is doing here. So the security pie that you're looking at on Layer 2B, the base security pie and the Optimism Mainnet security pie are actually the same,
Starting point is 00:37:46 because base actually is governed by the optimism collective because it is an OP stack chain that is a part. And so this is like the first chain. In addition to the main net, the base chain is the first chain to be formally, a part of the super chain, which is this thing that mean that people are talking about, which we're going to actually cover in a future bankless episode with Jesse and Ben from Optimism. But they are the first major chain to join the collective.
Starting point is 00:38:12 And so the base chain is governed by the OP token. And so when optimism made upgrades to fill in whenever they get in their validity proofs, then all of a sudden, base will also gain validity proofs because that's how the collective works. Santiago Santos has a take on this. Let's take a moment to appreciate the novelty of a centralized public company launching decentralized public infrastructure. Coinbase is a mission-driven company and will likely go down as the most impactful company who pushed crypto to mainstream. 100%. On base is to Web 3 as the iPhone was to the smartphone industry.
Starting point is 00:38:48 Big statement. Wow. Jesse and Brian on the Coinbase podcast, they have their own show now called OnChane Summer Stories because they are just pushing the phrase, On chain, on chain, online, on chain. Online, on chain, online, on chain. Get it in the head. So let's hear about Jesse and Brian talk about their collaboration
Starting point is 00:39:04 with the OP collective. You know, the collaboration we've had with optimism, by the way, is really incredible. And we're a huge shout out to them. The collaboration has been good. And it allows, it's allowing us to move very quickly with this particular L2 solution. And we hope it gets brought adoption across
Starting point is 00:39:20 every kind of product out there in the space. Yep, yeah. And a huge plus one to that on optimism. You know, when we were just trying to kind of get started building an L2. We obviously thought about kind of how do we want to approach this. And I think the thing that was a North Star for us was decentralization. It's like how do we get this decentralized network incubated inside of a public company
Starting point is 00:39:42 and then like fully decentralized over the next few years. And as we were trying to figure out how to do that, I think what we identified was having a partner, having like a collaborator in doing who could help lead the way on decentralization, help kind of push those boundaries for us and help us figure out our path was going to be really valuable. And I think that's where optimism has really kind of been a great collaborator. And really, I think the main thing that I want to get across in this section is that Fortune 500 companies, Coinbase is showing them the way to becoming on chain, to being on chain. This is going to be the first of many.
Starting point is 00:40:18 Just like how I sit was saying, hey, PayPal could have its own payments network. They are showing the way for Fortune 500 companies to spend. up decentralized layer two's because we have the technology in the year 2023 to get that done. Yeah, that is very cool. And by the way, we're going to have another opportunity to sit down with Jesse at Permissionless, which is coming right up. David, you're doing a panel, I believe, with Ben Jones and Jesse of base and Coinbase at Permissionless. So what are you going to talk about there? Yeah, so we're going to just unpack the relationship between Coinbase, the centralized company, the OP collective a decentralized Dow that governs over the OP stack. There is just a ton of nuance
Starting point is 00:41:00 to unpack there. And I think as a permission list is coming up, we're a month away. Yeah, one month away. And so there's going to be a lot of conversations about like, okay, but what is the super chain? How do these things form together? How does a decentralized organization, like converse with a centralized organization? Lots of questions all about that. And that's happening, a panel that I'm moderating between Jesse Pollock and Ben Jones from optimism. But that was not the only conversation I'm moderating at Permission List. New this week that we just got finalized, Vitalik, it's coming to speak at Permission List remotely.
Starting point is 00:41:32 Me and Vitalik are going to talk about Ethereum for the future. And just as a little teaser for all the people that, you know, for some reason are not going to Merrim, I just don't know why you wouldn't. Ethereum, there's plenty of use cases that we talk about. Let's put Wall Street on chain. Let's take, you know, NFTs and make them for brands. But what about all the future use cases that we can't imagine because we don't know the future? What about the future things that Ethereum, the future technologies that Ethereum will be a platform for?
Starting point is 00:41:59 So that's a conversation that Battalic and I are going to kick off Permissionals with right after Eric Voorhees and right before we have Dankrad and a few other Ethereum people talk about the Ethereum roadmap. Just the future use cases that we can't imagine because it's not here yet. So we're going to do our best to navigate Ethereum for the future. And that is going to be talk number two at Permissionalus. grab a ticket, guys. September 11th, it's coming right up. So get your ticket.
Starting point is 00:42:23 And there's a link in the show notes, as always. David, we're talking earlier about base and its kind of security pie on L2B. Actually, Arbitrum took a big step forward in getting one of the slices of its pie from yellow to green and becoming a bit more decentralized. This is not in production yet,
Starting point is 00:42:41 but the plan is in place. The Dow just has to vote. Code needs to get pushed to production. And then we're good to go. they are calling it Arbitrum Bold. Bold stands for bounded liquidity delay. Can you give us the TLDR of the Arbitrum release this week? Yeah, Bold basically allows the protocol to enable permissionless validation for all Arbitrum chains. It removes the permission validation set and improves decentralization like you said. Validation via fraud proofs is currently
Starting point is 00:43:07 permissioned in Arbitrum because the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service attacks. But Bold is a protocol that anyone who is running Arbitrum software, the Arbitrum, the Arbitrum, infrastructure can, uh, is, it helps solve that problem. So a single honest validator is now has the means to win disputes against any number of evil validators. We call this an N over one security model as in, you just need one honest person to be participating in the network in order for the network to be honest. It is the gold standard of network security. If you only need one honest person to maintain the network, then you can basically have as many as the strongest assurance as possible that that network is going to work.
Starting point is 00:43:48 So that is bold in a nutshell. And as soon as Bold gets voted by the Arbitrum Dow into Mainnet gets merged, then all of a sudden one little yellow slice on Layer 2B is going to turn green. And Arbitrum will have the most green slices out of all layer 2s. I think it already does, but it's going to have even more. Terence.D.Eth from Arbitrum, he tweets out a great way to explain this. Before Bold, in order to submit a fraud proof, it would be Terminant Style. And in order to win, you have to defeat all your molecular.
Starting point is 00:44:15 malicious opponents one by one by one. And now with Bold, there's one gigantic fight where you have the superpower to knock out all malicious opponents at once. The Royal Rumble and you have God mode. Yeah, exactly right. You are given God mode inside of the Battle Royale. Yeah. That's very cool.
Starting point is 00:44:30 This is an entire episode that we did earlier this week on Bold and Arbitrim. So if you want to catch that, there's a link in the show notes and also on your RSS feed. And also at permission list because all the layer two are going to be at permission lists. Stephen Goldtelling from Arbitram will be there as well. David, what are the guy coming up next? Coming up next, what's going on with Hobie? Should you be concerned? Curve hacker returns some of the funds
Starting point is 00:44:52 with a cheeky message, and Michael sold some more CRV to pay back his on-chain loan. Is Michael, the founder of Curve, going to make it? And then a judge rejects Ripple's ruling precedent in the TerraFour and lapse case. We're going to unpack all of that and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible,
Starting point is 00:45:08 especially MetaMask portfolio. I know you use MetaMask bankless listener, so therefore you have MetaMask portfolio, perhaps you just haven't opened it up yet. There's a link to open up your MetaMask portfolio in the show notes. Let's go hear from them right now. Are you a Metamask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are.
Starting point is 00:45:24 The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. Metamask portfolio is the ultimate one-stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once. You can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens, and NFTs in one convenient place just by connecting your wallet. Metamask portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio, though. Inside the portfolio, you can do all the incredible money verbs that make defy so powerful.
Starting point is 00:45:51 You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your defy moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in Web 3, your way, Metamask portfolio is the answer. I already know that you have Metamask wallet, so go check out your Metamask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio. Enter Mantle, an entire ecosystem dedicated to the adoption of decentralized token-governed technologies. Mantle formerly known as BitDow is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built differently from the other
Starting point is 00:46:30 layer 2s that you may be familiar with. Mantle asked the question, how would you build a layer 2 if you had a technology of 2023? Mantle Network is a modular layer 2, built using the OP staff. but uses eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80% compared to other layer 2s, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries in Defy, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle.
Starting point is 00:47:02 Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded to help the growth of Mantle, like Game 7 for Web3 Gaming, or Edu-Dou for in the world of D-Sai and ByBit for TBL and liquidity and on-rads. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledad layer-2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at Mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Polygon and ZK Sync had a bit of a scuffle this week over crypto Twitter primarily,
Starting point is 00:47:36 but it's spilled out into other channels. David, give us the scope. What happened? Yeah, so Polygon ZK Sync, two creators of the ZKEVM, probably the two most frontier creators of ZKEVMs, had a scuffle over attribution about whose code was who. So Polygon wrote this blog post called Protecting the Open Source Ethos, which is TLDR, copy and pasting source code without attribution and making misleading claims about the original work is against the open source ethos and hurts the ecosystem. In the world of open source, there are like these. rules of engagement for citing open source work. And Polygon is saying that ZKSink did not follow
Starting point is 00:48:17 those rules of engagement and did not provide proper attributions when ZKSink borrowed some of Polygons code that they created. And so that is the claim from Polygon about ZKSink. And then ZKSink, of course, has a response from Alex Lukowski on Twitter saying, we actually did all of these attributions, Polygon just didn't feel like they were satisfactory and then started making citations about when they were using their own code versus Plonkey 2's code, which is Polygons. It was a fight of who owes who credit and it elevated and got into the world of front-facing crypto-twitre. Most of this stuff, most of these fights happen, you know, just between these two organizations behind closed doors, but it surfaced and got into.
Starting point is 00:49:06 quote unquote the real world. That's the that's the TLDR. A bit of drama, huh? You know, because you're going to fight. I think that's what this looks like. This is a little spicier in the layer two war space and I would have enjoyed all the other layer two wars has been pretty fun. This one was a little bit. It's a little bit of a downer. A little bit of a downer. I don't think mainstream is paying attention to this at all. This is very much an internal. It is a question of like legitimacy, right? That is the big question here. Well, I'm happy to leave that one in the rear of your mirror. So moving on, speaking of rear of remear mirror, actually, Last week, Curve was a big subject on the roll-up,
Starting point is 00:49:40 and particularly, is Curve going to make it? Was CRV and some of Michael's, the founder of Curve, were some of his positions on lending and borrowing protocols going to be liquidated, and would that cause a cascade that would be bad for those protocols and bad for Defi and General. David, this week, it's looking like Michael is going to make it? It's going to make it, yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:03 Maybe? What happened this week? Barring any sort of further black swan events, which I would consider is why Michael was underdress in the first place. It was a black swan event of the day one bug in Biper. So first, an exploiter returned some of the stolen funds from Alchemics. So 4,820 Alchemics Ether was returned as well as 2,258 actual ether, which is about 15% of the total losses in the curve exploit. And then Michael as well also sold 72 million CRV to, 15 entities to generate $42 million to pay back some of his loans.
Starting point is 00:50:39 And so some good news. Michael's positions are becoming more secure. The Curve Exploiter is returning some of the Solon Funds. I think one of the funny things is that in the transaction, in the data for the transaction, the Exploiter wrote this message saying, I saw some ridiculous views. So I want to clarify that I'm refunding you, not because I think you can find me. It's because I don't want to ruin your project. maybe it's a lot of money for a lot of people, but not for me.
Starting point is 00:51:07 I'm smarter than all of you is what the exploiter said. What a dick. Yeah. What a dick. Yeah. Wow. So Curve finance has extended a bug bounty to offer anyone who is able to identify the exploiter, $1.85 million.
Starting point is 00:51:22 And so if you know who the exploiter is, you can get paid $1.85 million. But the Curve Expooter is saying, you can't find me. Neer-Neer-Boooo-Dibou. seeking head and it seems like the curve trauma is sort of over though is curve price recovering Michael's not going to get liquidated
Starting point is 00:51:43 at this point of time looks like he's going to make it he's probably fine I mean the curve price is definitely hurt but it's not it's definitely still alive it's doing just fine there's a comment a summary from Michael Bentley from Euler
Starting point is 00:51:58 who says this if there's one thing that's clear from recent events Dow governance of lending protocols is not a great idea. Most people are simply not qualified in possession of sufficient information to determine appropriate risk parameters and complex protocols whose risks evolve in time. I should say Michael from Euler, of course, has a lending and barring protocol that does not require governance of this type. But I think he's making a commentary on some of the governance decisions in protocols like AVE
Starting point is 00:52:26 that allowed so much curve to actually be deposited into their protocol. There was votes about this. We talked about this last week, and the votes passed, even though the CRV deposited was kind of very clearly owned, the vast bulk of it owned by one individual. There's some, you know, risk issues that fell out of that. Do you think that's a fair take from this entire episode? Yeah, I'm glad you asked,
Starting point is 00:52:51 because I actually think that governance-free protocols are a very core component of the bankless thesis, of the protocol sync thesis. If we can do all of our desks, centralized financial activities without governance, then we ought to. Governance I've always thought is like a stopgap means to an end. And it's exactly what happened with AVEA where Gontlet submitted a governance proposal saying, hey, there's risk here. You guys should take care of this. And Avey was like, no, vote no, 100% to zero. And then exactly what Gontlet feared would happen would happen.
Starting point is 00:53:23 And like, I talk, we talk shit about the Federal Reserve and their human control over the economy all the time. And then we juxtapose that with Ethereum and it's algorithmic balancing dynamic monetary policy and we applaud ether. And I think we should do the same for all of our governance applications should be looking to minimize governance as much as possible. That's my articulation of the bankless thesis. I don't know if you agree. Yeah, no, I totally agree that like governance is sort of a hack, but sometimes it's necessary. Like sometimes you really need it and sometimes you need it for kind of scalability. I mean, how could you do real world assets without that sort of governance? So I also think that governance will level up over time.
Starting point is 00:54:02 So now in AVE and other lending and borrowing protocols, they'll see where this went awry. Maybe they won't make the same mistake in the future. So long as they have skin in the game, that I think is the main point. And so it's kind of different than the Fed who actually, I mean, what do they care about the decisions they make? Well, AVE holders care a lot. AVE holders are being stuck with the bag and the Fed can do whatever it wants. That is a good point. This is interesting, David.
Starting point is 00:54:30 Phantom is exploring, adding optimistic roll-ups to connect to Ethereum. All right. You're laughing. Why are you laughing? Oh, it's because the L2 thesis, man. Dude, there are just, like, I was sitting and reflecting upon this agenda and just over the last few weeks. There are some bankless theses that we have put forth that are coming true in the best of fashions. Like, it was one thing when the Selo organization voted to move to a layer two, but now Phantom also looking at this and like,
Starting point is 00:54:57 we could become a layer two. And now if there's a meme that when you see memes about this stuff, you start, you know that it is becoming deeply solidified in people's mind share. What we are looking at is somebody has made a bingo card of all of the layer ones that could potentially become layer twos. Like some things you probably haven't thought about in a long time. Stellar. Iota.
Starting point is 00:55:19 Iota. Eos. V chain, flow, flux, Kanto. ETH classic would be hilarious. Tezos. We'll never do it. Never do it. You think so?
Starting point is 00:55:28 Yeah, probably not. Near might. Tron, probably not. Anyways, we have Sello and Phantom. So we have one, two, three, four, five, five, five, five, 25. I actually think Tron might, David. You think so? I could totally see Justin's on doing that.
Starting point is 00:55:40 Maybe. Yeah, actually, that's a good point. Okay, so we've got 25 squares with 25 layer ones. Two of them are turned green because of Sello and Phantom. Well, Phantom actually has to do it. So maybe we're at one and a half. But this has been a bankless thesis for so long. And I'm just, I just sit back and be like,
Starting point is 00:55:56 sometimes theses just play out exactly how you're expecting to. There's David Hoffman victory laughing. I am victory lapping so hard. Well, I do think this is a narrative to watch, right? Which side chain, EVM side chain is going to become a roll-up next? And that's what this is kind of articulating. This is a tweet from Sam CZ Sun, who's kind of the savior of crypto, a white hat. A white hat of white hat.
Starting point is 00:56:19 Yeah, white hat of white hat that finds our issues before they happen in most cases. Over the past few days, I've been working with a group. of white hats, auditors, and other security leaders to try and solve the hardest part of responsible disclosure, finding the right person to talk to. And he's got an image of the bat signal here. What's the take for this? Why are we including this in the agenda? So this is a telegram bot is basically what's going on. So there's a telegram bot that anyone can use during emergencies to get in touch with trusted members of the security white hat community. So trusted white hat hackers and their extensive network of contacts.
Starting point is 00:56:55 It's basically 911 for Defi protocols. I actually think I'm so proud of Sam. Obviously, he doesn't need to be anyone any more proud. Just like 911 is. Yes. Except it shows, it is an example of self-regulation and self-management of this own industry. Not only is it a public good,
Starting point is 00:57:14 but it is also a sign of maturity for what needs to happen if we are also going to have permissionless finance. I don't think we can make that point enough, honestly. It's like, as some, the regulators look in and say, crypto's completely unregulated and the crypto markets aren't doing anything about it. And then I look at things like this. It's like, no, we're, we are doing exactly what you should be. You would never be able to do. You know what? I also look at, you know what's another example of this? Is L2 freaking beat? Okay?
Starting point is 00:57:42 This is very, better than anything the SEC is, or CFTC has ever put forward for disclosures in crypto is creating a staging process for how decentralized our layer twos are. And creating a scoring. That is the industry regulating itself. And I think that should be commended. So very cool to see Sam CZ doing that. David, this is also cool. Nearly $3 million in sales in last 24 hours for Draft Kings NFTs.
Starting point is 00:58:10 I guess the theme this week is companies buying block space and using crypto, right? So this is draft kings. So Draft Kings is a, it's a fantasy sports betting. They're in the sports industry. They're in the sport. Yeah, sports fantasy betting. Do you know this is a, let me show you a stock. Have you ever looked at a public company?
Starting point is 00:58:29 Wow. It's a public company. Drafts King's worth about $2 billion, something like this. 12, $13 billion. Oh, $13 billion dollars. $2 million in revenue. So $2 billion in revenue last year, $13 billion. Sorry, I'm a little rusty on, looking at stocks here.
Starting point is 00:58:46 Tritfinials. Yeah. And they were, according to Sandeep here, they were the number one collection by sales volume on polygons. They beat board apes. They beat a lot of other things. They beat board apes on the Ethereum layer one. $3 million in sales on Polygon, which is the number one of sales across the NFT industry in the last week. Wow, that's crazy.
Starting point is 00:59:10 Yeah. Right? And I don't even know about this because I don't pay no attention. Yeah, I don't watch sports. It's very cool to see that that's bleeding outside of crypto culture, though. But going back to crypto culture, what's this from Frank DeGods? Yeah, so Polygon gets a dub, but then also Polygon takes an L. Utes gets yeated from Polygon to Ethereum.
Starting point is 00:59:32 So Uts is two D-Gods like mutant apes are two board apes, basically the derivative project. Same team. Utes is like the expansion collection. D-Gods, Uts, they were a big NFT hit on Solana before migrating. to Polygon. We actually had Frank from D-Gods on the show to talk about this after moving from Polygon, from moving from Solana to Polygon as the bear market wore on economies shriveled up, including the Solana ecosystem. So Polygon gave a $3 million grant to Utes to migrate to Polygon specifically. So fast forward to today, D-Gons has done well on Ether, Layer 1, and it actually
Starting point is 01:00:11 has given the D-Gods Utes Y-Eats-Y-Z-Y-Z-0-0-0-0-0-2. OTS team. UTS. It's given them confidence that they actually can be a blue chip NFT on the Ethereum layer one. They actually don't need Polygon. So they are migrating from Polygon to the Ethereum layer one. They're also returning the $3 million grant to Polygon as well.
Starting point is 01:00:33 And so that's the news. So from Solana to Polygon to Ethereum. That sounds like just a pure business decision to me. What do you think? Yeah, that's right. Well, it also shows the gravity well that is the Ethereum layer one. And so, like, if the goal of all high value assets is to be on the Ethereum layer one. David, did you see this?
Starting point is 01:00:51 This clip. This is a Joe Biden clip. You ready for this? It's drinking coffee. Look at his mug. Yeah. Look at his mug. I like my coffee dark.
Starting point is 01:01:01 What is that? What's on his mug, David? For the podcast listeners, he is drinking a mug of Joe Biden's bust 2024 with some glowing, deep red, laser eyes. Laser eyes. Laser eyes. Bitcoin Maxmos laser eyes. Wow. Where did that come from?
Starting point is 01:01:21 Yeah, I don't think it's related to Bitcoin. Unfortunately, David, even though there was some hope or speculation. I think this is a different meme from a different corner of the internet that crossed into crypto for a brief moment here. It's like a dark Brandon meme, I think, that his campaign is using. It's nothing to do with Bitcoin. All right, well, let's try to unpack this a little bit, even though we just don't know too many details. Is Huobi insolvent? That is a centralized exchange. I believe they're based in China and a fairly large one. At least like, you know, at some point in time,
Starting point is 01:01:56 was top five. I'm not sure where they stood right now. But there's some questions around its solvency. What do we know so far? So some financial media organizations in Hong Kong have reported that several executives at Huobi have been taken away by police in China. A spokesperson for Huobi denied this. Huobi stable coin exchange balances dipped by 33%. So they lost a third of stable coins. So almost $50 million has been withdrawn from Huobi. I'm pretty sure I remember this story happening like two years ago exactly as written as
Starting point is 01:02:28 With Huobi? With Huobi, yeah. Rumors of Huobie insolvency, executives taken away by Chinese government, and then nothing happened. So what do you think? Is this another repeat? I don't know. I don't know. All right.
Starting point is 01:02:41 Well, don't keep your funds on centralized exchanges, kids. It's another reminder. David, you'll never guess this headline. With AI booming, Gary Gensler wants to keep finance safe for humans. The head of the SEC is focused on the risk to markets and investors when AI is making trades and recommendations. David, this is Gary Gensler. He is pivoting from crypto to AI. Great.
Starting point is 01:03:04 Great. Yeah. Focusing on AI. Keep on focusing on AI. I think this just like, this. This is the emperor is wearing no clothes and it proves it. It's just like Gary Gensler is just trend following as the influencer that he is. And now he's focused on AI because AI is totally going to disrupt securities markets.
Starting point is 01:03:25 Like crypto, he actually has some like some foundation to stand on because these are financial assets. What is going on in the AI market that needs Gary Gensler's attention? So you think he's just fear chasing, just narrative chasing? Yeah, he's being an influencer. Yeah. So Gary is going to say, like, I can't. Next year he's going to, or next week he's going to rotate to semiconductors. It's going to be great.
Starting point is 01:03:47 I can't think of anybody who actually wants him to do this. Like, what is he, how is he going to keep finance safe for humans in the world of AI? This is a rogue human. Like, what practically does that even mean? Speaking of weird headlines, an FTX lobbyist tried to buy a Pacific island called Nauru in order to create a new super species. What? A super species, yeah. The younger brother of Sam Bankman Fried, his name is Gabe Bankman Fried, and he tried to buy an island to create a new super species of human beings, genetically modified human beings.
Starting point is 01:04:21 Is this even real? Like, what is going on here? Okay, so this is called the transhumanist movement. It's not actually all that cringe, except when you pair it with SBF and all the effective altruism groups and also all the wealth that they have. Then it starts to get really weird. So he wanted to buy an island to create a fortified. a copplex apocalypse bunker state in the event where 50 to 99.9% of people die for some sort of reason to protect his philanthropic allies and create a genetically enhanced human species. This is the headline that we are
Starting point is 01:04:55 reading to you. Wow. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I'm speechless. You don't have to say anything. We can just let the headline stand on the zone and move on, please. David, this was a really cool demo this week. I feel like this is a major unlock for wallets. Goldfinch wallet. This is their Unipig moment. Do you know what I'm talking about when I say Unipug moment? I do. I bet you about 80% of Bankless listeners does not. Okay. What was Unipig? Unipig was the demo between optimism and uniswap. And it was the first iteration of an optimistic roll-up deployed to Ethereum that was just meant to be a Uniswap application. So back before we knew, we knew, about layer twos in the way that we know them now.
Starting point is 01:05:40 It was the first implementation of layer two's. And it was like everyone was having this like breakthrough aha moment when after being used to uniswap on the Ethereum layer one, they used UniPig, which was a unswap fork on an optimistic rollup, very early version of optimism as a layer two. And everyone realized that, oh, it's rollups, rollups are where it's at. It was a breakthrough demo and we were still years from getting rollups to mainnet. But everyone, everyone who saw this. Yeah, we were like, oh,
Starting point is 01:06:08 okay, this is how Ethereum is going to scale. So I saw something similar when I saw this demo. This is a wallet demo. You can access it at D5 for the world. And basically in about like 15 seconds, you can open up a wallet with no seed phrase, biometric signing as well. So it works on your phone, kind of, you know, face scan. It's self-custody, okay?
Starting point is 01:06:32 So private key accessible. There are some compromises on it, but like it just felt. so easy to use and set up. Oh, I should mention full account abstraction. So gasless transactions and deployed on base, deployed on a layer two as well, right? So this is the diagram of how it works. There's a web standard that's commonly used. It's called passcode that can, you know, use the secure enclave of your phone. Every phone has a secure enclave that is authenticated via, you know, pin number or biometric access, you know, ID, face ID. And then the private keys are actually stored inside of a third party called Turnkey.
Starting point is 01:07:12 That's probably the point of weakness for me, but Turnkey has a really interesting component. Anyway, this, an other third party called Zero Dev bundles this up and makes account abstraction work. And the whole experience is you get a wallet in about like five seconds and it feels very fintech. The most bankless wallet possible inside of five seconds. I would say so, right? There's a few weak points maybe, but I would say so. And what's exciting to me and why this is comparable to the Unipig moment for me is like, okay, now I see the future.
Starting point is 01:07:45 The big next step for crypto is we have to make wallet UX easy. If we're going to get to a billion users and they're not going to use some centralized exchange or service, we have to make this whole process of setting up a wallet and holding your own private keys very easy. And this was a big step towards accomplishing that. So really cool, exciting demo. Another paired announcement, Turnkey, which is what we were talking about, that powers this whole thing. It's out of private beta and is now available for people to play with. No widgets, no pre-built generic U.S. is no limits on what you can create.
Starting point is 01:08:17 There's a link in the show notes to get started with Turnkey, if you so choose. Perhaps this is the Cambrian explosion of wallets going into a web two. Moving on to Zora. Zora has introduced protocol rewards, on-chain rewards for creators and devs, possible by Zora's Mintfi, which now automatically splits across creators and developers. All right, getting into raises of the week. And we've made a decision in the template for the bankless weekly roll-up. And so we're going to articulate what we are going to do with the raises section.
Starting point is 01:08:45 We've had trouble in times deciding which raises to talk about and which raises to not talk about because we didn't really have a standard for making this concrete. So here's what we're going to do going forward. Any big raises that like reverberate throughout the crypto ecosystem that is like news, we will talk about. And then we are also going to include anything that bankless, ventures is investing in. As a inception of the moment of a conflict of interest, whenever bankless ventures, our VC company, our VC firm, invest in something, we will also include it in the
Starting point is 01:09:16 raises. So big raises that become large enough to be news. And then also the moment of inception of a conflict of interest about when bankless ventures invested in something. Yeah. So this week, there were really no big raises that were on our radar. So normally we would skip this section. But there was a bankless ventures investment this week. Puffer Finance, They just raised a $5.5 million seed. Bankless Ventures was part of that. David, why do we invest in Puffer? Yeah, so Puffer is a LSD protocol in joining the ranks of like Lido, Rocket Pool, Stater, Diva, Swell.
Starting point is 01:09:48 And so it is going to have an LSD. It is different from all of these. It's got this one unique differentiator that I think really sealed the deal for me personally, which is inclusion of trusted execution environments inside of the LSD ecosystem. And so trusted execution environments, it's this primitive that are a part of just chips and hardware that Puffer is incorporating into their LSD. And so things like scroll and EigenLayer that need trusted execution services can have those services specifically enabled by Puffer and allows for the Puffer LSD to get extra yield
Starting point is 01:10:24 by providing TEE to the Ethereum ecosystem. Sri Ram from EigenLayer is an angel investor, as well as a member of Oble, which is a is also perhaps a user of TEE. And so that competitive advantage of TEE as a service is what attracted me to and bankless ventures to this deal. Yeah, congrats to puffer on that raise. We got a lot more coming up next, including some questions from the nation. ETH versus Layer 2, token value capture. We're talking about that again and some hot takes from crypto, Twitter, including why the Bitcoin ETF is a bigger deal than you might think. As always, make sure you like and subscribe. If you appreciate the content, we'll be right back.
Starting point is 01:11:02 Introducing Polygon 2.0, the value layer for the internet. For too long, the limitations of blockchains have held back app development and stifled user adoption. The internet allows anyone to create and exchange information. What's missing is a value layer that lets anyone exchange, store, and program value. That's where Polygon 2.0 comes in. Polygon Labs has unveiled a series of innovations that will radically alter the Polygon ecosystem and Web3 as a whole. By leveraging groundbreaking ZK innovations, such as Polygon ZKEVM, the next iteration of the best-in-class Plonkey 2 proving system,
Starting point is 01:11:34 and a first of its kind, ZK-powered interoperability layer, Polygon 2.0 will give users and deaths, unlimited scalability and unified liquidity. Right now, there is a Polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon proof-of-stake. If approved, Polygon proof-of-stake would become a layer-2, ZK-EVM, validity. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to help the Polygon community give the Internet the value layer it deserves.
Starting point is 01:12:01 Are you planning to launch a token? Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens.
Starting point is 01:12:19 Toku will help you navigate across the lifecycle of your token from easy to use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing post-cliff taxable events with payroll. For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge complex. complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll, and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space, Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help in navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to Toku.com slash bankless
Starting point is 01:12:55 or click the link in the description below. Questions from the nation this week, this one from seyogi.eathe. reason to think that implementation of massively lower cost L2s won't tank the demand for the use of ether, which is one of its pricing factors? And what do you think about that? We get all this cheap blocks based on layer two. Does that tank the price of ether? Yeah, so this is the conversation of our layer two's, our Ethereum layer two is parasitic to ether. And the answer is yes and no, but I would definitely say mostly no. And I think we saw this in the episode when we talked about Utes migrating from Solana to Polygon to the Ethereum layer one. While Polygon does pull,
Starting point is 01:13:31 TVL from the Ethereum layer 1 to Polygon or any layer 2 does this. Also, Ethereum itself is its own gravitational pull for liquidity. So it's a yes-and conversation. Ethereum layer 1 is going to have the most central liquidity in all of its own landscape. And so the massively lower cost of layer 2s are going to actually induce new transaction types, new types of economies that require low transaction fees, whereas the Ethereum layer one is going to be the epicenter of liquidity and high value transactions. And so I always have said that layer twos will actually induce net new economic activity
Starting point is 01:14:10 rather than being more parasitic to the Ethereum layer one. But then also, ETH will become money inside of all of these networks. And so the way that layer two economics works is that ether, it sacrifices the value of the transaction economy, the value of transactions, you know, gas fees, to the layer two tokens inside of each respective layer two, but it wins a pluralist network economy that all these networks use ether as its reserve currency. So in order to give room for these layer twos to exist, it gives up the transaction economy, the gas fee economy to the layer two tokens, but it wins another network that uses ether as money. And to follow through on this thread, I put out a tweet this
Starting point is 01:14:51 week, last bull market, ether was money only for Ethereum. This bull market, ether will be the money for the majority of chains for polygon, for arbitrome, for optimism, for base. And then I finished with saying, this cycle, ETH becomes money for the internet, is my bold take of the week. Yeah, I think that's right. I would add this take from pseudo, L2 business models are actually really simple. Layer two fees minus layer one settlement costs plus verification equals profit. Layer two's are really value-added resellers of layer one block space.
Starting point is 01:15:23 I don't think they're any more competitive than states are competitive with the federal government in this world. Of course, there's always that one state who could get really, really, really, really big and then threatened to secede from the federal government. But I don't think we're there yet. And as always, the US dollar and the kind of the United States becomes the currency of all of its respective states in the union. So that's how I expect that'll play out. Hey, we got some takes of the week. This is the first one from David Bailey. It's not just the insane flows. The ETF is truly the definitive integrative. into our financial system. You can own ETF shares tax-free in your IRA. Your bank will recognize
Starting point is 01:16:02 ETF shares when you apply for a mortgage. You can borrow against ETF shares. You can margin ETF shares. You can lend out your shares and gain yield. If $100 billion flows into the ETF next cycle and the price of Bitcoin is $10x, $1 trillion of ETF wealth will cause trillions of new credit within the financial system. Tens of millions of Americans will see their assets balloon in value. This is really the bull case, I think, for the ETF, which is the Bitcoin ETF, which I still am holding. I think it happens this year or shortly after, but I'll say this year is a shortcut. We will get a Bitcoin spot ETF. That represents after how long has Bitcoin been in existence?
Starting point is 01:16:41 12 years, 13 years? Okay. That represents... 13, 14? 14? 13. Okay. So close to that.
Starting point is 01:16:48 That represents financial integration into the traditional system, which is absolutely crazy that we've come here, like gotten this far in just over a decade. The ETF will be an absolutely massive win, and I think we're on the cusp of it. I think to put this into language that I think bankless listeners will be familiar with, the ETF is a money Lego that is very important for getting Bitcoin into TradFi so that it can go in margin accounts, and it can go in yield accounts, and it can just be expressed in Tradfai. And so it creates, induces a ton of reservation demand for Bitcoin. It is the building block that we need for Bitcoin to be incorporated in TradPai.
Starting point is 01:17:29 Yeah. This is a take from Dankrad. PSA, if it doesn't use Ethereum for data availability, it's not an Ethereum roll-up, and therefore it's not an Ethereum layer two. Wow. Dankrad, the hardliner. All right. There was some back and forth, a lot of commentary sort of debating that, right?
Starting point is 01:17:46 And this goes to what's the definition of a layer two and what's the definition of a roll-up? And I think we're playing kind of like games of words and games of definition, which, by the way, is not a bad game to play. I think we need to be precise in our language and in our definition. So I think Dankrad is making the case that it can only be called a layer two and or an Ethereum roll-up if it does two things. One, consensus on Ethereum, which is, of course, based, but also data availability layer on Ethereum. Okay? So that would cut out a class of what some people would call roll-ups called validiums, which they, you know, park their consensus data on Ethereum,
Starting point is 01:18:24 but data availability, it could be somewhere else. You know, Arbitram Nova is the example of this. You know, a mutable has lots of versions of this. There's all sorts of, you know, the Polygon-Prove-of-Stake system is moving more towards a validium type of architecture. So it's really a question of what gets it to call itself a layer two or an Ethereum roadmap and Dankrad here is saying unless the data availability is on Ethereum, it's not a roll-up, at least according to him. What's your take on this?
Starting point is 01:18:53 I think that's right. Yeah. So we have Ethereum roll-ups and then we have roll-ups. And both can hook into the Ethereum layer one. But Dankrat is saying, in order to be a roll-up that is an Ethereum roll-up, you must use Ethereum data availability. And so he's like presenting the hardliner argument for how you legitimately call yourself an Ethereum roll-up. But then it's leaving room. for non-Etherium roll-ups to still settle to the Ethereum layer 1, you just use a different data availability solution like eigenlayer data availability or probably on a valid data availability. It does.
Starting point is 01:19:26 Yeah, because EIP 4844 is allowing Ethereum block space, which is the most pristine World War III resistant block space in existence to be allowed for layer 2s. And so if they want to use, it's supposed to say like, hey, you can use this and have the best insurances, it's still going to be the most expensive version of data availability, even if it's a hundred times cheaper than it already is today, because you can also just use, like, a self-run database, and that will be even cheaper for you. So there's always, there's going to be a different ways to use data. And Dan Kraid is saying, well, if you want to be the gold standard, which is Ethereum, you need to use EIP 4844. You need to use Ethereum. And if you don't use the gold standard,
Starting point is 01:20:08 then you don't get to use the Ethereum brand as your roll-up name. Which is not out yet, by the way. EIP 4844 is not available yet, but we'll be soon. Yeah, I could see that. I think for myself, until this is sort of the dust settles with what the community decides is kind of how we're going to name these things, I'm going to start being a bit more deliberate in talking about Ethereum roll-up versus a Validium. Right. David, you got to take here, I'll read it out.
Starting point is 01:20:36 The chapter of 2021 to 2022 Scammers is coming to a close, but our 2024 to 2025 chapter of scammers is about to begin. Oh, that doesn't sound good, David. Those who would harm this industry walk among us today. Let's not repeat 2022. Let's stay vigilant. The SEC and mainstream media aren't going to help us. It's up to us, Uncle Sam picture pointing at us. David, are you charging us with some responsibility during the next bull market? Almost always am I charging people with responsibility. So this is just a continuation of my take from last week about Doe Kwan, Alex Wyshyshysh, SBCF, three hours of capital, Richard Hart, all going to jail, or being fined in some prospective way.
Starting point is 01:21:15 So we get to celebrate about that, but also reminder, bull markets attract grifters. And so if we are going to enjoy a bull market, we need to also be aware that it is going to attract grifters and is going to bring us a new cohort of scammers. And so we should be cognizant about how that is also going to happen and take our lessons of 2021 and 2022 forward so that we can be better in the future. That's a good take. What do you bullish on this week, man? bullish on the OP stack, man.
Starting point is 01:21:45 I've been bullish on the OP stack for a while. I made the OP stack video about what the OP stack is and why I think it's exciting in November of 2022. And this was after I wrote my EVM equivalence article. This is my second victory lap of the week of this episode. You only get two per week. First, I just like am so proud of the optimism team for having the conviction and the vision that they had from day one. One of the original things that they wanted to do is connect transaction ordering to public goods. Sequencer fees to funding public goods.
Starting point is 01:22:23 Raw degeneracy and Moloch turning into Ethereum's Phoenix and funding sustainable open source projects that can scale out to the world. And they've had this same convicted thesis from the gecko. And now, Coinbase, a public company in crypto, launching a layer two using the OP stack, which is meant to be forked and meant to be on and meant to be spawning 10,000 chains, all of a sudden they're creating the OP collective, which is going to have weight and bargaining power for public goods, and it's going to be financed by the O.P people forking the O.P stack and wanting to join that collective. It took such strong vision and execution back in 2018, 2019, when the optimism team came together out of the Plasma Group, and they've just followed through on it in, I think, fantastic sense. And it's beautiful
Starting point is 01:23:12 when you see a plan come together and also a plan that I think just goes so deep to the values of Ethereum and scaling Ethereum values. It's just nice to see what I consider to be the good guys. Take a huge dub. And so just big clap to the optimism team. It all started with the Unipig, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah, very cool. I think the thing I'm bullish on is similar, but also broader, which is this, I'm bullish on all layer too. in particular, this really crafty approach, I feel like the Ethereum community and the Ethereum Foundation had with respect to layer twos.
Starting point is 01:23:52 This is an episode that's not out yet, but I got pre-listened access from our Pod Squad team, and thank you for recording it, David. Which is the sci-fi roadmap for Ethereum with Justin Drake, Drake, and Tim Bako. By the way, I haven't finished it yet, but I can't wait to go back to it.
Starting point is 01:24:09 It's not an RSS feed. I'm going to do this weird Google Drive. Anyway. So I'm listening to it. And then Justin Drake is describing basically layer twos. And what's incredible to me is when he talks about how layer twos are basically funded, massively funded by investor dollars, by VC dollars. And this is the private market taking the execution layer for Ethereum and launching like
Starting point is 01:24:38 50 different incredible experiments on it. and then accelerating those experiments so fast because they have all of these disparate teams and all of this capital going and attacking the problem at once. And it just struck me as he was talking about how geniuses strategy this was for this particular layer of the stack. You focus on consensus for Ethereum and then you launch like, you know, a hundred private company type of experiments on top. And some of these might be able to turn into public goods as well.
Starting point is 01:25:12 well. And then what Ethereum plans to do is take the best designs and the best experiments and enshrine them in an enshrined roll-up inside of Ethereum. And so make the best projects, like private company projects, kind of public infrastructure again. Anyway, it didn't have to be the case. This was not the original strategy for Ethereum. Ethereum originally was going to develop everything. And this strategy, this play, worked out very well. And yeah, I'm very bullish on everything that's going on in kind of the layer two ecosystem as a result.
Starting point is 01:25:50 Yeah, that episode comes out next week. There we go. David, we've got a meme of the week. What are we looking at right here? Meme of the week. This is coming on from David Phelps. He goes, every crypto company's pitch deck right now, and he's got a two-by-two grid here.
Starting point is 01:26:06 And one spectrum has not been hacked and has been hacked. and has been hacked and also is in jail or is not in jail. And all of our companies, competitors, have either been hacked or are in jail. But this company, the one you're getting pitched, bankless listeners, our company is both not in jail and has not been hacked. That's all you need. Where do I send my money? You're still standing.
Starting point is 01:26:34 Oh, God, our standards are on the floor. Yeah. That is the game, though. You just got to survive for sure. going to end with our standard risks and disclaimers in a minute. But first we disclose on the show today. We mentioned a few projects that David and I are advisors for including some of the layer twos like optimism and Polygon and ZK Sync.
Starting point is 01:26:52 I am also an investor in Zora, a small angel check, and both David and I, as always, we hold a whole bunch of ETH. We are long-term investors, not journalists. We don't do paid content. And there's a link to bankless disclosures in the show notes. And of course, got to let you know. None of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky.
Starting point is 01:27:10 You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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