Bankless - ROLLUP: Blobs Arrive | BTC New High | ETH ETF? | Bankless 4th Birthday

Starting point is 00:00:00 Brian, I want to talk about the blobs. I want to talk about how optimism is using the blobs. I want to talk about how darkness using the blobs. Arbitrum is using the blobs in a very special way, so we're going to talk about that. We're just talking about the blobs base. We're going to talk about the blob contention. There's a new phrase just dropped, blob contention. Gets me all like hot and bothered.

Starting point is 00:00:18 I'm pretty psyched about blobs, Ryan. I can't talk to you enough about blobs. Well, this is going to turn into a blob cast, I could tell. Bankless Nation, it's the third week of March. Blob Week, it's Blob Week, it's Blob Week of March. Blobs everywhere. Yeah, Dave, we've got to talk about the blobs because this is Ethereum shipping an absolutely major upgrade.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Would you say this is the biggest upgrade since the merge? The second biggest upgrade ever, the biggest one being the merge. Yeah, now we have BlobSpace on Ethereum. In addition to some other cool stuff that is in the Ethereum Protocol now, it's really EIP 4844 that is now fully a part of the Ethereum Protocol enthrining blob space into the protocol itself, allowing layer twos to become super fast. All the layer twos are celebrating

Starting point is 00:01:07 and boasting their super speedy, super quick, super cheap transactions. Transactions across the optimistic roll-ups right now, like even some of the more complex stuff are zero cents. Oh my God. It feels so good. Will it last? Is the big question?

Starting point is 00:01:21 Is this just a short blippin time on blob space or is this going to be the new meta in Ethereum layer twos? That's a good question for sure. So we're going to talk about all of that. Also, Bitcoin hit another all-time high this week. A legit David Hoffman all-time high. You cannot dispute this all-time high. Are you capitulating, right?

Starting point is 00:01:38 Bitcoin all-time high. I'm not capitulating. I'm declaring the all-time high has been hit by Bitcoin. It passed David's line. We're at like $73,000 or something. Also, Eiff tipped over 4K. We're going to talk about that. I want to talk to you, too, about the wider context of this.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Like, where are we in the cycle? How early is it? The forever question. And also, are we going to get this Ethereum ETF? A bit of banter on that. Justin Drake says yes. Other people say no. Ethereum is getting its first restaked layer two.

Starting point is 00:02:08 Another layer two on Ethereum is if we need it anymore. Just kidding, we need all of them. But it's a layer two with new superpowers. Who is building it, what to expect. Also, some things in the Solana world, Tensor has announced their token. It's one of the biggest protocols on. Salana is basically the blur for Solana.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Very hyped. They're getting their token. Gito. on Solana, also getting rid of its mempool. Turns out Solana discovers MEV is a thing. And also a crypto project is going to be on the Vegas sphere.

Starting point is 00:02:36 So maybe that, Ryan, answers a little bit about where we are in this cycle. And then also, the bankless podcast. Gets his fourth birthday ever. So something special for bankless podcast, enjoyers. It's not the only birthday on the podcast today. Ryan, so.

Starting point is 00:02:50 What? Is it my birthday today? I don't know. That's a question to you, brother. I have a question for you. Okay, so a mysterious package. arrived on my front porch this morning, okay? And it was addressed to not Ryan Sean Adams, it was addressed to Ryan Dad Adams, okay? And I thought to myself, who in the world would do this?

Starting point is 00:03:10 Like, it looks like it was a package from Herman Miller. I was like, did one of my kids see that? And like, no, my kids can't afford a Herman Miller piece of furniture. Like, what is this? So I brought it inside still, like having no idea who actually sent me this. But I'm thinking, David, and we haven't talked about this yet, I'm thinking it may have been you. And what awaits me in that package is a brand new chair. Can you show the podcast viewers, the chair that you have been sitting on since the inception of this goddamn company? It's take it to step back and show just like the absolute lack of lumbar support that this fucking stool has. This is like for the podcast listeners. This is like a counter height stool for your

Starting point is 00:03:55 kitchen. It's a running thing. I took from somewhere else in his house and he's like, oh, I need a chair for my office. And he has not invested in his lumbar spine whatsoever. That's literally how it happened. This is just a chair from another place in my house. And every time we talked about this, you've been absolutely incredulous. You've been like, Ryan, when are you getting a new chair? When are you going to do this? So you just set me one. Thanks, man. I appreciate this. So what am I getting? What awaits me in the package? It's a Herman Miller embodied chair. It's the one that I use. It is a very fun chair. You get to bounce around on it.

Starting point is 00:04:28 It like curves up your spine. You get to sit on it all day. I don't know how your spine doesn't hurt. That's expensive. You spend some money on this, David. It must be a bull market. It was a company expense. Oh.

Starting point is 00:04:39 All right. Well, thanks for spending our money. I appreciate that for my spine. I'm sure my spine appreciates that as well. Oh, my God. I appreciate it. Hey, no, no, no. I want to talk one more thing with you because this is in your apartment.

Starting point is 00:04:54 All right. This is the plant wall. Tell us about the plant wall. I'm showing it on screen. Happy birthday, Ryan. And happy birthday from the bankless nation. Thanks for the chair, bankless nation. Thanks for the chair.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Thank you. All right. So what are we looking at here? I have noticed in your background, some on kind of the left side. It's still kind of green. Yeah. Yeah, it's getting a bit more green. And I remember in the 2021 cycle, like you were in your San Diego apartment.

Starting point is 00:05:17 It just kept getting more and more green every day that we would do a podcast until your entire back like a, part of your apartment was covered with plants. Yeah, you actually literally couldn't. Yeah, slightly off camera, actually. So there are some plants that have made it on camera, but you can see the wall of plants that is just to the left of the... The reason why this became relevant

Starting point is 00:05:37 was because me and Ryan were prepping for the show this morning, and then my circuit breaker pops, and I just go completely dark. And it's because, like, I have these studio lights for podcasting for whenever I want to do an in-person podcast, but they are also, like, very powerful plant grow lights. And so I have them like turned on and pointed to my plants because like, why the hell not? But then they're also really hot.

Starting point is 00:06:00 And it's a solid 69 degrees in New York right now. Nice. And my apartment gets very, very sunny. And so I had to turn on my air conditioning in, what is it, March. And so between the grow lights and the air conditioning and my computer, the circuit breaker pops. And I just like disappeared on Ryan during prep for the show. Yeah, that's, you're in a negative flywheel there. If you have more plants, more lights, more heat, more air conditioning.

Starting point is 00:06:25 more electricity. These things could keep happening, David. Anyway, I'm really excited about your plant collection. I'm really excited about your chair. We'll keep the Bankless Nation updated on those two things. Also, speaking of updates, can you tell them about primed stake, our friends and sponsors over at Prime Stake?

Starting point is 00:06:43 This is a restaking protocol. Pretty exciting. What are they up to? Yeah, brand new, Spiffy LRT protocol on the horizon. Prime Staked, of course, it gives you liquidity for your assets that you deposit into eigenlayer, so you can convert your staked eth into prime eth, prime staked, kind of like prime steak, like your prime prime.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Yeah, we get. Yeah, I see the prime rib logo here. Of course. So you get your eigenlayer points. You get your eith staking yield. You also get prime eth, XP points, which are, of course, the points for prime east. And so if you want to catch up on some eigenlayer points, you can get a hundred and fifty-six

Starting point is 00:07:17 bonus eigenlayer points per ETH deposited into prime staked, if you want to try out this new LRT protocol and catch up. on some eigenlayer points as well. There's a link in the show notes. This is a eigen bonus week starting on the 18th of this month, which is in three days. And so there's a link in the show notes in order to get started. And this is the part where I got to just mention, of course, restaking protocols are brand new. And so they are a little further on the risk spectrum. So keep that in mind as you think about restaking in any restaking protocol. All right, David, tell us about Bitcoin all-time highs because we have officially crossed David Hoffman's bar to all-time highs.

Starting point is 00:07:54 Thank you for tweeting that at me. I appreciate knowing from you that we had hit Bitcoin all-time highs. I think it happened maybe sometime Sunday, something like this. Yeah, it was on Sunday. Right. Where are we right now on the week? Currently at 71,200 started the week at 67,400, up 5.5. A modest 5.5% on the week.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Did you know, Ryan, that actually we've had one red week in the last seven weeks and it was only a down 1% week that week. We were up 70% on Bitcoin in seven weeks. On the note of calling all-time highs, I do think this one of YouTube comment from last week was pretty funny, which is like maybe the guy who doesn't own any Bitcoin doesn't get to call when the Bitcoin all-time highs are. Which I do understand. I do think that point.

Starting point is 00:08:40 Bankless owns Bitcoin, unless you spend all of it on my chair here, but we sell some Bitcoin. So by proxy you on Bitcoin. Okay, well, that's exciting. So we are in uncharted territory. Bitcoin's been going up only. This is why people are actually asking, are we going to have a reversion to you some local mean here?

Starting point is 00:08:58 So maybe we'll get to that in a little bit. But another thing to celebrate is Bitcoin actually surpassed the market cap, the total value of silver this week. It's down and hair below. Oh, but look at this. Necky neck. It'll get there. Silver is a thing of the past in like next week.

Starting point is 00:09:16 Well, silver is $1.4 trillion. and Bitcoin is 1.4 trillion as well. So silver must just have a decimal edge here. Silver has 80 million more dollar market cap than Bitcoin. Wow. The number two assets. So I guess Bitcoin is gold, silver. And Lightcoin has nothing to do with this, huh, David? That's right. Well, Lightcoin has always been irrelevant. It's just taking time for the market to realize that. This is Dan McArdle, keeping receipts, as always. He says this. They tried to tell you Bitcoin outperformance was a one-time thing due to zero percent. And government stimulus checks, but this is the long-term scoreboard. Look at all of that green, David. This is year by year.

Starting point is 00:09:53 Bitcoin returns versus gold versus S&P 500. And if you kind of compare it, yeah, that's a 14-year return of 2.4 billion percent on Bitcoin. Not so bad. We have some measurement, subjectivity going on here, but the point still stands that Bitcoin has been the greatest investment compared to all traditional investments since its inception session. Yeah, over the past decade for sure. It only was really bad if you got in at 20, 2017, 2021, and maybe in 2025. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people just missed out on, I think, once in a lifetime gains by just fading crypto too early and thinking it's a meme, thinking it's a scam, think it's a Ponzi.

Starting point is 00:10:37 The tulip mania thing has cost a lot of people, a lot of money, I would say. Let's flip over to ETH. We're on the track and charts, as usual. What's ETH looking like on the week? ETH starting the week at $3840, up 1% up $40 on the week. You know, actually, ETH price action was more exciting than that really accounts for. Like, we got up to $4,200, $4,100. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:58 But we are basically down around full circle to where we started the week, $3,880. Well, that above 4K, I mean, 4K is kind of a round number here. And we haven't been that high since, like, for two years. It's been over two years since we've seen that. We spent very little time. ETH has spent very little time above $4,000. Yeah, look at this. Like a brief period in May, it looks like May 21,

Starting point is 00:11:22 and then a brief period between November, 21. Yeah, November, to January, I think. Into January. So can I ask you? So we can have consensus on this, David. What is the Eth all-time high number? What is kind of, when will you celebrate hitting Eth all-time highs? I think the true accurate number is somewhere in the 4,000, low 4,900s-ish, if I remember correctly,

Starting point is 00:11:49 like high 488, low 4, 9,000. But it's really, we got to go for the round numbers. So it was 70,000 for Bitcoin, 5,000 for Eth. Once it hits 5,000, it's unequited, like we've hit a new round number. So you're playing hard mode. You don't want to call a specific, you know, 4,800, something like this. By the way, that's Coin Gecko, all-time high price, 4850 or something like this. You want to just square it up to 5K and then you celebrate.

Starting point is 00:12:14 Yeah, exactly. All right. I don't mind. Oh, oh, come on. Like, the new all time I is going to be something like 15, 20K.

Starting point is 00:12:22 So I'm not going to just like get excited about the difference between $4,880 and $5,000. I'm just going to go for $5,000. 15 to 20K. Wow, dude. I can't wait for that. Look at this. This is global crypto market cap. We are at $2.82 trillion.

Starting point is 00:12:38 Moving fast. Moving really fast. And this is, like getting close to all-time highs. So look at this. We hit $3 trillion. Just very briefly, $3 trillion. We're almost there.

Starting point is 00:12:48 We're basically there, yeah. All right, does this worry you? Does it feel like it's happening too soon? No, I am not worried generally about frothiness or anything until I will start to be worried about like the teeteringness of the market and the paper gains of the market after ETF inflows stop being insane. Until further notice, you are allowed. to be as bullish as you want to be until the ETL flows like wean and there's no sign of them

Starting point is 00:13:17 weaning whatsoever. So how far are we in the in the bull market do you think? I mean, are we entering into the second half, would you say? Are we still in the first half? Or are we like, are we actually top signaling and, you know, things are kind of like starting to flash? The thing is like we got one year of top signals from 2021 to 2022. Yeah. And there were still plenty of like gains. to be made after top signal started to come. I had the same conversation with Mike Abolito on the podcast, not too long ago. When we were like, it was the beginning of the fourth inning about is kind of what we said.

Starting point is 00:13:51 But it also really depends on when you started counting the bull market. And I think we are in the beginning of the fourth inning if you count like a very early bull market and it's a very long game. I think really the like the Gito AirDrop on Solana and then the Solana DTI summer is kind of like the soft official, unofficial launch of the bull market, if anyone can really put any date on it. But I think this thing could like kind of,

Starting point is 00:14:20 like, if the ETH ETH ETH ETF gets approved by November, of which the odds are still pretty good, I don't care what anyone says, like, that's just good continuation of more flows into crypto. And the ETH ETH, the Bitcoin ETF flows,

Starting point is 00:14:33 like have potentially a ton of life in them, like potentially like three to six more months of net new buyers from different corners of Tradfly coming into buy Bitcoin. And so that has a ton of life and energy left in it. And so, like, to me, I'm calling for, like, an idea is, like, you have, like, six to nine months where, like, we have, like, free paper gains because of all these inflows into the ETFs.

Starting point is 00:14:56 And everyone is speculating downstream. That being said, it doesn't matter how strong the fundamentals are. If there's too much total net paper gains in crypto, that will end the bull market because people will take the chips off the table and selling will beget selling and all of a sudden we'll discover a bare market. I'm terrible at timing these things, David, but I feel like we have at least 12 months left. And again, I could be wrong.

Starting point is 00:15:19 And I feel like $3 trillion is not the top in terms of a total crypto market cap. Oh, hell no. Like, I think we're getting to 10. Now, what could happen is we could spike up to like three or like four or five and then tank all the way back down, like even below three. And like people, you know, below two again. and people could think that that that was the top and we're heading back down.

Starting point is 00:15:45 But like I think we'll have multiple cycles of different top signals. And this is just kind of like the first class of top signals. David, I think a longer grander bull market because of an ETF flows is like a reasonable base case. Let's talk a little bit about layer two. I know next section is going to be completely about blob space, layer two, how cheap the gas fees are. you're going to get sick of hearing it from us. We're talking about Ethereum in this in this weekly roll up.

Starting point is 00:16:13 Oh yeah. But before we get there, that's going to be in the next section. Let's just gander at total locked value because we are up on the week and there are some pretty big movers, including base, is up significantly on the week to $1.4 billion on base and total value locked.

Starting point is 00:16:31 That's pretty good. Yeah, we have $38 total billion dollars inside of layer twos. I think that's actually stayed about the same week over week. We are threatening. teasing 10 million in layer twos in ether terms, eth the nominated. Yeah, base has really had a killer week,

Starting point is 00:16:45 but overall, like layer twos are always kind of just up, up, up, up, up. Just kind of spit out some of the numbers just to give people an anchor point. Arbitrum, 15.6 billion. Optimism, 8.9 billion. Blast, insane. 2.8 billion.

Starting point is 00:17:00 Yeah, so really good, really good healthy numbers here. But yeah, the big outperformer right now is base. Blastin, base blasting its way with plus 25% a week. over week to $1.4 billion. Layer 2B added a new tab here where you can see where the chain itself, the layer 2, is storing its data. What data availability solution is it using?

Starting point is 00:17:22 Is it using Ethereum Mainnet or is it using something else? And some are enshrined like Arbitrum, O.P., some like Manta Pacific, there's really no DA bridge. And others are using like Celestia and other third parties for this. So, yeah, Layer 2B. always kind of showing us the way here and showing us what's up with these layer twos. By the way, thanks to Mantle for sponsoring this section,

Starting point is 00:17:46 which is one of our favorite L2s of this cycle and is sponsor of this show. Especially as EigenLayer Aveses come online and make layer twos better, that's like been Mantle's deal for a long time. A lot of people don't realize. Mantle actually has been working with eigenlayer on eigenDA. They're going to be the first ones to leverage eigenDA.

Starting point is 00:18:04 And we're going to really see what 10 megabytes a second of data throughput can really do for a layer two. You know, this recurring theme we've been talking about the last couple of weeks is, is retail here? This is Eric Connor saying, yes, they are here. That is retail. They just aren't in Bitcoin and Ether. And he's looking at Google Search Index for meme coins. And it is just a spike absolutely up.

Starting point is 00:18:26 The clip that we played, the TikTok dude that we played last week, he was talking about some meme coin. He's definitely not talking about the fundamentals of Bitcoin and Ether. What do you think about this, David? Do you think retail's here? they're just buying meme coins instead of buying like, you know, our bags with great fundamentals. Yeah, I think maybe even at this point, like retail, quote unquote retail outside of crypto has heard of Bitcoin enough times where they're like, that's just not cool anymore. You know what's cool?

Starting point is 00:18:55 A dog with a hat. I'm going to buy that thing or Joe Bowden or whatever. Some nihilist financial stuff. Because I think with like a lot of retail who comes like speculating and degening, like they're not taking like their entire savings. putting it into like Dogwif Hat. They're putting like a amount of money that they can be nihilist about and like see if it goes to zero, whatever. And I'm trying to like shoot for the moon. And Bitcoin is just not going to do that for them anymore. So yeah, I think it makes sense that

Starting point is 00:19:22 retail skips straight to meme coins. I mean like they also saw JPEG's tokens with JPEG's last cycle. So why don't they just, they just go even more D-Gen? You know, it's crazy, David. This is a tweet from Franklin Templeton, like the bank, you know, Franklin Templeton, the asset manager. And this a report on the value between meme coins and their narrative networks. This is kind of like a bullish report on meme coins from Franklin Templeton. You believe that? Wow. I thought you'd find that interesting, right? They're catching a bid from the institutions as well. What the hell? Another what the hell moment, David, it's happening. So Dog with Hat is potentially going on the Vegas sphere. And there was a fundraise this week. I think they made the fundraise.

Starting point is 00:20:08 So apparently this will be what looks like the first crypto project on the Vegas sphere. And David, you and I pinned this as like this could be an absolute top signal for the cycle. It's the first crypto project. Just like the FTCS stadium of the past, the first crypto project that is on a sphere, that's a top signal. And we're joking around like this time to sell. At some point, there was also a race to get your crypto project on the sphere. and like when I kind of made my tweet, like the first crypto project to get their, their project on the sphere loses. I actually didn't really consider like crowdsourced meme coins as like one of the ways to race it gets there.

Starting point is 00:20:48 I kind of was thinking about like some semi-legit startup layer one, brand new layer one, Ethereum Killer on the scene, advertises themselves, like a legitimate attempt to advertising. This is a farce attempt at advertising. Like it's for the lulls. It's for the memes. And I wasn't really counting for that. It's going to count, though. I'm not counting this top signal.

Starting point is 00:21:08 That's the problem with top signals is once they come, you just find a way to justify it. You're just like, eh, it's not really a top signal. As soon as I see an ETH killer on the Vegasphere, that's the top signal. I don't know. I worry we're moving goalposts here in this bull market. It's what we do in bull markets.

Starting point is 00:21:24 This happened a lot earlier than I thought. I'll say that. But it's not that expensive to actually put your project on the Vegasphere, at least in crypto terms, $650K. So maybe our top signal calibration. 150k worth of dog with had donations had to be made. So that people are just giving away their dog with hat money in order to make this happen. But because it's a meme, it's going to like, kind of cool.

Starting point is 00:21:46 Yeah, because it's a meme, it's going to like increase the, you know, the price of dog with hat like, I don't know, fivefold or tenfold. You know, just getting this, this kind of press. So there's good ROI for people to do that. I don't think it'll do that. I think it's more for the lulls. You're doing an entire episode on meme coins, which I am disappointed to have to miss. but I want to get your take high level on meme coins. Like some people think that they're like fun,

Starting point is 00:22:08 that this is what crypto is all about. Other people think that they're toxic. I guess my take is I think they're fun. I think that I get annoyed at them when they start to suck all the auction out of the room and like they get all of the attention. And this is what they become the point. But otherwise, I don't want to be a purist.

Starting point is 00:22:26 Like I don't like participate in many of these things, but it's just like, whatever. People are having fun. It's fine. It's one nice thing about it is it's completely transparent, right? So like everyone knows it's a dog with hat. Yes. There are things that are less transparent about meme coins, right?

Starting point is 00:22:43 Like the genesis story of each one. Exactly. So like more private keys and more hands is good. It stress tests is all of our infrastructure that's good. Like bad things, I do think there will be some absolutely epic scams this cycle involving meme coins, right? And everyone now thinks they can kind of, you know, like have the next meme coin. And there's some harm, I think, to the crypto branding as a result of this that could come.

Starting point is 00:23:06 Like, what's your take? Well, the meme coins are first, just a very expected and acceptable byproduct of one of the great powers of crypto, which is giving people access to the money printer of financial assets. Like any Joe, any average Joe can make a financial asset. And that's the power of an ERC20 token. It's power SPL token on Solana or whatever you want. that's a democratizing power that is going to the people. And then like, what did we do when we got the internet? We put pictures of cats on there.

Starting point is 00:23:38 What did we do when we got access to like Web3? We made dog tokens. Like, it's just like a normal like progress of events. And so that is that part is good. Like let's give power to the people, especially like, let's not like, you know, gatekeep the powers of Wall Street. Like let's open this up. And so I think there is the fact that we can produce Dogecoin.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Dogecoin, to me, is an example of a good meme coin, like good on the morality, like ethics spectrum. I think that is a good thing. Just like fair distribution. Do you mean like that? Totally fair. Yeah. The fact that a meme can become worth billions of dollars is like cool and neat and interesting.

Starting point is 00:24:15 And it also opens up plenty of space for grifting and exploitation and extraction. And so like more or less like I'll take the point that like one of the reasons. why people love mean coins is like plenty of like layer one grifts who like grifts in crypto have been abundant and where like they have been like touting some narrative but they're really trying to get rich and so like all of those griffs are plenty real and plenty like throughout the history of crypto and so to your to the meme coin point it's like well at least these things are like honest but i don't think that makes them any better or worse i think it's like a natural like reflection on like human incentive and human desires. And so the meme coins will be as good or bad as like human greed

Starting point is 00:25:02 will be. And in the bull market, human greed can get pretty bad. It'll be, it'll be pretty gnarly. I also worry a little bit that it's not great for our financial literacy. Do you know, if people think that they're investing in these things and like what's an investment, you know, like they're doing more speculative attention gambling and and not like what I would call like classically investing. That might be a bad side. But you know, back to kind of financial annihilation. right um the people say that like people think the us dollar is turned into a Ponzi um the SEC won't allow our actual tokens right to have real utility and cash flows so like no wonder people are all about this right now anyway i did i did see one meme that i really really liked which was

Starting point is 00:25:42 you know the the bell curve being right like left and right curve and then you have the person in the center and the person in the center is like no you can't invest in meme coins there's no fundamentals like blah blah blah blah like that's me sometimes and the left and the right curves are like it's fun and I'm making money. Totally. And that's great. But the thing is, is that, like, these things are only fun because people are making money and eventually people will not, making money will turn into losing money and then the

Starting point is 00:26:08 fun will go away. And you know what will be left in the bear market? Fundamentals. Yeah. As they always will be. I will point out there is a fun in fundamentals, isn't there? Yes, there is. There is.

Starting point is 00:26:24 That is what, that's, that's, that's what we're here for. Uh, David. Although I have, I will have to say I did purchase one meme coin. I'm the owner of, uh, one meme coin. Well, do not. Do you know. So I'm playing in the game. Yeah. I don't blame me for that, David. Just enjoy yourself, man. Well, it lasts. Um, US, U.S. CPI rose faster than expected last month. So we're about 0.4 in February and, uh, 3.2% from a year ago. So the Fed really having a hard time getting this under 3% and getting it towards 2%. So, well, we're about, we're about. So, we're about 4%. So, so. And, we're

Starting point is 00:26:54 We'll continue to monitor that as we go. Do you know, another interesting thing is the yield, the interest on our stable coins in Defi have come back, baby, like 20 to 30%. And we're talking like in compound. And this is not just airdrop yield hunting. This is like actual real returns. Sustainable yield, yeah. In like a money market of crypto, which is sort of, you know, compound.

Starting point is 00:27:18 So it's fairly low risk, all things considered, right? And like the question Eric Forheese is posing is, why is this happening? Do you have a take on this? I mean, I think Hayden Adams' follow-on take was I think probably the best explanation. He said that crypto natives getting 30% on our yield is just like too low in bull markets when things are going 3x minimum. Like I'm personally looking for a 3x to cycle, so I'm not going to take 30%. But then also taking your tradfai money and tradfai dollars and putting them into crypto and defy is like too risky for all the people that still have tradfai dollars. And so there's just like that mismatch is producing very high yields where the

Starting point is 00:27:59 curves that the supply demand curves actually meet and that's meeting at 30%. This will attract outside capital. It's just like outside capital is going to be slow to move to take up some of that yield. Speaking of yield, David, can you explain how Athena Labs got to one billion? This is a relatively new Ethereum D5 protocol. What's going on here? Yeah, so Athena brand new stable coin. It's not a decentralized stable coin, but it kind of fits in the decentralized stable coin corner of how you design a stable coin. So I need to actually do my homework on how this works. But basically, there is a basis neutral trade that you can make where you have staked eth on one side and the yield from staked eth and like Mevion Ethereum, which is something like four or five, six percent. And then you

Starting point is 00:28:40 also have the yield of funding rates for people who are shorting ether on a non-leverage leverage basis. And so like one way short, you get funding for that. One way long, you get yield from that. You put those two together and you have a basis trade where it nests out at like a $1, but you also get yield. And so that produces a stable coin. That part of the jump, I don't understand how it makes, but it does check out. I know that it checks out. Yeah, so they just crossed a billion dollars. So congratulations with, you know, I did say on Twitter that if they hit a billion dollars, they can do a podcast on bankless. So I guess reach out to us.

Starting point is 00:29:19 Yeah, we should definitely do that. I'm curious about it as well. This is different than the algorithmic staple coins of the past, like, you know, Tara Luna, right? It's like this yield is from a legitimate source. Yes. And it's backed by real assets. Yeah. David, let's do an ETF scan really quick, like ETF watch.

Starting point is 00:29:36 We are looking at a dune board showing all of the ETFs right now. and we've got 4.2% of current Bitcoin supply in ETS. It's a lot. I mean, like, this was very low when we started a couple of months ago, and it's just shot right up. It's going to go to 10% by halfway through this year. It's going to be 10% by June. Flow since launch, 10 billion.

Starting point is 00:29:58 Just the past week was almost 2 billion. So, yeah, a lot of crazy things going on. And Microstrategy versus BlackRock, BTC holdings. Look at this chart, David. The blue. line is BlackRock and it's going straight up. Poor Michael Saylor just getting demolished by BlackRock is doing fine. I think BlackRock had its number one record inflow day. Black Rock itself had a one billion dollars of inflows if I remember that headline correctly. Yeah, I think you're right. Um,

Starting point is 00:30:27 and Sailor's going to return later in this episode, got a clip that we want to play. He's not done. Um, so let's talk about the ETH ETF like one last time because there's more banter back and forth on when this thing's going to actually happen. Actually, um, James Sakey. for Eric Balchunis put out some of their estimates. And these are sort of some people call them the Bloomberg Bros. I don't know if they, they appreciate that, but they've been right on with respect to like understanding the Bitcoin ETF landscape. And they put out their estimates that the odds of the Ethereum ETF getting approved by May are down to 35%. Yikes. Used to be 60%. Used to be. This is Eric Baltunus saying, I get all the reasons they should approve it. Okay. And we personally

Starting point is 00:31:10 believe they should, but all sign sources that we are making, that we're making us bullish for the Bitcoin spot ETF are not there this time. Note that the 35% isn't 0% still possible. And long term, we think it will happen, but not by the May deadline. That's Eric Baltunis. So that carries some weight in my mind. Also, Jake Chavinsky. Did you see his take here? Yeah, yeah. He's also being in the bear camp. I think the summary of just Jake's tweet and the Balchuna's tweet is that more or less like the signs of activity and and interest by the SEC of engaging with the ETH ETF issuers just aren't there. It's not that they are saying they're going to not approve it or not that they're saying that they're going to delay it. They are just doing nothing,

Starting point is 00:31:55 right? It's just like indifference. Jake Chravinsky says it brings me no joy to be an ETH ETF bear, but I'm calling it like I see it. I see an SEC that dislikes crypto as a concept, seeks to please progressive elective officials. Shout out Elizabeth Warren, who want to make anti-crypto a core part of their platform. Who could that be? Has a wrong but not insane basis for denial, i.e. spot futures correlation. Now, the spot price of ETH and the futures price of east on the CME futures, that is like mathematically been proven to have just as strong a correlation to the Bitcoin ETF. So this point, this line and Jake and Jake's like reasoning people have like in the Ethereum community has called into question.

Starting point is 00:32:38 Like we actually have like totally awesome, fantastic proof that the correlation is just as strong as Bitcoin. So like I'm not sure about that one. But like it does go back to the, I think just the writing, the tea leaves is really just saying like the SEC is just like not engaging with ETH ETF issuers in the same way that they were engaging with Bitcoin ETF issuers.

Starting point is 00:32:56 I think the strongest pushback against this that I've seen is, but like Black Rock wants it. And that's what we've been saying all along. Yeah. big finances now on the side of getting these ETFs approved and the Bitcoin ETF was so successful. They wouldn't just want to run that same playback. So Jake Trevinsky and Eric Balchunis, what about BlackRock? This is Jake's reply to that. I agree Black Rock's presence is a big deal, but ETH is a very unique asset and probably raises more legal and political controversy than any

Starting point is 00:33:25 other ETF filing that Black Rock has ever done. Black Rock always wins is not a satisfactory response to all the arguments for denial in his opinion. So, and BlackRock could get their ETH ETF denied. And BlackRock would just like not bat an eye and they would just reissue it until it got approved. Oh yeah. Like they, the ETH ETF. It's going to happen. It's going to get approved.

Starting point is 00:33:47 Everyone knows this. It's if it doesn't get approved in 2024, it'll get approved in 2025. Like it's, I'm not concerned. We're just trying to like, people are just trying to figure out whether they should take leverage on the ETH. have May approval or not, which you shouldn't be doing anyways. Yeah. Well, actually, Justin Drake, who I consider an incredibly knowledgeable person, is on the side

Starting point is 00:34:10 of it getting approved by May. A May approval. Yeah. Justin Drake is an ETH May Bowl. Yeah, he's thrown down a bet with Nick Carter on whether the ETF gets approved or not. And Justin Drake's team, it will get approved by May. Yeah, so Nick, there is some backstory with Nick Carter bets. This is a tungsten cube bet.

Starting point is 00:34:29 Nick Carter is famous for making bets with people across the crypto space where the stakes are one tungsten cube remember the tungsten cube games from last cycle and Nick has like collected like three maybe four tungson cubes because he's always been right he's doing well he's doing well

Starting point is 00:34:44 so he's collecting tungsten cubes as like these are my spoils of my victory this is my plunder and so he's made a bet with Justin Drake that if the spot ETF is denied in May or not approved in May then Justin Drake has to give Nick Carter his tungsten cube. Well, Justin Drake is not often wrong, but neither is Nick Carter, so I guess we will

Starting point is 00:35:03 see what happens with that. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, we're going to talk about blobs, because I'm tired of not talking about blobs on this goddamn weekly roll-up, Ryan. I want to talk about the blobs. I want to talk about how optimism is using the blobs. I want to talk about how starkness using the blobs. Arbitrum is using the blobs in a very special way, so we're going to talk about that. We're just talking about the blobs space. We're going to talk about the blob contention. There's a new phrase just dropped blob contention gets me all like hot and bothered i'm pretty psyched at about blobs ryan i can't talk to you enough about well this is going to turn into a blobcast i could tell what else though you got a brand new layer two on the scene another one is coming online why is this one different

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Starting point is 00:38:21 D-YDX Foundation, MENAProtest, and many more. Get started for free and make token compensation simple at tooku.com slash bankless. Welcome back to the bankless blobcast. Blabcast. We're talking about the blobs are live on Ethereum main net. Let's set some context.

Starting point is 00:38:35 So this was a major Ethereum upgrade, a hard fork that just happened. It happened on March 13th, right? So this was Wednesday of this week. It's called Denkoon. Can you give us? the highlights. So why was this upgrade so significant and what did it do? So EIP 4844, which is like the shining star of the upgrade of the Denkoon hard fork, is what introduces blob space to the

Starting point is 00:39:03 Ethereum layer one protocol. Blob space is a specific lane of transactions that's separate from block space. So we have all the normal transactions that everyone has ever been making on Ethereum has always been going into block space. What do blockchains do? What do? Blockchains do? Blockchains sell blocks. Well, now the Ethereum Layer 1 also sells blobs. And Blobs is a blob is kind of, it's actually a technical term, believe it or not, for just like arbitrary data. We're going to package up arbitrary data and we're going to, that is a blob and we're going to put that blob in the Layer 1 blob space. Think of it like a high occupancy vehicle lane and HOV lane for Ethereum Layer 2 transaction. So on the Ethereum layer 1 currently, we're all driving in our

Starting point is 00:39:42 individual cars. One car per person is not that efficient. And we're all having to pay high gas fees in order to do stuff on the Ethereum layer one, even layer two's are inside of the same kind of congested lanes that all the individuals are using. Now, layer two's, because they are high occupancy vehicles, they're bundling up thousands of transactions from thousands of users, they are instead of posting that as data inside a block space, they get to wrap that in a blob and post that into blob space. And so they all get to move faster through the carpool lanes and get from point A to point B faster for cheaper because of blob space. And so this actually is not affecting gas on the Ethereum layer one for layer one transactors. This is significantly increasing the, or decreasing the fees on

Starting point is 00:40:29 Ethereum layer twos. That's my summary. We've got blobs. That's great. That's great. I've never heard that analogy, David, of a HOV lane, but I think that's perfect. You know, who made that analogy? Vitalik? No, well, maybe. But the first time I heard it was from our, Josh at Bankless, which made it into the actual like live stream of just like, this is the way that you explain blobs. So if our Josh, who's actually the guy listening to this editing with this podcast right now, if he made that, well done.

Starting point is 00:41:00 It's become enshrined as like the best metaphor to explain blob space. Well, shout out Josh. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And here's another metaphor. This is one that Chris Dixon uses. And this is kind of an internet metaphor. So this, this upgrade essentially made layer two's really, really cheap. And another way to phrase that is basically increase the capacity, increase the bandwidth of

Starting point is 00:41:23 layer two block space, essentially. So this is almost like us getting from the 1990s on the internet to the 2000s. You know, you had dial-up modem through your phone line. I mean, a lot of people don't remember that, but that's how the internet used to be in the 90s. And then

Starting point is 00:41:39 in the 2000s, we started to get high bandwidth systems. We started to get broadband, essentially. And we just did that in Ethereum overnight. Phase one of increasing our broadband. So this is kind of Ethereum's broadband moment, I would say. And you're going to experience that not on Ethereum Mainnet. It's going to be just as expensive as ever.

Starting point is 00:41:59 These are not going down ever on Ethereum Maynet. I think we've talked about that so many times before. Well, we have the verge. True. We do have the verge. I don't want to get people excited about that. They should not be your expectations. That's like a three to five year type thing.

Starting point is 00:42:15 fees are going to get really cheap. That's a 20-25 thing. Oh my gosh. Well, stop being so bullish, David. I'm getting bullish. Okay. So anyway, what's happened is layer two fees have gone down basically overnight. And so let's talk about them. Let's just like, yeah, go through it. So this is, what are we looking at? ZK Sync, which was the first layer two to start using this brand new high occupancy. First blob on the layer one from ZK Sync, well done. Look at the transaction fees falling. Just go into absolute zero. So that's how it looks in a chart, but if you're using something like the Argent wallet on Starknet, right, which is another layer two that has adopted a blob space, your transaction fees for doing an in-app swap in your

Starting point is 00:42:56 smart contract wallet went from $6.82 dollars and overnight to $4 for the same transaction. And Argent is a smart contract wallet. So it actually has to generally have more fees. And so like specifically things like Argent and other like smart contract wallets have really been looking for this. Four cents is actually on the higher side of the types of transactions that I've seen. Here is a chart of optimism of the median gas fee on OP stack chains between OPE, mainnet, Zora, and base hovering around like 90 cents, and then now they are dropping down to somewhere between like one and five cents.

Starting point is 00:43:32 Liam from Optimism says, Optimism just enabled 44 a few minutes ago from 32 cents down to point zero, zero, zero, four cents for a transaction. That is optimism. Base is also a thing. This even attracted the attention from Brian Armstrong, because base is also, of course, an OP stack chain. Brian Armstrong says, this is huge. Reducing transaction fees and confirmation times on layer twos will open up so many more use cases for crypto. We are finally getting scalability. He's, of course, retweeting Jesse Pollock's tweet, saying, after two years of hard work blobs are now live on base before 31 cents, after 0.0.0. but he actually means 0.0.0.05 cents.

Starting point is 00:44:15 The network fee quoted inside of the Coinbase app to get from Ethereum to just to transfer ether from base to base wallet to base wallet is zero cents. So like when Coinbase shows you like here's a network fee, it's zero cents. Like imagine the delight of retail users at this point in time. It's kind of like why even charge them at that point? It's so cheap, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:38 I went and looked at this transaction that Jesse was showing and, just like the ether scan on this, is just absolutely hilarious. The transaction fee, 0.000, 0-0-0-0-0-2-6-Eth. The gas price, there's too many zeros for me to even read out or count. That's like 9-0. The gas price was 0.000-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1.

Starting point is 00:44:58 It was absolutely insane. For a $4 transfer. Zora, it doesn't stop there. Of course, the gas cost to mint on Zora was 61 cents. Now it is 0.0-0-9-E. granted. We are in day one of blobs. Actually, now this is day two of Blasbase consumption. And so we are approaching an equilibrium of all these layer two's leveraging blog space. Fees are definitely down across the board. But the blobs are about to go into price discovery. Because when things get

Starting point is 00:45:33 cheaper, when transaction fees get cheaper, you know, we use more transaction fees. And that can increase the cost of these things over time. That's what you're saying. Yes, that is what I'm saying. And we are also seeing activity on layer two's pick up, but also we are approaching if you, let's see, this is a doom board that we're going to look at from 0x Rob. If you scroll down, you can see a blobs per block. And so blobs actually have a very similar mechanism to EIP 1559 where they are, we are targeting three blobs per block. And if we have more than three blobs per block, then blobs get more expensive. We have less than three blobs per block, then blobs get less expensive. We are under three blobs per block, then blobs get less expensive. We are under, three blobs per block. And we have been since the inception of blob space. You want to scroll down a little bit. It's the blobs per block. There we go.

Starting point is 00:46:18 So you can see that purple line. We are below the line, the target line of three blobs per block. And so this is why blobs are so cheap. As more layer two's leverage blob space, we will get this thing called blob contention, which is the fee market for blob space. And so then blobs will start to increase the price of blobs because it is con-contested. And then what do we do after that, Ryan?

Starting point is 00:46:46 We make more blob space. Oh, yes, yes. We have to keep making more blob space because we'll never have enough blob space ever at this point in time. One thing that was really interesting to me, this is a chart of the layer two is the median price fee over time,

Starting point is 00:46:59 and you're right, that many of these, most of these are just now fractions of the penny and this happened overnight. I was blown away at how fast layer two's actually adopted this. They were ready to go. And they're in a competitive game to lower their fees as quickly as possible. but like almost all of them did.

Starting point is 00:47:13 One outliers Arbitrum, which I believe may have, oh, look at this. They did it. They did two hours ago, yeah. So actually, that's a really important part of the story, actually. So because Arbitrum, they were coming in at an 18-hour laggard into the blob space consumption. Why do they take long? Well, A, they have a Dowell, so they have to actually get this through a Dow vote.

Starting point is 00:47:34 But also, they have this thing called ArbOS Atlas upgrade, which is just a normal like Arbitrum software update for the Arbitrum layer two, that also, in addition to leveraging blob space, independently of the lowering gas fees of Blobspace, will also lower gas fees by another 90% just because it's optimization on the Arbitrum side of things. That's so cool. And so all of the layer twos are able to like squeeze out more juice from their own system,

Starting point is 00:48:03 and then they are also getting a 90% gas fee reduction on top of that because of blob space. And that happened overnight. So I think Arbitrum is actually going to be one of the best tests to how much, how can we really juice these systems? Because now we have Blab Space and Arbitrum is taking their next additional 90% reduction in gas fees. It feels like I've called it before, like an economic stimulus in terms of capacity because it happened across all chains overnight. And my timeline was just so wholesome. I'm talking about my social media feeds, right?

Starting point is 00:48:33 Of just people talking about, oh, my God. Like, there was a lot of surprise at how cheap layer two fees actually got. I mean, some of these, I saw somebody tweet out something about optimism or Zora or something like that being cheaper than Solana at this point. That was me. Oh, was that you, David? That was me. Oh, you're trying to get some spicy tweets in?

Starting point is 00:48:53 I mean... It wasn't spicy. It was true. It's factual. It's a factual tweet. Yeah. Ethereum layer twos are cheaper than Solana. It's really impressive.

Starting point is 00:49:02 Now, whether they'll stay that cheap, I don't know. but it's so cool to see it happening in concert across all of the layer 2s with this big Ethereum upgrade. There's a really good tweet thread that I want to read out from Liam.eath, Liam Horn, who talks about the perspective of EIP 4-844 is more than just a simple protocol upgrade to Ethereum

Starting point is 00:49:19 because it was a bunch of cross-proticle dev coordination cross-layer 2s and the Ethereum Layer 1 protocol. And so there was so many moving parts to make this happen. So I thought this whole entire thread was fantastic, so I'll read through it. EIP 4844 is more than a tech upgrade. It is a substantial shift in how Ethereum core devs work at all, improving the relationship between research and client teams

Starting point is 00:49:43 and welcoming layer two core devs. It might be the most important moment in the transition to the roll-up-centric roadmap. When we started two years ago before the merge, there were tensions between the research and client teams. It wasn't always clear that the ideas on the research side were feasible to implement and took into consideration all the client complexity.

Starting point is 00:50:01 This is one of the reasons why Proto Lambda and others conceived of proto-dank sharding, which is Pro-844, which is what we just merged. It was a sort of prototype or an early iteration towards full dang sharding that was technically feasible and ready to ship ASAP. ASAP turned into two years, but this was even only possible because 4844 was a compromise. It made a massive dent in scalability, future-proofed full dang sharding, and took an account client complexity. It forced research, client, and layer two teams to work closely together.

Starting point is 00:50:31 one, optimism made shipping 484444 a top priority and allocated multiple core devs to the effort. Two, base team started working and contributing to 4844 before the idea of base was even conceived. Prismatic Labs, three, now part of off-chain labs, that's Arbitrum, evolved into Layer 2 development with 4844 as a gateway. And many more examples of the above, 4844 acted as a central project that unify the efforts of so many research, client teams, and Layer 2 devs. It feels like we're in a whole new era compared to two years ago. Ethereum is feeling substantially more productive and pragmatic. And with layer two teams, now a major part of the mix, a roll-up-centric roadmap is in full swing.

Starting point is 00:51:11 When I read this, I just got goosebumps. Because especially with every single major hard fork that we do in Ethereum, I'm just reminded about how we are doing this crazy new thing called decentralized consensus and decentralized governance and decentralized coordination in order to discover the best paths forward that in my opinion, the Ethereum core devs and researchers all collectively agree and come to consensus on what those is,

Starting point is 00:51:36 what those are, and then they successfully merge them into the Ethereum protocol. And I just get goosebumps that we as humans can even manage to produce something like that. And so I'll just take a moment and say, thank you to anyone involved with Dan Kuhn, EIP 484, all the other EIPs, and actually like getting this thing into the Ethereum protocol.

Starting point is 00:51:56 So many stakeholders need a deal to be just juggled. And it was done in just super elegant fashion. So big thank you to everyone getting involved here. Yeah, absolutely. And this is so popular. Like everyone loved it. Everyone loves cheaper fees.

Starting point is 00:52:11 Everyone loves more bandwidth, more capacity. This was not contentious at all. And it's just a kind of a massive celebration. David, there was also some other upgrades that slipped in in the Ethereum upgrade. One is that beacon block routes are now accessible in the EVM. Why is that important? Yeah, so this is another EIP that was in Dengu that's aside from 4844. I just wanted to call out this one specifically because it's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:52:36 This is beacon block routes are now accessible to the EVM. The beacon block route is a consensus layer thing. The EVM is an execution layer thing. And so we have the beacon chain and the state of the beacon chain, which is a block route, is now being made accessible to the Ethereum virtual machine, aka the Ethereum application layer, aka DFI. So Light Clients brings out two exciting use cases, proof of validator behavior, and then efficient O of log proofs for historical block data. Basically, the proof of stake, the internet bond that is Ethereum, the staking, and also restaking state of things, is being made accessible to Ethereum's own defy application layer.

Starting point is 00:53:19 And so the actual protocol, and this is really good for eigenlayer for AVS is that need to know the state of beacon blocks. So who's got the ETH where? And the AVS's of eigen layer can now know that. Same thing with like LSTs and LRTs. And so this is just a stronger coupling between the proof of stake layer of Ethereum and the defy layer of also of Ethereum. I thought that was worth pulling out.

Starting point is 00:53:42 So I think a big question is we painted this picture of gas fees have gone down for now on layer twos, but demand is going to increase. And so they will increase in cost as things go. So where do we go from here? And there's two kind of categories I want to talk about for further reduction of layer two fees and expansion of the bandwidth of layer twos. One is on the Ethereum upgrade path.

Starting point is 00:54:07 I'm going to let you talk about that. But the other is in parallel to all of this, what's actually happening is the layer twos themselves are improving in their ability to support bandwidth, execution bandwidth, let's call it. And so a few things that are happening. One, of course, we've talked about so much, which is parallelization of the, you EVMs, right? So of EVMs and also other virtual machines like the SVM putting that in a layer two. So we can have a very high throughput layer two that also increases our bandwidth and our TPS. We also have room to maneuver on ZK proving and verification cost decreases. So there's a lot of projects that are specifically working on that that will really help our ZK VMs and our ZK rollups. And then there's also just generally, you you mentioned Arbitrum deploying some more called transaction compression, some optimization in terms of how they're posting data to Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:55:06 And so that is ongoing work and will continue to get better. I mean, I think Vitalik said there could be like gains of 3 to 5x just from compression alone. And then everything else is still a bit too expensive. You still need like fractions of a penny. There's third party DA solutions, you know, one of which is Slesia, which we've talked about before, then eigenlayer DA is coming aboard as well, which will be an absolute massive expansion in terms of data availability bandwidth if Ethereum main chain is getting too expensive. So all of these solutions combined are going to continue to drop gas fees towards zero.

Starting point is 00:55:42 Every time it spikes back up, there'll be an improvement and we'll get back down to zero. There's also main net improvements coming as well, David. So like, what are the next Ethereum upgrades in hard forks? what are they going to do for bandwidth? I'll invoke the words of Mike Noider here. We get 3x in terms of data availability. So blob space, the thing we just shipped, we'll get 3x larger for the next three to four years in a row.

Starting point is 00:56:06 So we'll get a 3x by just increasing the blob count and gas modifications. We can kind of do that today. We'll get that throughout this year. In 2025, we'll get this thing called peer-dass, peer data availability sampling. And then in 2026, these are all like super hypothetical timelines. when dank charting comes around, we'll get another 3x. And these are 3xes on top of each other.

Starting point is 00:56:28 These aren't like linear 3xes. These are exponential 3xes. And so like gas fees are just dying on layer 2. They're going to zero. It doesn't matter how much induced demand we can get. We can also also get more block space to like the logical conclusion. If we can't get there with mere just adding more data availability, we'll get there with ZK.

Starting point is 00:56:47 The conclusion of layer 2 gas fees is that they go away. They go away for the. the end user, they are perceived to be zero. They aren't actually zero, but they are so close to zero that the meta will just converge on somebody, some third party is going to pay for their users transaction fees because that's a user acquisition strategy. Gas fees on the layer two are just like in the fullness of time, which is only three, four years going away.

Starting point is 00:57:12 Yeah, I agree. It's going to be a feeless ecosystem. I mean, think about the internet, right? You don't pay server fees for using a website or for, you know, going on X or like doing something on Facebook, right? You won't pay fees, I think, in the future in these layer twos and layer three. So, uh, David, we got more to cover, man. We talked a lot about blobs because we're so excited about them, but there's more. What else? What else? A brand new layer two is coming to main net. You thought we were over with innovating on layer two's. You

Starting point is 00:57:37 thought wrong. Tenser on Solana dropping a token and Solana's Jito getting rid of its mempool. What's the deal with that? All of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, especially a mantle, the layer two, the highest native stake to yield in crypto that you can also get eigenlayer points if you put your M-Eath for Mantle on the Mantle layer 2, which is now also 10 times cheaper thanks to Blobs. Let's get here for Mantle right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, 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 using the OP stack, but uses eigenlayer's data availability solution

Starting point is 00:58:18 instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned own treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 gaming and buy-bit for TVL and liquidity and on-rounds. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralized Mantle.

Starting point is 00:58:52 If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledd layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Uniswap is revolutionizing the Defi space, not just by enabling swaps, but by empowering you to swap smarter with a comprehensive suite of products for faster, safer, and more informed swapping. Say goodbye to pop-up wallet extensions. The Uniswap extension is coming soon, and this extension is not a pop-up. It is a sidebar in your browser that persists no matter where.

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Starting point is 01:00:12 cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, SELO is looking to come home to Ethereum as a layer two. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Sello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Sello layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using Social Connect. But SELO is a community governed protocol.

Starting point is 01:00:50 This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice hurt. Join the conversation in the cello forums. Follow SELO on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Swell, the LST project that turned into an LRT project when EigenLayer came out, is now building their layer two with native restaking yields built in. So we're integrating all of the innovations that 20203 and 2024 have brought us with Swell. Swell's own ZKEVM from the Polygon chain development kit built in collaboration with eigenDA, so DA for data availability and alt layer as their roll up as a service provider, along with chain link.

Starting point is 01:01:26 And so they're getting all of the big players into the Swell layer two as well. And I think if I'm understanding this correctly, they are taking the Blast Playbook and putting in native yield into the Swell layer two, except this time not just with staking yield, but with restaking yield as well. So like Swell just put in a platypus of a layer two together Taking all the innovation that they can from corners of Ethereum It's really cool All this stuff is brand new right ZKEVM, Igen-TA is not even out yet Alt layer is kind of brand new

Starting point is 01:01:55 And then chain link and smushing it all together on top of an LRT And the gas token is going to be Swell's LRT token The restaked Swell-Eth token I think there's going to be a lot of these like kind of vertical stack type plays As well so this came out we haven't had a chance to really look at it But do you know the crypto wallet Zirion? They're a fantastic way to see your crypto portfolio. They have a Web3 wallet in your browser as well.

Starting point is 01:02:21 They are building a layer two. And their take on it, their spin on it is it's going to be zero fees. It's exactly what we were just talking about before the break. Yeah, they're going to subsidize fees. Why? For user acquisition, for onboarding. If it only costs like tens of thousands of dollars a year, why wouldn't you just subsidize fees?

Starting point is 01:02:40 Just get the VCs to pay for it. server costs. So really cool to see Xeron do this. I don't think they'll be the last. I think we will see so many layer twos this cycle of different projects, defy projects maybe, like wallet providers, that sort of thing, going and just building a full vertical stack here. So pretty exciting. Tensor has introduced the Tensor token. Tensor, of course, it's the blurred open sea on Solana. And so there is an airdrop for all the Tensorians. Actually, the Tensorians are the people who don't know the PFPs. But I don't know. know, if you own the tensor token, you're maybe a Tenorian, too, I'll leave you that up to the

Starting point is 01:03:15 Tenorian community. If you have been paying attention to the AirDrop Hunter from Bankless, that's us. This has been in the AirDrop Hunter for a long time. So, congrats to all the Bankless Airdrop hunters who hunted this AirDrop. David, tell me a little bit about Gito. So I saw this, and you threw it in the agenda because I think you really wanted to talk about it. It's a pretty big deal. Gito is kind of like a mix between for Solana. It's kind of like FlashBots a little bit, and it's kind of like Lido. So they do stake for a soul and they also provide some kind of MEV protection type services and a way to harness that inside of a salana client. So the news here is Gito Labs had decided to suspend the MAM pool

Starting point is 01:03:56 offered through Gito Block Engine due to negative externalities impacting users on Solana. What the heck does this mean? What are we talking about here? Yeah. So the way that Salana works, Solana does not have a mempool. It has just rolling block construction. So blocks, like transactions are put into blocks as they come in. And then the validator just puts that block into the chain. And the mempool itself, that's like the holding container for all the transactions that are in queue that have not yet been settled on chain, right? It's just this giant holding container. Which is where typically blockchains, that's how they're constructed.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Bitcoin has a mempool. Ethereum has a mempool. Most blockchains have a mempool. Salana's goal is to move so incredibly fast that transactions just skip over whatever would be a mempool. and they just go straight into the chain. Gito needed to make a MEM pool because Gito is this MEP organization, orchestration, optimization part of Solana,

Starting point is 01:04:51 module of Solana, if you will. And so they need to have a MMP pool because they need people to reorder the transactions. And so there needs to be this waiting room for, call it, like, block builders in Solana, to, like, reorder the transactions, take out the MEP because that's the business model, and then give it to the Gito sole holders,

Starting point is 01:05:08 kind of in the same way that, like, this is basically how it thinks. Ethereum works. Gito turned off their mempool, which basically means that they turned off their product. They're basically turning off all the MEV extraction that would go to Gito Soulholder. So there's now, there's not really any difference between holding Gito Soul and holding normally staked sole other than that you can use it in D5. Why'd they have to turn it off? Because they were getting sandwich attacked. And this is a very normal, very expected thing to happen in the MEV world. like sandwich attacking is MEV.

Starting point is 01:05:41 And what does Gito do? It organizes off-chain MEV so that MEV can get extracted and put into Gito's soul. But there's so much sandwich attacking what's happening that they just decided that this is just a net negative for the Solana ecosystem as a whole. Because like these weren't like, these aren't like one to three to five percent sandwich attacks. These are people with like trading bots and telegram just like not caring about slippage and then getting sniped for like 50, 80 percent. And so they just turned up. off the men pool because they couldn't get a grip on this MEV that was coming in. I actually learned that Gito has a terms of service that says like, hey, you actually can't front

Starting point is 01:06:19 run or sandwich attack. Oh, wow. And the sandwich attackers are like, I don't care about your terms of service. And so this is putting, like, Salana Gito into like this interesting place. This is like MEV what do, which has been like the big question that Ethereum asks itself when we discover. It's a hard question. isn't it? So like Solana is in like 2020 Ethereum land when like Phil Dyan just discovered

Starting point is 01:06:44 M-E-V and they're like, all right, what do we do about this? And so like the geo team are Chads, like super technically strong. So I'm interested to see the solution that that they come up with. Like this has kind of been my expectation for the Solana ecosystem. Like they've always been like, yeah, how do we pay for validators? Like M-EV. I mean, the reason they haven't had that before, haven't had this problem before is basically there hasn't been enough like MEV opportunity. There hasn't been enough like upside in terms of having been like activity. Now there is. A ton of the meme coin energy is happening on Solana. And I'm sure it's like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of MEV opportunity right now. Right. Right. Right. And so like to be

Starting point is 01:07:24 clear, the MEV opportunities are still there. They are just like, Gito saying like actually that's not our problem anymore. There might even be like a legal concern here because like you don't want to be the thing that's facilitating MEV or sandwich They're being pushed back to the valid like the actual kind of validators. It's just going back into the normal Salana layer one validator set.

Starting point is 01:07:42 And so like all now all the validators are getting the MEV and like the MEV extractors are more efficiently able to extract without that going back into the protocol. Well that doesn't mean it's not a problem. The same much it has not gone away. In fact it's an even worse problem now.

Starting point is 01:07:55 Now you just can't see them. It's just now it's Salon's problem, not Gito's problem. Yeah. Well, I do have some confidence that they will figure this out. right but it but it but it's a thorny problem um it's a thorny problem no blockchain ecosystem has figured it out by the way uh bitcoin's going to have to figure these things out as well wow with all of the

Starting point is 01:08:13 bitcoin leader too imagine right there will have to be some you know jito for uh for bitcoin some sort of flashbots for bitcoin so we'll see how that uh evolves is currently march lucas from gto is going to be at permissionless and so i think over the next six months we're going to actually get a lot of clarity as so like how salana as an ecosystem is going to solve its own mv problem I think Lucas is at the spearhead of this whole thing. So since he's up permissionless, I think that's going to be one of the themes of content that me and Mike and the other permissionless content organizers talk about. There you go, Luke.

Starting point is 01:08:43 You have six months to work on this. We'll see in Salt Lake in October. Thanks, Lucas. David, did you see this? I'm just going to play the clip. Michael Sailor. Michael Sailor clip. Here we go.

Starting point is 01:08:54 He's on MarketWatch, traditional finance media. Here he is. To be honest, most of the people who are, yes, sure, some people pass it on to their children. But like most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets out of profit. Let me say to a different way. Okay. People that use fiat currency as a store of value, there's a name for them. We call them poor.

Starting point is 01:09:17 Okay. Anybody that's rich in the world, they own property. Wow, that sounds absolutely terrible. At some level, though, that is classic Michael Saylor. Oh, yeah. And there's some pretty like decently savage, decently. like correct. We don't have to call them poor, but like this has been the thing that you and I have been talking about on bankless since the inception of bankless. Fiat currencies and central banks

Starting point is 01:09:42 make people who use those fiat currencies poor. That's why the stock market has been up only and savers have been down only since the inception of or the inception of the, the inception of fiat currencies in the 70s when we went away from the gold standard. Savings accounts suck. That's what he's talking about. He's just being a savage about it. Yeah, anyone who gets any amount of wealth does not hold their money in fiat any longer, in dollars or in a bank account, right? They're buying real estate. They're buying stocks. They're buying Bitcoin. Traditional store of value type assets, right? And that's kind of what he's saying. But wow, putting it so brutally, only Michael Saylor can do that. A few exciting bankless ventures

Starting point is 01:10:19 raises that we wanted to bring up both because we're excited about these projects and also you should know that bankless ventures is investing in them, one of which is Eclipse Labs. This is a 50 million Series A. A pretty exciting layer two. What are they building? Eclipse, we had Neil on forever ago. It is the Solana virtual machine

Starting point is 01:10:36 as an Ethereum layer two using Celestia for data availability and risk zero for ZK proving. It was actually where I got the term platypus layer two. And so other investors include a DBA, that's John Sharbonneau, polychain robot ventures,

Starting point is 01:10:50 but being led by placeholder and hack VC, that's Chris Berniske, and also the people over at hack, along with some angels. Barnaby from the Ethereum Foundation, Austin Federer from the Salana Foundation, Hazu, Eric Wal, D.C. investor, Santiago Santos. Pretty cool.

Starting point is 01:11:04 It just explains itself. Take the Salana virtual machine that everyone knows and loves, place it as a layer two on Ethereum, make it go even faster and be even cheaper. See what happens. See what happens. We also have Click.

Starting point is 01:11:17 They raise their $8 million Series A that's a bankless ventures investment. Click is doing a ton of exciting things right now. This is a compute coordination network. I think one big, reason why you and I were bullish is they've created this like identity oracle. And you know, on chain identity has been a thorny problem for crypto to solve. It's been an unsolved problem. But if you're trying to drop an air drop, if you're trying to incent a community and you want to know who the humans are,

Starting point is 01:11:43 who the civil resistant unique humans are versus who the bots are and who the farmers are, you need a solution to do that. And Click has this kind of anti-civil identity oracle where you can plug in your web 2 profiles and qualify potentially for air drops. That's just one of like a hundred different solutions. This team is brewing up. So I'm pretty excited to back those guys as well. Think about just like all the data that you leave around Web 2 and your Spotify account, your Twitter account, like whatever corners of the internet that you go about and Click is trying to get that data into just like a useful, composable bit of information inside of Web 3. So Web 2 data allowing to unlock doors,

Starting point is 01:12:24 create doors that could be unlocked inside a web three. David, we said we had something for bankless listeners, bankless podcast listeners. And it's time to unveil what that is right now. Yes, David, I'm a huge Spotify user. You know, a big Spotify user. I think you are too, because I see you on Discord. It's always like, David's listening to Spotify. I don't know if you're listening to a podcast or what you're listening to you.

Starting point is 01:12:46 But the news... I'm listening to The Sheep Dogs. Let me tell you that. Oh, awesome. The news this week... Or lately The Grateful Dead. Oh, okay. It's a grateful debt for the bull market.

Starting point is 01:12:55 Yeah. I'm sure people are excited to hear that. But now the news is, bankless premium feed is on Spotify officially. So if you are a bankless citizen, the old way of getting the bankless feed was using the RSS feed, you know, plug it into Apple or something.

Starting point is 01:13:11 You could still totally do that. You can also get the bankless premium feed on Spotify. And the premium feed gives you early access to everything we publish here. Also, bonus episodes. Of which plenty are coming. So the way you could think about this is the main public feed is sort of the 100 level content, the 200 level content, and the premium feed features all of that, ad free by the way, and also 300 level content,

Starting point is 01:13:37 and we are publishing more and more to the premium feed this year that I think like, you know, the casual bankless fans wouldn't be as interested in, but the deep fans and like the deep crypto journeys. On the frontier, yeah. With all this innovation and exploration of the crypto frontier, there will be lots of research episodes, call them research episodes, going on to the premium feed as well, just some other fun goodies as well. So if you're already a citizen and you want to get this into Spotify, you want to unlock this door.

Starting point is 01:14:06 This area is a link in the show notes to get the Spotify premium feed unlocked to you. If you're not a citizen, you can get 15% off because that's what we're going to give you for our fourth birthday on the podcast. Spotify 24 is the code. There is also a link in the show notes to unlock bankless premium. for 15% off in Spotify. David, let's get to the meme of the week

Starting point is 01:14:24 as we end this. What are we looking at here? Dad, why is my sister's name, Rose? Because your mother loves roses, son. Thanks, dad. No problem, blob. This is a dad with his son. His son is driving.

Starting point is 01:14:40 Apparently, the father named his child blob, which, you know. It's great name. Great name. Shout out to whoever decides to name their kids. Blob. Babies get made every single bull market. And at least some of you should name your kids Blop.

Starting point is 01:14:54 Yeah, class of 2024. Babies of 2024, Blab Babies. Guys, we're going to- We also have a moment of Zen. Yeah, this is crazy. You already heard the clip, but now have you heard the song? Crypto remix Michael Saylor. So enjoy that.

Starting point is 01:15:08 Guys, got to end with this, of course, some disclosures. Both David and I are investors in Swell. We're also investors in a bunch of the layer twos we named today. You can always see our disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. Also, crypto is risky. you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Starting point is 01:15:27 Thanks a lot. What do you do with the Bitcoin besides it just gather value? Real estate developers in New York City, they're not buying the real estate because they want to live in it. But like most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets out of profit. People that use Fiat currency as a business. a store of value. We call them poor. We call them poor.

Starting point is 01:15:58 People that use Fiat currency. You have the superior asset. It's going up forever more. Right, I mean, right, but I mean, we can all look Bitcoin sort of as forevermore. People that use

Starting point is 01:16:47 Fiat Currency As a store Of value We call them We core We call them poor People currency

Starting point is 01:17:07 Pire

Bankless - ROLLUP: Blobs Arrive | BTC New High | ETH ETF? | Bankless 4th Birthday

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