Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC ETF Rumors | Uniswap Fee Switch | SBF Trial Continued
Episode Date: October 20, 2023Bankless Weekly Rollup 3rd Week of October ----- 🧥 Take the Survey and Win the Bankless Jacket! https://bankless.cc/survey ------ 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 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:20 Markets 5:15 Janet Yellen on War https://news.sky.com/story/we-can-certainly-afford-two-wars-us-treasury-secretary-says-12985335 7:50 A Trade War https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1714280042547806316 9:10 Treasuries vs Bitcoin https://twitter.com/robustus/status/1714303541077020770 10:30 Vance on Young People https://x.com/pythianism/status/1714697205259325511 12:22 Commodity-Like Money https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1714710556865597816 12:50 Vitalik Not Dumping https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xb8ccf84d 13:45 Crypto Dollars https://twitter.com/sebventures/status/1714226872471470452 https://twitter.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1714345259847561526 18:00 BTC ETF Flub https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8kL82PX0AAC0dm?format=jpg&name=medium https://twitter.com/watcherguru/status/1713921987783885072 19:20 How it Happened https://cointelegraph.com/news/clarification-sharing-false-spot-bitcoin-etf-news 21:10 Surprisingly Bullish https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1713931735086313788 22:40 Analyzing the Trade https://twitter.com/john_j_brown/status/1713927067337646410 23:30 Larry Fink https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1714026700894359838 24:50 SEC Getting Involved https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1714987065664766303 25:50 Uniswap Fees https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1713987105666265113 27:40 People are Upset https://x.com/econoar/status/1713998895079145858 https://twitter.com/NTmoney/status/1714023810586804732 30:50 Nuanced Takes https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1714023895164920267 https://imgur.com/srTluvB https://imgur.com/52GHn8p 32:25 Closing Thoughts https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1714092908415156365 https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1714009148147241042 https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1714123412904267857 38:25 Uniswap Stats https://dune.com/hagaetc/dex-metrics https://twitter.com/1kbeetlejuice/status/1714096389024579796 https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics https://twitter.com/tomkysar/status/1714397906629783671 44:00 SBF Trial Continues https://futurism.com/the-byte/legal-experts-sbf-deep-trouble https://blockworks.co/news/sam-bankman-fried-trial-day-10 https://www.theblock.co/post/256368/blockfi-ceo-points-finger-at-alameda-ftx-for-collapse-of-crypto-lender-during-testimony-at-sbf-trial https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1713711029614448686 51:05 Scroll Mainnet Live https://twitter.com/Scroll_ZKP/status/1714286874020528554 https://www.youtube.com/live/FWzdCbFXAy8?si=LYpHH1xGkncyAUUh https://www.bankless.com/airdrop-hunter 52:50 Coinbase Perpetuals https://x.com/coinbase/status/1714642518678155709 https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/crypto-derivatives-market 57:40 Elizabeth Warren vs Crypto https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1715026122704900217 https://x.com/KMSmithDC/status/1714007648364880282 1:01:30 Fighting Back https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-13/sec-won-t-ask-court-to-reverse-its-decision-on-spot-bitcoin-etf https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1712935855877128662 1:02:10 EtherFi Token https://x.com/ether_fi/status/1714695381957902428 1:05:00 Jimmy Zhong https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/07/feds-seize-3point36-billion-in-bitcoin-the-second-largest-recovery-so-far.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/crypto911.html?taid=652e795bddbbd60001a5835f 1:11:30 Protecting Citizens https://twitter.com/shaughnessy119/status/1714384326467399858 1:12:15 MEV Searchers https://appointmenttrader.com/ 1:14:45 Mirroring the Stock Market https://twitter.com/degenspartan/status/1713030953193591084 1:16:40 Permissionless Finance https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1712229910477967781 1:17:30 What Ryan’s Bullish On https://u.today/joseon-blockchain-ecosystem-introduces-first-ever-virtual-nation-state https://www.joseon.com/l/en-US/ https://joseon.cloud/JoseonWhitepaper.pdf 1:22:30 What David’s Bullish On 1:25:20 MEME of the Week https://vxtwitter.com/tomkysar/status/1714066425071984992?s=46 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
The BTCETF gets approved. Actually, no, it didn't. Instead, $65 million of liquidations occurred due to an eager Beaver news organization.
Not bankless. Not us. But we did accidentally get a mock drive run of what a Bitcoin ETF approval would do to the market. And Larry Fink, of all people, gives his take.
Hey, Bankless Nation. It is the third Friday of this beautiful month of October. And it's time for what, David?
Oh, the bankless Friday weekly roll-up, Brian, where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto,
which is always an ambitious endeavor. Yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier.
Ryan, you got your morning coffee?
I got my morning coffee. It is black.
What number of pots are you on? I know you've got coffee in pots.
Second pot. Second pot about halfway through. So I would say one and a half pots.
You're going to need some extra coffee to get through this roll-up because it's a little bit of a doozy.
Yeah, there's so much going on this week. It was actually an action-packed week.
Number one, we talk about un-swap fees. They have been flipped on.
But everyone is upset about this because it's not the uniswap fees you actually hoped.
Doesn't mean things for the unitokin necessarily. Let's talk about what else we got, David.
Coming up after that, a false positive on the approved Bitcoin ETF sends the market in for a roller coaster.
It turns out that no Bitcoin ETF has been approved. But we did learn some things. And so we will talk about what we learned.
It's all about the lessons learned along the way.
That's why we're here, just for learning.
A new layer two hits main net, so we'll talk about why that one's unique.
Another layer two just dropped.
And then, of course, Ryan, what do we can end with?
David, you remember that guy who was storing $3 billion in Bitcoin that he stole from the Silk Road?
I remember this story.
Okay, so a year ago, and the FBI found it in his basement.
Well, we have the full story on today's show.
CNBC did an exhaustive interview and in-depth story on Jimmy Zong of Gainesville, Georgia,
the Bitcoin billionaire. Gainesville. Yeah, Gainesville. Literally Gainesville. So we're going to talk about that, too.
David, before we get in, we have a special message from who? Ourselves. Ourselves. Actually.
Yeah. Yeah. What do we want the bankless nation to go do?
We've got a survey. We got a survey to make the podcast better. So we would like you to fill it out.
If you are a listener of the podcast, surprise you are, we would like your feedback about how we can
improve the podcast. So there's a bunch of questions about who you are when you started listening to
bankless, why you listen to bankless, what types of episodes you like. We are working on a new
show format coming midweek is a little bit roll-upy, but we need more information about you guys
so we can understand what you guys want so we can figure out how to structure that show. One or a few
lucky responders will get a very cool bankless Sujikin jacket, which is quite literally the coolest
piece of apparel that I own. It's in my closet. I don't have it on me. Do you have a picture of it?
Look at this. Yes. Super cool. Super cool. I think it's
great. It's also reversible in case, you know, I don't know why you wouldn't ever want to rock this,
my gosh, but it also is reversible to be a little bit more tame. Yeah, bear on both side, on one side,
bowl on the other. It's awesome. So yeah, go fill out the survey. Go fill out the survey.
That's David looking out in a Sucigin jacket over the New York landscape. Shout out Dave Krugman
for taking that photo. That's awesome. All right, David, you ready to get to markets? Yeah, let's do it.
Let's do it. Okay, let's sound like. Happy sounds. Happy sounds. Oh, really? We didn't. We didn't get a double
digit week, but man, Bitcoin put in a 7.5% green,
24, 7 day candle, yeah.
7.5%.
Yeah, that's a big week.
More than 1% a day.
We are just hovering below 30K.
So what's the number on the week?
Start of the week at below 27,000.
We are now at almost 29,000, 28,700, up 7.5%.
That's crazy.
And look at this big spike here.
We didn't talk a little bit about that spike in a candle.
That was the fraud.
It was a mistake.
It was a fraud.
Yeah, it was a big old mistake that we learned a lot of them.
I was just saying the fraud word on this podcast.
That's great.
All right.
How about Eith Price in the week?
Less happy.
Starting the week at 1530 ending the week at 1665, up 2.5%.
So definitely a Bitcoin week.
Still happy though.
Still up though.
But the ratio is kind of down.
Extremely sad.
Extremely sad.
Ratio is all the way down to 0.545.
If you're a Bitcoin bull, this is not sad.
This is happy.
Well, I think if you're overall,
a markets bowl, like crypto markets, like first Bitcoin, then the rest of the market. This is how
it goes. I double, I doubled down. I ate up a little bit more of my ETHBTC trade, just a lower
dollar cost average into like lower the price. How do you guys explain this? Yeah, I know what you got
what I was saying. Yeah. And how about crypto market cap on the week? One point one three trillion
dollars. So definitely up. Total market cap looking good. L2B. Painted floor. L2B. We're we're hovering
of 10 billion in total value locked.
I would say that's unchanged.
On the activity side.
Yeah, unchanged.
Activity side, we're kind of hovering in the same around.
Five, yeah.
40 to 50.
We hit some 6X on layer two's on Ethereum.
Now we're down to 4.8, but still holding a high.
Well, let's broaden our horizons to macro, the rest of the world,
beyond crypto for just a minute.
So this is Janet Yellen this week saying,
America can certainly afford to support Israel and Ukraine.
So this is her saying, the U.S. Treasury, of course, David's saying that America can certainly afford to support two wars on two different fronts.
Where do you think she gets that confidence, David?
Because I'm not so sure about our ability to support wars or pay for all of the things that America wants to pay for.
Where do you think she gets that confidence?
It's a pretty hot take to say that America can finance two other people's wars when we have like a big,
very bad deteriorating fiscal situation internally.
Like our own house is not in order.
And then Janet Yellen, who's the Treasury Secretary,
she's a manager of the Treasury,
she's trying to make, you know,
she's managing our budget.
And then she is saying, quote,
we need to come up with the funds,
both for Israel and for Ukraine.
This is a priority,
which is a very politicized statement.
So it kind of just goes into the whole thing,
the whole like story arc of the US dollar and the politicization of the US dollar, it's like our
dollar is a weapon for a means to an end to get what America, the American Empire wants.
And that is, I am here on crypto to not have politicized money.
And this is extremely politicized.
You also have a take here.
War is the most inflationary thing humans do.
What do you mean by this?
Yeah.
War is extremely inflationary when a building collapse.
is because of a bomb, that building is capital being destroyed. And we have to go rebuild that
building. Who is going to finance that? Who is going to rebuild all of the destruction that wars cause?
It comes out of the fiat because we're not like, we're not going to increase taxes. We're not
going to, you know, we can't make more money. Actually, just kidding, we can't make more money.
It comes from inflation. And so like when we finance wars, where does that money come from? It comes
from inflation. We just print our way to finance it. Yeah. And if you want evidence of that,
go look at World War I, go look at World War II, go look at all of the wars throughout history
and what they do to the nations that, you know, that partake in them. It is a transfer of value
from the monetary base to fighting war, which is just straight destruction. I think it's like one of the
worst fiscal, like decision you can make. And we also have some hot wars going on, but we also have
some trade wars going on. This is a Kobayasi letter saying the last thing we need right now is a
trade war, taming inflation with skyrocketing energy prices and geopolitically geopolitical conflicts is
already hard enough. Unfortunately, we're taking one step forward and two steps backward.
I think they are referring to a trade war with China. So about a year ago, David,
President Biden restricted AI chip sales to China. And now last week, as of last week, he actually
expanded that restriction to include another set of chips. NVIDIA, particularly a maker of some
these GPU chips, which of course, GPUs are kind of the chips that AIs eat up.
That's kind of the new oil. Yeah, the new oil.
Chips. Down 7.5% on the back of this restriction. So the stock has raised $100 billion in value
just over 20, in the last 24 hours. That's another. For reference, Ethereum is 180.
billion dollar market cap.
Jeez, man, and videos is absolutely flying, huh?
But yeah, this is another thing that also decreases productivity.
It's not a hot war, but even trade wars are negative value creation for all parties involved,
unfortunately.
Speaking of negative value creation, David, you want to take a look at the value of
U.S. treasuries compared to Bitcoin from the beginning of COVID.
we looking at here? Yeah, so we're looking at a chart here. If you bought, if you were like,
oh, COVID, scary, I'm going to fly to safety and where a safety for the average person,
it's a bond. If you did that at the beginning of COVID, a 20 to 30 year U.S. Treasury bond,
you are down about 50%. You are down bad about 50%. You lost half the money. The safe asset.
The safe asset. If you went to Bitcoin at the beginning of COVID, you're up 230%. Wow. Wow. Yeah. What were
Flight to safety.
What were you thinking that week, the beginning of COVID?
It was a week in March when all of this broke, if I recall correctly.
Yeah.
I had fear, for sure.
Yeah.
I was like, oh, like, pandemics or a thing that can totally happen?
Like, how bad is this going to get?
I think we got lucky with COVID with how bad of a disease it actually was.
Like, it could have been way worse.
I completely agree.
I thought there was the potential to, like, to head into, like, a, you know,
an almost decade-long.
Yeah.
depression type of era, right?
I was considering that reality, for sure.
That was a crazy time, but yeah, the flight to safety, at least in the form of U.S.
government bonds, did not work out so well.
David, this is a take from Vance Spencer.
What's he saying here?
Vance says, when no millennials or zoomers can afford a house and job prospects are limited,
don't be surprised when price to earning ratios for Zike IC tech stocks or crypto are
going to go vertical even with higher rates.
interest rates don't matter to millennials and zoomers. They have no savings and little prospects to
ever have them. Even big tech friends are living paycheck to paycheck. So like big tech friends,
people working at Google or meta or very well paid people are still living paycheck to paycheck.
Vance says all that matters is swinging for the fences, a portfolio optimized for the Instagram lifestyle,
and this is actually quite rational. Spend more time in Asia and you'll understand the crushing
paradox for young people. We definitely saw this energy throughout crypto. It was one of the big narratives
that supported crypto during its bull market. It's like, why buy a monkey JPEG? Like, why go down
the list? It's like, why not? It's like, it might be worth a million dollars. It's a new narrative.
Like, we'll run with it. And so when interest rates, where they can't buy a house, you can't have
savings, you need to swing for the fences. And so portfolios are going to be like people are
dollar cost averaging into swinging for the fence fence portfolios right now yeah that's pretty crazy and
and so vance is making the case that even though um stocks are valued at well very high rates from a p.
ratio perspective they could go even higher but you know it's kind of it's it's it's almost sad
though david because it just feels like the you know the statement of people are desperate and so
they're just going to gamble is what's actually happening here and that you know that's sad i feel like
time is a flat circle this was a this was like content that we were talking about for like
I think a year and a half straight during the bull run.
And I think people are just noticing like,
hey, there's a bunch of Tinder.
This is bull market Tinder for what's going on.
Mike has a similar take here.
Crypto combines two of today's biggest trends.
One, a return to commodity like money.
It's part of the Neil House, fourth turnings,
Ray Dalio, like transitions.
Every once in a while, we blow up our money,
and so we return to commodity like money
that you can't blow up.
And then two, religious like online community.
Fade it at your peril. Fade crypto at your peril. I totally agree. Yeah, especially going into this world. You know who is not fading Eith, David? Just actually a reminder. Vitalik helped remind everyone is Vitalik. He's not dumping on us in this spare market.
Talek would like you to know that he's not dumping on you.
I think somebody asked him the question because there was a transfer of something like
4 million of ETH from not his address, but an address address is connected to his address.
And so someone asked, do you mean?
No, it was from Vitalik.
Like, not his specific addresses, but, you know, he moved some ETH somewhere else and they ended up selling.
And so he was asked in AMA, hey, are you selling?
And he was like, nope, that's a nonprofit.
I haven't sold any of my ETH since 2018.
So these sales are from donations.
I don't know, man.
If you're selling your Eth, are you smarter than Vitalik?
That's my question.
That's my question today in this market.
So there you go.
Some clarification there.
David, you know what's killing it even in the bear market?
Tell me.
Crypto dollars.
Okay.
What are we looking at on screen here?
Okay, so this is interestingly crypto dollars on Tron.
We're looking at a chart of weekly active addresses settling stable coin payments across various blockchains, Ethereum, Tron, Binance, Polygon, Optim, Arbitrome, Phantom, Avalanche.
And then also like USDT, USDC.
USDT active addresses on Tron are by far the most active addresses settling stable coins in all of crypto.
And it's followed up by Binance smart chain, followed by Ethereum. Ethereum is third.
And then USC is like a long second behind USDT.
Tron, just the absolute payments gargantuan for settling USDT.
It's pretty crazy, actually.
And but staple coins in general, active addresses are about flat.
And, you know, Nick Carter reminded us in our crypto dollar episode we did earlier this week that flat is actually up in these hard economic times.
You know what's not on that chart?
What's that?
Salana.
Didn't even make the chart.
It's true.
But if you look at this, stable coins are now the 16th largest sovereign holder of treasuries.
Okay, so stable coins hold more U.S. treasuries than Norway, South Korea, Saudi Arabia,
Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, the UAE.
So they are rising in terms of the amount of treasuries that they are holding.
I think if they break into the top 10, David, that's when...
The force we reckoned with?
Yeah, that's when it's a force to be reckoned with.
That's when Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell, really have to pay it more attention.
Well, okay, breaking into the top 10 is not hard.
Like, it's the top three.
It's Japan, China, UK that are the big ones.
If stable coins just doubled, they would be like number four.
In the top 10.
I know.
It's absolutely crazy.
So very bullish crypto dollars.
If you want to get more bullish on crypto dollars, we did an episode with Nick Carter earlier
this week that you absolutely have to catch up on if you haven't.
David, what do we have coming up next?
Coming up next, Uniswap is collecting fees.
but no, not the uniswob you're thinking of.
We'll talk about that.
The BTCETF gets approved.
Actually, no, it didn't.
Instead, $65 million of liquidations occurred
due to an eager beaver news organization.
Not bankless.
Not bankless, not us.
But we did accidentally get a mock drive run
of what a Bitcoin ETF approval would do to the market.
And Larry Fink, of all people, gives his take.
SBF trial week three, all this stuff,
and more new layer two main net,
some really good stuff.
So we're going to get to all of that
and more. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible,
especially a preferred crypto exchange for 2023. If you're not have an account with Cracken,
consider clicking the link in the show notes to getting started with Cracken today.
Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the
largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us
to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us,
hardwired. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive. And if any
Anything can be improved.
Why not finance?
Crypto is a financial system designed with the modern world in mind.
Instant, permissionless, and 24-7.
It's not perfect, and nothing ever will be perfect.
But crypto is a world-changing technology at a time when the world needs it the most.
That's the Cracken mission, to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency,
so that you and the rest of the world can achieve financial freedom and inclusion.
Head on over to crackin.com slash bankless to see what crypto can be.
Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss.
Cryptocurrency services are provided to U.S. and U.S. territory customers.
by Payword Ventures Eke, PVI doing business as Cracken.
Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions.
Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 with flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems.
Arbitram Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub, and social gaps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home.
And now, Arbitrum Orbiton allows you to use Arbitrm's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3,
giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput.
Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum orbit,
lets you take your project to new heights.
All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum
and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible.
Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees.
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.
Okay, David, that green candle we were looking at earlier, where did that come from?
Did it come from this tweet?
Yeah, so, Coin Telegraph reported earlier this week, SEC approves iShares, spot Bitcoin
ETF.
The approval of the spot Bitcoin BETF is the big thing that we are all waiting for.
It's the big one.
It's probably going to be the thing that kicks off the bull market.
So this is breaking news.
Like way earlier than people expected.
like it's on the table to get an approval,
but like we're kind of waiting for December, January,
not what month is it, October.
And then we got this surprising, like,
report from Coin Telegraph that a spot Bitcoin ETF got approved.
Bitcoin...
There's just one problem with this tweet, of course,
and what's that, David?
What?
It's not true at all.
Yeah, that right, the big problem.
Yes, the big problem, yes.
But before it was realized to be not true,
Bitcoin went all the way up above $30,000,
touch $30,000.
And then immediately,
fell back down because people realize it like, wait, wait, wait, this is not, this is not real.
Causing almost up to a hundred million dollars of liquidations on various exchanges.
Oof, not great.
And like I said, people quickly realize that like, wait, this is not confirmed.
Can we get a source?
Source, please.
And no one was able to produce a source.
So what happened?
How did this happen?
So there was some news telegram groups where people are sharing news, sharing alpha.
and somebody just says in a telegram group,
I found in my Bloomberg terminal
that the I shares bought Bitcoin ETF was approved.
So the source was this one guy said
that he saw it in his Bloomberg terminal.
If it's in the Bloomberg terminal, it's legit.
This guy said it was in the Bloomberg terminal.
It was not in the Bloomberg terminal.
So that was the source,
was a rando on telegram
that said it was in the Bloomberg terminal.
That is kind of the source.
And then what happened from there?
Yeah.
And so Coin Telegraph is part, like, one.
of the few people who's like in the arena of trying to break news as fast as possible. Like there's
a big difference between first and second. And so they just absolutely jump the gun and send
out the tweet, which sends the markets flying without verifying. Yeah. And so like shorts get liquidated.
Bitcoin adds in like billions of dollars onto its market cap and then loses it momentarily
afterwards. Not great. Not great. Like Black Rock had to issue a statement saying like no, uh-uh,
No, it wasn't approved.
It wasn't approved.
Oh my God.
So this is absolutely big.
And then so what did Coin Telegraph say on the back of this?
They said, we're sorry.
Did you see the, there was a news clip.
I think CEO or an executive at Coin Telegraph was at a conference.
Coin Telegraph representative, yeah.
Right.
And, you know, they asked her about this event as it was going on.
And she spoke to the difficulty with the modern news ecosystem.
incentives around news. Yeah, the pressure and incentive to get something out there as quick as possible, right?
And a bunch of people saw this clip and were like, oh, wow, she's totally deflecting.
Yeah. All blame. That was not a very well accepted line. Yeah. That didn't work out.
They didn't accept that one. So what are we looking at here? Okay, so then there was a bunch of speculations.
Like, okay, well, like, why would somebody was manipulating this market? Like, that was a move. Somebody made money here. It's a Fubar, I don't
know if this how to verify the integrity of this analysis. This is beyond me, but he goes,
insider trading, T-wopping, time-weighted average price. It just means you buy more as more volume
happens. An inside trader T-wopping in preparation for a fake Bitcoin ETF announcement tweet pumped,
which retraced once shown false, yet higher than expected strength shown from people buying the fake
ETF news is making people buy the preparation for the real ETF announcement. Are there any questions?
Basically, Fubar is saying there were more buyers than anticipated for the ETF approval.
And so now, as a result of that, people are actually buying Bitcoin.
So this is a fundamental catalyst, a real true fundamental catalyst.
So we got more than a trial run.
We actually, you know, people were so bullish on the fact that price went up due to this fake news that they actually bought.
Became bullish.
It became bullish.
Yes.
It started.
It's a snake eating his tail.
But more people were caught off guard with how fast this impacted the market.
So people started buying.
And that's why Bitcoin's up.
I'm not going to say it's all of the price action this week, but a decent chunk of it.
Here's an account.
John Brown says,
learnings from false rumors on ETF.
Number one, the market eagerly anticipates an ETF.
Two, most exchanges continue to work well under load and liquidations.
Oh, yeah.
exchanges didn't go down this time, David.
Number three, liquidity upwards is.
thinner than expected. Wow, yeah, it's true. Like, we just burst through those lines.
And number four, coin telegraph sucks. Oof. Sorry, going tolegraph. But also, that was your fault.
You know what? It was a bad week for journalism in general, just, like reporting on things like,
you know, truth and accurate news. And I think a lot of people realized through like Israel,
Palestine conflict and other things, like, how? Journalism is weird in this, in this year.
It's very bad. I mean, back to the Coin Telegraph executive, I mean, she's not wrong.
wrong. There is this crazy incentive to get news out first without verifying the actual facts. And that's
happening in mainstream news circles as well. Yeah. Okay, slightly unrelated. But this is Larry Fink,
the CEO of Blackfrock, and probably one of the most plugged in people to Tradfai. It's possible.
I don't know why you said that. It's extremely related. Well, I think he said it before the ETF kind of
debacle. No, no, no, no. It is in response. Did you listen to the clip? Oh, really? Yes.
Oh, okay. Well, let's just.
watch this. This rally is way beyond the rumor. I think the rally today is about a flight to quality.
Oh, my God, it is. You know, all the issues around the Israeli war now, global terrorism.
And I think there's more people running into a flight to quality, whether that is in treasuries, gold or crypto, depending on how you think about it.
And I believe crypto will play that type of role as a flight to quality.
He said flight to quality three times.
He said crypto is a flight to quality.
Depending on your perspective.
Everyone has their own perceived perspective.
But he said crypto is a flight to quality.
Man.
Hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds.
But also bags, David, because this is how I know Larry Fink has bags is Biggerly
ETH.
He's got something to sell.
These are the rules.
Phil then chill.
I think he's filled.
And I think the ETF is coming with Black Rock here.
pretty soon. Oh, speaking which, what's this? Yeah, so this is James Sefert who says,
there's an update, BlackRock filed an updated Bitcoin ETF perspective early this morning.
This is the morning of October 19th Thursday, which is likely in their response to SEC comments
that we've seen from ARC, Fidelity, and others. The conclusion, what does this mean? Just more
confirmation that issuers are in talks with the SEC, which means that the SEC knows that they're
going to have to approve it. It's going to happen. Gary cannot. Gary cannot.
rejected any longer. He's going to get totally moat over. It's coming. You know, you know, when my
next climb, my mountain climb is scheduled for? Right around some of the deadlines for the spot
approval. It's January, isn't it? It's January. Oh my God, David. If that happens, we'll know for
sure. You are on some kind of a quest on these mountains. You're the biggest mountains I've yet to
climb too. So the joke is every time David is climbing a mountain, he's actually destroying a Gary
Gensler Horacross.
Gary Gensler takes an L in some court somewhere.
Okay.
Uniswap.
They're switching on fees, okay?
Oh, no.
You've teased this a couple times.
You swap labs.
All right.
Tell me about this.
What are we looking at?
Okay, so here is Hayden's announcement tweet about this.
He starts off saying, I work in crypto because of the immense positive impact,
I believe it can have on the world, removing gatekeepers and increasing access to value
and ownership.
You know, he's, TLDR.
He's saying like, hey, guys, we're turning on the fee.
on the Uniswap front end.
And he's really kind of dressing it up.
What are the fees?
So the fees are 0.15% on a trade that goes through uniswop.org.
So the Uniswop.org website will add 0.15% fees to your Uniswap trade.
And this is not the Uniswap protocol.
And this is why everyone was upset and why Hayden needed to make this longer announcement
just to like, again, take caution around the announcement of a Uniswap lab turning on the fees.
you know swap protocol has not had no fees. Still no fees. Okay. So there's two there's two types of
ways you could collect fees, right? So there's one on the protocol level. So every time someone makes
a swap, the protocol could say, hey, we get, you know, point. Yeah, 15 basis points of that.
We can have 15 basis points. Yeah. Okay. And then the other time to collect fees is actually on the
user interface itself. Right. The where the transaction is generated in the first place.
Right. So if you do a swap right now on Metamask, for instance, the Metamask, for instance, the
Metamask while it charges you a fee.
There's a swap fee that MetaMass then takes.
That's how it generates revenue, which is pretty high.
Yeah, something like that.
And so this is Uniswop saying, hey, now on the Uniswop
Uiwip Labs, now on the UI we're going to take 15 basis points, a swap fee, and also
in our web app itself.
So in the browser wallet that Uniswap supports, they're going to take that too.
So why is everyone upset, David?
People are upset because they feel like the Uniswap.
token has been abandoned.
And I think that they think that Hayden has more of a responsibility to the uny token than what he has,
what he's been shown.
And so they feel upset that Uniswap Labs is a for-profit company that's trying to take
care of itself and it's just abandoned token holders.
And so Uniswop Labs has equity.
There are investors in Uniswop Labs, A16Z paradigm, like own equity in Uniswap Labs.
They also own the token.
But the Uniswob Labs is taking the fee.
And now the Unitoken, which has like dangled the fee switch.
Like, oh, Uniswap V3, it's got a fee switch, guys.
But it's not on.
And where are the fees actually going?
It's going to Uniswop Labs, you know, the investors, the equity holders, pockets.
But David, what's the process of turning that fee switch on for the Unitoken?
Because the Unit token could also have a fee switch in addition to...
This uniswop protocol could turn on the fee switch and have that go to the uniswap Dow,
which would be in effect to the unitoken.
That is a governance vote.
I haven't got on to the details specifically, but it sounds like there has been a handful of attempts
of turning on the fee switch, and the Dow has voted down.
And the people are pointing fingers towards the investors.
I need to verify that, but that is the claim, that investors, the large VC whales,
have voted no on the protocol fee switch.
and yes on now.
I think David,
some of them have,
some of them haven't.
This is Eric Connor
with the very pessimistic
critical take at this move.
The very negative take
towards Uniswap,
not bad.
So let me get this right.
Uniswop launches Uni,
that's the token,
and in original launch
post-hype fees,
post-hypes
a fee switch that gets people excited.
Uniswap VCs tied closely to labs.
Continue to make sure
fee switch doesn't happen,
allegedly.
I don't know how true that is,
but anyway,
that's what Eric says.
Uniswap Lees,
Uniswap Labs enables fees for themselves.
That's the charge.
It's basically like rather than put the fee switch on the unitokin side,
you're just taking the fees in the UI side.
Here's Nick Tamano who says,
the purpose of a protocol token is to align the incentives
of developers, investors, and users.
He continues, without pure alignment,
users and retail get screwed worse than in Web 2.
In Web 2, there is explicit misincentive,
misalignment in incentives.
We all know that Facebook's business is not aligned with its users.
When a Web3 protocol launches a token, alignment is assumed and reflected in the token distribution.
When this turns out to not be the case, the users and the retail investors are deceived.
This is wrong.
Wow.
That's a more measure of take than Eric Connor.
Like, I don't think the VCs that own Uniswap Labs equity are like, guys, turn on the fees.
Like, they're just, they're doing other things.
Like, Hayden and the other executives at Uniswop Labs are like, we have a company and we need to make revenue at some point.
let's stop bleeding money and let's start making money.
And so they turn on the fee switch.
Well, that's what Jesse Walden says here.
Another VC, Uniswap Labs products create lots of value for end users.
This is an important step talking about the fee switch for Uniswap Labs on the way to sustaining that long-term value.
And the healthiest protocols have sustainable products built on top.
That is Jesse's take on this, that they have to have a business model in order to continue to develop the wallet and continue to develop the user interface.
and absent this, what, do you want them not to have a business model?
That's the take here.
Some people will say yes to that question.
Yeah.
Here's a take from Leighton.
What's he saying here?
Yeah, here's Leighton Kusack saying,
if you are mad that the Uniswop protocol fee switch is not on,
these are the people to yell at.
And then he lists a link that shows all of the major delegates
towards the Uniswap protocol,
which is A16Z.
There's Jesse Walden,
Gauntlet, Robert Leshner, consensus.
Sorry to name names.
But these are the people.
that have been delegated unitokens if you want to go turn the uniswap fee switch on these are the people
of influence that need to be convinced to vote for that. Laten had another take on this which is maybe
more the positive side and this is just positive is pro uniswap labs is what you mean yeah pro uniswop labs
he says this there's a clear opinion divide in uniswop labs decision crypto builders who understand
why it's good and professional influencers who don't I think he's making the case that just like
But you swap labs needs to have a sustainable business model.
Like the builders need a way to generate revenue.
And like if you're depriving them of that, then you're telling them that they can't exist.
Exactly.
So what let me ask you, what's kind of your concluding thoughts on this?
What's your concluding take, David?
Yeah, there are some, we're going to read a Haseeb take who I think there's just some analysis about
the story arc that is where fees will ultimately converge in the fullness of time as it relates
to front end versus protocol that I think are really, really good.
You want me to pull up that?
Yeah, actually, let's start there.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's responding to this Maddie take who says, who's responding to someone.
So we're kind of entering in the middle of the conversation.
They say, I don't think it's that simple.
But clearly there's some soft max aggregate fee that the market will bear.
Soft max as mean, like, people only accept some amount of fees before they will move elsewhere
or just not trade.
So the market will develop some sort of limit as to like how many, how much fees users can bear.
all else equal the higher the fee earned by token holders,
the less room is available to equity holders or front-end people.
Uniswap Labs, then Uniswop.org is not the only front-end to the Uniswap protocol.
Other front-ends can trade on Uniswap and have different fees because that's just how this works.
There's an asymmetry because routing fees to equity holders, the front end,
less directly impacts token holders because users can trade on different interfaces.
Uniswap.org is there's no moat there. People can very easily type in a different URL to go to a different front end to trade there and just ignore the fee that has now been turned on by the Uniswop front end. And so Maddie continues and says, this asymmetry in payoffs helps explain why one would expect the front end fee to be turned on first. And it is why it'll be increasingly difficult for the token to accrue fees. And Haseeb just follows up and says, I totally agree with this and gives the analysis that I,
kind of agree with where many front ends will turn on fees and that will actually inform the
protocol how much the market is willing to bear for their fees. It makes sense for the periphery
to turn on fees first and then that is like user testing, market testing. And if the front ends all
like kind of converge on like 0.15, 0.3.1% of protocol fees, well then the token holders, the deeper
in the stack versus the interface have the information that they need. Like all of these front ends
are taking 0.15%. Let's turn our fee on to 0.15% and totally rug all equity holders or all front ends
because the protocol is understanding that this is what the market will bear. Protocols are they
got to be slower to move than front ends. Like Hayden and Unisop Labs, they just turned it on because
they're a centralized company and they can just do whatever they want. The protocol is going to take a
larger, longer time to move. This is just the nature of protocols. But, like,
like the token has the winning thumb war.
They just need to turn on the fees.
And I think this might be a moment in Uniswap's history
where like, okay, that whole like promise of the fee switch was cute,
let's effing do it.
And I hope that's how this plays out.
And that's my opinion.
Yeah, I think it can play out that way.
I think there could be a fee,
there could be a fee on the protocol, obviously,
and there could be a fee on the user interface.
One thing, when you put a fee on the user interface,
even Uniswap Labs,
they're inviting competition to enter the ring.
and build against the Unswap protocol and add their own fee as well. So from a decentralization
perspective, this might give us a diversity of front ends that we didn't have before. The other,
I think, factor in play here is obviously the SEC. Okay. So like, I think there is a world where
the UniToken could have received fees from even the fee switch on DUSWOP user interface, right?
from day one.
But how can you do that
when you're a U.S.-based entity?
Yeah, I think the question I would have
for people who are saying,
well, why can't Uniswap Labs
just give those fees back to the prototype?
How can they do that in the U.S.?
There's no way a U.S.-based company
can actually share these fees
to the unitoken holders,
given the current posture of the SEC in the U.S.
100%.
And so should they break securities laws?
And if you're saying,
well, you know,
USWAPs already has a whole bunch of unitokens,
and why don't they just sell them to the market?
well, that's not a sustainable business model.
And that's going to put downward pressure on the price of the uny token anyway.
And so that's kind of counterproductive.
I don't know.
I think in the fullness of time, some of this gets resolved.
I do think the fee switch will happen on the uni token itself.
And, you know, hopefully it gets resolved.
But there are people that felt like this was value extractive, I would say, from a uni governance token perspective.
Well, remember when you had Van Spencer on the show to talk about,
smell, like the smell, the token index, synthetics maker, ether, Lido, link. And I'm going to ask me,
like, yo, why isn't, why isn't uniswap here? And he cited is like, I think there's a misalignment
between equity holders and token holders. And he would be able to say, like, yeah, this is what I was
talking about. Yeah, I think my takeaways from this are it's, it's not good for governance
tokens that don't have a real source of cash flow. If you're just a governance token,
if you're just a utility token, it's, it's not great for that entire asset class. And,
any U.S.-based token team, I don't think it's necessarily bullish for them either.
And if, yeah, if you're just a token without cash flows, you're just doing governance.
It really calls into question like why that token is worth what it's worth right now.
And so those are some of my takeaways.
But you think this is some bear market rabble, rabble, don't you, David?
Yeah, well, that was my headline of this meme.
This is here the man standing up, the freedom of speech meme.
And I just say the protocol fee switch and front-end fees are just,
separate conversations.
There are separate conversation.
People who I think are mad at Hayden or labs, I think are just muddling the waters here.
And it's like, the token has the power.
We do need to be able to express it.
So like perhaps shame on VCs if they are actually oppressing token holders from trying
to turn that on, but they're also token holders too.
Yeah.
Well, this could amount to a lot of revenue, I think.
What are we looking at here?
Yeah.
So let's talk about the actual metrics behind this.
So let's get some numbers to frame the debate that we're talking about.
First, uniswop dex dominance on Ethereum is about 75%.
So all decks volume on Ethereum, all dex trades,
uniswap accounts for 75%.
So like, that's huge.
Pretty big dominance on Ethereum.
Like the next biggest one is pancake swap at 7.4%.
And so that's Uniswap, decks dominance.
Uniswap has 75% of all dextrates on Ethereum.
The uniswop.org frontend,
which is what we're talking about,
with where the new fees are, that accounts for 35 to 40% of all Uniswop trades.
So that's actually a pretty healthy amount of trades going through the Uniswop front end.
I don't know where the other like venues are, but like aggregators would be the next big one.
And then also MEV, people just like trading straight through the protocol, no interface.
But like Uniswap is definitely like the very, the most popular place to trade on Uniswap, 35 to 40%.
And so that is the 0.15 percentage of fees. That's where that's kind.
coming from. This is, I actually just got this from Micah Belita from Blockworks. So this is their new
Blockworks research platform that they gave me access to so I could talk about this Uniswap Labs
trading interface. They just slapped this together. Pretty cool interface. Since the, since the fee switch
has been turned on, the Uniswop Labs organization has earned a $110,000. And that's been like over
two and a half days. And so a little bit over $100,000 over over almost three days, about
$30,000 a day, about $12 million a year at current rates in a bare market, in a bear market.
So Uniswop Labs is getting about $12 million a year from this, which is pretty good.
Yeah.
But the context is they've lost some in the Unitoken, at least to the extent that Uniswap Labs
was holding Unitokens.
So Uniswap fees went live five hours ago.
They made 8K in that time.
Meanwhile, they lost $200 million in market cap on the Unitoken over the past 24 hours.
So Unitoken took a big hit in price.
Well, not big, not small.
Yeah, so here's the price of the Unitoken right after Hayden tweets goes from $4.20
down to $3.85.
The actual release of the Unit token happened at $3.
So it went up to like $45 in the top of the bear.
And that's all the way back down to basically it's like debut price a little over $3.
I mean, if you think the uni fee,
is never getting turned on, then maybe, maybe yours bearers unitokens. If you are, if you think
that in the fullness of time, the fee switch will get turned on. Like, this is, uh, look at this dip.
This is your dip. This is a dip for you. Yeah. I mean, the market is, uh, adjusting a real time
to information, right? And it looks like, you know, I, I guess one question I'd have for you,
though, David is, and this is a question I asked, uh, on Twitter earlier this week is uny tokens or
coin, which are you more bullish on? If you had to pick one, right? Because both are exchanges.
Right. But one is kind of like a squishy governance token that maybe has a claim to fees such as they are.
The other is like a fully registered security where you have like legal guarantees and there's a management team.
To make that thing go up in price. Yeah, with fiduciary responsibility. So it very much shows you that like the unitoken is a different type of asset. It is certainly not a.
a stock, right? It has different kinds of guarantees. But you're right. I mean,
yeah, fully diluted valuation of Uniswap is now under $4 billion, market cap $3 billion. So there's
some dilution that will eventually happen, but not too much. Coinbase valuation is $18 billion.
And so Coinbase is, like you said, it's an exchange. It's also got other lines of businesses that
Uniswap does not have. We did a podcast on this recently exploring all their lines of businesses.
we're actually going to talk about when they have an announcement.
$18 billion versus $3 billion, $4 billion.
That's interesting.
That is interesting, actually.
I hold both.
I hold both coin and uni.
I'm bullish both.
And I, if I'm staking a bet, I think the unoswap fee switch gets turned on sooner rather
than later, like inside of one cycle.
Okay.
Well, I am temporarily bearish on governance tokens, but that could certainly change.
David, what do we have coming up next?
Coming up next, coming up next, SBF Week 3.
How's it going?
How's it going?
How's it going to ask you that?
We're going to ask that question.
New layer two live on Mainnet and Coinbase International Exchange launches.
Uniswops already international, but Coinbase is making its way there.
And so we'll talk about all these details and more.
But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Metamask portfolio.
If you have not opened up your Metamask portfolio, because I know you have a Metamask account,
there is a link in the show notes to go open up your MetaMast portfolio.
It's pretty cool.
Check it out.
Metamask portfolio is your one-stop shop to navigate the world of Defi.
And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore.
With competitive rates and convenient routes,
Metamask portfolio's bridge feature lets you easily move your tokens from chain to chain,
using popular layer one and layer two networks.
And all you have to do is select a network you want to bridge from and where you want your tokens to go.
From there, Metamask vets and curates the different bridging platforms
to find the most decentralized, accessible, and reliable bridges for you.
To tap into the hottest opportunities in crypto,
you need to be able to plug into a variety of networks, and nobody makes that easier than
Metamask portfolio. Instead of searching endlessly through the world of bridge options,
click the bridge button on your Metamask extension or head over to metamask.io slash portfolio
to get started. David, we got to check on Sam Bankman-Fried this week. It is the third week of his
six-week trial, I believe. And I think this headline that we have up on the screen about sums it up,
at least to me. Legal experts say SBF is in deep trouble.
Things aren't looking too hot.
Thanks for that analysis.
There you go.
As former FDX CEO, Sam Bagman-Fries criminal trial settles into its third week, legal experts don't seem particularly optimistic about the ex-billionaire's chances of exoneration.
I have a number of friends who are not legal experts who are watching, who are in the courthouse watching this, and they say the same things.
I don't know if you need to be a legal expert.
Just say that.
Maybe it's more credible coming from a legal expert, though.
You got this list. What's this last line saying?
I'll read this last line a second. There's a little bit of context, which is that there's a big question going on, which is, will Sam Bankman-Fried take the stand? Will he testify?
Yeah. Because I'm sure he has words to say, but if he goes up there, he will be questioned by the prosecutor and are, do they want that? Like, gut take, no, you don't. But the question is, the trial is going so poorly that they kind of think, like, well, there's not much to lose.
so let's go for the Hail Mary.
Well, you know what?
SBF has always been a bit of a gambler, I'd say.
I'm sure SBF is like, put me in, coach.
Put me in.
So what's to say?
A former federal prosecutor
and law professor at Duke says,
it's very rare that a defendant
can turn a case around
from the witness stand.
Okay, not looking so good.
But three things happen this week
that I think are worth touching on.
So one is Sam's high school friend
goes on the witness stand.
Who also worked at FDX.
Has a real friend and worked at FTCX, yes.
Cool.
What's the TLDR from this part?
Okay, so the TLDR here is that of all FTX executives that have testified so far,
Singh, who's the friend, has the biggest best moral compass.
One of my friends who was there who's reporting on it said that like they felt the most empathy
for this particular gentleman who described admitting to admitting guilt to various crimes,
including fraud, money laundering, campaign finance,
violations inside of the FTX arena.
This individual described that he had felt suicidal in November of 2022 when FTX declared
bankruptcy.
He mentioned that there was a tense atmosphere among the executives in early November
2022.
There was a war room of sorts that, quote, he said, a crazy blame game going on.
So everyone kind of blaming everyone else.
Go figure how Caroline just immediately defects and goes full prisoner's dilemma as like,
I'm cooperating with the government.
He confirmed that Alameda took billions from FTX and that SBF was the mastermind behind it.
Like, shocker, no surprise there.
That's like the third time that different people have all said this.
He also portrayed Sam as a formidable character who had met with many celebrities.
He had described the massive SBF spending habits, including endorsement deals with high, very high investments,
and then connections to celebrities like Hillary Clinton, Katie Perry, Orlando Bloom, and the gender family.
And quote, I honestly could not tell you what they do, as in like, why do we have these relationships?
I don't know.
And that was, I think this is the last FTX executive that will testify.
So that wraps the whole like inner circle testimony.
Another ghost from 2022 is Zach Prince.
He is the BlockFi co-founder and CEO.
He apparently got on the witness stand and said, hey, you know why BlockFi went bankrupt?
It was because of that guy right there.
And he pointed at SBF.
Because he gave us fraudulent books.
Yeah.
Zach Prince said he would never have doled out funds had he known false balance sheets were being used.
So actually lent money to FTX.
1.1 billion to FTCS.
1.1 billion dollars on those.
Remember we were talking about last week, the seven different alt balance sheets that FDX actually had?
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure BlockFi got one of those.
I think Alt number seven, the worst one.
And lent him money based on it.
Would have never done it.
So all of the retail loss on BlockFi, of which, oh, there are many, probably even Bankless listeners, I was one of those two do.
Yeah, you were.
Because you're not.
Lost money in BlockFi as a result of this.
And then there was this comment from SBF lawyers about whether Sam would attempt to jump on the witness stand or not.
So unhinged.
I don't think they're doing them any favors, man.
What is he saying?
Okay.
So this is a tweet from somebody who's covering this debacle.
SBF Sunday night filing
a re-request for trial day
Adderall
so he can decide
whether to testify
quote as we approach the decision
of whether Mr. Bankman-Feed
will testify
because of the lack of access
to Adderall he will not be able
to concentrate
and so they are saying
hey we need to get Sam
some Adderall
so he can speak words
coherently
I feel like that
is not doing him any favor
and doesn't he have an Adderall problem
anyway. This is how we got in this whole predicament.
I'm glad that Sam Bankmanfried is off of his amphetamines, off of his operas.
Wish it happened earlier, actually, honestly.
Going back up to the Zach Prince thing, the friend that I have that's down at the
courthouse reporting, like what witness Zach Prince talked to, like, the jury and to everyone
listening, and she just, she said that he was just like a huge douche.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Just like super cringe.
Wouldn't stop using finance tech bro like lingo?
and the court had to stop him over and over and over again and say,
hey, can you explain that?
And, like, the reason why I'm pulling this out is, like,
and this is Natasha Hoskins from the Boys Club, by the way.
They're doing a great job, just, like, reporting on the court.
She's in there, like, watching this happen.
And so, like, the statement is that Zach Prince was totally managing Block FI's finances super well,
and it's up to Sam Bankrin-Fried, and it's all his fault.
It's like, if you look at, she said, like, he had to disclose some,
of his decision making about whether to give Alameda money or not. And she said, like, yeah,
like he was gambling too, man. Like, he was also effing it up. He just has the benefit that he can
actually point to Sam Bankman-Fried. But, like, Zach Brins was not doing good risk-adjusted analysis
of the capital of his customers either. Well, that was certainly evident. I think a lot of retails
feeling that now, David. Let's go on to brighter things, away from the SBF trial, at least this week.
We only have three more weeks of that.
Scroll Mainnet just went live.
David, what's been launched?
Yeah, scroll the ZKEVM, bytecode equivalent with the EVM.
That ZKEVM just went live.
So this is a true copy and paste your app onto scroll,
and it's good to go.
That's what that means to be bytecode ZK EVM equivalent,
open source from day one.
Created in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation,
interestingly, and a community of independent collaborators.
And so this is just kind of a big day, obviously a massive day for scroll, but a bite code equivalent ZK EVM layer two on Ethereum is a big deal.
Big deal for the ZK world.
Big day for the layer two world.
So congrats to scroll.
And we did an entire episode on this.
If you want to find out more, go catch that episode.
It's on the RSS feed and also our YouTube channel.
And David, do you know the talented analysts over at the bankless AirDrop Hunter have actually put.
a few quests up that might make folks eligible for this scroll air drop if they launch a token
at some point in the future.
It's a layer two, dude.
How do you decentralize a layer two without a token?
Exactly.
I don't know how you do else.
That would be new.
We have no special knowledge on, you know, how they might disseminate this token.
But we've got some folks that are hunting the, theirdrop opportunities here.
I mean, we ask Sandy and Torgle, hey, are you guys going to win the token?
and they said that they are not focused on a token.
Not that there wasn't a token,
but they're not focused on it.
So bankless.com slash airdrop hunter
if you want to join some quests and do that.
David, there are some perps coming out of Coinbase.
What are we looking at here?
Yeah, so this is the Coinbase International Exchange launch.
So perpetual futures have arrived not for Americans, sorry.
And so if you are in eligible non-U.S. countries,
you can now trade Bitcoin, Ether, Lycoin, and XRP.
fantastic. Perpetual contracts. Coinbase.com slash perpetuals is the new exchange.
Okay, but why is this a big deal, Ryan? Like, well, thank you, thank you for asking.
You remember Bitmex? That was a huge exchange. It's gone under. FtX, like was famous for its
perps. That also went under. Binance has eaten up the market share for perps.
What are perps, by the way? It's kind of like our crypto-native version of options or like native leverage.
It's actually like a financial primitive made by crypto people for crypto people that actually
could get ported back into TradFi.
Like this, Tradfi can do this too.
We just made perps based on the constraints of blockchains.
So this is kind of like our contribution, crypto's contribution to the world of financial
primitives.
Turns out there's still things that you can build there.
Yeah.
They allow you to go margin long, right?
Yeah, super capital efficient.
Like, how do you, you know, whenever you see those like advertisements for like,
100x leverage on some like B tier exchange that you don't know anything about.
That's a perp.
That's a perp.
And so perps because like derivatives, it's a derivative.
It's a derivative financial product under the purview of the CFTC,
which is why Bitmex went under because the CFTC is like, hey, bitmix, you can't,
you're not registered.
You need to go away.
And so then it went away.
And so the derivatives market's massive just because of the capital efficiency that you can get.
You can get like leverage on your money.
Like $1 means up to $100.
of capital. And so this is why exchanges like Coinbase are tromping at the bit to be able to
service this demand because the fees outpace the fees that you can take on the spot market.
The fees are lower, but the volume is much larger. And so Coinbase, I'm sure, is just very
stoked to be able to enter this market slowly, like in good old Coinbase fashion, just like
very late. But they're now in the game and they're doing it. I'm assuming the compliant way.
FDX has completely left open, right?
It's just, really it's just like...
First dominated and then died.
You died.
But, you know, Binance is the big player here.
And if you look at actual trading volumes, I mean, look, all of this orange, David,
this looks like it's about 70%, 75% of all exchanges actually happens in these perps.
Right.
Perp tokens and derivatives.
And it's not on spot.
Yeah.
So spot is about 25% of volume.
Derivatives, perps is about 75%.
We actually just recorded a bull case for coin episode with a couple of crypto Twitter analysts.
And so we actually have some speculation about like, what could this mean for Coinbase the company?
So let's go here some hypothetical numbers.
If Coinbase is able to do what FTX did from January 2021 to January 22 over that year,
Coinbase would make $720 million.
Okay, that's a bit bigger.
that'd be good for a 23% jump in Coinbase's overall revenue.
So now we're getting into things that are really going to potentially move for stock.
And then if we go even crazier and think about Binance,
which is obviously the whale in all exchange talk,
if Coinbase is able to capture 25% of Binance's volume on perks,
that would mean $3.6 billion with a billion revenue jump.
and that's good for a 97% increase over last year's total revenue for Coinbase.
And, you know, we can get crazier from there.
But, you know, you can kind of see how quickly, how much money, you know, this product can
throw off for Coinbase.
You could get crazy from there.
But perps are absolutely massive.
It's a huge opportunity for U.S. exchanges like Coinbase.
So, yeah.
I think this is the big question, which is like Coinbase is going after Binance's market share.
They're entering the international offshore exchange arena.
how much perp capital trading volume desires the comfiness of an onshore United States company
that's producing this offshore exchange.
How much capital will go from like, oh, I prefer Brian Armstrong overseas.
That is an unknown question.
Yeah, I think so.
There's also an unknown question as to how much of this market share defy can take, right?
There's like, there's only, of all of the players and kind of perps today, it's only really
D-Y-D-X that has any kind of market share.
And that's still tiny.
It's just like 1%.
There's got to be some new perp designs that happen in DeFi to take some of this market
opportunity away.
So we will see.
David, I just saw this when we're getting into the agenda.
And my only conclusion is this, David.
Elizabeth Warren is actually trying to kill crypto.
Like she actually is.
I think it's aggressive.
I think it's coordinated.
This is a letter led by Elizabeth Warren has some other senators who have signed off on
it, but she's basically asking the IRS to speed up its crypto tax reporting rules.
And these are some tax reporting rules that would be absolutely disastrous for Defi in the
United States. In particular, they make it such that all Defi user interfaces, as very vaguely
defined as they are, which could mean something like EtherScan, for instance, and certainly
could mean something like the Uniswap front end or crypto wallets. It could expand to basically all of
the interfaces in applications that we use in defy, they would have reporting obligations, IRS reporting
obligations, all right? And so this is an interpretation that the IRS has had recently that they
put out publicly, and the public is now commenting on that. In fact, we're doing an entire episode
about this. We're going to be putting this out next week with the Defi Education Fund on how
disastrous this interpretation of the tax rules would be by the IRS and what we can do about it,
how we can push back against it. But Elizabeth Warren here in this letter, David, is saying
that the IRS should accelerate its implementation of these tax rules. Originally, the IRS was going
to deploy them over the next two years and she says, we can't wait that long. We got to push
this forward even faster. And yeah, it's incredibly alarming what's going on. And that's
That's not the only thing.
She actually penned an op-ed this week in the Wall Street Journal titled,
Cryptocurrency feeds Hamas's terrorism.
Okay?
Oof.
Oh, wait, we just know that that's just false.
We know that that's false.
You can see it on chain.
You can see the lie on chain.
It's just opportunistically dishonest.
This is like low-wrung politics.
Hamas is obviously in the news right now,
and her association of that with crypto is completely.
targeted. It's completely aggressive. And I don't know why they're doing this. I don't know why she is doing
this specifically, but this seems like an aggressive targeted campaign against crypto. I'm very concerned
about this IRS interpretation, implementation of tax code laws. But it just doesn't stop there. It's been
like the entire trajectory of Operation Chokepoint over the last 12 months or so. And I have no
idea where it's coming from. So that is the context here. We are definitely under attack in crypto,
and I feel like I haven't fully realized it until lately how bad it's actually gotten, how
coordinated and aggressive it is. Right. I think, I mean, we as crypto citizens in the United States,
like definitely we would enjoy improved and updated tax guidelines for how we do taxes,
and that's not what we're getting. And like, we want precise and align. And we want precise and a
tax guidelines and what we're getting is like this blunt tool and then Elizabeth Warren is like
yeah but now faster like just hit them with a hammer hit him with a hammer that's basically
what is what is Elizabeth Warren doing she is understanding that like she can get 50 billion dollars
that's the number that she cited 50 billion dollars of taxes out of crypto if we just hit them with
this massive blunt like tax ban hammer and it's basically a way to like you know to to push the
industry away and saying like, hey, everything you're doing just like blunt taxes.
It's just like, it's just a hammer.
It's certainly pushing a lot of crypto, I think, interest out of the United States, at least
for right now.
So, but we are winning in the court system, David.
What are we looking at here?
Yeah.
So this is a headline out of Bloomberg saying SEC won't appeal court decision paving the
way for gray scale spot Bitcoin ETF.
And so this is just another indication that we have of Gary Gensler and the SEC backing down.
in the courts. And so they, the SEC lost their court case against Grayscale about
turning their spot their Bitcoin treasury into a spot Bitcoin ETF. They could have appealed it.
They did not. So weak, weak Gary. Yeah. It's, it's going well in the courts system. At least we
got that going for us. David, what are we looking at? This was a release this week that was
notable. Yeah, back to some crypto native stuff. Etherfi tweets out after a tremendous amount of
hard work by the whole etherfite team. We are excited to announce that we are shipping our LSTEEEETH.
So lowercase ETH. It is an LSTH like LSTEP, like LSTACT, like LITO, like RocketPOOL,
except it's different because it's eigenlayers native restaking token. And so it is a liquid staking
token that is also earning the yield of eigenlayer restaking networks. So it's all the yield
bundled up into one token. So you would expect, logically, it has the yield of Ethereum staking.
and whatever other eigenlayer networks are also up and running in the early stages of eigenlayer.
And so it would in theory have more yield, which is why it's cool.
Money Legos, David.
Yeah, good meme.
David, what do we have coming next?
I ever tell you about the sad story of Money Lego Saddith?
No.
Yeah.
It's the only private keys that I've ever lost.
Oh, what happened to them?
It was in my Argent smart contract wallet, and I lost the Guardian, and I don't know where this.
Yeah.
So I think MoneyLegos.
Eth expires in like 2025
and I'm just gonna like watch it,
watch it go.
Does I have, okay,
and does it have any crypto in it?
Not much.
I think I lost my Arbitrum AirDrop
in there as well.
Sad.
Well, speaking of crypto people
If anyone buys MoneyLegos out of Heath,
please talk to me.
It's the one meme that I made
that I'm super proud of
other than triple point asset.
I do on that one.
Speaking of people losing crypto,
we've got to tell you the story
of Jimmy Zong,
who is the guy who had
$3 billion in Bitcoin in his basement and he lost it to the FBI. Okay? It's going to be story time
coming up after the break. David, what else we have? I actually have a story time for you as well.
It's completely unrelated, but it's one of the biggest bear market signals. And it's all the
MEV searchers have moved to restaurants in New York City. It's something I learned about this week.
And then, of course, we have a take for the week, one take from DGen Spartan about crypto is the
mirror image of stocks and a few other things and what David and Ryan are bullish on. So we're going to get to
all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic.
fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.
SELO is the mobile first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world.
And now something big is happening.
Introducing the SELO Layer 2.
It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sello's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum.
Vitalik has shared its excitement for the SELO layer 2 on the SLO forum.
So has Ben Jones from optimism.
But why?
The SELO layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one block finality.
What does all that mean?
rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum
without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on SELO have grown over
500% in the last six months. With the SELO layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas
using ERC20 tokens. But SELO is a community governed protocol. This means that SELO needs you to
weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the SELO Forum. Follow at SELOorg on Twitter and
visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum.
All right, David, you ready for story time?
I love story time.
All right.
So do you remember that guy that we're talking about, like the FBI suddenly discovered
$3 billion worth of Bitcoin that was in November of last year?
It was in the midst of a lot of craziness, I think, the SBF stuff and all of this.
So we didn't talk about it for very long.
But the story was the FBI uncovered $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin from some guy's
basement in Georgia, in Gainesville, Georgia. Yes, Gainesville, Georgia. And this was Bitcoin from
the original Silk Road hack. This was Bitcoin that was actually stolen from Dreadpiret
Pirate Roberts of the Silk Road. It was 50K worth of Bitcoin. And suddenly it popped back on the
FBI's map and they raided somebody's house and confiscated $3.6 billion worth.
of Bitcoin. So at the time, it was just a crazy story. We didn't know very much about it. But
here are the details here. So the guy's name was James Zong of Gainesville, Georgia. And he
pleaded guilty to all of this stuff. James was apparently living the high life in Gainesville,
Georgia, okay? This is a picture of James right here. This is James and his friends,
Gainesville, Georgia. For the podcast listeners, this is the Stereo. This is the Stereo
Typical crypto nerd who's stumbled into a ton of wealth and now has two attractive women at his side.
Yes. Multiple times. Here's the same picture I just described, but now on a boat.
Yes. So how did the FBI actually track this down? So apparently Jimmy, as his friends call him, not just James. Jimmy, he had a break in actually. So he had a break in in in 2018 or so. And somebody broke in. It's assumed to be one of his friends or somebody close to.
to his circle, broke in, stole some of his bitcoins.
So he called the cops.
And it was only like 150 Bitcoin, which is a small amount for him.
He's like half a million dollars or something.
But he called private investigators to go help him with that.
And so he was on private investigators radar.
And then in 2019, he mistakenly sent a transaction to a centralized crypto exchange that had
AMLKYC 10.
That's how he effed up.
So had his identity.
all right and this put him on the radar of chain alysis who of course tracks all of these different
addresses um they probably know a lot about you bankless listener but you know listening to this and uh you're
on chain profile and they flagged this particular address with uh jimmy zong's you know identity
and they called the fbi and so two that is a huge own goal yes yes unfortunate mistake for jimmy zong um so
two FBI agents show up to his house.
They pretend that they are private investigators as well.
And they're trying to help him find the 150 Bitcoin that somebody stole from his house.
And so he invites them in.
He shows them, you know, his basement and the cool, like, stripper pole.
He just installed there.
Oh, my God, he had a stripper pole in his house?
Yeah, he did.
It was basement.
And so they talk and, you know, they, they chum it up.
And they just discover more about Jimmy.
and it becomes pretty obvious.
He invites them into his home and he just gives them everything.
Yeah, he's just a really friendly.
He was a friendly guy by all accounts.
But these FBI agents are clearly, you know, vetting more information.
They're building the case.
And then they show back.
They show up another time, this time with like a full warrant for his arrest and the ability
to search his house because they, they know essentially he's got more Bitcoin.
Yeah, because in fact might be the Silk Road.
thief. I mean, he stole from a thief, so he's the thief of the thief. And apparently,
Jimmy was hiding a lot of his Bitcoin in a Cheetos popcorn tin. So there was millions of dollars.
That's where I keep my private keys, you know. His Cheetos popcorn tin, and then also under
the floorboards of his house. So here's how a Bitcoin OG actually hide, hit his Bitcoin.
You know, that's kind of what I had in mind, actually. That's what I envisioned.
It looks very much.
It looks like like tens of thousands of dollars of cash, some silver.
Yes.
And some private keys.
Yeah, some private keys.
And do you remember these?
These are actually like the one of those called cacadus coins, cassatus coins.
Yeah, exactly.
So they're actually Bitcoin representations in kind of a coin form.
And then of course, you know, I don't.
I've never actually understood how those work.
You speakies.
Yeah.
Anyway, completely busted.
But the craziest part of this story, I feel like.
So they arrested Jimmy.
he got a year in prison.
Of course, they took all of the Bitcoin back.
But the craziest thing about this, David, is the government wasn't even really that mad.
And do you know why?
Because he was a hooligan.
Yeah, no, he was a whaler.
That's what he was.
Jimmy Zong did not spend any of this Bitcoin, all right?
And so what Bitcoin...
Well, yeah, because he would get in trouble.
I know.
But what the FBI originally did was they all.
Obviously, they got all this Bitcoin from the Silk Road from Ross Allbrick, and then they sold it.
Fairly, fairly immediately.
And then who's the guy that bought it?
Oh, that's his face, James Draper?
Draper.
Yes.
Yes.
VC.
And he did quite well on that.
It went for a premium because the government was selling it.
So it was like, yo, this is clean Bitcoin.
This is like cleaned by the government.
And so it went for a premium back then.
But if they had gotten this Bitcoin at that time and sold it, they said they would have gotten
$320 a coin or.
they would have made, the government would have made $14 million. Because Jimmy Zong diamond-handed it
for like 10 years, now the government got three billion in profit, like 3.6 billion in profit.
Nice job, Jimmy. Nice job. So that is the story of Jimmy Zong in Gainesville, Florida. And yeah,
that's, you know, wishing the best. David, we got some takes of the week. What's the first one we're
looking at? Bankless Nation should be pretty.
familiar with the takes like these. Now, this is Tommy from Delphi goes. Congrats, United States.
The Celestia AirDrop is not accessible to you. There's 800 million Telegram accounts and U.S.
users that cannot access the in-app wallet of Telegram. There are zero D-YDX nodes in the new
D-YDX chain that are inside of the United States. And EigenLayer restaking nodes not in the United States
will see premium usage, as in if your eigen-layer node is not in the United States, you will make more
yield. You imagine being this protected from the future of technology. I am so protected.
Protected from all the subside, all of these gains, all of these uh, air drops. David, what are we
looking at here? This is a MEV take. Yeah, so this is my story time for you. This is something that I
learned during my, my gossipy travels in New York. Okay. Okay. So you, you know what an MEV searcher is,
right? Yes. You want to explain what an MEV searcher does for the bank of the nation? You explain it.
Okay, so MEV searchers, they just crawl the blockchain and they find arbitrage.
So they rebalance sushi swap and uniswap.
They just, you know, they sandwich people.
They just find arbitrage opportunities.
Little nanobots looking, picking up all the profit.
That make markets on Ethereum in DFI extremely efficient because if there's an inefficiency,
they will eke out that profit.
Lately, that skill set has some searchers, there are some searchers out there.
they might be listening to this right now for shout out.
There are some searchers out there who are either bored by the bear market,
aren't finding profit on Ethereum in the bear market,
or just are intrinsically interested to take their skills to other venues.
Yes.
This is Appointmentrader.com.
Apparently there are at least two searchers out there who are very good at their jobs,
who are now searching out for arbitrage opportunities on appointment trader.com.
What is appointment trader.com?
Well, there are a number of restaurants and neighborhoods in New York where, like, if you want to get a reservation, you have to, like, hit refresh for the week that that restaurant will open up their reservations for.
And then you, like, get it as soon as possible.
Otherwise, you're not getting a reservation.
If you have a reservation, you can sell it on the secondary market for some, for a buyer of that reservation.
So people will, this is, it's like ticket sales.
So bots are, but bots are going and they are M.V.
They are M-EVing, like, New York restaurant, like, reservations.
And so, like, they will, they'll try and bought the, and make the first reservation,
but then they will also arb between reservations as if there's, if somebody is, like,
selling a reservation for too cheap, they'll buy it up and then resell it.
And those sandwiches, they will arve out New York restaurants.
So, like, the New York restaurant liquidity market is, like, made very deep.
Like, the order book for New York.
New York restaurants is liquid because of these goddamn MEV searches.
Can we tokenize it and can we spin up a uniswap market?
That is going to be up to them, man.
That is hilarious.
This is an theory of exporting its technology to the world.
Yeah, I guess so.
This is a take from DGEN Spartan.
What are we looking at?
Yeah, so DGN Spartan, I made a good take.
I thought it was interesting.
He says, crypto is the mirror image of the stock market.
He actually says,
Gripto is the mirror image of the stock market
because he is a crypto.
Twitter D-Gen, and that's the words that they use. In stonks, you get a big dump every few years
when panic supply overwhelms a stable demand. That was the COVID dump. That was, you know,
anytime there's like a big, this is like the Berkshire-Hathaway model, you just hold a bunch
of cash. And then when there's what D-Gen Spartan says, a panic supply overwhelms a stable
demand, you buy those in the stock market. In crypto, in Grip 2, you get a big pump every few
years when panic demand overwhelms a stable supply. You sell those. And this is kind of how I've
described crypto bull markets every now and then is like society is just going to forget about crypto for
three years. And then one year, all of society remembers crypto exists. And then they realize,
and they realize that we've made three to four years of progress. And they're like, oh, I'm under exposed.
Buy. Yep. If you are part of the, exactly, right. And if you are part of these stable supply,
you bankless listener you are a part of the stable supply you sell those is what DGN is saying
I just like to dress a position I do and I think that if you do dabble in trading at all like so
it's optional whether you sell those or not right some long-term holders will be like who what do I care
it's noise on the way down it's noise on the way up what do I care I'm gonna hold for another 10 years right
or you could dabble a little bit in in trading right which is like what I would say
long-term trading I would yeah long-term trading which is you just sell
a little bit when
everybody else is foaming in
because that's what they're going to do, right?
They don't, they panic by rather than panic
sell. That's a, yeah, it's a good
take. David, here's an Eric Voorhe's take.
Like every bank in the world,
FDX was closed source, custodial,
spied on and censored its users,
and advocated for compliance with government regulation.
Open source, non-custodial,
permissionless finance is the antidote.
This is what pisses me off so much about
Elizabeth Warren and others
in the U.S.
actually trying to clamp down on defy.
Using terrorism as a cudgel?
Yeah.
And trying to shut down our open source non-custodial permissionless finance
because that is the thing that worked when FTCS and BlockFi and all of the other,
you know, centralized lending providers were going under.
And so taking that away from us, basically.
That's, you know, how are you helping any American when you do that?
Yep, 100%. David.
What are you bullish on?
Am I bullish on?
Yeah, you're going first this week.
Okay, I'm going first this week.
This is actually not something I'm bullish on.
This is another, I guess it's story time week because...
Okay, all right, cool.
This was like the most bizarre thing I think I've seen so far in, like, or this year in crypto.
It's called Joe Son.
All right, let me explain to you what Joe Son is.
Joe Son is the first blockchain ecosystem, first ever virtual nation state.
I saw this from a newsletter I read telling me about Josan.
I was like, oh, cool, it's Bologi's network state idea.
Let me go look into this project.
So, David, this is the project.
You see, this is josan.com.
Josan or Josian?
Joson.
The first cyber nation state recognized by a UN member nation.
All right?
That sounds promising.
So Josan is a non-territorial successor state to the Joson Empire,
which was a Korean Empire
that founded in 1392.
A Korean Empire.
Yeah.
So we're going back in history.
Okay.
And this is the successor,
crypto nation state
to the original Josan Empire,
you know,
founded in 1392.
So I was like,
okay,
what is this?
Says who is the,
why is this successor?
Some crypto person is like,
hey,
we're going to carry on the legacy.
Okay.
So the country name,
other names for this
are the chosen empire.
The Korean Empire.
empire. The language is any, any language, right? It's an internet community. So it's not just
English. It's any language. Freedom of religion. Okay. Freedom of censorship. They have a
currency called the moon. Mun. Yes, excuse me, the Mun, which is the legal national currency
that has all of the benefits of a cryptocurrency. The government. It's a crypto. It's a crypto.
Yeah, there's a cryptocurrency. This is all on chain. Okay. This is a EVM.
based side chain called Joe San. It's a digital country. The government, here's where it gets
very interesting. The government is a constitutional monarchy. Okay. There's a king. Right. I would imagine
it's the guy who wrote the words that we're reading. Yeah. His name is Andrew Lee, King Andrew Lee,
his imperial highness. This is the founder of a crypto nation state. And he put himself as the sovereign
king of this thing, okay? Because of course, that's exactly what you would do.
Of course you would do this. Who's going to join this country where this guy is the king? At least one
person. Okay, so who is this guy? I looked up the white paper. These are some names that I've,
these are some old names. This name is Andrew Ling. Yeah, Andrew Lee, excuse me. It's been 10 years
since I made this statement. This is a statement he made. He said, in 50 years, I hope to be live
on Earth. However, if I'm not, I hope to be known in history as a man who helped bring happiness to the
world. It's been 10 years since I made this statement. 11 years after I declined joining Ripple's
leadership team for 6% of all XRP coins. So he declined that. And 12 years since I voluntarily
left the world's leading Bitcoin exchange. And now he has set himself up to be the king of
Josan. And do you want to look at Joe Sond's tokens here, David? How many tokens he has?
So this proud country, 20% goes to the Josan government, 5%
to Josan officials, government officials.
Which is also him.
Yes.
65% goes to the Josad ministry of a patronage.
Isn't this all him? Yes.
This is all him.
And then 10% issuance goes to kind of like anybody, I guess, who wants to buy in.
Which is also him?
Wait, but is there anyone else in this new country?
That's not him?
I have no freaking idea.
I mean, you can buy the Munt token if you want, so you can be a Joe San.
They're not called citizens.
What does being in this digital nation state?
What is this?
It's a network state?
Yeah, it's a network state.
What do I get?
Well, it's not, it's not really clear.
It's not really clear what the upside is, but you can definitely buy some MUN tokens, and you can
join this.
You can become a denizen.
There's a little bit different than a citizen.
They have a different take on it.
It's like this quasi-corporate entity, and you can join this country where this guy,
Andrew Lee, is king, and you can pledge your allegiance to him.
And I was thinking, as I was reading this, so this is what we're doing with Bologi's
network state idea.
We're creating these network states with like kings in them.
And it made me a little sad.
But also, that's probably how we start, right?
Like there's going to be all of these cults and weird network state experiments first.
And then maybe we'll land on something that is actually wholesome and decent.
So that's the story of Josan, David.
And if you become a denizen, I mean, let me know.
And tell me how it is.
You know, it might be cool.
I can't tell if you just wasted my time.
or not.
What the hell was that?
I definitely wasted your time.
What do you bullish on this week, man?
Oh my God.
I don't know how do I come back from that.
I have so many more questions.
Okay.
What am I bullish on?
I wrote this article.
I'm bullish on everyone reading this article.
And that's the TLDR.
The article is titled five big questions about the future of crypto.
Usually when I write, I have some idea that I very much believe in that I want to express
that I think I'm right about.
And this one is the opposite of that.
This is five questions that I would like to have answered
so that I can have some clarity about crypto.
But the point is that these are, I think, very important questions.
And the first one, like, is how, what does the future of Ethereum scaling look like?
We know it's roll-ups, but actually there's still plenty of more questions.
Many superchains are one Uber chain, huh?
Yeah, one Uber chain is a term that I just made up.
And then there are also sub-questions to help answer the questions.
Two, where does value get captured in the roll-up stack?
There's a tension here between roll-up as a service providers versus layer two tokens.
So I kind of unpack that.
Number three, where is the equilibrium of liquid staking tokens?
There's a bunch of, you know, there's more than just market forces.
Like one dominant, LST or many?
Right, exactly.
Number four, does Solana get gobbled?
I mean, Bankless Nation, it kind of understands my general take there, but I think there's
You have a fixation on Solana, David, don't you?
Well, yeah, I think Ethereum's going to gobble it up.
But is that the question?
Is it going to do that?
But also the most important one.
Is this one of our Discord conversation?
Yeah, I ripped, I screenshotted whatever comments.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But you asked for that.
I remember that.
I did ask for that, yeah, yeah.
But the most important one of the five is how do we get price discovery to happen on chain?
Rather than on centralized exchanges, which is where it happens now.
Right. Currently, price discovery happens on Binance. And if it wasn't happening on Binance, then it would be happening on Coinbase. And if it wasn't happening on Coinbase, then it would maybe be happening on Uniswap. It should be considered unacceptable to all crypto believers out there. That price discovery about the assets that our crypto networks produce happen exogenously. It needs to happen endogenously. We need endogenous price discovery over our own assets. And until we can rip,
the trophy of price discovery from the hands of centralized exchanges, we will always be in their shadow.
So how do we get price discovery on chain is like the big question. And that's what I'm bullish on.
It's not, I'm not bullish on anything. Please go read the article. You know what, David,
these, these are five excellent questions, I think. And I think that, you know, I learned a lot more
from your bullish, what your bullish on segment than you probably learned from mine about
Josanne, David. That's definitely true. These are really good takes. That's definitely true. What do we
got for meme in the week here.
Meem in the week, we're throwing it back to the uniswap drama.
The tweet is devs absolutely unhinged about this one.
And it's the regular old uniswap interface, but with the option to leave a tip,
you'd like to leave a 15% tip, 20% tip?
Are we going to say that thing obligatory of like, man, tips are getting insane,
aren't they?
Tips are getting insane.
Everybody, everything's asking for a tip.
And it, you know, it's not starting at 5% anymore.
It's like 10%, 15%, 20, 25%.
I always tip restaurants, of course, and I try to draw the line very firmly there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Tipping is everywhere.
Tipping cultures in.
So now it's been added to the uniswap UI.
David, we got a really cool moment of Zen, actually.
Do you know Theo Vaughn?
It's not that cool.
Well, he's a comedian, and it's funny.
But I think it perfectly captures what Normies think about crypto right now and about
NFTs, yeah.
NFTs and about our computer months.
So we'll play that right after we get through the disclosures and the risks and disclaimers.
First disclosures, David and I are investors in Scroll.
Uniswap is also a sponsor of the bankless show.
They were in the news this week.
So obviously we talked about them.
We are long-term investors.
We are not journalists.
We don't do paid content.
There's always a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes.
You can find that in the show notes section.
I don't have to say that twice.
There's always a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes.
risk and disclaimers. Of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're
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. Now, here's the moment of Zen. David, let's watch this together.
Oh, God. Look at that NFT market. That thing disappeared. I mean, what the fuck was that?
It sounded dumb from the jump. I would say it sounded dumb. People would be like, you don't get it.
I'm like, I think I do. And now it's all like, everything's been proven right.
Like, it's all gone. Yeah. And I don't, well, why the board
date was it wasn't good in the first place but you're going to spend billions on this thing it was
very very dumb and i think the person spending billions i think it's just one guy telling his buddy hey
let's write an article that say you spend a billion yeah and then we'll get everybody else to
buy bullshit yeah it's like the guy who said he spent a billion never even spent a fucking billion
i spent i think they spent five grand paying a website to make an article you know computer money
isn't real i don't i don't believe that you have like a billion dollars of crypto that's the same as having a
billion dollars in real money.
Yeah.
I don't buy it.
Okay, the thing is like a part of that is actually like some of that was not,
we don't have to make commentary on it.
That was the moment of Zen.
All right.
See you guys later.
The episode's over.
Goodbye.
Bye.
