Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC Halving is Here! | Worldcoin's New Chain | China ETF Approvals | Solana Chain Upgrades

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Nation, it is the third week of April. It's a special week. This only happens once every four years. I'm talking about the Bitcoin happening. David, it is Bitcoin Having Week. How are you celebrating? I'm actually throwing a party. Are you really? Yeah, yeah. Which all my friends were like, why are you throwing a big party? Is it a having party? Yeah, it's a having party. Yeah. No way. What do you do? Like, what do you do for a having? I invite friends over and I feed them drinks. Talk about Bitcoin? Yeah, talk about Sound money. Yeah. Hand out the Bitcoin standard, Stakinga and Moose. Well, you know, I have a signed copy of the Bitcoin standard by Stakinga and Moose. It's addressed to the shit corner, which is me. Yeah, well, that's great. That's accurate as well. So we got to start with that, though.

Starting point is 00:00:51 We've got to celebrate that because it happens only once every four years. And I think this is our second happening as a Bitcoin podcast. That's a Bitcoin podcast. That's funny. That was actually a slip of the tongue. I did Bitcoin podcast. Keeping it in. So you're having this party, David, but the happening is scheduled to happen on Saturday.

Starting point is 00:01:09 The big question I think in everyone's mind is, is this going to be bullish or bearish for Bitcoin prices? What about my bags, David? We got some takes in the show to talk about that. Willcoin and OkX are releasing their layer twos. Do we need more layer twos? How will they differ? Will they bring new users on chain? In addition to more layer twos, Cracken, is also opening up their own wallet.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Their beautiful wallet, which I've got my phone, will they be used? that here in a second. What's the deal about the cracking wallet? Open source, privacy first. It's great. What else we got talking about, Ryan? Hong Kong. They are front running the U.S. They just got their Ethereum ETF, okay? In addition to a Bitcoin ETF, they got an Ethereum ETF. So the question is, does this mean big inflows in Asia? We'll talk about that. And the next Ethereum upgrade is going to make Ethereum wallets great again. They could use an upgrade, I would say. So we'll talk about that. Also, alt restaking is now a thing? Question mark? What is this? non-Igan layer restaking?

Starting point is 00:02:04 And then last up, Solana is patching their chain, deployed a patch to account for some of the transaction spam that's going in. And now Solana is no longer broken. Sala is now fixed. But there is still a roadmap to perfect the engineering around the Salana ecosystem. So we'll talk about that. Perfection, huh? Search of perfection.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Perfection. Perfection. Yeah. Okay. So before we get in, we got a shout out our friends over at Safe Wallet. It is account abstraction season. I feel like this is going to be at Meshirefewskiy. massive year for Ethereum wallets. Safe is the wallet that bankless use uses to secure all of its funds.

Starting point is 00:02:39 So this has been a wallet we trusted for a while. And they got something cool coming up. What do they want folks in the bankless nation to know? Yeah. So a save is actually probably everyone's first account abstraction wallet on, especially on the layer one. They've, they've held over a $100 billion of TVL since NOSA safe was deployed like forever ago. Safe is building the on-chain ownership layer with now smart accounts. They're trying to forge a future. where smart accounts are embedded within every app on the web, on the entire internet, not just Ethereum, so we can give the internet ownership over assets and data and identity.

Starting point is 00:03:13 They want you to build with a safe smart account. There is a link in the show notes, so you can get started building with a safe smart account. And also they want you to go to SafeCon. That's May 23rd in Berlin. So if you are interested in building with Safe or building an account abstraction or you're just in Berlin or Europe, go to SafeCon.

Starting point is 00:03:30 There's a link in the show notes for that as well. David, before we get to the prices, though, and markets, I think we need to spend a minute to talk about the Bitcoin having. More having content. Yeah, more having content on this Bitcoin podcast that you've come to appreciate. All right. So we are this, according to this timer, we are at the time of recording one day until the having. So does this mean, is this going to happen on April 19th then? By the time people get this episode, will it be happening day?

Starting point is 00:03:59 I think it actually might depend on where you are in the world. I think only maybe Hawaii is going to have the Bitcoin having on 420. Everyone else will have it on 419. Oh, okay. So I think this happens like 10 p.m. Maybe the West Coast also has it in 422. I think this happens like 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday tomorrow, today for the time of listeners. Do we need to recap like what the happening actually is?

Starting point is 00:04:25 God, I hope not, but I think we're going to do it anyways. Okay. So what is it? So for every 210,000 blocks, so 210,000 blocks times 10 minutes gives you approximately every four years, the Bitcoin reward for mining a Bitcoin block gets cut in half. The Bitcoin reward for mining the first Bitcoin blocks was 50 bitcoins per block back when Bitcoin was literally valueless. And then it went from 50 to 25 in 2012. It went from 25 to 12 and a half in 2016, 12 and a half to 6.25 in May of 2020. and now tomorrow, and today for listeners, it's going to go from 6.25 down to 3.125 Bitcoin per block.

Starting point is 00:05:07 So this is the fourth one out of, you know, I guess there's been three previous. And we have some history. So a question in everyone's mind is, what is price going to do? Because everyone knows this is written in the code of Bitcoin. It's been here since inception. Everyone knows what's going to happen. There's always this question of have people front run this. Is the market already priced it in? What's going to happen to price? This is a tweet from Bitwise doing some analysis on this. What do they say? They just basically show the returns on Bitcoin for the year after the happening. And so for 2012, it was a whopping 8,800% price appreciation. Oh, okay. Is that what we can expect? Sorry, Big listeners, you should not be expecting that.

Starting point is 00:05:47 In 2016, it was 285%. And then in 2020, it was 550%. So we have yet to have out of three data points, we're about to have the fourth, we are yet to have a bearish year post-having for Bitcoin. Historically, it's always been real good after the happening between 285% and 8,839%. I will say actually, so both 2016 and 2020, which were very strong performer years for Bitcoin, it was actually the year after those years that were the better of those two years. So in 2016, Bitcoin was up something like a thousand percent.

Starting point is 00:06:23 And in 2021, Bitcoin was also up something even higher. Now, people say this time could be different, of course, because maybe we front-ran some of that demand. We got a Bitcoin ETF in January, which was a few years. We've never had a Bitcoin ETF before, so maybe it's different in that way. But also, there's something that happens in the month following the happening, which is the month we're in. So if you're like a near term one-month trader, what does traditionally happen in the month after the happening? Nothing significant. In 2012, we were up 9% and 2016. We were down 10%. And in 2020, we're up 6%. And so basically, it's saying, hey, like, zoom out, think long term. Don't think about, like, don't buy Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:07:01 now because of the happening is tomorrow. Like, think about it on like a longer time frame than that. I mean, you say it's not significant and I agree. Like, but the significance is it's super flat in the month after, right? And then like, so don't expect this to get like immediately priced in. I mean, the market's kind of anticipating this, I suppose. Everyone has seen the happening coming. It has been in the code since Jassus. Yes. All right. So there is something that. is actually shipping with this happening and has nothing to do with the Bitcoin core protocol. So it's not like the code itself is undergoing any upgrade, but simultaneous with the having is the shipping of Bitcoin Roons.

Starting point is 00:07:41 What's the significance of that? Why is that happening on the happening? Yeah. So if you are paying attention to Bitcoin land, Rooms is like the very hyped thing that is being released. The code, the core, the Bitcoin software for Roons is being released tomorrow. This is Casey Rotemore who created Bitcoin Ordinals, NFTs on Bitcoin using Bitcoin as like a data availability layer of sorts just to inscribe JPEGs on the Bitcoin blockchain. He has since figured out a way to do a very similar thing for creative construction of the nooks and crannies of Bitcoin block space to produce fungible tokens inside of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Like enshrined on the layer one. This is not a layer two on Bitcoin. This is not like a side chain to Bitcoin. This is inside of the layer one, fungible tokens using Bitcoin block space. And so this is a very hype thing in Bitcoin land. This is launching with a happening. We did a show with Casey yesterday. It came out yesterday if you want to learn more about it.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Probably one of the more hyped things that I've heard in the Bitcoin sphere in a very long time. I think these are like more like the most legit Bitcoin tokens idea that we've seen so far. And why is Casey releasing this on having just because? Why the hell not? Yeah. Yeah. Why not? So it's nothing to do with these.

Starting point is 00:08:52 just chose this as a shelling point. Very cool. All right. So what about prices on the week? Where are we at on the Bitcoin price? Down about 10%. Start of the week, a little bit above $70,000 currently at $62,000 and a half thousand dollars. Thanks to Cracken pro for these charts, even though they are down.

Starting point is 00:09:11 I wish, make them go up. Yeah, please Cracken. Help us with that. I feel like it was a rough week. Look at some of these red spikes downwards. It has been a rough couple weeks. Yeah, it's just like especially over the weekend. There were some spikes downward.

Starting point is 00:09:22 And the question, of course, when we go down, mostly when we go down. Why? Why did we go down? When we go up, it's like, oh, we knew this is going to happen. It's inevitable, you know? But like when we go down, we need some sort of rational explanation for this. And there are a few different explanations people have turned to. What are they?

Starting point is 00:09:42 Well, there's always the tax scapegoat. So April 15th was Tax Day, United States. Is it Tax Day just in the United States or is that like a global day? Oh, do other people use April? 15th for taxes or is it just us? I don't know. I honestly don't know. I've never paid taxes. Income taxes in another country, David, so I just don't know.

Starting point is 00:10:00 But so April 15th, you have to get your you have to file your taxes. And so, like, if you don't have the money in your bank account, then you have to sell your assets in order to pay for your taxes. Do you think people do this? Do you think people are like, it's April 15th? I don't know what other people's strategies are. Oh, no. I owe thousands of dollars. I better sell some Bitcoin to go pay this.

Starting point is 00:10:18 Yeah. Like, if you are like buzzer beating the selling of your assets, pay for your taxes is, do people do that? I don't really know. This is why people always don't really know, like, whether the tax sell-off is real or just noise. But we can use it as a week. It could be one of those reflexive things where everyone thinks it's a thing, so it becomes a thing. So anyways, it's scapegoat number one, taxes. Scapegoat, another, number two, Iran versus Israel. Markets do not like uncertainty. They do not like war. They do not like instability. And so over the weekend, Iran sent some drones and missiles over to Israel, which were intercepted.

Starting point is 00:10:52 People are worried about this being escalating into a regional conflict. The meme is that this would turn into World War III, which is definitely bad for markets. And so that's scapegoat number three. You say scapegoat. This one to me felt kind of legitimate, though. Over the weekend, I was like, what, drones and missiles? I was also like what's going on? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:12 Okay. All right. So maybe some legitimacy there, at least from my perspective. What else we got? Scapegoat number three, PTC inflows, kind of muted. We've actually had not any net new inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs for almost like a month now. So while there are increasing, there are flows into the new Bitcoin ETFs, there are similar outflows out of gray scale. So there's no net new TVL going into the Bitcoin ETFs for about a month, which is, you know, coincidentally, how long we've been about flat for.

Starting point is 00:11:42 Okay. So maybe inflows have kind of like stopped and people see that. And, you know, they're like, okay, well, the party, the ETF party's over. What else we got? scapegoat number four uh stock market's down actually uh so the SPY is actually like a good 50 points off its high uh so down like i think 15 percent so as SPY down four and a half percent off of the high look we got ryan to to do that little charty chart thing yeah thanks um yeah uh so i mean five percent off of the SPY is like that's like a big deal. Oh, way out.

Starting point is 00:12:15 You're 5% down? Oh, no. Come on, guys. The global economy is 5% off. You want to be it. Real investors, just like crypto volatility, all right? Try me. Anyways, SPY goes down 5%.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Crypto is going to catch a cold. Yeah. And so that's what's happened. You know what's interesting about this is, um, okay, so, uh, gold has been up. Reletlessly up. Unlike the last month. And like news of the weekend did not stop goals a cent. So is crypto, is Bitcoin trading like a risk off asset?

Starting point is 00:12:48 I thought it was like a digital gold. And it's been interesting that it hasn't been trading like that. So you would think, at least some narratives would say that global turmoil equals, of course, like wars. Like rumors of wars, governments are going to print money, aren't they, in order to pay for this stuff? And so shouldn't a non-state store a value pump? Gold has. Why not Bitcoin? You have any takes? Yeah. I don't know why gold is pumping. Obviously, I'm not like a macro expert. It is a little bit suss that like people were talking about gold pumping and then right into the Iran conflict.

Starting point is 00:13:23 But what the hell do I know? Overall, just like the whole hopium for the setup right now is just like basically the inverse of all of these things. Like the tax sell off isn't real or it's behind us now. Iran versus Israel actually stabilizes. eventually the inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs will surpass the outflows out of gray scale. That is also just inevitability. And, you know, the SPY can't go down forever. It's also designed to go up only. And we are currently

Starting point is 00:13:49 oversold in the world of the RSI indicator. If you are a believer of such a thing, what does that mean? That just means like you can't have that many selling days in a row before there's a buying day. Yeah, there'll be some recovery, right? There'll be some recovery. I like a little short run. If 2% increase in the SPY is like, you know, a 20% increase

Starting point is 00:14:05 in Bitcoin. Oh, you know what? We didn't have. there's number five explanation actually we didn't cover which is like the Fed is definitely talking about delaying the reduction of interest rates right inflation's burning a little hot and that's kind of bled over so if you want another reason there's a fifth reason for you also you know what happening it's also there's the thing though you got to put this into perspective and here's a good tweet to keep this in perspective there've only been 38 days in all of bitcoin history where we've ever had a closing price where we currently are which is a above 61K, like above 60K.

Starting point is 00:14:39 Actually, are we above 60K at the time recording? I mean, somewhere close to that, right? Yeah, we are. We are. We're 62 and a half. Yeah, yeah. We never got down below 60K. It's only been 38 days.

Starting point is 00:14:48 Yeah. Right? Like, so, I mean, we're in kind of the same range of all-time highs that we've been in for the last, you like, month and a half. There's some perspective for you. We haven't really experienced price discovery in crypto yet. So Bitcoin broke through the $69,000 all-time highs to get to like up to 73, 74. That's not price discovery. No one has experienced price discovery.

Starting point is 00:15:10 You're getting your wish. A nice slow boomer. That's exactly what I was going with. You're getting your wish. Like breaking out through all-time highs and then achieving like escape velocity to the moon. It should be hard. It feels healthy. It feels healthy. Let's draw this place out. Let's, like the normies aren't here yet. Like it's still just us. Like enjoy this time. All right. Well, so how about Eith Price? Are we doing something similar? Yeah, down 13%. Start of the week, $3,500. ending the week where we are now at $30,400. It's got all the way down.

Starting point is 00:15:40 That was a harsh spike. I'm not, I'm, no way, was that real. What? Yeah, that's real. Oh, my God, wow. That's real. Didn't you look at the charts over the weekend? I didn't, I'm not during that blip where Ryan is highlighting a, a, yeah, down to $2,530.

Starting point is 00:15:55 Yikes, wow. No wonder so many people got liquidated last week. No, what is this, four hour candle? No four hour candle. It went below $2,900. dollars. That's pretty low. $2,500.

Starting point is 00:16:08 Great buying opportunity if you snags up. Congress anyone who snipe that. This is why it's always nice to have powder available with like call it. We call these stink bids. Stink bids? You never heard of them stink bids? I, well, yeah, traders call these sting birds. I'm not of your kind, David.

Starting point is 00:16:26 It's when you set a limit order so unreasonably low that you just hope that you like kind of win a lottery with like some volatility. So you have those... It's basically kind of like a limit orders on there. It's a spot market put. Yeah. All right. So what's your stink bid at right now

Starting point is 00:16:42 for this market? I don't have any... I still have my triple digit stink bids that. Yeah, you are. Those are not going to fill. Yeah. I think I've capitulated on that.

Starting point is 00:16:52 Let's talk about ETH gas price, though. Real high, actually. Yeah. Almost 500 Gleigh at certain points. That is real expensive. We experienced a one-hour period of negative 10% deflation of e-supply because of all liquidation.

Starting point is 00:17:07 So that's a nice, that's a nice ETH holder framing on it. But like for the users, it's really expensive. What's nice about this, David Mihal, is showing there's a bifurcation in terms of gas market. What's he, what's you saying here? Yeah, so the Ethereum layer one experienced 500 way gas prices. Ethereum blob price, so like blob space for layer two's, completely unaffected by the congestion fees on the layer one. So layer twos were completely buffered from all of the liquidation.

Starting point is 00:17:33 and shenanigans and congestion happening at the layer one. So if you were on base or optimism or Arbitrom or a ZKSink or Polygon, you had absolutely no awareness or concern about the congestions of the layer one. It's like getting stuck in a traffic jam and then you look over and there's that high occupancy vehicle lane and cars just whistling by. Just zooming. Just zoom in. Just zoom in. Don't care about you. That's what was going on. And it's great because now for the first time post-Blob space, there are two separate markets for this as it should be. So the question is, what are the prices

Starting point is 00:18:03 on ETH layer 2's. Is that still hanging down? What are we looking at? Yeah, so this is a brand new website, part of the website, of growthe pie. XYZ, which if you are interested in just looking at the fee dynamics, the economics, the economics of layer 2's, this is definitely the website for you. So fees.grewthepi.z is this new website. It just shows you the fees for all the different chains.

Starting point is 00:18:24 0.15 cents, not 15 cents, 0.15 cents to transfer ethon zora, 0.41 cents to swap fees on Zora. Undercent. Real cheap. Yes. Everything, everything is under a cent here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:38 The only, the only systems that are above a penny are systems that are not yet using blob space. So Linnea, Linnea are not yet using blob space. They are actually, actually. Linnea? Yeah, I could sort this, okay, look at this.

Starting point is 00:18:52 They are, but like, see, look at this. You can sort by data availability blobs. I don't know. Linnaeia is just, it's premium. Premium stuff. It's good stuff over there. All right. Good stuff over there.

Starting point is 00:19:02 Let's see. What's the cheap. thing to arbitram is the cheapest chain to swap tokens on for 0.65 cents. What a deal. What a deal. I'll do some trades over an arbitram these days. Crypto market cap where are we hanging in? 2.4 trillion dollars. Two point four trillion dollars. Let's do another quick look at layer two's in the layer two world. David, you got some stats for us. This update of course is brought to you by one of our favorite layer two's, which is mantle. They're always placed quite high on the charts. hanging in at number five.

Starting point is 00:19:33 What do you want to look at this week? Yeah, so drop down below $30, $40 billion in TVL on layer two's. We're at an 11x scaling factor, so 11 Ethereum's on layer twos. So these numbers haven't really changed, but I think what is cool, actually, is we talk about layer two beat for all the layer twos, but now we're moving on to layer three right. I don't know if you've noticed this. Base, which is a arbitrum orbit chain that settles down to the base chain, which settles down to Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:20:00 The Dgen layer 3 is now doing the most transactions per second out of all of the layer 2s. Okay. So a layer 3, is a layer 3 just a layer, a chain built on top of a layer 2? Is it really that simple? It's really that simple. Okay. So there is a chain called DGen chain, which is killing it in terms of transactions per second. And that is just built on top of the base chain, which is built on top of Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:20:27 Yep. So DGent chain is the number one chain. that's not a layer two that's doing the most transactions per second and the number two transactions per second chain is base

Starting point is 00:20:37 which is where D-Gen chain settles to. Okay. I just have one question for you, David. Sure. When layer four? Okay?

Starting point is 00:20:45 We could just like keep stacking them. I don't think any, I think it stops at the layer three level on them for technical for like all chain, it kind of just stops at layer three.

Starting point is 00:20:57 If you are doing a layer four is because you are doing it for the meme, you can do that. There's nothing stopping you. I want to do that. I want to do that. I want to do that.

Starting point is 00:21:03 I want to do that. Yeah, you should ask Andrew from Kwan to, you're going to need some help on that one. Saddle on top of DGEN. David, what do we have coming up? WorldCoin is going from its app to a chain. We're getting World Chain. If you didn't have enough layer twos,

Starting point is 00:21:16 well, you just got another one. But this one's different. So if you are a verified human, you will be glib in a first-class treatment on World Chain. We're going to talk about that. OKX, also doing another chain. They're doing another. We're still talking about layer twos.

Starting point is 00:21:30 Which, Frank. did they choose? And then also, Cracken, congrats guys, launched their wallet. Privacy first, open source, and absolutely beautiful. I'm going to show you all. Ryan, I'm going to show you all my NFTs that are on my Cracken wallet. I got them in there. So we're going to get to all of that and more.

Starting point is 00:21:44 But first, we're going to adhere directly from Cracken, a preferred exchange, and now wallet. If you do not have an account with Cracken, or if you haven't downloaded their wallet, there's a link. Go get the wallet. Yeah, go do that. And then make you're an account with Cracken. Let's go hear from there right now. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning

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Starting point is 00:24:33 Okay? We got two big layer two announcements. One of them just went live on main net. So let's start there. World Coin introduced World Chain. All right. The last I heard about World Coin, they were trying to stick orbs in everyone's faces and scan your eyeballs. Oh, they're still doing that?

Starting point is 00:24:50 Still doing that. So I had seen, I think, a headline that they got to about 5 million humans with, like, iris scans. So that's the level. Anyway, that aside, what are they doing? What is World Chain? So World Chain has always been a part of the World Coin Vision. So anyone who's been, like, deep in the World Coin World. This actually is not a surprise.

Starting point is 00:25:10 It is an OP stack fork. It is a part of the Subaru Chain Collective. But it has a very intimate technical relationship with its own World ID and World Coin app. And so if you verify yourself, your iris, I mean, within the world coin system, you are a verified human on the world chain. And you actually get subsidized transactions on world chain, as in free. Not infinitely free, but I'm sure this model is going to change. But the idea is really to bifurcate humans from bots on world chain. And so if you are a human, because you are proven to be human because of your iris, you get a private key that's associated with your

Starting point is 00:25:50 Iris, you get to have first class position on World Chain. A couple of things. You know, WorldCoin as an app so far is about 44% of OP mainnet's activity at this point. I didn't realize that high. I think it's a part of the World Coin system because like verifying a human and putting the iris, the hash date of your iris on chain. I think that's how that works. And they're launching this.

Starting point is 00:26:15 Did you say this as an OP, you know, like stack chain? It's an OP stack chain inside of the collective. Okay, so they're joining the super chain, so eventually all of these will be integrated. You know, feelings aside, people have lots of passionate feelings about your world chain and using biometric data to identify humans and all of that. We've had that conversation before, just not stepping into that conversation. The idea of having a chain that is human aware, right, any sort of block space that is human aware is new.

Starting point is 00:26:47 And I think that's actually, it's interesting, right? because, well, we have all sorts of civil-resistant problems, not just in crypto, or sorry, not just on the client on the internet, but like even specifically crypto, like in the here and now. It's like, I want to provide an air drop to all of my real human users. How do I do that? I have no idea. You could be like a bot farm account with like hundreds of different accounts.

Starting point is 00:27:10 And by the way, I'm not saying that World Coin isn't gamable because I've also seen some like ways where it can be gamed. But it is at least better. it is more civil resistant than just like being able to spin up any sort of wallet and like, you know, track it that way. So human aware block space, human aware chain, where we can tell who the real people are and who the bots are, do you think that's significant? Yeah. And I think that we won't really know how or why it's significant. We won't have examples for this until like they meaningfully get built. But really like the whole idea is that we have this

Starting point is 00:27:45 platform to do activities and behaviors that we haven't had before. And that really starts with having some decent levels of assurances that devs building on this block space gets to know that they are actually having individually humans as their users rather than getting bot farmed. And so like the blast layer two pitch is like, yo, we have native yield. So come build on our platform. Come put your money on our platform. And the world chain pitch is like, yo, we have real individual.

Starting point is 00:28:15 non-civil humans. So therefore come build on our platform. Zooming out for a second, you and I have talked about this recently, and I think we want to do an entire episode on this, like the dead internet theory. What is the dead internet theory? The dead internet theory is this theory that I came across from those various AI conversations. It's this online conspiracy theory. I'm like four for four on conspiracy theories in the last weeks, by the way. It asserts that now the internet is, it asserts that now the internet is actually mostly bots and the activity of the internet is mostly bots and the content generated on the internet on Facebook is actually mostly bots and so like the internet is actually a human

Starting point is 00:28:59 devoid place and now we're getting to the point where like is bots consuming content by bots producing content for bots and actually like a lot of the commerce of like startups and internet companies are actually just like it's actually boss facilitating bots and we actually don't know it And so the internet is actually more dead than we actually assume. It's like a bunch of bots pretending to be humans too, right? Exactly. Okay. So you said you pitched that as a conspiracy theory.

Starting point is 00:29:26 I think the framing of it of like saying that internet theory, like, you know, if you were to say there are no humans on the internet anymore, that would be like very far and kind of the conspiracy. But like what you just said, I don't consider that a cons like that's evident. I mean, go. Go try to interact on Twitter. At the very least, it's the trend. Right. And like with all of the AI content and like deep fake type ability you have like it's going to continue to do that. I mean, you're not going to know whose Instagram account is real apart from some sort of proof of personhood type of protocol, right? I guess that's the entire point of world chain or world coin and and maybe a world chain. But yeah, I don't know how much of a conspiracy theory it is. Like that's just like what's self evidently going on. You could be listening to a podcast and one of them might be a bot. You just don't know. One of the hosts of the. the host. Your favorite podcast that you listen to.

Starting point is 00:30:17 You just might not know if that person's a real human or not. That's not the only layer two that we need to talk about this week. OKX, which is a crypto exchange. One of the world's largest, you know, top three, top five, something like this, just launched X layer. This is a layer two on Ethereum. It is, I believe, a ZK EVM. I think it's built on the polygon stack.

Starting point is 00:30:42 What else do we need to know? It's also one of the first. to use the Polygon Ag layer. So if you've been paying attention to like chain development in the space, Polygon has really been promoting their like Ag layer solution for global liquidity interoperability, not just for Polygon chains, but just actually kind of anyone. And so this chain, the OKX X layer, which we're going to get this confused with Twitter X, but whatever. So they're using Ag layer. And so all of the chains that tap into the Polygon Ag layer can actually share liquidity with each other, like perfectly interoperable liquidity. So more chains that

Starting point is 00:31:15 leverage the agglare all kind of add to a central liquidity pool. And there's also going to be the OKB token as the native token on X layer. Interesting that they're calling it X chain or X layer instead of X chain. I like that. I like that change of pace. And so you can actually, they will also be able to use this to pay the transaction fees thanks to the AgLayer. Yeah, I think this is a big deal because this is another major exchange that has entered the space thrown their hat in the ring. And like there's, you know, the meme of, is this the for Polygon. So it's another large exchange. It's outside the U.S., of course, primarily, and it is on a different layer two stack, which is Polygon instead of optimism,

Starting point is 00:31:56 and gets the benefit from Ag layer from the start, which is, again, composability across the entire Polygon ecosystem of chains. So if we do a rundown, David, of exchanges with an Ethereum layer two at this point, we've got Coinbase. All right, we know about base chain. Bybit is associated with Mantle. They've kind of like funded that and brought that to market. Now we have O KX. Bybit turned themselves into a Dow and then that Dow produced their own chain, which is Mantle. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:23 Now we have OKX doing one. There are two other exchanges kind of on my list, which is like Cracken and Binance. And by the way, there's been rumor that Cracken is sort of like investigating a layer two. Right. They won't tell us though. And then Binance, they have a side chain effectively that I think there's a roadmap for it to become a layer two if that ever made sense. So I think it's only a matter of time before all of the major exchanges have their own layer twos.

Starting point is 00:32:48 And this is something that we've predicted for a long time actually on bankless. Not to just pat ourselves on the back. We sometimes you do that. Yeah, we do that. But like first it's the exchanges, then I think it's going to be the banks. Because what's the next proximate thing to an exchange? It's probably a fintech company like a PayPal, for instance, or like a Revolut or like a transfer wise or something like this.

Starting point is 00:33:11 And then eventually we'll get to the stage where what are banks anyway? They're all side chains. They're all ledgers. They're all ledgers. So if they settle on top of a global settlement system, if they settle on top of Ethereum, they become a layer two, maybe a layer three or maybe layer four. I don't know. But some sort of chain on top that's settling.

Starting point is 00:33:29 So we're just knocking them, knocking him down from my perspective. And I'm super excited that exchanges are now going towards crypto nativity and becoming a bit more a blockchain native. One thing I think might be cool to see is that banks are always just going to have a hard time getting comfortable with this. So I could I can totally see some like trad banks. I'm like, you know, TradFi, Wells Fargo-esque bank making a layer two on Ethereum. But actually it's private and only for them as in like they're the only ones with right

Starting point is 00:34:02 access. But then they give like select parties read access. Maybe it's an encrypted layer two. I don't know. That technology is not here yet, but it will be. but like some sort of just like they just leverage a blockchain for their internal accounting and as like an insurance mechanism and efficiency mechanism for themselves and then they can like they elect to go up and down between Ethereum layer one and their private layer two that they control I think that I don't know if that future is a thing but I could totally see it I mean JPMorgan has a chain it's formerly called quorum or it's just basically a private blockchain it's just not public and making the transition to make aspects of that that

Starting point is 00:34:40 public in Settled To Ethereum could be a thing. So really cool. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Cracken who does not have a chain yet, but maybe they will one day. They do have a wallet, though. And if you're going to build a wallet, you're getting pretty close to building a chain. I'm just saying. What's the next? Here's my Cracken wallet. I loaded up my CryptoCoverin. It's an old NFT that I have. I think it's pretty pretty. Have you opened up your wallet? Yeah. Have you opened up your Cracken wallet? There it is. That looks beautiful. It does look beautiful. Yeah. So I downloaded it. I started with a fresh set of keys. You already got stuff on there. So how did you do it? Well, I have a seed phrase

Starting point is 00:35:15 of like my petty cache that I keep on my phone. And so all the wallets that I use, I just load up the same seed phrase. Yeah. Nice trick, actually. So what do you think so far? It's nice and purple. It's the cracker thing. It's absolutely beautiful. Let's see. So you have different chains. You have all the assets, right? It was really nice to see my NFTs in there that I wanted to see and all the spam ones were not in there by default. So I didn't have to do anything with that. And then different chains. I don't think there's bridging yet. So you can't bridge between layer two's, but you can send and receive

Starting point is 00:35:45 on layer two's. There's also like Salana support for people who like to plan Salana. But then there's also wallet connect. So like you can basically do anything inside of Ethereum, DFI, via Wallet Connect. They're doing the cross chain thing kind of nicely where it's just like all abstracted so you don't have to know what chain you're on. You don't

Starting point is 00:36:00 have to go switch around like you do in some older wallet. So I really like that. From a behind the scenes perspective, David, here's something I thought was cool. So the Cracken wallet is open source, a completely open source. So it is, and they're the first exchange, I think, to ever do this. So it's available on GitHub. So you can see how it's built. They've also built IP privacy as part of this, right? So it's a lot of analytics that can be derived about. And they seem to be tailoring this to make crypto native people, folks,

Starting point is 00:36:30 feel secure that, you know, their IP address isn't being collected and that kind of thing. Pretty on brand for Crackenzie. Yeah, I think it's great. And I think bank. And I think bankless listeners, again, like, I have, I'm in a place where I used to be like single wallet type of person. Now I have like multiple wallets. And this is going to have a place on my phone. It's not like perfect right of the gate, but I expect Cracken's going to be improving it. And yeah, a great, great start on this product. It's a foot in the door for Cracken to do something. Like be more on chain. Again, like have their own chain. I expect this is like the first of like a direction for for Cracken. Like, no one ends in a wallet. Yeah. I totally agree. There's a link in the show notes

Starting point is 00:37:12 if you guys want to check it out as well. David, let's talk about Hong Kong approving the Spot Bitcoin and Ether ETF. So that was announced this week. So trading is not yet begun, but that is announced. So the question is, is this a big deal? Is this going to bring like all of Asia's like inflows into crypto? Who has a good take here? I think this is, people are celebrating this just because we're actually kind of just stradden for it about our own lack of eth ETHs inside of the United States. Yeah, yeah. And we have the Bitcoin ETFs, right? And so, but we're, but they are also getting the ETH ETF.

Starting point is 00:37:48 Is this going to move markets? Eric Balchuna says, probably not. The Hong Kong market is pretty tiny. Like the total market is only $50 billion. Just because it's approved in Hong Kong doesn't mean Chinese capital has access to this. So there's like a firewall between the capital of China and the capital of Hong Kong. And also the three issuers, according to Eric Balachunas, are kind of tiny. There's no, like, big fish here.

Starting point is 00:38:12 There's something like BlackRock. And then the fees on these things are about to be, like, 1 to 2%. So whereas it's like 0.2 to 0.3% for Bitcoin ETFs inside the United States. Eric says it's likely going to be 1% to 2% inside of Hong Kong. So it's more about just like, hey, somebody else got an ETF. Yeah, there is some symbolism, right? This is like a Chinese adjacent, China adjacent, like jurisdiction for certain. and for a jurisdiction kind of like famous for its capital controls, right,

Starting point is 00:38:41 for them to get an Ethereum ETF besides the United States, there's probably some symbolism in that when you say. Like if I was making the argument in front of like Congress, if I was like a Congress representative who wanted to make the kiss, I'd just be like, Gary, Gary Gensler, okay? Hong Kong has an Ethereum ETF. Where are you? The whole world has an Ethereum ETF right now.

Starting point is 00:39:03 Canada, Europe, like you can buy these ETP products. U.S. is the U.S. really going to be a laggard for this? Maybe there's some ammo there that we glean for this. Yeah. It's a symbolic victory. All right. It's a symbolic victory. We'll take it.

Starting point is 00:39:15 We'll take any kind of ETF victory we can at this point, David. What do we got coming up? Coming up next, Ethereum, layer one, is actually getting a pretty big wallet upgrade. EIP 3.074. We're going to tell you everything you need to know about that particular EIP. Salana has also got its patch, so it's easier to get a transaction through now. And 0X.X. Mocki.

Starting point is 00:39:33 Remember that name, Ryan? Zero X. Maki, he awakened from retirement. What's he up to and why is everyone murmuring about it? So we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, who makes their own chain possible, so you can click all the healed on it as well.

Starting point is 00:39:50 Let's go hear from them right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects

Starting point is 00:40:21 from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 gaming, and Buy Bit for TVL and liquidity and on-rams. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledd Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Sello is the mobile-first EVM-compatible carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. Driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile defy and with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest growing Web3 wallets, Sello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses.

Starting point is 00:41:07 And now Sello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a layer two. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitruma have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Sello layer two to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Sello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas. natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallace using Social Connect. But SELO is a community governed protocol.

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Starting point is 00:42:18 while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Ethereum super wallets. That's what I'm calling them. I don't know if that'll catch on at all, but this is a pretty cool upgrade. And it is protocol level. It is coming in the next Ethereum hard fork.

Starting point is 00:42:37 It has, of course, an EIP. I'm going to have you recite because I don't yet have this one. 3074. I don't have this memorized. But it is a pretty significant upgrade. Can you tell us about it? This is account abstraction, which bankless listeners have heard countless times, which has generally been in the domain of layer twos.

Starting point is 00:42:55 We all need account abstraction. everyone needs account abstraction. Gosh, what is account abstraction? Basically, it puts logic into your wallet. So it turns your wallet, which is usually just a dummy wallet. It is what's formally called as an externally owned account in the EOA. It's basically just a public key and a private key with no logic in it whatsoever. Smart accounts, smart contract wallets, account abstraction are trying to produce smart contract wallet. So your wallet is like a brain. It's got like chip. It's got logic in it. It's got expressivity. In the same way that Bitcoin is Bitcoin and Ethereum is Ethereum. Externally owned accounts are like Bitcoin. Smart Contract Walls are like Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:43:33 And so how to design one and what features we should formally enthrine into the layer one has been a topic of debate amongst Ethereum developers for like, as long as I've been in crypto, as long as I've been here in Ethereum. EIP 3074 has been a thing for a very long time. It was picked up. It was debated years ago. It was dropped. It was ignored. It got picked up again recently now it's getting pushed through. And so it's actually kind of like a monumental hurdle that's overcome because this is actually kind of like the start of increasing the scope of the sophistication of smart contract wallets that are enabled in the layer one. We are starting small as we do in Ethereum and then we are expanding the scope as we come to consensus about

Starting point is 00:44:13 what features should be enshrined on the layer one. This is like doing the thing that Ethereum is very cautious about doing, which is putting opinions and adding complexity into the layer one, but we're doing it. And so if you've ever traded a token on uniswap that you haven't traded before, you have to go and first approve that token. Multiple steps. Multiple steps. Yep. Now this is all being bundled up into one single like smart service. So no more token approvals at the layer one. Also, this unlocks sponsor accounts. And so you can actually have no gas in your wallet, but through smart contract wallets, you can actually have in third party pay for your gas for you. And so like you actually don't need any gas.

Starting point is 00:44:52 You just have assets and somebody else pays for your gas. And there's a bunch of other features as well. But basically, like I said, it's just the big first foot in the door to unlock the entire, like, landscape of smart contract wallets for the Ethereum layer one. Yeah, wallet asset recovery is another thing about this. So we could have like social recovery wallets. I think that's great. Here's the thing I'm most excited about this.

Starting point is 00:45:12 All right. So a bunch of people, crypto natives listening to bankless right now, like they might have dozens of wallets, right? So the question is, what happens to those wallets? Do I have to create brand new wallets? Here's the best part. Okay. You can migrate your existing EOA wallet, same eth address, to account abstraction wallet

Starting point is 00:45:33 and get all of those benefits. I didn't realize before I learned a bit more about this that it would be like so backward compatible, I guess, or like I thought, I just assumed that we'd have to like create all new wallets. This would be possible in the future to my legacy wallets are like all Fubar. But they're not. you can actually like all the wallets that you've spent so much time and have so much history in, they can turn into account abstraction wallets, which I think is a pretty big deal.

Starting point is 00:45:58 Give us a sense for when this is coming, David. So next Ethereum hard fork, okay? So it's been approved for that, but when is the next Ethereum hard fork? Well, no one really knows when. No one asks when is the next Ethereum hard fork. Yes, we do. We always do. We always ask. Sometime at the end of this year, probably, which means probably at the start of next year,

Starting point is 00:46:18 Which means probably Q2 of next year. These things tend to get delayed. So think like early 2025. Early 20205. That's some nice padding, David. I'm optimistic for Q1 2025 that we'll have this, but we'll see. Yeah. This again, the next upgrade, next a hard fork for the year is called Pectra, which is a combination of, should we even go into this?

Starting point is 00:46:42 I think we should. Prague and Electra. So Electra is a star, Ryan. Prague is a city, but Prague is the execution layer of Ethereum, and Electra is the consensus layer of Ethereum. Wait, Electra is a star? Yeah, so this is how Ethereum Hard Forks are named. So you take a city that's on planet Earth, and that is the execution layer Hard Fork, and then you take a star, a name of a star somewhere in the sky, and then you portmanteau them together,

Starting point is 00:47:08 and that's how we'd name Ethereum Hard Forks. Did you know that? Oh, wow. No, I didn't know that. And how many stars? This is what happens when you let Dev nerds name your hardforx? I want beetle juice, Betel juice, you know that star? Big red dwarf. Well, so we already passed B. So, uh, E is, it was A, B, C, D.

Starting point is 00:47:26 So like after Electra, it will be an F-named star. An F-star. Some, with F-Star. I don't know any F-Stars. I don't know any F-Stars either. All right. Well, I can't wait. But I bet you the E-F devs do, because they would.

Starting point is 00:47:38 Nerds. Nerds. We love you guys. That's great. I'm really excited to talk about, what is it? A-star. Pectra, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:46 Yeah. people excited about Pectra. It's coming. All right. Tell us about eigenlayer because it is, it did a main day last week. Yeah. Now it's unpausing, restaking deposits. What does this mean? Is this mean floodgate is open to all the capital, all of the ETH that's important to Egan layer. Now you can just like, you know, there's no limit. There's no, there's no limit. There's no cap. There's no cap. There's no limit. Yeah. So there was 12 and a half, 13 billion dollars of ETH and related LSTs inside of Eigen layer at the time of the cap. Four million in ETH supply?

Starting point is 00:48:16 Something like that? Yeah, something like that. Someone do the math for me. They are now completely just removing the cap on LSTs. And so there was never any cap on native restaking, so you could always put vanilla ether in and natively resake, and you would generally do this via LRTs, like etherfi or Renzo or whatever. But now there's actually just no formal caps whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:48:36 We've slowed down a little bit. Like how high do you think? I mean, this is like at... I mean, how much ETH can I can Laird-Layer and take up a lot of ETH? I mean, we're at like what? like 4% ish of supply? Something like this? 3%.

Starting point is 00:48:48 I guess that's not that much. The Bitcoin ETFs already have over 3% of Bitcoin supply. I think we could go higher. I think we could give it 5, 6, 7, 8. Igen layer is equivalent to the Bitcoin ETFs for Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:49:03 That's large. Don't you think it's that it could slurp up that much in terms of ETH? I guess it depends. I mean, it already has. It already has. No, no, no.

Starting point is 00:49:13 But yes, it already has. but like I'm calling for like a higher number. I'm calling like I wonder. Say a number. When will we see double digits? Double digit. Double digit. Percent.

Starting point is 00:49:26 Percent or Ethan? In the Igan. Percent. Percent. Wow. 10%? Okay. So you need, what is that?

Starting point is 00:49:32 12 million ether and Iganer? We need to triple. Man, that is, I don't know. I don't know. It depends on the Avess. It depends on the Avess. It depends on the Avalierm. It depends on how much you yield.

Starting point is 00:49:45 If you don't speak eigenlayer. ABS is just the thing built on top of eigenlayer. The things that produce the yield. They produce the utility. They collect the fees. They give them to the LSTs. And then they are collected by capital depositors. Restaking has been an absolute massive narrative this cycle, particularly for an

Starting point is 00:50:03 uncontested narrative for a very long time. Let me tell you, David, something that's here, whether you like it or not, it's called alt restaking. All right. That's what I'm calling it. I don't know if any that's going to catch on, but we've got some new restaking networks on the scene that are doing non-Eetherium stuff. One is called nectar.

Starting point is 00:50:20 Is it nectar? Nectar. Okay. And then this one, Carrack, Carrack? Carrack. Carrack. K-A-R-A-K. Bankless system, you figure out how to pronounce that.

Starting point is 00:50:31 Big, big raise on this one. Big raise. Carrack got $1 billion from a whole bunch of VCs to accelerate universal security. They got $48 million at a $1 billion dollar valuation. Man, I am a VC. I should know how this works. Okay, so alt restaking, that's a thing. And the focus, it seems to be, at least with this narrative, is non-Etherium tokens. So eigenlayer, the only thing you can stake inside of eigenlayer right now is ether.

Starting point is 00:50:59 Right. And so these-ether derivatives, yeah. Or ether derivatives. And these restaking networks are saying, hey, we could do all of the tokens. Why stop at ETH? We can do everything. There's one interesting thing, though, here, which is like, eigenlayer is also going to do other things besides Ethereum. And that's been part of their design from day one is where they start with ether because it's kind of the most money-like, you know, like highest economic bandwidth thing.

Starting point is 00:51:27 But also it's mainly the unit of account of, this is three months explanation. You use ether because it's the unit of account of like the respective ecosystems because like generally the economics are denominated in the ether. You have to pay your taxes in ether basically. So you may as well. Right. Yeah, so they don't want any cross-volatility risks. So you denominate your assets and your liabilities in the same unit of account.

Starting point is 00:51:49 You start off by ether because that's what the Ethereum ecosystem generally denominates in. But then you can also expand to other assets because mainly you don't want to have this extra risk, which is cross-asset volatility. There you go. And so this eigenlayer strategy is like, well, most things are going to be ethonominated first. And then we'll get to like USC things denominated later. a pretty cool, like, a little rabbit hole in the eigenlayer ecosystem is dual staking. And so you would stake ether, but then you would also stake the native token of a respective AVS as well. And so you can have both things providing security.

Starting point is 00:52:21 And this is like the eigenlayer like slow, like road map, slow like crescendo of scope. So you start with ETH, then you add like a native token of a specific app and then eventually you can just do anything as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's a hallmark of eigenlayer's success that they have alternately. No. You know, you know you're successful when you start getting alternatives to your solution coming aboard. And I do think this is going to be, it's been a super successful narrative. So of course, it was going to attract competitors. And this is related to mostly Karek Network. Their whole narrative is like, you can stake anything. Nectar, the first one that we talked about, their whole thing

Starting point is 00:52:59 is DVT, distributed validator technology. This is actually a pivot from Diva. So if you all remember the Diva LST project that was always trying to leverage DVT to kind of just be an improved version of Rocket Pool. They have since pivoted into being a restaking platform that leverages DVT. So for bankless listeners, I remember that that name. That's where Nectar came from. I'm sure we are going to be talking about restaking at the Permissionless Conference, which, you know, anytime we get a chance to shout out Permissionless, I'm going to be there, David's going to be there. It's in October. Many of these projects. are going to be there. We actually do have a panel about

Starting point is 00:53:37 restaking. Alt restaking. Oh, really? Yeah. Because there's a resaking. Well, there's Babylon on Bitcoin. There's a restaking project on Solana. And so this is actually, these aren't the first two like alt-resaking ones. These are just the first two to actually also focus on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:53:53 Sri Ram's coming to that as well. He's coming to permission list. Bankless listener, if you want a 10% discount, you can go get that. The code bankless 10 at any point in time. And you'll like go come to permission list with us. great conference we'll be in the middle of the bull market it'll be beautiful be good times bankless citizens you guys get 30 percent so if you guys are listening to this on the rsssss fee or wherever

Starting point is 00:54:15 your bankless citizen don't settle for 10 percent don't settle 30 percent the code is the code is not bankless 30 so don't try that uh all right david immutable is doing some uh are they doing what is this are they doing layer three more chains we're talking about more chains more chains more chains it's layer threes right so yeah so they are building what is called the immutable nexus, the ecosystem of gaming chains. And so, of course, they are building out chains for the games that are part of the immutable ecosystem. There's a lot of games coming online right now. I was actually, I don't think you're much of a gamer these days, Ryan, but there's this Dark Souls game. Are you familiar with Dark Souls? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:54 Yeah, there's this Dark Souls, because it created its whole entire genre because it's such an awesome series of games. There's a crypto-esque, not even S, there's a Dark Souls game where all the assets are on chain. Really? Yeah. What's this called? The fabled. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:08 I actually demoed it at ETH Denver last year. It was a little... How can we're not hearing about these things? Are people just no users? Different world. Different. No, there is. This one isn't out yet.

Starting point is 00:55:19 It's on Steam with a coming soon. You can like demo it if you want to, I think you can like Jones to some hoops. I remember... Steam is totally fine with like crypto games because I know some platforms have not been. Well, this hasn't launched, but it's got a Steam page. It's got a Steam page for this game that is very... elegant the graphics are beautiful it was a little bit clunky when I played it but I

Starting point is 00:55:38 played it back in 2023 and so like a year over a year ago so I'm assuming this is this going to be on is fable is this going to be unimutable or is it the fabled I think so I think it's a name able game I don't know oh that's Robbie anyways it might have its own chain because that's what this whole announcement is and so you are as a game get to have your own ZK EVM because the costs of chains are just like solo these days. Like spinning up a chain with conduit, you can go to conduit and just spin up an OPE stack chain for $3,000 a month. It's probably a little bit more for ZKEVM. This is a ZK EVM chain that settles on top of immutable, which is a layer two, which settles on top of Ethereum, right? So we got chains on

Starting point is 00:56:17 chains again. It's a layer three, David. I found another layer three. It's not exactly a layer three. DGEN is a strict layer three. The ZK. EVM, it's more of a fractal mesh network. So it's a little bit more horizontal so there's not strict settling down to one specific chain it's actually all kind of like settles together yeah but you do get dedicated throughput gaming is like one of the most reasons why you would want your own sovereign chain because you don't want to share block space with a different game and so you get perfect customization uh you get to like you know reconfigure what your chain looks like uh you can configure native tokens for gas and staking so your game can have a native token um and then you get the set of ecosystem partners out of immutable so congrats with mutable. David, I know you are one to stay on the frontier of crypto, aren't you? So I wanted to hear about some of your recent frontier experiences. I think you're coming up with podcasts on these because I've been tuning into the bankless

Starting point is 00:57:10 premium feed and I caught one of the, well, I haven't listened to it yet, but it's waiting for me on the feed where you go and you talk about the crypto, the game. Let's start there. What is crypto the game? Because I've been among my crypto friend circles, everyone's talking about this thing and it's been described to me as like Survivor meets crypto like reality TV show type of thing like what is this thing?

Starting point is 00:57:36 Yeah, think of it like an MMO massive multiplayer online Survivor reality TV show. With economic reward like do I get the prize for like if I win? Yeah, economic reward is like putting it into like crypto terms you get a prize for winning the game

Starting point is 00:57:54 Oh, yeah. I guess I could just say prize. Yes, it's a prize. It's not like Axi Infinity where there's like an economic game. It's much more like a reality TV show where like, so the way that the game works. This is crypto the game. There has been two seasons. So we have seen two of these things happen. Season one, last of 10 days, season two last to 10 days. Season 1 had about 300 players. Season 2 had about 800 players. And you put in a 0.1-Eth entrance fee into the pot. And then the winner gets the entire pot minus the cut for the game devs who put in a

Starting point is 00:58:24 ton of work building this thing. And so it's also like, it's very much like squid games, you know, the Netflix squid games things where everyone like, it starts off with like a thousand people or whatever and then it gets whittled down and whittled down and whittled down and then the last one gets all the people aren't getting killed here. What they're just getting voted voted off, right? Yeah, they get they get eliminated. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:41 And so it's a social game. It's a social game. Yeah. Man, that sounds terrible. This just sounds like high school. I don't want to do this. Why would I do this? Apparently people are having a ton of fun.

Starting point is 00:58:52 And so like, okay, there's the actual game, which is like one. per day there's a trial that you have to go do like a little mini game like you have to go complete a quest or something you have to do an on on chain scavenger hunt uh sometimes there's an in a real life scavenger hunt uh there's there's a bunch of different games every 24 hours is like the same or there's a new game but then at the end of every 24 hours there's a voting period to vote people off the island like vote to eliminate so you and so you are in a tree you are given a group you're grouped up at the very beginning and so you and your group have to like coordinate and you generally trust each other, but you also know that eventually you're going to have to vote some of these people off.

Starting point is 00:59:30 But mainly, since you're grouped up, you want to vote other tribes off first. And so, like, it's a game, it's a game of elimination. Why don't you do this? Have you done this? I have not done this. I have heard, one of the things I like about this actually is, like, it's a very equitable game. It's not like a popularity contest? No, definitely, no. In fact, popularity is, like, kind of a curse because then you're a target.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, so I have been told that if I entered the game as a player, that there would just be a huge target on my back just because like, oh, David, let's just vote him off. Let's just get him out of here. I could see that. You know, giving some of your comments on bank lists, I could definitely see that. Made some enemies, David.

Starting point is 01:00:13 All right. Well, that's cool. So do you think it's cool? You think it's something that bankless listeners might be interested in on the frontier? Well, I mean, we have our own employees who are like can't get their eyes off of the game. I know. All right. So there is.

Starting point is 01:00:28 It's one of the most popular things to come out. So yeah, season three, it will happen in like four to six weeks or something. And if you want to find out more, David did like a 20 minute episode or something. It's on the bankless premium feed. If you're a bankless citizen, you have access to that right now. I'm going to actually listen to that and see if it's a, I won't have time for it. I'm not going to do it. I'll give it off anyway.

Starting point is 01:00:46 It's very consuming for how much. Yeah. But like the winner got 72 ether of season two. That's big. That's pretty cool. All right. What's the other thing you're on the frontier these days? Okay, so this is the Zero X-Maki project. For those

Starting point is 01:01:00 who don't know the lore around Zero X-Maki, he was the first person to step up and run the whole sushi swap project after Chef Nomi rugged. So generally, like, very technically talented beloved... He didn't rug anyone, though, right?

Starting point is 01:01:17 Zero-X-Machy? Zero-X-Maki did not. Chef Nomi. No, he was the good guy in Crypto History. Yes. Zero-X-Machie was the one that, like, fixed the ship of sushi swap after chef Nomi, like, effed it up. But this is ancient 2021. So, people really know this. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:33 Anyways, he's been involved with a bunch of stuff. Very well-respected, beloved dev has been hyping this thing up called Hero glyphs. And no one knows what this is because it's not released yet. But it will be by the time it's released when bankless listeners listen to it because it's releasing tomorrow.

Starting point is 01:01:48 And so it's purported, it's touted to be this thing that helps the decentralized of Ethereum, the Ethereum Validator Network. So it's a mechanism that rewards decentralization. It rewards solo stakers over like organizational

Starting point is 01:02:04 or institutional stakers. And everyone's like, how do you do that? That is an impossible nut to crack. No one's been able to figure out how to do that. Like how do you even identify solo stakers. And so I spent like 30 minutes talking with him. It's not on a podcast. But if this thing does blow up, maybe we will do a podcast. It's pretty clever.

Starting point is 01:02:21 So basically how this works. You know graffiti space in the beacon chain, Ryan? Yeah, I do know this. Okay, so in the beacon chain, when you as a proposer of a block, as an eth validator, there is this thing called graffiti. And actually, I don't know why Coredev's put this in there

Starting point is 01:02:36 and Mackey said he didn't know why either, but there are, is this 32 character space for you to put a little graffiti every time you propose a block to Ethereum. So if you propose a block, you get to say like something, something, something. When Bankless proposes a block because we run our validators,

Starting point is 01:02:51 it says Bankless was here. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I forgot we did that. Yeah. So clever. So clever. Super original.

Starting point is 01:02:59 I dare to copy us. It's amazing. Anyways, that is kind of, like, well, because anything is data availability that has characters in it. And so. I'm shaking my head. And so what Xerox Maki is doing is he is using graffiti space to produce like ordnals type things where, but except instead of producing Orrinos,

Starting point is 01:03:22 producing ordinals, you can actually mint a token on a layer two by encoding using a very like similar to ENS coding scheme. You can like code in a token. So like dollar sign, uh, bongless. You just create a syntax for it and you stuff it in a block in a place where like it's not supposed to be. Data's not supposed to be here. This is exactly. I'm surprised that this is such Bitcoin Ordinals energy. I'm, I'm surprised Casey, uh, Rotemore didn't do this. Ritamore isn't doing this. But it's, yeah, but he's a bitcorner, right? Yeah, but it's the same kind of approach. It's the same concept.

Starting point is 01:03:55 It's the same concept. There's this empty data field. We can put stuff in it. We can put some tokens in there. If we can just create a scheme and a way to decipher it, then we can stuff stuff in it. So that's what he's doing. Well, how does this benefit solo stakers? That's the part I don't understand.

Starting point is 01:04:09 Because you can't claim these. So who gets these tokens? So the token is minted when you propose a block and you put the token like ticker into the graffiti. But the token is minted on a level. layer two. So you actually don't touch the layer one. But it's minted to the address that your withdrawal credentials is set to. Oh, cool. And so a Solosaker generally has their withdrawal address is set to like an EOA that they own. But like Lido does not. Like Lido has it set to a Dow. Like Rockable has it set to their org. Any sort of institution has it set to a smart

Starting point is 01:04:42 contract. And in this protocol, in Hero glyphs, if your withdrawal address is a smart contract, it's invalid. It is only valid for people who have their withdrawal addresses set to individual EOAs. So it's not a perfect targeting of solo stakers. So it's like he didn't perfectly crack the nut but like is directionally correct. And it's going to create a bunch of meme coins

Starting point is 01:05:05 that only solo stakers have access to you. This sounds so much like ruins to me. It basically is ruins but using Ethereum beacon chain. It's going to be the ERC 20 killer is here. It's a hero glyph. We're going to encode it in graffiti. Wow.

Starting point is 01:05:21 Okay. I think it's pretty. I think it's pretty, I don't know if it takes off. We'll see if it takes off. It's easy for it to take, something like that to take off on Bitcoin because what other option do you have? Yeah, I've known. This is a little bit different in Ethereum. But it could be good for meme coins.

Starting point is 01:05:33 Who knows? I'm sure, you know, we'll have to see. David, update us on Salana. So they had, like, they had. Is this my job? Yes. You are our bankless Salon. Resonant Salana responder.

Starting point is 01:05:45 So Salon was having some problems with all of the volume it was receiving. In particular, there was a project called Orr that I think was like, quote unquote, spamming the network. Anyway, the end result was people, Solana users couldn't get transactions through. Users got pushed out, yeah. They got pushed out. You keep hitting the button and fail transaction, failed transaction. They're supposed to be an update for this.

Starting point is 01:06:03 They deployed the update. Am I right about this? Like, what is the update? What happened? Did it work? Okay, so Solana version 1.17.31, which is this, I think, short-term interim fix for what is a longer, more sustainable fix, is now deployed. I think the validators are now on this version.

Starting point is 01:06:22 I'm not going to pretend that I know what's in this version, so I'm just going to read a tweet from somebody who does know. If I just read this out, it would just be a bunch of networking stuff. So a bunch of networking stuff changed in the Salana's tech, and now it works better. Well, that was the problem, right? One part of the problem was the network tech that they had chosen just, like, wasn't kind of like scaling to the level they needed, so they swapped that out.

Starting point is 01:06:45 There's some other problems, like economic sustainability problems. But what I'm hearing from Salana users, it's been a little bit. I use the Salana network. But what I'm hearing from Salana power users is it's kind of late cleared up. And part of this, by the way, is aura has stopped. You know, like this chain that was spamming everyone has kind of stopped. But also this network change was somewhat effective. So there you go.

Starting point is 01:07:08 We got our hot mix in. Basically, so since Solana does not have a mempool, what becomes the mempool is like the networking layer of Solana, aka the internet. So that is the Solana mempool is like the networking layer. Are you asking me this? No, I'm telling you. You're telling me that? This is what happens when you delete a mempool is that it moves into the networking layer.

Starting point is 01:07:29 So it's just like the message messaging protocol around Solana. So they're just improving that. David, you want to hear about a stable coin bill? I love it. Tell me more. You don't love it. It sucks. It really sucks.

Starting point is 01:07:41 This is Senator Lummis and Senator Gillibrand bill. It says introduce a bipartisan landmark legislation to create regulatory frameworks for stable coins. Sounds really good, right? Yeah, we do want regulatory frameworks for stablecoins. Okay, so I saw this and I was kind of excited, hey, is it finally time? Are we getting like good regulation around stable coins? I asked our crypto lawyer friends, and my first question was, of course, where I always start with stable coins. Legislation is, does this kill die?

Starting point is 01:08:11 Their answer was, yes, it kills die. Oh. Okay, so it's bad. It kills any kind of algorithmic stable coin, followed by my, like, Crypto lawyer context. Dye's not an algorithmic stable coin. But they say it is. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:27 It kills die, right? Like, also Luna and everything like that, but also... Let me guess. It kills everything that doesn't have U.S. dollars in a bank somewhere. It might even kill U.S.D.C., David. Oh, God. Why? That's how silly this is.

Starting point is 01:08:40 All right. Anyway, so the overarching comment from crypto lawyers, because, you know, Senator Lummis has been a friend of crypto, so-called, with friends like these who needs enemies. all right that was like the comment because like this is bad actually uh it kills every stable that's not issued by a bank or a chartered trust which i don't think that's us dc that oh it's just they're not a bank yep and then also it has these like extra territorial provisions apparently so it's kind of like exporting it's imagining that the entire world revolves around the u.s and we could

Starting point is 01:09:12 just like export u.s law to stable coin transactions that are completely outside of the u.s. so it's bad. It's not great. I asked if this was like the bill that's going to go forward. It has some support. It's very early. People are still digesting it. There are other different bills that are in some sort of like formulation phase. So hopefully we just like reform this bill. We get like all the stupid stuff out of it.

Starting point is 01:09:37 We get the good stuff back into it. And it's a real bill. But it's like discouraging. It's discouraging because like we help us with regulation in Congress. And that's this is what they give us. No thanks. Don't help us with the regulation then. Like just... We keep on saying like, hey, we ultimately need to get legislation from the Congress. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:57 And I'm always assumed like, sure, they're going to throw like seven bad bills at us. And then the eighth one will finally be good and we'll just get that one in. But that also was like four bills ago. Yeah. And so it kind of just feels like, oh, yeah, we actually have to like get a good bill and we haven't gotten that ever. This is Jake Chivinsky. The bill published today is deeply flawed. It appears to ban nearly everything except a narrow band of centralized custodial

Starting point is 01:10:18 stable coins. This would be far worse than the status quo. Sick. You want to run for Congress, David? Let's do it. No, absolutely. You and I, let's go fix this. I don't. I don't put that off on me. Mr. Hoffman goes to Washington. We'll fix it all. I would not survive a day in Washington. I would get chewed up by those politicians. Let's talk about raises, David. Two startup raises that we want to highlight out of the Bankless Ventures Universe this week, Aligned layer, raising $2.6 million. Congrats guys. What is Aligned layer? Aligned layer is an AVS, which is outside of the eigenlayer ecosystem,

Starting point is 01:10:54 is basically a sidecar to Ethereum for super cheap ZK verifications. This is in the ZK universe. Basically, just like how we have blob space on the Ethereum Layer 1, EIP 4844, eventually in the fullness of time, Ethereum also wants to enshrine specific ZK circuits to have inside of the feature set of the Ethereum layer 1 to benefit roll-ups, right? more secure ZK settlement, just like a feature for layer 2s and just people to use. Because ZK EVM, ZK rollups are consuming that service right now, right?

Starting point is 01:11:28 You have to get your ZK proved verified on Ethereum and it's expensive right now. Yeah, so what if we just actually dedicated a ZK circuit as a part of the Ethereum protocol that ZK, LK, Lager 2s could very trustlessly just leverage for trustless perfect settlement of their layer 2s. This is something that will eventually be inside of the Ethereum protocol. But the total scope of all of these ZK circuits that could exist is completely limitless. And so for everything else that's not making it into the Ethereum Layer 1, there's Aligned layer, an external AVS for any sort of extremely cheap, extremely fast ZK proving. Kind of like how eigenDA is similar to Ethereum DA, but using eigenlayer as an AvesS,

Starting point is 01:12:09 aligned layer is an eigen layer AVS except for ZK circuit proving. Yeah, the net is this is going to make... proving and verification really, really cheap, which hopefully will enable a massive ecosystem of new ZK apps. Like a ZK roll-up is just one type of ZK app. And we haven't seen what's possible in kind of this whole sphere. Second up is Nibra, which is a ZK proof aggregator. So all of these ZK roll-ups who submit proofs down to the Ethereum layer one, they pay for that. They pay to put their proof down on the Ethereum layer one. But a ZK snark is succinct, as in it is a very specific number of characters. That's what the sync succinct is here. What if Nibra just consumed other people ZK

Starting point is 01:12:51 proofs and then aggregated them all together and spit out another ZK proof to settle all that singular ZK proof down to the Ethereum Layer 1. Economies of scale is more cheap for all of these ZK proofs. And so Nibra ZK proof aggregator raised 4.5 million. Again, one of a bankless ventures portfolio company. So congrats to Aligned Layer and Nibra. This is all part of the trend of going from like compute to trustless compute. I mean, there are some ZK bulls out there who think basically the entire internet is going to be ZKified.

Starting point is 01:13:21 I'm one of them. Right? And so like that's why we need abundant, we need abundant ZK verification. We need to be super cheap. ZK on your phone, ZK on your browser, ZK on your smart refrigerator, just because everything will be ZK everywhere.

Starting point is 01:13:40 David, tell me about the meme of the week, man. send with this okay so uh this is one of the greatest like tweets i saw this week tim cobblin so tweeting out the classic shot chaser line uh and ovi avie eisenberg if you guys remember this name who is the person who did some on-chain market manipulation of i believe mango market markets if the meme i executed a highly profitable trading strategy means anything to you this is that guy. And right after this individual manipulated some economic oracles to exploit mango markets, he tweets out, what are you going to do? Arrest me? And this is when right after he just exploited 22. In 2022, he exploited mango markets for like some millions of dollars. And here is a picture

Starting point is 01:14:27 from an article that went out just this last week. Federal jurors in New York on Thursday found Avi Eisenberg, 28, guilty of commodities fraud, commodities manipulation. And why do you? fraud for his actions on October 11th, 2022, when his trading boosted the prices of future contract by 1,300% in 20 minutes, sentencing is set for July 29th. He was indeed arrested. Crimes are still crimes when you do them in crypto. PSA, it's a bankless nation. So if I steal your crypto money, David, it's still stealing, huh? That is still theft. If you steal crypto from someone, it is still theft. If you manipulate markets, it is still illegal commodities market manipulation. Crimes are still crimes.

Starting point is 01:15:08 when you do them in crypto. Public reminder. I thought all of this was like imaginary money, but like it's good to know that this is serious stuff. Crimes are crimes. All right, guys, let's end with this. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in.

Starting point is 01:15:22 But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC Halving is Here! | Worldcoin's New Chain | China ETF Approvals | Solana Chain Upgrades

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