Bankless - ROLLUP: Bull Market is Here | $JTO Airdrop | Capitol Hill Crosshairs

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup 1st Week of December, 2023 ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ----- 🌐 AEVO's Options and Perps DEX https://bankless.cc/aevo  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.com/MetaMask  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.com/Arbitrum  ⁠ 👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE  https://bankless.com/GMX  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.com/Celo  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ TIMESTAMPS & Resources 0:00 Intro 04:00 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-04/bitcoin-btc-hype-machine-goes-into-overdrive-as-token-surges-past-42-000?embedded-checkout=true  https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd  06:36 Spot ETF Dates https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1730606890319532389  09:28 Altcoins Exploding https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bonk  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/beam-2  https://x.com/0xferg/status/1732546634536640694?s=20  https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1732542939736215638?s=20  12:55 Blockchain Fees https://cryptofees.info/  https://vxtwitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1732213564696617018?s=20  https://mempool.space  https://dune.com/dataalways/ordinals  14:52 NEAR https://x.com/NEARProtocol/status/1730585506314862949?s=20  16:49 Vibecession https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/1730345974957023355  https://twitter.com/SimonWDC/status/1731720857578328492  22:50 Jito Airdrop https://www.coinbase.com/advanced-trade/spot/JTO-USD  https://x.com/jito_sol/status/1732794280618668363?s=20  https://jito.network/airdrop https://x.com/Dogetoshi/status/1732775546071711939?s=20  https://x.com/usgoose/status/1732801746416619585?s=20  https://www.bankless.com/airdrop-hunter 27:49 Treasury Attacks Crypto https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1731038228902228012?s=20  https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/11/29/stablecoins-such-as-tether-may-be-in-us-sights-top-us-treasury-official-warns/  https://twitter.com/neerajka/status/1730298060645736883?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://twitter.com/CampbellJAustin/status/1729693478232215923?s=20  33:05 Jamie Dimon and Liz Warren Bash Crypto https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1732473232735809916  39:08 Coinbase Wallet Upgrades https://twitter.com/CoinbaseWallet/status/1732091130169176510  40:15 SAFE Updates https://twitter.com/safe/status/1732037206343290981  40:32 Zora https://twitter.com/ourZORA/status/1729908093902033062  40:59 Matcha https://x.com/matchaxyz/status/1732070138281918806?s=20  41:58 Stakewise v3 https://twitter.com/stakewise_io/status/1729530659566149762  42:57 Mantle  https://twitter.com/0xMantle/status/1731616189473046532  44:03 Eigen Layer  https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/eigenda-layer-n/  https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1732477811628405032  48:27 Do Kwon Coming to The US https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1732789392417186111  50:50 Meme of The Week https://twitter.com/Smacaud1/status/1731739370376335459?s=20  Moment of Zen https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/18ccm7o/why_sam_bankman_fried_got_caught/  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Bankless Nation, it is the second Friday of December, and it's time to welcome you to our Friday weekly roll up. We got Bitcoin above 40K. Welcome to the bull market, my friend. I think it's bull season. How about you, David? Are we calling it? Is it official? We've been warming up to the idea.

Did we? Did we already called it? We already called that we were entering the bull market. And now I'm like ready to just welcome people. I'm just like, you can't even deny it now. It's no longer, it's no longer like 90, 10. It's now like 99. one. It's no longer in dispute. This is the bull market. And so I just want to cordially welcome everyone

to the weekly roll up on the bull market. We are officially there. December 2023. It took us how long? Not too long, honestly. It was like in the grand scheme of things, it was a short bear market. It was a one year of down, one year of flat. Whereas last bear market, it was one year of down, two years of flat. Yes. If this is your first cycle or you're going to your second cycle, then consider yourself blessed that bear market wasn't so bad, all things considered, I guess. Back in my day, our bear market lasted two years. There we go, here we go. Grandpa Bankless.

David, what do we got to cover this week? What are the topics? Yeah, the markets downstream of Bitcoin are getting hotter. Solana AirDrop season at the time of recording, Gito, the combo, Lido plus Mev Boost application on Solana just had its air drop is probably going to be one of the most hot tokens in the Salaana ecosystem, just started trading. So we're going to take a look at what it is trading at and how much wealth was distributed to Jito sole holders. GameFi tokens also moving, but most bullishly, we have specific dates, at least a very specific window for the dates for a spot

Bitcoin ETF. And that is just the market section. What else we got, Ryan? We got crypto back in the crosshairs on Capitol Hill. So the U.S. Treasury wants to clamp down on crypto imposing what might be, and I quote, the broadest expansions of powers since the Patriot Act, it's not good. Treasury is not saying good things. Also, I'm going to do the market section. You're going to do that section. Yeah, I'll do the sad stuff. Also, a typical banker move, Jamie Diamond bent the knee to Elizabeth Warren in front of Congress today. I think he's getting aboard the anti-crypto army. He, of course, is the CEO of J.P. Morgan, three trillion in assets. So we'll talk about this. But there's good news. Man, you get all the good news stuff.

What's, I get the good news stuff. What are we building? Coinbase wallet gets some payment infrastructure that has way better U.S. than probably what you're used to. We got a bunch of new liquid staking updates to talk about that all lead into a big eigenlayer update as well as Igen layer opening up the doors for more ether deposits. We will see how long it takes for Igen layer to reach its cap. Every other time, like Igenlera has reached its cap.

It was very, very quickly under hours. Anyway, so we're going to get to all of that stuff, the market section, big hot market section this week. But first we're going to talk to our friends over at AVO, previously known as Ribbon Finance. They've been dominating the defy landscape within the options and perpetuals world. 70% market share, I believe, is what they've got. Number one options in Perps decks in crypto. You could have traded G-Do before it went live. Well, you can still trade it as Perps on Avo. So for all of those tokens that are not yet distributed, you can start to speculate them, speculate on futures for them on AVO. And you can get

started with that at the link of the show notes, banklist.ccc slash AEVO. Interestingly, while you trade on AVO, you are also getting 4.7% yield because that is what is going on in AVO in the background, not just blast. The only people who can access AVO, David, are people who live in the United States of America, my friend. And so, U.S. listeners, you can thank your friendly CFTC regulators for that. one. All right. Let's give the markets, David. Yeah, good news. We are above 40K in Bitcoin land. What's the price this week? Yeah, started the week at 38,800, up 12% on the week. I think we're at like two, three weeks in a row of double digit moves in Bitcoin world. Currently coming in at $43,600. And Ryan, mainstream is starting to pick up on the Bitcoin rally. Bloomberg had this article

talking about the Bitcoin hype mania that goes into over-trane. drive as it passes $42,000. Here's a quote, Bitcoin topping $42,000 is just the start of a fresh crypto super cycle. What? We just saw the word super cycle in Bloomberg, a start of a fresh 50s circle cycle that will push the world's biggest token above $500,000 in what adherents say is a new monetary order taking Wall Street by storm. So really, really bullish words coming out of Bloomberg. Just so you know, you guys know at Bloomberg, Supercycle actually meant that, you know, cycle that never dies. No bare market. That was an old three hours capital, Suzoo thing. But it's super cycle. Yeah, it does sound great. How about this one, David? This is,

well, Bitcoin is up 130% on the year. It's actually just an average year for Bitcoin. If you look at like full historical context. Now, this is not necessarily a predictor moving forward, of course. I think, you know, things can't always be in overdrive, exponential growth territory. But what are we looking at here? Yeah, we're looking at just the yearly returns of Bitcoin from inception. We have three insanely positive years that we are never going to get back. So don't put your expectations there. 2013, Bitcoin went up 5200 percent. 21, 400 percent, 2017, 1,300 percent. And then the three worst years, 2014, negative 56 percent, 22, negative 64 percent, 2018, negative 73 percent. We are smack in the middle at a 100,

a reasonable, healthy, 128 percent year over year. year. Ryan, I remember about a year ago when we were talking about the, if the four-year cycle meme played out again, we were going to look back on the year that was 2023 and it was going to be a year of perceived pain, perceived bearishness. And then when we look back on it, it's going to be up only. And that is exactly what happened. Twenty-twenty-three were up 138 percent and it really didn't feel bullish until Q4. But really, it's been up, it's been up the entire year. David, I got to say, my friend, we are right on schedule. Are we not?

You're right on schedule. It feels like the bear market was short, but also the bull market is right on schedule in these four-year cycles. David, let's talk about another schedule, which is, when are we going to get the Bitcoin Spot ETF? You promise some dates. Give us the dates. Yeah, so this is James Safer, who now says the window is officially January 5th through

January 10th. I already knew this because this is when I go find my horrocks. And he says, really this means that any potential approval orders are going to come either Monday or Tuesday, because, you know, the prior two days or the weekend, Monday, January 8th, or Tuesday, January 9th, or perhaps Wednesday, January 10th. Mark your calendar's people. Okay, so you're going to be in the mouse. Shout out Fitzroy Mountain in Patagonia, where Bitcoin ETF or Crux will be destroyed. That is why I'm doing this. Wait, so I'm going to have to do a show that day on my own and I just going to be like.

You need to schedule a show without me because I will be on a mountain. All right, man. Well, I'm, I'm happy to do that. You just fight your fight, okay? You get this done for us, David. I'm doing my part. Well, that's great to have some dates for when you're going to destroy that, Horrocks, and when we get, can you do the ether one after that, please? Oh, yeah. So that's in July. Okay. All right. July. What mountain is that data in Switzerland? Perfect. Okay, let's talk about Ether Price on the week. Thank you to these wonderful charts from Cracken Pro that are showing us. They look even more beautiful, the more green and up they are. I like the green lines. especially the ones that are very long and tall.

And we got so long, tall ones this week. What are we at on Eith Price? Eith Price starting the week at $2,100, up 11% to 2330, coming in with a last minute green candle right before we started recording this Thursday morning. And also some burn metrics, if you will entertain me, Ryan. We got some burn metrics to talk about. I'm happy to entertain the burn metrics.

Weekly burn of negative 0.77% with a monthly burn of, 0.47%. So we are accelerating in our deflation of the ETH supply. If the U.S. dollar inflated by 3% month over month by over the last year, the ETH deflated by 0.47% year over year with accelerating burn because of the gas prices, activity, layer one activity is up bigly. We are also Ryan approaching new ethelows in ETH supply after two months of inflation. We had a inflationary period of September to October in which on-chain activity was just based. basically dead. But it's coming back. One day, that deflation is going to make its way in the price of ether.

One day. It feels almost criminal to see some of these other assets flying so high, and ether's just lagging behind, my friend. So ultrasound money is not helping it out right now from a price perspective. But I guess we should be grateful. Does that mean the ratio is flat on the week? Ratio is pretty flat. Yeah, it's pretty flat. Yep. 0.054. It's flat and low. is setting, it's at a long-term, like, floor threshold of the eth ratio to Bitcoin.

Okay. Let's get the juices flowing. Tell me about some tokens that were really moving this week. The first is, this doesn't do anything for my juices. This is bong, but you wanted to include it. What in the world is bong? And why did it just go up 170% last week and 1,200% on the month, hitting a $1 billion valuation? I'm sure this is like a new revolutionary layer one, right? Yeah. Very cool. Not at all. It is basically the socially enshrined meme coin of Solana.

The story of Bonk is kind of like a doggie coin. It's basically a doggy coin. The dog coin of the people of Solana. The Bonk, how they became the socially enshrined like meme coin of Solana is like whoever minted this thing kind of just did the distribution play. So they just like gave Bonk out across the ecosystem. And then everyone was like, oh, we all own Bonk. I'm, I don't, I now love this thing.

And now, now that like, so sole price is up bigly. So Solana is getting like this wealth effect from air drops. We all know that meme coins are just like an inherent feature of life in the crypto world. Bonk has just rocketed over the last month, 1,200% in a month, hitting a $1 billion valuation. Well, it's definitely a bull market if we've got the dog coins back, David. This is another one, Beam. Tell me about Beam. Yeah, Beam is in the GameFi sector. I recently did an interview with one of their founders, Marco.

The Beam is also a product. It's a crypto gaming tech stack that is a product out of Merit Circle, which is a Dow. A little bit like YGG, Ryan, if you remember that, but that was specifically a Gamer's Guild. This is more of a Dow in the traditional sense. It's like they have investments. They build products. They just do a little bit of everything.

Beam, which is their gaming tech stack, up almost 300% since last October. Wow. It started on an avalanche subnet, on the gaming focus avalanche subnet. Their price appreciation was triggered by the strategic partnership with Pintera capital, which is when some of the price started moving pretty bigly. And Pantara just announced that they have a lot of beam tokens. And then the most recent news is that they're actually migrating from avalanche to immutable. They're saying they're keeping all of their pre-existing infrastructure on avalanche.

They're just now also deploying on immutable to keep it politically balanced. But yeah, so the whole idea is that immutable teamed up with Polygon because Immutable was going after gaming. Polygon was going after gaming. And they're like, well, let's just bring these forces together. Immutable. And so Polygon is now the underlying tech stack. Immutable is more of like the gaming infra. Merit Circle and Beam are now also gaming like gaming infra, but kind of at a higher level than immutable.

And so all of these three things are just coming together to be more or less what is crypto gaming is now, I would say, immutable ecosystem. GameFi is back on the menu, it sounds like, a little narrative brewing with the immutable. And, you know, Vance and Michael from Framework, I think we put that episode out this week. They got me bullish a little bit of GameFi. I think we're making a comeback year. David, tell me about the total crypto market cap. What are we at? $1.68 trillion, which is up over $200 billion since last week. What? Yeah. That was a big move. I mean, Bitcoin's just been painting numbers, bro. Yeah, and when Bitcoin moves. Yeah, it adds to the crypto market cap. That's for sure. Well, speaking of Bitcoin, David,

you know something else that's been moving. I noticed this. This is the cryptofees. Info. Look at Bitcoin on the seven-day average fee. It is almost Ethereum level. It's meaningful. It's very meaningful. Actually, look at these one-day fees is basically second place to Ethereum. So from a one-day perspective, Ethereum sold about $15 million in one day of block space. Wow, go Ethereum. Bitcoin sold $12 million, though. David, it doesn't usually do that. Usually it's way down on the list, you know, bringing, I remember a few months ago is just bringing in like a few hundred K per day on the daily fees.

So what is going on? Who's buying all this? Where's all this Bitcoin block space demand coming from? Yeah, so this is coming out of Ordinals out of the BRC 20 tokens, which I think is like the inscription. There's like this BRC 20 inscription ordinals phenomenon. Bitcoin is just congested because of Bitcoin's, internal like token standard.

Also what happened this week, Ryan, is that the Bitcoin Mempool hit its highest level of load ever, basically just like the highest number of awaiting transactions to be confirmed ever. It's the most blocks based demand that Bitcoin has ever seen. Over 280,000 transactions were waiting to be confirmed. The size of transactions waiting to be added to Bitcoin

reached 1.57 gigabytes, which is nuts. just it's all ordinals it's all ordinals so like we were talking about like friend tech versus ordinals like the friend the ordinals movement just died out and friend tech lasted way longer and now friend tech's dead and ordinals are what's also weird is uh bitcoin is becoming like a token platform bitcoin like i thought i'd never see it the bitcoin of

twenty three is like people the community is getting excited about tokens they're getting excited about nftes that that used to be just ethereum schick and now bitcoin is moving over there uh whereas on in the Ethereum world, we're talking about ETH's money. It's kind of an interesting flip-flop or maybe a convergence there at this bull cycle. How is NIR Protocol involved in this? You included this in this section. Yeah, so NIR Protocol also has a record high of transactions. 13.2 million transactions in 24 hours with, and NIR also has a burn with 350,000 NIR tokens

burned. Where did all this crazy demand come from? From NIR inscriptions. And this is also not the only chain that is experiencing the inscription effect. Wait, what do you mean near inscription? So is this on the near layer one? They're just a phenomenon. They're just a standard. Does this have anything to do with like the Bitcoin network? Nope.

Well, other than the fact, it's more about inscriptions. There's no tie formally to the Bitcoin network. It's just like inscriptions on Bitcoin. And then there was ETH subscriptions, which started on then after the Bitcoin whole thing with Ethereum. Then Solana got it and then now NIR got it and I would guess, I don't have a link handy, but I would guess Avalanche also has it too. There's just like this locus of inscriptions going around. What do you mean by all the different chains? People aren't familiar. Like I understand why Bitcoin needs this, right? It's because they don't have a smart contract like a virtual machine

environment. So they do their BRC 20s as inscriptions. They do NFTs as inscriptions. Why in the world would somebody be purchasing inscriptions in a like a virtual machine and something like near i don't know i've always considered inscriptions to be like a uh rudimentary form like very blunt primitive form of an nft um and they're super inefficient you can't do very much with them by comparison of an nfts um they just consume a ton of block space and they're pretty expensive and for some reason uh people people love though okay i get i get why bitcoin is doing it. I get why Bitcoin's doing it. I'm writing this off for other smart contract platforms is, oh, that's a thing I don't understand. And before we get into the rest of the news, Ryan, I want to shout

out our friend of the pod, Kyla Scanlon, who just retweeted this tweet from dictionary.com. The term vibe session refers to widespread pessimism about the economy regardless of actual economic situations. Learn more about its term and its origin. Its origin is Kyla Scanlon. She coined this term vibe session to talk about, well, consume. Consum, Sumers of the economy feel bad, but the fundamentals of the economy look good. And she's saying that's what we've been in for the past. That's what we've been in for the year or so. Yeah, even pre-Silicon Valley banking crisis.

And I mean, she's a prolific content producer. She's absolutely hilarious. Some surreal zoomer humor. And she got a word into the dictionary that she invented because of just the content that everyone appreciated. So just big shout out to Kyla Scanlon and congrats for inventing a word. Is that the story? Is that what we've been in in like a vibe session, is she right?

I saw this tweet this week too. The U.S. economy, GDP growth 5.2%. Inflation was zero last month. Wage growth remains robust. Strongest recovery in the G7, this is talking about the U.S. Lowest uninsured rate in U.S. history. Medium wealth up 37 percent, down nearing all-time highs. This person is saying, well done all.

A lot of metrics look pretty strong in the economy. It's, I, you know, this recession that people have been talking about has never come. Were we just in that vibe session, I guess? Perhaps. I'm always slightly skeptical about metrics reporting truth. There's truth and then there are metrics. And these things aren't always the same. Sometimes consumer sentiment is just a valid of a metric as others.

But to the actual truth behind the scenes, I'm not really sure. But vibe session has caught enough of resonance with people. that it's added to the dictionary. That's interesting because it's political season. So there's lots of political reasons entering 2024 that people would want to be optimistic about the economy and others pessimistic. So it's hard to know really what to believe at this point in time.

Actually, David, I saw on Van X, one of their predictions going into 2024, we're going to talk to Vanek about their crypto predictions, but their crypto group is actually predicting recession in the first half of Q1, 2024. So it's always going to be perpetually, debate is, are things good? Are things going to get bad soon? We don't really know at this point. The whole recession predictors is just like that gif of the truck running into the wall, but before it runs into the wall, it cuts, and then it kind of repeats, and then you're waiting

for it to crash and just hasn't come yet. It's been, like, I've been referencing that meme for like two years now. Yeah, I mean, recessions do come. I mean, everything's cyclical, right? We'll have to see. That's a discussion topic for 2024. But on today's episode, what else were going to cover, David? Coming up next, we're going to talk about the Jito AirDrop that just started trading on Salinas. Perhaps Solana's uni AirDrop moment. We're going to talk about what the valuation is of that. We also got crypto versus the treasury,

Oof. And then also Jamie Diamond simping for Elizabeth Warren. Get out your cringe hats and put them on. We're going to get to all of that and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred crypto exchange for 2020 and 2024. If you do not have an account

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Trade on GMX with the exclusive bankless discount code in the show nuts and benefit from 10% lower fees. Try it out now at app.gmx.io. Sellow is the mobile first EVM compatible carbon negative blockchain built for the real world. And now something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sellow's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Selo Layer 2 on the Selo Forum, so has Ben Jones from optimism. But why?

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Join the conversation in the SELO Forum. Follow at SELOorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Big wealth effect coming to Solana starting this week. You called this Salana's Uni AirDrop moment. This is the Gito AirDrop. We mentioned it last week and now it is out and available. David, give us the details on this. Yeah, so total supply of Gito coming at 1 billion GEDA.

tokens. Gito is a combination of something like Lido and Ethereum plus Mev boost. So it is a liquid staking token for Solana. So the Gito sole asset is Solana staked. So you get the yield of Solana, just like how you get the yield of Ethereum and Stake-Deth. It also has M-EV capture baked into it as well. And so you get the issuance of Solana baked into the G-DOTE, the sole Gito token. And then you also get whatever MEV is captured through the Gito clients. You smack these things together, you get Gito. It is decently like, it's one of these applications that also is very, very related to the layer one in the same way that like Rocket Pool or Lido or Stakewise are our applications of Ethereum that relate to the protocol. So it is a, to say it's like a big deal in the Salon

community is kind of like an understatement. It's closer to like critical infrastructure. There's other alternatives to Gito, but it's kind of like the beloved. staking token of Solana. So, okay, one billion token supply currently trading, I think, if you had Coinbase up a second ago, currently trading at $1.87, $1.87, it got up to like $2.1.7, got down to $1.7. What's the valuation on that sucker? Valuations coming in at $1.88 billion. For comparison purposes, Ryan, Lido on Ethereum is about $2.5 billion. So it's not, it's within striking distance of being a Lido valuation. We are. seeing it discover price right now. It's been trading for like an hour or so. So still in

price discovery mode. But things are settling around the $1.9 to $2 mark. So yeah, $2 billion just got minted out of thin air to the Aslana ecosystem through the Lido Air Drop. Excuse me, the Gito AirDrop. That is an absolutely incredible wealth generation event, I think, for a lot of folks in the Salana community. And Stephen Doge Toshi on Twitter puts it this. way. The Solana AirDrop farming is going to be split into the pre and post-Gito eras. Expect crazy mercenary liquidity to come into the ecosystem if GTO trades well. It looks like it is trading well, at least at first. And so this is where maybe the comparison to Uniswap comes in from a 2022 Ethereum AirDrop that was very widely distributed.

I think there was like 150 to 200,000 eth addresses that were eligible for this. And it created a pretty large wealth effect. And then every. air drop since has been smaller in size, smaller in scope on Ethereum. And kind of like there's the pre-unit-uniswap air drop era and the post. And I think Doge Toshi is making a similar comparison here with Gito and the Salana community. Yeah. So I think if I remember my numbers correctly, 250,000-ish addresses. I think it was actually 240,000. I do remember. Oh, wow. Yeah, got the uniswap air drop. And then that dropped at $1,200 at like trading at $3. And so that was about $300.000. And so that was about 300 million-ish dollars,

airdrop from the Unitoken to the Ethereum community, setting off air drop season. Air drops got bigger after this. The Gido AirDrop is actually relatively similar. So 1 billion Gito tokens, 10% was air dropped to the GEDO ecosystem, mostly Gito sole holders.

And so if it was trading at $2 billion and 10%, $200 million got air dropped to the Salon community. So $200 million, just put into people's buckets. Here's a tweet. Combined with a bonk, Pith, Gito air drops in the last month, if you did the bare minimum, use Salon a bit, you would have probably needed 20K easily. It feels like DFI summer all over again. Sounds familiar, Ryan? Yeah, massive wealth effect going on. And for all you bankless citizens out there who use the airdrop hunter that we have on the bankless website, there's about 112 of you who completed the tasks for capturing the Ptickrador. And I believe every single one of you got the Gito AirDrop. That's 10012 of you who completed. 12 of you got a minimum of $10,000. I think some of them got to over $20,000 just from doing the

things that are listed on the AirDrop Hunter. So congrats to all the citizens that followed the that did the homework, did the things, got your on-chain skills up, and then did the thing that crypto always does, which is pay you to use it. There is a link in the show notes. If you want to do the AirDrop Hunter, it is across all ecosystems, including Salana. David, that was a little bit of a self-shill. Oh, that was absolutely a self-shill. It pays for itself. You guys are going to make money if these airdrops continue in this way by doing these squares in crypto. It pays for itself. You only need to get one. Absolutely crazy. By the way, we know this is going to happen again because it already happened and it is happening now.

Anyway, what else we got? David, there's some bad news on Capitol Hill. Tell me about the U.S. Treasury official and what kind of nonsense is he speaking right now. Okay, so remember Treasury of all departments out there. We have the CFTC, we have the SEC. Treasury is the real one. Treasury is the final boss. Because they do the financial surveillance. This is like FinCEN. It's the anti-terrorism. Yeah, it's the national security arm rather than the Gary Gensler. Like if you have the big Doge, little doge meme, Gary Gensler is the Little Doge. And this is the big doge. And Janet Yellen leads this office, right? She's the Secretary of Treasury right now. Yes. And so there is a call from Deputy Secretary Wally Adimino at Adyemo's proposal calls to expand authority tools and resources to go after illicit actors in the digital asset space. I mean, I'm all a fan of illicit actors not being in crypto. But then they talk about terrorist groups, including Hamas, use new virtual currency methods to move, store, and obfuscate their funding streams, which we've already, as an industry, totally debunked any, meaningful amount of activity of this nature. He goes on and says, these methods often use

evasive cryptocurrency networks and services, including mixers. They're talking about tornado cash here. So the proposal here is really to beef up the Treasury Department's powers under the Bank Secrecy Act, allowing for the targeting of crypto entities and services that facilitate funding for terrorists. Of course, the definitions of who is doing these things is always very squishy. Under this new proposal, a new category of financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act would include exchanges, virtual asset service providers, virtual asset wallet providers, validators, defy apps. The threshold for becoming a highly regulated entity under this new proposal is very, very low, including the distribution and writing of open source software.

This is what I would call an attack on crypto. Right, Ryan? Fair, fair. Yeah, 100%. This is one of the worst things that I've seen coming out of Treasury, like maybe ever. They really want to expand their powers and use kind of like terrorist financing as an excuse to do that. We know where this is coming from. Tether might totally be in their sites as well. This is Naraj from Coin Center. This is his take on this. The Treasury Department has recommended a massive expansion of warrantless surveillance and power to sanction open source software. This would include expanding the definition of a financial institution to include any asset wallet provider, any blockchain validated or node, think of an ether scan,

defy services like Uniswap. Basically what this means is treating all wallets and defy service providers as if they were custodial, subjecting them to the same AML, KYC, financial surveillance apparatus as a custodial wallet. I mean, David, this is one of those things, which is like, this kind of kills defy in the U.S. It's kind of like an extension, uh, extinction event. It doesn't mean defy won't, you know, go outside. But it has to go underground effectively in the U.S. or it becomes a lot more like Tradfye. This is Austin Campbell's take.

Do you want to read this out, David? Yeah, I won't read the whole thing because it's pretty long, but there's a link in the show notes for people who want to dive down deeper. Austin Campbell, we've had him on the podcast before. Great guy. He says it has some reasonable points, but is also asking for the broadest expansion of powers since the Patriot Act and in a way that makes a mockery of some of the technical,

details of modern communication with a side benefit of probably causing major geopolitic conflict due to the overreach. To me, it's a little bit like an Icarus kind of moment for Treasury. It's just like not being informed about the technology, being just like a bull in a China shop when it comes to geopolitical relations and enforcing our rules externally upon other countries, regardless of whether they want them or not. It's kind of, it to me, feels like a grasping for power over this thing that they should know that can't really have that much power. It's 100% that, but it's also, I think this is coming from this political push that, you know, led by Elizabeth Warren and others to really squash out crypto, right? And so

Treasury doesn't have the authority to do this, to expand the Bank Secrecy Act in the way that they're proposing to, like, do something as invasive as the Patriot Act. Like, what authority do they have to do that? The answer is they don't have the authority. So what are they doing? They're going to Congress to go ask for it, to push for it. And that's why it's been so imperative for Elizabeth Warren in the anti-crypto army to basically tie crypto with terrorist financing in Hamas. That's why they've been really pushing that narrative, including through mainstream media. You could see it all coming together. And now Treasury is saying, yes, we have to do something about that. And we know just what the

solution is. Let me go to Congress and, you know, tell you guys what you should be doing. Oh, Congress put 20 signatures on a piece of paper that talked about the calling of reigning in the crypto industry because of terrorist financing because of this one Wall Street Journal article. Was it Wall Street Journal? Yes. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal article. Like, oh, we have to, like, we now have to do something. Even though the foundations for the rationale are completely vapid, like most people aren't going to look that far. They're recruiting others to the anti-crypto army as well. Did you see this clip of Jamie Diamond in front of Congress? Let me play this for you. I've always been deeply opposed to crypto, Bitcoin, etc. You pointed out to a true use

case for it is criminals, drug traffickers, anti-money, tax avoidance, and that is a use case, because it is somewhat anonymous, not fully, and because you can move money instantaneously, and because it doesn't go through, as you mentioned, all these systems have built up over many years, know your customer, sanctions, OFAC, they can get bypass all of that. If I was the governments, I'd close it down. If I was the governments, I would close it down. That is Jamie Diamond. He is the CEO, long-time CEO of $3 trillion in asset bank. This is a bank. This is a banker strikeback called J.P. Morgan. And of course, that question was fielded to him by none other than Elizabeth Warren. Do you see what's happening here, David? And Elizabeth Warren is giving Jamie

Diamond the opportunity to bend the knee. And he's just saying, oh, absolutely, I will totally do that. Also, all the services that he says that crypto does to the world, like money laundering and tax evasion and terrorist financing is just what banks do. That's what banks. David, he also said that that's the only purpose of crypto. Do you hear his words? It's like, that's the only purpose of crypto. David, do you engage in criminal activity? Are you a crypto user?

That would be news to me. Oh, wow. So, like, there's at least one person here who is using crypto for non-criminal activity. Yes, I'll say, I also do not use crypto for criminal activity. I mean, like, it's just unbelievable. What a broad stroke, you know, brush. But is it that surprising that the world's largest bank CEO doesn't like a system to help people go bankless? I mean, is it that surprising?

Yeah. Well, I mean, same thing with a political establishment. And this is what sectors like this have to do. They have to bend the knee because being aligned with the monopoly over violence, ultimately. is the final game. Sad. It's, it is sad. It's sad for the American people.

I also wonder here, David, do you know J.P. Morgan has a project, a crypto project called Onyx. Onyx? Yeah. Yeah, they've been in collaboration with consensus for like years now. They had their own private stable coin, too.

It's like an Ethereum chain. Like, I've actually met people who work for Onyx. Yeah. They're smart, great people. Yeah. Some of them are. It's just a complete private chain. So I don't know what he's saying about this entire division.

There's this chance that like, Jamie Diamond is like, oh, I have to go into Congress and chant the chant that lives with one wants me to chant. And in the back, I'm just going to go build on crypto because it's the future. He's playing both sides, right? So right now it's politically expedient to do this thing and make this unholy alliance. Anyway, you can see all the pieces coming together. And this is our challenge going into 2024. But I got to tell you, David, crypto markets don't care.

Seems like that on the week. Neither do the builders. We got a lot of builder topics to cover in the next section. What are we going to talk about? We got some LST updates to bring to you. Stakewise getting an upgrade, the Mantle Layer 2, joining the Liquid Staking Token Game. We have a Layer 2 playing it in the LST arena.

And then with all of these LST updates, EigenLayer is opening its doors to more liquid-saken tokens and Ether to play in its first AVS that's going online, eigen-DA. We're going to talk about that. And we just have a mountain of incremental U.S. Provenants coming to the Ethereum ecosystem, Coinbase Wallet, enabling free U.S.D.C. transfers on a variety of different networks.

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the ability to send money anywhere you can send a link. What have they just rolled out, David? So this is peer-to-peer payments via link, where inside of your Coinbase wallet, you can make a link that has a USDA payment embedded in it, kind of like a link as a bill, send that link to somebody, however you want to do that, any sort of messenger. And then once they click that link,

they will be taken to their Coinbase wallet or they'll download the Coinbase wallet. And then that link will be able to dispense to them, USDC, on any chain on which this payment system is working, which is Arbitrum, Base, optimism, Polygon, and Avalanche. And so free USC transfers, zero fees for payments inside of a link. And so I can just mint a link and send it to anyone.

I think one of the themes that we're seeing this week is that UX is not just being improved. It's just being totally obfuscated as much as possible. Also in UX improvements this week, you know the safe multisig that basically everyone in crypto and Ethereum kind of uses? Well, now you can sign up using your email address. So removing the wallet wall from the experience,

which is kind of difficult. Just sign up using your Gmail account. Also, Zora has something similar for onboarding new users. Today, we're making it even easier to get started on Zora. All you need is an email in your imagination, no wallet or crypto required. That's really the theme, this abstraction from setting up seed phrases and private keys and all of this difficulty in just getting started in a much easier way, rather than going through the kind of the nine-step process that it used to take back in our day when we started in crypto. The same thing that's powering the Zora innovation is

also the same way that everyone on FriendTech got their wallets. That's with the Privy back end. Privy is like a wallet management service. And so this is just a matter of just like we don't, it's not about making seed phrases and private keys easier to manage. It's just about deleting them and just having them be automatically managed in the back end in safe and secure ways. And so the whole chains are becoming invisible thing is just only getting better and better and better, including this also, this recent update from Masha and also Socet. So Macha is a a Dex Aggigator, it's now hooking into socket to become a cross-chain aggregator, Dex aggregator. So you can swap tokens across chains, access cross-chain liquidity. And so it's

one of these many incremental ways in which all of Ethereum's Layer 2s are just slowly weaving together in 10,000 different ways. That's so good because chain fragmentation, like liquidity across all of these chains is difficult. And now I guess we're starting to bridge all of that. David, there's also some cool things going on in the liquid staking world. And I think this bull cycle, there'll be lots of opportunities to earn yield on top of your ether. But what is Stakewise doing here? Yeah, so Stakewise v3 is this pretty hotly anticipated upgrade to Stakewise. And it's making the Stakewise staking system more modular.

So you can have different like pods, if you will, like Dows, sub-Dows, orgs come together and become a module in the Stakewise system. So they can kind of govern their own. independent structure. So it kind of pushes complexity to the margins and allows people to onboard themselves into Stakewise V3 as a part of this larger staking system. So each individual vault, they call it a vault, can manage their fees, custom MEVs, strategies, DBT, insurance, etc. Also, there is a restaking system through eigenlayer. We're about to talk about that in a second. And so one of the modules is that you can become an eigenlayered restaking network. And of course, it's also fully permissionless as well.

This is very similar to the Lido structure as well, if you guys all remember the episode that we did with Hazu. Mantle also is entering the liquid restaking protocol. Mantle is an Ethereum layer two. It also has one of the largest ETH treasuries in the world, like billions of dollars of ETH, and they have made M.Eath. MENTAL. And so it has its own native staking token for its own native layer two.

And so they're like, why are we going to use Lido when we have so much ETH? We're just going to make our own. And they have enough ETH to do that. And so Jordy Alexander has a comment here from CoinDus. Mantle's Treasury has been successful in his own right. We want to be like the third largest eventually after Lido and Rocket Pool. So big fan of the diversity. Also interesting that a layer two has its own LST token.

You can only imagine the building blocks that they are able to produce with that. Yeah, like we were saying, I do think this is a big story of ether being exported to other chains and other locations and new yield opportunities for ether, which brings us, I think, to eigenlayer. So they're doing some cool things these days. And I think this is going to carry forth into 2024. Every time eigenlayer seems to open the valve and let some more eth into the system, it almost instantly gets filled up. Is that what's going on this week? Two things out of eigenlayer this week. They're launching their eigenlayer partner program, which is basically just a category of layer twos that are using eigen layer. layers eigenDA network, their first eigenlayer restaking network for data availability. So much lower fees, much more stable fees, just to have higher scalability for all these layer twos that are

using them. One of them is mantle that we were just talking about. Layer N, cello, caldera, movement, polymer. There's a bunch of layer twos that are all using eigen data availability for their data availability. And this is going to be one of the ways in which these layer twos are adding yield to the native stake rate of restaked ether. And so this is the second part of the eigenlayer announcement this week. They are increasing the restaking caps as well. So previously, vanilla ether, Lido staked ether, rocket pool. Staked ether was able to all become eigenlayer restaked ether.

They're adding more LSTs as well. Stakewise, Swell, Origin, Stater, Binance, and Anchor are now all liquid staking tokens that are becoming liquid restaking tokens. I know it sounds very complicated, but basically it's just like you get the ETH stake rate because you're staked, and then you also get the Eugen layer AVS active validated services, the yield coming from EGEN networks as well. So this is happening on December 18th, that is in 10 days from now. And so if you were not able to get your ether into the eigen layer system, they are increasing the caps and increasing the diversity of liquid staking tokens coming into the protocol. So individual LSTs will now have the deposit cap.

at 200,000 ether, that is up from 100,000. And then at 500,000 eth cumulatively restaked, liquid stake in token deposits will be paused globally. But vanilla ether always remains uncapped. But why would you deposit vanilla ether when you can deposit, you know, staking ether? Well, yeah. I like my yields on yields on yields, sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to stake your steak, right? And stake it as many times as you can to juice those yields, I guess. There's obviously some risk that goes to the territory. in all of these things. But I think this is... I was saying we're pretty early on the Euthan nature roller coaster.

We're still on the second loop. So we have the liquid staking tokens is the first loop. The second is data availability. We'll eventually get pretty Dgen. But we've got a lot of youth... I think this will be a big story in 2024. This will be a big narrative in 2024, which is like all of the other services that Ether's monetary value can actually enable and secure. right? And one of them is data availability. So it's very interesting that if a layer two is looking for some cheap data availability, of course, Proto-Dank charting is coming up, 4-844, that'll be native to Ethereum. And there's all of these other providers that are spinning up. But one of them is eigenlayer DA. And that is also secured by Ether, the asset, but in kind of a slightly different

way. That's going to be really cool to see all of the yield opportunities for ETH in this coming bull run. particular AVS I'm kind of excited about is the NEAR one. That's what we did we did that at Twitter space with Ilya not too long ago. He talked about NIR's data availability layer, which also leverages eigenlayers fast finality settlement system. So right before you can get final settlement on the Ethereum layer one from your layer two, you can get eigenlayer settlement assurances using NIR's like super fast sharded, you know, smart contract transactions. So you combine eigen layer, NIR and all the, Ethereum Layer 2s that are trying to find composability with each other. And you can get settlement assurances, which is basically the silver bullet for getting recomposability of Ethereum Layer 2s. And that's also an eigenlayer restaking network. And so the cool thing about eigenlayer's networks is that they're not chains, but they are networks.

And they are networks that, you know, demand fees, which goes into. I saw a question from a bankless citizen. What kind of services can we build on top of this? Could we build like an oracle? What kind of services can't you build on it? Right? Could we build like a chain link? type of competitor.

And like, you could. You could totally secure a chainling competitor. It's going to be a pretty burgeoning ecosystem of new innovation. I'm super excited about it. David, last thing, we got to go check on the bad boys of crypto. Doe Kwan, he's being extradited from Montenegro, where he was held in captivity, I believe, for a really long time. So where is he being extradited to?

There has been a big tug of war between South Korea, where Doe Kwan was building Terra to versus the United States where Doquan went to school. And I think is... Stanford. Stanford. Was it? One of those. I think it was Stanford.

Yeah. So, quote, Montenegro's top justice official, as previously said, he plans to send disgraced crypto tycoon Doquan to the United States rather than South Korea to face criminal charges. People familiar with the matter said. I remember when I was in Montenegro earlier this year, right, as Doe Kwan. Yeah. Yeah, I do.

There's some horror crux joke there, but I won't make it. I was talking with one of the Montenegrin semi-officials, if you will, and he showed me the picture of Doquan's fake passport that he was using. Oh, wow. Okay, so the story was Doquan was in Serbia. He fled to Serbia to hide. Right. I remember that.

And then we knew that. And so Serbia, I was apparently looking for him. He hopped the border into Montenegro, like across the border. There's no real border. You just climbed through mountains, I guess. Okay. And then he is in the podrasia. airport trying to fly to

Costa Rica, I think, and he has a he has a, there's an Korean man with a Costa Rican passport in Montenegro out of, so he legally crossed the border from Serbia. It was one of the most surreal things I had ever seen. Man, what is the story? How does the

US end up with everybody? Did they just say, no, sorry, South Korea, we want him? What gives them kind of authority? I I guess the financial. Yeah, I guess it looms large across all sorts of jurisdictions. And so if the U.S. wants Doquan, they get him. That works? Doquot, Doquan is a South Korean citizen.

But he harmed United States citizens and we have the bigger army. So we get him. I'm a CZ here, Doquan here, SBF here, right? What about Alex Mishinsky? What's he up to? Oh, he's in jail, bro. He's awaiting trial. Okay.

I haven't kept up with all the bad boys of crypto. But maybe next week is time for that. David, we got a meme of the week. I think this is quite fitting on the week as we were talking about all of the exciting tokens that we're pumping. What are we looking at? We have the classic distracted dude meme and he's got his girlfriend fundamentals that he's looking at that he's holding hands with. But he's looking back at this other girl. And that girl is narratives. And that, Ryan, is what a bull market is. Yeah, it's that part of the cycle for sure. Disclosures guys on the week. Both David and I are advisors for eigenlayer. We're also angel investors. in Immutable and Socket. As a reminder, we are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content.

There's always a link to our disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosers. And you got to know, none of this has been financial advice. You can 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.

I don't know if you all saw, but Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all charges. If you don't know who Sam Bankman-Fried is, he's the dude who, who looked like somebody microwave shy LeBuff. He was behind a multi-billion dollar crypto scandal

and took a lot of people's money. Got had a lot of powerful friends so he could take a lot of people's money he was found guilty. And, you know, he made a serious mistake. He stole money

from rich people. Well, when you think about it, it's really all he did wrong. If you steal it from the poor, you're going to be pretty good off. I don't know. This dude, going to go away for a long time. Which is crazy, because I don't really understand what he did. But I'm glad he didn't do it to me.

I'm like, I'm like, because I never got into crypto because I hadn't understand it. So you ever just be so dumb, you miss a whole tragedy? Because I saw the whole thing coming. I was having foam-mo and everything. And then everybody started losing their buddy. I was like, maybe it pays to not read sometimes. Maybe it's to my benefit that I have stayed as eager as possible

on very specific subjects in life.