Bankless - ROLLUP: China Bitcoin Miners, John McAfee, EIP-1559 Testnet, Layer 2 Ethereum (4th Week of June)

Starting point is 00:00:07 Bankless Nation, welcome to this Friday's episode of the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Once again, for the second time this week, we have a special episode because our fearless leader, Ryan Sean Adams, is out on vacation. And so we have brought in a substitute teacher, Anthony Sizzano, the second time that he stepped in for Ryan. And Anthony, welcome to the Bankless Weekly Roll-up. Thanks for helping us go through the news, man. Hey, David.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Thanks for having me again. You know, Ryan keeps slacking off. I have to keep making up for it. So, you know, I'm always happy to do that. Yeah, well, Ryan does a ton of the legwork behind the scenes. And so we're happy to get a new face in on the show while Ryan deserves a well-deserved vacation or slacking off one of the two things. All right, Bankless Nation, I'm sure this isn't your first weekly roll-up. So you know what to do.

Starting point is 00:00:56 Get out your coffee because we are going to be moving through a bunch of topics really quickly. First, we're stopping at the market. What happened in the last week in the market releases? what got released, news, what happened in the news cycle, some ecosystem takes who had good opinions in the last week of crypto. And then finally, we will finish off with what David and Anthony are excited about and the cherry on top after that, the meme of the week. Anthony, you ready to get going here?

Starting point is 00:01:23 Let's do it. It's been an exciting week. But guys, first, before we get into the show, we got to talk about ledger and how you kind of need one. Have you been just fooling around in Defi doing yield farming and all that other stuff and you've been doing it on your Metamask and your Hot Wallet, if you've been using a Hot Wallet, you have to get a Ledger Hardware Wallet. And the Ledger hardware wallet only becomes more and more useful

Starting point is 00:01:45 as Ledger integrates more and more Defi apps. And the most recent Defy app that they've integrated is Paraswap. And so you can now use Paraswap directly from the Ledger Live software, which is the software you can download on your computer. It's extremely friendly to all of your friends that you're trying to get into crypto. So send them, get them a ledger first and foremost, and then send them to the Ledger Live app, which is a very safe environment to be in crypto while also being your own bank. If you are unfamiliar with what Per Swap is, it is a Dex aggregator that combs the world and

Starting point is 00:02:16 landscape of Dex's and make sure that you get the best optimized trade whenever you swap your crypto assets. And now you can use it inside of your ledger. So check out the link in the show notes if you want to download the Ledger Live app and also get a ledger hardware wallet, which like I said, if you don't have a hardware wallet, you're playing it risky. So protect yourself with a ledger and just start using the ledger live app. All right, Bitcoin at the price of $34,300. Anthony, got any opinions as to the trajectory or price action that we've seen in the last week with Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:02:50 Not really, not any strong opinions. It's just been weak price-wise for a little bit. I tried to bounce up a bit after falling under 30K again. And, you know, you know, I think everyone's just holding their breath and seeing if it's going to maintain that. Because I feel like at this point in time, not just with Bitcoin, but with everything, people are just kind of like too scared to open long positions right now because they're like, okay, if I can buy it back in cheaper, there's no rush really right now. But yeah, who knows what's going to happen from here? It's really everyone that I follow that's either a trader or investor whatever,

Starting point is 00:03:22 no one really knows what's going to happen in the short term. I think it's the most confused I've seen in the market in a very long time. Yeah, confused definitely really seems to be the, word of choice for the last week. What do you think about this head and shoulders formation that traders are really talking about where the shoulder, the left shoulder is in January, February of 2021, and now we are establishing that right shoulder. And then the high range between 50 and 60,000 was the head. What do you think about this head and shoulders formation? Yeah, I've been watching it. It seems like something that the bears really, really want to play out because that would mean that

Starting point is 00:03:55 VTC would go to around 20K or even below 20K, which would be, obviously like the buying opportunity of a lifetime on Bitcoin or at least what people will consider to be the buying opportunity of a lifetime. But it still has time to invalidate. I mean, it has to get back over 40K. It seems like to and stay there. Like it tried to do that a little while ago and then it just failed. But yeah, I think this is this is quite scary if it plays out because just based on technicals, if it does play out properly, yeah, it'll be going to the old all time high to test it again. And, you know, that's always scary. There's a lot of precent there to say that going underneath the old all-time high is just not something that Bitcoin does when it comes down.

Starting point is 00:04:35 But at the same time, you know, who knows, right? This has been a weird bull market. So maybe it's going to be a weird bear market if we go into that. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. My opinion here is that so many people have their eyes on the head and shoulders that it can't play out. Too many people are watching it. And so it's a crowded trade if it is a trade at all. Let's move to Ether Price.

Starting point is 00:04:55 Ether Price currently hanging at around $1,970. It's been flirting above $2,000 recently yesterday and the day before. It got up to, I think, as high as $200 or $2,040. And it's struggling to keep its head above that $2,000 mark. But doing a pretty good job of it. Again, right now falling below $19,070. Anthony, any opinions on the ETH price? Yeah, I mean, it feels like ETH is just following Bitcoin at this point in time.

Starting point is 00:05:26 It doesn't seem like kind of like head and shoulders pattern. on eth or anything like that or any kind of like i guess obvious technical patterns but i feel like bitcoin led the the way down and it's kind of like leading the the strength now in the market and bitcoin seems strong then it's going to seem strong but yeah i just it's just limbo again like the i guess the ether price is even more confusing than the bitcoin price because it's just not acting on its own it's waiting for a for a signal from bitcoin which is waiting for a signal from whoever to kind of go um and it's go back up basically yeah absolutely uh i think in a confused market, everyone is kind of waiting for Bitcoin to make its first move, right?

Starting point is 00:06:05 It reminds me of that meme from Forrest Gump where all the runners are running behind Forrest and everyone's waiting to see what Forrest will do next. And so I think if when we are going to finally get some clarity as to what this direction of the market is, it's going to probably come from Bitcoin first. Everyone's looking at the biggest whale in the room here. And of course, Bitcoin is still king, still number one. That's why we always start with Bitcoin price. But if any other asset happens to surpass Bitcoin in total market cap, we will lead with that one first.

Starting point is 00:06:36 Speaking of, the most likely candidate is perhaps Ether. So let's talk about the ETH-BTC ratio, currently at 0.057, which historically still high. Again, still high versus Bitcoin coming off the highs that we touched just above 0.08 when it was the flippinging mania. Anthony, are you seeing strength or weakness in the ETH-BTC ratio? Again, it's, I think this is related to what Bitcoin's doing. So I think if Bitcoin starts going up and trying to confirm some bullish continuation, the ratio is just going to fall because everyone's going to be piling into a Bitcoin trade. And I feel like ETH BTC does really well during bullish momentum.

Starting point is 00:07:17 But during kind of like bearish momentum, it seems to either just trend down slowly, get stuck in kind of limbo. I'm eyeing that 0.055 level that it tested last time. but, you know, it could go a lot of than that. It just depends on if Bitcoin starts sucking up all the air again. And sorry, sucking all the air out of the room again, we can see this drop further. So generally, I don't know people that kind of trade ETH, BTC.

Starting point is 00:07:42 They more trade sentiment around BTC and ETH, which gets reflected in this chart. So it's a very messy chart, that's for sure. And let's go to the DFI Pulse Index, which I have to admit defeat on my 0.013 bottom call. we are at 0.012, which is meaningfully below 0.013, and it's been a week without trying to regain it. I thought it put up a valiant effort, but I guess we are just going lower than what I thought. However, I still think that this is a good buying opportunity for DPI. It's just approaching lower lows and lower lows, and the fundamentals behind a lot of these DFI tokens are only getting stronger, especially when we talk about price-to-sales ratio.

Starting point is 00:08:27 and the cash flow as a price of earnings. And comparing that to traditional valuations and traditional metrics, really, really cheap defy tokens, in my opinion. Anthony, you got any opinions here? I mean, it's a little bit surprising how weak defy has been against Eiff in particular. This is, you know, it's pretty much like, I think it's at an all-time low or something like that

Starting point is 00:08:51 or lower than it's going to last low there we can see in the chart. But, you know, we could, I guess, talk about DPI's performance in general and, like, defi's performance for hours. But I think the one thing that caught a lot of people off guard was the fact that they thought during, like, the mania people were going to pile into defy tokens when in reality, they piled into like dog tokens and scams and, like, retail never came for defy, at least Ethereum defy. I mean, there's other quote unquote defy out there that, you know, it kind of falls into that

Starting point is 00:09:24 category because they market themselves as such. But I just really think that the retail investors didn't come. And we don't have enough institutional and traditional investors in this space. They really care about price to sales, price to earnings yet to move the needle there. But at the same time, Heath is just like such an amazing selling point of an asset for the Ethereum ecosystem. I mean, if you own DeFi, like Ethereum DeFi tokens, you own ETH. Like that already is enough signal to me because like, you know, defy is a broad kind of thing. And if I own ETH, it doesn't necessarily mean I own any kind of like specific defy token i might own some of them but it's not like everyone owns the same like me and you would own different kind of defy tokens or we might have some overlap but

Starting point is 00:10:03 generally we both own eth though so that that shelling point of an asset i think is incredibly important and i think that's why it's so so hard to outperform eith in over the long run yeah as we know eith is ultra sound money and so that's that's always why we kind of look at this dpi versus eith ratio because to me, the DPI dollar number is only, only tells so much of a story, right? The DFI and ultrasound money, I think, orbit around each other. It's really the ratio between the magnitude of these two things, I think is really the signal versus the noise.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And, I mean, we're all pretty convinced that over the long term, both DFI tokens and ether going up in dollar terms anyway, so why don't we get ahead of that conversation and just start comparing these things to each other. We are currently standing at $51 billion dollars, in defy again coming out the highs that it used to be at 90 billion but 50 billion dollars 50 billion dollars is still a pretty high number not setting any new flow floors i would say uh staying above the the 50 billion dollar market is pretty cool anthony any opinions here yeah i mean the

Starting point is 00:11:08 dollar value locked is just going to follow um the prices obviously so as prices come down especially of eath that dollar value is going to fall it's so i mean yeah yeah basically like i i feel like it's it's completely natural. And, you know, if you zoom out to like all on that chart, the growth is still like incredible, absolutely incredible, right? Even over just like that. Yeah, it really does look, it really does look exactly like the chart, which is pretty funny.

Starting point is 00:11:34 But I think, I think, yeah, generally like, obviously, if Eve is going down, then that number's going to be going down, you know, at this point in time. Because Eif is the, you know, premier collateral, the pristine collateral, whatever I uses within these systems. and you know that that that that's why it's tied i think ave coming in still at number one with the most value locked at in 15% dominance according to defi pulse uh v and defy pulse report different numbers locked if you go to the aave page they report a different number and so i'm wondering i'm wondering where that discrepancy is

Starting point is 00:12:05 is counted from uh something new that we might be revisiting a lot on the bankless weekly roll-ups is this new website called layer 2b l2b.com and this is kind of similar to defypulse in that it compares the amount of value deposited onto different layer twos. And interestingly, it's decided to not include Polygon here, which I guess because Polygon isn't a true layer two, I guess they are drawing that line there. I personally consider Polygon a layer two just because any scaling solution, I think that's politically aligned with Ethereum at the very least as a layer two.

Starting point is 00:12:38 That's a subject for perhaps a different day. But loopering coming in at number one with 120 million locked, followed up by ZK swap with 70 million, and D-YDX with 43 million. We got optimism in there. We got Hermes in there. We got ZK Sync and, let's see, what's the other one? Arbitrum as well, with a relatively low number of $66,000 in Arbitrum.

Starting point is 00:13:01 But I think that these numbers are going up into the right and it's going to happen pretty damn fast. Yeah, I think you can look at what happened with Polygon. Even if Polygon isn't included here, I think you can look at what happened there and kind of like extrapolate that out to what's going to happen with things like optimism, arbitram, you know, EVM compatible, ZK Sync and things like that. Like once you have the platform live and the apps on there, the users come very, very quickly, as we've seen, because liquidity is so easy to move. And as long as you have the correct infrastructure tools and the correct kind of plumbing in there, you can get users across.

Starting point is 00:13:36 So, yeah, I think this is kind of noise right now because the layer two if your ecosystem is still so, so early, you know, and a lot of these things aren't even live in a public fashion. And hopefully Arbitrum goes live very soon. And optimism obviously said that they'd be going live in July. I think they still might hit that. And then the other ones are coming later. So I feel like in the next six months, this is going to look very, very different. And the top projects will probably be the kind of like generalized platforms.

Starting point is 00:14:05 Because loopering is amazing, but loopering is in a generalized platform, right? It's just its own ecosystem. So it probably can never be as big as the generalized ones. but that's not what they're going for, so that's fine. Same with things like DYDX and ZK swap and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I think it's really cool that this site exists and I can't wait to see what it looks like in six months time. Do you have an opinion as to why DYDX builds on its own layer two or rather instead of just picking out something like Arbitrum or optimism that has more generalizability and perhaps a more diverse ecosystem in the future? Yeah, I guess you get more control, like building out your own thing.

Starting point is 00:14:44 It's like, it's kind of like this theory that like every app should have its own chain, so to speak. So app specific blockchain. And that's kind of like the Cosmos model, I guess, and and less to a lesser extent, maybe the Procodot model. But, you know, I think for them, they just wanted to, like, be laser focused on their own product, not have like the noise of, of anything else in the background there. They also rebuilt, I believe, DYDX in Cairo in Starkware's programming language. They didn't build it in solidity. And they're using Starquare's new version.

Starting point is 00:15:14 virtual machine, Stark OS or something like that, the operating system there. So, yeah, I think it's just like a different kind of model. It's like the loop ring model, so to speak, but they want to create their own ecosystem. They want to be laser focused on their own product. They don't want to have anyone in there, you know, crowding out of whatever, but they still want to live on Ethereum and they still want to inherit Ethereum security. So, yeah, I think there was a podcast done. I can remember where it was, what it was done.

Starting point is 00:15:39 I don't know if it was done on bank or somewhere else where DydX and Stark were on they're talking about like their philosophy through this and how they didn't mind having to so yeah yeah okay but then yeah they didn't mind having to rebuild uh the thing from scratch because they only took like six months and now they have like a fully you know um scalable roll up so to speak using some of some of the best technology in the space so yeah i don't i think it's just like a different model at the end of the day totally yeah and if you guys want to check out the anthony or the podcast that anthony is talking about that was a state of the nation with dydx and starkware you can find that on the youtube here is something new that happened this last

Starting point is 00:16:13 week over a hundred thousand ether two hundred million dollars was staked into Ethereum 2.0 in a single day Anthony do you know who who did this yeah it was me I didn't want to docks myself till today but yeah no you know what's it's funny because like on Bitfinex at around 1700 to 1800 when eight was falling through there was a massive massive whale buying up ath like I think they bought over a hundred thousand ETH. And I don't know if that same whale is the one that put this into staking, but this is a lot of ETH going into staking. I mean, the confidence that that this signals about Eith, like, because this went in directly, it didn't go in through some custodian. It didn't go in through Lido or anything.

Starting point is 00:16:58 It went directly into the deposit contract, which means this ETH is locked until the merge. So this person is essentially saying, I don't want to sell this ETH until at least the merge. So yeah, it's a huge photo confidence. It's really great to see. I believe like every bit of ETH going into staking, direct staking, not through like a third party, it lets you exit whenever you want, is a vote of confidence for the future of Ethereum. And, you know, this is just a huge, like 100,000, 8th. I mean, the dollar value on that right now is what, like $2 billion? $200 million. Sorry, 200 million, not billion. That is a massive amount of money going in. So, yeah, really, really cool to see this. I'm not sure who it is. Like, there's only a very

Starting point is 00:17:35 few people who can afford that amount of eth and who would actually buy that amount of eth. Maybe it was already someone that was already a whale. I have to do some on-chain analysis, but I haven't looked at it too closely yet. That would be insanely cool if we got a story out about somebody who bought the dip and then just immediately just yeated it into the deposit contract. That would be really, really cool.

Starting point is 00:17:55 The other indicator, you said a vote of confidence. To me, it's just like, there's provable data of on-chain bulls. Like, only bowls are in the deposit contract. Only bulls are people that are buying Ethan and putting it there. Because like you said, it's people that don't care about the price of ether. They are holders until the end of time, right?

Starting point is 00:18:16 Staking is nice because it intrinsically rewards bullishness. We talked on the bank list weekly roll-up a few weeks ago about people that had fears that when the merge finally happens, if there's gonna be a bunch of ETH coming to the secondary market to dump because a lot of ETH that got to place into the deposit contract got placed

Starting point is 00:18:37 between like 300 and, and $1,000 ether. And so people might want to take some profits. But my response to that is if you are depositing ether into the deposit contract, you are intrinsically an ethful. And so you actually are the person that is most inclined to not sell your ether. And so we'll see how that plays out when the merge actually decides to come around. And I think it depends on what price, what price eth is at that point in time as well.

Starting point is 00:19:03 And also, for those who don't know, there's actually a withdrawal queue. Like, not everyone can withdraw at once. I think a max 900 validators can get out a day, which is 900 times 32E, whatever that is, can get out a day. So that's the max amount of selling pressure, if you assume that they're all going to sell that we would have. So, you know, when you think about that, I just, I don't know, I'm with you. I feel like staking your ETH is like a sign of bullishness. And I feel like most of that ETH is just going to stay in there forever. I really don't believe that it's just going to become, like the merger is going to go through.

Starting point is 00:19:35 The withdrawal is going to be enabled. and everyone's going to rush to the exits to sell. I just, I don't see that happening. Totally. Agreed. Another sign that this bull market is not over is A16D launches a new $2.2 billion crypto venture fund, which means $2.2 of investment is coming into this industry. That is the largest fund that I have ever seen ever by a long shot. I think that's what this article is about.

Starting point is 00:20:03 Is this actually saying like, yeah, this is the largest fund out of crypto. So congratulations to A16Z, well-deserved, part of that brand power that you guys got there. Anthony, any comments here? Yeah, this is definitely the largest fund. It's their third fund, so they've got two other ones that they've already deployed. And I think the most exciting thing about these funds is that they have to deploy. You know, unless all the limited partners or LPs, they're called one or their money back, which, you know, a lot of the time they don't.

Starting point is 00:20:30 These funds have to be deployed, which means that there's a lot of money coming into. I think a lot of it will go into the private market. but A16 Z still does OTC deals with projects. I mean, I think they did one recently with Solana. So this money is going to make its way into the ecosystem for sure, regardless of if it's a private deal or a public deal or whatever. But this just means that anyone who wants to get funding,

Starting point is 00:20:53 I mean, it's not just A16D either. There are so many funds out there who recently raised money off the back of the bull market where people kind of FOMOD in. Like, I think when people look at funds, they think, oh, they're sophisticated. They don't FOMO in. No, man, they're humans. They foam a win just like everyone else.

Starting point is 00:21:08 So there's this money here just like for builders. And we've seen some mega raises recently like Starkware at 75 or 80 million or something, DIY decks at like 60 million. So these teams are going to be able to build through any kind of bear market. If we go into, for some reason, another two year bear, these teams are fine. And there's more capital to raise, you know, series A's or series Bs or seeds or whatever from these funds. So this is incredibly bullish, I think, for the builder space, especially. And for the fact that, you know, during the bear market, there were not that many funds in the 2018,

Starting point is 00:21:40 2019 bear market and not many things were getting kind of funding. Now, I mean, there's billions just waiting to be deployed, which is, which is really exciting. Yeah, there's a very strong conversation in 2018 and 2019 as to like, yo, how do we fund our industry? Ethereum really had that problem. And seeing these numbers come into funds like A16C and like you said, A16C, it's the biggest by now. so congratulations to them, but there are so many that are also very large. And so, like, guys, we got fuel in the tank if anything bad happens for the long term with crypto prices.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Bandag out of the YERN team posted this chart that I thought was pretty interesting, where it compares and contrasts the revenue generated by the YERN protocol versus some Tradfai, some traditional finance correlates like Betterment, well-threatened BlackRock. And interestingly, it also compares it as a revenue per employee basis. And so, Yerne made $123 million in revenue. And compared to Betterment, which made 50 and Wealthfront, that made $30 million in revenue. But interestingly, revenue per employee, Yerne made $5.86 million per employee. And Betterment just made 0.17, and Wealthfront made $13 million per employee.

Starting point is 00:22:57 Ryan, Sean Adams, if he was here, he would say exactly what I'm about to say right now. but defy protocols don't have much costs. They are protocols. They're autonomous software on Ethereum. Once they work, they work. In Ethereum and Ethereum security is what actually is the thing that is costly to maintain. And that's a whole separate consensus mechanism. That's proof of work and proof of stake and ultrasound money and all that.

Starting point is 00:23:20 Once that is taken care of, DFI apps are free to maintain. And so all that's needed for things like YERN or Uniswap is just a little bit of continued development from a relatively small team, which makes them some of the most efficient capital generating entities that we have ever seen in this world. I wrote a bit about this in the Daily Way newsletter the other day where I basically said that it's just absolutely incredible the flattening of costs here across the FI protocols with their centralized counterparts, I guess you could call them. I know you went through the table here. I think it's funny because you can look at the number here for year and 21 team members. there's also the community as well i think the difference between these kind of like betterment's well fronts whatever and yearn is that yearn has a core team that does you know the core development but then

Starting point is 00:24:08 they also have a massive community betterment and wellfront don't have any organic communities from what i've seen or even black rock right they're they're just like their community is their company so to speak um whereas you can be a young community member or a you know Wi-Fi token holder and have absolutely nothing to do with the the core development and on top of that there's a lot of other protocols out there that essentially done and don't need stewarding or don't need kind of like, I guess, like continued building. You know, Unisop's a perfect example here where V2 is still going strong. V3 is out there, but V2 is very strong.

Starting point is 00:24:40 And there is no development on V2 because you can't. You can't do anything on V2 because the contracts are immutable. It's completely decentralized. Governance doesn't have any control over V2. So essentially, it's done. There's zero employees. And it's still making revenue for the protocol and the LPs and things like that. So I think this is just going to be a massive kind of thing going forward where, as I was saying before, there's not enough sophisticated investors in this space yet to care about this stuff. But going forward, there will be. And they'll be like, you know, how is this possible? Like this protocol is doing this, you know, price of satcho. They have like such low costs. You know, their growth prospects are insane. Why is this token only trading at X and X market cap? And I think that is going to be a massive shift here because at the end of the day, yearn wants to be like, some.

Starting point is 00:25:26 similar to something like Black Rock or Betterment and Wealthfront, and they're already doing more revenue than Betterment and Wealthfront with way less team members and and and also with way higher growth prospects too. So yeah, I don't know. I just feel like the market can't just stay really dumb forever. No, that I'm I'm with you 100% brother like so to some degree I'm on my bearish days. I'll be confused. It'd be like, well, some of these apps aren't actually throwing off cash. Some of these like governance tokens do people actually want governance tokens? Are they really what we say they are. But at the end of the day, when I put my bullish hat back on, it's like, all that people have to do is make the association, right? All that people have to do is believe

Starting point is 00:26:07 that it makes sense to buy these things because they generate revenue for the protocol. And maybe maybe they're not thrown off cash into your pocket. Maybe there's just a lot of traffic controlling of value by these governance tokens. But all people have to do is believe that they are generating the numbers. Because a lot of these typical equities, they don't pay dividends, either. And so to some degree, it's very much a belief system. Like, do these tokens have control over the value that they say that they have? And there's a lot of value that these defy apps are controlling. And so at some point, I do think there's just going to be like a herd mentality. Like, oh, yeah, these tokens are really valuable. Let's buy them. All right. On the same vein of

Starting point is 00:26:45 protocols with cash flow and fees, Alpha Hamara is one of the few protocols that actually does put cash in your pocket as a token holder. So, and Alpha Hamara v2 has already generated almost $700,000 in protocol fees in just about one month. Annualized total fees collected by all Alpha Hamara products, V1, V2, and on finance smart chain will be $13.85 million if that was annualized over a year, which puts Alpha Hamara decently up the charts of revenue generating cash flowing assets in D5. Yeah, I mean, I think this is really cool that Alpha is already kind of like that big and and returning things to token holders.

Starting point is 00:27:27 But at the same time, I have a little bit of maybe a different view here where I actually believe that token holders shouldn't be getting anything at this point in the lifecycle of these products. It's too early. All the money and all the revenue that's being generated should be reinvested back into growing the protocol. That's a lot of money that can be reinvested into building. And I really, I don't think that token holders should be getting like a dividend,

Starting point is 00:27:52 what, and not even a year after Alpha Finance as a launch, for example. And, you know, you see this play out a lot in the traditional kind of finance system or the traditional, any, any kind of company system where dividends or maybe a company won't even go public for a long time. And they won't pay dividends for a for a long time there as well. So, and they just reinvest. I mean, Amazon does it still. They reinvest all their profits into growing Amazon. And the Amazon stock price hasn't suffered at all. Like it's, you know, so I think I have a bit of a different opinion there.

Starting point is 00:28:21 But I think it's still cool to be paying out to token holders. but maybe it's just a bit too early to be doing so. And I don't know about Alpha Finance specifically. I know some protocols do both where they take money for their treasury and they pay out some to stakers to act as like an insurance backstop. We think it's cool. If there's actually like a productivity being done here where staking tokens gives you access to like revenue of the system,

Starting point is 00:28:45 but it also means that your tokens are at risk if you're part of like some insurance pool or you have to act as like a backstop for the protocol, whatever. So I think that that's a better model. but just straight paying people for staking, you know, and not giving, and them not taking on any risk, I think is too early and probably not the best model going forward. Let's actually camp on this point here, because I want to parse this apart. I agree with you in the sense that there's certain laws about finance just exist no matter what. And, you know, young upstarting protocols shouldn't be paying out dividends because they need that cash flow for themselves. At the same time, I think it would be really important if, like, the defy ecosystem planted a flag and be like,

Starting point is 00:29:24 Like, no, we are not a, because there's a critique of the legacy financial markets that all of these non-divin paying stocks are really just a greater fools analysis or greater fools like valuation theories. Like, oh, I'm going to buy Apple stock. Why am I buying Apple stock? It doesn't pay me any money. But I'm going to buy it so I can sell it to somebody else at a higher price later. Which is a greater fool's like argument for why you think that's a valuable. Apple does stock buybacks too. I guess that's another thing.

Starting point is 00:29:49 It's like the, it's like the Wi-Fi model, right? where essentially you would buy it because you know they're going to buy it back. And it doesn't matter if they're not going to burn it or whatever. They're still buying it back, which adds buy pressure. But I get what you're saying. Like there is definitely a faith-based or greater full element, if you want to call it, to a lot of these things. But yeah, sorry, go on.

Starting point is 00:30:08 Well, so we have the option to pay dividends to token holders, which is one option. We can buy back and kind of make her doubt as the buy back and burn. Wi-Fi is buy back and put it in the treasury. Wi-Fi is, and urine is also buying back each. and putting ETH on the treasury. And so these are three different ways to, like, add value to your protocol. Dividends, buybacks, and then ETH and stable coins put that on the treasury. And I actually think buying Dye or UCC or ETH and putting that on the treasury

Starting point is 00:30:38 and inside the protocol, which is governed by token holders, is actually a nice compromise because that allows the protocol to still tap into the revenue that they're generating, but it allows for the governance tokens to govern over what is a growing. mountain of cash. And so that's a pretty direct way to add value to the token. Yeah, yeah, I think so, definitely. Monthly average borrowing volume on AVE has just gone up through the roof. And so in June 2021, we are already past where we were in May. Despite the decreasing crypto asset prices, borrowing volume continues to skyrocket with Avey. It's probably going to breach $10 billion in the next

Starting point is 00:31:20 couple days, which is absolutely crazy. So, tip of that has a AVE, has not stopped growing since day one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would be curious to see which assets people are borrowing here, because obviously when the market's bullies, people borrow stable coins to go long on things, but are people borrowing like EVE or BT, or wrapped Bitcoin or whatever to short it right now? You know, I'd be very curious to see where this borrowing volume is coming from, actually. Yeah, shout out to whoever put this truck together. Token Terminal, maybe you can answer that question. And then the last section in the markets before we get to it releases, Kathy Wood bought the dip. Ark Invest purchases 1 million GBTC shares. So those are the trust out of

Starting point is 00:32:04 gray scale. Not only is Bitcoin in a dip, but the gray scale GBTC has had a discount to it. And so Kathy Wood wanted to take advantage of that discount by buying a bunch of GBTC. So discounted Bitcoin with a discounted asset. rapper around Bitcoin. So Kathy Woods thinks that this is a really good deal. And then also the conversation of ETFs comes up because as soon as Grayscale, they've communicated their intentions to turn GPTC into an ETF as soon as they can. And as soon as that happens, the discount on GPTC just immediately gets eliminated and the thing will immediately trade on par with the assets under management. And so if that happens anytime soon, this will all be a good

Starting point is 00:32:48 trade. Anthony, any thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, the trade really is hoping that the discount goes away. And, you know, you bet you were able to buy kind of like Bitcoin at a steep discount here and then obviously sell it later on. But yeah, I guess it's a risky play for sure. And I've seen charts that a lot of these GBT she is see kind of things are unlocking over the next month where Bitcoin basically becomes liquid and these kind of people can close the arb. So maybe that's why she did it because she is betting on that. that kind of like spread being closed due to the unlocks. So we'll see. We'll see what happens there. But the thing is,

Starting point is 00:33:24 is that if Bitcoin goes below the discount that GPTC was at, like if spot Bitcoin goes below it, then it becomes like a really bad trade. So it's definitely risky. But I mean, Kathy Wood from Arc obviously knows what she's doing. So I'd be very curious to see how this plays out for her. All right, guys,

Starting point is 00:33:41 we are going to get into releases. There's a lot of hot stuff that came out in the last week. But first we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show podcast. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:34:11 Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grander. program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrantz.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go.

Starting point is 00:34:53 That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. AVE is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum, and just recently released Avey Version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using Avey even more powerful. With Avey, you can leverage the full power of defyphi, money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Ave, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio

Starting point is 00:35:34 of a number of different defy tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of AVE's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets. Trade them on Uniswap and then deposit them back into AVE. AVE does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction. So you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com.

Starting point is 00:36:06 That's AAVE.com. All right, guys, we are back with releases. First release is another deployment on to all. Arbitrum, Future Swap, Future Swap V3 going to Arbitrum. Anthony, I know you like Arbitrum. Got any opinions on Future Swap and Arbitrum? I think the most exciting thing about this is that Future Swap is not deploying to layer one. They're only deploying to Arbitram as layer two.

Starting point is 00:36:32 And I think this is actually going to be what happens going forward, where teams aren't going to necessarily deploy to layer one because there will be no point. Because we're expecting users to just go to layer two and that'll be the kind of user layer. So why would you even deploy to layer one? Unless, you know, you're like protocol that that can take advantage of layer one in terms of like liquidity pools and things like that and just building liquidity there. But I think generally a lot of projects are just going to go for the layer two approach now when launching their maybe new versions or kind of like a new product. I've seen like a few of them recently where they say we're launching natively on optimism or we're launching natively on this layer two because they really don't see the point to launching on layer one because they have to launch on layer two anyway. And I've been speaking a lot about this on the refuel on my daily kind of YouTube videos that I do where I'm saying that it, the reason why I don't believe in like a multi-chain future, like a multi-chain future where like 20, 30, 40 different chains exist is because the overhead is intense there for DAP developers.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Because developers don't want to have to maintain like 20 different instantiations of their app. Like it's too hard to do that. You have to kind of like monitor the different kind of like parameters on each chain. You'd have to upgrade it on each chain whenever you do an upgrade or, change anything. Governance would have to govern like 20 different kind of instantiations. So I believe that we're going to only have a handful of them. So I think that that handful will obviously include Ethereum layer two's and maybe there's some other chains that get some kind of traction here. But yeah, going forward, I think more and more teams are just going to natively launch on layer two or

Starting point is 00:38:03 just like completely migrate to layer two. I think synthetics is actually not going to be on layer one once their layer two migration is complete. They want to get off layer one completely. So that is the future of Ethereum for sure, I believe. Yeah. And I think it's really an interesting sign of already some level of maturity on these L2s, very early indications of this because people are just choosing to not even bother with the L1 anymore, which kind of leaves the L1 to what it's really supposed to do, which is really just traffic our assets and our value between other L2s. Some interesting piece of Ethereum trivia trivia for you guys. Future swap was actually the first, I believe, the first governance token in their beta.

Starting point is 00:38:42 And so if you came and used Future Swap, which is a perpetual exchange protocol, they would actually give their beta users their governance token. And this was before Comp liquidity mining was even introduced. And this is actually what turned Dan Helzer's attention into governance tokens and liquidity mining

Starting point is 00:39:00 because the Future Swap had so much success in their beta that they had to shut it down because they were too nervous because it was an unaudited contract. and I think $200 million got yeated into this unaudited contract because people wanted to farm the governance tokens before we even called it farming and governance tokens. And so, like, sound familiar, like unordered contracts,

Starting point is 00:39:24 yeeding $200 million. Fun little piece of Ethereum trivia right there. All right, guys, another deployment on an L2 is the graph is now working with optimism on their main net launch to help scale Ethereum. The graph, the way that I use, the metaphor I use to help explain the graph, it's like chain link, but reversed. So chain link wants to bring outside data to Ethereum. The graph wants to bring Ethereum data to the outside and allows you consume and output Ethereum data.

Starting point is 00:39:55 And it looks like they are going to work with optimism to do the same thing for optimism. Anthony, any thoughts here? Yeah, every layer two and layer one chain needs this supporting infrastructure. So there's actually like a course set that I consider to be supporting infrastructure, and that is something like Infura and Alchemy, which are node infrastructure providers. The graph, which is middleware, as you said, it brings data inside Ethereum to outside of Ethereum. People will use the graph without even knowing it because it sits in the background of pretty much every defy front end that you use, especially if it seems like Zappa, they use the graph in the background there.

Starting point is 00:40:32 You know, there's chain link, which for oracles, there's, you know, there's block explorers like the for scan like Block Explorer. And if people have been paying attention, arbitram and optimism are basically on neck and neck in terms of integrations right now. And I believe Polygon also has all this support. And I think this is the reason why optimism was delayed back in March. They didn't have any of this infrastructure in place,

Starting point is 00:40:54 which means that developers couldn't even do anything on the layer two. And that's why I believe that Arbitrum went a little bit of different kind of route here and said, okay, well, we're going to have a developer, main net, we're going to get all this supporting infrastructure in place. live and then we're going to launch to the public because there's no point launching to the public if you don't have this infrastructure because you want to give them the same experience that they have on layer one just with cheaper fees and you can't do that without this infrastructure. So this is really, really positive. But I expect obviously all the layer two to kind of have

Starting point is 00:41:25 this supporting infrastructure before they launch in any kind of like big way to users. Right. Yeah. So all the people that are it interesting to get on layer twos and see when it, when is it coming? When is it coming? You're like, yo guys, developers got to go first. Like they got to actually build the stuff that we all want to use. All right. Moving on into more raises. Risk Harbor debuts on Main Net with a round of funding. Risk Harbor, it looks like a competitor to Nexus Mutual for on-chain smart contract

Starting point is 00:41:51 protocol insurance. So if your smart contract, it has a bug or an exploit, you could buy protection from Harbor. And so not only are they launching their application, but they're also announcing their $3.25 million seed round, led by Pintera Capital and Framework Ventures. and additional support from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Bank Capital, Neiman Capital. Anthony, do you know anything about Risk Carper? These guys are new to me. Yeah, they're new to me as well. I hadn't heard about them until this phrase. I think they were in stealth, so that's why. But essentially, yeah, I mean, this is just another kind of, I guess,

Starting point is 00:42:26 insurance protocol out there, like Nexus Mutual and Insurease. And I think, like, cover protocol. I mean, there's a bunch of them out there right now. But that's a strong list of investors that they have there. And I think that, you know, the fact that they're already live on Mainnet is really, really cool. I'm, you know, you can get, I think if you scroll down a bit, it shows which apps they already support. I think all the popular DeFi apps, yeah, like Curve, Yern, Arvea, Compound, Uniswap, you know, and their apps ready to be used. And it's, it's really beautiful. I like, I like the interface and everything like that. So, yeah, I mean, we definitely need more insurance kind of like protocols than not.

Starting point is 00:43:01 But the thing about insurance protocols, and I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, they need to be battle tested. You know, before I trust one of these protocols, I need to see that they are completely battle tested and I need to see that they actually pay out on claims. Like if they don't pay out the claims and they're not really much of a good insurance protocol.

Starting point is 00:43:22 So I think Nexus Mutual is still obviously the leader here, but good to see more competition hitting the market. And I saw you highlighted that Pomp invested in this. And I saw this too and I was like, what a, what a, what a, you know, what a, what a laugh. because, I mean, for those who don't know, Pomp has been like, you know, crapping all over Ethereum-based D-Fi,

Starting point is 00:43:40 and now he's investing in it. I mean, it's like money talks, right? Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly enough, when he tweeted out that he was investing in Risk Harbor, he used DFI, but did not use Ethereum. And so I'd like to see Pomp's been that narrative. But also Naval Ravik-Kont,

Starting point is 00:43:57 also on the list of investors. Naval, that's pretty cool. So really strong backing here. So maybe D-Fi is about to become a lot less risky if you buy insurance. Maybe the insurance you go see some is, you know, it's definitely getting another player. So maybe that part of the industry is going to build out a little bit. Yield Protocol. Also, got some money. Excited to announce the close of our Series A, Series A funding led by Paradigm and also to share some new details of to version 2 of yield.

Starting point is 00:44:25 So there has been some money being thrown around. And Paradom, this is not the first, Paradigm has led a bunch of rounds in the last few weeks. And so they are dishing out the cash. Anthony, any thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, $10 million Series A is pretty positive. I think the yield team's been around for a little while now doing kind of fixed rate things, fixed rate borrowing. I think they had something for Maker-Dow to plead as well.

Starting point is 00:44:53 But it's cool to see that their V2 is coming soon. And yeah, this is a good list of investors. They have Paradom as the leader. and then they have like framework. People will know variant and DeFi Alliance and a bunch of others there. So yeah, really, really cool to see this. Last but definitely not least, Visa and PayPal join blockchain capital in their new fund, which is $300 million.

Starting point is 00:45:16 I guess this week is just funds deploying capital and raising more money week. Congratulations, Spencer Bogart. That's the guy pictured here and also blockchain capital for getting Visa and PayPal on board for blockchain capital. And again, 300. million dollars about to be deployed into this industry that that's a lot of money and this is like the third time we've been talking about this on this weekly roll-up at some point i'm like yo guys can you like buy some eth can you like pump the eth price a little bit like come on come on yeah yeah and that i think

Starting point is 00:45:46 that's a funny thing to think about is just like you know a lot of these funds aren't going to be buying ath directly they're going to be investing in like private rounds and things like that but i think just just generally more money coming into this ecosystem is good for the entire ecosystem i really don't think that, you know, it'd be very hard to measure what affect the, the fact that the money goes into, you know, private rounds versus ETH has. And like, if that money had gone into ETH, would it have actually done stuff? Because at the end of the day, these, these kind of like, I guess, private rounds, like C, series A's, are done on the apps that build on Ethereum. And those apps are what add a lot of value to Ethereum. So it should still flow to ETH generally.

Starting point is 00:46:22 But this goes back to like the FAT protocol thesis and stuff like that. So it's a much deeper of discussion, but still, I think any money coming into this ecosystem is fine. But I mean, okay, actually, I should qualify that by saying that not just any money. I think that the dumb retail money that comes in and buys dog coins is actually pretty poisonous for the short to medium term because it means a lot of money exits the ecosystem and it means a lot of people get wrecked. So I think money going into like just, you know, the builders, like funding builders, like actual builders is the right approach here. Totally. Yeah, retail should, I mean, there needs to be legitimate things to invest in if we want retail to be smart and come into this

Starting point is 00:47:02 industry and at some point we need VCs to like fund and like be intentional about where this money goes and so that's what I see happening here for those that really want to follow along with the AVE ecosystem AVE grants Dow at AVE grants on Twitter announces AVE news a recap of the latest updates and happenings in the AVE ecosystem apparently AVE is so big that it needs to needs its own newsletter to keep up with what's going on in Ave. Yeah, yeah, I was actually looking at this the other day. I'm like, wow, this is incredible. To put the newsletter together would have taken a few hours because there were so many

Starting point is 00:47:38 kind of things in there. But yeah, the fact that just one app on Ethereum, yes, it's probably the biggest app on Ethereum right now, but just the fact that this one has so much to report on each week is incredible. And I mean, I love it. And I love that this was launched by the Arvee Grant Dow, like by the Ava Dow and the other token holders and just coming together to do this. It's really, really cool. Yeah. And this kind of feels a similar vibe to perhaps like an investor newsletter, right? You know, hey, like if you are an AVE token holder, you know, who do you think reads the AVE newsletter is probably AVE token

Starting point is 00:48:09 holders. And so the AVE newsletter is probably saying, hey, token holders, here's what we're up to. And so at some point, it's just good investor relations to have a newsletter like this and can definitely replace some of the very slow quarterly reports that, we would get from TradFi. Not specifically crypto related, but Brave Browser, which has, it's a very crypto forward and a browser used by crypto people because it kind of shares some of the ethos of crypto

Starting point is 00:48:38 and also has the basic attention token to pay for payments. It's a brave browser now has a search engine. So now rivaling Google and Bing in the search engine game. And I think the reason why I wanted to talk about this, even though it's not really super crypto focused, is that other than the fact that crypto people love Brave Browser, is that all of the values and ethos is being baked into Brave Browser of the crypto industry,

Starting point is 00:49:02 and now the Brave Browser is venturing off into more competitive territories with a search engine. And so I'm rooting for them. Like, let's change the game with the values and ethos of our industry. Let's change the game of some Web 2 technologies. Anthony, any opinions here? I think this is cool, but it's also like a very uphill battle. I mean, there's Duck, Duck, Go that's being true. trying to go, have a go at Google for a while. It's been growing and everything, but it's still

Starting point is 00:49:27 dwarfed by Google. I mean, Google at this point is like a monopoly in the search engine kind of arena. I don't know if any free market competition can actually take down Google. And, you know, maybe in the very long term, something could happen here. But like taking any market share away from Google, I guess, is like a positive. But still, they have such a stranglehold on, on search. And search is their only product, really. I mean, Google has other products. But search makes, I think more than 90% or even higher than that of their revenue. So search really is their core product. And they've been refining that for like 20 years.

Starting point is 00:50:00 And they have their own algorithms. I mean, I'm not saying that people shouldn't compete, but like I'm curious to see where this goes because there's already been other attempts like Bing and stuff like that. Not even Bing has put much of a dent in Google. And Bing is supported by Microsoft, which obviously makes it the default search engine on all of their Windows operating systems. And it's still not competing with Google.

Starting point is 00:50:20 Because Google, I mean, Google's a verb, right? Like, it's like just Google that, right? Or maybe I'm not using the word right there, but like just, just Google that. Yeah, yeah. Just, just Google it. Yeah, yeah. It's not like just search it on the web. It's just Google it.

Starting point is 00:50:36 Totally, totally. All right, moving on, Coinbase enters the Japanese market after completing registrations with a financial watchdog. I didn't actually know Coinbase wasn't in Japan, but now it is. So cool, Coinbase released in Japan. Anthony, any thoughts here? From all I know about Japan is that their financial or system or generally like they're investing kind of like system there is very quiet. If you look at Japan's stock index, it only recently got back to its all time high after like 30 or 40 years or something like that. And generally I don't think for some reason in Japan is just not very, very good with financial markets.

Starting point is 00:51:13 Like their financial markets are very quiet, not very speculative. I don't know how much they do with crypto. But yeah, I mean, there's a Japanese community. And we obviously, we went to DevCon, you know, Saka and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, it's just, it's fine. I didn't know that it wasn't there yet. So that just speaks to the fact they're very slow on their financial markets, it seems. Yeah, maybe to some degree that just stagnation in the Japanese financial markets just made the financial industry really unexciting and allowed people to just like work in slow motion, I guess.

Starting point is 00:51:45 The last release that we've got this week is coming out of Bankless, my favorite podcast, introducing a new show. me and my new co-host, Michael Wong, doing the Top Signal show, which is going to be all about entertainment and comedy, some gag, some bits, some jokes. Anthony, you are actually going to be one of our very first guests, along with a Defi Dad and Kevin Awaki, coming to a show near you, Tuesday night. So everyone, mark it on your calendars.

Starting point is 00:52:10 This coming Tuesday evening is when we will be live streaming, Top Signal, the very first episode. We got a cool agenda lined up for you, Anthony. It's going to be a fun time. Are you ready for it? Yeah, I'm really excited for this. And yeah, I mean, as you said, you have an agenda lineup, but I haven't seen it yet. But I think it's going to be really fine.

Starting point is 00:52:28 You made me about this for a little while that project that you guys are working on. And yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited for this. It's, I think, you know, it's funny because like a lot of the stuff that like we all do, like, you know, the roll-ups, the refills, the weekly recaps on E-Hub and stuff. There's not much comedy sprinkled in, right? It just focuses on, like, the news and the fundamental stuff. It's work. It's work.

Starting point is 00:52:49 It's work to produce and it's work to listen to. to. Yeah, really. Like, it's, it's, it's part of that arena, whereas, like, a lot of crypto really is memes and, and comedy and jokes and, like, all of crypto Twitter is just one giant shitpost. So, uh, you know, capturing that in kind of like a, uh, kind of like podcast video form, I think it's going to be really fun. I, I hope it works out. Hopefully we are as funny as I think that we are. Uh, we are about to find out. All right, getting into news, EIP 1559 live on the Robson Testnet. Uh, and so one step close. to getting EIP live on the Ethereum main net.

Starting point is 00:53:24 Not quite here yet. But we've got some pretty interesting infrastructure already going live. Here's Tim Bako saying, we have a block. Took a little bit longer than expected, but London is live on Robson. And then we have this new watch the burn.com website, which is only pointing towards Robson

Starting point is 00:53:41 because it's only on test net right now. But I think this is going to be a website that we are going to revisit as a community quite often because we all are going to enjoy watching ether burn. And so watch the burn.com is going to be a website to watch ether get burned. It's a little bit slow to load right now, but I promise it works. It does this sometimes for me as well.

Starting point is 00:54:03 Anthony, any thoughts about EIP-159 live on Robson? Yeah, I mean, it's obviously super exciting to see that it's finally live on a public test net here. You know, Gurley comes next in a week, and then like another week after that will be Rinkabee, and then we'll get a main net date. I think sooner rather than later. So yeah, I mean, yeah, you can see here on the site, like how much ether has been burned. But it's funny because I saw that there's like a lot of transaction spam happening right now in Robston to test 1559. So it's like, you know, trying to break it.

Starting point is 00:54:34 Because essentially this is what test nets are for. We want to see if we can break the mechanisms. And, you know, that's why 88,000 ether's been burned in like two days. You know, Robston, specifically. Yeah. Robston, eat, exactly. Yeah, I should mention that. This is not really.

Starting point is 00:54:46 So don't go get your hopes up, guys. It's not really. but um one day one day yeah one day yes yeah exactly and this is total fees so one day we're gonna have like total fees be like a million eat burn it's gonna be really cool to see that that um play out so yeah exciting your developments yeah not only is the test net testing out how much east can we burn but the content producers are testing out how much eth burn can we talk about uh so we're in test test mode left and right all right moving on uh this is a tweet out of fearless leader ryan sean Adams goes seriously Venmo nice job on the eth description revolutionizing the way we

Starting point is 00:55:21 borrow lend and trade value with each other over the internet all without the need for banks yeah this is not something that you see often i think when you see like you know web 2 and tradfi companies try and explain ethereum they usually don't get it right but venmo got it right anthony have you seen this description before it's absolutely absolutely fantastic I haven't seen it and that is a really, really great way to put it, I think. You know, very simple as well, like for like I guess normies you can call them to understand. It doesn't use our typical crypto defy jargon. It just says, you know, this is what you can do with it.

Starting point is 00:55:58 This is the value. You know, here you go. The apps built on the Ethereum blockchain aren't like your other apps. Some of them allow you to lend, borrow and exchange crypto without going through a bank. To interact with these apps, you need to make transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. blockchain, each transaction requires fees paid in ETH, and then it has a section as to what makes Ethereum so interesting. They really got this one right.

Starting point is 00:56:22 And like I said, this is not something that usually people don't get things right about Ethereum. Usually people just miss left and right. But nice job. Nice job of the crypto team over at Venmo. Anthony, I'm sure you heard about this one. This was a little bit unfortunate, but staking company sues fireblocks, which is a custodian, with a lawsuit over the private keys lost to, after they lost.

Starting point is 00:56:43 lost $75 million in ETH. So there was a staking as a service company, which was using this fireblocks as a custodian to custody their staked ETH, and fireblocks lost the private keys. Whoops. And so that's a little bit unfortunate. If any of the listeners had their ETH

Starting point is 00:57:00 inside of the Staking as a Service Company, I'm sorry that you lost your ETH, hopefully the settlement works out for you. For the rest of us, Ether just got a little bit more scarce. Yeah, yeah. this is like I mean there wasn't just this there was also so this was steak here there was also shared steak recently that kind of lost some Eath as well um but this just speaks to the fact that what we have all been trying to drum home with people is that if you can

Starting point is 00:57:26 if you are able to if you have that 32E minimum stake on your own like for for your own sake don't don't go through a third party provider like I mean not to say that all third party providers are bad you know there's some of them that have like insurance and things like that like exchanges and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, you're always giving up control over your private key by staking with kind of one of these third party providers at this point in time. I think post-merge, you'll be able to, like, do some kind of like delegation where you keep the private key and then you give your signing key to a third party.

Starting point is 00:57:57 But even then, like this third party could sign something that goes against the protocol rules and get you slashed or whatever. So at the end of the day, like I always advocate for solo staking. If you have the 32E, if you don't, and you need to kind of like state with a provider. I would suggest to centralize things like Rocket Pool. I don't think Rocket Pool is live just yet. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:18 I suggest that kind of stuff. But then if you have to go through like more of a centralized provider, I suggest something like Lido because at least they take your ETH and like distributed among different staking providers. And you also get like STE, which is a representation of that ETH. And you can do things with that in DFI. I typically stick clear of like just centralized exchanges, like especially the Binances of the world, I would never, ever stake through Binance.

Starting point is 00:58:43 But like Coinbase, I guess, is the, is another option. But again, if you're able to, stake on your own. Yeah, there's a reason why the Ethereum 2.0 has taken such a long time to get up the door. That's because developers and the Ethereum researchers work really, really hard to make it easy for us to stake at home. So we should take advantage of the fact that they put all of that blood, sweat, and tears into making Ethereum accessible and allowing you.

Starting point is 00:59:09 to provide security to Ethereum from the comfort of your own home. And this also speaks to the difficulty of just private key management, but also the stakehounds claim against fireblocks and why they're going after them and trying to sue them is that they just claim negligence. A quote in the article says, in short, in short, a series of errors by fireblocks caused the loss of two of the keys that are part of a three of four signature,

Starting point is 00:59:34 this is a multi-sig, for the shards that form the withdrawal key. Fireblocks did not generate their private keys in a production environment and did not include the private keys required to decrypt their two keychairs in the backup and lost both the keys. Kind of a big whoopsie. All right, let's go ahead and move on here to Scoopy Trooples. If you guys watched the Bankless Weekly roll up last week, we talked about the, I don't even know what to call it, a bug in the Alchemics Al-Eath vault that allowed people to deposit Eth, borrow Al-Eth from Alchemics, and then also withdraw their colloquyx. And so people got to borrow free ETH from the protocol. And so they have asked people, hey, can you give it back? And almost 50% of the ETH has been returned.

Starting point is 01:00:19 So Crypto Gucci says, shout to CryptoGucci. Did you receive free ETH slash Al-Eath from the Alchemics contract bug? Alchemics is air-dropping Al-Kix, the A-L-C-X token, the governance token for Al-KMex, in the equivalent amount of ETH or Al-Eth that you received. and they've generated this special page on their website to go and return that ETH. And a decent amount of ETH has actually been returned, which is just overall, like, well, good for the protocol because we need to clear that debt, but also a very interesting indicator of the holisticness of the Alchemics community.

Starting point is 01:00:53 Scooby Truples on Twitter says, I have a feeling people who return their Al-Eath or Eith to Alchemics will be in several lists that goes to benefit them for a long time. crypto verifiable good person list because no one's forcing them to return this money. They can just keep it if they wanted to. But yet they are returning it because they are good people. Anthony, any thought to here? Yeah, I mean, it's really cool to see that basically what, half of it has been returned so far, just under half of it, I think, has been returned so far, which is awesome.

Starting point is 01:01:23 And yeah, I mean, I think that this is like the best bug that could have happened. It's not, I mean, it's not a huge bug. And even if not all the funds get returned, there's other ways to kind of, I guess, recapitalized the system here. So yeah, really, really cool to see this. And I think, you know, if you were a part of this and you got some bonus eat, just return it. I mean, really at the end of the day, we're all good stewards within Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:01:43 And we should definitely do this. But I, I kind of get it. Like, for some people, if they receive like all this ETH, say they got like 50 bonus eighth back, that could be like life changing for them. I get it. I really do get it. But at the same time, it's not yours technically, right? It is the protocols.

Starting point is 01:01:58 And you should definitely be a good steward here and return it if you, if you're, if you, um, kind of like suffered from this. guess. And what Scoopy is trying to say, and I kind of agree with, or at least I think people should consider that, like, if you have an account, an Ethereum address that got Ether or Al-Eth that shouldn't have, and you return it, that account is now verifiably a good person. And I think a lot of, it's beneficial to have a good footprint in Defi, right? And so if you use Uniswap, if you, if you've done a bunch of things, you got a ton of air drops from, just being a defy participant.

Starting point is 01:02:35 And I think doing this and returning your ether stamps your Ethereum address as somebody is Ethereum address that people want to just include as a reward because they want you to use their protocol because you are provably a good person. This is just good surface area to have. And so it might work out in the long term to actually return the ether because you want to show to the Ethereum community that you did something that you didn't have to do and you're a good person. Yep, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:03:02 Right. Moving on to Reddit is now selling three Ethereum NFTs. Reddit is already a very much an Ethereum aligned platform, but they are selling three NFTs of its mascot, Snu, which I've always enjoyed the Reddit Alien. I always kind of thought he was a cute little character. And now, if you want to, you can buy Snoo the NFT. Anthony, you're going to buy these NFTs? Probably not. I don't think I'm going to be able to afford these for starters. I feel like they're going to get beat up a lot. But yeah, I mean, Reddit has been doing a lot of things in Ethereum. They did their scaling challenge a while ago. They've done the moons and things like community point system. Yeah, it's just cool to see them doing like NFTs now. I think these are going to be very valuable in the long run because of the fact that these will be the first NFTs that Reddit does.

Starting point is 01:03:49 And I'm sure they'll do more going down the line. So yeah, cool to see them just jumping into that arena there. Yeah, I've always been optimistic that Reddit can really be a use case for Ethereum just because they have their community reward points, right? Like what happens if we can, like we end our ETH trader community had their donut token experiment? I think there's a lot of potential with tokenized communities and Reddit to really become aligned.

Starting point is 01:04:13 And so like Reddit might be one of the biggest and most largest communities that are non-Etherium native that come onto Ethereum and start using Ethereum in order to just better with their own community. And so if that does happen, that actually would indicate a lot of value in these NFTs because the NFT focused community on Reddit would, and the fact that Reddit uses Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:04:33 would bestow even more value on the first NFTs that Reddit even made. Yep, yep, totally. Moving on to Bitcoin stuff, Anthony's favorite section. We've got some crazy Bitcoin news out of China this week where it has now been basically confirmed based off the exodus of hashflow that China is straight up banning all Bitcoin miners, not banning Bitcoin, but banning Bitcoin miners. And so Nick Carter tweeted out or wrote an article actually that I thought was pretty interesting

Starting point is 01:05:04 where he goes, go West Bitcoin unpacking the great hash rate migration. And he says that by now it should be clear that the hash rate migration out of China is real. Minors are leaving China for good. As of April of 2020, an estimated 65% of Bitcoin hash rate was domiciled in China. and with confirmed bans across the country, he says that figure will be far lower in the 12 months from now. And he says the precise magnitude and schedule of the westward move is currently unknown. There's a lot of conversations going around about how this is actually going to be really good for Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:05:40 TM, this is good for Bitcoin. But A, like I said, BTC, the asset not banned in China. And this actually does a decent amount of improving the decentralization of Bitcoin's hash rate because so much of it was in China. it's going anywhere else. And so maybe that makes U.S. regulators more comfortable with Bitcoin. Who knows? And also, China has generally been the dirtiest hash rate source for Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:06:04 And so any hash rate migration out of China is likely going into greener and greener pastures. Anthony, any opinions about the BTC hash rate out of migration out of China? Yeah, I mean, this is probably the main reason why the crypto markets have been so weak, I think, is just like all of this coming out of China. it's definitely like it's funny because at first whenever you hear China doing something with Bitcoin you don't believe it because it's like the boy who cried Wolf, right? They always did this over the years.

Starting point is 01:06:30 But yeah, I mean, as Nick says, this is very, very real. Mine is leaving China in a very big way. And that's going to cause short-term disruption at the end of the day. And, you know, I mean, it's funny because I have different opinions on proof of work in Bitcoin. But I think that objectively speaking, mine is moving out of China is a good thing. regardless of your views on proof of work and mining, whatever, China has always been kind of like that centralizing vector for Bitcoin mining. But at the same time, as you said, it's also been a wasteful kind of minor too. So if it can move towards more greener kind of energy sources, then that's good for, I guess, like the industry as a whole as well.

Starting point is 01:07:07 There's also conversations that China is doing this in order to prepare to really push their Chinese central bank digital currency, which is confusing to me because if you really were doing that, why wouldn't you also ban Bitcoin? And to some degree, I'm a little bit confused with China strategy here because China as somebody that wants to disrupt the U.S. dollar and the power of the U.S. might actually be more interested in aligning with Bitcoin than rejecting it. And so now we can be definitely just confirmed that China has no interest in putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Otherwise, it would have been subsidizing Bitcoin miners, not banning them. And so the China Bitcoin story is going to be a long one. It's going to unfold for years and years to come. So we will be following it.

Starting point is 01:07:52 Out of the daily hoddle, microsailer, micro-stratage, now owns over 100,000 Bitcoins with new purchase. He is by far the largest single holder of Bitcoin. I'm pretty sure that's true. And now over the $100,000 or $100,000 Bitcoin mark. Anthony, is this crazy or what? What's your take here?

Starting point is 01:08:14 I mean, first of all, I think Tim Draper, or the Winkervos twins or Eric Vohy's may own more BTC than he does here. I know Tim Draper owns a lot of BTC. He bought them a while ago. But yeah, I mean, this obviously sale is one of the largest single holders now. And I mean, I guess it's not just him. It's micro strategy that's kind of holding it. It's him.

Starting point is 01:08:35 But yeah, yeah, I mean, technically yes. But I think it's funny because he bought these at like 37K or 38K or something like that. a couple of weeks ago. And I think he's average buy price. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, the average buying price is 26,000. So if it goes below 26,000, he's underwater on all of it. And he's not very much above water right now. But I think he's such a Bitcoin bull like, and, you know, Bitcoin Maximus, whatever you want to call him, that he's going to go down with the ship at end of the day. He's just going to keep buying as much as he can in any way that he can. And he's not going to, he's just going to buy whenever. He doesn't care, which seems to be the case here. So he's not trying to

Starting point is 01:09:15 buy the dips or whatever. He's just trying to buy as much Bitcoin as possible. But I was seeing some chatter about this being like a pretty big negative that having one kind of like person, especially someone who's pretty volatile, like I don't know if people have seen, but Saylor seems to be pretty volatile as a person, having him own so much of the supply and having that as like an overhang where people say, well, this guy owns so much of it, what's stopping him from just dumping it whenever he wants to and like putting huge downward pressure on the price? So there's that concern. I don't know if that's a huge concern. Like I feel like at this point, Seller has pretty much signaled that, you know, he's not going to sell this Bitcoin at these prices. Maybe he sells

Starting point is 01:09:50 it much, much higher than where it is now. But he's definitely not selling around here. So, yeah, I guess net positive, I guess, for the ecosystem in terms of like price movement, but it will probably play out over the longer term. Yeah, I agree there. It would be really nice if Siler had an ally kind of going after trying to compete for these bitcoins rather than it just being him. He really does seem to be trying to like brute force Bitcoin price to go up. It's like I'll do it myself. Damn it. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. All right. I'm going to burn through this one real quick. New York City will become a Bitcoin Center, says the city mayorial lead candidate, Eric Adams, which actually surprised me when I read this headline. I was ready to have that be Andrew Yang.

Starting point is 01:10:32 Turns out Andrew Yang isn't the city's mayoral lead candidate? I don't know. I'm not in New York. But either way, it seems like New York is getting a Bitcoin focused mayor. So that's pretty cool. A few more things. John McAfee found dead in his prison cell after he was about to be extradited to the United States. For those that aren't familiar, John McAfee was extremely active in crypto in 2017. He's been much less active this time around. Some nefarious activity, I would say.

Starting point is 01:11:00 It's definitely some pump and dumps. And there's been conversations that he's been on the run trying to escape the IRS for not paying taxes. And so he kind of had this like very questionable last three years of his life. And unfortunately he was found dead in a prison cell in Catalan. Anthony, what are your takes here? Yeah, I would say it's a lot longer than three years that he's been a controversial, kind of colorful figure. He's, he's been very eccentric.

Starting point is 01:11:27 But, yeah, I mean, essentially like the amount of conspiracy theories that we're going to be hearing about his death here are going to go on for a very long time because he put out tweets saying, you know, if I die in prison, um, and don't, uh, I didn't get, uh, I got Epstein essentially right. Like, I didn't kill myself. It was someone else. He front ran this event in his tweets. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and people are going to be like, okay, well, did he kill himself or did he get killed? Like, I don't know. I just feel like people are going to, you know, told, told those stories for years to come. But I mean, a sad life to, uh, sorry, sad end to a bit of a sad life, I think. I mean,

Starting point is 01:12:01 he projected as if he was like very happy and things like that, but it did seem like he had some mental problems, you know, generally. So yeah, I guess like always sad, but, you know, I guess that we probably, we won't be hearing from him anymore in the crypto ecosystem. Yeah. I had he, to me, he's a mixed bag. He's had some really good takes and really interesting like content and like one-liners that have come out. It's like, oh, wow, that's really profound. And then he is like provably a part of like a paid bump and dump scheme at the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very controversial. Yeah, definitely. All right, Anthony, I'm going to burn us through some of these so we can save some time here, but Goldman Sachs begins trading on J.P. Morgan's repo blockchain network. And if I'm not

Starting point is 01:12:40 mistaken, J.P. Morgan's blockchain network is a fork of Ethereum called Quorum. It is a private version of Ethereum. So not doing some overnight repo trading. And so not one step away from actually using something that looks and feels exactly like Ethereum. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston announced its collaboration with MIT to research digital currencies. Ryan and I, We stopped reporting on the Western world's development into the world of digital currencies because it's just a conversation about people having conversations about digital currencies. Like, oh yeah, we're researching into it. We're looking into it.

Starting point is 01:13:16 Once again, China is moving full steam ahead with its digital yuan, actually putting that into production. And the West is continuing to research. Nice job, guys, I guess. J.P. Morgan's survey says 49 of institutional investors agree. Cryptocurrency is rat poison, as Warren Buffett said, is a fad. But the important thing is, is actually more people said that crypto is here to stay than what is probably rat poison squared. And so there is a flippening of sorts of people bestowing legitimacy onto this industry. So that is pretty cool.

Starting point is 01:13:49 South African brothers disappear along with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin from an exit scam on an exchange. Exchanges are a honeypot of assets. This is why we defy. if it's not your private keys, it's not your coins. And this has always been, in my mind, one of the biggest weaknesses of Bitcoin is because if you want to buy or sell it, you've got to give it to an exchange and give us a custody of your Bitcoin. And that ultimately becomes a honeypot of interested exploits and attackers.

Starting point is 01:14:20 And so this is why we defy. MLB is a new FTX partner, FTX Exchange. They also bought the rights to put their name on the Miami Heat basketball. arena in in in in Miami. Uh, and now they are the official cryptocurrency exchange partner of the MLB. Anthony, I know you don't know what the MLB is.

Starting point is 01:14:40 It's major league baseball. I know what the MLB is. You know, this feels very dot com error to me where like all these companies flush with cash are just doing these random sponsorships. But I guess, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:55 Well, Sam Bankman free is going to put the FTCS name on every single arena that he can. It sounds like. All right guys, we got some really interesting takes coming at you right after we talk for a moment about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Balancer is Defi's most powerful automated market maker. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in Defi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM, which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases.

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Starting point is 01:17:46 And this comes out of Haseeb Qureshi, who says a snapshot of DeFi hack since 2020, notices the transition from Ethereum to Binance SmartChains. I'm going to blow that up here. But you can see all of these yellow highlighted projects are Ethereum, and this is a chronological list of hacks. And all of a sudden, it goes from Ethereum to basically only Binance Smart Chain. And so that's just interesting. All the hacks and exploits are happening on Binance smart chain.

Starting point is 01:18:13 It kind of just makes you feel that, like, Binance is kind of just living in Ethereum's wake, right? Like Ethereum had its defy summer, and then Binance had its defy winter. and now all of the hacks on Ethereum kind of got solved and now Binance is still dealing with them. Anthony, any opinions here? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just like a culture of people actually, you know, on Ethereum, building apps on Ethereum, you know, they're taking more care with it. But also the fact that when you, so maybe I should say that like it's got to do with the

Starting point is 01:18:40 lower fees, I think. Like when you have like such low fees to deploy anything for users to kind of like play in, then you're going to get more scams. I think this is actually going to happen on layer two if I'm being. honest where these generalized layer two is going to have so much space available for people we're going to get so many users on there and there's going to be a lot of rug pulls and scams I think so and that's going to be interesting to see how the layer two is deal with that because a lot of the layer two like arbitrament optimism they're going to be

Starting point is 01:19:05 centralized from the start because they're going to have like upgrade keys and admin keys are they going to interfere with this like are they going to actually kind of like return funds to users or like kick people off the off the layer two I think if they did that I'd be very disappointed to be honest because that goes against like the spirit of what these systems are but it's going to be interesting it's very interesting to see like where these rug pools i guess migrate to over time yeah totally absolutely maybe we start to see new um new colors in there for the different ethereum version two uh layer two excuse me um this is a a take from greg deprec de precio who used to work at the maker foundation

Starting point is 01:19:42 and this is a conversation that we had about how dows are going to operate and he he says in my my more complex opinion after having some conversations with me on Twitter is that Dow's scale in a bell curve where the X axis is the inverse of efficiency. So as you go higher up, you actually get less efficient. And he says that DAWS are great with only a few members and they are horrible at a size of a standard organization and also a new paradigm in big numbers. And he also says the caveat is that it's exponentially difficult to get over the hump. So what Greg is saying is that DAO's are online organizations. are really, really good with maybe just a handful of people, maybe five to 15 to 20 people.

Starting point is 01:20:24 And as soon as you get to maybe 50, 100, 150 people, efficiency actually gets really, really terrible. But then maybe when you get into maybe the 500s or thousands or tens of thousands, maybe we actually get some of that efficiency back just because there's so many little worker bees. Anthony, you have any opinions on this take? I mean, I completely agree with it. But I would also say that this can still apply to like traditional companies. because if anyone's ever worked in a big corporate company, you'll know that the efficiency is like very, very low in those companies

Starting point is 01:20:54 as compared to a startup. I think that's just the nature of just scaling people and scaling like the social kind of layer in general. It's just very hard once you get past a certain point to keep everything cohesive and to keep everyone kind of like informed and managed correctly. But I think, yeah, Dow's definitely, you could call it like a lean Dow, a Dow with like 20 or less members, like core members

Starting point is 01:21:14 that are all kind of like stewarding the protocol along. And they take inputs in. It's kind of like the core developers of Ethereum, right? Where they take inputs in from the community. They consider things. They kind of like use that kind of social consensus and things like that. So yeah, I mean, I totally agree here that DAO's with 100, 150 members as being like core members is not going to scale very well.

Starting point is 01:21:36 And in that same vein, the next take we got is coming out of Mark Baylon, who says, from an end user perspective, it isn't how do I launch a Dow? It's how do I make money with my friends online as, easily as possible and DAOs are just the best solution. I thought this was a really succinct and powerful statement. Anthony, any thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, I think Mark puts it really well. Yeah, that's definitely the feeling that I've been getting is like, you know, like you can basically get together with anyone around the world, whether it be your friends or anyone else, launch a Dow and launch products within that Dow and make money some way and

Starting point is 01:22:08 kind of like sustain yourself, which I think is really, really cool. Do you think that we need a rebrand for Dow's from Dow's to Do's? I always thought that perhaps we should just call these things digital organizations because a decentralized autonomous organization really meant something completely differently. And in my opinion, it's actually just straight up the wrong label. It's, I mean, good luck. Good luck changing. This is like the layer two debate, right? This is a layer two is it's not a layer two. People are going to use the language that is easiest to use the path of least resistance. So even if Tao is technically incorrect, people are going to use that. So I don't think it's worth trying to fight that. Fair enough. I remember trying to

Starting point is 01:22:47 trying to make op-fi or open finance a thing. Yeah, that took... We tried to do that in the early days of deep-fire as well. We didn't succeed. Right. And that, if we couldn't do it then, like, it's probably already too late for DALS. But yeah, you, me, Eric Connor, we tried to meme op-fi or open finance into existence.

Starting point is 01:23:04 And we just got absolutely obliterated. Just took a big fat L on that one. Another take that we had that I thought was pretty interesting was from Greg Eisenberg. And he says, where the world is going? I'd rather trust a blizzard. blockchain over a government, I'd rather trust a smart contract over a terms of service. I'd rather trust a community over a company.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Who we trust is changing fast. I thought this was really profound. Any thoughts here? I think so too. And I think the funny thing is that we don't actually have to trust these things. They're trustless and we trust them because they're trustless, if that makes sense. Where we trust a smart contract over a terms of service because we can see a smart contract is programmed and is immutable on Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:23:45 Like if it's coded that way to be immutable. I can trust that Unisov v2 is going to run as a program because I know that those contracts are immutable. And, you know, I don't know. I trust the community over a company. Well, yeah, I mean, the community has different kind of like allegiances and incentives as opposed to someone. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and as opposed to someone working in a company. So, yeah, I think the fact that we can trust these things because they are trustless is like a new paradigm.

Starting point is 01:24:09 Maybe I shouldn't use that term so loudly. Sorry, Mark, don't, don't listen to me. No, I specifically try and use the phrase new paradigm as free. as possible specifically to get over that hump. It's like, no, I want to use that word. I want to say paradigm. Here's something that I thought was pretty cool. Anthony, right before we started to recording this,

Starting point is 01:24:29 I went to Twitter and realized that you can actually search emojis in Twitter and specifically with people. And so here are all the people, let me zoom out a little bit, here are all of the people that have the bat and then the speaker emojis in their names on Twitter. The list just goes and goes and goes. And I think it's over like 300 or 400 Twitter accounts that have, Zoom isn't really capturing my scrolling,

Starting point is 01:24:57 but I am scrolling through these people here. And it could be, it's literally a countless number. And so there's a lot of people with Twitter accounts that have the bat emoji and the speaker symbol in their name. Of course, what does that mean? Ultrasound money. It's kind of Ethereum's first big like Twitter like banner. We've never really had a Twitter banner before, but it seems to be the bat and then speaker

Starting point is 01:25:21 emojis. Anthony, I'm pretty sure you have the bat and speaker emoji on your Twitter account, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a movement, right? Like, it's the ultrasound money movement and people are just signaling their kind of like, I guess, allegiance or bullishness to the movement. So it's really cool that you can do this. I mean, I say people with the emojis in their name and everything, but I didn't know it was this many people. And this is hilarious to me because this is exactly. why there are some contrarians out there right now who are saying that oh the only reason people care about one five five nine is because of the fee burning um and i was wondering you know where are they getting this narrative from and it's i think it's because of this ultrasound money meme which i think

Starting point is 01:25:58 i mean i think these people are wrong the contrarians are wrong but i just didn't realize like how far this meme had gone it's it's it's everywhere which is really really cool i wish zoom was capturing how much i'm scrolling right now a lot better so go to my tweet it's linked in the show notes go to my tweet and do it for yourself scroll down i haven't stopped i've still going. I'm still going. Like, it's, it's endless. It's an endless pit of people that have just the ultrasound money logos in their names on Twitter. And so if you have a Twitter account and you haven't added ultrasound money to your Twitter name, like, hmm, get with it, guys. Like, that's what we do now. You should do, you should do, you should do a search for how many Bitcoiners have the

Starting point is 01:26:34 lightning emoji in their name still. Oh, God. No, I don't want to do that. Because that used to be a big thing where a lot of them had it, but then they removed it when lightning adoption kind of like didn't go anywhere. All right, guys, we got the meme of the week coming up next. But before we get there, of course, we got to talk about what we are excited about. Anthony, what are you excited about? So this might be a little bit kind of, I don't know if it's off topic, but like a little bit different, where I'm actually really excited about different narratives within the crypto ecosystem being challenged. And now what I mean by this is that let's take an example narrative out of the Bitcoin of camp that said that they always said, you know, China would never mess with Bitcoin

Starting point is 01:27:11 because that would mean that they're giving more political power or more power to the U.S. in the Bitcoin kind of arena, so to speak. But I think the narrative is being challenged right now because, as you said, they're not banning Bitcoin, but they are really getting rid of most of the Bitcoin activity in their country by getting rid of miners. So that narrative is being challenged in a really big way. I believe there are other narratives out there that are getting challenged and that I have been getting challenged over time. Like people saying, oh, ETH can never accrue value or DFI is going to outperform ETH. Well, no, we've seen that ETH is accruing a lot of value. defy is not outperforming eith and you know on top of that we have so many other just narratives

Starting point is 01:27:46 over time that are being challenged at this point in time and i think you know the people saying oh the flipping in can never happen well you know i i think it can like yes the eat btc ratio has come down a lot but i think it's still higher than what it was like a lot higher than what it was at the at the lows um and i believe it's still going to go higher and and i think that there's narratives around oh you know ethereum is never going to ship the ship the merge which i think is is going to go away. So, you know, just generally this thing of like people coming up with stories and narratives and perpetuating them and then just always being wrong and these narratives being challenged.

Starting point is 01:28:20 And the more that they get challenged and the more that these people are wrong, the more skeptical people are of the new narratives that these same people come up with. So I'm just excited to see the shifts there because I think narratives rule this space. And I think Ethereum has been the, has taken the brunt of the really crappy narratives over the years and it's really kind of like suffered from that. But I think going forward, Ethereum has very strong narrative. is the playoff of. And I think it's going to get like,

Starting point is 01:28:44 it's going to be even better and be viewed better by the community because of that. Yeah, totally. The image that comes to mind is of the youth and age of roller coaster, which we talk about for tokens, that fork tokens, that fork more tokens and fork more tokens. But I think what's going on with what you're saying is that like, well,

Starting point is 01:29:02 if you're on the wrong side of the narrative, like each new FUD narrative or narrative against something that continues to be right, each new narrative becomes less and less more powerful over time. And so at some point, these narratives just straight up expire. And I totally think you're right. I do think that the death of anti-Etherium narratives comes at the merge, which that will be one of the great benefits that the merge will bring. That will be one of them for sure is like just putting to death that like Ethereum 2.0 is never going to ship.

Starting point is 01:29:35 Yeah, definitely a big one there. But yeah, I mean, what are you excited about, David? Well, okay, so one of the things I was excited about was that bat speaker emoji, so I accidentally put that out of the wrong order. And so we actually already talked about. That was what I was so excited about is like there's apparently an infinity number of people with the bat emoji in their Twitter handle. But I'm also excited about Top Signal, and I know you're excited about it because you're going to be on the first show. And so I'm ready to try and take my hand and make some new content that isn't all the content that Bankless listeners are used to listen to and trying to delve into something new. And so, like I said earlier, Tuesday evening is going to be the first show for Top Signal.

Starting point is 01:30:12 And so I hope we're funny. I hope we're funny. Yeah, that's the thing. Like, humor is like pretty subjective, right? And, you know, I guess like doing it for the first time as well, it might be a little bit funny. But I think it's going to be good. I'm excited for it as well. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:30:29 I hope it's good. Anthony, are you ready to see the meme of the week? Let's get into it. All right. This meme came from Jim Bianco, who we actually just had on The Bankless podcast on Monday. It was a fantastic podcast. I guess this isn't really a meme. It's just a comic, but whatever.

Starting point is 01:30:45 And so we have a what is looking like a corporate-looking individual talking to his corporate other board members. And he says, instead of risking anything new, let's play it safe by continuing our slow decline into obsolescence. Anthony, what do you think is on this joke? I saw it. And he was referencing kind of no coin is here, so people who are like, I guess, anti-crypto. And I think that this is really funny because this, I believe this, this comic probably talks about technology and how a lot of different companies fail to embrace new technology and get disrupted. And, you know, 10 years down the line, they're like, what happened?

Starting point is 01:31:18 Like, why is our company worth nothing now? It's like, well, because you fail to embrace new technology. And I think the same thing plays out with crypto, definitely. Yeah, I'm reminded of the Red Queen metaphor from Alice in Wonderland where in order to stay in the same place, you have to be running forwards. And so if you are not changing, you are actually falling behind. Anthony can't thank you enough for coming in and stepping in Ryan's very big shoes with the Bankless Weekly Roll-up, but you are a fantastic substitute teacher, and I'm sure the Bankless

Starting point is 01:31:47 Nation appreciated you to come in. Tell us a little bit more about all about the Daily Gway and what you do over there and where they can find more about all of the content that you produce. Yeah, so thanks again for having me. Really enjoyed it today. I always enjoyed doing these with you. But yeah, I mean, what I do is essentially a bunch of different education as well. Similar to what you guys do at Bankless, I have a YouTube channel called The Daily Gway,

Starting point is 01:32:09 where I give like daily recaps of Ethereum every weekday. And I have a newsletter as well. But you can find links to all of that at my Twitter. So Sassel ZeroX on Twitter, S-S-S-S-A-L-0-X. I'm sure David will link that in the show notes or whatever for you guys. But yeah, I do all of this pretty much every day. So, yeah, if you're very interested in giving up with Ethereum and want to be at the bleeding edge, all you have to do is follow the Daily Gway.

Starting point is 01:32:32 Yeah, Anthony does this at the Daily Gway. He also does this with the ETH Hub weekly recap. And then sometimes I need him to come and step in for the Bakelis Weekly roll-up. So I just ask him to do the same thing for the third time in the day. And he's absolutely fantastic at it. We will link the Daily Gway YouTube and newsletter in the show notes. So make sure you go subscribe there. All right, guys, just coming up after this, we have a fantastic moment of Zen.

Starting point is 01:32:55 It's a really nice song. I hope you guys enjoy it. But before that, Eith is risky. Crypto is risky. Defi is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Ryan. Nice. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber

Starting point is 01:34:37 to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly roll-ups, where we summarize the Week in Crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.

Bankless - ROLLUP: China Bitcoin Miners, John McAfee, EIP-1559 Testnet, Layer 2 Ethereum (4th Week of June)

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