Bankless - ROLLUP: Coinbase Crashes DC | Gary Grilled By Congress | Vitalik Deepfakes

Starting point is 00:00:00 Ms. Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro-blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti-blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, is the Pokemon Carter Security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. They are like, these are our things. The power of crypto Twitter is like getting into Congress. Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean, Bankless Nation, it is the last Friday of September. David, what time is it?

Starting point is 00:00:28 It's the Bankless Friday weekly roll up, Ryan, where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier this week with a bunch of clips of Gary getting grilled. So everyone, everyone prepare for that one. If you're not listening to this with coffee because it's too late in the day, well, then you should get your popcorn. That is what you will need. I mean, this is a catharsis, I think, for many of you in this episode. You'll enjoy this very much. Also, crypto was present in Washington. It's a one-two punch. Yeah, Coinbase's Stand with Crypto Day was held at Capital. Hill the same day that Gensler was giving testimony in front of Congress.

Starting point is 00:01:05 Convenient. What about the timing of that? David, what else we got? After that, we'll talk about pudgy penguins in Walmart, landing a huge deal, a ton of distribution for pudgy penguins. Also, with each toy purchased having an on-chain identity on ZKSync. So we'll talk about that. And then after, also, not only are penguins getting identity, but citizens of Buenos Aires,

Starting point is 00:01:25 perhaps also getting some on-chain presence as well. We'll talk about that. And then, of course, we're going to do the, uh, the, uh, PSA of deep fakes and fishing attacks that are out there. We got a Vitalic deepfake that we want to show you. It's pretty hilarious, but not if you believe it. Notable VC Fred Wilson got fished for 40 NFTs this week. So if Fred Wilson can get fish, so can you. We will talk about this and more. What else we got, Ryan? You know, the usual Bitcoin ETF stuff. Eith might be getting futures. There's a ton to talk about every week. This is a bullish week, I think. I'm declaring it such,

Starting point is 00:01:59 David. And we got some green candles when we get to the market. But before we get in, David, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero. What do they want the folks at home to know? They want you to know that after a year, over a year of combined effort, Layer Zero and Google Cloud have announced their partnership and are ready to build the interoperable cross-chain apps of the future. What is Layer Zero? Of course, Layer Zero is a set of smart contracts that are deployed on every single chain. These smart contracts connect to each other.

Starting point is 00:02:27 How do they connect to each other? Well, they need some Oracle service in the center to be the chatter boxes, the passing messages between all the layer zero smart contracts across all of the 50 different chains. Google Cloud is that new default Oracle. That is the partnership that they have created. So there is a link in the show notes for you to go explore more. If you're a builder who wants to build on layer zero, layer zero. Dot network is also the URL.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Well, you know what I want to learn more about this week, David, is markets. Yeah. Tell me about the old markets. I think, I think, I haven't looked at this. yet, but I think we got some green on the week. We got some green, dude. Let's look at the Bitcoin charts first. What's Bitcoin showing us? Some single digit green. Look at that green right on the right. Yeah, that's your dose of dopamine for this week. It's like, whoof, Bitcoin up two percent. It's starting the week at 26,600 ending the week at, well, Thursday morning,

Starting point is 00:03:19 if you call it at the end of the week. It's not the end of the week. 27,150, up two percent. Ether price up a little bit more, starting the week at 1660, up four and a half percent to the current price. Excuse me. Starting the week at 1560, ending the week at right around 1660 where we are right now. 1660. I mean,

Starting point is 00:03:36 it's still low. That is a low price. We are getting excited about very little right now. Yeah, it's up such a small degree. You shouldn't even be excited about this. 4.5%. Yet we are.

Starting point is 00:03:47 4.5% on the week. God, it's better than flat. When's the last time we had a double digit week, man? Double digit up or down? Up. I can't remember either, actually. We've been in the flat.

Starting point is 00:03:58 lands for so long. It's just like kind of a little bit of a bleed out all the way from 1900. Weren't we over 2,000 a few weeks ago? Yeah, we have touched. We have touched over 2,000 in this bear market, but man, it's certain, certainly doesn't feel like it. Yeah. Last time we were a 2K was July in July, briefly. We went out of 2K. I can't remember July. Um, I was, I was in the mountains. It's been downhill ever since I've been in, I caught back for the mountains. Yeah, it really was. It's been all downhill since you guys. So you got the, the only thing you can do, David. Go to the mountains.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Bad things happen to Gary Gensler when you go to the mountains. Although, I guess nothing bad happened to him this week. Anyway, I'm skipping too far ahead. We'll have our Gary later in the episode. ETH Bitcoin up 2%. Total crypto market cap $1.11 trillion. Layer 2 scaling factor. Touched 6% this week down to 5.5%.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Still at all-time highs. Wait, what touch 6%. Excuse me. Total value lock? 6x. 6x is what I mean. Activity. Yes. Layer 2x.

Starting point is 00:04:56 touched 6x of Ethereum's. But now it's at 5.69. 60 transactions per second. 64 transactions per second. Yeah, that's where we get the 6X. So, you know, we got more transactions per second left in this tank, I think. Oh, yeah. David, you want to talk about the general markets, like all the trad-fi markets?

Starting point is 00:05:17 You want to talk about macro really quick? Because it's been super confusing to me. And then I read this tweet. We're also doing a macro show on Tuesday as well. So a macro show, so talking about the state of macro from a crypto person. So it's a crypto person who understands macro. So I'm really excited for that show. Okay.

Starting point is 00:05:33 Are you a crypto person that understands macro, David? Do you understand macro? When I have a smarter macro person with me, then yes, I understand macro. My question to you is, does anybody really understand macro? Particularly right now. Oh, you mean current snapshot. Definitely not. All right.

Starting point is 00:05:47 So here's the tweet. Current situation. One, stocks are falling like a recession is coming. Yeah. Two, oil prices are rising like there's no recession in sight. That's contradictory. Three, interest rates are rising like we have 10% inflation. Yes, they are.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Four, gold is falling like inflation is gone. Five, housing prices are rising like rates are falling. And six, commercial real estate is falling like it's 2008. Nothing adds up here. That's the way I feel about macro right now. It's very confusing. There is a confusing set of signals going on, and it's not adding up.

Starting point is 00:06:22 in my head. What do you think about this? Yeah, they follow through and they say it's the beginning, it's beginning to feel like a pivot point in sentiment. I don't know if I'm about to say what I think they are meaning by this, but when there's a bunch of confusion, people I think brace for something, brace for clarity, and then whatever that clarity is will define sentiment. Like, where are we going? We don't know. As soon as we find out, we'll know how we feel about it, but we know it's going to be different from here. Different good or different bad? Those are the only two directions. Yeah, right. Yeah, I guess That's the, yeah, reductive take about it. Well, so, but it's basically like we don't really know.

Starting point is 00:06:57 We don't know. I mean, that's why I'm very interested in doing this episode, this macro episode next week, to see what the newest macro person kind of knows. I will say one thing, though. I think volatility is back on the menu. I think that's what this means. Because when the market doesn't know what direction it's going to go in, then it can kind of like lurch in one direction or the other.

Starting point is 00:07:18 So weird macro climate right now on the back of stimulus. on the back of money printing? Like, what's going on here? And just to be clear about something, we've previously talked about stocks being at all-time highs. That's been like kind of a theme of the last two months or I would say. Yeah. Well, so from looking at the SPY, you don't have the chart up,

Starting point is 00:07:39 but it has declined by 7% since July. So the SPY is down 7%, which is more, more, yeah, stocks are coming down. That goes to the first bullet point. Stocks are falling like a recession is coming. I don't know. down 7% just doesn't feel like a lot to me. Well, in the trademarks, 7% is a lot historically, but not recently. 7% in the trad markets, actually, that's just like trad markets are also volatile.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Okay. Well, we'll try to make sense of this, but let's get back to crypto. This is a negative report from J.P. Morgan who said Ethereum's activity post-Shanghai, that was the last hard fork back in March, has been disappointing. J.P. Morgan calling Ethereum's progress, disappointing. They've got some reasons for this. While the shift from proof of work to proof of stake meant that the energy consumption from Ethereum collapsed by 99%. The Ethereum supply is shrinking and staking rose sharply by 50% since the Shanghai upgrade.

Starting point is 00:08:35 While that happened, the increase in network activity has been rather disappointing. Ethereum's daily transactions, daily active addresses, and total value locked on D5 protocols on the network have all experienced declines since the last hard fork. So J.P. Morgan, their analysts expressing, expressing some bearishness here. Expressing disappointment. Yes. I'm not mad, just disappointed with that. My response to that is, who the hell are you? J.P. Morgan doesn't know how to analyze these things.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Disappointing with Ethereum post-shaying high activity. It's just the broader crypto downturn. And also, they're just wrong, he, J.P. Morgan, he is wrong. They say layer twos have displayed mixed results. Well, no, TVL and economic activity on layer 2s across the board are all up. I don't know where the hell they're getting their data from, but not only is their data wrong, but their analysis is poor. Well, let's go to the actual numbers, Stephen. Layer 2B provides a good source for value locked on layer 2's.

Starting point is 00:09:38 What are we looking at? At the 180 day time frame, it's basically flat. It's marginally up. It's basically flat. So flat TVL, 10.10.5 billion dollars. activity is up. It's up so much. It's unequivocally up by a lot. I'm disappointed in J.P. Morgan. Wow. Have you ever been not disappointed with J.P. Morgan, David? I'm generally disappointed by banking in general. Really? You should start a podcast called Bankless, David, about escaping your bank over time, slowly.

Starting point is 00:10:15 I think Vance Spencer put that tweet in perspective as well. Actually, I don't think. I don't think he was responding to that tweet in particular. But we are. We got some perspective here from Van Spencer. This is Ethereum, if you charted against some of the fastest growing tech companies in human history, companies like Alphabet, it was Google, of course, and meta or Zoom or Microsoft, and how quickly over time it took them to surpass 10 billion in revenue, okay? How long did it take them?

Starting point is 00:10:45 It took Ethereum seven years. and when charted against these other tech companies, there's only one that did that faster. And that is Google. Google, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ethereum really did all of its $10 billion of revenue inside of like 2020 to 2023. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:04 I mean, so look at this line. It's just kind of like a slope line up. Yeah. So, I mean, doing pretty well, all things considered JP Morgan. Not disappointing. I'm not disappointed by this. And I'm not disappointed. Also, long-term perspective, not disappointed in the price of ETH for the last seven years either.

Starting point is 00:11:23 And we can keep going. Uniswap this week hit 300 million in swaps. 300 million unique trade swaps has happened on Uniswap. Uniswap was invented in 2019. 300 million swaps since 2019. Is that disappointing? Is that disappointing? I'm not disappointed by that in the slightest.

Starting point is 00:11:43 I feel great about that. I retain my disappointment about JPMorgan. You know, I think it's part of a broader crypto sentiment. And I've seen a lot of takes just in general in news, but even in financial analyst news like JPMorgan Research, that sort of thing. It comes back down to this, David. Mainstream thinks that crypto is dead. Right. Again, like always, this always happens.

Starting point is 00:12:05 And this is what makes this a buying opportunity. As with previous cycles. And when crypto 10x is the next cycle, don't let it. anybody tell you you didn't earn it. Right. Because if you're buying here, when everyone is saying crypto is dead, it's never coming back, that they're disappointed. That's how you earn the upside here. The signals are just being laid at our feet right now. They really are. Somebody, I tweeted something like that out and somebody responded with this life cycle. What are we looking at here? Yeah, yeah, just like the cycle of the bull bear market. So in the top of the bull market,

Starting point is 00:12:46 some crypto friend of you will tell you, a bankless listener, you're so lucky, I wish that I bought too. And then the crypto market will go down and be like, you're an idiot. I told you crypto was a scam. Yeah. So, like, especially when they say the words, like, disappointing.

Starting point is 00:13:02 It's like such an emotional word. It's like kind of just playing into the readership. I don't know if J.P. Morgan is about that game. Yeah, I mean, that's where we're in the stage of the cycle where everyone thinks you're an idiot. And they told you it was a scam. And you can't talk about cryptocurrency. at your family events or parties because you're just the crypto moron who knows nothing and ha ha ha

Starting point is 00:13:21 SBF FTX that's so stupid you know scams frauds NFTs are such a joke so you're an idiot granted some of those things are actually true like sure sure but if you're still in crypto and you know why you're here right and you're no longer buying the scams because you can identifying them yeah and then and then you'll swing back to like I am a genius I am amazing I am lucky you know or third parties will say you're lucky when that happens and you'll feel like genius. You've been chewing glass for three years. But you know, you got lucky though. You got lucky.

Starting point is 00:13:55 How about the Bitcoin ETF, David? Here's a tweet from James Safert. What's this about? He just says that the SEC has come out super early and delayed the Ark Invest and 21 shares Bitcoin ETF filing. There wasn't a decision due until November 11th. And typically up until recently, the SEC has always gone up right up until the buzzer, but they decided to delay their decision on this earlier than usual. You know why? Partially is some of the speculation? It's because the government's about to shut down. The U.S. government's about to shut down. That's on Monday, right? On Monday? Yeah. So apparently if by Sunday night, this Sunday night, Congress doesn't reach some sort of compromise resolution, whatever, agreement to keep the government running,

Starting point is 00:14:40 then it shuts down yet again. I mean, how many times have we been through this? I mean, how many times have we've been through this. And so this is the SEC just getting ahead of that so that the stuff doesn't expire while the government shut down. And I guess I don't know what would happen if the government shut down and these deadlines were missed. But maybe they would de facto be approved. I think that could be how it works. Is this some sort of pseudo-Oracle Oracle about how the SEC thinks that if we do go for a shutdown, we'll get shut down all the way until at least November 11th? I have no idea. I have no idea what this could mean. I do know this is a good news. So Congress, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Gary Gensler pleading that he approve a spot Bitcoin ETF. Okay?

Starting point is 00:15:25 I'm not even sure I would use the word pleading. The first line in this article in this letter says, we write to ensure the SEC does not continue to discriminate against spot Bitcoin. That is not a plea. We're not begging him. We hired him. We hired him. That's a thing. He's not our king, right? I always forget this. He actually works for us and the people. He's part of the executive branch, but he works for the people. That's us. And Congress can rein him in. He operates under their legislation. And they said in this letter, following the Court of Appeals decision, there's no reason to continue to deny such applications under inconsistent and discriminatory standards. So that's Congress's take. And we're going to see a bit of the grilling. that Gary takes in front of Congress in the next section. But one other thing this could mean, actually, David, is Ether Futures ETFs could be

Starting point is 00:16:19 trading as early as Tuesday. This is all part of this government shutdown. Oh, we need to keep the government open until Tuesday. Well, the SEC is looking to speed things up in order to get it done before the looming shutdown. Okay, so they might actually approve it before, if they were going to approve it anyway, then they'll just approve it before. the government shuts down. So that could happen. So there could be a world where we actually have

Starting point is 00:16:44 Heath Futures trading on Tuesday. We'll be talking about that next week if we do. Fun fact, the crypto volumes are like heavily favored towards futures as soon as futures have ever come about. So the Ether Futures, that's a big unlock. Well, you think it's a good thing or bad thing? There's always that debate of whether when you have kind of big liquidity unlocks, whether people just hit sell or people hit buy or what that, you know, what happens in the short. Right. Okay. So why, Why do people think that? Well, we got Bitcoin Futures ETF at the top of the market in 2017, and then we just proceeded to dump for 12 months. That was just a coincidence of the timing. Like, yeah. It's just, I think it's just going to either do nothing or just amplify the trend that's already happening.

Starting point is 00:17:26 It's what's going to happen. More liquidity is bullish. And it's even more bullish when prices are low and liquidity is low. Like when you add liquidity to a low liquid market, prices go up fundamentally. Yeah. All right. What's coming up next, David? Coming up next, Gary gets grilled in front of Congress again. We've clipped out some of the best moments so we can just all have our shot in Freud. Meanwhile, CryptoBytes back. At the same time, Coinbase leads with their hashtag Stand With Crypto Day at Capitol Hill. So we got some pictures and coverage around that.

Starting point is 00:17:55 Kevin Milwaukee gave some great takes. A lot of friends and family. We're all out there. Penguins are in Walmart. Pugue Penguins lands a big deal with Walmart. We'll talk about the nuances and details behind that as well. All of this coming up more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:20:05 40 rules Gensler has been proposing lately, especially now that the market is adopting them. And he's been blamed for kneecapping U.S. capital markets. And some of the discussion was actually about crypto as well. And some guests made some appearances, particularly some pro-crypto legislators asking some questions of Mr. Gensler. David, you actually did this for us. You live streamed this whole entire event and you helped curate the clips that we're about to watch. What were your takes as you were watching this event unfold? Like is it just like watching C-SPAN?

Starting point is 00:20:41 Is it boring? Yeah. So everyone in the Senate Finance, the House Finance Committee gets to have their like five minutes where they just talk and they ask Gary questions. And so there's a wide variety of subjects. There was actually, before we get into the crypto stuff, there was a lot of focus on climate change and capital markets around climate change. And it just seems so contrived. I was like really frustrated because like all the people that were bringing up like climate chains, like they couldn't connect it to the SEC in any way.

Starting point is 00:21:10 I'm like, why this is. And so they just wanted to talk about climate change. Kind of. Yeah, a little bit. It was a little bit forced. Fit that in? At least it was, it felt forced to me. So it starts off with Pat McHenry, who always starts these things off.

Starting point is 00:21:24 This is the second time we've done this. So I've seen this kind of rodeo for the second time now. So Patrick McHenry starts it off. Grills Gary Gensler because he's a pro-crypto person. So it always starts off with a. bang and then the baton is immediately passed to Maxine Waters

Starting point is 00:21:39 who last scene blowing kisses to SBF yeah so she's just like dousing water like her last name on the whole thing because she Patrick McHenry starts off saying I'm fed up and tired with

Starting point is 00:21:53 Gary Gensler shenanigans and then Maxine Waters goes well I'm fed up and tired with the opposite side of the aisle and this immediately turns it into red versus blue and so there was a lot of like red verse bluing about it. And so that was the start. And then it went into like 30 minutes of non-crypto stuff.

Starting point is 00:22:10 All the good stuff happened at the end. So you had to wait to the very end where... Let's play the good stuff. Warren, Torres and Wagner. All right. What are we about to watch? So I think the first clip is Patrick McKendner. We're going to start with Patrick McKenna because he starts the whole thing off in a fantastic

Starting point is 00:22:24 bow tie. You've got serious questions to answer to the public and to Congress. And we intend to get your compliance. We can do it the easy way or the hard way. Oh, Clint Eastway. And you'll back, the ranking member is now recognized for five minutes. Wow, that really sets the tone. Yes, the ranking member is Maxine Waters.

Starting point is 00:22:44 We're not going to play that because it's just dumb. We're only going to play the good stuff. Who's this? This is Mrs. Wagner. She is a big fan. I'm confused. At which Gary Gensler, the American public should believe, the academic version, who spoke glowingly about the power of technology,

Starting point is 00:23:04 to help more investors participate in U.S. and global capital markets, or the SEC version, who apparently thinks all use of any technology by broker dealers and investment advisors is inherently conflicted, and firms should just stop using technology altogether. Sir, Gensler, you know, could you please briefly explain this change in your views? I thank you for the question, a clever question. It's the same, Gary, Genser. my identical twin brother, Rob, or anything. It's me. Wait.

Starting point is 00:23:38 Wait. So this is how I found out that Gary Gensler has an identical twin brother. We don't have that clip in the agenda, but I feel like now we have to actually bring that up. No, no, no. Okay, we need to talk about this. So Gary Gensler actually has an identical twin brother. We don't have that in the agenda, but we'll put a, we'll go and pause and go get the clip, and then we'll

Starting point is 00:23:55 do this after we need to hear more about Gary Gensler's twin brother. First, the lashing, and then we'll find that we'll talk about the Gary Gensler, identical twin brother. Okay, this was the best one, though. This is my favorite clip, maybe the clip of the year that I've seen from Representative Richie Torres, who's actually been on the bank list podcast before. So let's play it.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Suppose I would have purchased a Pokemon card. Would doing so constitute a security transaction? You can purchase a Pokemon card. I don't know what the context is, but if you're just purchasing a Pokemon card... If I purchase a Pokemon card, is that a security transaction? That's not a secure. Okay. If I would have purchased a...

Starting point is 00:24:31 tokenized Pokemon card on a digital exchange via a blockchain, is that a security transaction? I'd have to know more. Okay. So for you, the process of tokenization is what transforms a non-security transaction into a security transaction? Look, if the investing... I thought you were technology neutral. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:24:53 He asked the question, David, that we've always wanted to ask. How about baseball cards? How about Pokemon cards and these securities? So Ms. Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro-blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti-blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, is the Pokemon card of security? These people are listening to crypto-twitter. They are like, these are our things. The power of crypto-twinter is like getting into Congress.

Starting point is 00:25:20 Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean, Gary Gensler thinks that everything that is tokenized should be a security. And that is just an untenable position. Right. That's an untenable position. He refuses to provide any clarity. We are not saying, on the cryptoside, we are not saying that tokenized things can't be securities.

Starting point is 00:25:39 There are things that are tokenized that can be securities. We're not taking the binary. Every token is not a security. He is taking the binary. Every token is a security. And he's got to defend that. And it's indefensible. Or else Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering cards and Pogs and all of these.

Starting point is 00:25:55 And all of these things are securities. and it's so satisfying. Look, I know this is just just like kind of showboating. It's for the show. It's for the show. I know that, but it's still... It's important. It's important because each representative is trying to give scaffolding for their constituents to rally behind.

Starting point is 00:26:15 So even though like nothing is getting done, we are just publicly allowed, like Gary is just having tomatoes thrown at him and he's going to go home and shower it off, he's going to be totally fine. But like the public is, like these are scaffolding for the public. to go around. It's also, I think this meme will spread, David. This clip is, I've already seen it all over the place. It's spreading kind of like the, Gary hates Pokemon. And that's the best thing that we could

Starting point is 00:26:35 expect. That's the best outcome that we could is like, we have memeable clips that are showing what a far scary Gensler is. Governing this country by meme. I guess that's what we're descending into here. Yeah, yeah. Look at this. Did you see this? So in every one of these, this is the second time

Starting point is 00:26:51 or third time that we've had one of these. Gary gets a few minutes to speak. Like he gets to say words. Opening statements. opening statements. Someone in the back of the camera behind Gary pulled out the Coinbase stand with crypto shield logo icon and was just like flashing it like holding it there. There's in a different clip. You also see a stand with crypto bag. So like Gary while he's saying his statements about like how crypto's full of frauds, there's a bunch of like stand with crypto icons like in the back. Great.

Starting point is 00:27:20 Great stuff. Yeah. Ironically, by the way, that's an NFT, which Gary Gensler probably thinks that is an NFT. You're totally right. I forgot about that. And if you contrast it to remember 2017, Janet Elyleyn, buy Bitcoin. It's not the first time this has happened. I interviewed that guy, by the way, on P.O.B. Crypto. Oh, the buy Bitcoin guy? Yeah, the buy Bitcoin guy. Why did he do that? What's the story there?

Starting point is 00:27:39 He's an erbit guy. He's an herbic guy. Pretty passionate then. Okay, so that was the Gary grilling in front of D.C. And, you know, hopefully we get some clips. We get some memes. We get some arguments. We don't expect a lot to come from the lashing otherwise. Okay, we got to come back to the twin thing. So Gary Gensler has an identical twin.

Starting point is 00:28:00 You have a video that proves this? Yes, there's a video. This is Gary Gensler in MIT world, talking about crypto. And he brings in his brother, identical twin brother, Rob, who I think at the time is working at Tiro Price. Okay, so the person you see on your screen is Gary Gensler. Now watch closely because you might lose him because there's two of them. this is Rob that's Gary

Starting point is 00:28:31 that's Rob Gensler oh wow Rob Rob what's the shit what do you think Rob do you think he's like a big crypto fan

Starting point is 00:28:46 that'd be hard to go in public as a crypto fan like Mr. Smith from the Matrix there's like two of them it's funny what yeah didn't know about that so a big reveal

Starting point is 00:28:58 nuts. Three Gensler's twin identical brother. That is maybe pro-Crypto. I want to meme that into existence. We should get Rob on the podcast. There's a horrocks joke here somewhere. Well, to fight these forces of Genslerness in D.C., crypto showed up.

Starting point is 00:29:15 Crypto showed up on Capitol Hill this week. So what are we looking at? Coinbase has organized this stand with crypto day, where just a bunch of crypto founders and leaders and policy advocates came to Capitol Hill to advocate for crypto conveniently at the same time that Gensler was in his hearing. Coincidence? I think not. So 50 plus founders from over 15 different states all visited DC. And so this is not just like people

Starting point is 00:29:40 visiting. This was a big push. This was a policy and advocacy push. Here is Brian Armstrong on Yahoo Finance getting interviewed. I thought it was a great little clip. Yeah, so Stan with Crypto is here to tell people that 52 million Americans have now used crypto. That's 3X the number that own electric vehicles, it's more than hold union cards in the United States, it's a massive constituency, and they're frankly a little unhappy with the U.S. because the U.S. is lagging behind. We don't have clear rules on the books like 83% of the rest of the G20 countries for how crypto should be regulated, how consumers should be protected, and how this innovation can happen here in the U.S. And so there's a couple of bills going through the House right now that have

Starting point is 00:30:18 bipartisan support for how we get clear market structure, how we get stable coins in the U.S. And these entrepreneurs and the 52 million Americans really want this to happen. And so we're here talking about StandwithCrypto. We've got the pins. People can check out StandwithCripo.org and sign up if they want to be a crypto advocate. This is something that American needs to get right. The pins, of course, are the shield pins. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:41 And he's got these talking points absolutely rehearsed, comparing them to other constituents that people totally can resonate with and vibe with on an emotional level, which is the right way to do this. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually pretty cool. Brian also said this. I guess maybe he gave a speech on a panel, at least, a statement on a panel.

Starting point is 00:31:00 And he talks about Hayden Adams, the entrepreneurs, as he was referencing in that clip, Hayden Adams of Uniswap is an American hero. And I mean that literally he's the kind of person that any country in the world would kill to have, building the future of technology. And Elizabeth Warren called him a shadowy supercoder. He actually put that on his Twitter profile as a badge of honor. If that's what it means to be an innovator in this country, I'm a shadowy supercoder too.

Starting point is 00:31:24 And it's despicable that anyone keeps attacking American heroes like this who are helping propel our economy and our freedom and the future of this country forward. That was a statement. Brian Armstrong. Great line. Great line. Of course, Hayden Adams on Twitter says, you know, thanks, Brian Armstrong. Thanks for the kind of words.

Starting point is 00:31:40 So glad we have you and CoinBase standing with Defi and fighting for the whole industry. Really, I think that is what this represented as a symbol. We have 50 plus founders showing up the day Gary Gry. Gensler is getting a hearing to go meet, like in a coordinated fashion with talking points and just like PR and press. And they had this like armored car out there, this painted blue armored car that was all about, hey, money doesn't need to be driven around in armored cars in the year 2023. Let's upgrade the financial system. Saying that 87% of Americans would think that we should upgrade our financial system. And 52 million Americans own crypto. So there's obviously a

Starting point is 00:32:20 wide base of support. That is the facts that Coinbase is coming to Capitol Hill with. And overall, it just was the biggest show of force, a coordinated show of force of support for crypto on Capitol Hill on a day where, you know, it counted more than most. Yeah, that's real people, right? And one of the shadowy super coders that showed up is our friend Kevin O'Waki. He showed up in this co-court. And this was actually a fantastic thread of his just takeaways. And I think we should read a few of them. So this was its experience. He's one of 40 founders invited to DC in the stand with crypto day. And then he reiterates the stats that you just gave.

Starting point is 00:32:57 The first day of their session was watching Gary Gensler live. So they actually got to go into the congressional chambers and watch this live. And Kevin makes the comment. It kind of explains why there was a stand with crypto. Yeah, somebody was in there. Oh, who was it? And he said, well, I found the hearing itself to be pretty toothless. and that most Congress people wanted mostly to get sound bites.

Starting point is 00:33:21 That's what we saw a little bit. It's still nice to see that Gensler's prejudice against crypto are not shared by all of the legislative branch. And next, they met with some of the congressional leaders. So Ritchie Torres, Mark Molinaro, Hakeem Jeffries, several more. And Kevin goes on. Some lines that we'll pull out here. Kevin Milwaukee says,

Starting point is 00:33:42 the White House doesn't like crypto, but no one really seems to know why, As far as I know, no one would stand with crypto was able to meet with the executive branch. Interesting. So they're still not engaging in the executive branch. Still not engaging. Yeah. He says, quote of the day was from Mike Novagrats, who is also there. The extra legal debanking of crypto companies is the most un-American thing I've ever seen. Hard agree. Quote of the day, yeah. He says, this stank of SBF seems to have mostly lifted. The opportunists who use SBF and FTX implosion to advance their agenda last year have already played their hand. already. Wow, nice. And then last thing I'll pull out here is Kevin says, it was cool to sit shoulder to shoulder, pushing for regulatory clarity with prominent crypto luminaries like Brian Armstrong, Ryan Selkis, Mike Novogras, or Fred Erisim. And then, of course,

Starting point is 00:34:30 he finishes with the action item of call your congressman. This is not just him saying, hey, you should do this. This is saying, hey, this is what is the most effective. This is the advice that I've gotten from people in Congress who I just talked to. Call your congressman. If you don't know who or how to approach them, you can check out Coinbase's guide at www. www.standwithcrypto.org. So that is your big action item bankless listener. Literally. Five minutes. Yeah, go to standwithcrypto.org and just press the buttons and then call your congressman.

Starting point is 00:34:58 Sorry, you might have to be U.S. citizen for this one. So sorry to all our international users, but we're fighting America, you know, in America for this for sure. David, speak of America. What's more American than Walmart? And we got pudgy penguins on the shelves. What happened this week? 2,000 Walmart stores have put pudgy penguin, like, stuffed animals on their shelves.

Starting point is 00:35:20 So this is just a big co-marketing push between Pudgy Penguins and Walmart. Walmart even tweeted out the Pudgy Penguins, like, retweeted and showed their, out of their own quote, to the Pudgy Penguins like animation about Pudgy Penguins being in Walmart. I mean, this is probably the biggest distribution event for any NFT ever. Can you describe what you're actually talking about? So you're not just talking about the NFTs. course. No, no, no.

Starting point is 00:35:45 In case it wasn't obvious. You're talking about stuffed animals. Yeah, pudgy penguin stuffed animals. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, they're so cute. Do you have a pudgy penguin, David, still? No, I sold mine. I bought them the shit out of that.

Starting point is 00:35:57 I took a long bet on cool cats and sold pudgies and that was the wrong trade. No cool cats at Walmart. Well, Pudgeys was an interesting project because it got resold to somebody else, right? Yeah, right. So the founders sold it to this guy, Luca, who I think has just been doing absolutely Is that the guy in the video? Is that this guy? I don't know if that's him.

Starting point is 00:36:20 But yeah, he's been doing just a killer job executing. He's coming from the old world of IP and just IP growth. So Pudgy Penguin toys cost between $3 and $12, depending on the toy. Okay, the crazy thing about this is each toy has, I think, one of those RFID chips in there. And so each toy has its own identity as an NFT on ZK Sync era where people can build their but forever pudgy characters inside of the pudgy world, their digital social platform. So, you know, minigames, interact with others.

Starting point is 00:36:51 And then you get, like, some certain, like, traits. There's, like, this on-chain component where every single subject animal has a life on ZK Sync era. Big win for ZKSync era. Really cool. It's really cool. All together. I mean, we have, you know, an NFTE that's redeemable

Starting point is 00:37:05 for some sort of token representation on a layer two, a ZK-EVM layer two. This is like an IRL-Vverse connection. I love it. NFTs in Walmart is somehow a fitting in the spare market too. We are down bad. But actually, I'm incredibly bullish. I mean, the big potential for NFTs is really as a kind of a brand.

Starting point is 00:37:24 You know, in some ways a headless brand, in some ways like a kind of a, you know, a centralized lead brand. So are you going to get one of these stuffed animals? Are they cute enough? Are you just interested in the speculation aspect, David? I'm not necessarily a collector of stuffed animals. But for other, I do think there is some, like, interesting dichotomy of, like, crypto, D-Gens owning Pudgy Penguins and then like children thinking that that's their favorite stuff to animal because it is like that's a funny thing of I don't know yeah well there you go

Starting point is 00:37:53 oh look at this some of them are getting swept so looks like it's not just for children looks like some of the NFTE um well that's this is Luca this is the CEO of Puget Pungis he's buying his home products he probably put that on the company card that's a easy yield farming Pudjee's right now all right what do we got coming up next coming out next did you know There's like six forks of friend tech, and it's all on different chains. We'll talk about all of them, but not really.

Starting point is 00:38:18 We're just going to burn through those. Vitalik deep fakes and how we can stop them. And also, Chase Bank has banning crypto payments in the UK. Oof, not great. This is why we go bankless, of course. So we're going to get to all of that and more, but first moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors

Starting point is 00:38:32 that make this show possible, especially Metamask portfolio. If you have not opened up your Metamask portfolio, it is a new and improved way of looking at all your crypto assets and all the various chains. There's a link in the show notes. Go find out. Let's go hear from them right now.

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Starting point is 00:39:12 defy so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your defyy moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in Web3 your way, Metamask portfolio is the answer. I already know that you have Metamask wallet, so go check out your Metamask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio. You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. Uniswap. But Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create

Starting point is 00:39:52 or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card, with extremely low Fiat on-Ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswap mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts. Or use wallet connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defy with the Uniswap mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defyte. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There's a link in the show notes. Ryan, this clip of Vitalik has shown me which token I want to buy next. Let's play it. All right. Everyone remembers

Starting point is 00:40:33 when I sold billions of Shiba Inu tokens back in the day. Do I regret it? Well, I didn't. That is, not until I heard about Shib Exchange. Shib Exchange is pretty revolutionary in the crypto space. Making Shiba Inu the quote token is just genius. If I still had all those Shiba Inu tokens, I know exactly where I would take them. Let's fucking go. Well, that is classic metallic. That's classic metallic sentence right there.

Starting point is 00:41:02 The let's fucking go is just the funniest way to end this thing. Like when I was watching it, it's like, yeah, yeah, I can, I know Vitalik's mannerisms. I know that that was like manipulated a little bit. But man, if you're not paying attention or if you don't know Vitalik, then like, yeah, this guy just showed ship exchange. What do you think that is out of 10? Like the quality of this deepaks I've seen in a while because he's got the like relatively natural body movements, even though they're a little bit repetitive. Like the body movements are natural. And the voice was closeish.

Starting point is 00:41:32 It's not quite there, but it's closeish. Vitalik will never ever say let's fucking go I mean with a different script I think I would give it like a seven or eight out of ten right whereas like a 10 for me would be like indiscernible from somebody who's spent some time virtually with Vitalik would be indiscernible from from that experience and this is maybe a seven or eight

Starting point is 00:41:53 which like these are going to be everywhere these are pretty good clips yeah I mean so many bots on Twitter all over the place of just like Vitalik you know is giving away free Eith it's always been this way since like 2016 onwards. Vitalik's given in free, his image is going to be used in deepfix in all sorts of ways.

Starting point is 00:42:11 So what is the prevention for this? How do we fix this problem? Well, of course, there's the Ethereum at a station service, but that's not a quick fix. That is going to be years of infrastructure and building in progress. We have the tools.

Starting point is 00:42:23 We just need maturation and development. The fix is that everyone just needs to know that the internet is not a safe place. And especially with the emergence of private keys in owning your own assets. The internet is very insecure at this very moment. Yeah, it's a lot of fishing. A lot of people want to steal your money. This was actually

Starting point is 00:42:41 useful too on Twitter. The community notes I've been looking at this more and more on Twitter. Readers added context they thought people would want to know. The video is a deep fake. So yeah, that's good context to know. So be on your guard and we'll get back to that. But hopefully something like Ethereummatistation service will

Starting point is 00:42:57 allow Vitalik to release Vitalik content signed with his private keys. And that is much that is unforgeable, that's not fakable. Whoever has his private keys can actually sign it. The bulk case for this

Starting point is 00:43:09 is that actually every single bit of content will have some sort of attestation and so weird content will be missing the attestation. And so the idea is like eventually everything will have some sort of tag of inception. Like where did this come from?

Starting point is 00:43:24 And content without that tag will be extremely suss. Exactly. David, this is a pretty cool experiment in Buenos Aires. Areas. Government ID coming to Ethereum, again, via ZK Sync. What's this? Yeah, so there's actually an interesting corollary. I mean, maybe I'm just making this up in my head, but like pudgy penguins, when you buy the stuffed animal, you have this like NFT that has this digital identity on ZK Sync. I mean, it's not anything to do with pudgy penguins or stuffed animals, but Buenos Aires, the government abroados Aris, which is, of course, part of the government, the country of Argentina, but is also its own kind of like city state.

Starting point is 00:44:00 But as Ari's citizens will be able to download this wall wall. and claim essential personal documents such as birth and marriage certificates, which are very important documents in Argentina for accessing social benefits, using a digital wallet. So like self-custody of your digital documents using your, using a private key, using a wallet. And so this is also being used on ZK Sync era. And so it's just a way for like infrastructure of the nation state, city state sector of things. using public infrastructure to do things that they already need to do better. Pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:44:38 You could put anything in your wallet. Penguins are passports, right? Penguins are the way. This is cool. You know, Cracken are number one recommended exchange for 2023, David. Do you know what they're up to? Tell me. They are getting ready to push into stock trading.

Starting point is 00:44:54 This is a rumor. So I took this tweet from Walter Bloomberg, Crypto Exchange plans to push into stock trading. This came from the Bloomberg article that says this. I asked Crackens like, yo, what's going on with this? And their response is Cracken is always exploring how it can power the global adoption of cryptocurrencies. We can't comment on rumors or speculation.

Starting point is 00:45:15 We're looking to broaden and enhance our offering. So clients continue to have secure and seamless access to Cracken's full product suite. Pretty generic, neither confirmed nor deny. Didn't say no. They did not say no. They did not say no. We have no special knowledge about this. You know, all we know is basically that statement.

Starting point is 00:45:34 But this would be cool, if true. I would say, as someone who has not bought an equity and a stock since 2018, up until this week, actually, we'll talk about that later in a different show. Like, Robin Hood ever said, we always thought Robin Hood was like the app for the people, right? Like democratizing access to finance. And then the whole like Citadel GME thing just totally popped that bubble. One of the big reasons why I haven't bought an equity is because I don't want to use, Robin Hood, that's tradfai.

Starting point is 00:46:03 There is demand, believe it or not, for crypto people to buy equities. No, I believe it. But we just need a crypto-native platform to go back to the old world. And Robin Hood has good U.X. Have you ever used something like E-Trade or ever use something like E-Trade or something like Charles Schwab? No way. Like you couldn't. Like you would not be able to navigate this.

Starting point is 00:46:22 I wouldn't know how to do it. It's so stupid. It's so like 2000s era. And crypto exchanges have gotten the U.S. Right. Like it's easy to navigate. And so why not start listing other assets? Take Cracken ProUX and put it into equities and we can talk.

Starting point is 00:46:38 There you go. Maybe Cracket's doing that. Maybe they're not. We have nothing. Maybe it's a rumor. Yeah, it could just be a rumor. A friend tech fork for every chain. Okay, there are all of these friend tech clones.

Starting point is 00:46:47 We should have, we expected this would happen, right? Of course, a successful app is going to have like thousands of clones. What specifically is happening? How many clones do we have at this point? Okay, so on base, there's friends tech. There's post tech on our. Arbitrum. There's frenzy on Solana. There's fan.com on mantle. There's alpha on Bitcoin. What the shit? Oh my gosh. What's Bitcoin L3? That's what this says. I don't know. People have been

Starting point is 00:47:14 trying to tweet at me saying, hey, David, you're really popular on Alpha on Bitcoin. You should sign up. And I'm like, I don't believe you. No one is in the Bitcoin world. They're trying to steal your private keys, David. They're fishing you. Maybe. Of course, these are clones. So there's not a lot of difference. But there is some like minor innovation. So one there is one one version of this clone is introducing a bidding action for new accounts in order to prevent bots. Another is including features like public and private posts. So you could see accounts you could follow on Twitter, dark mode, stats mode, that sort of thing. Referral system. So some are even working through the the economics of these platforms and like juicing them,

Starting point is 00:47:58 making them maybe even more Ponzi-like in the games. So there's like these micro innovations that are happening across all of these clones. And I think that this will push things forward, is the optimistic view. Is some of these features will work, others won't, the ones that don't fall by the wayside and die, the ones that do will improve the product. Frentec will continue to have to level up. Fortunes will be made, fortunes will be lost. You know, that's what always happens in this space.

Starting point is 00:48:25 but I do think a lot of experiments will kind of level us up. I guess maybe the bear case for all of this is like, it's too much fragmentation, and we're just chasing a bunch of kind of, I don't, nothing products. And this is, instead of innovating, everyone's copying,

Starting point is 00:48:41 you know, the other apps, I guess you could take a bear case on it too. But yeah, overall, I think it's cool. And of course it would happen. This is crypto.

Starting point is 00:48:49 It's completely permissionless. Well, as soon as you do get the forking phenomenon, it is just a big plus one to the, legitimacy of the actual inception. Yeah. Like Bitcoin had the fork and fair launch era. There was the ICO mania after Ethereum, defy food farms.

Starting point is 00:49:04 Like anytime something gets forked a billion times, whatever it's getting forks. It's very successful. In some measure. Yeah. And I will say, even though I don't really understand the long-term economics and the long-term sustainability of FrontTech, like it doesn't care what I think. It is still alive. And so I'll give a plus one to that.

Starting point is 00:49:23 I am too exhausted to create accounts in all these apps and try them all out. I've got my friend tech, that's it. Coming out of the OP stack super chain base world, base has introduced pessimism, which is an open source monitoring system designed to enhance security of base. Hilariously named as well, of course. Not optimism. Yes, it's the right way to view this.

Starting point is 00:49:45 It's a monitoring system for like, think of it as like a second line of defense. So post someone attempting to exploit. you, whatever that means, smart contracts, the actual protocol, et cetera. This is an alert system after that fact. So there's like three different subsystems here. There's like a risk engine alerting system and then just another system that's responsible for parsing and transforming real-time data, basically trying to give you a live alerts of like, hey, some shenanigans is going on. And it's just a monitoring system. And all OP stack chains can benefit from this, right? That's a really cool thing. Like this is kind of like it has previously been deployed in other

Starting point is 00:50:23 context. We've seen other projects like this. But the cool thing about this is base is building this to protect the base chain for their base users. It's just like extra protection for all base users. And it's really important because that's Coinbase. But since it's on the OP stack, all OP stack chains can also leverage this open source system. So this is about everything growing and security all at once. We like it. We like it. Binance is interesting. Speaking of base, finance is now supporting base as well. So you can withdraw a deposit from Binance to base. I wonder if that has any implications for the future of B&B chain, David. Right.

Starting point is 00:50:56 That's the big question is like now with base, the B&B chain of the West, if you will. What is the future of B&B chain? That's always an... Do you think B&B chain just becomes a roll-up at some point? I can only hope. Like, you know, why be a side chain? In this economy, why be a side chain? Why be a silo when you could join in the crowd?

Starting point is 00:51:15 This is a Fred Wilson post. Fred Wilson is a notable venture capitalist Union Square Ventures. I followed his blog post for a blog post for a, while I just noticed this week. On September 9th, he's writing on the 27th, but on September 9th, apparently he was the victim of a fishing attack. So he got over 40 of his NFTs stolen, some of his most valuable NFTs, 46 to be exact. And it was because, I believe he was in a crypto wallet. He doesn't mention the wallet, but I'm guessing it was probably like a coin base wallet. He received a message, maybe a message from XMTP, telling him to click this link. He said this,

Starting point is 00:51:51 While waiting for our luggage, I got a push notification. I guess he was at the airport. So distracted, you know, waiting for your luggage. You just got a few minutes on your phone. In my wallet, about an NFT drop that I could participate in. So I clicked the link, sign the transaction, and nothing happened. So I tried again. Again, nothing happened.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Frustrated. I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it and got in the car. On the way home, I tried again a few more times. Turns out that each of my failed attempts to admit an NFT was a scam that allowed a thief to eventually take 46 of my most very very very. valuable NFTs. David, we're just talking about this last week with Mark Cuban getting drained from a similar kind of fishing scam. It's unfortunate. Yeah, do you have a take on this? There is some good news at the end, but do you have a take on this first? I have two takes. One is that you should not

Starting point is 00:52:38 be having your wallet with 46 of your most valuable NFTs be your mobile wallet that you have on your phone. So if guys, if you do that right now, stop doing that immediately. Don't sign you. things that are also ought to be your cold storage. Yes. Have your cold storage a separate wallet completely from your active wallet that you do this kind of like activity on. My other take is that we should be able to sign messages with our cold storage and knock it rugged.

Starting point is 00:53:06 We should be, we should do both. Well, how do we do the second there? That call for, call for startups. Yeah. Actually, delegate. Dot Cash, Fubar's project is working on this. But still. there are a number of attempts

Starting point is 00:53:21 is something we definitely have to solve because this is not good user experience to get drained of all of your funds because you click the wrong link anyway and by the way, just the PSA is even the pros can get rugged like this actually Anthony Sassano

Starting point is 00:53:37 had a similar event that he talked about in the Daily Gway earlier this week if it can happen to someone like Fred or Anthony it can happen to anybody David what did Michael Saylor do last week what does Michael Saylor do every, Ryan? He purchases Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:53:54 Also, all that Bitcoin Ether strength ratio, that was because Michael Saylor was buying a bunch of Bitcoin. Oh, really? Purchase, yeah. This has happened like three times now. Like Bitcoin Ether shows strength and then the... It's Sailor. It was Sailor.

Starting point is 00:54:06 Purchase $5,445.45 Bitcoin for almost $150 million. Where does he get all this money? Wait, he just spent another $150 million on Bitcoin? Yes. Yes. Yes. That's exactly right. He's borrowing it from bondholders.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Yeah, but everyone runs out of capital. If you run out of capital, sure, you take leverage. And then sometimes you run out of margin. Anyways, he's at 0.75% of the $21 million supply. He almost owns one full percent of all Bitcoin in existence. Over three quarters of one percent. Yeah. He is down 8% in dollar terms on his Bitcoin buy.

Starting point is 00:54:44 He is so, like, tenacious about this. It's impressive. And I've always said, I think he'll do well on it eventually. Eventually, yeah. So he has bought a total of $4.7 billion of Bitcoin, and that is currently worth $4.3 billion of Bitcoin. David, Chase Bank is banning crypto payments. Why? What's going on? Why? I don't know. They just say that our policy around crypto is changing. Here's what it means for you. If we think you're making a payment related to crypto assets, we'll decline it. but customers are free to use a different bank or provider to invest in crypto. That's called being unbanked.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Wow. Wow. I got one of these letters from Bank of America one time with one of my accounts that just saw me transferring into Coinbase. And they sent me a letter and they said, you're too risky. Bye. Right. They say here's why they do it. Fraudsters are increasingly using crypto assets to steal large sums of money from people. We're committed to helping keep our customers' money safe and secure. So they're saying that because people are losing money in crypto, that they're not going to let you buy crypto, which, So the evidence is that, yes, people are sadly being fished all the time. We are been talking about this.

Starting point is 00:55:52 Does that mean that you just close down the gates to buying crypto? That's a reach. I also think that this is maybe Operation Chokepoint hitting the UK, the same kind of effect here of big banks saying, no, if you're dealing crypto, we will unbank you. Back to the Novograt's tweet earlier in this episode, right? of companies getting unbanked as a result of this. David, another Ethereum address was just added to the OFAC sanction list. This time the Sinaloa cartel.

Starting point is 00:56:23 This is a fentanyl trafficking operation in a Colombian cartel leader, apparently. So added to the OFAC sanction list. I don't think that this is going to stop, by the way. Of course, bankless is no friend of drug cartels. You'll know that. But it does set a bad precedent, I think. think if this is not handled correctly. This is actually a GitHub maintained by ultrasound money of all addresses, Ethereum addresses that are on the OFAC sanction list. You see this?

Starting point is 00:56:53 21 of them. Yeah, 21 of them. Oh, there's Roman Seminoff. Roman Seminoff. With eight addresses, wow. 21 entities have been added to the OFAC sanction list right now. And I don't know. I'm like not a friend of drug cartels, but am worried about this black, list type of capability that the U.S. is growing in scope. And I guess I have a few takes on this. One, I don't think we're going to get out of this. Like, I think they're going to continue to add bad guys to this list, right? So that's going to be with us always. But I feel like we need to hold the line in some specific places. Like one is they can't be sanctioning privacy smart contracts as they have with tornado cash, right? It's a general purpose privacy tool. You can't

Starting point is 00:57:41 add that to the OFAC sanction list. And I know we're battling that in the court system right now. I'm also worried about increased demands to AML KYC, all of DFI, all front ends, and have them essentially like have to check the OFAC sanction list before they can serve up the DFI in the user interface and the application. So I'm worried about this, I guess I would say. I don't really have a solution other than there there's got to be some places we hold the line here uh and uh yeah i don't know if you have any wisdom for this david do you ever think we'll see banklist dot ethel on there better not well what are you doing what are you doing with our private keys man nothing bro they're coming for me well it's fine when it's all bad guys on the list i guess right so that's the point i'm making

Starting point is 00:58:32 that's the point when when does bankless narrative become enemy of the state well there's There's already some people who, I mean, we certainly argue are not bad guys. Like a tornado cash is on this list. Roman Seminoff is on this list. Open source privacy developer. Eight addresses he has on this list. So that is not comforting. David, we got a new wallet, though.

Starting point is 00:58:54 On to brighter news. What's this? New Browse extension out of the rainbow wallet. Rainbow is definitely a beloved wallet in the space, I would say. It's been a mobile wallet. They've been pioneering mobile, but now they are entering the world of being a wallet extension. I'm actually doing a show with Mike from Rainbow on Friday. He's a local Williamsburg resident.

Starting point is 00:59:13 But we will still be doing it over. Oh, you're not doing any person? Yeah, we got to do. We have to do share screen. So it's a virtual product. He's got to show you some stuff. I get it. How about raises of the week, David?

Starting point is 00:59:24 What do we got? One raise from bankless ventures out of this week. Again, this is the way that we do this. Whenever bankless ventures makes an investment, we talk about it here in the weekly roll up as the inception of a conflict of interest so y'all can know about it. And it also gives us a moment to explain why we invested in the raise. The raise this week is Phoenix.

Starting point is 00:59:41 Phoenix spelled with an F-F-H-E-N-I-X. This is privacy. This is encryption and privacy on the blockchain. Oh, cool. We're just leading the charge of investing in more of these things because there needs to be more privacy on the... Because there needs to be more privacy in the world of crypto. So there's a $7.5 million seed round.

Starting point is 01:00:01 It's dedicated to bring fully amorphic encryption to a layer two on Ethereum, and overall just pushing the frontier of FHE, fully homomorphic encryption into the world of crypto. So this is, I think, stands in contrast to ZK cryptography, which is, you know, the more commonly known form of privacy. Interestingly, privacy and scalability are actually two sides of the same coin. So you get ZK roll-ups, which are hyper-scalable, but you also get ZKZK-Rolups like Aztec, which are private.

Starting point is 01:00:31 This is a different strategy for produce. producing privacy. Fully hormomorphic encryption existed before crypto. It's just general cryptography, not cryptocurrency. But now we are imbueing it into a layer two for to have fully encrypted data. So the way that ZK roll-ups work or ZK in general is that you generate a proof off-chain and then you put the proof on-chain and then everyone's like, yeah, that's the correct proof. It checks out. Fully homomorphic encryption operates differently. It's more just like all the data, all the state is parsable because all the state is present on chain. So it's a more rich state of data that's just encrypted.

Starting point is 01:01:13 So you can run compute on it when it's in its encrypted form. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So you get, it's more composable because the state of things is all hosted locally on chain. It's all present and accounted for. It's just encrypted. And so more composability, more utility out of this kind of, say, a new, approach, an alternative approach to the ZK space, potentially more scalable. Yeah. Well, we need more privacy solutions specifically on layer two. And last fun fact, you know, this was founded by two guys. And I mean that literally. Damn it. I was going to give this joke. I was like, well, that was-front man you, David. All of that stuff was interesting. But

Starting point is 01:01:49 the real reason why we invested in this deal is because the two co-founders are guy and guy. It's just too good. If that's not, bullish. I don't know what it is. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, will ETFs push crypto values away? Are they coming to infiltrate and corrupt crypto? We'll talk about that. Arthur, another take. Are we at the peak ignorance of crypto? Is, are we in the peak ignorance phase of the market, I think, possible? And then also is Ethereum, a technology absorbing black hole. There is, I think, seven takes this week. It's a whole entire section of this week. So they're all so good, so good. So big takes, big take section this week. So we're going to

Starting point is 01:02:30 get to all of that and more, but first I'm one moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries,

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Starting point is 01:04:36 are you worried that the wacky but value-oriented crypto culture, which I love so much, is going to be overrun by a rush of new people who have large amounts of power in the existing system? David, are all these trad-five people going to erode the crypto values that make us special, make this whole thing decentralized, make this whole thing corruption-resistant? Should we be worried about the ETS from that perspective? it. Yeah, I actually wrote a blurb about this in one of my Davis-Takes articles, the last

Starting point is 01:05:02 crypto cyclist here, where I talked about Bitcoin ETFs and also Bitcoin Ether ETFs and also running through getting regulatory clarity. Like we are currently battling with regulators. We will get clarity one way or another. Eventually, Bitcoin and ETFs will be approved. So there's this growing east of crypto, if you will, like the civilized law-abiding, regulated civilization of the east of crypto. That is great. We are watching that grow. Will we be able to retain the freedom of the West? I think by default, absolutely,

Starting point is 01:05:36 because private keys are permissionless. Everything is a bearer asset. The West is the default in the world of crypto. The East has to be built. So that is actually an inverse in the historical corollary where people show up in the East. They're moving west to go away from Britain and the monarchy,

Starting point is 01:05:53 and then they've established their own civilization. But then people keep on going west because they're inherently looking for freedom always. So as civilization is born, they keep going west. Crypto is the wild west, and it always has been and always will be, because we have freedom and private keys and power and responsibility and opportunity imbued into us by default. That is like the substrate that crypto exists upon.

Starting point is 01:06:16 Will it be encroached? Well, with the ETFs, people are buying ether, Bitcoin, through their ETFs, but they're staying in the trad world. That capital is staying trad. staying in fidelity. They're also buying a worse product. Yes, and they're free to do that. And so actually, the line between Tradfai and Defi will definitely be retained. Defi will just be the permissionless version of finance. And all that ETS do is actually wraps ether, kind of like wrapped ether, and makes it composable inside of Tradfai. But it actually is us, we're corrupting

Starting point is 01:06:50 Wall Street. They should be worried about us. We're decentralizing that. Yeah, I know. I totally agree. I think this whole thing is one big Trojan horse, and we got them. Yes. And I think that we've said this before, too, you can't build something decentralized on something centralized, right? But it's fine if you put something centralized and something decentralized. So long as the base layer is preserved, right?

Starting point is 01:07:14 And that's why we are so passionate about the layer one and the layer zero, which is kind of the social community, keeping those layers decentralized. Our validator set matters so much. making sure that the entire block building, you know, searching, building, validating, like chain is corruption-free and censorship-resistant, right? That's the stuff that matters. So who cares what they build that's centralized on top of those layers? So long as those layers remain decentralized and corruption-resistant and, quote-unquote, pure.

Starting point is 01:07:48 That's what we care the most about. With the ether ETFs, ether gets sucked up into Tradfai, ETH price goes up. Yeah. And they add jet fuel to the values that power up crypto. Yep. They adopt crypto protocols. They adopt crypto values.

Starting point is 01:08:07 Shouldn't I do a song. Chris Berninsky. Eclipse is like a Solana embassy in Ethereum Nation. Wow. Just take from Chris Brininski. Give us some background on Eclipse first. So Eclipse is the predicted outcome, I think, of the roll-up-centric roadmap thesis, which is that new and alternative non-EVM execution environments can turn themselves into a layer two

Starting point is 01:08:30 and settle on Ethereum and benefit from Ethereum's network effects and composability and liquidity and assets. Eclipse we did the show not too long ago. Eclipse is Solana's Solana virtual machine as a layer two. And so Chris is putting this into nation state metaphors, which I so wholly appreciate. And he's saying Eclipse is like a Solana embassy on the Ethereum nation. So like a little domicile for Solana on Ethereum. And he follows up and says, Eclipse will further trade relations between two of crypto's major economies,

Starting point is 01:08:58 cementing the importance of ETH and Seoul as a means of trade production and consumption. That is his take. That is his take. That is Chris's take. I do agree with you. That is Chris's take. Yeah. You can see my take, my response to Chris's take.

Starting point is 01:09:12 Oh, did you say something? Yeah, well, kind of. Omnam. I said, om, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. Which is my version of saying, Ethereum is just gobbling up Solana. So it's not the Salana embassy coming to Ethereum. It's just Ethereum just absorbing it and digesting it. Well, that brings us to the next take, which is this one from not you, but Swagtimus.

Starting point is 01:09:33 That eith. The beauty of Ethereum is that it's a technology absorbing black hole. EVMs, layer 2s, optimistic roll-ups, ZK roll-ups, Snark, Starks, Starks, SVM, that's the Salana virtual machine. It doesn't matter. Everything ends up in Ethereum eventually. Ethereum's culture and draw is just too strong. And once you're caught up in it, there's no going back back. So Embassy versus Black Hole, two different analogies here for something similar.

Starting point is 01:10:00 Yeah, do you have anything to add to this? So this one is Swags' Take, but it's also my take as well, because I 100% agree with this. I have my own version of this tweet all the way back in 2019. You can understand this from first principles. Open source code aggregates. Better open source code depends on to better open source code. and Ethereum is a platform for open source code. So, and we've seen this play out before.

Starting point is 01:10:23 Do you remember EOS turned into LUM network? Well, neither of those ideas were. So they both just died. But Zcash, that's Aztec on Ethereum as a layer two. Like we have that technology. Like all of these things. Useful open source cryptocurrency related code can just append on to Ethereum. And then Ethereum grows.

Starting point is 01:10:43 I think, sure, it's an embassy for now, but then it's just going to get gobbled. Yeah, I think that the black hole analysis. is good. I would also just use the, you know, gravity, the gravitational pull analogy is good. And I would use like a star or a sun type of metaphor. If you are a layer one with a monetary unit and massive liquidity and massive economic bandwidth, right, and a culture of innovation, then you're just going to suck in all of the other stellar objects towards you, right? And they're going to start orbiting you, right? And so the goal, I mean, this is the bankless thesis. is to become the most massive star in your ecosystem.

Starting point is 01:11:23 Maybe there'll be a binary star system, though, David. That's what, you know, that's what some others would say. Binary star systems work when two equivalently sized stars within some range start like having a dance with each other. But if there's an imbalance between these two stars, one just gobbles up the other. Bitcoin and Ethereum, is that a binary star system? I would currently call that a binary star system.

Starting point is 01:11:46 Maybe we are stretching the metaphor too far, But this is another take from Brenner. We told you we got a lot this week. Given the concept of soulmate, there's probably a similar buildmate. Somebody, someone where the two of you enjoy building or creating stuff together, the creations will be stellar and the two of you will have so much fun doing it. Oh, this is a sweet one. Who put this in the agenda?

Starting point is 01:12:06 A buildmate. Find your buildmate. You got your soulmate. Yeah. It reminds me of the bare market buddy take. Like everything is just easier in crypto when you have a buddy. Find your buildmate. This is very heartwarming.

Starting point is 01:12:18 This is a good time to find your built mate too. Fun fact, I went to college with Brutter. Oh, really? Yeah. I feel like you always say that. Like every show, it's just like some random person. You went to college or you know this person from next. This is what happens when you go outside, Ryan.

Starting point is 01:12:32 All my friends are like virtual. So, you know. So this take requires some context. You know how we talk about blockchain fees are the taxes for the system? Like the gas fees are the Ethereum taxes that you pay for the protocol. Yeah, they go to the public good of the protocol, which, yeah, got it. It fits the pattern, right? But, Dr.

Starting point is 01:12:48 member in here, I think, provides an alternative perspective. He says, or they say a tax is dictated top down. An auction means pricing is set bottom up. In other words, if they didn't want to pay that price, the gas fee, that wouldn't be the price. The only reason the price is that is because people, there are willing buyers. So when I think as we move forward and talk about, I think we will continue to talk about gas fees are the tax to Ethereum. But there's this important nuance that the taxes to Ethereum are determined by the market, not by a top-down heavy-handed system. A tax that's driven by market forces, is how I put it. What's the context for this tweet, though?

Starting point is 01:13:28 It looks like it's a response to a threat. I was arguing with Solana people about a tax, like high fees versus low fees kind of argument. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Got it. Vance Spencer tweet, his second one of the episode. Wow. Big week for Vance.

Starting point is 01:13:43 It is now clear that there is going to be. be 10 to 100 restaking protocols and that the restaking game will increasingly become a hot ball of money. Why? It is unlikely that any one primitive data availability, bridge, Oracle, secured by restaked eth, will be able to meaningfully augment ETH layer one yield for the 23 million ETH and growing staked over a long period of time. Moving from one restaking protocol to another while their inflation is high will become the game. All right, let's take us to this corner of the universe here in crypto, restaking. This is like eigenlayer. Help us recall. So restaking is first you stake it and then you restake it. And the reason you might restake it with a protocol like eigenlayer is so

Starting point is 01:14:25 that you can get some additional yields and put that capital at risk in exchange for performing some other and get some other function and generate some other yield. So Vance is saying that this is going to be a hot ball of money and a game and there'll be many market participants. Yes? Yeah. So remember how we were talking about. about all the Front Tech clones that have spun up and forked out? Yes. How the Bitcoin, fork and fair launch era, the ICO, food farms in 2020. There's just this pattern in crypto of first you have this one thing, and then you have the explosion of other things that are all kind of iterations on that. The cool thing about eigenlayer is that it's actually not just one thing.

Starting point is 01:15:04 Eigenlayer data availability is one restaking chain. I can't remember the name of it, but there's another Oracle chain, which is why the Oracle thing is an example here. There's a bridge chain. There's many different use cases for eigenlayer restaking networks. And so what he's saying is applying this phenomenon that we totally understand where there's, as soon as one thing that's successful, you have the iterations and iterations. And then you also have like the liquidity locust, the mercenary yield farmers of defy summer. There's always going to be demand for a new restaking network because that's the pattern that we've seen in crypto. Is he talking about there's going to be a ton of different eigen layers, like restaking protocols, or a ton of different sort of, um,

Starting point is 01:15:43 Eigenlayer networks, not eigenlayers. Oh, I see. So different protocols. Right. He's not calling for a forking of eigenlayer. He's calling for a just in a large supply of interested restaking capital that will produce demand for further restaking networks as the yields get sucked up by more and more people playing this game. Well, I think this clarifies it. So in his next tweet, he says, I think the winners here are the dominant ETH-1 staking protocols.

Starting point is 01:16:12 so that would be like a LIDO or a rocket pool. And generally, ETH itself, people will get more comfortable using it, withdraw more sexy to on-chain and continue bootstrapping the ETH monetary premium. That has always been my thesis behind EGEN layer, is that this just shifts power, the pendulum from the many Alt Layer 1 thesis to the ether is the capital of the internet. Yeah, it strengthens the ETH's money thing and the cold kind of monetary game that all layer ones need to play. David, are we at peak ignorance of crypto? That's what this next take says.

Starting point is 01:16:46 What are we looking at? Yeah, so this is Ken Dieter, who tweets out this graphic, which I'll explain here in a second, and says, this is my mental model for comparing how crypto progresses through time to how people outside of crypto perceive that progress. So we got two lines here. One is that kind of stair steppie upwards into the right green line. And so the stair steps, I think, are kind of happen inverted to the market. So when there is a bull market, we hit a plateau because no one gets any fucking work done in a bull market because we're all gambling and it's raining money everywhere and everyone's distracted.

Starting point is 01:17:23 And then that's the peak bull. And then in the peak bear is when work actually gets done, but everyone thinks that crypto is totally dead. And I actually appreciate this subtle nuance in this graphic that what crypto can actually do line, the stairs stepping up into the right line, is also accelerating because progress compounds. But meanwhile, what everyone thinks crypto can do is kind of sine-use-writing, oscillating around what crypto can actually do. So the axes here are, it's over time, but it's capabilities over time, right? And so the green line signifies that what crypto can actually do is greater capabilities over time. That's actually happening, right? And it happens in kind of like different waves as we unlock various things.

Starting point is 01:18:06 But what happens during bull markets is we overshoot the capabilities. And we're like, it's the best thing ever. to change everything. You just price forward the future. You totally do. And then what happens during the bear markets is we're like, it's doomed, it's over, you know, crypto's good for nothing. It's just a bunch of Ponzi schemes and there's nothing that it's going to affect and we'll never go mainstream, right? And we're at the, would you say we're at peak bear right now? Oh, yeah. I think we're coming out of it actually. Like the whole shore force from. Yeah, what does that have to do with peak ignorance of crypto? Is he just saying like,

Starting point is 01:18:42 In the bear, you are peak ignorant. Yeah. Like, none of your friends want to hear about the pudgy penguins in Walmart right now. So that's where we are in the cycles. That's where we are. That's where we are in the cycle. Yeah, that's right. Good name for this episode.

Starting point is 01:18:55 Peak ignorance. David, last take of the week. What's this one? This is such a good one. This is a deep cut for the, both for long-term and newer listeners who don't know about these dynamics. CoinFessions is a Twitter account that just tweets out, like, statements from people. It's like a meme account that tweets out statements.

Starting point is 01:19:12 from anonymous people. Real statements, though? Real statements that are submitted. Yes, yes. So the statement that was submitted to this coin fission was, I was employed by a Bitcoin mining company to spread negative information about Ethereum on Twitter and 4chan for a duration of two years.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Now, if you are a veteran, you understand exactly who this company is. It's called Blockstream. They are the mining company. I mean, this is my take. This is my guess. I do not know this fact, but, man, like, prove me wrong. there here's another bit of information my first boss in crypto uh was a bitcoin ogy and who converted to ethereum in the iCO mania and but also just like disclosed to the entire company that like

Starting point is 01:19:55 him and a few of his bitcoin whale owning friends financed the subversion campaign of ethereum from from 2015 bro and he just told us the whole entire company like yeah we paid for like we paid for like We paid for like, fud. We paid for the fun of Ethereum. Like the extra fud on top of the Dow hack and Ethereum Classic and all of these things. Every time something negative went down, they just magnified it tenfold. Yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:21 The Ethereum is centralized. You can't run a node. Like just fudding Ethereum just because that was that, you could play that game. It was truly the Wild West back then. And so this coin fashion is just like the block stream employed. You just look at grubles. If you remember grubles. Samson Mao.

Starting point is 01:20:38 If you want to listen to the most cringe piece of content ever, listen to Samson Mal from Blockstream and Vitalik Buterin on what Bitcoin did. Oh, my God. That was so bad. I can't believe Vitalik did that. Anyways, these are the tactics that have existed and still exist. And I would say that I think that Brie has gone from Bitcoin, like it's left its scar on the Bitcoin culture. These tactics still exist. It still happens.

Starting point is 01:21:05 This is still an alive. And it's probably being, it's probably higher up the market cap stack than you would think. You have to curate your news, like your sources of information in this space because there's so much bad information, like out there or disinformation or purefudd. It's no wonder it's so difficult to find your way in crypto, right? People who are relentlessly on crypto Twitter pushing narratives all of the time, like that you should proceed with caution. Unless they're podcasters, right, David? Unless they're not us. We wouldn't do these things. things. Oh my God. We didn't even mention Bit Boys in jail right now. And that's fine. It didn't even make the

Starting point is 01:21:40 agenda. Yeah, I didn't want to do. Anyway, moving on. David, what are you bullish on this week? Okay. I attended, there's this rabbit hole that I know exists that I've been trying to go down. Okay. And I've gotten like nibbles of it. I went to a meetup in New York that was like 30 people. It kind of felt me, felt like the Ethereum meetups of old where like, you know, folding chairs and like this basement kind of looking thing. And everyone is there just because we're nerds looking at this stuff. What are you nerding out about? The words that we have described are autonomous worlds. This is being pioneered by Lattice, ZeroX Park guys, mud, but there's just interest in this. Who are these people? Ladis, mud. I don't

Starting point is 01:22:19 think I've heard. Like, very skunk-worky people. These are individual Twitter accounts. Yeah, like, the Zero X Park guys are funded by grants. So they're just like the developers, developers. autonomous worlds. It's like crypto gaming, but not like the crypto gaming that you know. Fully as much logic on chain as possible. And so you get unique properties about that. Ryan, I think everyone understands when I say NFT. They're like, what's an NFT? It's like, oh, it's a crypto punk. It's a Pughey Penguin. It's a collectible of some core. It's a JPEG. And maybe the team adds some like utility or access to that. Sure. That is. Or a plushy toy in Walmart. That exactly. That is the stoky.

Starting point is 01:23:02 of what NFTs can be. Inert objects, that is like the first iteration, kind of like the Bitcoin is the Stone Age of Crypto, my take. Ethereum is like the sci-fi version of this. We are in the Stone Age version of NFTs. What if I told you, Ryan, that an NFT could be a universe with specific laws of physics and specific types of property rights, internal property rights, and that universe is defined by an NFT, and that NFT is transferred. One, I don't know entirely what you mean. Two, it sounds cool. Three, do I actually want that?

Starting point is 01:23:41 I don't know. When universes can become, like, again, with state internal, state internal laws that are different from Ethereum and can have their own internal logic. And that is a transferable object. I mean, we talked about in our Metaverse episode, what are NFTs? They're digital objects. You know what's an object? A whole entire universe, bro. It's funny you use the M word, the metaverse word,

Starting point is 01:24:08 because that has so much fallen out of fashion of crypto. By the way, crypto started using that word before Zuckerberg took it over. That was our word. And then he killed it. Anyway, it's dead, dead, dead now. But do you know that statement of basically like everything that the bulls predicted about crypto will come true? It's just a matter of timing, right?

Starting point is 01:24:30 And the same thing happened with the internet. I feel like that's very much true. And this is basically that concept. It's property rights, digital property rights, autonomous worlds, inside of, like, what you're talking about. Another word for autonomous worlds is like metaverse, it's what you used to kind of call it. And are you saying, you're seeing hints, you're seeing green shoots of like growth, new growth in this autonomous world? How do I enter an autonomous world right now? Is there a game I play?

Starting point is 01:24:58 Yeah, there is. Maybe you'll resonate with this metaphor. Mud is like this game engine that this, the mud team are building this game called Sky Strife. So that is the game that you actually see on screen, built on mud. And so they're kind of dogfooding their own game. Is this happening anytime soon?

Starting point is 01:25:17 No, this is, this like needs years of iteration and development. Like some of the more informed numbers I've gotten is like three plus years. But there's a there there. And it's kind of one of the big pills that I remember taking. way back when I realized that like, yo, you can put any logic on chain. We just need to figure out how to compress it and make it finish, make it scalable.

Starting point is 01:25:39 This is what they're doing. Mud is putting, it's an on-chain game universe engine, and people are trying to figure out how to make rich, vibrant, stateful universes inside of like things like an NFT. That's so cool. I think it's cool.

Starting point is 01:25:54 And yet I still don't fully, like, I feel like you need to experience it. I know, I understand it. I think the TLD. are is why am I bullish on this? It's just one of many things that I think like there is so much juice left in crypto to squeeze. Like we are just tip of the iceberg. We can't even imagine some of the future stuff. So you think we're going to sell all that this this cheap block space we're creating? Because I've been worried about that lately, David. We've got real cheap block space,

Starting point is 01:26:17 but maybe autonomous worlds will buy it all up from us. Yeah. No, that's right. That's right. Ryan, where do you bullish on what we're talking about earlier, crypto people showing up in D.C. And the good people this time. All right? Guess who wasn't there, David? Sam Bankman Freed. Oh, yeah, right. All right. I mean, he was in jail. And I think that crypto has been a little late to the party

Starting point is 01:26:39 with respect to, like, participation in D.C. But it's here now. And like some reasons it's been late to the party. I think most other industries would have been in D.C. lobbying from like day one and participating in the way that crypto is from day one. But crypto didn't. And I think part of it comes from this core kind of libertarian governments are bad type of ethos.

Starting point is 01:26:59 that's maybe one part of it. Another is, I think there are some builders in the space who are a bit more techno-utopian. We're basically like, we don't have to play the lobby games like, you know, the old tribe did. If we build it, they will come. We'll see it's a better system. They'll just adopt it, right? And then there's another element of why we haven't participated. We just really didn't have the use cases. Like, what do you go to the U.S. government and be like, yeah, we're going to supplant the dollar with this new, you know, cryptocurrency. They're not going to act very favorably to that. But now we have the state. Cable coins, for instance. Now we have DeFi. Now we have the creator economy with NFTs. But I think the realization crypto has had that if it doesn't show up in D.C., if the good guys don't go to D.C., someone else will.

Starting point is 01:27:43 Someone like SBF, right? He really revealed that there's a power vacuum to fill and that if you're ambitious, if you're crafty, if you're short-termist, if you're organized, then you can go fill that vacuum with like political bribes to try to, you know, capture all of the entire regulatory apparatus and bend it to your will. And so anyway, I'm bullish that SBF is out and some of the good guys are in and actually playing this game in a good way and that we're getting organized, that exchanges are there, that our lawyers are on top of things, that our educators and lobbyists are there, that our builders like Kevin O'Waki earlier in this episode, showed up in D.C. And I still feel like we have a massively, like a very long fight in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:28:29 You know, we got to fight the IRS. We got to fight the SEC, the CFTC. The entire past year in the roll-up, we have been talking about regulatory way more than, like, I am comfortable. Like, I hate talking about it every week. And yet that is the thing that we are fighting right now. But I am bullish with kind of this new wave of progress in our participation there. And channeling, like, we're just more aligned and organized than we ever have been. And I think we'll make real progress in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:28:57 even though it won't be easy. Yeah. And I'm reminded about, I think my favorite line out of permission list, which was Hester Persis quote, which is that the courts are on our side. The law is on our side.

Starting point is 01:29:08 We just have to show up. Yeah. And we haven't, we actually haven't seen. We haven't even showed up yet. Yeah. We haven't even seen what we can do when we show up.

Starting point is 01:29:17 100%. Yeah. So absolutely massive unlock. David, meme of the week. You ready for this? Meam of the week. Yep.

Starting point is 01:29:23 Uh, what are we looking at? This is 100% convinced that Ryan Sean Adams. put this meme together. The quote is, another unregistered securities exchange, absolutely disgusting. And the picture is what looks like a middle school Pokemon competition with a nice young lady in a Pokemon suit.

Starting point is 01:29:44 Look at her trading her cards. Look at her. Violating securities laws. Absolutely. Lock these kids up. I bet she's not even paying her taxes. David, we got a moment of Zen this week that we just found prior to the episode. It's actually from a source you would not expect. I believe that source is Van Eck,

Starting point is 01:30:01 of all places. So we're going to play that moment in just a minute. Do you want to say anything to tee this up? Van Eck, very trad-fi boomer capital. Uncharacteristically zoomer meme. That's all I'll say. It's really good. It's really good. Disclosures. We're going to end with Rist in a minute, but first we disclose. Bankless Ventures, as we mentioned, is an investor in Phoenix. We talked about them earlier in the show. David and I are both advisors to Matter Labs as well in the ZKSync Project and of course David and I hold Eith. We are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes. I'm going to end with this. You know crypto is risky. You could get fished. You could lose what

Starting point is 01:30:44 you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Ethereum Ethereum Now in an ETF form Coming soon Follow us to stay informed on the release O and HODL

Starting point is 01:31:01 H-O-K-O-F-O-F-A-O-F-A.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Coinbase Crashes DC | Gary Grilled By Congress | Vitalik Deepfakes

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