Bankless - ROLLUP: ConstitutionDAO | Tarantino NFT Sued | Beeple & Jimmy Fallon | FEI RARI

Starting point is 00:00:07 Bankless Nation, happy third week of November. David, what time is it? It's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-up time, the time where we try and roll up an entire week of crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, but we have fun doing it regardless. Ryan, are you ready to roll up the week? I'm ready, man. Hey, I like your shirt, by the way, David. It looks like we're doing the red-black combo. Yep, red-black. The shirt. Totally.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Wait, is that a full Spider-Man uniform? Do you have the pants match that? No, I do. No, pants are just like, wait a second, Peter Parker. People always tell me I look like Toby McGuire, so I'm just taking that and running with it. The original Spider-Man, Toby McGuire. Yes, the OG. What's your favorite Spider-Man, by the way? Oh, Peter Parker. Excuse me, excuse me, Toby McGuire.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Toby McGuire? I look like him. That's what people tell me. Of course he's my favorite. New guy's really good. What's his name? Oh, yeah. Why can't I use his name?

Starting point is 00:00:58 It's really good to you. I know who you're talking about, but I don't know his name. Yeah. All right. All right. French on Adams and Toby McGuire. We've got some main events to cover this week. One is Constitution Dow, David.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Dow is buying the U.S. Constitution. What's up with that? You've got to cover that. Also, Adidas is issuing NFTs now, a Poet badge. Jimmy Fallon just bought a BoredApe, or so I'm told, and Crypto.com bought an entire, no, they didn't buy it. I think they put their name on an entire arena, which seems to be the trend among crypto banks.

Starting point is 00:01:28 So, guys, we are going to cover all of those things. It's going to be a hot week in crypto, as it always is. David, we should talk about permissionless because I believe, new tickets just went on sale. You recall every two weeks, new tickets go on sale. They're issued. They get a little bit more expensive every time, so you want to get in early. This is going to be the, I think, conference event, defy conference event of 2022.

Starting point is 00:01:51 And I said D5, but it's not just DFI. It's the Metaverse as well. It's regulation, defy, like we're covering it all. If you're a bankless listener, if you're a bankless member, I should say, premium member, you get a discount on the subscription. It's a 20% discount. and we'll include a link in the show notes to that. David, are you excited about this conference?

Starting point is 00:02:09 I know you've been going to a lot of conferences lately, but what's special about this one? Oh, yeah. All of these conferences that I'm going to are just practice for going to permissionless in May. I'm like working my way up to it, right? Yeah, so permissionless in May in Miami, or yeah, in South Beach, Miami,

Starting point is 00:02:26 excuse me, Palm Beach in Florida. All of Florida is the same. It's going to be a ton of fun. I'm really looking forward to that the party that we're throwing. We still have to get that ball rolling with planning that thing. May is going to come around quick. So you got to get your tickets because you got to come.

Starting point is 00:02:40 Me and Ryan are, unless we find some reason to meet beforehand, this will be where me and Ryan shake hands. So if you want to watch that, I might come to Yves Denver, but maybe this will be the one. We'll see. We'll see.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Anyway, it'll be historic. Certainly biggest DFI conference of the year. David, let's also talk about this. We are doing a new office hours. This is for bankless premium members. First one starts today as you're listening to this on Friday. So we're going to be.

Starting point is 00:03:05 hanging out in the inner circle discord and answering questions. Kind of asked me anything style. And a whole bunch of bankless members have been already asking questions. And these are pretty tricky, dude. Like, uh, like, this is not the one-on-one level questions, right? These are like, you know, 300's level, 400's level. Some of them, I'm curious, like somebody asked, uh, what our bags are. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:24 I want to hear what your bags are, David Hoffman. I think that that's going to be the theme of this AMA is like really technical, hard questions that I'm actually going to have to do my homework on. And then what are my bags? That's going to be the two types of questions that we see. Yeah, that'll be really fun, though. The last thing we got to mention is our friends at Opolis are doing something super cool. David, tell them what Opolis is while I click the link here.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Yeah, Opolis is Dow infrastructure via Dow. So we always talk about how you can go work for DAOs nowadays. Just hop into the Discord, start contributing. One of the unsolved problems with living a Dow life is things like health care benefits or all the other benefits that you would get at a typical centralized company. Well, Opolis is a co-op, a co-op DAW of sorts, that is providing all of these same basic employment services for people that work for DAOs. So you can get healthcare, payroll services, all through Opelus.

Starting point is 00:04:17 And just like all the other Dow's, if you use Opelus, you become an owner in Opulus. And so if you actually sign up before the end of the year and choose to get your payroll paid by Opelis, you get a 1,000 work token, that's the token for Opelis bonus, along with you with a thousand bank tokens as well. So if you want to sign up with Opolis, there's a link in the show notes where you can chat with a membership steward today and get some of your typical Web 2 legacy infrastructure

Starting point is 00:04:43 working for you in Web 3. Guys, this is really cool. The future of work is the self-sovereign worker, basically, and this is what Opelis allows. Also, David, I didn't know this, but on the payroll, you can get paid in crypto. Want to get paid in E? Yes, I did.

Starting point is 00:04:58 You know, some... Well, you can with Opelis. So really cool. that they are providing this. So make sure you check that out, bankless listeners. All right, David, you ready for markets time? Let's talk about King Bitcoin, still on the top, but it's been a sad week for Bitcoin. We are down. How much are we down at the time of recording, David? Yeah, we had some good weeks leading up to this one. So it's no surprise that we had a bit of a pullback. We started this week at $60,000, hit a high of $66,000, but currently are at $57,000

Starting point is 00:05:29 and $800, so down about 11% on the week. So, yeah, 11%. That's not a small number. Sad music playing right now. How about Eiff? Is it saying a similar story? Yeah, yeah. Start of the week at $42,000.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Hit a high of $4,800 and is currently clocking in at just above $4,000. We were very briefly below $4,000 about an hour ago before we started recording. Right now we got $4,056, overall down 13.5% on the week. allow me sir to zoom out may i zoom out right uh please do please do let's look at it on the monthly up we're up on the monthly we're up a little bit on the monthly so we started the month at uh 3,800 still up on the monthly so you know if if you told us we would be about here a month from now that would be okay let's take a look at the three month time period so I guess we're up on the three month remember all crab season all summer we were basically an into like I guess uh

Starting point is 00:06:29 into September, we were kind of hanging in this 3K range, you know? And under 3K felt a little bit, like, sad, a little bit bearish. We were just hugging this 3K line. Now we're at 4K. So, I mean, still, like, we got a lot to be thankful for going into the Thanksgiving holidays. Two weeks ago, people were just like, please give me 4K, please give me 4K. Then we go to $4,800. And now we're back down to 4K and people like, oh, I'm so bearish.

Starting point is 00:06:56 though. The year-to-date graph that you have up right now, like it's pretty choppy, but there is a very clear up into the right trend for the entire last 12 months. And so, again, just short-term chop. And I think if you want the big picture story, we had Ben Cohen on our podcast on Tuesday of this week.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And he kind of, you know, he's the chart expert. He's the cartographer, as he said. He charts this out far into the future. So if you're looking to get a hold of where we are in the cycle, the fourth cycle, make sure you check out that episode as well. Yeah, that was a really fun episode to record. Let's talk about the ETH Bitcoin ratio, because that's something we talked about with Ben as well.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Where are we right now? Marginally down on the week. I believe last week we're at 0.072. We are clocking in at 0.07. So just down a smidge on the week. Down a smidge on the week. Not a big story there, but we continue to monitor that. Defi pulse is telling us total locked value in DFI is still above $100 billion, not

Starting point is 00:07:56 bad for sort of a bearish week. We're at 106 billion. Anything else you want to say about that? Yeah, Maker continuing to have that dominance as the number one most locked a defy app, clocking it at 16.7% of all value locked in defy. Yeah, that's pretty cool. DeFi Pulse index. So this is a list of your defy tokens. So looks like DeFi took a big tumble. It looks like a big, ooh, Ryan. Is that down 18%? Almost 19%. Yeah, start of the week about $420. Nice. Now is at $320.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Down $100. Yeah, almost 20% on the week. What happened to defy? I guess, you know what? It's still, if you zoom out on the month, it's about the same as it was a month ago. It's just because we thought we were going back into a defy season momentarily, and then this week told us otherwise. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Yeah. Big rug by the defy tokens for this last month. Like, big up and followed by big down. Sat story for a defy to. Lately, but this tells the saddest story of them all, David. You know this, you know this graph very well. You know what's coming at this point in the show. You try to strip it out of the agenda. I put it back in, sir. You don't really do that. It's okay. Ryan's talking about, of course, the DPI over ETH, the DPI-Eth ratio, which over the last

Starting point is 00:09:14 November, it's been flat. So that that 0.08 is the new floor. Well, we don't know how strong that floor is. Last time I talked about the floor, I was wrong about that. But yeah, so So it's been flat for November, clocking in at 0.08, a little bit down on the week. Wow, it's down, just like... We know, we know it's down. It just keeps going down. Let's talk about the bed, though. So this is our combo of a third Bitcoin, a third Eth, and a third DPI.

Starting point is 00:09:45 So what is this showing us this week? It's down. It's down. It's down. It started the week at $200, clocking in currently at $160, down 16% on the week. Yeah, sadness, sad music playing, down, down, down. But let's look at the happier side of things, David. One contract, that is OpenC just clocked in 100K ETH that it has burnt.

Starting point is 00:10:07 You know, we monitor the amount of EF being burnt on kind of a weekly, monthly basis. This is one single application on top of Ethereum. Of course, like the largest NFT application to date. And that application alone, OpenC, has burned over 100,000. ETH supply. Pretty insane to see these numbers. Yeah. And it's crazy. That's just one application. Granted, if you add in Uniswap V2 and V3, you actually get 108,000 eth burned if you combine those two things. But again, the point is one single contract burned over 100,000 eth, which is just crazy. I think it's interesting to look at this leaderboard by apps, right, over the full time span.

Starting point is 00:10:48 So what are the big product market fits for Ethereum today, right? Well, the first is, NFTs. You see that in OpenC. The second is uniswap, as you mentioned, that's maybe even greater than OpenSuite. So we're doing NFTs. We're doing a lot of trading. The third is actually ETH transfers. So we're sending ETH back and forth to one another. ETH, the pristine collateral, the native currency of Ethereum, the money of the Ethereum economy is actually burning a lot of ETH itself. And then the fourth is a stable coin, is Tether. I think this shows us, like if you want to capsulate, what are the product market fit use cases for crypto to date? It's like NFTs, D5, predominantly trading, eith transfers, eth payments, and stable coins. That kind of sums it up.

Starting point is 00:11:36 So it makes sense that we'd see those applications here. Actually, I'm not sure. I'm going to be offer a counterpoint because I actually don't think that that is the perfect proxy for showing product market fit because collateralized borrowing and lending is a huge product that a defy offers, that clearly has demand. And that's actually something that doesn't burn a lot of ETH by the nature of what it is, because it just doesn't require a lot of transactions, right? So you lock up a bunch of ETH one time, you borrow like USC or die one time, and then you go and do stuff.

Starting point is 00:12:05 But like that's a huge use case. There's a lot of value. Like imagine how much TVL is in DFI over $100 billion. But that doesn't necessarily actually create the incentive to make transactions on Ethereum in the way that trading and payments do. Payment, trading and payments is just simply things that have. happen in very large quantities on a reoccurring basis and therefore burns a lot of ETH. Yeah, that's a great point, David. I guess it doesn't cover everything. Certainly it doesn't

Starting point is 00:12:29 cover all of those total octalque value collateral type use cases in this metric. Let's also talk about this. Why don't you read out this tweet? It's another crazy metric that we don't often talk about. Yeah, for the listeners, there's a graph here. And the tweet says, crazy metric that I haven't heard anyone talk about. EIP-159 has now burned more tokens than Ethereum miners currently hold. miners generally hold the assets that they are mining because they generally believe in the things that they're mining rather than just being pure profit. But as you can see, the amount of community of ether being burnt is just like skyrocketing in relation to actual miners being holding onto ether. And so it's just a kind of a cool comparison, cool metric.

Starting point is 00:13:10 This feels like forced hoddling by the network itself, right? Like all that orange amount of ether being burnt is like ether, Ethereum itself, the protocol putting ether. in the piggy bank for a rainy day, right? And this is really what EIP-1-559 is. It's locking in revenue so that it makes ether more scarce so that when it becomes time to actually subsidize security, we actually have like reserves to actually subsidize security for. Of course, this also means gas fees continue to go up. So average gas fees, I believe like the month of October and into November, were like higher than they ever have been. So people transacting on MayNet are feeling the squeeze for sure. And that's why hopefully layer two is coming. And I, you know, I believe it's

Starting point is 00:13:54 coming. We're seeing it coming. But hopefully it gets here quickly. We have some layer two things to talk about. So we will dive into that subject later. Well, let's talk about when's the best time actually to do an Ethereum transaction on Mainnet. Yeah, this is a fantastic, fun little, fun fact, which are my favorite kind of facts. This is Mark Andre Dumas, who I believe still works at Maker Dow, a really big data guy. And he says, Ethereum Base Feet, which is the gas price, is on average 8% higher at the top of the hour, so you should schedule your transactions accordingly, meaning that the last 10 minutes of an hour, like 250 to 259, is actually there's 8% lower gas fees on average. And if you want to click that little image, Ryan, you can see

Starting point is 00:14:38 the data here. Apparently, there's just a surge in demand in the first like 15 to 20 minutes that tapers off for the rest of the hour. So that's an interesting little tidbit. People have their transactions scheduled for the top of the hour for some reason. That's kind of weird, huh? Yeah, I wonder why that happens. But you know what? I read this report this week. You know, Bitcoin's stock to flow model that has been quite popular in terms of predicting

Starting point is 00:15:02 Bitcoin's price? Somebody actually put together a flows-based price projection for Ethereum, which is super interesting. And this is the graph they came up with. This is flows based on a price model with and without EIT. 1559. So the without EIP 1559 is shaded in this red portion. The width EIP 1559 is shaded in this blue portion. And then they went as so far as to estimate what this looks like, kind of like a long-term theoretical price model on a flows-based calculation post the merge. So when issuance on the proof of

Starting point is 00:15:40 work chain goes away, drops from like four to quarter percent all the way to zero. And all we have is issuance on the proof of stake chain, which is like also, of course, you have to subtract the IP 1559 and the fee burn for that. What's this going to look like? And the model tries to predict pricing. And it predicts pricing as of like July, let's say the merge happens in July of next year, which might be about right. It feels like maybe not too conservative. It feels probably about right. Anyway, price for July 2022. should be oscillating around 65,000 eath at that point in time. And this, again, is if you just use a stock-to-flow kind of theoretical pricing model,

Starting point is 00:16:29 which takes into account all of the new supply that is getting injected into the market, and you kind of model that out. So what's super interesting to me, David, is just this is still another, is yet another indication that it's not priced in. Okay, like the merge, proof of stake, everything that's happening on Ethereum, I still feel like whether we're at 4,000, 3,000, 5,000th, 8,000th, 10,000th, maybe it's still not priced in. I mean, like, you guys can read this report for yourself and see what you think. There's some other interesting graphics from it as well, including this one, which is actually one of my favorite most bullish charts for going bankless. This is the amount of ether on exchanges. And over the last 16 months, there's been a 36% decrease of ether on centralized

Starting point is 00:17:22 exchanges. And it's going somewhere. It's going to staking contracts, going in smart contracts, going in, you know, D5 protocols, is going off of exchanges. And that is a good thing for bankless. So I don't know. What's your take? Do you think this stuff is priced in?

Starting point is 00:17:37 Are we like, I mean, why isn't the market? reacting to this because, you know, somebody told me the other day, hey, Ryan, none of this is secret information, right? What you guys are saying, like, people know that the merge is happening. People know that there's this supply shock. I mean, it's not just bankless saying this now. It's others who are saying it. It's a well-known public fact. Has the market priced this in yet or not? Oh, I don't think the market has ever priced anything about Ethereum in. Like, what Ethereum is, it's so hard to, like, completely understand. And, like, yeah, a lot of people are talking about like the whole modular blockchain, how Ethereum over its time will ultimately become a platform that sells its space to other blockchains, not to other humans or individuals or funds or whatever. And like that's the most sustainable form of revenue of all time when you're like other blockchains are your primary clients. And like maybe people look at that $65,000 ether price and they just goff and like, that's too ridiculous. That's too crazy. Why are you in crypto in the first place if that's what you think?

Starting point is 00:18:40 This is what our industry is crazy. Do you know crypto? Have you been here? How long have you been here exactly? We're here for the craziness, right? And so... But the craziness is commonplace. I mean, it would be crazier to expect not crazy things.

Starting point is 00:18:55 Yes, that is true. This is absolutely true. And like, humans are not very good at understanding or thinking in exponentials. And so, like, it takes some time to wrap your head around. This isn't a 2x game. This is a 10x game, right? And this isn't happening over a decade. This is happening over like one to three years.

Starting point is 00:19:15 And so like when I see the $65,000 ETH price act, I'll be shocked just like the next person just because it's a shocking number. But like it's also kind of expected. Well, and this this model specifically is kind of interesting because it's just based on issuance, right? It's based on you hold demand constant and then you decrease issuance by the amount it's about to decrease. And you model that out and you see what happens. And this is what happens. Right? So like unless demand spikes all the way down, this is kind of going to be what happens, guys. Like, I don't know. I mean, I guess we'll have to see nothing is certain, but it does feel very underpriced to me. But David, let's go back down memory lane. We were talking about previous markets and previous runs. Bertie nomnomnom.com put together, like apparently this person has been taking a screenshot of coinmarketcap.com for the past like five or six years. and putting them together.

Starting point is 00:20:11 And what's super interesting, here's November 2016. Look at the market caps here. That's crazy. Let me read some of this out. Bitcoin, $12 billion in market capital, only $12 billion. What is it now? It's well over a trillion, right? Yeah, it's well over a trillion.

Starting point is 00:20:27 Yeah, individual Bitcoin clocking in at $747. Ether, $9.53. This is 2016. Could you imagine? What were you doing in 2016? at this time. Working in social services. Really?

Starting point is 00:20:44 This is like, and then, okay, ripple clocking in a number three. And then light coin, Minero, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Auger, NEM, Madesafe coin. Okay, which ones are still left standing?

Starting point is 00:20:55 I guess, light coin. Is light coin even in the top 10? It's not in the top 10. No, I think it's in top 30 now. Yeah. We had a crazy year in 2017. Look at the market cap increase.

Starting point is 00:21:07 $124 billion for Bitcoin. Ethereum number two, and then Bitcoin Cash number three. Yeah. We still have ripple there, still light coins. Do you remember Dash? Do you remember Iota? I do remember Iota, yeah. Full run.

Starting point is 00:21:20 Minero's still there. Neo, Nem, like, what are these things? Do they even exist anymore? Relegated to history. Neo was like the Ethereum of China. Yeah, that was his brand. Yeah, the Ethereum of China. Like, forgetting that like these are based on the internet, not domiciled in countries.

Starting point is 00:21:35 Do you remember Iota, 2017? Do you remember something called Adela? Dag. Yeah. The DAG trade was my biggest trade. I made my first big trade on Iota and I rotated that right into Rayblocks. And those were my two big wins of 2017. I remember.

Starting point is 00:21:51 Rayblocks. Wow. That is memory. Now branded as Nano. Dash was the interesting privacy coin at the time. It was master nodes and privacy coins and that was like the future. None of those things are now a big deal. But here is 2018, very sad.

Starting point is 00:22:07 You know, 2018 was in the depths here. Look at 2018 chart. It's Bitcoin first, not Ethereum second. Ripple number two. Ripple came in second for a brief moment in time, yeah. And in hindsight, that was like a great bottom signal. Then stellar. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:24 Then still Bitcoin Cash. And then Eos, our friend Eos jumping on the scene. Lightcoin, tether. Cardano making an appearance. Minero. And we got 2019. Cardano, still in the currently in the same state that it was all the way back then. Really?

Starting point is 00:22:39 Are you talking about from a developer perspective, dude? Are you talking about from a position perspective? No, the developer, like the state of the blockchain hasn't changed since, since like 2017, whatever. Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, this is 2019. Here is 2020. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether. Finally some changes. Yeah, chain link makes it up there.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Pocod makes it up there. But other than that, still kind of the same thing. And then here we are. Now, here we are just last week. Bitcoin number one, Ethereum number two. Binance coin first time it's making an appearance. Tether's still on there, of course. Solana first time at number five making an appearance. Cardano is still hanging out there. XRP goes from number two, three years ago, four years ago, no, three years ago, all the way down

Starting point is 00:23:23 to number seven, but still in the top ten, right? Still crazily in the top ten, yeah. Pocod. Then we have USC, which makes sense. And then Dogecoin. You know, it's weird to see Dogecoin in the top ten, like why is a meme in the top ten? But then if you look back at all the other years that we just look back on, I was like, oh, okay, like, I guess by comparison, like, Dogecoin is welcome to be in the top 10. So what are the takeaways from this? Okay?

Starting point is 00:23:46 It's like, one of my takeaways is just like, look at the things that have stayed the same and look at the things that have changed. The things that have stayed the same are Bitcoin, Ethereum, like, decentralization. Number two, right? The most decentralized money protocols still holding the number one and number two slots. I feel like under that, it's like, it's like Bitcoin. It's churn. Ether and all the narratives. Yep.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Right? Like all the narrative friends that you bring along with you, every single like bull or bus cycle. XRP is the banking coin. Like Cardano, I don't know what the narrative is, has a partnership with Africa, stuff like that. I mean you could make the argument instead of Eos, we have Solana. Some people might say that, right? It's like I realize Salana is different than Eos. It's kind of a different thing, but it's a similar narrative.

Starting point is 00:24:36 It feels the same niche. It's a similar narrative. Cardano's still there. It's just hanging on by the pure willpower of Charles Hotskinson, I guess. Pocodot, another kind of Eith killer. But we've seen many of these narratives play out in previous cycles. Just the players tend to change. But the things that stay the same are like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:24:57 Any other lessons from this for us? I'm looking forward to what this looks like in 2022. Yeah. That's the one that's hardest to predict, of course. MetaMask, doing big things. They just hit 21 million, I believe, monthly active users. Or 21 million, sorry, MetaMask users total, which is absolutely insane. And that is monthly active users.

Starting point is 00:25:21 So congrats to MetaMask for that. And the 21, as in 21 million Bitcoin, they kind of just made a show out of the 21 million. Ah, that's why that's 21. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. What's this, David? This is Hayden Adams talking about it. a new pool. Yeah, so this is pretty cool. Uniswap v3 launched with three fee tiers, 1%, 0.3% and 0.1%, I think.

Starting point is 00:25:43 And then Uniswap governance actually added in a fourth fee tier of 0.01%, which is specifically meant for the most stablest of stable coins, right? And so the 0.01% USDC to USDT pool is currently doing $100 million in volume on only $15 million worth. of stable coin lockup, which is absolutely crazy. Just a capital efficiency there is absolutely insane. And this is, in my mind, stable coins, the fees for stable coin swaps just being collapsed to zero. It is basically going to be free to swap stable coins. 0.01% is basically nothing. And it's gone from, I think if you scroll down, Ryan, and I think this was a quote tweet, maybe it wasn't. This went from the stable coin trading pairs on one inch, which is the

Starting point is 00:26:31 Dex Aggregator, it went from like, I think 10% Uniswop dominated volume, and then probably the other dominant volume was curve. And I think it went up to something like 95% Uniswap volume. So like this move after V3, after the adoption of this 0.01% fee tier stable coin pool. So Uniswap, starting to like corner the stable coin swapping market. What's interesting here, though, is like, does this worry you if you're a uni holder, right? Because that's less fees that you can potentially extract through. through your governance token, right? It's like it's collapsing the margins,

Starting point is 00:27:05 the profits down to zero. It's way more volume. So, yes, it's one-tenth the fees, but I think it's roughly 10 times the volume. Interesting. So the argument is you make it up in volume there. And I guess the big thing here is like, how can other exchanges,

Starting point is 00:27:22 maybe more centralized exchanges, compete with those kind of margins, right? You know swap can do that because it's a protocol. That's exactly right. Guys, we are going to be right back with some of the hot releases for the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Macha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common eth and wrapped Bitcoin pairs,

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Starting point is 00:29:37 Follow Alchemics on Twitter at AlchemicsFI and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemics V-2 and to get involved in governance. All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. The first is this, Polygon, continuing to add solutions to its network. It just added Polygon Midden. Midden is a Stark-based EVM-compatible roll-up. It's really cool.

Starting point is 00:30:01 So you might have heard the term ZK roll-up. That's effectively what this is, and it's general purpose. So it's EVM-compatible. Polygon is adding that to its arsenal. It's like toolkit of different solutions along with. We've talked about Polygon Nightfall. Of course, it has this proof of stake chain right now. Hermes is another ZK type of solution.

Starting point is 00:30:23 It's just added this. Midin apparently is like open source as well. So it's from a former Facebook ZK researcher who led the development of Winterfell, which is a Facebook project. And what's cool about this, David, is I feel like Polygon has long committed to being more than like just side chain technology. And now it's moving into kind of a roll-up sort of design. And now it's definitively moving in that direction in big ways.

Starting point is 00:30:53 I love to see this. Yeah, Polygon proving just to be an absolute gargantuan in this space, kind of gobbling up every single, you know, scaling startup that they can buy. So just absolutely crushing it on the BD front. Yeah, and we'll have to find out a bit more about this Miden solution compared to like, you know, the Matter Labs, CKSink, and also what Starkware is cooking up. Because as of now, I don't really know the similarities or differences, but that's going to be content that you're going to find on bank lists in the future for, sure. Vitalik Buterin said good things about it as well, which is nice to see. David, Argent, smart contract browser or smart contract wallet, I should say. Looks like they are investing in ZK roll-ups as well. What's happening here? Yeah, we talked about this, I think last week or the

Starting point is 00:31:41 week before, but Argent working on their own version of their smart contract wallet, but putting it on the Starknet, the ZK Sync, which I think is just like the right place to put Argent. interestingly in this tweet, Argent says, coming to a browser near you very soon, which is different because they're historically only in a mobile app. So having a browser-based Argent is interesting. That makes actually a ton of sense because, I mean, I do all of my D-Fi stuff on a browser.

Starting point is 00:32:09 I don't know about you. Doing it on a phone sounds really, really cumbersome. So cool. I'm excited to see this coming out to Argent. Yeah, absolutely. Arj has been kind of quiet, quietly building for a while. So I'm excited for the next release from them. I think it's going to be big.

Starting point is 00:32:22 Metamask and Ledger are working. together seamlessly again. That is good news. Right. On Chrome in particular, I believe. So what do you have to do? Update MetaMask to the latest version. Update your ledger firmware, which is kind of a pain,

Starting point is 00:32:37 but you have to do that from time to time anyway. And what do you get in return? A smoother signing flow. So right now, like Ledger and MetaMask is pretty clunky if you're using Chrome. And not only did they announce this fix, which is great for that problem. but they also announced a partnership between MetaMask and Ledger so that they're going to be cooperating more and collaborating more to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again and that they continue to improve the user experience because it's just kind of like you're using

Starting point is 00:33:10 both, right? You're not just using one or the other. You can't just use Ledger to do all your D5 stuff and you don't necessarily just want to use Metamask. You need both. So it makes a lot of sense that these two companies are talking to figure out how to make it work. more seamlessly. Yep, I agree. Happy to see it. What's this, David? Another wallet. Yeah, Brave wallet, a browser-native crypto wallet with no extension required. So on the other side of things, Brave is building out basically their own version of MetaMass. Brave is, for those that don't know, a privacy-focused browser. Very, very part, big part of the crypto story, I think, because it's kind of using crypto ethos, but not in a way that is cryptocurrency, right? It's just a

Starting point is 00:33:50 Brave browser. They do have the Bat token integrated for ad payments, but kind of like a self-sovereign browser. And now they have their own native Brave wallet inside of the Brave app. So Brave, in addition to having this like privacy first, user-first browser are also putting, you know, defy and crypto-native infrastructure right into the browser itself. Better wallet options are like one of the biggest user experience things that we can do for crypto at this point in time. So it's great to see more more entrance in the space. David, a really cool report just came out. Why don't you talk about this for a minute? Yeah, this is the Bitwise Defi report. And so they, Bitwise, again, the company that is funneling, what I just call boomer, funneling boomer money into our defy assets. They are set up a bunch of

Starting point is 00:34:34 trusts. They have their defy index, their Eth index, Polygon Index, for people that want to gain access to crypto exposure, but want to do it from the comfort of their own brokerage. They released a decentralized finance, a primer for professional. investors. So this is, I've read this, it's about nine pages long, perfect length, not too short, not too long, and just really is a very hard-hitting analysis about DFI. And so if you have a friend, a family member who wears a tie, this is, this is the report to send them. This is the report you send to people who wear ties. Serious people who wear ties. Very serious who take their jobs very, very seriously. And they put on a suit and tie every single day when they go to work and talk

Starting point is 00:35:16 about money and finance. If that, if you know somebody like that, this is the report to send to them because this is the language that they speak. This is in a format that they're comfortable with. This isn't some guy in a Spider-Man t-shirt on a YouTube shirt telling you about Defi. This is people that can speak the same language. So this is a fantastic report for yourself, read it yourself because they just unpacked Defi very, very well and then send it to your friends and family, especially when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner time. Yeah, start here. They'll make their way to bankless eventually, but like it's a weaning process, all right? It gets, it gets, it takes some time to get used to the Spider-Man costumes in the huddies. Let's talk about this too. The rug just came

Starting point is 00:35:55 out with a new addition. What is the rug, David? Yeah, and start contrast to what we were just talking about, a professional defy report. The rug is a product out of bankless Dow. So think of the onion plus defy, the onion plus crypto. So some of these headlines in here are just absolutely hilarious. I'll read some of these out. The Museum of Modern Art announces closure following total loss in a right-click save-as attack. I thought that was pretty funny. On the left, there are a couple quick headlines. U.S. regulators drop lawsuit after Celsius changes its name to Fahrenheit. Top 10 seed phrases of all time. It's just a nice, I think this is going to come out weekly, I think. I don't know how often they plan on doing this, but basically just like a fake

Starting point is 00:36:38 fake newspaper that is a bunch of satirical headlines and, you know, bankless doubt, putting the funny into crypto, which is very, very needed. What I think is cool, in addition to this content is they're actually like selling these. So like there's 69 copies of these things. Nice. The first edition. Yeah. And they all sold out. So it's like your traditional newspaper. And it's only like the homepage. You're buying it as kind of a memento as a collectible. But it's, It's kind of cool that people are into this idea and are funding it by purchasing these subscriptions.

Starting point is 00:37:12 So I think the next one might come out in December, David. This is right. Like it looks like November 2021. Oh, these monthly? Fantastic. No, I'm not looking forward to all of these. Yeah. So if you, if you, I think there's a Twitter account.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Yeah, there's a Twitter account. So the rug news, you can go follow the rug news on Twitter. And if you just think of like your shower thoughts, having a shower, think of a funny headline. Just tweet it at the rug. Yeah. Maybe like all it takes is you to have a funny idea, funny satir, idea. You just need a headline, right? And so just tweet at the Rugg News out on Twitter. That's awesome. Let's get to raise this, David. The big one of the week, consensus just closed

Starting point is 00:37:47 $200 million. They're raising at a $3.2 billion valuation consensus. Of course, a startup from Joe Lubbins, no longer startups, large company, creators of MetaMask, many other things in the Ethereum ecosystem. And this is a pretty big raise for them. So yeah, congrats on that. Any comments here. Yeah, consensus, very famously, we kind of joke about this with the Ethereum people, but like consensus was kind of like the cause of the ether bear market because they kept having to dump all this ether to pay for payroll. And so there were dark times at consensus. There were people getting laid off and cut all the time. And now, and consensus made it through the winter. And they are now raising $200 million at a $3.2 billion valuation. So congrats to

Starting point is 00:38:31 Joe Lubin and everyone that made it through. That was a rough gamut. The bear market was not friendly. But again, like figure it out how to turn a profit, not just with MetaMask, but with a number of other products as well. So extremely well deserved. I'm glad you guys made it through. It's funny. It's not too long ago either. That was like two years ago and all of that stuff was going on. Now here we are with a $200 million raise. Going from dumping like $50 million of ether at like $200 down to raising $200 million at $3.2 valuation in two years. That's pretty crazy. At 24 months. This is another, I think, exciting headline. that you wouldn't have seen back then, but it's commonplace now.

Starting point is 00:39:09 Paradigm is raising another fund, a $2.5 billion fund. I think this is the biggest crypto fund to date. It's a crypto Web 3 fund. And Paradigm, of course, is an investment group that we think a lot of. And Matt Huang is announcing this raise. Any comments on this? Yeah, Paradigm is, it's a very special fund, I would say, because they aren't just a typical fund that invests in startup.

Starting point is 00:39:36 They also have very deep involvement with the startups that they fund. Like, Paradime basically wrote Unoswap v3 from what I've heard through the rumor mail. And some of the people in there, we've had Dan Robinson on the podcast. They've got Hazu, they've got Sam C-San. They've got Georgios, they've got Anosh. They have so many just like... They have builders. They have huge builders, right?

Starting point is 00:39:56 And so, like, not only are the partners and the people that work at Paradigm good at their jobs of, like, figuring out where to invest in, but they also build their own stuff. And so it's this very hands-on fund. I don't think we've seen a fund like this ever before in history. And so congratulations. Everyone in the Ethereum world really, really likes paradigm. That's a lot of money, too. It's a lot of money.

Starting point is 00:40:17 It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Yeah. You know, what do you do with all that money at this point in time? This is no wonder we're seeing, like, private valuations for many of these startups, like just go through the roof these days. Starkware as well, talk about raises that are through the roof. Double unicorn now.

Starting point is 00:40:35 They're valued at $2 billion. This is, of course, the Ethereum ZK layer 2 solution. They just raised $50 million more dollars. It's quite a valuation, but wow, they've got quite a product right now, right? So, like, they do diversify. They do DYDX. This is the technology behind Immutable. If we're right about this modular blockchain thesis, then this technology will be core

Starting point is 00:41:00 to scaling out Ethereum into the future. So excited about that. raise and congrats to them. Actually, they'll be coming on the podcast on Tuesday. So, David, we'll have to talk to them about this raise and learn a little bit more about their product roadmap. But they are launching a really exciting new version of Starknet, I believe it's called, which is an EVM compatible ZK roll-up chain, which is like, I thought this thing would be coming out a year from now. And it looks like we are pretty close right now. So it's really cool to see this raise. What are your takes? Nothing too much other than that, but really excited to

Starting point is 00:41:39 unpack a lot of subjects with them on Tuesday. What's gallery, David? This is another raise for the week. Yeah, so for those that watched our DC investor NFT portfolio episode a while ago, when we were sharing screen and going through DC's investor, we were using Gallery. And so Gallery is a startup that is focusing on making an online gallery for all of your NFTs. They just raised $2.69 million. Nice. And well, I actually met some of the founders at NFT NYC, really nice guys. And I'm actually still working up on setting up my own gallery. I just have to figure out how to get these goddamn fidenza rocks out of my

Starting point is 00:42:14 NFT wallet. But yeah, congratulations to them. If you are looking for something to display your NFTs, a web page, check out Gallery. Use Gallery on Twitter. Yeah, I think you can filter those out, David, with Gallery. I know. You have to display this. I made a joke, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:42:31 Let me have it. I was going to say, like, okay, send those to the answers. Anthony Sisona or something. Just bomb his wallet with those Fadenza rocks. And then publicly shame him, okay? Yeah, definitely. Jobs time. This is the part of the episode where we tell you to get a job in crypto.

Starting point is 00:42:47 You haven't already done so. Where we bully you about your Web 2 job until you get a Web 3 job. If it's not a crypto job, David, it's a Web 2 job. That's exactly right. That's the binary. Old world job. Okay, don't you want your crypto renaissance job? These are the jobs of the week.

Starting point is 00:43:02 Community ecosystem lead. at D-YD-X. That's a D-YD-X foundation with that hire. Bitwise, we're just talking about those guys. They're doing a crypto research analyst, an NFT specialist role. They also need a smart contracts platform and web three analysts. Those seem like dream jobs to me. A governance specialist as well at Bitwise. A head of growth at Dex Guru, a technical lead at Draftly and accountant at Smart Defi, also a product manager, head of Ethereum research at Immutable, ahead of tokens, community manager at Dexible, lead engineer at Hatsdot Finance. That community manager role looks like it's still up from Eagramum, a CTO from Eagronom as well. Senior backend engineer,

Starting point is 00:43:43 SmartDFI, blockchain technical CTO as well for merit. Community manager, Aragon, founding blockchain engineer at highlight. I think I'm at the end, David, but it's not the end of this list. There are so many more jobs. There are so many more jobs. We are just reading off the top ones. There's actually, I think, like 10 new jobs from Gontlet. I think if you scroll down, Gontland, it is a Tarun. Oh my gosh. Tarun's company, a very big brain person to work for. And so like data engineer, engineering manager, go check out bankless. dot palette.

Starting point is 00:44:13 Dot XYZ slash jobs. There's a link in the show notes. Go find yourself a job. We've literally curated a fantastic selection of jobs for you. Go find one. Just go pick one. Yeah. And then go sign up so somebody can mail you this.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Team lead at the Ethereum Foundation. Like, come on. That's got to be one of the most prestigious jobs of all time. Dave is about to quit his bankless job. he's preparing his resume as we speak. All right, David, you want to talk news items? Let's talk about this one. The first is Constitution Dow.

Starting point is 00:44:42 Okay? What's this story? What's going on here? Apparently, a Dow is buying the Constitution. And this is just, I think we're going to see. You can buy the Constitution? I didn't know that you could buy the Constitution. I did not know that it was for sale.

Starting point is 00:44:53 Turns out there's like 11 of them. It's like 11 copies of the Constitution. And there's only one privately owned one. And that one is going up for auction on Sutherbees. and so a DAO was spun up to try to do exactly what Pleaser Dow did with the Uniswop animation. The DAO was spun up to funnel a bunch of money into the Dow so they could buy the Constitution. And I think the Constitution was something like $20 million and the Constitution Dow has already raised, I think, like $40 million, or at least 30 last I checked, over $40 million. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:24 So well over the amount of money that they need to buy the Constitution Dow, which, by the way, is the same thing that happened to Pleaser Dow. Like, they've raised much more money than they needed to buy the Uniswop GIFT. There's a Uniswop animation. And that extra money is what turned it into, like, a system that actually kept on going and going, going. And so this has drummed up a ton of excitement, a ton of hype. There's already something like over 10,000 people in the Discord. And so this has just gotten a ton of attention. And it's got a fantastic beam behind it because it kind of feels like we're going to steal the

Starting point is 00:45:56 decoration of independence, right? It's kind of like a little national treasure style. A little natural treasure. Nicholas Cage? We're going to buy the Constitution. So there's definitely some memeiness going on. And overall, I think it's just kind of a fun story. Like, yo, look what crypto can do.

Starting point is 00:46:09 It can buy the goddamn constitution. In seven days. In seven days. Like, what can your non-cry thingy thingy that you care about do? Not that. And what's cool about this too, right? So it's the story of a raise very quickly and the collaborative power of the internet plus a capital pool plus a Dow plus finance, right?

Starting point is 00:46:28 But it's also a story of like giving the Constitution back to the people, right? Because what is it now? Well, it's open. It's permissionless. Anyone can contribute. You want it in on this. You could contribute like $50, $100. And you would literally own a portion of the Constitution.

Starting point is 00:46:45 That is governance rights for the Constitution. What are they doing with this document? I believe they plan to like put it in a museum somewhere on display. But governance gets to vote on what they do with this document as well. So it's really powerful from that perspective. I think there's a powerful symbolism here too, right? Like, what's the mean power of the people's document that, like, the original decentralized governance protocol for a nation state?

Starting point is 00:47:11 I think that has some mean power here too. I wasn't sure whether they were going to make it, though, David. So I did this, I, you know, put a little money towards this on, like, Monday. And at the time, it was just like there was $2 million, something like this. And they thought they needed at least $20. million for this bid. And I was like, oh, I don't know. And I kept checking back on Wednesday, it was like, they were like five million. And then like, and then suddenly, boom, last minute, things shot up. It's over 40 million. The auction actually happens at the time of recording. We're

Starting point is 00:47:43 recording this on a Thursday at 630 this evening. So by the time this comes out to you, the auction will have already happened. And fingers crossed, Constitution Dow has enough capital to actually buy this thing. So they haven't for sure received it at the time of recording, but they certainly have enough money to make probably the most enticing bid that's out there. And that's why this story is super cool. And there's a, again, lessons to be pulled from the Pleaser Dow story where as soon as the bidder that Pleaser Dow was in a bidding war against, realized that they were going up against a Dow that kind of, in theory, had unlimited cash flows because more and more cash kept on going into the Dow to purchase the thing, then the person that Pleaser Dow was in a bidding war,

Starting point is 00:48:25 capitulated. It's like, I don't know how much it's on the other side of the thing, right? I'm done. I can't go against the entire internet. Right. That's exactly right. And so like whoever's going up against, like, they know whoever wants to buy this thing, they know they have to at least put up $40 million because that's how much the Constitution Dow has. So like they, the Constitution Dow might have just scared off bidders by by the very nature of its own existence, right? Which is kind of cool. Yeah. On the other hand, I suppose the person who's conducting the, the, the person who's conducting the bid knows exactly how deep the pockets and the Constitution down are. That's also true.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Because it's public and transparent. So that is maybe a downside of this method. Right. They could bid it right up to like $39 million. And then, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, this is going to be funny story. Early days, though, right?

Starting point is 00:49:10 It's early days. But the fact that this is possible is kind of cool. And like, to your point, I had no idea that there were like, you said 11. There's between 11 and 13 copies of the Constitution. Apparently, most of them are museums where there's like this one that is still private. Somebody bought it in the 1980s. and is now selling it on Sotheby's auctions. So kind of cool, neat piece of history, I think, and we'll see what happens.

Starting point is 00:49:34 Hopefully, good news for the Constitution Dow coming later this evening. By the time you listen to this, you'll have to look up to see if they actually got the Constitution or not. And hopefully this ends up as just like a nice PR story about crypto where people will hear about this on the news, be like, oh, a bunch of people bought the Constitution. That's kind of weird. and maybe they'll start to connect some dots about what crypto can do. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:49:58 I think that's what it is for sure. Let's talk about this. Speaking of connecting dots or connecting communities here, maybe, there was a governance proposal put in place from the Fay community, which has the tribe token and the Rari community to merge those two tokens, those two communities together. A tribe and Rari merger or a Faye and Rari merger, I guess it makes a Ferrari.

Starting point is 00:50:21 Is the meme here, David? Nice. What's happening here? Yeah, so this is, I think, a first of its kind where two tokens are going to be collapsed into one token and two very different products are going to start to build more intimately with each other. Rari is like a super set of compound where you can make your own borrowing and lending markets. Fay is a stable coin.

Starting point is 00:50:41 And apparently, these actually are really, really complimentary. I'm a little bit fuzzy on the details of how that works, but it's because I'm not terribly intimately knowledgeable about both of these things. But when it comes to different protocols, having significantly overlapping surface area where, you know, this is complementary. This is the same pattern that we know with normal mergers. This is why companies merge in the first place. Now it's just happening with tokens. So this is very much uncharted territory.

Starting point is 00:51:07 So an interesting experiment. We're going to have to see how this plays out. And we should say this hasn't happened yet and it may not happen. So the next step here is this is really just a governance proposal. and it's up to the community, the Rari voters, and I would imagine the Faye voters, to actually thumbs up or thumbs down this. And there has been some pushback. This is posted Rari governance forms from the Rari community saying, hey, I don't know if this is a good deal for Rari. I don't know if it makes sense at this market price to be kind of merging with tribe. There are different

Starting point is 00:51:41 holders. Like the Faye protocol came with a bunch of VCs, and the Rari token has been primarily fair launch. So it's still TBD on whether this is actually going to happen, but it's an interesting story nonetheless. The idea of two protocols merging together and creating potentially something bigger is something that we haven't really seen in Defi, and I expect we'll see more of. This is another thing, David, I expect we'll see more of more big brands minting NFTs. What's happening with Adidas here? So this is, this poem is titled Adidas Original, Our Future Started Here. So November 17th, which is yesterday.

Starting point is 00:52:17 There's a POAP for apparently a virtual online meeting that Adidas issued. So cool. Unexpected. But let's see where this goes. Why do I not? Look for these opportunities, attend these events, I guess, is a message. And interesting to see brands getting into POAPs, which was once a very obscure part of the Ethereum ecosystem and is now going mainstream, oddly enough. Congratulations, Patricio.

Starting point is 00:52:44 Yeah. Hubei is now allowing Hwobi. Wobi. Did I say Hube? Huobi. It's hard to say. Partnering with ZK Sync, this is the team behind Matterlaps to provide a faster and cheaper

Starting point is 00:52:58 blockchain experience. What does this mean, David? Does this mean they are going to provide, is this to do with their exchange or is this something else? On an off-rams, yeah. On an off-ramps. Yeah, withdrawals of your crypto assets onto ZKSink directly from Huobi. So Robe has a strategic partnership. I think they invested in MatterLab, ZKSink.

Starting point is 00:53:21 And so they are, and now obviously because of that incentive alignment, they are allowing for withdrawals right onto that layer two, which is the future we want. Exchanges should be allowing users where they want to be dropped off on. Like, do you want to be dropped off on optimism? Do you want to be dropped off on Arbitrum? Do you want to be dropped off on ZK Sync? Where do you want to go? Because the Ethereum L1 is not going to be, is already not a friendly place for humans, it's only going to get even more hostile to humans. You don't want to start. That's, starting in just like the level 99 areas of the metaverse, right? You want to start on like tutorials where there's low gas fees and instantaneous transactions. And so this is the future.

Starting point is 00:53:59 All exchanges are eventually going to allow people to offload themselves onto layer two's. This is just one part of that story. I guess there's two pieces here, right? One is like from our conversation with Coinbase. Like Coinbase is going in that direction too. Like Brian Armstrong said, we've got some stuff in the pipeline. So I expect work based to make some announcements. some announcements here soon about this. This is really the bridge that most users will enter crypto using. It'll be direct from exchange, Fiat, directly to a roll-up rather than to the Ethereum Mainnet. The other point here, I think, is interesting is like, you know, Ethereum can't, it's a protocol, right? So it doesn't do its own business development. It's like the internet. There's no,

Starting point is 00:54:35 like, we're the marketing team for TCPI, please build on our protocol, right? There's nothing, I know there's the Ethereum Foundation, but they don't really put partnerships. in place. They're not doing like business development. They're there for like education to support the research. These roll-up teams are really the business development function of Ethereum. I got this from your conversation with Robbie from Immutable, right? Like how many game studios is in social networks is immutable talking to you now? And they are really doing the the marketing business development job to start onboarding the large exchanges and large companies to crypto. So it's really cool to see that function start to take place. And it's necessary if we're going to onboard the rest of the

Starting point is 00:55:21 world to establish these partnerships and have some good business development. 100%. All right. What's this next one, David? This is Anthony. Yeah, last week, the Optimism EVM equivalent version of Optimism went live. And now you can see in the Optimism Discord a bunch of notifications for different projects. Finally, whitelisted to optimism. So this is optimism opening up the gates for projects to get whitelisted. We see Gnosis, no, Gnosis, NOSIS, Curve, Connect, Synapse protocol, UMA, D-Hedge, OptiPunks, Poly Network, bit BTC, flux protocol, just whitelisting after white listing after white listing. So optimism really becoming more and more aggressive with onboarding more and more teams.

Starting point is 00:56:03 And I couldn't be more excited for it. The theme park is opening now. The rides are invited in. and there's going to be more operational. That's what that means. What about this, David? There's some NFT stuff going on. Jimmy Fallon. Is this Beeple on Jimmy Fallon?

Starting point is 00:56:18 That's Beeple on Jimmy Fallon. Yeah, where also, Jimmy Fallon also announced that he bought a board eight. So this is, again, NFT is just going and taking Ethereum into the mainstream more than Defi ever could have. And so now we have Beeple, who's, you know, the richest artist of all time, I think, at least in terms of sales, now on Jimmy Fallon.

Starting point is 00:56:39 And Jimmy Fallon is talking about how he bought it board eight. This is so interesting because like defy could never do this, right? Nobody wants to hear some finance person talking about like tokenized derivatives on the Jimmy Fallon show. But they are happy to listen to an artist like people talking about NFTs. Could you imagine just like one of us being on Jimmy Fallon talking about, okay, so Uniswap opened up a 0.01% exchange pool and it's doing a ton of volume. Nerd alert. Change the channel. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:57:06 Yeah. It wouldn't happen, right? This is why NFTs have massively expanded the surface area of Ethereum into the into the culture. Is this Jimmy Fallon? There's his board ape. Yeah, heart glasses, sailor cap, sailor shirt. Is this a good one? I don't know enough.

Starting point is 00:57:20 I have no clue. I'm not an ape person myself. I actually heard an interesting take about apes last night where apes are very, very pop culture versus cryptopunks, which are very, very crypto culture. And so I think if you see that line, like the chain smokers, they are a bored ape person, Jimmy Fallon, Bored 8 person, a few others. But then granted, there's some other things. Like Jay-Z, he has a Cryptopunk, right?

Starting point is 00:57:42 And a few other rappers have Cryptopunk. But it's interesting to see the dividing line between, like, the ape culture and the punk culture. Yeah, that it is. Different, like, different groups kind of jumping in, right? So this is more like the NFT for celebrities, would you say? Whereas Cryptopunks are like NFTs for the OGs, anyone who wants to project that OG status? Yeah, but there's definitely a ton of celebrities with Cryptopunks too, right? Steve Aoki, in addition to Jay-Z, a few.

Starting point is 00:58:06 other ones. Different feel, though. The two communities have a different feel. Huge different feel. Yeah. And I'm very much legitimizing board Ates by putting them into the same conversation as Cryptoons, which they have no, no deserved belonging to be in the same conversation. So you're all welcome if you own a Bored Ape for me even talking about Apes in the same breath.

Starting point is 00:58:25 Wow, that is some punk maximism right here. Have you know bankless listeners, I am the neutral party here, okay? So like no ape, no Cryptopunk, great. I just like, I mean the Turtle Party? Yes, that's right. Yeah, we're slow to everything, guys. But, you know, we get there eventually. All right, let's talk about this.

Starting point is 00:58:40 So this was big news the other week as Quentin Tarantino was auctioning off a series of Pulp Fiction NFTs. Well, apparently, he didn't have the legal rights to do that. At least that's what Miramax is saying. That's the company that produced and distributed Pulp Fiction. I guess you have to remember, right, with some of these physical NFTs, you can't NFTs? You can't NFT unless you own the IP, can you? You can't just right-click save a movie and then NFT, even if you're the director, right? It doesn't work like that in Meetspace.

Starting point is 00:59:11 Okay. Right. Yeah. So, again, really, all NFTs are are IP. They're in stancheted forms of IP. So if the asset that the end token represents grows in IP value, well, that value goes to the token, right? And so according to this, you know, headline, I don't know the details behind the true behind the scene details between Miramax and Quentin Tarantino. But it sounds like Quintan Tarentino issued an NFT about something that he didn't actually own.

Starting point is 00:59:37 And so this is going to be one of many stories, I think. There's going to be a lot of stories like this, where there's IP battles over NFT, who has the rights to issue the NFT. I feel like there's something interesting here, right? Because stuff on Ethereum, like at least the most, you know, crypto-native, digitally native stuff, doesn't really have a corollary in, in Midspace World. It's like where punks were born on Ethereum. They don't have a legal tie.

Starting point is 01:00:02 into meat space. You could build that in some way, but they're kind of native to Ethereum, whereas something like Pulp Fiction, that exists in Meetspace and has, you know, contracts and kind of legal guarantees around it. And you actually have to port that into Ethereum. And in order to port that, you need those legal guarantees. There's something interesting here about, like, I guess, how crypto-native an NFT asset is in the same way that, you know, Ether is more crypto-native than something like USDC, which is actually like a tokenized representation of some money that Coinbase has in a real-world bank account somewhere. Yeah, there's a very, we could take this conversation and just extrapolate it all the way out. There's a very clear definition with,

Starting point is 01:00:46 we have transparent blockchains where we know who owns what. And so once an NFT exists, it becomes extremely concrete and just clear who actually owns the damn thing, which Ethereum address is the NFT actually in. Before it's an NFT, then it's in the meat space world where you actually get settled by courts. If there's a dispute, it's not like, okay, if there's a dispute as to who owns what, on Ethereum, we just open up Ether scan and

Starting point is 01:01:09 see who owns it. In the legal world, you've got to take people to court, which is costly. It costs a lawyer money. It costs like public infrastructure for courts money. And then even more just like, then we have to get into the conversation of like, well, the only reason why the courts actually work is because there's a military behind them to actually

Starting point is 01:01:25 enforce them. Where on Ethereum, there's proof of work or proof of stake. And so I think we're in this like valley, but this period of time where all of the existing IP of the world hasn't been NFTed yet. And so there's going to be a bunch of court battles as to who gets the rights to issue the NFT. But new IP that's coming out in the MES space world maybe actually starts on day one with NFTs and it becomes very, very clear because they're able to issue that NFTs before there's any sort of just like, you know, cloudiness as to who owns what. So maybe that's how this story plays out. Yeah, absolutely. Really, really interesting take. And I do think the new NFTs will be more creative owned than the last one.

Starting point is 01:02:01 You might say Quentin Tarantino, why doesn't he have the right to his own work, right? He was the brain. He was the creative force behind this, but Miramac owns it. Miramax owns it. So too bad. In this world, creators own the NFTs they issue, and it kind of works backwards from there. Let's talk about this. Another intersection of the world. What's Time Magazine doing with the Metaverse? Yeah, Time and Galaxy Digital, which is Mike Novigratz. company who were actually recording with tomorrow. So that episode will be out a week from Monday, partner to demystify the next immersive digital frontier, the metaverse, through a first of its kind partnership. So yeah, very interesting partnership between a fund that is crypto-focused

Starting point is 01:02:42 and Time Magazine. So Time Magazine really going headfirst into branding itself as a Metaverse-focused magazine. I'm sure they're going to keep all their old businesses, but they're really also building out this Metaverse line. And they are partnering with Mike Novograsse and Galaxy Digital to build out this metaverse side of Time Magazine. Mike Novigrat also has his own podcast as well. So he's in the world of media. But an interesting partnership between a magazine and a crypto fund.

Starting point is 01:03:11 This is like a media play, right? Yeah, it's got to be a media play. Yeah, this is time doing some kind of media play for the Metaverse. This is also interesting while we're on the subject of NFTs, OpenC now offered a 10 billion dollar valuation. So that is the valuation level of Opency at this point. $10 million. Opency is offering that, not being offered. They are offering a $10 billion valuation. And so I think they are soliciting this investment. I'm not sure if it's been fulfilled yet. I feel like they'll get it though, David. Probably. This market is so hot and frothy.

Starting point is 01:03:46 Like, I would not be surprised. Bitcoin news. Bitcoin just upgraded to Taproot. It's this soft fork upgrade. I know this was a long time coming, much awaited in the Bitcoin community. What is Taproot, David? Taproot changes the way signature schemes work with Bitcoin. I'm not too familiar with this, but basically it allows for more expressive signature schemes and does a couple things. You talked about how this is like super multi-sigs on Bitcoin, which can unlock additional privacy features. And I think also makes Lightning Network a little bit more easy to spin up. Bitcoiners absolutely love Taproot. They think it's like the greatest thing to happen to Bitcoin, I think, in the last year or so. And so, and now it's

Starting point is 01:04:28 live on the Bitcoin network. So congratulations to Bitcoin. It's cool to see Bitcoin adding new features, right? Adding new things. I don't know what's beyond Taproot. Is there anything else beyond Taproot, though? I don't think so, not that I know of. This feels like the last major update in the pipeline. It's also not like expressivity. It's not adding a programmatic layer to Bitcoin. It's not like you're going to be able to spin up Ethereum-style smart contracts on Bitcoin now. This is just like super fancy multi-sigs that Bitcoin didn't have before. Yeah, multi-sigs have like more capacity. Let's read that tweet that sound there. Let's see what that is. The individual is somebody on Twitter with laser eyes says tap root is a 100-year-tap

Starting point is 01:05:11 year's software merging every contract and use case under a single transaction type pay to tap root will in the long run yield a more fungible and robust blockchain. I don't know really what that means. This is how you do it. This is how you design a blockchain. That's how the tweet concludes. It's very much that Bitcoin ethos is like minimum surface area. Like we don't change very much and we keep the underlying blockchain as simple as possible.

Starting point is 01:05:38 It's great that they had that upgrade. Crypto.com. They're making some moves. What did they just do here? Crypto.com dress apart what is now formerly known as the Staples Center. the iconic home of the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, among others since 1999, will have a new nickname beginning on Christmas.

Starting point is 01:05:57 Crypto.com Arena is believed to be the largest U.S. venue naming rights deal to date. Cool. So they are buying the naming rights for the Staples Center. So it's the Crypto.com center instead. Yeah. Yeah. And like that's as a deal, that's going to work out for them.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Like Crypto.com, kind of like a banker's product. I'm not the biggest fan. But like this is going to, this is going to work. Like, oh, I don't know what crypto, how do I do my crypto things? There's all these crypto things going on. Like, oh, crypto.com? Oh, okay.

Starting point is 01:06:25 That makes sense. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's cool. And I think it's going to pump the crypto. com's valuation. It's probably a brilliant move for them. I mean, it's probably already pumped the coin price. I'm pretty sure.

Starting point is 01:06:35 begs the question, David. What stadium should bankless buy? Wells Fargo Center. Wells Fargo Center. Where's that? Is that Philadelphia? I have no clue. Let me find out.

Starting point is 01:06:46 I think there are a few. Yep. Philadelphia. That's the one. That's the one. Because there's a number of these things that are named after banks. Really? Yeah, there's like the chase. There's a chase one. There's, Oh, no, it's got to be Wells Fargo. HSBC. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 01:06:59 Wells Fargo, the first of many bankless is on its way to rename it. Do you remember that old book, Frindle? No. Okay. It was about a kid who made up the word frindle and he just made up the word frindle to call it a pen. And eventually just enough people started using it that it got into the dictionary. He named it to existence. He memed it into existence.

Starting point is 01:07:19 What have we just got as many people as possible to start calling Wells Fargo Center bankless center? We just made it. We don't even buy it. We just changed the name of our own accord. Hey, you know, as crazy as that sounds, I feel like crypto is about to buy the U.S. Constitution. So crazier things have happened. Maybe we just meme that one to existence.

Starting point is 01:07:40 That's a future rug article. Bankless Center buys Rolfo. We'll submit it. Tweet someone on that. Let's talk regulation stuff. So infrastructure bill, a horrible language for crypto. Some senators are already proposing a bill that would strip that language out and make it better, make it less unconstitutional for crypto. I believe this is a bipartisan bill, too.

Starting point is 01:08:06 So I can't remember whose names are on this. It's definitely Senator Lummis and maybe someone else. But this feels like really good news. that we've got some senators on our side. The bill has just been put through and just been signed. We already have some potential action to strip out the problematic language for crypto. What are your thoughts? That's exactly right.

Starting point is 01:08:28 We have heroes like Jerry Britta at Coin Center fighting the fight for us, so we don't have to worry about it too much unless it comes time for us to be called upon, which is not currently that time. But thank you for everyone at CoinCenture and all the senators that are actually fighting for this. Yeah, we'll keep you updated on maybe I'm sure there'll be some like some things we can do to contact senators once this bill gains some more steam to actually get this push through. Yeah, it is Senator Wyden and Senator Lummis who are introducing this amendment to the infrastructure bill. So is Ted Cruz also has a separate bill, I believe, but he's getting

Starting point is 01:09:04 on board too. It was funny to me is like all of these politicians suddenly getting on board, David's like unexpected allies, yeah. Yeah, it's unexpected, but it's also like, I mean, it's about time they saw it because we have votes, we have money, come on senators, right? Motivation, yeah. These are your incentives. So now they're getting incentive. Now they're understanding that. You know, Ted Cruz in Texas has talked a lot about being a cryptocurrency friendly state. So I'm not surprised that he's trying to get involved as well. India, on the other hand, doing something a little bit different. So what's this headline, David?

Starting point is 01:09:38 India banning crypto payments, but also regulating crypto assets. So crypto, is still cool, you can still purchase and own crypto, you just can't use it as payments, which is an interesting line. I believe the way this started is this is a bill in Parliament, Indian Parliament, I believe that used to be a total ban on crypto. So this is actually a pullback from a total ban, and it's only banning payments. It's super interesting to me. It's like, this feels like a little bit like we're going to ban, we're going to let you have

Starting point is 01:10:13 internet, but we're going to ban email. Websites are okay, sort of thing. It's just like, guys, like, do you even understand how this internet thing works? You guys even understand how this crypto thing works? Like, you can't just ban one use case of it and let the other ones through. So it's very strange, I think, regulation, but maybe kind of a win for crypto. I don't know. It's just like, it's just confusion.

Starting point is 01:10:39 It's just, again, tells you how much how little people know about these things. It's like, hey, you can have Facebook. But no pictures. Just don't pictures. Exactly. It's very funny, right? It's like watching these governments take, like make their different moves. Like China knows exactly what it wants to do with crypto.

Starting point is 01:10:54 And it's like, get the hell out. That's what it wants to do. And like more democratic, you know, nation states are a little bit conflicted. They're like, we can't tell our people no completely, but we don't exactly want to embrace it. So what do we do? This is India's answer to that. is having its own answers to like the what do we do type scenario coming in the form of i think the cc and what they're doing but maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit all right guys we will be

Starting point is 01:11:24 right back with the takes of the week and they are hot but first we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible arbitram is an ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and nfts and now it's live and has over a hundred projects deployed gas fees on ethereum l1 suck too many people want to use ethereum and it doesn't have enough computer capacity for all of us. And that's why teams like Arbitrum have been hard at work developing layer two solutions that makes transactions on Ethereum cheap and instant. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange

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Starting point is 01:13:40 as more apps come online. And if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a ledger, download ledger live, and get all of your defy apps all in one space. Hey, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. I'm going to start with this one. This is my own. It's weird that CZ, that is the CEO of finance, he's almost richer than Elon Musk, and no one outside crypto knows who he is. Mainstream completely ignores this industry. I really feel like that's the case, David. I was reading this article about CZ, and he said that he intends eventually to donate up to 99% of his wealth to charity, which is great. That's a noble cause. And also mentioned, almost like as a footnote, that he's also potentially worth $200 billion, billion with a

Starting point is 01:14:29 B. And I looked this up, and like, this is in the ballpark of the top five richest people in the world. This is like Elon Musk level, Rich, who is currently the wealthiest individual in the world. And what's crazy to me is like, no one's talking about it. Now, keep in mind, of course, a lot of CZ's wealth is tied up in B&B. But I mean, a lot of Elon's Musk is tied up in Tesla stock. Apples apples. Yeah. What's weird to me is just like no one is talking about this industry. And it's gotten really big, right? Like potentially. has the wealthiest individual in the world coming from it, right? Like, I don't love a lot of CZ's tactics, but like, if you're looking at the wealthiest

Starting point is 01:15:15 individuals in the world, he would be close to the top and he's gaining on Elon Musk. Why do you think mainstream is not talking about this stuff? Yeah, that's a really good question. I didn't know this until you brought this up. CZ, he's not the most like, he doesn't really market himself, right? He doesn't really have too much of an ego as far as I can tell. He definitely has a desire for money. definitely wants to pick up every single penny that's on the table.

Starting point is 01:15:39 It's a statement of I want to donate 99% of my wealth. Like, okay, I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah, I don't know what to think about that. Like, it's all assets, right? It's not like he has probably not very much cash on hand. These are all assets. And so there's that, like, there's that movement on the left. There's like, oh, like the billionaires have like billions and billions of dollars,

Starting point is 01:16:00 but they're not giving any way to like the poor people, right? Well, it's not really a fair comparison because it's not really a fair comparison because If sell assets, you actually don't have that money. You only have assets. And if you start selling assets, you actually start collapsing the price. And so you destroy other people's capital, too. It's not really a fair comparison. But, yeah, like, shit, what does a man do with $200 billion?

Starting point is 01:16:19 Yeah, I don't know. And he certainly wouldn't have the liquidity to, like, market dump $200 billion of B&B. But, yeah, it's just interesting observation. I feel like mainstream is still not picking up on this industry. What's the next take, David? This one I thought was pretty interesting. This is Willie Wu. comparing the Bitcoin chart versus the pro shares Bitcoin EDF trading hours visualized.

Starting point is 01:16:40 And so on the top, you see the Bitcoin chart, which is this very cohesive line that moves from right to left. And on the bottom, you have the Bitcoin ETF, which it only trades during trading hours on like the NYSE or wherever that gets traded on. Banker hours, 9 to 4. Banker hours, right? And just look at the incompleteness in the charts for the listeners. The top chart is the Bitcoin chart.

Starting point is 01:17:03 It's a full chart. Every single candle is connected. On the bottom, it's like 80% black space with huge gaps, huge gaps of time between the entire days. And so it's like you're trying to fill in the gaps between these different lines and you just don't know what Bitcoin does between the things. Which is the better market, which is, which gives you more information, which is just obviously better.

Starting point is 01:17:24 It's clearly the market that trades 24-7. And it's not like when we made the N-NNASDAQ, we started making markets. Markets historically trade 24-7, every single market, every single market, every single second of every people's lives. There's a market somewhere. And so it just makes sense that these markets move into 24-7 trading times. Yeah, and I like that, David. And here's Willie Wu's take on the bottom of the tweet. It's like going two steps backwards so legacy investors can have access to the old industrial way, along with the old industrial rent seekers in between you and the asset. That's what these, that's why we have these blank spaces is because it's just old industrial

Starting point is 01:18:01 technology. And yeah, it's it's like not in addition to the blank, blank spaces and the worst markets, we're also dealing with rent collectors in between, which is like crazy to me that, that, you know, an ETF would be thought of as a better product. Is the black spaces between all the trading markets? That is literally centralization instantiated. Yes. The only reason that exists is because people actually can literally turn off the markets. Bitcoin has a complete end-to-end chart for every single second of every single day because it's decentralized. There's no one that can turn it off. And so when you see those gaps of the trading hours pause, you say, well, that's thanks to centralization.

Starting point is 01:18:42 Well, yeah, one thing I would say is like I guess you can turn the exchanges off, right, the centralized exchanges. But like I totally see where you're going with this. And like something like a uniswap would be a great example of like that's going to be like going until the end of time, until Ethereum is dead and yeah, completely removes that exchange centralization as well. What's this take? This is about DAWS. Yeah, this is coming from Nick Narrake, who's apparently part of Constitution Dow, as you can tell from the Constitution comma comma that you can see in his name. Nick says, Dow's are games and governance are game rules. And he says, the magic of smart contracts is that we no longer need referees. And so that last line I really, really like where the EVM is now

Starting point is 01:19:27 this global referee, which is inherently unbiased. You can't bribe the referee. The referee can't play favorites with what teams are being played. And then he goes on, and he adds on that each Dow is its own game. And the way that every Dow determines what the rules are, are via governance. But the rules can't be broken thanks to the power of smart contracts. Yeah, that's really cool. What's this take? This is your take, I think. Yeah, this is a take that I was following up from Alex Kruger, who's a Bitcoin trader, big big-binker, I think he's a Bitcoin maxi. And he goes, Bitcoin plus Solana is greater than Ethereum. It's just common sense. Ethereum is trying to do it all itself. That's how you

Starting point is 01:20:09 fail. Bitcoin will always be safer and more decentralized. Salana will always be faster and cheaper. And so this is the power belt theory, right? Like let's optimize for decentralization on security, heavily, heavily, heavily with Bitcoin. And then let's use Salonah to optimize for faster and cheaper. My rebuttal to this is I say, Ethereum's design funnels economic energy from a fast and cheap layer two system into a security budget for the layer one. It's literally the best of both worlds. And it gets the tailwinds of having a single network effect versus two fractured ones. And I say broke barbell theory, woke Goldilocks zone. And to expand upon this, Ethereum is what it's doing is it's mimicking Bitcoin on the

Starting point is 01:20:50 layer one. And it's security, uncompromising security, uncompromising decentralization. But the layer twos on Ethereum, which are distinct and separate from the layer ones, are where you get the salonat type activity, the fast and cheap economic activity. And the power of roll-ups funnels all of that economic activity into a security budget. So where Bitcoin doesn't have a security budget because it has the hard cap, Ethereum does because it pulls that economic energy from the L-2s and turns that into when I was talking earlier about chains being the ultimate consumers of Ethereum block space. Blockchains consume Ethereum. block space and pay for security budget. And that's how you get the best of both worlds.

Starting point is 01:21:30 Yeah, I feel like this is a common like Bitcoin take, right? This is the reason I think many Bitcoin, particularly the maximalists, are so fine with scaling on side chains, effectively exchanges, right? Use something like a blockfi or a finance for your trading or a block five for your collateralized loans is because they just want to optimize Bitcoin to be the money. And then they're fine with the banking layer being being more centralized, right? This is kind of a a play on that. I really do believe some of these chains like the avalanches of the world, the salinas of the world that have not optimized for maximum decentralization, the base layer, like even the tariffs of the world, they're a bit more like fintechy than they are layer one

Starting point is 01:22:14 blockchains, right? So like they have an element of centralization that makes them a bit more like a crypto bank. And I think a bitcoyer is kind of fine with that because that is how they want to scale the monetary supremacy of Bitcoin is on like sidechains and even Ethereum like competitors, I guess, or even on Ethereum itself. So it is consistent, I guess, from that perspective. But yeah, to me, it's never really made sense, right? It's like you're not going to have maximum decentralization unless you decentralize the banking layer as well, right? Like, you have to have that defy layer. And that's important. And so like you need both the monetary asset. asset and the banking layer to be one in the same on the same network. That's kind of the

Starting point is 01:23:01 Ethereum approach. But this is a popular narrative, David. It's like grown in popularity of the last three to six months. Yeah. And I think I want to reiterate that one statement I make. And I say, and it gets the tailwinds of having a single network effect versus two fractured ones. When a Solana gets adopted, that kind of means little to nothing for Bitcoin. And vice versa. If Bitcoin gets adopted as a money, it kind of doesn't really mean much for Solana. Because these two things have their own network effects, their own moats, their own reasons for existence. Ethereum is one network that does both. And the consolidation of both network effects being in the same spot, the money network effect, the defy network effect, now it's the same network. And really the story of

Starting point is 01:23:45 crypto is the consolidation of so many different networks. Just like TCIP is a network, now we have the EVM. Ether is a money. Liquidity begets liquidity, money begets money, network effects, beget network effects. If you put all the network effects into the same spot, like that's what Ethereum is. Well, that's what we've said. It's like the dual flywheel, right? The two flywheels of ultrasound money, which is ether the asset, and then ultrasound scalability, which is Ethereum's, you know, modular blockchain design, right? It's going to be hard to compete with that in the medium to long term. We'll see how all this shapes out. But yeah, I agree with your take here. All right, here's another take, David.

Starting point is 01:24:23 This is from a post that you published in bank lists on why Web3 will win, right? So it's like Web3 versus Web 2 versus the nation state. These are the three participants in this three-way battle. You say this. While Congress wants to break up the Web 2 giants as an antitrust effort, Enos domains just airdropped 50% of its token to 137,000 people where Web2 centralizes power, Web3, distributes it. And that was your post this week on bankless. So dive into this take here. What did you mean? Yeah, a little over a year ago, the four leaders of the Web 2 world, like Apple,

Starting point is 01:25:06 Facebook, Twitter, and Google, the CEOs of each were all summoned to Congress because they were fearful of just like how big these things are getting, like how monopolistic they are. And so each one of these leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, the other, Tim Cook, I think, was also there. They all had to defend themselves as to why they're not a massive monopoly, right? They had to all pitch themselves, hey, we are constantly in fear of being disrupted. Like, there's so much innovation that we need that we need to work on. The competition is good for the consumer, basically defending why they're not a monopoly.

Starting point is 01:25:40 And the reason why they got summoned to Congress is because of antitrust laws, where antitrust is allegedly good for consumers. My conspiracy is that, well, if you have a monopoly as big as these Web2 companies, they're actually starting to infiltrate into what would be government. government services, things like identity with Facebook and data like Google. And so, like, the reason why governments feel the threat from Web2 world is because the web two companies are starting to become as powerful as governments themselves. Meanwhile, and so that's why governments want to break these things up.

Starting point is 01:26:09 They want to break up Facebook into its component parts to, like make these things smaller in the name of antitrust, which is part of American history. We don't like monopolies. And so while these Web2 companies are just, like, clawing teeth and nail for any ability to maintain their monopoly power. Because by the way, their products are their monopoly, right? Every single one of these companies, their products get better when they have a more larger monopoly upon the people, right?

Starting point is 01:26:35 The more data that Google has, the better Google can provide. The more people that are on Facebook, the larger social networks there are. And so the business model of Web2 is a monopoly. That's how these things work. And so they are just fighting government tooth and nail to not get broken up because that is the core component of their business. in stark contrast to the Web 2 versus the government world, we see the Web 3 world, which is distributing greater than 50% of its token supply to as many different participants as possible

Starting point is 01:27:04 as early as possible. It's in the ethos and best interest of Web 3 apps to give away their power, give away control to the community as soon as possible. It is literally doing the thing that government is asking Web 3 to do voluntarily and early in its lifespan, not late, not as a threat, but as a principle. And so this should be what governments really, really want to see out of these new disruptive technologies. And the only way that you can really disrupt a massive Web2 monopoly is not just by making another competitor to Facebook by doing, but instead is by doing something in Web 3. And so all of these DFI apps, DFI protocols, Web3 systems, they are going to be the things that disrupt Web 2 because it has to come in a different

Starting point is 01:27:49 substrate, right? And this is the substrate that is required. to actually break these things up. And I finish the post off by saying, like, this strips the government of the emperors of their clothes, right? Because they are, even though they are Web 3 apps are doing the things that governments want the Web 2 companies to do, governments are still fighting the Web 3 apps, which tells you exactly what you need to know that this is not about consumer protection. This is about protecting their power and control over the people. And so that was my big, long take this week in the Market Monday opening note. Yeah, I do, you know, I think we said before, basically, you'll be able to, it's an acid test for how authoritarian a country

Starting point is 01:28:27 you live in is their response to crypto and Web 3 technologies, right? It's like, do they, do they shun them? Are they scared of them? Are they fearful of them? Or do they embrace them? Do they welcome additional self-sovereignty and power to the people? It tells you a lot about what kind of nation you really live in. And so I think all nation states are going through this acid test, right? It's like, we'll see. I mean, the outcome is still decided for the U.S., for example. We're talking about India earlier and their classification. Like, all these countries are sort of wrestling with this. And hopefully, we come out on the other side within an embrace of Web3. But it really does show you where their priorities are for sure.

Starting point is 01:29:08 Totally. Let's talk about this. So this is something I realized this week, David, and I tweeted this out, fake Twitter accounts are about to be killed by NFTs. Once Twitter incorporates NFTs in order in order to spoof my account, you actually need to own my NFT. NFTs will become the blue check mark. They're unforgeable, costly, self-sovereign identity is how crypto is fixing Web2 identity one block at a time. Like one identity block at a time is what I meant.

Starting point is 01:29:38 And it's really, it's like, I don't know if you've been getting these on Twitter, right? But it's like all of these fake accounts, right? And so somebody will message me every single day and just say, hey, I just got message by a fake Ryan Sean Adams. I had this back and forth with this fake Ryan Sean Adams. Sometimes they'll show me like DMs of this fake Ryan who's like asking them for money or inviting them to a telegram group or just doing other shady things. And when I have time to respond, there's so many of these like, I'm just like,

Starting point is 01:30:07 hell, that wasn't me. I'm sorry. Like, you know, and they always ask me if there's something I could do with it. Well, it's like it's impossible. It's whackamol, right? Like you can block, you can report, you can do all of these things. but you can't hunt these people down. What's different is if I have an NFT that I own,

Starting point is 01:30:24 let's say my turtle, David, or my Dow Punk NFT that I own, and I get that authenticated, right, on chain and through Twitter, basically, the spoof account, the fake Ryan Sean Adams would have to actually purchase my NFT in order to fake me. Now, that's assuming that Twitter not only, validates NFTs, but also validates NFT collections or ENS addresses or that sort of thing, which is not too far of a logic leap.

Starting point is 01:30:56 But it's super interesting to me that in one fell swoop with the adoption of NFTs, you can basically eliminate spoofed accounts. Because anyone who sees a Ryan Sean Adams without my NFT, they'll know it's not me. And so, wow, maybe we've just created an identity primitive, the combination of ENS, and NFTs and Twitter authentication on chain. It's kind of a cool realization, not that Twitter's just going to integrate NFTs, but that NFTs are going to become Twitter's blue checkmark, and they're also exportable to any other social media website as well. Yeah, this really just lends itself to the defining the Metaverse podcast that we did together.

Starting point is 01:31:39 And if listeners haven't listened to that, you totally should. And we talked about NFTs as the identity vehicle for manifesting your digital force. into the metaverse, right? Like Ryan Sean Adams, the human, doesn't actually, can't actually exist in the metaverse, but Ryan's turtle can. And Ryan's turtle is very, a very unique, one of one of one, you know, it's very specific turtle. They only can be one of those. And as a representation of identity inside of Twitter, it works there. And like you said, it also works everywhere else that the metaverse manifests. My God, that's the nicest thing you've ever said about my turtle, David. Wow. And it's unique. I'm touched. It's one of one. It's unique.

Starting point is 01:32:14 Don't get used to it. Don't get used to it. It was meant to illustrate a point. What are you excited about this week, David, the size by turtle? So I'm excited to go home next week for Thanksgiving. I have a nephew. I've only met him like three or four times. He's one of the cutest little kids ever. And he's like four months older now that this is the last time I saw him.

Starting point is 01:32:33 So I'm excited to go home, see some family. It's been a while since I've been home in Seattle. So I'm excited to go home, play with my nephew. What's his name, David? His full name is Lincoln, but we call him Link. Lincoln? Okay, Link. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:45 It looks like Link is looking outside for you in this picture. Wait for me to come home. He's like, Uncle David, where's my NFT that you promise me? Where's my tiny turtle? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think there's another picture here. If you want to scroll down and we can have this cute baby photos time on bankless.

Starting point is 01:33:01 Look at him. Look at his teeth. Ah, he's cute. Cute little kid. Pretty cute. You have any more? Two photos. Just two.

Starting point is 01:33:10 All right, Ryan, what are you excited about? I'm excited about the Constitution Dowman. That's a really cool project. Yeah, so back to like a statement I've made before that I really feel like it's not just the 1990s. People always compare crypto to the 1990s. It's more like the 1790s because we are actually creating new decentralized governance protocols on which we can build all sorts of other things. Like we can build entire economies on top of networks like Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:33:39 And so the constitution is kind of a throwback to that, right? So think about the Constitution. It was written as a decentralized protocol for governance. And on top of that, an entire nation was built, right? An entire economy, right? This is, you know, why people go west. This is why immigrants came to Ellis Island for the land of opportunity, right, for these vast open white spaces of opportunity. And I feel like that's what Ethereum is providing now. And so purchasing the Constitution is kind of like, it's just like the meme is the message, right? What's the meme? It's the meme that the people are back, right?

Starting point is 01:34:20 We care about decentralized protocols. And now we have a new set of institutions and decentralized protocols that's going to like, you know, govern societies into the 21st century. So I really like the ability, the raw power to buy the constitution, a group of people on the internet in a capital pool. And I love the message that this sends to the broader narrative. I think there's something symbolic here. So again, I don't know at the time of recording if they're successful or not, but just the fact that they got to this amount of funds and are making a bid,

Starting point is 01:34:54 that in and of itself is a victory. So I'm pretty excited about Constitution Dow. And where does it go from here, man? It feels like crypto's just buying like bigger and bigger things. The projects are getting bigger. The coordination is getting more interesting. the tooling is coming along. So yeah, maybe the Wells Fargo arena in Philadelphia is not too far away.

Starting point is 01:35:16 I don't know. I think that's really the right question. I think buying the Constitution might be pretty easy for them, especially because they have double the money that they needed to. I mean, well, TBD on that. But it's really what I'm excited about is like see what happens next because they're going to have millions of excess dollars, and now they're going to have a bunch of people with a shared purpose and shared vision,

Starting point is 01:35:37 and they're going to have to figure out what that thing is, and then they're going to figure out, do exactly what Pleaser Dow did, which is, well, the first thing that they buy is just the first thing, like what happens next? And so maybe we have a brand new, a bland new player has entered the crypto arena, and that is Constitution Dow.

Starting point is 01:35:52 That could totally be the case, absolutely. All right, David, you want to get to the memes of the week? Mem of the week. We got two of them this week. Here's the first one. What are we looking at? Yeah, this is Stephen Doge Toshi, who works at the block, and he writes on a tweet, me sitting in a six-figure APY Ponzi, while the SEC goes after Block 5 for 3%.

Starting point is 01:36:09 And it's the shifty eyes like puppet puppet meme. Just like, oh, don't look at me. I love that. This led itself right back to the meme of the week that we had last week where the SEC was the Army Man protecting the users from airdrops while letting crypto scams just fly out of them. Yeah. Get old SEC doing good things.

Starting point is 01:36:27 Second meme of the week is a meme that I made while I was trying to get myself to pass 100,000 followers on Twitter. Did you do it, by the way? I did it. Yeah. This is the meme that. meme that did it. And this meme is the classic Billy learning the value of a dollar meme. The format is like a father giving Billy like a dollar. It's like, all right, son, like,

Starting point is 01:36:46 you need to make sure that you like spend this money wisely. And then the next thing you see is Billy is like taking the money to a vending machine. I've reformatted this, this tweet. And it's Orion goes, David, here's our company profit share for this quarter. Remember to set some aside for bear markets and taxes. And then the third panel is me just like buying as much ether as possible with it. And then Ryan saying, all right, good talk. Oh, my God. Dude, I swear to God, we do have that talk. Like, often. I just always like, hey, you know, you should remember these things. And that's where the money goes. Apparently, now I know. I suspected for a long time, David, but I feel like this is a confession tweet that you're using that money. You're just buying more

Starting point is 01:37:26 with it. Yeah, that is the confession. And I do appreciate the guidance and advice. But, man, ether is just like too damn compelling, man. It's pretty attractive. You can't get away. Yeah. Guys, I do one thing. I take dollars and I buy ether. That's what I do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:43 And I do one thing, which is I tax optimize. As we know, the tax optimizer cannot stop. So, yeah, remember bear market and taxes, guys. That's what the father in this meme is telling you. Just like last week, guys, Ryan is about to give his famous disclaimers about going west. But after that is a moment of Zen where you will hear all about. Jonathan Mann, the song of day man, who we featured last week with it. DNS drop, a new song about board apes.

Starting point is 01:38:09 Here's the disclaimer. None of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. So is D-Fi. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier.

Starting point is 01:38:20 It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Enjoy your moment of Zen. Huge mistake. I made a huge missus. I accidentally sold my six months ago. My mind. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video.

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