Bankless - ROLLUP: Elon Buys Twitter | Free Speech | Optimism Airdrop | Moonbirds NFTs | OpenSea Gem

Starting point is 00:00:00 So that's pretty cool. So I guess flat on the week. My numbers are already, I put... We'll see. I wrote these numbers in 30 minutes ago, dude. Look, by the time people hear this, it'll be inaccurate anyway. Guys, these numbers are always inaccurate, no matter what. It's just... 12-hour lags. Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of April. It's Friday morning. So what time is it, David?

Starting point is 00:00:21 Oh, so Friday, Bankless, weekly, roll-up time, Ryan, where we roll up the entire news in crypto that happened in the last week, which is always an ambitious endeavor. yet we persist. Nonetheless, ready to get into it, Ryan? What happened this week? I'm ready, man. It's good, look, first of all, though, it's good to see you back in your place. We've been doing a lot of these road tour roll-ups. And look, you've been doing from a hotel rooms, Airbnbs, like everywhere. And now you're back. You're back in San Diego, at least for now. Yeah, we have two more roll-ups here before this place goes away forever. Wow. Wow. And a brand-new apartment in Williamsburg will be the background. It's great. David's background's constantly changing. Mine is always. staying the same. The immutability of my background, David. Not going anywhere, apparently. You need to do rendering for your background for whenever I move. All right, man. So topics of the week. First, we got to discuss Elon Musk.

Starting point is 00:01:14 He just bought Twitter. Wow. Okay. In an effort maybe to preserve free speech, I don't know, that's what he's saying, but also the same day, something else happened. What happened? Stani Kulchov of Avey and also Lenz Protocol gets banned from Twitter because it's so ironic because Elon Musk buys Twitter to preserve free speech. In the same day, Stani gets banned from Twitter for tweeting out a joke about how he is the interim CEO to Twitter. I mean, you can see why Twitter would ban him. It's like, well, that's false news. So like Banhammer.

Starting point is 00:01:43 But the irony of that happening at the same day is interesting. And so we actually interviewed Stani, and we'll get some cuts of that interview here in the weekly roll-up when we talk about Elon Musk buying Twitter. Also, there was an optimism air drop this week. This is the starting pistol for layer 222. We're going to discuss the details, the metrics, the governance system we get at all. And finally, what's the last one here, David? Edward Snowden has been a secret founder of a crypto project that we had no idea about until now. So we're going to get all of those details.

Starting point is 00:02:13 What has he been up to? What project is it that's coming later in the show? Guys, before we do that, I've got to tell you about Graph Day because it is conference season. That's why David's backgrounds are always shifting because he's going to all these different conferences. After permission list, the next one you need to go to, particularly if you are a builder, is Graf Day. Graph Day is happening June 2nd. It's going to be a learning session on June 2nd, a ton of fantastic speakers, followed by a three-day hackathon, okay? Speakers like who, David, name some of these out for us.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Oh, so many. We got Kevin O'Waki, and from Gitcoin, we got Arjun Bupani from Kinext. Camilla Russo from The Defiant. She's going to be there. Also, one of my personal heroes in the space, recent. Lynn Mark is going to be there as well. We got Ava Baylon from the Graff Foundation and so many others. Jake Berman, who, Jake Berkman, who pilled us on NFTs in the first place, they're all going to be there. So if you are looking to bootstrap your Web3 career, if you just want to hear from the builders,

Starting point is 00:03:09 or if you're looking to hack and be a part of the hackathon, the Graph Day event in San Francisco, June 2nd to 4th is for you. There is a link in the show notes to get $50 off if you are so inclined. You should be so inclined, especially if you're a builder. This is the place to ago. But David, let's get into the markets first. You know what? It's more than $50 off, Ryan. What's more than $50 off? You're going to tell me it's Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin started the week at $41,300. It's down $3.9. Oh, gosh, it jumped actually since I wrote these numbers. So my numbers are out of date. Started the week at $41,300. I thought it went down $3.9. But it looks like it only went down $50 because apparently,

Starting point is 00:03:54 it's mooning as we speak. So that's pretty cool. So I guess flat on the week. My numbers are already I put this. I wrote these numbers in 30 minutes ago, dude. Look, by the time people hear this, it'll be inaccurate anyway. Guys, these numbers are always inaccurate. No matter what, it's just 12 hour lags. Yeah, at least. Anyway, so we're, what are we? Kind of steady in the week? Yeah, I guess flat on the week. Flat on the week. Wow. My numbers got rugged by Bitcoin. All right. Well, let's go to Ether and see how good or bad these numbers are on Ether. It's got to be down too since you wrote this, Right? Yes, yes, right. Okay, so we started last week at $3,080. We are currently at $2,960. We're down just a couple percent on the week. Not too bad. Not too bad. Yeah, kind of a flat week. And the ETH Bitcoin ratio, we were down at the time of recording as well. What does that look like? Yeah, we were down 1.5 percent. It's probably going to be about there still nonetheless. How about all of crypto, total crypto market cap? We are at, let's see, $1.9 trillion. Oh, below $2 trillion.

Starting point is 00:04:51 Sad, that's a shame. We ended last week at 1.98 trillion. We are at 1.9 at 3 trillion right now. Lost 50 billion dollars in the crypto market cap. But what's a few billion dollars, you know? Here's the thing. We're kind of crabbing out. We have been for the last few months.

Starting point is 00:05:10 Crab season back and forth, not necessarily up or down, just kind of back and forth. But we should also count our blessings because U.S. dollars is heading towards all-time highs. The Dixie, this is where you measure U.S. dollars, hasn't looked like this in a long time. We mentioned this last week, and it's been up only since last week. And what's the big story here? It's not that U.S. dollars are up, but U.S. dollars are up. And yet what?

Starting point is 00:05:35 And yet, crypto prices are flat. So, like, relatively, it's a win, I think, because usually, when the Dixie goes up, crypto prices go down. And so when the Dixie goes up a lot, as if it has, as it has, because it's a actually higher. The Dixie is higher than it was during the depths of COVID where people were fleeing two dollars during that March liquidation event. People are fleeing to dollars. And we are well above that point in the Dixie right now. And yet over the last, I don't know, like month or so, crypto prices are flat. Historically, when the Dixie goes down, crypto prices go up bigly.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And so right now we're watching the Dixie go up and crypto markets stay flat. If the Dixie goes down, well, crypto markets still go up is a big question. Yeah, the Dixie is kind of a short-term fear index, right? And so you're talking about that spike in March 2020 when COVID happened, and the spike all the way up in the dollar. And yet, and what happened to crypto, it went the complete opposite direction. Absolutely tanked. And now markets are fearful again. And yet crypto is not getting too hit, too impacted. And of course, in markets, all of this comes on the back of huge gains that crypto investors made in 2021 last year. So while this year feels a little bit like crab season last year was like boomtown crypto investors made 163 billion dollars in gains in 2021 that is

Starting point is 00:06:56 according to a chain analysis report and they've looked directly at the data to drive that number incredible 162 billion dollars what do you think yeah i mean it's no wonder that like all of a sudden sports stadiums now have like companies names including ours as their as their as their new naming rights right I just love that this is chain alice's report. Chain analysis, just like this eye of Sauron of the government, probably sending this information straight to the IRS. Oh, definitely. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:07:27 They are advertising, chain analysis is advertising their services to every tax jurisdiction in the world. Yes. Like, hey, you want some money because all governments want money right now. Look at this $163 billion sitting for you. We know where the capital gains are, says the chain analysis. This is also why you should pay your taxes, incidentally, as well. I mean, there are crypto people who are like, how are they going to know? I'm like, chain analysis knows.

Starting point is 00:07:53 The IRS doesn't know how to tax JPEGs? Come on. E&S bull market. Yeah. There has been a bull market in .eaths, the EMS domain name. Haven't heard a lot about ENS, at least, you know, kind of in the narrative section since their big air drop. And E&S price, governance, token, responsibility, token price has been down.

Starting point is 00:08:15 down since. But I've always seen this, and I think you have too, as like maybe the best NFT out there, one of the OG NFTs. And what's happening now is ENS registrations are going like crazy, particularly in, is it four digit ENS names? Yeah, yeah, low digit ENS names. Like three digits are also hot, but there's just so few of those. So four digits are the ones. I think there's like something like 16,000 combinations of four digit ENS names. So, no, not that many. If we're talking about like the URL of the future internet. And so for this ENS broker, which looks like a bot Twitter account, says 70 to 100, four digit DNS registrations in under an hour.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Only 6,622 remain. So not all of them are minted. So that's what's going on. There's like a gold rush to mint the remaining four, four digit combination ENS names. Look, here's one that went, 555.Eth went for 55.5.Eth. It was sold for 55.5. 5E. I think some of this is coming from

Starting point is 00:09:18 NFT world, right? So people are like basically buying the, you know, their board ape number or their, or their crypto punk number. That's some of the speculation. Oh, snap. Is 1-1-8 available? Yeah, it's like, yeah, see, now you're getting the phone model.

Starting point is 00:09:34 Oh, snap. It's the 10 K-NFT market, right? And so people are, you know, how there are crypto punks who go by, like, I'm 6410 or whatever. and so why not have 6410.Eth? Damn, 1118 is already minted. Is that your crypto punk?

Starting point is 00:09:50 That's my crypto punk. Yeah, too late. See? When we talk about it on a bank list, it's too late. Yeah. Someone's going to sell to me for 1,118Eath. Decline on that one. Yeah, there you go.

Starting point is 00:10:02 I got rsa.eath back in the day. That's a good one. I'm hobbling that. But this is crazy. If you look at the revenue, E&S revenue is now greater than all the fee revenue. of Bitcoin right now. Just surpass Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:10:16 At this point, so is everything else is higher than Bitcoin? Bitcoin just doesn't generate revenue, dude. But it kind of needs to for the security budget. Bitcoiners should be a little bit more worried about that than they are.

Starting point is 00:10:30 Yeah. The ENS revenue is also kind of the ENS security budget because that is the value flow that the ENS Dow governs over. And part of this ENS-MANS mania is probably triggered at least a little bit by Fallon.eath.

Starting point is 00:10:46 Jimmy Fallon. Dot Eith, the biggest dot-eath name yet. He is, I think, number one on the leaderboard now. Or at least, no, excuse me, he's in the top 100 most followed Twitter accounts with a dot-eath in the Twitter name. So congratulations, Jimmy Fallon, also owner of a board ape. And then, of course, there's also Budweiserbeard.eathe. We all know that Budweiser bought beer.eith previously, but now Budweiser owns Budweiser.

Starting point is 00:11:11 dot beer.eath. This is a future of ENS, subdomains. So if you own something. dot Eath, you can make something.com. Kind of like how you can make a Google, like a Gmail.com, right? Like, I own moneylegos. Did you know that, Ryan?

Starting point is 00:11:27 I own money Legos. I didn't know that. I knew somebody did. I didn't know. So I could sell David.moneylegos. Or I can sell you, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. So now Budweiser.

Starting point is 00:11:39 How much you want for it? I'll give it to you, Ryan. Oh my God. Thank you, David. I appreciate you. I'll give you a David. RSA. I love it.

Starting point is 00:11:48 I love it. We'll trade zees. So yeah, Budweiser. dbier. Maybe, dude, I would love

Starting point is 00:11:53 David. dot beer. I like beer. David. David. dot beer. Dot,eath. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:00 Think of the possibilities, right? Like, not a lot of people. Bankless. Beer. Dot,eath? I, I, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Absolutely. All the combinations. Anyways, this is a P. a PSA to claim your ENS drop because the last time that you are able to do that is on May 4th. If you have for some reason, I don't know, maybe your private keys are locked in a safe or something. Somewhere you don't live? Or somewhere else.

Starting point is 00:12:24 Like you need to go get your private keys and like unlock your ENS AirDrop by May 4th or else it's gone forever. So you haven't done that yet. Don't go do that. You know, that's happening to a friend that I know at this very moment. Locked private keys in a safe? Yeah, in a safe. I don't know who that would be. So is it worth the flight home or not?

Starting point is 00:12:43 I don't know. No, no. I have the safe here. It's just... It's just... Oh, God. Even better. Live stream the unlocking event.

Starting point is 00:12:52 Yeah, you know what? This also goes to show you that, like, NFTs are the gateway to the rest of Ethereum. They really are. Here's Fallon buying a board ape, right? Wouldn't have even known what a dot-eath domain name was prior to his board ape. But now he's doing Fallon. Dot Eith, and he's the biggest one.

Starting point is 00:13:08 And that propagates it because he's... got bejillions of followers. That's how we do it. Pump those ENS bags, Jimmy. Also, ape coin. We'll talk about the ape coin price. Last market section, it's just going up. When it got airdropped, it got air drops at something like an $8 to $10 billion market cap, just ape coin. Silly.

Starting point is 00:13:26 Like, valueless governance token of this unbuilt thing came in at $10 billion. And like literally every other like responsibility token that gets airdropped just is like down only versus EF basically. But of course, it's the ape coin, which governs over nothing, gets airdropped at $8 to $10 and is now at $22.2 at a $22 billion market cap, Ryan. He sounds a little upset. Are you salty about this? This is ridiculous. But this is so classic board apes.

Starting point is 00:13:59 And I knew this is going to happen. I'm pretty sure I said this on the roll-ups. Like everything that the apes touch just goes up. And so, like, why won't this go up as well? And look at this. This is the ENS drop, right? Which we're just talking about all of the virtues and values of the E&S with an actual product that's built and it's ready. Higher revenue than Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:14:19 Down only. Higher revenue than Bitcoin and down to like $2 billion. So like apes are like 10x. 10x that. Like there's no fundamentals. Like maybe I'm missing something. I don't pay attention to the APE because it says them that much. But like, what the hell, dude?

Starting point is 00:14:35 I don't get this market. Fundamentals don't matter in crypto. Attention does. and apes have the attention. And so they have the capital in the short run. That's how it works, guys. That's the lesson. Enough of markets, because we're tired talking about it.

Starting point is 00:14:48 We'll be back with some releases of the week. Then we've got some hot news for you and, of course, the rest of the show. But before we get there, we've got to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The era of proof of stake is upon us. And Lido is bringing proof of stake to everyone. Lido is a decentralized staking protocol that allows users to stake their proof of stake assets using Lido's distributed network of nodes. Don't choose between staking your assets

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Starting point is 00:17:12 Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an alto crypto IRA to invest in crypto tax free. Just go to alto IRA.com slash bankless and start investing in crypto today. All right guys, we are back with the releases of the week. This one's big. This is part of the defy mullet thesis, David, which is basically FinTech is going to look nice and fresh in the front. The party's going to be in the back. That's the defy mullet. And the party is, of course, decentralized finance, right? That's here.

Starting point is 00:17:43 That's on bankless. Bankless in the back. This is an example of that. FinTech giant stripe. They just jumped into crypto with a feature that lets Twitter users get paid in stable coins. What is the stable coin? I believe it's USDC. Of course.

Starting point is 00:17:56 Are they deploying it? Polygon. An Ethereum layer two slash side chain. And this is really interesting because Stripe has talked for a while about like, uh, crypto, whatever. It's a fad. They actually abandoned. They adopted Bitcoin as payment and they abandoned it back in 2018.

Starting point is 00:18:12 Now here they are in 2022, reentering stable coins on Ethereum. This is, uh, this is the utility that that D5 mullet gives you. Uh, kind of cool to see. Uh, this is what we love. This is why layer twos are so, so important. And the layer two, two revolution has only just begun. And so Stripe is getting ahead of the curve here before other payment providers. So as layer two progresses, I expect a lot more things of this nature.

Starting point is 00:18:38 All right, coming up next, there is Volt Protocol, now live on the Ethereum mainnet. Volt Protocol is a CPI adjusted stable coin and is now live. And so if you don't like losing the value of your dollars due to inflation, there's a stable coin on Ethereum that can help with that. Volt is a fork out of the Faye protocol. and so it's using phased protocols code base, which is generally well battle tested as far as stable coins go. And then they also integrate chain link oracles to help with the CPI adjusted number over time.

Starting point is 00:19:10 And so as the chain link oracles report an increasing inflation, the value of the stable coin will go up. And there's also just a bunch of DFI 2.0 mafia gang people. I think you'll recognize a lot of people here. Sam Cosmani from Frax. We had him on the show recently. Joey from Tribe. Jay from Rari, Tim Bako as well, and of course, the man whale himself, Tetranode. So really

Starting point is 00:19:34 solid project or a really solid team behind this project. Yeah, it'll be cool to see. More entrance into the freight. Excuse me, those are not people in on the project. Those are just angel investors, but they probably are going to help nonetheless. I'm sure they will. Um, speaking of helping Fidelity, they're helping Bitcoin right now and they're helping all of crypto. They are allowing retirement savers to put Bitcoin in 401k accounts. This is absolutely massive, David, because so many companies use Fidelity for their 401k service. Fidelity has something like $2.7 trillion, $2.7 trillion with a T of assets under management. It's absolutely insane. 23,000 companies. Yeah, it's a little bit more, not much more, but 23,000 companies use Fidelity for their retirement plans. And you know,

Starting point is 00:20:24 Bitcoin is coming, like Bitcoin's here, but other crypto assets are coming. In fact, they mentioned that in the press release. Fidelity is the custodian here. Okay, so Fidelity is taking custody of the Bitcoin assets too, and they've developed out their custody service for like the last five, six years. So that's all in place. It's really funny in the Wall Street Journal article that I have linked here. At the bottom, there's quotes from the Labor Department of the U.S. saying, this is seriously concerning and that people should use extreme care when investing in crypto. So a little bit of fud coming out of the Department of Labor because they're, of course, scared of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:21:08 And Fidelity put a cap on it. So the max cap is you can only YOLO in 20% of your retirement account, right? So it is still traditional finance. Like, we don't want you to be too risky, not too much crypto on the cap there. But still, a big step in the right direction. Directioning correct. Yeah, super cool. And it's big.

Starting point is 00:21:27 Look, this is going to usher in a lot of new money into the space. Yeah, awesome. Well, again, directionally correct. Nice job. This is another cool thing. Angel List is rolling out USDC. So Angel List is kind of a place that Naval actually you created it. It's a place for angel investors to like network and connect to startups.

Starting point is 00:21:50 And so the traditional way, if you are, were an angel investor you wanted to invest in a startup, you have to wire funds or ACH transfer the bank. And now they just rolled out USDC. Another example of stable coins, USDC winning. And like, I am so glad that we don't have to wire funds as much as we used to. When that goes away, that will be a happy day for me, David. There are some angel investments that that we've participated in Ryan where they're like, no, we can't accept USDC, you must wire funds. And we're both like, well, I'm not sure we want to join anymore. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:21 That's annoying. Wait, you're a crypto native company and you want me to wire funds from a bank account? Like, all right. What are we doing here, folks? Yeah, Angel List those rolling that out for everybody. This is another thing. You want to talk about this, Nike and Artifact. They're doing something.

Starting point is 00:22:39 Yeah, Artifact. They're the NFT studio, reveal Crypto Kicks, the first ever Ethereum, NFT Metaverse Sneakers. I mean, there are sneakerheads out there. They're like the OG NFTs before NFTs were really a thing, right? Like, you know, some people collect coins, some people collect stamps, some people collect sneakers. And sneakers generally be the most future of those things. So I guess it makes sense to put sneakers into the metaverse.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Like sneakerheads, they don't even wear their sneakers anyways. They just collect them. They just collect them. So I guess it makes sense to have NFTs. They look pretty sick as far as shoes go. But yeah, that is what is going on. You want to see what these puppies are going for on OpenC? Oh, I don't, but you're going to tell me anyways.

Starting point is 00:23:23 Here's floor price. 2.1. Eth? Okay. Floor price. It's not terrible. Oh, come on, man. How much, like, so convert that into dollars.

Starting point is 00:23:31 What's that like $6,231? Would you pay that for a pair of sneakers if you were a sneakerhead, David? Absolutely not, but it's a JPEG, Ryan, of course. What's the maximum amount you paid for sneakers? Oh. Are you sneaker culture guy? No, absolutely. not. I have my pair of Nike dunks I paid like $80 for. I had one red and black one and one blue and white one,

Starting point is 00:23:52 and on 4th of July, I would wear one of each. That's awesome, man. So no Nike sneaky sneakers for David, but I bet you pay more in the Metaverse though. I bet you, there's always the Metaverse premium, Ryan. I guess there is. Now, David's JPEG protocol? They're doing something? What's this? JPEG protocol? Dubious name, but okay. Why dubious? I don't need to explain that. You don't know. You don't know. This is a kid.

Starting point is 00:24:20 This is a kid-friendly show. I think you're going somewhere else. We don't need to go. Jaypegged, collateralized NFTs. We know that this is on the frontier. This is coming out now. There is the P-USD stable coin, which you can get a borrow at 2%, which is pretty low as for a fee. So if you put your NFTs into J-PEGed, you get to, you get to.

Starting point is 00:24:44 borrow PUSD at a 2% interest rate, and that's how you get liquidity on your JPEGs. They also have this insurance mechanism. Actually, I'll get to that in a second. Users can borrow up to 32% of the floor price of their JPEGs in PUSD. Liquidation will happen when the debt to equity ratio equals or exceeds 33%. There is a chain link Oracle for that floor price. I truly hope that they've thought about gaming because, like, you know, you can totally game the floor price of something. They must have thought about this.

Starting point is 00:25:16 I don't know how they did, but like, I can't imagine that they just like left that in there. And they also have Ryan an insurance mechanism, which is only made possible about the, how, because the Dow underwrites the debt. So users can purchase insurance to repurchase their NFTE in case they get liquidated.

Starting point is 00:25:33 So like if I put my crypto punk up for, up for collateralization, I borrowed against it, I got liquidated. I could go with that insurance, which cost me 5%. I could go back, buy back, my JPEG rather than just having to buy back any old random Cryptopunk, and that is jpegged. Do you think this is kind of why the Metaverse Premium exists?

Starting point is 00:25:51 Because you can't do that if you're a sneakerhead. You can't do that with your sneakers, right? But you can do this with your $6,000 metaverse sneakers. You can actually take a loan out against it. Yeah. And I also, it just makes me laugh. Do you know in the future how many, like, 12-year-olds are going to, like, become millionaires and then go broke and then become millionaires again and then go broke because

Starting point is 00:26:09 of this sort of mechanic, you get like NFT game items, suddenly. they're worth like tens of thousands of dollars overnight and then some 12 year old like goes and leverages them on jpegged and like loses it all. Doesn't understand what it means to leverage up all of your JPEs. As soon as I realized that NFT collaboration was going to be a thing, I've always been of the opinion that this is going to result in a lot of NFTs changing hands and a lot of people being really upset because like I mean, we all know like the I keep on harping on the ape community.

Starting point is 00:26:40 So sorry about that, but I'm going to keep on doing it. Like, if they lose their private keys, they're going to take an unreasonable amount of debt, probably. Like, those things... As soon as it's easy to do that. Yes. As soon as it's easy to do that, it's probably going to happen. And, like, there's just going to be a big churning of, like, DGen NFT holders because there's going to be some NFT drop.

Starting point is 00:26:56 They're not going to have any more cash. They're going to go to JPEG and collateralize their NFTs and leverage up on NFTs. The most ridiculous thing to leverage it up on. And then, Ryan, they are going to get JPEG, if you will. This is great because, uh, we, you know, I've, I've been hoping. hoping for better financial education in the U.S. in the world for like kids. This is how they're going to learn.

Starting point is 00:27:18 Look, man, this is how everyone learns. Unless you lose a lot of money, unless you get liquidated, better to learn these lessons when you're 12 years old. You're getting JPEG then. Rather than get JPEG when you're in the early 30s and you get JPEG done your house. Yeah, just hand that tax bill off to Mommy, okay? Oh, there you go.

Starting point is 00:27:36 12-year-olds having to pay taxes on NFTs. What is happening? So much great stuff with crypto Let's get to raises though Another one billion dollars has just entered crypto In the form of a new fund this time Joe McCann is raising Joe McCann is a targeting one billion dollars

Starting point is 00:27:56 Not one million dollars yet Yeah Okay well I bet they'll be able to do it This guy's career has spanned Microsoft also asymmetric passport capital Look man the TLDR is another one billion dollar our fund has entered the fray. I've been talking like channels, people are like, well, private equity, where are they

Starting point is 00:28:15 going to deploy all of this in crypto? There's nowhere left. It's getting crazy. Like these deals that, you know, aren't public for credited investors, a billion dollars has to go somewhere. Where's it going to go? It's just going to increase the valuations of all of these crypto startups. It's absolutely insane, dude.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Like, 1999. You know what we should do, Ryan? Like, there is, there, the number of stories I've heard of just like insane valuations. I heard a story where. Some startup founder was doing some modest raise at like $20 to $30 million valuation, which is not modest, but now it is. And then the VC firm that wanted to, that it was going to lead that round came back to him and said, hey, we are going to double the valuation that you're asking for.

Starting point is 00:28:55 We'll let you raise at $60 million, but you have to give us all of it because they don't have any places to deploy all the capital, Ryan. So the private equity rounds are extremely overvalued. And there's so much cashling round. And you know what is happening, Ryan? is everyone is forgetting about the blue chips. They're forgetting about Bitcoin. They're forgetting about ETH.

Starting point is 00:29:14 And like, I think a mistake that people like, perhaps Joe McCann are doing is they're thinking like, okay, get me into crypto. I don't know what to buy. So like diversify, right? I just invest all across the board and just diversify me into crypto. Not realizing and not knowing that like Bitcoin and ETH are basically indices. They're basically indices of the whole entire crypto market cap. Ether is formally an indecacy of the Ethereum economy.

Starting point is 00:29:38 And so they're making the mistake of thinking, okay, like, I don't want concentrated bets deploying my capital everywhere. But then they're deploying their capital in these overvalued valuations and they're forgetting about the blue chips. Brian, what should we do? We should start a startup that takes in money from all these investors and we just buy Eath. And we're going to outperform every single startup ever in the last year. That's kind of what I was thinking. If I had a billion dollar VC fund, first thing I'd do is I'd be like, thank you for your money. I'm deploying all of this right away. And I'm buying a billion dollars worth of Eth. And then I would take that ETH. I would stake a portion of it. And then my objective would

Starting point is 00:30:12 be to go beat the value of Eith. Measure all of my denominator would be Eid and all future investments. I would wait them against. Is this going to appreciate relative to Eith or not? If it does, I'd deploy there. There's our fund, David. We just made it. And, and Ryan, it's going to outperform every other fund or every other, like, yeah, private equity fund that came out in the last year. I'm firmly believing that. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe we'll announce it in the last. launch next week, David. Every single VC fund operator is like listening to this is like, you guys are idiots. Yeah, they definitely are.

Starting point is 00:30:45 But for those that are listening, we're also think that you're idiots. But who knows? Who knows? I don't think Haseeb is an idiot. Don't put him there. But this is his firm. He's part of this firm. Dragonfly Capital.

Starting point is 00:30:56 We should talk about this. Yeah. Raise $650 million in their third fund. They actually can't deploy money into ETH. So they are restricted in that. They have to do it into private equity. And so $650 million into. Dragonfly Capital's third fund, extremely successful fund. I actually did a show with

Starting point is 00:31:13 Haseeb on Layer Zero about how to be a VC if you want to get into the brain of one of the most articulate VCs out there and what it takes to become a VC. That was a really good episode. Dragonfly, $650 million, third fund. Look, man, I wouldn't be fair to VCs. They actually crushed it last year, the last couple of years relative to ETH, right? They absolutely crushed it. So I guess, you know, there's credit where it's due. Liquify. They're building a carda of Web 3. Carda is where you basically track your pre-public shares, investing, whether you're an employee and you get invested shares or whether it's some sort of a startup. And Liquefy is bringing

Starting point is 00:31:51 that to Web3 companies, doing that with Dowell's, I assume. So something interesting going on there. David. Next up. Yeah. This is pretty cool. Ethereum scaling solution at Scroll raises $30 million from Bain Capital and some other angel investments of which Ryan and I are are some of them. So disclaimer there. Scrolls building a ZK EVM. I met some of the team at Amsterdam at MEV Day, talented group of people, and some other angels include Santiago Santos, Anthony Sazano, and many others in the Ethereum community. Yeah, scroll is a really interesting layer to you. They've got some work to do, though, first. It's not going to be ready for Maynet for a while. ZeroX. They just raised $70 million from Greylock, OpenC, and Jared Leto?

Starting point is 00:32:39 Why? Jared Letto is actually the actor of one of my favorite movies. It's called Mr. Nobody, but very few people actually know that movie. It's a good movie. No, I've never watched it, but Mr. Nobody is now investing in ZeroX. So it's cool. The celebrities are getting into the game, too, a little bit. David, Jobs Report. You ready for it? Let's do it. Okay, this is our weekly reminder to tell you to get a job in crypto.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Oh my God, this first job looks amazing. I'm going to read some of them out. A lead community manager at Crypto Sculls. Dow. Can't even imagine what Cryptoskulls does. But you've got to get that job. Senior product engineer at Parcel. Junior engineer at Bankless and Ethereum Core developer,

Starting point is 00:33:15 Nethermind, Golang Engineer, Starknet clients, Nethermind, Bankless newsletter, editor, we're still looking. Content Manager at Talley, Director of Developer Relations, a Solidity Architect, Marketing Manager at Meshia, UX Designer, Prometheus, community manager, the DGN, Dogs, Dogs, club co-founder for a TBD, D5 primitive, a backend software engineer, AGMI. I could go on, but I won't. There's a link in the show notes to all of these jobs, and David is exhausted

Starting point is 00:33:42 because he's been dancing this whole time, as usual. What do we have to say about that? Just get a job in crypto? Help David dance less by giving a job in crypto and making his jobs board go down. If you want to post your job, there's a link in the show notes. Also, So bankless.palat.com slash jobs. And also, there's this thing called the talent collective for the other side of the matchmaking market. So if you are good talent and you want to be, you know, pitched to join other people's company, there is the talent collective where you can upload your resume and be reviewed, have your,

Starting point is 00:34:15 your resume be reviewed by all the companies that are hiring in crypto. So that is, go for. Sometimes that's a good play. You know, you play hard to get. You just like make them come for you. That's exactly right. All right, our first news item, the biggest. Elon Musk just bought Twitter. A couple weeks ago, he said he wanted to buy it. Twitter said no. They've been doing this dance back and forth. It was all public. It's very great. Now, he purchased it. So breaking news, Twitter and Elon Musk reach a deal on the buyout to be announced shortly. That was announced. I'm not sure if it's fully closed yet, but it's basically for all intents and purposes. Elon Musk now owns Twitter. Neat. How do I feel about that? I think pretty good. I think pretty good. I mean,

Starting point is 00:34:55 he built he built one of the coolest car companies that exist he's sending rockets to the moon so like you know don't fade Elon in his ability to innovate like turtle will probably be pretty cool uh as a result of that um i have a take later on the show about this but you know uh i think probably big changes coming to twitter i don't think he bought twitter ryan just to add an edit button or just to do a few other tweaks like no he didn't want to just add that he's got big plans Elon must never has small plans. He only has big plans. Well, I hope one of those plans is actually to distribute ownership to, you know, those who aren't Elon Musk. And maybe we'll talk about that because what's still going on right now is people are getting banned, often for no reason. And Stani from the Ave protocol, DFI

Starting point is 00:35:41 founder, was actually banned just this week. We actually had a conversation with Stani this morning, and we're going to play the highlights now. Stani, how's Twitter Dale going for you? Like, what's going on here? Not very well, to be honest. There's no one to talk to here. I feel like I don't, I feel like I don't have any audience. I had all my audience in Twitter and I got banned and I don't know who to talk to. Look, if you're on Twitter, any social media account for that matter, you don't actually own the property there, right? You don't own the list of your followers is completely private property. And we are viewing the actual tweets on YouTube. And I just want to recap this. Okay. So this is innocent. This is innocent. A.F. This is like even wholesome. It's funny. Stani tweets breaking, joining Twitter as interim CEO, clearly an Elon Musk style joke. And then as a follow-up, he offers an actual, like, tongue-in-cheek list of solutions of what Twitter should be implementing moving forward. If I'm in the product team of Twitter, I'm like jotting some of this stuff down, potentially.

Starting point is 00:36:44 And he says this, thank you for the opportunity to work at Twitter. My first agenda in the roadmap for the first 90 days is ship and edit button, open source the Twitter algos. add support for ENS and Ethereum integrate with Lens protocol. I ask you, the viewer, is this a bannable offense on Twitter? Like, what is going on? No due process, no explanation as to why. This is not a threat of violence in any way, shape, or form, or incitement of violence.

Starting point is 00:37:10 How does this break the policy of Twitter? These are some of the questions I have. But now this is Elon Musk's problem, isn't it? Because Elon Musk just majority purchased all of Twitter, which makes him kind of the governance vote for everything that happens on this platform. And we have also seen Elon Musk dabble in the world of Web3. You know, he loves to play attention to Dogecoin, which is like almost Web3. He knows what Ethereum is.

Starting point is 00:37:37 He knows the basics of this. Are you optimistic that Elon Musk might actually look into the fundamentals of what Web3 is and why it has drawn so much excitement from the world around it? and perhaps use his platform, use his now majority share over Twitter to turn Twitter into something like Web3? I very much hope so because there's just so much value added in Web3. Pretty much like even if you think about protocols,

Starting point is 00:38:09 on-chain protocols with different kinds of rules, whether it's decent class finance or Web3 social media or something else. So it's very valuable and efficient way. to actually provide the ownership to the users. But also if you kind of like approach the whole idea of, you know, who is the epicenter most valuable kind of like a stakeholder in social media? It's pretty much the users. And the way we have built social media is that we extract a lot of data from the users and

Starting point is 00:38:44 then pretty much use that data and algorithms to essentially sell different kinds of services to the user. In terms of like the free social, you can actually, we turn around this mechanism in a way where the user is actually the one who owns its own network. And then these applications, experience layers, algorithms are actually competing to provide the best services, bringing transparency and other values. I have tweeted this tweet out as an experiment. I'm wondering if I'm about to get banned. Oh, you're not joining Twitter as interim CEO, Ryan? Maybe I will.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Maybe we are all CEOs. Maybe that is the Web 3 way. I think that's ultimately what we are saying here is we should be CEOs of our own Twitter account. So if you want to tweet out breaking, joining Twitter as interim CEO, you can. Let's see if we get banned here. I really like that line you said, Ryan. We should all be CEOs of your own social media account.

Starting point is 00:39:43 You think about that on the spot? Yeah, yeah. Well, yes. I mean, it's basically what the tweet was saying. saying, right? It's like, Stani was, I want to be the, I'm the new CEO of Twitter. And it's just like, you know what? We should all be CEOs of our individual Twitter accounts. That is the decentralized Web3 model, isn't it? Yeah, that's exactly right. All right. And the other big news of the week, Optimism introduced the Optimism Collective, which is code word for releasing an

Starting point is 00:40:09 irdrop. So that happened on Tuesday morning. We did a show with an hour and a half long show, going all the way into the details about the optimism collective, what it is. And it's basically a two-house model. And so it's got the token house, which is governed by, I think you can guess, a token. But it also has the Citizens House, which is kind of this new innovation. And they have this bicameral system, this two-party system of sorts, where one is focused on the short-term incentives, which is the tokens, and the one that is focused on the long-term incentives, which is the Citizen's House.

Starting point is 00:40:40 The Token's House is, of course, composed by all the people that own the tokens. the Citizens' House are on-chain identities, on-chain people governed by a sole-bound NFT. So an NFT that is fixed to your wallet that you cannot transfer that you have been given because the Optimism Collective has deemed you a valuable contributor who understands how to drive sustainable growth to optimism, Ethereum, and the new Internet. And so this whole idea, this whole concept is that optimism can use the block space revenue from the Optimism Layer 2, and it will generate that.

Starting point is 00:41:13 generate that revenue and then it will send that to the protocol and the citizens house will govern over what is called retroactive public goods funding which is going to unlock something that I think is super massive. Ryan and I are about to have recorded a podcast about this because Ryan I think this is a billion dollar opportunity toward by the end of this year and probably more than that and then by starting next year it's going to be something like a 10 to 50 billion dollar opportunity that we have never seen for. What is the opportunity? Block space revenue going to people who create public goods.

Starting point is 00:41:50 This is what optimism is pioneered where you can, if you think that you can build public goods, then you can get money for that and not just a little bit of money, Ryan. This whole concept of retroactive public goods funding is injecting Silicon Valley type incentives, but allowing for public goods to be a product. This is something brand new in the crypto space. I'm extremely excited about it. I think this is the new alpha for the rest of the. said to 2022 and 2023 because this, I think, will become standard for L2s. L2s will need to invest

Starting point is 00:42:19 in infrastructure and are going to use the revenue for their block space to do it. And they will need builders who can build products that have never before has been seen on the face of this earth, which are public goods. So the upside potential of a tech startup, but the product potential of a public good, brand new, brand new thing out of crypto. We needed crypto to unlock this. And this has never been seen before. I'm really excited about this.

Starting point is 00:42:40 You know, another term for public goods that people are probably familiar with because we use it all the time is open source software. That is open source software, and that is one of the main public goods that people will be creating clients and all sorts of open source tools that will support the crypto industry. That's exactly right. In addition to this AirDrop and this new optimism collective, they have also created the optimism foundation, which will be the way that the Optimism Public Benefits Corporation, the company, the company that has existed thus far, will start to add in other members that are not part of that company to start to slowly dilute the original members and be a path towards decentralization.

Starting point is 00:43:18 So the Optimism Foundation has been created and it will eventually defer all governance rights of the foundation to the on-chain citizens' house eventually. A big step forward for building out an ecosystem of contributors for optimism. So the two members of the Optimism team, Jing and Ben, will be joining the Optimism Foundation. Carl from Optimism will be sticking around with the Optimism Labs, which is a new organization, the protocol engineers of optimism sticking around. And then over time, this will be wholly decentralized. But of course, Ryan, there was an airdrop.

Starting point is 00:43:51 And so 5% of the total supply of optimism was airdropped just last Tuesday. You can go check your eligibility. I've got a couple eligible addresses, which is just lovely. If you've donated to Gitcoin, you're eligible. If you have been, quote, price out of Ethereum, you're eligible. if you have done a bunch of other things. I think if you've used optimism deposited into optimism, and used it for four weeks, you got an air drop.

Starting point is 00:44:16 There's a bunch of different ways we've gotten theirdrop. If you got the airdrop for multiple reasons, there is a multiple reason bonus. And then there are tiers to that as well. So if you did all six, I think, of the criteria for getting the optimism air drop, you got the third tier bonus size. So you get bonus for doing more things.

Starting point is 00:44:35 So that is pretty cool. And the other cool thing, Ryan, is that there's not just oneirdrop that is AirDrop number one. And so implying there will be also AirDrop 2 and AirDrop 3 and AirDrop 4 going forward as determined by the community and what is best for the optimism layer 2. What are we looking at here, Ryan? This looks like some data, some transaction and wallet data, I think, for optimism. And it's really cool to benchmark this and actually look at, you know, the usage of the thing because the optimism network is, being used pretty heavily. I think it's actually the network with the sixth most fees. And they did all of that

Starting point is 00:45:14 previously without any token incentive. Okay, so this is definitely top 10 of all chains. And so what we're looking at here is the number of transactions in wallets of the last 30 days. There's been about 66,000 wallets. So every wallet is like a bank account. So 66,000 bank accounts. a total number of addresses that have been created on Optimism 330K. So these could be all potential citizens. Some citizens might have more than one bank account. A lot of fees being generated here too.

Starting point is 00:45:45 I've got some other charts here, David. Before you go on, though, very, very important to note. There's two metrics I want to pull out here. Last 30 days, optimism has saved 192,000 ether from getting spent on gas. And because it has saved that much ether being spent on gas, it has been able to collect 520 ether. So this is the business of optimism. It's saving users.

Starting point is 00:46:07 It saved users over the last 30 days, 192,000 ether. And for that service, it collected, it's for itself, 5002 ether in 30 days. And Ryan, you can see what happens when a token gets injected. Look at the bottom left chart, transacting addresses per day up into the right in the final days of April because of the token. Transacting addresses on a daily, weekly,

Starting point is 00:46:31 monthly basis, you can see that all go up into the right. Transactions per day, up into the right. This is what happens when you inject token incentives. We know this is true. And if you go look at Ryan at Avalanche, which is like optimism, a fork of geth. When they started doing liquidity mining incentives, that's when Avalanche started really succeeding, really getting TVL and driving usage. And optimism has been able to do comparable amounts of usage before having a token Ryan. So this is why we're calling this a starting pistol for L222. It's got to come with the tokens. The cool thing about all of these layers, two's, of course, is because they are a primary consumer of block space on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:47:09 And so they ultimately, they settle on Ethereum because that's where they're driving their security. So this is Optimism's Layer 1 gas used per month and transaction fees. The amount of transaction fees, they are actually spending. The amount of blocks base. L1 transaction fees. L1 purchases they have on Ethereum. So what does this indicate to us? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:30 I mean, you can just see that, especially that. top chart of just the gas per used per day, just going up and up and up, especially now that there's a token. And as layer two is built out, we are not even close to being done with reducing fees on layer two. So that's also going to drive a ton of adoption. And of course, that is going to increase the total transactions on the layer one, burning ether on the layer one. Because of course, as we have said, Ethereum turns into a settlement layer not for people, but for other blockchains. Optimism layer two and other layer twos like it are the settlement layers for people, the L, one is the settlement layer for other blockchains.

Starting point is 00:48:04 And then I thought this one was funny, Ryan. As soon as they air dropped the token, like, look at that spike at the very far right side. Like, just two-xed. And in the sense, dropping a token, the number of unique addresses on optimism jumped from, what was that? 350,000 to where it is now at over 800,000. Inside of one day, 400,000 unique new addresses came on to optimism because of the token. L2-2-2, man.

Starting point is 00:48:29 It's right around the corner. I mean, here's the reality. Here's that list that we talked about earlier. Optimism is the sixth most fee-generating chain right now, and it's above Solana, for instance, just below Arbitrum, which is another layer two. It's getting close to passing Bitcoin, and then Avalanche and Binance are only higher ones,

Starting point is 00:48:48 and then, of course, Ethereum. It's just nails home, I think, something that we've been saying. We expect layer twos like optimism to compete with the alternative layer ones of the, the world. So it's kind of like an execution layer competition here. It's Salana, Avalanche, versus layer two. It's really what's going on. And it feels like because Ethereum is positioning itself as a settlement layer is something different. It kind of stands on its own. It's part of the reason we've been a little bearish on the alternative layer one narrative.

Starting point is 00:49:22 Not that there won't be other alternative Ethereum chains. Of course there will be. but how will they fare in the backdrop of layer twos that are getting usage, getting market share, getting free low-cost economic security from Ethereum and then starting to issue tokens? That'll be the big question, I think, that will start to be answered as we get into, as we go through the rest of 2022. Optimism's livestream view of your account when we did our live stream with them was our second highest ever after Mark Cuban. This is what happens when you release tokens. You get attention. And we all know that in the crypto space,

Starting point is 00:49:57 attention, price follows attention. And tokens will put the attention back onto layer two's. Retroactive public goods, because we are funding public goods for not just optimism, not just for Ethereum, but for the whole world eventually, will eventually push Ethereum into mainstream legitimacy. And also, Layer 22, 22 will also lead us into the merge.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Ryan, I'm just feeling really bullish about the Ethereum ecosystem. It's because we needed the tokens, the L2 tokens, all along. Yeah, I can tell. And I do think this the citizen house is a really unique design and gets us away from the thing that I've been really disturbed with kind of token governance, which is this plutocracy, where you basically have token holders and capital holders

Starting point is 00:50:36 that set all of the rules. So I'm really hopeful that that will be successful. Other news, I guess, on the Ethereum side, is Ridley Scott, his production house. Ridley Scott, director, fantastic movies like Alien, Aliens Gladiator, Blade Runner, that sort of thing. His production house is producing, an Ethereum documentary.

Starting point is 00:50:55 Yeah, it's going to be based off of Cammy Russo's book, her fantastic book, The Infinite Machine. And so a great history of Ethereum walks with you, before Ethereum was even a thing into where it is now. And so I can't think of a better book to base a documentary on. So congratulations to Camry Russo. A bunch of news that's coming out next week about that. And so I'm just excited to watch it, man.

Starting point is 00:51:15 And like, Ryan, there's two other Ethereum documentaries that I know are being worked on, not in secret, but just like, know, they're working on it. And so, like, there's also the era of Ethereum documentaries coming to things like Netflix or whatever other studio. And this isn't a documentary, right? This is a full-scale movie.

Starting point is 00:51:33 So they're going to have to actually find actors to play all of these rules, I believe. It's going to be a drama? Yeah, dude. Who's going to play Vital. This is going to be, like, the social network. You remember that movie? Who's going to play Vitalik? Who's going to play Vitalik?

Starting point is 00:51:44 Who's going to play Charles Hotskinson? Who's going to play Joe Lubin? Like, it's all of the characters are completely unreplaceable. Really? I can't think of anyone in Hollywood today. They could play Vitalik. Yeah, no, neither could I. No one pops to mine. I get a few for Charles, though. We'll save that for later. At least a few. Infura, let's talk about that. It was down last week, last Friday, I believe.

Starting point is 00:52:09 The PSA here is, even when infura is down and Metamath doesn't work, there are alternative nodes. And our friend David Mihal has a fantastic website where you can see at any point in time, any of the data providers, whether they are serving, data or not. And Metamag, you can change your Metamath settings and tap into one of these if something like Infura goes down. So not awesome, but we are not fully reliant on Infura. I mean, if you're hearing that kind of thing, it's like, it's absolute flood. It's not true. Haters. Yeah. And you could just like prove that by redirecting your node to something else. You can even run your own node and process transactions that way. But let's get to some NFT stuff, David. What's

Starting point is 00:52:52 this first one. Moonbirds. Kevin Rose's Moonbirds, NFT profile picture project. A bird sold for a million dollars within one week of launch. They're all owls. They're all owls.

Starting point is 00:53:07 And the floor price on these things have just left people completely astounded. I think the last I checked, it was a 33 ether floor for this profile picture NFT. And this just goes and teaches about the power of community because this is not just a profile picture product, This is a profile picture or a specific community that is a bunch of highly researched, highly engaged NFT collectors that are here for the long term being stewarded by our friend Kevin Rose. And so it's just a combination of like some cool pixel art plus a very powerful community behind it.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Yeah, I can't believe these numbers. But they're also getting getting some major funding. So Alexis O'Hanian's VC firm just announced, along with some others, true ventures as well, a $10 million in. investment into the moonbirds ecosystem. So that happened this week. Also, there was some controversy this week as well. So the Moonbird C-O-O Ryan Carson announced he was leaving the project. And I think that that took some of the community by surprise. He thought that, you know, Kevin and Ryan, some of the others were in it for the long term. I think Kevin Rose is completely in it for the long term. All indications point that way. But Ryan Carson left. He's now starting an NFT firm. There was some

Starting point is 00:54:19 back and forth about that and, you know, some price reaction as well. But I don't know. I feel long term pretty bullish about about this project. And I think the team is positioned to execute. I don't know about these valuations, though. Like, it's just, it's, it's really hard to get my head around why moonbirds are worth what they were worth. But, I mean, you could buy, when we first had Kevin on the podcast, you could buy a proof pass for like a few ETH at that time. And now that, that's gone up massively in value since since then. And, has paid dividends for those who've held it. This is the bankless curse.

Starting point is 00:54:53 We bring people along because like, yo, this project's really cool. We do the podcasts on it. And then we forget to buy stuff. Every single time. Yeah, you remember like the most painful one is probably,

Starting point is 00:55:04 what was the most painful one? There's so many. In 2020, when we got like NFT pilled and, and you were like, hey, how are NFTs any different from this painting I had? Do you remember that podcast he did?

Starting point is 00:55:15 Of course, of course. Right. We should have just, uh, they use crypto punks as an example. I was like, how is it any different from this cryptopunk painting that I have on my wall two years later? And that took, what, that took two years later? That's probably a year later.

Starting point is 00:55:28 Nine months. It was nine months. Anyway, I have an answer as to why the floor price has done so well. It's because Kevin, they're doing, like the proof collective is like this community bottom-up, like, alternative to paid research. Like, some people, instead of just going and Googling and looking at bias research, they pay for research to be done about things. And it feels like that where the community is engaged and the community is serious.

Starting point is 00:55:53 And so when that community is successful, Ryan, they all have a bunch of money because they all research stuff together. That is the proof collective. Yeah, I know. It's good. There's such strength in community. They have so much ammo to pump the bird price floor because they all have made each other very wealthy. That is my interpretation of the moon, the proof collective. And you notice I have a bird right behind me. That's because this was given to me.

Starting point is 00:56:17 David and I have stepped in and Joy does advisors of this project. And I think it's because we saw a lot of parallels with the bankless community and with proof. At some level what proof is doing for NFTs is what bankless could do in the future on the DFI side of things

Starting point is 00:56:32 with some sort of membership. So there's a lot of commonality, a lot of synergy between these communities. And Kevin asked us to be part of this and we want it to be because it's a cool experiment that we hope to bring maybe into the bankless ecosystem a little bit more. Maybe there's some potential for collaboration opportunities.

Starting point is 00:56:51 So we'll have to see how that emerges. But the power of strong communities who are super knowledgeable in crypto is just like, that's all you're doing. You're investing in communities at some level. The network effects of communities. And you plus you can't share Alpha on Twitter because then it's not Alpha anymore. So you've got to grow your very specialist network of Alpha. And that's what they've done with NFTs.

Starting point is 00:57:13 That's what we want to do with DFTs. and there's always a power of composable communities. There's a ton of overlap between the bird community, the proof community, and the bankless community. And so we're going to work on the defy side of this whole entire thing. Listeners or people that are watching on the YouTube, drop a comment in the show notes as, who's got the better bird?

Starting point is 00:57:32 You can see my bird on the left. It's the pink background with the moon hat. We already know. You're only asking that question because you know you got the better bird. That's why you're asking. Yeah, do you think I got the better bird, Ryan? My bird looks a little angry. You know, and I'm like, I'm only angry.

Starting point is 00:57:47 When do I get angry, David? I've never seen you angry once. Well, I just, I don't get angry usually, but this bird is angry. So, you know, David's, it's looking pretty cool. That bird is not angry right, that bird is determined. Thank you. All right. Determine to go bankless.

Starting point is 00:58:01 Let's talk about the Solana ecosystem. You got something here. Yeah, yeah. Solana NFTs and crazy NFT drops. Birds are not the only crazy thing happening in NFTs. There is OK Bears, the new NFT project on Solana. beats out all, every single one, right? Every single NFT project to ever have day one volume,

Starting point is 00:58:21 which is all of them, OK Bears beat all of them. BeFriends is now number two. It got dethrone from number one as the highest NFT project with the most amount of volume, coming in at $13 million in 24 hours. Meibits is now number three at $12 million dollars in 24 hours,

Starting point is 00:58:37 followed by what's now number four at invisible friends at $10 million. Salana, and the Salana OK Bears came in at 18. a half million dollars in sales inside of the first 24 hours. They look a lot like board apes. They look a lot like board apes. That's cool. And look, this is bullish, I think, for sole price because the unit of account and the unit of exchange, the money in the Solana ecosystem is souls. So all of these things are being priced in souls. So that is somewhat bullish to the extent that souls get used as money in Salana ecosystem. That's monetary premium. Let's talk a little bit about

Starting point is 00:59:14 some other news that came out OpenC just acquired Gem. What is Gem, David? Yeah, it's a floor sweeper. So if you just don't care about what you buy, but you know you want to buy a collection, you can just go to Gem, say I have a five-eath budget, a one-eath budget, whatever, a 50-eath budget, and you can just press by and you can just sweep the floor automatically in an automated fashion. And so now that functionality is part of OpenCe. That's a really cool buy and kind of a tuck-in acquisition. The trouble with some of that, according to the community, is like, Jem users were hopeful that Jem would release a token. And now that they're going into OpenC, that's increasingly unlikely because OpenC is somewhat stated

Starting point is 00:59:53 that they're planning to go the IPO route, not go the token route unless forced. So no token, it looks like, for Jem, at least in the short run, and maybe forever. Real quickly here, Central African Republic is now accepting Bitcoin as legal tenders. So we have moved into Bitcoin macro adoption news. So another country has adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender. And we are also perhaps about to have a third. Because if the president of Panama signs it, all that's left is a signature. It will also become legal tender in Panama.

Starting point is 01:00:27 So two big dubs for Bitcoin this week, almost, almost two. One for sure, almost a second. And so the final step is the presidential signature. And Bitcoin can be legal tender in almost three countries by the end of this week, Ryan. That's crazy that that's happening so quickly. Let's talk regulation, but first, maybe this is not quite regulation. Snowden and Z-Cash. What's the tie here?

Starting point is 01:00:48 Yeah, yeah. So there's been this semi-anonymous contributor to Z-Cash called John Doberton. He was part of the ceremony for launching the Z-Cash network. We'll get into that in the details. Turns out that was Edward Snowden from Genesis. It turns out Edward Snowden was one of the original signers on the, what do you call it? Trusted Setup is what they call it. So Zcash, with zero knowledge technology, there's this thing called a trusted setup where a bunch of people come and they participate in this like zero knowledge ceremony.

Starting point is 01:01:17 And in order for this to work, one person just needs to permanently destroy their keys. And if one person does it, then this whole thing is completely decentralized, right? And so the final ceremony, which was held in locations across the world because we're on the internet, was in October of 2016. And that's where people all destroyed their keys. And as long as, again, as long as one of the people destroy their keys, it works. And everyone has said, like, oh, I destroyed my keys too. And John Doberton, who is one of the original guys, turns out it was Edward Snowden. Ryan, if Edward Snowden told you that he burned his ceremony keys, would you believe him?

Starting point is 01:01:52 Yeah, I think, especially in 2016 before any of this stuff was valuable. I mean, the man is principled enough to be exiled from the United States. Yeah, uh-huh. Right. So I would say there's a high chance of that. And so this is coming out and this is giving Zcass from additional legitimacy as well and giving this some attention. So it's a cool project. Really like what Zcash is doing.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And I'm not sure this will increase their favorability. In the market? Not in the market, but also just like U.S. regulators. I mean, they already don't like Snowden. You think this is going to make them excited about Zcash and anonymous cryptocurrency prospects? That's a good point. That's a good point. that is a coming just like collision

Starting point is 01:02:34 that we know is happening is privacy on blockchains and regulation. Oh God, here we go. All right, this is coming out of the Tron ecosystem. Justin Sun, the infinite copycatter, has imitated Terra to launch an algorithmic stable coin

Starting point is 01:02:50 USDD on Trond and with a reserve of $10 million for the Trondale and also has basic interest rate of 30%. So trumping anchor at 20%. Gotta be higher, of course. Got to be higher. So Tron refuses to be outdone. And so just copying the terror ecosystem once again, kind of copycator, Justin's son. You know, it's a little sad, but the saddest thing of all is that it actually works. It's worked for him in the past and he's just playing the same thing. It could work for him again. All right, last news item, the ECB, some officials gave

Starting point is 01:03:24 a speech there, central bankers, of course, for the European Union. I'll just give you the TLDR, but include the link in the show notes. The TLDR is, The bankers say crypto is scary and that we should be scared of it. And what do they say to do about it? Well, inject some additional regulation. This speech goes through four points of that. Number one, they got to treat all crypto-like banks. That is the recipe.

Starting point is 01:03:48 That is the prescription for fixing crypto. Number two, state surveillance for everything. They want to make sure that they collect all of their taxes, including taxing the hell out of proof of work. Number three, adding disclosures everywhere. It's interesting is I partially agree with like the centralized pieces, but I don't think they're realizing that defy has like disclosures written into the code. It's all open anyway.

Starting point is 01:04:14 No centralization, no disclosures. Exactly. And number four, make everyone basically registered financial advisors, right? So a lot more disclosures, a lot more certifications. It goes through this in more detail. I've super summarized it. I feel like this is how to miss the next internet and four easy steps, basically.

Starting point is 01:04:35 I think central bankers are right after a fashion that crypto and defy does need some more regulation in spots. But if you treat this entire industry just like the traditional banking industry, you'll get what you've already got, which is a broken system that doesn't service the people and services the elite few. That's the end of that.

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Starting point is 01:07:44 All right, guys, home stretch. We're getting into the takes of the week. This one comes from this guy, Ryan Sean Adams. He says, the more toxic, the community, the more insecurities is trying to hide. if you were confident in the success of your crypto, you wouldn't be toxic. You're toxic because you're worried. Don't at me. Ryan, I love this take. What inspired you to see? What inspired this? I would inspire this. I was inspired by toxic communities, David. Like toxic communities. What I mean by is toxic communities is just communities that kind of like swarm you. They drown out all possible logical responses, right? They call everything FUD. They hurl insults without engaging with the argument, and they use like swarm techniques. And often these swarm techniques are like pushed down by some sort of a cult leader that says, Hey, get them, get them.

Starting point is 01:08:35 And then they kind of like there. So there are communities like that. And I just kind of identified what the pattern is. And they're all just a little bit scared. They're a little bit worried. It's like a human fear type response. And I think that is the source of this toxicity. If look, if you're, if you're confident that X chain is going to,

Starting point is 01:08:54 dominate. Like, why do you have to be toxic? Yeah. Why do you have to like project these insecurities through toxicity? I don't think you have to. I think the quiet, confident chains and communities are the ones that, yeah, that are not worried. That's exactly right. I have so much to say about this, but we'll have to leave that for another day. I thought this take was interesting. This actually is not about crypto, but John Stewart warns that authoritarianism is the greatest threat to comedy as he receives the Mark Twain humor prize. The reason why I want to bring this up, Ryan, is because authoritarianism is also perhaps one of the biggest threats to crypto. Authoritarianism is just a threat in general. It's a threat towards expression,

Starting point is 01:09:37 and comedy is an expression of humor and social life and social culture. And crypto, what it is, is a financial expression. We get to express things in the financial ecosystem much more than we previously could, which is a threat to authoritarianism. So Ryan, authoritarianism, not just a threat to crypto, also to comedy. And I like both of those things. I agree. If you hear a political take on bank list, it's not going to be right or left. It's going to be anti-authoritarian every single time. Let's go to this next one. Look at this very clear divide. This is on crypto, Twitter, and you notice two clusters here. One, a cluster is kind of like NF, not NFT, NFT world, I would say. And the other is a cluster of like sort of the crypto money type people.

Starting point is 01:10:24 And these are these two clusters. And they're living almost like separate lives in different tribes. What do you think of this? Yeah, well, on the left, you can see the ERC 20 folk. And on the right, you can see the ERC 721. That's kind of how I divide this. There's some people in the middle. I bet I have people like a DC investor would probably find himself in that middle cluster somewhere. The crazy thing is like the whole like top third of the whole NFT side are bored apes. So just like it's showing you how gargantuan the ape community is, which is interesting in of itself. And also, for the podcast listeners, the NFT cluster is like three times larger than the crypto Twitter cluster. And so, like, it's just showing you how much adoption came in the last year because

Starting point is 01:11:03 of NFTs. Oh, I think there's tons of people in the NFT world that have no idea what bankless is. Probably. Like, no idea. Whereas that would be a bit more rare, I would say, on the crypto Twitter side of things. Well, you know what, Ryan? We don't know who they are either. That's true. That's why we're separate clusters somewhat. But it's pretty cool. More surface area. David, this is a take from you. Why don't I read it out? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. That's not your take. Of course. That's an African proverb or something like this. And that is a shout out to you. And there is a meme that we're looking at. One says EVM equivalence, the other EVM compatibility. Could you explain this meme for us? Yeah. So there's this concept of a

Starting point is 01:11:43 Peloton, right? Like, no, not the Silicon Valley like exercise machine. The Peloton is like the cluster of bicycles. When cycling is when people are racing, they all cluster up to reduce drag. And this is what open source software is. The more open source software contributors you have contributing to the same piece of software

Starting point is 01:12:01 such as the EVM, such as Geth, things go faster. The network effects are shared because when any other developer contribute something to Geth, everyone who's using that Geth standard gets to benefit from that. When you fork Geth and turn it into something else, or if you just

Starting point is 01:12:17 rebuild something else completely from scratch. You don't get to join in the Peloton. You are bicycling solo. You don't get to draft on anyone. You don't get to drag on anyone. And so you are not in the Peloton. Ryan, if you're in the middle of a Peloton, like in the middle of that very big one, you reduce drag by like five, by 95% at times. So like it's basically effortless to keep up with the network effects. Whereas if you have a smaller Peloton or if you're just going solo, solo, you have to bicycle, you have to work so much harder than the Peloton. So the Peloton always wins. And this is a metaphor for open source nature, collaborative nature, versus BC-backed forks. And that is the take here. I wrote an entire article on this, which I'm super proud of,

Starting point is 01:13:01 actually, on Bankless. It is also a video on the YouTube that you can listen to as well. I think the big takeaway here is if you want to understand the EVM, that's the Ethereum Virtual Machines Network Effect, read David's article. Because that's spell it out in detail and I think it's very bullish for the EVM and for Ethereum. So you expect nothing less from bankless, a bullish article about Ethereum. David, this is another take. What's this? Yeah, this is coming from Bartak from Layer 2B where one of my takeaways from Eth Amsterdam is that everyone is hiring and there's no one left to hire because everyone has gotten a hired. So we have an extreme supply glut of talent. So I asked Bartek for somebody because he's looking

Starting point is 01:13:41 to hire at Layer 2B. Bartak, what are you looking for it for a process? at Layer 2B. And he says these four things. And if you can do these four things, you can get a job that's like $200,000 plus as an engineer for 50 different companies. So we can make you extremely competitive. And he says, willingness to become an L2 expert in the shortest amount of time possible, implying that they're willing to hire people who are unknowledgeable in layer two's, but are very, very hungry for it. Full stack typescript a must. Web3 understanding Understanding Web 3 TypeScript is a nice to have, plus a passion for exploring the frontiers of the bankless world. Shout out to us, I guess. Thank you. And also excellent communication skills. So what are you waiting for

Starting point is 01:14:20 is what he asks? Yeah, get a job in crypto, as we say. All right, guys, that was all the takes. Coming in to the final question I've got for you, Ryan, what are you excited about? I am excited about the permissionless conference, David. Okay, so this is happening, Palm Beach, Florida, two and a half weeks. I can't believe two and a half weeks. We are busy, dotting the eyes and crossing all of the T's on content. I'm excited about a few main stage sessions that I'm going to mention. Number one, we're doing this panel with Chris Dixon. Okay?

Starting point is 01:14:48 We did the mental models for Web 3 with him. That was like a fantastic podcast. It's still often referenced. Yeah. And, you know, I think we're going to do some of that. It'll be a repeat of some of that, but also some really new concepts. And Chris Dixon is great on anything, especially in person. We're also doing a Why We're All Here panel with All-Stars.

Starting point is 01:15:07 Evan McMullen, Kevin Milwaukee, Justin Drake, and Mariano. These are four individuals who are perfectly situated to explain why we're here, like, why crypto. And then we are also doing probably my all-time favorite podcast. Is it yours too? Absolutely. Okay, the Crypto Renaissance podcast with Josh Rosenthal. We did that episode. Josh Rosenthal is bringing that to life with some new, really interesting additions with a keynote presentation.

Starting point is 01:15:33 And that's just day one. What I just said to you is just day one. And also all of the kind of the party events and everything that's going on, all the great conversations we're going to have, permissionless is going to be awesome. I think there are still tickets left, maybe not too many, but still a few. This is going to be like max packed, sold out, 6,000 people, 7,000 people, biggest D.5 conference ever.

Starting point is 01:15:55 Really excited to be involved in this one. Yeah. And for those that haven't listened to the Josh Rosenthal podcast, you do not know what you're missing. It's absolutely crazy. The number of times I go to a conference and people tell me that that, that specific episode was what made them drop everything and get it into crypto. I haven't been able to count. It's been like 30 or 40 or 50 or something like that. That's awesome, man.

Starting point is 01:16:14 And the other takeaway from that podcast was that we are speed running the Renaissance. Renaissance took like 200 years, Ryan, but we are going to compress that amount of time into just like 20 in the crypto Renaissance. That's why this is a whole revolution is so powerful. And it's been over a year since we did that podcast with him. So we have basically like a couple decades worth of the Renaissance to catch up on. So I'm excited to see what Josh Rosen's has in store for us. A few brief centuries have flown by since then. All right, David, what are you excited about, man?

Starting point is 01:16:42 Dude, I'm excited to meet you, man. We got it's like 10 days away before either this whole thing falls apart because we don't like each other or it just goes just fine. Bankless LLC has an Airbnb where all of us are going to be in the same place for the first time ever,

Starting point is 01:16:58 and including where I get to meet my co-host here. That's going to be awesome, man. This is going to be fun. Yeah, I guess the bankless podcast hangs on a knife edge. it could go either way after this. Yeah, I'm optimistic though, David. I think, look, I think I feel like I have met you. I'm like people, people are like, you've, people are blown away that we've actually never met.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Every single time. Like, they're legitimately blown away because I've spent, God knows how many hours with you in like the metaverse, like, cornyns and everything. Like, I feel like I know you. I don't know, but look, man, we get in person, something changes. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:17:31 Maybe I'm a total jerk. Maybe. You could smell bad. Yeah, something like. this. Something could break up the podcast. So I don't know, maybe the second last roll-up guys. We'll have to see. We'll let you know after the conference time goes. See if you still like me. You'll see. You'll see. All right, guys. Ryan, should we get into the meme of the week? Take us there. Yeah, let's do. Meme of the week. I'll take you there. So this is, what are we looking at?

Starting point is 01:17:52 We're looking at some sort of air drop metrics, David. What's this? Yeah, yeah. This is the optimism air-drop metrics. Where, like I said earlier in the show, there are different criteria that you could have met to get different distributions to optimism. So here's the meme version of this. Rug pulled by Andre twice. If you got rug pulled by Andre twice, you got 152 million op. If you're a seed oil eater, which is a deep cut of a reference for crypto Twitter,

Starting point is 01:18:14 you got 420,000 OP tokens. If you're a price out of Twitter, you got 100,000. And if you're an Ares sign, you also got 274 opi tokens. Other qualifying things would be donating to Joe Biden's campaign and also an A16Z partner.

Starting point is 01:18:30 And yeah, that is the meme of the week. If you had done those things, you would have gotten 6.5 million OP tokens. But of course, this is just a meme. That's a deep cut. Somebody might try that sometime. Guys, of course, we have enjoyed being with you. This has been your weekly roll-up. Eth is risky.

Starting point is 01:18:48 Bitcoin is risky. So is all of crypto, including defy. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Elon Buys Twitter | Free Speech | Optimism Airdrop | Moonbirds NFTs | OpenSea Gem

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