Bankless - ROLLUP: Elon Musk Twitter | UK Royal NFT | Bitcoin Miami | DAI vs UST Stablecoin Wars | Axie Bailout

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the first royal NFT. Okay? Queen Elizabeth in on that? The knighted NFT, the holy NFT. Hey, Bankless Nation. Happy first week of April. This is the first week in April 2022 that we are doing what, David? Oh, we're rolling up the week in Crypto, Ryan,

Starting point is 00:00:20 where we condense the entire week of cryptocurrency, which is always an ambitious endeavor. Yet we persevere nonetheless. So many crazy things happened this week. Gosh, Ryan, we want to tell. us about it. Give us a tease. Tees. Yeah, look, okay, I'll give you the little tease. So Elon Musk just became the largest shareholder in Twitter. And for those of you who are like, that's not crypto news. Well, Twitter is like crypto social governance protocol, basically. A lot of the social layer of crypto

Starting point is 00:00:48 happens on Twitter. So we're going to talk about that. The UK, the United Kingdom is minting an NFT. This is the first royal NFT. Okay. Queen Elizabeth in on that. The knighted NFT. the holy nfti yeah it's it's a very special royal nfts so we're excited about that and the uk talk as well also the stable coin wars are heating up you haven't heard of the stable coin wars we'll talk about them there's this thing called four pool on curve there's a lot of detail here but the the key thing is stable coins are getting agro with each other like communities coming after one another and like trying to conquer market share while do kwan is trying to basically kill die according to his own Meanwhile, Maker Dow is making deals with Tesla at the same time.

Starting point is 00:01:34 So there are some deep things to be talking about in the Sablecorn Wars this week. Luna is also buying Bitcoin and Avex. So that's what we're going to be talking about. Not Eith, though. So that's interesting. Political choice. A lot more to say about that. Okay, guys, before we get in, we want to tell you about this really exciting

Starting point is 00:01:51 NFT opportunity. All right. So this is an NFT that goes to a good cause. That's the first thing you need to know. So it is National Awareness Day. for HIV and AIDS on April 10th. And MAC, the makeup company, Consensus NFT, they're partnering up, teaming up to present some art

Starting point is 00:02:09 by the artist Keith Herring. Some fantastic art here embodied in an NFT, and all of the proceeds go to support those affected, youth affected by HIV and AIDS. So really cool opportunity. If you've never partaking the NFT sort of shenanigans, as David calls them, this is a good starter NFT. Some of the lowest tier mints cost $25, and then upwards of there, there's a limited supply.

Starting point is 00:02:37 And the art is really cool. David, Keith Herring, I've had an opportunity to look up more of his art. I'm sure you've probably seen it in pop culture references, but he's done some incredible work here in the past. Yeah, I actually, I didn't know the name Keith Herring, but I knew the art by Keith Herring. It's very iconic art. And so this is actually a pretty interesting opportunity. We have a very big company, MAC cosmetics, pairing up with ConsenSys,

Starting point is 00:03:04 one of the biggest crypto companies, using the art of Keith Herring, an absolutely massive artist in the space to make some NFTs where 100% of the revenue from these NFTs is going to youth HIV-AIDS awareness. So, like, just a lot of cool things all in this NFT project. And so perhaps this might be the NFT project for you.

Starting point is 00:03:24 Maybe you don't, maybe you're looking at all these monkey pictures and all these like, I don't know, all the weird NFTs. But, you know, if you want to get into an NFT and also feel good about it, maybe this is the first NFT for you if you've not yet minted an NFT. So if you want to hear about that, sign up so you don't miss it. Go visit the link to the show notes. It's bankless.com slash capital A, sorry, capital M, capital A, capital C,

Starting point is 00:03:50 and you'll be directed to that where you can sign up. David, some other things going on is we're doing an episode on Treasure, Dow. ecosystem. And I think that's cool in and of itself, but also this is a new show series that we're playing around with. Tell us about this, David. Yeah, we're calling this the Alpha Leak series. Basically any time that there is a community out there who wants to present the bull case for that community, Bankless is here for you. So I started out with this whole series with Maker Dow, and then this is going to be the second show in that series, Treasure Dow. And so I'm just posting on Twitter. It's like, who should come?

Starting point is 00:04:28 on next. So if you are a part of a community and you think that the bull case for that community needs to be heard, make sure you're following Bankless and me on Twitter because I will always listen to who gets the most energy into these tweet threads. You know, you got to get that engagement, Ryan. And that's how we decide who's coming on next. Is who wants this the most. So Treasure, the ecosystem, really, really vibrant community, had never been on Bankless before, but now they will be. And so your community can be on bankless too. So yeah, stay tuned for more.

Starting point is 00:05:01 I can't wait for the Cardano episode, David. Oh, God. Oh, what did I just do? Oh, no. I think you may have said too much. Yeah. Speaking of saying too much, though, I don't think we're doing that in the bankless Alpha Report,

Starting point is 00:05:12 but there is a lot disclosed in the Alpha Report, a lot of Alpha, okay? So this is where you get your Alpha. There is, I think, a growing need for people that are really just paying attention to the token ecosystem as attention goes from one token to another. The Bankless Alpha report is where you get an understanding is why is attention going to where it is. So this is coming off of analyst Ben Giev. He's a super hungry zoomer analyst in the defy space.

Starting point is 00:05:42 He's the methodologist behind the GMI index. And he pays attention to defy more than anyone that I know. He is on the bleeding edge. He is on the frontier. And so he is covering the hottest tokens that have captured people. his attention in the last like month or so. He's explained why they've captured attention. And then he gives his rating, overweight, underrate, underweight, or neutral, along with some price targets and some analysis and justifications as well. This is going out to bankless premium

Starting point is 00:06:08 subscribers for those that pay $22 a month. This will be an ongoing thing every single month to capture some of the hottest themes and the biggest alpha that Ben discovers, Ben and the rest of the bankless analyst team discovers in the DFI space. So if you are a bankless premium subscriber. This alpha report is coming to your inbox today, Friday, as you are listening to this. So go check it out. You can see the preview here, but the text is hidden. And so expect this could come out every single month and just would always be a rotation of the hottest tokens that are in people's mind share every single month. Ryan, anything to add to that? Oh, dude, I'm super excited about this because I actually want to know, right? It's like,

Starting point is 00:06:49 we're so busy with the day-to-day of kind of managing all of the news and the ecosystems. systems, like, to spend the in-depth time that our analysts do and finding actual token opportunities and what the catalyst might be, it's something I don't have time for. So this is something I'm going to pay a lot of attention to you. And I can't wait to read the entire thing. I've read part of it now, David, but I'm going to give it all my attention soon. We actually, we asked Ben to put in these, like, did digest to really bolster up the bankless roll up and what we talk about. But then we just realized, you know what? Let's just put it into a report. And so that's what we did. Absolutely. Okay. Beacon reports, I guess market,

Starting point is 00:07:29 market report. What's the market telling us right now? Bitcoin, where are we at on the week? It's a wamp, womp, womp, wamp week, Ryan. Bitcoin is down 7%. Started the week at $46,000, hit a low of $43,000 to where we currently are at now at 43 and it's $43.6,000. Okay. We're down. We're down. Let's look at the three months, still up? Still up a little bit? crabby up upy crab you're to date we're kind of down ish but it's all been crap uh how about ether what's that looking like on the week ether prize started the week at three thousand three hundred dollars hit a low of three thousand one hundred and fifty dollars to uh but it also had an interweek high at three thousand five hundred fifty dollars we looked really good ryan trying to break out

Starting point is 00:08:13 to the upside it failed that break out and now the bears are in control again but also not really because we didn't really break down below three thousand one hundred so crabby week but down overall, down 6%, I think. Yeah, down 6%. Over 3K, it's a good day, is what I say. And you know it's true because it rhymes, yeah. Yeah. That's true for anything. Heath Bitcoin, well, we'll talk about maybe why we're down on the week in a second because I think some of this has to do with the Fed news this week. But before we get there, the ETH Bitcoin chart on the ratio, the all-important ETH Bitcoin ratio, what's that looking like this week? It's looking good, Ryan. Last week, it was at 0.072. This week, it was at 0.072. This week,

Starting point is 00:08:53 is that 0.074? So above a little bit more than a 2% growth on the week, you know, you can't be disappointed. Yeah, we didn't really get the U.S. dollar breakout that we wanted, but the ETH BTC, the risk appetite indicator is slowly grinding upwards. Okay. Crypto hungry for more risk, I guess. The Bet Index, which tries to moderate some of that volatility in that risk, a third, a third, a third, a third Bitcoin, a third defy tokens, and a third ETH.

Starting point is 00:09:23 looking like on the week? Yeah, down at 7% on the week. Started at $122, currently at $113. Yeah, we good. There we go. Gas markets. It was a lower gas week most of the time with some huge spikes, I think. Like the Gary V spike, we'll talk about that when we get to the news, but what's the average gas? What's this looking like? Yeah, average gas last week was 40 Gway. It has moved up to 44 Gway. So Ethereum usage marginally increasing, marginally increasing. there you go well let's talk about maybe why some of the prices are down this is our fed watch the fed officials this this week announced a plan to shrink the balance sheet by 95 billion a month that's a big number that's a big number right and so this is reverse quantitative easing

Starting point is 00:10:08 quantitative tightening i suppose i don't know if these terms are still used very much but uh 95 billion a month they are shedding and this would shrink the fed's balance sheet by $1 trillion per year, David. And the reason is, of course, this is on the back of concern about inflation. It's not so fleeting, apparently, as the Fed was talking about last summer, it seems to be a sustained issue that the Fed is now dealing with. And so they're not only talking about, of course, shrinking the balance sheet, but also continuing to raise rates expeditiously was, I believe, a term that was used.

Starting point is 00:10:48 And we saw some of the damage that came in the bond market as a result of this. So massive damage, this was like one of the biggest drops, I think, since the 1990s in the bond market. So the biggest drop we've seen like 25 plus years. On what time frame, though, just for the listeners that aren't looking at the chart? Are we talking about from the end of November to where we are currently timeframe? No, this is a different chart. This is a different chart. I was just saying that in general.

Starting point is 00:11:15 This is the I shares 20-year Treasury ETF chart, which is down 11% here to date. Honestly, it looks like a crypto chart, Ryan. The takeaway is like people are getting out of bonds. What's interesting about this is stocks are still up, right? So you got bonds going down, stocks up. Like people don't want to be in bonds. People want to be in, I guess traditionally, they've been seen as risk on assets like stocks, like even crypto didn't take too big.

Starting point is 00:11:45 of a hit compared to bonds. And you sort of wonder if maybe the definition of risk is changing fundamentally. Like bonds are somewhat risky. I mean, you're looking at a federal government who's printing trillions per year. All of every single nation state is printing so much money these days and their deficits are getting higher. Their ability to pay them back without printing is becoming less and less likely. And so are bonds really the safe asset? I don't know. Maybe the market is showing some signs of that cracking. Of course, I'm not a macro economist. I just see the Fed doing some more tightening. Interesting that crypto didn't take quite as big a hit as I thought it might. And perhaps all of this is saying something to us.

Starting point is 00:12:31 It's also saying that U.S. mortgage rates are up. You're looking to get in a mortgage. The time was like a few months ago. Not so much now. rates are up to like four, 4.5% almost now. And the take I have here is that the joke, the tweet is saying, this is not oil, this is not a meme stock or even a shit coin, it's U.S. mortgage rates, which is indicating the absolute, like,

Starting point is 00:12:55 gargantuan run in mortgage rates from just like earlier this year, where it was at 3% down up to 4.4%, which is like a big move in mortgage rates, apparently. But there's also the speed and magnitude of the move is kind of what's caught a lot of people by surprise. And my take here, is that the world is becoming more and more chaotic. As crypto becomes less and less volatile,

Starting point is 00:13:16 the world around it is becoming more and more volatile. I remember in 2017, 2018, one of the conversations about why crypto will never work was like, oh, it's too volatile, it's too volatile. Well, the rest of the world has gotten a lot more volatile since then, and also since then, crypto volatility has dampened. So, you know, not really how I expected that to play out at the time, but the world becoming more chaotic makes crypto a lot easier, a lot more appetizing than previously. Can I just say this? I feel like crypto has made me volatility proof. Totally.

Starting point is 00:13:48 I just, if you've been in crypto, you are prepped. You are prepped for the next decade. You are totally prepped, like emotionally. Like you've been through like volatility wars. Like you are the veteran and say when you go back to the regular markets, you see something like this. You're like, oh, is that it? People are talking about this? Why are they talking about this?

Starting point is 00:14:06 It's always funny to see equities and people are like a 4% shock to the market. Stocks are 4%. S&Ps 4% down. I'm like, what? I don't wake up over 4%. 4%. In either direction. How boring. No, thank you.

Starting point is 00:14:23 Speaking of volatility, I guess. Volatility of three hours capital in their... In their alignment. They're rotating back into Eath. We talked about this. Not last week, but the week before. where people are, of course, tracking their Ethereum addresses and seeing that three errors capital, they just bought another 31,000, ETH.

Starting point is 00:14:45 It's another $100 billion. Not a lot, probably for three hours capital, but interesting. And I feel like this is part of the great merge rotation that we're about to see. Like, even trading firms are like, okay, we know that merge narrative is going to be hot. We want to be here. So that's what I think is happening here with three hours capital. Yeah, so I think the next steps for three hours capital is after they are done rotating into ETH, you'll start to, they've already added the ETH tag back into their bios. I think this is

Starting point is 00:15:13 Suzu. And like, you know, at some point, they're going to start talking about the merge on Twitter. Like, this is what everyone's expecting. This is the game. And a bankless episode, maybe? Yeah, probably. I don't know whether we'll do that. We'll have to see whether time comes. Guys, we're going to get to the releases and, of course, the news of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Maker Dow is the OG Defi protocol. The Maker Dow produces dye, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stable coin.

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Starting point is 00:17:43 With the Brave wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets. And it can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and defy apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a season pro, it's time to switch to the Brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. Hey guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. The first is it's Nitro Time. That sounds awesome. Okay, here's what it means, though.

Starting point is 00:18:10 Arbitrum, very popular layer two, optimistic roll-up layer two. They have just released the TestNet version of Nitro. Okay, this is going to be a seamless upgrade, I believe. So there's nothing that folks have to do. And of course, this is still TestNet, so it needs to go through the process and eventually get to their main net. a few things that this includes are one, a custom-built EVM emulator. That's what they had previously. They're now replacing that with Geph.

Starting point is 00:18:42 So getting a bit more standardized, I think, is part of what they're doing here. Of course, there's also the minimization of layer two costs. So gas fees on Arbitrum going down once this is implemented through batching and compressing. There's so much room for optimization. We've been talking about this for a while on bankless with, um, Optimistic roll-ups and ZK roll-ups. Once you have the first version of these things where transactions are maybe still like, you know, 10 cents, 20 cents, 25 cents a dollar, that's just the first version.

Starting point is 00:19:13 Now all of these layer tws are going through the process of just massive compression. And that's kind of the first pass of improvements into these ecosystems. And that's happening with Nitro now. The same is happening with optimism as well. So it's really cool to see these upgrades. Yeah, a couple paragraphs out of their article. Today we throttle Arbitrum's capacity, but with Nitro, we'll be able to release these controls and significantly up our throughput.

Starting point is 00:19:41 And while Arbitrum today is already 90 to 95% cheaper than Ethereum on average, nitro cuts costs even further. When we eventually migrate Arbitrum 1 over to Nitro, it'll be a seamless migration from the current stack to the nitro stack. So users will have an uninterrupted experience. The only thing they'll notice are reduce fees, increase capacity, and overall faster experience. So this is, they have the test net, and then they have the current Arbitrum 1, and they're doing the Indiana Jones hot swap thing. If I was on the Arbitrum marketing team, I'd start calling this

Starting point is 00:20:11 the merge, if I were to them, just because like, this is perfect. Do you guys? Some, some free advice, some marketing advice to you guys. The Arbitrum merge is coming. I think that if I might be getting outside of my technical capacity here, but replacing the EVM emulator with Geth, I think is following in optimism's footsteps. optimizing for EVM equivalents, which is a concept that I'm super, super bullish on. This is how you scale Ethereum out beyond the L1 and have EVM equivalents across all the L2s. It makes things very, very replicatable. Replacatable is anti-fragile.

Starting point is 00:20:43 This is how crypto works. Really excited to get this Arbitrum, Nitro, Altadore, and Ryan, I'm going to go ahead and guess that this is the last major thing that Arbitrum does before they launch a token. This is my guess. Oh, interesting. Well, I don't know if the team can either confirm. confirm or deny that, but we have predicted that 2020 would be L2 year. And by that, we also meant tokens. Tocons. We definitely did. So give me, give me, give me, give me all the stuff,

Starting point is 00:21:11 Arbitrum. We want tokens. We want low gas fees. We want all of it. And it seems like they're delivering that. So super cool to see. Instadap, really cool app. They just released a light version of their application. What's cool about this, I think, is the ability to get one-click defy yields. I almost worry that it's too easy. Like, look, I click that button, I start earning 10.3% on my Eth. How do they do that? How do they do that? I don't know how it works, but because I haven't looked at it,

Starting point is 00:21:41 I'm sure it's, you know, throwing it into all of these strategies. There might be some leverage. You don't know the risk. Anyway, cool stuff from Instadap. Let's talk about layer zero. Not your layer zero. God, dear. Not that layer zero.

Starting point is 00:21:55 This is a bridge, a bridge. application, a bridge, a bridge platform that we're talking about last week in the context of receiving some funding. The interesting thing this week is a NFT project that has rolled out something that the industry and people are calling Omnichain NFTs. In fact, William Pister did a fantastic overview of what Omnichene NFTs are, what they are, why they matter. But it's basically the idea of deploying an NFT, not just on one chain. You don't have to pick a Solana or a Pondy's Polygon or an Avax or an Ethereum, but deploying a little bit on each chain. And the application itself, I believe, sits inside of layer zero, right?

Starting point is 00:22:40 So it's almost like a layer zero type of application. And the idea of an amy chain is you don't have to mint on like one specific chain and live there. You can kind of live pieces of the NFTs, live on all of these various chains. It's a cool concept. and something I think we'll see some pickup this year, and so does William Pister. What are your thoughts here?

Starting point is 00:23:02 Yeah, having NFTs that change their expression based on properties is always interesting. Having one of those properties be which blockchain is it on is pretty cool as well. It's one of those things where I can't really immediately think of a use case for it, but I also probably couldn't have thought of a use case for the Internet back in the 1980s. And so same kind of thing, where it's just like opening up the design space to something completely brand new. Again, thank you for naming your project after my podcast. Ghostly Ghost is the NFT project. By the way, this harkens to a podcast episode we just did with Olaf Carlson Wii that's coming out on Monday for bankless listeners, where he made

Starting point is 00:23:40 the case that Bridges might also be an application platform in the future as well. I wonder if we're seeing hints of that with Omnichene NFTs and Layer Zeros. We'll be following that closely, of course. I see Eith is a new interest compounding ETH index from index co-op, okay? This is a way to boost up your ETH yield as well. Super cool. I can tell you a little bit about where the yield is coming from, but I don't know all of the details. Here's a Dune Analytics chart describing the process, but basically it deposits Lido's liquid-staked ETH token is collateral in AVE, and then recursively borrows the ETH through AVE, and then swaps more of that eth for staked eth.

Starting point is 00:24:29 So it's kind of a margin play on your eth to boost your yield on eth using staking plus some Ave margin. You could like do this yourself, but it would be a lot of work and this asset that you can buy from index co-op essentially automates that entire process.

Starting point is 00:24:49 What are we looking at as far as yield? Look at this. 10%. 10.1. Hey, that's where the instidap yield came from. So that would just spend way too much sense. And so in theory, this should be risk-free. If we remove away smart contract risk and other like defy exploit type risk, which is always a risk, in theory, this is risk-free, right?

Starting point is 00:25:10 Because if the value of your eth goes down, the value of what you also owe is also going down. So you're immune from US dollar fluctuations because you're putting your staked eth as collateral to borrow eth. And so these things move in tandem with each other, except we're immune. one move slightly higher than the other one over time. So in theory, this is a risk-free move to leverage up on yield if you are okay with taking smart contract risk

Starting point is 00:25:37 and any other defy exploit risk that might come with this. Yeah, I asked an analyst who's very familiar with this product, what he thought about it. He said, good product, but non-zero blow-up risk. But it's still probably safer than leveraging on Ave yourself, and it's really accessible to retail. Of course, the risks are the smart contract risk, as you said, and then any mechanical issues with the automated leverage and rebalancing

Starting point is 00:26:01 sort of functionality that's going on. So there's definitely some risk here, but wow, 10% yield on ETH is pretty appealing with a single asset that does that. So index co-op, bring in some cool products to market. David, what's this? Tracer having a competition? Yeah, Tracer down, having a trading competition, $25,000 in prizes and NFTs. It starts Wednesday, April 7th, That was two days ago, and it ends the 16th, and this is on the Arbitrum Rinklebee TestNet. This is ahead of Tracer Dow's coming V2 when they decided to go live on the main net with their V2 perpetual pools, which I'm really excited about. I'm already using Tracer V1, but the properties coming in Tracer v2 are definitely much needed,

Starting point is 00:26:44 and as soon as those come about, we will be talking about that on bankless and around. And Tracer, so if you want to come and be part of the Tracer trading competition and perhaps get up to $25,000, there's a link in the show notes for you to go participate. Perpetuals products. They're the future. Super cool here to have them in Defi. All right, let's talk raises. So the first is not quite a raise, I suppose, but is a lot of capital, so sort of counts.

Starting point is 00:27:12 The Luna Foundation, that is LFG. They just bought $231 million worth of Bitcoin. They, of course, have plans to purchase $10 billion worth of Bitcoin. They've stated to backstop UST. I think they're at like one over one billion now, like 1.1.3, something like this. So that ended up itself. 1.6. Okay, 1.6.

Starting point is 00:27:36 That in and of itself is a story. And by the way, if you'd like to hear kind of a debate about the merits of UST and maybe some of the risks associated with the UST, tune into our podcast from earlier this week down the Bull and Bear case for that. That's one piece of the news. But the other piece of the news is this, David. do you read this? Yeah, this is an interesting choice.

Starting point is 00:28:00 Buying Bitcoin to backstop your stable coin makes sense. But in addition to that, the Terra LFG fund has bought $100 million of the Avax token. And so that is a different choice than buying Bitcoin. And again, the idea is that we have these reserve currencies that help backstop the peg. And so it's like ammo in the bank to use, if, in case there's ever a lull in U.S.T. demand and U.S.C. removes its peg. You use the Bitcoin and the rest of your reserves to buy up the stable coin to make sure the peg is maintained. Bitcoin, I don't think anyone really would question the choice to use Bitcoin as an asset to backstop this.

Starting point is 00:28:42 The $100 million into the Avax token? Questionable. Questionable. There is a big difference between an $830 billion market cap in Bitcoin versus the Avax market cap of 23,000. billion dollars. And so if you are going to backstop something, you need something that has strong assurances and extremely high liquidity and is going to be available for you in the time of need. In a time of need is Avax token, which has a lower history of price than Bitcoin does, is not the same level of assurances that Bitcoin has. And like they've skipped from going from

Starting point is 00:29:24 the number one crypto asset, which is Bitcoin with an $830 million market cap, skipped over Ether, skipped over B&B, skipped over Solana, justifiably skipping over XRP and Cardano, down to Avalanche, down to the number 10 crypto asset. So this, in my mind, is not actually something that's in the best interest of the protocol. This is a political choice. This is like an alignment with the Avax community because they're putting Avax on the Terra balance sheet. Okay, so it kind of depends here from my take is this like i don't think that um terra is actually prioritizing risk mitigation with the move like this and in fact that was kind of what we learned from our podcast earlier this week with the bull hose who explained much more about the terra ecosystem in ust that the end game for

Starting point is 00:30:13 uh us t and terra is actually like utility it's actually usage and so the prioritization is not necessarily on risk mitigation with a move like this. The prioritization is on composable communities, right? Uplift, basically. So if I get the Bitcoiners on my side at Terra, what happens? Bitcoin price goes up a little bit. Terra price goes up. Bitcoiners are more friendly to my community, more likely to use USC. Oh, yeah, we like USC and Luna. It's kind of a Bitcoin friendly and a portion of it's backed by Bitcoin. How great is that? Do this rinse, wash, and repeat. Do the same thing with the AVAX community. Now we've got a tie. It is political.

Starting point is 00:30:55 Yeah. It is it is. It is political. But it's a move for not to backstop from a risk perspective. It's more to like pump the usage of this thing. Maybe even pump the value of this thing. Right. So Avax now, the Avalanche community is like, okay, I'm excited about this. Number go up for Luna token. Number go up for Avax because Avax is only the second coin that LFG has purchased and everybody wins. Everyone's happy. Now, whether you think that is a short-term game destined to fail or whether you think that is a long-term bootstrapping phase sustainable thing that's going to bootstrap UST and Luna into the stratosphere, the strategy does make some sense

Starting point is 00:31:38 from that perspective. But I would also say, I still make this claim, I'm not sure what the differences between UST that is buying and custody Bitcoin and AVAX for its reserves to backstop a currency and an actual bank.

Starting point is 00:31:56 I don't see a lot of distinction here. It's kind of like it's a bank, Jim. This is what a federal bank does. Looking a little bit like that. And that's probably unresolved piece of the discussion. I think Jose made a lot of fantastic points in our discussion with him,

Starting point is 00:32:13 but I was still not understanding how this is much different than a bank's balance sheet that is trying to prop up the value of its asset. So I've still got some more, I guess, due diligence or like, you know, things to think through on that side. I will throw a flag in saying

Starting point is 00:32:31 that putting AVAX on the balance sheet doesn't make U.S.T. the token have more utility. Like, UST has the same amount of utility based on what's on top of the Terra blockchain, putting AVX in the LFG fund doesn't add to the utility of that token. So here's what it could do, though. It's like the AVX community now wants to adopt it more. So AVX now prefers die.

Starting point is 00:32:52 And so, or excuse me, they prefer UST to die. Why? Because UST is now backed by AVX. And so you're creating a composable community linkage there. And so that could increase the utility of UST. So why would they skip over Ethereum, which has a much larger DFI, ecosystem and go straight for avalanche, which has a smaller, more nascent defy ecosystem. Well, I think that is what you said earlier, which is the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Starting point is 00:33:21 I actually didn't say that earlier in the podcast. That was in the Vitalik debrief. Okay. Guys, we just recorded an episode with Vitalik this morning. That debrief will come out in two weeks, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what's going on. Yeah. Do you have another explanation? Yeah. No, I think, again, it's a political alignment as in like, yeah, let's band together all the subdominant L1s so that, you know, together we can, we can beat Ethereum. I think that's kind of what's going on here. It's interesting. It's crafty. It's clever in a lot of ways. You got to

Starting point is 00:33:50 hand it to them from that perspective. Does it actually increase the, or decrease the risk of USC? Not sure about that one. Yeah, because Luna and AVitt and the AVEX token have to have such a high correlation with each other. So in the time of need, you need it non-correlated assets. Bitcoin is still pretty correlated, but also, you know, it's Bitcoin. It's much more stable. I would have, it would have made much more sense to have gold. If we're going to just do this whole, like, centralized custody thing, like, F it, let's do gold. I don't know, put some dye in it. I mean, really. Because it's backed by real estate and Tesla, which is actually where we're going next in this story. Well, let's talk about, well, actually, we're not. Actually, we have a few more

Starting point is 00:34:32 things. No. Yeah, a few more things first. So Wormhole, which is the bridge. You remember, had a big massive hack, biggest hack, bridge hack in history until last week. Well, they've recovered from that. Crypto Bridge wormhole is seeking $2.5 billion valuation price tag in private token sales. I don't know. My mind's exploding at the valuation of these things. Now bridges are just valued as highly as layer two's. I don't quite understand it yet. Am I missing something? Are we collectively missing something? This is the debate as to whether or not we live in a bridge ecosystem is, there's the debate as a layer two, cryptographic bridge or cross layer one interoperability bridges, which I'm pretty sure unless I miss something, the interoperability between L1

Starting point is 00:35:18 blockchains is not a solved problem. Maybe that's what they're trying to solve, but I'm pretty sure in theory it is a unsolvable problem. And so all layer one bridges are going to have to be centralized multi-sigs. And I don't think it can get any better than that at the fundamental level. This is to what I understand about cryptography, which is more decent than most other areas of my technical. knowledge, you cannot have a secure cross-layer-one ecosystem. And so these valuations on these crossed layer-one bridges, I just don't. It doesn't make any sense to me. Most of the bridges, and by the way, I think I am bullish on bridges, and I think, as are you, bullish on bridges as a category, like hugely bullish on them. But most of the bridges that we've seen are like more layer two to layer two, which makes a lot more sense.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Cryptographic bridges, yes. Right. This is a multi-layer-1 bridge. But if you want the contrary opinion to that, listen to our episode with Olaf Carlson-Wee, because he's very bullish on bridges, and I think Polly Chain was probably involved in, I don't know if in this sale, but layer zero for sure.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Anyway, we're mold's back, baby. Twitch co-founder, NFT startup, just netted 35 million in seed funding. So Twitch co-founder is starting an NFT startup, and in seed funding, he's getting $35 million for that. That's seed funding, David. That's not Series A.

Starting point is 00:36:41 That's not Series A. That's not Series B. That's like, I got a PowerPoint with some ideas. You know, it's that level of seed funding. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. This week, valuation seemed a little more ridiculous than usual. What do you think we could get for like 10% of bankless? I have no idea, David.

Starting point is 00:36:59 How much seed funding do you think we could get? I think you could create a narrative. Bankless is a... Bankless is a media interoperability bridge. Crossed blockchain. No one would believe that. Not doing it. Sorry, we didn't take this more seriously.

Starting point is 00:37:18 This is my bad. Course one. They are a staking ecosystem leader. They've been doing this since 2018. They're getting into the venture game. So investing $30 million into promising protocols. So staking company turns VC. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:37:35 Yeah, there's a discussion to be had there. I think we'll skip that one. How about this? Boba Network valuation just hit $1.5 billion after a $45 million series A round. Who's in the series A? Companies like Crypto.com, Whoobi, Bit Mart. Will Smith.

Starting point is 00:37:54 Seriously? Will Smith and Paris Hilton. Yeah, Will Smith. We're trying to get Paris Hilton on the podcast, by the way. That might happen. How about Will Smith? I just, you know, he's been in the news lately. Paris Hilton first.

Starting point is 00:38:05 She's smart. And she's crafty, and she's got some awesome NFT opinions. Yeah. I'd be interested in hearing Phil Smith's opinions about some things, too. You know what's interesting about this one, Ryan? 1.5 billion dollar valuation on Boba Network. Boba Network is a fork off of optimism,

Starting point is 00:38:19 which also raised at $1.5 million, not too long ago. So, like, L2 forks raising at the same valuations as the L2s themselves. Can we call a narrative here? Like, this narrative couldn't be more clear to me. What?

Starting point is 00:38:33 Do you mean the L2-2-2 narrative? There's, no, we've already called that. I'm talking about like an alt-l-2 narrative. That's coming. So I think a lot of the rotators of the world, I'm not calling anyone out three hours capital. I'm not calling anyone out. A lot of the rotators of the world

Starting point is 00:38:49 will be very excited to capitalize on this narrative because we've seen this is not be more obvious. Off-brand layer twos that are community-backed in non-VC and more pure. Like, that's going to be a whole thing. and non-Eetherium cabal, you know, fork an optimism, fork an arbitrum, fork some ZK Sync technology, and create an off-brand layer to you that now has capital from jump capital, Alameda, three hours, you know, the holes, and then pump that thing, pump that token, until the narrative's done and then you rotate back into Bitcoin and Heath.

Starting point is 00:39:30 All right, I think, well, I'll add that to the bankless pitch deck. we're making an off-branded layer too. Good idea. All right, Lightning Network. It's still there. It's still doing stuff. $30 million, or sorry, Lightning Labs just raised $70 million to bring stable coins to Bitcoin. That's the thing that they were trying to do over at Lightning Labs.

Starting point is 00:39:51 Any thoughts on this? I didn't know that that was possible. Elizabeth Stark, who is the woman that you see on the screen, has been just relentlessly working on Lightning Network, big open source developer, Big believer. It has been the CEO of Lightning Labs for forever. Lightning Labs has been around for forever. So it definitely deserves to raise a bunch of money. I do not know how stable coins become a part of Lightning Network.

Starting point is 00:40:16 That is new information to me. They're trying. They're trying. Maybe we will investigate that a little bit more as that matures. Actually, we see some stable coins. That's the first step. You've got to see it. Press release is easy. Crypto data firm, coin metrics.

Starting point is 00:40:29 I love this data. We love coin metrics for a long time. We love Coin Metrics. They just raised $35 million in a funding round. I was trying to find the valuation. They didn't mention the valuation. Didn't say. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:42 Didn't say. That part is hidden, but Coin Metrics has been around for a long time, very useful website to get very accurate and true data about stuff. I use it all the time. If you have not yet tinkered with Coin Metrics, you should definitely try it out. It's Nick Carter startup. Yep, Carter Startup. He was, yeah, he was involved in this.

Starting point is 00:40:59 Finance. US, they just raised $200 million in a seed route as well. That's a $4.5 billion valuation. Not to be confused with other Binance, which is like global Binance, I guess. This is Binance.us with its own $4.5 billion valuation. It's going the IPO route, David. At a technical level, there's actually no formal link between Binance U.S. and Binance, except for that actual finance licenses out there branding to Binance U.S. No way. I didn't know this. I think there is actually no legal link between these entities.

Starting point is 00:41:31 Oh, wow. Yeah. Other than, like, I'm pretty sure CZ owns, like, a significant share of Binance U.S., which is like a legal link through the man himself. Never, I've never used it. Never used it. Never used it. Okay, let's talk about NIRs.

Starting point is 00:41:43 So this is, I think, the last one in our raises, a lot of raises this week. They just raised $500 million after their latest funding round. I don't know what the valuation of this is in the billions, for sure. Certainly. Another big war chest, $500 million. Well, I mean, it's a live token, right? So you can just see the valuation based on the total. Yeah, they got a little, I'm sure VC's got a little discount on that,

Starting point is 00:42:05 and that's kind of how it works. You know, this reminded me of the... $15 billion total TVL, or not TVL, fully diluted valuation. Nice. Remember this chart? We were talking about this with the Italic earlier. It's from his post. This is a chart, if you're on YouTube,

Starting point is 00:42:20 you can see those major public chains, launch date versus insider allocation. And it's funny. Like, the chart is basically showing the early chain. had the lowest amount of insider allocation. Of course, Bitcoin had zero, unless you include the early insiders who were mining the thing, of course,

Starting point is 00:42:38 which you might include that. But Ethereum, very low insider allocation. It's probably just talking about the $10 million pre-sale, right? Yep. And then even Cardano and Tesos and Eos, like fairly low insider valuation. There were other flaws with EOS, for example. But low compared to today,

Starting point is 00:42:56 like we look at near, it's like over 50%, 60% insider valuation. And here's even more, right? Another private round with a larger valuation of insiders. I guess now the token is public, so you can kind of buy that and trade that. But it's just interesting over time that this is consolidated to a lot of early VC raises before the tokens have launched. And that's also true of layer twos.

Starting point is 00:43:25 We can't say that's not true of layer twos. This is a product of the SEC. Small clarification on this one. Near Protocol didn't raise $500 million. They have $500 million in cash after they raised $350 million on April 6th. So they raised $350, they have $500 million in cash, led by Tiger Global FTCVentures, block change ventures, dragon by capital. And then previous rounds by Three Roos Capital, Alameda A16Z.

Starting point is 00:43:51 What are they going to do with $500 million? Like, they're going to... They're going to hire. They're going to talk about jobs. $500 million. I don't see near hiring on this jobs board, Ryan. Yeah, I mean, look, they're definitely going to hire people. What else they do with it?

Starting point is 00:44:10 I've got to go to marketing, I'm sure. There's also future development. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what an L1 does with all this money. I think we will see, though, in the months and years to come. They're not going to go broke, that's for sure. I'm not a $500 million. Bare market immune.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Yeah. Well, on the topic of jobs and hiring, which is maybe where NIR is going to spend some of its money, get a job in crypto. Yep. This is our weekly reminder to you that there are jobs awaiting you in the crypto ecosystem in Web3, and you can have them. You could see them. You could see more at bankless.

Starting point is 00:44:43 com slash jobs. I'm going to read out a few. Is that okay? You're sitting down. I don't know if you can dance like that. I've done it once before. All right. Solidity architect, number one, Alu, marketing manager, Meshah, UXS.

Starting point is 00:44:55 designer, Prometheus Research Labs. That just sounds awesome. A community manager? The DGen Dogs Club? We're also getting a job at the DGen Dogs Club. A co-founder for innovative OmniChane DFI. We're just talking about the Omni Chain. That's a TBD thing. It's in Paris. Blockchain engineers at Masari, Software Engineers, Market Data, Massari, Operations Manager, Syndica, Senior Product Designer, SmartDefi, Senior Go Rust Engineer, Syndica, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Syndica, Senior Software Engineer, AirDrop Labs, product manager, Crypto Nori, bankless,

Starting point is 00:45:25 web developer at Bankless, and a bankless editor at Bankless. Still looking for those positions. We got some cool candidates. We want to see some more, too. For those who are going to Amsterdam, this is how I'm going to be dancing

Starting point is 00:45:35 at the Rave that's happening. There's a Rave in Amsterdam again. There's a Rave happening in Amsterdam, yeah. What's the story? They can't have these on U.S. territory, right? No, I think they just chose them not to. Okay. I understand that.

Starting point is 00:45:47 Europeans get all the good things. Plus, their parties are better. Do you want to move to news? Sure. Yeah. it? Ethereum news. Remember the Axi bailout?

Starting point is 00:45:57 David, we were contemplating. We thought maybe it would happen. There's the biggest bridge hack in history, 625 million something. Who bailed them out? Finance. Finance. But they didn't, Bionance just didn't give Axy $150 million.

Starting point is 00:46:10 It was a $150 million funding round. So we're actually still talking about raises. Binance gave AXE. They didn't, the details on it, what AXE gave them are undisclosed. There's probably some like Ron tokens, some AXS tokens, maybe a bunch of strange love potions, I don't know, but they got $150 million raised from Binance, which is going to help plug the hole for the users that lost the money.

Starting point is 00:46:33 And so, I mean, it's not a complete bailout because they lost $620 million. And I don't think, I haven't heard any news about, like, the fallout for where that money has gone. I think nothing's happened with it. You mean, like, the people who were missing the money? Oh, the hackers are sure. Yeah, where is that money gone?

Starting point is 00:46:50 I don't know. I didn't hear anything about it. I haven't heard a thing. But anyways, they are making amends with their community by raising this money. So anyone that lost money with Axi Infinity now has this $150 million to tap into to get some of their money back. That's cool. Thought this would happen. Yep.

Starting point is 00:47:05 And certainly the big capital pools are, you know, using it as opportunity to get some more, some equity, some more share in these crypto networks. This is interesting. Backed just inked a deal to offer Bitcoin and Ether buys and sells to American Bank customers. So American Bank is a community bank headquartered in Pennsylvania. What's interesting to me is now the banks are licensing crypto companies to sell their customers crypto, right? How far we've come? The banks going from like, oh, this is a scam, like cryptos, now they are actively trying to

Starting point is 00:47:40 find ways to sell crypto to their customer. When Wells Fargo? When are you guys doing this? Right. I mean, if they hadn't, if they had thought more openly about crypto like in 2017, 28, and actually started to build in the bear market like the rest of us, they wouldn't have to actually go through other people's services in order to now provide crypto.

Starting point is 00:48:02 They could have just done it themselves. But no, they were close-minded. David, not even one bank did this. Not even one bank. Not even one. It's all crypto-native companies that are dominating the new crypto banking industry. It's not even any of the old legacy ones. And I'm surprised, to be honest, we haven't seen an acquisition of a legacy bank

Starting point is 00:48:19 like acquire a crypto-native company. Yeah, probably because crypto-native companies are like, no, F-you guys. Like, we have all the goods. We're going to buy you guys in two years. Yeah, we don't need you. Yeah, we don't need you. Well, I mean, SBF came out and said that. He was like, yeah, we're going to buy Goldman one day.

Starting point is 00:48:34 I don't know if that was a, you know, Freudian-Fliff or what. If SBF could buy Goldman, he would buy Goldman. I think he would do that. All right, this is what you were talking about earlier. What's this? Tesla and Maker-Dow? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so Maker-Dow is pioneering into the world of real,

Starting point is 00:48:52 world assets. And so they have these legal structures that are formed that allow them, allows the protocol to mint die based off of collateral from real world assets. So Tesla is getting a $7.8 million loan from Maker-Dow to finance Tesla repair facilities around the world. And this is just the first of what could be many, many deals coming out of Tesla like this. I think that the next iteration on these are $12 million deals and like a series of them. So this is Tesla getting their feet and their toes in the water with getting loans from Maker Dow just because it's an advantageous place to get a loan from when it comes to Tesla's balance sheet, which, you know, that's a delicate subject.

Starting point is 00:49:37 Tesla's balance sheet is a delicate subject for Tesla. And getting a loan out of Maker Dow is really a great opportunity for them. And so this is actually not Maker Dow's first foray into real world assets. This is them using this legal structure that they've created to allow and scale out the onboarding of real world assets. And the cool thing about this, so people might be thinking like, all right, isn't this centralized, right? Like this is going to be some sort of trusted centralized entity managing this loan. And you're right. You're totally right. The thing is, if there's a thousand of these things, there's a thousand different instances of centralized trust managing real world assets, that is itself decentralized.

Starting point is 00:50:17 There isn't one trust. There wasn't one organization that's managing the real world assets for MakerDAO. Each individual deal is its own centralized deal. And when you add on like a thousand of these things, well then you have a thousand centralized deals kind of makes it decentralized. And so MakerDAO is pioneering into aspects of just crypto economics and adoption that no one else is doing. And so that's always why I get really excited about what they're going up, what they're up to at MakerDAO. I feel like there's way more meme potentialness than we actually saw.

Starting point is 00:50:50 Like, Elon just took out a loan from a defy protocol. Right. It's like the meme headline, and I didn't see that anywhere. Like, people aren't talking about this. That's because Maker Dow takes themselves seriously, and they don't play in, like, the narrative meme wars, and that's why everyone thinks they're a boomer, but they're just heads down grinding all the time.

Starting point is 00:51:05 I tweeted this out, like, last week, where of all the DAO's that are out there, Maker Dow has an order of magnitude, more number of labor hours being contributed to it that are also effective labor hours than any other. Dow. And it's just because they're, they're heads down building, bro. Interesting. There you go. Well, you are the Maker Bull among us. All right, four pool.

Starting point is 00:51:27 By that sound like, I think that makes one of us. Look, man, I read the Bankless Alpha report and it's neutral on Maker. So I'm neutral right now on MKR. All right. Stablecoin wars. This actually leads to the stable coin wars, though, because dye is, of course, a dominant, decentralized stable coin. on Ethereum right now. But UST and Luna is really looking to change that. They're looking to take over. They're looking to come into defy and take away market share explicitly from Dye. And how do they do that? The curve wars. That's what the four pool is. Can you explain some of the background on what's

Starting point is 00:52:07 going on, what the four pool actually is and how it's significant to the stable coin wars? So the current status quo with curve is the three pool, which is a combo of Dye, USDC, and USDAT, the Curve Wars has deemed that it's appropriate to incentivize this pool, so there's a lot of liquidity between these things. So Doe Kwan has proposed the four pool, which is adding UST, removing dye, and then also adding frax. And so four, instead of the three pool of die, USC, and Tether, we now have Terra, U.S.D, which is non-native to Ethereum, although it is a decentralized stable coin, adding fracts as well, and then also the USDC and tether stable coins. And so this is Doe Kwan, first off, getting UST into Curve.

Starting point is 00:52:54 So that is getting UST into the stable coin liquidity ecosystem. Curve is basically where stable coins get liquidity. So it's really, really mission critical for stable coins. And not only is he submitting a proposal to inject UST into Curve, at the same time he is proposing a pool without dye. So if the curve wars decides to vote that this is where they're going to incentivize stablecoin liquidity, this would be a knock against Dai liquidity inside of Defi. Dai has other liquidity sources, so it's not only in curve, but like losing curve does suck. And so this is, this is Terra taking an active stance, protocol wars, stablecoin wars against MakerDal.

Starting point is 00:53:36 Yeah, it's interesting. And like working directly with fracts to do that, right? And I think we're going to see more of these like cartels that try to like, teach. up and dominate. It's just a lot of game theory going on with these adversaries as they're chomping to try to get to get stable coin market share. And it's also, it's not only that. It's also like not only alliances, but it's also like narratives that like we're seeing this in the phase. Like there's a lot of vitriol between these communities. Die versus USC. I don't think I fully realized that that was a thing and that these were like Bitcoin and ether level like,

Starting point is 00:54:14 crypto conflicts. The communities had a lot of beef with one another until after that episode that we just did earlier this week. Well, no, you're totally right. That wasn't a thing until this is starting it. This is formalizing the wars, right? I was in the Maker Dow Discord and they were like using that the I don't think about you at all gif. Like the John Hamm from that. Right. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's like why is Tara so obsessed with Maker and moving out Die because Die doesn't think about Tara at all? We'll see. if that is a viable strategy. Can Maker Dow just be heads down building forever

Starting point is 00:54:49 and just like kind of just focus on fundamentals, which I think is admirable, but also can do you. Is it winning? Can you win? It's admirable. I don't know. I don't know if it's a winning strategy.

Starting point is 00:55:02 Yeah, that's a question. Maybe that's why the Alpha Report is a neutral on MKR. It's to be D on what Maker does next. NFT news, let's move to that. Pudgy Penguins, they just tripled their floor price. I thought this project was like dying, dead. Going close to zero. Founder abandoned.

Starting point is 00:55:19 Yeah. Abandoned by the founder. What happened here? The Pudgy Penguins floor was kind of more or less trending towards zero, but then zoomed up to, I think, at like 2.5 Eath for the floor because the team has announced basically a roadmap of sorts, including a metaverse game, an air dropping a token, kind of taken the Board of Yachts Club playbook and saying, hey, we're going to do that, too.

Starting point is 00:55:42 And so then as a result of that, the floorplice mooned. I still have my penguins, but, you know, it's interesting to me. It's like, you know, what kind of opportunities there might be in the future for investors? You know how, like, private equity firms would go and buy struggling companies, replace management, turn them around, like, boost up the value and then sell them? That's what private equity is, basically tons of firms like this. I mean, you could do the same with NFT projects as well, right? You take a struggling NFT community, put in new leadership, create a compelling roadmap,

Starting point is 00:56:12 app, buy it cheap, and then flip it. I wonder if that's a little bit what's going on, but it seems like opportunities for investors in the future. Yeah, that's exactly right. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They are coming to an NFT collection near you. Spring

Starting point is 00:56:28 2022. Unbelievable, man. For people's childhood, ninja turtles are back. Did I ever expect us to be discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on bank lists? But with NFTs, anything is possible. Yeah. We used to take ourselves way more seriously. Now it's just turtles all the way down. Nice. Nice. Looks rare. They just

Starting point is 00:56:49 created a chat button in their marketplace using ether scan. We talked about this ether scan chat a little bit. This is Ethereum address to Ethereum address messages, almost like an AOL kind of chat feel. And now Looks Rare is incorporating it, which is pretty cool. I really like that actually, because Etherskin has never, people just link to Ether scan. This is the first time I've I've seen EtherScan actually integrated into somebody else's front end. That's true. Really cool move by EtherScan. And I kind of want them to keep on doing stuff like this because EtherScan is the one thing in crypto that like I just, 10 out of 10 on just what the product.

Starting point is 00:57:28 Love it. Also just like it's always up. Like I, I'll take it for granted how awesome Ether scan is. We do. And I'm very like solid team from what I can gather. Like I would love to see what happens if they start to like, you know, start to get a little bit more. ambitious with what they can do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:44 Yeah. They could do a lot for sure. This is an NFT project that was really big this week. VaynerSports, which is Gary Vee's brother, apparently. They just launched a VaynerSports Pass, which is an NFT. They sold out super quickly. And that's part of the story. The other story of this is like it spiked gas fees for a period of time, fairly significantly.

Starting point is 00:58:08 Bigly. Bigly. Such that a lot of the transactions to purchase, mint these NFTs actually failed. And so looking at this tweet, David, a total of over 7,600 ETH was spent just on failed transactions, failed and successful transactions on the Vayner Sports Mint. And so that is $26 million of gas spent to try to mint this thing and to actually succeed in minting it in some cases for a total of $8 million in.

Starting point is 00:58:42 in NFT sales. So people spent 26 million to mint 8 million in value. Sort of weird. Yeah, yeah. So the takeaway is that why didn't they do this on a layer two? Like they've already done, like, yeah, Gary Vee has already done NFT minting on a layer two. And so there was, let's see, there was 26 plus eight.

Starting point is 00:59:08 So what is that, $34 million worth of demand for these things. and VaynerMedia only collected $8 million of that. And so if people were willing to spend $34 million, of which we know that they were, because it's provable and on-chain, they could have collected $34 million instead of $8 million by doing this on a layer two, like immutable or something like that.

Starting point is 00:59:30 And like, you know, you wouldn't have had the congestion, but instead they did it on the layer one, which we know is a bad place to mint NFTs, even though people like their NFTs on layer one. You know, they should, question mark on that one. Meanwhile, 4,000 ether got burnt from this inside of just like, not even an hour. It was like inside of one hour. 4,000 eth got burned.

Starting point is 00:59:53 I think the largest single block of Heathburn was 150th inside of one block. Wow. Pretty crazy. That's a lot of money spent. A lot of money wasted, you would say, on this. Thank you for your contributions to the security of Ethereum. I can't continue, though. Can't continue.

Starting point is 01:00:07 Got to start minting more on layer two. Let's go to Bitcoin stuff. Of course, Microstrategie, weekly update that they just bought more ETH, $190 million worth of ETH. So Michael Saylor just continuing to dollar cost average in. We say this almost every week. And this is such a sassel tweet. Anthony Sezano says, Saylor started buying Bitcoin in August of 2020,

Starting point is 01:00:28 and so far as accumulated, 129,000 Bitcoins worth $5.6 billion, of which he can sell whenever he wants. The Ethereum Network started burning Eith in August of 2021, and in that time has burned 2 million units of ether worth 6.6 billion, which can never, ever be reintroduced into the marketplace. And then I follow up saying, and Ethereum has basically infinity ammo, whereas Michael Saylor only has so much more ammo left in a tank, you know?

Starting point is 01:00:55 We've got the Infinity Ammo Michael Saylor, buyer, always buyer of Ethereum, I guess, always buying and burning at Eith that we don't even appreciate. The protocolized version of Michael Saylor, in EIP 1559. Well, it's funny how the Michael Saylor stuff makes headlines every single time when he purchases. Yeah, it's a meme now, yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:15 But the Bitcoin burning is not the same. East burning, yeah. Yeah, the Heath burning. It's quietly happening behind the scenes. Just burn, burn, burn, burn, burn. Silent burner. Other Bitcoin news, there's a big conference going on, David, and Bitcoin Miami conference, is that what's happening?

Starting point is 01:01:32 Bitcoin 22 in Miami, yeah. The mayor of Miami just unveiled a Bitcoin bull. Is that what we're looking at? here? Yeah, there is a new, which is an allusion to the bowl on Wall Street. There's now a Miami Bowl, because Miami is like really taking the charge on just crypto, the crypto industry, especially the Bitcoin industry. And so now there is the mechanical bowl for Miami to go along with the metal bowl that's on Wall Street. That's interesting. Are a lot of Bitcoiners moving to Miami? Like Nick Carter moved there. Isn't Anthony Pompeiano in there too? Miami? Am I am I wrong about that.

Starting point is 01:02:07 No, though. Yeah. But yeah, Miami has taken in a lot of those tech entrepreneurs being very pro-crypto, being like a bastion for crypto, especially for Bitcoiners because it's the right culture for them, I think. Let's talk about some regulatory stuff. So the UK is getting bullish on crypto. The UK's finance minister just said, it is my ambition to make the UK a global hub for

Starting point is 01:02:32 crypto asset technology. Pretty big words coming out of the government of. official and maybe they have some proof as well. So they're minting NFTs, David. A royal mint. This is an actual graphic out of the HM treasury. What's HM stand for? Her Majesty's Her Majesty's. Her Majesty Treasury. The Royal Mint NFT, the first ever minted NFT by the royalty of the UK. this decision shows the forward, forward-looking ambitions or forward-looking approach we have determined to take towards crypto assets in the UK.

Starting point is 01:03:09 The first Royal NFT. All right. All right. That's amazing. Never did I think I would ever see. The UK government actually minting NFTs. That's where we are in 2020. Royal NFTs, right.

Starting point is 01:03:20 Royal NFTs. Thank you. Yes. Not regular NFTs. Not your average Ninja Turtle NFTs. These are royal. I do think that every jurisdiction is going to be fighting for crypto. Like fighting for crypto legitimacy in the coming future and it's starting to happen. Because I think

Starting point is 01:03:40 governments are realizing that crypto is a winning proposition, that it's going to be an engine of the future economy, and they want to be part of it. This is the tailwinds crypto has and why I think long run, we win the regulatory battles, all of them. So we're starting to see evidence of that. Let's talk about Elon Musk, David. What's he up to? Oh, you know, just being Elon, just chatting into 9% of Twitter. Oh, I got ahead of myself. Okay, so Elon Musk last week tweeted out, free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? And then he had a poll yes or no. He followed up with that poll saying the consequences of this poll will be important, please vote carefully. No one really knows what he

Starting point is 01:04:24 meant. Anyways, like, I think 70 people said no to that question. So people think that Twitter does not function. 70%? Yeah, 70% says Twitter does not rigorously adhere to the principles of a functioning democracy with regards to free speech. Later, we would discover that Elon Musk bought 9% of Twitter, 9% of the whole entire company, and then is getting invited onto the board of directors. This is Parag Agarwal from Twitter saying, I'm excited to share that we're appointing Elon Musk to our board through conversations with Elon in recent weeks. It's become clear to us that he would bring in great value to our board. He's both a compassionate, a passionate believer and intense critic of the service,

Starting point is 01:05:03 which is exactly what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us a stronger and the long-term welcome Elon. And then Elon responds to that and says, looking forward to working with Prague and Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in the coming months. Elon has got some opinions as to how Twitter should be, and he's buying 9% of the company in order to express. those opinions. Wow. Well, he is a Twitter super user, I'd say. He's one of like the top point

Starting point is 01:05:29 0.001% of all Twitter users. So I guess it's the Buffett adage of buy what you know. Like he clearly loves this product because he's on it all of the time. But what do you think, like what do you make of this? Do you think he's going to advocate for more free speech and how does that actually happen on Twitter? I mean, there was Jack Dorsey always talked about turning Twitter more into a protocol and less of an application, but it never actually materialized. Do you think that's the direction Elon takes this in? It's hard not to take a Web3 framing on this, but also at the same time, I just don't know how Elon would do that of all people.

Starting point is 01:06:05 Like, Elon's not yet into the world of Web3. Like, he's not yet Web3 pilled. He's getting there. It's getting close. I do not know what he's up to, Ryan. Elon Musk on the Bankless podcast. Maybe sometime this year, David. That'd be amazing.

Starting point is 01:06:19 I love to see that. Last thing, before we get to the takes, Virgil Griffith, this is a sentencing of Virgil Griffith right now. We can talk about the sentencing in a minute, but could you do a quick recap of the story, David? Yeah, Virgil Griffith. I believe he worked for the EF. He's been an Ethereum developer for a long time, but he's also been in jail for a little over a year now, I believe. He was jailed for going to North Korea and giving a presentation on crypto and blockchain. What was in his presentation was common knowledge is what Virgil Griffith is claiming what people around him corroborate.

Starting point is 01:06:56 So it's not like he was giving North Korea secret like blockchain alpha. It's stuff that you could learn on YouTube. But the act of going into North Korea, which is not an illegal act, but then giving a presentation about blockchain tech has been deemed to be like, I'm not sure if it's treason

Starting point is 01:07:14 that's the charge, but treasonous activities-ish by Virgil Griffith. Sanction evasion, for sure. Sanction invasion, yeah. So he's been in jail waiting to have his sentencing, and here's his sentencing today. I don't know if this is official, right? Is this official?

Starting point is 01:07:30 I believe it is. I haven't read through the full document, though, but I think the headline is between 63 and 78 months of imprisonment in addition to a $1 million fine. And we'll include a link to the document. documents, you can read it. It has this image, though, which I did scroll down and see, which is Virgil giving a presentation. You can see on the whiteboard. I'm sure the government kind of used this in their case against him. No sanctions with the smiley face.

Starting point is 01:07:58 Uh-oh. Government kind of making their case here. Yeah, but once again, the first thing you learn about when you learn about crypto is that you can invade sanctions. Like, is he getting in trouble for writing that on a whiteboard? I don't know. It's a bad look, Virgil. It's a bad look. But also at the time. There's nothing new here. It's also true in a way, like no censorship, no sanctions. You know, again, readers can read the entire report in the case of the government and draw their own conclusions here, but be very careful what you write on whiteboards. Especially if you're in North Korea. Yeah, well, maybe just don't go there.

Starting point is 01:08:37 It's the first bit of advice. Guys, we will be back with the takes of the week. And, of course, what we're excited about, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative is trying to find the next hidden gem. Also, IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantage ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Also, crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401k or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees, and it's all you need to do to invest in crypto tax-free.

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Starting point is 01:11:21 Fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free. Hey, guys, we are back with the hot takes of the week, the first one from Nick. One confirmation, he's a venture capitalist. Since Genesis in 2015, it's Ethereum Genesis. Ethereum has led every bull market in 2017, ICOs, 2020, DeFi, 2021 NFTs, 2022, merge. Led every single bull market. That's the take.

Starting point is 01:11:50 Pretty thoughts. I've been arguing on my older show, which I don't do anymore, P.O.V. Crypto, which is me and then the Bitcoin Maxi. He was always trying to say, it's like, it's the happening cycles, man. It's the happening cycles. And I'm like, what do we call the 2017 bull market? We call it the ICO mania. Like, that was Ethereum's bull market.

Starting point is 01:12:07 Like, Bitcoin went from like $1,000. It wasn't the happening mania? It wasn't the happening man. Ethereum, Bitcoin went from like $1,000 to $20,000, but Ether went from like $30 to $400. And then every other, like the, the bull market for 2020 got kicked off with yield farming. We had the inflation narrative in the background. So it's not like Bitcoin couldn't pull its own weight. But like it was known as defy summer, man, not inflation summer.

Starting point is 01:12:35 And like it's been NFTs and now what Nick is now claiming is going to be 2020. is the merge hype. And so like I wrote in that Market Monday a while ago, like if Bitcoiners think that Bitcoin halenings can trigger bull markets, what do you think a triple happening in Ethereum will do, especially when Ethereum is bigger than Bitcoin ever was at any other previous happening except for the most recent one? It's going to be good for Bitcoin, too, because all of these bull markets being led by Ether also, you know, number go up for Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, you're welcome. You're welcome. That's what we're saying. You're welcome. Yeah. You're not secure enough yourself, but, you know, with Ethereum, we'll pump your number up so you can be secure for a longer amount of time. Bring a friend. You want to do this take? Oh, yeah. I know this guy. Ryan John Adams tweets, if you get into crypto to make life-changing wealth overnight, you'll probably fail. But if you get into crypto to make life-changing wealth over a decade, you'll probably succeed. Ryan, why is it easier to do it over a decade than it is overnight? Oh, you don't even have to think, man. You just like buy, hold, steak. That's it. Three things. You don't have to. You don't have to.

Starting point is 01:13:38 to you don't have to sell you don't have to like figure out what to ape into what to trade um i i do think that the problem with a lot of people in this space or the problem that they're going to have in this space is they just think uh too short term right i want to buy this thing because like what's the next thing to do a hundred x like uh you know some token or next nfti project and i don't think most of the people i've met in the space that have done really well have just been people who've been in the market for a long time and bought and held. And it's, I think it's so attractive to try to play the trading game, but most people are not going to make money that way. And thinking short term is like the way to lose in this market. So that's all. It's just a

Starting point is 01:14:26 reminder of if you're trying to make life-changing wealth in cryptos actually not that hard. The things you need to do are not difficult in terms of complexity. The only difficulty is you have to have the long-term time horizon, and that's more a temperament, discipline type of thing. It's in your head. Then it is, like, yeah, then it is like actual intelligent. It's not really that hard to buy good crypto assets and hold them for 10 years. And if you do that, I think you will do well. It depends.

Starting point is 01:14:54 Maybe life-changing wealth. You know, it depends what that means to you, but that's certainly the way to do it. The people really get FOMO in this industry, obviously, because that's what happens when you have provable scarcity, people don't get phomo over dollars because they'll just print more of them in the future. But as soon as you have like a supply cap with Bitcoin and you have like the eth burn, the deflation area of eth, then people start to get phomo, right? And then they also, when you get into crypto, everyone feels late. That is the first sensation that everyone feels after they start to have their aha moment about crypto. They're like, oh, I'm late. So what do they do? They take leverage. They go

Starting point is 01:15:31 down to risky moon tokens that are short-term thinking. And then they forget about how this is the largest wealth transfer event ever in human history. And they forget to be patient. And they try to catch up with the OGs by taking leverage and doing really risky stuff. Then they lose their money. And then they're even more behind. So the best thing to do is just buy, hold, and have patience and listen to bankless. Totally agree. Okay. Let's do this take. This is from Hasu. Why don't you meet it out? Yeah, Ryan once upon a time debated Hasu about a similar subject back, I think, in like 2019 or early 2020, Hazu tweets, well, first off, there is a Twitter thread by a Bitcoiner, Alex Thorne, who says, Bitcoin fees are at all-time lows. The craziest thing? Fall 2021 was the first bull run not accompanied by a major spike in fees.

Starting point is 01:16:22 How is that possible? What does that mean? Here's a thread explaining the most confounding and awesome chart in Bitcoin. And then he makes a threat about explaining why Bitcoin fees are going down, even though when price is going up. But Hazu just says, ignore all that. And Hodger just says, it means Bitcoin is effed long term. But okay, keep brainwashing people with ridiculous positive spins. So this is less about Hazu's take, even though I think both Ryan and I agree with this take. It's more about, Hazu, once upon a time, was taking the other side of this argument. Like, Ryan and Hazu had a debate on the Block Crunch podcast.

Starting point is 01:16:56 And Ryan was, of course, arguing pro-Etherium. Hazu was a Bitcoiner. At the time, I'll say Hazu was a moderate bitconer. But the difference in opinion that Hazu has now about Bitcoin sustainability is just night and day from where we saw it in 2019. Yeah, and I will give Hasu some credit for this, too. So we had that debate. And then it was kind of like later, he actually did some due diligence and some research.

Starting point is 01:17:20 And he came out with a paper. I don't know if this was 2019, 2019 or 2020, about basically the, the lack of sustainability. Here it is, Uncommon Corps, the paper, I remember reading this, 2019, yeah. So the lack of sustainability of Bitcoin's block subsidy. He was still like bullish Bitcoin at the time, but I think he recognized this issue and I think this is Hossi reflecting, hey, three years later, this hasn't changed. Like, there's no fix. It's getting worse. It's getting worse. The Bitcoiner is saying the crazy thing that fall 2021 was the first run not a comfortable by a major spike in fees. That is an uh-oh moment for a Bitcoin. Yeah, you should be like,

Starting point is 01:18:00 you should be scared. Like, where's the fees coming from? There's no block space demand. When no block space demand, you don't have security. Like, we've talked about this forever. Like, just to underline this and make this clear, because some of you guys haven't, you delved into this. But Bitcoin's issuance is going to zero over the long term. So no more blockchain subsidy. What do blockchains have to do? They have to secure their blockchain, either through issuance or transaction fees. So Bitcoin is moving to zero issuance, only transaction fee defense, like military budget. So what does that mean? The military budget is going to go down unless, and this is the argument always given by Bitcoiners about the fixed supply cap and why they're

Starting point is 01:18:43 bullish, unless transaction fees will rise to compensate for that. They are not rising. They're going down. Why? Because Bitcoin block space does not have high demand. Why? Because it only does one thing, move bitcoins from one place to another. No defy. No defy. No NFTs, no other sources of demand for this block space commodity. And so net, this is not sustainable. And I guess at worst, it's the entire chain could like collapse.

Starting point is 01:19:12 That's probably unlikely to happen. But what's much more likely to happen, it seems obvious will happen, as other chains will succeed it and have far higher security budgets. And there is a thesis out there. which I'm sympathetic and probably subscriber, that like the highest security chain will win the network effect for this entire industry

Starting point is 01:19:32 and become the money for this entire industry. So so go security, so go Bitcoin value proposition and moneyness and store a value. And so like, what are you building the foundation on? So lots, we've been pointing this out. Other people have been pointing this out, but it doesn't invade the meme bubble, I think, of Bitcoiners.

Starting point is 01:19:53 Yeah, Bitcoin issuance, dropping to zero, bullish. Bitcoin fees already dropped to zero, more or less. Like, it beat issuance in running to zero. Yeah, I think Ethereum has, it's like over the week, it's like 20 times more revenue from blockchain transaction fees over the last week, something like this. It was like, yeah, 15 to 20 X. 20 feels like low. I mean, it depends on the week, right? But it's just a lot more. And it was, there was a period of time where those two networks were neck and neck in transaction fee revenue. There was a, uh, there was a, uh, there was a, uh, period of time in crypto, Bitcoin has been in the lead up until, up until the end of 2020

Starting point is 01:20:33 when the Bolveron really kind of started getting started. You know what's funny, David, is you know who kind of taught me the value of revenue from blockchain sales? Was it Hazard? Nick Carter. It was Nick Carter. Yeah, it was Nick Carter. Yeah, he taught me that too. He totally emphasized that, uh, opened my eyes to that in a big way. And, um, yeah, it's, uh, it made me more bullish on ether. So anyway, Bitcoin has 4% the size of Ethereum's fees. 4%. There's a lot of Ethereum has 25 times higher fees than Bitcoin. There's advanced Spencer take.

Starting point is 01:21:07 Why don't you read it? 2021 narrative. Alt layer ones have solved blockchain scaling. ETH 2.0 is too little too late. 2022 narrative. Alt layer ones haven't been able to scale. Most or all of them have structural issues. ETH 2.0 plus rollups are the most viable way to scale a blockchain. in the near term and he finishes with funny how things change. L2222.

Starting point is 01:21:29 Do you think that's a narrative yet? I haven't seen that propagate as a narrative. I have not seen that propagated as a narrative, but I think he's calling it. Like, we're still pretty early into 2022. And I think also it's indicating that people are starting to understand deep protocol truisms that are in this industry and how some of the alt-layer ones have violated those truisms and therefore that's like the structure. I think he's talking about how people are starting to wake up to this. Well, we'll see if the market catches up to that and wakes up to that as well. This is a take from David Phelps.

Starting point is 01:22:01 Incredible to realize that Web3 kind of has to be desktop only to avoid extractive fees from app stores. We might look back and realize the success of mobile apps killed mobile apps because nobody can afford their taxes. Apple is a state. Web3 is an anti-state. Think about that. It's a really interesting take. Like the Apple store, don't they take 30%? of revenue of all apps, like all app profits, right? And like Web 3 is, you know, disintermediating. It is anti-state. It is anti-middleman. It is anti-intermediary. And so Web3 kind of has to be

Starting point is 01:22:42 desktop only. I've never thought about it like that. But I guess it's true. Or like mobile browser only. The App Store model just doesn't work. It's too closed. Yeah. I don't think that's why Web 3 is desktop only, but I'm open to that argument, but I kind of think it's just because, like, I don't want to use my ledger with my phone. That's weird. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, here's a take from Lenny Rattschitsky. Sorry for butchering your last name.

Starting point is 01:23:07 There are roughly 27 million software developers in the world. Only about 18,000 of them, or 0.07% work on crypto or Web 3 every single month. Those 18,000 active engineers have created $2 trillion in marketing. cap across the top 100 projects, 112 million value per developer. And we have only $120 million per value of each developer.

Starting point is 01:23:32 We only have 0.07% of them, Ryan. Are we early, Ryan? Is that what this means? I think the sweet means early, yeah, David. Yeah, I think that's my conclusion. Look, all the engineers are getting all the credit. What about the educators, huh? What did we do? Where's my $112 million?

Starting point is 01:23:45 Some portion of that $2 trillion had to be educators, right? Yeah. I want to believe that. bit. What are you excited about this week, man? At the end of this week, Sunday, I hop on a flight to New York, because Brooklyn specifically, because I'm going to be moving there at the end of May. That's the plan. So I'm just going in to dabble around, you know, get a feel for it, explore the Brooklyn crowd. Apparently, the Metaverse is being born and birthed in Brooklyn. That's where, like,

Starting point is 01:24:11 the epicenter of the Metaverse is. Everyone is, everyone who cares and is interested in Web 3 in the metaverse is all in Brooklyn, all in Williamsburg, apparently, specifically. So I'm going there for an Airbnb for a week while I plan my move and figure out where I want to live in Williamsburg. And then after that, taking a flight straight to Amsterdam for DevConnect for Heath Amsterdam, which is going to be the nerdiest conference I think I'll ever go to so far. And like all the core protocol developers are there, Vitalik's going to be there. Danny Ryan's going to be there. Anthony Sizzano, I haven't seen him since Heath, Denver 2020. He's going to be there. So over two years since I seen that guy. He got out of Australia, huh? He got out of Australia. Yeah. So like all my friends are going to be there. So I got to, I

Starting point is 01:24:52 pretty fun two weeks ahead of me, starting on Sunday. So that's what I'm excited about. So are you going to Brooklyn because you want to live in New York City, or is this a little bit about crypto? You want to emerge yourself in crypto culture and have more kind of, like, in real life crypto friends around? The ladder, the ladder, that one. I don't care about New York City in of this light days.

Starting point is 01:25:14 And I probably wouldn't be moving to Manhattan. I just hate the density, yeah, the claustrophobia. but like the number of friends that I have that are all in Brooklyn and Manhattan is just like growing through the roof. And so like if you want like, like I do want to be around Web3 crypto defy Ethereum stuff 24-7, like I love San Diego. I've been, I loved living here. But like the crypto scene is just not there. Does L.A. has a crypto scene, don't they? Yeah, but it's an NFT scene.

Starting point is 01:25:43 And it's like it's the NFT scene that which, you know, it's the culture scene. It's the pop culture side of crypto, the NFTs. it's not the protocol side of crypto. I like the defy, the Dow's, the protocols, and the people that have the entrepreneurial spirit. So if you are in Brooklyn, if you're in Williamsburg, I'm going to be there for a week,

Starting point is 01:26:02 starting on Sunday. Come say hi. There you go. I don't know where I'm going to be. Well, like Brooklyn for Ethereum Web 3 and I guess Miami for Bitcoin. That's how it's going. That's a little bit right.

Starting point is 01:26:11 That's a little bit right. Yeah. Be good to have you on the East Coast, man. Get on a sign a nice time zone. Dude, you're going to have to... I might take the train up. Say hello. You're going to have to deal with my ridiculous sleep schedule because I'm up at like 630 every single

Starting point is 01:26:24 morning. I know you're pretty early to rise though, right? I'm early-ish, but like, uh, not that early, dude. I'm not, I'm not cranking by that time. So we're going to be, yeah, everything about bankless is going to be synced on the time schedule for the first time ever. You're probably going to make me wake up earlier. That's what I'll have to happen. All right, Ryan, what are you excited about. I'm done my taxes, dude. What a pain. It was just a pain. There you go. You get the applause for that one, brother. I guess. So I just, it's, um, taxes and crypto for anyone, you guys have done this. It's just, it's just such a nightmare.

Starting point is 01:26:56 It's such a pain in the ass. Like tracking every single transaction. Um, I can't believe, you know, some of crypto isn't actually treated like a currency, like a money, like the euro or the yen or the US dollar, right? Trapped capital gains in and out, like your gas transactions. That's like your capital gains event. Long term capital gains on gas fees. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:14 Yeah. How do you manage when you like put liquidity in a uniswap pool? Is that like a tax event? What about like, you know, staking in ETH, you know, how do you recognize that? And it's just so, NFT, I haven't even talked about NFTs. That was, you know, that's probably why I didn't do as much in the NFT world is because I was like, oh, every single thing is like a tax event. No, but even buying them.

Starting point is 01:27:38 If you buy NFTs with ETH, that's a tax event, bro. But that's a normal ETH, a normal crypto tax event where like it's not any of the NFT complexity. Yeah, but just tracking all. Anyway, I'm done. And I'm so glad to be done. And I'm hopeful for a brighter future where some of the stuff can be like automated and figured out. All of the data is on the Ethereum blockchain. Like the IRS needs to have like a push button, here's your number.

Starting point is 01:28:02 Well, we also need like better tax laws. Like not every jurisdiction in the U.S. where all of this stuff has to be like tracked. I mean, there's some countries in Europe where like, you know, crypto does not trigger a tax event. That would be amazing too. Anyway. Well, Ryan, congratulations for making the. the lamest I was excited, what I'm excited about that we've ever had. How terrible.

Starting point is 01:28:26 You were like, don't do this, Ryan. I'm like, I'm going to do it because that's honestly what I'm excited about. I cannot lie in the show. Hey, I'm excited about this, though, too. Meam of the Week. What are we looking at? You skip to the end, though. We have to start at the beginning.

Starting point is 01:28:37 Oh, yeah, go ahead. We need the context for this. Oh, great. How did this come about? Okay, here it is. We talked about it with Vitalik. So this guy tweets out, I don't actually know him. He said, we're canceling each other over food takes today.

Starting point is 01:28:49 post your cancelable food take your cancelable food take and he said I was already canceled over my ice cream plus basalmic take which is gross you should be canceled for that no Ryan it's so delicious vanilla ice cream and bifsalmic vinegar

Starting point is 01:29:05 oh it's making it even like raspberry balsamic vinegar and it's so good oh dude you don't know what you're missing vanilla ice cream balsamic vinegar I know you've got some in your house you got to try it all right I might try that but I don't know if I'm brave enough try this. This is Vitalik's cancelable food take. I generally don't drink alcohol stuff, but

Starting point is 01:29:24 mixed green tea plus red wine, 85% to 15% ratio is underrated. My man Vitalik mixes green tea and red wine. What's up with that? Yeah, I mean, I sure it's underrated. If it has any ounce of just like being good at all, people are definitely underrating it because no one thought about that combination. And so the meme for the Limpankless listeners is that meme where somebody's dual pressing two soda streams at the same time, green tea and red wine, and then going into the same cup, and then the caption is, the merge, question mark. I actually am going to try that, though. So this is now the new meme.

Starting point is 01:30:01 This meme is going around crypto-Twitter, of just like this is now called a buterin or a VB. So you can go to your local bar. If they don't know what this is, just tell them. And so that this is now the new thing. I think this is actually just what a bougie version of a four loco is. I don't know if you remember four Locos, right? But they were basically, you were like what high schoolers would drink if they didn't have a lot of money. You would basically like pay like $4 for one and it would kind of get you wrecked because it was both caffeine and alcohol and just like syrup at the same time.

Starting point is 01:30:32 I got it. So like, you know, get the alcohol, the caffeine from from the green tea. You get the nice red wine, mold wine flavor, I guess. You're selling me, but it's only 15% red wine. And I was like thinking about what color could this possibly make in your, in your cup or in your glass, right? You got that the green tea look plus red wine. That's got to make some kind of like gross looking brown thing.

Starting point is 01:30:55 No, it's got to be like, because green tea can be like mostly water. I think it's closer to a rosé. Well, maybe bankless listeners, you guys can try the VB special report out. I think this is going to be a hot topic at ETH Amsterdam. I think everyone at ETH Amsterdam will definitely be drinking the buterins. When we do the live stream,

Starting point is 01:31:14 because you know we're live streaming the merge when that happens, we are all going to be drinking VBs. Oh my God, that's exactly what we're going to be doing. It's going to be like seven in the morning and we're drinking green tea. That's a great morning drink. If you have to drink alcohol, I think green tea and a splash of red wine is a great way to wake up. Okay, but you can't say that until you've tasted it. You can't say that yet. Dude, it's called the VB. I'm going to love it. All right, guys. This has been the meme of the week and this has been bankless. Of course, none of this is financial advice. It's not drink advice, beverage advice either.

Starting point is 01:31:45 Please do not cancel us. That was Vitalik who's. said this. But of course, ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. All of DFI is risky. So are your beverage choices. 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.

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