Bankless - ROLLUP: ENS Airdrop | MetaMask Token? | Discord Teasing Crypto | PayPal Bitcoin | Tim Cook Apple

Starting point is 00:00:06 Happy second week of November Bankless Nation. David, what time is it? It's the Friday weekly roll up where we roll up the entire week of crypto. It's my favorite part of the week is when we get to talk about all the crypto things, all the fun things that happened, and there's always fun thing that's happening. And then we get to talk about it for way too long, and that's why these shows go for an hour and a half. That's right. But you know what?

Starting point is 00:00:27 It's really fun. It's like a way to digest everything that's going on. It actually puts me at peace because every single week in crypto, like I feel like this frenzy of frenetic activity. And then after the weekly roll-up, I'm like, ah, I've absorbed it now. I know what's going on. And that's why I enjoy this time, too. Other than that, it's also fun.

Starting point is 00:00:46 There's so much going on. But, like, I feel like the box is checked. I got through another week of crypto, and I absorbed as much material as I could. Yeah, listeners think that we know all of these things before we talk about them. But no, we're just learning as we read them aloud. And so let's go ahead and get started with that, huh? Guys, some hot topics this week, including the e-emes. N.S. AirDrop. All right. So if you have a dot-eath, you probably had a right to claim some

Starting point is 00:01:11 E&S tokens and those skyrocketed in price. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the potential of other air drops as well, MetaMask with a token. Question mark. Question mark. Question mark. Discord teasing and Ethereum integration. They did some teasing too. Their CEO nonetheless. And then they kind of rug pulled it. So let's talk about that. A little bit of rugpole. Is he bullish on crypto, David? And also, bankless. is launching a new podcast. What? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:39 We are? Because we need another podcast. Wait, are you doing your own podcast? Oh, you'll have to tune into the full roll up to hear all the details. Ryan's doing a podcast. All right. Yes, right. Sure.

Starting point is 00:01:50 A few things we've got to mention before we get into it. The first is this. Look at this. This just dropped last week, this week. It's still going on. This is the bankless. We're going to make it hoodie. Dude, I got a hoodie.

Starting point is 00:02:03 I also got a t-shirt. You can get both of those. This is a bankless Dow Meta Factory collaboration drop. And if you recall, these things only last for like a week or so. Actually, this is your last day to get this. Wow. Okay, I'm just reading that now. November 12th is the last day.

Starting point is 00:02:19 So if you want this hoodie, if you want the shirt, go ahead and pick it up. Of course, you put in your metamask and there's also some robot for you waiting on the other side eventually. People love the shirts, the bankless shirts that I'm wearing out at these crypto conferences and every time I tweet about it, and I was, hey, like, where can I get that shirt? And I'm like, yo, like, it's too late. You missed it.

Starting point is 00:02:39 That's why you always have to get every single drop because you don't know if you're going to want it in the future or not. It's insurance, right? You got to get every single drop. It is scarce, right? You only have a specific time window. If you don't get it there, it never comes back. It's gone.

Starting point is 00:02:52 Yeah, this is a scarce merge. Yeah, so that sale ends tonight at midnight Eastern, 9 p.m. Pacific Time. So if you are listening to this on Friday morning, you don't have too long to get this. And if it's Saturday, you're too late. should listen to these on Friday. Sorry, guys.

Starting point is 00:03:07 You're not going to make it to the weekend. It's a T-shirt. But you are going to make this. I think you have some extra time for this. This is Dharma. Go sign up for their smart contract wallet. It's a mobile app. It's super easy.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Connect your bank account to Dharma in like 10 minutes. You can go from bank account all the way to defy. So do this. And then invite a friend because waiting for you on the other side is $50 in ETH. And that is deposited, I think, relatively instantly. You just have to trade $500 worth of $5. tokens. So good place to start with D5. Bank to bankless in 10 minutes and make sure you click the bankless link in order to get this code and get the $50 in ETH on the other side. That's

Starting point is 00:03:46 where it's waiting for you. Great user experience too. I mean, the wallets are getting... It's extremely impressive. Guys, if you are new in this space, this technology was not available a year ago or like two years ago or like, oh my God, three years ago, this would have been beyond our wildest dreams. It's pure magic. So. So yeah, it's pure magic. We're living the future. Go check this out. Even if you have other wallets,

Starting point is 00:04:09 like it's good to have a Dharma wallet as well. All right. Also, David, we're doing an office hours. I'm excited for this. I'm excited for this. Office hours with Ryan and David. So this is a premium member perk. And so we get a ton of requests for people

Starting point is 00:04:23 to just want to like ask us simple questions. We don't really have time for everyone's questions. But if you are a premium member, we are setting aside 90 minutes to chat with you and answer all of your questions. if you are trying to get into crypto, I know it's, you want those trusted resources to ask all of your questions that, like, maybe they're noob questions, maybe you don't know, but you want to ask the people that you're comfortable with asking, maybe that's me and Ryan.

Starting point is 00:04:45 And so if you are a bankless premium member, we are doing office hours November 19th from 4 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. Eastern Time. This is going to be the last Friday of every single month. This is going to be a reoccurring thing, except for this month because of Thanksgiving, and then also except for next month because of the holidays. But after that, every last Friday of the month. We're going to have office hours for bank, bankless premium subscribers. It's going to be in the premium Discord. So if you want to take part in that Q&A session, sign up for Bankless Premium so we can answer your questions. Yeah, you sign up for Bankless Premium. You get a link to the Discord and then we'll open this channel to you. And you should emphasize,

Starting point is 00:05:20 too, like, noob questions, welcome. Right? If you have just something you think is like, you know, a dumb question or too stupid to ask or something that's just taking too long to research on Google, that's where you can ask the question, right? And we are happy to answer. and so is the bankless team, the rest of the bankless staff. All right, David, let's get to it, man. Market time. Sorry, stuff happening in the markets. What's Bitcoin doing to us or for us this week?

Starting point is 00:05:43 Well, remember how it was all-time high last week last week, Ryan? Oh, yeah. Did that happen? All-time high this week. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, Bitcoin painted a new all-time high of $68,640, almost hitting that magic, magic meme number of $69,000. It's not quite there.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Tumbled a little bit off the high, currently at 65. $5,300. Oh, no, no, excuse me, it's $64,700. It dropped a little bit since last I checked. Overall, up 3.6% on the week. So Bitcoin, all-time high week for Bitcoin, congrats. Do you know what our friend Raoul Paul said when we had him on in August or so? We're like, hey, give us some price targets, right? And I was thinking he'd be very vague and not give a time horizon. He's like, boom, 100K Bitcoin, end of year, 10K, Eth, end of year. Yep. Mike drop. Yep. We're getting close. It feels very much within striking distance. We are within striking distance to Raul Paul's numbers, and that didn't seem as likely a few months ago. What's ETH doing for us? Heath, same story.

Starting point is 00:06:42 Also, all-time high week, hitting a new high of $4,850. Immediately after hitting that high, it tumbles $350 down to $4,500. It's crazy to see Ether make $350 moves inside of like one hour. Think how crazy that is. I didn't even think about that. Do you remember when Eith was below that? $350? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:04 That would have meant dropping to zero, sir. Yeah. But after tumbling $350 down to the low, low price of $4,500, it has since reclaimed up to $4,730 at the time of recording overall up almost 4% on the week. So Ether, New Time, All Time High, Bitcoin All Time High, All Time High Week. And also, a little something behind the scenes, but like the Bankless podcast downloads charts looks like the Bitcoin and Ether charts. right now. So we are also bankless. Except it doesn't go down. Except it doesn't go down. That is true. Yeah. Up only

Starting point is 00:07:38 on the bankless lessons. Yeah. Do you know what? Okay. So, you know, two things. One, 5K continues to elude us, right? Every other day when I, when I sort of like a run up, I'm just like, 5K today? Question mark and I throw it out on Twitter. And it doesn't happen. So me, that's the top signal. Mea I should stop doing that and like doing the Anthony Sassano thing. The other thing I'll say is like this drop, the sudden $350 drop. in the price of Euth, Bitcoin got hit too. Was this like, what were the rumors going around? I saw like Evergrand or something, some sort of weird fud, whatever.

Starting point is 00:08:12 I just pay no attention to these things because they're so temporal and temporary. It didn't matter. Do you think that was just an explanation? I have no clue. I have no clue, right? Like, it barely dropped below where it started in the week. And so like it went from like super high to just really high. Like maybe it was Evergrand.

Starting point is 00:08:30 I don't know. I just think it's funny at this point. just don't try to explain these things right sometimes bots leverage traders games in the short run you'll see moves like this yeah you only see moves like this when you zoom in on the on the one week charts like when you zoom out on the one year charts it doesn't actually show up let's do it yeah I'm gonna zoom out in the like you can't actually see it yeah like it's not there anymore it's gone wow look at that up into the right can you go down to the very bottom of that up into the right trend right a little bit to like past sometime between November and September

Starting point is 00:08:59 where it just starts linearly going up right there okay so Yeah, around the early in October, we have just been linearly up and to the right, like, perfectly. That's crazy. That's crazy. This is stair stepping. I guess like if each of these stairs are little hilltops, little mountains. We're just stair stepping out. That's a really interesting looking chart.

Starting point is 00:09:18 Let's see him out a little further, though. Look that. That is. This is not logarithmic, but, you know. You can hit that log button. Oh, do you remember? Hit that log button on the bottom. I'm not, I want to see it in linear first.

Starting point is 00:09:28 You remember 2018? Yes. This is the high, my friend. Burned into my friend. Look at it. Just a tiny little... A tiny little blip. A tiny little blip.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Famously, there's a... The trader memes is when, like, the top of the previous market cycle just doesn't actually show up anymore on a linear view. You can still see it, but it's getting small. It's getting pretty small. Do you know what's crazy? I was listening to your Griff Green, Layer Zero, which is great, by the way. I really enjoyed that.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Anyway, do you remember the Dow crash? Yeah, it went with... It hit 20. Right. Uh-huh. You can't even see them. chart. So this was like the massive like whiffo

Starting point is 00:10:06 moment where we're effed, it's over when the Dow collapsed and ETH price totally lost like 50, 60, 70, 80% of its value basically in a very short time span like a month time period of time. You can't even see on this chart. All right, hit that log button. Just to appease me and the viewers.

Starting point is 00:10:23 Look at that. That is sustainable, dude. That is look how like vertical the price action was in 2017 right at that blow off top. And look how not vertical it right now. Like that that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. This seems very sustainable. Are we falling in love with charts right now? Should we get someone on the bankless podcast to like chart with us, David? Perhaps. Perhaps. I'm in conversations right now with

Starting point is 00:10:44 Ben Cohen, who I believe last I checked just said that he's down to come chart with us on Tuesday. So state it's charty chart show on the bankless live stream. We don't do chart. We don't do charting very often. So this is a special treat. And like I do feel like it's it's kind of like candy. It's a, you know, I'll partake in it every once in a while, but I know it's not really good for me, do you know, but like every once in a while I'll indulge myself. So that's what's happening. Hopefully next Tuesday, we'll have a charting show. Let's see to the nation. David, another chart, Eith Bitcoin ratio. What are we looking like? Yeah, in comparison to where we were at last week, we are up just a tiny little smidge. We were at 0.0728 last week. We are at 0.073. So up basically

Starting point is 00:11:27 like 1% on the week overall kind of flat, but flat at a very, very high level. Yeah, we're kind of, I guess we're looking at, uh, to see if we can beat the, the highs of the year, uh, on the ratio. And, um, it looks like we're still getting close, right? The highs are point zero, uh, point zero eight. Yeah. Yep. So, that, that would be a fun day when that breaks. Uh, total locked value above hundred billion. Ryan likes to see that. $112 billion locked in defy. You know what's interesting about this week on total lock follow you in defy, Ryan?

Starting point is 00:12:00 What's interesting? Maker Dow, number one. It has been a long time since Maker. Maker Dow is the number one. Hello, yes. Hello. Welcome back to the King's Thrones, Maker. Did you see there was a, somebody minted, I can't, oh, did I put that tweet in there?

Starting point is 00:12:17 Oh yeah, I did put that that tweet in there. I don't know if you pulled it up or not. I don't think I did. But yeah, so one single person, and I believe this is Celsius, actually, Celsius, the lending app, Unconfirmed, though, minted $150 million of dye in one... When Celsius did this? Celsius minted $150 million with a liquidation price of $3,150,000, which is a pretty high number. But yeah, Celsius minted $150 million, and that's why MakerDAO is number one in the TVL charts today.

Starting point is 00:12:47 Well, that's super interesting, actually, and that's interesting on a number of levels, not just Maker number one, but Celsius doing the minting. That's kind of defy-mullet thesis, Celsius being sort of like a block-fi, like a crypto bank. if you will, and they're doing something to generate yields. Now they're using DeFi protocols, right? Protocols sync. Yeah. This is actually not new. Telcis has always been minting with Maker just for...

Starting point is 00:13:09 No way. I didn't know that. This is an old thing, but like $150 million is that's the new thing. Like, that's a large number. It's a lot of money. That's news to me too, though. Okay, let's talk about the DPI, DFI Pulse Index. Was it a good week for DFI?

Starting point is 00:13:23 Oh, you bet it was. It was. It was. It was. It was. clocking in at $410, up 9% on the week. Even hit a high of $442 before that big drop. So yeah, DPI, strong performance this week.

Starting point is 00:13:37 D5's back, baby. It's too soon to say. David's knocking on wood. It's too soon to say. But you know what? Tells us the truth is the defy to ETH ratio here. It's, at this point, flat is up. It was flat this week.

Starting point is 00:13:55 The DPI versus E. At this point, flat is up. If that's not the most capitulation, Coke sentence I've ever heard. The DPI versus Eith pair did not go down this week. It held its ground. In fact, it is up 0.4%. So congratulations to DPI.

Starting point is 00:14:11 I wish I had some skis so I could ski down that hill, David. You'd be going real fast. Well, let's talk about bed, which is the ultimate split where you get a third, a third, a third, Bitcoin, a third, ETH and a third DPI. What are we looking at on the week? Yeah, very strong performance by the bed index, which of course illustrates the market as a whole. And the market as a whole was up 6.3% this week, started the week at roughly $182, currently clocking in at $195. If you want to

Starting point is 00:14:42 get some bed, you can go buy it or mint it at indexcoop.com.com slash bed. Sleep comfy in bed. If crypto's dressing you out because of the volatility, the bed index is meant for you. So get comfy in bed. I love this chart, man. It's just so much more muted than like Bitcoin and Eith than DPI. Yeah, because it's just like up only. Yeah. Well, yes, exactly. And it's less like up and the down. And it's just like it looks like the adult in the room here. Good job, bed. Let's talk about this. This happened and I barely remember it. So apparently last week, crypto market cap just topped three trillion dollars. Three trillion dollars. Wow. Where does this? said, David. Where are we going to end this

Starting point is 00:15:25 cycle? Over 10? If you believe in cycles. Over 10? Absolutely over 10. Yeah. That's easier to call now, I feel like, but like $3 trillion, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, I remember in December of 2017, we crossed a trillion dollar crypto market cap in the ICO mania. And I remember asking my friends like, all right, like guys, like bets on when we crossed $10 trillion. And I think I

Starting point is 00:15:51 remember like saying May. six months later yeah I was wrong I was the top but you know what like this is how the human brain works right so like

Starting point is 00:16:04 do you remember let's see 18 months ago again people started called us included started calling for like Heath to 10K

Starting point is 00:16:12 right right now when I post hey Heath is still on the road to 10K everyone's like that's fud 10K is bearish yeah yeah they're like 10K is bearish you know now

Starting point is 00:16:22 now people are calling for 100k and this is how it always works right yeah market psychology it's always like now 10 trillion because we're at 3 trillion that feels very rational obviously it's going to 10 trillion you can't be wrong with that prediction sir right but like if you're to say 100 trillion that would be crazy and if you were to say hey it's going back to 100 billion that would also be crazy right so this is how it always works every single cycle right bullishness so bullishness begets bullishness people are like oh this thing's $1, well, if it can get to $2, it could probably get to like $5. And if it could get to $5, it could probably get to $10.

Starting point is 00:17:00 And then this just goes and goes and goes. Like, oh, I get $10 and it gets $100. And at some point, like, it just all blows up, right? Like it turns into like this, it turns on just like this very ingrained, like speculative fervor that humans have. But again, when I said when we looked at the slope of Bitcoin and Ether, very sustainable, we're not there yet. Not there yet.

Starting point is 00:17:18 But maybe we will. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, there's different sectors now in crypto. things can bubble where other things are not bubbling. Let's talk about this, though. I saw this chart, so I'm going to put out a fantastic report. And this is a graph of how long it took some major companies and also Bitcoin to reach a $500 billion valuation. That's a lot. So it took Apple, about 36 years to do that, to hit $500 billion in market cap in total value. It took Amazon less time, 23 years. It took Tesla 17 years.

Starting point is 00:17:53 It took Google just over 14. Facebook did it in 13. You could see the trend here. Bitcoin did it in 12 years to $500 billion. ETH just did it in six years. Right. ETH is the only chart that you see here that did it in less than half the time of the other examples on the chart. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:18:15 That's crazy. This is, I think this is, I mean, what are we saying here? like somebody could say, well, the value of the dollar is not what it used to be. Okay, sure, that's some effect. But I think what we're really seeing is the difference between like these computing revolutions here, right? So you see like an Apple, which was a massive revolution in compute. But it was physical, like physical computers, like the PC revolution. It led that and then the led mobile. And then we get like kind of the internet with the Google and the Facebook and the Amazon, right? And that's a revolution in it of itself. Now we have a, the network revolution, the network economy that this has turned into. And this is where you see ether and Bitcoin. And how fast the growth can be in these economies is absolutely astounding. This is like blitz scale growth here. Yeah. And there's such a strong story to be told here. First off, the pace of innovation of not just crypto, but overall innovation always gets faster and faster and faster. And when we start these shows, we always say such a crazy week

Starting point is 00:19:18 in crypto. Well, when a network grows to $500 billion valuation in the most record time, 5.8 years, like, that's because there's always so much stuff happening. And this actually reminds me of that line that we said with Josh Rosenthal in our Crypto Renaissance podcast. The crypto renaissance, the actual Renaissance took time because you actually had to build out the printing presses and then it had to actually diffuse out from a central point. Internet, the Ethereum is actually being built on another network. So it's a network on top of a network. It's being birthed across the globally. And also, it's not just Bitcoin where there's only BTC.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Like you can do any assets, any NFTs, whatever on Ethereum. And so this this malleability, this open-sourceness, this permissionlessness of Ethereum allowed it to be the fastest growing network in history, which is pretty cool. Totally. Yeah, Chris Dixon made the point when we had them on that like the internet, something like Ethereum is a network of networks, right? All of these other examples are companies. These are companies.

Starting point is 00:20:15 And so their permission. you have to hire employees. Like with Ethereum, people just work for Ethereum for free. They set up shop there, right? They don't have to be hired. And so it is continuously expanding in all of these directions at once. So no wonder we're seeing this level of growth. David, this is your take.

Starting point is 00:20:32 This is from actually Coinbase. I believe this is their quarterly earnings report. Yeah, what happened here? Yeah, so last quarter, it was the first quarter that Ether volume was the number one traded asset on Coinbase for the first time ever, passing Bitcoin. And this quarter, it happened again. So for two quarters in a row, Ether, the number one most traded asset on Coinbase. What is a definition of monetary premium, right? And what is money? One of the definitions that we've talked about since like early in the podcast a couple years ago

Starting point is 00:21:04 was liquidity. Depth of the order book is basically a good definition of money. And this is always something that Bitcoiners have said for a long time, right? Like what? Why is it? Bitcoin money, it's because it is the most saleable good, the most liquid asset. Well, it's interesting when Ether starts to surpass Bitcoin on the exchanges. Hard to deny now that Ether is money, and it meets the same criteria for money that Bitcoin did. Although, there was a lot of denial of that in 2018 and 2019. Yeah, I feel somewhat vindicated on that whole Eth is Money thing, David. How about you? Yeah, 100%. And I'd like to see that the numbers for other exchanges because centralized exchanges is where Bitcoin finds its liquidity. And ether can also

Starting point is 00:21:52 find its liquidity there. It's finding its liquidity there. It's the most liquid asset on Coinbase. And that's not even counting all of the liquidity in Defi. And so if you want to add the global liquidity of ether, you have to add the centralized exchange liquidity of which at least ether is dominating on Coinbase. And it's also clearly dominating in Defi because it's all on Ethereum, Ether, the most liquid asset of all time. Yeah. It does. It seems to be the case. All right, guys, we got a lot more to talk about. We're going to get to releases, of course, and the news of the week.

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Starting point is 00:24:20 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on un-swap, and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVEA, users, can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAVEE.com.

Starting point is 00:24:54 All right, guys, we are back talking about releases today. David, let's start here. The ENS AirDrop. This is the big one. Big AirDrop, maybe AirDrop of the Year. I don't know if that's too much, but it feels that way. Oh, certainly so far, yeah. Yeah, because if it's like how many people actually receive this for one,

Starting point is 00:25:09 but also the market cap of this thing has been absolutely extraordinary. We had the ENS guys on early. this week. So take a listen to that podcast and take a look at that show if you want all of the details. But what happened here, David? This is, by the way, our alpha alert. So anytime a really cool thing happens like this, an airdrop or something else, we send it out to bankless premium members so they get notified. But what was this air drop? What happened this week? Yeah, so this has been a long time coming. And no one really knew that the ENS team was going to do an irdrop. But if you had been paying attention to ENS, you would understand that the mission and culture and

Starting point is 00:25:44 values of ENS was to eventually have this thing managed by the community. And so I remember talking to Brantley Milligan forever ago when they were talking, when ENS was really getting bootstrapped and talking about like, oh, so ENS sells domains in Heath, but ENS does not want to be a company. ENS wants to be a public utility. And the reason why they have to sell domains is because of an anti-cibil mechanism. If you don't actually have to pay money for these things, somebody will just claim all of them.

Starting point is 00:26:12 So they were selling ENS names, generating a treasury, and now this protocol, the namespace of Ethereum, is now this public good, and that specifically should not be managed by two people or team of people, but instead should be managed by the broader community of people that are stakeholders. And so this is just the perfect marriage between what we've all been talking about with Dow's and tokens and a public utility on Ethereum. So if you have an ENS name that happened before the snapshot, and the snapshot wasn't too long ago, just a couple of weeks ago, you can go claim your ENS tokens. There's 100 million tokens. They're currently trading for about $60. The average air drop recipient got between like maybe 100 to 300 tokens or so,

Starting point is 00:26:57 which is a pretty healthy amount. And there's a few formulas with how your token amount was calculated. The longer that you've had your ENS name, the more tokens you get, the longer you've renewed it for, the more tokens you get. If you've actually registered your ENS name to an actual Ethereum address, you get even double that. All that information is in the state of the nation that we did with the ENST team. But this is really foundational, Ryan, and I actually think that this is even more foundational than Uniswap, because ENSWP is something deeper and closer and more related to Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:27:32 the protocol itself than Uniswap is. They're both in the app layer, but Ethereum is really, but ENS is really about, the namespace of Ethereum. So I think that a lot of people wanted to compare ENS to something like GoDaddy where you can register websites. It's even bigger than that. It's ENS is actually comparison to DNS where like the dot coms of the world. And that is another, DNS is another global public good that has to be managed by this private company. Instead, ENS is now being managed by the people that are using it. And so the ENS Dow is now being handed over to everyone that has a dot, ETH address. So we are all now managers of this open public good system. Yeah. So like something like GoDaddy is just an

Starting point is 00:28:15 app on top of of DNS, right? It's not DNS itself. And so reminding folks what this dot-eath address is, it's basically just a human readable name for your Ethereum address. And recall an Ethereum address, okay, one model of that is as a bank account. So what we talk about so often, it's just like you are self-sovereign bank account. But more than a wallet, more than a a bank account more than a vault, it's also your self-sovereign identity, and it's becoming more like a passport every single day. So we talked with Brantley and Nick about the ability to sign on with Ethereum. I think these addresses are going to become increasingly important to individual identity in this whole Web3 world, right? So you're storing your NFTs, you're storing your

Starting point is 00:29:01 tokens inside of your eth address. If I want to send some ETH to you, David or some tokens here on an NFT to you. It's very easy. I know you have David Hoffman. Dot, eat that could just do that very easily rather than this like public, public key with all of these like characters. So very cool stuff. You know, one thing that blew my mind, though, is the price on this thing. Yes. Okay. So like I know, you know, Nick and Brantley weren't the ones to talk prize, but let's see you and I talk price here for a second because this really surprised me. All right. So like, here's the market cap of this thing. And this is not fully diluted market cap.

Starting point is 00:29:40 This is just like, I guess, market cap that is unlocked up in supply. But here we are on coin market cap. And we hit $1.3 billion, some highs of probably over $7 billion in fully diluted market cap for this thing. I think the peak was $8 billion. Yeah. It peaked out at $8. Why? Do you understand?

Starting point is 00:30:00 So why is this thing valuable to people? Right. So like if you sign the Constitution to get your drop, which I did, it's basically like a not, it's kind of a nonprofit, right? You have governance rights in this thing. You've been given a responsibility. Why do you think people are valuing it at $6, $7, $8 billion? I definitely want to answer that question, but I want to answer that question at the very

Starting point is 00:30:24 end because it'll be easier to explain that. And so some of the dynamics just to fill listeners in about what happened here is like the ENS token got airdropped. Then there was a bunch of shenanigans with the Uniswap contract because everyone who didn't have ENSW wanted to buy it, but there were zero liquidity at the very start. And so if you were watching the uniswap, it would go like for a moment, ENSWP, one ENSWK token was worth $57,000, $100,000. And so like for a brief moment in time, everyone was like a billionaire just by this weird proximate of there being like no liquidity in uniswap. Eventually liquidity came in. The market settled and that's where we started some actually to see some actual price discovery started around 20 to

Starting point is 00:31:04 30 dollars uh which is again a two to three billion dollar valuation and then it zoomed up to 80 per token and now it's currently clocking in at just below 60 dollars a token but some really astonishing like imagine just like releasing your thing and like it immediate like it had no valuation it has had no public valuation it was managed by brantley by nick these guys that were just like eight people eight people just stewards of this thing not taking profit and like not doing this for revenue just managing this open protocol, and then boom, the token launches, and it comes out clocking in at a max of $8 billion. That's absolutely insane.

Starting point is 00:31:37 And so, like, to unpack what this thing actually is, what ENS actually is, ENS is a public goods. It is a public good for Ethereum. The namespace of Ethereum, if you could go back one tweet, Ryan, to my tweet, the namespace of Ethereum is a public good. What do we call all of us? Because you can't, like, Ryan, there's Ryan here, and then there's also Ryan Selk, We can't have two Ryan's.

Starting point is 00:32:01 One of them's got to be Ryan S. Adams and one of them's got to be Ryan S. Selkis, right? Like we need two... You hear that Ryan Selkis? There can't be two of us. Can't be two of us. You guys need two different names. One of us is going down. You can't have conflicting names because we need to actually point two things.

Starting point is 00:32:15 Only one entity per name. So that is called what is called a name space where we label all of the entities that exist in Ethereum. And with the Ethereum name system, we actually get to put in human readable names around these very complicated public addresses. And so the ENS is a public name space around Ethereum, the system for collectively deciding how we name things. And this actually lends itself to how blockchains work. EnS is a consensus system. It's a consensus for all identifying how we name all the things. Just like how a blockchain comes to a consensus, EnS is a public goods that comes to

Starting point is 00:32:49 consensus about how we name all the things. So just like Ethereum itself, ENS is a public good that needs to be protected from free riders. And this is the magic of Ethereum. This is why this gets me so excited. Ethereum as a protocol, like you said, a network of networks, Ethereum as a protocol is finally able to price in public goods in ways that we've never seen before. So like clean water, clean air, the free market doesn't do a very good job of like pricing in those free resources. ENS is a resource, a system that is now establishing a market value, which is somewhere between four and eight billion dollars right now. And just how like proof of sake and proof of work is the protection around blockchains, the value of the

Starting point is 00:33:29 the ENS token is the protection around the Ethereum name system. And so Ethereum is unlocking the free market to actually finally price a public utility. And so Ryan, to answer your question about why this is so valuable is, it's because we don't know how valuable this thing is. We have never been able to price public goods like this. And so like, and then like the bullish side of that is like, oh my God, we don't know how to price these things. Like the last thing I learned that we didn't know how to price was ether. And like the sky's the limit on that one. The other, the bear case is that these are public goods. Like, it's actually really hard to monetize public goods. That's actually why they're called public goods. So maybe they're not worth that much. This is going to be a

Starting point is 00:34:05 grand experiment about finally pricing in some public goods for the first time ever. And I think the price action is really going to be emblematic of how well Ethereum can finally price these things that have always been left out of the market. And it ultimately caused a lot of human suffering, but that's the topic for a different day. Yeah, you had a lot to say about that, dude. It's a lot there's a lot there. I mean, one point that Brantley makes is this, you were not dropped, air dropped free money. You were air dropped responsibility. That's another way to look at it. I think the ultimate question of what you're saying is like the question of how to price a public good,

Starting point is 00:34:40 whether right now $6 billion is overpriced or whether $6 billion is underpriced is ultimately decided by individuals who own ENS tokens. All right. And so you tweeted this out, raise your hand if you're holding your ENS drop. I choose to bear this responsibility. So the question to everyone who just received this, of which there are like 150,000 more, about 150,000 or so eth addresses that were eligible to receive this, is what are you going to do?

Starting point is 00:35:10 It's worth $6 billion. You probably made thousands of dollars on this. I know people have made tens of thousands of dollars easily on this air drop. So what are you going to do? You're going to sell it? Are you going to hold? And if you're going to hold, are you going to bear the responsibility of voting. But it's awfully tempting to sell at these prices, is it not? And so what are people

Starting point is 00:35:31 doing? They're not selling. That's why prices going up, a lot of people have decided that it's worth holding onto. This thing could be more valuable in the future. They want to participate in this network at any costs. And so they're not selling. But I've actually been pretty surprised at where supply and demand have kind of met with the valuation of this thing. And to your point, Like nobody knows how to price it. Okay. But like I feel like some things in crypto are definitely overpriced right now. I just honestly, I don't know whether ENS is overpriced or underpriced.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Like it's a legitimate project. This is not smoking mirrors. This could be insanely valuable. Like team is fantastic. The distribution seems to be. And they distribute it to all a whole bunch of eth bowls who have done well on ETH. And so they're going to be some of the last people to sell.

Starting point is 00:36:23 but like is it worth $6 billion? I legitimately don't know. So let me ask you the question. Did you sell or did you hold, David? So my two ENS names that I have, trestle estate.eath and David Hoffman. That's private keys are in Seattle. So I am holding.

Starting point is 00:36:42 Okay. Yeah, no, I can't actually get them. It's all hypothetical. Yeah, but I actually, I have actually bought some in addition to that as well. And so I've actually doubled what my airdrop is worth by buying some. and I think I'm going to be holding that for a good long while. And like it's also really something that's really, if you're paying attention to the crypto Twitter sphere, something that's also immersed.

Starting point is 00:37:02 There's a big like culture around ENS right now. And I think it's just this very emergent property of everyone being really, really excited about ENS. So like these memes are coming out in the same vein that we saw memes about like ChainLink and all these other memes. There's a holding culture around ENS right now, which is like pretty damn cool. that we're going to have, we are going to have two moments of Zen at the end of this podcast. So good.

Starting point is 00:37:28 And they are absolutely phenomenal. There are two songs about ENS and ENS Dow. They are actually catchy. And I hope you guys stay tuned to the very end so you guys can listen to that. Oh, yeah. How can you not? E&S stands for everyone not selling, I guess, right? That's the meme here.

Starting point is 00:37:42 Can I get you on a little bit more hopium, Ryan? Yeah. You're going to crank me up on more ENS? More ENS Hopium, yeah. Okay, convince me. So I have acclaimed now, David. part of me thinks that this is a bit overvalued my friend i love ens as a project it's fantastic i'm incredibly bullish but why should i hold at these prices how many funds do you think have purchased

Starting point is 00:38:07 or invested in in ens zero zero funds zero hedge funds it's all people no one's going to dump on me no one there's no one to dump on you it's all the way down there's the only people that got the ENS tokens were people that were using the ENS system or were part of the ENS team, which was like, you know, building the ENS system. So, yeah, there's no one to dump on you. Like that's... Except my friends. Except your friends.

Starting point is 00:38:34 Except your friends. Right. And so like this is kind of like, we can dump on each other, right? We can pump this thing to the moon if we all agree to not sell. This is how this works. I think it's a great project. And look, guys, this is just another reminder to you of the value of using these protocols. You've been saying this for the past like two and a half years, okay?

Starting point is 00:38:52 use these protocols. We're not just saying you'll be rewarded, as in you'll learn a new skill, and there'll be some educational rewards and it'll enrich your life. No, you get free money. Like, why are you not using these protocols? Okay? Like when we say you're getting rewarded, you're literally getting air dropped money. Okay?

Starting point is 00:39:12 Tokens, value, responsibility as well, but these things have value. So we published an air drop guide about two and a half weeks ago now. It had 25 different opportunities. This was number 16, guys. So that went to bankless premium members. That's another reason you should subscribe. I feel like we're shilling the bankless premium. But like, look, what's the ROI on that?

Starting point is 00:39:34 You spend $22 a week and you get a few thousand dollars a month? Yeah, sorry, a week. It would still be worth it, though. Yeah, I did see it fantastic. I think we put a meme on the weekly roll-up a number of like a month or two ago about somebody's daughter wearing one of the crypto, the cypherpun, t-shirts in middle school. That person's daughter got the ENS drop. No way. A middle schooler got a $20,000 ENS drop. Changed her life. Andrew Yang just got it. Andrew Yang got it.

Starting point is 00:40:04 We got to go help Andrew Yang claim his airdrop. We should put it in his address and see how much he got actually. But anyway, guys, air drop season, really fun. I think this is the air drop of the year. There's some great ones this year, D-Y-D-X, but I don't know. This is really fun from distribution perspective. David, we got to burn through these, man. We spent a lot of time on that. But let's talk about this new podcast launch. We teased it in the intro. Overpriced JPEGs. What is happening here? Oh, Ryan, this isn't you. This is Carly. No, this is not me. It's somebody way better to me. Yeah, newest host. You guys don't want to hear another podcast with me and it. Dear Lord. They probably, those are probably do. No. Overpriced JPEGs with

Starting point is 00:40:45 Carly Riley, exploring the world of NFTs and the Metaverse. We've always wanted an NFTs. podcast. Carly Riley's the person to do it. Ryan met Carly Riley while he was on the Yang Speaks podcast. Carly Riley is the former finance manager for the Andrew Yang campaign. Sorry Andrew Yang for stealing your finance manager, but she's great. And yeah, so now she's starting her own podcast, part of the bankless network. And so there are links in the show notes to go subscribe to overpriced JPEGs. It's going to be on a different RSS feed than the bankless podcast. So you need to go subscribe to that. It is going to come out on the bankless YouTube. So we're going to share the YouTube's, but Carly gets her own RSS feed. And I'm really, really stoked for this. Carly is a fantastic

Starting point is 00:41:26 content producer. She's a great speaker. She's a ton of fun. And yeah, I'm really, really excited for this. She's articulate. She knows her stuff. Yeah, I couldn't be more excited about the talent we're bringing in here. And think of this as like the sister companion to bankless. This is, if bankless is, we definitely talk about the metaverse and NFTs and, you know, but like this show is also called bankless. So you know we're going to be coming back to DeFi and crypto money systems or these things. This is the sister that talks about NFTs in the Metaverse all the time, right? You need this in your life. Two episodes a week, one with a weekly recap, the other with interviews.

Starting point is 00:42:01 You need this in your life. So go hit subscribe. If you like bankless, you're going to love this. All right, David, more releases. Across Protocol is live. This is like a hop. This is like a connects. This is a bridge.

Starting point is 00:42:13 But they're doing something different. You could be a co-founder, apparently. You join their Discord. You could be a co-founder. they've like created a Dow from inception in this thing. What's going on? Yeah, across protocol. I mean, one of the many, many protocols for bridging money across that layer two. And so that's not everyone, I think by now people understand this. We got hot protocol. We got connects. There's also mover. Now there's a cross. Just illustrating you how vibrant this market is going to be. There's going to be a lot of value to be won by whoever can win through in their market, their network effects to be the cross chain protocol. This one has this very interesting strategy of, of what they are calling a fair, fair launch. Fair launches are no longer fair. They've kind of been played out and gamified.

Starting point is 00:42:57 But they're trying to do a brand new experiment, and I think this experiment by itself is going to be fun to launch, where they are going to mint a Dow token, and then as a community, they're just going to manually figure out how to give it to, right? And so the community is going to determine the distribution, right? So not one person. This isn't top down.

Starting point is 00:43:16 This isn't a retroactive air drop, which is getting farmed. This is going to be a very interesting experiment to see, like, can we just mint a bunch of tokens and then collectively agree as to who to give them to? And I think that's, it's humans all the way down, right? And so the human choices of this Dow as to how they're giving out the tokens and the, if they can make sure that they do it correctly and not get corrupted along the way is going to be extremely bullish just for not only across, but all the concept of token distribution in general. It's like, it kind of like throws it into the face, like, you know, retroactive areas. Draft yield farming meh let's just pick and choose let's just put in the labor to pick and choose who gets the token Yeah and what I've seen with something like this it's going to be like meritocracy It's like you know that word gets used a lot and it gets abused a lot right and it's like our company's a

Starting point is 00:44:05 Maritocracy no it's probably not really a meritocracy this is going to be Much more like a meritocracy because I've seen these Dows in the early stages how they work is basically join a discord. Okay, your co-founder I I joined the Discord. I'm a co-founder. I don't have time to, like, figure out everything the Dow needs. I don't. I'm, like, involved in other Dow's, well, I'll be kind of a small, like, time co-founder, I guess. But if you want to figure out exactly what the Dow needs, take a leadership role, start

Starting point is 00:44:35 contributing, start actively doing things for the Dow, you can quickly rise up the ranks, and you'll get rewarded on the other side. This is like the create your own job path, and people would be surprised at how many of these opportunities now exist in crypto and it's pretty unique it's unique like you don't find this in the regular economy i'm going to join a discord i'm going to figure out what's needed and i'm going to create my own job based on what like it's it's a form of network entrepreneurship right you join a network you be a entrepreneur in that network and you create your own job that's what's happening in these dows and i think that's what across is doing i've always thought that the most bullish dows are the

Starting point is 00:45:11 ones that figure out how to collapse the cost of contribution down to the absolute minimum so anything can be can be contributed. And a part of that is the incentive. And when you're a very limited contribution of like, oh, guys, I made a meme and you actually like get some tokens out of that. Like, that's interesting. So fantastic experiment. Let's see how this plays out. Absolutely. Okay, Coinbase. Brian Armstrong said that they would be the defy exchange we were hoping for. They just released the Coinbase wallet as a standalone browser extension. So you know how you have Metamask in your desktop browser? Well, now you can also have Coinbase wallet. I haven't tried this yet, but I need to. And it's good to see MetaMask having some

Starting point is 00:45:54 competition in this space. What are your thoughts, David? Yeah, that's exactly right. Like, more competition the better. Metamask gets an unfair amount of flack for like basically supporting entire ecosystems worth of like support request tickets for things that are just outside of their control. And so there's been a front lines. There's been a ton of hate on MetaMass lately and it's totally unjustified. They are doing like, yeah, they are doing, they are doing, they are spreading the mission and it's just like unfortunate that the entire crypto web three funnel funnels down onto metamask but congratulations to coinbase like this is this is your guys's win uh we want more browsers extensions i said at the beginning of this week that i think coinbase is turning a page

Starting point is 00:46:32 i think they have kind of figured their their stick out and they are really like going hard into this whole web three defy world and uh this is an example of that yeah absolutely i mean we we went into the brian armstrong podcast and our mission was basically to say like Hey, it seems like Coinbase hasn't selected its strategy for what it's going to do in DFI, right, with smart contracts and all of this. What is your strategy, right? And I think Brian said, I'm going to double down on open, credibly neutral protocols. And this is an example of that.

Starting point is 00:47:02 So hopefully these words are followed up with actions. We're starting to see them. Rocket Pool. Speaking of Open, credibly neutral protocols. So tell us about Rocket Pool, staking your ETH in Rocket Pool. What just launched and what's, what's, still unavailable too, David. Yeah, Rocket Pool Mainnet has launched. So Rocket Pool is a decentralized staking as a service protocol. So if you want to stake your ether, but you don't want to run a node,

Starting point is 00:47:28 but you also don't want to trust anyone to run a node, Rocket Pool is a protocol for running nodes in a trustless fashion. And so it's a home away from home with regards to staking your eth. It has been a long time coming for Rocket Pool to get launched. They are finally live in a very limited capacity, kind of in the same way that like Arbitrum and optimism have spun out their L2s in a very constrained fashion. Rocket Pool has started its main net in a constrained fashion. They've actually already hit their limit, but the limit is going to be expanded and expanded and expanded over time. And so the Rocket Pool is going to be, I think, a very favorable place to stake your ether. Rocket Pool has captured, I love, from a very beginning, from very early

Starting point is 00:48:09 days in Ethereum. They've been around since 2017, just building. And the cool thing about Rocket Pool is they have not cut any corners. They have stayed decentralized through and through. So there's no multi-sig. There's no, no anything. And it's actually, that strategy has, while it's very honorable, has actually cost them in adoption. But now that they are here, now that they are alive, they are out the gate, and I'm really excited to see what Rock and Pool can do. So congratulations to the entire Rocket Pool team and the entire Rocket Pool community that is stuck with Rocket Pool, I think because of the values that Rocket Pool has upheld. So really, really a nice day. You can't stake your eth with Rocket Pool right now, but as David said, these, they're going to be expanding soon.

Starting point is 00:48:50 So they're at their limit. You could have, right? But it got filled up. It got filled up in the first 45 seconds as well. And it was only like 150 Eth. But they're going to, like every single phase, I think maybe on a weekly basis, they're going to increase capacity. And they're just doing this to have a measured phase launch. So this will be available to everyone pretty soon.

Starting point is 00:49:10 Speaking of being available to everyone pretty soon, David, air drop season. Air drops. Okay? This is Joe Lubin responding to you something on Twitter. A little bit of drama, but it's kind of aside from the story. Okay, yeah, yeah. So aside from the story, the main point is he's hypothetically asking the question. Are we driving towards decentralization?

Starting point is 00:49:32 We are driving towards decentralization of several of our projects. Joe Lubin says, when mask, question mark, that's the metamask token, by the way. Stay tuned. And then he says something snarky. But that's the main thing. It's like when mask, stay tuned. So this is a little tease. Metamask with anirdrop.

Starting point is 00:49:51 Okay? This is like the industry's best kept secret. Like it's going to happen, guys. What do you do to get this air drop? All right? You use Metamask specifically. Use swaps. Not financial advice.

Starting point is 00:50:03 We don't know for sure. We have no insider information. This could also not happen. But like, it could happen. Yeah. I mean, have any air drops to come true. The leader of consensus, which owns MetaMask, goes, when dollar sign masks stay tuned.

Starting point is 00:50:18 There was also another clip of the MetaMask, I think, community call, answering this question, when token. They said, we have no plans for a token, but we are actively investigating the best ways to engineer a token and also distributed like this. There's probably going to be a token. I used to think that it was just totally going to be off of the swaps, because that's the only verifiable way that MetaMask.

Starting point is 00:50:39 You don't think that anymore. I mean, I still think it's, it's, I mean, It can be a component. It's definitely probably a component about it. There's other ways too as well, but that involves like going into Infura where Metamask routes its orders and then collecting the addresses

Starting point is 00:50:52 that have used in Fuera to Airdrop tokens there. I think that distributions, it's a very hard problem just by the nature of what Metamask is. Metamask doesn't actually know what Ethereum addresses are in it or not. And so that's why the swap feature is the only verifiable way

Starting point is 00:51:06 to air drop a Metamask token. I think they're trying to spin up some sort of alternative distribution plan because I think the distribution for Madask is going to be really, really hard, but we're going to see how that goes. Yeah, absolutely. And again, just saying the ultimate guide to Airdrops, I'm sure this was listed in it, Meta Mask. Yep. Let's see.

Starting point is 00:51:26 That was number. It's in there. It's in there somewhere. It's in there somewhere. Yeah. Oh, it's an honorable mention. Okay. So you're not just getting 25.

Starting point is 00:51:35 You're getting like 35, 40 or so air drops in the ultimate guide toirdrop, which was published by bankless. Bankless Premium. You do that. You get that. All right. Let's talk about this. What is Die Wormhole, David? Is another release for the week. This is really, really cool. This is about the Layer 2 ecosystem. And this is Maker Dow with one of the coolest innovations, I think, of, one of the coolest innovations of the year. And so what this means is that dye can now be minted on any of the L2s, now Arbitrum, Starknet, Fuel. No way. All these layer 2s. And this is not dye being minted on the layer one and being sent to the L2 via a cross chain like hop like Connax or hop protocol.

Starting point is 00:52:18 You're actually minting it. You are minting it through a wormhole. You are wormhole minting dye natively on the L2. And so it's coming out of the maker contracts out of L1, but being minted on L2. And so there are some crazy cryptographic consensus magic going on here. But this is exactly why Rune Christensen was talking about the differences between layer two roll-ups and multi-sig bridges, you could not have built a wormhole through a multi-sig bridge. You can only build a wormhole through a roll-up.

Starting point is 00:52:47 We're just making up this. Wow. Is this available now? A wormhole is not a technical term, by the way. We are just making this up because that's a great metaphor. No, but I'm getting the visual, yeah. And is this available now, or is this coming to do anything? I think so.

Starting point is 00:52:59 Maybe. I bet you, I think maybe the contracts are live. Maybe the UI is not quite there yet. But yeah, this is a fascinating development where you, like, you can just birth an aspect. set anywhere around the layer two ecosystem without having to use hop without having to use connects not that using those things are bad but it's just like you know efficiency but it gets efficiency i'm just paying layer two gas fees i'm not paying mainette gas fees right yes right wow yeah minting die on l1 would cost over a hundred to two hundred dollars minting die on l2 costs 10 cents man i

Starting point is 00:53:30 need to read more about this this is uh actually this this is the first time seeing this um let's talk about this rebrand for uniswop they're rebranding Potentially, this is a governance vote. Still the unicorn. This looks like a medieval unicorn, something you put on like a knight's shield, like a suit of arms. What's going on here? Okay, Ryan, let's play a game here. On the count of three, thumbs up or thumbs down.

Starting point is 00:53:51 It was whether you like it. Ready? Okay. Three, two, one. Oh. Down. Wait, I can't see it. You got to put the camera.

Starting point is 00:53:58 Yeah. Okay, so I'll tell you. I like number four. That was thumbs down from Ryan, thumbs up from David. Yeah, so people can see that. I like number four, actually, because that preserves some of simplicity that I love. but like yeah one two three just a bit too complicated for me it doesn't have like the two's a little bit of a mess two's a little bit of a mess yeah it doesn't have like the apple

Starting point is 00:54:19 you know esk simplicity can i draw it in the sand that means it's a good logo like that's a good take it's a little too much for me but i like it like i would you know put this on my shield maybe that you have i like pulling forward the like the medieval era of europe into like defy it's just like such a juxtaposition that it's so crazy that it kind of works this is actually not official so this is actually going up for governance vote so if you are a uni token holder

Starting point is 00:54:49 and you want to participate in the you can say yay or nay on this so yeah uniswap getting a rebrand question mark yeah you know what so this is the thing I feel like we're post medieval era David I feel like we're Renaissance right yeah okay old air web web 2 is medieval all right we are we are Renaissance and then moving into the modern era

Starting point is 00:55:07 that's whatever. Josh, we need your help. Josh Rosenthal. Josh Rosenthal. What error are we in? Raises. Okay, Matter Labs. Matter Labs just announced

Starting point is 00:55:19 $50 million in new funding for ZK Sync. Pretty excited about this because this is like a Starkware-esque ZK roll-up. It's going to have the EVM general purpose smart contracts inside of a roll-up. They released some sort of a test net,

Starting point is 00:55:35 I believe, a month or two ago. I'm not sure. when MayNet is coming, but it has to be soon, and they just raise another $50 million. Pretty impressive. Congrats, Matter Labs. What's the valuation on this now after they raise 50 million? Above a billion. Over a billion.

Starting point is 00:55:49 Yeah. I don't know all of the details of this race. Layer 2s are hot. Layer 2s are hot and they're raising, and they're well funded. And yeah, they're coming. They're going to be here. There were other races this week, but that's the only one that we got. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:04 That's the only one we're talking about. It's the best one, yeah. Jobs. What's the reminder, David? Get a job. Why haven't you got a job in crypto yet? Your Web 2 job is not as cool as a Web 3 job. If you're not even in Web 2, then it's definitely not as cool.

Starting point is 00:56:15 Get a job. Get a job in crypto. Okay, either work for a Dow or work for a protocol company or some sort of company in crypto, okay? You're listening to Bankless, so you obviously are already down the rabbit hole. Crypto is probably one of the top five things that you think about all the time, if not like the number one thing. So why not let it consume all of your waking hours?

Starting point is 00:56:36 Just let it happen. Just let it happen. Just give in. Just give in. Just give up. People have told me, David, that I say the word capitulate too often. I was just about to say the word capitulate. You should capitulate and get a job in crypto.

Starting point is 00:56:50 Yes, yes. Let's talk about these jobs. These are new this week in the future section. Oh, Bitwise. Bitwise. Nice. All right. Okay, so Bitwise is an asset management company bridging kind of the, I guess,

Starting point is 00:57:02 the old world of finance and the new world of crypto. Love that company. God's work by funneling boomer money into our crypto assets. Look at these job titles. Oh my God. Crypto research analyst. NFT specialist. Wow.

Starting point is 00:57:16 Wow. That's awesome. Dream job. Research analysts. New research smart contract platforms in Web 3 all day. You want to spend all of your day doing those things. A crypto research analyst is a governance specialist. These job titles are amazing.

Starting point is 00:57:32 Okay. Governance specialists. I want to hang on this one real quick because it's really, really cool. Bitwise, it's an asset management company. They have assets under management. They have to be governors. And so you can be a governor specialist for managing the governance of, I think. They have tokens that you have to vote, like, be a proxy voter for.

Starting point is 00:57:50 Yeah, right. How crazy is that? So you have to, wow, it's such cool jobs, guys. Head of Growth at Dex Guru, sounds amazing. Technical lead at Draftly. An accountant at SmartDefi, a product manager, SmartDefi, head of research at a amutable, sorry, head of Ethereum. research at Immutable, head of tokens at Immutable, Community Manager, Dexible,

Starting point is 00:58:12 lead engineer at Hatstop Finance, Community Manager, Eagronom, a CTO at Eagronom, Senior Back End Engineer, Smart D-Fi, Blockchain Technical CTO Merit, Community Manager, Argon, founding blockchain engineer, highlight, I could go on. There are so many jobs on this job board now. We have promised to read all of the featured jobs, so that's what we have done, guys. But what you need to do is go to the jobs board, link at the show notes, bankless. dot palette, XYZ slash jobs, hit subscribe. You get these via email. And not only do you hear it from us weekly to get a job, you get an email alert saying,

Starting point is 00:58:48 here are the jobs that you can get. That's what you need to do. Yes. Man, you don't find job titles like this anywhere else. Absolutely not. I'm bummed that we don't have a meme lord, but that's because all the meme lord jobs get snapped up too damn fast. That's right.

Starting point is 00:59:02 We could use another meme lord too. So maybe we'll post around, David. All right, let's talk news of the week. All right, big news of the week. Let's start with Discord. What are they doing? Man, I would, Discord is where I spend so much of my time. It is the office for crypto that's like,

Starting point is 00:59:18 I'm going to the office and basically logging to a Discord server. What did they tease this week? Yeah, they tease an Ethereum integration. The CEO of Discord says probably nothing with an image of the Discord icon plus Ethereum. And it also has a MetaMask and Wall. it connect right next to the connections page so some sort of like address authentication address integration into discord uh being teased ryan they know what we want they know what we want they do know what we want they do know exactly what we want sadly there is a very sad part two of this

Starting point is 00:59:51 story uh where part two after uh let's see about a day later the same CEO tweets out thank you for all the perspectives everyone we have no current plans to ship this internal concept for now we're focusing on protecting users from spam, scams, and fraud. Web3 has a loss of good, but also lots of problems, and we need to work through at our scale more soon. So, like, they tease this,

Starting point is 01:00:13 they tease this thing, and then they had to say, like, don't worry, guys, we're not actually doing this. So, yeah, what the hell happened? You wanted to... Two-day period. This is, by the way,

Starting point is 01:00:20 these are, like, tweets from the CEO, Jason Citron, who is the founder of Discord, right? This is the guy who would be in the know. It almost feels like something happened within that 48 hour period of time to like chill him on the concept or chill them on the concept. They get like a call from a regulator? Like what do you think happens? I think we know what happened is that he got absolutely mobbed by the anti-crypto folk of the world, right? No way. Yeah. So here's Anthony Sassel Zero X saying on a tweet, this is, this is wild. There are

Starting point is 01:00:53 literally hundreds of quote tweets like this, people quote tweeting the discourse CEO. And he also says, imagine being this uninformed about something, but also still have a searching a strong opinion about it. So there are four tweets in here. Okay, so somebody who's not in crypto Twitter says, so this is the Discord CEO teasing some sort of crypto integration. Make sure to let him know Discord know how much you hate this both on Twitter and here. Go there, make a thread, yell, tell your friends to do the same thing. NFTs and crypto belong in the trash. That's just one. There's another one. Let's go on. I don't like to use my platform for big statements often, but Discord recently had a work in progress. a work in progress blog post about a partnership with AXI,

Starting point is 01:01:31 a community that exploits people in an MLM structure, indebting new users and making them share personal data. This is the antithets of trust and safety. We could go on. So apparently the Discord, yeah, I am canceling my Nitro subscription immediately and will be encouraging all my friends and followers to do the same. I will not support a platform that aligns itself with crypto and NFTs,

Starting point is 01:01:51 not to mention MLM schemes and sharing of personal data. Oof, rough. MLM is multi-level marketing. Yes, big oof. The CEO of Discord, informally teasing integration with Ethereum wallets, Ethereum misspelled, isn't surprising. Discord is a home of number of NFT grifts masquerading as exciting projects and is en vogue about know-nothing tech lords, but it's definitely a disappointing development. I want to swear.

Starting point is 01:02:14 I want to swear. I want to say, everyone F off. You don't know what you're talking about. Like, ugh, it's so frustrating. And like, this goes back to the cognitive dissonance that people have about crypto. I was like, oh, you didn't get rich off Bitcoin. Well, you hate it because of the environment. Oh, like, you haven't made any money off NFTs.

Starting point is 01:02:31 That's because they're a scam. Oh, MLM schemes. Guess what? The dollars in MLM scheme. Like, it's so frustrating. It's so frustrating. And the fact, like, I understand as a CEO why he had to capitulate to this. Here's me saying capitulate.

Starting point is 01:02:44 But, like, damn, is it really frustrating? Because, like, that could do, like, sign in with Ethereum, self-authenticated, like, self-sovereign identity where you don't have to sell your data to Google or, yeah, who or Facebook to sign in is the exact opposite of what they're talking about. David, here's the thing, dude. It's just a login with MetaMask. If you don't like it, don't freaking use it. If you don't like it, don't use it.

Starting point is 01:03:09 Why are you getting mad that somebody is building an integration to something like, look, the biggest Discord server in the world is Axi Infinity. Right. Right. Don't you think those members of Discord, those users of Discord would like some integration with their MetaMask wallet? I asked this question because I saw some of this pushback. I actually didn't read everything that you just put up.

Starting point is 01:03:31 But this guy said Discord is pausing NFT plans after the huge backlash. Apparently, some people in the gaming studio totally hate NFTs. And I was previously unaware of that. But you read some of the quote tweets. So I asked the question of one of the guys who was tweeting this, why? Like, why do you hate it? and this is his response oh wow i'm unable to view it i i may have just gotten blocked open it open it up in a private browser then okay let me let me try to open it up in a private

Starting point is 01:04:05 okay let me open it up in a private i didn't even respond to it anyway wow you did get blocked wow i got blocked by basically saying okay so just so people know here's my response um uh he Ryan tweeted this and he linked me to this thread and i said I appreciate this reply. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm not going to use this thread to push back against these points, but I hope you stay tuned into the NFT community to hear the counter arguments.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Apparently I got blocked over that. Yeah. Anyway, so it goes. But basically the thread, now that I can see it in incognito mode, NFTs are harmful to games. And the entire thread is basically a few points. One, energy, okay? So like the environmental issue,

Starting point is 01:04:50 every NFT that kills the environment, right? Which, by the way, in six months, the Ethereum merge that'll no longer be an issue. Ethereum will reduce its energy expenditure by 99.9%. If you know anything about this, done any research, then you obviously know that. NFTs are not on Bitcoin, et cetera, et cetera. And it's also like individual NFTs don't actually add more carbon to the air.

Starting point is 01:05:14 It's just like Theorem's ecosystem as a whole. It's not NFTs. Yes, exactly. That's another subtle point that seems. to be missed. And then going through it, it's basically like play to earn is is toxic to the gameplay mechanics, right? Turns it into a multi-level marketing type scheme, right? And it's like, our response there is, well, then just don't play those games. You're not losing anything from the existing games that you play. Like, you don't have to play an axi if you don't want to.

Starting point is 01:05:41 And, and then they basically don't believe the premise of we control, you control what you buy. So they're like, you already control what you buy in a centralized database. And if the gaming company goes away, then like the NFTs go away anyway. So that's another point, not really understanding the difference between like property rights and being able to port your NFT from game to game. Also, the one good point in this thread was basically a point that we've talked about before, which is like what happens if all of the games turn into like these grinds for money? Right.

Starting point is 01:06:17 What does that do to gameplay? Does that remove the fun? So like a whole massive thread of criticisms, maybe a few points, but mostly misinformation. Big swing and a miss. Like big swing and a miss. So again, I don't understand why there's this disconnect. And I didn't even realize until this Discord thing that some of the gaming industry actually hate crypto. Like they hate NFTs and they hate what we're doing here.

Starting point is 01:06:44 I didn't realize any of this was the case. but I think there's a massive amount of misinformation out there and just like lack of education on what crypto is actually trying to do. Any other thoughts here? Yeah, the concern about like, what happens if these games just turn into a grind and they suck out all the life out of the game? You know what else?

Starting point is 01:07:02 Is it a grind? Working from below poverty wages in a country that doesn't have jobs to support you. That's also a grind. And that really sucks. And so like gatekeeping is like, oh, I don't want to dilute the art of my industry to the point where like you,

Starting point is 01:07:16 actually are like revoking people's ability to make an income from themselves. They do not know that the reason why AXid Infinity is so incredibly large is because it's supporting an entire like country's GDP right now. It got people through COVID in the Philippines. Yeah. So like sometimes this is why like these, I understand that people have cognitive dissonance about accepting crypto. There's a lot to swallow.

Starting point is 01:07:38 It really breaks people's brains. But also you are doing so much harm by just jumping to conclusions that these things are horrible. You are, it is extremely frustrating. I will stop there. It is, yeah, it is extremely frustrating. But now we know this pushback exists. So we can talk about it a little bit more.

Starting point is 01:07:55 No pushback at Sotheby's, though. They are auctioning off as many NFTs as they could. And this one is actually denominated in ETH. And it's for Banksy art, David. What's the significance? Yeah, so if I'm getting the story correct, Banksie went up to Sotheby's and made a stipulation saying, hey, when you auction off my piece of art, you have to do it in Eath.

Starting point is 01:08:15 And so there's going to be. be a live auction for a Banksy art piece. And this is the auctioneer is going to be like, can I get 50Eth, 50E, 50th, 50th, can I get 60th, 60th, 50th, 50th, 50th de, can I get 60th? Gray, please. So yeah, 60th. Can I get 60th? 75Eath. That's crazy. Imagine how many, like, non-Etherian people, very rich art collectors are going to be in that crowd hearing instead of, yeah, with their calculators. That's exactly right. Instead of hearing dollars, hearing Eith. And like, this goes back to like the whole, the first time we had this NFTE, like, bubble. where we started realizing that art is going to be priced in ETH.

Starting point is 01:08:49 Well, part of that statement was because we thought all art was going to be digital, but now Ether is moving into physical art. So physical art is starting to get priced in Eith. That's crazy. It is crazy. And it's super cool. And yeah, it's unexpected that it's happening so quickly is what I would say. Let's talk about this, though.

Starting point is 01:09:07 Some bad news on the NFT side is like the games are fun to play. The art is fun to collect. But the tax optimizer is here to ask. have you thought about your taxes this year on this stuff? This was an article I read, David. NFT games are fun. Filing taxes afterward is a nightmare. I'm not going to go through this whole article,

Starting point is 01:09:28 but it's just kind of a PSA that the way the IRS and other nation states treat game items is as like physical property. Okay? So if your axi breeds with another axi and you get a new axi, then you got a new asset. And if you swap that asset, for another axi, it's an asset to asset trade, and there's a capital gain on that trade.

Starting point is 01:09:52 And I bet none of you listening are tracking that stuff, right? No gamers are, okay? Why would they? But this is what the tax code says. And what I'm saying is, as ludicrous as this sounds, right? One, you should be aware of it and conscious of it, because if you want to do the letter of the law with taxes, you have to record these transactions.

Starting point is 01:10:14 but two my god how could we tax games in this way how can we tax digital goods in this way there's got to be a better system than recording every single time and reporting the IRS every single time and axi infinity mates okay like we got to we got to do better than this david do you have any answers for us oh no answers but just more illustrations of how nonsensical this is imagine you're like you're you're grinding against this boss you kill this boss it drops like a legendary sword and you're like, shit, if I pick that up, that's a taxable event. It's a tax event. I can't pick that up.

Starting point is 01:10:51 And when you pick that up, right? It's a tax event at that moment. And oh my God, that that sword is worth $1,000. So now you have $1,000 in ordinary income you have to file in your taxes. And so I'm terrible. We already know that like crypto, the way crypto works, it's like just incongruent with a tax code. But like previously, like the defy tokens and like normal.

Starting point is 01:11:14 ether like it wasn't that bad where you can still do your taxes complying and for like stocks defy summer came along and started to really really get hard mess once gaming is here is like it is like you we are have to rewrite the tax code or else you are getting none of it because gamers do not give a shit about their taxes well but listen this imagine the exact same scenario i laid out right draws boss drops an item you go to pick up your sword right and it's a taxable event and you're 10 years old yeah You're a 10-year-old kid. Little Bobby's going to go to tail.

Starting point is 01:11:49 Sorry. Sorry, Bobby. I hope you've reported that sword to the IRS. God, man. Anyway, what a mess. Bobby, you got to stop playing the games. Your parents can't afford the tax bill. It's Bobby's responsibility.

Starting point is 01:12:02 Sorry. Damn Bobby. All right. All right. Let's talk about this. We have too much fun on this sometimes. Yeah, well, you know what. Taxes can be fun, right, David?

Starting point is 01:12:10 Joking about that's for sure. Bitcoin News. The New York City mayor elect Eric Adams is going to take his first paycheck, his first three paychecks rather, in Bitcoin. Wow. This is a flag in the ground. And he's saying basically, I want New York City to be a crypto-friendly city. Mayors around the country, around the U.S.

Starting point is 01:12:30 have done this, right? Mayor of Miami, some other mayors as well. And it's really cool that they're doing this. Vitalik had this blog post about, like, crypto cities. You know, mayors and cities have a bit more ability to be flexible and experiment. and New York City is actually talking about launching a New York City coin. I wonder what they're going to do with this, but it's kind of interesting. Eric Adams says, we're glad to welcome you to the global home of Web 3.

Starting point is 01:12:56 They're starting to see the jobs potential, the economic prosperity potential. They're starting to make the connection between that and Web 3 and crypto. What's your take, David? Yeah, this New York City coin is of the same category as like the Miami coin that happened not too long ago. this is built on this Dax side chain bridge thing off of Bitcoin. I'm not sure of that connection there. Which is kind of weird because Bitcoiners generally don't like tokens, especially not like city tokens. But if there's enough traction to justify another New York coin, like absolutely, let's do it.

Starting point is 01:13:29 So let's see what happens here. I still don't know what this whole city coin thing is about. But I'm a fan of experiments. I really don't know either. And mostly I'm a fan of politicians saying, hey, we want this jurisdiction to be friendly to crypto. All right, let's talk about there. I guess I have to consent something. Okay, crypto firm gray scale, this is big.

Starting point is 01:13:46 Cryptoferm gray scale just hit 60 billion in assets under management. What's interesting about this is this is now larger than the top gold ETF. And this is both incredible from a growth perspective, but what a tragedy. Okay, what a tragedy that we have not really an ETF, but a fund that has additional rent extraction, like, you know, one, two percent. I forget what the gray scale management fees are rather than an ETF. And it's grown as big as gold. And it doesn't actually track Bitcoin closely, not perfectly. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:14:20 All right. So like the SEC is in action on ETS. I know we got a futures base ETF. We need a spot ETF. Just take this gray scale ETS and convert it to an ETF. Do the right thing, guys. Now we're bigger than gold. You've waited four years too long for this.

Starting point is 01:14:36 Four years too long. Retail could have had this already. Now you need to make up for lost time. Is the SVC listening, you think, to this, David? You think they're going to do that? Well, Hester Pierce is. Hey, Hester. Hey, Hester.

Starting point is 01:14:51 Yeah, we love your work, by the way, Hester. We just, you know, SEC's got to get moving on some things. Gary, though, lukewarm on him. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe he'll come on the podcast and persuade us, David. Jake Trevinsky, okay, the infrastructure bill, you probably heard about this, had some really terrible language. in the bill regarding tax reporting and crypto and all of these things, it passed.

Starting point is 01:15:15 Right? So it's a pass in the house. Looks like it's moving towards approval. Or was it approved, David? I didn't catch up on the news last week. I don't know. I don't know either. But like for crypto, what, you know, this is not great.

Starting point is 01:15:28 Crypto stood up and pushed it out. But here's, I think, the main takeaway. There's nothing really we can do at this point in time. Okay. So like, how is this going to get resolved? Do you think, David? Well, if this does actually go into effects, like 75% of the infrastructure that makes this crypto industry work becomes illegal. And so at that point, we just go to the courts because

Starting point is 01:15:51 it's not like we're going to stop doing this. And so I think we might have a destiny in court, which will be fun to watch. Yep. And it doesn't take into effect until 2024. So keep that in mind. Also, there will be some legislative pushes from basically the crypto lobby, people listening to to get this amendment, get this stripped from the bill. So they'll be that pushed. And then ultimately, if all of this fails, then we take it to the court system. So not the end of the world. I think crypto made a valiant stand against this.

Starting point is 01:16:21 And I think we'll have some other steps up to bat to try to get this language out. But we got to remain vigilant. And I guess that's the story. There's nothing we can do at this point in time. But we will sound the alarm when there's more that we can do on this sort of thing. Jerry Brito has a good comment on that to you. include that in the show notes. David, PayPal, getting some revenue increases on their quarterly earnings. They plan to increase their crypto offerings. You know what's so cool here is like

Starting point is 01:16:49 corporations become addicted to quarterly earnings reports basically. They're always looking for the growth, right? That's what the street wants from them, investors want from them, their company wants from them. And once they get on the crypto train and they start realizing some of that growth for crypto, they ain't coming back. They're going to do this more and more. They're going to double down it tripled down on it. It seems like that's what's happening with PayPal and Venmo. Any thoughts here? Yeah, Ryan here always says crypto pays you to learn about it. Well, all these like companies, these financial services companies like integrate with crypto and they're like, oh, there's a lot more revenue here than I thought. Let's keep going. And so crypto pays companies to

Starting point is 01:17:25 integrate with it. And this is how crypto wins. It does, totally. David, let's see some quick takes here. What's this one? Yeah. Tim Cook of Apple says he's bullish on crypto and that he owns some. So that's kind of cool. I kind of think that's the whole story. Is that the whole story? Yeah. What coins do you think he has? Probably Bitcoin and Ether.

Starting point is 01:17:44 Yeah, okay. Probably got to start there. Oh, God. You think he has Doge? Oh, God. I don't know. I wouldn't get against it. What's this next one?

Starting point is 01:17:51 Matt Huang of Paradigm is joining the board at Stripe, the massive, massive payments company that does a ton of volume. Matt Huang, a crypto native person coming on board there. He says, I'm excited to see them invest more energy into crypto and Web 3. This is super cool. Basically, this is Stripe saying, hey, we need a crypto native on the board and them getting a crypto native on the board because they're doing cool stuff in crypto. I think that's what's going on. David, what's going on with this? Dave Dow, David Dow? Dave Dow, yeah. It's officially Dave Dow. We have the Dave token. It's on Polygon. There are like 250 daves in the Dave Dow Discord. And so like what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to corral everyone into the day, whose name, Dave or David or Davy or from what I've learned if you're Italian Davide or if you are Arabic Dawed. Yeah, so all forms of David are welcome into Dave Dow. We're trying to corral every single

Starting point is 01:18:50 David that exists into the Discord. There's over 250 of them. And this has actually generated Matt Dow and Dan Dow. Dan Dow is Dave's Dow archedemy. Is this just a fun experiment or what are you expecting to fall out of this? Yeah. So yeah, the cost of issuing a token, the cost of making a Dow have collapsed so low that you can make a Dow out of anything right now. And so, like, I think this is a great model of those, like, when you strip away everything from a Dow and you just compact it down to just one single thing that people share, that is what this is, right? So, you know, the bankless Dow, that's a complex narrative. Like, we want bankless technology, bankless culture. There's a lot of things there. What happens if you have a Dow

Starting point is 01:19:30 collapse down to just the bare minimum, but just like one thing that people share? And I want, I want name dows to get spun up all over the place. And so if you click that screenshot at the bottom, somebody says, finally, a place for Dave's can feel at home. And then I quote, and I quote him and say, this is unironically the point of this. And I say, in quotes, hey, I want to get into crypto. Where should I go? And if there's a bunch of name dows everywhere, you can just say, well, well, what's your name? Just go to your name Dow. And so we said, Dave Dow is going to be maximally successful if we also get like Ryan Dow Justin Dow Sarah Dow also to get started that should be our goal Dave Dow the crypto punks of Dave Dows by the way because we're the first ones

Starting point is 01:20:13 but yeah I think this is a fun experiment it's just the perfect level of meme and realness to matter and the goal we have decided the collective vision of Dave Dow is to buy the statue of David so we can oh my god this is so there is so when once one point once it's it's not for sale but like the power of crypto will make it happen. We are going to own the statue of David and it would be property of Dave Dow. Wow. This is very strange and interesting. I don't have time to start a Ryan Dow, but I'd probably join one. So if there's some listener out there with the first name Ryan, then you've got some ideas that David has just dropped you. Let's talk about this too. Optimism. We were teasing it for the last couple of weeks. What did they just drop?

Starting point is 01:20:58 Yeah, by the time that people listen to this, the optimistic Ethereum, the EVM, equivalent version of optimism will be online. The network is going to go down in 24 hours from a little bit yesterday. So that's going to be coming up at the time of recording. By the time you guys listen to it, it should already be a backup line or maybe it's in that six hour window. But then, boom, optimism is EVM equivalent, which I think is going to be an iterative process, but moving closer and closer and closer towards EVM equivalents. It's such a beautiful thing. Really excited for that. Congratulations to the optimism team. Yeah, really cool for sure. We also wrote a fantastic post this week about Ethereum's roadmap. A lot of people have questions about

Starting point is 01:21:37 Ethereum's roadmap. Like so when is the merge? What's it going to include when the merge happens? Will I be able to, you know, withdraw my ETH? What about what about sharding? What about scalability? When's that all happening? We wrote it up in the Ethereum roadmap update. Trent from the Ethereum Foundation wrote that for us. So it's just a fantastic overview. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. Guys, we will be right back with our takes of the week and also what we're excited about. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans,

Starting point is 01:22:21 Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor.

Starting point is 01:23:01 Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof-stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof-of-work systems, and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized.

Starting point is 01:23:40 Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32-Eth and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32-Eth, and you need to pool your Eth with others so you can access staking yields. Lido offers a solution for both.

Starting point is 01:24:10 Simply go to Lido.fI, choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible, and it's committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Tara, or Sol, and get liquidity on your stake, go to lydo.fI to get started. Hey, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. David, let's start with the PSA here.

Starting point is 01:24:39 Don't get fished on Uniswap. This is Harry.eith giving us the warning. What's going on here? Yeah, so for the listeners, this is a visual thing. But if you're on Twitter, the links that populate are on Twitter, they come with a preview, right? And so if you're used to seeing the same links, you'll see the same previews, there's a link here that has the Uniswap Unicorn logo.

Starting point is 01:24:56 It says Unicorn, Uniswop.org. It says Uniswap swap, and then are all the same things that you see on Uniswap. So, Ryan, let's go ahead and click that link and see where it goes. Am I going to get fished here? Oh, we are not on the Unswap page. We are on a page called Harry Denley.com, who's probably the guy that made this website slash fake Twitter unfurling. And it says, do you trust links?

Starting point is 01:25:16 Well, you shouldn't. And so basically there is a way to make a link on Twitter look like it's going to someplace and then take you to a different place. And the idea is that it could take you to a clone of Uniswap that looks like Uniswap, acts like Uniswap, but instead takes all of your money. So don't get fished. This is a new scam that we've seen. Now that we know about it, check your URLs, check your links, verify everything. Guys, and there are so many phishing scams out there. Okay, so like Discord all the time.

Starting point is 01:25:45 I don't know 20 times a day. I get hit up by things, okay? Don't click weird links in Discord. I get text messages these days, you know, like Ledger had a leak, for instance, that gave away a whole bunch of, you know, people's email addresses, funnups. I've gotten letters, okay? Like in the mail, physical letters, like fishing, like if you're in crypto. Yeah, like basically, if you're in crypto, expect to get these things.

Starting point is 01:26:12 And they'll look like they're coming from legitimate sources. That's how a fish works. So this looks like it's coming from Uniswap. I get text messages from Google, right? Google support saying you've got to check your Gmail. Like stuff like this, be on the lookout for it. If you are in the crypto industry for any amount of time, you are going to become a fishing target. So be very skeptical of messages from unidentified sources as they come in.

Starting point is 01:26:35 David, what's your take here? Yeah, this is actually a talk that I gave at a local San Diego meetup condensed down into a tweet form. I'm still working on the talk. But basically, I say, historically, banking has always been centralized while artists have always been at the margins. Artists are on the frontier. They are exploring the margins. And I say, with crypto, the institution of banking is outsourced to the individual. Banking is now also on the margins where the artists are. And I follow it up saying, I'm so damn bullish on a human culture. If you put the money next to the artists, what do you think happens? Artists create more things.

Starting point is 01:27:10 Like, that's awesome. And that is why I'm bullish on humanity. Yeah, crypto is very bullish on humanity. Actually, this is, at least I think the Ethereum ethos very much is. Let's take this take from Jason Choi. I'll read it out. Slow success builds character. Fast success builds ego.

Starting point is 01:27:28 That's the take. He says, it explains most of the people you'll meet in crypto. Wow, that's true. This one hit me, like, as far as like, hey, this is my, experience in crypto. There are a lot of people in crypto that have gotten wealthy very quickly. And some of them become pretty egotistical as a result of that. Some of my favorite people are the people who have been here for a long time and have gotten wrecked a few times. Okay. Like just like made some dumb mistakes and gotten absolutely destroyed by them at some point in time,

Starting point is 01:28:05 right or at least bend through some shit right like so going through 2018 2019 holding eth you had a 95% price drop guys okay even more if you kept on buying on the way down like I did right that was even more painful so that's the type of thing experience that really builds character and honestly it's like a quiet humble type of type of character right but like on the other side you see a lot of people who man they just yolo bet on something now they know everything hi i've been in crypto for like eight months and i know exactly what's happening and i've made like uh you know a 50x return okay i see a lot of these people and uh they have pretty large egos because they haven't gone through the the trenches that others have so i don't know this one just resonated with me and it kind

Starting point is 01:28:57 of explains what's actually going on it's like um too much success too quickly can build ego and like when it happens to people. Let's do a thought experiment. Say there's two people. Both of them at one point in time both have a million dollar portfolio. One person ground and did research and was patient and was responsible and dollar cost average into responsible assets that went up and now that person over the course of three to five years has a million dollar portfolio. This person B, aped into Dogecoin and they were poor for all three to five years and then all of a sudden they have a million dollars. Both people have a million dollars. Both people have a million dollars, who do you think is going to be still wealthy, like in the next year, right?

Starting point is 01:29:37 Right. It's the guy that figured out how to actually maintain long-term wealth and long-term responsibility, right? Like, if money comes to you extremely quickly, it can also go away from you extremely quickly. So it's good to practice long-term thinking, long-term responsibility, because, again, that's what Jason Choice says builds character. Yeah, and, you know, I know someone's listening. He's being like, hey, look, everyone in crypto's gotten rich quick, okay?

Starting point is 01:30:01 Don't talk to me. I've been like investing for like 30, 40 years, right? But like, but then I go back to somebody like you had on layer zero this week, DC Investor. Okay? Like, DC Investor has been here for a while and he's gotten wealthy via crypto and NFTs, right? But this wasn't an overnight success. Go listen to his story, okay? He's been thinking about how to get out of the rat race and use his money so that his capital works while he's sleeping for,

Starting point is 01:30:31 like his entire adult life since college. Okay? And like this is not, and he's been involved in all sorts of different communities, like this investment communities. This is not, you know, suddenly he got rich because he made a lucky bet type of story.

Starting point is 01:30:47 And it's funny too, because I see in somebody like DC investor that slow success that's built up character rather than the ego. And yeah, I think that's what you get. So even in crypto, people think it's like overnight success,

Starting point is 01:30:59 but it's not. And some of the best, some of my favorite people have gone through some serious stuff in crypto in order to get to the other side here. Yeah, we are blessed that crypto moves faster than the rest of the world. And that includes our markets. But you don't want to go too much faster than that. That's when things are sustainable. That's right.

Starting point is 01:31:18 And, you know, keep your ego in check, right? Because this stuff is fleeting. Okay. Let's talk about this take from Sam Altman. David, why you... Yeah. Sam Olman says, there is a special combination of optimism, excitement, camaraderie exploration frontier speed and knowing a shared secret that existed in the startup

Starting point is 01:31:36 community of 2005 to 2012. It has been dormant for a long time. It's nice to see it again in the Web3 community. I really like that shared secret element. And this is like the difference between the people that like hounded the Discord CEO. The people that hounded the Discord CEO to get him pull back on that Ethereum integration, they didn't know the shared secret. Only we know the shared secret.

Starting point is 01:31:57 We've got the secret. it. This is Sam Moulton, by the way. I think this is the Ycombinator guy as well. So, you know, that has some resonance here. This is a take from Polynia, one of our favorites, talking about modular blockchains generally, but also has some fantastic takes. And he talks a lot about the settlement layer. And here's his tweet. On five top criteria that matter for a settlement layer, this is the base layer, the layer one for assets and transactions and like the property rights layer that we talk about so much on bankless. He said the five things that matter are a culture of users running nodes, running their own nodes, wide token distribution. That's number two. Credible neutrality.

Starting point is 01:32:40 It's number three. Number four is Lindy effect. That's like time without it breaking. And then number five is liquidity. And then follows up with this. Bitcoin is still arguably the leader. So it's frustrating to see there's no concentrated effort to support roll-ups. I think that's like two takes within the take, right? It's like Bitcoin should be supporting roll-ups because arguably it's leading or it's one of the number one contenders in a lot of these things. But I guess, you know, my take off of this is one I completely agree. But this is also why not all layer ones are equal, right? Just because you say you're a layer one doesn't mean you have these five characteristics. Your users running nodes, wide token distribution, credible neutrality, Lindy, time without

Starting point is 01:33:27 breaking and liquidity, okay? Like, and you have to have five of these to actually compete in the game. And of the chains that are competing in the game, it's honestly right now, it's only Bitcoin and Ethereum. That's the whole thing. That's why we consider those two things, the bankless things, because they are actually fighting for these five properties. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:33:49 Yeah. So anyway, it was just nice to see kind of a breakdown of what those things are. And if you have anything to add to this, David. Yeah, I put out a tweet that was along the last. lines of like, hey, do you have a favorite L1 that you identify with? And like, everyone in crypto has their favorite L1. And then I said, do you actually, do you understand the values that are embodied in that L1? Because if you haven't consciously thought about that, you need to. People just, and then replied to that like, oh, my favorite L1 is this. My favorite, like,

Starting point is 01:34:16 kind of misunderstanding the point of the tweet. And so this, when I say, like, do you understand the values of what is embodied in your L1? And so it's a lot of this. Like, do the people run the nodes. Is the actual system decentralized by the people for the people? Is there a wide token distribution? Do we all have access to the upside? Is it credibly neutral? Credibly neutral or does it king make? Does it bestow rights that some people have that other people don't? How long has it been running without breaking? And then of course liquidity, which we talked about at the very beginning of the show, is the actual L1 asset liquid? Do you know it's not listed there is transaction throughput? Yes. How many TPS transactions per second? You have?

Starting point is 01:34:55 have. Well, so that's why he says, I'm frustrated to see that there's no concerted effort to support roll-ups on Bitcoin because actually he did actually put that there, but it's, again, not at the settlement layer because TPS doesn't happen at the settlement layer. TPS happens at the roll-up layer. That's right. Bitcoin could totally do this. It's just not. It just needs a hard-funk. Let's do this, David. What's this tweet and what's the take here? Yeah, this is Klon. Klon is the OG guy behind the Coolcasts NFTs. And he does a first now and then later, um, uh, uh, tweet or picture, there's two tweets, two pictures. 2015, there's this kind of like shoddy-looking tent with a bunch of cat drawings that are

Starting point is 01:35:34 hanging up on strings, you know, kind of looks pretty weak. But turns out the guy really cares about cats and didn't quit. And now in 2021, on the right side, you see cool cats on like these LED screens, which are in New York, amazing. And so... Time Square. This is what I'm talking about. This is the exact perfect representation of what I'm talking about when you've removed

Starting point is 01:35:55 central banking and you push money and banking to the periphery where the artists are, all of a sudden these guys that really care about their art that are going to stick through it get funded and all of a sudden we see cute little cats on Times Square billboards. This is what happens when you fund artists. This is the power of NFTs. This is the power of having an asset, like being able to democratize making NFTs, making assets to everyone. You generate communities, you generate culture, you generate art.

Starting point is 01:36:25 So congratulations to Klon. If you're listening to this, I actually met you at the LA Cool Cats Meetup. I don't know if you knew who I was, but I appreciate all of your work. And I love your community. Yeah, it's just like what this is like a golden age for creators, man. Like the opportunities here. You go from kind of a tent and obscurity to you go from like Times Square, right? And this is only possible because of crypto.

Starting point is 01:36:48 Back in 2015, when Klon was in this tent, like this whole NFT Avenue was not available to him. And I didn't even have the NFC standard. Right? Yeah. We didn't even, it hadn't even been invented. So what a golden era. What a golden age to be a creator these days.

Starting point is 01:37:04 David, let's talk about what we're excited about. So let me ask you the question. What are you excited about this week? Yeah, two things, Ryan. Two things. I'm excited about this thing that I learned called manifold contracts. And there's a story here.

Starting point is 01:37:17 So while I was at NFT, NYC, the last day, Friday, I went to an in real life NFT art show. And a little fun fact about me, fun fact, is once upon a time I was a photographer that was really interested in taking like cityscapes, city skylines, geography, pictures, and then making like these HDRs where you would take pictures across many, many brightnesses and then compress them down into one image. So you get the full range of color and spectrum. It added it like a bit of a surreal nature to these like cityscapes.

Starting point is 01:37:45 I go into this NFT in real life art show and I see this very, very surreal drone footage of New York. and it was like 20, it was on a loop, but it was like 20 minutes long, and I watched the whole thing, and I was just like mesmerized by it. And so it's like this guy took a drone, flew it around New York, added this like AI, like algorithm

Starting point is 01:38:06 to make it really, really surreal, really, really, like, watercolor. He called them the painted cities. And then I met the artist, because he was there. And so there's eight different individual units that he was displaying. And he hadn't actually minted these things.

Starting point is 01:38:19 And so I'd do a handshake deal with him, and I buy every single one. the whole series to swept the floor. And the thing is, they weren't minted. So it was a handshake deal. And so I've had to go on a journey with this guy, with this guy, Nate, to actually figure out how to mint these damn things. And I didn't really realize how big of a problem this is that is currently being

Starting point is 01:38:39 tackled right now by so many different teams. And so I asked around, because if you mint them on like foundation, if you mint them on super rare, you're putting the, what's that word, provenance in foundation or or super rare. And we don't want that. That's a little bit of the Web 2 model. I'm sure Super Rare and Foundation have something to say about this.

Starting point is 01:38:59 But I want the artist to have the provenance. I want to buy them from Nate, the artist, not super rare the platform. And so I want Nate to mint the tokens. And so going through the journey of asking people around, like, hey guys, like, how do we do this? Because I want my art, I want my NFTs that I paid a lot for to be on all the platforms,

Starting point is 01:39:18 not just the one that we minted them on. We discovered this thing called Manifold Contracts. from the Manifold team. And Manifold is this cool NFT minting platform that they call it stateless. As in like it doesn't host anything. It takes your tokens

Starting point is 01:39:32 and mints you some contracts that is yours as an artist and then you can mint the NFTs and that is again your contracts and then it takes the data of the NFT the actual JPEG or in this case like a gigabyte size of footage puts them on RWeave

Starting point is 01:39:47 for decentralized file storage and then the tokens are owned by the artist, but can go anywhere, open seas, super rare, foundation, like whatever NFT platforms show up, and it gives complete ownership to the artist. So Manifold doesn't actually collect any rent from this process. They are just supporting infrastructure to mint these tokens. And I'm really bullish on that. That's really, really cool. And so we're waiting for gas prices to come down because it's going to cost a bunch of gas to mint these things. But I'm really excited for that. And just like learning through that whole process, we're going to get Manifold on a state of the nation to talk about this process.

Starting point is 01:40:22 and that is what I'm excited about. Only the first thing, though. The second thing is I'm also excited about Metaverso in Puerto Rico, which is the first week of December. So Puerto Rico blockchain week, G money's throwing Metaverso. I'll be speaking there. So if you guys are going to Metaverso in Puerto Rico

Starting point is 01:40:35 for the first week of December, I will see you there. That's awesome. Very cool, man. Yeah, it's, yeah, I would love to learn more about Manifold, honestly, in this whole minting process from that angle,

Starting point is 01:40:46 have not learned about that yet. Yeah, no, it's if I'm glad I actually had the experience. I didn't know that this was a problem that exists and now I'm exploring how to solve it. And so I will report back when I find out. Ryan, what are you excited about? What am I, okay. So I'm excited that like, so I was thinking about this a little bit when the holidays

Starting point is 01:41:05 come about, which is like talking to friends and family about crypto, right? Because, you know, they're going to ask, especially in up years. Usually they're quiet, like in the bear market. So I tweeted this out. What's the most common objections to crypto you hear from your family and friends? Just, you know, put that out there. Then I read through the objections, David. And my impression was like, holy crap, that's all you got?

Starting point is 01:41:26 Yep. Right? Like, most of the objections are just a result of a massive education gap. Again, I was left again with the impression that we're still early. It was just the same old stuff. Like, nothing backs a Bitcoin. The governments are going to shut it down. It doesn't scale.

Starting point is 01:41:46 I can't buy my coffee with crypto yet. It's like the same old objections that have. have been answered in a thousand ways, a thousand different times. Like, there's really nothing meaningful here that's new or different. And so, yeah, I was just left with that impression that's like, wow, it's been a while since I've kind of peeked my head up from crypto and, like, talk to people in the real world who aren't yet, I guess, crypto-pilled, aren't yet into why we're in this industry, in what we're doing here.

Starting point is 01:42:17 And the objections just haven't really gotten any better. In fact, they've deteriorated, right? It's like even like what does crypto actually do? What are the products behind it? Like, wow, I mean, we have answers to all of those things now. I mean, go check out a Dharma wallet. It's like, where else can you get, you know, 8% yield? Okay.

Starting point is 01:42:35 It's like NFTs. Where do they exist? Like the metaverse. Like Facebook is even seeing this future. So I think it'll be a different conversation, I guess, you know, during the holidays for many people. and we'll have a lot to show. But like, I guess just be prepared. The objections haven't really gotten any better.

Starting point is 01:42:56 And I guess that's bullish for crypto. I think my take here is that if they haven't gotten better and they've only gotten worse, that's because they only worse and worse objections actually can work anymore. Because like we've answered all the good objections. Here's a good objection. And then we solve that problem, right?

Starting point is 01:43:13 And so we are actually eating away at all the objections because we're actually delivering on some of these promises. Yeah. I think that's true too. So anyway, that's what I got. David, you ready for me of the week? Yeah, which one? We got two of them this week, right?

Starting point is 01:43:26 We'll start with this one. Yeah. Okay, so this is, we've done this meme format before. So this is the Army Man protecting the sleeping child, right? So we have the SEC, and it's protecting the sleeping child from a bunch of money coming in with the air drops. Like, no, SEC does no money for the, for the child. Meanwhile, on the other side of the frame, we have crypto scams coming in hot with grenades

Starting point is 01:43:48 and knives going right. for retail investors. So SEC protecting you from those airdrops, but not from the scams. Hmm, weird. This about summarizes it and maybe is a call for a switch of priorities there. David, let's see this next tweet. What's this? This one's great. I'm pretty sure Michael Wong made this one, but the last time I said this on the show, it turns out it was actually you, Ryan, so maybe you'll be correct. This was not me. This was not you. Okay, so this is the guy looking in the mirror of his car. The mirror says, objects in mirror are closer than they appear. The guy is banks. Banks are looking in the mirror. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. What's in the mirror? L2 scaling. Just coming,

Starting point is 01:44:24 coming fast. Just chasing down like a predator. That's awesome. All right, guys, Ryan is about to give his very famous disclaimer, but after the disclaimer, we have two moments of Zen. They are both songs about ENS. One is about the ENS Dow, one's about the ENS AirDrop. They are both really catchy. And I'm just extremely surprised that both of these songs are fantastic. One of these, the first one is going to be by a guy, Jonathan, I think is his name, that makes one. That makes one song a day and he's done this for like 5,000 days or something like that, something crazy. And the other song is a rap artist that I don't know. But they're both good.

Starting point is 01:44:57 They're both good. Okay, so stay tuned for that. Ryan, tell us about going west. Yeah, yeah, yeah, stay tuned for the sick bees. But I got to tell you, none of this has been financial advice. Of course, Eath is risky. Bitcoin is risky. All of crypto is risky.

Starting point is 01:45:09 You could definitely lose what you put in. But what are we doing, David? 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. Hey, the dress. That's an air drop in a stimulus. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts, and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most.

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