Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum Absorbs Alt-L1s | SEC vs. Stoner Cats | Mark Cuban's -$870k Wallet Hack

Starting point is 00:00:00 Layer two summer is getting hotter and hotter. Three new roll-up ecosystems have joined Ethereum just this last week. This isn't just another OP stack. It's not just another Arbitrum or ZK Sync. These are brand-new ecosystems coming into the Ethereum layer-2 roll-up fold. Bankless Nation, it is the 4th Friday of September. David, what time is it? Ryan, it's the Bankless Friday Weekly Roll-Ware.

Starting point is 00:00:22 We cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. This week, no exception. Yet we persevere into the frontier nonetheless. Nonetheless. How are you doing this week, Ryan? I'm good, man. Back from permissionless, feeling energized. It was great to meet the community last week in person, get some proof of humanity.

Starting point is 00:00:38 One time a year that Ryan manifests. Yeah. Some hugs. Wow. Handshakes. High fives. Stuff like that. Fist bumps.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Yeah. It was great. Anyway, okay, we got some topics of the week, David. The SEC, they're coming after the celebs, man. Milakunis, Ash and Cutcher. Gary Gensler does not like what they did with their NFT project. We're going to talk about that. What else we got?

Starting point is 00:00:59 But why this NFT project? Is it because of the celebrities? We'll talk about that. Coming up after that, Ethereum collects three new roll-ups this week, two of them previous layer ones, now layer two's on Ethereum. And the third, based on Salana, Salana on Ethereum as an L2, what is going on with that? We're going to cover that. And then Ryan, what's after that? We got Coinbase. Apparently, they have a 570-Eth work of Alchemix's money. How in the world did that happen? And should they give it back? This is kind of an M-EV question. Legal question, moral questions, some big questions. It's a

Starting point is 00:01:34 quandary. It's a real quandary we got on today's episode. And then speaking of quandaries, Mark Cuban, he lost almost a million dollars in a wallet hack. Not good news. We'll tell you a bit more about that. David, before we get in, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Bridging Protocol

Starting point is 00:01:50 Platform Layer Zero. What do they want people to know? Layer Zero and Google Cloud have partnered up and they are ready to bring the interoperable cross-chain apps of the future to you. This is what they want to do. So, of course, what is layer zero? It's a simple, simple modular framework for applications to use the layer zero smart contracts that exist on 15 different chains. And then Google Cloud as the default Oracle between these different smart contracts are the service provider for passing messages so that apps on different chains can start to be

Starting point is 00:02:21 woven together. So Google Cloud is the latest option of oracles for layer zero is serve as the default. Of course, Layer Zero. If you want to pick your own Oracle, that is something that you can apparently do. So visit Layer Zero.network for more information if you are working in the world of cross-chain and interoperability. Cross-chain. We're moving from this world of cross-chain to a multi-chain, which is different. You deploy once and you've got across many different chains. So very cool stuff there. David, let's get to the markets, though. Speaking of cool stuff, how are we looking on Bitcoin price? Is that cool? I don't know. It's not cool. Not cool stuff. Bitcoin lost $100 in the week, which isn't.

Starting point is 00:02:59 that crazy. No, that's, that's not that crazy at all. I mean, it's not cool, but it's not like bad. It's not cool. Yeah, it's something in the middle. How about Eiff? It's worse. Definitely not cool. Down 3%. Started the week at 1640, currently at 1590. I think I saw a low with 1575. Not, not cool. Thanks to Cracken for these charts, though. And if I press reload, does the price go up at all? I should try that. You should try that a few more times. How many times do you do that per day? Just like, you know, if you don't like the price, you just reload. That's never

Starting point is 00:03:30 worse for me. That only works in the bull market where you legitimately reload and all of a sudden you're like, you know, a few bits more wealthy. There are those days. There are those days. We're distant in the past with those days.

Starting point is 00:03:42 Where we had stupid large green candles. Man, we haven't had a stupid large green candle in a long time. I miss them. I'm starting to miss them. Absolutely deprived of dopamine, man. Double digit days, right? Where you just like, you look at the charts

Starting point is 00:03:54 and it'd be up like 10% and look at it again and be up like 15% you look it again, it's like up 19% you look it again is down to like back to 12%. It's just the whole day. You go into work and I'm like, what am I doing here? I remember my first cycle. I'm not saying it's healthy. Oh, no.

Starting point is 00:04:10 No, it is bad for your mental health. But it's temporarily good. You know, it's just a drug. You know, it's just like cocaine. Oh, wow. Yeah, I wouldn't know anything about that, David. But maybe that's for a different show. Here's your tweet.

Starting point is 00:04:25 Speaking of a . ETH has spent almost 500 days between 1,100 and 2,200. That's 2x bottom and top. Compared to 2017, ETH spent 700 days between 80 and 2 and 320. That's 4x bottom and top. Okay, it's getting dangerous because David is charting. So tell me about the chart, man. What's your TA analysis here?

Starting point is 00:04:48 I mean, it's just a comparison of time, right? It makes sense that in 2017 to 2020, that bear market, that it was a 4x bottom to top range, things were less liquid. They were lower market cap. That's just the nature of markets. Now, 700 days. That is the thing I'm comparing here. The thing I'm trying to get apples to apples. So 700 days was the bear market of old. Today we are passing 500 days of this current bear market between 1,100 and 2,200. So have we paid our dues? Is that what you're telling me? Or we got 2 more days to go? I think the left's curve, bell curve take is we got 200 more days to go. Also, I will say, like, we're at the top of, the closer to the top of the range.

Starting point is 00:05:28 So, like, we're ether's falling down to, like, 1575 right now. Like, 1575 and 100, 1,100, these are, there's a gap there. So in that 200 days, like, not necessarily clear skies. 200 days to go would put us in 2014, right? Maybe like mid-2014, or sorry, God, 2014, 2024 is what I meant the wrong four but what if this cycle is a little bit longer than the last cycle isn't there some truth to the idea that every cycle takes a little bit longer lengthening cycles how about that theory correct yes that length cycles have tended to lengthen out a little bit

Starting point is 00:06:07 there's also the conversation of like well was it even crypto's four-year cycle or was it the liquidity in the macro four-year cycle lots of variables here I think Just like the stupid brain take is like, yo, 500 days, last time was 700 days. You can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You don't have to think too hard about it. Yeah, maybe 300 days, which is a year. Maybe, yeah, 300 days more, maybe 400, maybe 400, maybe just 200, maybe 150, right?

Starting point is 00:06:35 We're in the range. We're in the zone. Let me ask you, because I feel like at this point in the market, we are our most sober ever. I know you're talking about fucking earlier, but the truth is, you and I are very, very sober. Well, yeah, this is the very depressed range. Like, no one's getting excited. No one is, like, happy. Have you seen how much fighting there's going on on Twitter right now?

Starting point is 00:06:56 Everyone's angry. Everyone is angry and irritable. It's because we've got no serotonin in our system. We've got no dopamine. Is that why? Okay. Well, I'm going to ask you in this very sober moment that you're in. Call the top.

Starting point is 00:07:08 Next cycle, top. Okay. 300 days away or whatever. ETH price, give me the top. $15,000 to $17,000. Wait, wait, what? $15 to $17,000. $15,000.

Starting point is 00:07:22 That's a big bump from here. So you think we're going $10.15. Wow. I mean, it's a pretty sober come down from like the last cycle's range, which we called for 10K, and we got not anywhere close. Yeah, I guess last cycles range, you know, it was really hanging. This zone was like... Anthony Zizano was calling for $10,000 when Ether was $100,

Starting point is 00:07:44 which is like, he was like, he was like, he was, I think he was the first big person to put a very confident flag in the ground saying like Earth's 10K. I was doing that too. I'm calling for a $10,000 ETHK. I mean we didn't get to $10,000. We got to $5,000. But like in a logarithmic

Starting point is 00:08:00 term, Anthony was right. I think my, so my take on that is 10 to 15K. This is pretty close. But above 10K? Because the theory is it's a lengthening cycle, maybe, but it's also like a dampened. Like we're not

Starting point is 00:08:16 always going to get like. Yeah. And what was the last cycle? Oh, I'm hitting sell at 15,000, by the way. Are you? You sell Eith? Well, how dare you? Yeah, at some point. Is that allowed? Is that allowed on the bankless program? Are you allowed to sell Eith? Sure. At 15,000? Yeah. Just all of it? You're gonna, none. I'm out. I'm out. Job here is done. Bankless is closed. We got you to 15K. See you later. Close for business. You're on your own now. No. You know, here's a secret about my co-host, David, he's addicted to the podcast, you know, almost as much as I am. So we'll just change podcast. Anyway, okay. Do you have a top call for Bitcoin? Or do you not care as much? I don't care. Below my 15K.

Starting point is 00:08:58 100K? 100K? We bet. 100K? Yeah, that sounds like that sounds about right. I feel like that's totally possible. Yeah, shooting from the hip. Ratio. Anything on the ratio this week? It's down. 3%. And total crypto market cap. We're above a trillion. Almost 1.1 trillion. Not dead yet. It's close, though. David, you want to talk about the first? Fed a little bit. Can you do it? I can talk about the Fed, sure. The Fed leaves rates unchanged. That was the news of this week. So, you know, the rate of 5.25 to 5.5. They were scheduled to

Starting point is 00:09:27 maybe think about changing that right now, and they decided not to change it. So there's no change. This is the chart over time, David, all the way from the 1970s. Fed fund target rates. And good old 1970s, it was between like 8, 9 percent. And then by the early 80s, remember Paul Volker. I mean, we don't remember him, but he existed. He's a name that we know. I did not exist when he was in his leadership position. Well, way before your time, David, he, he increased. Yeah, no, I did. But he increased prices to, sorry, market fed fund rates to 19%. All right. And then it came down. Like, this is the story of the 90s. It was just down. And then the story of like post 2008, it was like zero. It was very, very low. And now here we are back to 5.25%.

Starting point is 00:10:15 When I look at this chart, it does not look organic at all. I don't know what to make of it. It's very controlled. It's not an organic chart for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This does kind of look like the interest rates last stand. It's like this is the first time interest rates have gone higher than they previously were. Like we're marginally higher than the second to last most previous interest rate. And that's just because we just did helicopter money, right? That feels like, you know, interest rates last stand before. Well, I mean, I don't know. As inflation does increase. capital controls go up, interest rates might go up. Maybe it does get worse. I don't know. Well, this is what the Fed projects is one more increase this year, two cuts in 2024. So one more increase, and then we start cutting in 2024. Again, these are just projections. And also, the Fed does not expect a recession if that was on your weather report. And GDP will grow. So we'll see how that works out. That's the prediction coming down the pike for the Fed. They're not expecting a recession

Starting point is 00:11:13 And they're expecting GDP to grow Yeah, okay So they're expecting sunny skies Only good things Good things, good things My cynical take is like Yeah sure like You know

Starting point is 00:11:24 I mean But it hasn't been catastrophe A lot of people calling for catastrophe You remember Bology You know one million Bitcoin And all the banks are gonna fail Hasn't happen yet Yeah

Starting point is 00:11:33 Yeah you're totally right Like when we were doing All the micro stuff A little bit over a year ago Like everyone was giving us doom and gloom And it hasn't been terrible Kylea Scanlon, who I think has been the most tapped into this, has called this a vibe session.

Starting point is 00:11:45 So people feel worse than the actual fundamentals of the economy. People report negative affect about inflation and their prospects, but the actual metrics of the economy don't support that alignment of negative sentiment towards the economy. So she's calling it a vibe session. That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure there's theories on what causes that. But we don't have time to get into them. Here's something we do want to get into, though, David.

Starting point is 00:12:09 A question for you. How many Americans do you think own crypto right now? There are 330 million Americans or 350 million Americans. That includes all the kids, you know. All the kids. Five, ten million? More. Five X that.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Oh, Coinbase report. 50 million? 50 million. 50 million crypto owners. Let's see what the stats are here. Yeah, Coinbase says, One in five Americans own crypto right now. And that is five X more Americans than own an electric vehicle.

Starting point is 00:12:49 You know that? That's a weird stat. I mean, I get what they're saying. It's a weird step, but it's a cool stat because they're putting the crypto users into like political cohorts. So here's another one. 3.5x more Americans own crypto than belong to a trade union. Okay.

Starting point is 00:13:06 there are 2.75x more Americans that attended an NFL, this is 2.75x more Americans than attended an NFL game seat. So bigger than the NFL tribe too, bringing than the football tribe. And this is 2x more than American families who hold stock. That's unbelievable. That can't be right. Who directly holds stock.

Starting point is 00:13:27 Is that an important? Yeah, maybe who directly holds stock, so not through mutual funds. Okay. Who, I don't even know how you directly stock. And this is more Americans than use Uber every month or ride-jury apps. Oh, crypto is more popular than Uber. That's kind of cool. That's what Coinbase says.

Starting point is 00:13:43 Okay, here's a question to you. How many, at least, this is on Ethereum specifically, how many addresses hold USDC? How many Ethereum addresses own USC? Yeah. I'm going to call $1.2 million. Wow, pretty good, 1.7. Wow.

Starting point is 00:14:00 It's not exactly relevant to what we were talking about, but I think it's a nice metric to talk about. Well, do you want to know what the spread is? in terms of demographics here. So I said 1 in 5 adults own crypto and 75% of them have an income less than 100K. So this skews under, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:15 six-figure salary. 60% are Gen Z or millennials, which probably not surprising, but also like 40% are boomers in Gen X. 41% are racial minorities. And 63% of crypto owners agree that the system unfairly favors powerful interests. I'm not surprised about that.

Starting point is 00:14:37 I feel like that should be higher. So Coinbase is basically channeling this into like political motivation. It's basically saying, hey, we have a cohort. Go out, vote, download the app, look at your candidates, and, you know, get out there. And this is a message as much to crypto users as politicians. Like, we're a powerful cohort and force if we choose to use it. The one thing I would say is I wonder how many of those 52 million Americans feel kind of down bad about crypto. Moving on.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Next. How many of them are like, I own crypto and I'm proud of it and I can't wait to tell you about it. No, they're probably ashamed. I own crypto and I'm a bag holder. They're probably like, yeah, mistakes were made. At least 20%, at least 50%. Can we move on to some happier news? I got some happier news.

Starting point is 00:15:24 We have an anniversary to celebrate. Ethereum's first merge anniversary. So the first anniversary of full proof of, well, not proof of stake, proof of steak, Ethereum. Happened on Friday, September 15th. So here's some numbers. Since the merge, almost a million ether, 980,000 ether burned, 11.6 million ether staked and 362,000, 100,000 validators. So pretty cool. Yeah, congrats to the Ethereum for having your first merge anniversary. You know what is the, this is the third anniversary of September, September, 2020. Right? What? Bankless LLC.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Oh, wow. When we. started, we were like, oh, we got a podcast. Podcasts. We're going, well, let's put a ring on it. Yeah. Yeah, let's register in the state of whatever, Virginia, Delaware, something like that. Yeah, something's stupid nation state. Make this real.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Yeah. I always forget about that. Yeah, well, happy anniversary too then. Likewise. Bankless. Likewise. But let's not overshadow the merge, okay? The merge is a little bit more important.

Starting point is 00:16:24 But, okay, I got a flip. Maybe some bad news. It depends on how you interpret this. Bye-bye ultrasound money, David. It's gone. Ultrasound money. forever. Yes, forever. This was Ethereum's first inflationary month. I think we're talking about in a long time, in a long time. The month of September or the last 30 days or something.

Starting point is 00:16:41 So some history from October 22 until now, there's only been one month in loss. There's only been one month where ether the asset was not ultrasound money. Overall, there's been a gain of 414 million in uh 2023 but in september 2023 Ethereum block spaces only had one single profitable day so in September so far there's 15.9 million in losses. David does that kill ultrasound money mean are we gone it's totally dead what are the reasons for this uh it's the bear market it's just like on-chain activity super low no one's minting new nfts no one's doing any sort of DGEN stuff and simultaneously, layer two activity is up only.

Starting point is 00:17:27 So I think the layer two stats, the activity on all layer twos are 6x versus the Ethereum layer one. So like this is what is expected from the layer two roll up centric roadmap thesis. We take Ethereum's economic activity and we move it onto the layer two's. So I don't think there's any coincidence in looking at the aggregate Ethereum layer two economic activity

Starting point is 00:17:47 and the reduction of gas of ether being burnt on the layer one. This is what you would expect. Yeah, layer two's are very healthy. This is the highest we've seen at the scaling factor 6.21 this week. David, we have a question later in the episode at the end of the episode about whether this is actually bullish or bearish for ether. Ether. So we'll talk about that. What else we got coming up?

Starting point is 00:18:08 Coming up next, we have a very important part of the answer to that question, Ryan. It's always going to be inside of the world of roll-ups. Layer two summer is getting hotter and hotter. Three new roll-up ecosystems have joined Ethereum just this last week. This isn't just another OP stack. It's not just another arbitrar. or ZK Sync. These are brand new ecosystems

Starting point is 00:18:26 coming into the Ethereum layer two roll up full. So we're going to talk about all of these. We're also getting our first privacy-enabled layer two, so one that's already in the Ethereum ecosystem, but this one private. Tons of things to talk about. And Milakunis and Ashton Kutcher,

Starting point is 00:18:40 everyone's favorite NFT celebrities in the hot seat from Gary Gensler. There's just a lot, so much more to talk about even beyond that. All of that is coming up and more. But first, I'm going to talk about these fantastic sponsors, especially Cracken,

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Starting point is 00:19:57 The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 Gaming, and Buy Bit for TVL, liquidity, and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow led layer two ecosystem,

Starting point is 00:20:26 check out Mantle at mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. We've got a narrative watch this week. Are all the chains moving to Ethereum? Are all the chains becoming layer twos? That's a question we're posing this week. There's been some maybe evidence of movement this week, or at least support for the layer two ecosystem. I think we've got three examples here. What are we talking about? Astor Network from Pocod, Kanto from Cosmos, and Eclipse, not

Starting point is 00:20:52 necessarily from Solana, but using Solana technology. These are all brand new ecosystems coming to launch different layer twos powered by different technologies all on Ethereum. So Aster Network from Pocateodot will launch a ZK EVM layer two powered by Polygons technology. And so a quote out of Sandeep here, Astor is the leading blockchain of Japan, he says, which is probably why I'm not familiar with it. After launch, it quickly became the most notable parochain in the Pocodot ecosystem, focusing on owning the Japan market. Japan, Japan with a large entertainment and gaming ecosystem has the potential to become one of the biggest hubs of Web3 in the world, especially with the most crypto-friendly regulatory environment. So with the Polygon CDK, the chain development kit, this is the OP stack of Polygon.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Aster will be able to build a ZK-powered layer two with a trustless bridge straight to Ethereum. This is the Polygon subnet, the Polygon SDKK. So this is Polygon taking a win from Pokedot. So that's the first one. You ready to move on in the second one? Yes. Yes. But before we do that, so they're taking a win from Pocodai, I would say, in a way, but also not. So I was corrected by the Pocodot community.

Starting point is 00:21:59 Aster is not totally migrating Pocodot. So they're going to actually maintain their Aster parochain on Pocod. And this is like an expansion move. Yeah, I guess two chains. I don't know. I don't, that, that doesn't under, that doesn't fit in my understanding of how it works. And, you know, I don't know how this will change long term, right? whether, you know, they're going to have to pick one chain or the other.

Starting point is 00:22:23 But, yeah, that's what the founders reached out and said to me after I tweeted something super salacious. We'd talk about that tweet later. Anyway, that's my caveat. Okay, but one, Pocod and Ethereum are both trying to be settlement layers. One activity from this chain, it has to pick one. Like, one chain, you can only be enshrined to one chain. One chain to rule them all? Yes.

Starting point is 00:22:46 You can't, you can't be Polly. There are no poly chains. This is Polygon, though. They tell me I can't be Poly. Polygon settles to Ethereum. Okay. I will have to go get my... I will have to go get my learn on,

Starting point is 00:23:02 and we will talk about this next week. Cool. What's the next one, though? You know that one a bit better. Canto, yes. Canto, it was previously a Cosmos chain. It was Scott Lewis's project. It's the, what is it?

Starting point is 00:23:13 The contract secured revenue model as a layer one. Now moving to a ZK, layer two, poly powered by also Polygon's chain development kit. So Polygon taking some dubs this week. So Canto from a layer one to a layer two. My understanding, by the way, in the size of this, Aster is about 500 million total locked value. Not necessarily that's all migrating, but that's a lot. Kanto is about 40 million in terms of market cap. It was way up there. And then it's right. It had like a moment. And then it died back down. So additionally with this pivot into a layer two on Ethereum, they are also pivoting into the

Starting point is 00:23:49 world of real world assets. I know. Scott Lewis is very bullish on real-world assets. And where are they pivoting from, David? It's not-it-it's not-Pocados. It was a cosmos chain, wasn't it? Yep. Yeah. Cosmos chain. Cosmos chain.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Okay, ready for the third? Yeah. Eclipse. We did a show on Eclipse with the founder Neal this week. And so this is the Solana virtual machine inside of an Ethereum layer two. But not just Solana technology here. We are using Celestia for data availability and then risk zero for fraud-proof.

Starting point is 00:24:20 So we have Ethereum for settlement, ether for gas and payment tokens, the Solana Virtual Machine, Celestia for data availability, and Risk Zero for Fraud Proofs. What the hell is that? It's a platypus chain. You had a meme about that. I don't know if it made the agenda, David, but about it. Yeah, it's in there. It's further down. Oh, no, I don't see any agenda.

Starting point is 00:24:43 We'll get it. Sorry. It's on my Twitter. It was a good meme. It's the family guy. What the hell is this meme with four different animals, all kind of like. like slapped it together. Okay, so why Solana VM, why the Solana virtual machine?

Starting point is 00:24:57 Yeah. Like, I don't even think Ethereum people will argue that it is just a great piece of technology. The EVM is custom built to do certain things. It's meant for security. It's not meant for execution. It's also made in the year 2015. It's got improvements, but it's just not built from the ground up.

Starting point is 00:25:11 It's single threaded rather than multi-threaded. Right. So multi-threaded parallelization is what the SVMs got. It's also got localized fee markets to help with hot, spots is what they call them, where people are just using the same state and that needs to be jacked up in fees, but nothing else does. So now the Solana virtual machine, that piece of technology, is now a roll up on Ethereum, a layer two on Ethereum. Celessia for data availability, just because it's got more bandwidth than Ethereum, and then risk zero for fraud proofs, of course.

Starting point is 00:25:41 So I thought the episode that we did with Neil was extremely informative. I think this is a very strong validation of bankless theses where I remember an old 2019 tweet 2019 tweet of mine was just all about how like Ethereum is gobbling up all useful bits of technology and this is one of the main

Starting point is 00:26:01 reasons why I've never been able to fully understand the investment thesis behind Seoul because Seoul and the SVM are different pieces of technology and now the SVM is settling on Ethereum. So if Solana is as good as it purports to be as an execution layer

Starting point is 00:26:16 well, that can be settled on Ethereum. And so now it's Eclipse versus Solana in my perspective. Yeah, there's a full episode on that. And by the way, I'm clicking through it right now. Is this what I look like the whole freaking time when we interviewed people? This is why I tell you to sit up every single time we start recording. Well, I'm Mr. Slavichie.

Starting point is 00:26:35 So first of all, I'm super low. I'm super Slavichie. But look at that face. And your camera sucks. It's just like boring into the guests. Like, that's not hospitality at all. That's just a particular one particular. frame.

Starting point is 00:26:47 Really? Let's go to something. If you, if you updated the camera that I gave you, the camera makes you smile more. Oh, really? Yeah. All right. I'll get to that, David. I'll get right on that.

Starting point is 00:26:56 It's only been forward. Bankless station. I shipped Ryan a camera almost a month ago. And all he has to do is take the old camera off and put the new camera on and plug in the each and he hasn't done it yet. It will get done. Next roll up. Maybe I make a promise, a public commitment to the bankless community.

Starting point is 00:27:13 Next roll up, I will have a newly improved camera. You can hold me accountable on that. You wouldn't fail the Bankless Nation, would you? I would never do that. Bankless has never disappointed the band. Everyone talks about how good your skin care is, Ryan. And so I think people are like, they would love to attempt to see the pores.

Starting point is 00:27:30 You know, maybe we can get even closer. We'll zoom in. We'll zoom in. This is my comment from it. Yeah. That was a weird segue. Whatever. Weird segment.

Starting point is 00:27:38 Hope you guys enjoy the roll up. This is my comment on it. The largest chain from Pocod just moved to Ethereum. That's Aster. The largest public common chain. from Cosmos just became a polygon Validium. Validium.

Starting point is 00:27:50 It's Canto. And I hear the world's first slana virtual machine SVM layer two is dropping. Ethereum roll-ups are eating the world. That's my kind of ETH-s sort of centric type take, I guess.

Starting point is 00:28:02 I'll amend this a little bit because Aster didn't move to Ethereum. They just opened up a new residence, I guess. I disagree with that, but I need to learn more. Canto definitely moved. Canto is now an Ethereum. Kanto is now an Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:28:14 And there's some debate. I mean, there's some debate in the community as to whether the Solana virtual machine deploying as a layer two is actually bullish for Solana or bearish for Solana. I mean, there's a question of relative to Ethereum, and there's also a question of relative to other layer ones. And of course, like you and I have our take on that. But before we get to kind of like our take on that, we should hear out some members of the Salana community. What's their take on that, David? Yeah, so this is Mert, who, who does a Solana podcast, also the founder of Helium on Solana.

Starting point is 00:28:50 He says, seeing some awful takes about Eclipse, an SVM-based ETH layer two and how it is, quote, bad for Solana. Please don't fall for such non-serious comments. This is extremely bullish for Solana. This is open-source software. It's as if as great as we say, it's as if as great as we say, it'll be much more concerning if it weren't being adopted. So he's saying, like, this Salana, the SVM is so great.

Starting point is 00:29:12 It would be weird if it wasn't adopted. And it is being adopted. so that's validation about how great Salana tech is. Salana's bottleneck has never been tech. It's been mind share. And now with Maker forking Solana, and Eclipse an ejective adding SVM roll-ups, you can see Solana is gaining mind-share.

Starting point is 00:29:28 Not only does this open the door for more developers, it also de-viscs those wanting to build on Salana because now they can deploy in multiple environments versus just the Solana layer one. Layer twos are inevitable. Ethereum isn't going to just stop working on them because you disagree with their roadmap. So he's talking to the Salon and people here,

Starting point is 00:29:44 kind of in the same way we talked. Yeah, but he's basically saying the point is that any propagation of the SVM is good for Solana because it gets the SVM into more developers' hands, more ecosystems, and then they kind of come back to Salana.

Starting point is 00:29:57 So that's certainly a take. Here's another take. Who's this, Frankie? I don't know this Twitter account, but they write very well in the short of the tweet that this is and I love history. And so I think this is,

Starting point is 00:30:08 I agree with this sake. This is my perspective as well. He starts the tweet titling SVM rollups and the Elgin Marbles. Elgin Marbles. In the early 19th century, the Earl of Elgin removed a collection

Starting point is 00:30:21 of Greek sculptures from the Parthian and placed them in the British Museum. At the time, some Greeks justified the removal saying that the placement of the marbles is in such a prestigious museum validated their artistic value. And indeed, to this day, the Elgin Marbles are displayed in Britain,

Starting point is 00:30:38 a testament to Greek culture and artistry. Yet, every time a museum ticket is sold, profit flows back to Britain, not to Greece. And 200 years later, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in Greece who thinks that this was a good trade. This is my perspective. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:30:54 For people who aren't into like the metaphors and historical significance of this, please link this. Yes. So like I said, I would say even everyone and all the developers in Ethereum, the debate between Ethereum and Solana is not about the EVM versus the SVM. I think everyone in Ethereum will say,

Starting point is 00:31:12 guess for execution purposes, the SVM is a marvelous piece of technology. The debate relies on the properties of Solana as a settlement layer versus Ethereum as a settlement layer. So Solana and all of his hard work has created the SVM. A lot of technical expertise has gone into the SVM. Now Eclipse is taking that technology because it's open source and free to fork and saying, hey, since this is so good at execution, we're going to use this as a layer two on Ethereum. And we're going to tap into Ethereum's network effects. Ethereum's assets. that's ether as money. The liquidity...

Starting point is 00:31:44 I think we forgot to mention that, by the way. Eclipse is using ether as money. Yes. Yeah, I did. I did mention that. Okay, cool. So, yeah, the native currency of Eclipse is ether. And so, you know, it gets to tap into the liquidity of univswap.

Starting point is 00:31:57 Any of the other activities that are now adjacent to all the layer twos. And so it's making a bet of taking Solana technology, but saying it's going to be able to be better expressed connected to Ethereum. And when we talk to Neil, his philosophy, on eclipse is similar to the philosophy of Solana, which is one single shared state is very valuable, one single composable layer. So eclipse wants to absorb a ton of economic activity and put it all in the same spot. So is it, is eclipse going to compete with other Ethereum rollups? Certainly. Optimism competes with Arbitrum. Arbitrum competes with Polygon. And now all of these things will

Starting point is 00:32:33 have to compete with eclipse. But there is a, in the terms of like flow and diffusion and osmosis of economic activity, the difference being like, how much SVM-based activity is there on Ethereum versus Solana? Well, it's all on Solana and none on Ethereum, but now there is a place to express Solana activity on Ethereum, which is the new SVM-based roll-up. And so I think it's really Eclipse versus Solana. And this is what the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap thesis has always said. Like, Solana competes with layer twos because it competes on execution. This is so much of the thesis that we've had about the Ethereum roll-up centric roadmap playing out to a T. Whatever technologies that's out there, that's useful.

Starting point is 00:33:14 If it is useful, you can just plug it in as a roll-up to Ethereum. Yeah. And I guess hence the yet every time a museum ticket is sold, profit flows back to Britain, not Greece, right? That's how that relates is basically it's flowing back to Ethereum, not Salana. I think what's interesting here is you could say in a world that it's sort of bullish for both. But it is, it is bullish for both. The pie is growing here.

Starting point is 00:33:36 The real question is who is taking a larger slice of the pie? I think that's true. And also, so I'll say my take is it's bullish for both Solana in a way, maybe, but it's more bullish for Ethereum than Solana, but it's more bullish for Solana versus some other competing virtual machine type of technology, right? It's bullish Salana versus the long tail of other layer ones. Yeah. So it's kind of complicated.

Starting point is 00:34:03 And I think people, you know, people would say we see. this. Like every tribe sort of sees what they want to in this story. And, you know, people say that, you know, yeah, you guys like Ethereum so much. And so that's obviously why you think this is bullish for Ether. But I would just say, I think if you believe in the thesis of moneyness on, like, that's the big departure. The big difference, I think, between the Salana community or other communities and kind of the, you know, the tactic that we've taken on bankless is we believe very much that all layer ones are competing as monies, as monetary assets, a store value assets. Whether they like it or not. Whether they like it or not. And so we see ether being used as money and to pay for, you know, block space, fraud proofs for this new eclipse SVM chain.

Starting point is 00:34:51 And we're like, oh, bullish eth relative to everything else. Because actually, I think all the rest of it is kind of a commodity. The technology is open source. And we can use it. It's sort of like for me, I saw this at play with Cosmos. in the beginning, like, Tenderman is used freaking everywhere. It's all over the place. It's an open source piece of technology. How much of that value accrued to Adam? I would say effectively zero. There's not very much, right? A little bit did, but not like a moniness type of quality,

Starting point is 00:35:21 not massive appreciation, not, you know, many hundreds of billions of dollars and into the trillions of value. So it's just a different way of, you know, the thesis playing out. Anyway, we've talked about this a lot. I would also, I think if we're going to talk about who's like taking wins and who's taking L's right now, Celessia is taking a win here.

Starting point is 00:35:41 Yeah. And so if ether gets more moniness, and this is a roll up centric roadmap, a theory thesis, is that actually ether flows and why there's less burn going on this week is because activities going to layer two's post 4844, layer twos have to burn much less ether than previous, because that is the benefit of call data moving into blob space. So all layer two are going to be burning less ether. And why is this bullet for ether? Well, you're enabling more networks that all use ether as money.

Starting point is 00:36:13 This is already true in Eclipse, which is already using Celessia for data availability. And so Celestia is taking some of the fees of this, of the eclipse layer two that would have otherwise burnt ether, otherwise gone to the Ethereum layer one. And so Celestia is taking a little. a win here. Ether is taking a win here because it becomes the money of the eclipse. And I think Salonid is far is behind these three in terms of like the value. One thing I'll say is some people say this is all, you know, pedantic and like who cares?

Starting point is 00:36:44 Layer one, layer two, like who cares? Just build some apps, guys. Like we don't have any apps that the world can use. So these are all stupid academic kind of conversations. Yeah. The only reason that I do think this is important is because one thing we're trying to do is actually understand how these assets should be valued. and like we're trying to create an investment thesis, right?

Starting point is 00:37:03 We're trying to understand, well, is this asset more than, like, going to be worth more than this asset? And if so, what are the drivers for that? So to me, it's just like a capital allocation type of decision. It's an investment type decision. That's why it's worth discussing. But I agree, largely, that the point is moot. If we don't have apps that will consume this block space, then who cares?

Starting point is 00:37:23 I'm just, I see that as an inevitability. And then you have to track through, okay, where is value, actually going to accrue in this stack. And that's why it's important worth talking about. Yeah. And I think to tie a bow on this, Risk Zero is the big non-capture of value here. It's even behind Solana, I would say.

Starting point is 00:37:41 Sorry, Risk Zero. Well, I think they got something there, though. They got something. Yeah. I mean, the Phantom, for example, didn't get anything here. At least the Risk Zero was in the... Phantom. The Site-in?

Starting point is 00:37:54 Yeah, the layer one that's not even relevant to this conversation. All right. I forgot that existed. All right. David, Gary G. versus the cats. What's going on here?

Starting point is 00:38:04 SEC is charging the stoner cat's, the stoner cat's NFT project. This is the project that, remember that video that Milakunis and Asson Coutcher made where Asciccher was like married to Milakunis. He goes, hey, babe. Do we play it? Why don't we just play it?

Starting point is 00:38:21 Hey, babe. Yeah. What's crypto? It's digital currency. see. Hey, Hey, babe. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:34 What's blockchain? It's like what information is stored on. So like, it's, you know, what information is stored on? Hey, babe. Yeah. What's decentralization? Oh, there's not one person in charge of anything. So it's everybody keeps everybody else in check.

Starting point is 00:38:58 I mean, it's not bad. So far so good. So far so good. You're doing great. Everybody to the same code. It's the people holding each other responsible. Hey, babe. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:09 What's Ethereum? So Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. So unlike other watching, it, Bitcoin, for example, but they're just a... Okay, so for Biggos listeners who are not watching, Vitalik is actually in the living room, hanging out with Mia Lakunas and Ashton Kutcher. Is that like promotion, though, for Stoner Counts? Is that why it came out in the summertime? I don't know how this came to be together. I remember after Stoner Cats. came out, I was like, hey, Vitala, can you intro us to Ashton and Mila so we can get them on the show? We never had that show happen, but he did say, like, positive words about, like, Mila and Ashen

Starting point is 00:39:47 and what they're doing. This is Stoner Cats, by the way, is what they look like, just little cute cartoon cats. Oh, yeah, I forgot about the story that we're even talking about. Okay, so Gary Gensler is coming after the Cats. And so he's charged them with offering unregistered security. Surprise, surprise. It's Gary Gensler's favorite move. And so, like, looking at the PFP offerings as akin to 2017 ICOs, same marketing mistakes. One aspect of this is that the fact that the NFTs were not CCO was relevant to the security status analysis.

Starting point is 00:40:20 Not really. The marketing and manner of the sale was similar to vintage ICOs, as they say. Another relevant is that the issuer received a 2.5% royalty on secondary sales. And also the issuer advertised the team's credentials and expertise when marketing the NFTs and indicated potential increase in value. So more or less, kind of all of the reasons about why NFTs we consider to be good and powerful for the margins and for the everyday man is why these are being deemed by and security by Mr. Dendler. So what was the punishment? A cease and desist order, a civil penalty of a million dollars. And like, I guess you can't, can no longer do the

Starting point is 00:40:59 stoner cats if you are the issuer, the creator of the stoner cats. So what are the implications of this, David. Lupify put out a good tweet about this. They're saying, well, StonerCast have to return the $8 million raise. That's a new precedent. I haven't heard that before. Maybe that's normal.

Starting point is 00:41:13 And pay their $1 million fine. They also follow up and says, I think the NFT space is missing something really scary happening right now, saying that I don't see how 99% of projects aren't in trouble. So this is kind of the danger of this. Yes.

Starting point is 00:41:26 Why is Gary Gensler going after this project? It's because of Mila and Ashton. We know Gary Gensler is an influencer. We know that it is his game. that is why Stoner Cats are going after being targeted here. Yet the foundations that support Stoner Cats are the same foundation that supports your desirable NFT that you probably own bankless listener. Well, right.

Starting point is 00:41:48 So if Stoner Cats is a security, then all NFTs are security? Right. Any NFT with a roadmap is a security. So if there is resale royalty value that goes to the team and also if the team is saying, hey, we have a roadmap with plans to increase value to these NFTs, that's a security. So there's a quote from the director of the SEC's division of enforcement. Regardless of whether you're offering involves beavers, chinchillas, or animal-based NFTs, under federal securities laws is the economic reality of the offering,

Starting point is 00:42:19 not the labels you put on it or the underlying objects that guides the determination of what's an investment contract and therefore a security, which I agree with, by the way. Remember my whole hot take about like board apes or security? that's what I'm talking that's this like resale royalty team that do's does promotion but we all know that what is the fifth prong of the how we test what does the SEC want to regulate it yeah but I don't agree I don't agree with that like so I I don't understand what makes this an NFT and why that why doesn't this director of enforcement show up to like my kids school at recess and go you know grab their magic the gathering cards and Pokemon cards as unregistered securities I mean NFT is quite clearly

Starting point is 00:43:01 a collectible. Yeah, I don't understand how, yeah, like, what's the framework for this? This is, it is the fifth prong of the how we test. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. All of a sudden, the SEC has determined that there is enough desire for them to regulate NFTs and they're using cool cats, or not cool cats, stoner cats to do it. It's just so frustrating, man. It's easier to make the argument against NFTs than it is magic the gathering cards because, like, upside and liquidity and royalties are just baked into the smart contract. So they're just hyper-efficient. You know, magic the gathering cards and digital magic the gathering cards.

Starting point is 00:43:39 Like, what's the difference in an open defy account? The difference is- Magic the gathering cards are just so many more steps removed from the financialization of crypto. I would love to see that tested in court. And hopefully with Stoner Cats or some NFT project, it gets to be tested in court because to me, there is no distinction between like physical collectibles like this and what we're talking about on the NFT side.

Starting point is 00:43:59 A collectible is a collectible. And does Gary Gensler want to regulate all collectibles? Yes. Probably. That's the problem. That's the problem. That's what we're talking about. So Hester Perse, once again, dissented, chief dissenting officer, along with another

Starting point is 00:44:12 commissioner, Yeleda, UY, D-E-A, apologies for not being able to pronounce the name. They released a joint statement saying they disagree with the SEC's actions against stoner cats, comparing these NFTs to 1970s Star Wars collectibles, which is exactly your point, Ryan, stating that we need to protect artists' abilities to create without excessive legal constraints. There's some also just sort of really great quotes in here. They say that it carries implications for creators of all kinds, rather than arbitrarily bringing enforcement actions against NFT projects, we ought to lay out some clear guidelines for artists and other creators

Starting point is 00:44:47 who want to experiment with NFTs in a way to support their creative efforts and build their fan communities. Artists of all kinds have long struggled to support themselves, and NFTs offer a potentially viable way for them to monetize their talents. Yes, this is why NFTs are good. The fact that money is involved does not transform NFTs into securities. Basically saying, like Hester Pers is saying, you are killing creative endeavors, Gary Gensler,

Starting point is 00:45:12 by trying to regulate all of these things. Like, don't regulate artists, regulate Wall Street. And I think that sentence at the end is important. The fact that money is involved does not transform NFTs into security. So what you just said previously, because it's liquid, because it can go up in price because it's digital because it's defy does not make it a security has nothing to do with it collectibles also fit that criteria anyway uh i don't know where we're going in the u.s with all this stuff david it's just man they keep attacking every like gensler's got to go

Starting point is 00:45:43 that's the bottom line is that ginsler's got to go in order for crypto to like continue to have a you know a strong future in the u.s it'll have a strong future everywhere else somewhere somewhere Yeah. It is just a shame that NFTs in the power of NFTs, like I see goodness in NFTs. I'm a relentless optimist. I see the power. Like remember the story I was telling you of the NFT that I bought and the creator, the cast simmered photographer? Like that is a story of an NFT.

Starting point is 00:46:12 It's not a security. And if you deem it as security, it's just fundamentally bad for the universe. Sadly, those stories are few and far between an NFT land these days. There are more stories about like rug pulls and stuff like that. So that makes that just a more bigger uphill battle. Well, speaking of uphill battles, last thing on the SEC this week. And wait, I want to move on. The SEC's crypto enforcement chief, the same guy I think we're quoting.

Starting point is 00:46:35 He warns more charges are coming to exchanges in defy. Great. Yeah, I can't wait for that. That's just a not so veiled threat. They're coming for you. Yeah. Absolutely ridiculous. Okay, ready to move on.

Starting point is 00:46:50 Coming up next, new optimism, AirDrop. Yes, for real. AirDrop number three, you should go get it. Actually, you already got it. It's already in your wallet if you qualified for it. So we're talking about that. Infura, decentralizing, a very hard thing to decentralize going down the progressive decentralization route. And then there's a moral dilemma.

Starting point is 00:47:08 Coinbase earned 570th of MEV as a result of the curve hack. Then that happened not too long ago. Should Coinbase give it back? What are the illegal implications of this? And of course, Mark Cuban's wallet exploited for almost a million dollars, PR and crypto at the absolute floor, but we're going to talk about all of that stuff and more. But first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Metamask portfolio. If you've not opened up your Metamask portfolio at all, it is a sexy piece of software. Go

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Starting point is 00:49:13 Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. AirDrop coming in, Optimism AirDrop number three. 19 million OP tokens allocated to 31,000 unique addresses. That's almost $30 million given out, meant to reward positive sum governance participation in the collective. Directly distributed to addresses. There is no claiming going on.

Starting point is 00:49:33 If you qualified for the air drop, you got the air drop. If any website or Twitter or whatever says go claim your optimism air drop, that is a scam. Don't do it. People got allocated these OP tokens. If they're their current holdings of OP,

Starting point is 00:49:48 were allocated, delegated to a governor, and they got a bonus if that governor was active, really doubling down on OP governance. So that's the Optimism AirDrop. Also, optimism of retroactive public goods grant funding round three is also live right now, so you can submit your project to receive retroactive public goods funding from optimism as well. That is optimism. Ryan, you want to take next? Yeah, they're sprinkling that air drop to a lot of people over time, I guess, with these OP grants. The next is about the poll. token. So the pole token is coming. Do you know Maddick, the token, is becoming pole in the future? So there's a Polygon 2.0 implementation that is happening in Q4, the beginning of Q4, it looks

Starting point is 00:50:31 like. And one of the main implementations here is Maddoch is going to become pole. There's some new token economics behind this. So there's going to be a yearly emission added to the Maddo, a.k.k. Issuant schedule. It was a fixed $10 billion in total supply, and the yearly emission is going to increase to 2%. And that will be equally distributed between the validator community

Starting point is 00:50:57 and a community treasury to fund Maddick Polygon moving forward. I guess we'll call it Polygon moving forward. There's also a native Madic bridge. In addition to the upgrade to the token, we're also getting an upgrade to the bridge. Of course, Polygon Proof-Stake has always been a side chain. it is now becoming a roll-up,

Starting point is 00:51:16 and so that means we need to build a bridge. So there is a new canonical bridge for Polygon being built. And these are basically the main two upgrades to Polygon. I guess we're on the layer two track right now. So Arbitrum, what are they doing? They've got some quests.

Starting point is 00:51:32 They've got an Odyssey going on. What's this? Yeah, the Arbitrome Odyssey was a thing that they were doing pre-airdrop, and everyone thought that this is the surface area for qualifying for the air drop. They weren't wrong. Actually, it kind of was.

Starting point is 00:51:42 And then they stopped the audits. Arbitrum Odyssey because it was so popular that it crashed the network. And then they had to install Nitro and that was the upgrade. And then they are dropped the token anyways. And now Arbitrum Odyssey returns. So seven weeks of an on-chain excursion, completing missions, exploring some communities. Oh, there's some music that I wasn't expecting from Ryan. Wow. The purpose of the Odyssey is to explore Arbitrum One's diverse set of applications and introduce you to the protocols that you might not have used yet. I don't know what the incentive is now that the token is already out there. But hey, I mean, crypto pays you to learn it.

Starting point is 00:52:15 It's probably going to be beneficial some way. And then also the last bit of Arbitrum news, Conduit, which is a roll-up as a service provider. Previously, just focused in the optimism ecosystem is now being supported by Arbitrum. So it's great that we have the OP stack, but just launching an OP stack chain takes infrastructure. This is what conduit provides to the OP stack world.

Starting point is 00:52:37 Public Goods Network, Zora, these all launched with Conduit. Now Arbitrum Orbits is also part of the Conduit offering. And so Arbitrum is going to, it's just how it's easier to deploy Arbitrum chains. It's just like a cloud provider for, for Rollout Stacks. Yeah, that's right. Basically. This is just a part of a growing story as to like the growth of the optimism super chain, the growth of Arbitram orbits, but also the growth between these two things. As soon as you get conduit to do some shared sequencing, all of a sudden these things start to blur together. Is it kind of cool? Is it a shared sequenceer too? It can't It has the properties that are required to make shared sequence powerful.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Interesting. Yeah, we will do a show on this soon, TM. Let's talk about the Coinbase moral dilemma. So Coinbase apparently earned a 570th as a result of the curve hack. Do you remember when we were talking about the curve hack? Yep. Months back maybe. Well, Coinbase earned some MEV as a result of that.

Starting point is 00:53:37 And here's the headline. Coinbase received 570E, the second largest payout tied to MEPB in Ethereum's history to process transactions related to the curve exploit. Okay. So this is like perfectly legal. And the random lottery winners who got the big MEV block. Yeah. And it's legal in the sense of like it's not illegal in the kind of the nation state, but it's also in the code is law sense. I mean, they're just playing by the rules of the game. They got this 570-E allotment.

Starting point is 00:54:06 But it was like hacked money. It was like exploited money. Yeah. It's not the greatest reason why. Yeah. So what's going on with this story? What's the dilemma here? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:16 So there is a call for Coinbase to return the hacked money. This is Alchemics is a curve pool money. And so the Alchemics pool that got hacked, this MEV happened as a result of that. And so there's a call for Coinbase like, hey, give the money back. Like you guys got the money. Give it back. But did Coinbase give it to all of its stakers, basically? Was this part of the-

Starting point is 00:54:36 Yeah. So this is part of the legal dilemma? It's like, well, is it really CoinBases or is it part of CBE? The first question that came up in my mind is like, okay, if Coinbase, the validators for CBEath, Coinbase's liquid staking token, if they got it, well, that's actually belongs to the people who operate the LST, the Coinbase LST. And this article doesn't say that the validator is linked to Coinbase's LST program. I kind of would assume that it would, but it might just be an independent validator that happens to be Coinbase. Yeah, but does it belong to the CBEath holders? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:55:11 So it's a matter of who owns that, who operates that validator and why? Coinbase can operate validators outside of the CBEath program that's not connected to the program. And then there are the actual validators of the CBEF program. I'm just saying in any case, you know, couldn't you make, you could certainly make the legal argument that Coinbase should give it back. No, if it is the CBEath holders, it is, it belongs to the people that own CBEath. and Coinbase as a fiduciary. Why do you think that? Why do you think that? I don't know that that's, is it true? Is that true?

Starting point is 00:55:41 Yes. Yeah. Because the power, the might of Coinbase's validators is thanks to the people that have staked their ether with Coinbase. It belongs to the people that own CBEath, not Coinbase's validators. Coinbase can't just, of their own decision, take money. What I'm saying is why wouldn't the CBEath holders be like legally liable to give it back then, right? Or like Coinbase is kind of the intermediary. for the CBEath holders. Like I, well, there's so many of them.

Starting point is 00:56:09 This is very clear in Rocket Pool, I think, right? Which RPL got some of this MEV as well as part of that. And it's decentralized, so everyone gets it. There's no call to kind of like give it back. Right. But because Coinbase is a centralized entity, operating this validator service, they kind of can give it back, right?

Starting point is 00:56:25 That's not purely problematic. That's why this is a story is people can see the trail of money go to Coinbase and we're like, hey, we know Coinbase. Brian, hello, please give the money back. It's interesting. So what do they do? What do you think should be done here? Do you have a solution? A statement from Alchemics to CoinDesks says, Coinbase has shown no wailing list to return the funds,

Starting point is 00:56:42 despite knowingly benefited directly from the exploit. Coinbase representatives have sold that there's no legal requirement to reverse anyone. And also, it's like if they do reimburse the money, then it also is kind of a legal precedent of just like that we don't want to enforce. Granted, M.EV burn totally removes the power to give back money. We should do that. We should do M.E.E.B. Yeah. Let's just do that. Yeah. Just maximum credible neutrality.

Starting point is 00:57:09 Yeah. Well, then all ETH holders are equally culpable. Yes. Everyone is a part of the firing squad. Yeah. Dave, this is some cool news from Aztec. What's going on? Yeah, Aztec announces their sandbox, a local developer test net for smart contract privacy. The Aztec project and the fullness of it has been described as like one of the most ambitious cryptography projects of all time. They want to be a fully decentralized privacy preserving layer two. to go from just like not having a live in production environment to a full in production, fully private, fully decentralized shared sequencer layer two in one big go.

Starting point is 00:57:44 That's a thing we don't have yet. We don't have a private layer two. We don't have privacy on the base chain. This is a thing that we need. So this is the first step in getting a fully fledged, fully private, fully decentralized layer two. Again, very ambitious project making steps along the way. Is the government going to let them to be determined, right?

Starting point is 00:58:05 What happens here? Well, okay. So why is this not illegal and tornado cash is illegal? Well, because North Korea used tornado cash. Well, and more than that, I would say, because OFAC, you just said, you know, tornado cash is illegal, right? Well, yes. As a result of North Korea, yes.

Starting point is 00:58:24 They didn't have to do that, though, is all I'm saying. OFAC did not have to say that. That was an option to not do that. In Fuhrah, becoming more decentralized, that sounds like good news. What's going on here? Yeah, so Infura, they are the RPC endpoint service provider for your Metamask by default is one of the centralization vectors that I don't think is massive because it's easy to change your RPC, but yet nonetheless, it is a centralization vector.

Starting point is 00:58:47 They are entering their progressive decentralization era, if you will. And so they are looking to decentralize part of the Infura stack. So this is a consensus project. The idea I would assume at the end of this is now a Dow with different federated, modular parts of infura. so that in inferior a very important part of Ethereum is now decentralized. I think a regulatory may be driving some of this too. I don't know, but more centralized infrastructure providers are looking towards decentralization.

Starting point is 00:59:16 Speaking different types of centralization vectors, back on FDX. You want some FDX gossip this week, David? I would like nothing more. FDX is suing SBF's parents. I love that. I love that. That's great. They're all eating their own now.

Starting point is 00:59:29 So what's this lawsuit over? Did you see this? Yeah. So $26 million in gifts and property have gone to SBF's parents from FTX. They were in it, man. Oh, yeah. Just as dirty as SBF was. Oh, for sure.

Starting point is 00:59:45 Yeah. Like, where did we just? Sam goes to his parents like, mom, dad, I'm so successful. I'm going to give you $26 million in a house. Okay, so the suit is looking to claw back property in millions of dollars in, quote, fraudulent transferred and misappropriated funds from SBF's parents. Yeah, so also, since 2019, according to this article, Sam's father also directly participated in efforts to cover up a whistleblower complaint that threatened to expose the SBF, the FTX group as a house of cards. Yowser, so parents just as bad as Sam.

Starting point is 01:00:20 Stanford Ethics Professors, by the way. Oh, my God, dude. That's what they were. Takes one. No one. Are no longer. This is SBF's mom right here. Look at a lot like SBF to me.

Starting point is 01:00:31 Honestly, that's kind of the image that I had in my mind of SBS mom. Wow. Things could get more ugly in that Nick Carter calls them a crime family. Yeah, it's probably accurate. The crime family of SBF. David, this is sad. Mark Cuban's wallet got drained, it looks like, for almost a million dollars. What are we looking at here?

Starting point is 01:00:51 We are looking at Mark Cuban's wallet getting drained. That's what it is. On chain, you can see. Yeah, you can see the Oof happening live. Yeah. So the wallet was enacted for a high. 160 days and I think maybe Mark Cuban just decided to do some spring cleaning. But in that time, it looks like he downloaded a malicious form of Metamask. And as soon as he typed in his password,

Starting point is 01:01:12 then boom. That's bad. So this is what Cuban said, his direct quotes. I went on MetaMask for the first time in months. They must have been watching. I'm pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some shit in it. That's what he said. That's what he said. I'm sorry, Mark. I think that's what happened. Do you remember when Mark came on our show the last time, it's like a little over a year ago? He was extremely jaded by crypto. I do. And this is definitely not helped. Can we talk about that then?

Starting point is 01:01:39 Like, this is not only bad PR, it's really bad UX. Yes, it's bad UX. Yeah, getting hacked is bad UX. This is kind of the worst UX possible.

Starting point is 01:01:47 Imagine like you think you have fun somewhere and you're being your own bank and then you just get, your bank gets robbed. Yeah. Can you produce a safer vault than your home bank? Probably not.

Starting point is 01:02:00 And again, And like Mark Cuban wasn't a, he knew his way around crypto decently well. It wasn't like a super crypto. He was better than most for sure. Yes. I mean, he did stuff with his metamass wallet. He did defy stuff. He had funds on the Polygon layer two that he was actually able to save because the

Starting point is 01:02:19 metamask didn't point to Polygon. So he saved a few million dollars that was on Polygon. So what do we do about this, David? I was, uh, I saw this headline go out on Twitter while I was just hanging out with some friends in voice chat, non-crypto friends. And I just read it out. Like, ooh, Mark Cuban just got his crypto wallet drained. And they were all like, yeah, it's, duh.

Starting point is 01:02:37 Like, crypto's broken. You can't use it. I'm never touching it. And like, when that's the PR of crypto for the last like two years straight, like I had nothing to say. Yeah. I don't know. We've got to improve UX in this area.

Starting point is 01:02:50 It's fishers and hackers and scammers. It's true. It's true. And I mean, this can happen to people for sure. So I don't know what the solution is. the answer. Just like, yeah, don't touch, don't do anything with your crypto. Like, that's not the future that we envision. Smart contracts that, I don't know, validate, that check things. I don't know. If you bankless station. The answer is a kind of abstraction, but we've been saying

Starting point is 01:03:16 that for a while. If you guys have a solution for this or Nova project, I think it'd be really interesting to get them on the show at some point to talk about this in more depth. Wow. Call for startups. Yeah. Call for startups. We'll fund it. Bankless vendors. Back to good news, there's two new ether ETFs that are going through the gauntlet of the SEC. What do we got here? Hashdex mixed ether ETF. What's a mixed ether ETF? It's a mix between futures, cash

Starting point is 01:03:44 equivalents, etc. Just a hodgepodge of ether exposure. So that's where it files with the NASDAQ. And then Grayscale, of course, much more familiar. Ether futures ETF. So two new ether-related ETFs in the pipeline to get denied by the SEC. But eventually they will be approved. But eventually, we'll just dedeastern.

Starting point is 01:04:04 Do you spot Bitcoin ETF? I still think it's happening within the next six months. I was being facetious. There's a pretty good chance that they get approved. Yeah. Just not soon. Just not soon. Not soon.

Starting point is 01:04:14 David, what do we got coming up next? Coming up next, we got some questions for the nation. That question that we talked about earlier, what are the implications of five cent, sub five cent transaction fees on layer twos and on ether, layer one, all this stuff. What happens if blocks space gets so cheap? What happens to my eth bags?

Starting point is 01:04:29 That's a big question. We'll ask that. And then also there's another one. And then some hot takes from crypto Twitter. We got some good takes this week. And then, of course, what Ryan and David are excited about coming up. All of this and more as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Selo is the mobile first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world.

Starting point is 01:04:46 And now something big is happening. Introducing the Sello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sello's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Sello Layer 2 on the Selo Forum. so has Ben Jones from optimism. But why? The cello layer two will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer,

Starting point is 01:05:04 off-chain data availability, and one block finality. What does all that mean? Rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening.

Starting point is 01:05:16 Active addresses on Sello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Sello layer two, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens. But Sello is a community-governed protocol. This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard.

Starting point is 01:05:31 Join the conversation in the SELO Forum. Follow at SELOorg on Twitter and visit sello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. You know Uniswop. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap. But Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go.

Starting point is 01:05:57 With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card, with extremely low Fiat on-Ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswop mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defi with the Uniswop mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defi. Download the Unswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Question this week from ZeroX, Nader. What are the biggest implications for blockchain apps in a post-EIP 4844 world where transactions cost less than five cents?

Starting point is 01:06:40 What will become possible that wasn't before? Okay, this EIP number, an episode we did earlier this week on BlobSpace, this is the next Ethereum hard fork. It's probably coming in the next three months or so, plus or minus, you know, one or two months, something like that, and it's going to make layer two block space really, really cheap. According to the ETH researcher we had on the podcast, Domitie, he actually says, like, basically free, at least at first, effectively free, or really close to free and could be maybe subsidized by the layer two as well.

Starting point is 01:07:13 So the question is, what are the implications of this? What does that mean for apps? Are there new things that are possible? So it's not just about getting cheaper fees. there's a threshold that is crossed when you get cheap, if he's cheap enough. There's like a zero to one moment when we get real, real close to zero.

Starting point is 01:07:32 And that, remember the episode that we did with Antonio Garcia's from Spindle Project, who worked in the Web 2 ad space? His take that immediately just merged into my brain as knowledge about how this whole system works was that the ad model of Web 2 and Web 1 paid for the development and growth and adoption of the internet. internet because third party ads, third party service providers paid for the maintenance of websites, for the utility of websites. And they just paid for in aggregate eyeballs for people views to go to

Starting point is 01:08:07 websites. And that was just the big engine that powered the growth of the internet. What did it take to get there? We needed some certain level of bandwidth to get there. And then all of a sudden, once things were sufficiently cheap, third party ads subsidized development and growth and innovation and utility of the internet, which caused even more traffic, which produce the utility of the ads. That was how Web2 grew. Web2 was never going to grow if you needed to pay $5 a month for your Facebook. That was never going to work. Instead, we have the ad model, and that's why Facebook is valuable. So why Twitter is valuable. So why Web2 is the way that it is. Without ads, we wouldn't have YouTube. The point that you're making is there's some large third party, in this

Starting point is 01:08:46 case ads or like model that is funding all of the user activity. And that drops the user activity cost to like zero, basically. It costs, it drops the user activity cost to the user to zero. Using the internet costs someone money. It costs the operator of the website, the who's making the website in the first place. It costs them money to have users. Instead of users paying for it, ads paid for it. And that was just more efficient and it paid for the growth of the internet. Because we are the product. Because we are the product, yeah. But again, in the beginning of the that that was a good thing, not a bad thing. It's just now in this day and age, it's kind of turned into this maladaptive thing. Okay, move forward into Web3. When you get fees, like below five cents,

Starting point is 01:09:25 below one cent, you know, point one cent, all of a sudden new business models are unlocked by people paying for their users transactions, websites, like apps, anything. Like imagine if like, I don't know, your favorite app that you use all the time just paid for your transactions. That app would be more useful. And so we do not know what new use cases are unlocked when transactions are so cheap that third party businesses or third parties can subsidize users transactions when they're free. And so that is a, that is just like a massive playing field that we have not unlocked yet because we've been existing in the internet where users have to pay for everything. And we know from web one and two that that doesn't work. We all know that Facebook wouldn't have worked if you have to pay

Starting point is 01:10:09 for that service. And so now there's new use cases where third parties pay for you to use them. And all of a sudden, like, UX is better, economics are better. And this is just like the paradigm shift that happens. Yeah. It is hard to predict what those apps might be though, right? What the high band apps might be. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, we might look to you some apps that were tried at first that just fell on their face because transaction fees were so high and too expensive, right? And so that might be a class that we could look at. Here's a related question. I think that's important. Bear Burrito asks, if the base gas fee is, let's say, 20-Gway for us to be in the

Starting point is 01:10:47 ultrasound territory, what happens in the L2 world where transactions are occurring on layer two and gas fees on layer one continue to drop below the ultrasound 20-gway barrier? Does this reduce the impact of the burn? What is the value in ETH in a layer two world? I think that's the meta question here. So free transactions, practically free, less usage. of main net, we're not deflationary anymore. And by the way, for the last month, we haven't been deflationary.

Starting point is 01:11:14 We opened the show with that. What is the role for ETH? Does ETH price go down in this world? What is there still a value of cruel mechanic? Yeah, I still think in the fullness of time, ETH will, the layer one will be expensive. Like, it's currently not expensive because of the bare market. In the fullness of time, we're going back over 100-Guay gas prices. So you still predict deflationary, ETH basically.

Starting point is 01:11:34 Yes, yes. But overall, there is a large transfer of economic activity. from the layer one to the layer two's. And the layer two, the roll-up-centric roadmap, the reason why 4844 is a big deal, why we call and giving roll-ups first-class citizenship on Ethereum, why we are saying like, hey, Ethereum is super credibly neutral, but we're still going to prioritize layer roll-ups.

Starting point is 01:12:00 And what does that mean? We're not charging roll-ups for call data or data availability. So we're making that resource effectively free so that roll-ups can be. their maximumly independent own network and just do the minimum amount of payment to the layer one to exist. So roll-ups pay the minimum amount of value to the layer one in order to exist. So roll-ups burn the minimum amount of ether to access the security and decentralization of Ethereum. This is taking away from the burn of ether and it is giving it to the moneyness

Starting point is 01:12:36 of ether because these roll-ups are adopting ether as money. These are all satellite networks of the ether monetary system. And so the bulk case for ether goes, it's not the burn, because like I said, there will still be burned, but it's a transfer of ether will be bullish because of it being adopted as money and less of it getting burned. Just more people will have reservation demand of ether on these layer twos, then ether will be burned. So there's a tradeoff here, and one is creating the other. And the The tradeoff is saying that there will be so many layer twos that will all use Ether as money that that is going to be a bullish tradeoff. Yep, that's basically it.

Starting point is 01:13:16 So the two reasons, ETH is valuable is one because Ethereum sells block space and that that turns Ether into a productive asset. So it's a capital asset. There's some return on that asset. It's yielding positive cash flows. This is number one. And the second is because it's a monetary unit. It's a store of value.

Starting point is 01:13:35 it's a medium of exchange, it's a unit of account these things, it's collateral for a loan, it's economic bandwidth. And what you're saying is in the short run, maybe even the medium run, well, the block space demand goes down and kind of the productive asset, the capital asset, utility value of ether the asset might go down and ether might turn inflationary. That's more than compensated by ether's use as a monetary unit inside of these networks. And you just look at Eclipse, for example, they're launching with Ether as the money for block space, for their gas, and as the unit of exchange, the unit of account. And all of these layer two networks will require a very strong decentralized monetary unit in order to operate.

Starting point is 01:14:22 And the default is probably going to be ether. The default for their defy and their collateralized loans, their economic bandwidth, and all of these things is probably going to be ether. And that's the bet. And it's as simple as that. And so you could believe that happens or not. And that's your entire thesis for Ether the asset. It's actually kind of simple, I think. It's just...

Starting point is 01:14:42 It's very simple. Yeah, Ether is a monetary network, and it's the roll-up-centric roadmap that is carrying the money of Ether to the corners of Ethereum. And then I also will say, like, layer twos are going to trade with each other, and they're going to settle through the Ethereum layer one. So instead of, like, individual users going from, like, one, layer two through to the layer one to the second layer two, they're probably going to bridge. they're probably not going to touch the layer one,

Starting point is 01:15:03 but then like massive big shipping containers of value are going to flow from one layer two, settle down through Ethereum, use Uniswap, use Aveh, whatever, and then that new state will be uploaded by a different layer two. And that is the net economic activity that's going to stay at a basal level

Starting point is 01:15:20 on the Ethereum layer one where you're going to get ether burn. And it will be burnt. It will be deflationary, is my prediction. It'll just be not like maximally deflationary. Instead of trading maximum deflation, we're trading for maximum monetary network size. There you go. It takes the week. David, what's this one? This came out from Matt Huang of Paradigm. It came out last night, Wednesday night.

Starting point is 01:15:42 He calls this the casino on Mars. This is actually a full blog post, but he does a shorter condensed version along with a fun, cool little graphic. So I'll read out the blog post while Ryan puts the graphic on the screen. He says, it's useful to think of crypto as a new planet that's being settled. Skeptics see a desolate planet without purpose, or worse, a haven for an unsavory casino. Optimists see the planet's potential, a blank slate on which we can build an upgraded financial system and an internet platform. Early settlers are a mixed bunch, explores drawn to the frontier, speculators, some

Starting point is 01:16:14 rough and disreputable, innovators and researchers attracted to what's newly possible, and ordinary people, especially those marginalized on Earth. Governance remains ambiguous. Some earthly jurisdictions prohibit their citizens from visiting. Others seek a foothold in the new world. A history of speculation and hype cycles have cast a social taboo over the new planet, leaving many to wonder what is its future. Today's casino-like speculation is a part of the bootstrapping process,

Starting point is 01:16:42 much like the gold rush of the 1849 transformed San Francisco from a quaint village into a major port and ultimately the heart of tech innovation. Today's speculative frenzy in crypto is attracting the settlers and catalyzing the infrastructure necessary to turn a barren planet into a thriving crypto civilization. and probably the longest take we've ever read out here. But the accompanying visual, I thought, was also very cute and fun. You know what this looks like is, do you ever play like RTS games, like Starcraft or like Warcraft or, you know, Warcraft? There's the command and conquer reference in the bottom left corner of paradigm.

Starting point is 01:17:13 Oh, is it really? Yeah, yeah. That's what this looks like to me. So we're looking at a graphic and there's kind of a city in the middle and it's got Ethereum and this is it. Bitcoin is we're first to settle here. Exchanges like Coinbase and Binance get you on and off the planet. Ethereum is the largest city depicted here where Uniswap is the best way to get around. Very cool to see.

Starting point is 01:17:31 Uniswap is a monorail system in the Ethereum city. And there's some other like cameos. Yeah, there's the FTX exchange right next to the Coinbase exchange and Binance exchange, and the FTX exchange is just burning. Coinbase exchange has a rocket that is launching because of the base layer two. Then on the other side, there's the Cosmos ecosystem with all the independent satellite cities. And then there's Luna that's just on fire. And the nuances in this illustration, I thought was great.

Starting point is 01:17:59 The nuance. And also some of the paradigm bias, you see. I don't see any crack in right here. You know, that would be Fred Erism is like coin-based maxi, I'm sure, right? There's no arbitram. Yeah. So there are investors in optimism, but there's no arbitram. It's out of frame. It's probably in the full picture. It's just out of frame in this picture. David, here's a take from you. Let me start with Mike Epilito. It's a take within take. Cosmos for interoperability. Ethereum for security. Solana for Xxia. That's similar really to the episode we just did recently with him where he basically said that.

Starting point is 01:18:31 There are three different approaches trying to solve the same problem and coming from three different perspectives and angles. And your tweet on top of the tweet was, now, which one do you store your wealth on? Yeah. Which one do you store your wealth on? Interoperability, security or execution. Where do you store your wealth? Interoperability, security, or execution?

Starting point is 01:18:53 If you're just saying those words to me, I want security. because like money vaults security with like armed guards. And I don't want it to leave my wallet the way Mark Cubans, $1 million left is metamass wallet. It's a different type of security. But anyway, I want security. That's the thing I want. Right.

Starting point is 01:19:12 Money is secure. Money holds its value over time. Interoperability. You suffer from the MV equals PQ problem. Salana, what we saw the execution of Solana moving on to the security of Ethereum. Security is money. that's my take. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:27 It's the classic bankless money pieces take, okay? MV equals PQ, where'd you pull that one out? I haven't heard that since 2017, my friend. Yeah, right? Yeah, the velocity. Remember the velocity problem? It's old school Chris Berninski talk right here. Yeah, that velocity problem, that was the OG tokenomics.

Starting point is 01:19:45 Remember supply sinks? Yeah. Wow. We've come so far. Now it's very simple. Blockchain sell blocks, like money. All layer ones compete as money That's what you need to know.

Starting point is 01:19:56 David, what do you bullish on this week? I'm bullish on choosing your own character class. Bankless has its own illustration to bring to the table just like paradigms. Our paradigm has the cities in this new planet. We've got the character classes, the clerical archetypes. I put out an article this week in the Bankless newsletter. And this is a metaphor that we've used

Starting point is 01:20:14 since inception of Bankless, I would say. When you come into crypto, you choose your character class. Like, what do you want to do in crypto? Do you want to be a trader? Do you want to be a yield farmer? Do you want to be a token DGEN? You want to air drop some, a hunt some air drops?

Starting point is 01:20:27 You want to be a content creator, Twitter influencer. Or you can be like, Brian, just be the silent staker. You're also a content creator. So, like, I just made this fake universe, talked about the archetypes of each. It's like the sorting hat article.

Starting point is 01:20:40 This is, I think we're going to reference this article in the future. This is like the sorting hat. So when you're friends, inevitably get into crypto during the bull market of 2024 and 2025, this is, I think, a very useful piece for people to understand how crypto operates,

Starting point is 01:20:54 why crypto Twitter is weird, and it will help them just move through the crypto rabbit hole faster and quicker. I think we've made this point before, but the worst thing you can do is try to play all of these at the same time. Yes. Right.

Starting point is 01:21:06 You do not have to be good at all of these. I very quickly realized I was a bad TA trader when I tried in 2017, and I was like, oh, never again. Yeah. One other thing I'll say, shout out to Gordon from our team who put these graphics together.

Starting point is 01:21:21 Totally fantastic. And I guess if a paradigm is playing that like StarCraft, this is like a, you know, Diablo 2 or something or Diablo 3 type of reference, right? Because you really, it's a role-playing game. And it's really important for people to understand what they're, what game they're playing in crypto, right? You don't have to follow all of the token trends. You don't have to be degenerate NFTs.

Starting point is 01:21:46 You can just be that shout out, silent staker class. Okay? You could just like dollar cost average in to assets that you know like ether, like Bitcoin, every single week and stake it as well and play that game. Just know what game you're playing. Choose your character class. It's the most important thing you can do in crypto. That's a great content piece, David.

Starting point is 01:22:05 Yeah. And also, like all good games, there is an expansion pack. We already have the expansion pack ready to go. But we couldn't put 15 character classes in the first edition. So these are the base characters. There are more characters. And I will say this to everyone out. there who started critiquing us for saying like where is the dev character type the dev character type

Starting point is 01:22:25 is not a base character that is in the expansion pack folks you know wait until the addition to buy the expansion pack comes out we got the on chain wizard we got the researcher we got the high priest we got the trade influencer we got the dev everyone calmed down god everyone's fighting these days christ no it's just twitter everyone's actually happy outside of twitter yeah i keep forgetting that listeners of the bankless podcast are like why are they always like talking about twitter fights It's because we spend too much time online. Sorry, guys. That's how we bring the content to you.

Starting point is 01:22:53 It's a double-edged sword. Okay, Ryan, what are you excited about? You want to hear something super nerdy about what I'm excited about? It's always nerdy. Well, this is a nerd show. I feel like, yeah, you're right. Okay, but this sounds nerdy. Non-evm virtual machines.

Starting point is 01:23:09 Yeah, that's what's getting me going this week. It's pretty nerdy. All right? Okay, tell me about them, brother. The Slana virtual machine, the SVM. Okay. We haven't had an opportunity. to explore it in depth. And we've wanted to, right? But, like, the truth is, uh, the EVM is kind of like

Starting point is 01:23:26 its legacy. It's like, I wouldn't say it's legacy. It's just old technology. It's single threaded. It's not optimized for execution. And, um, the SVM has really been optimized for execution. Um, solidity is kind of, so I'm told from the devs, a janky type of language. Like, it's a derivative from JavaScript with, from a previous era of crypto. Yeah. With SVM, you can use like rust. really optimized for execution. And I guess I'm just excited about not only the SVM and Eclipse and kind of layer two's, but there's other non-EVM like multi-threaded projects being developed as well. There's one that I'm aware of is called Monad actually developing something that is

Starting point is 01:24:08 kind of an EVM. Closer to the EVM, yeah. It's like parallel. Parallel EVM. Yes. And so that's being developed. Anyway, this whole puzzle piece of the virtual machine is fine. finally getting some love and attention.

Starting point is 01:24:21 It's also happening, by the way, in the EVM community with Arbitrum and Stylists, right? They're giving the EVM a little bit of love. And for what it's worth, sorry to hijack your shit. Yeah, no, go. Starkware is a non-EVM layer two. Aztec is a non-EVM layer two. Fuel is a non-EVM layer two.

Starting point is 01:24:38 And so there has been a splattering of these. Yeah, so it's a nice new space that we're experimenting and developing in. So, yeah, sorry to be nerdy, but that's the whole show. You're right about that. non-evm virtual machines are getting me going this week. Cool.

Starting point is 01:24:51 Yeah, I know. Also, that is the roll-up-centric roadmap is useful pieces of technology can just plug in to smart contracts. David, what do we got, meme of the week? meme of the week.

Starting point is 01:25:00 This one's from Udi Wertheimer. This is about NFTs. NFTs. This is the guy running a bicycle who sticks a peg through his bicycle and falls over and blame something else, meme. So first panel,

Starting point is 01:25:11 NFTFers. Second panel, scamming each other and nonstop until everyone's poor. And then third panel, He's falling on the grab on grabbing his knee. He goes effing blur. Blaming it on blur.

Starting point is 01:25:23 Yeah. Because blur is the reason. Is that what we're doing? Blur is the reason why all of our NFTs are down bad. David, are we just nonstop scamming each other and then blaming other things for that? Is that, is there some truth here? Yeah. As much as I think Udi's a big, big fat troll, he is also generally like on target sometimes about stuff.

Starting point is 01:25:46 Oh, man. How are we going to stop the scams, David? You got a solution for that? Just stop scamming people. Stop doing it. I don't know, man. I'm not doing it. You're not doing it.

Starting point is 01:25:59 Yeah. Anyway, that's the simple solution. It's just scammers. Call to action. Everyone stop scamming. Yeah, one, two, three, stop scamming. Stop. Stop do it. Let's get to disclosures.

Starting point is 01:26:11 We're going to end with risk in a minute. But first we disclose, David and I are both advisors and investors to optimism. advisor to Polygon. I'm also an investor in Arbitrum and Monad, the project I mentioned to, and we're both investors in Aztec. Of course, both David and I hold ether. We are bullish layer two's and the entire ecosystem. We are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to the disclosures in the show notes. And you know this. And Cuban felt this this week, certainly. But crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. You got to be careful. But we're

Starting point is 01:26:47 We're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Are you sitting up as much as possible? I'll come down. I'm trained. I'm programmed. All right, ready? Yeah.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum Absorbs Alt-L1s | SEC vs. Stoner Cats | Mark Cuban's -$870k Wallet Hack

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