Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum Burning | Penguin & Axie NFTs | Poly Network Hack | Infrastructure Bill (August 13)

Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome Bankless Nation to this Friday edition of the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Another special edition with the substitute teacher of the Bankless Nation, Anthony Sizzano. Anthony, welcome to the Friday weekly roll up. How's it going, man? Hey, mate, I'm going good. I glad to be the substitute teacher again. You know, that Ryan is always slacking, right? Like, I'm always going to have to fill it in.

Starting point is 00:00:27 But it's all right. I get paid double time for this, right? Yeah, it's like, can you imagine just like having a family in crypto? Just like, what a guy. Who does such a thing? I don't know how he maintains. like that. I couldn't do it. All right, for all the people without kids and vacations, every Friday weekly roll up, we go through the markets, what's going on in the market, what got released

Starting point is 00:00:48 in the last week, as well as what's going through the news cycle. And then we go through the ecosystem takes. Who has some good takes around the world of crypto Twitter? And then lastly, we finish up with what David and Anthony are excited about. Anthony, you ready to get going? Yeah, let's get into it. Before we get into the show, we got to talk about pool. together because it is summertime and it's all time to get into the pool. If you don't know a pool together, it is a no loss lottery, which means you put your stable coins, your comp tokens, whatever tokens that pool together accepts into a pool and then you have a chance to win the accrued interest that accrues weekly from everyone's collective funds. So you don't lose your

Starting point is 00:01:28 principle. You might lose your opportunity cost of money, but you also might win everyone else's interest as well. It's a fun, no loss lottery on Ethereum. Every single week, roughly $50,000 to $60,000 gets awarded in USDA, and that is just the USDA pool. There is usually a drawing every single day of the week. They have also recently deployed their polygon implementation where you can deposit TUSD Tether into the polygon, pool together, pool together pool, and they are also rolling out their L2s coming soon in the future. So check them out. There's a link in the show notes so you can have fun in the pool. All right, starting with the markets, Bitcoin coming in at the price of $44,842 started the week right around 43,500.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Anthony, any comments on the Bitcoin price? I mean, just generally the market's kind of trending up. I think people are, I mean, it's funny because I see some people on Twitter talking about, you know, a Bitcoin dominance move and how Bitcoin's going to like, gain dominance into the winter, actually, for the northern hemisphere, summer into, for me, like towards the end of because you typically see kind of, I guess, Bitcoin dominance increase over that time. But I'm not convinced. I have a different opinion there.

Starting point is 00:02:41 Maybe when we talk about the eighth price, I can give my opinion on that. Absolutely. There's always, are those people that talk about the cyclicality of crypto markets. And I think those times are coming to an end if they're not already over. Too many people talk about them. Too many people talk about the cyclical nature of these things. And I don't know, Bitcoin dominance have never really been very bullish on that particularly. All right, ether price starting the week at around $2,680 coming in at the current price of $3,130.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Hit a almost hit $3,300 earlier this week. Pretty much a straight line up and to the right all throughout the week. Anthony, thoughts on the ether price. Yeah, I mean, it's just been funny to see like how quickly we've rebounded. I think we're at 1700 only, you know, two or three weeks ago. And we've pretty much almost doubled since then, you know, hanging around at the 3100s right now. And this is coming off obviously 1-559 going live and people realizing that we're burning a lot of Eath. Like, I don't know why people thought that we weren't going to burn a lot

Starting point is 00:03:44 of Eth considering that the fees have been high. I always thought that was funny. Like everyone was complaining about the high fees and then they didn't realize that we're going to burn a lot of Eth because those fees were high. So I think, you know, people are finally real. You know what I mean? That's just weird. But I think people are finally realizing that, you know, the 1-559 is in fact a burning a lot of Eath. And it's not just the only thing. that's going to be affecting ETH price, like over the, I guess, maybe medium term. We've got the merge coming up. You know, NFTs have exploded.

Starting point is 00:04:12 If you look at the projects burning the most amount of ETH, I'm pretty sure OpenC is at the top of the list, when usually what you would see is something like Uniswop up there. So we're seeing, I think, just ETH have like this positive price movement in part because of that. But just generally, like, I mean, the ETH ecosystem's on fire right now. We're going to talk a lot about that. But just to go back to what we were talking about before with the seasonality, if people monitor the seasonality of these things.

Starting point is 00:04:35 I think crypto is very cyclical and is very seasonal, but I think that's been a big part due to the fact that it's all been speculative, like 100% speculation for most of crypto's life, whereas now we're actually seeing the use cases be adopted in a really kind of real way. Yes, NFTs are full of speculation, but a lot of people are actually interested in them building cool new things, doing a lot of different things there,

Starting point is 00:04:58 and kind of like adopting this technology, rather than just buying it for purely speculative reasons. Is that one to be part of a community or whatever? So, yeah, I think the cynical nature over time, over probably the next couple years, is going to definitely change a lot. We're going to see, like, definite changes in that behavior. Yeah, the thought that these crypto markets are just going to stay cyclical until, like, crypto takes over the world and over the universe, like, no, that's way, like patterns don't work

Starting point is 00:05:25 like that over the long term. What do you make of this very straight line from, like, roughly the 19th of July to where we are almost a month later. It seems to be Ether has going on this like very straight up into this line up into the right line for the last almost a whole entire month. Is there, is there anything to talk about there or is that just a coincidence? I mean, it's hard to tell because some people call this like a complacency bounce where the price will bounce off if it's low after a big crash and no one will cash out and then, you know, it'll drop down again because everyone was complacent about this. Everyone thought that the bull market was going to continue and all this.

Starting point is 00:06:03 sorts of stuff. Couldn't that have been like this bounce right here? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like it could have been any of these bounces, right? To me, this is just, so to me, I think two things are playing out right now with the ether price. There's disbelief. A lot of people are like, you know, wow, we're already back over 3K. How is this possible? And there's a bit of complacency. We've all like, you know, we're back over 3K going straight to all time high. So I think the market's going to do what the least amount of people kind of like expect. And and that's probably go sideways from here for a little bit, maybe, you know, in the short term, kind of like people change from, I guess, like, I think a lot of people are neutral right now,

Starting point is 00:06:37 rather than being like overly bullish. They're just waiting for like a signal where they're like, okay, let's break out of this kind of like a range here. Let's go straight to all time high and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, it's just kind of hard to tell over the short term. But I do think that as I was saying about the cyclical nature of things, I don't know. I think the four year kind of cycle is like dead. I don't think that's a thing anymore.

Starting point is 00:07:00 Like really. Yeah. The fact that it continued three times is already telling you that, in my opinion, that's already over-extended in its cyclical nature. All right, moving on to the ETH-BTC ratio. We are at 0.069 on the ETH-BTC ratio, which is, like I always say, historically pretty high. Like always, if we go back throughout the, like, the very beginning of, like, the whole

Starting point is 00:07:24 ether-BTC ratio thing, we are at always very high levels. And we have been for basically all of 2021. Anthony, anything to talk about here with the ETH-BTC ratio, maybe in the last like few weeks and months or so. Yeah, I think the, the secret cool seasonality kind of plays out here the most with ETHBTC. I don't think too many people trade this pair. I think it's just good for looking at for overall sentiment around like Bitcoin versus Eith and how their prices are going. I think what's going to happen is, you know, I mean, I don't think this is going to happen. I'm actually curious to see what happens in that typically in Q3, more so in Q4, Ether,

Starting point is 00:08:02 Bitcoin bleeds, like, and it bleeds hard, right? It basically makes Ethereum feel like shit for like all of Q4. And then in late December, early January, it typically explodes upwards again. Like there's that kind of like bounce because everyone's kind of like feeling really shitty and that's kind of like the typical place to bounce. But if you pay attention to what's been happening with Eith Bitcoin and kind of like seeing the change there, I don't, I'm not convinced that we're going to see this play out again. Like it's played out pretty much every year since Ethereum's existed, like since ETH was trading. But if we break. this cyclical nature. I mean, you can look on the chart and see that it's played out every

Starting point is 00:08:35 single year. Every single Q3, Q4, ether Bitcoin has bled since the earliest days. Then it's bounced after that. But like if we don't bleed now, if Heath actually takes, it's, you know, if ETH Bitcoin doesn't bleed and it either goes sideways or keeps going up, that will show the entire market that there really is a real change and shift in how people are viewing ETH as a standalone thing compared to Bitcoin. I think people more. and more people are realizing that Ethereum as a network does just obviously so much more than Bitcoin does. And we shouldn't be comparing the two in lots of different ways. So yeah, I just think that if we do break that seasonality, that is an absolutely massive break of pattern. And I mean,

Starting point is 00:09:19 that's breaking like six years worth of patterns. So yeah, it's a pretty big deal if that does play out there. And the reason why I think Anthony and I are focusing on this whole like cyclicality theme in the market section is that we see a lot of just excitement in the news cycle. We see a lot of adoption and there's a discrepancy between what this cyclical pattern of crypto market history would predict for the next quarter or so and what we are seeing when it comes to on-chain fundamentals and things just like in the new cycle and the rate of adoption, which is going to be something that we revisit throughout the rest of this weekly roll-up. So stay tuned for that. But actually, we're going to get to one of those subjects right now. Coming out of a business,

Starting point is 00:09:59 wire, which is apparently a Berkshire Hathaway Company, a Genesis Q2 report shows decreasing Bitcoin dominance and hedge funds diving into a defy. So this is one of the fundamentals that we are seeing that would disagree with the nature of the cyclical nature of the markets, as we've seen so far. Genesis, a digital asset industry provider and digital currency prime brokerage, released its Q2 2021 Market Observations Report, which highlights major trends across institutional digital asset markets. The report shows a significant rotation out of Bitcoin and into Ethereum and explains how clients search for yield drove activity across Genesis throughout Q2. Man, it's as if some of the core Ethereum community members were talking about this. They live for the past like year or so.

Starting point is 00:10:48 Institutional investors, institutional money, they love yield and that they love the narrative that surrounds around yield. And we all know that they were largely, not sufficiently exposed to ether and over-exposed to Bitcoin because everyone started with Bitcoin, right? When you only start with Bitcoin, you only have other places to go. And when you see the next step after Bitcoin is perhaps this thing called Ethereum and there's all these yield opportunities on Ethereum, that just makes a ton of sense to me. Anthony, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about this for years at this point. Like both of us, you know, wherever on Twitter, on bankless, on Ether, whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:11:27 But essentially, Ethereum just appeals to so many more people than Bitcoin does. Like, what you do with Bitcoin is you buy BTC and you hold onto it, right? There's not much else you can do with it. Maybe you can put it in some kind of like centralized custodians to earn a little bit of yield on it. But a lot of the time, they're earning yield on it by putting it into Ethereum. So it's kind of like ironic when you think about it like that. So I'm not surprised to see this at all. I've been a long-term proponent that I think Bitcoin dominance is going to fall dramatically from here

Starting point is 00:11:55 and probably fall to under 10% eventually. I think that the space is much bigger than Bitcoin. It is even bigger than Ethereum. Like, I don't think Ethereum is going to be the absolute kind of like juggernaut and everything else will be like this tiny little thing. I do think we're going to be kind of like this. I mean, I guess people are calling it like a multi-chain ecosystem, but I do think a lot of that value is still going to accrue to Ethereum, right?

Starting point is 00:12:17 Like Ethereum as it's kind of like the base chain and as this economic nexus that sits in between everything. And from that point of view, I think, a lot of people realize that. And so with, especially with one five, five nine in place now, people are like, well, how do I get exposure to all of this? Well, you know, you buy ETH, right? You buy ETH to get exposure to everything. Doesn't matter if, you know, this DeFi app is hot one, you know, one month, this defy app is hot another month or, you know, same with NFTs. You get exposure to the entire Ethereum ecosystem by buying ETH. And then with that ETH, you can choose to

Starting point is 00:12:45 stake it or you can put it into DeFi, borrow against it, you know, and earn some yield on stable coins. And there's an infinite amount of things you can do with, with Ethereum. And if you're trying to bet on, I guess, like a falling Bitcoin dominance because you're betting on, like, the world kind of waking up to things like defy and NFTs, well, then you, you kind of like buy Athea. So I think we're going to continue to see this. I don't think this is an outlier. And I'm just, I'm very happy to see institutions finally realizing the value of Eith and Ethereum. Absolutely. And this is also backed up by the fact that Ether had its first whole entire quarter having more volume on Coinbase than Bitcoin, which is a pretty monumental milestone. A whole entire one-fourth of a whole

Starting point is 00:13:27 entire year, ether trading volume is higher than Bitcoin's. And as we all know in the world of crypto, there is a competition to be the internet money. And money means liquidity. And so seeing the volume shift from Bitcoin to ether for a whole entire quarter tells us a new story about where the liquidity in this industry lies. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's interesting to say how dramatic the shift has been in only a year. Like a year ago, Bitcoin was 57%. Ethereum was only 15%. And now, if you go back to the other kind of like screenshot that I was reading off, yeah, yeah. I hear it when Ryan does that to me. And Bitcoin is now 24%, whereas Ethereum is 26%, then has not only been like a massive catch-up from Ethereum. And you can see like the pattern. It basically played out mostly in Q1 and Q2. But, you know, Bitcoin's lost. a lot of dominance to other crypto assets as well, because other crypto assets over the last year

Starting point is 00:14:25 have increased from 28% to 50%. So obviously, people are just like very, very excited to trade other assets, very interested in trading other assets. And ETH is like the big, I guess like one of the biggest beneficiaries of this. And we've felt that with the price as well, with the ratio going up to, like, as I said, I don't think many people trade ETH BTC, but ETH BTC tells the story. And it tells the story of ETH dominance increasing while BTC dominance decreases. And then we also have this tweet coming out of Frank Chaparro from the block. Institutional demand for ETH has surged and it's pushing Fidelity in NIDIG to expand their BTC-focused offerings. NIDIG, which is known for one of the biggest Bitcoin funds ever,

Starting point is 00:15:08 and it's one of the reasons why so many commercial banks can tap into Bitcoin via NIDIG. NIDIG, which bills itself as BTC-First, has quietly been offering ETH custody to an increasing number of clients plus FDAS could offer East Services by Q4 or Q1, 2022. So this is kind of like, while there was so much going on this week with the whole like regulatory tax stuff, the penguins, there's been this underlying story of just like institutions quietly rotating and finding infrastructure and rotating into ether. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, like I responded to Frank's tweet there saying like it doesn't

Starting point is 00:15:48 pay to be a BTC maxi shop. And it doesn't, right? You eventually have to cave because your customer demand is so high. There's revenue sources elsewhere. Why not go to them? Go to them. All right, turning now to money locked in defy. We are coming in at $79 billion locked in defy, which is about roughly where it started a week ago, but has been a lot higher where than it has been all throughout July. So really coming back into that high 70s, low 80s range, which again, I believe we capped out at $88 or $90 billion locked in Defi and of course the Defi Pulse Index coming in at $390.00. Starting the week at around $350 peaked out at over $400, $415. And then we are currently at the price of $390. Anthony, any

Starting point is 00:16:35 comments on money locked in defy or the DPI? Yeah. So the money locked in defy measured in USD is going to trend up based on the market, right? Because a lot of it is E, a lot of it is Bitcoin and other kind of tokens. So obviously it's going to go up and the market goes up. But I think Defi, you know, the last, I mean, maybe a couple of months has taken a back seat because NFT mania is kind of what everyone's talking about. But Defi is quietly building in the background. There are a lot of things going on and it's not going anywhere. And I think we're going to see like a Defy Renaissance happen over the next few months, especially as these layer twos go live and more and more people kind of like can play with these things. I think we're definitely going to see a resurgence here.

Starting point is 00:17:12 And I wouldn't be surprised to see 100 billion plus locked in Defi very, very soon. Yeah, that will be a fun day to. to be in Defi, that's for sure. You can definitely see that number be tweeted out on Twitter if you don't want to miss it because there will be a race for all the Twitter influencers to get that first 100 billion locked in Defi. We all know it's coming. All right, moving on to the DPI Ether ratio coming in at 0.216, a little bit below my 0.13 call.

Starting point is 00:17:40 But again, not all that far away. It is below the call. I will not deny that. But Anthony, do you have any comments about this, ETH, D.P.? API ratio. Yeah, I mean, doesn't look so hot. So I have a thesis at the moment that I'm wondering if it's going to play out.

Starting point is 00:17:59 It seems to be playing out already. But I think that in a post-1559 world, outperforming ETH over the long term is going to be very, very hard, especially, you know, maybe like the blue chip, defy things and stuff like that. Things are already kind of large cap. It's going to be very hard for them to outperform either the long term, I believe, because of the that all the activity generated by Defy is going to feed back to ETH anyway, because we're going to be burning ETH because of it. So, you know, and a lot of, and because we have so many DeFi tokens now, I think buying the

Starting point is 00:18:30 Defi Pulse Index is still a really good idea for people who don't want to sift through all the, all the defy tokens. But if you kind of like look at it from the point of view of maybe like the complete normie who sees everything going on, they're like, okay, well, you know, there's DeFi's NFTs, like, I don't know what to buy. Like, what do I buy? And then they think to themselves, well, this is all happening on Ethereum. why don't I just buy ETH as like the shilling point index sort of thing for the entire Ethereum

Starting point is 00:18:52 ecosystem. And I think that's going to be a big reason why over the long term, say like a year plus, it's going to be very hard to outperform just holding vanilla ETH or even like maybe I guess like you guys have the bed index like Bitcoin, ETH and DFI, which I think is less volatile. So it's something that people will be interested in as well. But yeah, the DPI ETH ratio is not looking too hot. but at the same time, it can always reverse very violently. If for some reason people like all of a sudden say,

Starting point is 00:19:22 oh, well, defy's underpriced I'm going to buy defy, then over the short to medium term, it can definitely outperform. Right. We are, like Anthony said, we are in the middle of what seems to be an NFT hype session. If that session were to ever turn to defy, things would move really, really quickly. This is kind of how this industry works is we are only ever extremely hyped or extremely subdued, never ever in the middle. You mentioned the bed index and the best.

Starting point is 00:19:46 bed index is coming in at $142. It has performed really well for basically all of its genesis, started the month right around $90 and then it has peaked out at $153. And on the week, we are up 8.6%. So as an industry, which is why the bet index is so great, as a whole entire industry, we are roughly up 8.6%. So that is pretty cool. All right, here is L2B.

Starting point is 00:20:12 And we haven't talked about L2B for a while, even though that we have it in the show templates. But the reason why I wanted to bring it up this week is, A, we haven't talked about it in a while. But we were going through a little bit of a downtrend in money locked in layer two. So, excuse me, L2B, it's kind of like D5 pulse. It's like money locked in D5, but instead it's money locked on layer two's. And we have been seeing a resurgence in some value and some deposits coming in at layer two, largely because I think the DYDX token, DYDX coming in at number one. And over the last seven days, it's had 160% extra value being deposited into its L2. But of course, we are also seeing a strong showing by optimism and a few other layer twos as well. Anthony, any comments on

Starting point is 00:20:58 the layer two world? Yeah, I mean, you can see with DIYDX, this is the power of adding a token, right? Like as soon as you add token incentives, you get a lot of liquidity. And I'm really glad to see their growth there. I think they're one of the best L2s out there right now, obviously built on StarGrest technology has a really great platform. But like I'm always curious to see how these things perform when there isn't token incentives in place. So I've been watching something like optimism where they've got synthetics and they've got Uniswap. But I've put in particular, I've been watching Unisov v3 on optimism because synthetics has token incentives technically because of the staking. So with Unisop v3 on optimism, there's zero token incentives on there. So I've been really curious to

Starting point is 00:21:38 see that, oh, sorry, very, I'm happy to see that the TVL has been growing steadily on there and the volumes. I think they peaked out at maybe over $4 million, 24-hour volume, which, you know, is small when you consider layer one is like in the billions. But, you know, as I said, no token incentive, still very new, very limited guard rails everywhere. And, you know, we have other altus like arbitram going live this month, you know, in a fully public fashion. So I think this TVL is going to explode. And I think the early TVR that they're measuring here might have been just like all synthetic staking. And when the SNX price was like three times what it was now, you know, and that was, I think that was on optimism, but for a little while too earlier on just staking.

Starting point is 00:22:19 But like I'm just looking at the 30 day. If you could be changed to the 30 day chart on, on there. Yeah, you can see that the trend is very strong. Like we've basically like, you know, almost pretty much doubled here. You know, and I think that's just going to keep continuing. and it's just great to see. And then there's a lot of ETH locked in there as well. I think that's measuring ETH if it was priced in USD there. But I'm being seeing like ETH locked in in L2s go up as well. Like D-YDX is a big kind of like a big driver of that for sure.

Starting point is 00:22:48 Yeah. And we did have the optimism team on the bankless show last week. If you did not catch that episode, absolutely go watch it. It's not often that optimism comes and talks on a show. We did ask them if they were going to do a token. because Anthony, I'm pretty sure you agree with me, we kind of think everyone's going to do a token. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:07 But when they answered that question, they said that they had no plans. So they know plans to do a token. No plans yet. No, well, they didn't say that, but we totally will. All right. No, yeah, no, no. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 00:23:21 Now in the new to the bankless weekly roll-ups and also continuing for all future weekly roll-ups, we are now seeing 36,000 Ether, get burned since EIP-159 got introduced a little bit over seven days ago, seven and a half days ago. So in the last seven days, $36,000, or excuse me, 36,000 ether was burned, which is coming in at $111 million. Fundract roughly about three and a half ether per minute for over the last 24 hours. Anthony, did you see this ether burn thing coming? Like, did you know about this?

Starting point is 00:24:01 No, like, this is, this is called me by surprise. Like, I am so totally surprised. Like, where did this come from? Like, this one-559 thing? It just came out of the blue, right? Oh, but okay, but did you think that it was going to burn this much, Eith? Yes, yes. I mean, I've been obsessing over this for a very long time, and I have been screaming about it.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Because Justin Drake put out his assumption saying that 70 to 75% of the Eath fees would be burned. And that's exactly where we are today. It's about 75% on average. So he was right about it. And I based a lot of my assumptions on his work. And given the how much work he's done throughout the ecosystem with research on Ethereum Monetary Policy, 1559, everything like that, I tended to kind of like believe his estimates.

Starting point is 00:24:46 And when I saw this happening, I was like, yeah, this is exactly what I expected. But a lot of people didn't. And it just really surprised me because, I mean, maybe a lot of people don't watch my stuff. But, I mean, I've been screaming about this for so long. I really like this watch the burn.com website over the last seven days. It's been keeping a tally of the burned versus issued amount of ETH. And this is one of the metrics that I talked about forever ago. The ETH issued to burn ratio. In the last seven days, we've issued almost 67,000 ETH and we've burned 35,800 ETH. So we are burning more than half of the ETH that we are currently issuing. And that is in a proof of work environment, right? So actually, excuse me, we burned 35,800, and then the net issuance was 66,800.

Starting point is 00:25:37 Okay, so we actually only burned roughly 35%. And so, you know, 35%, like no, like, and that is largely ETH that would be otherwise being sold by miners. And so 35% of ether being issued is no longer being sold. It is just being burnt. It's as if people saw this coming. This fits in with mine up. good math about how if we wanted a full net deflationary, ETH in a proof of work world,

Starting point is 00:26:03 we would need about 150 way on average. We've had, I think, about 50, 60 way on average over the past like seven days. So yeah, it's not going to be net deflationary. But we have had ultrasound blocks, right, which is blocks where we've burned more eth than we've, that we've issued as block reward. And we've had many of those, which I think is really cool to monitor. But I mean, yeah, like the thing is that it's funny because I've been seeing people say, oh, well, you know, how much ETH was issued during that time. Like, who cares how much was burned? How much was still issued?

Starting point is 00:26:31 And it's like, guys, like, this is like so missing the point right now. Like, it's just, it's insane. Um,

Starting point is 00:26:36 but like, other than that, I just think it's, it's funny when you look at the dollar values too. Like, there's $10,000 on average of the last 24 hours, each minute being burned with Eath. So don't just look at the ETH value.

Starting point is 00:26:46 Look at the dollar value. $10,000 a minute. That's like someone buying $10,000 every minute and sending it to the burn address. It's the same thing. At this rate, it's faster than Michael Saylor is dollar cost averaging in two. Bitcoin. And the crazy thing is, is like, you said that we've had ultrasound blocks. We've also had

Starting point is 00:27:03 ultrasound hours, as in for a whole hour ether was deflationary during dependent, like, times of NFT drops, usually. But I mean, in Defy Summer, we sustained over 150 Gway for weeks, if not months, right? And there was times where we were holding three to 400 Gway for, for an entire week, right? And so to some degree, like when we have a really, really high congestion environment, like that burns way, way, way more ether. And like, does it retro, like, if we want to retroactively become ultrasound, that is possible, right? Because, you know, the maximum amount of ether that you can burn inside of a single block is infinite, right?

Starting point is 00:27:39 And so, you know, the maximum amount of ether you can burn in a single month is also infinite, right? And so, and of course, this just gets so much easier under proof of stake. You said your napkin mass with like 150 guay. Well, under proof of... I think it was like... At the previous steak, yeah, I think it was like 10 to 15 way or something, depending on the eight steak. Yeah, 10 to 15 gray. Like, we've been sustaining 10 to 15 way like 97% of the time for the last like two years.

Starting point is 00:28:04 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, and this is why I think I've been saying it on Twitter, leaking a bit of alpha. The merge is like a hundred times more bullish for Ethan 1559. Like, 1-559 was like the appetizer guys. Like, the merge is the main course. Like, it's the main course. It's the dessert. It's the drinks you have with your food, right?

Starting point is 00:28:22 It's just, it's everything. It's huge. Yeah, and the cool thing is we can actually do a little bit of like, again, napkin math here is like, so we call the merge, the triple having, the triple happening, right? Because it's having the amount of issuance of Eath and then doing it again and then doing it again. So what is, what is that?

Starting point is 00:28:37 50, 25, 12.5 percent percent? Not a 90 percent reduction. 90 percent reduction, which is triple, you're triple halving. Like if you have it 50 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent. It's about 90 percent. Yeah. And then with this burn rate, we are burning, I think. Oh, God, this is why I'm not a math major.

Starting point is 00:28:57 But anyways, take a third of the issuance of under this proof of stake, proof of work form, and then also keep on burning that. Like, these things are really symbiotic. Okay, all right. We've got to move on. So we're going to stick into the markets for a little bit too long. But before we do, a shout out to Michael Silberling, which he was listening to the EIP 1559 expert panel, which another great piece of content, and made this Dune Analytics

Starting point is 00:29:20 board, which I found very, very useful. but apparently it's not loading. But if you want to get a very in-depth Dune Analytics Board about EIP-159, check out that link in the show notes. Shout up to Michael for making that Dune Analytics Board. And then again, I guess we're not done with EIP-159. Here's a nice visualization of all the ETH being burnt

Starting point is 00:29:41 versus the ETH being paid to minors. The dark blue is how much is being burnt. And then the light turquoise-ish is revenue paid to miners. And there's a lot of dark blue there. Like it's most of it. moving on to Axi Infinity, which is the first NFT project to hit $1 billion in all-time NFT trading volume.

Starting point is 00:30:03 It's a very large number, absolutely massive. Axi Infinity, we brought them on to the markets a couple weeks ago because the price was just going absolutely bonkers. And we brought that on two weeks before that, we brought them on the show because the price was going absolutely bonkers. And the revenue of this whole entire ecosystem continues to. to be sustained, which is very, very impressive. Anthony, any comments here? Yeah, I mean, this is just like, to me, the story of Axi Infinity is what's going to bring in the kind of

Starting point is 00:30:35 like next wave of NFT, kind of like, you know, adoption and builders. Because think about all the game development studios that have now realized how big the total adjustable market is for play to earn games. And think about all of them integrating these sorts of things into their mobile apps, right? Like, there's a lot of apps within app purchases and stuff like that, but they're going to be able to supercharge it by tapping into this play to earn things. So I'm going to, I can pretty much guarantee that every single game company worth its salt right now is contacting, you know, whether that be Ethereum Layer 2s that are focused on NFTs or anyone who knows about this stuff, they're contacting them to, like the team of Polygon as well and stuff like that, to say, hey,

Starting point is 00:31:13 hey, how do we do this NFT thing? And you're going to see an absolute explosion of this stuff happen over the next six to 12 months. It's going to catch. everyone off of God. I think this NFT mania is just getting started. There is so many people to come. Like the amount of people that there still is to come in is incredible. Like this is going to be the story, I think over the next six to 12 months for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And we have not even gotten to the NFT section of the weekly roll-up to close out the market section. Coinbase. Coin had a really impressive quarter. And so they beat earnings. They were expected to have $1.8 billion in revenue. But instead they pulled in, $2.2 billion of revenue. And coin, as a result, is finally seeing some life in the asset price. So congratulations to Coinbase. Anthony, any comments here? Yeah, I mean, it's great to see.

Starting point is 00:32:04 But my thesis has always been that Coinbase is very, very heavily reliant on crypto trading volumes and crypto trading volumes go up when the crypto market is hot. So just buy it if and you'll outperform coin. All right, guys, that was the market section. We are going to be back with releases in just a second. First, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:32:32 Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrantz.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project.

Starting point is 00:33:35 Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. Balancer is a powerful platform for flexible automated market makers. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in Defi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM, which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools can make asset indices, but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Balancer lets you collect the fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity.

Starting point is 00:34:10 Additionally, Balancer smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fee based on market conditions. or even liquidity bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity. At Bankless, we use a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAPT T-shirts too much success. Balancer V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you. In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield in defy without sacrificing liquidity in the pool using balancers' asset managers.

Starting point is 00:34:43 Balancers' vault architecture lets you trade between balancer pools at a fraction of the cost, versus trading on other platforms. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in D5 by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Dive into balancer pools at app.bancer.fi. All right, guys, welcome back. We are getting into the releases and starting alphabetically. A is for Arbitrum and apparently A is also for August.

Starting point is 00:35:13 And apparently Arbitrum is releasing in August. So they recently put out a blog post on their blog on Medium, offchain.medium.com, if you want to go check it out, talking about how they are going to release Arbitrum in August. Anthony, what month is it? I think it's August. Is it August? I think it's August. It's turning out to be a very big month for Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:35:33 Yeah, weird. All right. So what does that mean for us? What does that mean for Arbitrum to go live? So Arbitrum 1, which is their first implementation of the Arbitrum Optimistic Roll-up, going live means that it's going live for everyone. It's been on Mainnet in a kind of like closed capacity for developers to deploy their kind of apps to them, but it going live in August for end users means that we're going to

Starting point is 00:35:57 all be able to use the Arbitrim system from our, you know, favorite Ethereum wallet. So that is super exciting. And I mean, August, what, we're on August 13th for me and then it's the 12th for you, but essentially there's only a couple weeks left of August. So are they going live, you know, sooner rather than later? They're going to leave it to the end of August that really tease us. You know, who knows. But I think Arbitrum is usually very good with their dates and they release windows.

Starting point is 00:36:19 So I don't expect a delay here. So yeah, they're going live in August. So super exciting. I really like this release date format. And I really wish that as a community we had figured it out earlier. Just give people an entire just like month. Like no release dates. Just give us a month and just like tease us for a whole entire month.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Arbitrum also released this page, which also illustrates all of the apps that are coming to Arbitrum. This page is called the Arbitrum One portal. your gateway to the Arbitrium ecosystem, and the amount of applications on here continues to just grow and grow and grow as I zoom out on this page. Look, there's AVE, there's Curve, there's Creme, there's, gosh, there's a, there's balancer.

Starting point is 00:36:57 Look at that. There's chain link, ether scan, not even an Ethereum app, but Ethereum infrastructure, which we all know that we need. There's Maker Dow, MC Dex, loop ring. Gosh, what isn't there?

Starting point is 00:37:07 Yeah, yeah, this is why I'm really, really excited for this is because we're going to have a fully kind of like fleshed out a layer two ecosystem with Arbitrum going live where we have all the apps we know and love from layer one and just on layer two. So I expect the TVL and the activity to absolutely explode on this. And I'm sure optimism isn't far behind either because Arbitrum is their main competitors in the optimistic roll-up space. So I'm pretty sure we're going to see like the Arbitrum versus optimism wars over the next few months and it's going to be amazing. There's going to be so much kind of like liquidity mining going on. It's going to be pretty funny to see how that plays.

Starting point is 00:37:44 plays out. But yeah, I mean, I can't wait. Like, first, you know, true layer two ecosystem on Ethereum that isn't just like app specific. Like obviously, Dydx, loopering, diversify, all that sort of stuff is app specific, specific. But Arbitrum 1 and optimism are both generalized EVM compatible platforms that are going to really change the game, I think. Yeah. And as we've been saying on the bankless show, the layer two summer is upon us. August still counts as summer. So we still got that one right. And if Arbitrum does what we think they do and releases a token, maybe there's yield farming on Arbitrum. I don't know how they're going to release their token. I don't even know if there is going to be a token, but I would imagine there might be some aggressive yield farming

Starting point is 00:38:24 going on there. Moving on to Rarable released the Rarable protocol, a set of tools to simplify the go-to market process for NFT projects and ideas. I took a peek under the hood, and this is, interestingly, an NFT cross-chained system to bridge NFTs across all the various chains, not even just just Ethereum L2s, but also things like Binance Smart Chain and Flow and Pesos, which, uh, interesting. Okay. Anthony, did you read this announcement at all? Yeah, I mean, I saw it last night. Basically, I mean, it makes sense because essentially what Rerable was trying to do is to provide the tools for people to kind of like build out their NFT projects and developers to kind of build them out on, you know, Ethereum layer two's, other chains, things like that. And, uh, yeah, I mean,

Starting point is 00:39:09 it definitely makes sense for them to release something like this. But I think it's definitely more developer focus right now, but end users are obviously going to get the benefit from that at end of the day. Coming out next was Gearbox, which is a brand new protocol for generalized leverage. I'm not sure what that means to have generalized leverage. And if there is somebody who is a trader in the world of the bankless nation who wants to come and inform me what generalized leverage is, I would super duper appreciate it. Anthony, do you know what generalized leverage is?

Starting point is 00:39:38 Yeah, so the way that I understand it is basically you're going to have like a pool of capital that people can kind of like tap into, that they can kind of leverage off of, right, to go do kind of like yield farming and thing and similar things within the ecosystem. So I think the way maybe gearbox does it is, you know, you can see in the screenshot here, they have like this pool, right, where liquidity providers can provide liquidity to. And then people create these things called credit accounts, which they borrow from the pool as leverage. And then they go do, you know, any number of things.

Starting point is 00:40:05 So it's essentially a way to access like a massive pool of capital for people who want it and to borrow, to kind of leverage it in order to do the other things in DeFi. So I thought this is actually a really cool idea because I think Alpha Finance has done this in the past in a different implementation where people could like borrow from this pool of liquidity. But I think gearbox is just taking it to the next level by introducing this thing called credit account where it's essentially, you know, keeping track of all the credit that this person has and generalizing it so that they can borrow these, you know, leverage this liquidity and put it into all these other protocols. And you can see here, on the other side, there's like a two-sided place.

Starting point is 00:40:43 There's the liquidity providers, then the traders, and there's this a credit account that everything goes into, and the traders can kind of leverage that. And, yeah, I mean, the post details a lot more kind of like how this works, and there's like a little blurb underneath the screenshot that describes it. But yeah, I think this could be pretty, I think this could lead to, you know, a resurgence in defy, especially because at the end of the day, everyone loves yield farming and, you know, making it easy people to leverage yield farm

Starting point is 00:41:06 is probably, you know, going to be a hot product, especially if DeFi heats up again. Yeah, as we all know, the DeFi is providing some of the most powerful financial tools to the people that use it. And we are also inventing brand new ones, which gets even crazier. So I'm excited to see how this rolls out into the future. What can this change when it comes? Because you all know everyone in DeFi loves leverage, perhaps a little bit too much. I'm a little bit worried about putting even more leverage tools out there.

Starting point is 00:41:31 But like I know that if they can be built, they absolutely will be built. And it looks like that's what's going on here. All right. Moving into it raises the decentralized wireless network helium has raised $111 million in a sale led by A16Z. Anthony, any comments on this? Yeah, helium's one project that I've watched for quite a while. I haven't been able to participate in it. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:55 I wasn't able to participate in it from the early days because they were only shipping their helium units to places in like the US initially. And then I think they do Australia now, but I haven't kind of looked at it lately. but for those who don't know, Helium is trying to create like a decentralized, I guess, like 5G network. And so to do that, you need to obviously bootstrap it with new hardware. And hardware rollout is actually very, very hard and very expensive. So what helium has done to basically say, well, what if we have a token attached to it? What if we do like mining where you set up your unit, you get to mine these H&T tokens, and then that kind of incentivizes you to do so?

Starting point is 00:42:31 And I really think that this is going to be part of a broader trend where we can actually use these token incentives to essentially bootstrap new kind of like hardware rollouts. And there's no surprise to me that helium has raised this amount of capital because they are, you know, there's literally like tens of thousands of these things. And they actually were sold out for quite a while because there was just so much demand for them. So this is really like liquidity mining for hardware rollouts. Like that's how I like to think about it. And I definitely have always thought this is one of the most like sci-fi applications of the use of crypto.

Starting point is 00:43:00 But we've also seen teams try and do similar things like this before. The foam network comes to mind where people wanted to make like decentralized triangulation so we didn't have to like rely on Google Maps. I mean, we all want super high speed connectivity and a mesh network of like radio. I'm pretty sure that's the right device. Makes a lot of sense.

Starting point is 00:43:21 Is society ready for that? We will find out. But we have $11 million to put to the test. So moving on, Dune Analytics, which we refer to all the time on the bankless program. Got a $8 million Series A, led by Union Square Ventures. I'm really, really excited for this.

Starting point is 00:43:41 Dune Analytics is such an important way to gain some perspective as to what's going on directly on chain on Ethereum. And their boards feature is great. We use it all the time on the roll-up. I'm excited to see what happens when they inject $8 million into improving the product and growing out the team. Yeah, I mean, this is awesome to see. And I mean, I should disclose that I'm actually a seed investor in Dune Analytics.

Starting point is 00:44:03 So, yeah, yeah, thanks. But this is like awesome to see, like, from both ends. But one, because like I'm really glad to see that a team that I have backed is, you know, going on to raise another round and seeing continued success, but also because I'm a massive fan of Duna Lake's. I use it every single day for looking at on-chain stuff. And I absolutely love the fact that they have such a vibrant community that builds all these awesome dashboards.

Starting point is 00:44:24 I mean, we showed one from Michael earlier. There's literally hundreds of these people building out these dashboards. And I think with this money, Dune said that they're going to expand to layer two's and other chains and kind of just have like this world of data for people to kind of like tap into to essentially build these dashboards around. So yeah, I'm really, really excited to see that they've raised this money. Closing out the raise section, we have a consensus incubated crypto wallet. LaQuality raises $7 million in seed funding. So consensus, the, you know, try, true and tried Ethereum project that has spun out with the things like Metamask and Inferra

Starting point is 00:44:59 and Codify. Now spinning out Lequal equality, which, I'm not so sure, I'm sold on the name, but a new wallet coming into the ecosystem done by consensus. Yeah, the name trips me up because I always just go straight to liquidity. Instead of saying the quality. And I just started figuring out liquidity. I was about to say liquidity. There are these names. But no, no, I think this is really positive because we need more competition in the wallet space.

Starting point is 00:45:27 And the fact is that the wallet space is actually, you know, the front door for the ecosystem. So if you own that front door and you have the users there, there's a lot of money to be made. I mean, we've seen Meta Mask absolutely printing money off of their swap feature, which is literally like, it's not even in your face or anything like that. And they're taking like a 0.8% fee off of that. And I think they're printing like half a million dollars a day or something, something crazy. And that's like pure revenue and profit, right? Because Metamask doesn't really take much to maintain.

Starting point is 00:45:56 There's a small team that builds out the updates and things like that. So, yeah, the wallet space is definitely going to heat up. and there's going to be a lot of competition coming to market here. Just kidding. One more raise in the race section. Crypto tax software firm Tax Bit has raised $130 million in a series B that sticks their valuation at $1.33 billion. Everyone in crypto hates to do taxes.

Starting point is 00:46:20 I'm pretty sure I can speak for everyone. We all say we hate to do taxes. And so the fact that a tax reporting company can raise such a large amount makes a ton of sense because we just want other people to do it for us. Or at least that's just me. me. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And of course, finishing up the releases section, if you are looking for a job in crypto, there are jobs out there to go and find. So if you are perhaps a senior product

Starting point is 00:46:45 manager, Immutable X is looking for you. A full-sac software engineer pallet of this job board is looking for you. We also have jobs from nervous network, impact theory, the graph, and Argent. If you are looking for a job, go to pallet.xy-s slash list slash bank list. or just go to the show notes and check out the jobs because they are hire everyone is hiring these days, including Arbitrum. And so if you want to go get a job with Arbitrum, they are hiring as well. All right. Moving on into news, let me close out some of these tabs.

Starting point is 00:47:16 The big news of the week was this Poly Network hack, which had over $600 million exploited out of its contracts. Poly Network was a cross-chain asset transfer network, kind of like Thor Chain, kind of like a few others. interestingly none of the people that I had I talked to in my circles like new polynetwork even though it had the largest hack in defy history which is kind of interesting so some funds were lost from polygons some funds were lost from the ethereum main chain some funds were lost from a finance chain but interestingly this hacker wasn't very sophisticated and because he or she or they realized that they had led some breadcrumbs back to a centralized exchange and or they had let a done kyc presumably they were forced into having to give all of the assets back and so assets were exploited uh the hacker had an oh crap moment and returned all of the money and there's also a story in here about the nature of decentralized uh you know permissionless assets versus more permissioned assets uh usdt actually froze this these hackers funds and as we all know

Starting point is 00:48:25 usdt it's a centralized company they can freeze your money and so if you hack usddt you You actually don't have the money in the bank. And so there's a bunch of just funny little stories that happened with the biggest hack in Defi history. Anthony, any thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I had never heard of this either. And a lot of people getting this confused with Polygon, which is funny. But I think this shows like a deep divide between the East and the West. I think this was a project in China or somewhere in Asia.

Starting point is 00:48:57 And there's like a deep divide between the East and West. communities both kind of language barrier wise and cultural wise. And a lot of people weren't using this in that in that kind of community. And no one I knew was kind of using this. But yeah, I mean, 611 million stolen. Like it's an absolutely massive amount of kind of like money. But them giving it back because they were sloppy is just, I mean, this just points to pure amateur hour where some script kitty probably got on a high and said, wow, if this actually works, I'm going to steal all this money. And then they were like, oh, wow, like I didn't think this through. I've linked, you know, personal information everywhere. Like, oh, crap.

Starting point is 00:49:29 And then USDT freezing the funds. I mean, this shouldn't come in as a surprise to anyone. USDT and USDAC both have functions in their smart contract to freeze these funds. So you should never be surprised by this when this happens. But yeah, just, I mean, good to see that money was returned and people are going to get their money back, I assume. But at the same time, just speaks to the nature of this cross-chain stuff and how, I guess, like, immaturity is right now. It is very immature. There's a lot of moving parts to it. There's a lot of things that can go wrong.

Starting point is 00:49:57 and you need to be careful when using these tools. Maybe we will borrow some time from the takes section, but one of the takes that I had this week was that the phrase cross-chain transfer is going to move away from a L-1 to L-1, a Bitcoin to Ethereum or to Polygon or whatever, and it's instead going to be used as an Ethereum L2 to L2 transfer. This is what we are seeing with things like Kinext and Hot Protocol. When people start to talk about cross-chain, they're going to increasingly talk about Ethereum L2 transfers to other layer 2s.

Starting point is 00:50:31 And when you go from EVM chain to EVM chain, things are easier, especially when they are actually true roll-ups on Ethereum. There's a lot less complexity. There's a lot less risk. We saw Thor chain the L1 cross-chain transfer protocol. That got exploited multiple times in the last month. It's just very, very complicated. And there's this growing ecosystem of Ethereum L2s.

Starting point is 00:50:53 And I'm pretty sure, Anthony, you believe me, or you agree with me. when we kind of think that all this activity is kind of going to get sticky to these L2s and the world of cross-chain is just going to mean cross-l-2. Yeah, yeah, I believe so. You know, I mean, as I was saying before, like about the multi-chain kind of world and how I think that other things can exist and find their niches and stuff, I still believe that to be a reality. But I do think that a lot of stuff is going to accrue to L2 because it makes too much sense,

Starting point is 00:51:18 right? You have the security and decentralization of L1, and then you have inherit that at L2. And then with the cross-chain stuff, I mean, I think inherently the cross-chain stuff is always going to be more risky than anything because of the fact that it has to touch multiple points. There's always going to be like a point where there has to be maybe a trade-off between decentralization and centralization and some security trade-offs.

Starting point is 00:51:40 But I'm excited to see like all of them play out and all them to kind of like innovate here. And maybe we can get to a fully trustless cross-chain system eventually. That would be like the holy grail. Absolutely. Something that came across my feet earlier this week is Avey is exploring building. building on other, other chains, including Solana and Avalanche and, of course, other layer twos. This is a new direction coming out of Avey. It's not something that's foreign to the world of DFI and Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:52:07 We've seen plenty of teams build on, you know, any chain that they can get their hands on. But it seems to Avey's moving out on to other L1s. Anthony, any thoughts here? I'm not surprised. I think that it's more of a defensive measure than anything else where if they don't move Avae to their, someone will fork Aver and build it on these chains. reins, right? And then they'll lose the market share. The way I view these kind of things is that Ethereum is the headquarters, right? It's HQ. It's where everything, you know, major happens,

Starting point is 00:52:33 like governance and things like that. But then you want to have branches in other countries, right? So you basically have like an AVE branch on Solana, maybe an Avalanche and Ava branch on all the layers-oes, but all that value accrues to the Aver token that sits on Ethereum and to the treasury that would sit on Ethereum because that's the most secure place to be. And that is the headquarters. So we're going to see this in pretty much like all apps eventually. but just because they're deployed to one of these chains doesn't mean they're going to see the usage, right? Deploying is easy. Getting users is what's difficult.

Starting point is 00:53:03 So it's going to be interesting to see what users prefer. I'm betting on users preferring layer two and devs preferring layer two as well because they know that it's a more secure system to build upon. But we're going to see how this shakes out. Like it's still very early, right? We don't know how this is going to shake out. I obviously, and I mean you as well are betting on Ethereum being the thing at the middle. And I think Ethereum has already won that. but it's going to be interesting to see which other chains kind of like get traction.

Starting point is 00:53:29 Coming to a close on defy news stuff, Uniswap just became the first protocol to surpass a billion dollars in fees. Wow. A billion dollars in not trading volume in fees. Fees collected and paid out to liquidity providers. That is pretty cool. Lucas, who tweeted out this tweet and of course I agree with this as well. Congratulations to Hayden and the whole Uniswap team.

Starting point is 00:53:53 Yeah, yeah. I mean, just doing the head math, yeah, if the 0.05% fee rate was turned on for like the treasury or that's for the token holders, instead of it all going to LPs, this would have been like a lot of money. The hundreds of millions going to them. So yeah, I mean, it's still cool to see like that's a crap ton of money going on liquidity providers. And then last thing in the markets or the news section is Gemini makes an acquisition of Gesser a new prediction. market platform. And so we've seen the Gemini twins, the Winklefi acquire other things before. They acquired a nifty gateway from Fun Facts, another set of identical twins.

Starting point is 00:54:33 And then I asked them if they was, if Gesser was founded by another set of twins, but they didn't like that joke, or they didn't respond. One of the two. All right, guys, moving on into the world of NFT news, penguins are on the front page of the New York Times, which is absolutely crazy. I guess, disclaimer, I have a penguin.

Starting point is 00:54:51 I have a couple penguins. But the title of this, I thought was pretty interesting. And the title of this piece was called, I joined a penguin NFT club because apparently that's what we do now with the subtitle. Is this what the metaverse looks like? And bankless listeners, if you have listened to the episode with Luke Burgess, the power of memetic desire, the line, apparently that's what we do now,

Starting point is 00:55:17 stood out to me because it's so clearly shows the power of just like, oh other people are doing this, I guess I'm doing this. Like, oh, other people are putting penguins as their profile picture? I'm doing this as well. This apparently this is what we do now. And so, uh, this is kind of turned into what the story of Ethereum has been over the last two weeks or so is like this NFT profile picture avatar like games like started with Cryptopunks then moved on to board apes. These penguins have absolutely exploded on the scene. And now penguins are on the front page of the New York, or not the front page, but on the New York Times, which I think is is pretty crazy.

Starting point is 00:55:53 Yeah, yeah. I mean, this has been funny to watch play out. I'm copping shit because I don't own a penguin. And even though a lot of these penguins look like me because they have a hat that's similar to my hat and some of them have like a beard and things like that. And I guess like I'm just a no pengu right now. They're going like pengues or pengis or whatever. But I mean, yeah, it's been wild.

Starting point is 00:56:13 And, you know, I think this profile picture trend stems from the fact that a lot of people have been priced out of punks, right? Like punks, the floor is like $150,000 or whatever it is. and people want to be part of a community. So there's a lot of these projects spinning up. A lot of them are opportunistic money grabs or some of them are scams. But there are certain ones that pop up and people just resonate with them. Like the penguins are cute, right?

Starting point is 00:56:33 They're cute and wholesome. A lot of people kind of resonated with it, change their profile picture to it. And that's how these things kind of like come to life. And if you join their Discord channel, you'll see like the absolute madness that goes on in there. It's just meme heaven. Like there's so much like stuff going on in there. It's hilarious. But essentially, and then, you know, the price of admission right now,

Starting point is 00:56:50 I think the floor for the penguins is like 1.8Eth, so it's not cheap anymore. So as the price of admission goes up, I think people that get priced out, just go down that kind of like, I guess, that pyramid. And eventually you get to the base where like, you know, there's a project where everyone can enjoy. But then, you know, eventually it keeps going up. Like at the top of the pyramid, you have punks and then you have like board eight yop club. And then you have maybe like penguins.

Starting point is 00:57:11 And then as you go down, you kind of like have, it's like a status thing as well, where it's like, you know, you own a certain thing. You're part of a certain group. But this is, this is fun. to see play out. Like, I really like how much energy there is in the NFT space. Even though a lot of people are speculating on these things, I think a lot of people just feel like a very deep sense of community whenever they buy something.

Starting point is 00:57:30 Like, yes, you can right, click, save it, but like you're not part of the group, right? You're not part of the cool kids if you do that. You're only part of the group if you actually buy a pengu. And there's only 8888 penguins. So, you know, you could be a part of an exclusive club, but only 8,888 people can never be a part of. And even though the price of admission is quite high right now, it's probably worth it for a lot of people because they're like,

Starting point is 00:57:52 well, I can be part of the cool penguin club. No, that's exactly right. I'm part of the cool penguin club and I feel very, very cool. The other two things, two fascinating things I think that are about this is like, these whole NFT avatar games, they are literally games of just like, do we like the way these things look? And like, so the fundamentals on these penguins are like, they're really cute.

Starting point is 00:58:14 They're really cute little drawings. That's like the fundamentals behind this project. And then, of course, we also have the subtitle, is this what the Metaverse looks like? Metaverse, becoming a household name. We see the Facebook pushing the phrase the Metaverse. The Metaverse is a very frequent topic in the world of crypto. We have the bankless sub-newsletter coming out as the Metaverse, ran by the fabulous William Peaster. Metaverse, common household name, more and more and more these days. Moving on real quick here, something interesting in the world of crypto is going on at FTX, the big exchange out of Sam Bankman-Fried,

Starting point is 00:58:49 likes to slap its name across everything is sponsoring 137 AXE Infinity players from developing countries, which means that they are giving them the axes to go play the Axi game, which is where they get the revenue from, and FTX is sponsoring 137 of them. So that is pretty cool. Also in the world of NFT's draft kings launches an NFT marketplace with Tom Brady as the first drop. I tried to do a little bit of snooping and figure out what a blockchain that they had been deployed on. They have kept it a secret. There's murmurings of it being on Polygon, but that could be- It is Polygon. Is that what that is? I snooped around. Yeah, it is Polygon. Yeah, it is Polygon. All right, wow, that's actually, that's fantastic for Polygon. Congratulations

Starting point is 00:59:34 to Polygon. And also congratulations for drafting to getting into the world of NFTs, although not all NFTs are created equal. So we'll see how the more and more details behind this. Anthony, do you have any your thoughts on this announcement? I mean, I think it's pretty cool. And I think Polygon itself is definitely positioning themselves as a really nice NFT platform that obviously the POS chain is in a true layer too, but like, you know, Ethereum friendly and things like that. So it's just great to keep this kind of like in the Ethereum ecosystem and great to see. I guess like I didn't know what Drive Kings was because I think it's very big in the US. It's not big here in Australia and I'm not into sports. So I actually had to Google who Tom Brady was the other day. That's how not into sports I am. But essentially,

Starting point is 01:00:14 I mean, it's good to see that like the thesis playing out for NFTs where basically the thesis is that NFT has like a total adjustable market of like the entire world and all these different industries and they're coming. They're coming in waves. And as I was saying before, there's going to be a lot more over the next six to 12 months. Coming in at Bitcoin News, five North American mining firms reported that they earned 58% more Bitcoin in July thanks to China. Thanks to the big hash, hash, hashing migration out of China, the drop in hash rate, which makes Bitcoin miners everywhere across the world more profitable.

Starting point is 01:00:49 So a little bit of positive news, if you're into the belief that this is good for American regulation of Bitcoin and American Bitcoin infrastructure at large, Bitcoin miners, making a little bit more money, bringing some more Bitcoins onto American soil and away from China soil, which, again, I always think is bullish,

Starting point is 01:01:06 at least from a regulatory standpoint, makes people more friendly with Bitcoin. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is, this is obvious to see, like, obviously, there's China shut down. They're kind of like miners and hash rate. The ones located in other kind of like jurisdictions are going to get more profit from mining Bitcoin. So, yeah, makes sense to me. Moving into regulation, which was a massive topic this week.

Starting point is 01:01:28 This subject matter really kind of finished out on Monday and Tuesday of this week. We kind of had it. We were watching it live as I was writing up the Market Monday post on bank lists. If you also want to get yourself updated with what's going on in the world of regulation. But as we all know, we have this massive tax bill in America that was getting held up by the crypto industry, by cryptocurrency. The crypto industry was one of the, the reason as to why this massive, massive infrastructure bill got held up in Congress in the Senate. The title on the CNBC article says, lawmakers fought over crypto's place in the infrastructure bill. Here's what's next

Starting point is 01:02:05 for the industry. And then, if you were paying attention, we watched this Republican senator from Alabama blocked the amendment because he didn't get the money that he wanted for defense spending. He wanted something like $50 billion for defense spending. So he blocked the crypto amendment because he didn't get his amendment in, which frustrated basically everyone in the industry. And so where we stand now is that the Senate has voted 69 to 30 to pass the infrastructure bill with the original crypto provisions, right? So this is where everyone becomes a broker.

Starting point is 01:02:41 This was more or less actually the worst case scenario. This is what no one wanted. But like the thing is, it's such a bad scenario that no one is taking it seriously. It's like it went all the way around the world, right? Like it is so bad that it's so backwards that it's actually like good for some reason. And that's kind of my take on that. And finishing up the conversation, we were as an industry trying to figure out who is going after crypto, who is really trying to come.

Starting point is 01:03:11 come after crypto and impose all these burdensome regulations on it, turns out it's the White House and Janet Yellen, who was a previous Fed chair. And I think that is particularly interesting. Janet Yellen, the Treasury Chair Secretary to the Biden administration, is apparently the one that has been lobbying the Senate and lobbying Congress to get this really, really burdensome regulation on our industry, especially Defi. And, and then, Anthony, I'm going to give you the floor. The thing that I thought was particularly interesting is during this whole week of drama and so many different amendments getting proposed, we had this amendment get proposed that specifically protected the proof of work industry and the mining industry. And so the Bitcoin community was overjoyed because not only were they protected,

Starting point is 01:03:57 but everyone else was not protected. And my take on this, and I want to get your take on my take, Anthony, is that the fact that the regulator, were okay with Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin getting carved out, but not defy and not Ethereum, tells you exactly where their priorities are and tells you exactly where they think the threat is. Bitcoin getting carved out was not bullish for Bitcoin. It's because they don't feel like it was a threat. So that is what happened in the last week of regulation and also my take on it. Anthony, any thoughts or anything I missed?

Starting point is 01:04:32 No, no, you summarized it really well. I think if we're just like cutting out all the bullshit, this is an attack on D5. straight up, like the Treasury being involved tells me that, you know, more than anything. It's unfortunate to see what happened here, but I agree with you that this kind of like legislation was so bad and so shitty and so unenforceable that the market was just like, we don't give a shit about this. This is a joke. Like, this is not going to lead to anything.

Starting point is 01:04:57 And we can still, you know, we can still fight this in the house, in the US and then in the courts if it gets to that, because this doesn't go into law until 2023. So I think just generally people are like both optimistic. that we're going to be able to get this crap out of there, but also at the same time being like, well, you know, this is what we're fighting up against. This is the war that we have to have. We shot first at the end of the day. Like we definitely, you know, kick the hornets nest. But now crypto is, you know, crypto was the sole thing holding up this massive infrastructure built for the US. Like crypto is kind of like in the big leagues now. We have, we have made ourselves

Starting point is 01:05:30 known. We have said very, very loudly, we are here and we are not to be not to be screwed with. because a lot of these senators would have learned about crypto this week. A lot of them would have learned how many of their constituents, how many people as part of like their jurisdictions, actually care about this. And this could be like a single issue, a voter type thing for a lot of them. So they're going to start, I think, you know, learning more about it,

Starting point is 01:05:52 seeing who cares about it, seeing what they can do to help it. And, you know, we do have some people in the Senate that actually are on our side. You know, people will be cynical and say, well, they're not on our side. They're on their side. It's like, doesn't matter. If they're on their side and aligns with our side, then they're on our side. That's how I view it. So yeah, I mean, I just think that really this was a nothing burger for now.

Starting point is 01:06:11 But I do think if this does go into law, it's going to be very bad for the U.S. long term because a lot of companies will leave the U.S. because they'll be like, well, I can't operate here anymore. But crypto is going to change the world. So I'm moving to this other country. Goodbye all the economic benefit. Goodbye all the taxes that you get from these companies in the U.S. And you basically just push away a massive, massive industry. Yeah, that is the takeaway that I've heard so many people give is it was a,

Starting point is 01:06:35 massive surprise as how energetic crypto came to defend itself. And it showed up in force. It showed up with phone calls, emails, and tweets. Apparently, tweeting at your senator is a really powerful thing to do because when you call your senator's office, you're not getting to the senator. But when you at your senator, that's going to their phone. That's going to their Twitter messages. And so they know what's up with that. One last take on this came from Jake Chivinsky, who we are actually having on the bank list state of the nation next Tuesday. And so we are going to ask them all of these questions and more. But DC investor, of course, friend of the pod, says,

Starting point is 01:07:12 Fun fact, I have a master's in public policy and spent years working around the government. I know how the sausage is made. All of this probably jammed in by random staffers who were probably heavily lobbied by various industries. It is what it is. All we can do is express our opinion with money and words. But then Jake Chavinsky, who's very, very close to this whole thing, says, this isn't what I hear. Word is, is that it came from Treasury.

Starting point is 01:07:35 They don't like what we're building, and they're using the infrastructure bill as a strategic cover to get a jurisdiction over non-custodial market actors, which they wanted to, but failed to get with a previous FinCin proposal, the whole minution regulatory fund during the transition. So it's interesting to see this, like, surgical, targeted attack on defy, just like what you said. And it's also interesting to see the absolute strength of the crypto community come and put their foot down and say, no. This story is going to continue to be unfold. It's going to continue to unfold. All right. Also in the world of regulation, Brian Brooks steps down from Binance U.S. as the role of CEO. Brian Brooks, also a former regulator from the CFTC, steps down as CEO from Binance U.S.,

Starting point is 01:08:24 which raised a lot of eyebrows because he had only been there for a few months. And as we all know, on the bankless program, we've been calling it the bankless, or excuse me, the finance squeeze. Binance is getting squeezed more and more and more by regulators. And now their CEO has stepped down after just a few months. And so the Binance Squeeze Titans. Anthony, any thoughts here? I think Brian says the writing on the wall that Binance is going to continue to suffer this squeeze, as you call it.

Starting point is 01:08:51 I mean, they have been suffering from it. I think centralized exchanges in general are going to keep getting squeezed, especially those that don't follow the regulations that are in place. And I mean, you've already seen this play out like with Binance. lowering leverage requirement, leverage, max leverage to 20x, banning leverage in certain countries, pulling out of other countries. And yeah,

Starting point is 01:09:10 this is just going to continue. And I think Brian really did see the writing on the wall. And you can see he's had a colored history within crypto, you know, former CEO of finance US, former chief legal officer at Coinbase as well. But he was also working in government

Starting point is 01:09:21 as the acting controller of the currency, which is a pretty big position too. So, yeah, I think he's just getting out while he can. He doesn't want to be involved in the regulatory kind of like mess that's coming towards what's finance and continuing to come towards it. Last thing in the regulatory

Starting point is 01:09:38 section, Circle intends to become a full reserve national commercial bank. So a big upgrade from Circle to become a national bank. Interestingly, as we all know, the banks in the US operate on a fractional reserve basis, a 10 to one basis. But that is not Circle's products. So Circle wants to become a fully collateralized one-to-one bank. And there are probably some, more details need to come out there as to what this really means. Can I just make an account with Circle? Can I finally break up with Wells Fargo and just join Circle? I mean, I'll trade bank to bank, but I think I like that one a little bit more. Anthony, any thoughts here? Yeah, if I have to use a bank, I would rather use one that at least had crypto features embedded into it and was like

Starting point is 01:10:21 crypto-native and friendly. So I mean, obviously Circle's not going to be coming to Australia anytime soon, but, you know, I think that if you have to use a bank, I would go with this. But obviously, like, we all want to be as bankless as possible. But we, We can't be for certain activities. Like, unfortunately, I have to use a bank account for certain things. We all do. Like buying figurines, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:41 Yeah, like buying figurines. But, yeah, no, I think this is quite positive to see. I think this is going to bring in a lot more people into crypto as well. Because at the end of the day, a lot of people don't want to manage their own funds. And that's fine. They can, you know, use a third party. But this third party is still going to be using our beautiful defy rails, which I think is great. And then, of course, last thing in news, just, I,

Starting point is 01:11:03 feel like it's worth a mention, but it is the one-year anniversary week of yams. I think we all remember where we were when yams happened. As we all know, comp kicked off liquidity mining and yield farming, but it was yams that kicked off the whole food coin mania and to really tell people that you could actually compose some brand new community using other communities and a bunch of yield farming and really just left a very significant mark on at defy to this day. Anthony, any Any thoughts on the one year anniversary of Yams? Yeah, I mean, I remember the day Yam went live. I woke up after I had gone live.

Starting point is 01:11:40 I came to my computer. I was like, what the hell is happening? Like, I went on Twitter. I'm like, oh, my God. The next 16 hours of that day felt like less than 10 minutes. I didn't really do anything. It was absolutely. No, it was absolute insanity.

Starting point is 01:11:53 It felt like I was playing World of Warcraft again back in like my teenage years where I just didn't move the whole day, did nothing else, except sit in front of my computer. But yeah, like it was crazy. And as you say, they kicked off the food fork mania, kicked off everything and just absolute in mayhem. And I think it's a special kind of like moment that a lot of us will hold in our hearts. And a little bit of Robert Lishner there with the with the yam.

Starting point is 01:12:17 That's funny. That is funny. I did not see this earlier. But yeah, like just like you said, here's Robert Leshner apparently farming some yams. All right, guys, make sure you don't go anywhere because we are going into the ecosystem takes afterwards and of course finishing off with. the meme of the week. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer

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Starting point is 01:13:21 credit card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to be. going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com slash go bankless. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version two has a ton of cool features that makes using

Starting point is 01:14:04 the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here you can see me borrowing 200 U.S. DC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on un-swap,

Starting point is 01:14:48 and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVE, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Avey at Avey. That's aavee.com. All right, Anthony, I got some takes for us to talk about. And of course, the first one starts off with your good friend, Eric Connor, who says, We all need to realize that this is going to be commonplace for crypto and defy over the next 20 years when it comes to regulation. It's the hot new thing to be regulated like banks in 2009.

Starting point is 01:15:18 We need to coordinate properly, but not overreact every single time. It's not the end of crypto. And I think Eric is really just saying, hey, like, we're here. We've arrived. we've arrived into the era of crypto regulation. This first bill is an absolute mess, but it's the first one. So that makes sense that it's kind of a mess and get used to it because we're going to see more crypto regulation moving forward into the future.

Starting point is 01:15:40 Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with Eric. This is literally just the first thing we're seeing of this. And we definitely should all be prepared and expect this because, as I said, we shot first. We are poised. This whole industry is poised to interrupt very, very deeply embedded institutions in the world. And they're not just going to sit by and take it.

Starting point is 01:15:57 They're going to fight back. Some of them will join us. Some of them will be our enemy. And we'll just have to fight. Absolutely. A take from Suu, who writes a tweet as to why he bought punks and other NFTs. He says, we bought punks and NFTs because they are undeniably a part of the broader story of digital scarcity, meme economy, collective capitalism, metaverse, and mind-body dissociation.

Starting point is 01:16:21 Anthony, I'm going to let you give your take on this take first. Yeah, no, no. I totally agree with him. here. If you really think about it, like, how, how much time do we all spend in front of our screens as part of, like, this metaverse digital kind of like world? We spend most of our days in that. So, you know, why not kind of, I guess, like, embrace that? And then by, and the way you embrace that is by being part of like the NFT ecosystem, being part of the metaverse, you know, instead of buying physical kind of like products, you buy digital ones, or if you're like me,

Starting point is 01:16:51 you do both, you know, buy figurines and buy, you know, digital NFTs and stuff like that. But he's right. I mean, yeah, Sue's definitely on the money here with what he's saying about digital scarcity in the meme economy. Like if you just see what's been happening over the last kind of like, you know, decade or so with the rise of social media on the internet, it really is all about memes and, and kind of like the metaverse and mind body disassociation. But what crypto brings to it is that digital scarcity, that collective capitalism and things like the metaverse, which supercharges everything that we've been building up to, you know, over the last decade or so. The only thing I have to add is it's totally on brand.

Starting point is 01:17:27 for Suzu to finish up this whole justification of to why he bought NFTs with mind-body dissociation, which is like very on brand for it's like a little bit Chad, a little bit crazy and definitely going to like trigger people's fomo and imaginations. But also it's mainly just crazy. Uh-huh. Yep. Yep. All right. This one, this next one comes from me and I think it's pretty simple. And I just go ahead and say that imagine thinking that trading JPEGs isn't product market fit. like it's such a simple activity I have this picture you have that picture

Starting point is 01:18:00 hey do you want to trade them like you don't have to think about it much more than that we all traded Pokemon cards when we were young like we did it we didn't question it then somebody could print off and print make their own picture make their own Pokemon card but it wasn't the same and so I think trading pictures

Starting point is 01:18:16 is going to be just a thing that society does now I mean we've been trading pictures for hundreds of years right like whenever you show a picture someone or give a picture to someone like, I mean, technically, you know, you're not really trading it, but you're like trading the idea behind it. You're showing off like kind of, you know, your picture to people. And we do this online all the time. Everyone shares memes with each other. It's like, hey, look at this meme. Hey, look at my meme. Now we're just kind of like

Starting point is 01:18:39 stepping it up and kind of like bringing money into the mix where we're like, hey, I own this me. Hey, I own this collectible. And I can prove it to you that I own it. And, you know, digital kind of like collectibles isn't something new. It's been part of, I guess, like video games for a long time. But what's new is the openness, the metaverse nature of it, the kind of like collective capitalism, as Sue calls it. So yeah, I mean, there is so much product market fit there. It is even funny. Another one from Eric Connor, which I think puts things very, very well into perspective. Fun fact, we didn't cover in markets this week, but gold took a 10% dip this week, which is a very large dip for gold. No one really expects that level of volatility to come out of gold.

Starting point is 01:19:19 And so Eric Connor retweets this news and says, no, you can't buy JPEC. and then, you know, in quotes, proceeds to trade rocks. It's very sobering reminder that gold is just a goddamn rock. It's just a rock. And so, like, people thinking that is weird to trade JPEGs on the internet, like we still have people trading rocks and it's one of the most financialized instruments in the world. Yeah, no, I think so. And I think, I don't know, like, I'm super bearish on gold.

Starting point is 01:19:47 I think over time we're just going to see more and more gold of gold's value transferring to digital assets. And I think that, yeah, people complaining that you can't trade, you know, JPEGs, but are trading rocks. Well, yeah, I mean, that's just like the irony there is delicious. And then the last take that we have comes from Andrew Yang, who says, cryptocurrency is one path to universal basic income. As bankless listeners, when I'm a big fan of Andrew Yang. I've been trying to get him on the podcast. And he thinks that there is an alignment between cryptocurrency and UBI.

Starting point is 01:20:21 Fun fact, he actually tweeted this out after a couple days after I had a listener of the show, send him a little note to Andrew Yang saying, hey, Andrew Yang, please come on the podcast. I believe that your movement that you're trying to inspire is actually done better on Crypto Rails. Maybe that was a coincidence or maybe he read that letter. I don't know, but Andrew Yang, come on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, UBI has been something that's been talked about within crypto for a long time now. There are a few projects out there trying to do this. And I mean, I think he's right that it's one part.

Starting point is 01:20:51 universal basic income, but if we build it on crypto rails, we can get it into the hands of people much faster than anything else. So, I mean, I hope that he comes on bankless. I'd love to listen to him on bankless. Like, yes, you know, not everyone would agree with a lot of these policies or stuff like that, but I think just listening to what he has to say is a very smart guy, you know, would be worth a while. So yeah, Andrew, I mean, I don't know if you're watching the roll up, but if you are, go on the bankless podcast. Andrew's brand is not left, not right, but forward. And that is the brand that I can get behind and he can talk plenty about non-political things, which means the content can be non-political. All right, Anthony, before we get to the meme of the week, which there are actually two of,

Starting point is 01:21:30 so stay tuned for that. Usually this is where I ask Ryan what he's excited about, but you're here instead. So Anthony, what are you excited about? So I might give like a bit of a boring answer, but I am like very, very excited about what's happening in the NFT space outside of the profile picture mania. There is a lot of innovation going on. There are a lot of people doing a lot of interesting things. Something that I saw come out the other day was paperclip Dow, where it's this kind of like Dow with the initiative to essentially trade their way up from like a very, you know, kind of like a valueless kind of NFT to something worth like a lot, maybe a crypto punk or something like that.

Starting point is 01:22:04 And this is basically based on the story. And I don't know if this story is true, but it's a story that a guy was able to trade a paperclip, you know, for various items all the way up to a house. So he started with a paperclip, traded his way up to a house. And that's what Paperclip Dow is trying to do. So there's a lot with kind of like NFTs. So there's a lot of innovation happening in this space outside of the profile picture mania. And that's what I'm most excited about seeing is like people using NFTs for more than just like trading like, you know, I think trading JPEG is a big use case. But if you're just doing that and that's all, I think you're limiting the potential of of that technology.

Starting point is 01:22:37 Absolutely. This is where you ask me what I'm excited about. Okay. What are you excited about, David? Well, I'm excited about specifically the NFT avatar movement. The thing that you were talking about, you weren't excited about. No, maybe I'm putting on the bull market goggles, but like the NFT avatar movement is such a simple thing to understand. And like also to some degree people are going to like, oh, cool, cute penguins, I'll put that as an as my avatar too.

Starting point is 01:23:04 Oh, wait, like it costs $6,000. They're going to run into that, that whole like, but I can still put it as my profile. But at some point in time, some NFT avatar thing is coming for you. in the sense that like maybe crypto punks weren't your thing maybe penguins weren't your thing maybe bored apes weren't your thing but there's going to be something there's going to be something that is relevant to you and uh when i the when i fomode into my crypto punk uh it happened right after people pleaser had her um digital artwork featured in fortune and she had all these cameos all these like easter eggs to all these like crypto native people like and it was you know

Starting point is 01:23:43 Santiago Santos, but it wasn't his picture. It was his crypto punk, right? It wasn't Tetranode. It wasn't his picture, because we don't know what Tetranode looks like. It was his, like, digital representation. And so if you want a place in the Metaverse, if you want a digital representation, you need a picture that is you that isn't you. And I think that as the Metaverse grows, this whole NFT avatar movement is also going to

Starting point is 01:24:08 grow and grow and grow. And that is what gets me really, very excited. Also, Penguins are cute. Yeah, I mean, I agree through, even though I said that I'd like seeing more innovation. Not to say that I'm not excited about this kind of like avatar or profile picture movement. I think that there's definitely a lot of value there and it gives people a sense of community as well. All right, Anthony, are you ready to get into the meme of the week? Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:24:30 I think I know which one it is. Are you sure? Because I actually have two of them and I'm not sure you know which one I'm about to show up first. All right, here comes the first one. Okay, I don't know the first one. This one's made by, I'm pretty sure Michael Wong, but I could be wrong. It's the is this blank meme for those on the podcast. It's the guy looking at the,

Starting point is 01:24:47 looking at the butterfly. And always there's this caption, is this something that it's completely not? And that they quote for this particular meme is, is this a broker? Is this a broker? Yeah, I mean, under the new law, like pretty much everyone's a broker.

Starting point is 01:25:02 So, like my dog's a broker. You know, sorry, sorry, mate, you're heavily regulated now. You're going to have to go to jail for brokerage services. Like, yeah, I mean, this meme is pretty funny and encapsulates that well. All right. And here is, of course, the meme that I think that you thought was coming. And it totally is.

Starting point is 01:25:20 Here it is. Anthony, you want to talk about this meme? This is a very, very good meme, David. Like, I have to applaud you on this one, my friend. This meme, like, for those just listening in is basically the Grim Reaper going door to door and, like, killing who's in the room. You know, first we start off with the narrative that Ethereum, will never work. Well, that's dead now. Obviously, Ethereum works. The beacon chain will never launch,

Starting point is 01:25:43 well, dead again. 1559 will never ship. Dead. And there you have two doors that are still remain to be opened. The merge will never happen and ETH will never flip BTC. Now, you have these in the wrong order, I think. Oh, spicy. Wow. I actually think the hype from the merge, like when we actually get a date will be so grand that we might actually see Eith flip BTC before the merge happens. So it's going to be interesting to see if you have these doors around the wrong way, which I think you might just. The thing about that claim, Anthony, is that's a very precise claim. That is going to, like, we're going to figure that out in like the next like three months or so. You think that ether will flip in Bitcoin in like three months, give or take?

Starting point is 01:26:26 Not in three, maybe not in three months because I still. Well, we'll have to start the process by then. I think the process started a year ago. But I think that the merge, I mean, the soft, the soft range is Q1, 2022. It could go to Q2. I don't know. But I think at least within the next 12 months, like at most, there will be the merge happening. But the thing is, is that that's a lot, long time.

Starting point is 01:26:53 Like, ETH is only, I mean, it's a bit more than 2x away. I think like 2.3x away from flipping Bitcoin. And like the momentum is there. Like, it's really, really there. if we break that seasonality in Q3, Q4, I mean, I'm pretty much like very confident, like 99% confident that we will see E-flip BTC before the merge happens if, you know, a few different things go right. But the momentum is there.

Starting point is 01:27:18 I just, it's undeniable. And I think that the narrative is there. The merge, you know, as we get closer to it, more and more people will learn about the fact that we're about to cut issuance by 90%. Do three Bitcoin harvenings, 12 years worth of Bitcoin harbonyings in one foul swoop. Like literally block to block, one block we have proof of work, the next block we have proof of stake, then 90% issuance reduction, bye-bye, you know, all the kind of like issuance and hello deflationary Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:27:44 It's just too much. Maybe I'm too in the weeds here, but like I'm going to keep talking about this for a long time. And I hope a lot of people, you know, read my tweets and see just what's coming because, I mean, a lot of people, this is maybe a bankless exclusive. I've never said this before. But one of my top missions of being involved with Ethereum is to help it flip Bitcoin. because I don't think Bitcoin deserves to be number one. I believe Ethereum deserves to be number one.

Starting point is 01:28:07 So that has been my mission for a very long time. So I'm obviously very bullish on the flippinging. Well, bankless listeners will probably tune into the fact that Ryan and I definitely lean to the Ethereum side of things. But we do try and keep some sort of balance on the bankless show. But not today. Not today at all. Well, I mean, me saying that Bitcoin doesn't deserve to be number one doesn't mean that I don't get the value of Bitcoin. I just think that Ethereum offers much more value.

Starting point is 01:28:33 than Bitcoin does. So that's kind of like my view on it. And I've been saying on the roll-ups that, you know, when we ever we talk about the ETH-BTC ratio, I say like, oh, we are at historically high levels and we have been sustaining these high levels. And if we're not going to dump on the ETH-BTC ratio, then maybe we're just going to like hang out here and then go up even more. I don't even know. We'll see. I'm actually very, very cautious about that because the seasonality is very strong. So I don't want to be quoted in. six months time when the Bitcoin ratio has gone down saying that I don't think it's going to go down.

Starting point is 01:29:07 But definitely you can quote me on the flippening like any day. I don't care. Like I've been saying that for ages. I'm, I am on the flipping boat 100%. Anthony, thank you so much for helping me go through the news of the week. And Anthony, you do this every single day, every single weekday, at least on your YouTube channel, The Daily Gway. You want to give that a quick plug and tell people what people talk about or what you talk about on the show? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you said, I do the same thing we've done, I guess, like every weekday, just covering the last 24 hours worth of Ethereum and Crypto News. So yeah, people can go check that at the Daily Way YouTube channel. And I also put out a daily newsletter covering the biggest thing, one of the

Starting point is 01:29:46 biggest things happening in the Ethereum ecosystem as well. You can find them both. If you just Google the Daily Way, you'll be able to find them. And we will have those in the show notes as well. That is where I get a lot of my information every single day as a trusted source for all of Ethereum, DFI, all this good stuff. And really good. analysis from someone who has been in the community for longer than I have. So Anthony, thank you for all you do at the Daily Way. Yeah, thanks for the kind of words and thanks having me on the roll up again. Hopefully Ryan will stop slacking so I won't have to fill in for him anymore, but no, no, no, I enjoy this. And Ryan deserves a break. I mean, I, you know, I saw on the

Starting point is 01:30:21 Twitter the other day. He actually has a lower body, which surprised me a little bit. But, you know, I was so surprised. I didn't know who let him out of the house. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Yeah, we're going to have to add that link to the show notes as well so listeners can know what we are talking about. All right, everyone, thank you for tuning into this Friday edition of the Bankless Weekly Rollup. As we all know, ETH is risky, crypto is risky, Defi is risky. You can lose what you put in. We are headed west.

Starting point is 01:30:50 We're on the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop. your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis,

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Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum Burning | Penguin & Axie NFTs | Poly Network Hack | Infrastructure Bill (August 13)

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