Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum Merge Breakdown | Starbucks Polygon | Solana NFTs | Do Kwon Arrest | Binance zkRollups

Starting point is 00:00:09 Bankless Nation, it is the merge Friday of September. David, what time is it? Merge o'clock? I don't know. Ryan, it's time for the Friday Bankless Weekly Rollup where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. Because it's Merge Week this week, we are merged. No longer future tense, now past tense.

Starting point is 00:00:31 And so grab your coffee because that is what we are going to be covering the merge and so many more things that happened in the last seven days. But mostly the merge, though. Mostly the merch. Yeah, we're going to talk about that a lot. Last week was the last weekly roll-up on proof of work. This week is the first weekly roll-up completely on proof of steak.

Starting point is 00:00:50 This podcast did not consume any energy in the production of this podcast. I'm not sure, that's totally true. But Ethereum node is now consuming less energy than this podcast takes to create, yes. Wow. Yeah. That's a fun fact.

Starting point is 00:01:05 How are you feeling, man? Because so I got some naps in between. Like I woke up for the merge, middle of the night for me. By the way, it happened at the worst possible time for East Coasters. I was upset. I put out a tweet yesterday. I said, hey, can we delay the merge for a more like reasonable hour? Well, and you don't get to decide unless you're a minor, basically, right?

Starting point is 00:01:27 That's the only power to decide. But, I mean, it was looking pretty good the last few weeks. It was, you know, 8 a.m. in the morning, something like this, East Coast time. That would have been perfect. Yeah. As it happened. It got up to 11 p.m. East Coast time, which was going to be great.

Starting point is 00:01:42 When was the exact time? I can't remember. I woke up at like 120 or 130 or something in the morning, East my time. And it happened between that and like 2.30, I believe. I think it was like 230 to 245 in the morning. Yeah. 230 to 240 in the morning. But, I mean, there was a lot of energy on that call.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Even for like folks in the U.S. who are East Coast time. And of course, the call was attended by everyone from our around the world. What a surreal experience this was to witness. And how many people were on the call itself, David? Attending the call, like in the actual Zoom, it was something like 40 to 50 people. We had a peak of people watching of almost 50,000. But by the time I woke up in the morning, it was over a quarter million. That's absolutely incredible. The biggest event in crypto, we'll talk about that. A few other things we're going to cover inflation. That was the news in

Starting point is 00:02:31 macro markets. But is it really that bad? The SMP stock seemed to think it is. is we talk about what we think. Also, a crypto founder has been issued an arrest warrant that happened this week as well. We're going to tell you which one in the roll-up. Can you guess? There are a few you can be thinking about right there. But as always, make sure if you enjoy the weekly roll-ups that you like this, wherever you are listening, subscribe, of course, on the podcast or YouTube. And if you're listening to the podcast, write us a review, rate the episode. That's how we get up to the top of the charts. David, before we get to the markets,

Starting point is 00:03:09 there's an announcement from our friends and sponsors at Swell Network. This is a new ETH staking opportunity. It comes at a good time. Of course, you and I, David, we like the Swell team so much. We also became angel investors. But what is the Swell Network? What are they doing? Swell Network is joining the ranks of Rocket Pool and Lido

Starting point is 00:03:29 as a decentralized, permissionless staking as a service system. And Swell is really going after the best of both worlds from both Rocket Pool and Lido. It's got the permissioned validator set like Lido that helps it scale, but it's also got the permission list validator pool so anyone can join the network and validate. And so this is a brand new staking as a service network coming out of the ground just in time for the post-merge world. So there's a link in the show notes. So you can go and join the Swell network Discord and get in on the ground floor of a brand-new

Starting point is 00:04:02 staking as a service system. Really excited. And like Ryan said, and also full disclaimer, both Ryan and I are angel investors into Swell. And they are also a sponsor of this message. All right, David, let's get in the markets this week, starting with Daddy Bitcoin, up or down on the week, David. Yeah, Bitcoin actually made it up on the week. So it is up 2.5% from $19,300 to $19,850. So a modest 2.5% bump on the week. that's actually really impressive given the week that was, I mean, down in stocks and I think down in ETH price as of now, as of recording, things were pretty flat post-merged. There was no, there's really no volatility, neither up nor down after a successful merge. Until we said it.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Until we said that. So we did a post-merge recap, and I think the ETH Bulls were all commenting on the lack of volatility in this market. And then what's this? Big red candle. What price are we at this week right now? We started the week at 1650. We are down 8.7%. And you see these two big red candles. That one in the middle of the week is the macro red candle where the inflation numbers came out. And so we tanked from like 1750 down to about 1,500.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Then we reclimed right into the merge up to 1650. But then right as we started recording this, we go all the way down to $1,500. So we are overall ethers down 8.5% on the week. Like, oof. I really, by the time this episode is released, I really have no idea. No idea. Like, this could recover, the candle could reverse. We could be down further.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Who knows? I mean, sometimes, I just wonder if we tend to overanalyze things. This could just be market noise, traders playing trader games. People unwinding in ETH POW trade. Who the hell knows? Yeah, exactly. We'll look at this, you know, on the month type basis. And that'll be a clear indication.

Starting point is 00:05:54 Although, I will say, ETH BTC ratio, it was. doing well last week in favor of ETH. Now it is back down. So Bitcoin has very strong recovery on the ratio. What's that looking like this week? We really ended last week at like the top tick of the recent ETH-BTC ratio move. So we ended last week at 0.085. We are currently down to 0.075.0.7.000. And so but we're bouncing between 0.075.085. So down 10% on the week. So bad week, but we will see as this thing goes into the future. Yeah, what's interesting about the ratio is it's probably for you. I would consider you now, David, you've come out as a ratio bull, a big ratio ball. I'm mainly long the ratio, yes. Okay. And when you say long, you're talking about

Starting point is 00:06:43 multi-year time horizon. I've heard you talk about like five years. So like my time horizon for Heath is like five to ten years at minimum, at least, right? Actually, for me, similar to Bitcoin, I think you have a similarly long time horizon for the ETH Bitcoin ratio. At what point, like, do you think the thesis will have, you know, completed, played out? Yeah, like minimum something like 18 months. And I'm really going for my price target is what I'm calling the lappening or the lapping. So, like, you know, we have the flippening where ether flips Bitcoin, but I'm planning on unwinding this ETH BTZ position at like the lappening where their ether is like two times

Starting point is 00:07:23 the Bitcoin price. or two times the Bitcoin market cap. No clue in that take, when that's going to happen, but it's going to be a multi-year-long endeavor, of course. But the whole argument is that minor cell pressure is fundamentally bearish, and proof-of-stake hoddle pressure is fundamentally bullish. So time, like Hal Pressed set on our show,

Starting point is 00:07:43 time is on ether's side. Time is a tailwind for ether and a headwin for Bitcoin. And so, like, while these short-term moves, like always just make no sense, over the long term, the cell pressure into proof of work is a headwind that Bitcoin has to fight against, that ether doesn't have to fight against. What's really interesting about that is, do you remember the episode we did with Arthur Hayes, right?

Starting point is 00:08:05 And like the concept we kind of coined, I don't know if this is a concept anyone else uses, but like Arthur to us was a thesis-driven trader. This to me, David, feels like you're being a thesis-driven trader here. Yes. And that, like, this is a trade, definitely. This is a trade, yeah. So it's something I have to sell. I have to press the sell button eventually if I want to give my ETH back.

Starting point is 00:08:24 Yeah. Exactly. So David's playing a trade here, but it's not a kind of a narrative trade. It's not a short-term, like trade or some other sort of trade. It's like a trade that you think is backed by some fundamentals. And that fundamental is all about flows into and out of the asset class. Well, let's talk about flows into the global cryptocurrency market cap, David. I think you mean out of, Brian?

Starting point is 00:08:48 Oh, uh-oh. Are we down on the week? Yeah, we're down on the week. Start of the week at 1.28 trillion. We are down to 1.009 trillion. So lost a few Billy on the week. A few billion on the week. But that was up last week, maybe artificially so, with Bitcoin kind of lagging as non-Bitcoin coins emerged. David, the last week, we have been talking about the ETH merge date. The last thing we will show here is question of, have the ETH merged yet? And the answer to that question, is, have the ETH merged yet? And the answer to that question, Is? Yes. Yes, it has. Binary yes or no? The answer is yes. There's a website. There's a website you can go to. If you want to confirm that and check that. Has eithmerged? In big letters, the answer to that question is yes. We've successfully merged. We'll get into that a little bit more further in the episode. But David, before we do, we should talk about macro right here. I think the question in macro markets is inflation is up. That sounds pretty

Starting point is 00:09:50 bad, stocks tumbled on the week. Here's the CNBC headline. Dow tumbles 1,200 points for the worst day since June 2020 after hot inflation report. June 2020, of course, was a day. I'm sure that was in the thick of the COVID scare. So we're having a similar day here after a hot inflation report. Let me just recap the numbers from that inflation report. So let's go back to June. So annualized inflation in June, the numbers, the official numbers, 9.1%. And if you recall, that was the highest since 1981. We had a 40-year high. So no question in anyone's mind that inflation was running hot in June in the previous 12 months preceding it.

Starting point is 00:10:35 July, 8.5% down a little bit, but still up. Too close for comfort to the double-digit territory. August, the numbers we just got last week, the reason for this market tumble, 8.3%. So you'd think that that's down from July, David, on an annualized basis, but apparently it was still larger than the market was anticipating. The average analyst expectation for inflation was 8.1%. And this came in at 8.3%. So 200 basis points over on inflation. 0.2% over expectations. And that sent the market tumbling? that is apparently what people are crediting for the reason the market is tumbling.

Starting point is 00:11:22 So this is the headline from CNBC. 0.2% over expectation inflation sent the market tumbling that hard. This is what mainstream financial media is reporting that's a hot inflation report. But I do think, David, we have to dig into these numbers a little bit further, right? Because, so first of all, let me just say 8.3% still sounds really high. Like, don't we want to be in the 4%? Ideally, the 2% area, like 2 to 4, maybe that's somewhat of the new normal. But you actually can't look at this from a 12-month annualized basis because the 12-month

Starting point is 00:11:58 is really a lagging indicator. Here's a tweet from Tom Schmidt. Do you want to read this out? Tell us what this means. Yeah, Tom says, not to be that guy again, but CPI is actually dropping month over month. I really do think that year-over-year is a very confusing way to report inflation, especially with the spikes and volatility we've had over the past two years. And there's a chart here showing inflation going up and up and up and up until June. And then it hits like, well,

Starting point is 00:12:25 this looks like a ceiling. And we've been going very marginally down ever since. But the fact that we're not going up seems to be a decent trend over the last three months, according to this chart, which is coming out of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So this is Tom's large point, larger point, which is you can't really look at annualized numbers when we're dealing with this level of inflation volatility because of all of the craziness that we've seen with COVID and economic sanctions and wars and all of these things. These are sort of unprecedented times, and it doesn't make sense to look at 12 months in total. What we should maybe also be looking at is the monthly total. And inflation in August, just the month of August, not the last 12 months of August in preceding it,

Starting point is 00:13:12 In August, it was 0.1%. And if you annualize that out, multiply that number by 12 months, right, to get the new annualized number, you get 1.2%. That's a lot. Just to pit those again into perspective. So August prices of assets or whatever, consumables that we measure inflation with, is up 8.3% year over year. but in the last month at prices of like food, gas is only up 0.1%, which is not high,

Starting point is 00:13:48 which is actually low. And so I think the big question is if inflation has peaked, what happens if the Fed over-adjusts too far? You know, it's like it's kind of like you're steering a car, it's starting to wobble, you turn to avoid something, and then you swipe back too far,

Starting point is 00:14:07 you over-correct, in the opposite direction. And now you're in another lane of traffic, right? That lane of traffic might actually be deflationary forces. Okay, this is a tweet from Elon Musk saying a major Fed rate hike risks deflation. That's what he's talking about if the Fed overcorrects too much in the other direction. And I think the market is really tussling with this right now. And I mean, so are the central bankers, of course.

Starting point is 00:14:32 And it's not very clear that they know what they're doing behind the steering wheel. at this point. And I guess there's precedent for this because the whole reason why we have inflation in the first place is because the Fed was too slow to increase interest rates in the first place. So it would go, it would continue to say that like, well, the Fed's also going to be too slow to stop tightening as well. Like, I feel like that's an easy Occam's razor take to have. It definitely is. They just might not be prepared for the whiplash of the times that we're living in. And Ryan, that's perhaps why we should have. an algorithmically controlled monetary system and not a human controlled monetary system.

Starting point is 00:15:13 Speaking of algorithmically controlled monetary system, Ryan, do you know what happened this last week? Oh, did some algorithmically controlled money system just get an upgrade? Yeah, did our money just get a software update? We're going to talk about that, how money is getting software updates these days. And of course, we're talking about the merge. So we're going to leave the Fed behind us and we're going to go into the future talking about the Ethereum merge right after we talked to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Lens Protocol is an open-source text act for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our

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Starting point is 00:17:09 so I'll see you there. Merged. Merged? We have officially merged, David. We're merged? This is a tweet from Vitalik Buterin, just some guy on the internet. And we finalized, he said.

Starting point is 00:17:22 He's talking about the finalization of the proof of stake chain. Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today. David, as we're recording, this tweet is sitting at 170,000 likes. This is echoing around the internet, making this a historic event. I think earlier, David, you called this the most historic event that crypto has ever seen.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Maybe not the most important milestone, right? You'd harken back to like the launch of Bitcoin as a more important milestone or even the launch of Ethereum as a more important milestone. But an event is different. An event is something the entire world is watching, something that the community is anticipating. And I think this was the biggest event we've ever seen in crypto. Certainly. Like how many people witnessed the launch of Bitcoin, like under five? How many people witnessed the launch of Ethereum?

Starting point is 00:18:18 10 to 15,000? How many people watched the live stream on the Ethereum Foundation YouTube last night? A quarter million people. And that's just the people that watched the stream. So like a ton of people just watched Ethereum go through its transition to proof of stake. So this is the biggest event in crypto history in those terms. Like the most number of eyeballs, the most amount of hype. And Ryan, it went off without a hitch.

Starting point is 00:18:46 The merge was so incredibly smooth. It was absolutely successful. And just to clarify a term here, Vitalik is saying, and we finalized. That's actually a technical term. So the merge happens as in we hit that TTD number, that total terminal difficulty that tells all of the ether proof of work, Ethereum main chain, Ethereum execution layer clients to start to stop paying attention to proof of work and start paying attention to proof of stake. That's the merge, but the merge isn't complete until we finalize it. And so that's about six minutes later. And we need that finalization to lock in proof of stake because once a part, once an epoch and Ethereum is finalized,

Starting point is 00:19:27 That means to go backwards in proof of stake, you need to slash a huge proportion of ether out there. And so it's one thing to merge, but it's really like final when the Ethereum proof of stake chain finalizes the execution layer. And so that's really the celebration with that Vettalics going for us. There is now the full weight of Ethereum proof of stake behind the Ethereum execution layer. So now going backwards on the chain, more than six minutes, results in billion dollars of slashing. and that is the economic security that we have all been excited about and why the merge is such a big deal. Billions of dollars of economic security. And David, I was looking at this earlier. Did you know that if you add up ETH, all the ERC20s, all of the NFTs, we just forklifted a $400 billion economy. That is the size of the Ethereum economy. And we just swapped that in real time. We swapped out the consensus engine, proof of work to proof of state. And of course, one thing that the world might know,

Starting point is 00:20:27 notice, and I think mainstream is taking note of, is the massive electricity consumption decrease. This is a tweet from Vitaliki's quoting Justin Drake with a figure here. The merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%. Zero point two percent energy. Crazy that it shows up. Yeah. Electricity use might have just been diminished last night with this event unfolding. of course we reported on this last week, but Google knows about the merge. So if you type in the merge

Starting point is 00:21:02 into Google, there's now past tense happened on September 15th, nine hours, 54 minutes ago. And instead of two bears walking towards each other, one black, one white, there's now a panda, very happy, cute-looking panda holding the Eath logo. So Google knows about the merge. The world knows about the merge, right? This thing is echoing everywhere. It's super cool that Google did that, by the way. I'm just, you know, it's awesome to see. Apparently there are a ton of Ethereum, a ton of even bankless fans in the Google community. So if any Google employees are listening right now, shout on Google. Nice move here. It's good to see the solidarity. This is actually a historic moment, not just for crypto, but for the entirety of the internet as well. David, we're looking at a tweet

Starting point is 00:21:47 about bortle.w.w.tf. What is this? Bordle was that website that everyone is looking at to predict when the merge was actually happening, right? It was how we knew when the merge was going to happen. And as we got closer and closer and closer, that thing just got hugged to death. So the numbers were that the Bordle.wtf website was refreshed over 13 million times from 7 million unique IP addresses.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Absolutely crazy. It crashed at the end. And so then I had to go, and I had both Bordle and Ultrasound.money open, and then Bordle crashed. So I went to look at Ultrasound.money. and then moments later ultrasound dot money went down. Because maybe you were displaying it.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Are you talking about on the live stream? I mean, I wasn't displaying mine, but just like everyone was looking at the same like four websites that were telling you when the merge was happening. And like one by one by one, they all went down. Yeah, I got hugged to death, huh? Yeah. These are some images as it was happening.

Starting point is 00:22:42 David, what are we looking at here? Yeah, this is the Ethereum Foundation offices in Denver. And we have Danny Ryan on the far left facing away from the camera. You've got Tim Beko at the bottom. people just like sitting on the ground like watching one TV. There's Austin Griffith holding up the phone on the couch on the right. There's Kevin O'Walky in the bottom right corner. A few other people that I don't remember, don't recognize, but just a ton of people.

Starting point is 00:23:05 A ton of these Ethereum development teams, people really close to the heart of Ethereum. All just like sitting around waiting for the merge to happen. And then here is a tweet from Raul Jordan out of Prismatic Labs. And he says, when you meet on Reddit and four years later reduce the world's energy consumption by half a percent, some fluctuation on the numbers here. And of course, this is Raoul Jordan and Preston Van Loon, two co-founders of Prismatic who met on Reddit. I can kind of relate to this, you know, meeting co-founders on the internet. They're celebrating the transition to proof of stake. These guys have just been putting their blood, sweat, and tears

Starting point is 00:23:39 into a fantastic Ethereum client out of Prismatic Labs. And so I'm sure these guys are just over the moon right now. Preston, I know particularly, has been itching to merge for a very long time. So So congrats at both Raoul and Preston here. Yeah, he's absolutely been driving this forward. It's funny that how Web 2 facilitates kind of the meeting of founders and minds in Web 3. It's really an enabler of Web 3. Like they met on Reddit. You and I met on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:24:06 I mean, so many people are like using Web 2 tools, using the Internet itself to build out the property rights layer, the next layer of the Internet. That's cool. The other thing I would say about the developers. and I'd always remind folks listening to thank your developers. Have you thanked a developer today? Seriously, have you thanked a core developer? This was my thank you for these two individuals, especially, because I remember when they stepped up to the plate in 2018,

Starting point is 00:24:36 when it seemed like no one else was, I replied this under their tweet as a thank you. I remember I thought ETH II would never ship. Then Prismatic Labs stepped up and said, we're doing this. No funding guarantees. You guys just started. building. It was such a confidence boost to the

Starting point is 00:24:51 ETH community during a difficult time. That was an epic bear market in 2018. And my sincere thanks to Raoul and Preston Van Loom and the Prismatic team and all of the other client teams out there that made this happen, we wouldn't be here

Starting point is 00:25:06 without you guys. We would have nothing to talk about. Yeah. So here is an interesting chart from a quant.com where if you click on one of these, you can just see the Ethereum hash rate drop to zero. Oh, wow. That is going from a very high number.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Yeah, it's a price chart you don't want to see. But no, that purple line, that blue line is the hash power of Ethereum. And you can see it start to dwindle off up to the moment of the merge. And then the merge happens, and it just goes to zero. This absolutely goes to zero. There's the subreddit R ether mining, which was actually a subreddit I frequented quite often back in my mining days. And here's a guy playing bagpipes while he shuts off his.

Starting point is 00:25:48 his mining rigs, which I thought was just hilarious. There still are some at-home miners, huh? A few of them? Yeah, uh-huh. This looks like a basement somewhere. You know, a decent number of hobbyists miners left in the world, even if their margins have gotten compressed. If you haven't ever gone down the mining rabbit hole,

Starting point is 00:26:06 just cruising down our ether mining, it's kind of like an interesting expedition into the world of mining. But now it is a relic of the past. Yes, your services are no longer needed. and the miners will need to go somewhere else. Essentially, the holders of ether now become the miners of the Ethereum network through proof of stake. This is a tweet from Hasu.

Starting point is 00:26:29 What are we looking at? Yeah, so as the miners powered down and shut off, MEV boost is powering on. So Hazu says MEV boost is live. So now we're waiting for a validator to request a block using the new builder API. And just a quick refresher on to what MEV boost is, is that building. a block is can be intensive. You can do like naive block building is when you just like take in a bunch of transactions that have a bunch of high fees. Or you can recruit the sources of a professional block builder that can extract some MEV from you and hopefully some optimum non-malicious

Starting point is 00:27:03 MEV, which is what MEV boost is doing. And so as soon as the merge happened, MEPB boost went live saying, hey, you guys can as stakers, as validators can feel free to request blocks from MEV boost using the new builder API. And Hazu's tweeting here saying, we're waiting, waiting for validators to request blocks. And then a few moments later, if you scroll down, Ryan,

Starting point is 00:27:25 he goes, it happened, just landed in slot 47 million, the first ever block produced by MEV Boost. Apparently there was also a war room with the FlashBots team. And then right after that first block was created by MEV Boost,

Starting point is 00:27:38 a second block was created after that. So MEV Boost, as miners shut down, MEV Boost is up and running. So congrats to the FlashBots team as well. If you do not know what MEV boost is or what David was talking about just then, we've got some resources for you. So there's an episode that we put out with flashbots on MEV Boost. Go check that out. Also another episode with Matt Cutler.

Starting point is 00:27:59 You can Google. Just type in bankless Matt Cutler. And you'll get that episode and learn all about MEV Boost. It's an important addition to the protocol. David, let's take a look at ultrasound money. Oh, I've been itching to go here. It's so good. This is the best website now.

Starting point is 00:28:14 To see in a post-merge world all of the stats, this is basically a dashboard of Ethereum's issuance, monetary policy, ether the assets, a dashboard for all of these things. Maybe we'll highlight a few things that my eye is immediately drawn towards the top. Of course, we are post-merged,

Starting point is 00:28:35 and the supply change, since the merge went live, is negative 203Eth. I'm sure by the time people are listening to this, this will be far higher than it is right now. But what this means is, ever since the merge was deployed earlier today at the time of recording, we have been burning more ether than we've been issuing. So ether as an asset is officially ultra-sound money. Burning more than it's issuing, it's deflating. The supply is not increasing

Starting point is 00:29:10 for the first time ever. Supply of ether is actually going down. What does this mean, David? It really is nice to see the first, where are we at, like 10 hours of post-merge ether being net deflationary. I remember checking this when I went to bed

Starting point is 00:29:29 and we were down to like negative 80th. And there's actually been a moment inside of the last 10 hours where actually supply has gone up. So I think we immediately started burning rapid like right after the merge because of all the activity. I think we went down to like negative 100th.

Starting point is 00:29:43 And then we went up to up to negative 70 eth, but then we started burning again because gas fees have gone up. But what really draws my eye, Ryan, is back up to that chart. Just look at that slope up to the merge. Look how steep that slope is. And that is ether issuance out of proof of work. And then the merge happens, and the slope just stops. So actually straight up looks like a mountain peak.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And so a lot of burning right at the start, a little bit of issuance. And then something happened starting a few hours ago. And we are definitely net deflationary bigly. It's going to be interesting to watch. Can we maintain that net net deflation moving forward into the future for how long? But really, this is the time to really look at this website and look at these ultrasound money mechanisms. As long as gas prices are above 15-gway average, we will be burning more ETH than we're issuing. That's what Ultrasound Money says as well.

Starting point is 00:30:39 They've run the numbers around this. total eat supply is a hundred and twenty million five hundred total eat supply is a hundred and twenty five total eat supply is 120 million five hundred and twenty thousand and some on eth and you wonder how high eat supply will actually get i know justin drake is predicted at times that we won't ever get beyond a hundred and twenty two million right so just you know two million more it could also be the case that we never get beyond 121 million, right? So we don't know where this is going to start and stop. The last thing I'll

Starting point is 00:31:16 say on this, I think we'll be doing more on ETH monetary policy in the future, but if you want a friend in your life, maybe with a suit, somebody who's kind of financially minded, who looks at their assets and actually analyzes them, if you want them to understand the mechanics of Ether as

Starting point is 00:31:32 an asset, send them to bankless, of course, download some of our episodes on this, also send them to the ultrasound.money website. If they understand all of the numbers on this page and where they came from, I don't know how you can't be bullish after understanding all of this. That's a good point. And so that is the place to send folks, particularly in this post-merge world. And as we are recording, something is happening on Ethereum that is sending gas prices through the absolute roof right now, relative roof. Gas is up to 78, 79 way. And it's not

Starting point is 00:32:06 because ether is dumping, so something's happening on Ethereum. We started this segment at 203 ether burnt. We are up to 214 ether burnt. So we have burnt 11 ether since starting to talk about this ultrasound.money website. And I think if we hang around here for a second, there it goes, 214, 218. We just burnt four more ether since I started this sentence. This is so awesome. And here's Hazu saying, eth is now the commodity money, with the lowest rate of supply inflation. It's the number one. If you are believer in stock to flow,

Starting point is 00:32:44 the ether stock to flow number is like five, 10 times higher than Bitcoin's right now. It's like breaking that metric. There is no commodity money with a lower rate of inflation than ether. So if that makes you bullish, you should be bullish. And here's a chart from Martin Koppelman that is showing the block times of the last 100 blocks

Starting point is 00:33:02 and you can clearly see when the merge comes in. Proof of work, when a proof of work averages, you know, pre-merge, averages one block every 13.6 seconds, but it averages that. And so it fluctuates around that all the time. And there was a block that took, you know, something like, I think, two or three minutes up until the merge. Some blocks happen as quick as like two or three seconds. But then you see the merge happen. And this very organized proof-of-stake system allows for blocks to happen extremely regularly every 12 seconds.

Starting point is 00:33:32 And so that random block production that happens 13.6 seconds on average is now happening every 12 seconds with no fluctuation. There is that one little spike where somebody missed a block. And so that went from 12 seconds to 24 seconds. But that was like irregular. Every other block is at 12 seconds. This looks like the heartbeat of an entirely different organism, from proof of work to proof of stake. The pattern is completely different. Also, David, you were helping to host the live stream.

Starting point is 00:34:02 as proof of as proof of stake was was going live and as as the merge was actually happening. And you're saying earlier there's between 40 to 50,000 concurrent watchers as as the merge was occurring over, you know, quarter million total view so far. And you had an opportunity to explain the merge in like one minute to all of these people. How did that feel? Yeah. It was like when we were organizing the call, they were like, David, Do you want to explain what the merge is? And I'm like, I have been preparing for this my entire life. Yes.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Yes, I do want to explain the merge in the most simple, reductive way possible. Bankless listeners, tell me how I did, because here we go. The proof of stake component of the beacon chain is like bumping out the proof of work minors for the main Ethereum consensus. And so this merge, what we are all here for today on this stream, is to watch the event where the beacon chain, the proof of state consensus of the beacon chain, becomes the actual consensus of the main Ethereum chain. And all of the various clients, there are many clients of Ethereum. Instead of one canonical Ethereum, there's a five, six, many different clients of Ethereum. And each one of these are syncing with each other and the beacon chain to all, listen

Starting point is 00:35:25 to the beacon chain all at the same time, all at the same, what is the TTD number, total terminal difficulty, a very large number. Once we hit that number, all of a sudden, the main Ethereum chain will start to listen to the beacon chain instead of the miners. And in that moment, we will have merged with a beacon chain and become proof of stake. So Fis, that is what the merge is. And that is why we are all here today on this live stream. David, that was great, man. I think you did a great job there. There's also been some increasing... I've done it a few times. Yes, you have. Bankless has strained you for this. There's also been increasing mainstream coverage. So maybe you should read a few headlines.

Starting point is 00:36:02 The New York Times. Can the merge save crypto? The headline of their article. This is The Verge. Ethereum just completed the merge. Here's how much energy it's saving. The subtitle is, A Step into a More Sustainable Future for Cryptocurrencies.

Starting point is 00:36:17 This is CBS News. Ethereum's merge is live. Here's what you need to know. I love in the beginning of this segment. I think they are showing an Elizabeth Warren tweet may be concerned about environmental impacts of cryptocurrencies, which goes away in the merge world. Here's CNBC. Ethereum's massive software upgrade just went live. Here's what it does. David, we are breaking out into mainstream.

Starting point is 00:36:43 Like we said earlier, this is the biggest event I think crypto has seen in the entire world has been watching. Yeah. And of course, as we predicted, they're all talking about energy reduction, which is a valid thing to talk about. Energy reduction is 0.2% of all global electricity consumption. and that's massive. And so, I mean, it's not the things that we get really excited about, but to each their own. If that's what's going to grab people's attention,

Starting point is 00:37:07 that's what's going to grab people's attention. Absolutely. It is a vital improvement. So if you are wondering what the projected APR is, this is, of course, some pre-merged projections, but I think could be fairly close to the money.

Starting point is 00:37:23 We'll see how closely they live up to those expectations. 6.1% APR is, is the estimate put out by a flashbots report based on the median estimated Ethereum staking yield given blocks-based demand over the last six months. And this number, David, includes all of the block rewards for validators. It also includes M-EV. So 6.1% might be a guess at where we start. Now, whether that holds, whether that goes up or down, my guess is it probably heads in the direction of down unless block space demand drastically increases and then maybe that number goes up. The reason it would head down is because sort of anticipate more and more people will stake.

Starting point is 00:38:07 Remember, staking at this point, guys, it's a one-way ticket. So you go in, you can't come back out. So it has to increase over time. It's not going in the other direction. But if block space demand, MEV fees, these sorts of things perform even better, we get kind of another bull run for blocks-based demand, then maybe this number goes up as well. And of course, David Mihal has another website for us to take a look at.

Starting point is 00:38:34 He's, of course, the guy that created Cryptofees. Info, Moneyprinters. Info, layer 2 fees. Info, you've seen us use his websites on the roll-up all the time. There's now simple stakers. info, which is telling you all the different ways you can get APY on staked-Eth derivative token. So Coinbase's CB, ETH, Anchor, Lido, Steakwise, Rocket Pool, all of the APYs you can get by holding that staked ETH token. But he's also included an extra little bit of data, which is also really helpful because, you know, these tokens, the Coinbase CBE token actually trades against Ether, not necessarily one to one. So Coinbase CB Ether is trading against one ether at 0.97, meaning there's a 3% discrepancy. And so David Mihal has also added the dislocation of the staked-Eth derivative tokens versus Ether itself.

Starting point is 00:39:29 And so if you buy that point, that Coinbase CB Ether for 0.97Eath for 1-Eth, you actually get an effective APY of 7.95% because you're buying that Staked Heath token as a, at a discount, at a 3% discount. Really useful website. I'm wondering where he's getting this APY from, because I'm wondering if the actual transaction fees are actually coming into this website, because this kind of just seems like issuance. I'll have to ping David and ask. Yeah, the other thing I think it's very important if you're evaluating where to stake, of course, is

Starting point is 00:40:02 APY is only one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is risk. What you actually want to understand is your risk-adjusted rewards. And none of these APY websites, David Mihal, or anyone else, can't really assess quantitatively the risk of some of these centralized staking. providers. So just know that there's some risk. Listen to our episode with Justin Drake on censorship resistance. If you want to find out more about that, well, David, I think that wraps up the merge. This has been a historic week. We of course are very glad you could join

Starting point is 00:40:36 us, Bankless Nation, in celebrating the Ethereum merge. Never going to happen again. You only merge once Yomo. But if you are still itching for more merge content, there are some live streams and some videos that are available on the bankless YouTube if you miss them while we did them live but of course coming up on tuesday i'm so excited for this one ryan we are hosting danny ryan and tim beaco the two lead coordinators behind this whole entire merge effort on the state of the nation guess what the title of that episode's going to be right i think i know what it is yeah merged merged that of course it is uh so we're going to talk to these guys about like the journey to get to where we are today and of course what margarita is

Starting point is 00:41:19 their drinking or pinia collada they're drinking as they take a very well-deserved rest from a bunch of just i'm sure frustrating and and exciting times in ethereum and then coming up after that on the monday podcast the week after that we have vitalic for the next steps for ethereum because there's still plenty of work to do while it does feel like we got something finished it also feels like this is just the beginning for ethereum and the optimism and excitement around the broader ether community I think is got to be at all-time high as Ryan. I mean, how do you feel? I'm absolutely thrilled, David.

Starting point is 00:41:52 It goes to kind of, maybe I'll save some of this to the end of what I'm excited about. But this Ethereum community has really shown its strength and shown its metal. And I'm excited to be able to ship this important upgrade. I think it confirms a lot of the, like, the ETH thesis and the bankless thesis that we've been talking about so much on our show over the past couple of years. Speaking of Italic, though, coming up next, Vitalik somehow found the time to go to Ukraine. Crazy.

Starting point is 00:42:21 Like just before Merge Week? We're going to talk about that. Also, Starbucks putting reward points on the blockchain. What's happening? What does that mean? And we tell you the crypto co-founder who's just been issued a warrant for arrest. All that more coming up. First, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Starting point is 00:43:53 Inside Juno, you can buy and sell crypto with $0 fees, and your Juno checking account comes with a metal master card that gives you up to 5% cashback on your spending. Juneau is also giving you $10 cash back on your first crypto deposit and $100 when you set up a direct deposit. This ad just writes itself, so go sign up at juno.finance slash bankless. So somehow during the eve of the merge, the week or so before the merge, Vatalek had the time and the balls to go into the middle of a war zone, to go to a Kiev tech summit. It's also really nice to see that Kiev is hosting things like tech summits. But then Vitalik, of course, tweet saying,

Starting point is 00:44:30 big thanks to the Kiev Tech Summit and everyone involved for the opportunity to visit an amazing and brave community in Ukraine that we all have a lot to learn from. And there's some pictures of him in Kiev. at the Kiev Tech Summit. I just want to emphasize, David, how badass this is of Vatelic. Okay, this is, he's going to a conference in Ukraine, and it's wartime. And this was a hackathon that was hosted in a bomb shelter. And Vatelik both found the time and had the courage to fly over and talk to the developers

Starting point is 00:45:01 in Ukraine. I just think that's such a stark contrast with a lot of the individuals that we see in the crypto space who are here. And I don't necessarily fault them. I mean, sometimes I do. If you're scamming someone, I fault you. But a lot of people aren't here for the mission. A lot of people are here for the money.

Starting point is 00:45:22 They're here for the kind of the short term opportunity. Vitalik, it's been clear, has never been here for that purpose. And, you know, things like this, prove it to us. Yeah, absolutely. It's just surreal to watch him, like, be like this, like, monk figure, like, walk around the world. as some people in crypto have like four or five bodyguards. Vitalik is going with a single backpack to a war zone. Absolutely crazy.

Starting point is 00:45:49 Anyways, on the other side of the world, Polygon tweets out, guess what's brewing today? Starbucks unveils Starbucks Odyssey on Polygon, a unique experience that enables you to earn and buy digital collectible stamps and unlock new and coveted coffee experiences. So basically, Web3,

Starting point is 00:46:08 Starbucks is coming to Web 3, Ryan, through a loyalty program allowing customers and Starbucks employees to purchase digital collectible stamps in the form of NFTs. And it's all going to be done on Polygon. So loyalty token rewards on the blockchain. That's kind of cool. It's, you know, brew to earn, I think is what some people are calling this. But you know, here's a fun fact for you. I read this back in 2019. Did you know that Starbucks is actually one of the largest, is like a stable coin giant? Like Starbucks cards, for instance.

Starting point is 00:46:45 This is back in 2019. I'm sure they had more today. At $1.6 billion in Starbucks bucks, right? They're basically like internal ledger stable coins. And so you kind of start with the NFTs, and I wonder if that leads Starbucks into kind of like payment and stable coin issuance. and you know, you could turn that Starbucks stable coin into an ERC 20, couldn't you?

Starting point is 00:47:10 I'm not sure. You're making some real crypto terms out of these things just to make this real crystal clear. Yeah, yeah. What's going on here is there are $1.6 billion of credits that people have purchased in like Starbucks cards. So like you spend $20, $100, $1,000 to buy Starbucks points on a Starbucks card, right? And so that goes into a Starbucks bank account and they credit you. you with that $1,000 or whatever you bought on your Starbucks card.

Starting point is 00:47:38 Kind of acting like a bank. A thousand dollars, David, yes. Yeah. And so, like, they, the Starbucks, Starbucks is getting a yield on the money that you have credited them. And instead of owing you a dollar liability, they owe you coffee liabilities. Right. And so they have all, they have $1.6 billion in the bank, and they owe that in coffee to

Starting point is 00:48:00 their customers. It's just kind of a crazy model. It goes to show like the larger and larger of a fintech or, yeah, as you get larger and larger, no matter what your business is, you ultimately turn into a bank. Like, Carbux started selling coffee, but now it's just getting yield on customer deposits. They're a coffee financing company. That's how they are. Coffee financing. Yeah, it's very interesting. I do think that there's a role to play here. But anyway, to say, like starting with NFTs, that's very cool, and loyalty points,

Starting point is 00:48:27 and then maybe stable coins in the future as well. But speaking of NFTs, David, but Solana NFTs are hitting all-time highs. They're kind of having a moment right now. What's going on? There's just a big surge on Solana for NFT minting. So there were 300,000 mints on one day on September 7th. They spike out of nowhere. And I did like two minutes of research to figure out what NFTE drop this was.

Starting point is 00:48:54 It doesn't seem to be like there was one particular drop. I could be wrong about that. So people that are more familiar with the Salana ecosystem can go check that from themselves. It just seems like there, it's like aggregate volume just surged for one day on Salana. Volume across all Solana marketplaces hit $11.5 million on September 6th. Cool. That's pretty impressive.

Starting point is 00:49:16 I think Salon is getting definitely some strong traction in the NFT community. So we'll see where that goes next. In contrast, while Ethereum is merging and forsaking proof of work, abandoning proof of work for proof of stake, a couple. Last week, before this happened, the White House apparently just issued an environmental report on the impact, criticizing the impact of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, saying that they could impede U.S. efforts to combat climate change. And this report, David, came out of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and they said, they recommended that the U.S. take action to mitigate the pollution tied to crypto production. Now, the report apparently stopped short of prescribing specific regulations, but this is definitely

Starting point is 00:50:07 a shot across the bow for Bitcoin and the whole proof of work industry. It's kind of not Ethereum's problem anymore in one way because Ethereum is no longer proof of work, they're proof of stake, and I guess the Ethereum community could take a posture to just say, hey, it's not our problem. It's like proof of work's problem, Bitcoin's problem. And yet, this does seem to be some sort of stifling or government intervention on something that's happening in the free market. And I know there are different takes in the crypto community about this and the Ethereum community about this. What's your take?

Starting point is 00:50:42 Do you think that there's a role for the federal government to, like, restrict use of energy in certain sectors or for specific reasons? Yeah. No, definitely not. the government should not be determining what is good or bad use of energy. Yet at the same time, I am like empathetic to the argument that like energy is more and more and more precious these days, especially as like, you know, the world population grows, global warming continues. Like, we have to pick and choose our battles as to how we want our energy pointed. And I feel like that's where this, the White House office of science and technology is really coming from. It's like,

Starting point is 00:51:23 yes, there's a limited supply of energy in the United States that we have. Bitcoin is using a decent chunk of it. If Bitcoin grows, perhaps we should do something to make sure that there's more energy for other things as well. I understand that perspective. But never, should there ever be some sort of ban against proof of work or should there be a statement as to who gets to consume what energy? Well, it's interesting, like the arbitrary nature of this. And I think proof of work advocates have talked about this before. Just like, why are you picking on proof of work? I mean, didn't you tell me, we had a conversation earlier this morning, and you said some

Starting point is 00:51:59 stat that resonated with me is like, did you know YouTube consumes more energy than Bitcoin? Right. I don't know what about like 33% or so? So what if the U.S. government said, hey, YouTube is consuming too much energy. It's just a waste of time. These are dumb, like cat videos and bankless podcasts, like who fares? Let's just turn that off. Oh, turn it off.

Starting point is 00:52:21 Yeah, it's like clearly useless. And so I don't think, I don't, my problem is not with some government policy around disincentivizing, like, or incenting kind of energy use in kind of greener ways. It's around the specific targeting of an industry. It's like, it's not a better way to put kind of a blanket tax on all energy use to kind of curtail demand and accomplish a specific purpose. that way you're not targeting like, you know, Bitcoin mining over Christmas lights. I mean, who's to say, which is more valuable?

Starting point is 00:52:59 And to me, when you start to get into these political decisions as, you know, some bureaucrats deciding what's good use of energy and what's a bad use of energy, you start to get into some real trouble. You lose the credible neutrality of the federal government. So I do think I stand with bitcoinsers on that side of things and proof of work on that side of things. Although I'm still of the Ethereum mindset of like, guys, you don't have to be using proof of work, right? Like proof of stake is kind of better. So there's an element where I'm not going to fight it too hard personally. One thing I am looking forward to is the Bitcoin or narrative is that Bitcoin consumes green energy.

Starting point is 00:53:40 And it doesn't get enough credit for all of the green energy that it consumes. Right. And like I have a hard time understanding if that is like a classic Bitcoin or narrative that, that like kind of just like chant to chant about or if that's actually backed up by data. And so I'm I'm a fan of this topic surfacing because I would love some clarity on that from more people both inside the Bitcoin camp that's not just the cyber hornets that attack me on Twitter. And also outside of the Bitcoin camp from like more people that like don't have a dog in the fight. Although I'm not saying the White House will necessarily be biased.

Starting point is 00:54:13 I'm just saying I would love clarity on this statement is Bitcoin, does Bitcoin mining incentivize green energy. I used to be a fan of that argument. I'm becoming less and less of a fan of that argument as time goes on. Yeah, I agree. And if you can eliminate it entirely, it's hard to see how that is not better for the environmental impact. The greenest thing to do is to just not consume energy. But Bitcoiners will take offense to that. Meanwhile, Michael Saylor doesn't care. He is buying more Bitcoin. Microstrategy files to sell up to- You have taxes to pay? I think so.

Starting point is 00:54:45 Microstrategy files to sell up to 500 million of stock to fund more Bitcoin purchases. Wow. That is insane, dude. It's definitely balzy. You got to give them credit for that. This is like, or maybe you don't. Maybe you could say it's like, you know, fiduciarily irresponsible to investors in micro strategy.

Starting point is 00:55:08 But it's certainly interesting. I mean, I can't. knock someone for being a permable, I guess. I still content, David, that this will play out. This will play out for him. This is going to lower his average, his cost basis by such a pick number. Well done. Buy and lower.

Starting point is 00:55:28 I guess. I mean, 500 million of stock to fund more Bitcoin purchases. Absolutely incredible. This is an interesting headline out of Zero Hedge. China, back amongst the top 10 countries in Bitcoin usage, despite the Bitcoin ban. And so even though Bitcoin is banned in China, it has resumed its top 10 position, I believe, in number 10,

Starting point is 00:55:52 as the country that uses Bitcoin the most. Cool. You can't ban crypto. I mean, that's the takeaway, right? You can only ban your citizens from accessing crypto, and apparently not even that. Speaking of banning,

Starting point is 00:56:04 the tornado cash saga continues. OFAC just updated their frequently asked questions, so I of course, I of course read them. I wanted to get some of the highlights. I'll show that in the minute. But I've got good news for you, David. Yeah? You and I might not be going to jail.

Starting point is 00:56:21 Oh, thank God. And here's the thing. So there was a... Every time there's a knock on my door, I'm like, oh, sweet. There was something that happened like, I was at four or five weeks ago. Right now, of course, you know, Tornado was put, smart contracts, were put in the O-Fax sanction list. And then somebody dusted a whole bunch of public.

Starting point is 00:56:41 influential eth addresses, including Jimmy Fallon, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul, all the exchange CEOs, Brian Armstrong, Battalick, you, me, the rest. Bankrupt. And what Ryan means by Dusted is that somebody sent 0.1 ether to all of these addresses from the tornado cash contract, making them in violation of the OPEC rule. Exactly. And without our consent very clearly, be like somebody, if somebody sent a, you know, robbed a bank and then deposited that money into your account. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:57:15 Or if they sent, exactly. They robbed a bank and deposited money into your account. And then are you a criminal or not? That's a question. And of course, you and I think that would be absolutely ludicrous for Treasury and for OFAC to take that posture. Well. Although I'm totally willing for people to rock banks and them to put that money in my account.

Starting point is 00:57:34 I'm totally down for that. You should not say that on a podcast. This is a FAQ, OFACC, trying to clear the up. Do OFAC reporting obligations apply to dusting transactions, the issue that you and I just mentioned? And it starts by saying, OFAC is aware of these things. And I'll read the statement here. Technically, OFAC's regulation would apply to these transactions. Okay, so if somebody robs a bank, deposits it into your bank account. It's your problem, David. Your problem. Somebody takes from tornado cash and sends it to your eth address without your consent, without even your

Starting point is 00:58:11 knowledge, it is your problem technically. That's what OFAC's position is. To the extent, however, these dusting transactions have no other sanctions nexus besides Tornado Cash, OFAC will not prioritize enforcement against delayed receipt of initial blocking reports and subsequent annual reports of blocked property from such U.S. persons. Okay. What they're saying here is technically it's a crime, okay? But we're going to lower the priority through which we prosecute this prime. So we're at the end of the list, is what you're telling me. That's what they're saying.

Starting point is 00:58:49 And it is asking as well, I think the reading of this is they somehow want anyone who received some dust to file a report with OFAC. Yeah. I'm not going to do that. Absolutely. It's an absolutely, it's an absolutely unbelievable position today. Here are some of the, some more of the, frequently asked questions. One was

Starting point is 00:59:13 what is prohibited as a result of OFAC's designation of Tornado Cash? OFAC has clarified that if you're a U.S. citizen and you do anything with Tornado Cash, you are prohibited from doing that as a result of OFAC.

Starting point is 00:59:29 And then they make this statement. Yeah, that's not new, but they're clarifying this, but I found this funny. The Tornado Cash website has been deleted from the internet. What a statement. They said that out loud. But it currently remains available through certain internet archives. So don't worry, guys.

Starting point is 00:59:48 The tornado cache website is made. The powers that be deleted from the internet. Do not look at the man behind the curtain. Oh my God. It's crazy to me. The audacity. Yeah. You didn't delete it from Ethereum, bro.

Starting point is 01:00:01 You can't delete the tornado cash website from the internet either. Do you remember there was a, Beyonce did a Super Bowl halftime show one year? I don't know. This is like, I don't know. seven years ago or something like this. And there was like this terrible picture of her that was posted where she was in this really awkward dance position. And like after the fact,

Starting point is 01:00:21 her PR team, her crew was trying their utmost to like delete Beyonce's picture from the internet. That is a fool. Fool's Aaron. You can't delete things from the internet. That's not how this stuff works. This tries into fact. Anyway, that's some of the language coming through from OFAC.

Starting point is 01:00:37 So, you know, clearly there will be court cases about this and we'll have to get some clarity in the court system because these are not tenable, these are not reasonable positions to say that if you get a dusted transaction, yeah, you're still doing something illegal. We're just going to put you at the end of the list in priority. We'll talk to you later. Yeah, like we could still come after you at any time. You're not going to be at the top of the list. Like, what is that? How is that tenable in a, you know, free and open society? Didn't Matthew Green restore the tornado cash contracts to a new version of, on GitHub?

Starting point is 01:01:13 He did. Now, they did- I'm gonna go download those and put them on my wall behind me. They did say that that is actually legal. So that was another FAQ. So it's not deleted from the internet. They were talking about the user front end, by the way.

Starting point is 01:01:25 They were not talking about the actual code. They did understand that much. They were talking about the website in itself. Yes. It specifies that. Oh, website has since been deleted. The internet cache website, yes. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 01:01:39 But of course, that can be hosted on. PFS that could be like there's you can't really delete the website um but yes they did clarify that if a u.s citizen copies and pace um you know and hosts hosts the tornado cash code in a gitcoin repository somewhere that is not illegal according to them well i was going to put it on my wall anyways regardless of whether it was legal and that would be fine that was always allowed apparently that's always allowed um speaking of of things where people are actually getting in trouble for doing illegal things. Doquan now has an arrest warrant for his arrest in South Korea.

Starting point is 01:02:19 So a court in Seoul issued a warrant for Doquan and five others allegating that they violated the nation's capital markets law, which I don't know what that means, sounds very broad. But yeah, I bet there's something in there where, like, if you are responsible for imploding $50 billion of capital, that you probably broke some law somewhere. And so, yeah, there is a, warrant out for his arrest.

Starting point is 01:02:44 Doquan has said that he plans to cooperate when the time comes, and he said that in this crypto interview media startup coinage, that floated the prospect of jail time to Doquan, and Doquan finished saying, life is long, meaning that, like, I got a lot of life to live, so I might as well just go to jail and pay this time and just go through it. Okay. It's incredibly stoic. We'll have to see where that ends up. Not only Doquan, it was five others.

Starting point is 01:03:14 Five others too, yeah. Involved in the company with Doquan. So that's happening. Meanwhile, the SEC in the U.S. is setting up a new office where you can come in, tell them about your crypto project. This is going to be called the Office of Crypto Assets. So the statement here from the SEC is, as a result of recent growth in the crypto assets and the life sciences industries, we saw a need to provide greater and more specialized support.

Starting point is 01:03:38 the SEC is coming up with an office apparently where you can go and talk to them. I have yet to hear of a case where that's actually been useful for a real-world crypto project that is trying to get some clarity on the asset class and their position with respect to the asset class. I don't know. It's kind of a speak of untenable positions. It seems like an untenable position for the SEC to want to take leadership in crypto in the U.S. and not provide any framework where it's legal or any clarity where we can do these kinds of things in a legal way. They're taking a very hostile approach while also saying that they want to be like the place where you can come in and have a nice conversation with them. I mean, these things very much seem at odds. So until they fix that, I'm not sure that this will provide a lot of clarity or use for people building things in the real world in crypto.

Starting point is 01:04:32 Yeah, I want to make fun out of this, because that's usually my default response, but they do say that as a result of the recent growth in crypto, we sought a need to provide greater and more specialized support. More specialized support is what we have been asking for. So, like, I can't knock that. Like, keep going down that path, but, like, still call me skeptical, right? Like, I wouldn't want to be the first or second or third organization to walk in through that office. I'm just kind of getting like Delors Umbridge vibes. Like when you walk in, step into my office and then like you're Harry Potter and you're like writing scars into

Starting point is 01:05:12 your hands like, I will not issue illegal securities or something. Look, there's an element to that. And just to contrast that with another US executive branch agency, the CFTC, which has been much more welcoming to the crypto agency and kind of like talking about what is possible rather than all the things you cannot do and providing a much more clarity in the field of commodities. So that's a good contrast point. But Coinbase is starting to fight back even more. This was a really cool move. Starting today from Brian Armstrong, Coinbase will begin integrating our crypto policy efforts right into our app. These will help our 103 million verified

Starting point is 01:05:53 users get educated on crypto positions held by political leaders where they live. And this is Brian showing a video of what the app looks like. And you can actually see, like here is a Democrat from District 9, New York City, and her crypto sentiment is positive. You can see Caroline Maloney, a Democrat, New York District 12. Her crypto sentiment is negative. It displays all of these things inside of the app so that the 103 crypto users of Coinbase can actually see where their politicians stand on this.

Starting point is 01:06:28 And the idea is, I think Brian was pretty explicit. For instance, U.S. users can see crypto sentiment scores for members of Congress, he says. And then he says, over time, we want to help pro-crypto candidates solicit donations from the crypto community. He's being very explicit about this. Why are we doing this? Because this will drum up donations from a base who wants the ability and right to own crypto in their jurisdiction. does not want unfair laws and legislation against crypto. This is so awesome.

Starting point is 01:07:05 Like Brian and Coinbase is just building piping of crypto money into crypto-positive legislations in an easy-to-use app. My God, is that going to move the needle so much? And so imagine being a senator and you're seeing this rating app of your, of your, like, how loving you are to this particular industry that is so, like, where crypto is so important to them that they're putting it in the main crypto app, the Coinbase app. I know.

Starting point is 01:07:37 Right. It's built into the most consumer-friendly app of all time, just like, does this person support or not support crypto? All it's missing, and I don't know the legality of doing this, but all it's missing is a button that says, donate to this politician. Look at Richie Torrey's Democrat New York District 15 is very supportive. nice button there imagine donate donate donate donate donate like coinbase already has all of your kyc information so they could just pass that along because you need to do that and if you're

Starting point is 01:08:04 going to donate to somebody yeah like the the infrastructure is already there and i was talking about this i can't remember where on some podcast live stream i've been on a trillion live streams in last like four days um crypto has the two things and we've talked about this before on bank this has the two things that legislators want and need the most single issue highly motivated voters and money. And Coinbase is the host of a 104 million people who have money

Starting point is 01:08:33 and care about crypto. And now they're being piped in directly to like these congressmen and women. I expect this to be such a huge help to the industry at large. Coinbase, Brian. Yeah, well done. This is huge.

Starting point is 01:08:45 This is, uh, yeah, big supporters of this. This is Coinbase showing up, I think, for crypto and defy in a way that we need most. And if you don't think we need this, I would encourage you to go back and listen to what we just said about OFAC and tornado cash. David and I received a dusting transaction, and OFAC says, we did something illegal. That's what they said in their FAQ. I mean, that's just not tenable.

Starting point is 01:09:12 And the only way we have to fight against this is money and votes. And that's what Coinbase is hoping to provide the crypto communities, the knowledge to allocate that money and those votes to the right places. So we can push back on some of these unelected bureaucrats saying, we don't have the right to on-chain privacy. So, yeah, big plus one on that. David, what are we looking at here?

Starting point is 01:09:36 This is a website that I wish was around in 2017. It's called token.onlocks.com. And it's basically just being a reporting service for token unlocks. So that is like angel seed investors, like seed rounds, like series A, series B. token supplies are locked because of like vesting schedules, right? So if you're an early investor, you get your token locked up

Starting point is 01:10:00 so that it can start to trade on the secondary market and that thing doesn't go to zero because all the early investors who got it for very cheap are locked up for a certain amount of time. And so this website is just like aggregating all of that information of how much of the token supply is locked, what are the next supply unlocks, what is that date, how much is getting unlocked, what's a circulating supply,

Starting point is 01:10:19 what's the fully diluted valuation? And so if you are worried about, if you are, you should just like include this in your basic due diligence anytime you're ever going to buy a token. So like usually if I'm going to buy a token, I start on Coin Gecko and I start to look at some of that data. But I think I would now go here next because I would then want to find out what is the, what is the unlock schedule? Like is this thing like 90% liquid or 90% locked? And if it's 90% locks, like when's the next unlock coming? Who's going to dump on me?

Starting point is 01:10:49 This is basically like, it's the token website. of course I'm going to repeat it, token.unlocks.app could also be renamed, are people going to dump on me dot app? And so you can go check on if people are going to go dump on you or not. Yeah, it's great to see this transparency coming to crypto, and I think it's something that I've not seen in stocks. So it's kind of neat to see this in crypto.

Starting point is 01:11:11 It's a single dashboard. We can view all of this. This is some news coming out of Abra, which is a crypto bank based in the U.S. They say, today we are announcing the formation of Abra Bank, the launch of Abra Boost, which is Abra's new staking and yield offering. And so this is Abra actually becoming a U.S. state chartered bank, which is a full bank, not a trust in the digital asset space, giving them the ability to do trading, custody,

Starting point is 01:11:37 investing, NFTs, credit cards, and more. And here's the justification, according to their CEO. Abra intends to be the premier Web 3 and crypto bank in the world. while we believe in the ethos of not your keys, not your coins, we recognize that consumers and institutions need help navigating crypto, enter Abra Bank. This to me, I think, is a narrative that we'll see. There have been some banks that survived 2022, some crypto banks, right?

Starting point is 01:12:07 And they did things because they were much more prudent, much less risk-seeking than the Celsius of the world, didn't make mistakes like BlockFi. And I do think we're going to see a resurgence, of crypto banks. And the resurgence, I'm hopeful, David, that these crypto banks will have learned their lesson from 2022, become much more transparent, become much more defy friendly. And I do think that there is a role for them to play as a risk. Not everyone can go completely bankless from day one. And so we need sort of a, you know, a bridge at times in the meanwhile.

Starting point is 01:12:44 So I'll be monitoring the progress of Abra and what they're doing there and, like, crypto, banks in general. Yeah, with the power of crypto, new banks can just be better than the old banks, and it's as simple as that. Moving into the world of Binance Chain, Brian, did you know Binance Chain is actually doing ZK roll-ups? Yes. Crazy. So Binance Chain announces the test net launches of ZKBNB, the first ZK roll-up on the Binance Smart Chain. So ZK Tech is not easy. And so, like, there must be a pretty good team behind this, too. And, of course, Binance Chain has the second most, second largest DeFi ecosystem after Ethereum. And they're generating a decent amount of fees.

Starting point is 01:13:27 So it actually makes sense that a ZK roll-up would eventually come to Binance Chain. So Binion Chain becoming modular. ZK technology is definitely not just for Ethereum. It's for any kind of modular, modular blockchain. Now, the weird thing about deploying this on Binance is because you think you'd want a fully decentralized settlement layer in order to scale your layer too. Well, you would think you would want that in the first place. I think we're already, that ship has already sailed. We'll watch to see what emerges there. A new wallet, a bankless custody style wallet, self-custody wallet called Plasma wallet has just arrived.

Starting point is 01:14:02 I've not tested this myself, but it looks polished. It does look polished. In fact, I think I saw an image of the bankless podcast in one of these screenshots. Do you see that, David? Oh, wait, really? Yeah, we'll spin this around here. Did I see that? Is that us? Weekly rollout there it is That was the last week's merge Or weekly rollout We have not tried this I love this wallet

Starting point is 01:14:22 We have not tried this I don't know too much about their team To be honest But if you are on the frontier And want to try a new non-custodial wallet Go check it out at plasma-hyphen wallet Dot com Let us know what you think

Starting point is 01:14:37 And it's great to see more innovation In the space And lastly the opera browser Is now supporting MetaMask and other third-party wallets. And so if that has been the blocker for you to use Opera, because Opera didn't support Metamask,

Starting point is 01:14:51 well, that blocker is gone. You can now support Metamask inside of Opera. And moving into the raises this week, Doodles coming in at a massive $704 million valuation. Wow. After raising $54 million dollars from... Does that feel like a bare market valuation to you, David? Does not feel like a bare market valuation?

Starting point is 01:15:10 Almost a billion dollar valuation coming in from Alexis Ohanian 776, FTCVentures, and a few others as well. I'm not sure how I would feel as an NFC owner if the centralized team raises money. I might feel like I'm the product here. But to some degree, like that's kind of what people might want, if that's their vibe. This is kind of the board apes model, right? Well, yeah, definitely like the board apes model. There's a place for it.

Starting point is 01:15:37 These valuations, though, are absolutely insane. I'm not sure what they're based on. hopefully these investors know what they're doing here and good luck to the doodles team. And the other raise of the week, Kupa Troopa announces Koup Records Fund number one. Cooper Turley, raising $10 million early stage fund investing in the next generation of music and NFTs. Cooper, of course, is known as the music NFT guy. And actually this last week, Ryan, during all of the merge hype, during all of the other live streams and podcasts that I did, managed to get Cooper on the show for a 20-minute episode

Starting point is 01:16:13 as to what are music NFTs. And I think the crypto community, the crypto Twitter community has always been like kind of teasing Cooper is like, why would I buy a music NFT? Like, what does it do for me? And his answer has always been a collectible. But he gave me a line that I actually really liked, which was, don't overthink it. You need 25 people to buy a music NFT at 0.1Eath to equal a million downloads on Spotify. So music NFTs don't need to be much. It's just the 100 super fans. It's 100 super fans that need to buy your music NFT. You can think about utility later. You can think about access later. But like how squeeze the margins are for artists is so bad that Cooper's answer is you just need 25 people to buy your music NFT to generate an equivalent amount of money for the artist as a million

Starting point is 01:17:06 dollar or million downloads on spotify I got I got music NFT pilled so congratulations to Cooper I'm really optimistic to see this guy's future yeah I mean he's definitely been doing a lot in this space I guess maybe that's advice don't overthink it a 700 million dollar doodles

Starting point is 01:17:22 valuation don't overthink it David maybe it makes sense bankless jobs this is our weekly time to remind you that we're in a post merge world the first time we're talking about getting a job in crypto and Ethereum is 100% proof of stake at this point.

Starting point is 01:17:40 Those things don't have anything to do with what I got to say. I just wanted to say it one more time. Here are the jobs of the week. I'm going to read a few out on the bankless jobs board. Molecule is hiring ahead of engineering. Bankless needs a growth marketer. That's us. Bankless needs a growth marketer.

Starting point is 01:17:55 It's non-technical and it's dope. Yes. Economia needs a lead designer. Silent technical. Full stack smart contract engineer, Superforam senior back-end engineer, Bitgreen full-stack engineer, Misari software engineers,

Starting point is 01:18:07 they need two of them. Root needs a head of fundraising. I could go on, but you can find all of these jobs on the bankless job boards. Bankless.com slash jobs. Sign up. You'll get these in your inbox.

Starting point is 01:18:19 Wow. We got more coming up, David. What's in store next? We got the takes of the week. There are four of them. And of course, David and Ryan gets to talk about during merge week what we are bullish on.

Starting point is 01:18:32 I wonder what that could possibly be. But we're going to get to all the takes and the week, all sorts of merge-related takes and more as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that makes this show possible. ZKSink is an Ethereum Layer 2 network that is pushing the frontier of high-performance blockchains that don't compromise on security or decentralization. ZKSink has combined the power of zero knowledge roll-ups in the Ethereum virtual machine, enabling developers to build the greatest Web3 projects possible, ones we haven't even seen yet. Crypto needs its killer applications to onboard the world, but Crypto-KKKSink, a platform to build on first. It's generally accepted that zero-knowledge roll-ups are the conclusion of crypto blockchain scaling technology. And ZKSink is leading the charge into the final frontier of crypto-economics. So if you're a developer who wants to build your app on a future-proof

Starting point is 01:19:17 foundation, which gives your users the best Ux possible, check out ZKSink's website at zkynk.i. And yes, there's also going to be a token, so give them a follow on Twitter 2 at ZKSink. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet, with over 60 million monthly active users. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the secure multi-chain crypto wallet built right into the browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy, but there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. And most crypto wallets are browser extensions, which can easily be spoofed. But the Brave wallet is different. No extensions are required, which gives Brave browser an extra level of security

Starting point is 01:19:54 versus other wallets. Brave wallet is your secure passport for the possibilities of Web3 and supports multiple chains, including Ethereum and Solana. You can even buy crypto directly inside the with ramp. And of course, you can store, send, and swap your crypto assets, manage your NFTs, and connect to other wallets and defy apps. So whether you're new to crypto or you're a season pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions and it's time to switch to the brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash banklists and click the wallet icon to get started. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Here's the first from Fubar. Post-merge, the most important improvement that can be shipped, talking about Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:20:29 isn't proto-dank sharding, though that's plenty useful. It's enabling withdrawals. Because making it as easy as possible to withdraw from centralized custodial staking pools is critical to validator to centralization. I do think that enabling withdrawals is the next feature to come in the roadmap anyway from a priority perspective. But there is some element that the developers have talked about before where they would combine withdrawals and proto-dank sharding together in the same hard fork. And I think Fubar is kind of making the case, like, don't do that, not if it costs us time, because what we need right now is to enable withdrawals. And he's making the case for decentralization purposes. That's the reason we need to enable withdrawals.

Starting point is 01:21:17 What do you think? Yeah, and just to elaborate on this, it deposits into Coinbase, deposits into Lido. When they stake this ether for you, it's fixed because there aren't withdrawals. So all ether and Lido is stuck there. And so if we have centralization concerns like Coinbase or Lido has too much ETH, we need to enable withdrawals so we can get that to be jumbled up and mixed around with the other staking as a service providers. I mean, I'm not a developer, but I don't think the withdrawal hard fork is all that complicated. So I could definitely be in support of expediting this update, yeah, for sure. Same, same here.

Starting point is 01:21:56 We'll see how that evolves. I think the core devs are taking a much-eded break for a little bit. Let them have a margarita, and then we will pester them about when withdrawals, okay? We can't ask for withdrawals right away. Not this week, anyway. This is a take from you, David. The Ethereum never ships narrative, in quote, is dead. It's dead.

Starting point is 01:22:16 Skull, crossbones. Why is that dead? So this has been the narrative that Ethereum just lives like a bunch of vaporware and never is never going to ship proof of steak. It's never going to ship scaling. it's never going to ship, it's never going to ship. And at this point, we've shipped proof of stake. We created and then shipped EIP-1559 inside of that time.

Starting point is 01:22:35 We have scaling on layer 2s. The only thing left is data sharding. And it's like the less complicated update in comparison to the merge. And so the Ethereum never doesn't ship narrative is now dead. And so if you are the person who is claiming that Ethereum doesn't ship stuff, of which there are plenty of these people, like the onus is on you to prove. that that update that's coming of whatever we're going to talk about isn't coming. Like, it's no longer on the responsibilities of, like, the Ethereum community or Ethereum

Starting point is 01:23:05 developers to convince you that Ethereum ships, we've now proven it out in the biggest of ways. So the Ethereum never ships. Narrative is dead. I think a bunch of narratives have been kind of slayed as a result of the merge. In fact, we did an episode earlier this week with Justin Drake on 15 bad takes. that you should definitely listen to. I think the merge kind of... One of them's already done,

Starting point is 01:23:29 which is the merge will never ship. Sticks a fork in a lot of those in a lot of those takes for sure. This is my take. Do you want to read this out? Yeah, sure. Ryan Schott-Adam says, with a shedding of proof of work,

Starting point is 01:23:41 Ethereum is fully charting its own course, inspired by, yet distinct from Bitcoin. From here on out, Ethereum is no longer living in Bitcoin Shadow. Little brother is all grown up. What did you mean by this? I think that for all of Ethereum's life, it's been somewhat living in the shadow of Bitcoin. It's been kind of the little brother.

Starting point is 01:24:03 All of the attention is on elder brother Bitcoin, who's off going to college, and he's, you know, the football quarterback, the captain. Like, you know, everyone cares about Big Brother. And Little Brother has been kind of living in Big Brother's shadow and somewhat like copying some of the moves of Big Brother. More and more, Ethereum has kind of diverged. from the Bitcoin roadmap. Of course, at Genesis, the big divergence was expressive smart contracts on the base layer. That certainly has been true. And now with the merge, I think it's fully

Starting point is 01:24:38 charting its own course. The origination of Ethereum at the time, the best technology available for a consensus layer was proof of work. It's no longer the case. And so Ethereum had to copy Bitcoin in the early days, but now it's clearly charting its own course. course. And I do think this opens up an opportunity, David, for Ethereum to take kind of the main flagship role, right? Always much respect to the older brother who's gotten us this far, but it's time for Ethereum to kind of live its own life and do its own thing. And I think the world needs Ethereum to take center stage in this whole crypto movement as well. And I see this merge as kind of a milestone and a key point at which the trajectory changes. And

Starting point is 01:25:24 the industry's focus is more slanted on Ethereum moving forward versus Bitcoin. I don't know if everyone sees that, but that was certainly my takeaway from the merge events, and maybe it'll be seen that way historically as well. Absolutely. This is a very different way to express my ETH-BTC trade. Little brother. Little brother is going to become stronger. Yeah, Ethereum finally decoupling from his bigger brother. Yeah. Personified take there. This is my favorite take that we've ever put on the weekly roll-up, I think. What? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:57 Vitalik. Dot Eith, Vitalik Buterin says, normalize saying dub instead of W as the name of the letter W. He follows and says, all letters deserve a one syllable name. So Vitalik is saying we should change, we should fork the English language and we should merge in a new pronunciation of the letter W and we should change it to dub, which I am a huge fan of. That is a great take. Why? Okay. So all of the other letters in the alphabet are one syllable. Is that correct? A, B, C, D, D, F, G. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Okay. But then we have this W that just sticks out

Starting point is 01:26:35 like a, like a swore of thumb. Yeah, you have U and you have double you. Like, how do you think W feels in comparison to you? He's like, oh, I'm just like two of U's. Like, no, I'm dub. Okay, but I don't know if that flows as well in the song because like we need two syllables. T, U, V, W, W, X, Y, Z That's fine. Dub X, Y, Z. Dub X, Y, Z. Yeah, that's fine. That flows.

Starting point is 01:26:58 Dub, XYZ. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I support this Fatalic take, David. How old is your youngest kid? 11.

Starting point is 01:27:05 She's 11 right now. Okay. Yeah, too late to indoctrinate her with new ABCs. Yeah, I think it's passed for this generation. You have to like start from scratch. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:27:15 My parents will never go for this, David. Yeah. What do you bullish on this week, man? I know the answer, but tell me, anyway. I'm bullish. on what I feel like is the next era of crypto. It really feels like that was Ethereum proof of work is like Ethereum beta. I know we kind of tease Salana for being a beta main

Starting point is 01:27:33 net. But like if they could call themselves beta, I'll call Ethereum proof of work beta. And now like Ethereum proof of stake, layer twos, sharding, soon, TM. But that proof of stake thing is so critical that this really feels like the way that Ethereum has always been meant to expressed when it was envisioned back in 2014. And so with proof of work, with like the dark cloud of proof of work energy consumption and supply over supply cell pressure, it really feels like we're in a new paradigm of crypto, not just for Ethereum. But, you know, we all know that like crypto as an industry trades like alongside Bitcoin. Well, that's because Bitcoin's proof of work. Ethereum has been proof of work up until now. And so it has been a proof of work paradigm ever

Starting point is 01:28:20 since. Ethereum is currently one half of Bitcoin's market cap, and that's magnitude of market cap is now proof of stake. And so this part of crypto, the decentralized finance part, is under a new paradigm. It's a new era of crypto. And so it really just feels like a zero to one moment for the crypto industry. And it's going to take time for that to like show up in market prices and show up in activity. But like this is what, this is the version of crypto that I've been waiting for and been here for for years now. And it's finally arrived. So, Ryan, bullish on a turning of the page for the industry. I really like that. And you know, I jot it down as I was listening some of Fatalik's first comments in the post-merge. Somebody asked

Starting point is 01:29:02 them on the call post-merge. And he said this about the merge. I think Hudson-Jaminson asked how you feeling like what does this mean? He said this. To me, the merge symbolizes the difference between early stage Ethereum and the Ethereum we've always wanted, right? That's kind of that shift. A new era, a different, a new change. So yeah, that resonates with me as well. Ryan, where do you both on? Is it similar? You know, this is, I guess I could say similar, right? It's just definitely kind of merch related, but let me zoom out and talk about this in the context of my own personal crypto journey and maybe like the bankless journey as well, because those things are kind of intertwined.

Starting point is 01:29:41 I feel like we have just closed a major chapter, David, for Ethereum, as you just said, the end of an era and the entrance of a new era. Also for bankless. at some level. Also for me, my own personal thesis. Do you know, you and I, many others in the Ethereum community, were very early chanters of this meme that we started in 2018, ETH is money, eth is money. Let's talk about this asset for its monetary properties. And the reason that was so important to us was not number go up. It was because we saw this fundamental link between the value of ether and the economic security of the network. And those things could not be severed, right? And it didn't make sense to think about a valueless eth, right? It was all

Starting point is 01:30:25 kind of one unified theory of the world, right? And so, um, we were chanting this and had been chanting it at nauseam for the last few years and that kind of evolved into like ultrasound money and the monetary premium properties of Eath. Do you know what, David? I feel like I don't have to say it anymore. Yeah. I feel like it's a part of the DNA. Just, I'm a minor, man. Now my watch has ended too. I don't have to say it anymore. It's not, I am going to talk about it. I am going to say it from time to time. Eat this money.

Starting point is 01:30:54 Eat this ultrasound money. But you know, from here on out, there's no more pushing that we have to do. It's just going to freaking happen. Why? Go to ultrasound. Money. Just go to that website.

Starting point is 01:31:05 You'll just see it happening. Like one of the best websites in crypto. There's nothing the social layer has to do to make this happen anymore. It's now it's going to happen on its own. And as the economics become more obvious, more people will, except the fact that ether is an internet bond,

Starting point is 01:31:25 ether is a store of value that's not issued by a nation state, that's issued by an internet protocol. Like the entire thesis, all the stuff we've been talking about, and at some level, David, this is why we started bankless, because this story hadn't been told very well, the story of defy, the story of going bankless, the story of eth's money and the value that this network could bring. Now I just feel like it's done.

Starting point is 01:31:50 It's like my watch has ended. So I think moving forward, you and I don't have to actually focus as much on getting the story out as of Ethan's money. Of course we're going to. Of course it's going to be important. But this is also entering another chapter. And it's just going to happen with us or without us, with the community support or without the community support because it's now it's fully baked into the algorithm itself. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:17 The values have been indoctrinated. instantiated in the actual code. And once it's there, it's really hard to get it out. And that's been the whole purpose ever since. And so I think that really just like begs the question. It's like, all right, then what's next? What's the next thing to talk about? Are we done? It's madeless done. Well, no, I think there's plenty left to talk about. And one of the ways I've always described Ethereum versus Bitcoin is that Bitcoin, the blockchain is meant to serve BTC the asset. Like, all the surrounding infrastructure is meant to do one thing, which is preserve the 21 million hard cap of Bitcoin. Ethereum is the inverse of that, where Ether, the currency, is actually just meant to support

Starting point is 01:32:54 Ethereum the economy. And we know that Ethereum, the economy doesn't only exist on the Ethereum layer one now. Like, the economy is escaped, and it's got, it's escaped into the layer two's. And so now I think the story to be told, it's that Ethereum's roll-up-centric roadmap, we see this story manifesting itself with Arbitrum Nova and Ethereum finding its way into Reddit. right? That's what Arbitrum Nova is. Is the Ethereum escaping out of the layer one and building a chain that's specific for a Reddit? And that's the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap.

Starting point is 01:33:27 And so I think this next era of Ethereum is now that Ethereum has taken care of itself, it's gotten its security properties and its monetary properties on lock, and like that thing is tie a bow on that, and like that's the way that it's good to go. The rest is building roll-ups, layer twos and layer threes, custom fit for different corners of the Internet, and putting economies and money and bankless tools in all corners of the internet. And I think that's the final frontier of Ethereum now that we are post-merge. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think some of our content will begin to reflect that.

Starting point is 01:34:02 We still got a few more episodes, of course, on the merge coming up. But yeah, I'm super excited to enter into like the second chapter of not only Ethereum, but also bankless and start to explore these brave new frontiers. David, we've got a meme of the week. What are we looking at right now? We are looking at this meme of the crying TikTok dancer girl. So she is, for some reason, bawling your eyes out while doing a TikTok dance. And the caption is, minors staking their eth post-merge. And so if you are a miner who's collected that eth and you are now staking it, yeah, you might be said that your mining business is gone. But hey, at least you're staking eth. And that's why this crying TikTok girl is doing the TikTok dance. She's still dancing. She's still dancing. She's still dancing, not giving up. Guys, as always, got to end with risks and disclaimers.

Starting point is 01:34:53 Of course, ether is risky. So is Bitcoin, so is all of crypto. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. There are new frontiers unfolding. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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