Bankless - ROLLUP: Facebook Meta | ENS Airdrop | McRib & Tarantino NFTs | Reddit & Matrix | Axie Ronin DEX

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

1st Week of November, 2021 ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 DHARMA | Trade on Polygon! https://bankless.cc/dharma  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​  💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro Permissionless: https://blockworks.co/events/permissionless/  Bankless Discount: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/discount-to-permissionless-2022  7:00 MARKETS 7:22 BTC Price 7:41 ETH Price 9:14 ETH / BTC Ratio 10:10 DeFi Action $BED: https://www.indexcoop.com/bed  13:19 Layer 2 https://l2beat.com/  15:05 Ultra Sound Money https://ultrasound.money/  Fees: https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1453939554172301314?s=21  20:40 Market Cap https://assetdash.com/  24:00 RELEASES 25:10 ENS https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-airdrops  32:10 Maker x stETH https://twitter.com/nomos_paradox/status/1453793036865982464?s=21  35:30 Crypto.com leveling up https://twitter.com/froggyfrogster/status/1454181118807351310?s=21  40:05 Phonon by Gridplus https://twitter.com/PhononDAO/status/1453822451436113924?t=CtbsGJIyI3ejIIirzm9UdA&s=19  41:47 DAO Masters https://www.daomasters.xyz/  42:55 Ronin DEX https://twitter.com/AxieInfinity/status/1456161289722548225  43:46 Optimism Upgrade https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1455645114269724675  45:28 ‘Standard Oil’ of Crypto https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-currency-group-wants-to-be-cryptos-standard-oil-11635764400  47:51 Metaverse Fund https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/122856/firm-backed-by-alan-howard-winklevoss-twins-closes-100-million-metaverse-fund  51:22 Sandbox Raise https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/122936/crypto-sandbox-93-million-softbank  52:58 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs  54:00 NEWS 54:48 Facebook Meta https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-meta/  1:02:15 Nike https://twitter.com/joshgerben/status/1455225423411953671?s=21  1:04:22 Microsoft https://blockworks.co/microsoft-ceo-the-metaverse-will-bring-real-world-into-any-digital-space/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T  1:04:55 Reddit https://twitter.com/iamRahul20x/status/1455950490366263301  1:09:32 Quentin Tarantino https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/quentin-tarantino-to-offer-seven-uncut-scenes-from-pulp-fiction-as-nfts.html  1:10:26 NFT McRib https://twitter.com/chriskatje/status/1455154519491416064?s=20  1:11:32 Matrix NFTs https://twitter.com/jordanlyall/status/1455544585732640775?s=21  1:13:18 China Yes NFTs, No Crypto https://blockworks.co/chinas-tech-giants-yes-on-nfts-no-on-cryptocurrencies/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T  1:14:31 CryptoPunk Flash Loan $500M https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is/status/1454952085611589634  1:17:23 Aaron Rodgers https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/01/nfl-star-aaron-rodgers-gives-ringing-endorsement-of-bitcoin/  1:18:14 Coinbase Borrow https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1455664736687722500  1:19:06 Stablecoin Report https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/11/01/biden-administration-to-congress-put-stablecoins-under-federal-supervision-or-we-will/  1:21:33 China Digital Currency https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1456257274087763979?s=20  1:23:00 TAKES 1:24:30 NFT Breakfast https://twitter.com/zeneca_33/status/1454599139803779076?s=21  1:25:58 L1 Traffic https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1454331785668608002?s=20  1:28:52 Play the Metaverse https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1455160580843712519?s=20  1:31:13 A Wallet is a Profile https://twitter.com/ohhshiny/status/1455270402788405254?s=21  1:32:14 Wikipedia https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1455548002114879493?s=21  1:33:31 Never Seen a Bear https://twitter.com/ryansadams/status/1456001806992031755?s=21  1:37:46 Robots Use Ethereum https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1456115235769647110?s=20  1:40:54 Gender Equality https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/1456285472326623242?s=20  1:41:31 What David’s Excited About 1:43:14 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:47:59 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/niftynaut/status/1454142514487861251?s=20  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, happy first week of November. David, what time is it? Oh, it's a Friday weekly roll-up time because, like always, it's always a crazy week in crypto. And so we are going to roll that week up in the Friday Bankless Weekly Rollup. David, you're on the road right now. You're in New York City, NFT, NYC. That's an NFT conference. How's I going, man? What's the vibe been like? I actually don't know, because I never went to a single NFT conference event. I've only been going to the peripheral satellite events. And those have been absolutely fantastic. We'll talk a lot about a lot more at the end. But yeah, I listened to the famous Wu-Tang album that got bought by Pleaser Dow.

Oh, my God, man. How was it? At this, I mean, I wasn't, I'm not really the biggest Wu-Tang fan. Okay. The first song, pretty good. Next two songs, whatever. Did Wu-Tang people like it? The Thu-Tang people really liked it.

And then there was like the fourth song that had this great, like, trumpet riff. and the whole entire room was just like five into that song started bobbing their heads. By the way, is this playing off the same? Like, this is a CD, right? It's a compact. Yeah. Okay. It's like, what happens if that thing gets scratched?

Okay, so it is scratched because Martin, freaking Screlli used it as a coaster. He used a CD as a coaster. So he scratched the shit out of the face. Sorry, for swearing. Yeah, dude. Why would he do that? Because he's an, that's his.

His brand is he's a villain. Yeah. It's literally just the perfect level of a villain. So it has some like, I guess some scratches in it. Does the track skip? Try to remember what CDC. It sounded great. Yeah.

No. Like, and the acoustics in the room were phenomenal. Yeah, yeah. Overall, it's been, it's been a great week. Seeing a lot of people, like always at all conferences that I only see online, but got to see them in real life. Met Camie Russo in person. So that was great. Chatted with her for a while.

Yeah. always always a good time at the crypto conferences are people feeling like um bullish on nptu's still is like i mean it's been a phenomenal year it's got to be feeling bullish right but what's the vibe like people were people were just like oh guys is this the top remember in 2018 coin desk where we had the lambos outside of the conference like there's like topy conversations going on but there have been topy conversations going on in crypto for like i don't know a year now be conversations in like for nfts specifically like March or April, remember? And, you know, people felt like, and then there was kind of a lull, and then it came back even stronger.

I don't know. What's your personal take on this? Yeah. Apparently at the conferences, there are a lot of people like pitching terrible NFT ideas. Yeah. I heard some person was trying to pitch somebody else about supporting Afghan women oppressed by the Taliban using the stellar network. Like, when's the last time you've heard about the stellar network, Ryan? And like things, it just doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. That always happens. There are some weird shenanigans going around. Apparently that was closer to the actual NFT conferences, not the satellite events. So I didn't get the full face of that. But there was a number of parties, like the audience party I was at and a few other related NFT events. I didn't recognize a single person. It was a common through line of all the friends that I've known in crypto for the last few years.

Different crowd. A lot of us completely different crowd. Like brand new, brand new people. And we have a take to talk about later. Yeah, we do have a take. Brand new people that are just no one is familiar with, like getting into the world for the first time. I feel like that's especially true of NFTs. Anyway, guys, we have a fantastic show for you today on the roll-up.

We're talking about a few things. First of all, Facebook with the name change, pulling a prints on us. Actually, not changing their name to a symbol. But Facebook becomes meta. What's up with that? A pivot into the metaverse. Also, some air drops coming your ways. If you are a .eath, have a dot-eath domain, ENS.

We're going to talk about that. Also, there was a crypto punk that sold for $500 million. Not mine, sadly. Half a million. That wasn't yours? That's right. David would sell his crypto punk. I was, you know, going to ask that.

But we talked about that a few roll-ups ago. You would sell for $500 million. I would sell for $500 million. Okay. I would. Let it be known. If there's any takers out there. McDonald's with the McRibb NFT, that doesn't feel top.

at all does it. Quentin Tarantino as well. We mentioned that. The Matrix releasing NFTs as well. And Reddit with the biggest Web 3 pivot ever. We're going to cover all of that in more on the weekly roll-ups. As you know, this comes at you every Friday morning. We try to pack as much the week in crypto into your mind as possible. David, before we get into the main show, got to talk about a couple of things. The first is this. Permissionless conference tickets. This is a big D5 Metaverse conference that we are putting on next year with our friends at Blockworks. Websites just been updated. The tickets are now released. There might not be any left. I got to warn you. So tickets were released maybe a little earlier this week, and I'm not sure if they're going to be left

by the time you listen to this. Every two weeks. Could they get release every two weeks? It's always a new cycle, yeah. Yeah, batch release. So if you didn't get this time, get them next time. But the thing is, they increase in price every single two weeks. So you want to get them early. if you can. I think the price now is 418. When we started, the price was $15.15 and $59. You might recognize those digits. 15.59, but now it's 418. This is just going to keep going up. If you are a bankless subscriber, of course, a premium member, you need a discount on this, a 30% discount. What's the value of that? It's a hundred and something dollars, hundred and whatever. It also keeps on going up. Keeps on going up as well. So make sure you catch that. The speakers

going to be hot. The tracks are amazing. David and I are helping to plan all of this. So check out that conference. Also, another thing to check out is the Dharma wallet. David, you want to tell them about Dharma wallet? Yeah, Dharma wallet is the easiest way to get you and your friends into the world of crypto, into the world of defy. If you guys have gotten into crypto without Dharma, you probably went the route of sending your money to Coinbase or Gemini, which takes a while, it takes like seven days. Then you have to buy ether, send that to your, to your, to your your metamask or your ledger. And then if you want to go on to Polygon,

you got to send it to make an L1 transaction to Polygon. Then you need to get gas on the Polygon network. That's a whole mess. Then you have to prove it. The old days. The old days. But no longer, because the Dharma wallet will do all of this for you in just two to three minutes. You can connect with your actual bank account with Plaid,

which again is just like logging into your bank account. And then you can send Bunny into the Polygon network. It's a smart contract wallet. It's connected into Polygon. And they have a ton of cool feature. So it is the fastest portal to get Fiat money. into the world of crypto where it belongs. So download Dharma, no gas fees.

There's a link in the show notes. And I believe that if you sign up with the link of the show notes, you'll get airdropped $50 worth of ether on the Polygon network to get your life on an L2 started. So go check that out. Yeah, you got to make a purchase. But if you make a purchase above $500, you get $50 in free on Polygon. So check that out using the link in the show notes.

All right, David, you ready to get to it, man? Yeah, let's do it. Market time. Let's talk Bitcoin. What are we doing? Bitcoin had a flat-ish week up a little bit, up a little bit. Started the week at $60,000, which was the low, hit a high of $64,000 and currently at $62,000.

So up roughly 4 or 5% on the week. Good job, Bitcoin, 4% or not too bad. But Eith, another story, all-time high week for Eith. A few all-time highs were hit this week. I feel like celebrating every single one of them. Where are we right now and what was all-time high, David? Yeah, Eath started at $4,200. The new all-time high of $4,000.

$4,675 was hit a little bit more than 24 hours ago, but roughly 36 hours ago at the time of recording. We are currently clocking in at $4,485. Next milestone is 5K, I feel like, you know, that's coming right up. But are we up? How much are we up on the week? We are up 15% on the week. It looks like we dipped a little bit before I wrote that number down.

So maybe about like 13 or 14%. Why? Do you think this is like the Facebook meta news? not to front run that. We're going to talk about that in news a little bit, but do you think there's a metaverse story connected here, or do you think this is just the market kind of catching up to what ETH should be? There are so many stories about what ETH should be. There's NFTs. There's the Metaverse. There's DeFi. There's scaling. There's the merge. Ultra-scalable Ethereum. Like people are getting that, their heads wrapped around that.

There's so many stories to tell you to tell why this number is going up. And, you know, a lot of stories means a lot of reasons for a number to go up. I still think it's low, to be honest. I still think the price of ETH is undervalued even at these prices. But you guys know that. If you've been hanging out with bankless for any time soon, we are ultra bullish on this asset. The listeners are like, we know, guys. It's like, shut up already, okay?

We know. We already have our bags back. All right, ETH Bitcoin ratio. What is that looking like, David? Yeah, again, three green weeks in a row for the ETH Bitcoin ratio, clocking in at 0.0734. And so ever since the Bitcoin, ETF, the Bitcoin Ether ratio has done really, really well. And again, has not spent very, very

little time higher than this, especially in the last six months, but also definitely ever. Wow, David, are we getting close to, we're getting close to like the two year, three year, maybe all-time high for the ratio. Exactly. Yeah. So that's a lot, a lot of people I know, I know Anthony Cizano pays attention to this ratio a lot. And like, I know he's like waiting for that to break through. He's frothing at the mouth. Yeah, he's like, he's like, just don't tweet, don't tweet, don't tweet. Yeah, this is one to continue watching. But like this is also an indicator, I would say, of the continued crypto bull run, right?

If this ratio is gaining steam, then it means bull run in full effect. This is another bull run indicator. But dude, wait, this number is way down today. Total log value in DFI. I'm going to go with it. That's a bug on the DFI pulse. Yeah, this did not happen. I'm going to go with a broken graph.

Oh, you know, actually, you know what? that was, go down to AVE. That might have been a lot of people withdrawing from AVE. No way. Yeah, because they're Avey's number two now. Avei had that bug exploit, which got fixed, so nothing bad happened. But a lot of people pulled funds out of Avey. This happened from November 3rd to the 4th, right?

And we went down $105 billion to $87 billion, for those of you can't see on the screen. Yeah, I'm going to go. That's a bug. Does feel like a bug. But so let's call it, we're still above. I think we're still above $100 billion. Let's say that. That means we can make up these numbers, right?

We want it to be over $100 billion, so therefore it is this week. How do you feel like it should be, Ryan? I feel like this should be a trillion, to be honest, but, you know, I'm going to be conservative on today's episode. We'll wait. We'll bite our time. How about the Defi Pulse Index? This is an index of the top DeFi tokens, the blue chips, as it were, up or down on the week.

Up, up, up, up on the week. Finally, the DPI had a great week this week, up 9%. on the week started the week at $330, end of the week at roughly $375. Signs of life, David. Are you liking that? Some signs of life here. How about this? Ether has way more signs of life than DPI continue.

We're still going down on the DPI to ETH ratio, huh? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it put a little bit of a bottom. Again, not a bottom-dottom, but like hit 0.078, climbed up to 0.08. But again, it is a nice linear slope down. But just remember, folks, David reminded us last time, if you swap out those defy tokens for another set of defy tokens and retrofit the data, then David was still right about this ratio.

Exactly right. David's never wrong. That should be the takeaway here. Not defy season yet, or at least it's more ETH season than it is DFI season. So to the extent that remains the case, this ratio continues to drop a little bit. but let's talk about the best of all worlds, which is the bed index, bankless bed index, that is Bitcoin, ETH, and the DPI, all inside one token that's a third, a third, a third. What are we looking at on the week?

Yeah, bed had a good week because it is the best index in all of D5. Start of the week at $172, hit a new high of $192 currently clocking in at $181. Overall, up how much percent on the week? I don't know, 5%. Five percent. Call that five percent. So guys, of course, you know you can get into bed, get with this index. It's a simple purchase.

Go to the index coop.com website slash your bed and purchase that. It's actually up 60 percent for the 90 days in terms of close to 60 percent in terms of, you know, the 90 day increase in this index. So it's starting to get closer to being sort of a staple type index of the crypto markets, which is awesome to see. All right, let's look at layer two beat as well. This tracks how much value is locked inside of true layer twos. Those are chains that are backed by the economic security guarantees of the Ethereum network.

David, just added a cool $1 billion in the past week from last week to this week. Getting close to $5 billion. Pretty crazy. Clocking in at $4.93 billion, up 21% on the week. Arbitrum up 20% in total value locked in. layer two's optimism clocking in at plus 85% on the week, almost doubling the value locks and optimism. A lot of cool things are happening on optimism.

Optimism breaking through that $500 million level. So congratulations to the team. Also, loopering, clocking in at a doubling and 98% off of, I think, speculation because something to do with a GameStop and loopering integration. They did make some key hires of, you know, loopering. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting.

And also, again, my one equity that I don't, that my, the one thing that I own that's not crypto, GME stocks, doing very, very well, by the way. It's all related, isn't it? It all comes back to crypto. What's cool about this, I think, is particularly with arbitrium and optimism, we're seeing this growth without a token incentive, right? So we're seeing so many other layer one communities, different layer ones, not Ethereum, giving away like millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in token incentives to come yield

farm on their on their chains all right and optimism in arbitram are not doing this and they're still getting like massive growth uh week over week so that's good to see wait till they dial up the tokens if they ever do we'll see what happens there um also ultrasound money eth is becoming ultrasound money and just passed a big milestone what is that david three quarters of one million ether has been burned as of this week. 761,000 ether. That's more ether than I have closing in on the one million ether mark. A little bit more, huh?

Just a little bit. Just past David's bags here. This is cool, too. I wanted to actually correct this because I think I said that last week, I think I said that ETH had 10x the transaction fees over the past seven days of Bitcoin. And I was actually wrong. and someone reminded me of this. Ethereum actually had 100x the transaction fee revenue of Bitcoin over a seven-day period of time.

So I was like, you know, 10x off on that number. I knew it was a lot bigger. But over the last seven days, look, man, Ethereum had 50, almost $50 million worth of transaction fee revenue. And back to what we said last week, what do blockchains do? Blockchain sell blocks. This is their transaction fee revenue. And I guess a year ago, two years ago, it was like a fight between Bitcoin and ETH, like every day. It's like who's kind of going to have more transaction fee revenue.

Here's Bitcoin a very distant number on this chart, not even a million dollars in transaction fee revenue over the past seven days. So it's super interesting to see, right? The thesis for Ethereum has always been you make block space more valuable than the assets. that becomes more valuable. And of course, EIP 1559 kicked that into high gear so that there's this immediate feedback loop. But it seems to be the case that this is happening. Revenue numbers going up for Ethereum block space. Any other takes on this, David? Yeah, there is a direct connection between the amount of fees your blockchain collects and the soundness of the money. And if you have not yet learned how to articulate that association,

there's a ton of stuff to go and read on the bankless news letter letter. Ultra scalable Ethereum, ultrasound money with Justin Drake, tons of things. So make sure you understand the relationship between blocks-based demand and soundness of the money. It's a really important concept. The only one of this closest is Binance Smart Chain. And I don't even know what they do with their numbers. It's washed rate. Let's talk about this too.

Last week was actually the first week that Ethereum actually had negative issue. David. We've seen some milestones on this ultrasound money thing in the past. In fact, like the first day, I remember an individual block. I mean, it was the first day or the first two days after EIP 1559, an individual block that had negative issuance. I remember being really excited to see that. Like, it's happening. But now we're hitting all of these milestones. Talk about this for a minute. Yeah, yeah. I think it was like just a couple hours after EIP 1559. Everyone was scraping the block ether scan trying to find. the first ultrasound blocks. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It took people a couple hours. And then I think just a couple weeks later, we had our first ultrasound day. We're the full, or no, we had just a couple of weeks later, we had our first ultrasound

hour where every, all the blocks over the hour were ultrasound. They were burning collectively more ether than was being issued. A couple weeks after that, we had our first ultrasound day, 24 hours of more ether being burned than was being issued. We have now hit our first week of total issuance going down. down rather than up due to ether burn. And so at some point, we're going to be repeating this, but it's going to be a month. And then at some point, it'll just be every month moving forward into the future.

Ryan, are we seeing the current limit of the ether supply right now? Like, that could be happening as of this week. The total of the ether capped out. That is a possibility. That's true. I mean, Justin Drake, when he put some numbers on this, predicted this in April. He thought that ether supply would never get above 120 million. And I don't know what the total supply looks like, but you're right.

I'm looking at it right now. The total supply is $118.2 million. So over under on, do we ever hit $120 million? What do you think? Oh, under. Yeah, I definitely. Under for sure, because this isn't even getting started yet, okay? Once the merch happens, so like we're maybe six months away for that.

It's over. It's done. It's gone, right? So a reduction of 4%. This is an immediate reduction of 4% annualized issuant. So we're going to be ultrasound month every single month, every year. I wouldn't be surprised if we start to get ultrasound decades, David, under our belts with this. I mean, we'll see what this looks like.

As soon as we hit the merge, it's just ultrasound now and for forever. So it's just a race to get to the merge. Unless you think block space, Ethereum block space is going to drastically decrease in demand. Is there any world where that happens? I don't think so. And there's a take that we have later to talk about. happens when you increase the block space available, people just use more of it. And so, like, even with charting, we're going to increase the amount of block space available. People are just going

to use more. They're going to transact more. And that's the thing. It's not even going to be humans. It's going to be other chains that are actually using this block space and being secured by it. Absolutely. There's no coincidence that we are breaking all-time highs this week. And this is all-time high week. And then also, ETHBurn ultrasound week as well. Like, that is not as a coincidence. like bowl markets bring in fees. And so like really this is a game of are like are we in all time high season, right? Like are we in bull market season? Are we out of the crab season?

And we're just going to keep on yeeting into new all time highs. If that's true, then we might actually be an ultrasound territory now and for forever. If that bull market can carry us into the merge, like that's a possibility. Heeding into all time highs, eating into the bull market is what we're doing right now. I love it. Yeah. Top assets by market cap. This is all top assets.

market. It doesn't have things like gold, but it has things that you can just generally trade on exchanges. So number one, of course, actually not of course. I've surprised to see this. The top asset in the world worth $2.5 trillion to the T is Microsoft now, no longer Apple. It's Microsoft, actually. Then after that, it's Apple and Google and then some like oil and gas companies, Amazon, etc. All the way down to number seven is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the seventh largest asset in the world that you can buy on an exchange of this type. Right behind Tesla, yeah. Right behind Tesla.

Well, that's interesting. And then right ahead of Facebook. And then if you keep scrolling past Berkshire, past Navita, Nvidia, you get to you get to you Ethereum at number 13, almost breaching into the top 10 assets in the world. That's pretty cool to see. Yeah. Ether is within striking distance. I think it's just like something like 12 or 15 more percent, which is just like, hey,

that's just like one good week away from becoming a top 10 global asset. So you got to love this. You think Jamie Diamond's looking at this and being like, oh, I'm number 14 and Ethereum just passed me. Now it's over for JP Morgan. It's like I was wrong about crypto. I don't think he's saying that. Probably not, but maybe he should be.

And along with the rest of the banks, even visas behind Ethereum at this point, which all makes sense because Ethereum is a network of networks. It is a global settlement layer. It is a monetary system. It is a money. It is not like all of these other things, aside maybe, but a little bit like Bitcoin. I think they'll continue rising in the charts. David, that's it for the markets.

And we've got some hot releases coming up for folks. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy.

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And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. The first is this, E&S, which is the Ethereum. name service. You might have seen those dot eths all over Twitter. You might have a dot eth yourself that is registered to the ENS, Ethereum name service. Well, now ENS is issuing a token. They are doing an airdrop to all holders of dot-eath accounts. What's going on here, David?

Yeah, yeah. So we need to, when I was talking to Brantley, even forever ago, he was always saying, like, they would receive money from selling the ENS names. Lots of money, right? Lots of money. tons of money. And like they consider themselves like a public goods, right? Not a private company. They don't want to be a private company that is just like operating what is a core function of the Ethereum system, which is dot eth names. And so they've been sitting on all of this ether, not knowing what to do with it, not knowing how to structure like this company. And then the whole Dow revolution starts. And I think it's just very, very obvious that the dot-eath side of Ethereum becomes community operating, community governed. And so what's so fantastic about dot-eath names is that it's so easy. to identify who has them. And so they just air dropped some, or they will be air dropping some ENS governance tokens to dot-eath holders. And so there are some different parameters

as to how much you are getting. You are getting one if you own a .eath. You are getting double that if you actually linked that. DotEath name to an actually Ethereum address. And you are also getting a multiplier based on how long you've actually had that linked. And so if you have linked

to your ENS Ethereum address and you've done, done it for a long time, you might get some nice air drops coming your way soon. Hell yeah, man. That means if you've been listening to Bankless, when we started talking about E&S addresses back in 2019 and we created tactics on how to actually register them and set them up correctly, then you will definitely get thisirdrop, which is super exciting. 137,000 accounts.Eath holders, which is great.

One important note, though, is they're not rewarding like squatters. in this mechanism, right? So if you bought like, I don't know, 100 names and you're just sitting on them, you're not getting any amplifier for owning more. Dot-Eath names. Is that correct? That is correct. Yeah.

So if you bought 100 ENS names and you're just sitting on them, you're not, then linked them to your Ethereum address, you are just getting one shares worth of anirdrop. And so it's unique addresses that linked their ENS name to their, to their Ethereum wallet for amount of time. I think it's a great, great mechanism. There's a link in the show notes if you want to check out more details on that. Overall, 25% of the total air drop will be given out two. In two dot-eath holders, 25% will go to the ENS contributors and then 50% to the Dow Community Treasury, which I really like that model. This is Kevin Awaki shared this model and I put this idea in my head where it's 50% for the past and then 50% for the future, right? So everyone who's

worked on the project so far. So 25% to theirdrop, 25% to the team, and then 50% to the community treasury, which goes and funds the future Dow, right? Yeah. People that wants to start the down. This is super cool. I think this is one of the ones I'm most excited about since probably Uniswap. And the reason is because of such a large distribution. I mean, there's so many dot-eath holders, so many ENS users. And so this is getting out there. But like in general, they kind of had to go down this path, right? Because they had a multi-sick, they had a treasury, and they had a small set of individuals who are really responsible for that multi-sig. I don't know. It's like seven to 10 members of the Ethereum community who had access to that multi-sig. And of course, you know,

it requires, you know, some majority of owners to sign off on transactions. But this turns that multi-sig over to the Dow, over to governance, over to the users, over to the community. It's a very Web3 concept. And it's super cool to see. So we are actually having Nick and Brantley from ENS on our State of the Nation on Tuesday. I think more details will come early next week on how you can pick up this irdrop. Of course, if you were a bankless premium member, we dropped the ultimate guide to airdrops last week.

And if you did, number, let's see, number 20? Number 16. Number 16. These are 25 hypothetical potential. We're not sure if they're going to air drop, but you might want to check them out in case they do sort of opportunities number 16 was Ethereum name service had some folks ping us early in the week and be like oh my god I'm glad I saw that registered a dot eth domain got started on it now I'm eligible for that air drop so bankless premium members get that we will include a link

in the show notes so you can check that resource out's evergreen 24 more on this list potentials so take you to be damn sure that every time an air drop happens we'll be reminding you that this I mean, I'm just saying it's just like, why not go do your homework? Do your homework. Why not get free air drops, folks? Like, why not just put in some effort? Crypto pays you to learn about crypto. So take the extra step here.

Anyway. Before we move on, there are a couple more dynamics about the ENS Dow now that I think are worth pulling apart. Dow's inherently have like a funding problem at Genesis because like they just mint a token. They don't really have any money yet. that's not true with ENS. They have that very large stack of ether from all of the ENS sales. And so the ENS Dow is going to have a very large treasury of ether behind it. And so they are going to be able to fund themselves right off the bat.

The ENS team is giving all of that ether to the Dow. So that's pretty cool. I don't know how much that is. I'd forgot about that to you. But it's got to be a lot because when we said the Dow has a lot of money, all of that money is an eth, as you said. So when you register a .eath domain, you're paying for it in ETH. And if you paid for it in ETH back in like 2018, 2019, that ETH is worth a heck of a lot more in dollar values.

That is so like your $5, your $10 to register is now a 10x from that, right? So I'm sure it's a substantial treasury. Yeah. And then the other side of this is that the ENS team, they never raised anything from any funds at all. Yeah, that's right. So zero funds own ENS, right? Like this token was it just born. There were no VCs, no one backing it.

And so it's going to be one of the coolest, I think it's going to be one of the coolest launches of all time. Top 10 launches. Top 10 launches. Top 10 launches. Sounds like another bankless blog post. This is like, yeah, the distribution is great. I'm excited about this one the way I was with Uniswap. So anyway, next week more details on that.

Let's talk about this. Make your governance just onboarded Lido's Staked Eith. That's STEath as a collateral type. It's really cool. because staked eth is kind of like treasuries and T-bills are to dollars, right? It's sort of like, you know, you take your dollars, you put it in a risk-free asset, which is a treasury. And the reason it's risk-free is because the U.S. government can always pay you back.

Why? Because they are the mint. Of course, they can print more money and always pay you back. So it's called risk-free rate of return. That's what staked-eathe is. or it can be. It does have some risk. The risk with the staking provider, like Lido has some risk on it. So there are various forms of staked Eath. But anyway, it's really cool to see staked Eth tokenized and available as collateral. So you can get a loan against it. You can start to use it as a composable money Lego inside of the defy economy.

And he takes here, David. Yeah, this is, this is, A, it's just a great integration. It's a great collateral. but this is a first step of a very, very large story, which is eventually all-Eath, all-Eth inside of DeFi is going to turn into state-Eth inside of D-Fi because why wouldn't you? You could have two collateral types. Eth and Staked-Eath.

One stays the same and one goes up for like five, four, four, five, six percent a year. And they're both equally liquid. And they're both equally liquid. That's the difference, right? So like with the T-Bill, it's like, it's locked up, but you can't do anything with it. Like your money is kind of parked inside

of that instrument, you can't do very much with it. At least an individual can't do very much with it. But with this, you could do anything in the defy economy that you could do with any ERC 20. And that's exactly right. And really the important story here is there's going to be a network effects competition for this staked ETH derivative token, right? Coinbase as a centralized staking as a service operator, probably going to release Coinbase staked Eith as a secondary current. any staking as a service operator, in order to compete with all the other ones, they need to generate liquidity on their staked ETH token. So they will all generate the Staked ETH derivative token.

Who can get their staked ETH derivative token integrated into DFID the best is going to win. And so, like, because monies have network effects. And so this is a competition that all staking as a service providers are playing in this game. Rocket Pool also has R.Eath as well. And so it's really nice to see these decentralized, committed to decentralized versus the centralized ones, start to make those moves before the centralized companies do. Yeah, the collateral types I'm going to support most are the ones that are the most decentralized.

Yeah, the most trustless forms, because those are truly the most risk-free forms and in the best interest of the network. And that's specifically the bull case for Rocket Pool and RE. This Rocket Pool is trying to be the most decentralized, like technically risk-free that there is. Lido has done a few compromises to get there, but they are still committed to decentralization, and they just want to go to market first, and that's how they have done that. Both of those are far superior than anything a centralized staking as a service company could offer.

When launch, Rocket Pool. Come on. Come on, come on, guys. Yeah. Let's see you soon. Let's get this going. This is really great. Look at this.

Release from crypto.com. So we think of the crypto.coms of the world as like crypto banks. So, right, so there's sort of infrastructure that sit on top of chains. They are now supporting. direct deposits and withdrawals to and from arbitram, a roll-up. Nice. We said this is going to happen. It's starting to happen.

Crypto.com. I believe they were in the top like five or something apps in the, like the Apple iTunes. You know, this is Google Android I saw. This is the Android app store, top five apps. So like crypto.com has a ton of customers and consumers. And now they are enabling layer two fiat withdrawals. This is fantastic to see a much-needed bridge into these ecosystems. Any thoughts here, David?

Yeah, there's going to be another race between all of these centralized companies to figure out how can they drop their users off onto much more user-friendly environments. We asked Brian Armstrong the same question on the podcast that comes out on Monday. Brian Armstrong on the podcast Monday, by the way. And so stay tuned for that. Such a good episode. Oh, my God. It was really good. Yeah.

And so, like, every single exchange needs to be playing this game right now. figuring out how to. And it's not that hard. Just do it. Just do it. Put it on the side chain. Allow users to withdraw it. Like what? I don't get why this is so hard. Yeah. Shia LaBuff me, man. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it right now. Okay, exchanges? And look, we're going to support you if you do, right? The exchanges that I care about, so like, this is a conversation we had with Brian Armstrong, just to tease that episode a little bit more, by the way. Premium members get that tomorrow or today, if you're listening to it. But, we asked him the question of like a couple questions I guess related one was do you regret not building coinbase chain was a question we asked him in the podcast this answer to that was phenomenal the other question we we asked is

binance is building a finance chain right uh FtX is really partnering with with Solana it feels very much like most exchanges are playing this this web two game like they onboard you to crypto and then they try to lock you into an eco system that they control, right? It's like, like the Facebook. We've seen this before. And then we kind of asked Brian Armstrong, are you going to be the crypto bank that's going to build on open, credibly neutral protocols? That was the question we posed to him for the answer to that question. You'll have to stay tuned to the podcast coming on Monday. But it's such a good answer and it's so worthwhile. Anyway, I think very much the crypto banks and exchanges will be competitive. And hopefully they're competing for consumers in a very web three way that is positive, building on top of credibly neutral open infrastructure. Layer two is one essential layer in that stack.

And so maybe we see Coinbase support for Layer 2 next. Ryan, I actually saw Brian Armstrong last night. You did? Yeah, he was there. Yeah. And so again, so we saw him yesterday. the day before we were recording with him in Zoom. And so I go up to him, like, oh, hey, hey, Brian.

And he looks at my name tag. And the name tags, okay, there didn't be an NFC, NYC, sorry. When you were in line and somebody was filling out your name tag for you, they were asking you like, what is your AIM screen name? Yeah. Not your name. What was your AIM screen name? And mine was Blackjack Davy.

So like, I go up to Brian and I say, oh, hey, Brian. Like, hey, it's great to meet you. And he just, he looks at me and then looks at my name tag. I was, oh, hey, Black Jack Davy. I'm like, no, Brian, it's David. from from bankless. Oh my God. We were just recording.

It took him a while. Like it's a loud party. It took him a while to, to hear you. But yeah, he did not recognize me at all. Well, the other thing,

it was funny that because we were joking with Brian on the podcast. We were like, he's like, look, we've hired so many people. I've done bars. Number is like 150 people.

I don't even know the employees that we hired on Coinbase. So, yeah. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard when you meet so many people, like for that facial recognition software

to keep up. like remember and put names with faces and it's difficult but uh crypto crypto conferences there's the running joke that it is just so impossible and like i i will never knock him for not recognizing me because i do the same thing for so many people i don't they just meant like three times like i recognize people in the digital world by their twitter avatars honestly yeah it's like that is more recognizable to me and i know some people change their twitter avatars a lot so that throws me off but anyway um digital games let's talk about this next one running phone What is this?

This is a product by Grid Plus. What does it allow you to do, David? Yeah, Phonon is, I guess, this new kind of primitive that is being built by Grid Plus. Grid Plus, again, has the lattice hardware wallet. And what they have done is they have made what they are calling a Phonon Transfer. Now, the details for this as to how this works, I do not know, but I know the GIST. And so the gist is that they sent Bitcoin, 100 Satoshes of Bitcoin from one Grid Plus hardware wallet to another grid plus hardware wallet, not using Bitcoin using the hardware.

And so basically it mimics the properties of cash. It's like if I were to actually be able to give you, go and the hand you physical Bitcoin, it's like that. And so Bitcoin was sent over the internet from one hardware wallet to another hardware wallet, but not using the Bitcoin blockchain. And this also works for Ethereum too. And so we are now able to mimic the properties of physical cash and then also send over the internet, but not actually using the networks. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. So like trustless,

bearer assets and private too. Privacy is a really important because like I can just like DM you some like bytes of data in this Zoom chat and that those bytes of data will be like a big Bitcoin, 100 to Satoshi's of Bitcoin, right? And you can go redeem it. All this sounds magic and I don't know how it works, but it sounds super interesting. And I know grid plus is very much in the cutting edge of hardware while it's like, the most secure enclaves possible, which is super cool. I feel like I want to learn more after this, David. And if you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to check out some

the technical details of this. Also, Dow infrastructure tools, man, where do you go? Is there one place you can go where you can see all of the infrastructure tools available for you? Now there is. It's called Dowmasters.x, Y, Z. And you could look at all of the tools that are required to spin up a Dow. Discord, of course. Mintgate, gardens, open law, investing, recruiting, marketing, fundraising, payroll, all community management, all of these various tools in one place. Kind of cool to see.

This is all the infrastructure I wish I had in 2017, 2018. Oh, I wish I'd like to make a token. And then I would like, how to mint and ERC 20 token? Oh, it's gotten so much better. Like, I've always wanted just like drag and drop, push button, Ethereum smart contract infrastructure. And this is, is that and not only that but a bunch of infrastructure around that infrastructure too so this is that and it's the golden age of infrastructure right now it's gotten better but it's still going to get so much more better like better like better it's like it's going to be another 10x a year from now in terms of the tooling we'll have so stay tuned for that guys also stay tuned axi infinity continue to crank it out they just released on their ronin side chain something called katana which is a dex for AXS tokens and SLP tokens,

tradable with ETH. David, what's going on here? Yeah, Axi Infinity, famously, the Axi Nation has their total entire GDP on the Ronan side chain, but it didn't have a Dex. And so if you wanted to swap stuff, you would have to take it back to Ethereum. So they just built their own decks on the Ronan side chain.

So it's like Axi Infinity Nation's got its own New York stock exchange natively on their side chain. And so that's probably a huge upgrade for all the AXI Infinity players out there that don't have to go back to Ethereum to start using the defy there. God, look at this video, man. These axes are so cute.

The Q's creatures I've ever seen. Digital creatures, that is. Optimism. What are they doing? Evm equivalence. We talked about that a little bit next week, but they're releasing that as a release in probably just like seven days or so.

That's exactly right. Optimistic Ethereum coming to optimism itself. They're upgrading their own system going into EVM. equivalents. They release a fantastic blog post. If you want to understand EVM equivalence and AlphaLeak, you do. You do want to understand EVM equivalence. So go check out that blog post. It puts it into really simple language. There is a fundamental difference between EVM compatibility and EVM equivalence. Evm equivalence allows optimism to ride the network effects

of Ethereum. All the infrastructure tooling, the dev tooling, the node tooling, everything that's already been built out just gets to be immediately replayed. purposed for optimism. And that is their big competitive advantage. So, congrats to the optimism team. We're going EVM equivalent in just about seven days. Yeah, it's really interesting because I think the real chain wars are actually going to be the chain wars between layer twos that will need to carve out their place and carve

out their niche. And I feel like our optimism's take is we are going to be the most Ethereum-aligned roll-up of them all, basically. So other roll-ups might adopt other technical implementations. They might even go to other chains. But optimism is really aiming to be an extension of Ethereum, which is a really neat niche. And it's something that I expect they'll be able to carve out quite successfully. David, let's move to the raises of the week every week in crypto.

There's always a massive amount of raises. We can't cover them all anymore, but we do try to cover some of the big ones. This one's different, though. Yeah. So what is this? DCG. is digital currency group. So Barry Silbert's firm, of course, you might know many of his products.

CoinDisc is one of his products. Another one of his products is GBDC and all of the grayscale funds that you might buy the bridge. All gray scale. Yeah, gray scale. The thing. Yeah, exactly. The whole thing.

So what are they doing here? What's the raise? Just raising a casual $700 million. Okay. Okay. Yeah. $700 million at a $10 billion. valuation.

All right. This is the second largest. Yeah, this is the second largest crypto raise ever. I actually don't know what the first is. But I mean, this is just absolutely massive. Naturally, SoftBank is behind this because they have all the currency in the world. So, yeah, congratulations to Barry Silbert. This is absolutely massive raise.

Weird headline, though, I think. I don't know who gave them this moniker. DCG wants to be crypto's standard oil. Standard oil? Yeah. We don't want standard oil. We don't want robber barons in the crypto industry. That's a little weird.

Yeah, I don't know where that's coming from. Whatever, metaphor aside. Quick facts about Barry Silbert. Like, he was originally super supportive of Ethereum Classic for some reason. He put a ton of Ethereum Classic on his treasury. I don't know why. Also, he's also previously, this is no longer the case from what I've gathered, but there was conflicts of interest between Coinbase and digital currency or CoinDesk,

and digital currency group because they didn't put up a firewall between the news arm and the fund arm of the same company. So that's raised some eyebrows overall. Like a what is it called? A conglomerate, I guess, is what this is. It's an absolute massive empire. It doesn't not fit. Right. Yeah.

And they're definitely raking cash. I think they've done a lot for crypto adoption. I'll totally give them that. And yeah, I think overall they're healthy. They're a good actor. I think they definitely skew a bit more banker, old world, Bitcoin maximalist type. But still, I mean, this is all part of the adoption story. And I mean, wow, $10 billion evaluation. That's got to raise some eyebrows, soft bank jumping in as well. This is another one that's pretty big. The firm backed by Alan Howard, which, remember, he's the massive hedge fund manager that is also backing Eric Peters from One River Capital Management a couple weeks ago on the podcast. Anyway, they just closed a $100 million investment in a major Metaverse fund with our friend, Andrew Steinwald, who a year ago, about a year ago at this time, came on the bankless podcast. Andrew has his own podcast, had his own firm, was a very small firm at the time, and I'm going to

butcher the name, David. Can you say the name for me? Sir, Mim. Yeah, Sofermion. Sifurmion. Okay, thank you. Sofermion. And at the time, he's on a podcast with he and who was a Jake.

It was Jake, Jake Berkman. Jake Berkman. And he basically gave the pitch for NFTs in the Metaverse. And he was like, guys, you're not going to believe us when we say this, but NFTs are going to be bigger than DFI. And we'd just come off of DFI summer. And it felt like very much like. Both Ryan and I were like, what? Yeah.

Like, yeah, eventually, you know, in 10 years or something, sure. Like, I did believe him, but, you know, I thought it would take a longer time for it to play out. And to be fair, he probably did too. Well, he definitely thought it was. It did not happen as far. It happened way faster than he thought it would. Okay. So now his firm just got $100 million in funding, his fund.

So congrats to Andrew. Congrats to the people preaching NFTs. Andrew, you were right. We were wrong. And like, I think a lot of the people who were right about NFTs and the Metaverse a year ago are now reaping the rewards on this side. It's like market validation. Now you get $100 million in your fund. Go invest for us.

So congrats, Andrew Steinwald and his entire team. And congrats for being right on the thesis. It's really cool to see. Yeah. And again, like believing in NFTs before there was any real market validation about them, right? Cryptopunks were still like below two ether, right? Like there was no excitement about NFTs. They were just a concept.

Yeah. He believed in it before anyone was actually bullish on anything about NFTs. You know what? Something really gets me excited, gets me going, is like investors with conviction. Okay. There are so many people on YouTube and I feel like in Twitter. Some of these are traders, self-proclaimed traders. But some of these are like crypto influencers and like investors in the space.

And they don't really invest. with any conviction. They don't really have a long-term thesis. They just play on whatever's popular in the narrative, right? Three months in, six months in, okay? I hate that. Like, it's just not, it's not something that I gravitate towards. Like, I like the Andrew Steinwald's of the world. I like the Olaf Carlson Wees in 2013. I like the Brian Armstrongs in 2012 who are like, oh, I see what this can become. I have conviction when everyone else is going in a different direction. No one else believes. I'm going to put my flag in the ground. I'm going to build something cool. And I'm going to invest in this space and build in this space with conviction.

Those are my favorite people in crypto because all of them are playing long-term games. And you should go and follow what they do at every single step. And I think Andrew is one of those people. Have we said enough good things about Andrew? I wonder if he's listening. Andrew, you like you. All right. What's next, David? What's this one? Sandbox. Yeah, This is the company that Snoop Dog is associated with. So that's how Snoop Dog came into the world of crypto with partnering with the sandbox, Metaverse-type avatar-ish second-life type game. It hasn't been opened yet, but you can build stuff on it so far.

Just raise $93 million again by SoftBank. So SoftBank really injecting a ton of cash into this space. Yeah, they just raised a couple months ago $140 million. I don't know what the valuation is. This particular article doesn't say it's got to be unicorn status already. Building on Ethereum, which is interesting. I know you've taken a look at the tech. You think it looks cool.

But I think a lot of this comes off of the Facebook meta pivot, right? Facebook, the biggest social media company, the fifth largest company, we're just looking at that in the world is now pivoting to the metaverse. And sandbox has a sand token? What has that done on this news? It's done some things. Yeah, some big things. So yeah, it's been hanging around like 75 cents. And then as soon as the Facebook MetaPivot,

as Sand just went from 75 cents to like three plus dollars. And then at the same time, it also raised, you know, $93 million. So good things, good tailwinds for this for this sandbox company. Geez, market cap close to $3 billion. And this is just a leg up. We've seen that ever since the Facebook announcement and a lot of like anything that is classified as the Metaverse as a token, that's a, narrative that is happening in defy tokens right now. Another narrative that doesn't get old is the

narrative of get a job. Getting a job in crypto, of course. Time for the, this is the time when we remind you that there are all sorts of fantastic job opportunities in crypto. All of these fantastic protocols and companies are hiring. We have a bankless job board where we try to consolidate as much as possible, some of the coolest opportunities. This week, Head of Growth at Dex Guru, a technical lead at Daffley, incorporated an accountant at SmartDefi, product manager at SmartDefi as well. Head of Ethereum research at Immutable. David, you had a mutable on the podcast earlier this week.

Also, head of tokens, community manager at Dexible, a lead engineer at Hats. Dot finance. Community manager E. Agronum. Did I get it right this week? Yeah, nice job. Nice job. That's like four weeks in. Also, I don't know if that's correct, but that's just how I do it. Okay.

That's how David has always said it. Also, they're looking for a CTO E Agronum, Senior Backend Engineer, Smart Defi, BlockTain Technical CTO, interim role at Merit, Community Manager, Argon, founding blockchain engineer at Highlight. Oh, my God, I'm almost out of breath. Senior Software Engineer Popcorn and a community lead at Popcorn as well. I rattled off just the top ones that I could list, but there are dozens more on the job board. Sign up for that. And make sure you check this weekly for opportunities in crypto that could fit your skill set. Yeah, as these raises have come in in the last few weeks that we keep on talking about,

raise after raise after raise. That's what they're doing with the money? There's so many jobs available on the job board. We just raised $700 million. We're digital currency group. I think we need to hire some people to spend that on. They've got to be doing some of that, right? Where else is the money going with all of these raises?

Yeah, that's where it's going, folks. All right, David, let's get to the news. The big one of the week is the Facebook Metaverse Pivot. they're changing, they're rebranding, no longer Facebook. They're now called meta. That is the company name. That is the ticker symbol. That is the meta.com website.

A social technology company is what they're saying in their press release. David, what's happening here? I like this little graphic where they have like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, all of their products, and then it forms into the M of the meta. Basically, I think we talk about this a few times where like sometimes people, start building stuff and they don't know what explicitly what they're building towards until they actually get there. So I think the idea here is that Facebook has been building out parts of the metaverse in different little pieces. Like, you know, the Facebook was like the first virtual

online social media thing that really took the world by storm. It was the first iteration of, you know, V1 metaverse. Add in Instagram, out in WhatsApp, I'll add in all these social elements now with Oculus VR. I think this pivot makes a ton of sense, right? They are all, already making like virtual online experiences in different silos and now they're just branding this under the single umbrella also doing a fantastic job of aligning their branding with the metaverse which is getting a just absolutely ton of attention as a word even though no one still knows what it actually is oh i feel like we know what it is we have some hints we all yeah we have some direction there yeah but uh i mean obviously like there's basically nothing that facebook and zuck can do

that has positive light on it. Like, sure, you can call it the Metaverse. I'm going to call it the Zuck first. It's the Zuck first. Well, deservedly so. I mean, they have, it feels very much like use their command and control to abuse users in the past, maybe abuse even ecosystem participants. Countries, entire countries.

Yeah, it does feel like Zuck deserves, maybe Facebook deserves a lot of the flak that they get. But Chris Dixon pointed out in our podcast, like, he is one of the, only original Big Web 2 founders that are still actively involved in making bets and managing their companies, right? It's just kind of Zuckerberg. I guess Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg, but like the Google founders, you know, they're gone. Microsoft, of course, like, they're gone. All of the original big tech companies are mostly gone. I guess Bezos is still there. I don't know why Dixon didn't include them. But it enables somebody like Zuck to make a big bet. And that's this is. This is a big bet on the future. It's going to cost a lot of money for them to get here

into the metaverse. And there was so many different takes on this, right? So like one take I felt like was the political take, right? Maybe political Twitter was very much like, oh yeah, this is just Zuck trying to deflect from this bad PR, right? Everyone hates the name Facebook. So now you're becoming meta. Okay. You know, whatever. I think crypto Twitter, much of crypto Twitter saw this as a co-opting of Crypto, a co-opting of the Metaverse. Yeah, okay, you're trying to duplicate our thing, but just make it decentralized or centralized. Centralized, right. Brian Armstrong's take was interesting, which he was very much like, you know, Zuck knows what

he's doing. He's smart. He's founder-led. He actually believes that someone like, like I think I do, maybe you do too, David, that this is going to force Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to build on top of Cryptofer. Right? Because like in the Metaverse, where do you get your property rights layer? We can't have meta, Facebook, be the property rights layer of this entire economy, this is a universe that we're building. So where does that come from? Well, it has to come from NFTs, tokens, settlement on systems

like Ethereum. So maybe this is actually just Zuckerberg kind of capitulating and being like, okay, I'll build my universe, right? I'll own the front end, but I'm going to build it on this open standard, which is crypto. Maybe that's a super bullish thing for crypto. What's your take on all of these things? I'm going to go with Occam's Razor here. I don't think there's much of a crypto story here at all. I think this is just about, because there was a video I saw of the whole presentation of the pivot and what they were going to do with it, and everything was cut out for it except for the words experiences. And so it's just Zuckerberg saying, experiences, experiences, experiences over and over.

The word experiences was built into this thing. I truly think it's more of Web2 stuff, less about crypto property rights, NFTs, stuff like that and more just literally about like it's a big pivot into Oculus, into VR, into the online social experiences. And so maybe the crypto part does come, but I don't think that's the specific strategy that's being communicated here. It could be wrong. Yeah, no, I think there's some truth to what you said.

I just think the reason it's bullish crypto is because I think many people in Silicon Valley No, it's like it's more than that. So many people in Silicon Valley, if you ask them what they're, we have a different definition of the metaverse than them. Okay. If you ask them what their definition of the metaverse is, it's experience. It's augmented reality. It's virtual reality. It's this new realm that you can go to. Okay. The crypto definition of the metaverse, is strong property rights. It's self-sovereignty. It's like the difference between New York City,

a neighborhood where you can own private property and set up commercial shops and business and Disneyland, which is an experience. And where are you actually going to set... Yeah, it's manicured. Where are you actually going to create a real organic digital universe? It's not in Disneyland. You don't build a house and raise your kids in Disneyland, okay?

And if the metaverse is going to be a human experience, If it's going to be a real organic thing, then it has to have property rights. It has to feel real. It has to like live. So that's why I'm kind of of the mind that yeah, Zuck thinks it's about experience maybe because that's the only hammer in their tool belts. But what this really is about is like they can build the front end on top of this thing. I don't care.

They'll be forced to settle on top of crypto money systems and crypto property rights systems. So that's why I am, I guess, bullish, and I do think that there is a crypto story here underlying, even though they don't see it yet. Sure. Yeah, I do like that take. You said that they think it's all about experiences and we think it's all about property rights. And I will say, when you have property rights, you also have the culture come out of the property rights. Yes. Cryptopunks, bored apes, like property rights about those things. And that is also experiences. and those experiences are vibes that I've been feeling all week here at NFT, NYC, and you're not going to be able to, that's a bottom up vibe, not a top-down experience.

And so that is the difference. It's, yeah, it's totally right. And it's like, back to what we were talking about, it's like, let's make the internet weird again. The internet is like boring and sterile and not weird. Let's make it weird again. I think that's what crypto is doing. There's no risk in Disneyland, but there's a bunch of risk in NFTs. There's no risk in Disneyland?

You can't kidnap to Disneyland, huh? It is locked down. Very secure, very safe. Nike is heading to the Metaverse as well. They are filing trademarks in the Metaverse, and they are hiring Metaverse designers. So here's an interesting thought for you. Okay. It's like all of the growth for the mega brands, particularly the premium luxury brands,

is going to be growth in the digital product space rather than the physical product space over the next 10 years. Remember when we had Kathy Wood on, we were. like, well, like, for the banks, you know, they could start doing more in crypto, but it would just be such a marginal small part of their business because they're so large. And she was like, oh, that's where you're wrong. Chris Berninski said this too, because it's not about the proportion of total revenue. It's about the proportion of future growth. All right. So all of the other business lines could be stagnant. And if you have 90% of the growth on the digital,

side on the crypto side, then the banks are going to start taking notice and capitulating. I feel like that's going to happen with brands too. It's like Nike, you've got all this IP, you got all this fan base, this brand equity, all these athletes, how are you actually going to grow your revenue over the next decade? And the massive amount of growth is going to come from digital products rather than physical products. So they're going to start piling in David. That's what I see here. Yeah. And the whole Facebook pivoting to meta, I think there's a lot of companies behind the scenes doing virtual goods, metaverse type things.

And this is just, again, going to turn this into an absolute rat race of who can be the most metaverse, the fastest. These are awesome shoes, by the way. What are these? Like virtual Nikes. They look awesome. I would...

I don't think, I don't get it. I want these. What? In my life? Have you ever seen my shoes? I have never seen... You even see the bottom half of me. Rarely?

It's weird when I do. It's weird when I do. I'll show you my shoes sometime. I do have a pair of Nike's. Not that cool, though. Yeah, I said this take, but that's the take. The virtual goods are going to dwarf the physical goods before long. Microsoft getting in on the action, too.

Microsoft CEO, it's the biggest company in the world, apparently. The Metaverse will bring the real world into any digital space. So they are going all in. They plan to introduce 90 new services and updates in three major areas, including the Metaverse. You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming. Of course, they said, no surprise there. They own the Xbox.

So are they just going to fast follow Facebook into this thing, David? Yeah, everyone, everyone. Everyone's going to the Metaverse. We're all going to see you there. See you in the Metaverse. What's Reddit doing, David? This is super exciting. This is an engineer who just joined their team.

Going to the Metaverse, three words. He says, decentralized, period, social, period, media. What does this mean? This is huge. Okay. Reddit is, I think Reddit is on the cusp of perhaps one of the biggest pivots of all time. From a Web 2 company to a Reb3 company, not just a little bit, but going heads first. So we know that Reddit has always been curious with Ethereum.

They had the Reddit scaling bake-off competition forever go. Arbitrum won it. And so Reddit is now using Arbitrum to scale out NFTs and tokens inside of the Reddit platform. And so this thread and the writer of this thread has the ultrasound money icons in his handle. I just want to throw that out there. Oh, my God. And so he makes a fantastic thread. So let's go through it.

Your karma points will soon be tokens. Think community-based decisions, forking subreddits in disagreements, which is, oh my God, that's so cool. That's so amazingly cool. First off, like incentivizing good content via valid contributions, that's amazing. but also a very dark part about Bitcoin's history and Crypto's history at large is that the Bitcoin had a civil war inside of the R-Bitcoin subreddit and they forked it off into our BTC and our Bitcoin because there was this I can't remember his name but a mod a mod subredder that was like silencing anyone that wanted big blocks and only four small blocks and there was a massive massive civil war that ultimately created the block the block they forked size wars, the fork wars, right? And it was just a conspiracy and espionage. It was crazy back then.

Some of the stories, Griff Green told me some of these stories in the layer zero. And like if we can just figure out how like in like how we fork our blockchain, we can just fork our subredits like with more like instantiated assets inside of them that go and have governance votes and allow the communities to have voice. That is amazing. And that's exactly what Dow's do when tokens do. And so I think what this could become is one of the coolest things of all time. The threat continues.

Reddit has 500 million monthly active users. When we all pull this off, we will onboard 500 million Web2 users into Web3, and then there is no going back. We are all going to make it. And then he just continues saying crypto-culture things. It's time to take back control. Make the Internet truly open and break-free. Give us each ownership of everything.

And so I think this could be one of the most ground. breaking pivots of all time. Yeah, I do too, David. I'm super bullish on this. Like we said in the last episode, Reddit actually has, they don't monetize their user base very well, right? And maybe that's because they don't really prey on their user base the way other social media platforms kind of do through advertising, through like mining them for all of this information. It's a bit more open, bit more free. But as a result, it's not as profitable. Well, this gives them incentive to jump into Web3 first because they don't have to cannibalize a large existing business model. There's just opportunity.

They don't have much to lose. There's just opportunity on the other side. And the thing is the technology is here, too. So this thread goes on to say, Reddit is partnered with Arbitrum, which you mentioned, created our own separate instance of Arbitrum. Community points for two subreddits. 80,000 users are already on Rinkbee TestNet and our Arbitrum network. So remember Arbitrum when we had them on, they have Arbitrum 1, which they're rolling out,

which is live right now. But Arbitrum doesn't have to be just one roll-up, okay? You can use the Arbitrum code and create your own roll-up. And that's what Reddit is doing here. They're just forking, they're creating a separate instance of a roll-up that all settles on top of Ethereum. So super exciting to see an engineer talk about the technology being ready for this, too. Overall, this is just ultra-bullish web-2 companies becoming Web3 companies.

they have everything to gain. As Chris Dixon said, Web3 is ownership. He actually quotes them in this thread. And I mean, man, Web 2 is. That's great. Web 2's peaked, man. I really feel like that. Absolutely.

This is the Wall Street. New York Times. New York Times says they are hiring a crypto and fintech reporter. Must be able to explain what Web 3 is. Apply here. New York Times. Look at that. Getting in on the action, too.

Also going Web 3? Everyone's going to the Metaverse. Everyone's going to the Metaverse. We're all going there. They want to talk about it anyway. So super cool stuff to see. David, let's talk about some NFT action. You saw some of it.

Lots of NFT action. This week. Yeah. What's this Quentin Tarantino thing? Yeah, Quentin Tarantino, seven uncut scenes from Pulp Fiction released as NFTs. So he was at NFT NYC on a panel with some of our fellow community members, a coin artist, G Money, Quentin Tarantino, all sitting in chairs together talking about NFTs. that's a big name getting into NFTs.

So NFTs, you know, like, got another one. Yeah, got another one. What's your favorite of Quentin Tarantino movie, by the way? Do you watch any? Oof, oof. I was not prepared for that question. Can I defer to next week? Yeah, yeah.

Go watch a few. We'll talk about it next week. Gohous Bastards. Jaygo and Chain. Oh, Enchance is a good one. That's a good one, yeah. Oh, no, it's Jane Go and Change. That's mine.

That's fine, dude. Yeah, totally. It's easy for me. I love that movie. All right. Let's talk about the McRib, David. McRib is issuing an NFT, okay? Top signal, global adoption, new paradigm.

It's top signals all the way down. It's just like a rotating, like, trading card, but it's a McRib. McRib has this, like, cult following McDonald's. It's a pretty big deal that McDonald's is releasing an NFT of a McRib. Again, just legitimizing the technology. like hey someone's gonna buy it have you ever eaten a macrib i have never and i've never eaten a mick i've never eaten a mac rib do you know what it's made out of because i don't i've heard it's made out of a bunch of BS that i don't want to know so it's not an actual rip with like fake filler and like

the ripples in it are not actual like it's not an actual rip right like it's just uh right synthesized fake rib fake rib fake rib okay well i'll probably enjoy it more in nfts real nfts though real NFT. That's great. All right. Well, I don't know if we peaked or not, but McRib is on the blockchain, so that's great. How about the Matrix? Dude, that, actually, yeah, let's skip to that. We'll get back to this. So the Matrix, the new movie coming out, they are actually issuing NFTs as well, right? ProfpP NFTs. Profile picture NFTs, a hundred thousand of them, which is crazy. On a side chain, right? on a side chain, yeah, on an Ethereum linked side chain, not a roll up, just a side chain, it's called Palm. But yeah, 100,000 profile pictures for the Matrix avatar.

Is this the new style of marketing? It's like, oh, yeah, it is. Yeah, it's like, oh, our movie's coming out. Let's try and get everyone to wear our avatars as the movie gets released. People get hyped about it. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. And the numbers here, you pointed out, David, $100,000.

That's big for crypto, right? Because usually these PFPs are like 10,000 or something is pretty common. But, like, that's pretty small for all of the moviegoers who see The Matrix, right? What are their box office sales? The millions and millions of people that go and we'll see it, box opening weekend. It's pretty small. And it's very easy for them to release this digital NFT merchandise. I wouldn't be surprised in the future, David, this is successful.

Every single release. We're certainly seeing, last week we talked about Disney getting on it. Every single movie release, you're going to see NFT digital merchandise that you can purchase on top of this too. here's like a possibility that I could see happening you know how Twitter is integrating verify verifiable NFTs yeah well what if you get an air drop for verifying your matrix NFT and having it on your profile picture for like two weeks because they want you to do that to market the movie and if you do that and like market the movie then you get an air drop after the fact like imagine those games that could be played I mean marketers are going to come up with basically every every sort of

iteration of what you're talking about David yeah I can totally see that playing out um what's interesting to you is in China, the tech giants are saying yes on NFTs, but no on cryptocurrencies, right? We sort of seen this in the U.S. where Web2 companies are like, we're not going to do crypto payments. That's a little scary. But NFTs, oh, yeah, easy. Let's add some features, you know, TikTok, Twitter, all of these things. We're seeing that in China play out too. Yeah, from a thing about this from a regulatory perspective. Like, it's the same thing. Like, no, get the currencies out of here. NetTs? Like, sure, whatever. Yeah, sure. We're not threatened by your Apex by your Axy?

It's a Trojan horse. Oh my God, that's what I was about to say. It's the biggest Trojan horse. It's the biggest because without cryptocurrencies, NFTs actually don't work. Like, did you know NFTs are actually secured by the cryptocurrencies on the chain?

Right. Like, that is the security mechanism. The value of cryptocurrency. That is a security mechanism for NFTs. And if they're not secured by a cryptocurrency, then they're not NFTs. They're just entries in a centralized database. So, tricked you.

We tricked you guys. You are, by adopting NFTs, you are adopting cryptocurrencies, maybe without knowing it. So thank you very much. The NFT rugpole. I love it. Let's talk about this. Was this a rugpole or what? There was some Cryptopunk that sold for $500 million, as the Bloomberg.

$500 million. For FYI, I think the biggest crypto punk sale ever was something like $7 or $8 million, something, you know, very, very high, but not $500 million. So what the hell happened? Turns out this guy wrote a smart contract, guy or girl, unknown person, wrote a smart contract that when the smart contract would receive the ether, it would immediately send it back.

And so what happens, this guy put his Cryptopunk into a smart contract, borrowed a flash loan from Ave, just borrowed all money possible. And a flash loan lets you borrow all the money that's in the vault so long as you also return it in the same transaction. which is why you actually don't have to put up any collateral to do a flash loan. So this person just borrowed $532 million to buy a crypto. Once in that same block, the Cryptopunk was bought, the contract returned all the money.

So this person basically bought their own Cryptopunk for themselves for it. It wasn't a sale. It's like a wash trade kind of thing. It's a wash trade, right? But they did set like the all-time high sale of a Cryptopunk ever. And so what happened was that the Cryptopunk bought that goes out, the notifications that a crypto punk was sold. One goes out and says somebody bought a crypto punk for $532 million.

Everyone started freaking out. It's not even that cool of a crypto punk. What the hell is going on? And then they realized that this guy just made like a circular loop and it caused a bunch of storm. But yeah, it's good meme. Good joke. Good riff. Now we're all talking about it.

It's, yeah, that's the thing. We're all talking about it. And we're all getting educated on flash loans because this one person, I don't know who this is, Ryan Patrick Curlin. He says, who the hell gives out $532 million loan to? an individual, even for an instant, who does that? And then Scott Lewis is like, uh, the Ethereum virtual machine does that. It's magic. That's how we do it. And so what just happened? We do it with code. Yeah, this guy washed straight. It wasn't a real sale, right? But like, these numbers, the,

the amount of money that we're talking about gets headlines. And then those headlines further propel this conversation and mainstream to start learning what flash loans are, what Ethereum is, what NFTs actually are and what this transaction was really about. So kind of cool, kind of genius, I guess, from a PR perspective. Ryan, since you're the tax optimizer between the two of us, is this a taxable event? Oh my God. I don't even, oh, that's, you just ruin the rest of the episode. I'm going to be thinking about this the whole time. No, I mean, if you're moving from one wallet you own to another wallet you own, it's not a taxable event, there you go. Tax optimizer, answer.

for the week. Thank you, sir. No taxable event, David. You can do that. It's fine. Check with your CPA. Now this is financial advice, tax advice. Bitcoin stuff. Man, quarterback sure do love getting their payment in Bitcoin. This is NFL star Aaron Rogers. He is of the Green Bay Packers. He is getting some of his salary in Bitcoin. What's going on? Yep. It's not the first time that that's happened. Some NBA players have also done this. Some people just want to be paid in Bitcoin. And I've, they're, and players like, they have a lot of money, right? And so they like to, they like to play in the money games too. They play in the markets, but and they like crypto markets. Just saves you a step, I guess. Rather than buying Bitcoin, you get paid in Bitcoin, you don't have to

do that step. Good marketing. You stuff to pay your taxes in Fiat, unfortunately, but, you know. That's true. Yeah. They won't be changed with that anytime soon. Coinbase. That's why they want to be paid in Bitcoin so. So they can just like get it immediately, you know. Yeah, I, I guess so. Yeah. I see that. You know, I guess I'd rather be paid in, in crypto and a lot of cases. Coinbase is doing Bitcoin loans now. So the SEC shut down Coinbase lend, right? Well, threatened them. And Coinbase decided to withdraw. But Coinbase borrow? Yeah, that's what this is. That's okay. So what is this product, David? What's it doing? Yeah, well, famously, you can't do defy on Bitcoin. That's not what Bitcoin's for. You can take your Bitcoin onto Ethereum and then do

the defy stuff there. Or now you can also take your Bitcoin to Coinbase and get your loans, your Bitcoin collateralized loans from Coinbase. And this is kind of how we've always said Bitcoin is going to scale out as a currency. It's going to use crypto banks. And that's what's going on here. So $1 million loans from Coinbase on your Bitcoin collateral. Yeah, that's cool. It's interesting that they can borrow, but they can't lend according to the SEC regulation.

It's completely nonsensical. One half of Block 5. But we talked about that with Brian Armstrong too. You can listen to that on Monday. What is the Biden administration doing next? they might be putting stable coins under federal supervision. If you don't do that to Congress, Biden administration says, we will. We will do that.

What's your take on this message coming from executive branch? To me, this was relatively sensible regulation. What I got from this is that the stable coin issuers need to be regulated as banks. That makes sense. The other thing that's also really nice about this is that Biden is saying, hey, Congress, hey, legislators, the people that were elected, please. do legislation, which I like way more than the SEC, which I did not elect, to impose regulation. What about this? Or we will part, though, David. Yeah, or I think it's by or executive order,

which like, yeah, okay. Yeah, they might do it anyway. Yeah. But also, it's Congress. So, like, don't hold your breath. Like, Congress doesn't go very fast. Yeah. It doesn't go fast at all, especially these days. Jake Trevinsky, I think, had his take here. He's a great, you know, crypto lawyer. Somebody's been on bankless many times. There's lots to pick apart in the new stable coin report. This is a report that was put out, I believe, by Treasury, I think. That's kind of related to that headline that we just read.

But the TLDR of this is basically Congress has to act in order to enact the new legislation. Right. And so I think what the Treasury is saying is basically like, hey, we'd like to do some things. but we really can't unless Congress acts. And Jake's point is like, prompt action from this Congress on anything is unlikely, let alone on something like stable coins. Like, this is not that big of a deal on the congressional agenda. They can't get any of the main initiatives passed that the Congress wants to get passed.

Are they going to do anything with stable coins? No. So this is kind of a, I guess, a sigh of relief for people in the industry who are worried about some harsh action. being taken against staple coins. That might be a bit, you know, we talked to Brian Quintez, Quintens. He talked about like, you know, Congress is either doing like not enough or like way too much.

And so you got to watch that pendulum swing. And that was the worry that suddenly they would get draconian on stable coins and do way too much. It doesn't look like that is likely, at least at this point, according to Jake. Yep, I agreed. Yeah, very cool. David, let's talk about what China is doing. China is continuing to roll out its central bank digital currency.

Did you know 10% of China's population now has a digital wand wallet? Yeah, that's crazy. Big moves. That's way more. Like, there's not, how many, 10% of people inside the United States play with crypto? How much do you think people play with crypto inside the United States? Well, Coinbase has 65 million customers. I guess some of that's worldwide.

So, yeah, 10 to 15%. Let's call it that. Okay. Okay. Anyways, no one's touching the United States, central bank digital currency. So if the United States would like to latch on to the success of defy, they could actually beat China in this. But I'm not holding my breath there either.

Yeah, they really should. I put out this tweet, meanwhile, in the U.S., back to our favorite screenshot here, the congressional hearing, cryptocurrencies, what are they good for? That's what the U.S. is still debating while China is like rolling out a central bank digital currency. All right, guys, we are going to be right back with the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the fantastic sponsors who made this episode possible. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana

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We search for all of the great takes that are happening in crypto this week. We try to dish them out to you. This is the first one. David, you want to read this out from Zeneca once again. It made it last week. Making it this week, too. What's this take? Yeah, Zeneca says, on the calendar year of NFTs,

we are still having breakfast on January 1st. What he means that, like, if you take all of the NFT lifetime, like the whole entire progress and development in the stories of NFTs, we are just eating breakfast on the very first day. Basically, he's saying NFTs have a long, long road runway ahead of them. Have you ever seen, like, you know what that reminds me of? It's like the lifespan of humanity. And if you, like, project, like, the entire history of the universe and make that a calendar year,

then how long would humans be alive? It's something like some sort of picosecond. It's like nothing. So it's nothing. Yeah, we're very early. Not quite there, but maybe we're just still on day one of NFTs. David, what's this take from Eric? Eric Wall. Yeah, Eric Wall says, making a high throughput L1 to reduce gas costs is a bit like

making a road wider to reduce traffic. In reality, the wider road makes people think, oh, I can take my car to work now instead of commuting. And then boom, traffic reclogs. It takes exactly as long as you took to get to work as it did before. And he is quote retweeting, Kyle Samani when somebody was asking, hey, can like Solana do rollups too? And yeah, sure, of course Solana can do rollups. But the point is like, if you can do roll-ups, but the point is like if you can do roll-ups, why do you scale the L-1, right? And so it's just what Eric's saying, he made a great threat about this, is that it doesn't make any sense to both scale the L-1 and the L-2 because you're putting an L-2, which is really, really, really scalable, on top of an L-1, which is also scalable,

but also not decentralized. And so what he's saying is, like, Kyle Samani is saying, like, oh, yeah, Solano will eventually have to go to roll-ups because it'll eventually congest. Kyle said that, which goes against the whole entire point of why Solana exists in the first place and is just being like, hey, we can just like use penetrative pricing, cheap gas fees to undermine Ethereum. And then we're going to be the thing that goes to roll-ups because we are all, we totally know that we're going to be in the future. That's a total pivot, by the way. That's a total pivot because the entire purpose of chains like Solana, monolithic chain design was high throughput on layer one so that you wouldn't need roll-ups. Why? Because the advocates of Solana would argue in roll-ups, you lose composability, right? You lose this kind of atomic defy-to-defy

sort of transaction ability. And so you need massive amounts of throughput on the monolithic chain on the layer one. And this is a pivot from that, a departure, a change, a 360, I don't know, sorry, 180. Like, what else is this? I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me either. And Eric, well as I think rightly calling it out. I think there is a path, as we said before, for the salinas of the world to get, you know, to move into the roll-up design. And it's like twofold. Either you become a roll-up on top of some other highly economic consensus layer, like an Ethereum or something else, right? So you become the execution layer. Or you move to become more decentralized over time, right? And like you become a bit more Ethereum-like and you prioritize rather than scalability on layer one, you prioritize decentralization a bit more and security, right? And then in which case, you're just kind of following Ethereum toward the path that it's taking.

So this is what we've been saying, right, with the ultrasound Ethereum, ultrasound network, modular blockchain kind of thesis that we've been putting out there and others like Pauline and I have been putting out there too. That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this. I read a letter earlier this week because Metaverse was all the rage, right? You know, Zuck and Facebook moving to the Metaverse, what does this mean? And this is like an investor letter that said, oh, hey, if you're an investor and you want to play the Metaverse, the thing you should do is go buy Facebook and go buy Roblox.

All right? It's so crazy to me that people still think that the Metaverse will emerge from this old world, that it will emerge from like one, old capital formation tools like stocks and like two old web two companies that don't really get it. It's like, folks, the best way to play the metaverse is to buy ETH. Okay? It's to buy the property rights layer of the metaverse. Okay?

So if you believe the thesis that we believe, which is this entire metaverse thing has to be backed by strong settlement guarantees, strong property rights, like actual digital scarcity that's open and incredibly neutral. you're buying things like Eith, you're buying things like Bitcoin, you're buying the banking layer of this new economy which is defy, like you're buying Web 3 type things. You're buying crypto money things. You're not buying Facebook

and Roblox? My God. I mean, you could buy those things. They're not terrible. It's just like, why would you allocate capital to those old things when you have this new thing? That's how I see it anyway. And so I just

it was just like a connection is people think, oh, the Metaverse is hot, and they really don't know what to buy or what to invest in in the space. And I think, once again, the answer is really it's crypto. Yeah, 100%. And we don't talk about it. We haven't talked about this angle a lot lately, but Ether is one of the most fantastic indexes of what Ethereum is. And if you read our Metaverse Emerges article or our Metaverse podcast, everything, when the

metaverse is built as a property rights layer, everything ultimately conveys. verges on ether. And yeah, and you finish this up with exactly what I was about to say. ETH is Metaverse money. That's the whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. That is the whole thing. And I don't think traditional investors and traditional media get it yet. So that is an opportunity to front run. Of course, we're still the ability to front run the Metaverse now. David, do this take. It's really good from Twitter. Yeah, this is funny. The first company to call it a profile instead of a wallet will win. If you still think it's a wallet, don't understand its capabilities.

This is just lending itself to like, you know, your Ethereum address is more than just like, you know, the place that you store your money. It's your Metaverse identity. It is your Web3 identity layer for the world. My David Hoffman.eath connects to my specific Ethereum address. And that is, you've called this before, my passport into the digital nation, into the metaverse. So it's not, these aren't wallets.

These are profiles. I love these small, little paradigm shifts like that, right? Like wallet is a really good mental mental. model, but also profile, self-sovereign identity is a really good mental model. And I think that is starting to emerge in crypto as well. Hey, these things aren't just places where you can store assets. These can actually be like the ability to log in with an ether address is as a real thing. Really cool to see the decentralized identity narrative, you know, taking form some more. David, this is your take. Why don't you say it?

Yeah, Facebook's Metaverse is Encyclopedia Britannica. Ethereum's Metaverse is Wikipedia. And this is, And this is just basically saying, hey, Facebook is going to build their own metaverse, their own Disneyland, and they're going to invite you into it. Ethereum's metaverse is everyone's going to contribute and put their pieces of the metaverse into this larger and growing and open and free larger metaverse, right? And so this is just a fundamental analogy that we always use in the free and open source software world. Like why did Wikipedia win? Well, it allowed anyone to write for it. Yeah, I think it's the difference between like, like the United States versus Disneyland, right?

It's like you couldn't fit the United States inside of Disneyland, could you? Yeah. But like Disneyland has to rest on something like the United States, right? So it's like Facebook's Metaverse really is going to be an app on top of this larger metaverse that we think of. It'll be the Disneyland version of the Metaverse. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. It'll still be there and people can go there.

People can visit. It'll be in the Metaverse. Yeah. It'll just be in our Metaverse and it'll be the Metaverse inside of the Metaverse. Exactly. Yeah, I don't think it's, it's just not that complicated. It's just like Facebook is an app on the internet. It is not the internet, right?

It's just that. Here's a scary thought. I was thinking about this earlier this week. As bullish as I am, Devin, you know I'm bullish, right? And you know, I don't think the bear market is coming anytime soon. I think we've still got a run in us. But it is a scary thought to me sometimes when I see all of these token thoughts, probably close to 50% of people right now have never seen a bare market.

They don't even know what that looks like. Their only experience with crypto is, oh, I buy the thing and the number goes up. Oh, and it doesn't really matter what I buy because anything I buy, the number goes up, right? And like, oh. JPEGs go up? Yeah, everything goes up, all right? And some things just go up faster than other things. And so what do I want to do?

I want to get in the assets and tokens that go up the fastest, right? These are like little babies in crypto. Like, and I don't mean that in a condescending way. I'm just, they're so new. They're like newborn babies. And they've never seen the real shit. Okay? They haven't really like until you've been through a bear market and like everything gets tested.

Your conviction gets tested. All of your theses get tested. And you've seen kind of the recovery of that, the other side. you don't really know what you own. So many people, like your friends and family, people you go to Thanksgiving with, many of them will probably own some crypto, but very few of them probably know what they own

or why they own it. So this is actually a little scary to me, a little concerning because, you know, bare markets can come, and then what happens when people don't have conviction in the things that they bought, and they start to see a 20% 30% decline,

they're going to head for the exits. And then it's going to make it worse, right? It's going to make it worse. It's going to make it worse. Feedback of loop, yeah. That just struck me. I guess at some point in time, you get a certain amount of people who buy in

and they don't really know why they bought in. And then it kind of like, there's a tipping point reached where like something bad could happen, right? I guess that's what speculative bubbles are at the end of the day. Absolutely. You have any thoughts about? Yeah, one of the guts that I,

that I try and listen to is like the euphoria pain like spectrum. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, it's been a while since I felt any pain. I've been feeling a lot of euphoria lately. Like that usually means that pain's like around the corner. Yeah. Like you don't get to be in markets and don't feel like both. Like you get equal amounts of pain and equal amounts of euphoria. And there's been a lot of euphoria lately.

And as you can definitely tell that in like how many strangers there are at this NFC, NYC event. Like a lot of these people are just here for the first time. and like they've come they've been coming in when the times are good not there are very few people that have felt pain and so so does this worry you sir are you worried right now are we getting a little long in the tooth in this run the thing is like i'm i always leave room for a new paradigm and so like i think like all of the pain that the collective crypto uh community felt during 2018 2019 like it's it's that the meme of the army man protecting the sleeping child from the from the knives and the swords and the grenades and stuff.

Yeah. I think we, maybe there's a world where we took that pain and, like, you know, shielded the 2020, the 2021ers from having to worry about that because we built all the infrastructure in the bear market. I think the other thing is once you go through a bear market, right? Like, you're not worried about that. You don't, you don't worry about the next one anymore. It's like, what's the worst thing that could happen, right?

Oh, I was making so many jokes this week. It's about like, oh, yeah, all the crypto people that I met in 2019, 2018, Like a lot of us are like, gosh, the bear market was nice. Like, it was quiet back then. Like it was quiet. It was really cozy. Good time to make friends. Good time to start things.

Good time to build. Right. And like if you didn't leave in 2018, 2019, are you going to leave in the great bear market of 2024? No. It'll still be a bull market to us. Exactly. Anyway, I just, you know, it's something I'm thinking about. And again, I don't think this is imminent personally, but you never know.

and markets can certainly turn in a hurry, at least in the short run. David, this is a meanstake, and it's actually a riff on the Reddit thread that we're talking on from that engineer who just recently joined Reddit. What does he mean say here? Mean says, the end users of Ethereum are no longer individual humans. Its roll-up dev teams building ecosystems, let 1,000 roll-ups bloom. Ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor. And Ethereum is specifically talking about the Ethereum L-1.

He's saying the end users of the Ethereum L-1 are no longer. longer individual humans. And Amin Soleimani, he's one of these guys that memed Moloch into existence. And this angle of Ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor is so great. And so Reddit, when it uses Arbitrum to scale all of its stuff, it, all of the world, the entire universe of Reddit comes and settles on Ethereum. And that is why Ethereum is a civilizational trust anchor, because it's not just Reddit. It's going to be everything. It's on a roll-up. Settled by Ethereum, secured by Ethereum, allowing coordination to happen. So great take.

Yeah, I really like that take. And also let a thousand roll-ups bloom, right? Like a roll-up can be whatever you want it to be. And this is Reddit, you know, creating its own roll-up. Super cool. I have actually a question for you, David. This is just something I've been thinking about recently. So let's assume, as we are, that the main chain is completely occupied by roll-ups in the future, right?

So, like, large pools of capital that are settling on Ethereum. That means gas fees are not going down on a few. your main net anytime soon. Transaction fees on roll-ups will go down in the future, but gas fees on main net will not. Does this mean there could be a lot of NFTs, like stranded on Ethereum in the future, right? And I say like tokens too, but NFTs specifically because some of these are pretty, like, some of them can be very low value and they cost more to trade. Has there been any talk at NFT, NYC, that sort of thing?

No, no, I haven't thought about that, but that is a good point. do believe that L1 gas fees are up only. And so, like, damn, like, NFTs might, a lot of cool stuff might get stranded on the L1 simply because it's just not viable to get it off there. It's something I'm going to think about some more, but yeah. Anyway. Also, when Amin Soleimani says, let a thousand roll-ups bloom, that should be in stark contrast to what Kyle Somani was talking about and with, when Eric Wallet retweeted him and talking about,

like, oh, yeah, if you add more lanes to a road, the road just gets congested. the way you add more lanes is you add more roll-ups because they're separate roads. More roads? More roads rather than one super big road? Make more roads on the L2. That's what the L2s do. That's where the extra roads go. Roads and bridges and all sorts of things.

This is Scott Lewis-Take. Ethereum isn't going to be a consumer-facing blockchain for all that much longer. That's what he means on the main chain, right? Specifically. So I was asking that question about NFTs on main chain. And it's always been, it's always been Ethereum's plan to be in the background. It's not supposed to be in your face. It's supposed to be invisible, just like TCPIP.

And if Ethereum hides behind these roll-ups, that's perfect. That's where it's supposed to be. Yeah. You don't even know. Like, it's D-Y-D-X. I mean, this exists in practice. You don't even know you're using Ethereum. David, you do this take.

This is from NFT, NYC again. Yeah, somebody tweets out, the pro of being a woman at an NFT event is that there are no bathroom lines ever. And so Mike Dutis, who I actually met this week. Great to meet you, Mike. He goes, Crypto, bringing equality. two bathroom line waits. I experienced this for myself. I had to wait behind like seven other dudes to go to the bathroom while like the ladies room had no one in there. That's funny.

Maybe another push for this like unisex gender neutral bathroom's edge. It's like this even things out anyway. Okay, David, before we get to what what you're excited about, actually, we're about to what you're excited about. So let me just ask you, what are you excited about this week? Yeah, tell me. Well, I've teased it throughout all of this roll up. But, NFT, NYC was great. I met Cammy Russo there. I met her in person, so I thought that was funny. It's nice in crypto where, like, you know, defiant bank lists.

Like, we're not the same. We're not different. But yeah, some friendly competition there. Like, she's got a great newsletter. We've got a great newsletter. She's got a great podcast. We've got a great podcast. But in crypto, like, it's all love.

It's all love. So got to meet Camie Russo. That was fantastic. Like I said, met Brian Armstrong. Got to shout out to the Pleaser Dow family, which we call ourselves a Dow, but we're really a family, even though I'm like the least. active member of the town. And but like, you know, hanging out listening to the Wu-Tang album.

It's like, I keep on chilling in real life events. Maybe Ryan will come to one. Maybe one day. Maybe. Definitely next year. Okay. The culture and vibes are really, really great. And again, if you got to find your clan.

You got to find your community. Find your people. There's somebody, the first ever crypto event I ever went to was East Denver, 2018. I met two people there from the Brave team. Luke and Jenny. I saw Jenny for the first time in four years this year here in New York, so that was pretty cool. Yeah, like, again, the crypto world, the longer you're here, the more it feels like family. It's really cool, too. A bunch of people shared values as well.

And I'm glad, Cammy probably recognized you unlike Brian Armstrong, right? But I see your AIM username, AOL username there, Blackjack Davies, so I understand. David. Yeah. It's a totally different song. Shout out to Jack White and the Black Jack Davy song that I named myself after. That's awesome, man. Ryan, I think I just got to tease about what you're excited about.

I'm putting tabs too quickly, but you know this, okay? Bankless Dow, the Dow Punk kind of project that spun out of Bankless Dow had an NFT drop. And that happened last Friday. It was awesome. Dude, it was just really fun. I mean, you know me. Look, I'm into turtles, okay. but I haven't jumped two feet into the whole NFT game.

So this was the first time I got to experience a whole NFT minting from the ground up. And what was cool about this was like, it's really started with the community first. So there was a culture and community for Dow Punks and what is that culture in the community? It's like a bunch of people who want to say F the 9 to 5, right? Like we want to self-organize in these new capital structures and social structures and work for DAOs full time, right? It's about going bankless, which of course, we are fully into bankless culture and saying like no to the establishment.

This is about going west. And so a lot of this culture and these values were really imbued in these Dow punks. And so I minted some NFTs and then I purchased a few NFTs like on the secondary market. And again, I don't do this a lot. So it's just really fun, man. And I love the NFTs. All of these are going to be actual physical merchandise, too. So this is a bridge of the real world.

And what I saw in the community was not a lot of shilling, not a lot of like what's the floor price checking. Not a lot of like it was just a very long term kind of thinking new vibe, new culture, right? Very sustainable culture. Sustainable culture. And you talked a lot about like what's a Dow. It's all about like flow. It's all about like the vibes of the Tao. And I think I felt that in a cool way.

And, you know, tying that to NFTs is cool. So what do you think of my collection here? Not too bad, right? Oh, I love it, Ryan. Yeah? Yeah. I'm trying to pull up mine right now, but I don't think I'll be able to do it in time. I was trying to.

Oh, wow. You've got some good ones. Wait, some good ones. Okay, sorry. That one's awesome. These two. Look, I minted this one and that one, right? Which are great.

They're great. But, like, I really wanted a, I wanted one of these either crypto natives or a shadowy supercoder. And I wanted one specifically with, like, a bankless bankless box. And so anyway, I found somebody in the Dow Channel who's willing to like just, you know, sell me one that wasn't posts in the market. So I did that. And then I also bought this, which is a great one.

Yeah. It's like, you know, it's rare. It's got this interesting skin. It's a creative number 35. Anyway, it's really fun. I know you had a lot of fun too. So do you have yours? Can I pull yours up?

Yeah, I just sent you my, my NFT address in the chat. So if you want to paste that into open. see it'll take you there because I also like mine. One of the cool things and cool things like you said in the Discord felt very sustainable. It felt really great. Oh, there it is. Trustless State. Okay.

Yeah. And like the thing is like I made a joke in the Discord. Like these Dow Punks are going to simultaneously be with zero and also infinity. Yeah. No one wants to sell. Oh, someone sold me one. Oh, I got a new one. Which one?

Oh, these ones? Bottom one. Yeah. The PJs? Yeah. Ultrasound summer. Oh, dude. These are PJs.

These is ultrasound summer. Yeah, that's a good one. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That was another one on top of my list. But yeah, tell me about which ones did you mint? I minted the top left two, the ones of the orange backgrounds. Yeah.

And then the other three that I bought. I offered a guy 3.5 eth and a trade on one of the crypto or Dow Punks that I already had. And he was like, no, man, like, it would be really nice to have that Eath. But it just meant it was two sentimental value. I had this conversation like three times. Like another person's like, no, like, I, that's a nice offer, but like, I want to give it to my wife. And so like, no one's telling me the Dow Punks that I want, right? I have a list of a few others that I'd love to get, but I'm just not seeing them on the secondary market and offers aren't going through.

This is probably my favorite in your collection here. That's my bankless ninja. I call that my V for Vendetta Dau Punk, because he looks like he's about to hack a bank. That's awesome. This one looks good, too. That looks like that's pretty neat. Anyway, look, I guess I'm down the NFT rabbit hole now. Like, you know, I guess Turtles was kind of my first experience with the Dow Punks, you know.

I got some like a few other things. But yeah, it's been really fun. I'm glad the turtles are in their rear of year. I run. Hey, I haven't sold a turtle. I will, look, turtles will come back. Okay, David. But, you know, got to give it to rest after dressing like a turtle last week.

All right. I hope listeners are ready for the meme of the week. Let's finish this thing out. Meme of the week. What is this from NiftyNod, David? Yeah, he says, can't see it any, can't unsee it anymore. And we have Netflix, Google, meta, Instagram. And if you are looking at this, it very clearly spells it out N-G-M-I, as in not going to make it.

Now, I think Netflix might have got some collateral damage here. I don't have any problems with Netflix. I mean... It was an N. We needed an N, okay. We needed an N, but yeah. All these Web2. companies, not going to make it. I'm just not going to make it. That's awesome. Definitely the meme of the

week. I think maybe the meme of the next era, the next decade, we'll have to see what happens. Of course, guys, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky. Defi is risky. You could lose what you put in. All of crypto is risky, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on the bankless journey. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now. to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks.

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