Bankless - ROLLUP: Friend.Tech | SBF to Jail | SEC vs Coinbase
Episode Date: August 18, 2023WRU 3rd Week Of August ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ht...tps://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader ----- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:46 MARKETS 4:52 L2 Beat Check https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary 5:44 US GDP Aint Bad https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/atlanta-fed-model-lifts-us-third-quarter-gdp-view-58-2023-08-16/ 8:38 Base Activity UP https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/base 13:51 Permissionless Party! https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1141000052253397112/1141127988935655485/BK_invite.jpg?width=1620&height=2096 18:00 Friend.Tech https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1690137625414569986?s=20 https://twitter.com/_ThePinkyToe/status/1691818070317081080?s=20 https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1689961952007561216 24:36 FriendMEX https://friendmex.com/ https://twitter.com/nnnnicholas/status/1691591282395619686?t=aB2QdT8F3LV0pNh1rZCCDA&s=19 31:31 SEC vs. Coinbase https://dailyhodl.com/2023/08/14/blockchain-association-supports-coinbase-in-amicus-brief-filing-says-sec-short-circuiting-legislative-process/ https://twitter.com/MetaLawMan/status/1690355411373772800 35:36 SBF In Jail https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939.200.0.pdf https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-existence-is-pretty-bleak-the-harsh-conditions-sam-bankman-fried-will-face-behind-bars-202511231.html https://twitter.com/MetaLawMan/status/1691200324269228032 41:37 Fraud Proofs! Do they matter? https://twitter.com/MattFiebach/status/1691600391635427360?s=20 https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1690395159538634753?s=20 https://twitter.com/DCbuild3r/status/1691610447663735288?s=20 50:21 Gitcoin partnered with Shell https://twitter.com/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728 https://imgur.com/ekdl7LP https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1691488210315288576 54:56 CoW Swap releases TWAP orders https://twitter.com/CoWSwap/status/1692152855694803112?s=20 56:07 Visa testing onchain payments https://twitter.com/digitalmustafa/status/1689741716084215809?s=20 58:24 Argentina's Pro Crypto Candidate https://www.thestreet.com/cryptocurrency/argentina-pro-bitcoin-candidate-javier-milei 1:00:05 Donald Trump's Crypto Wallet https://twitter.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1691875444809781337?s=20 1:01:59 3AC in trouble again https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1691791478815641859?s=20 1:03:38 Bankless Airdrop Hunter! https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT 1:09:26 BitGo Raises https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/08/16/bitgo-raises-100m-after-scrapping-prime-trust-deal-bloomberg/ 1:12:35 Questions from the Nation https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1138917318899027988 1:17:54 Takes Of The Week https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1690106630610829312?s=46 1:20:10 What Are We Bullish On 1:25:21 Meme Of The Week https://twitter.com/josephdelong/status/1691961456491639022?s=20 1:26:40 Outro and Disclosures ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Now Ethereum is going to become Uber.
Now Ethereum is going to become decentralized Twitter.
And it just never seemed to kind of click for me.
We made some progress.
We did episodes with like Farcaster, for example, and Lens.
Cautiously excited about those and bullish on those when I started seeing them.
But the question is always, how do we get mass adoption?
Friend.com and this experiment, again, I'm not saying it's going to be friend.
Dot tech, guys.
Okay, don't hear me.
This is a POC, okay?
This experiment showed me how it can work in the same way that CryptoKitties showed
me how NFTs can work.
Bankless Nation, happy third Friday of August.
David, what time is it?
It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup where we cover the entire weekly news in
crypto, which is always an ambitious never yet.
We persevere nonetheless into the frontier.
How are you doing, Ryan?
I'm doing fantastic.
I'm excited to talk about friends, how you sell your friends this week,
because that's what you've been doing.
You bought some of Ryan shares.
Yeah, and then you sold them right after it.
That's right.
That's topic number one.
It's this.
app called friend. Tech that hit, I think Friday after we recorded the last roll-up. And everyone
on Crypto Twitter was using it. I used it. It's kind of interesting. We're going to talk about that.
Number one, friend.com. This new app, is it a fad or is it a new paradigm? What else we got, David?
Coming up next, we got SEC back in the hot sea after six law professors, A16Z and paradigm,
who both employ lawyers, all voice their disbelief about how the SEC ought to approach
crypto and proposes something new in lieu of that.
Also, SBF is on the move.
It seems like, David, you might now be neighbors with Sam Bankman-Fried.
That's exactly right.
This is a factual statement.
After that, we're talking about PayPal, Visa, all making moves into crypto this week.
And then Coinbase futures?
Coinbase getting some futures?
What does this mean?
How is this changing Coinbase's international strategy if they are allowed to roll their own futures here at home?
All of this is coming up as we get into this episode.
So make sure to like, subscribe, rate and review, wherever you get your podcast so we can get
the good gospel of crypto to the top of these iTunes charts or Spotify charts or YouTube,
wherever there's an algorithm.
Give those to the five-star reviews so we can push it up to the top.
Guys, before we get in, want to tell you about our friends and sponsors over at SAFE.
They have a message for you.
Safe, of course, is the wallet that everyone in crypto uses.
That's one that I certainly recommend.
David, what are they rolling out?
Yeah, so SAFE is proposing their modular open-source safe core protocol as the standard way to move forward
for the wallet transition to smart contract wallets.
If you all ever caught my talk at DevCon,
there's just universal consensus in the world of Wallace
and the world of Ethereum that we are going to all have
smart contract wallets by default.
But that is not the way things currently are.
That is the future that we are trying to get there.
Safe, like I said, is proposing their Safe Core Protocol as the standard.
And so they want you to check it out.
It features an unopinionated core standard as vendor agnostic,
high component reuse and robust security.
this is how we prevent bugs,
while also maintaining interoperability
and smart account diversity.
So there's a link in the show notes
to get started with SafeCore.
You are a dev.
They also have a safe con
coming up in Berlin, Germany.
So if you are in around Germany
or around the European area,
they are doing a safe con in September.
So check out the link in the show notes
to get started with that.
Con,
as in conference, by the way, all right?
Not con as in like a con job.
Oh, God.
I hate that we have to specify this.
What is that?
This industry.
This is crypto, David.
Let me introduce you.
There have been some cons in crypto.
Yes, they're in this agenda, actually.
Multiple.
We have multiple cons in this agenda.
One of them is living down the street from you, as we just said.
And one of them is a conference.
But first, markets want to thank Cracken for showing us the market charts today.
And I got to ask you, David, what's cracking with Bitcoin price?
I'm never going to do.
There were two in a row on this one.
29,500 is where we started.
We are currently experiencing some.
Red candles coming in below 28,000.
Are we below 28,000 right now?
This is a moment where I'm going to have to ask the Bankless Nation to please pull out your
price checker app to check out the prices because they're probably outdated.
27,700.
Wow.
These numbers have updated in the last like five seconds.
We are currently dumping down below 5% negative 5%.
Look at this red candle.
Why?
Why we dump it on the red candle?
I don't know.
By sellers and buyers.
All right.
Well, at least it's not flat.
It hasn't been for the past three, four weeks.
Yeah. Ether, doing the same thing. This looks like an equivalent chart.
Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Ether, when I put these numbers in, it was at 1740. We are now at 1730. So we are down 6%. 6%.
All right. You might have to find out afterwards. Also, the ratio down. Ration is doing normal.
No, it's flat. Okay. Pretty flat.
Total crypto market cap. We're still above a trillion. 1.16 trillion. Tell us about layer 2 beat, though, okay? So this is the total value locked. Tell me this number's going up at least.
number is going up. We are a $10.1 billion TVL on layer two with the activity. The activity passed
5x-Eath layer one. So combined Ethereum throughput on this layer two is if you want to hit that
activity tab right. It is now 5x. Oh, we're down to 4.92. It was five earlier. We breached five
for the first time. We are now at 4.92. Although I will-X of what? Of Ethereum. Remind us.
So ratios of Ethereum's throughput to the Ethereum layer one.
So layer twos are doing five Ethereums collectively versus the Ethereum layer one.
Base is now included, I believe, in all of this TVL and activity, which we'll talk about in a little bit how the base launch has gone so far.
But before we get there, I want to talk about the trad markets for a second.
Oh, boy.
This is the thing that caught my interest this week.
This is the Atlanta Fed.
And you know, when I say Atlanta Fed, the Fed is all these different, I'm going to call them chapters.
They're not chapters, but geographic banks.
Atlanta Fed apparently has a model which predicts GDP for the U.S.
And their models currently predicting 5.8% GDP growth in Q3.
It seems wildly optimistic.
And yet...
5.0.
That's annualized over the year, right?
5.8% annualized over the year, but just in Q3.
Right.
Okay.
5.8% is gargantuan.
That's a big quarter.
That is a huge quarter.
You have to take this with a grain of salt because it's a prediction model, and as more data comes in,
it will probably go down, all right?
But a lot of the market indicators of GDP have been up, including industrial production
print, which showed factory output jumped 1% in July.
So it looks like GDP ain't too bad.
I don't know if you ever look at this chart, David, but let me show you.
This is on the St. Louis Fed.
They keep track of a bunch of the GDP numbers here.
Yeah, this is GDP over time.
Look at that.
So you see COVID,
down 30% on a coin in Q2, 2020.
That was a bad quarter.
Negative 32% G2.
We popped up, but we did pop up to positive in Q3, 2020,
positive from the previous.
Anyway, this is where we are right now.
Maybe I'll circle in on, you know.
Let's zoom in.
Yeah, that is up into the right chart.
Right?
Wow.
No. So I guess the end of the story is GDP is not looking so bad these days. Yeah, that is insane, actually. Like that... Are you surprised by this? This is why I put it in here because I was like, oh, I haven't been looking at GDP for a while because, you know, other numbers are more interesting. But these numbers are better than I thought they'd be. Yes. This is, I will call this a flash as in this is a single point of measurement. It really matters with if this thing continues. This is a, this is a, this is a, this is a,
one of those charts where it's actually the area under the curve that is the big thing rather than
the single point of reference. And so the longer that this is sustained, the better it gets. But man,
coming in at 5.8 percent, that is crazy. Where is all this GDP? Where are we getting this GDP from?
What couch question did we look under? Yeah, that's probably a subject for an entire podcast.
But what's interesting is I don't hear the R word recession being said very often these days.
And a year ago, that was kind of a different story.
All right.
Well, let's actually talk about what BASE is doing because no recession in layer two's either.
And BASE launched recently.
Was that last week?
The week?
Yep, that was last week.
Okay.
Last week.
How's it going?
What are we looking at?
I would say, I said on Twitter, this is one of the takes I gave, is that this was
the best protocol launch that crypto has ever seen.
Wow.
Zero hiccups.
Bridging was seamless.
Like, no one has had any problem.
UI, UX of interacting with base is great.
You know, transaction fees are super cheap because it's a layer too, as we know.
Failed transactions, no one's talking about any failed transactions anywhere.
And there's a ton of apps.
There's a ton of things to do.
The first time I went on base, I ended up minting like five NFTs until I have two minutes.
Really?
And I redeemed one for a hat, which is sitting on my wall over there.
It says on chain.
A utility.
A utility.
Yeah, I minted an NFT.
And then I went to like a stripe checkout page.
And then it connected my wallet.
and had the NFT in it, and the $30 hat dropped to zero, because that's what the NFT does.
And then I bought the hat, and all within like five minutes. It was great.
And you actually received the hat. It was not a con. You want me to go show you. It's great.
Yeah. Yeah, go grab me. I'll go grab it. And after I spit off some facts.
TVL, almost over $230 million. So closing in on one quarter of a billion dollars.
That's big. Overeaging almost nine transactions a second over 24 hours,
which makes this the second most popular layer two behind is the,
K Sync era, which has got 10.2 transactions per second, although I bet you the ratio between, like,
users doing things that I was doing, like, and then bots on ZK Sync is probably different.
Transaction volume all-time high on August 10th with a record of, you ready for this?
136,000 active wallets on the network.
What?
Yeah.
42 of them were all first-time-based users.
42,000, not 42, yeah.
Yeah, so a whole total number of 142,000 unique wallets
Already bridged assets over to base and claimed the bridge to base NFT
This is going to be one of those NFTs
I don't know if you can pull that up if you have that pulled up the bridge to base NFT
Maybe you want to search Google for it
Bridge to base NFT
Yeah this is going to be one of those NFTs where like you're going to show your grandkids
Like one back in the day I used to I used a bridge to get on to base and I minted the
NFT and it's one of yeah one of these things yeah uh-huh
You can see, how do I get this?
Press the mint button, bro.
Like with a wallet that I've bridged with?
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, MetaMask, coin-based wallet.
Phantom probably works.
I got to go find a wallet that I've bridged with.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's cool.
Or you can bridge.
It takes two, like, two seconds.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So some great success out of base.
I'll go with my hat.
I can't bridge live on the episode, David.
All right, he's getting his hat.
One second.
On chain hat.
Hey, there it is.
Yeah, oh, wait.
Zoom in.
There it is.
It just says on chain.
It just says on chain?
Yeah.
I like that.
On chain hat.
That's a great hat.
There were other colors.
There was like white on white.
There was white on black, but I got the red on black because it matches my bankless hat.
Yeah, that looks very bankless of you.
Of course, the best analysis comes from poop man.
One of my favorite Twitter accounts right now.
Poop Man, defy.
Bro, there are senators that listen to the show, man.
Yeah, I know.
They need to respect poop man.
They need to know too, David.
Poop Man, Dify.
Thank you for the day.
What is poop man telling us about?
analysis. It is. It's pretty good. Put in a great tweet about base. Okay, so base has been earning
3x more revenue than ARB or optimism, arbitralia or optimism, while only incurring 50% of batch
submiter cost compared to the others. Interesting. So like this is the cost of actually being
a roll-up. You submit the batches down to the layer one. Comparing the daily fee margins from
transaction fees between optimism, arbitral, and base. Base revenues in the last week, I think,
1.25 million. Optimism revenue 424,000. Optimism. I did say Arbitrum, but I stopped because I thought I didn't. Arbitrum revenue, 424,000. Optimism revenue, 404,000. What makes this more interesting is that the cost of batch submitters on base is almost the, is the cheapest among all of these. So a submitter cost for base, 522,000. An arbitram submitter cost, 950,000, and optimism submitter cost, 1 million.
What do you mean submitter costs?
Is how much you pay Ethereum?
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And so, like, this is one of the costs of the protocol.
I remember.
So the profit, if you want to calculate the profit, you take those fees, the $1.25 million of base revenue and you subtract largely the base submitter costs, 522K.
We're still left with, what, $700k in profit?
Mm-hmm.
That's right.
Yeah.
Hey.
And like this is the Coinbase.
Coinbase gets 85% and then the OP collective gets.
15%. Is Wall Street noticing this? No, probably not. Probably not. Um, so he continues. If this data is
correct, base is likely the most cost effective and profitable layer two right now. Thanks, this is
probably from the fame from Coinbase. Base has been able to leverage this network effects and
popularity to drive immense on-chain activities and volume, potentially create a positive feedback loop.
Increase volume attracts more users, more users in turn build more projects on base and, you know,
rinse and repeat. And then also, like, we have this new friends tech phenomenon, which I bet you
is one of a nice, healthy chunk of the volume on base right now. We'll talk about that a little bit
later in this show. Base is going to be a growing part of the content at permissionless.
I think I said this last week, but me, Ben Jones from Optimism, Jesse from Base, are on a panel
at Permissionless, where we're going to talk about some of these details, all about the
base layer two in its relationship to the Optimism Collective. And since we're talking about
permissionless. This is a PSA for all bankless citizens out there. We are throwing a
party. You're a citizen? Yeah. I actually pay for our product. Do you pay for our product? Do you,
wait, do you pay for it with a company credit card or a personal credit card? I think a personal
credit card because I've never deactivated. You're not a citizen?
No, I am. But I pay with the company credit card.
All right. Anyway, if you are a bankless citizen, we are throwing a party. How about
big of a party, 500 people. Who's coming? You, if you're going to permissionless and you're a
bankless citizen, you are invited. And literally everyone who's at permissionalist, who's also been on
the podcast before, so like all of the speakers that we invited, and basically all of our friends
and people that we like to hang out within the space. And also all the bankless citizens.
So they're in the Discord, going to the Discord say, and there will eventually be a link that
we're going to hand around to our citizens. And so make sure to come. It's going to be very, very
fun. Ryan will actually be there.
Is that a bar?
So Ryan and I will have drinks.
I'm gonna sit right there.
Look at that bar.
That's your spot.
That's your spot?
Yeah, that's my spot.
I'm gonna say one thing.
Well, yeah.
I mean, we won't talk to each other the whole night, right?
We don't hang out in real life.
One thing I should say is, okay, there's a place for 500, right?
We might not be able to give everyone who is a bankless citizen ticket, hopefully.
I don't know how many bankless citizens are showing up to permission.
It's while availability lasts.
Yes.
As soon as we have 500, we, you know, fire code says we can't have more.
Fire code.
Nation state regulations are preventing us from gathering more than 500 people.
Yeah, they're oppressing the bankless nation.
But we're not there yet.
So stay tuned for that link if you're a bankless citizen.
It's going to be fun.
What we got coming up next, David?
Coming up next, we're going to talk about friend tech, the phenomenon that has swept
through crypto Twitter passing fat or new paradigm.
If it is a passing fad, is there still lessons to be learned?
We will talk about this.
SBF, my new neighbor.
We're going to talk about how that happened.
And then we are also, we, bankless, are dropping an app to help you hunt some air drops.
So all this is coming up and more.
But for a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible,
especially Cracken, the actual organization who's going to give us all free drinks at the party.
And then Cracken will also be at the party.
Thank you, Cracken for all the free drinks.
And also sponsoring the Bankless Nation.
Cheers.
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You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion
in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists.
It's Uniswap. But Uniswap is becoming so much more.
Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS.
The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go.
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exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on ramp fees and you can seamlessly swap on
main net, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswap mobile wallet, you can store and display
your beautiful NFTs and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market
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go directly to Defy with the Uniswop mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted
team in Defi. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes.
crypto last week. It's a new application on base. Okay, explain this one to me. What is friend.
Dot Tech? And why is, why is everyone flocking to this app? Yeah, it is an app built on base.
But, okay, so it's an app. I think it's for iOS only because it's not, it's not an iOS app.
But okay, I see what you're saying. Yes. Okay. It only works on iOS devices, right?
Yes. Okay. So they, why are we like hung up on this one little point? Because of the
iOS App Store charges is 30% fees to all apps. So Friends. Tech did this workaround where Safari
on the native Apple browser that no one uses has this ability, this native ability in your iPhone
to actually take a website and then turn it into a little widget square, just like a normal
app, but it's not an app. An icon, it's just a direct to a specific website. And so using that,
it turns and it behaves like an app. It's kind of clunky, but it's the workaround. So
so that they don't have to pay the Apple store.
They don't have to go through the iOS.
Permission.
It's just like the internet used to be, David.
Remember, you could just spin up an app
and everyone who typed in the URL could access it.
We didn't have to go through gatekeepers.
We didn't have to pay any app fees.
It's like that.
And it's a little bit harder, right?
If you're used to kind of the-
It's kind of the-clunky.
It's one of the first of its kind.
But it's doable.
The first time I actually used this
was actually turn chat GPT into an app
before they actually release an app.
So it was a nice little shortcut, right?
but this is actually a core part of how this stack is built.
Then you sign in using a code.
It's like they're doing their gated launch to help drum up excitement about it.
So I got a code, submitted it, opened up friends.
And I'm given a base wallet and a brand new Ethereum wallet that is non-custodial.
No one, that is my wallet because it's built into my phone because it's saved in the little app thing.
So I have my own wallet.
I link my Twitter account.
And so I link my Twitter account to this wallet.
and all of a sudden I have my friend's profile, and then people start buying shares of me.
Why are people buying shares of me?
Yeah, why?
I don't know, because I'm just such a valuable, I'm just a valuable friend to own shares about.
Because they want to sell you?
They want to make money on you, David?
Well, they think that other people are also going to buy shares of me.
And so there's like a leaderboard for this.
One step two, you actually have to bridge some ether.
Yes.
I bridge over like 0.1 ether to get myself started here.
Okay.
It's like, you know, $10 or something.
You can go a very low amount to kind of bootstrap this thing.
Okay, so why, yeah, why is everyone so excited about this?
Is this just a Ponzi game for influencers?
Is this the only fans of crypto pros?
I think it is a Ponzi game for influencers.
Part of the incentive is that you, your account, you get 5% of all share trading fees.
And then the friends app creators, the app, the company, also gets 5%.
And then, so when you buy a share, 90, you, 10% of the value of the share, 5% goes to the profile, the influencer or, you know, your friend.
And then 5% goes to the company.
And then you retain the share.
And so like me, as somebody with a following, I'd be like, oh, go buy my shares.
And then I get trading fees.
And so I have accumulated 1.4 ether from trading fees.
What?
Yes.
So to date.
And there are, let me see.
There are, how many people have bought my shares?
How many people, I'm checking it. I'm checking.
I used to be a shareholder.
You did.
You dumped me.
And I sold, I, I have 45 holders.
I have 45 holders.
And then I can't, I don't know the supply, but like, I, I own five shares of myself,
because I believe in myself.
Zero X bread guy.
So you're pumping your own bags, huh?
I'm allowed.
I'm allowed to do this.
It's transparent, right?
Zero X bread guy also owns five shares of me.
Goon machine owns four shares.
Tangle account accountant owns two shares. Altcoin Daily I.O. Owns two shares. Hiro Kennelly from the
bankless Dow. He owns two shares of me. And my current shares are at all time highs. So all my followers,
right, are in profit. What is it take to get a share of David on friend.com? One share of David
currently costs 0.26 ether.
Point 26 ether. Are you kidding me? That's hundreds of dollars. How much is that?
That is like $400. Well, getting less.
getting less now.
You can sell your share too, right?
And so also, I have committed to distributing all of my trading fees that I accumulate in seven days starting on Sunday to one of my shareholders.
So on this, on this Sunday, I'm just going full Ponzi.
On this Sunday, it's a prize.
Like I said, I have accumulated 1.41 ether in trading fees.
That will continue to go up.
So every time somebody buys one of my shares, and especially as my shares get more expensive,
the point the five percent of the trading fees that goes into my trading fees earned also goes up so
uh point two five ether to buy one of my shares five percent of that goes in the trading fees and
i am raffling that off to one of my shareholders on sunday so go buy my shares wow that that that is
um worth a disclosure i think david david is benefiting from all of the shares and he is making
a commitment i hey you better not refund it to yourself because you're a shareholder you know
I'm allowed. I own five shares. If I win, then I get my own trading fees. I will do this in a public trustless way. Trustless. Trust me, bro. But yeah, that's the plan.
What's funny about, so one question I have for you about the share price. So it's basically shares go up the more demand there is.
Correct. It's just like an algorithm curve. Yeah. So as somebody, as there's a unit swap curve. Yeah. Yeah. It's the next time's Y equals K kind of thing. So as more people buy my shares, they get more pricey.
Okay.
I think I'm top 20.
I think I'm top 20.
Dang, David.
I'm just ultra show right now.
Let's talk about...
I'm like top 20, yeah.
Let's talk about what this is doing in general.
So friend.com on basis generated 650,000 for users.
For users, they've gone to people like David.
After launching a beta a week ago, users received 5% shares you talked about.
With over 250,000 transactions and 23,000 unique users,
users, user counts are higher than Ethereum's largest NFT platforms combined. This is a tweet from
a Misari analyst giving us this info. So those are some of the stats that make this happen.
Okay, so I've got this app open. It's called friendmex.com. What in the world am I looking at right
now? Friendmex is a reference to Bitmex, which is this old derivatives exchange that Arthur Hayes
used to run before they got in trouble with the law. But this is just like the dashboard of
friends if you are a trader. So like bots and people who are making bets on other people are making
money here. So like some people have made a lot of money. I think I saw somebody,
people like profiting 30. If you go over to the Discover on the far right side and scroll
down about 20-ish people, you'll find me again on the leaderboard because I'm coming up, you know,
using my trading fees to pump up my position. You have to keep scrolling data.
There you go. There you go. I trust will say it. You just scrolled right past it.
Oh, there you go. My profile picture is broken. Yeah, yeah. Mark, I have a market cap of 18.8 ether.
That is the value of David Hoffman, apparently, 18 ether.
Yeah, you know, I think you personally, I think you're worth more, but I'm also not going to be buying a share anytime soon, but maybe I should. Maybe I should. Maybe you should, yeah.
What's cool about this is, and people are maybe asking why we're talking about this so much, this is this friend Mac's website was just spun up.
Because all of this data is public, all of this data is open, and you can create an exchange.
on top of base, on top of friend.
dot tech.
So friend.
dot tech is powered
by smart contracts
completely in the background.
All of it is open source.
Can you go click my profile
so you can see my chart?
See my chart of my net worth
right there.
I just click this.
Yeah, they can click it.
Look at that chart.
Oh, that's bullish.
Oh, that's so bullish.
That's a bullish chart.
That's a buy.
And you can connect your wallet
right from this app and trade.
Although, I don't know.
It's maybe not audited.
Be careful where you connect your wallet here, folks.
We're not necessarily endorsing this.
You know why I'm excited about this is, you know, not just to buy different influencers like David or Kobe or anything else.
I feel like this is very much a proof of concept for a next thing that we've unlocked, right?
You know, last week we were talking about Unipig and how that felt like a paradigm shift.
We just unlocked layer two for the first time.
This to me feels kind of like this.
This to me almost feels a little bit like CryptoKitties did.
At, you know, when was that?
2017, 2018.
We were like, oh, NFTs.
Like, we just unlocked some new primitive.
This Twitter poster agrees with me, Nicholas.
FriendTech, friend.tech is not a revolution in social tokens.
It's the wow moment about a brand new stack.
PWA progressive web app.
That's the Safari app we were talking about.
Web2 login.
Oh, that's a great point.
you could just log in with what your Apple ID, your Google ID.
Embedded self-custodial wallet, so it's still bankless.
Layer 2 transaction fees, so you're not paying like dollars for transactions to do this.
iOS notifications.
It's all of those things combined.
And to me, it feels like a proof of concept.
I mean, likely this thing is just, you know, it's going to pump and dump.
It is natively a Ponzi scheme.
I guess there is some utility in here in that if somebody purchases a share of someone else,
then they unlock this chat room, right?
Yeah, we totally forgot the main point of this.
Yeah, okay.
Well, let's talk about that.
Owning a share unlocks a chat room.
And so, like, why are people buying my shares?
I'm actually in there, like, answering questions that people have directly.
So, like, providing value to my shareholders, right?
Like, there's a room where you can direct access to the influencer that you've, you know, influencer.
Whoever you own a share for, you can go talk to them directly.
And if, like, they don't respond or they give you shitty answers, you can dump them and move on to the next one until you find a room that provides value to you.
you. It's cool. I think it's very cool. And I will say it's the most fun I've had in
crypto in a while. And it felt it felt very much like crypto-cuitous. Are you still active in there?
I, look, I bought it and dumped your share. So I also, I did. I did. You know, we both sold each.
I, I activated on Friday and Saturday and I was like, oh, this is cool. I see where this is going.
I'm going. I'm going to let other people like do these things. But, you know, maybe, maybe, look,
maybe Ryan is underpriced relative to David on friend.com. You know, I'm just saying that's a
possibility. It is a possibility. Yeah. So you're taking a bet that Ryan's going to start
becoming active rather than the guy who's already active. And who's also giving away 1.4 ether to
his shareholders. What are you doing? You don't even have 1.4 ether to give away. Look at this. See,
these are the types of games that like it's basically every creator is I suppose incented in like to do
something. And and I think that the chat room is the first layer of utility, but other layers of
utility can be added. Like what, imagine if this was scaled out to like, Kobe was teasing his followers
with feet picks. Okay. Right. Like, um, imagine, you know, okay, so I was right. It's, it's only fans for
crypto bros. So, but what happens if you scale this out beyond kind of like the, the, um, the crypto
crowd and you scale this out to like, I don't know, music artists. I mean, how much would people pay for
like Taylor Swift chat room? Like a share of that. So much. You could see how this scales.
and how the social games, like, it's just social, clout, economic games, meets crypto.
And it just, something about this for me just kind of works or unlock something that's going to be absolutely big.
And again, I don't know that friend.com will capture all of this, but somebody's going to.
We're in a new frontier here.
I think really the biggest pressure that I see on this on the future is the progressive web app.
This is the crypto-native application that just routes around the 30% tax of Apple.
And if this becomes standard, if like a lot of people start, you know, providing services through progressive web apps that are crypto.
And so like anyone that wants to do their thing, but they can't because of Apple, they just start doing this progressive web app instead.
It's a bargaining chip against Apple because we just routed around their gate.
Guys, it's the open in red, right?
Because if you, if you tried to do this on the app store, they'd want 30% transaction fee for all of this.
Like, it wouldn't work.
Like, their systems are not set up to handle crypto economics in this way.
And so it's a big bargaining ship that the crypto industry has to force Apple's hands to either lower their fee or just like crypto in or do something.
Or we'll just, you know, progressive web app our way around their gate.
Guys, I'm only half joking when I'm about to say this.
Are Ponzi games are going to change the world?
They're going to change the Internet.
Like, for real, this is going to lead to a more open Internet.
Yeah, Ponzi Games versus Ponzi schemes.
Ponzi schemes are where somebody is a rugpillar.
Or Ponzi games is where it's kind of just a collective game of chicken that we all agree to play.
Well, I mean, some of these influencers on there might be red pollers you don't know.
I mean, some of them might be.
They could walk among us.
They could walk among us right now.
What do we got next?
Okay, the SEC versus Coinbase.
I feel like this is the Avengers assembling here, David, because a set of lawyers filed what's called an amicus brief saying the SEC should leave Coinbase alone, basically, should drop the care.
case. Okay. And what is an ambicus brief, you might ask? You have that question, David?
Do you know what an amicus brief is? It sounds like some lawyer speak. Okay. I think it basically is
lawyer speak. It's basically where a bunch of outside lawyers who have some level of prestige,
some level of legitimacy, write their opinion on a case, either while the case is in progress or,
you know, before it goes. Why do they do this? You know, they just want to communicate their position.
And so depending on the level of legitimacy, I think the court system, like the court system, the legal system will kind of look on this, not as a piece of evidence necessarily, but as a, you know, an element of the argument here.
And so this is a bunch of lawyers who've stood up and said, hey, the SEC is out of line here.
So the law professors are from Yale, University of Chicago, UCLA, Boston University.
and they go through and they school the SEC on the history and meaning of an investment contract,
both during and after the passage of the original Federal Securities Act in 1933,
the act that gives the SEC their power.
And what are their conclusions?
Their conclusions are basically that the SEC's argument that crypto tokens are trading
on secondary markets, our investment contracts, is wrong.
That's what their conclusion is.
I think the significance of this is not just that.
this opinion is being expressed, the crypto industry has been trying to express this opinion for
years now. The significance of this is that it is a band of legal minds who are putting forth
a legal document, which is now in the public space for anyone and all to use in any sort of
future legal proceedings that they might need to use it. So I think like really it's like
these Avengers coming together to produce this future document that allows for any other
lawyer to leverage the arguments if they ever find themselves in the positions of needing to be
leverage. And so it's ammo. It's collective ammo for us as an industry to shoot. Is that fair?
I think that's totally fair. Yeah. And so this is A16 Z crypto and paradigm also filing an amicus
brief that is as similar. And their argument is also similar. The SEC's approach is a significant
and problematic expansion of its regulatory authority and even threatens purchases of tailings
of Taylor Swift concerts and Teslas.
Oh, no, Taylor Swift.
And probably friends shares, yeah.
Yeah, definitely friend shares, David.
Senator Lumas, as well, has added to the voice of the lawyers coming out, swinging against
the SEC, asking the courts to actually drop the lawsuit entirely.
I don't know how often that happens, where a senator, like, chastises a regulator and says,
like, the court system should absolutely drop the case.
Meanwhile, there was actually some good news on the regulatory front this week.
Yeah, Coinbase announced that the National Futures Association, which is apparently a CFTC-designated SRO, has approved a Coinbase Financials market as a registered futures commission merchant.
Coinbase can now offer futures contract in Bitcoin and Ether to eligible customers inside of the United States.
Inside of the United States.
That's us.
That's big, right?
Yeah, so Coinbase was recently like six months ago or so.
making a big push to be international because they could not do this, because they could not offer
competitive products and services that push so much United States capital offshore to things
like finance and FTX. So now they are given the green light to do some of these future stuff
inside the United States so that Coinbase could do it. So that's great news. Yeah, CFTC playing nice.
The SEC still not playing nice. But, you know, two steps forward, one stop back. And we'll get there
eventually. David, speaking of two steps forward, SBF is now your neighbor. What were we teasing in the
intro? Where's SBF right now? Yeah, so two steps forward to jail. The federal judge has revoked
SBF's bail for attempting to tamper with witnesses, wall, so that he has been moved from
house arrest with his parents in Palo Alto, California, to a New York jail awaiting his criminal
trial on October 2nd. Wait, because he was tampering with witnesses while he was in
his parents' basement?
Yes.
Yes.
He was attempting to tamper with witnesses and therefore violated the terms of the bail.
Turns out if you're on bail, you're not allowed to tamper with witnesses.
Okay.
Prosecutors, so mental note for...
Seems reasonable, but okay.
Prosecutors alleged that SBF repeatedly tried to corruptly influence witness and interfere
with a fair trial through attempted public harassment and shaming.
Wow.
Okay.
And so he's in New York.
Not only is he in New York.
He is in Brooklyn.
Really?
Yeah.
So a federal judge revokes bail for FTCS founder of Sam Bankman-Fried, and the crypto entrepreneur
was sent to a crowded Brooklyn administrative prison known for grueling conditions as he awaits
trial in October.
The quote from someone who's familiar with the matter says, the existence is pretty bleak
of the inside of the jail.
Federal prosecutors that have alleged that Bankman-Fried 31 violated bail agreements,
of course, communicating with a New York Times reporter about Caroline Ellison.
his former girlfriend, who previously served as CEO of Alameda, of course, and Ellison, Caroline,
has pleaded guilty to multiple fraud charges and entered a plea deal to testify against SBF.
So we have, you know, ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, you know, in a prisoner's dilemma together.
Apparently, SBF released her diary, which he had access to, which is just like, I mean, he's a sleaze ball.
So it's not beneath him.
But that's why he's back in jail because he's tampering with witnesses.
He's like, I put the address of where the jail is in Google Maps and in my apartment.
It's like a 30-minute bus ride.
It's not that way.
That's so bizarre.
But David, I'm not sure if the corruption stops just with SBF.
So the DOGA this week released an indictment alleging that SBF was lobbying Congress and high-level government officials.
This is pretty big news.
You wonder who else was caught up in SBF's trap here?
And it sounds like there's a lot of people.
on Capitol Hill that may need to provide some answers around this.
Yeah, I don't think this is news to anyone in the crypto industry who's been following the FTC's case,
but of course, FTCS and SPF just like spewed out what the DOJ is alleging to be over hundreds of millions
of dollars to both Democrats and Republicans.
So quote from this article,
the defendant's use of customer deposits to conduct a political influence campaign
was a part of the wire fraud scheme charged in the original indictment.
And as a part of the originally charged money laundering scheme,
the defendant also concealed the source of fraudulent proceeds through political straw donations.
So the DOJ is on the case, which is great.
We're going to get some more clarity, and we're going to see who turned a blind eye to all that incoming money from FDX.
David, this is absolutely crazy, but this actually might make Gary Gensler a witness in this case, okay?
Which would mean if that happens.
I don't think what is not being charged is that Gary Gensler received money.
That's not just to make sure that's crystal clear.
It's true. We don't know, but he might be a witness.
He could still be compelled to testify.
And that would mean that SPF's lawyers would be able to cross-examine Gensler under oath at a trial.
Yeah. Where can I buy tickets?
Man, if this is pumping right now, that would just make my day.
It would be a complete day, but we're dumping instead.
What do we got coming up next, though, David?
Twitter fights over fraud proofs.
We're going to talk about this controversy and how you should understand it.
Also, Gitcoin, partnering with Shell, the oil company has obviously caused some controversy.
We'll talk about both sides of that argument as well.
And also, we found Donald Trump's eth address.
You'll never guess what he's holding.
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Stater staking protocol today. As we've gotten into layer two summer, the layer two wars are heating up.
And so this week it was fraud proofs. Fraud proofs. Do they matter? And so this is a post from Matt
Febeck, Fibik. He says, it's crazy how few people are aware of the risks of using optimism and other
OPSAC roll-ups, given that they do not have active fraud proofs. It's honestly one of the most
substantial risks to the Ethereum ecosystem today. If the centralized sequencer wants to land
invalid output proposals, it can't. In other words, the centralized optimism sequencer can
settle a malicious transaction that removes all $3 billion in the bridge to an address of their
choosing. There's nothing that anyone can do about it. It's really just a decentralization facade.
We need to push these roll-ups to implement fraud proofs yesterday. So that is the, oh my God, this is a
really big deal. People should pay attention to this. Take number one. Here's take number two.
Well, can I ask though, David? Just to like set the basis. So who doesn't have fraud proofs?
Which chains do and which chains don't? Is this all in layer two beat? Yeah, this is all on layer two beat.
Most chains do not have fraud proofs. The arbitrum bold, most roll-ups, yes. The arbitram bold
announcement is arbitram gaining decentralized fraud proofs. They still need that to be merged into the protocol.
but I mean the Dow's is going to vote yes and it's going to happen.
All OP stack roll-ups do not have fraud proofs.
Including base, which is maybe why some of this narrative is heating up at that.
Right.
So the reason, yeah, that's exactly right.
Why is this conversation happening now?
Well, I think it's actually just like a normal immune response of the crypto industry.
Sometimes stuff like this needs to happen.
We are seeing new users and TVL and MineChair go to base, which is a fork of the OP stack,
a clone of basically optimism bedrock.
And then also optimism bedrock doesn't have fraud proofs
because they just haven't implemented it yet.
And so now while there was previously some like grace
to give in about layer two teams
about their state of fraud proofs
or lack thereof, now people are like,
okay, these things are main net now.
Like it's no...
For dates and...
Yeah, it's no longer time to be not having fraud proofs.
So that was the first take.
The second take is from a Martin Coppelman
who's maybe saying this a little bit more punchy.
To be very clear,
Until they add fraud proofs, all the $3 billion that are in the optimism and base bridges can be taken out at any time.
And users can do nothing about that.
Not sure under what definition this is called non-custodial.
Okay, so these are like the two takes about like, yo, like red fire alarm sounds.
We should be very cautious and concerned about this.
There is also the other half of the story.
And I think DC Builder said this very well.
He said, tired of seeing takes shitting on optimism for not having Canon live.
Canon is their version of fraud proofs.
there was a lot of fighting on crypto Twitter and so I'm about to read the next sentence and it was
not in response to any of the just two takes there was a lot of just like if you're in crypto
Twitter you know that shit gets thrown you people should get a life intention seeking is not what
is going to get you anywhere yes bedrock was a prerequisite for canon yes canon has been the main
focus of optimism ever since they shipped bedrock almost two months ago yes all the progress is
available on gethub for y'all to see stop making long threads about why your roll-up is better
when you either have permission fraud proofs live
or a ZK system that is as mature as a toddler
and with more security service area
than the world's oceans.
David, the kids are fighting.
Okay, and then, okay,
so then A.J. Warner from Arbitrum
responded to this tweet,
which I thought was very, very useful.
And so I'll just read that one as well.
I'm obviously very biased here,
so take my perspective
with a Himalayan-sized grain of salt,
but I don't think this criticism
is because they don't have fraud proofs live.
Building proofs is hard,
decentralizing proofs
and making them permissionless is harder.
If they think the best roadmap for the project was emphasizing bedrock and making all of its components modular before building the prover, that is a super reasonable roadmap.
I'm going to unpack that really quick before continuing.
Building bedrock, which is the current implementation of optimism, maintenance, and also base, was a precursor step to implementing fraud proofs.
You need the bedrock scaffolding to insert the fraud proofs module into the scaffolding.
They need a bedrock first so they could get to implementing cannon.
So I'll continue on with AJ's take.
I think the criticism, which in my opinion is completely justified, is the other decision
that have also been made alongside that.
It stems from my opinion that having some sort of prover with training wheels should
be necessary to qualify as a stage zero roll-up.
This is how I think things have evolved and represents the frustration of many other
roll-up teams.
I don't think any other team or community could have or would consider pulling off the below
set of operations.
One, if you want to prioritize a roadmap that will take years to build a prover, you don't
have to launch a roll-up. The ZK teams didn't, and they lost a significant opportunity for market share
and land grab. Two, if you launch, you don't have to launch a token and massive incentives to use
the technology before the Prover is built. Three, if you want to incentivize people to use your
implementation, you don't have to prioritize building out the OP stack and super chain so that anyone
in the world is encouraging to launch their own roll-up. One of the reasons why I think the first bullet
was acceptable by the community was because the optimism team is trustworthy and nobody thinks
that they will steal funds, and I 100% share that sentiment, but they have extended that
trustworthiness to this stack in which anyone can run it, and the trust assumptions completely
fall over. Let me try and distill this. So the OP stack strategy, which I'm a big fan of,
is to try and get as many chains as possible. Fork the O.P. Stack, build your own chain. Let's
democratize access to building chains. It's one of the cool things about this technology,
which is, I think, is a great strategy. Then AJ is articulating here that that is like the order
of operations is bad because if you promote doing that before you solve your fraud proofs module,
well, then you're actually promoting just the proliferation of centralized change, which I think is a
valid take. Can I interject there? So it's not that this hasn't been done before, right? So it's sort of a
market share type of prioritization. I also think you can argue that that bedrock is also necessary
first and making that open source and releasing that. But there's definitely an argument that
that some of optimism strategy has been a market share type of strategy.
We've also seen this before.
Polygon launched for years of proof of stake network.
And that was a side chain.
And I remember before a lot of, you know, people out, you know, were angry about this.
But I also remember that Polygon took market share away from the finance chain,
which, to my knowledge has no plan to actually phase into a volidium or a roll-up of any kind, right?
And so Polygon went with a market share approach, and they added security and decentralization later.
And that seems to be a bit more what optimism is doing in this case.
And so some people are griping with the order of operations here.
Yes, that's right.
And so it's a little bit of like damned if you do, damned if you don't for the optimism roadmap.
Like I said, they needed to ship bedrock so that they could implement fraud proofs.
What is bedrock?
It is the OP stack.
And so they simultaneously have the OP stack as a precursor to implementing fraud proofs.
But then once they have the OP stack, then you have, you know, Coinbase, Lyra, Public Goods Network, WorldCoy, Mantle, all forking the OPEC stack because they all want their chains.
So it's like, it's kind of just the way that the universe played out.
But then I will also say like the immune response from, you know, the broader layer two ecosystem saying, hey, not having fraud proofs is no longer like tenable in this in, you know, halfway through 2023 is also.
a valid take. Now, I'm very well connected to the optimism team. I know for a fact that they are all
focused on shipping fraud proofs. That has been the number one focus since shipping bedrock because like
I said, bedrock was a precursor to shipping fraud proofs. So we are now in this is like this
uncanny valley of post bedrock. Post bedrock but before canon, right? And now this is,
this is where we are. And then of course the Solana ecosystem will tell you that fraud proofs are
never coming and these Slayer 2s are going to be centralized and they are wrong.
It's many of them.
But yeah, I agree with that.
I think we've we've talked about it sufficiently.
One thing I will do a big plus one on though is AJ's post right here.
It's just a nice, rational post.
It spells it out.
It's interesting, by the way, that it's not tweet sized.
You know the old Twitter tweet size of 280 characters or whatever?
It's actually taking the time to go through the arguments.
And I encourage more conversation like this.
So all of this is healthy.
And I do think we all as an industry want those red and yellow parts of the pie on layer
two beat to turn green.
And yeah, it's good to apply that pressure once in a while.
David, more pressure apply.
These are things that are breaking out of crypto Twitter, maybe in the bare market.
But Gitcoin was on the hot seat as well.
So what's the Gitcoin controversy this week?
Yeah.
So kind of an interesting announcement tweet from Gitcoin.
They say Gitcoin tweets out.
we're happy to share that we've entered a collaboration with Shell to accelerate open source innovation
to the energy sector.
Shell, the oil company.
Yes.
Together we're driving sustainable solutions and making a positive impact in the world.
Let's dive in.
And then there was a blog post from gitcoin.com.
About the Gitcoin plus Shell partnership.
Ooh.
People don't like Shell.
People don't like Shell.
For good reason.
Have you ever read the book Confessions of an economic hitman friend?
No.
That one will destroy your own.
about the oil industry?
Yeah, it's worse than that.
It's just about the way that, like, first world countries make third world countries
beholden to them indebtedness forever.
It has to do with the intense international monetary fund.
It has to do with Shell.
It's all bad.
So when you think of Gitcoin as a brand, you think of, like, nice, wholesome things.
Public goods.
Sustainability.
Public goods.
Yeah.
When you think of Shell, you do not think those things.
I think of deforestation and climate change and, like, a, you know,
assassinations and corruption.
That's the brand association a lot of people have as well.
And that's why this fell pretty flat.
This tweet fell pretty flat, I'd say.
Let's put it mildly.
So I photoshopped in a bunch of just people's takes.
Here they all are.
Anthony Sizzano, as a longtime fandom user of Gipcoin,
I have to say I'm extremely disappointed in their decision to partner with Shell.
Scooby-Truples.
I love Gipcoin, but this is greenwashing, not green pilling.
F. Shell.
Hazu quotes the tweet and says, quote, the end justifies the means said by Gitcoin, 2023.
So yeah, just general WTF response from crypto.
And then here's Kevin O'Waki, who is no longer at Gitcoin.
He is now at his software company Supermodular, which is built on top of the Gitcoin protocol
because Gitcoin is a protocol now as a Dow.
And Kevin, Kevin was the founder of Gitcoin.
And as you said, yes, Gitcoin itself is both a protocol.
and a Dow. And so Kevin is not, you know, associated with those things, except as it kind of an
ambassador for the brand. Yeah. So Kevin O'Waki writes out a tweet titled, in all caps,
O'Waki, what do you think of the Shell Bitcoin Club, which I'm sure is what he has been asked many,
many, many times. The TLD of this, he says, I personally don't care for the Shell brand.
I doubt many people will opt in for the optional Shell funding pool, but we'll see it's a free market.
I think $500,000 is a pittance, especially if you look at Shell's contribution to climate crisis and the
brand damage to Gitcoin is immense and also greenwashing is just not okay.
But then also he goes on and says, but the point of Gitcoin is to be a permissionless
protocol, not to actually pick winners and losers.
And so he actually, he said it better than I did on a podcast, which we have a clip for it.
And so we'll just go ahead and play that clip because I think this is a hot sign about.
Public goods are relative to the values of the communities they serve.
Some communities are going to want a DEI round.
Some are going to think that's woke fucking nonsense.
Some are going to want to fund open source software.
Some just don't give a shit about open source.
Some people want to fund physical public goods.
Some want to fund digital.
Some are okay with an oil company, giving them money, and some are not.
So basically, it's impossible to serve all of these memetic tribes at the same time.
And that's a fundamental tension in what Gitcoin is trying to do if you're trying to build the stack for civilizational scale public goods funding.
All of the tribes don't agree on what is a public good.
And this was a really profound realization for me.
And it's why 24 months ago we decided to shut down the company that was Gitcoin grant.
and turn it into a protocol in a Dow.
So basically now at Gitcoin, you have the Dow contributors and you have their politics.
You have the PGF Workstream, which is like the public goods funding workstream that did these partnerships.
And then you have the products, which are now credibly neutral protocols.
And so by design, if you think Gitcoin's too woke because they're funding diversity equity and inclusion or that they're taking blood money from Shell,
then you don't have to take the money, but you can still use the protocols.
and anyone can go to manager.
Getcoin.co.
And set up their own quadratic funding ground
for their own values.
There you go.
That's Kevin.
That's a take.
Kevin will also be at permissionless
and he will be at the party.
So if you want to berate him
or ask him about his opinions
on other things, he will be there.
Please don't parade him.
He's trying his best.
Look, this is a credibly neutral protocol, folks.
I think he's right on there.
Cowswap, to be of credibly neutral protocols,
they just released TWOP orders.
What is a TWOP order, David?
Yeah, TWOP, time-weighted average price.
So this is a way to automate your dollar cost averaging in a very short amount of time.
That's probably not the best way to say dollar-cost averaging.
But take dollar-cost averaging and compress it down to like an hour or day or something really narrow.
But this T-wopping is like a strategy that if you have a very big order to spread out your order to match volume over time.
So as more buying picks up, your order will be fulfilled faster and as buying or as volume slows down, your order will be fulfilled slower.
This has been harder to introduce into native crypto dexes just because of the logic that is required to make this happen.
But CalSwap has done it.
And so there's a link in the show notes if you want to try it out.
You can do it right from the safe wall.
The cool thing about this architecture is it's intense-based architecture, right?
So basically rather than commit to a transaction, you commit to a transaction, you commit to.
an intent. And that's been a theme that we've been exploring definitely, and all of crypto has been
exploring definitely the summer. So very cool. Visa has always impressed me with how on top of crypto
they've been. And this week was no exception to that. They are testing an on-chain payment system
for gas with a card. So they're essentially abstracting gas fees away for blockchain payments
and allowing you to complete an on-chain transaction just with your Visa card. So the gas is kind of paid
by account abstraction in the background.
Just really cool to see like the largest payment company in the world innovating on this.
I think this is also related to two other headlines from this week.
So Metamask has just rolled out a one-click crypto buy button with Apple Pay.
So Apple Pay, Metamask, you can get into Fiat, you can get into crypto directly through your Apple Pay account.
Also cool.
Ledger and PayPal have also introduced a partnership.
So now ledger users will be able to buy crypto automatically via their PayPal account.
This whole chain of things, we've got Visa, we've got kind of Apple Pay, and we've got Ledger.
These feel very much like 2023 things, bare market things, that we would have no concept of in 2019.
Do you remember all the fake partnerships that were going around kind of the ICO landscape
where somebody would take a picture of themselves, a skateboard in front of Google?
Yeah, or they'd be, they'd advertise a partnership with a partnership with a,
Amazon, and really they're just using AWS servers for some like portion of their user interface.
I know that that sounds insane. And that's what 2017 was. Like that happened so many times.
Yes. That was a real tactic that many ICOs did. And what's so crazy is now we actually have these
large partnerships. This is like going mainstream. I mean, last week, PayPal just rolled out a stable
coin. How crazy is that? Ledger and PayPal together. So now you can go directly from PayPal to a bankless
wallet and ledger, right?
Visa pushing forward not just like,
we have a blockchain strategy.
They're looking at account abstraction.
It's so cool to see this
and makes me very bullish
even in the midst of this bear market.
Yeah, certainly.
And it also just shows that we have enough
like UX solutions,
UIUX solutions to make some of this stuff easy.
From PayPal to your Ethereum wallet
was like,
that took 50 steps in 2017.
So in South America, Ryan,
Argentina has a, apparently, a far right to pro-Bitcoin candidate, Javier Mili, who's won a primary
in Argentina.
And there's this clip going around the internet about him explaining Bitcoin and Ethereum
to like the news panelists that he is like shoulder to shoulder with.
And so all of all the crypto is like, oh my God, people are getting it and also being elected
into Argentine offices.
Argentina, of course, very, very crypto, one of the most crypto-native countries that
exists. It could be number one, to be honest. Why? Why is Argentina so far ahead?
High inflation and high internet connectivity and a technically competent population.
And so, like, it's one of the most crypto-enabled countries that exist. So it is no surprise
that we are getting crypto-politicians working their way through getting elected. So Javier's
coalition known as the La Libertad Avanzah garnered more than 30% of votes in the political contest.
I think the big story here is that crypto is continuing to become a global political movement.
And I don't know very much about this candidate.
It's certainly not an endorsement.
I've heard many mixed reviews.
In fact, many negative reviews from the Argentine community.
And apparently this candidate's track record in crypto has been rocky.
He's been embroiled in high-profile crypto Ponzi schemes, one called Konyx, which allegedly
stole $800,000 worth of pesos.
So I don't really know very much about this candidate other than the story that
crypto is becoming a political movement. And speaking of politics and crypto, David, we this week
got to see what Donald Trump holds in his Ethereum wallet. Do you want to know what he's holding?
I am so excited. Here it is, right here. We believe this eth address, ending with 2-2-C-E, is Donald
Trump's ether address, Ethereum address. This is supported by information from his financial
statements filed that I believe probably the court system, August 14th. So this is,
This is what he's holding, David.
Rate this portfolio.
What do you think of Trump's portfolio?
It is just an A-plus portfolio.
It actually is.
It's great.
It's great.
Okay.
What's in it?
He's got four assets.
Ether.
He's got 1.5,000 ether worth $2.8 million,
coming in at number one.
And then he's got 16 Weith, 3.4, Matic, and 12 U.S.DC.
So it's 99% ether.
There you go.
Where did this man get all of this ether?
Why does he have Maddoch?
Well, it's because of the Trump
NFT sales on Polygon.
He needed the Madik for gas, and they were sold
in ETH. So he made
$2.8 million in Ether.
You know, Trump
is just making money on his NFT.
The only thing I've ever heard him say
explicitly about crypto
was this from a Fox business
interview in December 2021
about crypto. He said,
I've never loved it because I like to have the
dollar. You should do this in your
Donald Trump backs in. I shouldn't be reading this. I've never loved it because I have always
loved the dollar. Trump told Fox business in the December 2020 interview. It's way better. I was never
a big fan, but it's building up bigger and bigger and no one's doing anything about it, but I want
our currency called the dollar. I'm terrible like shit out of impressions and for some reason
that Donald Trump I'm not completely terrible at. I don't know. It's pretty good. I got to admit,
it's pretty good. Ray David's impressions of comments. He's a fiat maxi. Like I, Trump,
Trump declares he is a fiat maximum.
It may change, though, once he gets bags.
I mean, who knows?
All right, moving on, here's a headline that I thoroughly enjoyed out of a coin desk.
Fallen hedge fund three errors capital co-founders were fined by Dubai's crypto regulator
over their new bankruptcy claims exchange, OpenX.
So, do you know how much volume OpenX has done, Ryan?
Like how much, they have the, okay, what is OpenX?
It is an exchange for bankruptcy claims.
Yeah, they would know.
coming from, like the ones that Three O's Capital caused.
Like anyone, like Celsius, Theros Capital themselves, FTX,
Voyager, any of the bankruptcy that we like reported on for like almost a year straight.
OpenX is a exchange, a crypto exchange to trade claims.
That these guys co-founded.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Man, they are just loving that we are talking about this right now.
And so I'm going to get to the meat of this whole thing.
The whole, the volume on OpenX is coming in at a lot.
like a couple thousand dollars. That's it. And so is that why they're being fined?
Yes, they are being fined for like not being up to snuff with a Dubai crypto regulator.
They are being fined $2.7 million on their exchange that they've had to build from scratch
and probably have, you know, a million dollars of investment in and they've made zero money on it.
So they are in the hole. Can you imagine investing in this thing though? They actually raised
money and investors were willing to give them money for this thing. That, that, that, that,
blows my mind. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they're in Dubai because they can't go anywhere else because
if they go anywhere else, they'll get extradited to the United States and then thrown in jail.
And now they're in Dubai and they owe $2.7 million that they probably don't have.
And by the way, David, you know we're talking about friend.com.com and the progressive web app?
The bankless app is also available as a progressive web app. You can open this thing in Safari.
You can set it to your homepage and you can actually use it. Did I just blow your mind right now?
I didn't know that we had a progressive web app.
I thought we just had an app.
Well, you have a progressive web app if you just load it in your Safari browser and you added
to your homepage.
We had a progressive web app before I even knew that what a progressive web app was.
Yep.
Yep.
We just bypassed Apple.
We're doing it.
But anyway, we got the AirDrop Hunter that we launched this week.
What does this thing do?
Okay.
So the AirDrop Hunter, what does it do?
It helps you hunt AirDrops.
It's in the title.
So AirDrops, of course, are this meta in crypto.
And that meta shifts.
And so we've been.
built this product because we were writing this as articles, like, hey, there's this, like,
new crypto app. They don't have a token. They're probably going to have a token. Here's how you
use this app. And if you use this app, you're likely get some, some qualify for the token
air drop, perhaps, if they ever, we don't know. And so like a part of the bankless newsletter,
which is now the bankless website and bankless media org has always been just like, here's how you use
this defy app. Like one of the earliest articles in bankless history is Ryan Sean Adams here saying
here's how you use uniswap.
And then later, anyone who did that article
got the Uniswap Airdrop.
And this, and like our articles have progressed.
We did, you know, we did D-Y-D-X.
We did, like, a lot of layer twos.
And so as soon as the Airdrop meta has unfolded,
a lot of these guides is like, here's how you use this.
Here's how you use this D-Fi app
has also simultaneously been like,
and then you do these things in order to maximize your chances
for receiving the Airdrop.
And so now we've just turned this because of our team,
our Chad team.
We now have a product team.
and also airdrop hunters who are filling out, like, all these different possible protocols that
might have anirdrop, how to use them, what to do inside of them to maximize your footprint for
receiving an air drop, and then like a step-by-step process to make this easy for people.
And so this is part of the progression of this story of bankless, I think, is like how to use
defy apps, how to learn about them, and then how to grow your on-chain footprint to do the
thing that Ryan always loves to tell you is like crypto pays you to learn it.
he's mouthing it right now.
And so now we've just formalized this into a product for the bankless citizen.
So if you are already a bankless citizen, A, come to our party at permissionless, and B, while you're waiting for permissionless, go hunt some airdrops.
I think we have 31 air drops, and we're going to just add more and more and more.
And I also want to add in a bit about the difference between what we are calling air drop hunting versus airdrop farming.
So there's this vertical that's growing out there.
Do you ever remember seeing like the Pokemon Go people with like 50 phones out of?
at once. There's that... No, but that's crazy. That's a thing. Yeah. Like, there's an industry that
is this. They're all based out of Asia generally. But yeah, just like, there's AirDrop Find Farming,
which is like these highly capitalized, kind of like just like how proof of work mining is now
in the hands of just like extremely well capitalized verticals entities, entities, not individuals.
So there's the era of like AirDrop farming is upon us. And that is not what we want to promote. And that is not what we are
trying to instill on this product.
The product is like first use this application as a real human, as a real person to do things
that we think are in what the protocol wants you to do.
Things like locking, like, you know, depositing rather than just transacting, right?
Like things that are actually truly valuable to the protocol because our job is to try and
guess the meta of what future air drop criteria will be.
and that meta is going to respond to the Airdrop Farmers.
And so as like all of the bankless citizens, they're humans.
Those are human beings.
We talk to them in the Discord.
We have Jack guiding like talking about like D-Gen stuff.
We have Jack the chief hunter who's like guiding some of these citizens through some of these apps.
These are the humans.
And so we're trying to give humans a platform to stand out against the bots.
And that is the Airdrop Hunter.
Yeah.
Well said.
Hunt and then settle.
Those are two verbs.
Learn hunt settle.
Yep, learn hunt settle.
That's the bankless platform in a nutshell right now.
So go check that out.
And by the way, if you've never considered becoming a bankless citizen, I think this is a compelling opportunity to do that.
So you can check this out.
So I think we provide one air drop hunt available for our free members.
And then you get 31 of these if you're a citizen.
And we're going to be adding more every week.
So I think we've got another batch of a dozen or two dozen coming.
and we'll of course keep you updated on this.
The one other thing I want to mention is beware of fishing attempts.
Okay.
So this has been something that I feel like it's been plaguing crypto all summer.
Of course, it's always been here, but has really ramped up this summer.
Fishing sophisticatedness?
Is that all-time highs?
What do we mean by fishing?
Okay, that means like you could get an email from someone you think is bankless and is actually
not bankless that's telling you to click a button and connect your wallet.
and your funds could be drained.
Okay?
So emails from bankless only come from the at bankless URL.
And if you go to a third party website, make sure it's got the lock, htps, and it's
www.bankless.com.
And that's the URL.
That's from us because there are people out there that are sending spam emails to try
to get you to click a button, connect your wallet, and drain your funds.
So be careful out there.
definitely still the Wild West. And if you need help, you are confused, and you just want some guidance
or some friends along the journey, coming to the Discord, we'll help you out. Totally. David,
we got one raised this week, but it's a pretty large one. Bitco raised $100 million.
Who is Bitcoin? A hundred million dollars. Why is this significant? Yeah, Bitcoin is a custodian.
They're actually the creators, the producers, one of the producers of wrapped Bitcoin,
because they are the custodians of the Bitcoin that backs the wrapped Bitcoin.
But they're a Bitcoin and crypto custodian.
Why are valued at $1.75 billion?
I'm pretty sure the custodian play is like eventually like PayPal bought a custodian.
Anyone that any bank that wants to do crypto stuff is probably just going to buy a custodian.
And so this is being valued at kind of that.
1.75 billion dollars is nice.
A hundred million dollar raise.
This is their CREC.
Congratulations to Bitcoin.
David, what do we got coming up next?
Coming up next, we are in the early endings of base,
and there are rug pulls and meme coins everywhere.
Is that a problem?
We'll talk about that.
That's a question from the nation.
Also, a hot take, why on-chain revenue is the next meta,
and the main thing that you should be paying attention to right now.
That is a take of the week from Van Spencer.
We also got a take from Ryan that we're going to talk about as well.
And, of course, we're going to talk about what we're bullish on,
and of course, the meme of the week.
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We got some questions of the week.
This one from the bankless discord from someone who calls themselves ZK Jew.
So the question is, in the early inning,
with base, it's been rife with rug pulls,
like bald, I guess there was a
rug pole called lead. I didn't even know that.
Is virtue signaling values really
more important than creating a safe environment
for onboarding users? And what about
base? All right, so some of the things
this comment is saying,
some of the things that they're seeing
are not entirely wholesome
over on the base layer two.
What's your reaction to that?
I think this is just the meta that unfolds.
When we have something new,
you need, and there's just like
the shelling point is for all the traders and DGens and just the attention. Everyone understands
that the attention is on base. And so if you are a, if you're going to issue a meme coin,
you should do it on base. If you're going to rug pull, you got to go there quickly because
that's where the attention is. You've got a rug, you got a rug before the attention leaves.
And so like, I think I gave this take last week, but just the all the early and easy things to do
are bad. And the hard things to do are good. Good things are harder than bad things. And so the first
things that you're going to see on any new network are just because the attention's there,
just because it's a shelling point, are like all the value extractive things that are just
fundamentally unaligned. And then we build harder things. Like there's a reason why friends
did not get on base day one. It took a little bit. I'm sure they were building it prior.
But like that's that's kind of my take. Like early network stuff is like the worst of the worst.
And then we improve and iterate and it gets better. It's a permissionless network.
anyone can deploy so Coinbase cannot moderate or cannot gig keep.
This reminds me a lot of the early internet in the 90s,
where early critics of the internet just said,
the internet's for gambling and porn and scammers, right, as in the 1990s.
Lots of porn on the internet.
I mean, and they dismissed it as a result.
You can't do serious things on the internet.
And that was a massive mistake.
But those are the use cases that pop first, certainly.
Another question here, this one from Rock 3T.
In the debrief of the Lido episode from earlier this week,
you talked about how everything eventually settles to layer zero.
That is the social layer.
As crypto adoption grows and more people make up layer zero,
do you worry about the potential impact on Ethereum values
that the dilution of our social layer could have?
That's a really interesting question.
I think a fantastic question.
What's your take?
Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer
and not a 90-minute podcast.
We should do a podcast.
Okay, so as crypto adoption grows,
more people make up the layer zero.
Do you worry about the potential impact
on Ethereum values
that the dilution versus the layer can have?
I actually think that as crypto grows,
not necessarily does the layer zero also grow?
Because the layer zero are like
the people on crypto Twitter,
the people on the Ethereum Magicians forums,
the people in Discord having important conversations
about Ethereum.
If you are just an average user,
if you're a collector of music NFTs,
and you don't really care about the chain
or what protocol or whatever you're on.
Blockchains are designed to be invisible,
and it's actually a KPI
that people go and adopt crypto protocols
without actually having to join the conversation.
We have these conversations because we're nerds,
and we like to talk about these things,
and it's important to us,
and it's philosophically interesting.
That's layer zero.
We just need enough of a robust layer zero
so that we can check our values
and make sure that they are doing the right things as we build these networks.
But it's the networks that's supposed to scale these things.
The networks are supposed to scale.
Not necessarily the layer zero.
The layer zero is a backstop.
It just needs to be the last line of defense.
And I don't think it needs to be large.
It just needs to be precise.
Yeah.
I guess I would add maybe two things to that.
You know, one is I do think that the OGs for a while will have a disproportionate share of kind of at least, let's say,
ETH stake, right?
Why?
Because they bought it in a lower price.
They have more ether at first.
So it'll take longer for that to dilute, and I think that's a good thing.
But more broadly, I'll say this is a challenge of any social system that we construct.
So the founders of the Constitution, American Revolution, you might say, well, will future generations, well, our grandkids, grandkids, will they still care about the values that we're trying to embed in this nation state, right?
and they try to document as many of those values as possible inside of a protocol, essentially, an
algorithm. And that's kind of what we're doing with crypto right now. So I think our constitution,
our protocols will harden and ossify. And over time, they'll be less malleable to kind of
future generations who maybe care less about these values. And maybe these future generations will
find new ways to help us live up to the values that we purported as well. I mean, it certainly was the
case in America, you know, expanding the voter base of, you know, beyond white males, for instance,
to women, to minorities. I think, I have faith, I think, that once we embed these values
of decentralization into our crypto systems, that they'll carry forward.
David, takes the week. This one from Van Spencer.
What's he saying?
Vance, Spencer says, if you don't nail the transition to on-chain, who he used a hyphen,
oh, oh, Vance.
On-chain revenue generation.
On-chain is spelled O-N-C-H-A-N.
Okay, Vance.
Okay, so if you don't nail the transition to on-chain revenue generation as a centralized
crypto exchange, you will be left in the dust by competition in the coming 12 to 18 months.
It takes an entirely different DNA to succeed on-chain versus centralized, different products,
people, and culture.
Basically, Vance, I think is just saying that, like, yo, the,
meta is shifting on chain and you better go there.
Interesting.
Speaking of on chain meta,
I feel like this is a new on chain meta
for this cycle. I said this on Twitter.
All Ethereum competitors want to become an L2 now.
Ethereum won the thumb war.
I sort of tweeted this out
to get the response. Not entirely true,
of course. There's still
alternative layer ones. But
you got to admit, this cycle is a lot
different. Last time,
you know, in 2018, 2019,
you had a whole bunch of
alternative layer ones
were coming to kill Ethereum
and eat Ethereum's lunch.
Now I'm seeing far more
just become layer two
is become kind of app chains.
And so that has been a paradigm shift.
What do you think about this?
Yeah, your response a little bit
your reply to your own tweet.
You used to say, okay, not all.
There's still Solana, Cosmos in the long tail.
Throwing a flag at Cosmos,
cosmos is actually not a chain.
It's a network of app chains.
And so Ethereum, layer two,
role apps could absorb
any Cosmos app individually.
And I think when D-Y-D-X
just capitulates and comes back to be
a rollout back on Ethereum,
you will know.
You will know that the design philosophy
of the theorem later...
I don't know. Antonyo is showing...
All the way around.
He's showing no signs of capitulation.
He is all in on
Cosmos for D-Y-D-X.
So we'll see.
Solana will never.
Yeah.
Solana is always going to live in Ethereum.
I don't think they...
Yeah.
I don't know that they should.
They want to.
I don't know that it's best for
the value of soul to token.
The layer one of Solana,
it's imbued in the social contract of Solana
that they must be a layer one.
Like all the Soulboys are like,
they think that Soul will overtake East one day.
You've been much more involved in those conversations than I have.
I've just been observing, David.
What do you bullish on this week?
Speaking of what I'm bullish on this week,
I'm brewing up a piece that I'm going to write.
Yes.
About like some,
the differences between I think Ethereum,
and Solana.
Remember my old Pio Crypto podcast?
Yeah.
It was about the differences
between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I think that there are
similar level of depth
to that conversation
between Solana and Ethereum.
And I think it goes way deeper
than I think most of both camps
expect than they think.
So I'm bullish on this article
that I'm writing.
Is it an article
that's going to help us all come together,
David, or is it?
No, it's an article
that is going to help us all understand.
Okay.
And obviously we'll have my positions about things.
So I'll tease it a little bit.
Ethereum and it's layer two's, layer three, layer fours, it's validiums.
It's like base roll-ups.
It's sovereign roll-ups.
There's like so many different ways to construct a roll-up.
Ethereum, like I say, blockchain is supposed to be invisible.
Ethereum's supposed to produce enough networks to permeate throughout the entire internet as well.
So when you have all of these different flavors of roll-ups, we can get into the cracks of
internet because a particular roll-up construction is specific towards a specific use case that
allows itself to find itself in the corners of Ethereum. Whether your on-chain data is on
Ethereum layer one or it's hosted by eigenlayer DA or it's hosted by a centralized database,
the lines between Ethereum and the internet blur because of how roll-ups are constructed.
Then you have the Salana vision, which is a single global shared state. There's a very firm
boundary between what is and it is not on Salana. And these are two different archetypes.
which have downstream consequences.
So this article is unpacking that metaphor.
Well, I can't wait to host the debate between you and Kyle Simani
on modular versus monolithic.
David doesn't want to do this debate.
Yeah, well, I'm bullish for your article as well, David.
Thank you.
Ryan, what do you bullish on?
I have definitely flipped bullish on crypto social media.
And I think I've been sort of in a, I'm not sure, this could work type of state.
Well, let me tell you where I started.
I started with being fairly bearish on Web3 social media.
Do you remember the early days we created kind of Ethereum and people were like,
now Ethereum is going to become Uber.
Now Ethereum is going to become decentralized Twitter.
And it just never seemed to kind of click for me.
We made some progress.
We did episodes with like Farcaster, for example, and lens.
And so cautiously excited about those and bullish on those when I started seeing them.
But the question is always, how do we get mass adoption?
Friend.com and this experiment, again, I'm not saying it's going to be friend.
Dot tech guys.
Okay, don't hear me.
This is a POC, okay?
This experiment showed me how it can work in the same way that Cryptokitties showed me how
NFTs can work.
economic social games.
That's what they did.
And they vampire attacked Twitter's network effect.
They just vampired it.
They did do that.
How'd they do that?
Because I got a message from someone saying,
oh, go check this out, right?
And I was, you know, someone I trusted.
I went and I checked it out.
And I connected my Twitter account
and ported some of my social graph over to friend.com and spent some time on it.
That is a vamp, an economic, why did I do that?
partially because it's kind of cool.
And partially because of token incentives, right?
I wanted to see how this thing worked.
That's why everyone did it.
And then you did it to compete in the social game of the leaderboard, right?
When you were just talking earlier how like, I'm in top 20, I'm in top 20.
That means something to you, right?
And so I now I see the path.
Now I see how crypto, social media, maybe it's Messenger apps, maybe it's apps like, you know, friend.
Dot can actually do it.
And I also see a path around Apple App Store, Android, right?
with kind of this web-based safari sort of experience.
Again, it was still super clunky.
Like half the time when I was using friend.com,
the chat didn't work.
It was like broken.
It was a pain.
That's actually fixed now.
They fixed it.
Okay.
So they fake.
That's the thing.
It reminds me of,
do you remember early days of Twitter?
Okay,
I got my Twitter account super early.
And early days of Twitter was always like fail whale.
You know,
the fail whale was this image that they would put on screen
when Twitter was overcapacity,
couldn't handle the load, right?
to fill with. Like, when things break because of overuse, it's a really freaking good sign. Okay?
It means there's demand. That's what you want. Uh, so anyway, that's kind of cool. It's like hackathon
quality right now, but it's a proof of concept for things to come. And I have flipped firmly
bullish on this category of whatever you might call crypto social, web three social messaging,
like, uh, considering me bullish. And I'm super excited about it. And into the meme of the week,
We go.
This is Joseph DeLong won the meme of the week trophy this week.
This is the, this meme format has been going around crypto Twitter.
This is the, it's a joint.
It's a picture of a joint.
And like the first majority of the joint is, like you have decently cool and good thoughts.
And then the last sliver of the joint, you start to get real, real crazy.
So this is a, Joseph DeLong is, he used to be in charge of a sushi swap before he moved on.
So the first like three quarters of the joint is just X times Y equals K, you know, the un swap AMM curve.
And then the last quarter of the joint is, I can fix impermanent loss with options.
Which, man, you have to kind of be deep down the crypto rabbit hole to understand this one.
But to unpack this meme, impermanent loss, for some reason, people are L-Ping into uniswap and
Sutry swap and all these AMMs, these X times Y equals K-A-MMs.
And they're not making money?
They're all losing millions of dollars.
And no one knows why there's so much liquidity in Uniswap because everyone's losing money.
And so everyone is, there's like a meme lately, a rotation.
into like, oh, we can fix LP loss by like adding options on top.
And like, Joseph is saying it's like you've got to be effing crazy to think that.
That is one of the mysteries of crypto is why people are doing this.
Not even Dan Robinson knew when you asked them on that will do some podcasts.
It's just crazy to me.
Guys, that has been the roll up.
Hope you enjoyed it.
We're going to end with risks in a minute.
But first, we disclose.
David and I mentioned optimism.
We mentioned arbitram.
I think we said Polygon.
We are both investors and our.
advisors for optimism. I'm advisor to Polygon. Both David and I hold a little bit of
Maddoch tokens. David and I also hold ETH, and it's our time to remind you, we are long-term
investors. We are not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's a link to all bankless
disclosures in the show notes at all times. And of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what
you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're
glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
