Bankless - ROLLUP: Inflation, Nike NFTs, Disney & Marvel IMX, CryptoPunk Sale, Ledger Debit Card

Starting point is 00:00:00 like rugged, communicates a lot, right? It communicates a lot inside of that one word. 100%. So many institutions are trying to rug us, you're like right now. Hey, Bankless Nation, happy third week of December is Friday morning. You know what time it is. David, tell them. Oh, it's a Friday. Bankless weekly roll-up time. We roll up the whole entire week in crypto.

Starting point is 00:00:23 And I know I say this every single time that it's such a crazy week. There's a lot of stuff in this week. A lot of stuff got released. A lot of cool news happened. Some cool takes happened. And we are going to go through all of it because that's what we do on the Friday weekly roll-up. So grab your coffee. It's going to be exciting.

Starting point is 00:00:37 We're going to have a fun time as we start to wrap up this year in crypto. Guys, a few things that's going on. Nike is entering the Metaverse space with the acquisition of a company. Also, Marvel and Disney issuing NFTs on a mutable. That's a big story. Polygon just makes a big acquisition as well. Doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on their ZK roll-up strategy and their roll-up strategy in general. also Ledger releasing a debit card.

Starting point is 00:01:02 There's so much we have to talk about. But before we get in, David, man, you're doing this on your birthday. And I admire that. Happy birthday to you, sir. I can't believe we're doing a roll-up on your birthday. Just, you know, the timing worked out that way. That shows the dedication that my co-host, David Hoffman, has the bankless community. He's willing to do this on his birthday.

Starting point is 00:01:22 Not only your birthday, the birthday of Beethoven, I am told. Yes, yes. Yeah, me and Beethoven share the birthdays. And it's just very, very fortunate that my birthday landed on a Thursday this week or this year because, I don't know, the weekly roll-ups are I think the most fun thing I do every single week. So there's no better way I think I could spend my birthday than doing a weekly rollout with my business partner here. Dude, that's awesome. That's touching. Wow. No wonder this is the greatest podcast in crypto. It was dedicated hosts. That's what. I'll do a podcast in my birthday, too. How about we do that? Just so, you know, share it in the burden. Sounds good. All right. Well, you know what?

Starting point is 00:01:58 Before we get into it, we got to talk about a few things that are going on. The first is the permissionless conference. It's coming down to the pike. They just released another trunch of tickets. We'll include a link in the show notes. That is a conference that happens in May. It's going to be the biggest defy conference ever. Not of 2022, ever.

Starting point is 00:02:14 The greatest defy conference ever assembles. We're going to talk about the Metaverse, Defi, regulation, institutional stuff. You've got to get a ticket. NFT galleries out the Ying-yang. It's going to be fantastic. Yeah. No, it's going to be every night's a party. Every night's a party.

Starting point is 00:02:29 Every night, there's going to be at least three parties. I'm told, you know, some of them I will spend in the hotel room. But, you know, I'll be there for some of them. We're definitely throwing a bankless party as well. So hopefully we catch you there. Grab your ticket. They go up every two weeks in price. You want to get it early, just like crypto.

Starting point is 00:02:45 You've got to get earlier. You just FOMO in later. Also, let's talk about hashflow. So Hashflow wanted to tell bankless listeners, about their service. It's really cool. So this is like a OTC desk for DFI. David, what's an OTC desk for people who aren't familiar with that term? Yeah, OTC sounds for over the counter. So it's kind of like a white glove service. If you have a bunch of money and you are going to make a big trade, an OTC desk can help you optimize the price that you get. And so they search around. It's kind of like

Starting point is 00:03:18 order routing, but it's manual because this is coming from the old world and still existing in crypto today. But now with Hashflow, we have a DFI service that does OTC-like activities, but now as a protocol. Once again, software eating the world of finance through DFI. This is really cool because it's trustless. It's non-custodial. It's bankless. The old OTC marketplaces were completely banked. And this is built on DFI. So low gas fees, M.EV protection as well. So you can use Hashflow today for some of your OTC trades. Here's a bit of alpha for you. In the coming weeks, hashflow is going to open liquidity pools. So individuals can deposit funds in these liquidity pools and provide liquidity to the Hashflow

Starting point is 00:04:02 OTC desk. That's some early alpha for you. If you want to get in on that, it's going to be yield on your various tokens. You can sign up for that for early access. There's a Google form we are including in the show notes. Make sure you check that out. I think that's going to be some alpha for you as well. Speaking of alpha, David, let's turn to the markets.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Is there any alpha to be had in the Bitcoin markets today, my friend? What are we at from a price perspective? Yeah, we started the week at $48,000 and then got up to the high high price of $50.5,000. And then we had what I like to call a big oof candle. Which one is that? Yeah, it's the one that goes all the way down to 46.5,000. $1,000 and really hung out real, real low for a while, below the $50,000 mark. And then almost tried to reclaim it earlier this week, had a little bit of a resurgence yesterday,

Starting point is 00:05:00 but overall still down 2% on the week. A big oof to start the week with a small to modest recovery, but not yet fully recovered. So down on the week, 2%. Crabb December. I don't know what's saying is bringing us. Maybe it's higher prices, but maybe it's just more crabs. What's Eith doing? ETH, starting the week at $42,000 hit a, and that was its high.

Starting point is 00:05:22 It's Oof candle brought it all the way down to $3,700. Dipped a little bit before that, but then recovered. And then also I had a fantastic resurgence above $4,000. So reclaiming the $4,000 level, reclaiming that meme line, but still overall down 8% on the week. So oof, oof. Oof, indeed. But this is still like, look at this face, man. This is my I'm not worried at all face.

Starting point is 00:05:47 I feel like this is totally healthy. Yeah, it's just, this is fine. Like, zoom out a little bit. Actually, why don't we do that? Zoom out to the year. Wow, that looks like nothing. Looks like we're doing okay. This time last year, actually, let's do the full one year.

Starting point is 00:06:03 This time last year, we're hanging out in the 600 range for Ether, 638. So a pretty good year, all things considered, as we reflect and we close things down. Let's talk about the ratio. How was the year for the ratio? Look at that on a one-year time scale. Also, a big victory for the ratio. And the ratio during the big Oof Week, which was, again, this week, started the week at 0.086, which was really pretty damn high. All the ETH people were really, really stoked.

Starting point is 00:06:33 It fell down almost below 0.08 and did not break below 0.08. And now has reclaimed 0.084. So my mind is like, it's down on the week. but on a oof week, it's doing pretty good. And so holding the 0.08, again, that meme line is really, really important. And overall, again, signs of strength, signs of strength. Doesn't usually do that on weeks like this for sure. So that recovery has been important to see and still indicates a lot of strength in the ratio.

Starting point is 00:07:06 How about the bankless bed index? So that is a third Bitcoin, a third defy, and a third ether. What's that looking like on the week, David? Yeah, start of the week at $143, bottomed at $123, and currently is at $142, so down like 1 to 2% on the week. So flat week. It's always a little flatter, a little less volatile in the bankless bed index, and that is the purpose of the index. A good asset to holding your portfolio, I think. You know it's not a good asset to hold in your portfolio, David.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Oh, I have a guess, Ryan. Tell me. It's dollars, okay? 7%, 6.8%, annualized inflation. This is not asset price inflation, which we talk about all of the time. This is the inflation that everybody actually, everybody else actually sees. And this is CPI inflation, the price of energy, the price of rent, the price of food at the grocery stores, up 7% year over year on all of these things. If you look at the composite, that's not good, man. That's not good.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Right. wages are increasing by, you know, 2, 3% max. If you didn't get a 7% raise in the last 12 months, You got a pay cut. You got a 4% loss, right? All your dollars went down. The only way to escape that is, of course, by holding assets. This is something we're going to get into a little bit in the macro side. But let's first read this take from her friend Jim Bianco.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Basically, the country knows, this is the U.S. inflation is hurting them and they're not happy about it. There was a CNBC poll yesterday that was bad for Biden. Why? Because inflation is now the number one concern. No longer coronavirus, not COVID anymore. inflation is number one concern. And so Jim goes on to say, what does the Fed do in response to this? And there was a Fed meeting earlier in the week that we're going to touch on briefly. But he said

Starting point is 00:08:54 the Fed's choices are both bad. Okay. You either respond to inflation and hike interest rates aggressively. Increase interest rates, of course. That is one lever the Fed can pull. A flattening yield curve says this is what the Fed will do. And they did end up doing that. They indicated that they were going to do that. Or you don't respond to inflation at all and you destroy your reputation of Democratic Party, not good in a midterm election year. That's not an option either. Being in the party in power right now feels like the hot potato, right? Because the Republicans are totally going to blame the Democrats for all this inflation. And it would totally happen in reverse if it was the other way as well. It was like, damn. It was going to happen no matter what.

Starting point is 00:09:36 It was bound to happen. No matter who's in charge. And so some quick numbers that I got from a friend. So definitely double-check these numbers. But this is talking about how the Fed is trapped. And so just doing the napkin math on our $30 trillion of debt at 5% interest rates, if we were to hike rates up to 5%. That is $1.5 trillion in interest payments per year, which is about half the annual budget for the U.S., already running at a $1 trillion deficit per year. So when people say the Fed is trapped, oh yeah, the Fed is trapped. They can't raise interest rates because there's too much debt. Oopsies. That's also what we call

Starting point is 00:10:15 a big oof. Yeah, and you know what? I feel what's happened is a chain of events has been set in motion that is now like inevitable. It's just going to play out. It doesn't matter who the central banker is, whether it's Joan Powell or someone else, doesn't matter whether it's President Biden or someone else.

Starting point is 00:10:31 They're all kind of actor. They no longer have control. That's what I feel like. It's kind of like we're in the Jesus take the wheel economy. You know, it's like we don't even know where this is going. We don't even know where this is going. right? Oh my gosh, yeah. I really feel like no one is actually in control, and so the Fed is in position where they're just kind of responding. And what they did do this week, interestingly enough, is they indicated, this is like, you know, you got to read the tea leaves and everything

Starting point is 00:10:55 Jerome Powell says, but they indicated that they were going to raise the rates three times over the next year in 2022. And of course, that can change. But what was interesting to me, David, is like the market's reaction to this was like, oh, cool, that's not so bad. And then, like, stock prices resumed their incline. All-time highs, yet again. Right. This is the moment where Bitcoin and Ether actually, like, bounced off that floor a little bit.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Exactly. That was that moment. Yep. So it was like an oof in the anticipation of Jerome Powell's speech. And then after it's, oh, it's not so bad. Even though they're raising rates was kind of... Does the market believe them is the question? I think TBD on that.

Starting point is 00:11:35 Does the market believe them? Will they actually... Yes, will they actually raise rates? Or was this less bad than they? they thought. It's really interesting to me, David, that the European Union banks, they said, we're keeping our interest rates at 0%. Right. And go Fed. The Fed can do what it wants. So this is definitely not following, this is not like global. They're not following what happens there. David, let's also talk about this. This is a cool chart. Speaking of inflation in different

Starting point is 00:12:00 contexts. Moneyprinter.com. This is not what you think. You'd think this was like a Jerome Powell Moneyprinter go Burmeme. But what is this actually? Yeah. So this is talking about the network issuance of currencies for crypto economic networks and also as an inflation percentage, right? So what we are looking at are the different issuance rates of all the different crypto economic networks and then the dollar value of that issuance. So clocking in at 14.19% inflation is Ethereum, which is issuing $54 million per day. Next up is Bitcoin at 1.79% inflation, clocking in at $45 million per day, followed up by Solana at $8.2.2.000. excuse me, 7.25% issuance rate at $18.5 million per day.

Starting point is 00:12:47 You can check these numbers out for yourself. They change on a daily basis at moneyprinter.info. And overall, it's just a nice way to see, like, how much is the actual monetary unit of each chain inflating on a yearly basis? And with that inflation, how much actual daily issuance, which is economic security, does that chain actually achieve from that issuance? So some nice metrics here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:08 So I think one of the takeaways of this, that is, really nice is if you start comparing this with another, I guess, chart that David Mihal put together in cryptofees. Info. So interesting thing about what you said is if you think of a daily issuance, let's think of these blockchains as a business, for example, for a company, for example. Daily issuance is essentially their cost. That's how much money they pay for, as you said, David, economic security. So every single day right now, as denominated in ETH, of course, but translate that to dollars, Ethereum pays $53 million or so, $54 million in economic security. Bitcoin pays $45 million in economic security. Salana pays $18 million in economic security. Pocod pays $7 million in

Starting point is 00:13:59 economic security. That's like a cost to the business. What's interesting is if you start to contrast that with the revenue that they bring in. Remember, what business are these blockchains in? Well, blockchains, they sell blocks. That's their product. That's the thing we're selling. That's what they do. Apple sells iPhones, Amazon sells everything. Blockchain sell blocks. Okay, that's the thing that they're selling. So you can look at the revenue contrast. And ether, it's revenue, $36 million in blocks sold. That's one-day fees. That's how you measure it. How much fees did this blockchain pull in? $36 million. You look at Bitcoin, it's about $500,000 in blockchain sales.

Starting point is 00:14:41 If you look at something like Pocodot, keep going. There it is. There it is. $4,600. Oof. That's the third big oof of the roll-up, Ryan. $4,600.

Starting point is 00:14:56 Okay, so what does that mean if you think about this as a business? All right? So we've got daily expense for Ether, $54 million. That's cost. And then you got daily revenue of $33 million. So it's operating at a bit of a loss. But if you think of it like this, for every $100 spent on blockchain security for Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:15:19 it's making $61 in revenue. Okay? Spend $100, get $61 in sold product. Pocod, $100 spent less than one cent in revenue. Oof. 0.06 In revenue. 0.006, excuse me, less than a cent in revenue.

Starting point is 00:15:40 You're going to be oofing the entire podcast, aren't you? Bitcoin, $100 spent $1 in revenue. And the reason I think these metrics are interesting is because I think this is a marker of maturity, of health, of sustainability, of persistence during the bull run, the durability and strength of these blockchain sales, how much people actually value their blocks. And so I really like these charts that were put together. And I think people should be looking at it. When we talk about fundamentals, these are some of the fundamentals that

Starting point is 00:16:17 we consistently come back to. How much is your blockchain spending for its product, for its economic security? How much revenue is it actually bringing in? Any other thoughts on that, David? Yeah, you said this is a sign of maturity. I think that actually is a really great framing to put on this. I actually do think it's appropriate for some of these younger blockchains to be issuing much a lot more because we also need distribution, right? Distribution is a very key component of blockchain security, of how you get decentralization. Issuing all the currencies into all the different people of the world is nice,

Starting point is 00:16:53 and issuance allows that to happen. In these very, very young phases of crypto economic networks, we need more issuance than we need capture because these things, things are so young. We need a lot of people to enjoy the fruits of these systems. And so how these things are actually getting issued and where they're going is also really, really important. I think it's fine. I think it's very appropriate that Salon is actually issuing quite a lot right now because it's only like 18 months old, something like that. The other half of the story is where is that money going? And is that actually becoming

Starting point is 00:17:23 distributed into the hands of the users, into as many different people as possible? That's what I would like to argue. And I think Bitcoiners would agree with me is that proof of work is really, really useful for. Why I'm very happy that proof of work actually is where Ethereum started for the first five years. And what concerns me about Solana and these other delegated proof of stake chains is that the issuance is actually going into a very small set of individuals, which are the validators, which is why Ryan and I are concerned about centralized validation because all these, all these, the new issuance of these networks are being captured by fewer and fewer individuals.

Starting point is 00:17:57 Where this is going really, really matters. There's also the topic of the buyback, the EIP-1559. We've seen roughly a 70-30 EIP-1559 burn and a 30% tip rate going back to the validators. And so this is 70% of the revenue for blockchain Ethereum fees is getting distributed to eth holders via the burn, right? That's what it does. And it's democratizing access to protocol. income to not just people that are validating, but any and everyone that holds ETH, which is an open

Starting point is 00:18:32 permissionless thing to do. And that allows this income to be democratized off, 70% of the income to be democratized off to a broader set of individuals. And then 30% of that revenue gets added on to validator compensation in order to subsidize security, pay for security. So that's really just the full story here. And it does dovetail nicely with like the inflation conversation of the US dollar, because the goals for to be long-term sustainable, to have long-term equilibrium so that we can enjoy these things and then our children can also enjoy these things and also their children is that eventually all blockchains need to collect and fees more than what they issue or else we get unsustainable inflation over the long term. So these are things that we need

Starting point is 00:19:13 to be thinking about today because these will be eventually systems that are children and our children's children inherit. Absolutely. And so, I think not enough people are looking at charts like these. And so if you're looking at fundamentals, we encourage you definitely to check this out and make your own decisions. You know, evaluate chains this way as well. David, let's talk about this, Sotheby's. They just netted $100 million in the NFT sales in 2021.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Picks and shovels. Do you know what? More than three quarters of the NFT bidders were completely new to Sotheby's as well. So it's like a new demographic. And over half of those were under 40. All right? So Southerbees has got to be like just over the moon excited about the NFT market and its performance. How much of their growth was attributed to NFTs and this whole new demographic that probably wasn't going to art house auctions previously is now showing up.

Starting point is 00:20:09 I'm just reminded of the take that we had earlier this year where like a lot of the crypto people were skeptical about NFTs, but a lot of the rest of the world, they're just going to be like, oh, we buy JPEGs now? Okay, sounds great. That seems to be how it plays. out. Totally. I think it is. Guys, we will be right back with the releases of the week and also the news and you can't miss the memes and the takes and everything else we do on the weekly roll-up. But before we do, we want to thank the fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. Macha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common eth and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Macha are free.

Starting point is 00:20:49 and that's why you should be using Macha. Macha routes your orders across all the various DFI exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance SmartChane, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage. Macha has smart order routing that splits your orders across multiple liquidity sources, if Masha sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on Masha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me into a single and easy-to-use platform and has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking the wrong decks to trade on and getting a bad price. Masha also allows you to make limit orders on chain so you can set and forget

Starting point is 00:21:23 your defy trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to macha.xyz slash bankless, connect your wallet and start getting some of the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger Hardware Wallet, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger Hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app.

Starting point is 00:21:58 And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite Defi apps all in one spot, Ledger Live is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy your crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into all of the Defy apps and services that you're used to. Using Ledger Live, you can stake your Ethan Lido, swap on decks as like pariswap, or display your NFTs with Rainbow. You can also use wallet connect inside of Ledger Live to connect to all the other Defy apps that keep coming online.

Starting point is 00:22:25 Defy never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all of the Defy apps that Ledger Live has, and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your Defy apps all in one space. All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. Layer 2, optimism, removing whitelist, opening floodgates to developers.

Starting point is 00:22:55 What is happening? I think that's happening today, so it'll be live by the time people are listening to this. What is it? Yeah, this is optimism removing the whitelist, allowing anyone to come build on the optimism layer 2. So congratulations to optimism for getting this far. Optimism really differentiates itself via EVM equivalent. as in if you have something on the main chain, you can press a button and then have it work on optimism layer two. That is the whole point of what optimism is trying to do.

Starting point is 00:23:24 And overall, I think that it's really going to give it really strong tailwinds, just the ease of development. That's why we've seen so many Geth Forks, Ethereum client Geth Forks, spin up and have a lot of outsized success, finance smart chain, avalanche among them, because it's really easy to port your Ethereum thing from one EVM chain to another EVFORK, M chain. Optimism is making that even easier. You don't get one-click deployment to like BinaMarchain or Avalanche. You do have to tinker with it a little bit. But still, it's not a complete rework. With optimism, you can just, boom, deployed. So congratulations to optimism. I expect a ton of activity to end up flooding there. And I'm looking forward to see what happens in 2020 for optimistic Ethereum. David, look, you're quoting this article. David Hoffman of

Starting point is 00:24:07 Crypto Media Alibank lists described the removal of optimism's whitelist as a one-way decision. This is one way, right? They don't get to come back from this too. Can't go back. That's what's so cool about this move as well. Look, next year is going to be the year of layer twos, 2022. We're calling it now. Big year for optimism, big year for all of the layer twos out there.

Starting point is 00:24:26 We'll keep tracking what's going on there. Also, something to keep tracking. ETH Global, they just rolled out their 2022 season. Six in real life hackathons, 10 online hackathons and 15 summits. What's Eith Global, David? Why are these events important? Eath Global just hosts all these cool different Ethereum events all around the world because Ethereum's a global network. And so we need representation all across the world.

Starting point is 00:24:51 And so there are so many different ways to, if you're a hacker, developer, or just enthusiasts to take part in the Ethereum ecosystem. So check out the link in the show notes. There's definitely something coming to a city or country near you in probably every single continent except for Antarctica. And yeah, so there's options for. you to go do in real life stuff. If you are not yet completely pilled about crypto, go to one of these events because by the time you leave, you absolutely will be. Absolutely. No love for Antarctica though, huh? Not enough developers. No, Ethereum. Okay. Balancer. They just launched boosted pools. What are boosted pools, David? Yeah, Balancer, they did this, like, V1 of this

Starting point is 00:25:33 concept earlier with Avey. So basically all of the liquidity that gets deposited into Balancer just waits for people to come and trade on it. And that's when it gets the fees. But like 80% of that liquidity in balancer pools are actually kind of stagnant. It's really the remaining like 10 to 20% that really matters just to allow the trades to happen. So what balancers doing is they're allowing the stagnant liquidity in their pools to be deposited. First they did it into AVE. That happened a number of months ago. We did a show on that. So check that out if you want to get up to speed. But first they would just like lend out the liquidity into Avae in their pool. So not, only are they collecting trading fees from Balancer, but they are also collecting yield in AVE. They have now

Starting point is 00:26:12 made this generalizable. So now liquidity in Balancer can now be put more in just AVE, but can be generally tapped into by any protocol. And so this is Balancer just really becoming capital efficient. And this is the theme of Defi is capital efficiency, capital efficiency, capital efficiency, capital efficiency. That's what Balancer is doing with their boosted yield pool. So both getting trading fees and yield in defy at the same time. Capital efficiency super fluid collateral. Speaking of super fluid. There's actually a protocol called super fluid. Nice. Great, great segue. Yeah, I know. And it just worked out that time, okay? They're excited that they just announced on optimism and arbitram to layer twos, of course. Remind us what superfluid is. If I'm recalling correctly,

Starting point is 00:26:54 it's this really neat, you know, payment type protocol, payroll to, you know, pay contractors. It's, yeah, tell us about it, David. It's streaming payments. And so if you, if you are an employee of somewhere and you are getting X dollars per year, well, you could actually break that down into X cents per second if you really wanted to. You could start in getting your income the moment you clock in and have that verifiable on chain. And that is what superfluid is. It's like these plumbing, the plumbing between different contracts. And it's just streaming payments on a per second. It's like micro-transactions. Do you remember when Andreas Antonopoulos used to talk about this in like the earlier days of Bitcoin being so excited about this use case. Like now it's here.

Starting point is 00:27:38 So it's actually even more granular than micro transactions. It is literally fluid transactions. There are no micro transactions implies like a bundle. This is more like liquidity. This is like more water flowing through a tube. That's why they call it super fluid. And so again, per second per microsecond payments on L2. So like the use cases for this is infinite. Like streaming. We don't even know. We don't even know what all the use cases are. Streaming for bandwidth. Like maybe you're walking around some city and you need some internet and you go buy some internet from someone and you just stream them pennies per second. For a few seconds.

Starting point is 00:28:12 Stuff like this. Yeah, really cool. Automatically withdrawn from your, you know, your ethidress, something like this. Yeah, this is going to be a big primitive in the future, I think. Speaking of primitives that are big, okay, NFTs are big. This is an NFT project called Forgotten Rune's Wizards, these wizards that you can collect. It's kind of a PFP type project. Now they have just rolled out an RPG game.

Starting point is 00:28:36 Check this out. It's a, you know, a graphic from the game. Looks like you're playing your wizards. Looks like an acting up against other wizards. Just like you've got little characters, you've got to fight some people, you get some stuff. So look at this. An NFT project now spinning up a game.

Starting point is 00:28:52 I wonder if this is the future for a ton of different NFT projects, the direction they're going. You can almost see the beginnings of the Metaverse this way, right? It starts with a boring JPEG. and then it becomes digital property and then it turns into a game and then before you know it, it's immersive and virtual

Starting point is 00:29:07 and you become your NFT and you're in the metaverse. This is how we evolve. Exactly right. Looking forward to play. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about Bitwise.

Starting point is 00:29:17 This is cool. Okay, so BitWise launching the BitWise Blue Chip NFT index funds, the world's first NFT index funds. So if you are perhaps a baby boomer and Defi and NFT scares you, fear not, bitwise has your back. So if you want to get into the cool, hip, new NFTs that all the kids are getting with, you can get into the Bitwise Blue Chip NFT index fund.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Ryan, I've actually checked out what's in this index fund. It's pretty good, man. Is it? Yeah. So, not just for baby boomers. It's for anyone, if you don't want to custody your own keys, all right? If you don't, if you haven't been fully defy-pilled and you're, like, scared of a lot of things, you just want an index of these things. Of a diversified blue chip NFT portfolio. Yeah. Yeah. In your retirement account, which is kind of wild. So what's in this thing? Yeah, Cryptopunks weighted at 37% of the total fund, followed by bored apes at 29%, mutant apes, V-Friends,

Starting point is 00:30:11 Autoglyphs, Fidensas, Cybercongs, Cool Cats, Mebits, and Chromy Squiggles. Those are the 10 Blue Chip NFTs that are in the Bitwise NFT fund. I think it's a pretty good list. I think it's a pretty good list. Well, you like it because Cryptopunks are at the top. That's why you like it, right? I don't see any turtles here, okay? That's not an opinion. That's just the market cap. Sir, there are no turtles in this blue chip NFT fund. I refuse to believe this is the market.

Starting point is 00:30:33 Is that the alpha? It's like buy the turtles before they're in the bitwise blue chip. Oh my God. That's not alpha guys. None of this is financial advice. All right. I just have a turtle fetish. Aztec.

Starting point is 00:30:46 As tech. Privacy network on Ethereum, layer two. Super cool. What is this technology? Look, okay. Up to 100x gas savings, fully private transactions by default, all in our roll up private defy is here i think they're on test net have they they've rolled out their main net yet uh no i do not i do not think they have rolled out a main net no just a just it's coming no yeah

Starting point is 00:31:09 so this is like this is a private privacy layer two uh and so think of it like tornado cache that same technology but on a layer two and and also better uh because tornado cast you have to wait for entropy to happen that's not true with as tech you get immediate privacy uh in theory i don't know if this is true at genesis but in theory you can send any asset uh any erc 20 token. Maybe NFTs, maybe that comes later. So think of it like the Tor layer two. Like the layer two where if you go in there, you can do a bunch of private stuff and you can come out completely anonymously.

Starting point is 00:31:39 So a fantastic privacy tool so you can stop doxing yourself anytime you send anyone money from your wallets. And really, really, really bullish. And the cool thing is you simultaneously get privacy and scale at the same time. That's what simultaneously means. This is the same technology. And so this is one of those things where the more people that use this thing, the cheaper the transactions get.

Starting point is 00:32:05 And so with full adoption, gas fees for privacy should come down really, really low. It's already better than the layer one. So for a basic uniswap trade, it's 130,000 gas clocking in at $54. Right now on Aztec, a uniswap trade is $17,600 gas, $7.52. And I think that will not stop there. Many of these L2s continue to have optimizations. So really, really bullish on that. Also, disclaimer, Ryan and I are seed investors in this, Angel Investors.

Starting point is 00:32:33 It's really cool. It's Zcash, man. Zcash as an app. Where it should be? It's Zcash as an app, but with smart contract functionality in a roll-up. That's what we're talking about here. This is why we're so bullish on roll-ups, guys. New ones coming about all the time.

Starting point is 00:32:47 Paradigm was the lead investor in this. It's $17 million Series A. Yeah. Well, that kicks us over to raises then. So they also announced a raise this week almost simultaneously as well. That was strategic for sure. 17 million Series A paradigm to bring this network to mainstream. That is the headline here.

Starting point is 00:33:08 Let's talk about a few other raises. Slinghot just raised $15 million in funding. It's like a DFI trading app. I believe they started on Polygon. Really slick user experience. I'm pretty bullish on what Slinghot is doing. Any other thoughts on this, David? Yeah, this is coming out of the same team as a DFI Pulse.

Starting point is 00:33:25 So there is a relationship there. I've used it once. It was great. I haven't used it since, but that's because, yeah, I don't know. Life is busy. Life is busy. Not much of a trader. Yeah, you're holding instead of trading.

Starting point is 00:33:36 That's why, I guess. Let's talk about Anchorage. So we just had Anchorage on the podcast, at least one member of the Anchorage team with Visa as well. They just raised $350 million. This is the group that purchased Visa's Cryptopunk custodying a ton of assets for big fintech companies as well. this is a $3 billion dollar valuation, billion with the B. We're seeing a lot of bees. You know, a lot of unicorns in crypto. B level valuations, yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:04 Yeah, B level valuations. Let's go to the next one. Euler Finance, they just launched a new DFI lending platform. It's a crowded market, but they have kind of a permissionless take, similar to Rari, I believe, and maybe the Fuse Protocol. Think of it sort of like that. Only has its own unique differences. Any thoughts on what Euler is doing here? Yeah, so where Reflexer is kind of like MakerDAO, but with control theory baked in, as in some like equilibrium mechanics that remove governance, this is a very similar thing. This is like compound or AVE, but with some equilibrium balancing mechanisms that removes governance. So governance, governance, minimize protocols, which is, you know, we forget to talk about this a lot, but kind of the whole point of this whole thing is to actually remove governance. Governance is like kind of a means to an end. The whole point is to remove governance. So cool, bullish. Also, disclaimer, me and Ryan are I see angel investors in this one too.

Starting point is 00:34:55 Let's talk about Li-Fi. Plug-and-play, interoperability. This is an aggregator, so I think of this is kind of the one-inch for bridges, basically. So if you want to do hop-connect, you're trying to get liquidity from one bridge to another. You just use Li-Fi. It pulls it all together and aggregates it. Not only that, but you can also exchange at the same time. So it's a liquidity aggregator between layer two's, but it's also a layer-two.

Starting point is 00:35:22 Dex aggregator. So it's like, oh, I have Ether on Arbitrum, but I want USDC on optimism. It will both get you from layer two to layer two and from asset to asset simultaneously. So, I mean, just very obvious use case, I think. They just announced their raise as well. Let's talk about Nansen. Nansen, fresh funding, $750 million valuation. Pretty close to that B word. Not quite there, but an analytics platform and crypto. I've used Nansen before. I think it's fantastic. Dune Analytics, Nansen, there's a few others that I think very highly of. Any thoughts on this, David?

Starting point is 00:35:59 Congratulations, well-deserved. This is going to be something along the lines of like the Bloomberg terminal for DFI. Ramp time. Ramp is a Fiat on ramp. They're doing a lot with layer two's, which we are super bullish on because it feels like exchanges have taken too long. I was hoping for a Coinbase integration layer two platforms

Starting point is 00:36:17 by Christmas, but it's getting a little late, man. It's not happening so far. on the road, Coinbase. Skate to where the puck is going. Ed Gemini, Crackin, all you guys. Got to get on it. But ramp network, they just closed a $52 million raise. I'm not sure what valuation that is.

Starting point is 00:36:33 Yeah, a high one. 300 million. 300 million. There you go. 300 million. And that is to provide Fiat on ramps and off ramps, all over crypto. So go direct from your bank account directly to optimism, directly to Arbitrum, directly to Starknet, directly to ZK Sync.

Starting point is 00:36:50 that's what this enables. So good to see that they are funded as well. NIDIG. NIDIG. Announcing a $1 billion funding round valuing the company at $7 billion. So NIDIG is both a fund and also I think an OTC desk is overall just like crypto, Bitcoin-focused infrastructure, but they get into other things as well, raising a massive round at $1 billion. So congratulations to NIDIG. You take this last one, David. Yeah, Circles U. U.S.EC. Sablecoin is now on the Avalanche blockchain.

Starting point is 00:37:20 So sufficient adoption on Avalanche means that UCC's going there. So there's now, I didn't even realize that UCC wasn't actually there yet. So congratulations to Avalance for getting UCC. USC going everywhere, going in all chains, going in all exchanges. Inflating everywhere as well, yeah. That's not their fault, to be fair. That's true. Jobs time, all right?

Starting point is 00:37:40 Here we go. You heard our inflation talk earlier. You heard about wages not increasing, you know, two to three percent per year. Going up in crypto, though, I think wages will continue to rise because demand is there. Crypto needs people, needs you. Get a job in crypto. That's the message coming to you from bankless every single week. I'm going to read off the jobs. You ready, David? Yep, I'm ready to dance. Here we do. All right, all right. Founding full stack engineer at Utopia Labs, senior iOS engineer, smart defy, senior back end engineer, smart defy, senior

Starting point is 00:38:10 software engineer, popcorn, community ecosystem lead, DYDX.DX. Got to check that out. Crypto research analyst. You got to be an NFT specialist, a smart contracts, platform and Web 3 specialists and a governance specialist. Those are three positions from Bitwise. We're talking about the NFT index earlier. I wonder if that NFT specialist would be involved in that. A head of growth dex guru, technically draftly, head of Ethereum, Head of Token's Immutable, Community Manager, Dexable, Lead Engineer, Hatstop Finance, Community Manager, E Agronam. Those are some of the jobs. David exhausted. Look, man, I can go faster. I can go slow. Depends. I went fast because it's your birthday, okay?

Starting point is 00:38:50 Those are the jobs, guys. You want to get clued into the jobs. Go check out the bankless jobs for it at bankless. dot pallet. That xyz. Make sure you subscribe. You get these in your inbox. We'll also remind you on a weekly basis.

Starting point is 00:39:03 David, you want to get to some news items? We should do that. There are some cool news items. Again, this is a really awesome week. All of them are awesome. We just like nonstop good news. Okay. Here's a big one.

Starting point is 00:39:14 The first publicly traded company. We talked to these guys, Ether Capital, they're based in Canada. First publicly traded company. to go big on staking ETH. No wonder, they have a big balance sheet, but $50 million worth of ETH they're staking. Publicly traded company, staking ETH on their balance sheet. I think this is the first of many.

Starting point is 00:39:33 Ether Capital has been the first of many in lots of ways. And I wonder how long, David, until we see some of the Fortune 500 companies with ETH on their balance sheets actually staking it in what we call the Internet bond. Any thoughts on this? Ether capital is basically like micro-strategy, their one job is to buy ether, put it on the balance sheet. They're a Canadian company. The only

Starting point is 00:39:54 difference between them and macro strategy is that they don't have this ancillary company that makes money in completely different ways than what the new purpose is, which is to buy Bitcoin. So it's a public company, put an ether, staked ether on the balance sheet, also taking part in Ethereum staking. So pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool. Let's talk about this too. Polygon. They just acquired a ZK roll-up. We're talking about this in the intro called a mere protocol, $40 million acquisition. This is Polygon. Big number.

Starting point is 00:40:22 Yeah, this is, look, man, this is Polygon going all in on roll-ups. We just had the Polygon founders on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. If you didn't catch that, go listen to that episode. I think it's really key to understand both Polygon and where roll-ups are going and what they think of this entire space. They're calling this product Polygon Zero. And what's interesting about the Polygon strategy is they have a lot of these chains, all right? They're kind of a Swiss Army knife for chains. This is a graphic that they put out.

Starting point is 00:40:48 that I kind of like. Their thesis is Ethereum is the settlement layer, kind of in the center. It is the chain of chains, if you will. And then Polygon is going to provide lots of different chain solutions for different use cases. So Polygon Nightfall, more focused on privacy and enterprises, Polygon Hermes. It's kind of a payments type. ZK rollup. Yep. ZK. Rollup. Polygon proof of steak, of course. That's the first one that you're familiar with. Yeah. That's the less secure, but also, you know, very scalable chain, higher throughput chain, Polygon avail.

Starting point is 00:41:24 Data-a-a-laylayer, yeah. Yeah, so look, that's their strategy, sticking to it, and they just made another big move in ZK-Roll-up space. It's pretty cool. Look, only a few of these need to work out for it to be very, very bullish. And so, like, yeah, again, if you think that Polygon is just the proof of stake chain, you're missing the forest for the trees. Yeah, absolutely. They said they were coming here, and now they have. in a big way. Let's talk about this. This is a uniswap proposal to get, yeah, what is this proposal

Starting point is 00:41:53 about, David? Yeah, we've been following this for the last three roll-ups. This will be, I think, the last one, because there are 66 million four votes from uni token holders and only half a million against votes to get uniswap spun up and deployed on the Polygon proof of stake chain. So this sounds like it's definitely going to go through. And we will shortly see Uniswap v3 deployed on the Polygon improve the stake change. So cool. It took a while, but also fine. Great, great, fantastic. Love it. Community wants a big show of support there. Let's talk about Ledger. So that is the hardware wallet, you know, and love. Actually, last week, they just unveiled a plan to issue a crypto debit card. We had the VP of product from Ledger on our YouTube earlier this week to talk a little

Starting point is 00:42:36 bit about that, but a few highlights are an interest-free, 30-day debit card. So you actually get credit for 30 days on your debit card and pay that way. You can convert to crypto at the point of sale. So basically you can sort of charge up your ledger debit card from your ledger and pay for your coffee, whatever you're buying on a visa as well. You can even have salary sent to your account. So like the salary sent to your account and it converts it to crypto and drops it off in your ledger wallet.

Starting point is 00:43:11 Some cool stuff there. I'm not exactly sure how this is going to. evolve, but I know when it comes out, I'm going to check it out and see what's up. Do you use it? The other thing you can do is you can put ether or Bitcoin in your account and then spend dollars backed by that Bitcoin and that ether. So you're not spending it. You're not spending the Bitcoin and Ether because don't do that. Those things are going up while the dollar's going down. But you can use those things as collateral to spend dollars, which is an interesting use case. Do not get over your ski tips just because you have the Bitcoin and Ether. Doesn't

Starting point is 00:43:40 mean you get to spend freely dollars. It's really cool, but be careful. Is David? his message, right? Let's talk about this. Yeah, this is from IMAIaguchi, who is tweeting out a very fantastic announcement. And IAS says, we strongly believe that a diverse set of clients is essential to Ethereum's health and decentralization to ensure the client teams have a long-term incentive to maintain the network. The Ethereum Foundation has launched the client incentive program. So what they are doing, what the EF is doing, is they are giving each of the nine Ethereum client teams, 144 validators, that is total, not each, that is 4,608 Ether at roughly $17.5 million each, and that is being given out to the client teams as one part of reward for all of

Starting point is 00:44:27 their hard work, but also as long-term incentives to keep maintaining those clients. The clients, the individual clients are not owned by anyone other than themselves. their one job is to make Ethereum clients work and work better over time. That's one of the reasons why Ethereum has actually been able to scale. I think how much higher are gas, our block sizes within Ethereum first launch? It's something like five to ten times larger. That is because of clients. So Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:44:51 Optimizations. Yeah, client optimizations has made Ethereum five to ten times more scalable since it's day one inception. And that's because of the client teams. And now with giving them a ton of ether, a bunch of validators, they both have the actual capital, but then also the staking interest over time. So long-term alignment to keep these clients innovating and moving forward and maintaining the health and security of Ethereum in a decentralized fashion. So that's really, really cool. It's cool. It unlocks over time. This is a great performance bonus. Like, no one deserves it more than the protocol development team, the client teams that are providing the public good that we call Ethereum. So I'm really glad to see the EF pull that off for all of these client teams. This is great. What's this, what's happening with Ave, David?

Starting point is 00:45:32 Yeah, this is kind of a take, kind of not news, a little bit of speculation, but this is Donnie. from AVE saying after testing AVEV3, I'm fully in love with layer 2s, L2s, calling it now, AVEV3 is going to be L2 only. It will not be AVEV3 on the main chain. Is that your personal opinion? Or do you actually, is that? I'm going to put a lot. I would put a lot of my money on that bet. Yeah. I don't know if that's 100% confirmed. But yeah, I think, I think regardless, even if even is not confirmed, Avey V3 will be used almost primarily on layer twos. I'm anxious to hear more about Avey V3. wonder what they're adding to the protocol. They're also pursuing a social network that I want to

Starting point is 00:46:11 hear more about too. I think that's unrelated, yeah. It's unrelated, but it's all AVE. Let's switch to NFT stuff. This is big news. Nike apparel is entering the metaverse, okay? Big acquisition of RTFKT studios. I'm actually not familiar with who these are. People need to rethink their naming. I don't know how to say it, but this is a metaverse apparel type of company. Nike has just purchased them. So welcome to Web 3, Nike. Is that what we're saying? That's exactly right.

Starting point is 00:46:42 Nike making a very intentional move into the Metaverse, digital payroll, digital goods to go along with your physical apparel and your physical goods. Buying a whole entire NFT studio. So not just like partnering with one, straight up buying one. So this is like going to be like the Nike NFT Metaverse like churn factory. So I expect to see a lot of Nike digital merch out there. Big moves, digital fashion, digital merch.

Starting point is 00:47:05 It's happening. Nike moving first. And, you know, others will follow behind them. Adidas is right there with him. They're also doing similar stuff. That's true. Yeah, we're going to see them all. It's going to be a crowded space.

Starting point is 00:47:15 It's going to be a fun space to watch. Let's talk about Marvel and Disney. Their IP is moving to Ethereum. NFT is unimutable. Talk about this story, David. Yeah, so I think the story here is that Marvel and Disney have their IP licensed towards this VVA, VVEVE official NFT platform,

Starting point is 00:47:34 kind of just like what we were talking about with RTFK, It's just an IP system for just putting digital merch into the Metaverse. And Vevey Official is now being migrated over to Immutable via the eCommy platform. There's a lot of moving parts here. Basically, the TLDR is Marvel and Disney IP is being issued on the Immutable Layer 2. So a huge win for Immutable. Like Disney IP, like, is there any more valuable IP than Disney? And Marvel's up there as well.

Starting point is 00:48:05 Marvel, Star Wars. all the Mickey Mouse stuff. Basically, every kid's movie in existence. Harry Potter, I think. No, no, no. Harry Potter's Universal. Okay, all right. Well, never mind.

Starting point is 00:48:15 I mean, it probably won't be long. One day, yeah. So all of that IP becoming issued on Immutable. So again, a huge win for Immutable. And also, cool, Disney now in the Metaverse 2. It's really cool that Mutable's business development is just like, just crushing it. It's doing stuff that a protocol can't do, right? It's like, you know, good job here.

Starting point is 00:48:35 And yeah, so speaking. of how cheap is it to mint NFTs on immutable, David? Apparently, it's free, Ryan. Through this new app called mintable. So mintable is now live on immutable. And so all you got to do is set up account deposit some eth and you get, they say infinite transactions with no fees. So free NFT minting on the immutable layer two. This is something that a layer two can do that a layer one could never do, which is free and infinite transactions. And then our good friend, Paulinea, had a really good take about this. Like free and infinite, that sounds too good to be true.

Starting point is 00:49:10 It is slight hyperbole, but that's because mintable is actually just fronting the cost for their users. And that's just because the fees are so low that mintable, the platform is like, yo, we'll just eat it. Like, it's so low that we'll just do it for the users themselves. So Paulineas says, infinite transactions with no feed, slight hyperbole there.

Starting point is 00:49:27 But the point is, if you want to mint and trade low value NFTs and trade off security, Immutable X is the premier venue. Can't be literally zero gas fees. It's still early days, of course, much more to come from Immutable X. Again, Immutable X just executing in the best of ways. Just nice job, guys. Are you a person that hates gas fees but loves decentralization? Right?

Starting point is 00:49:49 Like, that's what this is solving for. Hopefully that's the whole world. Hopefully that's the whole world. Exactly. But like decentralization is an important public good and worth preserving. And why can't we have both? I think we can. With cryptography, we can.

Starting point is 00:50:01 With the power of cryptography, we can have whatever we want. Exactly right. a little nerdy on it. But look, Justin Drake told us the beginning of the year, that crypto moon math episode. Go check that out if you're in sort of the theory of cryptography and why it scales blockchains. Why that is the, that is the big performance improvement, right? Everything else is a hack. When we make big cryptography leaps forward, that's when we improve these systems, these computers that we call blockchains. And that's what's happening here with these roll-ups. Coming up next, a rare crypto punk has sold at a record $10.2 million is the highest

Starting point is 00:50:35 Cryptopunk sale ever, 2,500 Eth. Yeah, it's the ape with the blue bandana. Cryptopunk 4156 purchased for over 2,500 Eith. New records for Cryptopunks. Are Cryptopunks still going up, or is it like kind of, I know everything in NFTs have kind of died down a little bit, but like Cryptopunks being blue chip, are they still ? Cryptopunks have, they've taken a little bit of a hit lately. I think they peaked out a 144-Eth floor. They're currently clocking in, Oof, that's the fourth big oof of the show ran. The new floor is 61. ETH. There's a little bit of drama and fud in the crypto-punk world having to do with licensing and larva labs and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:51:13 Creative Commons licensing and all that. Stuff like that. Yeah. That's another podcast episode. Well, I'm waiting until it hits $500 or so, David. And then I'm all in. I might buy one. Hold your breath, man.

Starting point is 00:51:22 Hold your breath. Someday. Someday. I get turtles, though. Whatever. They're fine. How many turtles do you have? Many turtles.

Starting point is 00:51:32 All right. Is it turtles all the down? I'm stacked. I'm shell stacked, okay? I don't have any of these, though. Dr. Seuss characters, they're getting the NFT treatment. Seussibles. Seussibles.

Starting point is 00:51:42 Is your great name. Well, cute little green eggs and ham guy, Sam I am, cat in the hat. Thing One, Thing Two, all your favorites. Coming to the NFT world. How can you hate that? How do people hate NFTs? I just don't know. Pop culture is so fun.

Starting point is 00:51:55 Look, if you hate NFTs, just don't buy them. That's all you have to do. Just ignore them. And also shut up. Yeah. But you can't resist. You know you'll be back. You know, you just wait until your favorite whatever comes to the NOTE

Starting point is 00:52:05 then you'll be like, oh, those weren't cool, but these are. Wait until it's your turn, yeah. Everyone will take us their turn. It's going to hit you. Okay, Bitcoin stuff. Two Bitcoin core developers, they stepped down last week. Why are Bitcoin core developers stepping down, David? According to this guy, Mike in Space, the subtext seems to be lack of funding.

Starting point is 00:52:24 Luke was talking about lack of funding this week. Trillion dollar asset, no funding. This has always been a problem that has plagued Bitcoin. It is one massive public goods that doesn't have a way. of providing funding, R&D effort. Ethereum also has this problem too, where we have billions of dollars per year being spent on security

Starting point is 00:52:43 and just a handful of millions of dollars being spent on R&D in public goods. But it's a big difference from zero to a handful of millions of dollars. In stark contrast to the EF, paying the client teams a bunch of ether for long-term sustainable development, Bitcoin doesn't have a way to pay for its own like maintenance,

Starting point is 00:53:02 which is unfortunate. It's unfortunate, but I also respect that they haven't done anything silly, like inject a block rewards, yeah, a block reward dev fund to siphon off to some third-party organization, like Blockstream in order to pay for this stuff. Blockstream would love that, I'm sure. Yeah, that would be not a good idea, of course. So I do respect that.

Starting point is 00:53:21 There's got to be other ways to pay for public goods funding. I think Square is doing some of this. Hopefully this gets resolved for Bitcoin. 90% of all Bitcoin have now been mine, though. Cross that monster. Today I learned. 90%. There's only 10% of Bitcoin's left to be mined.

Starting point is 00:53:34 Yeah. Fix supply. That remaining 10% is going to take like a hundred years. And Michael Saylor would capture it all. No dollar cost average news from Michael Saylor this week. I'm sure he's doing something, but it's taken off for the holidays. He'll be back in the new year. All right, let's talk about some traditional finance stuff, regulation. Yeah, this is going to be fun. I like this. All right. So one of our big predictions, longstanding bankless predictions, has been the protocol sync thesis. Okay.

Starting point is 00:54:04 And this is the idea, yeah, the defy mullet plus protocol synch thesis, they're kind of, they're kind of related. And the basic idea is that the most credibly neutral decentralized protocols, whether that's a chain like Ethereum, or whether that's a credibly neutral automated market maker like uniswap or a protocol like compound, they're going to sink to the bottom. And other things will be built on top of those things. Because why? Because they're maximally decentralized. They're credibly neutral.

Starting point is 00:54:32 Everyone can tap into it. they're totally permissionless. And so we had a longstanding prediction that at some point in time, all of the exchanges, all of the crypto banks will start tapping into these D5 protocols for various things. So, for instance, they'll start earning interest, providing access for their users to earn interest in something like compound. Well, it happened.

Starting point is 00:54:53 It's happening. It was literally the example that we've used. Yeah, it's literally the example. So we said someday, I think we said this a couple years ago, someday, Coinbase will use compound under the covers to provide a lending and borrowing platform interest rates, that sort of thing. And it's happening. Starting today, it's happening. So, it feels good. It feels good, man. When that happens, I think it's validation of the thesis and only more to come, right? This is Coinbase, but soon it's going to be every single bank in the world.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Where do you get your savings rate in your bank account is going to be in protocols, protocolized form. But here's the thing. Absolute garbage that we can't get this in the U.S. And not Coinbase's fault, all right? This is rolled out to 70 countries already. Rolled out completely to 70 countries. It is not in the U.S. The services available in the UK, Germany, Spain, not in the U.S. And I think that is raw nonsense.

Starting point is 00:55:49 Not Coinbase's fault. I just appreciate being protected so hard. I just like, you know if they do it, the SEC has threatened to file a lawsuit and their Coinbase earned product. So Americans can't have it. So 7% interest rates. My bank account gives me a 0.025% rate in my savings account. Calling that a savings account is an absolute joke.

Starting point is 00:56:13 We come out with some innovation called DFI where you can get a reasonably, like a really safe loan and borrowing an interest rate from something like compound. A very tried and tested protocol. That feels very safe. Not accessible if you're an American through Coinbase. Of course, you can go directly to the protocol yourself. Not through Coinbase. And that's where 36, 40 million Americans have accounts. So, like, what are you doing, U.S.?

Starting point is 00:56:38 Yeah. You want to, when you want to help protect consumers from inflation, give them access to defy, don't block it. What's the purpose? Who are they protecting, David? They don't want to give protection from inflation. They need people to own the dollars. This is the same type of capital controls maneuver that we see from Argentina.

Starting point is 00:56:56 It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, we need you guys to keep on holding dollars because we need you guys to like not have inflation go out of control. And so like, no, like you don't have your 5% interest rates. Like keep that money in your bank and continue having your 0.05%. Like that will protect you like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:14 It's the worst form of protection I can think of. And it's only hurting American citizens. This is the reason why we say you have to take control of your own digital sovereignty. And of, you know, you have to go bankless, okay? Thank God for Defi actually giving the individuals to go directly to the protocols. The ability to opt out. All we want is the ability to opt out of the crappy system that is, they're trying to imprison us in. Let's move on.

Starting point is 00:57:45 Let's talk about another system of imprisonment, and that's kind of Web 2, the Web 2 world. So here's a story, David, of somebody who lost their Instagram handle, Metaverse. What's happening here? Yeah, so somebody had the at Metaverse Instagram handle. and then Facebook pivoted to meta, making that Metaverse Instagram handle way more valuable. And then a couple weeks after the pivot, it got revoked from the owner's hands. Unexplained. They said it was impersonating somebody else.

Starting point is 00:58:16 The account was impersonating someone. And so they got the ownership of that account got yoint from the owner. Eventually, it was given back to the owner after a bunch of uproar from her, the owner, and also everyone else on the internet because of the exact reasons why you would expect. Like, oh, this is like, who are you Facebook to just revoke ownership? But this is a very big reminder. Do you invest time into your Instagram account? Do you invest time into your Twitter account?

Starting point is 00:58:43 Do you know that you actually don't own those assets? That is not Web 3. That is Web 2. And in Web 3, if Twitter was a Web 3 platform, if Instagram was a Web 3 platform, you would actually have complete property rights and assurances over your ownership of your handles. And this is exactly what we are trying to get away from. Facebook was like, oh, Metaverse handle that we have. Well, it's ours now, thanks.

Starting point is 00:59:07 And then the people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And thankfully, at the end of the day, the whole entire world resides on people. And so because the people push back, this individual has her Metaverse Instagram account back in her hands. Only has it back, though, by the good graces of Facebook after this public pushback, as you said. So it was interesting when the pivot happened and Facebook turned to Metaverse to the name Meta, someone texted, someone messaged her and said, you were now a millionaire. But another person warned, Facebook isn't going to just buy your account. They're just going to take it. It's all theirs. Why would they buy it? It's theirs. And then early the next morning, she tried to log on Instagram. She got a message saying your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else. I think that's big oof number five, Ryan. Big Oof. Yes. That's definitely. I'm really a big oof number five. And yeah, I mean, this just shows, I guess, you know, the take that you were saying is, I don't own my account, my Twitter account, my Facebook account, Gmail account, YouTube, Twitch.

Starting point is 01:00:09 Neither do you. You don't own any of this. It's company property. We live our digital lives toiling away on rented property for our feudal lords. Completely broken model. Web three fixes this. Web three fixes this. Property rights.

Starting point is 01:00:23 That's what we've been talking about the entire time. They're louder for the people in the back, Ryan. Web 3 fixes this. We have property rights. The people should own their own property rights. Elizabeth Warren isn't having it, though, David. Should we just play a clip? Yep.

Starting point is 01:00:37 Go for it. Okay. And play a clip. Listen up. Defi is the most dangerous part of the crypto world. This is where the regulation is effectively absent. And no surprise, it's where the scammers and the cheats and the swindlers mix among part-time investors and first-time crypto traders. Shoot, in Defy, someone can't even tell if they're dealing with a terrorist. Wow. What do you think of that, David?

Starting point is 01:01:03 Big goof number six, Ryan. Well said. In Defi, someone can't even tell if you're a terrorist. Going straight to the terrorist thing. Takes her no time at all. It's like, oh, yeah, terrorism. Shady, scammie, the worst part of crypto, the shadiest parts of crypto, Defi. That's what she called it.

Starting point is 01:01:25 Spoken like somebody that's never used it, Elizabeth. This is the way out. So I don't understand. So Elizabeth Warren is somebody who speaks, has spoken up against the banks so many times. Kind of a populist anti-bank message. And then when faced with crypto, when faced with defy, the transparent open financial system that actually provides a way out? No, that's shady. That's for scammers.

Starting point is 01:01:51 And terrorists. It's because she wants those services to be provided by the government, by the state. It says very paternalistic, very infantilizing take. It's a terrible take. Get your services from the government. We know what's best. Look, it's setting us back, though. Okay?

Starting point is 01:02:08 She says defy is one of the shadiest parts of the crypto world, not banks, not Wall Street, not our 7% inflation. It's defy. That's the problem. It's sad, man. I don't know where we went wrong. That's worth another oof, David. That's not just one.

Starting point is 01:02:21 Oh, I said it at the beginning. This one gets two oafs, double oafs for Senator Warren. Alexis O'Haney and co-founder of Reddit says, transparency is the hallmark of Web 3. It's all open source. It's an open database. It's not shady.

Starting point is 01:02:34 Rather, it's an antidote. The cigar smoked field ruins where a centralized finance historically gets done. People trust code more than people because it always does what it says it'll do. Elizabeth, get a metamask, girl. We'll send you some ether. Come on bankless.

Starting point is 01:02:47 Come on bankless. Let's talk about it. We'll help you out. We genuinely want, we generally think this part of the solution to some of the problems that you're seeing and we wish you could see that too. Yeah. I think you will in time. I hope so. Hopefully. Alexis O'Haney and he's coming on the podcast though, David. This will be a good topic for discussion in January. In other news, we got some we got some badass regulators fighting the fight.

Starting point is 01:03:08 Some bad regulators and then got some badass regulators. Who's this one? This is Hester Purse who tweets out the latest regulatory agenda shows that the SEC will be busy in the upcoming months but it won't be working on the right things. So Hester Perce put out the statement in combination with another chair, Commissioner Rosman, basically saying that the SEC has a mandate and what they are doing is completely adjacent to that mandate. There's not actually following through on trying to provide fair and orderly markets and capital formation. She is just critiquing the Gensler agenda, basically, saying, we're supposed to do our jobs and the things that we're doing are not our jobs right now.

Starting point is 01:03:50 Like WTF, SEC's the agenda. Hester Purse, thank you so much for being so bold to put this out there. This is how democracy works. This is how this thing goes down. So thank you for pushing forward this conversation in such a public way. This is why we have multiple commissioners. This is exactly the way it's supposed to work so that we can push back and there can't be unilateral control of a given regulators agenda. and I'm just so glad that it feels like some regulators like Hester Purst are fighting for the people, fighting for the intent. For first principles of why the SEC exists in the first place. Thank you. First principles. Go back to first principles and evaluate new technologies and new market approaches based on those first principles. We need more like Hester Perst in government,

Starting point is 01:04:33 that's for sure. David, what's happening in Russia? Bank of Russia to ban mutual funds from investing in Bitcoin. I guess a little oof. just because it's Russia. So like, I mean, they're kind of kind of on the way out. Let's just say once again, you don't ban Bitcoin. You ban your citizens from accessing Bitcoin. So not going to really work out for Russia in the long term. Yeah. Let's talk about the IMF. Yeah. Do they have a very different policy? Looks like no. Yeah. So IMF leaders, IMF advocates are calling for a coordinated crypto policy amongst the world's governments, basically saying, hey, we need to like team up and fight this crypto thing before this

Starting point is 01:05:09 crypto thing comes and eats us because crypto is already a globally coordinated set of participants. We are already global. That's the nice thing about being internet networks. And so the IMF saying like, hey, other governments of the world, if we don't team up to take down this crypto thing, it's going to come eat our lunches. The last time global governments tried to coordinate against a problem, it was climate change and that hasn't gone out too well. Like global coordination kind of a kind of a hard thing for nation states to do. That's the whole point of crypto is we are actually more able to out coordinate them by the nature of our protocols. So, big oof coming for the IMF. Stay tuned. You know what's hilarious though, David, is they're right. If they do want to stop this,

Starting point is 01:05:54 they have to globally coordinate. The thing is, they're never going to be able to do it. If we could globally coordinate, we'd have larger, more scaled nation states than how we have right now. And they have insurgents in every single country that the IMF represents. And those are crypto people who are excited about this technology and want it. I mean, it's basically what we are. Like, good luck. It's going to be a civil war. To them. No, they're the insurgents. They're the establishment. Let's talk about Katie Hahn. Okay. This is A16 Z VC. It looks like she is departing A16Z. That's the fund that Chris Dixon co-leads as well to start her own fund on crypto and Web3. David, it feels like we've got to get Katie Han on the podcast at some point to

Starting point is 01:06:35 tell us a bit about that. Maybe we'll schedule that sometime. What's this? FTX U.S. signs NFT deal with the Golden State Warriors basketball team. As a part of this deal, the Warriors will create and launch NFTs, and FTCS will be the main hub for the team's digital asset launches. So big win for FtX. Congrats. FTX doing celebrity, doing sports endorsements. So is Coinbase.

Starting point is 01:06:57 Not too far behind. FTCX and Coinbase going blow for blow. Is this Kevin Durant? Kevin Durant. Yeah, Kevin Durant now has a partnership with Coinbase, basically doing the same thing that FTC is doing with the Golden State Warriors, but now with Kevin Durant. So yeah, congratulations to Coinbase.

Starting point is 01:07:11 Celebrities in crypto. Wow, 2021. That's been a year for that too. Guys, we will be right back with the fresh takes of the week. And of course, the meme of the week you can't miss. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and NFTs.

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Starting point is 01:09:39 and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemix V-2 and to get involved in governance. All right, guys, we are back with the fresh takes of the week. The first is this, po-aps. I got a few po-ups. I have many po-aps. All sorts of different things I've done in the past. The take here is that they're memory tokens?

Starting point is 01:09:56 What's the tweet and what's the take here? This is a 15-tweet-tweet thread, which we will not be reading out. Basically, this individual, I don't know how to read out her Twitter date handle, says it was always stated that poaps is an ecosystem for the preservation of memories. And I think kind of just really like about what that take is. Like, poaps, these little badges that you collect, again, here are all my poaps. I could name the every single time that I've got in Poep. Tell me about a few of them.

Starting point is 01:10:19 Yeah. Tell me about your POAP stamp collection, sir. Yeah. So here's the bankless ultrasound party, the ultrasound party that I went to in New York. Here, oh, I love this one. Here is East Denver 2020. I got plenty of memories there. Here is Mariano Conti's birthday party in Argentina, which I didn't actually go to,

Starting point is 01:10:38 but I was actually able to get that NFT. And there's a bunch of, there's East Paris, there's Metaverso, like, in Encon. So my parents have, like, a motorhome, and they go from, like, state park to state park all around the U.S., and they go and they collect stamps at all of the state parks in their stamp book. And my mom loves showing them. Whenever I meet with my parents, they're always like, oh, here's what, you want to see where we've been? Let me tell you about it.

Starting point is 01:11:03 And then they pull up the stamp, the badge, the analog NFT, and they tell me about their memory. And they get super nostalgic and they look back fondly on it. Yeah. Like, yeah, especially for people these days that, like, I don't know about you, you're wrong, but I've outsourced as much of my, like, brain's computational power to all my electric devices that are around me.

Starting point is 01:11:19 Like having these little, like memory triggers. Barely know my phone number. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Having these little memory triggers are really nice. Poaps are ecosystems, it's an ecosystem for the preservation of memories. Nice take. That's cool. All right, let's talk about this.

Starting point is 01:11:31 This is my take. Go for it. You know what you start? Yeah. Okay. So I now use the term rugged whenever something mildly unexpected happens in real life. I'll be like, oh, rugged, rugged. Rugged again, mate. And I don't know why. It's just kind of fun. And I was thinking about this, but crypto culture has now invaded the way I talk, especially with the last 18 months, without me even knowing it. And so I tweeted this out as like, what crypto term do you now use in real life. And there were tons of these great, great answers. Daniel said he started to use front running and bullish a lot. Like something good happens, he's just like bullish. Someone else said, rugged and aped using that. Getting aped. Yeah. Yeah. Or aping. I love the floor. The floor,

Starting point is 01:12:15 whenever I can find a way to use like the floor for something. Oh, yeah. How would you use the floor in context? So when I, this is about crypto. So maybe this doesn't really count. But like when I bought all 10 of Nate Muller's NFTs, I sweat. like swept the floor, right? Which is actually the right way to use it, except for the fact that like it's really more for profile picture, NFTs, more than it's like just one of ones. But yeah, it's just like, oh yeah, when I go in and buy a bunch of stuff, like, oh, yeah, bought a bunch of, like, chocolate bars at the grocery store, swept the floor on chocolate chocolate bars. I don't know. It's hilarious. Okay, so like, but I feel like only, um,

Starting point is 01:12:45 crypto people really understand these, these works and this culture. It's, it's being exported. Yeah. Like, rugged is such a great one. So it's like wrecked, uh, aping into pizza. I ape into things. That's great. So what's just fun, what's fun is I feel like crypto culture is really starting to invade real life in these fun ways. And maybe it's happening with us crypto geeks first.

Starting point is 01:13:09 But like I think mainstream is catching on going to start adopting all of these terms. I don't know, it's just fun to see anthropologically the way language evolves. Right? And I tweet this out and I tag Josh Rosenthal from our crypto renaissance episode. And of course, he put together like this

Starting point is 01:13:25 15 tweet thread about how this is exactly what happened in the reformation as well in the Renaissance and all this new language change. So this has happened before. This is just what humans do. Yeah, we are in a phase change. Absolutely. And also just our terminology in theory, like the reason why it gets adopted is because it's better. In the same way that memes work, memes work as like a packet, a bundle of information, like rugged, communicates a lot. It communicates a lot inside of that one word. It's so useful in the 2020s. So many institutions are trying to rug us right now. Use these crypto terms in everyday life, guys.

Starting point is 01:14:04 Let's talk about this. By the way, language is really cool because it's such a decentralized technology, right? Bottom up, every node has to accept it. Love the parallels between language and what we're doing in crypto. Here's another take on decentralization. You want to read it out? Yeah, this is coming from Tasha. Extreme decentralization is a solution looking for a problem

Starting point is 01:14:21 with a very small market demand in the real world. Most BTC and ETH Maxis have yet to wake up to that. And this tweet got to over 2,000 likes, Ryan. Sad. Big oof number seven. No, dude, we're at nine now. Oh, my God, whatever. Why is this a big oof, though?

Starting point is 01:14:39 Tell us. What's your take on the take? Ethereum's decentralization. Ethereum is decentralized. Attacking Ethereum is really, really hard. That means anything that's on Ethereum taps into that security. Uniswap, protected by Ethereum. Compound, protected by Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:14:53 Cryptopunks, boardates, protected by Ethereum. Name your thing that's on Ethereum, protected by Ethereum. So it's not like we need to have the minimum level of decentralization just to protect like the most important application on there. We need to have as much decentralization as possible because all things that exist on Ethereum are protected equally by this level of decentralization. It's not about how can we reduce the level of decentralization down to the absolute minimum. It's how can we export as much security and decentralization so that everything

Starting point is 01:15:23 that ever comes to be on Ethereum from now and to the future, has that level of security and decentralization. And here's why decentralization is important. So when you use the term decentralization, people's eyes glaze over, right? They don't know why it's important. But when you use the term anti-corruption, everyone hates corruption, okay? If you said that, hey, we should build our society on the most incorruptible systems possible with the best anti-corruption technology, right? I know I always go back to the Constitution, the idea of separation of powers, but like, that's a great example. Rather than kings and tyrants, we do a constitution with a democratic process and separation of powers across three branches of government.

Starting point is 01:16:07 It is decentralization, is anti-corruption technology. We make sure the states have a say. We make sure the federal government has a say. We make sure it's all as balanced as possible. We have a judicial branch, an executive branch, a congressional branch. legislative branch. Those are the three branches of government. Okay. We would build, we need to build our systems and our societal governance frameworks on the most decentralized things possible. We don't want to build a government on Facebook shareholder vote where Mark Zuckerberg has over 50% of the vote and he can revoke your Instagram account. All right. So why does decentralization matter? It's so our systems and the trust, the fabric of our society doesn't get correct. That's why it matters. And it matters for lots of use cases. Like money is a big use case. Finance, banking, property rights. These are the things that crypto is protecting. And if you start screwing with that, then what the hell is the point of the entire industry that we're in? Right. And the idea is that if like, it's great if we're just decentralized enough for like

Starting point is 01:17:13 the value that we have now. But the idea is that very much more valuable things, very much more valuable things will come to exist on these chains in the future. So you need to optimize for that level of security because we have ambitions to like 100x the value of the entire ecosystem. Therefore we need to have a container that can fit that void because if we only have some decentralization, you can't actually 100x the value because then it becomes corruptible. You need to have as strong and decentralized as a foundation as possible as a container for future value because if it's not that today, it won't actually come. Do you know what? I think, though, is the Trump card answer to this whole critique in general.

Starting point is 01:17:58 The Trump card answer is because we don't have to sacrifice decentralization. Also true. Also true. Right? Like, it's just because you're impatient. That's the reason you're sacrificing decentralization. All right. We have this magic that was given to humanity called cryptography. Now we have the ability to roll it out at scale using ZK-proof technology, using optimistic fraud-proof technology, like roll-ups are a fantastic example of this. And this is not about being like an eth-centric view of the world, right? Other other protocols can do this too and are doing this. So NIR is taking this approach. Tezos is taking this approach, all right? But the reason the reason not to abandon decentralization is because we don't have to. Like, just be a little

Starting point is 01:18:41 patient. It's coming. It's happening. So anyway, look, we feel passionately about that thing, I guess. Long-term thinking. Long-term thinking. What about this? This is somewhat related? Talk about this. Yeah. So this is Sue is talking about the concept of anti-network effects. And this is how he explained, like, the rise of avalanche and Solana, saying like, oh, yeah, Ethereum was so big and so successful that it creates this incentive to spin up, like, versions of Ethereum

Starting point is 01:19:06 that are valued at the, that are on the floor, right? Like brand-new, very fresh, low valuations. Because of the thing was so grand and so big, the incentive to start a new one to try and get some of that, that upside is really, really strong. And this is exactly what Moloch is. Moloch is rearing its ugly head in this statement of just like anti-network effects.

Starting point is 01:19:25 The idea that like a dominant chain creating the incentive to start a fresh L1 so people can get in on the ground floor of something is a human coordination failure. And I'm saying that's also a failure of the Ethereum ecosystem. Like we didn't actually build out this layer two ecosystem as fast as we could have

Starting point is 01:19:41 to incentivize everyone to come onto the same network, which in my mind is the whole goal of this whole progress, humanity. We like to get everyone on the same page. That's coordination protocols. And so Moloch is this concept of human coordination failure. If you have 10 fishermen around a lake, and they all agree like, hey, if we all fish this lake to 100% of our capacity, like the lake will go bone dry. So we all will diminish our fishing of the lake to 70%, therefore sustainable for the rest of time. And then all of them agree to that, except for one person, and it's like,

Starting point is 01:20:12 well, I'm just going to let everyone else agree to that. And then I'm going to fish the link at 100%. And then somebody watches that person do that and like, well, they're not following the rules. So why should I? So then the second person starts fishing at 100%. And then that continues down the line until the lake is completely fish dry. This is fishless. Fishless. Yeah. This is this is the problem of human coordination failure. We've seen this throughout the end of time. And what Sue is talking about with anti-network effects is the same thing. And so I follow up this suite saying new layer twos are the new layer ones. And these layer twos can collectively coordinate in ways that that new layer ones cannot via strong cryptographic assurances. That's roll-ups and also

Starting point is 01:20:51 cryptographic bridges between these roll-ups. And also new wealth will be created on the new layer twos that will satisfy the desires of new ecosystem entrance, exactly answering to the same exact desire that made and incentivizes so much adoption on Solana and Avalanche, which they won. They deserved all of the recent adoption that they've got in the last like six months or so. But I'm saying the pendulum will swing once again as it always does. The wheel. will turn. I think to fully get that take, so people should listen to the Uncommon Core podcast with Suu. This is kind of a tweet in response, I think, to some of the things he said in that podcast. So that could be some homework for you as well. The other thing I think you're saying is like 2022,

Starting point is 01:21:31 bullish layer two. That's what's going to happen. We're excited to get there. Okay, here's a final take of the week. Optimus shall inherit the earth. And David, this is your pin tweet. It sounds like this is an important one to you. Why? Why do you think that? Do you really think Optimus? will inherit the earth. Yeah, I think the arc of human history bends towards optimists, because optimists are the people that take risks and build things.

Starting point is 01:21:54 They actually say, like, oh, yeah, I can take a risk, but I think it's going to work out versus a pessimist who's like, I'm going to stay in my home and not do anything. And I recently saw a tweet out from Jake Chavinsky

Starting point is 01:22:05 who pays attention to, you know, the Capitol Hill and all that stuff. He goes, a big problem with U.S. policy broadly, we lack vision. Everyone has a long list of stuff they hate. everything we now have is bad. Everything we're trying to do is worse. Everything we've succeeded out is particularly awful. It's exhausting. Where's our sense of optimism and progress, he says, he says. And I say, you know why it's not in Capitol Hill? Well, not among many reasons,

Starting point is 01:22:29 but, you know, it went to the crypto world. The crypto world is full of optimists. We all see a brighter future ahead of us. And those people are the innovators. And optimism is just infectious. People want to be around people that are also positive. And so people that, and this is what I think crypto is one of the best things about crypto is our ability to export our optimism about the world to the rest of the world because my like our generations, millennials, zoomers, they're very, very pessimists that for the first generation in history. We do not think that we will actually be better off as a generation than our parents. Crypto people don't think that. And that is something that the rest of the world wants. And so people, the rest of the world will be onboarded into the

Starting point is 01:23:10 crypto world by our optimism alone and for all the other reasons. And so yes, optimists will shall inherit the earth. Yeah, I totally agree with that because optimists are what it takes to build the new institutions of the future, right? It's this mindset of not just burn it down, but like build it up, build something entirely new. And I think optimists have that market cornered. I do think it's something that crypto can actually export to the world. And this new meme around Web 3 kind of encapsulates it. Yes, yes, it's an optimistic meme. That's exactly right. I do. I think sometimes, you know, Capitol Hill and legacy institutions of the world, they hear the term crypto or like Bitcoin and they get suspicious and start calling you shady before you know it.

Starting point is 01:23:50 And but like Web 3, the next generation of the internet, this thing, this technology has brought so much benefit to humanity, allowed the entire world to communicate, created so much progress and economic good for the world. Okay. That's the third. No one wants to shut Web 3 down. The third iteration of the internet. It's an optimistic movement. And I think crypto is going to be net exporter of optimism, those who are optimists, right? Look into crypto rather than dismissing it. Those are the ones that are going to help shape these things. I hope you are optimistic, if you're listening to Bankless. We certainly are. Yeah. And I wasn't before. I mean, we've said that, did we just synchronize on that? Is that oof number 10? Is that okay? That's great.

Starting point is 01:24:32 Anti-oof. Anti-oof. All right, man. What are you excited about? You excited about your birthday? What's happening? I'm excited about a number of things. Right after this, I'm about to hop on plane home back to Seattle for a little bit early of a holiday break, but going right up to Baker Mountain to ski with my friends for a weekend. Haven't skied since last year. So this is my first ski trip of the year. So I'm super excited for that. I'm also excited about this article that's coming out on bankless today, which is yesterday,

Starting point is 01:24:56 if you're listening to this on Friday, called Bankless's Layer Zero technology. And overall, what I think is about is the prime goal of this whole crypto thing. This is the thing that I hope everyone gets into their brains. and one of the lines that I have in there is where L1 blockchains sink nodes via the internet, humans sink their brains via stories. I think that might just be one of the legacies that I think hopefully bankless leaves behind is I think we tell good stories, Ryan. Real stories, not just making stuff up.

Starting point is 01:25:29 And the story that I hope I told in this article, I think, can get into the brains of everyone. And that's how these things work. is the layer zero is where we spread ideas so we can onboard the rest of the crypto world. And so I hope everyone takes a moment to go read that. I enjoyed writing it. Ryan helps us well. And I'm really excited about that. And of course, lastly, I'm also excited to just receive all the love from politicians that's

Starting point is 01:25:58 coming our way. While some politicians do not like us, a lot of politicians are joining forces with us. So I think in addition to 2022 being the year of the L2, it's also going to be the year that politicians all come and swear fealty to the world of crypto. So I'm excited for those. I'm excited for those three things. An optimistic take. Actually, you just teed me up for my take. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:21 My thing I'm excited about. Yeah. Tell me about it. All right. So I think last week or a couple of weeks ago, we said something about, like, I wonder if anyone in government, U.S. government actually listens to bankless. We know regulators do. and we've heard murmurings, right? And actually, bankless was mentioned in British Parliament at one point in time.

Starting point is 01:26:40 Crazy. Anyway, after that episode, a member of Congress reached out and said, I'm not going to name who it was. I'd like to answer your question as to whether some members of Congress are reading bankless. The answer is yes. Your podcasts are a regular part of my weekly crypto diet. Thank you for all you do to help educate those of us who are trying to get smart on the space. Politicians, lawmakers, trying to get smart on the space.

Starting point is 01:27:04 We need more of that. More optimist. Yeah, bullish. He's a crypto term. Bullish on that. And yeah, anyway, it's been a phenomenal year. As in David, like, it's been really exciting for the bankless movement, for crypto. A lot of things that we thought would happen, you know, happened this year. Bankless got to number four on the U.S. investing podcast. I don't know how that worked. I don't know how that happened, I mean. also, you know, hundreds of thousands of members of the bankless community across the world.

Starting point is 01:27:35 So super exciting. We have politicians involved in the movement now. We've got, you know, celebrities involved in the movement. I think crypto is really an unstoppable force and makes me optimistic and excited. That's it, dude. Optimism is the word of the week. Word of the week. After oof.

Starting point is 01:27:54 After oof. Yeah, there's some oof, but there's a lot more optimism than oof. I think we've used it more. Let's turn to meme of the week, shall we? Let's turn to meme in. What are we meme in? What are the memesters kicking up, cooking up this week? Here we go. All right, so when I saw this on Twitter, I just started bawling. This is Iron Man. And who's Iron Man's wife, girlfriend? Gwyneth Peltra. Gwyneth Peltra. What's your name?

Starting point is 01:28:18 Penny, Penny? Penny. Penny? Yeah. Oh, gosh. We're going to get off. We're going to get by the Marvel. We just mentioned Marvel as NFTs, too. This is bad. So Penny is talking to Tony Stark saying, your account was hacked. And Tony Stark responds, my meta mask? And then she responds, no, your bank account. And then Tony Stark's like, oh, thank God. It's so true.

Starting point is 01:28:40 It's so true. Who cares about your bank account these days? Yeah. If you're living a bankless life, you definitely resonate with this meme for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Please hack my bank account. I just don't care. There's nothing in there.

Starting point is 01:28:50 And please tell us who Tony Stark's wife is after the show, if you will. Yeah, DM us or whatever. Don't yell at us on Twitter. Guys, this has been the weekly roll-up. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks to David for doing this on his birthday. That is awesome. We've got to end with the regular comments we always end with, which is this.

Starting point is 01:29:11 Eth is risky. Bitcoin is risky. All of crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Starting point is 01:29:23 Thanks a lot. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head to 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. If you're interested in crypto, the bankless

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Bankless - ROLLUP: Inflation, Nike NFTs, Disney & Marvel IMX, CryptoPunk Sale, Ledger Debit Card

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