Bankless - ROLLUP: Is SBF Killing DeFi?? | Aptos Launch Down Bad | Ethereum Censorship Heats Up | Reddit Onboarding Millions

Starting point is 00:00:02 Hey, Bankless Nation, happy third Friday of October. David, what time is it? Ryan, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll Up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless. Into the frontier with coffee, with your coffee, with your Friday morning coffee. David, before the show, you told me you had too much coffee. How much is too much for you, man? Three cups. Three cups? So is that what you had before recording this? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:27 And that's like before 1 p.m. Yes, that's three cups before 11 a.m. How do you know it's too much? I, I, yeah, you just kind of, you just know it, you just feel a little bit jittery, yeah, a little bit, uh, manic, you know, you know, people know. I'm on my seventh cup, dude. That is insane. That is insane. I would die. I think. I would be, I would have to like sit down on the ground and just wait for that to pass. Sorry, seventh so far. I shouldn't limit myself. The day is still young. Yeah, I might have a problem.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Anyway, happy weekly roll up. Just enjoy one. cup of coffee, if you will. We're not encouraging more than that. Just one with your weekly roll-up. David, we get a lot of hot topics this week. Number one, SBF, that is Sam Bank been freed. The billionaire, super billionaire, founder of FTX. He's got some ideas on how to regulate Defi.

Starting point is 00:01:16 David, I don't love a lot of these ideas. How about you? No, no, I don't remember seeing him asking the rest of Defi about thoughts about things. He's kind of going rogue on this one. Following SBF, Aptos, the newest layer one on the block from X meta. employees launched, but also flopped? We'll talk about that. Ryan, what are we coming in third? Ethereum censorship. It's been a hot button topic. We did that episode with Justin Drake, but it is increasingly a hot button topic, particularly around relayers. We're going to talk

Starting point is 00:01:48 about what relays are, flashbots, all of these things. And the big question, I think, for the Ethereum community, is, are we in a critical state? Or is this a nothing burger? We have to sound the alarm or not. So we'll get into all of these things. As always, make sure you like and subscribe wherever you are listening to, wherever you are watching. That gets us up to the top of the charts. David, before we get in, we have a message from our friends and sponsors at push. Push protocol. David, this is an app that I know, love, and I use. The way you activate this app is you just enter, log in with your wallet address. And what you can do is subscribe to alerts, very handy alerts.

Starting point is 00:02:30 I don't know how many times I have woken up in the middle of the night being like, oh my God, am I about to get liquidated to my maker? How many times, Ryan? Like, well, not so much this cycle. Zero times for you. But I will tell you, no, in the original cycles. Sure, the first cycle, yeah. 2018, 2019, things are getting pretty tense.

Starting point is 00:02:49 And then also my ENS names, for example, like when do they renew? You need to know that. There's nothing on chain that will let you know that, except for push. You can opt into notifications about E&S. about your collateral requirements, about whether you are in the money or out of the money on a uniswap liquidity pool. There's literally hundreds of different alerts you can sign up for. David, what do you like about this app? Well, as the metaverse, the thing we're building that Ethereum is going to be this like scaffolding

Starting point is 00:03:14 skeleton of builds out, we need push notifications to go and, because that's what do you do when you wake up in the morning, Ryan? You look at your phone. I check my phone. Yeah, right. You get your push notifications. So the metaverse is going to need something like push to notify people of shit going on in the Metaverse. And so you can go and check them out at push.org if you are interested in receiving push notifications or pushing push notifications to your users. David, I got one in there for Flag Me When ETH is under $895 because that way I can outbid you and get in lower if it happens this market cycle.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Yeah, well, I don't think there's a, you have to sign in for a defy app to get notified of the defy app that wants to notify you. No, they actually, no, it's actually off-chain stuff too. Oh, oh, cool. They have like price alerts in here too. Oh, cool. On-chain or off-chain. You can even get alerted with your favorite crypto publications. Like Bankless France. New post from Bankless France. Yeah, pretty cool. All right. Tell us about markets. Speaking of price, what's Bitcoin doing this week?

Starting point is 00:04:14 Nothing. Not really anything. Start of the week at $19,150-ish-dollar, ending the week at $19,150-ish. So flat. Super flat. I'll take it? Yeah. better flat than down. Yeah. How about Eith? Eth, also flat.

Starting point is 00:04:29 12,800 or 1,080 currently, and that's where it started this week. Is this another crab market? Is this like the summertime? Yeah, so when we recorded the last weekly roll-up, it was like when we had like nuked down to like $1,200. And then as soon as we got done recording the weekly roll-up, we bounced right back up to $1,300. Correlation.

Starting point is 00:04:47 The $1,300, like, number for Ether and like $1,900 number for Bitcoin is like super just a magnet, I guess. Yeah, sticky. sticky right now until something new happens. Yeah. What is that new thing going to be? It's got to be macro. It's got to be macro.

Starting point is 00:05:01 There's not much. It's got to be macro. We're post-merge. What's the next exciting news in crypto? The happening? That's the thing. There's like a bunch of exciting things in crypto. So no one can like have,

Starting point is 00:05:10 no one can focus on one meme because there's like three different things and they're all like smaller than the merge. A lot of smaller building going on. No like main chain major events here. How about the each of Bitcoin ratio? It's flat. It's flat.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Also flat. Surprise. And that's actually not bad for either. in the bear market though. I mean, you'd expect during the bear market much more loss in the ratio. We're not seeing it. In history, yes.

Starting point is 00:05:34 If you look back to history, yeah. This is history. Look at this. Yeah, that ratio looks so good. The problem is the ratio looks so good over like a almost coming up on three year time horizon now. So in order for that to like continue it looking good,

Starting point is 00:05:48 like it's just going to take 1.5 more years for that to like keep on going up. Anyways, long term focus, long term focus. You know what I saw this week, David? What? You have hashtag Bitcoin in your Twitter bio now right now. I saw that. There's a story behind that.

Starting point is 00:06:04 Do you have this story? Is this a story that is disposable? No, it's not. Bitcoin shills paid David. That's what it means. Yeah, Bitcoin shills, yeah. Is that what happened? I think this is a private bet among friends that he made.

Starting point is 00:06:17 That's my guess. That I lost. And maybe he lost. Okay. There are worse things to lose. That's pretty funny, though. David, the Bitcoin Bull. Global crypto market cap, what are we looking at?

Starting point is 00:06:27 We under a trillion? Under a trillion. 956 billion. 956 billion. Okay. Is that also flat in the week? Yes, basically. It was a flat week.

Starting point is 00:06:36 All right. Summary, flat week. Neither up nor down. Housing mortgage rates are going up, though. This is a tweet from Guinevere. Breaking 30-year fixed-rate mortgages hit 7.15%. Also breaking the housing market. It feels that way.

Starting point is 00:06:54 7.15% I've never seen rates this high in my probably lifetime. My adult lifetime. So what does this mean for me? I'm a crypto person who bought a house during the bull market. You own a house. Good job. Yes, thank you. Can I ask you?

Starting point is 00:07:10 Did you buy that house or do you have, is this a personal question? Do you buy that house or do you have a mortgage? I have a mortgage. You have a mortgage. Yes, I have a mortgage. What rate did you lock into that mortgage? Two point something. Hell.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Yeah, David. All right. This is my take on that tweet, all right? Okay, actually, I don't have that tweet up, but here's what I said. Locking in a 3% fixed rate mortgage or under is the new I bought Bitcoin under $300. Okay, but I also bought the top of the housing market, though. So like, which one am I, am I happy or sad? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Well, right now, mortgages are going up, but house prices aren't dropping. I don't know if you've looked at the Zilla rates for your house. I bet it's probably the same. or at the level that you bought it in terms of like market value. So I'm happy. You're happy. And the best thing about that is, not almost who cares, but like you locked in at 2.1%? 2.7?

Starting point is 00:08:08 2.7? 2.9%. I think that's right. You're printing money, man. Like congratulations. All right. We're inflating at like 70. This may be the best financial decision you've ever made. That's probably true.

Starting point is 00:08:22 It's not even. Including buying ether at $80? No, we can't include that. Other than ether, this is David's best. So far, we don't know this. But, okay, but you locked in a interest rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, 2.7%, 2.79%. And money, like, inflation is 8%. So what's your delta, man?

Starting point is 00:08:45 Maybe 5% per year. Oh, good for me. Thank you, Uncle Sam. Thank you, like, the dollar. You actually, like, in a high inflationary environments, you actually want to have a lot of fixed rate debt because it means you don't have to pay it. Very nice to be a debtor in these times for mortgages. But let me tell you who is screwed, David.

Starting point is 00:09:04 Everyone who is younger than me. Gen Z, totally. I don't get, do you know how like the meme of, which is true, like millennials getting screwed? Like 2008 financial crisis and then you can't afford a house and how many millennials are like not able to like afford this? This is, look this. value beauty and charm. This is a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house, somewhere in the burbs. 19, what year?

Starting point is 00:09:28 1950-something? 54. Rent is $87 a month. Yeah, but that also has in a ton of loss of value of the dollar. Like how much, you could get a cheeseburger for like 50 cents back then. This is also true. There's inflation baked in, but it's also true that home prices as an asset, like homes themselves, have risen far far.

Starting point is 00:09:51 faster than inflation, like something like 3x, 4x. And so I thought millennials were screwed, but like Gen Z. Now, how are you supposed to afford a house when house prices are so expensive and like your interest rates are like 7,8 percent? What's like the monthly payment look like on that? Well, isn't every single generation further away from the boomers just more collectively more screwed? I did seeming that way. Yeah, I think that's kind of how it works. Like the further you are away from the boomers, the harder it is. This is how it's seeming so far. Absolutely brutal, but

Starting point is 00:10:25 the rates keep increasing. This is a tweet from our friend Michael Saylor. If you flew an aircraft carrier like this, you would, A, stall, B, rip the wings off, or C, crash and burn. And he is showing a chart of the U.S. one-year

Starting point is 00:10:41 government bond yield. This is bonds. This is the yield of bonds. This is kind of showing you what the Fed is doing, the Central Bank. And for those of you, I can see you listening to the podcast. We see in 2018 kind of a brief bump up and then massive volatility, spike all the way downward to zero, COVID spike, and then this crazy ascent.

Starting point is 00:11:01 David, you've flown planes before. It's possible to take off like this? Is that how planes work? Yeah, you need a massive engine to be able to do that. Like a rocket ship? Yeah, you need to be in like a jet. You need to be in a very fast, lean jet. Okay.

Starting point is 00:11:16 So validate this. If you flew an aircraft like this, would you rip the wings off? David? You would stall. You would stall is what you would do. You would run out of energy. Yeah. This is crazy. I feel like it's the next experiment of the central banks is like how much volatility can the bond market take before the wings get ripped off. Currently taking more than Bitcoin. Remember that from last week? Yeah. Yeah, true, true. Meanwhile, tell us about ultrasound money, David. It's super ultra sound, Ryan. I'm so glad you asked. And so last week was the first week that we had a ton of burn. And this week, we also have a ton of burn.

Starting point is 00:11:55 I think last week we're at 5,000 ether issued since merge. Yes. Right now we're at 3,700. It's going down. Going down. That's what we like. Yeah, that's what we like to see. And so the current supply of ETH has like peaked out at 120,000, 534,000.

Starting point is 00:12:14 was what it was about two weeks ago. We are now down to 524,000. If we continue on this trajectory, Ryan, in like maybe three, four days, we will actually be below the ether supply where we were when we merged, and ether will become deflationary since the merge. That is awesome.

Starting point is 00:12:34 Last week, we talked about how this was because of this, like, a new Ponzi token, Zen crypto. Well, actually, in the last three days, it's been uniswap v3, open C, and uniswap v2 as the three largest burners of ETH, collectively burning basically 3,000 ether above Zen Crypto, still burning 900 ether, and then ETH transfers burning 800 ether, tether transfers, burning 630 ether. So this is good, real sustainable burn, not from some Ponzi token. And we are still going down.

Starting point is 00:13:08 And just a recap, at the peak of issuance, when the supply, of ether was the highest. There was something like 0.22% net inflation per year. We are all the way down to 0.03% net inflation per year. And if this burn continues, man, we are going to be deflationary since the merge. Wow. What I like about the burn leaderboard too is like,

Starting point is 00:13:33 it's all of these use cases of eth is money. A lot of the uniswob trading pairs are actually ETH. ETH transfers. Number three, burning a lot of ETH using ETH is money. I guess ETH is money after all. Maybe even, maybe even, I'm not going to say it. I am going to say it. Ultrasound money.

Starting point is 00:13:48 Maybe. We're almost there. We're almost there. It's kind of, it's my fate. This will never not be my favorite website. I can't imagine a better, like, what's better than this? It's great. Name me a better website on the internet, David.

Starting point is 00:14:00 Oh, if we wait one more block, we're going to watch it go down below 3,700. Wait for it. You really want to do. Wait for it. Every 20 seconds, 21 seconds. You block every six seconds. Oh, I did. It only went down a little bit.

Starting point is 00:14:12 Nope. Antichlamactic. We'll edit this part out. What's happening with Euler? Euler, Oiler TVL, hitting a new all-time high at almost $300 million. Oiler, a new money market on the scene, like the likes of compound, Avey, Rari, but a little bit more governance minimized, a little bit more algorithmic. We recently did a show with him, an alpha leak. Precincidence that is hitting a new all-time high of TVL, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:14:39 But if you want to learn all about Euler, I did an alpha leak with Michael Benton. to learn all about it. Disclaimer, Ryan and I are Angel Investors in Oiler. We are, and that token is now on the market, though. Yes, that token is now on the market, yeah. Angel Investor a long time ago. Yeah, that was one of the first ones we did. It took that project in a while to come out.

Starting point is 00:14:58 Token Terminal, what are they doing? Okay, actually, this is music NFTs, and I know you've got to take on music NFTs, but I'm feeling some bullish vibes from you, not only David, but as other members of the bankless team, keep talking about music NFTs. Is it shown up in the numbers yet? It is shown up in the numbers yet.

Starting point is 00:15:18 A monthly cumulative side-by-side fees is what we're looking at. Basically, to date, $3 million has been earned by artists paid for by fans. So $3 million has been transferred from fans to artists. In my mind, all I'm seeing

Starting point is 00:15:31 is $3 million of compensation for creating art. And that's what we like to see. $3 million, not that much. But you have to remember, it actually doesn't take a lot of value transfer to really move the needle versus what something like Apple music or Spotify does. Like Spotify and Apple music for like value transfer from fans to artists is like first gear

Starting point is 00:15:53 where like music NFTs where if you buy one single music NFT that accounts for like like a hundred thousand listens is one single music NFT sale. And so that's like, you know, third or fourth gear in terms of efficiency of what you get if you purchase a music NFT. So I know we're on the bankless roll-up. We're used to numbers like hundreds of millions, billions, blah, blah, blah, blah. $3 million is small, but again, it's such a big order of improvement from what previous Web2 value transfer platforms provide. And this is primarily on the sound protocol too, right?

Starting point is 00:16:29 Sound dot XYZ, which is where David was talking about the art is actually music. So these are actually not JPEGs, these are MP3s that are selling. JPEGs are the album covers and then like but but mainly it's but it's mainly the it's the sound it's the music it's all about the sound uh super cool you're starting to sound you know okay so um do you think let me ask you this do you remember uh jpegs in 2020 nfts 20 20 hadn't taken off yet right it was late 2020 with some people on the podcast telling us it was going to be huge absolutely like really big thing yeah um do you think music NFTs are where JPEGs were in winter of 2020?

Starting point is 00:17:10 My take is that music NFTs are not for crypto people. They are for music people. And music people are normies. Like JPEGs definitely was a product that like we all like to speculate on just because there's like digital collectibles, right? Very, very adjacent to crypto money is crypto like digital collectibles. I think music NFTs are going to be more for artists and their fans. regardless of whether they are crypto people or not.

Starting point is 00:17:37 And so I think that that is an invalid question. An invalid question. So in other words, you think it'll just grow differently. It'll grow. Certainly it'll be more mainstream. We saw kind of JPEG sort of start to take shape. Firstly, there were crypto collectors of JPEGs, and then it bled into mainstream. And you're saying we sort of skip that step.

Starting point is 00:17:57 I think what you're saying is we kind of skip that step. It won't be as many crypto collectors. It'll just start with mainstream instead. Right, because some unknown artists can come in and start making like an NFT collectible thing. But to sell a music NFT, you have to be a musician and you need to make good music. Like no one's going to collect like bad music NFTs, probably, hopefully. Actually, I take that back. I could probably see some crypto people figuring it out.

Starting point is 00:18:21 But I do think it's just like it's more mainstream than what we've seen previously. Also kind of a like NFT is kind of a regulatory proof industry. There's always ways for regulation to apply. It's always great for regulation. So don't let me speak too soon. And yet, this is not like as scary as a, you know, non-state money asset as seems to be for regulators. I agree. Cool.

Starting point is 00:18:43 We got a lot more coming up. SBF wants to regulate defy. We're going to talk about that. What his idea of regulation looks like. Also, Aptos was a total flop. That's what it sounded like. The newest layer one chain on the block will tell you about that. And Ethereum censorship, is this a problem?

Starting point is 00:18:59 Or a massive nothing burger we get into that? as well. We'll be right back, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible.

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Starting point is 00:20:59 that's going to kill Defi? the Alliance Dow, the team out of the Alliance Dow says, the DCCPA greatly threatens DFI innovation. The proposed bill says three things, according to this tweet, the summary tweet, gives the CFTC new powers to regulate spot markets, also forces human intermediation, we don't like that word intermediation, and also forces projects to sacrifice decentralization.

Starting point is 00:21:23 It favors centralized incumbents and kills startups. Alliance opposes the DCCPA. Ryan, you were paying attention to this while I was gone at DevCon. How big of a deal is this? Yeah, I was paying attention to this. And I guess in my mind, there are three things to know about the DCCPA. I have a hard time saying that. But this new bit of legislation actually stands for the Digital Commodities Consumer

Starting point is 00:21:43 Protection Act. This is coming out of the Ag, the Agriculture Group Committee in the Senate. Three things I think you should know. Number one, it feels like the U.S. really wants to do something with crypto. from a regulatory perspective and what I mean is particularly legislators. And also, I think crypto kind of wants them to. We've been asking for more clarity. There's so much ambiguity.

Starting point is 00:22:12 We want our legislators to do something. Number two, I've been told this bill actually has a real chance. There's so many bills about crypto, like hypothetically talked about and batted around. I've been told, David, that this bill could actually pass. Like, it actually might work, and it could actually pass during kind of the, the, the lame duck session that we have in kind of the winter time period. The last thing, though, I will say, and this is important, you ask the question of should we sound the fire alarm? I think the answer is not yet. I know Alliance Dow is kind of doing that in this tweet,

Starting point is 00:22:46 but I think the answer is not quite yet. And the reason is the newest draft of the bill isn't yet public. All right? And so a lot of people are fighting behind the scenes, including people, blockchain association, people we've had in the podcast, people that are defy friendly. These are lobbyists. These are educators and are legislative. They're fighting to actually make this bill better, make it good. And the fight's not over yet.

Starting point is 00:23:12 And so what this tweet is responding to is an early leaked draft version of the bill. A leaked draft version. So not the actual bill. Not the actual bill. It was a version of the bill from like three weeks ago, is what I've been told. And it is true. it has a whole bunch of garbage in it, particularly garbage around defy. And the big concern about this earlier draft, I mean, it has good stuff like, it says Ethan Bitcoin are not securities,

Starting point is 00:23:40 their commodities. I mean, that's good. We would also put that. That's the clarity we want. But it has some bad stuff because mainly defy is not even considered or worse. In some cases, it's treated the same as C-Fi. This is what the alliance is saying. They're saying forces human intermediation. They're not even considering the possibility that defies is code-based and peer-to-peer. So that is bad. And that's why some critics in these earlier drafts have said, look, if something like this passes, buy-bye defy in the U.S. or maybe like buy-bye U.S.'s role in defy. You're going to eliminate yourself from the crypto market. So in what mechanism does it just like, how does that? Can you elaborate on that?

Starting point is 00:24:23 I haven't read all of the details of this particular draft. But it seems to do things like make all defy protocols in the U.S. register, for example. Does it just like operate under the assumption that decentralization is actually like impossible and therefore there's always somebody to register somewhere? The high level is it seems to operate under the assumption that all D5 protocols can be regulated and treated the same way as an FTX or a coin base. So it's just ignoring the property. Go register with each state, like go like just the whole same process and apparatus that

Starting point is 00:24:55 applies to CFI and banks, well, let's just take that. Of course, it can apply to some code in a defy protocol and the creators of this code. And that just doesn't work. And that's inherently, I mean, it breaks the system, destroys the credible neutrality of the system. So I guess my take is, and Jake Trevinsky said this, commenting even after this tweet that you originally read was posted, there's been some discussion today as to how the bill, this new bill we're talking about, affects defy. Here's what I said it after the Senate egg hearing on the bill last month. I'm hopeful that it can be amended to treat D5 fairly, but we'll have to wait and see what the next draft says. So I guess my take, while you're out, David, my take is following kind of Jake's lead here, right?

Starting point is 00:25:36 Like, he's working, they're working collectively behind the scenes. There may come a time when it's time to throw up the bat signal and send out the fire alarms. And the bankless community needs to react to this. And all of, like, crypto needs to react to this to either kill it or something. support it, but we don't know enough yet. So I'm saving that ammo until we know a little bit more. I feel like that's the right approach here. That said, David, there's another story in the midst of this. You want to lead into that? This is not our first rodeo with like undesirable regulation, proposed regulation in Congress. Like the difference here is SBF, Sam Bankman-F from FTX is like leading

Starting point is 00:26:19 this thing. And it has been, apparently he's been in a DC. almost living in D.C., working with regulators to get this bill through. And that's kind of the big news here that I've gathered from crypto Twitter and around, is that SBF has, like, just decided to, like, go on his own and, like, lead this bill, and it's the incentives here that seem to point in that all of DFI is, like, semi-regulatable, therefore we might as well do it on, like, C-Fi rails. And, wow, that's really convenient for FDX and SBF. that's kind of been my take here. Is that accurate? I think some of that criticism might be true.

Starting point is 00:26:57 I guess I would say is in the process of this bill's creation, it's been well known that the SBF has been heavily active. He's not the only one pushing for this bill, but he's been an active participant along with some of the DIPI. No, no, no, there are a lot of DFI advocates that are involved in this bill. Oh, interesting. Crypto, lobbyists and such, like, you know, some of the people that we would, that you and I, and probably the bankless community, should actually like trust to uphold defy rights. They've been also active in this bill and pushing against it. Although I will say with it, like to craft it in kind of an image of what it should be. But I will say SBF has had some pretty big influence as well. So he's made massive amounts of political contributions.

Starting point is 00:27:41 All of these contributions are public, numbering in the millions of dollars. And also, as you said, he's been active, like he's been there. He's kind of, I don't know, maybe the adult in the room, right the person who can kind of bridge fintech and that world in the banking world with this new world world of crypto and he's got some influence and and so i don't know it's hard it's hard to know some people are saying like sbf is intentionally trying to sabotage defy right it's like to me you have to kind of wait and see like i mean these could be rumors we don't actually know but what sbf did publish um yesterday at the time of recording was as promised he says this is a tweet my current thoughts on crypto regulation.

Starting point is 00:28:23 And he writes a post to his credit, open, transparent about his thoughts on a possible digital asset industry standards, right? And he talks about there's a heading here called sanctions allowless and blockless. There's a section about hacks and accountability. There's a section about asset listing. What's the security? What's not? tokenized equities. There's a section about consumer protections.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Generally, the things legislators care about and regulators care about, there's also a section here about DFI. So I read this thing yesterday, David, and there are some things that make sense here. And of course, the straw man argument for like, you know, the people might make to, you know, to those in the defy communities, oh, you're in DFI, you don't want any regulation at all, right? No, that's not true. We actually really want clarity. We really want regulation. But do you know what's worse than no regulation? Bad regulation. Yes, bad regulation. If we end up with bad regulation. These laws get on the book, they could set the U.S. crypto industry back by like years, maybe generations, maybe it'll never recover, right? And so I went through this.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Here's my response, David. Sam, this is to SBA. This was spicy. This was spicy. With respect, utmost respect for everything you've done in crypto. This absolutely sucks, I said. You're saying defy should be OFAC. You're saying on-chain freezes should be normal. You're saying defy front ends need to register as a broker dealer. No, this is not. This is not reasonable. This would eliminate the U.S. from the crypto race. And Sam's advocating for all of those things? Yes. From his, like, if you read this, and we'll include a link in the show notes, there's this section on OFAC. He says this. Then both centralized and decentralized applications can query in real time the list of sanctioned addresses to avoid

Starting point is 00:30:10 transferring funds to or accepting funds from those addresses. He's saying basically, if you're a uniswap, your defy, and before you let an address do something with your protocol, you have to query the OFAC sanctions list. Is this okay? He's advocating for application layer censorship. Application layer OFAC sanctions, correct. Right, okay. Now, he's saying, and he even says this,

Starting point is 00:30:34 he's not advocating for validator level censorship. Right, not protocol layer, which is something we're about to talk to in a second. But uniswap? Right. Having to basically OFAC check you or not, that is something he's advocating for. What else is there here,

Starting point is 00:30:49 just to back some of these statements up. Talking about on-chain freezes, if there's kind of like normalizing the idea of being able to freeze assets on-chain, I don't possibly the implication is writing that into the code. Obviously, this would apply to a USDC, but into other assets as well, maybe validators have this obligation as well,

Starting point is 00:31:10 and this one really triggered me. If you host a website that makes it easy for U.S. retail to connect to and trade on a decks, you would likely have to register it as something like a broker-dealer. Yo. David, if you host an interface for you-swap,

Starting point is 00:31:26 you've got to be a broker-dealer. You have to go apply for a license. Okay, so going and show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Yeah, FTX, big competitor out there is the aggregate defy landscape. And so Sam, the guy who's been donating $39 million to political organization,

Starting point is 00:31:48 in the Biden campaign is now saying, hey, Dex's and Defi should have to register to become a broker dealer. That's what regulatory arbitrage is. That's legalized corruption. That's the whole thing we're trying to not do in crypto. All right. So this is obviously my worry, and I think many of the crypto communities worry. Sam in this thread, and to his credit, SBF was engaging back and forth. Public engagement. People were calling him on this, myself included others, and he was engaging back and forth. And his point was, hey, if you don't do this, the de facto, like, is worse. And I'm at least working in this DC to pass something that is better than nothing, better than what we have today. And is it?

Starting point is 00:32:36 No. This is terrible. Now, to be clear, I don't want to mix. I don't want to mix this up, his personal thoughts on regulation. I don't want to mix that up with the bill itself, okay? These ideas are not necessarily in the bill. But this gives you a sense for where his head is. And when I read this, I was just like, oh, we are not here for the same reasons, are we?

Starting point is 00:32:59 Right. You do this, David. Well, that's always been our frustration with Sam. But like, yeah, but you do this. And like, what's the freaking point? You remove all of the credible neutrality of, like, U.S. crypto. And what do you have? You have nothing.

Starting point is 00:33:13 And it's got to be negative EV for negative. expected value for FTX because if you like nuke the cool things that make crypto what they are, where does FTX's business come from? It comes from crypto. Over the long run, I think that's true. I don't know if he thinks maybe there's some money to be made in basically providing the AML KYC type layer. I mean, there could be like, or maybe there's, or I don't know what he's thinking. I actually don't understand here. But like this to me definitely has a flavor of, well, a crypto banker not sticking up for defy's interest, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:52 Like this is what, like this is not, we didn't ask for this. We don't want this. If you're going to participate in lobby in D.C. towards these ends, like, please don't. Not on my behalf anyway. I don't want any of this. I request to not have this. Now, to be fair, he's saying like, if you have feedback, give me a better suggestion. I'm completely happy for the crypto community, the defy community to present.

Starting point is 00:34:16 present better suggestions and like we will in the future. And I hope people like Sam actually listen to this feedback. Like he might not be in it for the reasons we're in it, but he has to respect like why crypto is valuable in the first place and not start to erode these values. David, there are some other takes around the community. You want to talk about some of these? Yeah, DC investor says, SBF is the most effective value extractor in crypto. He's very transparent in that he wants to siphon value out of your account into whatever causes he claims to care about, couldn't care less about decentralization. Meanwhile, NPCs hear Simp and worship him like a hero, pathetic.

Starting point is 00:34:51 Ooh, DC coming in with this spice. Yeah, I mean, so, like, Sam Bankman Free does have this, like, cult following in crypto. Like, anyone that makes, like, a billion dollars in crypto is going to generate a cult following. I think DC here, DC is, like, saying, hey, like, let's not, let's not do that. Let's not, like, more.

Starting point is 00:35:09 Billionaires, because they've made billions. Exactly, yeah. How about this take? Scott Lewis says, FTCS is spending money to push a law through Congress that may force DFI protocols to operate like centralized exchanges. This proposal is called the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act. A better name would be Digital Commodities FTX Protection Act. That's what I was saying when it's like, yes, this is like, okay, like somebody builds a big

Starting point is 00:35:31 entity and then they start lobbying regulation to protect them. I see this take as well. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I think that is the big fear. This is where that number came from. What's this tweet saying, David? Yeah, Sam Bankman-Fried has spent $39.3 million, quote, buying DC politicians since January.

Starting point is 00:35:52 I mean, anyone who's been living in D.C. lately has, I mean, that's what you would do. I mean, and here's the thing. I think we actually do need to spend money. The crypto industry does. The D.Fi industry does need to spend money and get out votes in order to get politicians working with us. That's just how the system works. But if we're... And I will bring up.

Starting point is 00:36:12 that Sam Bankman-Fried has promised to donate 99.9% of his wealth or something to effective altruism and give away all of his money. I haven't seen any tweet talking about him doing that. I would like to know if there's been progress on that front. I mean, he said he's going to do it later. I don't know. I mean, we'll see. So am I. I'm also going to donate 99.9% of my wealth later. Are you really, though? Yes, I am. Are you really? No. I'm making fun of Sam Banking free. I mean, like, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:36:43 I mean, I don't judge him on that. I just, you have to wait it. Actually, who else had a take on this? So this is a take from Eric Forhey's responding to SBF. And again, SBF has been on a lot of criticism. I appreciate that he showed up in Washington and that he's like, I appreciate some of what he's doing. He's not doing nothing. He's not doing nothing.

Starting point is 00:37:01 But, like, if it results in terrible legislation, like, please just don't do anything. This is Eric Forhe's saying, you can advocate for effective all. altruism or can advocate banning 80 million innocent Iranians from the future of global finance. You can't do both. Glorifying OFAC and proposed crypto industry standards is a non-starter. That to me is actually like effective altruism or side. I actually think the thing that we're trying to do in preserving and propagating crypto protocols and crypto values, that is a public good.

Starting point is 00:37:38 Right. I mean, that is a service to future generations. And I wouldn't mind more spent on that. I can't tell a billionaire where to spend his money. But like if the result is we get something like this, David, no thanks, man. No thanks, man. I'm out. Last thing I'll say is the invitation is open to San Bang been freed to come on bankless.

Starting point is 00:38:00 We are in DMs. We are in DMs. Yes. I'm waiting for him to confirm a week from today. He said he'd be willing to come on the bankless podcast and talk about it. And I think that is the form, like you can't have a nuanced conversation. over Twitter. Podcast is the form. And we would love for Sam to tell us about his take. Yeah, tell us what he's thinking, respond to some of these criticisms. And we hope he takes us up on that

Starting point is 00:38:23 offer. So we will see my friend. That is that for now. David, can you tell me what the people really want to hear about? And that is the Aptos layer one, baby. I just cannot wait to hear about Aptos. This shiny new monolithic layer one that's promised to be even faster than all the other previous layer ones that have come out has finally gone to. main net. So Aptos Autumn is here, this tweet says. Was it actually here? I don't really know. But the news that I heard on Twitter and around is that it's not actually what it was all cracked up to be. So Aptos, it was a layer one blockchain that was built off of the move language, which was developed by the, what was that one Facebook chain? Libra. Yeah. So for people that

Starting point is 00:39:06 weren't around during the Libra era, Facebook was wanting to make a digital currency, a new, literally new currency. Yeah, with an eth killer attached, the whole smart contract platform. Yeah. Before, like, Congress said, no, Mark Zuckerberg, you can't have a new reserve currency. Sorry. But anyways, the team behind that has gone off and created Aptos using the move language that LeBois was created.

Starting point is 00:39:28 It promised to have a maximum ceiling of 100,000 transactions per second. And apparently, I haven't verified this myself because I don't even know how to use Aptos, which is another problem, that the current Aptos TPS is drum roll, Ryan. Four. For what? Transactions per second. Wow.

Starting point is 00:39:52 Yeah. That's not the same. That's less than Ethereum. Okay. Interestingly, while the blockchain seems to not be effective, the tokens have definitely been deployed and sent around to all stakeholders. But there's this, and all this news break broke, came from this Twitter account called Parenthem Engineer 420,

Starting point is 00:40:14 who tweeted out, Aptos is broken. And so I'll read some key tweets here. Aptos promises 100,000 transactions per second in its finalized version. However, the current TPS is somewhere in the four transaction range. It's hard to see how users can even use Aptos right now. I personally cannot find any RPCs worth connecting to or any validators that can send transactions.

Starting point is 00:40:35 Aptos team knows something is wrong, because between Genesis and 1.30 p.m. Pacific time, the AppTor's Discord was disabled. Users couldn't chat or ask any questions, kind of like the blockchain. They only recently opened up a few channels, but important channels like dev resources are still closed. The total supply of the APT token is a little bit over $1 billion. However, $821 million is currently staked. This means that over 80% of the token supply is controlled by the team and investors, and there was no air drop or no other method to, earn main net Aptos tokens.

Starting point is 00:41:10 However, this doesn't account for the remaining 200 million Aptos tokens. Where could those liquid tokens be? Question mark. So they propose some potential answers, sitting on investors' FTCs accounts waiting to dump on retail, or sitting in investors' finance accounts waiting to dump on retail. The point is that the nearly entire and token supply is going to private parties. There was never a public sale or any method where users could have earned tokens.

Starting point is 00:41:34 And then they continue. However, hope is not lost. Suey, another. blockchain is using the move language with arguably better tech. If I had to guess, Aptos knows that Suey will probably succeed in the long term, and they hoped that by front running them on launch, they could gain some sort of advantage. I will wait for the suey launch, try out a few applications on Optos, and see what would happen. So that is the summary thread that we got out of that. And he takes Ryan. Yeah, you know, here's the TLDR in this thread, too.

Starting point is 00:42:00 You are going to get dumped on. The only play I would make on Aptos is a quick farm and dump. This reminds me back... Not financial advice. Yeah. Well, yeah, just maybe life advice. Goes without saying. Do you know, so this reminds me a little bit of like 2018 again and kind of the promise of another crop of Ethereum killers, 2018 and 2019. And the best advice I kind of learned at that time that I think now applies to this new group of supposed...

Starting point is 00:42:29 This isn't actually an Eith killer. Now it's a Salonah Killer. It's a Salon Killer, which is a Neath Killer. Right? Yeah. Zalana Killers, Eve Killer, it's like, and so... Buy the transitory property. Yeah, but the best advice I could give, not financial advice, life advice, is just try the thing first. Forget about the freaking token.

Starting point is 00:42:48 Don't buy a token. Don't focus on a token. See if it works. Is there anything on there that's compelling? Compare it to your experience on other layer twos and layer ones. Can you do anything on it? Do you know the most recent valuation of Aptos? Based on the

Starting point is 00:43:05 Is it in the billions? $2 billion. Damn. Is that all kind of like private valuation? So VCs? Yes, private valuation stuff. That's the highest number

Starting point is 00:43:13 that VCs is. A pre-launched chain, right? But again, it had the pedigree. It had move, the language. It had the X meta Facebook team. Oh, boy. I don't know, man. These kind of narratives are worth a lot.

Starting point is 00:43:24 There's some few takes. Here's one from Oloff. Remind me. What's the name of Oloff's firm? Poly chain. Polychain? Poly chain, multiple chains. Olaf is definitely embracing multiple chains.

Starting point is 00:43:35 As many chains as possible. What does he say? Olaf says, the APDOS token distribution scheme is among the worst designs I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. And then he gives us the numbers. The foundation, 67.5%, the team 19%

Starting point is 00:43:49 investors 13.5%. The only way coins get into, quote, the community, parentheses, lull, is through arbitrary foundation distributions. Yeah. So the only way that community can get tokens is by buying them. There was some sort of airdrop.

Starting point is 00:44:06 I think it was small. It was like maybe a couple thousand dollars. Here's the reaction I'm seeing from the community and all of crypto is like we're just tired of the extractors and rotators. I'm so tired. We're exhausted by it. It's a bear market.

Starting point is 00:44:18 It's just like again, you know that one meme of just like the comic of this guy that goes to like a bear trap? I'm like, bears, this is ridiculous. How are you falling for this? And then like it goes to like some other form of a trap and it's like,

Starting point is 00:44:31 this is so silly. How can you fall for this? And then like the last panel would be like him buying the Aptos token. Yeah. I mean, it's so DC investor calls this the events of this week a near categorical rejection of Aptos by the community. I saw this mainly by the community. Kobe says, you could tell who bought the seed round because they're tweeting, excited for launch, rocket chip emoji, instead of calling it Craptose and tweeting about how it already crashed for something. This is Anthony Sassana. You just know the Three O's Capital would be shilling the hell out of Aptos if they were still around. He follows that up.

Starting point is 00:45:07 That was one of my favorite tweets. Really? You can totally see it happening. Well, this is the follow-up. It was actually, in my opinion, I even enjoyed this more. Oh my God, I did see this. He's quoting Three Roos Capital potential. I have a ban in Ethereum, Avalanche Deer, Pocodot, Tara, Mina, and Salon it, despite supporting them in the past.

Starting point is 00:45:25 My new chain is Aptose. All in, baby. Okay. So, for the people who didn't get that reference, But when Solana, or not Solana, when Three O's Capital was done with their whole super cycle narrative and they were done on the ETH trade, they moved on to the sole Luna Avax trade position. So this was in the second half of 2021. And Suu said, yes, I have abandoned Ethereum despite supporting them in the past. And so what Anthony Sadano has done, he's just added every other chain that Three O's Capital also shield, Avalanche, near Pocodata, Tera, Mina, and Salonid, despite pointing them in the past.

Starting point is 00:45:58 That was that reference. Guys, put your hands up if you are sick and tired of rotators and narratives without the building. Right here. I'm tired of it. Come on, SpongeBob. David's tired of it. Oh, yeah. We didn't comment on. David, David's wearing this ginormous SpongeBob shirt today.

Starting point is 00:46:16 It's a huge SpongeBob on my chest. It's like five. No, it's a, it's meta because it's a sweater of SpongeBob wearing a sweater. Oh my God. How deep does it go? Yeah, only two layers deep. Okay, two layers deep. That's pretty good.

Starting point is 00:46:29 Layer two. We'll get to layer three later. David, another big thing this week that was a question, not just this week. It's been the last couple of weeks. Been growing. Yeah, a growing narrative

Starting point is 00:46:40 of this talk of Ethereum censorship. And this comes out of a kind of O-FAC-compliant relayers, in particular flashbots. I pulled up a Reddit post. The title of this, maybe you could explain it to us, is in the last 24 hours, 51% of ETH blocks were censored and O-FAC-compliant.

Starting point is 00:46:58 What is this? What does this mean? Is Ethereum being censored right now? Yeah, so this is, the 51% here is coming from how many blocks came out of the flashbots or other OFAC compliant reliers. And that doesn't, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of like stuff packed in there. OFAC compliant, it just means that tornado cash transactions are not in this block. So now that we're on the website, we're actually seeing that 54% of blocks are OFAC compliant, as in 54% of Ethereum blocks. so do not have tornado cash transactions in them. I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that means OFAC compliant or not. We're using tornado cash transactions.

Starting point is 00:47:34 For now, but OFAC could add whatever it wants in the future. It could add, you know, David Hoffman.eath if it wants. Yeah, yeah, well. And then there's a couple relays which are definitely not following OFAC compliance, which are probably outside of the United States. And that's like a very small sliver compared to OFAC compliance. Most blocks are like totally normal blocks. And so there's this big conversation as like,

Starting point is 00:47:58 okay, we have all these relayers who, and this is strictly a part of the whole Proposer Builder, M-E-V-Boost conversation, where people will build blocks for you, and then relayers will relay that to Ethereum stakers who will choose a block and then stake on that. Somebody like FlashBots, the biggest relayer in Ethereum, because they are a U.S. domiciled entity, has said, hey, yeah, we're going to follow OFAC and not violate the law, and we're only going to relay OFAC compliant blocks. So this has created a conversation of, is it the Ethereum, Ethereum protocol being censored because there's like 54% of blocks being produced are OFAC compliant.

Starting point is 00:48:34 Now, there is a huge difference between creating a block versus building on prior blocks. And so we'll call it 50-50. 50% of blocks are OFAC compliant. 50% of blocks are non-O-FAC compliant. The non-O-FAC compliant blocks are taking, like, comprised of 50% of all blocks added to Ethereum. and then the non-compliant blocks are building on top of those blocks, rather than building on top of the most recent OFAC-compliant block. So, OFAC-non-compliant blocks are making their way into Ethereum easily,

Starting point is 00:49:08 and this is not an issue. And so O-FAC, so people that want to be O-FAC-compliant are just adding on to the O-FAC-N-compliant blocks. So Tornado-Cash transactions are getting into Ethereum. They just take longer. they take they take instead of taking uh probabilistically speaking instead of taking uh 12 seconds they're taking perhaps 24 to 36 seconds to get in um we are worried about this getting worse we are worried about this approaching as soon as we start to get like 90 to 95 percent of all blocks are oafact compliant then we actually start to be like okay it is now troublesome to use tornado cash but not

Starting point is 00:49:45 until we get to something like above 95 percent would it take like perhaps sometimes up to five minutes to get a tornado cash transaction into the blockchain. And so it really only becomes a critical issue when we start to actually get into the extreme saturation. And right now we're 50-50. 50-50 still like a lot, still not good. However, it's been my opinion that this is just a very temporary part of Ethereum's history while we are just post-merged without all this other infrastructure. But that is the conversation going on today. David, this is a form of weak censorship. Soft censorship, yes.

Starting point is 00:50:21 Is what Justin Drake would call it. And I would encourage you guys, if you want the full story on this, like the full download on how censorship-resistant Ethereum is, go listen to the Justin Drake Bankless podcast on Uncensurable Ethereum, I think, is what it's called. He goes through this exact scenario that's happening right now. And so this is a form of weak censorship, not strong censorship. It's not happening at the validator level. It's happening at the relayer level.

Starting point is 00:50:48 And by the way, this relayer job function, is set to be eliminated at some point in the protocol. We are no longer going to have relays post some upcoming protocol changes. Right. And that's a solution that we even have other solutions before we even get to that point, too. And so, like, we are just in this one moment in an Ethereum's history where we are at the weakest point of censorship resistance, which is the weeks to months following the merge. This is latelaw.eath who put out an interesting poll who said,

Starting point is 00:51:19 I'm a solo home validator in country A. We are at war with country B. And I decide that I'm not going to include donations to their military when it's my turn to make a block. This validator should A, B, B, slash for censoring, B, voluntarily be exited, or C, be tolerated. And about 41% said B slash for censoring, about 11% said voluntary exit, and 47% the slim majority said be tolerated. And that's also what I said, Ryan. tolerated because, and I also asked Martin Coppulman here, asked what his answer was, because I had a debate back and forth with him about how severe the censorship thing was. And Martin Coppelman says,

Starting point is 00:52:00 ideally the validator would not even have the option to censor. And then Vitalik responded to that and said, I would say be tolerated, as in allow that person to not include blocks. And Vitalik continues and says, slashing or leaking or socially coordinated anything should only be considered for massive reorgs, which is what I was talking about with going back and building on a different chain, even though we know that we already have a good one to begin with. Slashing or leaking should only, or socially coordinated anything, should only be considered for massive reorgs of other people's blocks,

Starting point is 00:52:32 not making wrong choices about what to put in your own. Any other answer risks turning ETH community into morality police. And I really like this. I think I, as a validator, should get to freely choose what transactions to put into a block, so long as I choose. choose the most recent block to put in. Like, say, for example, I am a religious person, and it is, according to my religion,

Starting point is 00:52:57 morally wrong for me to include certain transactions of a certain type into the Ethereum blockchain. I feel like I should be able to be included by the Ethereum protocol, and I should feel free to choose whatever transactions I want to include into the Ethereum protocol. I should not be able to dictate what other people put into the Ethereum. protocol. So I feel like I should be able to pick and choose. And that is called that censorship, but so long as there's not one uniform version of censorship, and we are all picking and choosing our own particular flavor of how we want to do our own particular censoring, if you open that up

Starting point is 00:53:34 to 10,000 validators, there's no canonical version of like, we are doing this or we have these values. Everyone's transactions ultimately get in, while we also don't censor people's ability to express themselves. That's my take here. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think some people are worried, though, David, about this being sort of a slippery slope. And are we letting, are we making it socially acceptable

Starting point is 00:53:58 to get part of the block building process be OFAC compliant? And some of the criticism has been lobbied at flashbots themselves. So let's remember how much good flashbots is done for Ethereum. Like, save the Ethereum's ass. I don't know how many times, right? Just like, we are in a much more, censorship-resistant place because of flashbots.

Starting point is 00:54:20 And people are saying, well, now FlashBots is undoing that because they are choosing to host a relayer that is censoring transactions and why don't they turn it off. Truthfully, David, I don't know the answer to why doesn't FlashBots turn off their relay or not. They might have reasons for this. I have no idea why. I do think that, like, FlashBots and Phil Dian and others have literally spent their entire, like, lives, their entire career trying to predict.

Starting point is 00:54:46 Phil Dian is a hero. Yeah, he's a hero. And so a little bit of me, the back and forth on the social layer, because Phil put out a tweet and he was like, hey, I'm just sick of like the vitriol. Like, you guys are, like, it's kind of toxic. I'm paraphrasing what Phil said. He said it far more eloquently.

Starting point is 00:55:01 But like, to me, Phil Dian, this is a little bit like Gotham City complaining about Batman. About Batman? Yeah, it's like FlashBots and Batman has been protecting Gotham for pretty long time. There are sometimes, you don't understand, Batman's motives. There are sometimes like Batman screws things up and actually should be criticized. Like cause a car craft. Sure. Or like maybe he actually genuinely screwed up and we should definitely

Starting point is 00:55:27 hold hold them accountable for this. But like also at the same time, Batman's a good actor. It's like doing it for God. And I don't know, there's the element of that where I feel like we as a community also should have extend some grace to the builders actually trying to protect against this. So these are my takes. And long run, David. I am. It's a, on long run, it is a nothing burden. I 100% agree. I think we are going to have a censorship resistant.

Starting point is 00:55:55 But like, if you want to make your own call on that, Megless listener, first listen to Justin Drake on uncensoredable Ethereum in order to have... That's why we made that podcast. Yeah, we made it. And we made it before all of this started happening. Yeah. So anyway, that's what I think you should do. David, what do we got coming up next?

Starting point is 00:56:15 Coming up next, we have next. of a new announcement out of FlashBots called something called Suave, which we have some details on. It was an announcement that I actually had to go ping HaZu. He was like, hey, Azu, can you give me the details for this? And he was like, no, the announcement's coming soon, but then he followed up with some details. So we got those details coming soon. The European Union preparing to ban mining what's going on over there. And a critical vulnerability found in Cosmos, IBC.

Starting point is 00:56:39 We'll cover all the details and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. The reality today is that five corporations control the entire world of social media. They own our names, they restrict our content, they monitor our every move. And their time is up thanks to our sponsor, Diso. DOSO is a layer one blockchain built from the ground up to decentralize and scale social networks. With Diso, you can own your own identity, content, and social graph, and take it with you across hundreds of applications already built on the censorship-resistant D-So blockchain.

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Starting point is 00:58:30 FlashBots reveals new version of its key Ethereum software reads the CoinDesk headline. Development of Suav, as the project is codename, has been going on for over a year now. So this has been something that FlashBots has had, I guess, like in their back pocket ready to deploy, and they're coming out with details now. And so this is what I went to Hazzo. I was like, Hazu, can you like help me interpret this and what's going on? And he said, details still coming out soon. But conceptually, he says, you can think of Swab as the end game of the Flashbot stack, an auction, an encrypted menpool, and a block builder. It sounds like a bunch of censorship resistant tools. Encrypted menpool sounds real good. I like that sounds awesome. As a user, you'll be able to trade on Ethereum Sue Swave, and any MEV that you create will be captured for you. As a searcher, you will get the perfect environment to trade, including across different chains,

Starting point is 00:59:25 and as a roll-up, you can connect to Swab to get the benefits of encrypted MEV-aware trading for your users, unlocking MEV auctions for your stakers, and all in a progressively decentralizing way. So this is why I think people are in like FlashBots stop censoring What are you doing?

Starting point is 00:59:43 What are you doing? Don't patronize their voice, David. And then flashbots like maybe they don't say anything But that's because they have this swab thing Which answers all of the All of the criticisms and claims, maybe not all of them, but it's a decent job of fixing a lot of the stuff

Starting point is 01:00:01 And it's called Swab and it's coming out soon And so this is coming out and I think it's going to but truly change the conversation of this whole Ethereum censorship thing. I share that take to you. And yet also, I don't want to go on the other side of things and just say,

Starting point is 01:00:17 Ethereum community, just trust everyone. Stop caring about censorship so much. At some level, it makes me incredibly bullish that we are getting such a reaction from the community to say, this is not okay.

Starting point is 01:00:31 OFAC, I mean, you go the other direction and go sign up for some of SBF's regulation, right? I don't want to do that either. So we've got to strike the right chord. And like, I don't know, when in doubt to me, David, the best thing you can do is if you see a problem, grab a shovel.

Starting point is 01:00:49 Just help out. Rather than be critical, help out. Anyway, that's not the form for Twitter. Twitter is all about talk. Not a lot of actual things get done. What do we got? Anyways, coming out of ZK. Sink, this is their secret sauce. they have released their secret sauce.

Starting point is 01:01:08 There's a lot of people who thought... It's not MainNet yet, though, right? It's not MainNet, no. But the reason why ZK Sync is first to Mainnet is because they have this crazy ZK Prover thing that you can prove with a GPU. And this is the piece of the puzzle that really completes a ZKEVM,

Starting point is 01:01:26 and it's the secret sauce that ZK Sync has that has allowed them to go to Mainnet while everyone else is still releasing their test nets. And so ZKSink tweets out, today we are extremely excited to announce that we have successfully completed milestone three proof merging with the integration of validity proofs which is like uh if you're if you're talking about an optimistic roll-up that would be a fraud proof uh with the integration of validity proofs zkcing 2.0 is officially the world's first ever zk a evm running on public test that's the hard thing right the validity

Starting point is 01:01:56 proofs that's the hard thing okay yes and there were many other teams i remembered uh both people out of Arbitrum and Scroll last week who tweeted out without naming names, even though they were just basically talking about ZK Sync. A ZK. Evm claims to going to MainNet next week, and by no means will it be a complete thing because there's still stuff missing. And while ZKSink and many other later two teams are all still have much work to do, this was the thing that they thought wasn't present. And ZK. Sync is saying that it's present. Now, I am not technically competent to be able to vet this myself. I don't know, I have any idea about how a validity proof is created. But ZK. K. Sink is saying that they got the thing that everyone else says that they didn't.

Starting point is 01:02:42 And so these are the Layer 2 wars, and they are awesome. I think this is part of the moment of truth. The other part of the moment of truth is October 28th, once the main net ships. And we are what, as of the time that this is released probably seven days away from that. Eight or nine days away. Yeah, eight now, seven tomorrow. So, yeah, we'll get to see it soon. And pretty exciting. And just a reminder, David and are advisors for ZK Sync. We're also investors, incredibly bullish about ZK EVM in general.

Starting point is 01:03:09 You can always find all our disclosures information in the show notes, as usual, guys. Uniswap is on eight chains, David. I lost track of how many chains Uniswop deployed to, not just Ethereum Mainnet, but eight. And its next one is going to be ZK Sync. Mm-hmm. ZK Sync, making moves.

Starting point is 01:03:27 And so the community voted, U-Swap V3 will soon be deployed on ZKSWPSWP, Unisop's eighth chain. Sounds like a multi-chain world, if you ask me, Ryan, and it sounds like the multi-chain world that you and I were talking about while everyone else was talking about

Starting point is 01:03:41 all the Altlayer ones. So I'm just going to take a quick... Well, what are the chains? What are the chains, you know? They're all Ethereum EVMs. No, so there's not like... Arbitrum, Polygon, optimism, what's the other?

Starting point is 01:03:54 Avalanche? Maybe. They didn't do Avalanche. They did all of the Ethereum aligned chains. Is that what you're saying? Yes, yeah. By the way, I'm really excited about the episode that we're releasing coming up with Dan Alitzer

Starting point is 01:04:07 about the app chain thesis. This ties very nicely into that. Super hot episode. Yeah, just teasing that. Bankless premium listeners probably going to get that pretty damn soon here. Yeah, hopefully. But we have so many podcasts in Q that it's actually going to come out for bankless premium subscribers probably like 10 to 15 days before we actually released.

Starting point is 01:04:23 Is that a promise? That's a bankless premium promise, David just made on podcast. The bankless editors are like, damn it, David, what's the news, promise? How about this? This is pretty cool, Ryan. Is it cool? Yes. Okay, so as somebody who came from a tokenized real estate startup, this is actually pretty cool.

Starting point is 01:04:38 I read it first. Digital real estate platform sells house as an NFT. So you can buy a house on chain. And this is an article out of the defiant. The way that this works is each home is titled as a limited liability company and is associated with a unique NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. This is how my old startup did it, except we did it with ERC20s instead of NFTs. and we also fractionalized it.

Starting point is 01:05:02 The process here is that when there's a lender involved, approves and funds the borrower's request on Teller, the USDA Holmes platform uses the funds to purchase the LLC NFT. The NFT is transferred to a multi-sig wallet that serves as an escrow account until the buyer pays back the entire loan and accrued interest. So there is also a mortgage and loan application being going on here as well.

Starting point is 01:05:28 And this is coming out of this platform called Root. roofstock, which was just a normal trad-fi business. I remember using roofstock as like the competitor to go after when we are, we were using our like leveraging like blockchain when they weren't. Were you talking about your previous startup that David used to work with was called real, real tea. Realty, yeah. And then they, but roofstock has made their own on chain marketplace.

Starting point is 01:05:53 So they are making a, I think that's that's on chain is the name on capital C chain property marketplace. And so that is pretty damn cool. Okay. Can I take the counter to this? I didn't know we were arguing. Okay. No, no.

Starting point is 01:06:08 I just, I don't know. Is it cool, though? Okay, so I have been promised real estate on chain forever. Okay? And it's never taken off. It's been a big need. And used to work at Realty. So I've heard your previous thoughts on this.

Starting point is 01:06:23 I know this is different because it's an NFT and it's cool. It seems like it's attached to kind of like. It's also different. because it's a business that already existed. Okay. That was doing democratizing access to real estate property. Okay. I get that.

Starting point is 01:06:36 But also still, the house is off chain, right? So all you're getting is kind of this global transaction verification of an off-chain assets. Like the real world assets on-chain thing that's just also still hasn't really taken off very much yet. Yes. Your take now is it's not crypto-native. for why should I be excited about it because it's still meat space legal regulation? That's part of the take. And then also the other take is just like, it's been five damn years.

Starting point is 01:07:08 Right. Okay. But the fact that roofstock is doing this is different. Okay. Because again, like I said, they're all, they're not a startup. They already are like profitable as a company, probably. And they are now getting into blockchain stuff. And so you're totally right in that. And this is why like tokenized real estate was also just fundamentally uninteresting to me in the first place,

Starting point is 01:07:27 was that it's not crypto-native. Like, I like things like ultrasound money or crypto-punks. But tokenized real estate or off-chain real estate is inherently not actually blockchain innovation. It's legal system innovation.

Starting point is 01:07:41 It's like lawyer innovation. It's a lawyer-heavy blockchain light. But we're seeing signs of this starting to actually roll. And so we'll see. And like, there are benefits of doing on-chain stuff. There are literal,

Starting point is 01:07:55 just a bigger marketplace for on-chain stuff. and just things are actually easier. Payments and escrow and all that stuff. As somebody who recently bought a house and did the whole escrow process, I would have loved for that to have been a multi-sake on chain.

Starting point is 01:08:08 I could totally see how that would have translated. So there are real efficiency improvements by using blockchain stuff. Honestly, I've always thought it's only a matter of time, right? It's just not going to be the first. It's kind of somewhere between like, you know, crypto money that we have

Starting point is 01:08:24 and like being able to buy a coffee with Bitcoin, right? It's like somewhere in between kind of the spectrum of when it happens in our trajectory. But this is cool, David. All right. This is, this is cooler. This is definitely cooler. You think it's cooler? I think it's cooler.

Starting point is 01:08:37 I think it's cooler. This is an example of like stuff that went under the radar, right? 2.5 million people just created crypto wallets using Reddit and no one noticed, including the Redditors themselves. I'm pretty sure. Not even them. Right? They didn't even notice.

Starting point is 01:08:54 Okay. So this is a story from TechCratch Redditors. have created millions of crypto wallets to buy NFT avatars. This is a tweet during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt. The Reddit chief product officer revealed that to date, Reddit's vault blockchain, which by the way is based on Polygon technology, created over 3 million crypto wallets to date.

Starting point is 01:09:16 3 million crypto wallets, and they didn't even know that they were creating it. Most of these, 2.5 million of them, were created to purchase NFT avatars that could be sold as profile picks on the platform. 40,000 of these things sold between $999 and $9999.99. And most of these sales are...

Starting point is 01:09:35 I want to emphasize that. 40,000 NFTs were sold at various price ranges from $10 to $100, and they sold out. And remember, I remember talking about this over a few weeks ago where Reddit was going to do this, and somebody made the comment how they never used the word NFT. They just used digital collectible. and they sold it with a credit card.

Starting point is 01:09:58 So not NFTs that are actually NFTs were sold with credit cards and 30 artists released 40,000 avatars and they all sold out. And so what's the lesson here? NFTs, don't call them NFTs, don't make them use crypto and just charge them credit cards and that worked. And so like there's now perhaps like millions of people who don't know that they just bought an NFT on a blockchain. And that they've opened a real crypto.

Starting point is 01:10:25 wallet. Yes. They don't know that either. That's how seamless experiences. Users who purchased one of the limited edition pictures got licensing rights to use it on and off Reddit as an avatar and could make them match their avatars look using a built-in avatar building tool. That is cool.

Starting point is 01:10:40 And this has always been the bull case for Ethereum is that it finds its way into all corners of the internet and you don't actually notice that it's there. I mean, just to benchmark this, okay? So Reddit maybe just on board of three million people to crypto wallets, okay? OpenCy has about a million active wallets. As of last January, they had that. MetaMast does about 30 million users. So, bam, 2.5 million users, just like that.

Starting point is 01:11:04 That's how quickly social media can scale us. David, what's the story? European Union countries must be ready to block crypto mining, says the European Commission. Members of the European Union, the EU is developing an energy-efficient label for blockchains, basically approved or unapproved blockchains, as the distribution of gas supplies for Russian.

Starting point is 01:11:25 leave some fearing high energy prices, blackouts, and shortages. So there's a quote here. In case there is a need for load shedding in the electricity systems, the EU member states must be ready to stop crypto asset mining, the commission said. Load shedding is, of course, when energy companies deliberately switch off supply to certain set of users to avoid the entire grid toppling. In the coming months to years, the commission intends to take various steps to boost digital energy services while ensuring an energy efficient sector, including an

Starting point is 01:11:55 energy-efficient label for blockchains. I feel like, Ryan, I called this. When we saw the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, we saw the coming energy squeeze as we are going into the winter, and then Ethereum went proof of stake, and right around the time where energy prices start to go through the roof in Europe, and now the European Union says, we're going to have to stop crypto mining, which is basically at this point, Ryan, just Bitcoin mining, because energy is in short supply. I feel like I called this. It's unfortunately for Bitcoin proof of work too. It's not just the fact that they are stopped, like they want to stop it because of the energy waste narrative. It's the fact that they can stop it. Yes. And well, yes. And it's also not just the narrative.

Starting point is 01:12:43 They need the energy to power people's homes that Bitcoin is sucking up. Right. That that is the fact on the ground too. I know it's a I think it's a major problem for proof of work moving forward. and certainly a regulatory burden for Bitcoin. David, what's this? What happened with Cosmos last week? Yeah, huge security on vulnerability, at least it's allegedly huge. On October 13th, Ethan Buckman,

Starting point is 01:13:05 the co-founder of the IBC ecosystem of Cosmos, says that a critical security vulnerability has been discovered that impacts all IBC-enabled Cosmos chains for all versions of IBC, as in the whole thing. Buckman assured that steps have already been taken to ensure that all major public IBC-enabled chains had been patched.

Starting point is 01:13:24 Yeah, wow. The whole thing got a bug. I mean, this sounds really bad because IBC is everywhere. I mean, if something like this could take down the entire interchain. Yes. It's funny. This just came out after.

Starting point is 01:13:35 But it's patched. It's patch. Thank God. And they found it before anything really bad happened. But it's disconcerting when something like this is kind of so deep in the code. David, B&Y Mellon. This is a bank, old school, traditional bank. They just launched a digital asset.

Starting point is 01:13:52 platform. Is this a big deal? Well, it's not only a very old bank. It's America's oldest bank, Ryan. 238 years old. Select clients will now be able to hold and transfer Bitcoin and Ether. So quote from the article, while BNY is not the first bank to explore crypto, this is still big important news because B&Y Mellon reaches 20% of the world's investable assets, a remarkable $42 trillion in assets under custody, and $1.8 trillion in assets under management. Those are big numbers. Remember how the crypto industry is currently at 0.95 trillion, and BNYMellon has 1.8 trillion in assets under management.

Starting point is 01:14:32 It's Bitcoin and Ether. It shows you how, I guess, saturated Bitcoin and Ether have become among mainstream finance as well. We've got a lot more work to do with D-Fi, but Bitcoin and Ether as assets are there. Getting into releases, D-Y-D-D-X, just release an option for. Fiat onboarding? Is that what this looks like? Credit card deposit. So yeah, you can now fund your D-Y-D-X account with a credit card. And my only take here is that the current Ethereum ecosystem or crypto ecosystem has like, I don't know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, I don't know, ten on-ramps of Fiat.

Starting point is 01:15:09 But the bull case for Ethereum is that it goes to infinity because all of the apps on all the chains all have their own native onboarding, whether they, if they need it. And that's what we're seeing here is that you just, D-Y-D-X is an application. It's going to be its own chain. It has its own native onboarding. So every single endpoint of Ethereum can produce its own. I think so. I think what you're saying, if you want to get money into defy,

Starting point is 01:15:29 fiat and defy, you have to take a step. And that step is usually in the form of like your bank to crypto exchange, like a Coinbase or Gemini to Defi, right? It's like a three-step hop. This goes direct from bank to defy. Bank to Defy. Very nice. How about this?

Starting point is 01:15:44 What's O.P. Craft. O.P. Craft is an autonomous world, a fully on-chain virtual space, kind of like Minecraft, definitely like Minecraft, where the entire world, every aspect, every river, blade of grass, every patch of snow on the mountains, exists on chain, and every single action in the world

Starting point is 01:16:03 happens as an Ethereum transaction. So this is built using what optimism released at a little bit before DevCon, which is the OP stack. And so the OPE stack is this modular layer two stack. I think it's going to be the future of layer two's, because just like how Ethereum layer one has going from monolithic to modular,

Starting point is 01:16:21 so are Ethereum Layer 2s, except what O.P. Craft is done is they've popped out the Ethereum VM, and they popped in Minecraft, which is crazy. Why would you do this? I don't know, but now we have a verifiable state machine of Minecraft that now exists as part of the OP stack. This is really cool. So there's a link in there, by the way, where you can play O.P. Craft, if you want to try that out. David, on the raises this week, the most notable one I think was this one from ChainSafe. ChainSafe is excited to announce that they've raised $18.75 million as a series A. The reason that's notable is chain safe. What do they do, David?

Starting point is 01:17:01 They make clients. They make three main clients. They make Lodestar for Ethereum. They make a client for Pocod. They also make a client for Bilecoin. So, cool. I mean, we like it when our clients get money because this entire industry is built on clients. So that's that.

Starting point is 01:17:15 Congratulations to the chain safety. This reminds me of the episode that we did early in the week with Arbitrum's purchase of prismatic in the prism team the major ethereum client of course you can catch that in the rssssvade somewhere it's also with a raise it's time to remind you that we have a jobs board it's live crypto's hiring and what should people do david they should get a job ryan get a job in crypto do you know i saw some tweets back like hey i did it ryan david i got a job in crypto i see that they're my favorite tweets yeah they're my favorite tweets if you do get a job in crypto make sure you shout out because like congrats to you and also you deserve congrats welcome welcome to the world of

Starting point is 01:17:51 web 3 I'm going to read a few jobs for you guys as I usually do uniswap labs hiring a director of product management platform non-technical is that I don't really know question mark developer relations lead uh developer relations yeah I don't really stuff you David I think that's non-technical you need to know a little bit but I think I'm to say that's non-technical senior front end engineer that's technical that's technical that's technical Senior backend engineer, trading platform technical. That's technical. Head of security at optimism.

Starting point is 01:18:20 That's technical. Senior infrastructure engineer devops. That's technical. We got rolls from rabbit hole, coin shift, ribid capital, and on. If you want access to all of these jobs, go to bankless.com. Slash jobs and log in and find out more. All right, guys, coming up, we've got some takes from Twitter. Of course, Bitcoin and Eath, what were they worth five years ago compared to now?

Starting point is 01:18:41 And what does that tell us about the future? Of course, as always, make sure you like and subscribe. If you're enjoying this episode so far, we'll be right back. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Sequence is the all-in-one developer platform you need to build Web3 games and applications. For your users, Sequence is a smart wallet, and it's the easiest, most intuitive onboarding your users will ever experience, and comes with all the features users need to feel empowered in the Web3 world. Multi-chain support, NFT display, and users can buy SFTs, NFTs, and crypto directly with a credit or debit card.

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Starting point is 01:19:30 NFT projects like Cool Cats, and marketplaces like NiftySwap. And Sequence is compatible with all the EVM chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Avalanche. So go to Sequence.com slash bankless to start building or speak with the Sequence team today. TruFi is Defi's largest credit protocol, connecting global lenders with institutional-grade lending opportunities.

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Starting point is 01:20:29 crypto with institutional-grade lending opportunities and portfolio tooling. Explore the diverse financial opportunities available on TrueFi or launch your own portfolio at trufi.io. Robert Leshner tweets out, think of all that has happened in crypto and globally since January of 2018. The reason why he's saying January 2018, because that was the top of the 2017 ICO mania. It was December to January. And then he goes, well, keep thinking about it. Bitcoin and Ether are both worth less than they were five years ago. It's also an anniversary of the top of 2017 tweet. That's basically also what's going on here. But Robert Leshner says they are, Bitcoin and Ether are worth less than they were five years ago. How does it make you feel,

Starting point is 01:21:14 right? confused. Yeah, I also confused. I don't know how to do. I'm really tripping me out. Okay, okay, Robert, I'm thinking about it. He says, keep thinking about it. I'm thinking about it.

Starting point is 01:21:23 Is that bullish or bearish? It's bullish. Well, we always went in doubt, always, aside of bullish. I think it's bullish. I think it means, well, probably it was very bearish if you were in January of 2018. I mean that like there's a lot of price

Starting point is 01:21:38 and like not a lot here. Right. It was the next five years of growth priced in It's already priced in, right? But now the question is, are the next five years of growth priced in with an eth at what, 2000 or 1,200 something? Is that we read at the top of that episode? I'm going to go with, no, no, it's not priced in. I'm going to go with hell no, it's not priced in.

Starting point is 01:22:00 Can't be priced in. I don't think there's ever been a moment where the full potential of Ethereum has been priced in, except at the top. Well, yes, and we won't know, of course, until we see the full potential of Ethereum, what the full, like, price should be. but yeah, I don't know. I think that's what he's probably saying, although you could interpret this the other way and be like, I guess nothing's happened. I think he's saying a lot's happened in the last five years.

Starting point is 01:22:22 Yes, I'm pretty sure it's blush. All right, what's this? David Hoffman saying, Bankless is bigger than just Bankless HQ. And here you are with a photo, someone in a bankless tea, but it looks a little different. What's this bankless tea? Yeah, this is the Bankless Brazil guys,

Starting point is 01:22:34 which, Ryan, I've signed us up for a podcast with them next week. Oh, cool. So are you going to record them next week? Do I need a new? No, I don't know Portuguese either. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's just cool to see all the different flavors of bankless teas that are out and about DevCon. So shout out to the Bankless Brazil team who just keeps on chugging along.

Starting point is 01:22:51 They're crushing it. Their podcast is great. It's in my feed. I like listen to it just to because, you know, but I don't understand Portuguese, but it's just fantastic. And these guys are crushing it at social media as well. Here's a tweet from Tom Emmer. Do you want to read this one? Yeah, Tom Emmer, Representative Tom Emmer says, decentralization is the point.

Starting point is 01:23:08 I'm pretty sure this is sub-tweeting SPF. If we sacrifice DFI for legislation, we're throwing away the opportunity. Yes. Nice job, Tom Amher. David, it's a politician saying this. Yeah, that's cool. That's incredible. It's amazing.

Starting point is 01:23:23 One other tweet. This is the classic regulatory capture attack. Reads the tweet. Reads the tweet. Here's what you do. If you want to classically achieve radio to capture. Okay. This is Dr. Dick.

Starting point is 01:23:39 This is a tweet put out. over the summer, but I think it's resurfaced, and you might see why. So if you want to capture an industry, here's what you do. Number one, you enter a nascent, unregulated industry, and then you be early, you be lucky, and you be aggressive, you make hay while the sun shines. Then... Okay, okay, so you build a business and you make a lot of money. Yep.

Starting point is 01:23:56 Step one. Step two, you get away with whatever you can. You push it right up to the point where you're told to stop. You find the boundaries. Okay, so you liquidate your own customers, you shill a bunch of tokens, and you make more money. Check, check, check. Number three, you've made your billions. Well done.

Starting point is 01:24:11 Got your market here. Now it's time to shut the door behind you. You spend a good chunk of your spoils on compliance, in quotes. The goal now is to be the market leader at the regulations. You know where coming. Lawyer up to the max. It starts to sound like someone I know. Number four, you know they're coming because it's you that's lobbying for them.

Starting point is 01:24:30 This industry needs, quote, cleaning up for the good of the customer. Even better if you think a, think of the children. Even better if you can find a think of the children narrative. You're the champion of making this industry better. So like you make a bunch of a blog post that are like, hey, we need to protect consumers and you talk about that a lot. You spend time in Washington. You're the adult in the room. You know how to solve this.

Starting point is 01:24:52 You get where they're coming from. You get where crypto is coming from or whatever industry you're trying to conquer. Number five, this gets the regulators on your side because you're the actor most progressive in the industry and compliance. They have to let you pass because you're top of the pile. They can't be seen destroying the industry. industry, so they need a good guy to get behind. Kind of a fall guy. Good guy. Hey, if this person says it's okay, it must be okay, right? He's crypto and you're crypto. Why don't you like it? Number six, every other newcomer to the space hasn't made enough money yet to be able to afford

Starting point is 01:25:19 the new compliance regime. Yeah, this is regulatory arbitrage. Okay, you're shutting them out. And in any case, you've hired all the people that know how to impact the rules and implement them. In fact, you've made the rules so you know them better than anyone. Number seven, here's what happens next. Maybe we're at number seven. Regulations come in. Everyone dies apart from you in the handful of big players on your tail or the ones willing to play the outlaw regulatory arbitrage game. So what do you do now? Now your job is to layer on the bureaucracy. Lobby for the regulations to fit the way you're already doing it. If you have a competitor that's doing it radically different, lobby to make it illegal. Congratulations. You've captured the industry. Now it's time for

Starting point is 01:26:03 ultra monopoly, own it all, crush your competitors, make your shareholders happy, the end. I hate this movie. This movie sucks. I've seen this movie before. I've seen this movie before. It's the banking industry. So many industries, it's social media, it's so many industries that achieve regulatory capture. And this is why Ethereum as a protocol and the all-core devs call puts such a strong emphasis on credible neutrality, because the one thing that we are trying to do in Ethereum is make systems that are capture-resistant. And this tweet thread starts with the classic regulatory capture attack. When was this tweet thread written?

Starting point is 01:26:40 I can't go to the date on this. July 3rd, 2022, months ago. Months ago. Months ago. Months ago. And, you know, we don't have to name names, obviously, but this is what we should be wary of in the industry. And particularly, I think the threat could be coming from crypto bankers in the industry.

Starting point is 01:26:59 Cryptobanks, yep. specifically. It could be coming from DFI at another stage, maybe D5 protocols, but not right now. Maybe. All right, David, what are you excited about this week? What's making you bullish? I am bullish on college kids, Ryan. What? On Monday, I went and gave a talk to the Princeton Blockchain Club, about 12, 12 kids, 12 Princeton kids who were all super into crypto, a bunch of juniors, a few freshmen, a couple seniors, and the questions they asked were really, really smart. And if you, if you're

Starting point is 01:27:30 asking smart questions about crypto, you're already like half of the way through it. I'm told Prince and kids are pretty smart. They are pretty smart, allegedly, yes. And then also tomorrow, on Friday, I'm going to go and teach a computer science class about Ethereum. Wait, David, doing computer science? They're in trouble. Something's in trouble. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to talk about, I'm going to do my classic Ethereum is a piece of software that's actually meant to produce culture. So, because like, somebody else can teach them computer science way better than I can. Yeah. But I'm going to talk about how code influences culture. Yeah. Applications. And you'll be wearing your SpongeBob sweater in order to do that. Yeah, perhaps.

Starting point is 01:28:09 Show them culture. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Anyways, I'm just like stoked on it because like there's more and more surface area for college kids, universities, both grad and undergrad. There's graduate students in the NYU class to get exposure to crypto. And the professor of this class, I actually met at ECC. So professors are in the Ethereum community going back to their university to teach their kids about crypto. What do you think the like college and universities do you think any students are listening to Bankless?

Starting point is 01:28:37 You think we get the Gen Z student synergy? Yeah, so the professor, I asked her as like how much of Bankless is in your like your what do you call it curriculum? Yeah. And she was like a lot, a lot of bankless. Really? Like articles? Yes.

Starting point is 01:28:51 Yes. And Evan McMullen has also taught guest lectured for classes around New York. Yeah. And she says she just like regurgitates bankless episodes. Nice. Well, I've always wanted to be. And that's just the ones we know about it. I've always wanted to be a professor personally.

Starting point is 01:29:04 I've also always wanted to be a professor. Well, maybe are we being professors right now? Is this how you do? We're a pseudo professor. Yeah. Podcast professors. I both want to and I really, really don't want to. Do you know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:29:16 Like, yeah, I want to guest lecture. I don't want to teach. Well, you live in the dream, man. That's awesome, dude. Yeah. What are you bullish on, man? I am bullish that this bear. market doesn't feel like a bear market. What I'll say is it just feels different. I've said this before,

Starting point is 01:29:30 but look, 2018, 2019, if you weren't there, it was utter despair. Ethereum was dead. Bitcoin was was maybe kind of alive. It was on life support, but Defy had zero product market fit. It was the great depression of crypto. It was very bleak. It was very sad. This does not feel like that at all. Prices are down, but there's no depression. I mean, the builders, are building. Like nothing has stopped that. Nothing is stopped. In fact, I think the velocity has increased because there's less noise. Yes. And there's more simple. Good building is off the charge. There's also like better talent entering the space. And so we we actually slow down our building, I think, during the last bear market. We didn't even know what to build. And this time I see more

Starting point is 01:30:15 firm like resolution rather than despair. And so this is the bear market, but it's a bear market that's different than the last one. This one, bear market, we already have product market fit. You know what? I think this makes it, David. It's the most obvious bear market ever, because you know we're coming out the other side.

Starting point is 01:30:33 The most obvious time to buy is what I mean. Ah, okay. Yeah, it's like obvious bear market. I don't think anyone was contesting that's a bear market. Like, the most obvious... Bare market implying that, like, we're actually going to go and end the bear market in me? Exactly.

Starting point is 01:30:47 A bear market before the bull market is what I mean. It's just only a matter of time. time and I didn't honestly feel like like so last time David I was like we might not make it like this story might not end well um this is a completely different feeling which means like um I'm back back to maybe Leshner's tweet right it's like this is the price of ETH now it's the price that was five years ago and look at the five years of building and look at all of the talent that is continuing to build in the space and has entered the space in order to build tell me you're bullish on that I bearish on that. I dare you to be bearish on that. So it's going to be fine. And I think that's the difference

Starting point is 01:31:27 between this one and the last. Nice. Getting me bullish. Getting me excited. Getting the people excited at the end of the podcast. All right, what's the meme of the week? Is that going to get them excited? Let's do it. Anyone else getting deja vu says Nick White of Celestia. Monolithic layer ones are like iPhones made to be obsolete in a couple of years. So you buy a new one. And here's the meme of this guy, receiving a shirt as a present, and it's the same exact shirt he already is wearing. And he's wearing Salana. Oh, what's the one below Salana again?

Starting point is 01:32:02 Cardano. Cardano. I don't know why Cardano's there, actually. Definity, Avalanche. Now he's holding Aptos, and he goes, oh my God, thanks. I can't wait to try out my new Monolithic Layer 1. I do like the evolution of Monolithic Layer 1

Starting point is 01:32:13 that's just like a shinier phone, a shinier iPhone. Yeah. I think that's a good metaphor. Yeah, totally. I love this guy's face. too. He just got the exact same gift. We keep receiving this gift every single cycle. He clearly loves it. He's wearing it.

Starting point is 01:32:28 Totally. Just put another one in the closet. It's a benefit. I guess maybe you could do that with player ones too. All right, guys, this has been the roll-up. We appreciate you hanging with us. As always, got to remind you of this very important advice that is not financial advice. Risk and Disclaimers. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. So is D-Fi. So is all crypto. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Starting point is 01:32:53 Thanks a lot. But this guy right here, Ryan, Sean Adams. I don't know who the F you are because you're not important. But here he says, please dear Lord, and any lawmakers or adults reading this tweet, just know BitBoy doesn't represent this either. Talk to Jay Shravinsky, talk to Miller-C-WL, talk to Coin Center. You know what? We are tired of people that look like this guy trying to run stuff.

Starting point is 01:33:18 I don't represent the people the fuck I don't. I'm the one who does. It's me. I'm the one out here putting the work in behind the scenes trying to save crypto while these devils, Sam Bingman-Fried, Brian Armstrong, they're trying to permanently ruin it. This is not about money for me. I hope you guys understand this. I am here fighting for you.

Starting point is 01:33:39 This guy with these freaking glasses on, this douchebag is out here trying to tell you that only the suits know what to do. only the suits, only the people who have all the money. They're the ones who can determine what happens. No, our bill is for the people. And you're going to find this out. We've got the funding for it, and it's coming out.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Is SBF Killing DeFi?? | Aptos Launch Down Bad | Ethereum Censorship Heats Up | Reddit Onboarding Millions

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