Bankless - ROLLUP - Jack Dorsey Exits Twitter | BTC ETH Ratio | Spiderman & Ross Ulbricht NFTs

Starting point is 00:00:06 Hey guys, happy first week of December. David, what time is it? Oh, it's the Friday weekly roll-up time, Ryan, where we roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor yet we do it anyways because we have a ton of fun doing it and I hope you do as well. So grab your morning coffee because we are about to roll up the week. It is fun. Look, crypto is never boring, guys. So you know this. How is your Thanksgiving, by the way? Was that fun? Do you get any crypto conversations in? Oh, inevitably. Just like I said with the, the last, part of last week's episode is like everyone talks about crypto because that's like one person in the room is the known crypto person and no one knows what crypto is so they always got to ask about

Starting point is 00:00:46 crypto so yes that didn't eat happened uh guys we're going to get into the main events of the week first of all budwiser beer company buys beer dot eith and now they're prominently displaying on their twitter page it's an nfti more to come maybe jack dorsey just stepped down from twitter david what does this mean for crypto we're going to dig into that also all eyes on the eith Bitcoin ratio. Ratio talk. Give me hot and flustered. I know you're excited about that one, all right?

Starting point is 00:01:13 That's why we'll get to it first. And also the Ethereum Roadmap Refresh. Of course, there's a ton of other things we're going to cover in the weekly roll-up. You do not want to miss it. Try to jam pack this into the next hour or so. 90 minutes. We'll see if we can do 90 minutes. No promises on the hour.

Starting point is 00:01:29 But before we do, got to mention a permissionless conference. So, you know, this conference is coming in May. This is happening in Florida. So if you're in the cold weather climate, we want to get down to Florida. You're thinking of it. This is going to be the crypto conference of the year, at least the defy conference of the year. We're going to be there. Our friends at Blockworks are putting this on.

Starting point is 00:01:48 We let you know now because new tickets just went on sale, new tranche. Every two weeks, new tranche goes on sale. Price gets more every, it goes up every week. It's up only. So if you want to have bankless discount on that, you can become a premium subscriber and go get your permissionless tickets. we will see you there in the new year. I think, David, you got probably like four or five conferences in between like now and that one. But, you know, that's going to be a highlight of next year for sure.

Starting point is 00:02:16 At some point, the yearly subscription to bankless is actually going to pay for itself because of the 30% off that it gets you off this ticket. We might be close, too. Yeah, right. So like Ryan said, you can sign up for bankless, get a 30% off discount. But the sooner you get that ticket, the cheaper it's going to be. because like no one wants to be paying they have the you know

Starting point is 00:02:36 April of 2022 FOMO where the tickets are over a thousand dollars apiece get them now before we went while they're like 400 something in crypto you never want to delay things right you just just ape in guys ape into that conference also we want to mention our friends at Metamask they are

Starting point is 00:02:52 sponsoring this message I use Metamask all the time David I know you are a power user of MetaMask the most the safest way to use MetaMask is with a hardware wallet so a ledger wallet is one good option. Also, lattice. Metamask has recently added support for the lattice wallet, which is a hyper-secure hardware wallet. It sits right in your desk, beautiful user interface. Also another wallet called Keystone, which provides a QR, air-gapped QR code-based hardware

Starting point is 00:03:22 wallet. So what Metamask is doing right now is really doubling down on its wallet support, which is a perfect compliment because you want to use Meta-Mask, but you want to use it in a safe and secure way. If you've used Ledger and Metamask before, you know, there's some, like, there's some bumps. It hasn't always worked perfectly in some of the browsers like Chrome. Ledger and Metamask are partnering to iron out those issues, and they've just released a whole bunch of releases.

Starting point is 00:03:47 So the action item here, if you don't have Metamask, you want a portal into Web3. Go download Metamask. There's a link in the show notes. If you haven't used Metamask with a wallet before, then try it. It is the most secure, safe way to experience Web 3 to date. You can get it to Defi. You can use it all of the time.

Starting point is 00:04:08 So check that out. There is a link in the show notes to Metamask, and you can find out more about it. All right, guys, the last piece of housekeeping. Gitcoin Round 12 has officially kicked off. It kicked off on December 1st. We all know Gitcoin rounds. They are the times where we can all donate towards these up-and-coming projects that need that support. But the cool thing about Gitcoin is that there is this massive, massive,

Starting point is 00:04:29 So when you come and donate to projects and upstarts and different things that need your support, client teams, different defy apps that are just getting up and running, your donations are matched. But they are not matched linearly. They are matched quadratically. We've had Kevin Oahuaki on the show before to talk about quadratic matching. Basically, if you are donating to the same grants that many, many other individuals are also donating to those individuals have outsized matching from this supply of matching pool, There's also the brand new pool of crypto advocacy, all funding efforts to advocate for crypto on Capitol Hill.

Starting point is 00:05:06 We just had a two-part panel yesterday on Bankless came out on the podcast yesterday. It's also on the YouTube where we had some just big heavy hitters, Jake Schrovinsky, Jerry Brito, Brian Quintenz, Kristen from the Blockchain Association, a number of people to really kick off this brand new advocacy round. So if you want to move the needle in Capitol Hill, go to getcoin.com.co, check out the Getcoin round. matching round. Check out the crypto advocacy track and donate to some really cool projects on Gitcoin. Yeah, crypto advocacy is where it's at, man. Didn't you guys like, didn't get coin isn't there like an $800,000? Over 900,000 now. Yeah, 900,000 matches going on? Just for the crypto advocacy round. There's that's just, yeah. That's crazy. Crypto lobbying. This is something that

Starting point is 00:05:50 we need to do. Crypto is political. Whether we like it or not, so we have to get involved that way. David, let's talk about prices though. It's market time. Yeah. Bitcoin price. Yon. Bitcoin flat on the week. A little bit up on the week. Started the week at $54,000, hit a high at $59,000, currently at $57,000, up about 3 to 4% on the week.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Okay, flat week. Okay. How about Eith? How's Eth tracking? Eith, doing great. Started the week at $4,400. Hit a low of $4,000 right at the bottom of that COVID-Omocrine scare, which we're going to talk about.

Starting point is 00:06:27 But then hit a high of $4,400. $4,780 and is now clocking in at $4,500 right now, and currently is up 8% on the week. Okay, Bitcoin flat, but ETH going up, that has some ripple effects. That means all eyes continue to be on the ETH Bitcoin ratio, because that is doing things, things we haven't seen in a while. Tell us about the ratio story here. Yeah, so the ratio hit a new high for the first time in over three years. And so hit that full of a chart for you, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:07:00 The ratio started the week at 0.075 and hit a high of 0.083. 0.083 and is currently coming in at 0.08, overall up 8% on the week. And, again, we have not seen these levels of the ETH-BTC ratio since 2017, or maybe late 2018. February, it looks like February. February of 2018. When the ETH-BTC ratio hits new highs, To me, this is what I tweeted out.

Starting point is 00:07:30 And I think my tweet is next, Ryan. The ETH-BTC ratio is the bull market signal. When ETH goes up versus Bitcoin, it's a signal of the bull market is ongoing. Not necessary prescriptive of future returns, right? Like, we can't predict the future. But really, when the ETH goes up versus BTC, it's a signal of the bull market. And making new highs, I'm saying that I think this is going to indicate a stronger continuation of the bull market into the future. a lot of the ETH people, myself included, are talking about, man, if the ETH-BTC ratio can just jump from like 0.08 to 0.1, like the flippinging becomes real, real close. There is very little price discovery in Bitcoin terms above these levels right now. Breaking a three-year all-time high is a really big deal. And there's not much more left before Ether actually breaks the complete and full all-time high, which is just like,

Starting point is 00:08:26 in a flash of a pan claimed in 2017 at like 0.01 or 0.1, I think. But it's a long time coming. There's two things that jump out at me from this chart that we're looking at, which is the ETH Bitcoin ratio. You know, the first is we haven't been at this point in the ratio for very many days either. Because when in 2017, it's kind of the ratio spiked above where it is right now. That was relatively brief. It's a flash.

Starting point is 00:08:55 Like we're talking days, right? And then also in the end of 2017 and 2019, 2018, when it did as well, that was days as well. I don't know how many days we've actually been above the ratio we are right now. Not very many. Not very many at all. 16, 17, 18, you know, less than a month in terms of days. So that's pretty remarkable. The other remarkable thing about this chart, David, is look at this troth, this troth of disillusionment between the end of 2018.

Starting point is 00:09:26 and I guess the end of 2020 where it was like Bitcoin season. It was like Bitcoin maximum. Everything is down only versus Bitcoin. That's what they said. And that was the narrative. And I think the thing about narratives is a lot of people sort of get biased by the most recent narrative

Starting point is 00:09:46 and sort of project that extrapolate that forward. And so because that was the most popular narrative, everything was bleeding against Bitcoin. The idea was nothing aside from Bitcoin would would ever appreciate or ever retain value. So what's interesting is the long, I guess, crawl through this trench, this troth of disillusionment, and then the spike up, right? Like, we are well above where we were.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And this feels like, I guess what I'm saying is it's a strong recovery on the Bitcoin ratio. So this is primed to do something and possibly continue increasing. I hate that you're making me look at this chart. Can you click on my tweet? So we can have like a real chart to look at. There we go. So look at that. Look at that.

Starting point is 00:10:31 So for the listeners, if you grow and just zoom all the way out from 2016 to 2022 where we are now, it is a solid upwards trend. It went up real, real fast from 2016 to 2017 and 18 because that's when like Ether had this very early ICU mania that was completely unsustainable. And then that just flash just like, you know, leveled off for the next like two years. But after that in 2020, like it started to climb again. And overall it has been painting this very up

Starting point is 00:11:00 into this right trend versus Bitcoin. Its entire lifespan. And this is why people were talking about the flippinging before Ethereum actually had its first block mind. Some people like read the Ethereum white paper and they were like, oh yeah, this is going to flip in Bitcoin. No one will say, tell you when because no one actually knows. The ETHBTC trading pair is extremely hard to trade and predict.

Starting point is 00:11:21 But damn, does this chart just look good? Ryan, I did some TA actually. I'm not really much of a TA person, but if you want to go onto the tweet that I followed this up, you can just exit out of this picture and then scroll down. I did some TA. There it is. It's a solid green arrow up to the right. This is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:11:39 This is the kind of quality TA that bankless subscribers sign up for here. That's exactly right. So I actually counted the number of weeks that Ether has been higher in Bitcoin terms. 12 weeks. Only 12 weeks of price history out of Ethereum's like six years of existence. Has the ratio ever been higher? It has the ratio between Bitcoin and Ether ever been higher. So it wasn't days.

Starting point is 00:11:58 It was weeks. It was probably, you know, three months or so. But how big would this be if, like, it's never happened in history. Just like why we're talking about this so much is Bitcoin has never been flippant in the history of Bitcoin. It is the OG coin. And so if this does happen, you can expect not just people like us, not just crypto media and people on, you know, crypto Twitter and in these circles will be talking about it. The entire world will be talking about it. The entire world knows Bitcoin as crypto.

Starting point is 00:12:27 But when something else takes the number one spot, that will, people will reconsider what it means to be crypto. Absolutely. So that will ripple out. And I think that's definitely something to watch. David, we are preparing some of our predictions for 2022 as well.

Starting point is 00:12:44 I know on bankless, we're going to publish this toward the end of the month. I'm wondering if one of your predictions is going to be a flippinging in 2022. Are you going to call that? oof, I think it's a greater than 50% chance. So do I. Yeah. So do I.

Starting point is 00:13:01 It's really hard to have conviction about the ETH BTC ratio. Because like I said, people that trade the EFBTC ratio generally just get absolutely worked. It's one of the hardest things to trade in crypto. Yeah. And predicting the flippinging is also really, really hard. But man, are we real? We're just predicting when it's going to happen is the hard part, right? Yes.

Starting point is 00:13:21 It's like, okay. Well, if you, if you predict it. it, I will say I'm not so sure, and I won't predict it. And that way, one of us is right. And that would think this is always right. That's how we mean. That's why there's two of us. Well, let's talk about the DPI. Sorry, let's talk about DFI pulse and total locked value in DFI. That's at 108 billion. So we're still above 100 billion. That's feeling pretty good. That's feeling healthy to you. How about the DFI pulse index? Here's a seven-day view. It didn't have the week that Ether did. No, no. It's a flat, down,

Starting point is 00:13:53 down a little bit versus the dollar. Start at 360 and it at 330. Still not defy season. I'm curious about your predictions for DPI into 203. Oh my God, look at that chart. The DPI to ETH index. Okay, so this is another ratio that we track on bankless roll-ups. DPI to ETH, man.

Starting point is 00:14:16 We have to look, you can't be mad about this. I know you're an ETH bull. You can't be mad about this. Why does this ratio bring you some? much pain, David. And first, what is it? Yeah, this is, I'm going to make you say it. This is the ratio between the aggregate of DFI tokens and Ether.

Starting point is 00:14:31 Not all DFI tokens, kind of the OG Defi tokens, Ove makers, Uniswap, Sushi Swap. And just Defi has just not been catching a bid versus Ether. Ether is ultrasound money and defy tokens are not. And people are really just believing in that difference, I guess. We are clocking in a 0.07. I believe it was 0.08 last week. I guess we did our ultrasound money job too well, David. That's why this is happening.

Starting point is 00:15:01 But here's a sure way to win is you bet on all three. A little bit of Bitcoin, a little bit of ETH, a little bit of DPI, a third, a third. And that forms the bed index. So what are we looking at on bed on the week here? Yeah, started last week at $177, ended this week at roughly $165. So a little bit down on the week. a little bit down on bed. That is a secure way to get exposure into the crypto monies and also defy.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Each have their seasons, right? Sometimes there's Bitcoin season. Sometimes it's a defy season. And the bankless bed index allows you to get exposure to all three of those things. Let's talk a little bit more about Thanksgiving, though, right? So this is a chart from Blockworks. Actually, I think maybe crypto.com is. is the source of this, and they said, show this chart to your crypto-sceptical family members.

Starting point is 00:15:57 This is a chart of 1990s internet adoption, David. So it's internet versus crypto. And there's a green line and a blue line. The green line is internet users over time, tracking from like 1990 to the year 2000. And the blue line is total crypto users. These are both measured in millions. And what's interesting is the blue line is tracking. the green line. Right on top of it. It's right on top of it. So what this is saying is like

Starting point is 00:16:27 something that we've said a lot is crypto is the internet of money and it is tracking the adoption of the internet in the way the internet spread in the 1990s. I think this is a useful way to help your family understand crypto, to be honest, because everyone lived through the 90s, right? at, you know, maybe not everyone, but like lots of people remember the internet transformation and what that looked like. And so if you're looking for an analogy, you just say, look, crypto is the internet of money and it is getting adopted like the internet was. Remember how fast that happened? Remember how much transformation occurred as a result of that? Well, crypto is going to do that except for scarce things, property things, money in a different way.

Starting point is 00:17:17 I think it's a useful analogy to help people understand it, and it's interesting that the numbers are tracking. But when we were talking about this agenda, David, you were also a little bit disappointed at this graph, right? Right, yeah. Like, I want crypto to be adopted faster than the internet, because crypto is on top of the internet, and the internet's already been adopted. So when I see crypto being adopted at the same rate of the internet, I'm like, God, like, why are we so slow? Like, let's pick up the pace here. What is taking so long? What's, why do you think it's taking so long?

Starting point is 00:17:45 So first of all, this makes me hyper bullish. I don't like I, you know, to get to this point in crypto is frankly amazing, right? It's like we live through the internet to have a second revolution that was on the same order of magnitude as the internet is just incredible. Like this is beyond my wildest dreams and super excited about this, very bullish about this. But to your point, you know, crypto had the internet to propagate itself. So why is it not propagating faster? What do you think is holding crypto back when you look at this? Not only did it have the internet, but also had the financial incentive to adopt it.

Starting point is 00:18:21 Like, crypto pays you to adopt it. So, like, where is the juice? Like, where's the steroids? I kind of always thought the crypto would be the internet just on steroids. Granted, we are not, like, you know, disrupting the internet. We're disrupting legacy financial institutions. And people seem to be a lot more skeptical about crypto than they were the internet. And maybe that's because the nature of crypto has the nature of

Starting point is 00:18:43 money inside of it, people generally are skeptical with value. They're like, oh, buy Bitcoin. They're like, oh, you're just trying to take my money. Do you know one take here, though, is like, I don't think the, look, the internet, the institutions adopted the internet almost immediately, right? It's like the U.S. policy was pro-internet. You know, corporate policy was like, we have to get, go on the internet. We have to do dot-coms, all of these things.

Starting point is 00:19:07 I think crypto has been, interestingly enough, more a bottom-up movement in some ways than the internet. What I mean is like established institutions haven't seen the value proposition, right? The banking industry adopted the internet, but the banking industry has been super slow to adopt crypto. Why? It's because they're being disrupted by crypto, right? Even like, extrapolate that to governments and central banks. Maybe they're also worried that they're going to be adopted by crypto. So we haven't had the institutional support that a legacy institutional support that the internet has had. What's your take on that? And what? what else he thinks holding us back?

Starting point is 00:19:44 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. The fact that it's a bottom-up system, I think also lends itself to why it could have been adopted faster because, like, bottom-up systems are just, like, organic and nature's really, really good at spreading. Granted, this is in log. This is a log scale, and so, like, deviations are actually really, really compressed in this chart, but, like, damn, are those lines right on top of each other?

Starting point is 00:20:07 At some point, I don't really know. We'll just have to wait for it to figure yourself out. The story is not over, but... Basically what I'm saying is like, I'm bullish. I just wanted to be hyper bullish, and I can only be bullish. Like, I wish I was more bullish. Wow. You, uh, yeah, that's, um, spoken like somebody who's gotten used to a lot of bullishness lately.

Starting point is 00:20:30 You're spoiled, sir. You are spoiled. Uh, let's talk about this. Umnacron. What is this? This is a story of, uh, okay, Omicron. Amicron? Amicron, yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:42 So this is a COVID variant. Maybe you should explain that. And it did kind of tank the markets a little bit, like, you know, both stock markets and crypto. Okay, so let's talk about that. And then also we're seeing like meme tokens. Right. Number go up as a result, which I don't understand.

Starting point is 00:20:57 What's the story here? Yeah. So the Omicron variant was discovered in South America. It's apparently a new variant. South Africa, right? Yeah, South Africa. And, you know, apparently more transmissible, apparently more contagious. we don't really know there's not a lot of data out there,

Starting point is 00:21:13 but the markets just read the headlines new COVID variant and just got super, super spooked. And I was just so dumbfounded by this market reaction because it happened in the legacy markets. It also happened in crypto. And I'm like, guys, we've seen this story before. First off, like, we're way more prepared. Like, we already know what COVID is.

Starting point is 00:21:29 We already have vaccines. We already have testing centers. We already have global mask adoption by some people. And so, like, why are people more scared about another, like, COVID variant? Like the way that COVID is going to get work is just we're going to, it's going to just morph into the common cold and we're going to get a bunch of booster shots over and over and over again. Like this is how this works. So like new variants are totally to be expected. And like, and then the market's dumped as if like it was going to be pandemic 2.0 all over again. Forgetting about the last time the market dumped, we just printed a bunch of money. Like the whole market reaction was totally nonsensical to me. And so many people got really, really bearish. Like I just did not get it. I was not bearish, sir. I was not bearish in the slides.

Starting point is 00:22:07 I tweeted out, like, if you sold the Omicron variant news, slap yourself, we're going to 10K. And then people followed up, it's like, David, no, we're going to 20K. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right. And meanwhile, this completely unrelated but also interesting part of the story is there's this random token that I had no idea existed called Omicron, and it pumps like 200% because of the Omicron variant. Is this a token that existed pre-Omacron variant? it was just like through happenstance.

Starting point is 00:22:36 Correct. It was just coincidence of the names. And it just started pumping. And I think that this is kind of just a small little like microcosm of just the world, the state of the world at large. People just like to invest in memes. Like, oh, the word Omicron is in the news. Let me go to Coin Gecko, type in Omicron and buy the first token that comes up.

Starting point is 00:22:57 Like fundamentals just don't matter for a like decent portion of the population anymore. And so like welcome, welcome to the meme economy. Like the words that are in the news are going to be turned into tokens that are going to pump. Like we saw this with Doge. Like this is the meme economy. Welcome to the meme economy. So do you think this is going to happen with other news items and other kind of memes that propagate? They're all going to have tokens that will like temporarily pump?

Starting point is 00:23:20 Yep. Because traders are going to be like, oh, the word Omicron is in the news a bunch. I'm going to go buy the Omicron token because other people are thinking of the word Omicron. Why is Omicron? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:23:31 It doesn't even matter originally. Yeah. Well, good job. Sorry to the Omicron team. Omicron. Yeah, Omicron users. Like, you know, you just got your payday there. That was a, you know, lucky event.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Let's talk about this, too. CRO token has been on an absolute tear. This is Crypto.com's chronos chain token. It's just locked up one billion total locked value. Token has jumped 350%. Crypto.com has recently, I believe, got naming rights for a major sports arena, too. That might be part of this. Yeah, part of this.

Starting point is 00:24:04 But this chain seems to me very much like kind of a, it's a proof of stake finance type chain from a crypto bank, right? Kind of Eith Killer or side chain, whatever your perspective is on that. And it's very much, you know, side chain season, I guess, ETH killer season. So we're seeing a pump here. Anything else that we explain this, dude. Proof of authority consensus mechanism.

Starting point is 00:24:29 Okay, so it's not even proof of state. They must not be doing any sort of decentralized. visualization theater unlike the other ones. You're like, oh yeah, no, this is like a consortium blockchain. We own this thing. I got to be honest. So I understand CRO token as sort of a loyalty token if you're a crypto.com user, right? And that does have some value. But like the, it's value as it relates to this side chain. I don't really understand. It's just to be in the club in my mind. Like, oh, people are building chains and issuing tokens. Like, oh, we have the crypto.com URL. Like, we can do the same thing in the URL, the value of the URL can sustain the whole entire ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:25:05 That's what's in my mind, in my mind, what's happening. Yeah, absolutely. In my mind, that the entire business is just centered around the URL. Right, right. Well, I mean, they are doing a lot in the space. Like, they have partnerships with Visa. I've actually used to crypto.com card. Like, it works.

Starting point is 00:25:21 It's cool. But it's kind of an example of sort of a crypto bank play on this. And like, you know. In my mind, it's co-opting crypto. Yeah, it's. It's definitely, I hear that too. Let's talk about ETH a little bit. So this is a tweet from Chris Clay says,

Starting point is 00:25:39 So ETH has surpassed every global bank's market cap. And you're still not sure if this whole blockchain crypto thing is here to stay. This is a chart of Eith versus J.P. Morgan versus Bank of America versus ICBC and Wells Fargo and C.M. And all the banks that you love to hate, Ethereum is on top with $550 billion. The next closest is JPM. Morgan with 480 billion. At this point, I feel like calling it to you, right? Like, guys, wake up to Ethereum. Crypto is bigger than all of the best. Now you feel like calling it, Ron? I'm just like, no, I felt like this for a while, I suppose, David. But like, yeah, this is, now it's self-evident.

Starting point is 00:26:21 Now it's like maybe I'm at the point of a Zen where I don't even feel like I have to explain this anymore. Exaporation by people who don't get it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just like, okay, well, Well, like, explain the start then. How about rather than me explain crypto, how about you explain why Ethereum market cap is larger than all the banks? Start from there. Explain that. And then we'll have a discussion about it.

Starting point is 00:26:44 I feel like a bit more like that. Maybe it's vindication that I'm feeling. I won't be satisfied until Ethereum market cap is bigger than all the banks combined. And then we can say that ether is undervalued, just not misunderstood. Like, oh, people now understand. Ethereum, now it's in the realm of some sort of fair evaluation. It's still low, but at least people understand it. That's where I'm at.

Starting point is 00:27:10 It's just a fad, David. Just a fad. Let's talk about this. Another cool fad, I suppose, is ether on exchanges hitting a three-year low. So as the ratio, the eith to Bitcoin ratio hits the three-year high, we're seeing a low on the amount of eith on exchanges. And that's bullish. Why is that bullish, David? Because if any institution or any newcomer wants to buy ether, they got to do it on exchanges. And so the lower of eth's supply on exchanges, the more a dollar has on the impact of

Starting point is 00:27:45 Heath price when it is bought on exchanges. And so this is just going into any sort of just new inflows has outsized impact upon each price. Bullish. Bullish. I'm really bullish. also bullish ongoing bankless as well it's like more of this more more more of this eith becomes non-cassodial the better for the bankless journey guys we will be right back with the release of the week we're going to talk about the hot news items and of course get to the takes and the memes but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bankless is proud to be

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Starting point is 00:30:20 choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible, and it's committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra, or Seoul, and get liquidity on your stake, go to Lido.fI to get started. All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week.

Starting point is 00:30:44 The first is the Starkware, David, we're just talking to Starkware last week about Starknet, and now here it is. It's launched. What is in Starknet? give us the TLDR. Yeah, so think optimism, just like they have their optimistic roll-up and arbitram. They have their optimistic roll-up as well. Starknet is a ZK roll-up, and we've seen ZK roll-ups before, but this one is different

Starting point is 00:31:05 in that it is the public permissionless, censorship-resistant version of what Starkware has to offer. So this is the one single roll-up where everyone can permissionously come and deploy on Starknet. ZK roll-ups, they are much more complicated than optimistic roll-ups, but also, also a lot faster and a lot cheaper because of the power of zero knowledge cryptography. Starknet Alpha, the first implementation of that, is live on mainnet. So this is the first of a number of rollout progressions in the Starknet story. And so ZK, EVM, is now here on Ethereum, which is really, really awesome.

Starting point is 00:31:41 Congratulations to the Starkware team. We had them on the show recently. If you missed that episode, you got to go watch it. It's another bullish episode, absolutely. And these are all, of course, this is a general purpose. didn't quite call it a chain, but like we call it a chain for short. It's, and so it can run essentially something like the EVM. And so you can have multiple applications interacting. You preserve that composability. And the more apps that joins Starknet, the cheaper the transactions get.

Starting point is 00:32:07 So how about that for a virtuous cycle? Yeah, the more users and more applications that are on Starknet, the cheaper the per user transaction gets. That is not something that you can ever find on an L1. That's one of the beauties of L2 is that costs or Amher across all the users. So the more users that use it, the cheaper the transactions get, rather than like the L-1s of crypto, where the more people that use it, the more expensive the transactions get. This is why we call it inverting the blockchain trilemma. Another piece of content that you need to watch, if you haven't watched it, is super-scaling with the ultra-scalable Ethereum. Is that what we called it? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:44 Ultra-scalable Ethereum, absolutely, yeah. This is super-scaling with StarCware, was the other episode you're thinking up with the Starkware folks. And you know, it's so funny is when we're talking about, hey, when are ZK roll-ups coming, when this feature functionality, the co-founders of Starkware were like, guys, it's here. Like we're delivering it. Like next week it's happening.

Starting point is 00:33:04 And then over the next six months, this is going to get smoother and smoother and smoother until maybe you don't even know you're on a roll-up at all. So super exciting there. Also, this, Argent, is maybe launching on Starknet before the end of the year, I believe. Yep. This is what I've heard.

Starting point is 00:33:21 I saw the hint as well. Somebody was saying, all I want for Christmas is Argent on Starkware and Argent responded in a tweet, your wish shall be granted. So sometime before Christmas, guys. Santa's coming.

Starting point is 00:33:31 All right. Let's talk about this too. Tornado Cash, moving to Arbitrum. What does this mean? Yeah, tornado cash, which is an ETH mixer in case you are docks

Starting point is 00:33:39 and want to undocks yourself for whatever reasons. You can now do it in a much cheaper fashion on Arbitrum. Tornado Cash is generally a gas-intensive application on the Ethereum

Starting point is 00:33:47 L1, but now it's on Arbitrum. So you can get your privacy on Arbitrum. Privacy solutions coming to Ethereum. The other one to watch is Aztec. The Aztec protocol, of course. That is whole ZK roll-up that is dedicated to privacy, but I'm really glad to see some of these privacy solutions continuing to be pursued by the Ethereum network. Bankor 3 has just released the third version of Bankrupt. These are one of the original automated market makers. They had a big ICO in 2017, and they've continued to plug away at this protocol. What's new in the release, David? A bunch of new things.

Starting point is 00:34:23 They have impermanent loss protection, which they already had, I think, in Bankrupt, too, but maybe that's updated and tweaked. There is L2 support. So there's Bankor on Layer 2s. And they also have an Omni pool that allows for all trades on the network to occur in a single transaction, probably some gas efficiencies and some trading efficiencies there, as well as a number of other features as well. So check out the link in the show notes to get the full.

Starting point is 00:34:45 of Bankor 3. This is cool, too. Nosis making some moves here. So they have a token called GNO. There's also a side chain called X-Di that I've used before, and I'm sure you've used as well, David. That's my first side-chain ever used. Yeah, back in 2018 or something.

Starting point is 00:35:00 So I think it started as a proof of authority, side chain, maybe move to sort of a proof of stake type of side chain. Anyway, it's kind of been overshadowed, I feel like, recently by the polygons of the world and some of the other side-chain-type solutions. I'm not sure exactly why, but there is a proposal from one of the co-founders of Nosis, Martin Coppelman, who is actually proposing a merger between X-I and GNO. And what I think they are doing, David, is they are putting together sort of an ETH-2 test net. So it's like a beacon chain type of environment that is going to provide ETH-2, like, function.

Starting point is 00:35:44 with a bit more centralization. Okay, so it won't be nearly as decentralized as Ethereum mainnet, but it'll almost operate as kind of a, I guess, a staking side chain like to Ethereum. And the idea is they're going to propel, I guess, you know, the development track of Ethereum clients and sort of be, have a relationship that way. Anyway, this is a governance proposal. So this is not happened yet, but was interesting nonetheless and caught our attention. this week. What else would you add? Yeah, there, I think we're really just going to have to wait and

Starting point is 00:36:18 see really what the, what happens with this and what the utility of this side chain actually would do. I wouldn't, there is some things to be concerned about because since there is a brand new token that's securing this side chain, that kind of does like, you know, Sazel on the Daily Way, put it nicely, splits the communities, right? So you have the one token validating the side chain and the ether token validating Ethereum. And there's a different. there. And that's by what you meant by like a split token, right? It's like so you one is for one chain and it doesn't actually informally link it to Ethereum in any particular way. Yeah, there's some disalignment there when you have something like this. But people said

Starting point is 00:36:59 this about Polygon as well in the early days and they've managed to say it's kind of socially connected to Ethereum. Yeah, the difference there is that Polygon actually has economic economic slashing for any malicious activity between the bridge and that Polygon staking is actually occurring on the Ethereum L1, not on the Polygon side chain. And I believe if this, if I understanding this correctly, is that the, the X-Di-Nosis side chain will not have staking on the Ethereum main chain. It will be its own independent self-sovereign system. And then also Polygon is very, very committed to ZK roll-ups, which by definition are hooked right into Ethereum itself. So there is some differences there. Yeah, it's interesting, though, because also, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:40 Martin and the team at Nosis have been very socially plugged into Ethereum. Right? It's like very socially connected. So we'll have to see where this project evolves. But I like the experimentation of it. And I think it's cool to kind of resurrect X-Dye in a new way and see where that goes. Let's talk about some raises, David. Celsius, crypto banks are raising.

Starting point is 00:37:57 They just got a series B. $400 million is over-subscribed. So actually, I think maybe they were asking for $400 million. They got $750 million. I'm not sure how that works. Wow. But it's a lot of money for crypto banks these days. Any takes?

Starting point is 00:38:11 That is a lot of money. Yeah. Why is Celsius so highly valued? I mean, I haven't used it, but isn't it just, isn't it just like DFI products, but in C-Fi form? Yeah, I mean, I guess. Yes, sir. That's what it is. It's 3.25 billion. And look, it's kind of a crypto bank, right?

Starting point is 00:38:28 Borrowing and lending your tokens and your Bitcoin, your ETH. All right. There's a lot of value in that. I bet you they're going to buy a stadium. They probably should, right? Join the club. Join crypto. How about this?

Starting point is 00:38:42 Fireblocks. Man, I feel like they just raised. We had the founder of Fireblocks on. I don't know. It had to be less than six months ago. They had just come off a raise. Now, here's another raise. I don't remember what the previous raise was, but I feel like it was like a $2 billion

Starting point is 00:38:54 valuation. It was multiple billions, maybe. Now it's $8 billion valuation. Okay? And they just raised $400 million. Fireblocks, of course, provides kind of institutional friendly defy. They provide the custody layer and the APIs so institutions can hook into the crypto. experience and particularly in D5.

Starting point is 00:39:14 So it's a really interesting company from that perspective. And another crazy race. This is a series E, David. So I don't know how many letters of the alphabet we get until you go public, but like we're already on E. So on July 27th, they raised $310 million for a $2 billion valuation. Now they are raising $400 million for, sorry, again, $8 billion valuation. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:39 4X. They 4X their market cap. What's a 4X between friends? than six months. Crypto is absolutely tearing right now. I don't know. Does that make you worried? There's a lot of money out there.

Starting point is 00:39:50 Remember how much money we printed? It was in the trillions. God, money has become meaningless, I suppose. It's not crypto that's the bubble. It's money that's meaningless. One-inch network just closes $175 million in their series B. They're moving into institutional customers as well. That will really change.

Starting point is 00:40:10 Like, One inch was kind of like a, I guess, kind of a niche defy project in the beginning. It looks like they're really scaling up for institutions, really commercializing. You know, it's like last experience I've had with one inch, I actually couldn't use it because I was based in the U.S. Right. I did like turn a VPN on or something like this before you could connect. But this is a pretty massive valuation as well. What do you make of this? It's interesting when I see teams raising that also have a token.

Starting point is 00:40:38 like intuitively you kind of want to say well you only get to pick one like either you raise or you do a token but you don't get to do both but actually that's just like kind of the gut reaction you can totally do both because nothing's stopping you but you do have to ask like where's the value being captured because if there's a centralized private entity and then a public traded token where's the value going to go um but this yeah are you starting to worry about this it's kind of like it's kind of like uh cRO and crypto.com right yeah it's something to pay attention to. I'm not yet concerned about. I think it's just going to be an interesting subject matter with tokens where like tokens don't actually have any regulatory commitments. Like you

Starting point is 00:41:18 don't actually have any investor rights as a token owner. There's just the token on the blockchain and that does whatever it does. And then there's a centralized company that can do whatever it does. So like, you know, TBD on what the dynamics behind private equity and public tokens are like. But again, there's no actual limits as to why you can't do both. Just intuitively it seems kind of weird. But again, it's just like, you know, we'll just got to experiment. It seems like the higher risk, maybe higher return, but definitely higher risk asset, particularly if there's a centralized company involved.

Starting point is 00:41:52 So it's a centralized company and it also has a token, right? Like, at least if you're buying equity in that company, you have some sort of legal right. Yes. If you just have a token, what do you actually own? You just have a token. So maybe that goes up higher, you know, zooms in the bull run. But when things turn, that's got to be the riskier asset. We'll have to see how all of that plays out, David.

Starting point is 00:42:18 This is a raise from a former Wall Street banker who just launched a $1.5 billion dollar crypto venture fund. This reminds me of 2017 a little bit too, where everyone was launching a fund. This is someone from a fund called HiveMind Capital Partners, a former city group executive. So former banker Matt Zhang has launched this fund and he takes here. Yes, I think there's two quick takes here. This is an example as to why crypto doesn't fix, you know, wealth distribution. Wealthy people can just take their wealth and buy crypto with it and they are still wealthy

Starting point is 00:42:50 and now they're in crypto. But what it does fix is long-term incentives. And so getting wealthy people into the world of crypto makes them abide by our rules and our values. Well, crypto is not a panacea for fixing wealth distribution and wealth inequality. in the world, it does actually force people onto the same equal playing fields, which is something that we can't say about the TradFi world. If they adopt crypto, they adopt crypto values. We say this often on bankless.

Starting point is 00:43:18 Speaking of crypto values, let's talk about jobs. Imagine having a job that aligned with your crypto values. If you're listening to bankless, which I know you are, then you probably have crypto values like us. So go check out the job board. You want to make the full-time commitment. make the leap. Look towards 2022. What are you going to be doing in 2022? You'll be sitting at a corporate job, or are you going to look and see what's available in crypto? There's lots you could do here. Here's a senior back-in engineer from SmartD-Fi product manager, as well as an accountant from SmartD-Fi. That's pretty diverse. Senior software engineer at Popcorn, community ecosystem lead at DYDX, crypto research analyst. You've got to be an NFT specialist for this,

Starting point is 00:43:58 also a smart contract research analyst, and a governance specialist at BitWi. A head of growth at Dex Guru, a technical lead at Draftley, ahead of Ethereum, Enmutable, head of Tokens at Immutable as well. Community Manager, Dexible, lead engineer, Hatsdot, Finance, community manager, Eagronom, CTO Eagronom, senior backend engineer, smart defy. Guys, those are a lot of jobs, and we just scratched the surface, okay? There's a whole list here.

Starting point is 00:44:23 Go check out the bankless job board. Sign up for that. Get these jobs posted to you in your email address, so you're first to know, and get a job in crypto. Get a goddamn job. All right. Let's talk news, David. Big news, item in the week. We promise this. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, also CEO of Square. He's like a co-CEO. He just resigned from Twitter. Here's his letter. Very transparent. He posts on Twitter as is fitting. And yeah, what do you make of this? Jack Dorsey, gone from Twitter.

Starting point is 00:44:56 Feels like he is maybe committing full-time to Square, which now is a new name, David. what's the new name square has a new name called block because it wants to lean in towards blockchain infrastructure and square crypto is now called spiral so jack is really just like leaving twitter i think to really double down on i mean in jack for jack it's it's bitcoin uh for square crypto is called square crypto but it's and with jack leading it's really about bitcoin um and there's been a bunch of speculation as to well why did jack leave twitter did he really want to actually do this, or was he kindly asked to leave because he was putting up frictions for Twitter putting up adopting Web3 things? Jack is a famous Bitcoin maximalist. He really

Starting point is 00:45:44 only cares about Bitcoin. He has publicly retweeted tweets calling Ethereum a scam and really only believes in Bitcoin. And, you know, all these Web 2 companies, Twitter especially, all kind of see Web 3 on the horizon and see this wave of adoption happening. And so the speculation from the Ethereum people who have the Ethereum bias. And so they are just biased towards thinking this is that Jack Dorsey got pushed out because he wasn't adopting Web 3. Do you know the interesting thing, though? I feel like saying, Jack, you can run, but you can't hide.

Starting point is 00:46:16 Do you know why? So you just named Square Block, okay? Like, you didn't name it Bitcoin. Square really can't, Square faces the same dilemma that Twitter does, which is if Jack does take square in the Bitcoin maximalist direction, which he kind of has so far. We'll have to see what happens next. He's going to miss out on all the cool DFI stuff, right? I mean, we had Visa on. We had anchorage on. We were talking about the DFI mullet and fintech and visa, and it's all, like, it's stable coins. Right. It's like, squares a payments company and people don't pay with

Starting point is 00:46:51 Bitcoin. They pay with stable coins that are on Ethereum. Like, what? Like lightning just, it's just a small fraction. It's not going to happen. Of kind of the block story. So it's going to continue chasing him there, I think. Let's talk about the new person who's taken over for Jack because that's important. Look, Twitter is a very important platform. So the new person, I think, was Jack's number two.

Starting point is 00:47:17 Parag. Augurwal. He is a champion at Twitter. So five things about him. This is a coin dust story. He was the leading force in Twitter's decentralization projects. I'm not sure how much progress they actually made, but there was a project at Twitter called Blue Sky

Starting point is 00:47:33 to kind of protocolize Twitter. So maybe he's an advocate there. He also led Twitter's migration to cloud services. He's very concerned about the ethics of tech, which is sort of interesting because as a web to company, you have to, it's refreshing, but also like, I mean, I'm kind of at the, I very much feel like protocol should be as credibly neutral as possible

Starting point is 00:47:58 and actually shouldn't be injecting political bias into their platform. And it's interesting that Twitter has had a, I guess a recent run of what some would say, kind of erosion of free speech. And just earlier this week, they actually banned the ability for individuals to post public images without consent. So unless you're a public figure, if I just take a photo of you, David,

Starting point is 00:48:26 and I post it on Twitter, that's like a banable offense, a censorable type of fence. Which is somewhat interesting, right? So like when you have permission to post pictures of me on Twitter, by the way. Okay, can I get that in writing, sir? Because I don't want to get in trouble. Do you want to tweet? Yeah, he also rose up quickly in Twitter's ranks. He doesn't use Twitter very much.

Starting point is 00:48:45 But I think part of the summary from this new CEO is I think he'll be very friendly web three, right? So like the NFT initiatives, the Ethereum initiatives, that's like full steam ahead and maybe it needed jack to kind of step aside to your point for this to really take off so it's you know i think it's bullish for nfts and web 3 from that perspective hopefully hopefully hopefully we're just not reading into it just too much hopefully that's we will see uh square becoming block though like okay facebook becoming meta square becoming block what's next man i i don't know what's alphabet going to become uh constitution dow it's It's shut down.

Starting point is 00:49:25 We've reported on that. We talked about that last week. They raised $50 million almost to buy the Constitution, a copy of the Constitution. Now they shut down. But something crazy happened, okay? Which is their people token, which was a people, which was a token associated with this project, has been moaning. Yeah. Do you know why?

Starting point is 00:49:44 No. Can you tell me? Because I sold right before that happened, sir. Or I redeemed. I was like, so like going to Thanksgiving, I was like, ah, I want to get everything off my plate. I don't want to have to worry about this thing. And, you know, I had a little bit of funds in the Constitution Dow because that, you know, that was fun. There's a really interesting thing. And I was like, I just, I'll withdraw this.

Starting point is 00:50:04 Biggest mistake I've made this year, this month. The week. Of the week. It's only because the people token started mooning for God knows why, what, what reason. It's memes. Back to what you're saying with the Omicron. Yeah. Right? Just because it can. I don't know. What do you think? Why isn't a new clue? I have no clue. I have no clue. What is this reinforcing you? For me, it reinforces that, like, I still know nothing in the short run in crypto as far as what's going to happen. Crypto will always surprise you.

Starting point is 00:50:32 Like, I had no way to predict this. Neither did anyone else. Let's talk about EIP 4488. This is a new EIP. We talked about this a little bit briefly on the last roll-up, but what is this, David? This is a proto-Lamda, a very, very long-time ETH developer. Now also working on the optimism team and also with the ultrasound money emojis in his header. and he goes, I support EIP 4488, let's make roll-ups cheaper.

Starting point is 00:50:57 Let me explain what this is about. He goes, technical TLDR, EIP-4-88 reduces the call data gas cost from 16 to 3 gas per byte with a cap on call data per block to mitigate security risks. End user TLDR is that roll-ups cost overhead decreases, thus lowering L2 fees. So basically, we talked about this last week. This is just a rebalancing of gas. And we haven't actually really talked about how gas is calculated, but there are arbitrary values associated to certain calculations that comes up with what a gas cost is.

Starting point is 00:51:28 And we can tinker with those numbers in order to balance the economic resources of the network. And EIP 4488 reduces the cost of call data, which is something that roll-ups all definitely use very, very heavily from 16 to 3. And so really this is Ethereum executing on its roll-up-centric roadmap from the get-go by making, by really just like allowing us to take off the brakes on roll-ups. So roll-up transactions just become meaningfully cheaper and also therefore faster. And yeah, and so that's what EIP-44-88 is all about. You know what I find so endlessly fascinating about this?

Starting point is 00:52:06 This reminds me of just like public policy changes to incent a certain behavior. Like the government does this all the time with its tax policy, right? So if you want more corn, right, you provide a subsidy for corn. You want more dairy. You provide a dairy subsidy, right? You encourage this behavior. You subsidize it economically. This is the Ethereum protocol encouraging migration to roll-ups,

Starting point is 00:52:31 encouraging users and usage to get off of layer one and to move over to roll-ups in a big way. So what's your take on this? Do you support this? I mean, there are some trade-offs, David, which is. is one is it does kind of increase block size, right? And so this could, if without further solutions in the future, this could make nodes a bit more difficult to run for individual users, which obviously can't go unchecked or you have another problem. Are you pro-EIP-448A or no? I mean, the pros and cons are definitely like way more technical than I can get into, but

Starting point is 00:53:14 Proto Lambda, I think as a proxy for me, as a delegate of my beliefs. If he supports it, then I 100% support it. And we've seen Ethereum have measured increases in block space plenty of times before. And the quick trivia fact is that I think the Ethereum block space is over like three to four times higher than it was at Genesis because our clients got more efficient. Our network had got more efficient. Things just improved. And so Ethereum is actually like three to four times more scaled than it started at Genesis because we were able to measuredly and responsibly and sustainably increase block space. And so sure, let's just do it again. There you go. That's David's take. Mahalo, this is about Uniswap and Polygon. What's happening here?

Starting point is 00:54:01 Yeah, so last week, the Polygon proposal to onboard Uniswap onto Polygon had overwhelming support that vote did in fact pass so they are moving on to the second phase of the governance process which is a temperature check pull and then there's another phase after that there's just a lot of hurdles but we're on to the second one so polygon perhaps eventually getting uniswap once it goes to it's going to happen right i mean i had overwhelming support so it's definitely going to happen do you know yesterday the time people read this would be the beacon chain birthday Happy birthday is the beacon chain. Proof of stake on Ethereum was born.

Starting point is 00:54:38 Do you remember that call when we were on as that was launching? It was a lot of fun. Yeah, my roommate chewed me out for waking him up because it was at like 4 in the morning. Well, he wasn't as excited as you were. And now I live alone. Bye, roommate. Sorry. Well, Vitalik put together a happy birthday beacon chain post with a handy roadmap.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And this is really interesting. This is the roadmap for Ethereum in the future. this most consolidated roadmap, I think I've seen, and it comes complete with timelines. And there are really five things going on that are going to happen with Ethereum. One is the merge. I have to.

Starting point is 00:55:14 Okay, I'll just read them fast. The merge, the surge, the verge, the purge, and then the splurge. Okay? And this is like memetic as well, because, you know, it's crypto. The merge we've talked about so often. That happens next year. Proof of stake becomes the consensus layer. Proof of work goes away.

Starting point is 00:55:32 The surge. is data sharding. The verge is providing stilchle trees. Merkle trees, verical trees. So providing more stateless ways to run a node, right? So it's easier for users to run a node. Again, each of these, by the way, are like efforts to continue decentralizing the network, right? The proof of stake and also data availability and the verge too.

Starting point is 00:55:56 The purge, this is eliminating historical data and technical debt. I'm a bit more fuzzy on this. And then the splurge seems like it's everything that's left over, just all the cherries on top and the bits of pieces that are going to be important in the future of Ethereum. Yeah, what do you make this roadmap? It's just really, really nice to see everything all in one spot. Vitalik of all people is one of the few people

Starting point is 00:56:19 that actually has the ability to kind of have this bird's eye view upon everything. These progress bars that you're seeing are definitely just completely subjective from the brain of Vitalik. But Vitalik's just known to be good at stuff like this. And so it's just nice to see like what is all left to do. And it's kind of overwhelming how much there is left to do. And it is nice to see that all these progress is happening in so many different directions at once. But like Ethereum has always had this very, very ambitious roadmap.

Starting point is 00:56:48 And, you know, while we get to the merge soon and then data shards after that, those are kind of close, there's still so much left to do. There's statelessness. There's stateless clients. There's meta-transactions. There's Z-K snarking the whole entire blog. blockchain. My God, that sounds hard and complicated. I'm glad I'm not the one having to do that. But I'll just talk about it along the way. But yeah, there's a lot left to do. And this is cool. When we had Justin Drake on our first episode with him, the moon math cryptography episode,

Starting point is 00:57:17 he talked about how Ethereum is just like this cryptographer's playground. And so, like, cryptography finally has a place to actually get meaningfully implemented and put into practice. And that's why Ethereum has attracted so many deep cryptographers because Ethereum, needs cryptography. And that's also one of the big things that really separates Ethereum from every other ecosystem is all the cryptographers are here. And our industry is based on cryptography, I will remind you. It's called cryptocurrency for a reason. And all useful bits of cryptography are eventually becoming integrated into Ethereum in this roadmap. Do you know what hits me with this roadmap to you is I feel like Thier's roadmap has never been more clear. So it's always been

Starting point is 00:58:01 incredibly ambitious. But it's never been as solidified and clear as it has been in in 2020. One. I feel like we've gotten that clarity. So like I remember back in 2017, 2018, I was like pining for a roadmap. Details. Like what's going to happen and when and how is this all going to work? And it just like, it wasn't available at the time.

Starting point is 00:58:25 It's like, oh yeah, we're going to have proof of sake in the future. Okay. Okay, how? Like what is the detail? What does that mean? Sharding, cool, sharding. Like, what? More details, please.

Starting point is 00:58:35 This is incredible progress, and that makes me bullish as well. So the Ethereum roadmap has never been more clear. Budweiser did it. Beer.eath. In their Twitter handle. They've owned beer.eath for a while, but now it's in their Twitter handle. Oh, wow. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:58:53 So can we send Budweiser some Eith? Can we send them some money? Totally. Will they send us some beer? Probably. I don't want Budweiser. I don't want any beer from Budweiser personally. That's the right answer.

Starting point is 00:59:05 Well, that's cool, man. It's like a huge brand, though. Budweiser is like the brand of beer and one of the major ones. I wonder if we'll see others following suits. Pretty cool to putting it in their handle. How many followers? Wow. I expected more.

Starting point is 00:59:19 Yeah, what? Weird. Only 230,000. 230,000 followers? Yeah. You have something like that, David? Are you close to that? Way more than that.

Starting point is 00:59:27 My alt has more than that. It's, what's this? A month for ENS. What's happening? Yeah, so this is just a summary of the activity on ENS. Brantley summons it up nicely. 90,000 new.eith registrations in November, all on the Ethereum L1. 7.6 million in protocol revenue. So, like, when you buy an ETH domain from ENS, it goes to now the ENS Dow.

Starting point is 00:59:51 So the EMS Dow got $7.1 million in ETH revenue this last month. And then 99% of OpenC volume. ENS trading activity is on open seat. So that's pretty crazy. And now there are 200,000 unique individual owners with an ENS name. Is this the token effect, David? It's definitely the token effect. Definitely the token effect.

Starting point is 01:00:13 It's funny. It's like I feel like Brentley's gotten a lot more popular too, like post-token effect, right? Like I'm seeing like, I just think communities rally around tokens. It's just what happens. It injects energy into whatever you're doing. Tokens are the place that communities can deposit energy and attention. and alignment into. Without a token, there is no coherence. Tokens align communities. I mean, Brantley's always been cool. He's just got like post-token, man.

Starting point is 01:00:37 But now he's token Brantley. He's hitting it. Tokenbrantley. Tokenbrantley.combrantley. Brantley, hope you're listening. This is a PSA. Watch out for front ends. I think front ends can become centralization vectors. And this is a tweet from Bantag saying anyone know when the Uniswap front end has started snitching on users? That's some harsh language. But what the app is saying is it's actually notifying you. This is the Uniswap front-end app. It's saying the app securely connects your wallet address

Starting point is 01:01:09 and shares it with TRM Labs incorporated for risk and compliance reasons. Okay, TRM Labs, it looks like they are some sort of apparatus that collects information for risk and compliance, which basically means for the government. I don't know if this is for the IRS, if this is for the SEC, who this is for, what compliance, what risk this is covering. But that is happening on the Uniswap front end. And I expect teams that are based in various jurisdictions.

Starting point is 01:01:39 Uniswap, of course, is based in the U.S. to be like arm twisted into doing this sort of thing on their front ends. Of course, this doesn't affect the smart contracts, the underlying smart contracts. This is not Uniswap. This is the Uniswap Labs, centralized company, their website. Yeah, that's a huge distinction. Why don't you get into what that distinction means? Right.

Starting point is 01:01:58 So we have the Uniswap smart contracts on Ethereum, which allow anyone to swap tokens through their liquidity, through their factory contracts. The front end of a very large number of websites allow, make it easy for users to use those smart contracts because no one's actually going and writing the code themselves. We have these front ends that do it for us. Uniswap spun up the first one,

Starting point is 01:02:21 but there's plenty of others. There's one on Zappers is a front end. Zerion is a front end. All the decks aggregates. can tap into uniswap, so they count as a front end. There's infinite front ends for uniswap. But the uniswap labs version of the front end collects your wallet address for compliance reasons.

Starting point is 01:02:38 And, like, you know what's interesting, Ryan, is like, there used to be, there, there's a time where the uniswop labs front end also, like, banned a bunch of tokens and also banned a bunch of countries. And then the Bitcoin maxis were like, see, we told you uniswap was centralized, not understanding the difference between the front end and the contracts. And now this time, maybe this hasn't made it into Bitcoiner circles yet, or maybe they've just given a- Oh, should I tag someone? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:02 Tag Anthony Pompliano. Tag Anthony Pomfielo. But like, you know, usually this would get some sort of attention from Bitcoiners talking about, oh, like, oh, I knew Ethereum was centralized. This one hasn't happened yet. I think they're feeling a little defeated on the ratio, maybe. Went out of their sales. I think they have, are fully relegated into gold bugs.

Starting point is 01:03:21 But anyway, so that used to happen all the time for those that are new to crypto. no longer happening now because people, I think, are understanding the difference between a centralized website and an application on Ethereum. Yeah, that's important. And I think this is an important PSA. And I also think it's sort of a reminder that, you know, centralized websites can become vectors for this sort of thing, right? And they're going to. So we've kind of decentralized the protocol. We've decentralized the money robots. And that's all good. That's all smart contract code. We have more work to do in crypto to make sure our front ends remain decentralized as well. And of course, anyone can spin up a front end.

Starting point is 01:04:00 This is not stopping anyone. But having the ability to have like decentralized storage, decentralized compute sort of layers is going to be incredibly important. And that's kind of where we're journeing because things tend to centralize unless you actively push against that force of gravity. Let's talk about this. NFT land. AMC, Sony, they're launching NFT rewards for the Spider-Man movie launch. David, I'm seeing this in theaters, man. I'm a big Spider-Man fan.

Starting point is 01:04:26 I know, look, you are classic Peter Parker. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to see you. But, like, you don't watch the new ones, right? Oh, sure. You're not a new Spider-Man? You do? Okay, so I'm seeing this in theaters.

Starting point is 01:04:36 Apparently, there's an NFT associated with this. This on the wax blockchain. It's kind of an NFT side chain. But what's interesting to me is, like, are all movies going to start having NFT releases? Like, why not? Of course they are. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:04:51 I remember when we were talking with D. Yogo and Kai from our Visa Anchorage podcast where they talked about how like the volatility of crypto actually is really, really attractive for a lot of companies because the volatility of crypto makes a lot of their users open up their app and check it. Oh yeah. That's such a good point. Yeah. And so like NFTs.

Starting point is 01:05:09 NFTs are just engagement magnets. It boosts engagement. It boosts engagement. Like for some reason. And this is why everyone is like, Macy's Day parade had NFTs. It boosts engagement. Yeah. It's like we're just talking about token, token Brantley.

Starting point is 01:05:22 What about token Spider-Man? Right. Token Spider-R-R-R-Ber. He's way better than the original Spider-Man. He's Token Spider-Man. Token Peter Parker. Yeah. That's what I want. So, like, all big movies are like trending towards just like, oh, and we will issue tokens during the box office weekends because that's what people want, I guess. There's token engagement. Yeah, that's interesting. And everyone's going to follow suit. We'll have to see how that progresses. I'm going to see the movie. I'm not going to get this NFT because, like, oh, how exhausting. Too many NFTs, man. This is Ross Ulbrick. This is an NFT to watch, though. Okay? So people probably are familiar with Ross's story. Maybe not, actually. Give him the short form.

Starting point is 01:06:03 And then he's starting an NFT auction in two days from jail. Is that what's happening? Okay. Yeah, so his mom is his liaison between him in jail and his Twitter account. So this is actually his mom talking on his behalf through his Twitter account. Ross Ulbricht is the famous Dread Pirate Roberts from the Silk Road Days. So the Silk Road was started by this guy of Ross Ulbricht. He is in jail for basically life on ridiculous trumped-up charges in my mind.

Starting point is 01:06:31 And he should absolutely be freed right now, but he's not. And he's kept in touch with the world of crypto. His mom prints out the front page of Reddit and gives it to him so he can review it and also feeds him other crypto news. And he's launching an NFT. And so Ross Ulbricks is launching an NFT auction. So Ross Ulbrick says in his post, with this NFT, I see a chance to make a difference where it really counts. In the lives of kids

Starting point is 01:06:55 who did not ask for any of this, there is a lot that we can do with the proceeds of the auction, but one idea I'm committed to is to help kids travel to visit their moms and dads in prison. Ross Holbeck, again, in prison for basically life. Very peaceful, nice guy. Mom has to come and visit him in prison all the time, and so the proceeds of this NFT are going to help, just help maintain connections between loved ones in prison. Are people hating on this, though? Bitcoiners are, yeah, because it's an NFT. So Ross Ulbricht went to jail before Ethereum was really a thing. And so he was always a bitcoiner.

Starting point is 01:07:30 And a lot of Bitcoiners are very, very upset that Ross Ulbricht, their beloved, like, jailed martyr, is using non-Bitcoin tech to do stuff. And so they're Bitcoiners following up on this tweet saying, God effing, damn it, Ross. And then another one saying, how to ruin your base in one fellow swoop. for just touching NFTs. Bitcoiners have absolutely lost the plot. Absolutely lost the plot.

Starting point is 01:07:57 Definitely purity tests have gotten more and more extreme, right, until you can't even like touch an NFT. This is Udi being satirical though, right? He's kind of joking on this. No, no, no, no, he is. This is Udi being serious. No. Yes, 100%.

Starting point is 01:08:10 Are you serious? Are you sure? Yes. I can never tell. Yes, no, Udi's being 100%. He says effing disgusting. Effing cult disgusting. Right. Talking about the Bitcoiners reacting to Ross Ulbricht.

Starting point is 01:08:22 Talking about the Bitcoiners? He's talking about the Bitcoiners. Like he's not anti-Ross. No, he is telling the Bitcoiners they're a disgusting effing cult. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I thought he was saying effing disgusting, like, effing cult about the NFT itself, about Ross doing the NFT. Okay. No, he's saying the Bitcoiners are being done. Call him out, man. Love you, Udi.

Starting point is 01:08:45 Most of the time. Most of the time. Most of the time. Let's talk about this, man. This is like a Reddit post. I'm going to full-screen this. This is some dude unlocking his house with an NFT. Yeah, an NFT that he has in his Ethereum wallet, connecting to the internet somehow, and then unlocking a door to his house.

Starting point is 01:09:04 There's also another example of this for the same thing with a car. And here's a fun piece of Ethereum trivia. This is why our shows go on so long, because we have so many stories to tell. There's this old, old organization called Slokit that I don't think is around anymore. that wanted to do exactly this, where you could go and, like, open up a locker, and the locker would have the thing that you would need in it, and, like, drones could come,

Starting point is 01:09:25 and it would all be based on Ethereum and public-private key cryptography. Very Ethereum 2016 sci-fi stuff. When we didn't really know what Ethereum would do when we thought we'd just do anything, right? Unlock bikes and unlock houses. Yeah, right, like, you know, communal sharing, communal resources, stuff like that. Slocut, the three guys behind Slocut are, they wanted this to not be a centralized company, so they wanted to start a Dow back in 2017. But then the idea kind of more from there,

Starting point is 01:09:53 I was like, well, why'd have this Dow just be about Sloket? Let's just have a Dow of Dow's. And I think you can see where this is going. This was the genesis of the Dow. The three guys behind the Slotet started to write the codes for the Dow, which turned into the Dow and then created the whole Ethereum classic mess. So yeah, that's a fun piece of Ethereum trivia. We are coming full circle to some of the utility and use

Starting point is 01:10:17 cases that we were dreaming of in 2016, now being happening just through the maturation of mobile wallets and also ENS and also NFTs. It's funny. You're not wrong. You're just early, is really the phrase here. So many things have happened in the history of technology where, you know, ideas are good. It's just not their time. And I think Slokit was one of them. And now here we are starting to unlock various locks with our NFTs. And it looks somewhat normal. I mean, this looks like a pretty good user experience. I'm not saying this is ready for mainstream, but it's a lot closer than it was in 2016. If you want to hear that full story, by the way, Griff Green, Layer Zero podcast. I listened to that one, David, I was laughing out loud in some spots. That was just a lot of fun. Tells the story of the Dow,

Starting point is 01:11:02 everything that went on with Slokit. I guess this is the internet of things, huh? The internet of scarce things, maybe. Very cool. Let's talk about immutable now, immutable X. Actually crushing it. Okay, so the first thing we want to talk about is they're getting a Fiat on ramp. So MoonPay is a Fiat on ramp. They're getting a Fiat on ramp directly to a mutable on and off ramp, which is something we need so dearly. So that's happening. And that means instant credit card purchases of your NFTs on top of the Mutable. This is mainstream ready.

Starting point is 01:11:38 Completely abstracting away. Like, oh, NFT, where can I swipe my credit card? That's what this partnership creates. And the awesome thing is gas fees on Immutable X are so incredibly low that you just don't actually have to be presently. They're not zero, but they are zero because they are so low because the immutable team is just paying for them. Yes, right, exactly. Yeah. And so there's zero from the perspective of a user.

Starting point is 01:12:02 I just like, I can buy my NFT with a credit card and it's all secured by Ethereum. Right. This is the difference. This is what we've been waiting for. Yep. Totally. We don't sacrifice decentralization. These are some immutable stats too.

Starting point is 01:12:14 Well, first, let's talk about their business development. Yeah, so immutable tweets out. We're getting 50 plus in bounds a day from the largest companies in the world wanting to use NFTs, and we need help. NFTs are eating the world to come accelerate it, hiring 30 plus business developers and CSMs. I don't know what CSM is. DM's open or apply here. They are also on our jobs board as well. Yeah, they are.

Starting point is 01:12:34 Some really cool jobs too. Head of Ethereum research. Is that one of them? Yep. Awesome jobs. What's your month, too. God, head of tokens. Yeah, head of tokens.

Starting point is 01:12:41 What a great name. Lord of tokens. Yeah. What's the Game of Thrones name? Master of coin. Master of coin. Master of coins. That's what I want.

Starting point is 01:12:49 Okay. A third Immutable Tweet that says October was a blockbuster months for community projects on Immutable X. US $30 million in US dollar trading fee volume. Gas free. 20 new NFT collections dropped. And then a link to a blog post with some of the most innovative NFTs projects that dropped last month. Overall, Immutable X is absolutely killing it. Congrats, guys.

Starting point is 01:13:11 We're about to find out what happens when you make block space virtually free and you allow fiat on ramps on top of that as well. So you mainstream the user experience. Earlier we were talking about Starknet and Starkware. Immutable X is built on StarkX, which is the pre version of StarkNet. Again, that's a topic to go into the Starkware team, the show that we talked about with them. Also, disclaimer, Ryan and I are angel investors into one of the immutable seed rounds. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:13:41 Bitcoin, Bitcoin news. The same news every week. Okay. El Salvador is buying 100 more Bitcoins as the market falls. Buy the dip, man. Buy the dip. El Salvador present doing that. So is Michael Saylor.

Starting point is 01:13:55 So that's what happened last week and the week before. It's happening this week again. El Salvador and Saylor buying the dip. I honestly, David, I think this is going to pay off for them. Probably. Like I don't hate it. It's going to pay off for them. It's just kind of funny to me that these are the things

Starting point is 01:14:11 we're reporting week after week. Yep. It feels like we got paralyzed in time around February of this year. And like not much has happened in Bitcoin land since. Hey, but like, again, according to the Bitcoin or value prop, that's the only thing that needs to happen. Okay. All right.

Starting point is 01:14:27 It is, it's kind of funny seeing El Salvador buying 100 more Bitcoins and Michael Saylor coming in and buying 7,05 more Bitcoins. There are some difference in numbers there. Yeah, well, he's, you know, Michael Saylor has a company and, you know, El Salvador. Michael Saylor can never sell his Bitcoin because, A, he has way too much of it. And if he does start to sell it, it's going to start to signal to the market that this massive Bitcoin whale, I don't know how much Bitcoin has. He doesn't have to sell it, though. Just if you believe in the monetization of Bitcoin, right, then you could just start using it.

Starting point is 01:15:00 Just lend against it, borrow against it. It's just collateral in the balance. You never have to sail. And the thing is, like, his trade, he's getting basically free money because he's borrowing it from, like, bonds. Right? It's like, you know, this is sort of a nice little arbitrage as long as Bitcoin continues to appreciate in value. Funny to me that he hasn't like looked at ether or some other alternatives out there at all. He's just laser-eyed focused on Bitcoin. Some quick stats is that micro strategy has bought $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin that's currently clocking in at $6.8 billion.

Starting point is 01:15:36 So almost a 2x. They've got $121,000 Bitcoin. which is roughly a little bit over half of the total, one half of one percent of the total supply of Bitcoins. One day, maybe he turns that into WBT because no one else will give him a loan on his Bitcoins. And so he's got to defy to do it. It's possible. It's possible.

Starting point is 01:15:55 He might just buy a crypto bank, though, and do it himself. We'll see. China's crypto censorship is now reaching, not just mining companies, of course, which have mass moved. There was a mass exodus of mining companies. proof of work mining companies out of China. But now it's pouring into news outlets.

Starting point is 01:16:12 So there's the banning of crypto media companies in China as well as they continue the crackdown. What are your thoughts? Overall, China just slowly pushing out everything to do with crypto to their loss. I think it's a reasonable claim to say that in the long term, 10, 15, 20 years, China will lose its power because of its pushing out of crypto. I think this is going to be, this is a catastrophic error on China that's going to come back to bite them in the butt, maybe in 15, 20, 20 years or so, something like that. I think that's how the game theory works out. But if you're, this is why it's an

Starting point is 01:16:47 asset test of how authoritarian your country is with respect to how it responds to crypto, right? It's like we're seeing this acid test play out in every, in every government worldwide. And I don't think the U.S. is immune. We'll see what the U.S. continues to do with crypto. But like China, which is a bit more authoritarian, top down, they are going all out banning crypto, like get it out of here. And I think in the process, you're exactly right. They're being outplayed by crypto. This is a strategic mishap. But they have big aspirations for their centralized money system, you know, crypto and quotes money system. So we'll see how that plays out as well. Let's talk about Powell. He's redefining what he means by transitory inflation. Do you remember this

Starting point is 01:17:33 meme over the summer? It's like not inflation. It's just transitory. Yeah. inflation. All the crypto people were like, we know. There was that, there was the, I can't remember where I saw this, but there was something along the lines of like the Federal Reserve has finally admitted that inflation is finally here. And then there was meanwhile crypto Twitter a year ago. And there was that animation of the money printers going burr and like this anime girl just

Starting point is 01:17:59 like dancing. It's like, we were making memes about inflation a year ago. And finally the Fed is like, yo, guys, I think inflation might be here. he says he's done with the term this is a quote from jerome powell i think it's probably a good time to retire that term transitory and try to explain more clearly what we mean and then he goes on to try to explain that it's not going to be so transitory after all yeah yeah this is this is a meme i put out david i just thought it was funny it's kind of like an onion style meme this is like breaking news Powell clarifies transitory inflation.

Starting point is 01:18:33 From the perspective of our 13.8 billion year old universe, humanity itself is transitory. Yeah, what is transitory? This is relative. Everything is relative, of course. Transitory, not so transitory after all. Congress is still holding hearings on crypto. This one with Coinbase, FTX, Paxos, some other crypto banks as well. What's happening here?

Starting point is 01:18:57 Centralized crypto banks being summoned to Congress for a centralization. hearing from the centralized forms of government, but you know what's not anything defy related because you can't summon defy, and that's the story there. Anyways, the government is looking at crypto more and more and more. So it's going to be interesting to see what is actually discussed at these hearings. All right, guys, we're going to be back with the hot takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful.

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Starting point is 01:21:41 And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Let's start with this. Is this going to be the last time we talk about the Ethereum pre-mine, David? Damn, I hope so. No. No. Okay, it's not going to be. This is a detailed pie chart of eith genesis allocations. Why don't you guide us through this? And then maybe we can refer people to this clip when they ask the next time. Yeah, so there's a bunch of different colors here. There's also 45.9 million ether that's been mined since the pre-genesis allocations. Everything else is the pre-genesis allocations. And then the 46 million

Starting point is 01:22:20 ether that's also mined has been mined since the pre-sale. So starting from the biggest to the smallest, a little over 60 million ether was sold. 60.1 million was acquired, ether was acquired by sending, in 2014 by sending BTC to a widely public-sized ether sale address, again, no KYC, no registration, just sending in Bitcoin to an address. The next largest slice, not including the mining, is allocation to early contributors. And those are people like the Ethereum co-founders. I believe there was eight of them. That is 8.4 million of those as well. And then 3.4 million ether got sent towards the EF, and that is the next largest slice. Today, the EF only holds 350,000. So the EF has reduced their ether holdings by 10x.

Starting point is 01:23:11 1 tenth is what they currently own of their initial distributions. And then the largest single recipient, Vitalik Buterin himself, an accidental meme lord received 696,900 ether. from the Genesis event. I don't know how much he holds, but he's definitely distributed a bunch of his tokens as well. To me, Ryan, this seems very, very fair, and this was the intent of the Ethereum presale.

Starting point is 01:23:37 Over 50%, well over 50%. It was something like 70, 75% of all ether at Genesis was sold freely and openly to the public without any sort of registration or KYC or private presale or whatever. Then we got the early contributors, like the eight-ish,

Starting point is 01:23:53 maybe there's more of the Ethereum co-founders. and then the EF. The amount that was given away to the public, and it was only raised, like, they only raised, like, $14 million was, like, 75% of the total supply.

Starting point is 01:24:06 Yeah, and this, the allocation early contributors wasn't just, like, co-founders. It was just a whole slew of other workers. There were hundreds of different,

Starting point is 01:24:14 you know, developers and people involved. Yeah. And what, so what's interesting to me is, like, some of the takeaways are, okay,

Starting point is 01:24:20 like, 55% or so, something around that, that range, went to, the pre-sale of like the total supply now right way more wait wait what are you talking about at the time of the sale or now not now now in now supply terms right if you're just like zoom out and look at the supply and then you had another like 40 percent or so like 35 40 percent or so that were like fairly

Starting point is 01:24:44 distributed via proof of work mining i got i got some of those yeah exactly and that's part of the reason you came into crypto right david yeah exactly and a lot of other coins that start with proof of stake do not have this proof of work distribution for like this period of time. There's a massive amount that was distributed this way. What's interesting to me too is like you talk about like the centralization of the Ethereum Foundation like some people do. I don't know if anyone does anymore. Look man, they have like 0.4% of supply, something like this, right?

Starting point is 01:25:14 Like less than half a percent of the total supply. Vitalik himself, right? After you dilute through all this proof of work, he's got far less than 1%. I don't know. It's like 0.4%. You never had more percent. Yeah. In what world does the founder of a thing, of anything, have that kind of like I, so if

Starting point is 01:25:35 Satoshi was smart, he was mining Bitcoin from inception, right? I'm sure he was. Okay. So, like, he probably had a far higher percentage. I mean, it's impossible to know, but like if you look at Satoshi's addresses, that sort of thing, things that might be linked to him, then, then Vitalik does of Ethereum. It's like Michael Saylor owns more freaking Bitcoin than Vitalik owns of the supply of ether. So, I don't know, I guess this is maybe the last time we talk about this.

Starting point is 01:26:06 It just seems to me like such a, the pre-mine thing seems like such a non-issue to me. It looks like a pretty fair distribution. And for the newer listeners, the pre-mine presale thing is really just ticked off a lot of bitcoins who are able to contrast it with the whole fair launch of Bitcoin. But fair is just relative. It's really just a subjective argument as to what is fair or not. So you really have to do your own critical thinking and ask yourself what is fair. And then the other side of this is the whole VC chains and the way that they got bootstrapped.

Starting point is 01:26:39 Really the hot ones, the ones that we were talking about last week are the avalanche and salon chains, where far greater, like two-thirds of the supply was sold in private pre-sales, so financially well-capitalized VC firms. In my mind, when we talk about public permissionless blockchains, public open money as a public utility, that is extremely unfair. And so there is these differences. The first impressions of these chains are really, really important. And I think the way that Ethereum, the ether distribution happened from day one, and then what happened with proof of work mining over the next six years is as fair as we could have ever have hoped for.

Starting point is 01:27:16 It could probably only happen one time, too. It's right? It's like, you know, ever after ICOs were kind of diluted. Here's a take two, David. Optimism is Ethereum, Arbitrum is Ethereum, Starkware is Ethereum, ZK Sync is Ethereum, amputable is Ethereum. Why? Because Ethereum is the chain of chains. When we're looking at, you know, transactions last week, the total transaction throughput of Ethereum from that website, I can't recall it at the top of my head, but I'd like to, you know, talk about it maybe next week a little bit, roll-ups. It just shows you that the total transaction throughput of Ethereum is not just what happens on Mainnet. It's what happens on Mainnet plus

Starting point is 01:27:54 optimism, arbitram, starkware, ZK Sync, immutable, all of these things, if they're secured by Ethereum are Ethereum. It's like California, Texas, Nevada, all of these things, they're different states, but they're all part of the United States, right? And so when we talk about, like, the U.S. being a union of states, Ethereum is like a union of chains. It's the Ethereum Union. It's the EU.

Starting point is 01:28:20 Ethereum, the chain of chains. I think that's important for people to start understanding that more of this activity is going to happen in layer twos and Ethereum will be the mainnet at least will be a settlement layer of all of these chains. But the entire collection of these chains will also be Ethereum, the Ethereum Union. The website that Ryan was talking about is eth-tPS.info if you want to check that out.

Starting point is 01:28:45 The other cool thing is that you can actually deploy roll-ups on top of roll-ups and then you can deploy roll-ups on top of those roll-ups. So, like, you can deploy roll-ups all the way down. And, like, think of just, like, a gigantic fractal, like, root system or just, like, branches of a tree, where these roll-ups spin-off of roll-ups, because of why not. And eventually, like, everything settles down,

Starting point is 01:29:06 down to the very base protocol, the Ethereum protocol. So no wonder gas fees are so incredibly high. The weights of all L-2s are pushing pressure on the gas fees on L-1. That's why users got to get off the L-1. one and go to L2s. Shout out to everyone that played borderlands two, the lava's rising meme. That one's a big one in that community.

Starting point is 01:29:29 The lava is rising on layer one. You got to get off. You got to get off at some point. Yep. Mainchain is lava. Say it again. It's Brantley again. Hey, Token Brantley.

Starting point is 01:29:39 What's he saying? Brantley says, things I expect to see with DOWs. Dow's splits. Dows firing people. Hostile takeovers, governance attacks, cross-Dow coalitions, Dow's going bankrupt, lawsuits against Daos,

Starting point is 01:29:51 Dow's reorging to cut people out, quote, going centralized, like going private, Dow's merging with acquiring other DAOs. Basically the same exact behavior that we have seen throughout all of human, just organizational efforts, but now we're just doing it in Daos, because again,

Starting point is 01:30:06 DAO's are nothing new under the sun. They're just humans organizing in a different vehicle in a different way, this time on Ethereum, this time with tokens. And so these same sort of behaviors that we've seen before are probably going to play out

Starting point is 01:30:19 again, at least that's what Token Brantley is saying. Well, then it begs the question, are Dow's any different than corporations than are, you know, corporate organizations? In some ways, they are a complete paradigm shift, and in others they are exactly the same. Yeah, I think that's the right take. I think that's a good take. And, you know, I do hope we can invent some things that are different from a governance perspective as well as we go on.

Starting point is 01:30:47 But a lot of what we've seen is less. less Dow, I guess, in more digital organization. Brantley, he follows up saying we are currently living in the golden age in an early naive golden age of Dow's when none of the above has really happened yet. But it will. The next decade is going to be fun. That's a good take. Oh, and then somebody also responded saying this has actually already happened with

Starting point is 01:31:08 Steamit, which is a different, what was once a blockchain. And there was this attempted hostile takeover by Justin's son. And then the Steemit Dow was like yoint his funds by forking them. themselves. The ability to fork is definitely a new governance, you know, paradigm shifts, I think. Let's talk about this. Squish chaos. What's he saying? Squish chaos. L2s or L1s is the entire crypto bet right now. You may think you're betting on Eith, but really you're betting on ZK Sink, Starkware, Arbitrum, and optimism. Or alternatively, you may be thinking that you're betting on Avalanche or Solana, but really you're betting on the multi-chain L1. I thought this was

Starting point is 01:31:46 really, really good take. I agree. There needs to be Many, many, many, many, many blockchains. And as I've said, I've said before, where I kind of think the whole multi-chain world is going to start to mean multi-chain on Ethereum, multi-L-2s. And like these L-2s will be bridged by things like Connects and Hop and all these other like cross-chain liquidity providers.

Starting point is 01:32:04 Or you can bet on the multi-layer-1 ecosystem where you have Solana and Avalanche and Ethereum and Bitcoin. And then maybe something like Pocodot or Cosmos is like the connecting layer. I think listeners know where I've placed my bets. I'm betting that it's easier to actually just implement layer twos on one single chain and that will allow that one chain to optimize for decentralization. And the reason why is because in a multi-L-1 world, you have multi-sig bridges,

Starting point is 01:32:35 whereas in a layer two world that's all built on one single L-1, you have the world of cryptographically secured roll-ups. And remember, this industry is about cryptography at the end of the day, not multi-sigs. remember to listen to our Rune Christensen podcast where we went through the full game theory unpacking the differences between an L2 world and a multi-sig side chain world.

Starting point is 01:32:57 One is just way better, way more efficient, way more liquid, and in that world, only one chain needs to focus on decentralization and that one chain can sell its decentralization to every single other layer two via roll-ups. And that is Ethereum. Yeah, this is, I think it's a really interesting take, right? The other side of this take is like, so first of all, I wonder if people realize that this is actually what they're betting on.

Starting point is 01:33:26 Okay? Like when they purchase ETH or when they purchase Avalanche. The second thing I wonder about this is, do you think it's a good bet to bet on ZK Sync and Starkware and Arbitrum and, you know, optimism? Because Squish is also right when he's saying that a bet on Ethereum, and ETH, the asset, is you're actually, ETH is actually outsourcing its execution layer to all of these other chains.

Starting point is 01:33:54 And so that means these roll-up chains will own the user experience, they'll own the Fiat onboarding. It's like almost in a way giving up a lot of control that it had previously in its monolithic model. And is that a safe bet, is the question? Because now Ethereum is more dependent on these other chains to carry it forward.

Starting point is 01:34:16 What's your take on the? that? It's kind of like whackamol where like maybe one L2 doesn't work, but you can, you, you can have many, many L2s, right? Not all of them have to work for Ethereum to be successful. But if you're betting on Avalanche, and D.C. Investor follows this take up saying, well, Squish says, if you're betting on Avalanche, you're actually betting on a multi-chain world. And D.C. investor says, well, if you're betting on Avalanche, no, you're actually just betting on Avalanche. There can be a multi-chain future where Avalanche doesn't succeed. And so, yeah, many, many L2s can come, Ryan, and then not work.

Starting point is 01:34:49 But Ethereum, the L1, can still work because only some of the L2s need to work. Whereas if you're betting on L1s, you are making a very specific bet upon a specific L1. If you bet on Ethereum, you're not betting on a specific L2. You're betting on the concept of L2s at large. Yeah, I'm kind of, I've been obsessed recently, David, about this analogy between, like, the United States and, like, Ethereum. It's like with the idea of like a union of states. basically. Think of every single roll-up as a different state. Right. And like when I say state,

Starting point is 01:35:23 I'm talking about like a state in the United States, right? So it has its own set of laws. It has kind of its own economy. Heavily skewed towards state rights, by the way. Exactly. And it has its own jurisdiction and, you know, where do people move? Well, they just move to a state where good laws, decent taxes, reasonable taxes, good services, and lots of jobs, right? So so the population migrates from state to state. And the economic output, of the United States is just an amalgamation, an aggregation of the economic output of all of its individual 50 states. Isn't that interesting? And like some states have done better than others, right? Economically or from a variety of other factors, depending on how you measure the metrics,

Starting point is 01:36:03 but you got 50 separate experiments. That's what's happening with Ethereum is basically like all of these roll-ups will have their own experiments, but the economic output of all of these roll-ups will actually end up partially in ETH the asset. ETH as the money and the store of value and the chief utility across all of these states, too. Yeah. I'm obsessed with that analogy. Love it. Won't be the end of it.

Starting point is 01:36:30 Kyle Davies. Fundamentals are a joke. Kyle Davies from Three Aros Capital, which is the entity that was kind of the subject to a lot of the I or the Ethereum community last week. Yeah, he says, fundamentals are a joke. Fundamentals are a joke. And granted, we just talked about Omicross. this token that has nothing to do with COVID or anything, pumping.

Starting point is 01:36:48 And how are people? Huh? And people. Yeah. Dogecoin, for that matter. So, like, granted, there are a lot of things that are pumping that don't have any fundamentals. But in my mind, you can't just say that fundamentals are a joke.

Starting point is 01:37:02 That's equivalent in my mind of saying real life is a joke. Like, fundamentals are based in real life. And so I followed up and says, and I said, nothing matters, said the nihilist. And then Kyle Davies response to me, long live the meme. So he's agreeing nothing matters. Yeah, and then I go, without fundamentals, memes are just fads. Memes with fundamentals, however, can last forever.

Starting point is 01:37:23 I'm acknowledging the power of memes. But what's even more powerful is memes that are backed by fundamentals. Totally agree with those takes. Yeah, totally agree. There's a reason why we do a podcast together, Ryan. I know, man. Look, it also, I think it also depends on your time horizon, right? So it's like that's another way to say the same thing.

Starting point is 01:37:40 Fundamentals are a joke in the short run, but they matter a lot in the long run. Try to survive a bear cycle on just memes alone and narratives alone, right? Like, no, you go back down to the base, you boil it all down to the fundamentals, and then you rebuild every bare cycle. How do you have conviction without fundamentals? I don't think a traitor needs to have conviction. That's the thing.

Starting point is 01:38:02 It's just back to the Ryan Selkis tweets. Like everyone's arguing and they're just arguing about timelines and time horizons rather than actual substantive, you know, issues. David, this is your take. I'm going to read it out. Eth is the best way to get exposure to the Metaverse. Nothing else comes close. Yeah, so the Metaverse, if you guys remember listening to our Metaverse defined podcast, which you should definitely go back and listen to, the Metaverse isn't one thing.

Starting point is 01:38:26 The Metaverse is not going to be having exposure by Facebook stock or, you know, Decentraland or Sandbox token. The metaverse is going to be a collection of very many, many, many different micrometaverses. The overall aggregate Metaverse is going to be a collection of many, many different things. The only way that I see possible to actually have direct exposure to the growth of the metaverse is with Ether, because Ether is Metaverse money. I think in hindsight, in like 2030, people will look at Ethereum and while we see it as a parallel financial system, people in 2030 will see Ethereum as the Metaverse, the thing that

Starting point is 01:39:04 supports the single shared registry of all known objects in the Metaverse. and Ether will be Metaverse money because it will be the liquidity currency for all of these objects. I think Ether, as the asset, is going to track the growth of the Metaverse, far better than any other asset possible. And that includes the MVI, sorry Index Co-op people, that includes the MVI Metaverse Index Fund, because the problem with that is that you actually have to put in Metaverse assets into the Metaverse Index, but after they're established, after some of them have grown, and they're not going to be, able to capture all of the growth of the Metaverse by definition because it is reactive rather than being proactive where Ether already exists today and we know that the Metaverse

Starting point is 01:39:48 will exist tomorrow. Therefore you can buy Ether today on the back of the growth of the Metaverse. If you want to have exposure to the Metaverse, buy the money that people are going to use in the Metaverse. Like it's that simple. Yeah, I think it's that simple as well. And look, man, I'm going to go back to my U.S. analogy like one more time, okay, one more time in this podcast, right? So, like, if you want economic exposure to the, to the United States in the 1900s, it would have been a bad play to just buy the dollar and T-bills or something, treasuries, right? But it would have been a good play to buy some of those things, maybe, but also the S&P, like all of the, all of the companies that are big. And that's kind of what

Starting point is 01:40:27 you're getting with E. Right. Right. You're getting exposure to the economic output of Ethereum and all of its nation states and the entire metaverse, right? And, and, you're you're getting an index level, like, performance of that. Heath is an index of everything that's happening on top of Ethereum. Pretty much. Pretty much. All right, Dave, it's that time. What are you excited about this week, man?

Starting point is 01:40:48 Oh, man. Yesterday last night, I recorded a layer zero with Justin Aversano. Justin is the photographer behind the Twin Flames project. And man, was that guy's story? Really, really cool. I usually slate out 90 minutes for these episodes, but we almost went for two hours just because the story wasn't over by the time we hit the end. Justin has this insanely cool story where he's connecting his, I don't want to spoil too much of it.

Starting point is 01:41:14 His mom died of ovarian cancer right after he started getting into photography. One of the reasons why his mom had ovarian cancer is because he lost his twin in the womb. And he also made this twin project, which he took 100 pictures of 100 different twins all over the world and got into the world of NFTs by selling this project. There's so much more to the story. It's a crazy story, and this story is one of the reasons why I started doing layer zeros in the first place to get some of these stories out.

Starting point is 01:41:45 And the cool thing about this is that, you know, layer zeros, I started with people like Vitalik's dad, Dimitri, and Eric Connor, who has been with Ethereum since day one, and Danny Ryan and Tim Bako, all the protocol people. But I also want to talk to the people that didn't care about Ethereum but got pulled into Ethereum because something about Ethereum changed their life. And that's what happened on this week's next week's episode of Layer Zero. So do not miss that one. It was a great story. That's hype, man. That's great.

Starting point is 01:42:12 I'm looking forward to that. It's like you're a cultural, a cryptocultural anthropologist is sort of what Layers, you know, zero is. I have a ton of fun doing them. Surfacing these stories, yeah. Yeah. Layer Zero's are just some of my favorites because like I just pull someone into Zoom and they just tell me a story for an hour and a half. And I'm like, oh, this is great. No prep. You just have a conversation. It's nice. What are you excited about this week, Ryan? I was just thankful for like two days of rest. Like I got off screens, had some, you know, fun in real life, just hanging out with my family over Thanksgiving.

Starting point is 01:42:42 And just like sometimes we forget, like real life is good. Do you know? Like we're digital all the time. But real life matters. But there's always this counterforce in crypto. And I don't know if you're the same way, David, but it's like, it's always like, what did you miss? Like I missed a couple of days. What did I miss?

Starting point is 01:42:58 Did I miss any alpha? Did I miss any opportunities? And the truth is, like, if you're a. way for too long in crypto, you will miss out on some opportunities, right? But then you have to like reevaluate what's important in your life. And I think it was important for me to remind myself, this crypto thing is a marathon. It's not a sprint. Like, you don't have to be first on every single opportunity. You don't have to like get the alpha from day one, right? It's like, don't play that game. Don't exhaust yourself that way. That's no way to live. And then like,

Starting point is 01:43:30 what's really important. And wealth is not the most important thing at the end of the day. I think Kevin O'Waki said it's like optimize for freedom. We're optimizing for freedom here, not wealth, right? And it's like if you're a slave to your screen, you're a slave to crypto prices, blockfolio, that's not freedom. Right. Right? You know, so like, re-evaluate what wealth actually is and you make sure you're looking at it through the lens of freedom is sort of another thing I kind of took away from a couple days of rest. And the other thing is always important to remember is like comparison is the thief of joy, okay?

Starting point is 01:44:06 Like, just, there's always going to be someone who's doing better, right? You ever play a video game? Like, you know, Fortnite or something. It's like, there's always someone who is just 10 times better than you. They always will be. Like, just enjoy the game, though. You don't have to be as good as that.

Starting point is 01:44:22 And you don't have to be first in crypto. You don't have to get every 100x upside that you see. So it's just a time to reflect. and help me stay grounded and realize, like, maybe this is a message someone needs to hear today. Like, stop chasing all the time, just enjoy the ride and have fun. That's what this is about. And I hope this year has been like that for you. When it's not, just zoom out and reevaluate, realize what's important because those are the things that are important, at least to me.

Starting point is 01:44:53 And it helped me realize that. The story of the progression of crypto is going to last for our entire lifetimes. So you have to sustain yourself so you can watch that story unfold because that's, to me, like this is just one of the best movies that's ever happened, which is the story of crypto. And the cool thing about this movie is that it's going to last 60, 70, 80 year, however long I do, the whole time. And so again, you got to sustain yourself because like you said, it's a marathon, not a sprint. There you go, guys.

Starting point is 01:45:23 That's the message. All right, meme of the week. Me in the week. It's meantime, David, this is a Thanksgiving meme too. Good timing on this. Yeah, so I said this is a tweet. I said GM to you, if this was you. And then in 2017, we have that crypto dude at Thanksgiving.

Starting point is 01:45:38 And this is Charlie from All Be Sunny in the Philadelphia doing the whole crazy eyes, connecting all the different crazy things. Like, oh, the crypto's going to change the world. It's so amazing. But he looks absolutely insane doing it. And then in 2021, we have like this. like royalty guy like looking over the banister of some like deck with dressed in some like royal looking stuff. Just very, very superior looking and the label's 2021. So if you were the crypto crazy

Starting point is 01:46:07 guy in 2017 and then you also felt you're now royalty. Very, very proven in 2021 jam to you. Yeah, absolutely. That's very much what it felt like in 2017 versus 2021. Do you know where this image is from, the second one? I do not. All right. Fun fact. I won't tell you I know. from the Twilight movies, David. I'm embarrassed. I know that. I'm embarrassed, I know that. These are the vampires of the Twilight movies.

Starting point is 01:46:30 Do your kids watch Twilight, Ryan? Yeah, that's it. My kids watch Twilight, guys. Oh, that's not it. Let's run it back. Moment of Zen. We'll never know. Moment of Zen, guys.

Starting point is 01:46:40 Oh, my God. Ryan's a Twilight fan. Heath is risky. Bitcoin is risky. You can definitely lose what you put in. I'm fading out on that. But we are going bankless. Thanks for joining us on the journey. David, you got me all flustered.

Starting point is 01:46:53 screwed up the ending. See you later, guys. This is your moment of Zen. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our Alpha Leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto,

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Starting point is 01:48:23 Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation.

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