Bankless - ROLLUP: Jack Dorsey vs Web3 | Apes Flippening Punks | Weeknd NFTs | SOS & GasDAO Airdrop | FEI RARI

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm just excited about next year. I'm excited about 2022. Excited about crypto. Bullish crypto, David. You believe that? I'm bullish crypto. Yeah. Hey, Bankless Nation. It's Friday morning. Happy New Year to you. Well, it's almost the New Year. I guess it's New Year's Eve Day that David and I are recording this. And it's roll up time, David. Well, actually, I stole your thunder. What time is it, David?

Starting point is 00:00:23 Oh, it's roll up time, Ryan. Thanks for the stop following that one to me. Yeah, no, it's time to roll up the whole entire year. Actually, we already did that, but this is going to be the last roll up of 2021. We are covering the last two weeks, so there's a lot to cram in, but also it's one of those times of the year where there's kind of quiet. So it might actually just be the same kind of length, same roll-up covering two weeks, but about the same amount of stuff, hopefully, and hopefully we can get this done in a reasonable amount of time. We were really, really good at it last time. We'll see if we can do it again. So some of that stuff we're going to cover is Shopify. They just opened up their platform to NFTs.

Starting point is 00:00:58 That's really cool. It's also been like air drop week for the past week and a half. Everyone's dropping coins, you know, I guess right before the new year. I don't know why. But we'll talk about some of those airdrops that are coming. Also, the biggest protocol merger ever was just approved this week. Two big D5 protocols teaming up. We've also got like old brands like Radio Shack.

Starting point is 00:01:18 They are entering the DFi space. Are they though? Are they? Yeah, good question. We'll get into that. And also Jack Dorsey versus Web 3, a tussle on Twitter. We're going to talk about that too. So a lot of things going on in the holidays as well.

Starting point is 00:01:33 And once again, we will roll this up for you and talk about each of those with some additional things. Before we do, David, let's talk a little bit about hash flow. Hashflow, all right. Yeah, so hash flow is like this defy OTC desk. What is an OTC desk, David? And what does this protocol do? Yeah, an OTC desk is if you have a big trade, if you're a trading firm or just you, Do you want something just to have your price be optimized?

Starting point is 00:01:58 An OTC desk is where you go. You throw them a bunch of money and then they get you back, your trade, back to you at an optimized price. Hashflow is that, but as a DFI app, OTCDFI. So they work with you to automatically get you the best price on your trade, as well as things like M.EV resistance, front running resistance, and just a number of other things to make sure that you get the best price, when you make your swap.

Starting point is 00:02:25 So you can check them out at app.hashflow.com. That's pretty cool for Wales, too. And rumor is they are issuing a token as well. We'll get to that a little bit further in the roll-up. All right, David, well, let's talk about Bitcoin as we get into the markets. The markets this week for Bitcoin. And David, why don't you give us like the two weeks? We usually do just one week, but what's the two-week's highs and lows look like?

Starting point is 00:02:49 Yeah, two weeks. We started this two weeks ago at $48,000. We are currently at 47,300. So over two weeks, we're down $700 with Bitcoin, hit a low of $46,000, hit a high of 52,000 overall down 3% over the two weeks. Just down 3%. It felt like it was down more. Maybe that was because of Ether price has been down, and it feels like a lot more. What's the last two weeks been for Ether? Yeah, two weeks ago, Ether started at $4,000. Hit a low of $3,650. A little bit surprising how low that got. It's high during that time period was $4,150. We are currently at 3,750. So overall down 6% over the two-week period. My take on this is this is just low liquidity shenanigans.

Starting point is 00:03:34 This is the end of the year, all the traders and market makers and all institutions that place bids and asks on exchanges, just, you know, they take a break too. And so just the markets are very, very low liquidity in a low liquid state towards the end of the year. And so this is a ripe opportunity for whales to play some whale games. I suspect that that's kind of what's going on here. I don't really treat these numbers as real. I'm going to wait until the first week of January to actually reaffirm what the real prices are.

Starting point is 00:04:04 I feel like retail is taking some time off to you. Like retail isn't really bidding these things up either. They're just kind of letting it happen. So maybe that's what's going on as well. But I'm kind of glad that we're not ending the year in Euphoria territory, to be honest. I feel like this tees us up for next year. And I'm anticipating a big year next year, bullish, going into 2022. How about you?

Starting point is 00:04:25 Oh, absolutely. And you have the one month's chart pulled up on Ether right now. And it's a bad one month's chart. Yeah, that is bad, actually. Starting the month at $4,700, ending the month at $3,700. So down $1,000 on the month. Three month looks okay, though. Three month looks great.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Yeah, so starting the three month at $3,200, hitting the high of $4,800, and ending at $3,700, dollars. Just a crab, crab two months, slightly up three months, bearish one month. Overall, just like a quieter market than what we have been used to. So I think that's setting us up for a fantastic January. Well, we're looking at it. Let's look at the year. $730 at the start of this year. And now we're 3,700. So not a bad way to finish it. But also not euphoric, right? Like, things didn't get crazy last year. So maybe we'll save some of the craziness for next year. How about the ratio?

Starting point is 00:05:25 What's that doing? Yeah, ratio also down, down with the market as well. It's down to 0.086. So kind of broke through that 0.08 number, but still overall in a satisfying place if you believe in the flippinging. Do you believe in the flippinging, sir? Oh, yeah, definitely. A core believer in the flippinging.

Starting point is 00:05:44 Founder of the flippinging belief. How about the bed index? All right. This is a third, a third, a third, defy, Bitcoin, and Ether. We must be down on the two weeks. We are down 18% on the one month. The last two weeks have been flat or ish. I think we're down at roughly $6 from 141 to 135, where we are now. Okay, there we go. Let's talk about decentralized exchanges though. Well, we're on markets, David, because if you aggregate this and look over the year, this has been an incredible year for decentralized exchanges. Over $1 trillion. in trading volume activity in 2021.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Absolutely phenomenal. You can see this chart. This is kind of the compilation. You see a lot of uniswap here from V2 and V1. Also, sushi swap, curve, Serum. They're about 14 others, kind of a long tail of Dex's. Uniswap, by far, the most dominant. But what an incredible year for decentralized exchanges.

Starting point is 00:06:41 I remember not too long ago, people said that decentralized exchanges would never take off. Right. It's like because you couldn't out host an order book on Ethereum is too slow. And that wasn't that long ago. That was like, you know, 2017, 2018, 0X was trying to make it in that world and really just couldn't. Now decentralized exchanges, like they're just taken for granted. But this is something that has totally burst onto the scene. And what an incredible year, one trillion in trading volume.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Dex is breaking through coin bases, volume numbers on a 24 hour or even a weekly basis. is now like kind of feels like normal. Dex volume numbers don't make big headlines anymore. People are just assuming that they are the things that just carry us into the future when it comes to markets. Yeah. I mean, the next milestones to break her, it's like NASDAQ, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:31 It's like, wake me up when Dexes are bigger than the NASDAQ and, you know, New York Stock Exchange. 22? I'm not going to call that, okay? I got my predictions, but that's not one of them yet. Not for 2022. Let's talk about you're in finance. So this is the YFI token, the protocol behind the YFI token.

Starting point is 00:07:51 It had a pretty good week despite DFI collectively being down, sort over 85% one week. And the reason is token economic changes. Okay, governance put together a few ways to juice the YFI token or to deliver more value to token holders. One of those ideas that went forward through governance is the ability to stake YFI tokens in exchange for X YFI tokens. And then holders would receive additional YFI and Yerun would buy that YFI in the open market. So it's almost like an open market operation in exchange for staking Wi-Fi. They also are considering implementing a model that's based on curve finance, or the more you Wi-Fi you lock up, the greater rewards that you get in YFI tokens as well.

Starting point is 00:08:45 There are a number of other things, but I think the big takeaway here is like, this is sort of what we anticipated. Every token protocol is very much incented through its government process to start capturing the value that's accrued by its protocol, by its token. And sometimes this happens during bear markets.

Starting point is 00:09:04 This will also happen during bull markets, but every defy token is going to do this. This is why I'm not worried about token value capture long term as long as it's governed by individuals with a profit incentive and they all are. What are your thoughts on this, David? Yeah, there's this inevitable friction behind the value that a protocol offers to the ecosystem and then the actual valuation of the token on the secondary markets. Those things are separate things and the field, the domain of knowledge that we are calling

Starting point is 00:09:36 tokenomics is about how do we get those things more aligned? do we get those things to overlap rather than be separate? And Uran has really struggled with this throughout 2021, where I think it's more or less been flat versus the dollar and then absolutely got smashed versus ETH in 2021, just because the tokenomics were a point of contention. As people would consider, you're in a very valuable protocol offering a very valuable service, and the value of the token could not capture that value. And so naturally, as Ether has like, you know, 5x and urine has stayed flat, Yafi is stayed flat. There's a growing incentive for everyone to figure out like, all right, how do we more

Starting point is 00:10:16 closely align the value of the protocol with the value of the token? So this is an attempt at that. There's a little bit of like pumpamentals or Ponziomics in here, but kind of that's, that's what tokenomics are. How do we align the value of the protocol with the value of the token on the secondary market? And these changes created an 85% YFI price increase. And so the market so far seems to agree that these are good changes.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Yeah, absolutely. I do think other tokens are going to do this as well. So this is the final form, the final state of all defy tokens. Guys, we will be back with the releases of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use Defi and NFTs. And now it's live and has over 100 projects deployed. Gas fees on Ethereum L1 suck. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. And that's why teams like Arbitrum have been hard at work developing layer two solutions that makes transactions on Ethereum cheap and instant. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying.

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Starting point is 00:13:16 Let's start with this one. Shopify plus NFTs. Shopify massive e-commerce protocol platform plus NFTs, the ability to sell NFTs, just spin up a Shopify store and sell your own NFTs. That is coming. That is now here. What do you think about this, David? Yeah, on their page, they say mint and sell your own branded NFTs with Shopify and Shopify

Starting point is 00:13:37 and Shopify payments right from your store. Join the NFT beta program today. So Shopify already out of the box has like half of an NFT platform ready to go. All that's missing are the actual NFTs. And seems like that's what's here today now. And so Shopify already a digital e-commerce store, integrating digital products into your digital e-commerce store, seems pretty trivial as far as things go.

Starting point is 00:14:01 And so it seems like they're diving headfirst into NFTs. The URL for this is Shopify.com. slash NFT. So relatively easy if you want to go check that out. Yeah, it's super cool. There's so many wins for existing like Web2 platforms in the NFT movement

Starting point is 00:14:16 and this is just another win and this provides another Fiat on ramp directly to NFTs. So it serves consumers as well. Bullish that. Great to see Shopify diving in. I mean, they're absolutely massive and they've grown like crazy recently.

Starting point is 00:14:30 David, let's talk about the browser game. So Opera's doing a big move here. What are they up to? Opera, the browser, of course. Yeah, Opera is integrating Polygon. Polygon applications and the Matic token are integrated directly into the browser coming in Q1, so like in two days. Well, Q1 starts in two days. I don't know if it's coming in two days. It's sometime in Q1. And they say, get ready to benefit from the fast, scaleable low-fee environment of Polygon and access over 3,000 apps on the Polygon network. So Polygon, integrated right into Opera, which is a pretty interesting choice because Polygon isn't everything about crypto. There's stuff elsewhere, but Opera has decided to not integrate Ethereum, not integrate, you know, arbitrummer optimism, just only select Polygon for now. Pretty interesting choice. But definitely makes sense because, you know, you've got to have something scaled in there. So congrats to the Polygon team and also really awesome to see Opera moving forward into the Web 3 world. And I wonder what this integration will look like. I know it's particularly aimed at their mobile device. And I know Opera has a wallet as well. So I wonder if this is just like a seamless browse. to adapt to defy app sort of experience inside of the inside of your mobile browser and if so like

Starting point is 00:15:43 that's awesome that is that is super bullish I've been looking for like more seamless integration between crypto-native applications and the browser like right now we're doing it through extensions and third parties but like what if it was completely integrated if it was just there's there's no need it there's no a fundamental need for it to be like a whole separate application inside of a browser, like it could be part of a browser. And I wonder if this is what Opera is pushing towards. I'd love to see Chrome, Firefox, the other browsers follow suit. But they seem a little sleepy compared to Opera. Opera's like hungry for market share, right? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Let's talk about this, David. Clarity Dow. This is a new coordination and information management tool for Dow's. Lots of Dow infrastructure being built out these days. This is a way for DAO contributors to solve the access control problem. So it's the ability to, I think, you know, segment access to certain things within a DAO to an Ethereum username. So if there's some piece of content on a web page or maybe there's a Discord server and only certain whitelisted Dow participants should have access to it, I think this provides a way to provide access control and, you know, segment that access to particular Ethereum username. So it's sort of a sign-in with Ethereum type of application here, specifically targeted at DOWs. Yeah, it sounds like it's a Google G-suite, like some admin management

Starting point is 00:17:14 tool with permissions and, you know, lets you access different parts of the drive, but instead of the drive, now it's the Dow. Makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. And good to see that stuff being built out. Parachains also officially launched on the Pocodot network. David, what is, what is this about? Yeah, parachines are Pocodot's big, that's their big thing. That's their big innovation. Kind of some sort of hybrid between sharding and roll-ups, but built inside of Pocodot. It's been the flagship feature of Pocodot since inception. And now it's finally here. So congrats to Pocod. Five parac chains went live. I think of these sort of as roll-ups.

Starting point is 00:17:56 What's interesting about these is you actually have to, the parachines actually have to bid for a slot. They're not just like, you can't permissionlessly just start using Pocodot. You actually have to bid in dot tokens for one of these slots. And so these first five parachines that successfully bid, they went live. All told, it cost about 99 million dots, I believe. That was garnered by these five projects during the auction period. That's $2.4 billion. I'm not sure all of the details of how that works,

Starting point is 00:18:26 but it's definitely a different and interesting mechanism as compared to Ethereum roll-ups. David, what's this? Bitmex is announcing a token. Okay? I thought Bitmex was the anti-token. What are they doing here? Yeah, for those that came into crypto in 2021, you might not be familiar with Bitmex. It has a pretty long track record. Bitmex is a centralized exchange for margin and leverage trading. It's kind of been known to be like the casino, just like where people just go 100x long on Bitcoin and inevitably get wrecked or not. Or may, or they're, get riches. It was like, David, it was like the Dgen playground before D-GEN playground.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, before defy and then also before Binance, smart chain kind of took over the casino thing. But yeah, Bitcoin, it was famously Bitcoin only for the longest time. Arthur Hayes was like on the run from, I think the CFTC or Arthur Hayes, the founder of Bitmex. There's a long backstory. Ever since Bitmex ended up getting, I'm not sure, charges from the CFTC or some three-letter agency. They've kind of taken a new turn, new turn. And what was formerly a very like Bitcoin-centered ecosystem is now issuing a token, which like previously was blasphemous coming from the leaders behind Bitmex.

Starting point is 00:19:45 But now BitMex has a token. It's basically a loyalty token, some sort of like, kind of like airline miles, but specifically for the BitMex exchange. So the BMX token is out and live. The interesting thing is like, why not, right? I mean, like, why not issue a token and see what happens? I guess that's their play on it. And I think they're trying to revive some retail interest, right?

Starting point is 00:20:08 So give some retail users a reason to continue using Bitmex and compete against the FTXs of the world and the binances of the world who've really taken center stage over the last couple years and leapfrogged Bitmex. Let's talk about this. So Hashflow is issuing a token as well. We were talking about hashflow earlier in the introduction. That's that OTCDFI protocol. What are they up to here, David?

Starting point is 00:20:33 Yeah, they're issuing a token. So if you have traded on hash flow or contributed to the community in early on, do you own a hash bot NFT, for example? Then you might have the HFT token. And so that's the hash flow's governance token and we'll be able to free to claim towards the end of January. And so stay tuned. If you are a hash flow ecosystem participant,

Starting point is 00:20:55 you might have a token coming your way at the end of the month. There you go. More Fiat on ramps to Arbitrum. This one from Puyobie, who is a centralized exchange. Now they are allowing deposits and withdraws for ETH directly to and from Arbitram's kind of cool. What are your thoughts here?

Starting point is 00:21:13 Yeah, knocking them down. We need more, more, more and more. This is good news, and I want 50 more news items like this over the next month. It's coming, though, in 2022, right? Like, including Coinbase. That's the big one I've been waiting for. Yep.

Starting point is 00:21:25 Coinbase. got it. I bet Coinbase Q1, 2022. Okay. Was that a prediction? Is that official David Hoffman prediction? That's an, God, the last time I did this, I did not end well. Certified fresh. Yes, it's an official David Hoffman prediction. Coinbase on and off ramps onto an Ethereum layer two in Q1, 2022. There you have it, folks. He took the bait. We got him now. I'm texting, I'm texting Brian right now. It's like, Brian, I'm going to do something. Please, please, Brian. Tweet outstanding. Okay. This is this week. Alexis O'Hanian and Polygon, they're investing a cool $200 million in decentralized social media.

Starting point is 00:22:03 Alexis O'Hanian, the co-founder of Reddit, of course, venture capitalists. He's coming on bankless a couple of weeks. We're going to ask him about this. But what's up with this news? What's going on? Yeah, there's a lot of just excitement and energy around decentralized social media platforms. While the details on what that means and what that is is still fuzzy, regardless, people are still working on them. is working on this. Polygon is working on this. I mean, it would be huge for any ecosystem to be like the thing that figured out decentralized social media.

Starting point is 00:22:33 So there's obviously a lot of reward there for whoever can crack that nut. And it makes sense for Alexis O'Hanian to be right there. He's the guy that created Reddit, which is the most, you know, kind of like Reddit itself isn't decentralized, but it kind of looks and feels like it, right, with all the subreddits.

Starting point is 00:22:48 And so really, really cool. $200 million in the war chest to build out some sort of decentralized social media. And in a time where we kind of really need it right now, Ryan. We're going to talk a little bit more about that later. Yeah, absolutely. Have you seen any decentralized social media that you've liked so far? Like, I've tried BitCloud a little bit, and it's just been kind of, meh.

Starting point is 00:23:07 I mean, I don't even know what, like, decentralized social media, what does that mean? Like, what does the decentralization, how does that impact the social media aspect nature of it? Yeah, I don't know. I just, it's always been my gut that it's not going to look like the social media platforms of the past. It's not going to be Instagram, but decentralized. That's not going to be.

Starting point is 00:23:24 Exactly. it's got to be something different. I do think there's something here, but you can't just slap decentralization on the thing and call it decentralized social media. So we'll see what they have in mind, but it's good to see the innovation. Talk about this.

Starting point is 00:23:36 Figment, they reach unicorn status. Wow, everyone's a unicorn these days. With a $110 million series C, Figment is a staking services provider. They've got some big investors in the round here, including Binance. What I think is interesting here is, David, there are a number of probably a couple dozen or so staking service providers. Figment is one of the

Starting point is 00:23:59 larger one. There's chorus one. There's a number of others. One called Staked was just acquired by Cracken. We'll talk a little bit about that. But interesting to see these just pure staking as a service companies accruing such massive valuation so quickly. What are your thoughts? Yeah. Being a unicorn is just not the same this day and age. Not after we, we printed like a bigillion dollars in 2020. This is going to be a huge story. It already is a huge story, but even bigger going into 2022 is staking.

Starting point is 00:24:32 Proof of staking, staking. It felt like 2021 was the year of staking anticipation. I feel like 2022 is the year of actual staking and staking services coming into their full production ready environment because of all the chains that are also coming in to production ready staking. And so some of the evaluations on figment, staked, and all these other protocols starting to make a lot of sense. Well, this wouldn't have happened, in my opinion,

Starting point is 00:24:57 without, like, Alt-Layer-1 season completely taking off, right? It's like, because many of these networks, they're semi-active in ETH-2 staking, but not really. Their bread-and-butter is like the cosmos ecosystems, the Solana ecosystems of the world, all of those alternative layer ones. The ecosystems that the individual has a hard time staking on,

Starting point is 00:25:17 yeah, weird how companies start to fill that niche, huh? Kind of, right? And you're going to take on that when it comes to news when we talk about steak, but we'll save that for the news section. B Protocol, they just did a raise. $2.2 million. What's the B Protocol, David? Yeah, B Protocol came out of the Black Tuesday.

Starting point is 00:25:35 It was Black Thursday? Black Thursday, was it? Black Thursday, yeah. When the crypto markets cut in half by like 50, 55 percent. Such a distant memory. Yeah, right. You remember that? Yeah, Ryan, we were recording bankless podcast number two that day.

Starting point is 00:25:50 Yeah. Yeah. We stopped the podcast and we're like, oh my God, ETH gas fees are like 1,200 glare or something. Right. And everyone's getting liquidated. What's happening. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:59 So what happened on that day was Maker Dow had zero die liquidations, as in people would pay zero die to bid on the collateral because gas congestion was so high. No one other, no one else's bids on underwater maker vaults were going through because gas was so high. And also, by the way, that was novel for the time. Like gas fees has started to creep up, but gas fees were still not a thing back in February of 2020. Like gas on Ethereum was still relatively cheap at that point.

Starting point is 00:26:26 So having gas congestion was very new to Ethereum. And turns out that created an unprecedented scenario with regards to liquidations as what happened with Maker Dow. So like Maker Dow had $8 million of collateral that was purchased for zero dye, which is a problem. And so B protocol is a solution for this. It is basically like a protector. around your vaults. Your compound position, your maker position, and when you deposit into maker or compound through B protocol,

Starting point is 00:26:59 it gives you a wrapper of protection. It gives B protocol the right to liquidate you before anyone else. And so B protocol is a Dow that is going to liquidate you at the most favorable rates without gas fees, and you can take part in the liquidation or have your positions be protected by B protocol. really just a great effort here as well. Disclammer, Ryan and I are in this Angel Investment round. Very cool. All right, David, let's talk about jobs. Hey, it's a new year, just about anyway.

Starting point is 00:27:30 It's time to consider a job in crypto. A new job. New year, new job. New year, new job, new outlook on life. You've been listening to bankless for a long time. How about getting a job in crypto? No regrets for me, man. I jumped ship full time in 2017. my corporate job. And it's been absolutely awesome. I had no idea what I was going to do next. And in crypto, you just kind of figure it out. Right?

Starting point is 00:27:58 Like you meet the community, you figure out your niche, and you go develop it, growing industry, tons going on. Here are some of the jobs this week. First, a senior software engineer from Gilded, a founding full stack engineer. A founding full stack engineer? That's awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Utopia Labs. Senior iOS engineer, a senior backend engineer at Smart Defi, community ecosystem lead, D-YD-X. BitWise still has some positions open. NFT specialists, smart contract, platforms and web three,

Starting point is 00:28:26 research analysts, crypto research analyst, governance specialists as well at BitWise. Ahead of growth at Dex Guru. Check that out for you marketing types. Technical lead, Draftly, blockchain developer.

Starting point is 00:28:38 You've got to be specialized in Rust at Solidics as well. And we could go on a ton of different jobs for you. You can check those out. Bankless. Pallet.xyz. Grab a job in crypto this year. Grab a job in crypto. Ryan, shall we get to the airdrops? Because there was a lot of them. News time. Air drops time. Yeah, let's hit them. There's like, there's like five or six or maybe seven, David, but we're going to hit like the three that are. The three big ones, yeah. Yeah, the three that are, you know, kind of worth claiming maybe. Why don't you start with this one?

Starting point is 00:29:11 SOS token. So here's the headline. Open Dow's SOS token hits a $250 million market cap. Despite unclear goals, and security risks. Unclear goals and security risk. Man, does that not just sound like the start of the very beginning of a token? An airdrop? That sounds about par for the course. Yeah, what's your white paper?

Starting point is 00:29:31 Unclear goals and security risks. The SOS token is basically OpenC but decentralized, but a Dow is what they're claiming to be. So if you ever bought, sold NFTs, bought NFTs on OpenC, you might have an SOS token, AirDrop Q. I had my SOS token. I think I got like 0.6 Ether's worth of SOS tokens.

Starting point is 00:29:52 I haven't done anything with them. There you go. You're holding? Maybe. Maybe selling for Ether. That just means David hasn't had time to sell yet. How about this next Air Job? Because that's, you know, one of three that we're going to highlight.

Starting point is 00:30:06 What's this one? Yeah, this is from Giveth. Giveth has been around Ethereum for a really long time. If anyone has listened to the Layer Zero with Gryff Green, he talks about Giveth. If you have participated in the Givis economy, you might have an airdrop. You can check that out at GIV.G-I-V-E-T-H.I-O.

Starting point is 00:30:25 Giveth is something that's been trying to spread out money and wealth into the different corners of the world, both with giving grants and trying to spin up the giving economy. And so, yeah, definitely check out that layer of zero with Gry. Especially if you want to, like, get front row seats for the Dow and what happened there. And then after that, we talk about Giveth. This is a responsibility token, guys.

Starting point is 00:30:47 the valueless responsibility token. So the power to vote. A cool claim process, too. I went through and I claimed, and you can claim on X-Dye, so cost no gas in order to do that. So you can plug in your eth address and check to see if you are a potential recipient.

Starting point is 00:31:02 Why don't you do this last one, too, David? Yeah, this one is Gas Dow. Have you spent more than $1,559 on gas? You might recognize that number. You can go claim your gas tokens if you have spent more than $1559 on gas. what it does and why it exists, absolutely no clue. But you can claim a proportional amount of gas tokens to how much you have spent on gas.

Starting point is 00:31:26 Yeah, I'm selling that one. 1559, though, like those are rookie numbers, man. How much gas have you spent? Oh, my God, a lot. It also depends, right? It's like on what value, like, is it the value? What dollar value? Because if you spent, you know, some Ethan gas a couple years ago,

Starting point is 00:31:46 that that it was you spent pennies at the time yeah spend pennies at the time that could amount to like dollars you know hundreds of dollars even uh today so that's a pay have you ever plugged one of your addresses into like yeah how much gas have I spent I don't like to do that too much yeah I never do that I just don't want to know this is I don't want to know uh let's talk about this Ethereum news test net is out the test net for the merge right a long-awated merge fork kensugi is the test net and this is a post from the Ethereum.org website from Tim Bako as well. This is just another step towards getting the merge into production on Mainnet, hopefully coming in the first half of next year.

Starting point is 00:32:31 We'll have to see, though. Any thoughts on this? Yeah, this is where we do mock merges, mock merges. We also talked about this with Vitalik Buteran on the podcast that's coming out on Monday, all about the future of the Ethereum roadmap and more. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, that was a good podcast, man. We just recorded that earlier today. Yeah, good stuff in that podcast.

Starting point is 00:32:51 Make sure you check that out. David, this was huge too. This happened during the holidays. Well, it didn't happen during the holidays, but the news came out during the holidays of a critical polygon bug that put $24 billion in Maddock tokens at risk. Basically all the Madic tokens. Like, not quite, but like 92% or something like this.

Starting point is 00:33:11 What happened here? Yeah, there was an exploit. in the token contract, I think. This is kind of hard for me to parcel part because I'm not a developer. But the token itself had an exploit, which is now patched. There is nothing left at risk. All fallout has already happened. Black Hat attackers did manage to get away with $800,000, I believe, worth of Maddoch tokens.

Starting point is 00:33:37 But in contrast to the $24 billion that was at stake, that's basically nothing. two white hackers were paid out many millions of dollars. I think $3.3 million for the white hacker that discovered the bug and then helped patch it. And so this is now in the rearview mirrors. Unfortunately, that happened in the first place. Also very nice that we are paying white hackers millions of dollars to discover these things.

Starting point is 00:34:01 That's very important. Yeah, what was the reward here? This was huge, right? It's like $3.4. $3.3 million, yeah. Yeah. In Matic tokens, yeah. And so, yeah, real close call with the,

Starting point is 00:34:11 with the whole Maddick. thing, right, that happened in the last couple weeks. Yeah, and this was, this all happened and was resolved on like, I think, December 5th or something, but news just came out this week. They like, they quietly, like, patched that and then issued the news a few weeks later, taking care of that. I mean, it goes to show you, like, there can be zero day bugs in some of this stuff. Yeah, even with thousands and hundreds of thousands of users and billions in value. Even with billion dollar networks, yep. Let's talk about this. This is probably the biggest protocol merger being proposed in history,

Starting point is 00:34:47 and it was just passed by governance. Rari Capital and Faye Protocol, token holders, approving a multi-billion dollar defy merger. What's happening? Yeah, on the surface, this kind of seems like what is a borrowing and lending protocol, which is Rari? Why are they being acquired by or merging with a stable coin protocol, which is Faye?

Starting point is 00:35:10 on the surface doesn't make much sense from, I haven't unpacked this myself, but the people that I listen to in this ecosystem are very, very bullish on this partnership. There's a bunch of aligned incentives here. And this has also been adopted overwhelmingly by both sides. There was a, it was basically on both Faye and Rari had like 90 to 1 or, yeah, 90 to 1 approval

Starting point is 00:35:34 with regards to the token votes for saying, yeah, everyone's a big fan of this. There was some criticism. about this how hasty this was from some community members that was definitely a critique but overall I think this is going to be a great alignment and incentives for over the long term. I actually want to hear the story here. I think we should get Faye and somebody from Faye and somebody from Rari on the podcast to just like discuss like why this is happening and what the benefits are for both parties or at least somebody who can dissect this for me because I haven't

Starting point is 00:36:05 quite followed it but it seems like it could be a very big deal and maybe a a harbinger of things to come, more of these protocol-type mergers in the future. That was a formal request, by the way. For all the listeners out there. Jay from Rari and somebody from Fay, come on bankless. We'll host you guys and talk about this. Consensus, it's collaborating with MasterCard on a new Ethereum scaling solution. They're built using consensus roll-ups.

Starting point is 00:36:33 What is this, David? So this is the old consensus quorum, which used to be a side chain. I believe they might now be pulling it into a roll-up. this quorum was previously sold to JPMorgan, JPMorgan, and then bought back by Consensus from JPMorgan. And now is, I think consensus is now positioning it as a CBDC stable coin payments protocol. That's a little bit, something a little bit closer to IBM's hyperledger than it is to an open public permissionless blockchain, which is, I think, probably the right foundation for something like a CBDC, where, you know, it's permission, gets controlled by private public partnership.

Starting point is 00:37:10 And there's actually somebody to call if something goes wrong. But consensus is moving forward with, you know, institutional stable coin, CBDC stuff. Yeah, it's cool that MasterCard is involved here too. It's like Visa has a massive play in crypto and MasterCard has some catching up to do. And I've started to see them trying to catch up in the back half of 2021. And I expect they'll continue to ramp it up. David, let's talk some meme stocks, man. Well, I guess maybe not meme stocks, but like meme tokens or old brands becoming tokens,

Starting point is 00:37:41 RadioShack is pivoting to Defi, apparently. So RadioShack, two guys bought it in 2020, and I assume they just purchased it for like nostalgia reasons for the name. Obviously, there are no RadioShack stores that I'm aware of anymore, at least, you know, all the malls I've seen no longer have Radio Shacks. But I feel like this pivot to defy is sort of a, I'm. asking to become a meme stock, right? It's kind of like following GameStop, following AMC, some of these older brands that have some retail nostalgia and pivoting into a new and interesting

Starting point is 00:38:18 space. Maybe that's just the skeptical take. Maybe there's something really here. I guess their plan is to provide a bridge between defy and larger corporations, the world's corporations, but it also seems very vague to me. What's your take? on this? I think this is just a bunch of hot air. Do you remember in 2017 when the Arizona ICT company added blockchain to their name formally and then like the stock price went up, right? The stock price like doubled it like overnight in the middle of the ICO mania. I think that's this is that's something closer to what's happening with with Radio Shack. Some people just bought the defunct Radio Shack brand, slapped Defi on it and now they are just dancing it around Radio Shack DeFi, Radio Shack DeFi.

Starting point is 00:39:02 And now people like you and me are talking about it. I think that's what's going on. Yeah, probably so. I mean, that's, that's, that's, that, that worries me a little bit because, uh, that, that was a top signal in 2017. So, um, but, you know, like top signals are different every single time in the market. But here's another one. A Dow wants to buy Blockbuster and turn it into a decentralized film streaming service. Is this more of the same? Yeah, same kind of energy. Uh, I mean, they just want to make a, they just want to buy the Blockbuster brand and have it turn into some sort of Dow related streaming service. Um, again, I think this is just a headline, and I will wait for this to turn into something real before I expand any more brainpower on it. But aren't memes real, David? Not without fundamentals, Ryan. Good answer, sir. Let's talk about this.

Starting point is 00:39:51 Speaking of memes, so a meme made it onto Jeopardy. No, Constitution style is not a meme. That's not a meme. I mean, you don't think it was a meme? There's tons of meme energy behind that. We're going to form a doubt to buy the Constitution. Nothing's more me and me behind that. They were actually able to raise some money.

Starting point is 00:40:08 So I guess maybe there were fundamentals there. There's maybe some fundamentals there. Anyway, the Jeopardy question from Alex Trebek was, billionaire hedge fund, CEO Ken Griffin outbid a group of crypto enthusiasts and paid $43 million for a copy of the seminal American document. The answer, of course, is what is Constitution Dow? Well, actually, no, the answer is what is the Constitution of the United States of America? That's actually, the DAO is not actually a part of this.

Starting point is 00:40:37 That's right. Bummer, okay. I misread the answer, hoping it was Constitution Dow. Yeah, it's just, yeah. Sorry. Alex Trebek, I'm sorry. My apology, sir. All right, moving on.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Let's talk about Paris Hilton, getting on the Eith leaderboard. Yeah, so there's a website that tracks the most followed Twitter handles that have dot Eath following them. and Paris Hilton is now up there as well. A few other ones came in, who was it? Oh, yeah, Shack. Shack and Paris Hilton.

Starting point is 00:41:11 Pais Hilton's coming in at number one at 16.8 million followers, so Paris Hilton.eath on Twitter. Shack.orgh at 15.5 million. We also have Trace songs. That's new to me. He's got a bored ape. 13.8 million.

Starting point is 00:41:24 And then coming in fifth is our friend Vitalik. Vitalik is number five. Unseated. Yeah, unseated. big time coming in at a mere 3 million followers. Look, I mean, he's going to be booted out of the top 10 before long. It won't take much. Mainstream is coming to .eith domains.

Starting point is 00:41:42 David, I'm sure you're somewhere on here, right? Yeah, you're on here. You're on here. We're all on here. I think. Not for long. We're not going to be on the front page for long. We have 100,000 followers.

Starting point is 00:41:50 Yeah, we're up there somewhere. There you go. We're somewhere. But, you know, it's cool to see mainstream, I guess, joining the dot-eith club. Mainstream's also joining Board Apes. So board apes just flipped Cryptopunks. I believe this is briefly, or has it been persistent? I don't know, I haven't really paid attention,

Starting point is 00:42:08 but that was a flippening that some NFT holders were predicting for quite some time, and it actually happened. David, I know you're a crypto punk holder. So what's your take on this? Yeah, this is regards to the floor price. So the floor price of Board of Apes is at 59 eth right now, and I'm pulling up the Cryptopunks floor plate, floor price, oh my gosh, floor price, which is clocking in at 65.8E.

Starting point is 00:42:34 So Cryptopunks have reclaimed the higher floor price. But I wrote this in the predictions article that we haven't released yet two weeks ago. I did say that Bored Apes were probably going to flip punks. Just because I think they have so much more surface area. They're newer. They have the momentum. They're just kind of in pulp culture. So, I mean, bored apes, one of the big stories of 2021 is definitely the board apes.

Starting point is 00:43:01 Are they doing different things versus Cryptopunks? Like, are they provided? Cryptopunks are like the Bitcoin of NFTs. They don't do anything. And like, there was a theory that like, you know, Bitcoin actually needs to pay for security and Cryptopunks don't. And so like Cryptopunks can work where Bitcoin actually might not. The fat, the fat Cryptopunk thesis.

Starting point is 00:43:20 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how well that plays out into 2021. But Cryptopunks are definitely more of a. a crypto native, Ethereum native type of NFT, and the board apes have reached into new horizons. And board apes are still building, right? They're still doing things.

Starting point is 00:43:35 They're adding utility to the board apes. And that's part of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Snoop Dog got in as well, David. So he just aped. And this is from his main account, not his Medici account. Looks like he's got four.

Starting point is 00:43:51 Yeah, one actual board aped, two mutant board apes, and then a board ape kennel club as well. Man, that's crazy. You know what I'm waiting for, though? This graph right here, David. Speaking of flippinx. Look this. Yeah, get out of it. So first, the apes pass the cryptopunks, and then long term, real long term,

Starting point is 00:44:09 this might be like years in the making, the turtles come and dominate. I'm pretty sure that's like at the end of this year. That green spike is like for tomorrow, Ryan. No, no, no, no. This is a dot, dot, dot, dot, you know, who knows? That timeline just kind of like, this could take thousands of years, David. you know turtles move at the speed of turtles how it goes turtles turtles turtles at the speed of turtles adidas they just sold 22 million dollars in nfts that's crazy man so what are they doing here

Starting point is 00:44:38 yeah they sold 30 000 nfts at 0.2 each and they all sold out which is nuts made they made 22 million dollars they also did this right uh they they got into the nfti influencers they bought a board tape, put on an Adidas jacket on their board A, put it as their profile picture, started doing, and did NFTs right. And so look what happens when you do NFTs right as a company. You get $22 million in revenue. That's crazy. They've got to be so happy about that. And other brands have got to be following. I wonder who the buyers of these things are. Do you think this is more mainstream? Or do you think this is like I can't, this can't be the traditional crypto and ITT collector. It's got to be mainstream. Even though like $750 for an adobeysm.

Starting point is 00:45:25 Dita's NFT, like mainstreamed ready to cough that up? That was kind of confusing. That's sort of surprising, but yeah, good for them. Success. Success either way. The weekend is releasing an NFT as well on Tom Brady's platform, his platform called Autograph. This is a blinding lights single that is inspiring seven NFTs that are going to be auctioned on OpenC.

Starting point is 00:45:47 So now we have mainstream artists entering the fray as well. That's been a story that has been continuing to develop over the course of the year. NFTs are for everyone. And we're just going to see celebrity, more and more celebrities all throughout 2022. So get used to it. Get used to it. Should we get used to Facebook being called meta? I'm finding that hard to get used to, okay?

Starting point is 00:46:07 But like, let's call them meta. Here's the Facebook CTO promising deep compatibility between what meta is doing in the Metaverse and blockchain. I guess they're bullish Web3. At least that's what they're saying. What do you think about this? Yeah, deep compatibility is not what I want it to be, which is built on top of. Compatibility implies two things coming together, where the Metaverse significantly needs to be built on top of a decentralized protocol. So nice try, meta. Not a fan. But I mean,

Starting point is 00:46:42 they're going to, you know they have to actually, actually onboard crypto assets, crypto monies, NFTs anyway. So, I mean, this isn't anything as a surprise. This messaging is expected. Do you think they still think that they can become Like a watch-jane killer? Do you think they think they are the metaverse? Or what do you think they're trying to do here? They are probably at the very least Trying to become people's first metaverse

Starting point is 00:47:08 Like hey, you want to get into the metaverse? Start with Facebook. I think they know they can't capture the whole entire thing Because that's antithetical But if they can count like It's just a fight for mind share. It's funny because it's something I'm still not worried about at all. Like I still think they don't have a shot at competing against like the property rights and, you know,

Starting point is 00:47:28 strong settlement guarantees of crypto networks. And they will have to provide deep compatibility with them in order to execute on their strategy. So I'm not worried about Facebook long term and its threat on Web 3. Let's talk about Jack. He's got a different perspective on Web 3. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. He, of course, stepped down. a few weeks ago. That was a big story when we talked about it. But he's pretty anti-Web 3,

Starting point is 00:47:55 it seems like. What's this meme that we're looking at, David? Jack Torsey's been anti-everything that's not Bitcoin, basically from as long as I can remember. Everything in crypto, yeah? Everything in crypto is not Bitcoin. Jack's not a fan of it. And he's explained some of his reasoning why, but it boils down to the same old arguments that he thinks that nothing other than Bitcoin's actually decentralized and everything else is just a cash grab. So he retweeted a a comic that has a pipe just flowing water into the mouths of Silicon Valley VCs. Meanwhile, there's a very famished-looking retail investor that is under a small, small, small hole in the pipe,

Starting point is 00:48:34 just getting some drops, just a few drops. And so all the value of Web3, what Jack is claiming is he's retweeted this with the 100 emoji. He's claiming that Web 3 is just putting all the value into Silicon Valley VCs and implying that Web 3 is just this VC's. created, you know, way to make a bunch of money. Just overall, very, like, cynical and skeptical on the fact of the idea of Web3 at all. I have my opinions on this. Jack follows this up and says, you don't own, quote, Web3.

Starting point is 00:49:06 The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. Know what you're getting into. So, wow, some pretty harsh words coming out of Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, about the whole entire concept of Web3. I've got my thoughts, Ryan. What do you think?

Starting point is 00:49:25 I mean, I think harsh and wrong, right? So, like, the idea that VCs are the owners of Web3s, I think this is particular to some protocols, right? Some DeFi protocols, maybe governance protocols, you could say. VCs own some of those. But, you know, at its core, something like Ethereum, which is actually depicted in this meme, is not VC-owned. It's really interesting that there were no VCs as part of the original sale of

Starting point is 00:49:54 Ethereum, like for one. Here's Baleji saying, Ethereum raised zero dollars from VCs as kind of a comment on this. And I mean, that's true. Also, VCs do not control Ethereum. I mean, like, if you think VCs control Ethereum, then you have to apply those same rules to Bitcoin and say, like, Wales and VCs control Bitcoin. But, like, they don't. They don't control Ethereum. They don't. They don't control Ethereum, they don't control Bitcoin. So the entire assertion is false. Maybe he's like focusing on some sliver or some subset of Web3 that like we have criticized as well as being kind of overly whale or VC owned, you know, the finance chains of the world. You make the case for that. You make the case for some like D5 protocols. You could make the case maybe for some elements of

Starting point is 00:50:42 you know, alternative layer ones. But I think it's unfair to categorize all of Web3. as being completely owned by VCs. What's your take? Apparently, if you were following this story very, very in depth that Jack was really going after A16Z in Adreason Horowitz specifically, apparently has a bone to pick with them. I think that's kind of what's going on under the hood.

Starting point is 00:51:05 It's more sense. But overall, there's been a ton of investment, a ton of deal flow into a ton of Web3 platforms, Web3 protocols that are happening right now. So maybe this critique is more about 2021 Web3 and not like maybe the foundations of how Ethereum didn't raise any money from VCs. Maybe he's talking about more about the apps that have raised money recently. But there's still some big, big things that we need to parse apart here.

Starting point is 00:51:28 First off, the comic of all this value flowing into VCs mouth and then the retail just only getting droplets, we have to remember where we came from. Because before Web3, it was absolutely nothing into retail. It would go straight into VCs and you would never even hear about it. So the fact that we are even complaining about this just tells you how much Web3 actually has moved the needle. Retail didn't even have an option or even knowledge about how to complain about not having deal flow from early stage startups. Now that we actually have a taste of it because of Web 3, now we actually put up a fight about like, hey, don't give all the money to VCs. You got to give some to the retail too.

Starting point is 00:52:10 So first off there's that. Like the Overton window has already shifted to the point where we are allowed to complain about this in the first place. Did you see this mean, by the way? There's goddamn air drops. What are air drops except for giving tokens and value towards users? The Uniswap air drop, the ENSWop air drop, the GITCOin air drop, all the air drops. Every single air drop you've ever gotten, you didn't even have to invest.

Starting point is 00:52:34 You just had to use it. The VCs had to invest money. The users just had to use it for free. And so there's a great meme of somebody crying with wiping their tears with $100 bills. and the caption is, me with my ENS AirDrop after Jack said Web3 only makes money for VCs. To me, this is one of those things that, like, it's actually so incredibly the opposite of what Jack is saying that is kind of dumbfounding. It's like somehow Jack went full circle and said, like, Web3 is all about giving money to VCs. It's literally the opposite.

Starting point is 00:53:04 It is literally about how much, how can we make our users wealthy? That is what Web3 is. Yeah, I agree with that. There's also another comment from Blaji. He says, I respect everything you built talking to Jack, but I also disagree here. Twitter started as a protocol, the free speech wing of the free speech party. Then corporate and political incentives led to deplatforming and censorship. Web3 offers the possibility, not a guarantee, of something better, turning Twitter into a protocol,

Starting point is 00:53:32 something that unfortunately Jack was not able to accomplish during his tenure at Twitter. He says he follows up. Of course, I don't believe Twitter set out to bait and switch developers or promise free speech, get people to invest years in their profiles, then censor them. But that is where the incentives landed upon. Web3's smart contracts may prove more durable than Web 2's social contracts. This is what I also fundamentally don't understand about Jack's take is Web3 offers a solution to the things that Jack, you know, claims are his values, which is, you know, values of free speech and minimization of censorship resistance. So I don't know.

Starting point is 00:54:13 It's ongoing back and forth between Jack Dorsey and the Web 3 and Crypto community. I guess my invitation would be this to Jack is like, I think the community wants a longer conversation about this with you, Jack. Like, do you, are you rejecting the VC definition of Web3 or are you rejecting the entire premise of Web 3? Like, that's a question that I think we have. Do you see Bitcoin is Web 3? I mean, the way you and I define Web 3, David, it's kind of synonymous with crypto.

Starting point is 00:54:43 And so if you say you hate Web 3, then you also hate Bitcoin. Also, Ethereum is like very close to Bitcoin from a values perspective. Right. It's like Vitalik is called it moderate Bitcoin values. I really feel like that's the case. So why the hate for Ethereum all of the time? That's the discussion we want to have with Jack Dorsey of, you know, on the bankless podcast. DEMs are open, man.

Starting point is 00:55:07 So, you know, come on. Let's talk about it. Let's hash it out. Ray Dalio. Someone else we want to get on the podcast. I've been listening to a lot of Ray Dalio podcasts, actually, over the past week or so break. But apparently, he says crypto should be part of a diversified portfolio. This is new in 2021.

Starting point is 00:55:27 He wasn't saying this in previous years. This is new for Ray Dalio. Of course, billionaire hedge fund investor, fantastic insights on long-term macro trends. Have a lot of respect for him. Now he's coming around to crypto, it seems. Any thoughts here? Yeah, I think I would classify Ray Dalio in 2020 and 2021 is cautiously optimistic. And now in 20 or at the end of 2021, I would call Ray Dalio decently well convinced.

Starting point is 00:55:53 Listening to him on the Lex Friedman podcast and also in this article right here, he talks about how Bitcoin has stood the test of time. And so this is one of, you know, our biggest advantages in the crypto industry. We have time on our side. If you don't invest in crypto in the first zero through five years, totally fine. five to 10 years, totally fine. But 10 to 20 years, like, now you're going to have to start to actually account for like, hey, it's been here for a while.

Starting point is 00:56:18 Like, it's not going away. And Ray Dalio is, I think he's calling it good at 12 years of crypto. He's like, okay, 12 years of crypto, like, it's here to stay. And now it should be a part of your portfolio. And so I think that's a perfectly pragmatic and reasonable conclusion. Do you know, David, on the podcast I was listening to, he's actually talking about NFTs too. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:37 Issuing his own NFTs, purchasing NFTs. It's really funny. how all of this provides surface area to, like, getting people on the crypto train. Right, because it's one thing to just stick around for 12 years, but it's also one thing to also, as an ecosystem, be exponentially growing for 12 years. Exactly. Exactly. And garnering more attention.

Starting point is 00:56:57 I mean, it's always part of the conversation. Everyone wants to talk about it. So this is the story we're talking about in releases a little bit alluded to this. Crypto Exchange Cracken, that is a crypto bank, crypto exchange. They just acquired staking startup staked. So staked like Figment, which is $1 billion unicorn type valuation status, is a staking services provider. And they were just acquired by a crypto bank.

Starting point is 00:57:22 What's interesting about this story, David, is like, so I spent some time in the staking game. Actually, I was one of the, with Figment and staked, one of the original validators on the Cosmos network back in the day. And one of the things I saw happening is because, like, Cosmos and many of these other protocols operate almost like a delegated proof of stake type of network. So individuals really don't run their own nodes,

Starting point is 00:57:47 run their own staking nodes in these types of networks. They generally, they stake them with a third party. So when you trust, right? And so one thing that I observed in my day is kind of staking, and part of these networks is like they were all becoming sort of like whale staking service providers. They had to in order to make their margins. and like do the best in the game.

Starting point is 00:58:12 And so in that kind of game, the thing I saw was like the bigger fish would just snap up the smaller fish. And then you'd get a smaller and smaller pool of staking service companies like, you know, over time. And this is finally what's happening, right? So like I was pretty certain at that time that all the staking service companies would eventually you either go public or you're acquired by a crypto bank of some form or another.

Starting point is 00:58:39 And to me, that is such a, it's just, it's a very big centralization vector for this entire space. Because now, essentially, all you're doing is you are staking directly with Cracken. And you're kind of back to square one. So like the coinbase of the world, they're smart, they're going to grow their business. They're going to acquire other staking service providers too. And they have in the past. They've acquired bison trails, for instance, and incorporated that into their staking service provide. So the protocol itself, I feel like, is incented and basically pushes in the direction of more

Starting point is 00:59:15 centralization with fewer and fewer staking parties. And we're seeing this with stake here. I don't fault staked for this. And obviously, this is a good play for Cracken. Like, so I understand why everyone's doing it. It's just back to the descent fundamental decentralization of, of so-called layer one protocols. There has to be some resistance against this. Or you'll end up with just a very small set of staking, you know, service providers that everyone's using. And then, like, what's the point? There's a huge line between being able to stake on computers that you naturally find in people's homes and any other type of staking.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Because any other type of staking, just more and more tilts towards centralization, especially delegated proof of stake. Delegated proof of stake and actual proof of stake are completely different beasts. And that's all I will say about that. Yep. All right, let's keep moving. A16V, they just put out a poll. Voters prefer candidates that support Web 3, the title of this poll. Americans want policymakers to play an active role in supporting the next generation of the internet. This is from a survey of individuals in the U.S. one in five people in the U.S. own cryptocurrency. This survey finds. 35% of those between 18 and 34, a key demographic. I guess more support for the idea that voters will vote in candidates who support Web 3. The word crypto has always had this negative connotation. Like it scares my boomer parents like, oh, crypto, like, oh, weird stuff's happening.

Starting point is 01:00:53 Web 3 is the perfect rebrand for cryptocurrency. It's exactly it just fits right in. People understand it. They kind of understand that there's an evolution of all the negative stuff that's happening with Facebook causing like civil wars. and how we're moving into a digital future with NFTs and Web3. Like, it's just enough to get people's heads wrapped around it.

Starting point is 01:01:14 And turns out it's a huge hit with people. It just pulls well. So shout off to a future podcast episode that's coming with Erica Rhodes, running to unseat Brad Sherman, the guy that was making fun about crypto and Mongoose coins and Congress and all that stuff. We're having her on State of the Nation sometime in January.

Starting point is 01:01:31 We're going to talk about being a Web 3 candidate. If she likes the Web 3 branding, and if she's trying to lean into that. Also, if you are in the California 30th district, which is northwest of L.A., Erica Rhodes might be your representative. And if that's true, we need you to vote for her. So we're going to talk about that on the state of the nation.

Starting point is 01:01:50 So stay tuned for next couple of weeks when that comes out. All right, guys, we will be right back with the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Macha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common eth and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Macha are free. And that's why you should be using Macha. Macha routes your orders across all the various DFI exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance smart chain, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage.

Starting point is 01:02:26 Mata has smart order routing that splits your orders across multiple liquidity sources. If Mata sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on Masha is super easy because it pools the liquidity. for me into a single and easy-to-use platform and has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking the wrong decks to trade on and getting a bad price. Masha also allows you to make limit orders on chain so you can set and forget your defy trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to macha.xy-z slash bankless, connect your wallet, and start getting some of the best prices and most liquidity when you trade

Starting point is 01:03:00 your crypto assets. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite Defy apps all in one spot, Ledger Live is where you want to be.

Starting point is 01:03:29 Not only does Ledger let you buy your crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into all of the Defy apps and services that you're used to. Using Ledger Live, you can stake your Ethan Lido, swap on Dexas like Paraswap, or display your NFTs with Rainbow. You can also use Wallet Connect inside of Ledger Live to connect to all the other Defy apps that keep coming online. Defi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all of the Defy apps that Ledger Live has,

Starting point is 01:03:57 and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger Hardware Wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a ledger, download ledger live, and get all of your defy apps all in one space. All right, guys, we are back with the hot takes of the week. Let's start with his first one from Hugh Karp. He's the founder of Nexus Mutual A insurance protocol.

Starting point is 01:04:18 So not surprised with this take. Not valuing decentralization is like being uninsured, he says. Most of the time it's fine, and then it's not. What does he mean? I think that's just a great way to illustrate the value of decentralization. decentralization is this invisible shield of protection that you're not supposed to notice. You're not supposed to notice a decentralization. And it's there for you, regardless of whether you're thinking about it or not.

Starting point is 01:04:46 Yeah, I think it's a great take. Yeah, it's there for you. And then, like, most of the time it's fine. And then it's not? In what cases does it become not fine? Oh, so many different cases. Well, it also depends on the severity of the centralization. I mean, if you have all your money with a bank and then the bank goes under, boom, you're effed.

Starting point is 01:05:07 If you are on a centralized blockchain and the blockchain halts and you need to get your money out, um, out. Decentralization just protects you against, uh, not only just like, uh, accidental bugs in code,

Starting point is 01:05:20 but also just from, from centralized control, uh, you know, banks, you know, you actually don't own your own money when you put your money in a bank. They, they,

Starting point is 01:05:28 they give you IOUs. Uh, And so you have to trust that. And so there are so many different attack factors that are just completely mitigated with decentralization. And so without decentralization, you're kind of at risk to all of them. You know, I always worry about here. Maybe this is a point about insurance too is humans are really notoriously bad at

Starting point is 01:05:47 quantifying risk and assessing risk, particularly over longer term time horizons. And I think this is why we have such a hard time quantifying the value of decentralization is because like, you know, if everything is going okay and the banks aren't stealing from you and, you know, Binance isn't halting the chain and, you know, the hedge fund isn't calling Robin Hood to halt stock trades, right? Right, reverse trades. Then it all works very seamlessly and it all seems fine. But it's those, it's those edge cases when you really need.

Starting point is 01:06:27 need decentralization. That's the value. But human beings are really bad at quantifying this and taking that risk into account. So I don't know if we'll ever get out of that cycle, but it doesn't just provide a defense to the individual, I guess I would say. It's like it's a defense to the entire system. Like it's a public good for the entire system, kind of like similar to privacy. What's the value of privacy? It's like the value is aggregated. It's a public good for everyone in society. It's not just for one individual. Yeah, so I don't know. Hopefully humans have the ability to quantify that a little bit better.

Starting point is 01:07:04 This is Leighton with the tweet, quantifying some things, though, quantifying hacks. Why did you take this, David? Yeah, not only quantifying hacks, but also comparing the size of hacks to bank overdraft fees in 2020. So in 2021, crypto lost $7.7 billion in crypto hacks and scams. but in 2020, $12.4 billion was lost in bank overdraft fees. So all of these hacks that were just like, you know,

Starting point is 01:07:32 in an uproar about and all these exploits that people get money and they get frustrated, crypto bank overdraft fees were almost twice that amount in 2020. And so Layton finished it off saying all the scammers and hackers in the world still can't rob people as well as banks can. Nice, nice and spicy. Nice job, Leighton.

Starting point is 01:07:50 I love that, by the way. Like bank overdraft fees is just, one of the ways banks steal your money, right? That's just one product from that. Yeah, it's just one of many. Let's see this tweet. This is a quote from Vitalik from a recent interview. What's this quote?

Starting point is 01:08:04 Yeah, he says, I think the big difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoin is a platform where the value of the ecosystem comes from the value of the currency. And in Ethereum, the value of the currency comes from the value of the ecosystem. And this is something that I've said

Starting point is 01:08:18 in a different capacity. I always like to say, the Bitcoin blockchain is meant to serve BTC the asset, whereas in Ethereum, the Ether, the currency is meant to serve Ethereum the blockchain or Ethereum the economy. Ether, the currency, is a means to an end to provide the strongest security to Ethereum possible so that Ethereum can host as many things as possible securely. Bitcoin, the blockchain, is a blockchain that the whole entire point of it is to do one purpose, which is to allow for 21 million Bitcoins to be sent from

Starting point is 01:08:50 wallet to wallet. And that's the whole thing. And so there's just, different priorities in these things. And so you can go ahead and choose your ecosystem with whatever values that you resonate with. Do you resonate with the hard cap or do you value a platform that has free and public security for all applications? You can do both. But that's kind of the main differences between these two ecosystems. The interesting thing about that too is like that ether the asset scales as well with Ethereum the economy. Whereas, you know, Bitcoin not so much. Bitcoin to me is a bit more like gold. And Ether and Ethereum to me is a bit more like

Starting point is 01:09:24 we use an analogy of a nation state, a crypto nation state. It's a bit more like the United States, right? Not a Fiat currency because this currency is scarce and deflationary and cannot be changed and ultrasound cannot be changed by central government. But it scales in the way

Starting point is 01:09:41 the U.S.'s S&P 500 scales according to like the value and the growth of GDP, the value in growth of the economy. So it's a different way to value these assets as well. Let's talk about this take. This is our last one of the week from Daniel.

Starting point is 01:09:58 Daniel Gothits. Yeah, Daniel Gothitz is the Twitter handle. People say, crypto is too risky for me. Me, being dependent on a single employer for all of my income and not being able to access my retirement funds until I'm 65 is too risky for me. Good point. I love this. I love this.

Starting point is 01:10:17 And this reminds me of a quote from Nassim Teleb's book. anti-fragile where he compares two people with different jobs. One of them is a barber and the other one is like a white-collar office worker. The barber has very unstable, volatile income. Sometimes five people come into his shop every single day. Sometimes zero people come into his shop. His income is volatile. But over the long term, his job security is stable because hair gross.

Starting point is 01:10:47 Whereas the white-collar worker, his income is very, very stable. it's a cool $60,000 a year promised by his salary that he's going to get it no matter what. But his job security is very unstable because he might just get axed at any moment of any moment. And so this is about leaning into towards volatility as a way to actually grow stronger and more robust as an individual. And so if you work in crypto, a highly volatile, highly rapid environment, you actually gain job security because you learn how to live in a voluminable. volatile world. And the skills that you come out with and the connections that you come out with, the opportunity cost of being in crypto is just immense. And so there's just different kinds of risk out there. Like, what kind of risk do you want? Do you want the risk of crypto volatility in

Starting point is 01:11:33 the assets? Or do you want the risk of absolutely getting left behind in your corporate job? This is why I have such a hard time answering the question of like, is crypto a risky asset? Because I honestly, in my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a risky asset. I don't. Okay? It's a volatile asset. Yeah. But volatility. People conflate those things way too much. And in fact, like finance textbooks conflate those things.

Starting point is 01:11:57 This is what finance people are taught, that volatility equals risk, like the one in the same. But that's not actually true, right? It's like crypto is far less risky than it first appears, even though price fluctuates and it's far more volatile. And I think the things in our everyday life that we don't quantify, right? Like, you know, inflation, for instance, or, you know, collapse of the central bank. digital currency or a job loss or my job just basically in the skills that I have like losing all

Starting point is 01:12:30 value in the economy because the economy converts to some new form and becomes more digital and enters the metaverse that sort of thing like the risks of those those things aren't quantified by the average individual when they're just following the path that everyone else takes so yeah way less risky than people think Ryan what do you think's going to be here in 100 years what's more likely. Ethereum or the U.S. dollar. See, that's 100 years. That's so easy to answer for me. It's definitely Ethereum. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:57 Even in its relatively nascent form. Yeah. Totally. Your answer is still Ethereum. A hundred percent. Yeah. Like 100 percent. And I guess that's why I'm betting the way I'm betting and you're betting the way you're betting. But a lot of people don't realize that. David, what are you excited about this week, man?

Starting point is 01:13:14 I'm actually, I got something else other than being excited. Not to say I'm not excited, but I'm reading this book called Human kind. It's the case that humans are inherently good. And it's just a very feel-good book to read, by the way. So if anyone's feeling like down or they just need something to pick them up, read this book called Humankind. It's the case that humans are very, are just inherently good. And Ryan, while I was reading this book, they were talking about how humans succeeded where Neanderthals didn't. And one of the reasons why they said that while our brain powers were about the same. The main difference between the Neanderthal brain and the, the human brain is that

Starting point is 01:13:55 our brains are all connected better, as in we're very, very social creatures. So my question to you, Ryan, is this isn't true at all, but I'm just going to say that it is for hyperbole's sake. What do you think the very first consensus mechanism that humanity ever had? What do you think that was? I would probably say language would be my guess, but, you know, there's probably stuff before that, but the big one that comes to mind is definitely language. So going even earlier than that, the main difference in the evolutionary paths of Neanderthals versus humans is humans developed whites of eyes. And Neanderthals had very, very big black eyes.

Starting point is 01:14:36 And so they didn't really have whites of the eyes. And the whites of human eyes allows me to look at you and see what you are looking at. And so my node can check out your node and see what your nodes up to. Yeah. And so like, oh, what's what's what? Ryan's looking over there. Why is he looking over there? I'm going to go look over there.

Starting point is 01:14:53 And all of a sudden, like a group of people can all come to consensus about where other people's attention is. So the humans have been social creatures from day one, and that's been our main competitive advantage, because we've been able to sync up with each other.

Starting point is 01:15:05 We've all been on the same protocols. And so whites of the eyes, the OG consensus mechanism. That's wild. I guess this is why also humans developed the fantastic facial recognition software, right? It's like we're very, like, how much of communication is nonverbal?

Starting point is 01:15:19 Like 90%, 95%, it's like tone, intonation, but like also body language, facial expression. That's all nonverbal. I guess that's baked into our DNA. So learning that, Ryan, was what I have been excited about. Ryan, what are you excited? That's cool, man. I'm just excited about next year. I'm excited about 2022.

Starting point is 01:15:37 I'm excited about bank lists. We've got a killer lineup of podcasts starting the first one of the year with Vitalik, a number of others in Q1. Super excited about that. Excited about crypto. I'm bullish cryptocurrency. Do you believe that? I'm bullish crypto. Yeah. But like a lot's going on. Okay, like roll-ups still haven't had their moment. So that's all ahead of us. If the Ethereum merge hasn't happened yet,

Starting point is 01:16:00 that's still ahead of us. Been waiting for that for years, right? I know both of us have. NFTs are just starting. Okay. Well, maybe they'll have a bare market in between, but there'll be new use cases for NFTs unlocked. We're just tapping into this thing called Dow's and figuring out how that works. So 2020, I'm going in there. I'm bullish. I'm bullish, both from a price perspective, but I'm also bullish, you know, Chris Dixon style bullish in the podcast. He's like, hey, I look at the builder cycles. I don't care about the price cycles. I look at the builder cycles. And I'm seeing more builders, more talent entering this space than ever. So it's like being simultaneously bullish on price of these assets and mainstream attention and also bullish on the building that's getting

Starting point is 01:16:42 done in this space. It's a really cool, unique time for crypto. that I don't think we've ever seen before. 2021 was a breakout year in a lot of ways, but I'm just as bullish, if not more so, going to 2022. I'm just as bullish right there with you, my man. All right. Two bulls on the bankless podcast. Bullish from day one.

Starting point is 01:17:02 Can't go wrong there. All right, here we go. Meme of the Weektime. David, what are we looking at? We are looking at an actual real, completely undoctored photograph of somebody at their wedding, eating their wedding dinner. They just got married and the grooms got his phone out watching the bankless weekly roll up while he eats dinner with his new wife. Totally real. It totally happened. Hators will say it's fake. And that is your meme of the week. What a great meme to wrap up 2021. Guys, we hope you have a happy new year. And we'll see you again in 2022. As always, none of this was financial advice. None of the things we talked about on bankless in 2021 were financial advice. Eat is and remains risky. So we'll

Starting point is 01:17:43 is defy you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot 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 to joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get at access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks.

Starting point is 01:18:22 If you're interested in crypto, the bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly roll-ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation. vision.

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