Bankless - ROLLUP: LooksRare Airdrop | Fees.WTF | Inflation | PayPal Stablecoin | Top Shots Ban

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Second Week of 2022 ------ 📣 ONJUNO | Crypto from your Checking Account! https://bankless.cc/OnJuno  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot  🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:10 MARKETS 3:27 BTC Price 4:30 ETH Price 7:15 ETH BTC Ratio 8:15 Burning ETH- Burners - Visualized 14:56 Merge https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1481280658135728129?s=20 16:55 DCF https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... 20:00 Uniswap on Polygon https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/stat... 21:54 Brave Passes 50m MAU https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... 24:00 RELEASES 25:00 LooksRare Airdrop https://looksrare.org/ 33:42 Fees.wtf Airdrop https://fees.wtf/claim 34:55 Tally Wallet https://blog.tally.cash/a-community-o... 35:54 GMI Index https://twitter.com/indexcoop/status/... 37:10 Etherscan NFT Tracker https://twitter.com/etherscan/status/... 38:18 IMX Permissionless https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/... 39:16 dYdX v4 https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-full-de... 40:23 Optimism Explosion https://www.optimism.io/ 42:49 Zerion x Avalanche https://twitter.com/zerion_io/status/... 43:04 Ramp x zkSync https://www.argent.xyz/blog/ramp-x-usa/ 44:09 FairX Coinbase Acquisition https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... 45:20 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 46:00 NEWS 46:23 Inflation at 7% https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/cpi-d... 50:42 Moxie on Web3 https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-fir... Vitalik’s Response: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/com... 55:44 Arbitrum Outage https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1... 59:00 AP NFTs on Polygon https://thedefiant.io/nfts-associated... 1:00:09 Nas on Royal https://twitter.com/3LAU/status/14792... 1:01:23 Penguins Drama https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... 1:03:48 Doodles Soar https://thedefiant.io/doodles-nfts-fl... 1:04:54 World of Women https://boardroom.tv/guy-oseary-signs... 1:06:25 Top Shot Bans Users https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... 1:12:37 PayPal Stablecoin https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/statu... CBDC: https://blockworks.co/fed-chair-powel... Tom Emmer: https://twitter.com/reptomemmer/statu... 1:16:46 Aarika Rhodes vs Brad Sherman https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?co... 1:21:00 TAKES 1:23:00 Zones of Sovereignty https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/st... 1:29:30 Esoteric Terms https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1... 1:31:38 Cobie https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status... 1:33:35 Preaching https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... 1:40:10 What David’s Excited About https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... 1:41:25 What Ryan’s Excited About https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... 1:43:55 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/sartoshi_nft/stat... ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures     

This is one of the reasons why I'm super excited about optimism because they are committed to public goods. And public goods get me all hot and bothered. Good morning, Bankless Nation. It is the second week of January. David, what time is it? Oh, Ryan, it's the Friday weekly roll-up time where we roll up the entire week of crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we undertake it nonetheless, because that is what we do every Friday morning on the Bankless Friday weekly roll-up. Absolutely. Topics for the week, okay? Inflation over 7 percent. That means you're dollars are worth 7% this year versus last year.

PayPal? 7% less. Did I say more? You just said 7% less. It's 7% less. That's bad, okay? PayPal doing a stable coin. What's the news on that?

We're also going to talk about this air drop from looks rare. I got my look token. Looks token. Did you get yours? Oh, I got my looks. All right. Finally. Looks bright.

Like this is like an open sea competitor. We're going to dig into that. Maybe it's what we've been looking for. Not sure yet. There's some other air drops we're going to touch to. Also some big. NFT winners this week and some losers. What are the winning projects? What are the losers? Last two unpack on the roll-up. And you are freshly back, David. You're back from your ice-climbing

trip. How was that, man? Well, I didn't die. So that's correct. Always been a big rock climber, but never been ice climbing before. And I've had this, like, badass afterglow for the last week. It's just, you know, yo, I didn't want ice climbing. That's amazing. Are we going to show those pictures like toward the end of the show? Oh, yeah, we are. Yeah. That was pretty badass. Hanging on with one arm while I'm taking a selfie. You will never see me up there with you, dude. But I admire what you're doing. Oh, it's true, man.

Yeah, that's very cool. Also, we've got to tell you a little bit about our friends and sponsors at On Juno. David, tell them what On Juno is. On Juno is a checking account for crypto people. So if you're frustrated that your Boomer Bank account doesn't have USDC or ETH or BTC when it totally could, use On Juno. because on Juneau is a crypto-enabled checking account. You can put USDC in there. You can also get 4% on that USDC. Ryan, how much APY do you get on your deposits in your bank account? Okay, I know this.

0.01% in my Wells Fargo way to save account. Yeah, that's significantly less than the 4% that you can get on Juneau. It's also significantly less than inflation. I also remind you. And in addition to that, you can also get your direct deposit from your company sent into your On Juno account and they will automatically convert that into crypto so you can reduce the amount of time that you hold your inflating dollars and it can get sent directly into actual sound real money like Bitcoin and Ether. You can do a number of other cool things. They have a metal debit card for you where you can get like 5% cash back at select Web 2 type companies. Walmart comes to mind Spotify, stuff like that and just a bunch of other features as well.

So if your bank account, if your boomer bank account has not taken the crypto pill, On Juno has. So you can go and sign up with code bankless to get $50 when you get your first direct deposit into your On Juno account. Yeah, I've never seen a bank account that can do this. This is my On Juno account. Look at that. So you can get started, split your paycheck. And you get to pick whether you are a Bitcoin maximalist, an eth maximalist or something in the middle. Really cool features that On Juno is rolling out. So make sure you guys check that out and get an account. There is a link in the show notes. David, let's start with some market news of the week. Get to the numbers, man. Bitcoin first. How is Bitcoin hanging in there in this second week of January 2022? Yeah. So the big red days were last week, literally eight days ago. So the seven days of price action has actually not been terrible, even though we've kind of had like a bad market. So Bitcoin is actually up one percent since like Monday. Okay. It started the, started and also like there's we kind of we simply record these on thursdays but the weeks end on

sundays there's a little bit discrepancy we have to sort that out anyways uh seven days ago the bitcoin price was 43,000 dollars it hit a low of 40 and a half thousand dollars in the middle of the week we are currently clocking in at 44,000 oh 42,800. Uh so actually since I wrote these numbers down we must have taken a little bit of a dip because we were actually down 1.8 So scratch that. Down 1.8%. And who knows what it'll be at the time of recording, of course. Pretty choppy, pretty volatile, but definitely it's been down in 2022 so far.

Same story for Eath. What are we looking at on the week? Eath started the week at $3,400, which was the high of the week. It hit a low of just below $3,000. Didn't stay below $3,000 for too long. We don't like that $3,000 number. That's too low of a number. I hate that number.

3,000, I'll settle for 3,300, but we are below 3,300 right now at 3,286. What happened was that the last Wednesday, a week ago Wednesday, the Fed Minutes came out, and people realize that the Fed is now, are now looking at reducing their balance sheet, which means that they are going from injecting $120 million, billion per month, into the market to pulling out $80 billion. So a $200 billion month difference in liquidity. That spooked a lot of people, especially risk on assets like crypto assets.

And that was because of perceived just like unsustainable nature of the balance sheet and also inflation. And so that's what spooked the market. That's why the market's down. And then on Wednesday, when we went from a price of like 3,100 to 3,400 over the course of 24 hours,

that is when the CPI came out and inflation wasn't worse than expected. And so people said, okay, it's not, couldn't have been worse than this. So I'm going to go a little bit more risk on. So markets went from like 4,000 down to 3,000 because of the Fed notes and then bounced back from 3,000, up to 3,400 with Ether Price. But since I've wrote these numbers down, we are back down to $3,290 on the Ether price, Bitcoin doing similar things.

So that is the TLDR of the last week in crypto prices. Yeah, macro really taking center stage in the crypto markets. and, you know, Jerome Powell. And so it's like that $120 billion that they're buying every month, right? That's kind of like an asset stimulus program. It's a price for. It's a price for. Exactly.

And, you know, that goes into all risk on assets. So I think there's that compounded with the fact that people are wondering, does the Fed really know what it's doing? Are they really in control anymore? Or a couple roll-ups ago, I called this like the Jesus Take the Wheel economy. I mean, it's like no one actually is steering this ship. And is the Fed really on top of things? Are they just reacting to things just like everyone else?

I think that's given some jitters to the market. That's going to take some time, I think, to work itself out. So I don't know what's going to happen for the rest of Q1. But I think this macro stuff could be in the headlines for a while, David. I think that's right. The actions of the Fed are similarly as volatile as the markets themselves. So it's not really helping anyone. All right, let's look at the ETH-Bitcoin ratio.

So our numbers for Bitcoin and Eith are flat on the week. Is the ratio looking pretty flat too? Yeah, the ratio is up from 0.075 to 0.0667, up a tiny little bit, but still down on the, like, on a four-week trend. About four weeks ago, we almost hit 0.09. We are currently at 0.076. I would like to be above 0.08. I've said it in episodes past, and so I'll have to say it again.

Like, the ETH-BTC ratio going up is an indication of the bull market. It's been going down the last four weeks. I don't like that. If it's not an indication of a bull market, it's an indication of a bear market. So I'll have to be fair to myself and say that. It's still pretty good, though. Yeah. 0.076. Not too bad.

Hanging in there, not knowing what to do. It's kind of like, it reminds me the summer. We back to crab season. this quarter? It might be a crab season quarter. See how that plays out. How about the bed index? That is Bitcoin, ETH, and DFI Tocons all combine a third to third to third on the one week. What are we looking at? Yeah, we started the week at 126. We are ending the week at 128. We are up by about 2.4%. 2.4% on the week. Interesting. You know, let's switch maybe to away from the short-term chop and back to to fundamentals. So I tweeted this out, David, earlier this year. Like,

And this is kind of a year earlier this week, rather, this is kind of a joke. But like, I'd rather sell an organ than sell my eth this year. Because it's a merge year, all right? Will someone take my kidney for eth? I don't know. You can tokenize it. If anyone needs my kidney, I got an O plus or blood type O. Let me know.

Let me know. You'll leave one. Yeah. So like, but seriously, the fundamentals for ether as an asset. And I think for other assets in crypto are looking quite strong. And now we're talking about the burn. The furnace is quite hot this week. 18K-Eath burn record in a 24-hour period of time.

That happened on January 10th earlier this week. The biggest ETH burn in a single day. Pretty impressive there. We got some other things on the burn. Why don't you talk about this, David? Yeah, for seven days, we had no net new ether issuance. We had a day where ether issuance was matched by ether burn. And actually this tweet is actually a little bit outdated.

The issuance offset 1.00 is actually, the last time I checked it, it was 1.02. So we actually burned 2% more ether than we issued this week. So ether supply didn't increase this week. Yes. Is what you're saying. Yes. But that doesn't happen with any other blockchains. Never ever.

And this is likely because of volatility. One of the first articles, actually I think the first article I ever read, wrote was an analysis of MKR getting burnt during times of market volatility. And I noticed that a lot of MKR gets burnt when prices go up and down really, really quickly. Totally. Because people are paying back their debt into Maker Dow and that burns MKR. And now we are seeing the same dynamic play out where market volatility creates congestion on the blockchain. People are getting liquidated. Their arbitrage bots all over the place. People need to cover their positions. People need to do defy stuff when prices move. And so when that happens, congestion on the chain goes, goes,

really, really high. And so during times of market volatility, ether gets burned the most. And so we definitely saw that with, there was definitely a decent number of liquidations on Saturday and Sunday of last week. And that is being reflected in how much ether we are burning. So market volatility ultimately burns more ether. It's definitely some of that. And at the same time, open sea activity like hasn't slowed down either. So you've got both the market volatility causing people to click more buttons on defy and then you have OpenC and NFTs going full steam ahead. That all adds up to a lot of burn, perfectly balanced, as all things should be,

is the Thanos meme reference here. This is a whole review of 2021, the top Ethereum gas consumers, and you can see the big ones here. What came in number one, David? Yeah, for the viewers on the YouTube, you can watch these graphs. The bottom is going to be the biggest, and then you can see the bands get highlighted as we move up. This is Alex Svanavik from Nansen. And so Uniswap coming in at number one, burning like what looks like 40% roughly of all gas in 2021. So that's pretty big. Definitely taking up the majority

followed by OpenC. And you can see just the rate of adoption in OpenC where even though it's number two, it actually didn't burn all that much gas in the first half of the year of 2021. It was all in the second half. And from the period of like August to November, OpenC was actually burning more ether than uniswap, or consuming gas, I guess, is the more technical term. So that's number two, followed three by one inch, which had a nice steady, eth gas consumption all throughout the year. Number four is the wrapped ether contract. So that's wrapped ether being transferred around that wrapped ether.

Okay, quick dive into wrapped ether. Why does wrapped ether exist? Because ether is not an ERC20 token, and DFIR is used to ERC20 token. and DefiR is used to ERC 20 tokens. So just to make Ether be on the same page as all the other tokens we use in Defy, we have this wrapper contract called Rapt Ether. People put their Ether in there,

and then, boom, Ether behaves behaves-Behapes-in-N-E-R-T-E-R-Torke at the most burned in 2021, followed by Tether, coming in at number five. Going to blow through the rest of these. USC at number six. AVE at number 7, 0X, X X X X X X X-E-E-R-X exchange, and Macha coming in at number eight.

Number nine is Metamast. swap and number 10 is sushi swap. So there you have it. There are our top 10 ETH gas consumers in 2021. Yeah, pretty cool. Defi and NFT is definitely the story. This is a visual from token terminal. Let's see if I can expand this, blow this up a little bit of ETH becoming a productive asset. So this is the effect of EIP 1559 visualized. I'm playing this now. So you can see transaction fees to miners, if you're on YouTube, looking at this in the Aqua. And then suddenly EIP 1559 kicks in burn transaction fees. Oh, look, look, about to hit it.

It surpasses transaction fees to miners. The nice thing about these burn transaction fees, of course, is they go to all eth holders. It's kind of like a stock buyback type program. If you're thinking about this in terms of capital assets like stocks or something, like that. Wait, before you go on, I want to elaborate on that point because the number of miners out there are like, you know, not that many, like less than a thousand individuals or entities are capturing like 95% of the value of the transaction fees going to miners.

The number of ether holders out there is far more than that. It's over a million people. So we're going from like just a thousand people who receive the benefit of Ethereum transaction fees going to over a million people. That's one of the beautiful things about EIP-1559. It democratizes the value captured by the Ethereum Protocol to the maximum number of people possible that's also aligned with the Ethereum Protocol, which is ether holder. So this is a democratizing force.

Yeah, it's interesting, too. I mean, this doesn't go to Wales disproportionately. It goes to everyone equally. So you want some of the benefits of the stock buyback? You can have it. Just own some ETH. You can have a fraction of ETH, and you receive this benefit. That's pretty cool.

One of my predictions, maybe this is kind of a hot take for 2020. 22 is the Ethereum merge will happen this year. And historically, it'll be like, it'll be a historic milestone in the whole, you know, history of crypto. That's how it'll be viewed in the decades to come. But when it does happen in a few months time to time, people will still be disappointed because there's this idea, David, that ETH II and the merge will actually reduce gas fees. And that's not what's going to happen.

It's almost like a efficiency improvement. It's a monetary policy improvement, right? You're ripping out the old proof of work engine and you're installing this hyper-efficient electric engine. So we've gone from a combustion engine to an electric engine, but it is not going to alleviate gas fees. And I'm worried there's this sentiment that people think, oh, when the merge happens, suddenly gas fees on Ethereum will go away.

That's not what's going to happen. That is not Ethereum's scalability strategy. So I guess a quick PSA for people who didn't realize that. And also the take there is, I think some people will be disappointed because there's a lot of bad information about what's going to happen in the future with Ethereum's roadmap. Any thoughts there? No, I had that same question while I was on a podcast this week where like, what's going to happen to the gas fees after the merge?

I don't know where that, excuse me, I don't know where that misunderstanding came from. I've never heard that be iterated. I think people just assume that ETH2 has low gas fees, and it kind of does with sharding. That's the part where Ethereum block space actually grows is because of sharding. A lot of bad information out there. It's like, look, to be fair, it's hard to keep track of all of this stuff. And sometimes we use all sorts of the technical terms. You have to kind of be in the weeds like EIP 1559.

What is that? What does that even mean? ETH2. Oh, it sounds like an upgrade. Is the upgrade going to be faster? Well, no, it's not. Like, what does it improve? It's complicated.

So I get it. But yeah, I'm not sure why that sentiment has somewhat. The interesting thing about all of this is somebody actually put together a discounted cash flow model that I thought was really neat. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Putting a link in the show notes, yeah. It's pretty cool, right?

So this is how analysts analyze. This is done by Ryan Alice. This is a discounted cash flow. It's how analysts look at capital assets like stocks or, you know, rental properties, that sort of thing. And what's interesting about this is if you just look at it from a. amount of revenue that goes to ETH as a productive asset once staking kicks in, right? The value, the fair market value of ETH, if it has a P.E. ratio is something that would be

common for a fast-growing tech company of 100, then ETH is massively undervalued. It should be valued at close to $12,000 per ETH. Just because this thing is a revenue machine, all right? it's December 2021 revenue was $13 billion. Wow. And remember what we said. So like the EIP 1559, all of those burn metrics that were going back, that's stock buybacks. Okay.

But basically when the merge happens and you stake your ETH, then you not only receive the stock buyback, but you also receive a dividend. You also receive annual staking revenue rewards, block rewards. The fees that are currently paid to miners go to validators. The leftovers from the burn go to the validators who stake their eth. So that effectively is like a dividend. So that's what's happening right now with ether. And if you just value it as a productive asset, it just seems hilariously undervalued at this point in time.

I know bankless listeners are probably sick of us saying that. But like, I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Just look at the numbers. Okay. Just look at the numbers for yourself.

Check out this discounted cash flow. And this is only if you've viewed. ether as a productive asset, as a capital asset. When you add a monetary premium, right? So as a productive asset, it's worth $2 trillion. But if you consider that you should also have a monetary premium for all of its uses as money, collateral and defy, like what else are you going to hold? You're going to hold sovereign bonds? No, you want a long-term store of value. I mean, that feels like a $4 trillion, $5 trillion valuation, right? I have no idea if that's going to happen this year. But These are just the fundamentals that I think you and I see when we look at ether is an asset and why we talk

about it so much because it just seems like a freaking no-brainer. Right. It really does. It really does. I mean, it can't just teleport to its fair evaluation, right? Because there's too many people that got too rich too quickly, so they got to sell. So there's many dynamics about why it's not at that price. But one of those dynamics about why it's not at that price is time. And so bankless will be here talking about this until that time comes. It's just the most fundamentally strong asset in this space. In the world. In the world. Best asset the universe has ever seen. Well, now we're being too bullish. But yeah, it's, it seems like a massive opportunity. All right, let's talk about uniswap on Polygon. So it's going pretty well, David. What's

happening here? Yeah, so we've been covering this lately where there was a proposal to put Uniswap on Polygon. It passed with overwhelming support. So now it's there. And it's only been a few weeks tweets Hayden Adams since launch. And Uniswap v3 is already, the highest volume dex protocol on Polygon with only 45 million TVL2. That's one of the beautiful things about Uniswap V3. It's super capital efficient. You can get a lot of liquidity with not that much capital being provided in liquidity. And so no surprise that Uniswap comes to Polygon and just dominates in the Dex space.

So congrats to Uniswap. Congrats to Polygon. Congrats to Define Layer 2. It's thrown off some serious revenue here too. So in 2021, Uniswap LPs, this is the liquidity providers. they made $1.6 billion worth of revenue. And Hayden says that's more than any app, any decentralized app, defy-Pritical L1 network or L2 network, aside from Ethereum, the king, itself.

Pretty impressive. He also shows six other projects that are direct V2 forks of uniswap. So the Uniswap AMM model working pretty well, generating a ton of revenue for the space. And the highlight about this revenue, this $1.6 billion in revenue, is going to liquidity providers who never did any KYC, who never filled out a form, who never signed up with anything. This is permissionless revenue. So yes, it's $1.6 billion, but in my mind, it's the best kind of $1.6 billion, which is the permissionless and free kind, where no one had to submit any sort of

documentation to access it. It's the best kind of revenue. How old is the Uniswap? Is this like just... November. November 2019. Okay, so three. Just, you know, three years old. Just over three years. Yep.

Incredible, how fast these protocols can grow. Another growth story from a market perspective. Crypto browser, the Brave browser, just passed 50 million monthly active users. Of course, Brave just launched a crypto wallet as well. This is more crypto-native browser and pretty cool, pretty impressive to see that growth. Yeah. This is not strictly crypto because Brave is just a price. privacy. It's a crypto ethos browser where you get to,

crypto friendly. Yeah, you get to control your digital footprint. It's user first. It's user sovereignty. So very in line with crypto values. And then they do have their brand new wallet in the browser as well, which you've heard of from the bankless ads. So you'll hear about that later in the show. Guys, speaking of bankless ads, they're about to come at you. We want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. We'll be back with the releases and the rest of the roll up in just a minute. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users.

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All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. We've got to start here with an airdrop and a release, a combo, double threat. Looks rare. They just released. This is a vampire on OpenC, an NFT trading platform, an NFT listing platform, minting platform. You do a lot of things with Looks Rare. What's going on here? Yeah, this is kind of, I think this might be the OpenC alternative that we've all been looking for. There's definitely some very viable alternatives.

Zora comes to mind, like, you know, rareable foundation. But like everyone's really looking for that search and organization and curation feature that OpenC really has done a very good job off. And looks rare.org is a brand new. app on the scene, Web3 app that is closer towards the Web 3 end of the spectrum than OpenC. OpenC is kind of a Web 2.5. And also, I think people have just finally swallowed the pill that OpenC's, I don't think it's going to be doing a token. And so people really want an NFC platform that they can own, which means they need a token. And this platform came with token first. So they airdropped

the Lux token to anyone that has put three ether of volume through OpenC. So if you've ever bought anything more than three ether or collectively purchased anything more than three ether through open. So you have the looks token. We'll pull up a chart here in a second because that number actually scales up the more volume that you put through. Three is just the minimum. In order to get your air drop, you must list an NFT for sale. So you are not automatically eligible. You have to actually list an NFT that you own for sale on the looks for air platform. But there's some pretty interesting tokenomics. And this is, there were angel investments. I'm not sure of there was a big VC profile behind this, but there were angel investors. So there is investors in this.

It's not like the immaculate nature of ENS where they have absolutely no investors. There are some investors behind this. But I think so far, like it's been very, very well received by the community. A lot of the friends that I've heard chit chat about this are excited about it. And I think that I've went through and I listed the two air drops. I got the air drop twice, two different Wallace, and I've listed two NFTs, and that process was great. Very sleek UI. We did ask the Looks Rare team to come on the state of the nation, but since they are all anons,

and they are also very busy with the launch, they politely declined, which is totally fine, but maybe we will talk to them in the future. Yeah, that's really cool. And I guess the vampire attack part of this, right? So last episode, I feel like we were just talking about OpenC, a good chunk of that episode. It's because OpenC just raised $20 billion.

And at that point, if you issue a token, I mean, a lot of the gains have already been realized by accredited investors, the VC side of things. In this case, the vampire attack piece of it is basically they went through, they got all of the higher volume open seat users and they said, hey, you can take part in our equity, in our economy. We're issuing a token. We're giving that to you. And I believe, David, there's some like staking incentives here. So the revenue, OpenC of course, collects 2.5% of all. trading fees, right, on OpenC platform. Looks Rare collects 2% of that. And then is it somehow

staked? Is it somehow distributed to people who are staking the looks token? Is that how this works? That's exactly right. And Ryan, you just said that OpenC raised $30 billion. Not quite. They raised $300 million at a $13 billion valuation. Ah, did I say, thank you. They did not raise $30 billion? Did I say $30 billion or did? Okay. I don't even know what I, okay. They raise $300 million at a $13 billion valuation. And yes, they charge a 2.5% eath fee on the sales, and that goes into the OpenC Company. Instead, with Looks Rare, they charge 2%.

And that goes to people that are staking their Looks token. And if you actually, you can go into the rewards page on the looks rare.com website, Ryan, and it'll tell you the API, which is insane. 930% APR on your looks tokens. And this is not a pool two. This is not coming from, actually, maybe there is, maybe there actually is some inflation.

But you are not providing liquidity on this. So you are not getting, like, people can't dump on you. It's not pool two. So that's very strong percentage of APR. And this is a combination of, yes, this must be because I'm staking my looks token and I'm watching that number go up. So you get more looks token when you stake. so there is some inflation there.

And then you also get wrapped ether. You get wrapped ether in your wallet. And Ryan, I tweeted this out earlier today. Just some of the metrics of 24 hours worth of staking on the airdrop that I got. And I don't know if you have that tweet up, but let's see if you can, let's see if you can, if you do. Yeah, so 24 hours into staking looks. I got 21 new looks tokens, which is about $100 and 0.024E, which is about $80, which is about $80 in rewards. So about $180 inside of 24 hours on my air.

the air drop. The air drop that I got when I claimed it, it was $4.2,000 for the irdrop, and then because appreciation is now up to $7,000, and so it's a pretty compelling air drop. That's amazing. And it's like, so you're earning, those earnings are denominated in ETH too. It's really hard to find like ETH denominated earnings. Yes. This is an application that is sending out Ether dividends towards its users on day one. So that's in of itself, like a brand, like a kind of a breakthrough. This is something I've always wanted. It's also, no wonder they're anonymous, because I can imagine there could be some securities, like SEC type concerns with this type of an arrangement. But I'm glad they're like moving the

Overton window in its favor. What is the value of the looks token here, David? Yeah, so the last I checked it at when the looks token was I think $4.8 per token, $4.80. It was valued at roughly $4.2 billion. $4.2 billion on day one is like, it's a lot. It's a lot. That's a, that's a big number. That's very strong, that's very strong returns for all of those angel investors who invested at, I don't know what valuation, but I'm, it wasn't a billion dollars.

I can be sure. So, you know, this is already like a pretty highly valued token. So, you know, buyer, beware. But, hey, you know, open sea competition. Pick up your air drop, though. Yeah, you got an air drop, right? Definitely pick up your air drop. Yeah, Ryan, do you have that chart of the different air drops tiers?

If not, I can just read it out. Where would that be? Would that be on the... I can just read it out. Yeah, read it out. Okay, so like I said, the lowest tier is that if you sent three ether through open C, you get 125 looks tokens. And again, looks tokens is trading about $4.5. Three to six to 10 ether, you get 200.

It looks tokens, 10 to 20 ether. You get 400 looks tokens. 25 to 35, you get 800 looks tokens. So you can extrapolate from there. They'll be on link in the show notes to check that out. And overall, there's a decent bell curve distribution. So the biggest, the people that spent the most through Lux Rare who spent over 1,000 ether through Open Sea, collectively those people got 4.5 million tokens. But the biggest tier were people that spent between 35 and 120 ether through Open Sea. And collectively, those people got about 35,000 looks tokens combined.

It's impressive, man. It's impressive, look. And they also shipped a product like day one with the AirDrop, which is super impressive. And I think we're going to see this as a trend in 2022. Like we've seen it a little bit last year, but you'll have kind of a, I guess, a more closed, less community owned type of application, like say an OpenC, for example. And then I think in 2022, what we'll see is a fork of that, a VAMP.

empire attack of that. This is not a fork. They didn't steal OpenC's code, but like similar concept, except rather than VC owned and kind of going public route, it'll be community owned. That's exactly what we're seeing. I think we'll see this repeat again and again and again in 2022. So it always pays to use crypto applications, doesn't it? I mean, all you had to do in order to be eligible is like definitely three-eth is a decent amount of volume. NatifT, but all you had to do is do that and use OpenC and you got some free money. Crypto pays you to learn about crypto, as we say so often. Really cool trend to see.

There's another air drop here, David. WTF, a fees.wtf airdrop. People might know this website as the website that you don't want to go look at when you look at how much money you've spent on gas. Whoa, is this your account? Did you really spend $2.5 million? I'm not spent $2.5 million on gas. This is some random address.

But at the time of recording, this contract unlocks in about six hours. So it will already be unlocked by the time that you listen to this. No clue what the token does. Unless I have no clue why they need a token. Why do we need a token for how much gas you've spent? I don't know. Maybe they actually plan to do something of it. One of the big reasons why I haven't sold my looks tokens is because I'm staking it and it's giving me ether.

The only way that I know that I can get ether from this new fees.wtf airdrop is by selling. it for ether. What is your purpose? You get sold for ether. That is just my personal take. That is what I'm doing until I see any further information. About airdrops. People can do whatever they want with them. If you spend the time to research this project, then you can hold. If you don't, then just sell. Or you could stake in some cases. Maybe there's something that people know that I don't. And maybe I should be much more bullish on it. But until then, selling it for be by the way on that on that trend of of looks rare here's a community owned wallet for the open internet this looks like it's uh maybe trying to you take the metamask play and create a community

owned version of metamask the wallet is called tally at tally dot cash uh what do you make of this yeah free open source software kind of true to the nature of you know crypto which is free and open source um they they do take a swing at metamask for having a license on it but you know can you really blame them for having a license. Some people can. I guess this wallet does. Definitely interested in seeing more and more competition in the wallet space. And so I'm excited to try this out. I have not yet tried it out. Yeah, these wars between sort of community-owned versus VC-owned, the net result of them, there's like mud back and forth and like there's all sorts of noise about it. But the end result is consumers get better products and the industry moves forward faster.

So I'm all about it. Bring on the competition. Let's go. Love it. This is pretty cool, too. index co-op. In partnership with Bankless Dow, they just released a new index called the GMI. Going to make it index. What's in the GMI index, David? What is this thing? Yeah, a bunch of the newer tokens that aren't in the DPI, and I think that's really what this angle of the GMI token is. A lot of newer DFI projects have moved faster than what the parameters of the DPI index allow for inclusion with. So there's a bunch of tokens in here that are not in DPI, things like Tocke from Tocomac, Maple Finance, CVX, PIRP from perpetual protocol, spell, tribe, FLX from Reflexer, a bunch of different stuff.

Also a very balanced index. There's nothing really with that has really too much outsized, outsized proportion of it. So bankless Dow, just churning out the products. The streaming fees, 1.95%. So 1.95% of the market cap of the GMI index goes, splits between the bankless Dow and index co-op. And bankless Dow, got two. products on the index co-op as index, both the bed index of which we talked about and the GMI index. So kind of taking the lead with using index co-op to churn out some awesome indices.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Good to see more indices enter the market too. Let's talk about this next thing, which is ether scan. Man, there's not a date that goes by that I don't use ether scan. And I'm not always thankful. I don't always think about it, but because it's just like become second nature to me. It's like kind of like Google. But it is the most useful tool in crypto. Crazy useful. Now they're adding some more features. So this is an NFT feature. So it allows for the on-chain NFT, like you can track trading and minting in EtherScan's new NFT tracker. What are we looking at here, David? It's just a UI-UX upgrade. People, you can already see when you're trading NFTs, but now you can see what NFTs. So just a, a,

a small, medium, UX increase improvement to EtherScan. They're always shipping. And it's crazy how good EtherScan has been even before Defi was like good. Like EtherScan was a good product before anything else on Ethereum was a good product. I don't know what would happen if EtherScan went down. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I would be beside myself.

Ether Blocks of I.O. just doesn't have it. Let's talk some LT releases. We're going to burn through some of these immutable. is now permissionless. So it used to be permission, used to have to fill out some paperwork in order to get on immutable. Now you don't.

Anyone can enter. The theme park is open. Anyone can set up a ride. And they're doing some serious volume here too. So they've just hit a thousand test contracts that are registered on immutable X in just two months. The number has skyrocketed 4X.

So insane growth for Immutable X, seriously impressed with their traction. Yeah. This is what happens when you have, Free NFT fees. This is the beauty of layer two. Free blog space. It's free block space.

Yeah. It's free real estate. The ZK roll-ups are just pure magic. And this is why Ryan and I are just harboring on layer two's. Because layer two is where you get the fastest and most free kind of transactions. And Immutable is definitely getting the adoption based off of that. So congrats to Immutable. D-YDX also based on layer two, of course, using a Starkware technology.

ZK Layer 2. cool, advanced stuff. Feels like a centralized exchange, but it's not. And now they are fully decentralizing. There's a whole blog post about this that will include in the show notes, but I think the line is they are planning to in V4, their newest launch by the end of 2022, be fully decentralized in the implementation of the DYDX protocol. So that means no central party has the ability to receive fees on V2 or V4. It will just be the DYDX token holders, I believe, and the parameters of which governance kind of, you know, sets what those trading fees actually are. I'd love to pick their brain about, you know, the nuances of this. Like, what about the front end?

Is the front end still going to be centralized? Things like a liquidy protocol have done fantastic job incentivizing other front ends. When we say fully decentralized, are we also talking about the front end? And what about the other components of decentralization? But they are doing what we like to see, which is decentralizing. Moving that direction is always great to see. We will always support it all about that at bank lists. Tons of stuff going on with optimism. Dude, optimism had a killer week. You want to burn through these around?

Yeah, so they went permissionless. They opened up their doors to the theme park for all applications, the third week of December. Now, one month later, what are we seeing here, David? Oh, gosh, Macha is now on optimism. So one of the most used decks aggregators is on optimism. So congrats to Macha. We also have tornado cash. So if you have a doxed wallet and you want to regain your...

privacy. Tornado cash on the Ethereum L1 is pretty gas intensive. It requires a lot of computation to do its, to do its duty. So it makes it much more sense to be on optimism. So tornado cash, now on optimism. If you want to undox yourself, you can bridge your eth over to optimism and use tornado cash there for much reduced fees. Set protocol. Also now on optimism, the OGs will remember set protocol. It was a big topic during the bear market, 2018, 2019. They are one of the teams that is responsible for a helping index co-op spin-off. And so that's definitely where some of their energies have been. Other since then been kind of quiet, but they are now on optimism with their token sets. So check that out. And also, in addition to that, optimism, all of these, like

all sequencers of layer two, people that produce blocks, they, just like on the Ethereum 1, they take, they can take transaction fees and M-EV. And that's, this is a very significant conversation to be had because of so many different things that are related to who gets the money that is value extracted from layer twos. And optimism as a part of just its ethos, its values, is giving away all of its profits to donate it towards public goods. So in the last year, optimism of all the adoption has had is, you know, sending out the blocks, sequencing the blocks, which is eventually going to be decentralized. But last year, they donated $1 million to open source projects on Ethereum. And then they finished up saying, over the

the course of hashtag L222, Layer 2, 2022, will be giving away significantly more. So this is one of the reasons why I'm super excited about optimism, because they are committed to public goods. And public goods get me all hot and bothered. Me too, David. And of course, like all roll-ups, they're speeding up. So fees on optimism just got a nice reduction. So more incremental improvements going on all the time in roll-up land transaction fees now 30% cheaper than last week. And that will continue to happen as well. We're also seeing some applications go to alternative layer ones too. This is Zirion deploying on Avalanche. So you can now track and trade all your Avalanche assets directly on Zirion. Cool to see them expanding as well. Last thing, in all of these layer 2s, this is really cool.

There's now a Fiat on ramp. So you have the ability to buy crypto directly on a layer two in your Argent wallet. Of course, Argent switched from Mainchain to ZK Sync, which is a ZK roll-up. And again, some of these terms, you know, mainstream, by the time this is fully ready for mainstream, they won't have to worry about any of it, right? It's like they don't care about ZK roll-ups or, you know, ZK Sync or any smart contract wallets for that matter. They'll just see, oh, cool, here's an app super easy to use. I can deposit directly from my bank account, and now I can use cool DFI stuff, which is not inflating. away at 7% per year and gives me a higher interest rate than 0.01% in my Wells Fargo bank account.

So I'm just going to click some buttons and make that happen. That's how the mainstream experience will feel. And I feel like we're getting closer to that all the time. Right. No one these days says, I'm going to go log into the World Wide Web using my TCP. That's not what we talk about. There's a take later on in the show. Well, we'll unpack that a little bit more.

Absolutely. Some raises, maybe the only one to highlight this week. not really a raise, it was an acquisition, but Coinbase bought this company called FairX to launch crypto derivatives. I've not heard of FairX, but Coinbase getting into the crypto derivatives market, I think, is a big move. I guess maybe derivatives are ready for Coinbase. They've been holding back, FTCs is of the world, the binances of the world, have outstrip them recently. Hopefully, Coinbase plans to catch up a little bit. I guess that's probably their plan with this acquisition. So that is happening as well.

Anything else on that, David? Yeah, FtX really putting the fire under Coinbase. FtX gets their name on the Miami Heat Arena, and then, boom, what does Coinbase do? They get a partnership with the NBA, I think. And then FtX signs on somebody like Tom Brady, and then, boom, what does Coinbase do? I think they got Steph Curry. And then, you know, FtX really big on crypto derivatives. Boom, what does Coinbase do?

Acquires Ledger or FairX. So this is why a competition. is always good for the consumer. Absolutely. Totally. I think this battle will play out in the years to come. There'll be two Titans clashing in this way. But you don't have to get involved.

Or you could. You could go get a job in crypto on our jobs board. That's the bankless. Dot pallet. XYZ job board. Now's the time. It's the beginning of 2022. You're probably evaluating things.

Probably have some New Year's resolutions you're trying to keep. Maybe one of those things is to get a job in crypto. Crypto is always hiring. All right. We are in still a secular bull run. We will be for the next decade. There are lots of opportunities to plug in. Here's a senior full stack engineer. If you don't have enough crypto and you want more, the best thing you can do is get more exposure to crypto by working in crypto. Absolutely. Some of these positions probably come with a token upside as well. Senior full stack engineer at Syndica. There's a senior software engineer at

Guilded. There is a founding full stack engineer at Utopia Labs, a community ecosystem lead at B-Y-D-X as well. That's all we have time to highlight a ton more on the bankless job board. So go ahead and check that out. I don't have to dance that long today. Guys, news time. David, do you want to start with the CPI story? I know we alluded to it. But like CPI, that's consumer price index. So your shelter, your groceries, like the stuff that you pay for in your everyday life has just gone up 7% over the past year. It's the highest inflation has been since 1982.

We all remember, like, parents, people in our lives talking about the 1970s being crazy for inflation. Well, we're starting to see it again. Transitory inflation? Not so transitory. What's happening here? Yeah, inflation clocking in at 7%, which is crazy. And I think I actually want to start with a little anecdote that I remember during the 2019-2020 era of Defi. There was a time where there were multiple years, two,

plus years where MakerDAO had a 0% or 0.5% interest rate. Stability fee is what they call interest rate on their die. So it was extremely cheap to borrow die. All you'd have to do is deposit ether into Maker Dow. You could borrow die basically for free. And that's because the die was always pegged to the dollar pretty damn well. And as soon as the bull market hit, the die started to lose its peg. And so it went from $1 down to $0.98, down to $0.96. It got even as low as 94 cents because the ether price kept on going up and up and up and up and up. And so in your brain think S&P going up, right? Like the market goes up.

There's more capital in the market. And when there's more capital, people can borrow more. And dye is minted when more people borrow more by depositing more ether. And so when ether doubles, you have the same amount of ether, but you can borrow twice as much. So the dye supply just got out of control. And so MakerDAO started to like increase their stability fees. they went from 0.5% to 1.5%. Then they went to 2.5%.

And then the die pay got even worse. It got down to like 92 cents. And so like Rune called Maker Dow governance. And so like, yo guys, I think we might need to be really, really aggressive with the interest rate. Like I'm thinking like perhaps plus above 10% in order to restore the peg, the Maker Dow governance had to increase the stability fee up to 19.5% before the die peg got back down to a dollar. And this is kind of a similar mandate that the Fed has. The Fed has the demand for price stability, where MakerDAO pegs their dye stably to the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. dollar just needs to be pegged towards a basket of goods. And right now, it's not being pegged towards a basket of goods because how inflation is 7%. So there's a nice little anecdote about how DFI works and how it's kind of the same in the traditional world. And I think that's what's going on here. I think the Fed had a moment in the last few weeks where they realized that, like, yo, it's not going to take like a margin. increase in interest rates. Like, it's going to take an aggressive increase in interest rates

to combat inflation. And so that's, I think, part of the story of why the markets are down this week and why people are freaking out, because people see the Fed, the Fed, people are freaking out because they see the Fed freaking out about how high the interest, the inflation is. And so they are projecting high interest rates in order to combat that inflation. And they have to do this without breaking the economy, which is the tight walk that the Fed has to walk, and it's pretty tricky but like for the average person I mean you look at 7% and this just looks broken I mean did you get a 7% raise this year oh if not then you actually lost money you got like uh you know a real term pay cut yeah you're earning less than you were last year in real terms we're talking

about bank you you know bank accounts right they call it a savings account and they give you 0.01% interest it's just embarrassing how How does a bank even call it a savings account when you're losing 7% per year? You can't possibly make that up on the interest. So this starts to feel like a broken economy, and I think people are looking to the Fed to get a hold of this. It's not just the Fed's responsibility, right? Like fiscal policy comes into play here. Anyway, it's going to be an interesting decade as we watch some of these dynamics around

money supply playing out. But this is the case for crypto, isn't it? I mean, crypto people have been saying that this would happen for a while. and here it is. Sorry if people didn't like the buzzer. I thought it was funny. I like the buzzer. Good buzzer, David.

Yeah, I don't think people are that's coming. This was a good post. First Impressions of Web 3. This is somebody from the Signal application, I believe kind of a founder or someone involved in that project, which is a great privacy-centric messaging application. And I don't know, what did you make of this article

when you read it, David? Yeah, the takeaway was that, while these foundations, the blockchains may be decentralized themselves, and some things on them may also be decentralized like defy, things up the stack are less decentralized. And so the take is like, yeah, we have these decentralized base layers, but a lot of the things on top of them are not decentralized. And this goes into the question of, like,

where does the data for your JPEG actually live? Is that on a blockchain? Because, like, if your JPEG's any more than a very small file size, the answer is no. Very, very few NFTs actually have the image stored on chain. And that's actually why things like autoglyphs out of Larva Labs are so popular. Fun fact, cryptopunks are actually on the Ethereum blockchain. But the average NFT does not have the data on the blockchain. And that's just one example of how there is centralization worked into different spots around the Web3 world. And that was the critique out of Moxie here. Just parts of the applications that we use aren't

decentralized. They are censorable. They have weak attack vectors. And so the critique is like, yo, what is this web-through thing? If it has all these potential attack vectors. What's your take, round? Yeah, I think he brings up a good point. Something we've known for a while. And it's, you know, it's not just like the image themselves and the storage isn't decentralized, but actually, like, accessing the JPEG is also uses APIs from centralized companies. So if OpenC went away, for instance, did you know you probably wouldn't be able to see the NFT in your MetaMask wallet, at least for some period of time, because MetaMask and many of the different wallets, they just call OpenC for that indexing data to tell them which NFT is what.

My take here is that I think he raises some good points, but that also the crypto industry is not unaware of these things. And he might not appreciate the extent to which we're working on them. and the extent to which, like, we're taking them seriously. This was a post from Vitalik who just actually commented on Moxie's post. And, you know, he said this. This stuck out at me. Because one of the things Moxie said is like, oh, if you're going to call this space decentralized,

why hasn't it actually become decentralized? Why hasn't it happened yet? Vitalik said this. As far as my theory, as for my theory about why this hasn't happened yet, I would say a lot of it comes down to limited technical resources and funding. It's easier to build things this lazy centralized way, and it takes serious effort to do it right. The Ethereum ecosystem did not have that much resources up until four years ago. And I think that is really the theme or probably the response from the crypto community.

It's basically like, yeah, we're taking some, we're using some Web2 infrastructure. We have to take some temporary shortcuts and centralized things that long term we want to decentralize. but we are working to decentralize them over time. Vitalik gets into some more technical details about how light clients can actually prove to be a better, more decentralized kind of access layer for some of these things. And also the work that the graph is doing, for example, as an indexer to decentralize itself. So it's kind of a work in progress. I feel like this was a good critique.

It's a good reminder. Definitely good reminder, elements of truth. and also that we're still early in the crypto industry, at least the parts that we love the most, are working on these things to start decentralizing them over time. I 100% agree. When we created crypto, applications on the internet, we're good at making Web 2 applications.

Developers have gotten mastered the Web 2 universe. The Web 3 universe is a new universe. And so it's not like we can just immediately imbue all of these applications with all components of decentralized. Some things are easier to decentralize than others. For example, DYDX was non-custodial from the very beginning, but it's always had centralized servers in doing the orders. And some things are easy to tackle, some things are hard, and we just need more innovation to tackle the rest of the things. And so I would just like to say that we just have to wait for the decentralization of the base layer to work

its way up the stack into the application layer. Totally. And we've already seen it happen. So do you remember time where there was only centralized exchanges? There was no such thing as defy. If you wanted to exchange one crypto asset for another, you had to go to Coinbase and you had to use a decentralized exchange. And somebody could look at that and be critical or they could just wait a couple years. And now we have tons of decentralized exchanges. So we are working our way up the stack, wholeheartedly believe. But good post, good reminder.

There was also some downtime for Arbitrum that happened this week. A few hours of downtime on the Arbitrum sequencer. So why did Arbitrum go down? David and what did that mean? I don't actually know the how or why it went down but this is what happens when you have a centralized sequencer, you know, single point of failure. The sequencer is down therefore Arbitrum is not producing blocks. So assets are can't move on the Arbitrum layer two. They can be withdrawn from the layer two but they can can't really have like the super fast transactions or super low fees on Arbitrum. I think it was down for four or five hours or so and I actually

haven't read the post-mortem about it. But I think there was some equipment failure or something and sort of their redundant equipment, their redundant hardware. Somebody accidentally kicked the power cord. Yeah, somebody kicked the power cord. Yeah, but so the thing about this is, of course, this is less severe in my mind than a layer one going down, right? Because layer two always have layer one to fall back. But I think an escape patch.

An escape hatch. An interesting question is, okay, well, so during that five hours of time, during that outage window, could people actually withdraw? to the L1. Like, it's a good time to test this, this theory. And what's interesting about that is, like, number one, for roll-ups, optimistic roll-ups, is actually the withdrawal period takes seven days. It doesn't happen immediately. And the second thing is, it's not easy to do that right now.

Like, it takes some command line, technical skills digging into the code to actually execute a withdrawal. And so user interfaces, easy user interfaces, aren't available to do that. But the fact that you can, that this bridge exists, also means user interfaces are getting spun up and going to be spun up to make withdrawals easier if this happens again. So, yeah, it's different when an L2 goes down

versus an L1, but it can seem similar, I think, to people if they don't have an easy way to actually exercise and use that escape hatch. And we're not there yet. Like, we don't have easy user experiences to be able to go back to layer one. Right. We know that it is technically possible to do this.

So if you had your money on there, you would be technically able to do that. It would just be a matter of just like making the effort. Like if you don't know how to code, you got to go find a developer, you need some instruction and stuff like that. But, you know, it's technically possible. Now the next step on the L2 ecosystem is making it easy.

I know teams like L2B are working on having front ends for every single significant roll-ups. So you can just press a button there. And this is a very solvable problem. And just like you said, This is fast chains, like optimistic roll-ups, are unstable chains. Fast equals unstable. We can do some optimizations.

We're going to make these things more stable over time. But if you want fast, you have to commit to some amount of instability. That's just how it works. And that's why fast chains belong on the layer two. It's because you don't want unstable L-1s. Because imagine if Ethereum was a fast chain and then Ethereum halted or went down, every single L-2 would be stuck. You wouldn't be able to get your money off of any.

You're dead. You're dead. You're dead. Scott. It's over. Stability on the layer one, speed on the layer two. That's how it works. Let's talk about the NFT games. Some cool stuff going on in an NFT world. AP, this Associated Press, they just doubled down on NFTs.

So they're launching a marketplace for some of their iconic images, a ton of really fantastic images from the Associated Press over the years. They are doing these photography NFTs on Polygon as well. Really cool to see, I guess, literally mainstream, media entering the NFT market. Yeah. An NFT, a photo, NFT photography marketplace is... Do you feel like that's a nascent space? Like, hasn't really been developed yet? I hope so. Photography was my like side gig throughout high school and college. So it

holds a special place in my heart. One of the, my frustrations with the industry was that like in order to pay bills, I would have to take like photos, photographs for events. And that wasn't like my creative expression, right? And this is the power of a Web 3, we can unleash creativity. Shout out to the podcast coming out on Monday with Lee Jin and the creator economy and what crypto protocols can do to unleash everyone's internally native kernel that they have inside of them. Get paid for your creativity now? Really hard to do that these days, but more opportunities coming with Web 3. This is cool as well. Once you talk about this, it seems like NOS is doing something in the NFT space? Yeah, people will remember our two

episodes that we've done with Blow, the DJ Blow, who has the Royal platform. Ryan might call him Three Lau. Sorry, Ryan. Royal is a tokenized music platform. So if you like a song and you think that it is going to be a hit, you can buy a song and receive royalties. And now Noss has joined Royal or will be joining Royal. No, it has joined Royal on the 11th. So two days ago and is selling royalty rights to two of his songs as NFTs. So music NFTs really taken center stage lately. vision with uh for for blau or three low as you like to call him david is like you know turn Spotify into into a marketplace into an ownership economy so you find some hot artists that you really you really like their music buy some royalty license and receive a piece of that in the future

pretty awesome what that unlocks for creators and fans imagine you're like going out to like starbucks and like a song that you own comes on imagine how good that we're feel that would be I just made money. I'm making money right now. Amazing. Pudgy penguins. Let's talk about some drama, right? NFTs are up, NFTs are down, which ones which?

Some are up, some are down, but penguins are down. They're down bad because some drama's going on. I haven't been following this closely. Tell us. Well, it's a little bit of a chicken in the egg as to which what came first. Did the prices go down and then drama happened? Or did drama happen and then prices went down? Perhaps a little bit of both.

It's always a flywheel. There's some drama with the team. My kind of take here is that because the pudgy penguins never really caught on as much as the other NFT projects, the prices never really did the things that other NFT projects. So that's frustrated the founders. And the drama is that they are looking just to sell the project. You can do that? Apparently, I didn't know you could do that.

I mean, I guess somebody owns the admin keys for that. And so they wanted to list the project for a pretty large sum of ether, something over 1,000 ether. No one took a bid. They dropped that price down to 888 ether. I'm not sure anyone took a bid on that either. But they are looking just to exit the project because I think they are just kind of done with it. Except the thing is, like, it's the Pengeons community is strong. Like, it's not like the community's absent.

There's just friction between the founding team and the community. And so, like, what I'm kind of hopeful for, Ryan, is that this kind of turns into, a sushi swap story, whereas just the perhaps less aligned founders. And I do not know the full story here. I do not know there's the founders. There's takes and sides to unpack on both sides. I'm just giving some preliminary takes. My take here is that the founders are just not as committed. They're ready to move on, but the community wants new leadership. And so this is kind of like the community taking over, maybe taking over the project and finding a new leader to spearhead the Pudgy Penguins project into perhaps new successes.

Perhaps this is a sushi swap moment where, like, you know, starts off good, then fails and doesn't get the traction because, you know, some maligned founders and then the community takes over and takes it from there. I don't know. A disclaimer, I guess, I have like three penguins, I think. Maybe four. You know, my take is we don't have this kind of drama in the turtle community, okay? I don't know what you penguins are doing. When's the last time you've talked to a number, a member of your turtle community? No drama, all right? In fact, it's silent most of the time.

Completely silent. That's how drama-free it is. Turtles don't make noise. They don't. That's true. Let's talk about some NFP projects that are going up. Yeah, the Ws this week. Doodles is one. What's happening here?

Yeah, doodles. I didn't get the doodles, but other people doodles. Doodles just caught a ton of bits. What's a doodle look like? Yeah, what does a doodle? Here's doodle number six, nine, one four. There's king, king. King doodle.

That's a king? Oh, God. $5 million for King Doodle? Well, that's the current offer. But yeah, that is like the best doodle out there. Click the doodle link on the top center. So we can look at some more doodles. My opinion on these is that they don't really differentiate themselves as much.

But people are really, really liking them. And so doodles really won the NFT market lately. Yeah, a number go up. They're crushing it. Their floor price above 10, ETH right now. Yeah. At the start of the November, it looks like the floor price was around 1.5 to 2, and now it's at 10.

And that is only one of two winners in the NFT market. We got to ask, we got to ask, We got to ask Carly, what's going on, overpriced JPEGs. Carly. Another bankless show. It's just, yeah, all about NFTs. What's going on with the dudes? What's going on with the doodles?

Send dudes. This is cool. This project, World of Women. So WW. I was thinking of World of Warcraft, but they are crushing it as well. This is another project on the Ascent. It looks like they're getting a lot of celebrities

purchasing these World of Women NFTs, legendary music manager, known as Guy O'Sera has just bought, is that how you pronounce his name or am I making an embarrassing celebrity thing again? I don't know. This is the first time I've heard of that name as well. Okay, we're both. We're both numbers. Fifteen million worth of NFTs in the last week we're sold of these wow NFTs. Pretty cool. What's going on? Eva Longoria, I think I saw last week, purchased one. What do you make this? Yeah, I think all the NFT ladies or defy ladies that I know who are into NFTs have a world.

They're flexing their world of women NFTs. So a world of women NFTs, very hot with the ladies. So if you're trying to impress a lady friend, perhaps get her a world of women NFT. And maybe that's why the price is going up. I do think that some of these look really, really cool. They have these gradients. They have very artistic.

Ladies love the world of women NFTs. I know Camie Russo has one. I know Aubrey Strobel has one. I see it. Yeah, right? When Beyonce, huh? Yeah. Jay Z has a Cryptopunk, right?

Matchy Beyonce. She's got to get one. Yeah, Cryptopunk plus World of Women Collab relationship. Love it. Love it. God. That's going to happen, too. We just predicted it here.

All right. Let's keep moving. NBA Topshots, they are banning users right now. This is on the Flow blockchain, NBA Topshots, the application specifically. This is purported to be an NFT platform as well. It seems kind of anti-crypto. to start banning users, particularly, like, for geopolitical reasons, like bending over to authoritarian nation-state pressures.

Am I reading too much into this, or what's going on? That's the signal that I'm hearing, because we know that the NBA has bent the knee to Chinese influence before, so that there's very strong precedent before. The NBA, and this is actually a global macro problem at large. Like, I'm going to swear, everyone's kind of the China's bitch. like they own all of our assets they own our stock markets

they like they kind of control us they control Hollywood they control the narrative like if you say something bad about China you can't that you can't put that in Hollywood that's a listen to the Hidden Forces podcast about this with Dimitri

if you want to unpack that a little bit more I think it's a systemic problem but it's outside the scope of the bankless podcast except when a blockchain like flow from which are from Dapper Labs has NBA top shots on top of it that's banning users and freezing assets because of a free Hong Kong username. I don't think that has explicitly been stated as in that was why. They just said that the user

provided false or misleading information during the verification process according to an email, and they said that this activity breaches one or both of the top shot terms and use of the DAPAW service terms of use. Maybe it was something else. I don't know. But the fact that they can ban them. Blockchains, Ryan, don't ban people. Blockchains cannot freeze stuff. And so this is why I have always had a grudge against Flow and Dapper Labs, because if you can freeze something, you're not a blockchain, you're a database.

You're not permissionless. You're permissions. And so I tweeted out this morning and said, hey, dapper labs, the guys behind Flow, the blockchain that NBA Topshot is built upon. I said, if you can ban a user on NBA Topshots for a free Hong Kong username and freeze their assets, you don't deserve to call yourself a blockchain. The name NFT requires strong property rights. Your NFTs are fraudulent. Get GTFO out of here. I guess that's a little bit redundant. Your NFTs are fraudulent. The tokens only work if they're actually tokens on a

blockchain with strong property rights. If you can take someone's NFT from them, it's not an NFT. Stop using the word NFT. That's our word. You don't get to use it. Yeah. You get to use a JPEG. Like your NFTs are fake. Our NFTs are real. Get the hell out of here and stop with this decentralization theater because you're harming users by freezing their assets and taking away their accounts. Okay, so some people are listening to that and they're going to feel like you came down too strongly on this, David. So, you know, what do you think about that? It's like, do you think that's being a little too decentralization maxi about this blockchain? Do you think there's a role to play for NFT platforms that are more centralized like flow? What would you say?

is somebody who, you know, says that. I think Dapper Labs in China came on too hard on this particular user. Like, I'm sorry. Like, I will take, I will take the blame that perhaps I have been too critical on other, other blockchains, which I'm working on. That's one of my resolutions in 2022 to not harp on. Be kinder. Be kinder to some of the blockchains out there that have meaningful adoption,

things like Avalanche, things like Solana, going to be kinder to them moving forward. David gets fired up when there's a freezing account episode. When you can freeze an account, like you've got to draw the line somewhere, Ryan, and I draw the line at China using its nation-state influence to control a blockchain and a user's funds. Like, at some point, but the decentralization maxi comes out. Like, I'm sorry. I do feel like that this is part of at least our role in the space or bankless's role,

or like what I feel like I care about most. I've noticed a lot in just kind of mainstream, you know, Reddit and such, there's different subredditers, people hating on the term Metaverse because they're like, what is Metaverse? It seems like this virtual reality world that Facebook wants to control to suck out all of our energy and trap us into their ad platform. And like, we've been there, done that. We don't want part of Mark Zuckerberg's dystopia. And I'm like, I see that.

And I'm like, my God, now Facebook gets to co-op the term Metaverse. right? I'm like, hell no. The metaverse is about strong property rights. Not about virtual reality. It's about strong property rights. So I do get fired up and I do agree that there's things that we have to do in the space to make sure that we have crisp definitions of things. And in NFT, the term does imply some level of property rights. It might not be Ethereum the main chain level property rights, but it has to fall. somewhere in the spectrum of cannot be censored. Yes. Or else it is no longer an NFT. It becomes the thing we already had in the past, which is just a JPEG selling for an exorbitant price. And I'm not sure where exactly that line is,

but I agree, David, when you start to see censorship, when you start to see banning, when you start to see like some authoritarian pressure being put down on a platform and then it just like kind of crumbles away, like that is where you have to start. drawing the line. I do think that's partially our role in the space. So let's definitely be nice, you know, compassionate, but like I think this is part of what we need to do as people on the bankless journey is like appreciate and respect decentralization and evangelize for it. Tell people

why it matters so much. Absolutely. Yeah. And to their credit, Avalanche, Solana. I haven't heard of any of those blockchings freezing anybody. But when they do, look out. Dave's coming for you. that we are talking about it. We are talking about it in angry tones. Yes. That'll be the angriest part of the podcast. This is pretty cool. Okay, on the regulatory front, PayPal is planning a stable coin maybe.

Now, this is leaked news. So PayPal didn't come out and say it, but somebody was like digging into the code and found references to PayPal that it would be backed by the US dollar. But how big would that be if PayPal issued and launched their own stable coin? I wonder what that would look like and how that would change the conversation about stable coins in the United States. Pretty bullish from my perspective. Yeah, the thing is that, I mean, I guess the competition isn't all that crazy. There's really only USC and I guess also Paxos.

I'm not considering Tether as part of the conversation because it's offshore. Sure, I guess there could be more competition in the stable coin space. We'll see how PayPal uses its influence to penetrate its own stable coin into the defar markets. The next few things we'll talk about are all kind of related to that. So there was this hearing in the Senate, I believe, with Powell and some various senators who were talking about stable coins, various things. And Powell made the comment when asked if stable coins and a central bank digital currency could both exist simultaneously at the same time. He said, yes, essential bank digital currency and stable coins are compatible. They can both exist together.

You don't have to just have one or the other. So making some room for stable coins. And then there was this, Senator Tom Emmer, he just introduced a bill that actually prohibits the Fed from issuing a central bank digital currency directly to individuals. And this bill would also support privately adopted stable coins. And here was his rationale for doing so. As other countries like China, he says, develop central bank digital currencies that fundamentally omit the benefits and protections of cash, I think he means privacy, it is more important

than ever to ensure the U.S. digital currency policy protects financial privacy, maintains the dollar dominance, and cultivates innovation. Central Bank digital currencies that fail to adhere to these three basic principles could enable an entity like the Federal Reserve to mobilize itself into a retail bank, start collecting personally identifiable information on users and tracking their transactions indefinitely. He goes on to say, requiring users to open an account at the Fed to access a US CBDC would put the Fed on an insidious path akin to China's digital authoritarianism. And he says, any central bank digital currency implemented by the Fed must be open,

permissionless, and private. This means that any digital dollar must be accessible to all, transact on a blockchain that is transparent to all, and maintain the privacy elements of cash. That is incredibly powerful, hearing that coming from a senator with a, a bill to back that up. I'm not sure how much steam this bill actually has, the likelihood of passage, but I love that we're starting to have this conversation. This is the conversation we need to have. Like, digital currencies could be very bad, very authoritarian, could usher in a dystopia if we're not careful. And the way to do it right is with public blockchains.

Issue a stable coin on a roll-up, even a central bank digital currency on a roll-up, have the private sector develop this out and collaborate as well. Like this is the way to export the dollar in the digital world. Use free open source technologies blockchain to do it. The combination, there are plenty of good things about a central bank digital currency. There's a lot of financial inclusion that it can bring. And there's also a lot of bad things, as if you just listed, the censorship and all that stuff. The combination of a central bank digital currency on a roll-up on top of a decentralized public blockchain is the best of

both worlds where the Fed gets to have all the control that it wants to have on the roll-up, but it can connect to the rest of an open, open, permissionless financial system. And the Fed and the interest of the United States get to be instilled by injecting its dollars into the market. So I'm interested. Yeah, pretty cool that this is actually maybe happening, actually being embedded in a bill, and I think this is bullish. So, David, I think part of the reason we're getting some of the support in Congress is because

we have politicians running crypto platforms now, one of which was Erica Rose, whom we had on the bankless podcast. She is running on a pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto platform running against Brad Sherman, who is about the most anti-crypto member of Congress that exists. And we talked to her. We had a great podcast episode with her earlier in the week. Folks can go tune in, listen to that. You know, it was really interesting after the podcast. We went and actually looked at donor records for people. She said because you can get Brad Sherman's donor records. Apparently, it's open and transparent. I have not done this before. But this is Brad Sherman's donation record. What are you seeing here, David? Oh, God, number one. Clocking in at number one. Wells Fargo and

company. Clocking at number two, Goldman Sachs. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Don't know what that is. But we got some banks. Liberty Mutual insurance company. A lot of big banks here. Big banks, big companies. Old finance, trad file. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, so, you know, we don't have any bank support on bank list, do we, Ryan? You don't like the banks. No, you don't get donations for Wells Fargo, unfortunately. I don't think they're aware that we exist. Quite a contrast, though, versus Erica Rhodes donor list. Look at this. Ryan Selkis. Clocking in that the first donor ever for Erica Rhodes, Ryan Selkis, the crypto-native, the crypto-believer, the crypto-politician. Nice job, Ryan. of individuals here too, which is really good to see. And so you donated to you, David. This is

important to you. Yeah, totally. I mean, one part because I want my money to go to Erica Rhodes, but also I want to virtue signal and signal to the rest of the crypto world that they should also be donating to Erica Rhodes. And I think this story of Erica Rhodes versus Brad Sherman is going to be it's a great microcosm just of so many things that need to happen, in my opinion, as a millennial in America. We have Brad Sherman, who is like, again, no thing. offense of the boomers, but like they kind of have outsized representation. And Brad Sherman doesn't spend a lot of time in his district. And Eric Rose... He's owned by the institutions at this point. He's owned by the institutions. And Erica Rose says that, Rhodes says that his disposition

is that he thinks that that seat is just his. That no one can really take it from him. He's been an incumbent for over 20 years. And so we have this incumbent boomer who doesn't, who hates crypto, who's backed by the banks. And going up against him is this millennial elementary school teacher who's in her district talking to her people and who thinks that Bitcoin and crypto innovation needs to remain in America. You know, crypto and Bitcoin, they're not her number one priority. But like in stark contrast to Brad Sherman who wants an outright ban on crypto, all Erica has to do is be like, yo, like, yeah, let's keep Bitcoin innovation in America. I have a good idea. Let's keep an open mind. Yeah. That's literally all you have to do.

It's all you have to say. Just keep an open mind and let it happen. And she's had plenty of personal stories where people have been able to get out of, there are parts of her district that live in poverty and are unbanked. And she has stories of her constituents using Bitcoin to access financial services. And like sometimes we forget about how much of the American population is actually unbanked. So I donated to Erica Rhodes. I hope that you consider, I'm not telling you to, but I hope you consider also donating to Ericka Rhodes, at the very least to get this Brad Sherman just, what's the right word?

Loser out of Congress. Incumbent, yeah. Do it for your bags. Do it for your bags. Because if we can get Erica Rhodes elected, it'll set off a domino effect of politicians be like, oh, God, the crypto people put all of their money behind Erica Rhodes. And it worked. Like, imagine the influence that that would cause if we could get this to have.

happened. So like the ROI from this from just an industry adoption perspective is so huge. There you go, guys. We will be right back with the takes of the week. And of course, things we're excited about in the meme of the week. So stay tuned for that. We want to first tell you about these fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DFI. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DFI in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on SlingShot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time. SlingShot is available on Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism,

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So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up, at Gemini with Gemini.com slash go bankless and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, we're back with the takes of the week. Let's start with this one from Vitalik Buteran. This was from the Reddit AMA with Ethereum researchers that conducted last week. But it was really good take and Vitalik tweeted it out. It was his argument for why the future will be multi-chain rather than cross chain. There's some differences there.

And he says there are fundamental limits to the security of bridges that hop across multiple zones of sovereignty. What did he mean? It's cool because we discussed some of this on our bridges panel that we just had earlier in the week

if you guys want to hear that discussion. Go check this out. The great LTEU migration panel where we dig in some big brain bridging projects and we get their insight on this take too. But I thought this was a super interesting take. It reminded me of our episode that we did with Roon Christensen about the

security hazards of relying on bridges that are multisig, that are centralized bridges, and how that is kind of the destination we're heading towards if we go in the direction of a massive cross-chain ecosystem, where you have one layer one communicating with a second layer one. Vatallic goes and kind of illustrates the difference here. It's really interesting. If you have, say, Ethereum and you want to get that to the Solana token, and you transport that ether to Solana, it becomes kind of a sole-eth-type token. And it has a much different security profile than Ethereum. Because, why? Because you have to use some level of a trusted bridge in order to get that ether to Solana. And the other direction is true, too. If you take Solana and you move it

you, Ethereum, you have a weaker form of Solana. And that because there is a security, because there is a bridge in between those things, it really changes the risk profile of the asset. So something could happen to that bridge and the ether that you had on Solana becomes worthless or worth like 50, 60% of the value that it should be worth. And so this becomes a problem when you get like chains of change that are strung together in all. all connected by bridges because it creates a very fragile ecosystem for finance. So that's why Vitalik says he actually doesn't think that world is very likely. What he instead thinks is more likely is we'll have very clear zones of sovereignty.

So you'll have sort of an Ethereum world, you'll have a Solana world, you'll have an Avalanche world, and their assets, their version of an ERC20 and their tokens will be kind of isolated into their universes. So for Ethereum and, you know, layer two, that's all one in the same universe. But as soon as the assets transferred to something like Solana, it enters into a different zone of sovereignty. So it kind of, for me, David, it sort of throws a monkey wrench in the gears of this idea of a multi-chain ecosystem. I know there was some pushback on this post from Vitalik, but what's your take on it? People have identified blockchains as like the new age nation states for a really long time. And this is just an articulation of that thesis where Solana and its layer two ecosystem,

if it ever develops one, it would be great to keep for that ecosystem, right? Like Solana tokens get put on Solana L2s. Ethereum tokens, Ethereum NFTs get to put on Ethereum layer twos. But when we talk about multi-sig bridges, the whole point of these crypto things is to have strong settlement assurances that are trustless. And as soon as you use a multi-sig bridge, which is the only way to go from one LLB, 1 to another L1, you compromise on so much of what makes blockchain super, super cool. And so I think what Vitalik's saying is that, like, he's not saying that there's going to be

one chain to rule them all. He just kind of thinks that, like, the Solana things are going to stick inside of the Solana ecosystem. The avalanche things are going to stay inside of the avalanche ecosystem. And there's not going to be too much interconnectedness between these things. Because I imagine if... There's going to be borders. There's going to be borders.

These are borders. Yeah. And it's going to be difficult to pass... through these things, and you're going to have less incentive to do so. Because imagine if, like, just like you're the example, like imagine if you took a wrapped ether, you sent it over to avalanche to the avalanche bridge. You sent that from, so now you have wrapped ether,

avalanche wrapped ether, and then you take your avalanche wrapped ether, and then you send it to Solana, and then you have Solana avalanche wrapped ether. And then you send it back to Ethereum. There would be Solana, Ethereum avalanche wrapped ether. It would be a complete mess, where if you send it to a roll-up, You don't stack the dependencies. You don't stack the risks. The risks stay small rather than compounding.

Yeah, so it's interesting. I do think we'll have multiple layer ones in the future, but they'll all sort of be like nation states and that they'll have borders. And they'll be trade between these nations, right? It doesn't mean the different chains, the different nations will be at war. They will interact and they will have commerce.

But I do think you will have like citizen assets and you will have foreign assets. And when you project that forward, you know, that's an interesting way to see how crypto is going to evolve. And I don't think that's very widely known or appreciated that, you know, the security profile of an asset can change drastically when you connect it with a multi-sig bridge. We can even talk about the concept of like tariffs, right? Because if you want to take like the Solana token and wrap it on Ethereum and then use that as collateral, these applications are going to have to take into account that increased risk. and they will be charging higher fees on that and crisp risk. Yeah, because they're taking the risk.

It's a risk your asset. And so, like, there's going to be, like, pseudo tariffs in order to port your assets into a non-native domain. It's funny. Maybe not as borderless as people hope. Yeah. New borders. New borders. Well, new nations face new borders.

Yeah. That's right. Makes sense. Let's talk about this. This was a take from someone who said, crypto people. We need to make crypto accessible and also crypto people. Ethereum, Arbichum, Squeth. ZK.

Plonk, Vitalik Buterin, as if all of these terms are esoteric and hard to understand. Anthony Sassana with the take under this take, internet people. We need to make the internet more accessible, internet people. TCPIP, HTML, CSS, JSON, API, modem. I think what he's saying here is all of these terms will become so native to us that they won't really matter anymore. So like, like the terms of the internet, like the word JPEG at one point in time, that was geek speak, right? It's like, or GIF. That was like, that was nerdy talk, right?

Like, oh, you're an HTML programmer using GIFs and JPEGs? Like, that's nerdy, right? That's geeky. But now it's just a common, it's common parlance. It's entered mainstream. And a lot of these things like TCP IP that people haven't heard of, well, mainstream users don't actually have to know what the TCP IP protocol is to use a website or use an Apple. I think Anthony is saying that all of this will get wrapped into the internet just as the previous

generations of the internet have been wrapped into it. That's exactly right. These are things are going to get abstracted away. Actually, I don't even know. I don't think I can name a single one of these things. Like, I don't know what a TCP IP is. I know IP is internet protocol. HTML, I don't know what that is. CSS. I don't know what that is. JSON. I don't know what these things are. I don't know what they are. I mean, I know what they are, but I don't know what they stand for. And so like the point of, technology is to abstract away the protocols and make these things super accessible. And so the fact that the protocols exist are what makes them accessible is now it's up to the interface layer or the browser layer to obfuscate these things.

Also kind of weird that this Twitter user listed Vitalik Buterin. That's an esoteric name. Vitalik buterin is not necessarily the most accessible person out there. So I take the point. He is just Vitalik, though. You don't have to use his last name. He's kind of like Madonna or Prince. It's just Vitalic.

Let's go here. Kobe had a fantastic clip. Should we play this? Yeah, let's play it. Before I had money, I thought everything was a scam, and it was all rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now having money and being able to help my family out, for example, and seeing my parents' personalities change

because they don't have to worry about certain things anymore, like making ends me or, like, what's going to happen when they retire. Seeing their personalities change and getting to know them more as people, because some number changed on a screen makes me, A, like everything seems like a giant scam, but B, feel like I was also slightly robbed of experiencing that while I was growing up or while I was younger because they had these burdens and had to worry about them. So it doesn't weigh on me so much, but I do think a lot about that. Like, it feels like everything is a bit of a scam for some, like, weird numbers on a screen, and it means that people, like, live their lives in ways where they

don't get to properly know the people around them because everyone's always worried about short-term stuff. So, David, this clip was from our recent episode with Kobe. And absolutely blew up on Twitter. Why do you think it resonated and landed so much with people? Well, everyone kind of resonates with the story at one point in other. It's not like most people struggle with money. That's something that usually everyone comes across. And so everyone kind of ideates about what their life could be like if money wasn't an issue. I think that was the biggest issue, or the biggest takeaway that I had out of this is that like a lot when ryan and i you really you and i really emphasize decentralization and you know some people just aren't in a place that they can worry about decentralization they need to

worry about other things like getting out of the rat race getting out of the nine to five actually having stability in in financial terms then they can start to worry about decentralization so that's kind of my takeaway yeah i really like this conversation with cobi because like i think he um he articulated things differently than bankless and pushed back on on some different things that i think we emphasize from time to time. Like with some reflection, yeah, I sort of thought about this. This is my tweet. People don't come to crypto for decentralization.

They come to get rich so they can live fuller, freer lives. And they don't like anyone gatekeeping about how they got rich. Pontificating decentralization is the thing people do after they get rich. That's why it can feel out of touch. I think you and I on bankless a lot, like we talk about decentralization so much that that can become, in some people's minds, sort of like the end game. Like, why are David and Ryan always preaching about decentralization? And I think we have to remember collectively, all of us in crypto, like bank lists and, you know, listeners

externally is, decentralization is just a means to an end. It is anti-corruption technology, but the end goal is freedom. And, you know, if you don't have, if you still live in sort of the scarcity mindset of living paycheck to paycheck, right? And, you know, money is a real issue for you. well, like, you don't have freedom either. So at some level, thinking about systemic problems like decentralization, like that's something that you do after you have money.

So I think sometimes that is why when this is for people who value decentralization like us and talk about it so often, that's why it can come across to sounding preachy or out of touch. Because like, hey, like people are in crypto. And I think part of the attraction that brought you and I in crypto, of course, is like, the ability to make money fast, right, towards some financial freedom in the future. What are you going to do with that freedom? Like live a fuller life. Provide for those around you.

That's what Kobe's clip was about, too. And I think we have to remember that as we're talking about and extolling the virtues of decentralization, that it is a means to an end. Freedom is the end. And there's all, like, you almost have to get, you have to do well for yourself first to fully appreciate that. And that gives you the time to think about these higher level things like. decentralization. So some people aren't ready to talk about decentralization yet. And yeah, I think

sometimes we run the risk of like if we over-emphasize it, we might sound a little bit preachy or out of touch. And yeah, I don't know what your thoughts are. It's a hard thing to talk about sometimes. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a privilege to be able to care about decentralization. Like it's what I hope people, all people, after they get theirs, lean into after they get theirs, right? It's something that we all should strive for, but I now fully accept that anyone needs to do whatever they need to do to get out of the rat race and to get theirs. And so I think the mistake that perhaps we've made is that, Ryan, you and I have made our wealth using decentralized assets, Bitcoin and Ether. And if you go, and everyone who comes into crypto is kind of a product

of the generation that they came in on, right? Like you came in, I think, in 2016, I came in 2017. And the only two assets that made it through the 2018 to 2020 bear market, actually there's three of them. Bitcoin, which is decentralized, ether, which is decentralized. And what's number three, Ryan? Doge. Doge coin, which is also decentralized.

And so, like, that's a lesson that we've learned. And we saw the centralized spinoffs come and go, things like EOS and things like all the, I can't remember all the other centralized enough that came out in 2017. And so we saw centralization fail. And we didn't want to see history repeat itself, but it didn't. Some acceptable amount of centralization has worked out. And it's made a lot of people very, very wealthy. And I think the mistake we made was like, it's like, hey, we made our wealth using decentralized assets. You need to make your wealth with decentralized assets,

too. And so we kind of gate-kept how people choose to, you know, get out of of the rat race. And I think that was a mistake that I am now reflecting upon. However, I want to also extrapolate into the future, the reason why decentralization works so well and why we emphasize it is because decentralization means that there's room in the future for future generations to also make their wealth. Because in my mind, centralization tilts into the favor of a few people rather than the many, whereas decentralization is much more balanced and much more long-term focused. And so I think the world will have more total wealth for more total generations and be able to include more people in the long term if we ultimately land on decentralized platforms.

So we have to consider the near term of needing to get wealth now so people can actually start to care about these things while also ensuring that we are decentralized enough to include future generations so that they can also get theirs. Yeah, I think part of the bankless platform from day one has been like kind of no shortcuts, right? And that's, that's been important. So like, I do think that some of the centralized L-1s will not stand the test of time. And I'm not sure there's a lot. There's too many those are. And we've seen many cycles where, you know, that has happened. They've just kind of, you know, collapsed. And founders have gone on to other projects. They've never really developed a community. And,

I worry that that is also happening this cycle, too, which is why it's like, it's kind of like part of the call for bankless is like, hey, think about the long term, right? It's like what has fundamentals, what is sustainable, you know, decentralization is one of those things that is sustainable in the long run. It is a competitive mode competitive advantage. But it's not the only way to do well in the crypto markets, right? And I think one of the things that we need to take with us in 2022 is just like being happy. when people do well and achieve financial freedom in crypto.

And I think we've always been that. And at times when we've been harsh, it's been, like, I think more directed at, I feel like people who should know better. It's like, Justin Tran should, your Justin's son, rather, should know better. Yeah. In like copy pacing, Ethereum, hyping it up,

making a big deal, you know, like, issuing Tron, and then exiting the project. And then just a few years later. And then collecting more ether than Vitalik Buteran. It's just like, it's just, it sucks. Okay? And it's like, so people have been in the space for a while, they've seen these cycles repeat, and they just like, they see it every time. And that's why they come off a little, like you and I sometimes come off a little strong and a little harsh on other projects. But anyway, that was a good learning lesson from Kobe. And I think one of our takeaways, so we'll carry that forward. David, what are you excited about this week, man? Oh man, right after this, Ryan, I'm taking all the stuff that you can't really see in the background because I'm hiding it, putting it in my car and going off to Joshua Tree because I just got. done ice climbing, but I haven't finished getting my climbing fix. So I'm on my way to

Joshua Tree to go climbing. So here are the ice climbing pictures. Yeah. That's awesome. By the way, like, yes, there's a harness with that rope definitely holding onto me, but like I am also holding on as I take that selfie. That is not just a relaxed arm holding onto an ice axe. Like how, how secure is that ice axe? It's holding my entire weight. Between that IACs and my feet in the wall, yeah that's my entire weight wow and you totally roped in like you know nothing could possibly go in wrong right yeah i mean i did fall off the wall and got caught by the rope a number of times yeah but okay well so it's it's been tested then yes certainly wow i thought you had a pretty funny funny comment in this which i think is linked oh yeah yeah i said this yeah when someone says bankless is too

risk adverse i'm tweeting them this photo these photos uh yeah absolutely man you're doing it something i could never do Ice climbing's dope, yeah. On the edge. Hopefully I'll, maybe I'll come back with some pretty dope rock climbing pictures as well. Sweet. Ryan, what are you excited about?

I'm cited about competition coming for Open Sea. I think this is a big deal. I think these kind of community-led vampire attacks really level the playing field. I mean, we're talking earlier in the episode about VC things, getting attacked by community things. I think that's a trend that's going to continue. And I think ultimately users win

from that, right? So, like, we get new platforms, we get new experiments, we get to put the incumbents on their heels to, you know, think about who they're rewarding in their ecosystems, and it's all net positive. So I'm super excited about that. I'm also excited about the recent unblocking that is happening in crypto Twitter. So, right, like, in crypto Twitter, there's always back and forth, like people make enemies, you know, block people, some people block you. One person that's blocked me, I had no idea why is Sam Bankman-Freed from FTFs, SBF. And he, I don't know, maybe it was something I said at some point in time. We've never really had an interaction on Twitter.

But with Kobe's, with this video that kind of went viral, Pomp actually tweeted this out. Yeah, who doesn't talk about bankless, by the way. He doesn't tend to talk about bankless, right? But by the way, I had some nice things to say about Anthony Pompiliano because I do respect what he does in the space. and his hustle and his ability to build fantastic media products, media companies. And so he tweeted something out from Bankless, which never happens about Kobe.

And then a Bitcoin Maximilus, who we've had on the podcast, Preston Pish, said, wow, I really like this point. Kobe says, oh my God, I got unblocked. I guess Preston, Pish, had blocked Kobe in the past. So he got unblocked. And I said, we're healing the world out here, Kobe. Next, someone get SBF to unblock me. and then SBF shows up on the thread and he's like, I just unblocked Ryan.

So everyone's unblocking everybody. I think you called this David an unblocking Jubilee or something like this. Like we're all resetting the clock here. Yep. Yeah. And I really loved your tweet following SBF saying, hey, I'll give you a shot. I'll unblock you. And you go, suddenly, best be friends for SBF, which I thought was pretty funny.

So yeah, everyone's loving everyone right now. And so maybe the end of Q4, 2021, the rise of the alt ones kind of cause some spite. But I think now love only, love only on crypto Twitter. There you go. That's what's happening. Meme in the week, David, you ready for it? I'm ready for it, yeah. All right. What are we looking at? This is the my parents in their 30s versus me in my 30s meme. So my parents in their 30s, honey, we've saved enough for a house. Why don't we also have kids? And then me in my 30s, which is this guy with frazzled hair, looks like death, just like gaunt eyes, and goes,

I just took a nap and I'm down 22%. That was the story of the last week or so. That is crypto all the time. That's how it feels, guys. But we're glad you're with us. Of course, as always, none of this has been financial advice. Bitcoin and ETH are risky. So is D5.

So are all of the Alt-Layer ones. 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.

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