Bankless - ROLLUP: Markets Turn Bearish | Trillion Dollar Bank Launches L2 | Massive Pudgy Airdrop | DeFi Drama

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Nation, it is the third week of December's time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. I've got Anthony Sissano here. David Hoffman is off not climbing mountains this time, Anthony, but he's like apparently circling around them somewhere in Argentina right now. So this is like a hike expedition, not a mountain climb expedition. How you doing, man? Actually, it's super late where you are. So I want to thank you for doing this recording.

Starting point is 00:00:26 You're all the way in Australia. It's like, I don't know. It's like 12 a.m. or something like that. And I know you always wake up, bullish, Anthony. But my question to you is, do you also go to bed bullish? Yes, well, thank you for having me on again. And yes, I wake up bullish. I go to bed bullish.

Starting point is 00:00:41 And I sent to you in a message before I said, it's okay if we have to record this late because I'm always bullish on ETH. So it doesn't matter. Thanks, fan. Well, we appreciate that. I'm amazed, actually, that you go to bed bullish because, like, I tend to wake up bullish. And then just the day, you know, if you spend enough time on crypto Twitter,

Starting point is 00:00:57 it, like, beats you down until you're, like, not as bullish as when you woke up. And you have to, like, go sleep and, dream about like, you know, high crypto prices in order to refresh yourself for the next day. But I'm impressed that you stay optimistic and you're able to go to bed bullish too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it can wear everyone down over time depending on how much time you spend. You know, people get burnt out, things like that. But I don't know.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Like it's, it's for me, I spend the whole day talking to a bunch of different people within the ecosystem, just researching a lot about Ethereum, checking out all the new updates. And it just keeps me going, keeps me bullish. Yeah. It's just very hard to be bearish. Like, even if the prices are going down. just so much stuff happening in Ethereum, which obviously we're going to talk about a bit today. But yeah, just very easy to be bullish, I think.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Well, speaking of prices going down, that is pretty relevant to the topic today. So prices are down, Anthony Sassano. We're going to talk about that. Also want to get some takes from you and others on where we are in the cycle. So there was the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, the meeting this week. They did something with interest rates. We'll talk about that. Also, some big layer two news on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:01:59 So Crackens, Inc. This is their layer two. it hit main net. This was unexpected. This was ahead of schedule. We'll talk about that. Also, there's a $1.5 trillion bank launching a layer two. What does that mean? And ENS, you know, the .eath domain names, they picked their layer two. So we'll discuss that too. Pudgy Penguins also did an air drop. We'll talk about that. There's some defy drama. I want to get your takes on this. We've got crypto developer numbers, a whole report. And guys, stay tuned to the end because what we're going to do is I'm going to get anthony's.cometh address.

Starting point is 00:02:32 I'm going to plug it into the bankless on-chain version of Spotify Rapp. And we're going to actually see his score to see how bankless he is, what he's been up to on chain this year. So all of that and more. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the bankless weekly roll up. All right, Anthony, let's get to prices. And, you know, not as good as they have been previously. But actually, at least at the time of recording, we're still up on the week the last time we recorded. We're up on Bitcoin about 1.5%.

Starting point is 00:02:58 So Bitcoin is hanging out at 101. thousand, so we're still above 100k. We've got an eth price down more significantly, down about five to six percent at the time of recording from 3,900 last week to 3,682. And the big question is, are we down because the Fed cut interest rates? I thought cutting interest rates was a good thing, but apparently some of the news, the Fed had their meeting this week, bringing the target interest rate from 4.25% to 4.25%, but they indicated that there would only be two reductions in 2025. And the market was hoping for four reductions, not two. What's your take on the prices this week? And like in general, like, why are we down? I thought this was a bull market. I thought we were

Starting point is 00:03:52 just like infinity up only. Yeah, I mean, it can feel like that. I think once you get towards the ends of a bull market, you will start to get like that up only every day or every week for kind of a few weeks or a couple months or something like that. But I think people obviously always need to zoom out and kind of contextualize things. One week worth of price action is not really going to tell you much. And people will always look for different reasons as to why movements happen.

Starting point is 00:04:17 Obviously today, people will be pointing to the Fed stuff tomorrow. they'll be pointing to something else. So for me, personally, I don't tend to pay too much attention to the short-term kind of movements. I tend to zoom out. And I think on both Ethan, BTC, they look really amazing when you, when you zoom out there. I think Eith, honestly, obviously it has lagged for a little while now, lagged BTC. It usually does do that until later on in the bull market.

Starting point is 00:04:42 But I think if you actually look at what ETH is doing, it's consolidating between around 3,600 and 4,000. And I feel like 4,000 just seems to be this very, like, very strong. strong resistance for some reason on Eath. I say for some reason, but I think it's quite obvious why, because if you actually zoom out over multiple years, you can see that 4,000 has always been a tough area for Eith. But I feel like in the new year, things are going to pick back up.

Starting point is 00:05:05 And Heath will definitely get through that and go on to all-time highs. So, yeah, I'm more of a zoom-out guy than anything. I mean, anyone who knows me knows that for sure, that I take a very long-term view on these things. So these week-to-week or day-to-day movements definitely don't affect me too much. And I think when it comes to the macro environment with stuff like the Fed. No one's an expert on this. Like, even the macro people who follow this aren't experts. It's very hard to kind of be across all of this stuff. So I honestly don't spend too much

Starting point is 00:05:31 time on it myself because you can make yourself go crazy trying to find a reason, right? 100%. You can make yourself go crazy. And who knows what the Fed is going to do and how that'll affect markets. It did seem, though, in the charts that, you know, the Fed announcement, you know, correlated very closely with this crypto sell-off. So here's the Fed press conference right here. and we were, this is the Bitcoin price chart, it's about 105K. And then after that conference, you know, Powell, and we're dipping below 100K on Bitcoin. There was Matt Hogan, I always appreciate his takes. They're always like pretty, pretty seasoned, pretty rational.

Starting point is 00:06:07 He wrote a brief thread on today's move in crypto, the down move, and why he said, I don't think it alters the bullish trend. I want to hear if you agree with some of this. He said, obviously the big catalyst today was the Fed announcement. We just talked about this. But that being said, he says, the initial pullback wasn't the end of the story. Leverage is a fact in crypto. He points out that some of these sharp pullbacks get amplified in crypto because there's all of these leveraged positions.

Starting point is 00:06:35 So this was like a $600 million of leverage position that just like gets blown out in crypto. And I'm not saying that like leverages, you know, crypto is the only market to have leverage. But it does have a lot of leverage. The big question, though, is this a hiccup or a reversal? and Matt says, it's a hiccup. The reason is because the Fed is not even like relevant to crypto. It's less relevant at least than it has been in the past. And he points to these four things that we still have as tailwinds going into 2025.

Starting point is 00:07:04 The pro-cropto reversal in DC, rising institutional adoption of ETF flows, which you're going to talk about, Bitcoin purchases by government and corporations and major breakthroughs in smart contract blockchains, primarily scaling them, right? and this is coming through Ethereum layer two. So what do you think about that? He says it's just a hiccup. It sounds like you tend to agree. Yeah, I definitely think so.

Starting point is 00:07:30 As I said, like you can make yourself go crazy looking for different reasons when it comes to the macro stuff. But I agree with Matt here that the Fed macro stuff isn't very relevant to crypto overall. Maybe over the longer term when you're talking about different kind of assets and their price movements and stuff like that and how that reacts there. But in terms of what? where crypto is going in 2025 and in terms of what's on the horizon. I completely agree with, Matt, there are these massive tailwinds, like the pro-crypto policy in Washington in D.C.

Starting point is 00:08:00 And on the political kind of side here is, I think, still way underpriced. I don't think people realize just... No, I don't think so. I think people realize just how bad it was, especially at the last two years and how different it's going to be. There is obviously those kind of doubts from people that say, well, they say it's going to be different, but what if it's the same? And I understand that. it's not like a guaranteed thing, but everything that I've seen so far points to it being very different and points to it being a very, very favorable environment for crypto to thrive in. And that will actually lead into the rising institutional adoption because they'll be able to get

Starting point is 00:08:33 involved. They have those regulatory frameworks in place to get involved, which will then translate to more ETF flows. So it does tend to feed on itself just having this, I guess, clearer guidance and clearer regulation and a much, I guess, maybe not safer is not, maybe the right right word, but like clear our picture for these institutions to get involved because they're very risk-averse, especially the bigger ones that are managing lots of people's money. They don't want to get involved with something that could bite them in the ar, so to speak, later on. And I think this is what they've been waiting for, just clear regulations. Yeah, there's some structural differences this time, particularly in the regulations. I totally agree with that. And also, there's some similarities.

Starting point is 00:09:12 I mean, crypto goes in cycles. And I wanted to get your take on this because another question during weeks like this, people ask themselves. And again, at the end of 2024, starting a new year 2025, is like, where are we in the cycle? You know, these four-year cycles, gray scale put together a report here where here's kind of Bitcoin price over a log scale, and they show kind of the cycles. And you can see sort of when the price goes above the line, right? That's like bull cycle. And when it's below the trend line, then you're kind of in the bear cycle. But it tends to follow this log, this log trend line. Of course, this is also the, you know, the log line is fitting the data, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, all of these things. I get that. Here's another chart

Starting point is 00:09:51 that's showing Bitcoin Price by Cycle with the number of days. And so we are how many days in? We are over about 800 days in, something close to that, into the Bull cycle. And this dotted line, you can see where we are in the cycle. Basically, their conclusion is we're in kind of the intermediate stage of the cycle. So we're not early in the cycle. We're not late in the Bull Mania part of the cycle. It's not over. We're in the intermediate phase of the cycle. What's your take on this kind of analysis and these cycle types of metrics? Yeah, I mean, this is the classic four-year cycle that crypto has become known for, especially obviously led by Bitcoin, because that's the asset that tends to get us out of the bear markets, tends to run first. You know, Bitcoin dominance goes up,

Starting point is 00:10:37 and then that liquidity gets pushed into other assets as time goes on. People can become more risk on and then we have a full-blown ball market. So I do agree with this analysis that we're pretty much like not at the end yet, but not at the start. We're kind of in the middle. Maybe, maybe I guess like you could say three quarters of the of the way through, so to speak, getting to that really crazy phase that I suspect we're going to see in 2025. But again, I think I've mentioned this on the roll-up before and also a lot of times on my own show. This cycle's been a bit weirder than other cycles, I think. You know, we've had weirder price action and different kind of price actions. I mean,

Starting point is 00:11:12 BTC went to all-time high before it's harvening. And that has never happened before in the four-year cycle. And obviously, this was driven by the ETFs and driven by SELO as well, doing his big buys and things like that. So there has been differences, but a lot of similarities. So as they say, you know, the history doesn't repeat, but it does often rhyme. And I think that's what we're seeing here. But I think going forward as the asset class matures, these kind of cycle analysis that people do is going to become less and less reliable because it'll just become, I guess, more well-known. and it won't be as self-fulfilling as it probably has been in the past, and there'll be different, I guess, ways to access these assets.

Starting point is 00:11:49 Like right now, BTC and ETH have an ETH, but nothing else does, and that tends to distort things, because there's this whole pool of capital that other assets don't have access to that BTC and ETH do. So there are differences, but similarities, for sure. Well, speaking of ETS, let's look at some Ethereum ETF numbers on the week. And I want you to go full bull mode, Anthony Sassano here, because look at all of these.

Starting point is 00:12:13 These are the totals from all of December, basically. I'm looking at the Ethereum ETF flows and this totals column net inflows positive, positive, positive. All of the days in December have been positive. Even yesterday, which was like, you know, Wednesday, December 18th at the time of recording, was even a positive day on a sell-off. And this, you know, like in previous months,

Starting point is 00:12:38 it looked like the flows weren't actually, the ETF flows weren't actually coming into ETH. And now suddenly they are. Like it's happening, but later, what do you see when you look at these numbers? And I'll just say for the audience who doesn't have this open, total net inflows right now on the week into the Ethereum ETF. This is a net new institutional buyer of ETH

Starting point is 00:12:57 that we haven't had in previous cycles. 2.4 billion. I think that's like between 2 and 3% of all ETH supply here. Anyway, what do you see when you look at these Ethereum ETF numbers? Yeah, I see a trend shift, to be honest. Like obviously, I think anyone who's been following along with this stuff since the ETH ETF went live in July knows that it didn't have the start like Bitcoin did because it launched in a different market conditions.

Starting point is 00:13:22 July was still very bearish, whereas the Bitcoin ETF launched right in the middle of a huge uptrend in January of this year. So the ETH ETH ETS have had a slow start, as we're all pretty much aware of by now. But over the last few weeks, there's been a major trend shift with the ETH ETFs getting, I think, 40 to 50% on average of BTC's flows, which is higher than its market cap percentage, right, in terms of comparing it to BTC. And I think it hasn't had a negative outflow day since November 21st. So almost a month now of positive inflow days.

Starting point is 00:13:53 And as you said, even on the sell-off, we had a positive flow here. So people need to be paying attention to the trend shift that's happening here and how this tends to accelerate as time goes on, especially as price keeps going up. Obviously, these institutions will also get FOMO. It's not just us kind of DGN Cryptonatives that get FOMO. They get FOMO as well. But I think as long as the price is above $3,600, I think all ETF buyers are in profit because that's when the ETH ETFs launched.

Starting point is 00:14:19 People don't remember this, but ETH went from $3,600 to like $2,000 after the ETHETF's launched. There was no appetite to buy an asset that's going down, of course. But now that it's going up, there is an appetite, but there is also a lot more education happening too. I've been hearing that there's a lot more education happening on the institutional side and that's ramping up as time goes on. So that's being reflected in the flows.

Starting point is 00:14:42 But as I said, the main thing here is to notice the trend shift happening and notice that it is a shift that's happened over months now, not just days. And to, I guess, pay attention to this as we head into 2025 because I feel like EAT is going to have a really good year in 2025. And the EATFs are going to be a very big part of that. Yeah, I think that that piece has understated the amount of education. that these issuers, like the Black Rocks of the world, the Fidelity of the world, are like prepping to do and have planned in 2025.

Starting point is 00:15:11 That's going to be like, and that's something that Ether the asset has, I think, struggled with in mainstream as kind of education, getting institutions to understand it. And they're basically all incented now to help investors understand Ether. Yes, exactly. And I think a bigger deal is that these institutions traditionally have been selling Aether as, or Ethereum as like a technology platform, right? Not as a store of value because they don't want to cannibalize the BTC ETFs. And I think that obviously within crypto, we know that eth is the money as a store of value.

Starting point is 00:15:43 People treat it like this. And I think that's going to slowly bleed into the sales pitch that these institutions use, but they're going to start with the tech pitch first because that's what resonates most, I think, with these investors after they've just heard about the money and store of value pitch for BTC. But I do think that it's inevitable that the ether's money store of value story gets woven into the tech story as well, and that's definitely going to help flows. Do you know what I think is going to be a narrative that's like the institutions aren't ready for,

Starting point is 00:16:11 but I think it's going to be pretty exciting for those of us who think Ether is a phenomenal store of value. I just did an AI roll up with EJAS where we just kind of recap the AI type agent type news on the week. And we talked about an AI agent called Zero Bro, earned a whole bunch of fees through like, you know, trading, earned money through trading, through Spot. streams, all of these things. And you know what it did with those funds, Anthony, is it took that Fiat and all those token fees and it actually purchased Ether, the asset. And it spun up a

Starting point is 00:16:44 validator, okay, in order so it could have passive income. Okay. So the big question is, what's the store of value for these new economic players, AI agents? Is it going to be Fiat? Is it going to be stocks? Is it going to be real estate? or is it going to be a programmable non-sovereign money like ether that generates passive income? It's kind of like the internet bond type story here. And that's how Zero Bro is treating it. Anyway, you know, emerging story, that kind of thing. But they're a new economic actor and what they determine as money and how they store their value is actually going to factor in here and matter.

Starting point is 00:17:28 One topic I have for you in the realm of non-institutional assets, though, but also links with AI agents is Fartcoin. Like, what the hell, man? I have not, like, okay, this is, there's an actual token called Fartcoin. It's been moving a crazy amount. It's up 27% on the week. Started in November, it was like $18 million. And now it's, wait, fully diluted over a billion dollars. and its genesis was really another AI agent, like a token terminal type thing.

Starting point is 00:18:02 And, you know, token terminal, if people are following that story, you know, not created, but popularized a coin called a goat, token terminals in LLM. Anyway, token terminal has adopted a fart coin as like its memetic, you know, token of value. And the, you know, like, look at the price assent here. What do you think of these types of shenanigans that are going on? What's your take here? Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to these sorts of things, it's always hard to pick winners. Like you look at this right now and you think to yourself, okay, well, this has done really well,

Starting point is 00:18:36 price action-wise. Obviously, right now it's at all-time high and everyone's made money that has bought it and everything. But then there is usually a graveyard of other assets, like millions of these things that go absolutely nowhere. So really what the mean coin and AI coin game becomes is a game of attention. Like, where can you direct people's attention to? and that's what coins usually tend to particularly do well and get outsized attention. Sorry, outsized our price movement. And usually how that attention was given was via humans.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Like there'll be some influencer on Twitter that says, I bought this meme coin. I think it's going to go up for such and such reason. Go buy this. But now we're entering the realm where these AI agents are doing that themselves. It's not just the humans. It's the AI saying, well, I like this meme coin for such and such reason. And this is the one I've chosen. So people are now following that.

Starting point is 00:19:24 So it really is, it's the same kind of concept, but with an autonomous agent instead of a human doing it. And it starts to get weird when you consider the, I guess, incentive here where you can say, well, there is an identity attached to this AI agent, but at the same time, I know it's not a real person and know it's not a human. So I can trust it potentially more than a human because I can actually see what it's doing on chain. Whereas a lot of these humans that promote these things, they've got backroom deals going on, they've got insider stuff going on, they're part of a cabal. AI agents can do this too, but if they're doing everything on chain from a public address, then it becomes a bit more transparent, I think. But at the same time, it's still fundamentally the same concept of attention economy, I think. Yeah, I totally agree.

Starting point is 00:20:09 Attention economy. What we're looking at here is to your points, you can see inside of the AI's brain. So this is infinite back rooms. If you do a like search for fart, right, this is where a token terminal is literally dreaming up the idea of, hey, we should do a fart coin. and airdrop it and instantiating it. So you can literally read the transaction logs of what it's thinking.

Starting point is 00:20:30 Anyway, bizarre stuff. In contrast to the institutions where we're like, hey, Bitcoin and Ether, they're serious asset classes. And then we have Fartcoin trading over a billion dollars. One last thing on the week that I noticed from the Fed FOMC meeting, somebody asked Jerome Powell

Starting point is 00:20:45 about a federal strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Of course, that's been a Trump talking point lately. And he said this. from the Fed's perspective, Jerome Powell, we're not allowed to own Bitcoin, he said. And he was asked a follow-up question in terms of legal issues. Like, is it legal even for the Fed to own Bitcoin? And he said, that's the kind of thing for Congress to consider, but we are not looking for a law change at the Fed. I don't think Powell or the Fed actually wants to own Bitcoin. And there's a question as to whether Trump or Congress kind of like forced them into it or forced the rest of the U.S. government

Starting point is 00:21:21 into owning some Bitcoin. What's your take on the strategic reserve? Are you like in 2025 over, under on the probability that, you know, Trump does something or the U.S. government does something here. Do you think it'll happen? I think they'll try to do something and they'll talk about it a lot and try to get things kind of passed or push through. I don't think it will happen in 2025, to be honest.

Starting point is 00:21:42 I think that people underestimate how difficult it is to actually make this happen. It's not like Trump can just like wave a wand and make it happen. It has to go through all the bureaucratic stuff. to do this and he's not like some god king who can just make anything happen, especially when it comes to the money. Like it's a very different game when you're playing that game. So I think maybe potentially it can happen eventually. But I mean, I've been following it and all I'm seeing is a lot of talk with not much action yet, obviously because they can't be action until at least the inauguration happens and Trump's actually got in power and everything kind of changes over. but I feel like it should happen because I do agree that it is of strategic importance for nation states to own these assets. I believe that they're better off owning ETH than BTC.

Starting point is 00:22:29 I believe ETH is a more strategically important asset, of course. But I think both of them hold their own importance for different reasons. And I think that you've already seen smaller nation states around the world by BTC. I think some of them even bought Eith or are going to or have plans to. Eventually, I can say the U.S. doing it, but yeah, I don't know if it will happen in 2025. There'll be a lot of talk about it, though, that's for sure. Yeah, the one thing that Trump might be able to do, it's unclear to me, is just keep the Bitcoin and other crypto assets that they have already, that they've already seized. Whether you consider that a strategic Bitcoin reserve or not, I guess, is semantics.

Starting point is 00:23:04 I think buying more might be a little bit of a higher bar. I did point out, by the way, that, you know, China has something like 10x, the amount of ether versus the U.S. government. So, you know, I don't know if Trump wants to play for second place or if he wants to play for first place, but you better boost those ether bags. And you can see him doing that in World Liberty Financial, his little defy outlet, we'll talk about that later. A lot more to talk about too, including Anthony, I'm going to get your take on the developer report. So we got some big insights from a 2024 developer report. Also, Crackens ink chain. We'll get into that.

Starting point is 00:23:37 It's a new layer two, of course. And an update on a vote in Congress for the very last remaining anti-cribians. SEC Commissioner. There's still one of them. Is she going to be there come January or not? We'll talk about all of that and more. But before we do, I want to take the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange for 2024. That is Cracken. It's almost the end of the year. Go create an account. Want to know the exchange we have bankless used to buy, sell, and trade crypto? It's Cracken, one of the longest standing in most secure crypto platforms in the world with tools for every type of trader to get started. Over 13 million

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Starting point is 00:26:47 You know, Steve Balmer, developers, developers, developers, developers. So every year, Electric Capital puts together their annual developer report. And my take on developers is they're sort of like entrepreneurs. You know how regular nation state economies, they'll do reports on how many small businesses started in a given year? Or like, you know, what's the kind of the company activity of all? of the startups. Well, this is a similar type of thing. I think it's a leading indicator for the crypto economy. So like developer number go up. That's a good thing. That means more entrepreneurs. That means more businesses on chain. So electric capital analyzes like a whole bunch of GitHub

Starting point is 00:27:25 repositories, 1.7 million repositories, apparently, and it produces this report at the end of the year. So a few things to look into. The number one is this chart. You see in this? So this is crypto developers grew 39% per year since 2015. And you can see kind of this chart up. It's not a vertical lineup of interest, right? It's kind of like, it's kind of bumpy. When you see something like this and 39% per year since 2015, we're at the end destination right now, as of November 2024, we have 23,000.

Starting point is 00:27:59 So there's part of me where I'm like, I'm impressed at the, you know, 40% annual growth rate. But also, look, there's only like 23,000. I mean, that's a small town. There's not a lot of developers yet in crypto. What's your take on these numbers? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's not that many yet. I mean, obviously, the growth is great to see, and it's up and up.

Starting point is 00:28:18 But compared to the rest of the software development world and all the other developers out there, there are hundreds of millions of developers in the world, I believe. So this is a drop in the bucket. And we have a lot more people left to onboard. And I think we're going to keep doing that as time goes on. I don't think this is going to slow down. Obviously, there's bumps along the way. A lot of these bumps tend to be correlated with price action.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Obviously, as prices go up, you know, things tend to get hot up. People, developers, just like everyday regular people, follow the money as well. If you're getting, you know, a higher salary working in crypto and you've got the skills to do it, you're going to go work in crypto. And then if there's a downturn and you get laid off because the company you're working for doesn't have much money anymore and you go work somewhere else. So it's the same kind of story here and you follow that boom and bust, but the trend is up. That's what we care about.

Starting point is 00:29:01 That's what we care about in all, I guess, aspects of crypto. As long as the trend is up, we're doing something right. The trend is up, but not in all places. Actually, the trend is down in North America. So maybe this was the hostile regulatory environment. But look at North America, it used to be the leader in terms of crypto developer share, market share, that is, and it's dipped below two other continents, both Asia and Europe. So now North America is number three and has been bypassed by Asia and Europe. I think that's the whole like Gensler anti-crypto army effect. Yeah, you agree? Yeah, I mean, 100%.

Starting point is 00:29:37 Like, as I think I said earlier, the last two years specifically have been really, really bad. A lot of different crypto entrepreneurs, developers have either moved their business offshore if they were based in North America or just not started anything in North America at all because they're like, well, it's a hostile environment. I'm not going to go there. You know, if you're a sheep, you don't go into the lions then expecting to be drinking fairly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So all the wolves then, I should say. But yeah, so I feel like if we get the positive regulatory change in 2025, North America should.

Starting point is 00:30:07 go back up in the next report that we see from electric capital at the end of next year. From an ecosystem perspective, Ethereum was leading on every continent. Solano was like number two, and then there was some of the other ones, Bitcoin, etc. A couple of my takeaways is it's sort of interesting to see the differences between these chains. So this is a chart of a total value locked where Ethereum is like absolutely dominant, like nothing else is close, not even kind of the layer two's. So a lot of the kind of total capital locked up is on Ethereum. Whereas, you know, Solana has had an increase in terms of transactions, like number of transactions and like exchange volume and that kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:30:49 They're actually quite impressive on that dimension. So there's some differences between the markets. A lot of people pointed out, though, this, Anthony, I wanted to get your take. So this is a chart of the number of new developers in the ecosystem in 2024. and Solana for the first time, this was the headline chart, Solana for the first time was ahead of Ethereum in terms of attracting new developers. Now, there's a few footnotes to this. If you include Ethereum plus you add, you know, base and plus you add Arbitra,

Starting point is 00:31:18 Optimus and other layer two's, Ethereum is still ahead on net new developers. It's also the fact that like net new developers don't tend to stay. So, you know, there's kind of the tourists and the settlers, right? And anytime you get net new developers, 80% of them are likely to leave, according to some of the stats and only a few sort of stay. So they're less valuable than the veterans when it comes to staying powers. But still, pretty impressive in terms of attracting new developers. What's your take there as an Heath Bowl? Yeah, I mean, there's no denying that obviously Solano had a big year in 2024, right?

Starting point is 00:31:55 It grew a lot. The price of the token went up a lot, which created a wealth effect around the ecosystem, which tends to draw people in. users and developers alike. As I said earlier, users, people, regular people, developers, they're all attracted to the same thing, which is money. You go where the money is. You explore new frontiers. You explore new kind of places to generate wealth. And I think that's exactly what happened here. As I said, Salana had a wealth effect. Developers came in. They're like, what's this Salana thing? I haven't tried it before because it says new developers, right? So it's like, okay, well, I haven't tried Salana before. Maybe they've tried the EVM before. You've been able to

Starting point is 00:32:26 build on the EVM for a very long time now, which includes Ethereum, it's L2s, and also other L1s, right? There are many other L1s out there that are also EVM. But Salina is different. Solana is SVM. They have their own virtual machine that they use. So it's a different environment altogether. So if you had been on the fence about it until this year and you saw this activity happening there, you're naturally going to be like, well, let's see what I can build on there. What's the developer experience? Like, I want to check this out. I want to see what's going on over here. So I think that it's natural for this to happen. And I think that it's obviously impressive as well. Like kudos to Solana for this. But as you pointed out as well,

Starting point is 00:33:01 Ethereum is still huge, right? Ethereum still has plenty of developers on there, both at layer one and layer two's. And that shows no signs of slowing down either. There was actually a good thread from Josh Stark that pointed out from this report, all the Ethereum-related stuff. And Ethereum still dominates across pretty much everything else. Like, not the new developers chart as you just showed, but for the reasons I explained, but across everything else, Ethereum still dominates.

Starting point is 00:33:24 And it dominates, I think, where it matters as well. You mentioned TVL. That is a huge thing. People tend to underrate it, but I think that it is something. that is not rated highly enough because it really does show where like the big capital likes to be and likes to stay. And even though there are other ecosystems, most of the money stays on Ethereum L1 because, I mean, they're probably fee insensitive users, obviously because fees are higher there you have to be. But also you trust Ethereum L1 not to go offline. You know, trust it to be

Starting point is 00:33:51 secure and resilient and decentralized. And you trust that there aren't going to be changes made to the network that's going to cause things to go wrong for you and your assets. And, Obviously, a lot of the defyre protocols on there are extremely battle tested at this point and hardened, like AreVe, for example, like Uniswap on there, been around for a long time. So I think that's what you're seeing there. But, yeah, I feel like as the Ethereum community or Ethereum ecosystem continues to modularize, you're going to see more of a split here as well, because Ethereum also has layer twos that are not EVM going forward. They're going to be launching. I mean, Eclipse is already live. That's using the SVM.

Starting point is 00:34:27 There's fluent coming along that's going to be doing a bunch of blended execution stuff. up with WASM, things like that. Fuel just launched one with a similar architecture to what Bitcoin uses, UTXR architecture with their fuel VM. So there's just a kind of modularization pattern happening too. So I do hope that the electric capital report can highlight that and kind of dig into the intricacies of that in their next report because that's what it's going to be like going forward for the Ethereum ecosystem. Well, speaking of all the Ethereum modules there, there's certainly a lot of layer twos that have launched. And one of which just launched this week, This was kind of a little bit of a surprise, I think, for a lot of people in crypto because, you know, this is the Cracken Inc launch.

Starting point is 00:35:09 Okay, so Inc. is a layer two. It's built on the optimism stack. So similar in some respects to what we've seen from Base, which has chosen a similar framework. And it seemed like Cracken just like launched this ahead of schedule. I mean, they had announced that they were going to launch it, I think, about six weeks ago or something like this. And now here it is. It's live on Mainnet this week. And people who are listening to this can go to. check out the ink chain. I've got here a dashboard, a list of kind of all of the apps, and it's everything you'd come to expect. You know, you've got like things like curve down here. You've got like fracks on there. You've, of course, have the Cracken wallet support and everything that is you'd see in another optimistic roll-up EVM-type chain. What's the significance of Cracken, another major exchange? Probably the, you know, one of the top exchanges in the world right now, launching its

Starting point is 00:35:57 layer two and doing this on the back of a very successful base program from Coinbase. What do you think this means? It just continues the trend of everyone wanting to be on chain, right? And they want to be on chain in their own way. They want to kind of create something that reflects their brand identity. And that's exactly what Cracken has done with Inc. That's what Coinbase has done with base. There's others out there as well. You can go down the list on L2B and check out each of them for yourself. But they all have their own ecosystem, brand, community identity that they they try to build. Inc. seems to be trying to build its kind of branding an ecosystem around, I guess, Dgen first, right? Like very Dgen kind of stuff first, like getting into the meme coin

Starting point is 00:36:37 stuff. I know they had like one of the gigacad kind of faces on their website, like stuff like that, right? Whereas when base initially started, they were going hard on things like SocialFi, for example, and they had Firecaster on board there and things like that. And they've kind of shifted over time. But yeah, it's all about creating that new kind of, I guess, on-chain identity for these organizations here. So overall, I think it's really bullish that these organizations get to do this because you can imagine a world where there wasn't L2s. It was just one layer.

Starting point is 00:37:05 Like Ethereum was just one layer. There wasn't L2s out there. These brands wouldn't have built an L2 obviously. And then they really, to come on chain would probably have a harder time doing that because they'd maybe just create some kind of, I guess, like app on Ethereum instead of a whole L2 ecosystem and try to build an ecosystem. system around that. So it does become more kind of difficult there. So I'm excited to see this go live ahead of schedule. I know that the cracking guys have been working on this for quite a while now.

Starting point is 00:37:32 And I really do like this dashboard that you have up on your screen because it shows you exactly what you can do straight away. You know, there's no need to ask, oh, what do I do on ink? It's like, here's what you do on ink. Here's all the apps. Here's how you bridge in. Here's the infrastructure support we have right now. Here's how you on ramp. Because that's what we need to see going forward because there's no use putting something out there and being like, okay, well, we're live. And people come along and go, oh, okay, you're live. What do I do on your chain? So I'm glad that they've done this. This is actually a really cool thing to see. But I think that going forward, you're going to see these chains launch faster and faster as the infrastructure matures as well,

Starting point is 00:38:06 and it becomes easier to launch these things. And you're going to see other companies around the world doing this. And I'm sure we're going to talk about one of them, as you mentioned, a big bank that's doing this as well. Oh, let's talk about that next, because what we've seen, of course, is all of the, what we call on bankless sometimes crypto banks, but what we mean is exchanges that are custody and crypto, they all have layer two strategies right now, almost all of them, except for like Binance, which has its own like, you know, layer one strategy with the B&B chain. The question is, what's the next kind of like group to start launching chains? And the answer to that question might be like trad-fi banks, actual traditional banks.

Starting point is 00:38:41 So Deutsche Bank is a $1.5 trillion dollar bank. It's Germany's largest bank. and just this week they announced that they were launching an Ethereum L2, not just any Ethereum L2, a ZK Sync L2, so it's a ZK EVM on top of Ethereum. Here's the headline here. Deutsche Bank valued at $1.5 trillion, Germany's largest, is developing a layer two blockchain on Ethereum. Are we just going to get all of the banks to launch L2s as well?

Starting point is 00:39:11 Is that how this works? They're just like port all of their ledgers and their assets over? I mean, if they want to, they can. That's the beauty of it, right? No one's stopping them from building these things on Ethereum because Ethereum is credibly neutral and decentralized. It will not stop you from doing this. And I think that you can see on the headline here, it says it's going to have regulatory oversight. And people will maybe bulk at that and say, oh, you know, there's just like another centralized thing from a bank. It's like, yeah, but the point is, is that they're using crypto rails. They're coming on chain. They're going to interoperate with the wider on chain economy. And if you don't want to use this, this, you don't have to. You have the entire decentralized on-chain economy to access. But they're saying, well, I want to access that too. I want to be involved with this too. And that's why I think they're doing this. And one of my, one of my dream things to see in crypto and one thing that I've been speculating about for a little while now is an entity like BlackRock coming along and launching their new stock exchange that they want to launch as a layer two on Ethereum using real

Starting point is 00:40:10 world assets that they've tokenized, like stocks and bonds and all that, and doing that there. That to me would be the holy grail because all of a sudden, if BlackRock was to do that, you would see an absolute flood of all of these banks and companies coming in and building their own L2s here, which obviously strengthens Ethereum beyond words. I think even though these are centralized entities, it basically says to the world, Ethereum is the place that we're building. Just like when, I guess like a nation state comes up, like America, for example, all the businesses went there and said, I'm building in America because of such and such reason.

Starting point is 00:40:41 People are coming to Ethereum and saying, I'm building in Ethereum. I'm building my ecosystem on Ethereum because that is the obvious place to build. Oh my God. Do you know something about BlackRock, Anthony? No, no, I don't have an insider. No, no. It's something that myself and others have speculated. But that's the thing.

Starting point is 00:40:59 I think that's the point. You can see it, right? There is a path to that actually becoming a reality. Yeah. Like my take was when BlackRock launched the Biddle Fund, which has been a massive success on Ethereum, this is their tokenized treasury assets. And now, by the way, there's some news later in the episode where they're integrating into all of these other D5 protocols. My take was that, okay, that's the first Black Rock bank branch on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:41:22 They just, like, opened up shop on Ethereum. And it totally makes sense that they would expand and eventually become a layer two. So let's see what they have in mind. Anthony, I don't know if you've been following this, but we have one remaining SEC commissioner that's part of the Gary Gensler, anti-crypto army. Her name is Caroline Crenshaw. And we, just an update on this, because she was supposed to. to go up for vote in Congress this week to be reconfirmed, renewed, another tenure. And of course, the crypto community pushed back against this. We don't want more Gensler-style commissioners

Starting point is 00:41:55 that are super anti-crypto. An update on this, she was up for vote this week. And what happened, the vote was canceled. And what I think this might mean is it's likely that she's going to be out because we are running out of time for her to get the votes in the Democratic you controlled Congress to actually vote her in. And in January, this all flips to Republican, of course. So that's kind of crazy. And it's also crazy because it's another extension of the story of crypto advocacy in D.C. This is Stand with Crypto, you know, also part of kind of like the PAC. They sent, they had crypto advocates send over 100,000 emails to U.S. senators about a regulator, about Caroline Crenshaw.

Starting point is 00:42:43 saying like don't reconfirm her like crypto is watching your votes members of congress and if you vote yes that is an anti-crypto vote i think the a big story coming under 2024 is just like the political willpower of the the pro-crypto army which it seems like is composed by a lot of single issue voters crypto zealots a lot of capital of course industry support all of these things but it's like a force in Congress. We may be down to like zero anti-crypto like commissioners going into 2025. And that's absolutely crazy. Yes. Yeah. And I think that if you look at all of the stuff that's happened over the last couple of years as well on this front, the SEC is at the forefront of being the worst actor in the crypto ecosystem on the regular regulator side of things for sure. So having a positive SEC going forward,

Starting point is 00:43:38 like once the inauguration happens and everything changes over, that's going to be a huge boon to crypto, I think. So we're definitely going to have a pro-crypto SEC finally. Like after so long, it feels like we've been waiting forever for this, we're finally going to have that. And, you know, I think it's funny because I think most people would settle for just an SEC that actually plays by the rules. People don't realize that the end. You know what I mean? It's not about being pro-a-cropto. It's just that we want a regulator that follows the rules that they're supposed to follow. I mean, that was basically Hester Purst. I mean, she was just like open to it. She wasn't just like, oh, I support everything.

Starting point is 00:44:13 God bless, all of your tokens are, none of them are security. She wasn't like that. She was just like, why don't we create a sandbox? Why don't we just not stop this innovation in the U.S.? It was totally reasonable. You're right. It's not even pro-crypto. It's just like neutral. We just don't want anti-crypto. Actually, last thing on politics before we leave this section, a Congressman French Hill, which has been on the bankless podcast. He's a congressman. He has been nominated to chair the House Financial Services Committee. It's a very big rule in Congress. He is definitely pro-crypto.

Starting point is 00:44:43 He got that nod this week, too. So big news on that. Anthony, we got a lot more to talk about, including Athena. They introduced a stable coin backed by what were we just talking about, Black Rock, the Black Rock Biddle Fund. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:44:56 Also, there's some AVE versus Polygon drama, defy drama that I want to get your take on, all this and more. But before we do that, we want to take the sponsors that made this episode possible. With over $1.5 billion in TV, the M-Eath protocol is home to M-Eath, the fourth largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LSTs. And now, C-M-Eth takes things even further. This restaked version

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Starting point is 00:47:16 I'm not sure what the lessons are from this, if this is a lesson in risk, a lesson in governance. Like, how would you summarize this? Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since we've had some serious defy drama, I think, within Ethereum. So it was quite entertaining to follow along with this if I, if I say so myself. But I think if we zoom out a little bit and focus on what was actually being debated here. So essentially there was a proposal put forward by a bunch of projects within the Polygon ecosystem that wanted to use the bridged funds. So the funds that were bridged into Polygon and put them to work essentially.

Starting point is 00:47:47 Because right now they're just sitting in the bridge. These projects were like, hey, we can use these stable coins to earn a yield. And we're leaving like $70 million a year on the table by not doing this. And then, of course, there was a whole debate kicked up about this once people started paying attention to it saying, Well, that's really risky. What if something happens to those assets, then the assets that were bridged over aren't backed by anything anymore and essentially can become worthless. And we've seen all these bridge hacks over the years.

Starting point is 00:48:14 And it's really ugly. They're huge honeypots, so on and so forth. It also breaks a kind of social contract you have with users that you won't use their bridge assets to do other things and so on and so forth. So ultimately, the proposal was shot down and it's not going to be going ahead right now. But the drama, I think, stemmed from a bunch of community members, a bunch of people within the AVEAR and Polygon ecosystems, having a bit of, I guess, like, I don't know if I'd call it personal attacks, but more of like personal drama where they said,

Starting point is 00:48:42 oh, he said, she said kind of thing. So that's what blew out the drama, I think. But the actual proposal itself, yeah, there was debate around that, but then there was also debate around the interpersonal drama that stemmed from that. Yeah, okay. So I, I want to, so I haven't been watching this up close, but I've sort of seen some of it. And I guess my take is, so there's. this proposal, as you said, to take bridge assets and do something else with it, like put it

Starting point is 00:49:07 in morpho and yield or something like that, morpho and urine, get some additional yield on that. Like, my take on that is like, oh, that sounds like a really bad idea because, you know, none of the users who bridge their assets, you haven't consented with any of them. And what we're doing is like, it's almost like re-hypification, right? We're stacking risk on top of risk. So, like, at the outset, I don't like proposals like this. It doesn't sound like a great idea. However, it's just a proposal.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Like, it's not, it hasn't happened yet. Open governance forums. Proposals are messy. And then what I saw is some members of the AVE community submitted their own proposal, which is basically like, if you do this, we're going to deactivate AVE on Polygon. Basically set parameters to zero in their risk models. So that nothing on Poly. And so, and then Polygon reacted to that and some of the founders, Sandeep, et cetera, and said, wait, okay, hold on. This is just a proposal.

Starting point is 00:50:02 You're like, why are you exiting? Maybe you're doing this for your own reasons, AVE. And you secretly wanted to use, like, the bridged assets for something in Avey. That's the point, right? One of the projects that proposed this was Morpho, which is a direct competitor to Avey. So that's where a lot of the drama stem from as well. It's like these conflict of interests, I guess, and competitive stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:24 And then so there was some, like, Sandeep from Polygon and Stani from Avey, like back and forth. like back and forth. And, you know, I think Stani was saying, like, well, what are you get, what are you guys getting from the morpho community? Are you getting token incentives? Anyway, some messiness, some mud slinging. What do we learn from this? Other than, like, some of this, uh, happen, all of this happens in the open, such

Starting point is 00:50:46 as the nature of defy. So we're, this is probably not the last time that we'll see like a blow up, uh, from this. Uh, you're like, what else did we learn? Yeah, I mean, I think from some of the discussions that I saw that fell out of this just regardless of the projects involved, it was discussions around using bridged assets in other ways. Like that's been a big discussion for a while. I know there are some like layer two, for example, like blast and mantle that will tell you, we're going to use your bridged assets to do

Starting point is 00:51:13 things. Like they just put the ETH into Lido and stake their ETH and a yield on that. But they tell the users up front that they're going to do that. There is no kind of like after the fact bridging. Oh, sorry, after the fact usage of assets once they're bridged in. So I fall more in that camp. As long as you let the people know that, hey, your assets are actually going to get used if you bridge into our L2 or use our protocol, whatever it is, then that to me is fine. It's when, yeah, you do it after the fact where you've bridged in all this money, billions of dollars of capital, and then you say, well, it's just sitting there right now. Why don't we use it for something? That's where things get very murky. So I think that we're going to be having more and more debates over the coming

Starting point is 00:51:51 months about this, because there is a lot of money in these bridges that is doing nothing right now. And as that grows, it's going to become more and more tempting to put that to work, to earn yield, and to kick that back to users as well in order to get more users on your platform, especially when it comes to the L2's competing for users. This could be something that they're used to essentially even offer free fees. Even though the fees are low, they could offer free fees because they could earn that yield and then kick that back to users as subsidization for fees. So there is going to be a lot of more discussion around that.

Starting point is 00:52:23 But in terms of the other major lesson as well is the fact that, these protocols compete with each other. People tend to forget this, but they compete with each other, and it's cutthroat competition, too, because it's all out of the open, as you said. So we're going to see more of this drama unfold as protocols start juicing incentives for these things. Says, hey, why don't you use your bridged assets in our protocol, and we'll put some nice token incentives on top as well. And then you're going to get the users saying, well, I want those token incentives.

Starting point is 00:52:50 So I want you guys to use the bridged assets. And then you're going to see capital flow around like that and projects fight with each other over users and so on and so forth. So I think this is really only the beginning of what we're going to see around using bridged assets for different things. But there's going to be lots of drama as well. Okay. So I totally agree with you about informed consent.

Starting point is 00:53:10 And for anyone who's looking at this and being like, oh, this is terrible. Like, I don't like it. You're watching how the sausage is made. And what I would remind everyone listening to is banks do this all of the time, except it's completely closed. They don't talk about it. They don't ask anyone's permission. They don't, like, they just re-hypothecate, okay?

Starting point is 00:53:31 And there's no accountability because none of it's on chain. So you have no idea what's actually going on. So these types of conversations, actually, and kind of the back and forth of it. And even the competing for users here and the competitive pressures, it's good for us. It's good for defy users, okay? Because it's open, it's transparent. You go right-click view source in the code to see where the assets are, you know, what the risk profile is and all of that. and that you can't get in traditional finance.

Starting point is 00:53:58 So I think it's like in that way, it's like bullish, even though it just looks a little bit, you know, mudslingy. Pudgy penguins launched their penguin token. Seven million addresses were eligible, whole bunch of eth addresses, whole bunch of Solana addresses as well. This is what the token is doing, Anthony. So almost a $2 billion market cap.

Starting point is 00:54:18 What does this remind you of? Okay? So like it feels like I'm getting flashbacks to board apes. And they launched. I launched a coin. Am I right about that? I'm pretty certain they did at some point in the cycle. And it did something like this, multi-billion dollar valuation. Are you getting flashbacks to that? I mean, they launched a different timing in the market. I believe they launched in 2022, which was obviously the bear market like crypto had already topped in 2021, whereas Pudgy Penguin seems to be

Starting point is 00:54:46 launching at least halfway through the bull market. But the price action is interesting to see because there was another air drop a few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two ago called Hyperliquid that happened. And then it went up only after the air drop, right? But with Pudgy Penguins, it has gone, I believe, like mostly down only since it launched basically, a few days ago. And obviously the Pudgy NFTs, for anyone who you saw,

Starting point is 00:55:10 they also dumped, I think, 50 to 60%, because people were buying those NFTs in order to farm the token. And then as soon as you got the token, that was baked into the price of the NFT, the ARB was done. Everyone sold the NFTs. So what kind of happened is that there was a ton of hype. The broader market sold off.

Starting point is 00:55:28 You know, the NFTs sold off because that ARB closed. And then the token just is already worth, you know, a fair bit right now. So it's kind of plateaued of where it is. So I don't have any opinions of where it's going to go from here. I don't know much about the pudgy ecosystem. I'm not a bull or bear on it. I'm relatively neutral on it. But I don't think it is that comparable to what happened with apes because it was a different

Starting point is 00:55:48 timing in the market. And also, I think from what I've seen, seen the pudgy penguin ecosystem is doing a lot more than the board ape ecosystem is doing right now. And they're branched out and doing a bunch of different things. They've got their own layer two coming out with abstract. I don't think it's like the pudgy L2, but they're working very closely with it to launch that. So they're doing a lot of different things. So I respect the building that's going on there.

Starting point is 00:56:12 But yeah, the token, I mean, who knows? I think they even called it a meme coin themselves. So we'll see. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. It's just another meme coin. I do really respect Luca and his ability to execute. Basically brought Pudgies back from the dead.

Starting point is 00:56:27 And you're right around this ARB opportunity. So Pudgy's has been up from the NFT perspective. And now it's like it was down on the week because everyone sort of got the proceeds from this. You know, one other dimension that's different than board apes or anything that we've seen before is actually there's actual Pudgy Pinguine toys in stores. And so what's happening is Pudgy Pinguins toys were sold with a QR code that entitled you to, Pengu AirDrop. So what's been happening, Anthony, and stores like all around,

Starting point is 00:56:56 like, I guess the world is people are like, you know, ripping open the package and yonking the QR code in order to be eligible for that air drop. So they're just like, here's a package of pudgy penguins. You know, they left the stuffed animal, but they ripped off the QR code in order to be eligible for that air drop. So some weird incentives when it goes into,

Starting point is 00:57:17 like when it comes to air dropping, you know, physical products. Yeah, yeah. And this is funny because we, Like, I pay attention to, like, the trading card game kind of arena. That's right. I collect prognon cards and stuff like that. And this was happening with program on cards where people would go in, open packs,

Starting point is 00:57:33 collect the rare cards, and then resell them on eBay or whatever. And then they had to end up locking up all the cards behind glass. Imagine seeing these pudgy penguins locked up behind glass. And you have to go to the teller and ask, hey, can I get one of the buggy plushies, please? Yeah. This is what happens, though. I'm sure, you know, when there's a market, you can buy the guns, right? They're not locked up, but like the pudgy penguins are locked up behind the class.

Starting point is 00:58:00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. To a manager, show your ID, sir. All right, so that's the pudgy story on the weekend. And by the way, go check if you're eligible for this. A whole bunch of wallet addresses are eligible for this. So you might be as well. At Bankless Claimables, you can do that. Athena launched a new stable coin, Anthony, on BlackRock's Biddle Fund.

Starting point is 00:58:19 This was kind of new. So they have a stable coin, of course, that, you know, works on sort of the, the ARB-type trade, the carry-type trade between the kind of the price of ETH and the price of Fiat and works with centralized exchanges. They've launched a different stable coin, though, that is different. It's called USBTB, and it has a different yield source, a different backing, a different collateral base. And that collateral base is all Black Rock Treasuries. It's all the Biddle Fund. So this is an example. I think of Black Rock really expanding into Defi. So it's like, you know, Athena's like less than a, I mean, maybe it's a year or too old. It's pretty new. It's all defy. It's all cutting edge. And this is Black Rock, like striking a deal with them and really expanding. They would just want Biddle to go everywhere in the crypto economy, it seems. And they're willing to partner with just about everybody. What do you

Starting point is 00:59:13 make of this? The partnership between Black Rock and a defy protocol, Athena. Yeah, I mean, For such a large organization, BlackRock being the largest asset manager in the world, the fact that they're this forward looking and this fast moving with coming on chain is pretty staggering. As you mentioned, Athena is not an old protocol. It is relatively new. And they're already working with BlackRock. And BlackRock is already working with them. And it seems like this is just the very beginning of BlackRock's plans. They probably have some very ambitious plans of what to do on chain. And that's why I mentioned earlier where I do see a reality where they launch their own L2, which gives them the control and the ability to come on chain in the biggest way possible

Starting point is 00:59:56 and to interoperate with the rest of the on-chain economy. And they are a fee insensitive user as well. So they wouldn't necessarily be launching the L2 for, I guess, scalability purposes. It would be more probably to be able to onboard a bunch of different things, bunch of different real world assets, which is what they're mainly focused on. Larry Fink always talks about tokenization of real world assets. So bringing all of that on-chain interoperating with the wider Ethereum on-chain economy is such a thing that I see them doing. And it would be such a massive unlock for Ethereum that I can't even begin to describe, to be honest. So it's great to see them being so forward-looking, to be honest. As we begin to close out this episode, I wanted to get into your personal

Starting point is 01:00:38 on-chain rap. So somebody tweeted this out that we should, somebody in crypto should create a Spotify wrapped, but for your wallet, essentially. And so the devs at Bankless actually did this. So, Anthony, I am going to plug in your wallet. This is bankless.com slash wrapped. And just reveal what you've been up to on this address. I'm sure this is... So what is this wallet?

Starting point is 01:00:59 This is not all your trading activity. I'm sure you have all sorts of secret wallets out there that aren't docks that no one knows about where you're making like insane gains. But this wallet, what do you do in this wallet? So, yeah, this is my very public wallet. I don't do that much on this wallet. It's stuff that I don't care if people know that I'm doing. I do have separate wallets.

Starting point is 01:01:20 I have one wallet that I use just for trading like different very risky coins, like meme coins and AI coins because I don't want anyone copy trading me. Yeah. You know, also because I don't want them seeing my bad trades too. Yeah. Because there are some bad trades on there. I get it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:38 I'm with you. So this is Anthony's most wholesome wallet, let's say. So you're not going to see any of the fart coin trades that he's been making behind the scenes, I'm sure. Yeah. So here it is. Let's take a deep dive into Anthony's wallet. So you performed 99 transactions this year from sassel.eath. 45% more active than other bankless citizens. Your most traded token was USDC.

Starting point is 01:01:59 I imagine you're just trying to sell all that fiat for like, you know, ether or something like this, right? You wake up bullish and you're buying ether with your fiat. You're most loyal to base. Your most commonly used layer two. Your spirit animal. Let's see. Brian Apex Armstrong.

Starting point is 01:02:15 That's your spirit. animal. So there you go. Balt. Balt. There is a fit here. How do we know this? It turns out your most active time was during July, 18% of your transactions. So you're, you know, summertime, you had some energy. It's winter for me in July. That's the thing, sorry. That's probably why. It's these indoors. What else? What else are you going to do with trade crypto? Your crypto horoscope is a cancer and how bankless are you? Let's see. Here it is. Drumroll, 71 on the bankless score. I'd love to plug in some of my other addresses in that on my own, not on the stream, but on my own. Yeah, we won't tell.

Starting point is 01:02:53 To see my school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then just maybe I'll talk to you about it. But this is cool. This is actually a really cool thing. I hadn't seen this yet. Yeah, people should definitely plug their addresses into this or other people's addresses as well. You know, I know there are a lot of people who have public addresses that they don't mind doing whatever on them.

Starting point is 01:03:10 Because they want the attention, basically. And they want the fame, I guess. So I don't know how this works, but I actually plugged in Vitalik.Eath. And fun fact, do you know who his spirit animal was? No. It was you. Oh, really? Yes, it was Anthony Sasano.

Starting point is 01:03:26 Yeah. That's amazing. I don't know how the Algo works. I'll have to consult the devs on that, but like, I don't know, you know. I'm sure the machine intelligence saw the similarities there with Anthony and Vitalik. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:40 Yeah. I'm basically twins. Basically twins, basically the same person. Okay, I want to end with this. So I was thinking that we would have more of a bull market going to this episode, but I think we will in 2025. And I want your seasoned veteran advice. When we go to 2025 and things are feeling frothy, things are feeling bullish,

Starting point is 01:04:02 how do we know it's a top? You know, this whole thing around top signals, okay? So I've got nine top signals here for you, Anthony. And I want you to score them, if you will, one by one from one to 10. Okay? And one is you're not seeing any of it exhibited. It's like deep bear market. Your sensors aren't tingling.

Starting point is 01:04:23 It's like whatever. One is kind of low on the, you know, is it a top scale? And 10 is you're seeing it everywhere. It's like high alert. It feels like the top feels super frothy. Okay? You ready for this? Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:04:35 I snatched this from a crypto Twitter account. I'll have to include in the show notes because I don't have it in my notes. where these top signals are front. But here's the first one. Okay. So are people you know asking you about crypto right now? Again, 10, a lot of them, super frothy. I'm like scared. And like one, not at all. It feels like a deep bear market. And they're like feeling sorry for you that you're like in the crypto industry. So what are you from one to 10 on this? So a few days ago I was a five, but that's like an eight right now. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you. I'll tell you a guy that did some work on my house a couple of years ago that I hadn't spoken to in a couple years,

Starting point is 01:05:13 called me to ask about crypto, and he's not nothing to do with crypto at all. And I was like, oh, no, we're already at that part of the cycle. So, yeah, I went straight to an eight when I got that call. I was like, no, not already. Oh, yikes. Yikes. Too soon. Too soon. Okay, but no fear, guys, no need to panic yet. There's still eight more. How about people flexing on the timeline? Are you seeing flexing on the timeline going on from 1 to 10? Not much, actually. I would say maybe like a 3 or 4, to be honest. I'm not seeing much.

Starting point is 01:05:46 I saw some account post that he bought like a Porsche 9-11 the other day or something. Oh, my God. I was like, okay, that's a bit of a flex. But it's just here and there. I'm not seeing a lot of it yet. So yeah. Is that because we're in the ETH community? You and I?

Starting point is 01:05:59 So you don't see any. Oh, my God. Maybe. Moving on. How about number three? Greed on the timeline. You seen any greed. It's a little bit different than flex.

Starting point is 01:06:09 It's just more like, oh my God, I'm investing in this thing and just like it's going to the moon, that sort of thing. Yeah, but I've been seeing that all year because, you know, obviously we've had the meme coin mania going off and a bunch of other kind of ecosystems having a bit of a pump. So I would say that it's probably like at a five still in terms of what I've seen. Like it's definitely not like what I saw in 2021 just yet. That's good. Okay.

Starting point is 01:06:34 How about when the market stops going up with positive. news. Okay. So that's when the market's fatigue. You can get this super positive thing and there's still not going up. So what's that for you? One to ten. Yeah. I mean, probably like a three or four to be honest, but I feel like we've moved past that phase of the bull market so far and we're in the phase of it doesn't really matter at this point if it's negative or positive. The trend is still up. So yeah, we've kind of moved past that, I think. Okay. How about crypto apps in the in the app store trending, you know, top 10, top five? Yeah, I mean, Coinbase and Robin Hood, which does crypto as well, have been there for a little while now for multiple months.

Starting point is 01:07:14 But I don't know if I would call that the same top signal that I would have last cycle. I feel like that crypto just has more general mind share now. And more people are just generally aware of it and already have the apps on their phone and stuff like that. And they're just re-logging back in. So that again, maybe like a five, I guess, or a six. Okay, that's not too bad. All right, blood pressure going down a little bit. search trends at historical high.

Starting point is 01:07:39 Oh, sorry, what was that? Search trends, like Google, Google results. From what I've seen, they're not anywhere near their highs yet, or they're creeping back up, but they're definitely not at the 2021 level. So, yeah, again, like maybe even less than it, maybe like a three or four right now. Oh, that's good. Okay, crypto in mainstream news. You've seen this in mainstream news?

Starting point is 01:07:58 Yes, Bitcoin mostly, though, not crypto. Just Bitcoin, like, in the mainstream news, especially because Trump's talked a lot about it. that's obviously a huge reason why it's in the news more. Outside of that, not as much, like just Bitcoin mainly. And that's usually not a top signal. That's usually just a signal of, oh, well, the mainstream is paying attention to us again. It's when you start seeing the really kind of random Dgen crypto stuff that is a crypto insider thing, start branching out into the wider ecosystem. That's when you can probably start like screaming. So I would say, again, this is probably like a five. Yeah, it's just Bitcoin and Hocktua. It's the only thing.

Starting point is 01:08:33 me, Hawk to a worries me, okay? Hawk, what worries me? Okay, how about people quitting their jobs? This is a peak bull market when people are like, I'm getting a job in crypto and I've been doing like corporate finance for 20 years, but now I'm doing crypto. You do this at the tops. Yeah, no, not necessarily, not seeing much of that.

Starting point is 01:08:51 I am seeing a bunch of people who joined a team like three years ago now going and like starting their own thing or kind of leaving and saying, I'm going to take a break for a bit, probably because they made a lot of money in the last three years and they're like, you know, I'm going to go and relax for a bit. So maybe a five. Yeah, I'm not seeing too much of that. Yeah. Okay. Last one. Then we'll sum this all up. Exaggerated price predictions. So that's where you started seeing people saying like, you know, Bitcoin to like, you know, two million or something. Or I remember last cycle, right? You and I were chanting, many of us were chanting, ETH to 10K, eat to 10K, right? As soon as we started saying that,

Starting point is 01:09:27 last cycle, people were like, uh, 10K is bearish. Eth to 100K.K. You know what mean? And that's at the point you're like, oh, okay, I don't know. Have you seen exaggerated price predictions yet this cycle, one to ten? Yeah, I mean, I have. But the thing is that I've been seeing that on Bitcoin for a while now, like since even 2023 of people saying one million dollar Bitcoin and so on and so forth. But what I will say is that I am seeing a lot of the people who were previously calling for maybe 150K to 200K Bitcoin start calling for like 500K now because whatever reason, obviously the froth in the bull market. And same on like Eath.

Starting point is 01:10:05 Like people just like to raise their targets as time goes on. But if I start seeing people give ridiculous prices for assets that are fundamentally worthless, that's when it goes to like 10 for me because those assets are obviously been pumping a bit and people are like, oh my God, it's going to go to such and such. But no, I would say it's probably like a five or maybe not. You know what? That's just close to a six, I think at this point. But nothing too crazy just yet.

Starting point is 01:10:28 But I think the common theme through all of this is that we're in the middle, right? That seems to be where all my answers landed. Totally. Intermediate. I think we are a five or a six, which is actually a good place to be as we end the year. Anthony Sistano, thank you so much for hanging with us. Remind people where they can get the daily way. Fantastic Ethereum education that you're putting out on the daily, almost, you know, like often, a lot.

Starting point is 01:10:52 These days it's a bit more sporadic, but I did make a new year's resolution promise that I'll go back to doing it a lot more frequent. But yeah, people want to follow me. They can just go find all the links on my Twitter. I do my daily gray show, as you mentioned there. And I'm very active on Twitter. So I'm sure you'll link that in the show notes of people to check out. Go check it out, guys. It's also available on podcast format too.

Starting point is 01:11:14 So if you're not tuned in to Spotify, you can get on the podcast. We'll include a link to that. Gotta end with this, of course. You guys know crypto is risky. It's been a good year, 2024, but you can lose what you put in. We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

Starting point is 01:11:26 But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Markets Turn Bearish | Trillion Dollar Bank Launches L2 | Massive Pudgy Airdrop | DeFi Drama

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