Bankless - ROLLUP: Memecoin Frenzy | BRC-20 Tokens | Brad Sherman

Starting point is 00:00:00 Bitcoin culture is shifting. The balance of power is shifting from the Bitcoin fundamentalists to the Bitcoin builders. Bankless Nation, it is the second Friday of May. I hope you're ready for what, David? The bankless Friday weekly roll up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto. Say it with me, which is always an ambitious endeavor. I almost forgot that line. Yet we persevere nonetheless into the front side. David's trying to make that a thing. It's definitely always an ambitious endeavor, but we persevere nonetheless. Yeah, nonetheless. Topics of the week. We got meme coin season. I've been sleeping on this one, David, but you tell

Starting point is 00:00:39 me why it's important. Oh, I'm not sure if I'm the man to do that. But I will anyways. Crypto, can we not find product market fit? Well, let's just go back to trading memes. That was the thing of the week. That meme was so powerful that even Bitcoin caught the shit coin bug this week, leading to a change. in the balance of power in Bitcoin culture, which is actually a more significant topic that I do care about. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:05 And then lastly, of the big news of the week, even though there's so much more than this, Brad Sherman has a hot take for crypto. Did you see this one, Ryan? I did. And you're going to love it, thankless nation. It's a perfect soundbite to encapsulate what's going on in our halls of Congress these days

Starting point is 00:01:23 when they talk about this silly thing called crypto. And we're going to get right to it, guys. But before we do, we want to tell you about our friends and sponsors over at Swell. This is a decentralized staking network specializing in the staking of Eith. David, tell them about Swell. Swell is a liquid staking provider.

Starting point is 00:01:40 We know what these things are, the LSD sector. But Swell is if what would you do if you built a LSD provider in the year 2023? So not only is it a brand new Dow to spin up to build a brand new staking protocol, but it also hooks more natively into defies. doubling up where you can get sources of yield from. And so if you are interested in getting some extra, both defy yield along with your e-staking yield, Swell is the place for you.

Starting point is 00:02:08 In their roadmap, they have the thing that really gets me going, which is DVT, aka squad staking as well. And they want you to know that they have a voyage towards decentralization, which is starting soon TM. So app.comnetwork.io slash voyage or the link in the show notes, if you just want to go click to get started. Yeah, and one of my favorite things about this, David, is there is zero percent fees for stakers who stake now.

Starting point is 00:02:34 And, of course, gas fees being high just means stakers get more rewards. So yield goes up. Good time to be staking these days. All right, David, tell me about a good time or a bad time in the markets. Let's get to the price of Bitcoin this week. We are experiencing, Ryan, as we recorded, the saddest time of the week. So far this week, prices are the lowest. at the time of recording, Thursday morning, Eastern time.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Bitcoin is at the low, low price of $27,200. Started the week at $29,400. We were down 7.5%. Not a great week. We lost all of our May gains, huh? We're back to April 23rd or so. We're back to April, yeah. I'm looking at this on the Cracken Pro charts, of course.

Starting point is 00:03:18 How about ETH price? Is that a similar story or any good news here? It is down exactly 7.5% just like Daddy Bitcoin. Yeah. So it started at 1950, currently at 8,000. 1810. Well, you know I'm going to ask you what's going on. And I think you've got some analysis here coming up, David, because I want your take on this, take on the charts. But before we get there, Bitcoin to eat the ratio, flat. No news there. How about crypto market cap? 1.16, down to

Starting point is 00:03:45 1.1, does not feel great. I remember a couple weeks ago, three or four weeks ago, you were like, I'm ready to start to be ready to wave the white flag on triple digit eth. And I was like, hold on. This could be the middle of the year top. So far, the middle of the year top thesis is correct for three weeks in a row. Yeah. This one, this is getting nervous? I mean, okay, are you asking me, do I feel emotionally nervous? Like, almost never.

Starting point is 00:04:13 No. Are there reasons to be concerned? Yeah. There are reasons to be concerned. Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to separate, like, I'm never nervous. So, like, if you're asking me if I'm nervous, like the answer is going to be no.

Starting point is 00:04:25 However, yes, if I put on my short term hat, it's like, yeah, there's reasons to be concerned. What's the probability that we get to that triple digit, ETH again? Well, as we've gotten so far, the 7.5% lower this week has increased that probability by a comparable amount. Come on. I don't know how to answer that question, but I mean, we're getting there. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I was, I was like 60% earlier that it could happen again, that we'd revisit triple digit. And then that kind of decreased, I think,

Starting point is 00:04:59 with the beginning of this year. And we haven't seen the hit that we thought. As we've gotten further away from it, right? But this is also the thing I was most worried about is kind of that apathy season of the market. What's interesting is we'll talk about this later. We're going to talk about meme coins. And whether that's just injecting new blood

Starting point is 00:05:16 or that's injecting recycled capital. Maybe we should talk about that in a minute. But this number to me is interesting. We're still above a trillion, even despite this. And Brad Sherman hates that number. We'll get to that. He actually named a trillion dollars in the video quote. They're going to play a little bit later.

Starting point is 00:05:32 But tell me about the market news, okay? David, why are prices down? Prices are down because liquidity, oh, first before we get there, Ryan, happy one-year anniversary to the Terra Luna crash. Deploying more capital steady lads, that famous tweet that got tweeted out by Doquan. That was one year ago this week. So happy anniversary to those who celebrate this. I do not celebrate this anniversary.

Starting point is 00:05:54 It's not a holiday in my books. Well, either way, anniversary, nonetheless. Okay, so the big reason as to what is going on in the market this week is that the idea has circulated that both Jump and Jane Street, which are big market makers, have scaled back their market making operations

Starting point is 00:06:11 in the crypto world. And so here is a tweet that went viral and is showing a finance order book liquidity. And you can just see the thinness of the order book in the narrow spreads. Right? So what we're looking at, very narrow snapshots of both Bitcoin price a long time ago in January of this year,

Starting point is 00:06:31 so not that long ago, versus now. And so the order books are thin. So it doesn't take as much money to move the markets. And we all have learned the lesson that when you pull liquidity out of the markets, asset prices go down. And so Jump and Jane Street, very big players, have been alleged, I don't think guys, we've seen a confirmation of this, but they are scaling back their market-making operations as a result of regulatory fears. And so when liquidity exits the markets, it's easier to push price down. It's easier to be fearful. And they also are having their own sell pressure. Liquidity, lack of liquidity is bearish. And so that is the thing that has happened. That's why the market seems to have entered a new phase lately. The market's behaving differently.

Starting point is 00:07:17 And people are speculating that is because liquidity has been pulled out. And behaving differently in that it's like more volatile or, more like little bumps in the night, send it spiraling and positive. Emphasis towards the downside. No momentum towards the upside. Any positive price action just immediately gets sold off. There was a phase change in the market and it happened recently. And people are crediting the exiting of market makers to this. Interesting. This may be the apathy market I was talking about earlier. What is this showing us here? Yeah. So this is a graph of liquidity in the market, which is the blue line.

Starting point is 00:07:53 can see some events that have happened recently. So the Silver Gate Bank failure was followed by a large decline in liquidity of Binance in Binance, Bitcoin to United to, Bitcoin to tether liquidity, then followed by the Binance CFTC charge. And then also a finance bot fees increase is what's indicated here. But really, it was a Silvergate bank. So this is largely tradfai, the crypto banks, as who called them, Gary Gensler called them the crypto banks, even though we use crypto banks to call it Coinbase and Cracken, the trad banks that service crypto customers all crash and win under. And so these are the banking providers that also provide banking services to marketmakers.

Starting point is 00:08:39 And so it's harder to market making crypto these days. So liquidity is drying out the system. And so I tweet out this tweet. Everyone knows, who is a bankless listener. Everyone knows that I'm a huge fan of this bunch of box. bigger fan of SpongeBob than you are, bankless listener. And so this is the water, Sandy, water. He needs water, like crypto markets.

Starting point is 00:08:59 We need water. We need liquidity. Otherwise, we're bearish. So the state of the crypto markets right now is dry. Dry. We are dry. We are bone dry right now. Which does not bode well for price, right?

Starting point is 00:09:11 There's not a lot of buyers stepping in under this, you know, $1,700, eath price. Right. Yeah, if you scroll down, I give it a little bit of an autopsy, right? And so one year ago, Tara blew up $50 billion, six months ago. FTX blew up $15 billion. Alameda, a market maker, ceased operations. One month ago, three crypto bank fails.

Starting point is 00:09:30 This last week, the largest bank failure since 2008, regional banks, which do offer services to the crypto industry, are getting slammered. Meanwhile, we are the operation choke point 2.0. Choke point. They're choking liquidity. Gary Gensler is pointing a gun at us. And what I'm saying is like, we don't get bullishness until liquidity returns. And then the crazy thing, mine, is somehow in the midst of all of this, fucking Pepe coin gets to $1.5 billion.

Starting point is 00:10:02 What's the shit is this? That's not real. That's not outside money. That's not new buyers. That's all playing around. We'll talk about that in a minute. But, okay, I think this is actually a big story, David. I think this is a theme of the apathy market.

Starting point is 00:10:16 It's bone dry. And I think this is probably something we'll be talking. about a lot over the coming weeks and in months is when is the liquidity going to come back? And how does it come back? Where are the net new buyers of our crypto assets? That's the big question right now. And I think that is the appropriate question at this stage of the market where like the worst news, all of the kind of the like impact of SBF and Alameda and Terra and Celsius and three hours capital, that's all hit us. And now we're on the other side of that. And we're just like, well, we still don't have the use cases to attract new buyers.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And so it's quiet. You know, like, that's what's going on. The, uh, the trillions of dollars of latent capital that's still out there, which we need and we are doing Pepe coin. You mean they're not buying this stuff, huh? No. Somebody is looking at it. Like, oh, the cryptocurrency industry was needed to professionalize and come into the

Starting point is 00:11:12 light and like provide good products and services. They just created Pepecoin. And Elon Musk is tweeting out about milades. Like, God damn right. You know, Gary Gensler's like, excellent. This is exactly what I wanted to see. He's loving this right now.

Starting point is 00:11:27 Well, let's talk about a good side of the equation, which is holders are still holding. Holders are holding. I feel that very strongly, right? We don't have new buyers. We don't have new liquidity into the market. We have some indications that the holders are holding. We're still here. And what are we doing?

Starting point is 00:11:43 We're staking. We're looking at on the screen here. What's the story around Eith staking in the numbers here? The story around. on ETH staking round. I'm so glad you brought this up. I'm glad you asked. We are at an all-time high an amount of ether staked to Ethereum. That is awesome. That is awesome. How long did it take? Less than one month of time. Less than a month. Remember they told us when withdrawals were enabled? It was going to just like crater. All of this staked Eath was going to drain out of the

Starting point is 00:12:12 system and we were totally crater. And less than a month later, we're already at all-time highs of staked eat. So that means inflows has exceeded outflows. I was not expecting this so quickly. I thought we'd have a more sustained dip. I mean, I was bullish, but I wasn't like, if you told me like within 30 days, we'll be at all-time highs again, I've been like, I mean, three months maybe, I could see that, but like 30 days, that's fast. I wouldn't gamble a significant amount of money that we will be at all-time highs inside of one month. So yes, this is a bullish outcome of this. The general Ethereum community member thought leader take was that like this is not a bearish event.

Starting point is 00:12:49 Yes, there will be a net outflow, but it will quickly, the gap will quickly be covered by net new inflow because of the risk off. Like that was the Ethereum consensus. And like, by the way, that's what you said. That's what I said.

Starting point is 00:13:03 With Jordy Alexander. Okay. David does not like to choose his own home. Please go back to the Jordy Alexander David Hoffman debate and look at who and who made what points. I'm sorry. You said you weren't going to victory lap. I was supposed to victory lap for you.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Okay, David won that debate. I think Jordy Alexander, the evidence is Jordy Alexander took down a terra-a-luna. Terra Luna in his debate. Single-handedly, well, everyone else thought that he got smashed because they were all lunatics. Yes, but then you did a debate with Jordy on whether the Heath withdrawals would be bullish or bearish.

Starting point is 00:13:38 Right. And Jordi's thesis would, a lot of eth would actually drain out of the system. I think David wins this round. So I'm going to do the victory laugh for you. I'll give a point to Jordy, which is like the price of eth currently is marginally lower than at the time of the debate. But I'll say all of this ether price action is completely related to exogenous factors. There you go. But this is the point I want to make.

Starting point is 00:14:01 All the internal points about the Ethereum network and about Ethereum fundamentals, the Ethereum community has been right on the right side of history, every single incident of drama about Ethereum. Remember Eith proof of work? remember the eth overhang and dump into the market fearmongers? Like remember like a like I don't know

Starting point is 00:14:24 every time any Ethereum event has caused drama the people about Ethereum who know about Ethereum have always been right almost every single time there it is folks there's the there's the victory lap but honestly I mean I can't like that's kind of right

Starting point is 00:14:41 here's superfiz here saying in 2020 the beacon chain launched that was December 2020. 2022, September, proof of stake replaced proof of work, the merge. Then in April of 2023, withdrawals from stake were enabled. And now those who wish to withdraw completed the action. That happened on May 7th. That's when the withdrawal queue was emptied.

Starting point is 00:15:04 We started to see inflows again. Pretty impressive to see it laid out in this timeline. Here's another Heath Bowl, Anthony Sasano, saying, there are now more active validators live on the Ethereum network than there were before staking withdrawals were enabled. It took less than a month for this to happen. ETH staking is up only. Give that one a like.

Starting point is 00:15:23 Give that one a like. People are holding. Anthony Sazano, one of the, also perpetually correct about Ethereum. Perpetually correct about Ethereum. I'd love that you just said that right now. He doesn't need to convince him.

Starting point is 00:15:39 Let's zoom out. Cracken actually put out a great report this week on kind of the overall state of staking. of course, Theorem isn't the only proof of stake network. Did you know, David? This report is about staking as an industry. So some stats that I found interesting, $288 billion is the market cap of the top 35 proof of stake assets. So that's growing, 49% quarter on quarter.

Starting point is 00:16:06 The value of stake assets. Just for context, 288 billion is a total market cap. 220 billion of that is Ethereum. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. A lot. A lot is ETH right now. So I want to make sure Ethereum gets its credit right. Yeah. Bankless listeners, no, we don't give Ethereum enough credit around here. $68 billion, the value of staked assets. $5 billion annualized staking rewards. It's a pretty big industry at this point, right?

Starting point is 00:16:33 The value of all certain rewards is $5 billion. That's 23%. Proof of stake is 23% of the total crypto market cap. I imagine that's a largely ETH. Here's one thing that's interesting. The average yield is 11.6%. And of course, Ethereum is that way downward. So other proof of stake networks are rewarding, are distributing a lot more of their supply than Etherness. A lot higher issuance. I think there's reasons for that. A higher inflation. Yeah. You can tell we're coming off of Justin Drake Monday episode too, right? Because, you know, we got some bullish takes on this week. You know, let's switch, though, the conversation.

Starting point is 00:17:09 Actually, just so, okay, Ryan, what do you think in the last seven days? What do you think was the staking reward for ether? In the last seven days, are you talking about like an annualized percentage? Yes, annualized percentage. Annalized percentage, yeah. Plus four point, four point five. No, that was just from issuance. That's just issuance.

Starting point is 00:17:29 Okay, you're talking about transactions and NED. 3.8% APY from issuance. If you get add on the tips and also the M.EV, you come up to 6.6% on your eth. It has been a great time to be a validator. Yeah, that's definitely good. That yield generated in the ETH denominated returns is always quite nice.

Starting point is 00:17:52 David, this is a question, I think, that came off of our market section last week, asking about, I mean, we're critical from time to time on the Fed, on Jerome Powell, on interest rates. Here's a question from stevef.eith. I missed the cutoff this week, but my question for TeamBank,

Starting point is 00:18:09 for next weekly roll-up is the following. And I ask this with true respect for you guys. Thanks, Steve. You don't have to respect us, though. Since bankless consistently criticizes the federal interest rate policy fairly, and is calling for a pivot, what terminal interest do you think the federal reserves should settle on. So this listener is calling us out, David. And if you're going to criticize the interest rate, you have to say what you think it should

Starting point is 00:18:35 be. You have to say why. What's your response to this? My response is like the only reason why I'm not calling for a pivot, except my portfolio is. You as a human person who's living in an economy and lives in a society, I am not calling for a pivot. My portfolio would love a pivot.

Starting point is 00:18:58 There's two davids. He wants a pivot for his bags. Yeah, my bags want to pivot. What is the appropriate interest rate? No clue. God, I do not want anyone's job inside of the Federal Reserve. I do not want Powell's drop. I don't have an opinion on this matter. And so I apologize for bankless listeners. If we have given off the air of like we think that we are right about interest rates

Starting point is 00:19:20 and that we want to pivot, we're just, this is an industry and all you guys also have risk on crypto assets. So don't pretend that you also don't want to pivot. Yeah, I guess I would zoom out though. And I would say I agree with that. I'm glad you clarified, right? So a pivot is good for crypto bags. Is it good for society? Is it kind of a different question? But here's where I'd zoom out, and I do have some criticism for the Fed that I think is more fair over the long run. As you said, David, no one really knows what the real interest rate should be. No one. Not even, maybe God knows. Maybe God knows, right? So this was actually a point. This was a point that was made by Edward Chancellor in our recording. By the way, guys, there is an

Starting point is 00:20:05 episode coming out with a financial historian, Edward Chancellor, is coming out, I think, on Monday. And if you want the more nuanced, non-bag-biased take on the Fed and what they should be doing, what they should have done, rather than what they are doing, listen to that take. But he makes the point that no one knows the real interest rate, of course, that a hypothetical real interest rate exists. But the best tool we have of finding out what the real interest rate is, is that the free markets. And we're in this mess because central bankers have distorted free markets so badly for so long, and they've pretended that it's all okay. And so I don't know, neither did Edward

Starting point is 00:20:49 Chancellor know what the actual rate should be. Maybe God does. No human alive on Earth, no AI on earth knows this. But we do know that the rates, the fake rates over the last 10 years were dumb, like real dumb. Real dumb. I mean negative? We went negative in, in, you know, like zero percent, close to zero percent in the U.S. So if I'm Powell, I don't know if I can fix this. And there's an element of Powell,

Starting point is 00:21:19 I think you made this point last week where he's just a wheel in the cog, right? This is the wheel of history. What else can he do? He's got the hand that he's been dealt. He's got to play those hands. He's not outside of the system. He's inside the system. Right. So the criticism, though,

Starting point is 00:21:33 is the system and the way it's been managed. And the fix, I think we're pretty, like, much more certain on this. The fix is individuals need an escape hatch, an alternative store of value. Like, why would you put your money in treasuries? Why would you put your money in the dollar? Right? So for the individual, I'm like, well, crypto is a great escape hatch for that. And I think as a collective, we need a check on the central banker power.

Starting point is 00:21:57 As a collective, we also need crypto, right? And it provides that escape hatch so that central bank. have less power over the future. But again, if you want the real perspective on this from a true financial non-bag-bias historian, the episode coming at you on Monday, it was one of my favorite episodes that we've recorded recently, actually. I really enjoy Edward. Yeah. One of the reasons why the weekly roll-up episodes always go so long is because we find little rabbit holes to talk about and then I also want to talk about it, so I'll give my take as well. So like the whole idea of this episode is that interest rates are a naturally emergent phenomenon. So the concept of

Starting point is 00:22:33 set interest rate by mere mortals, mere humans is not real. It's fake. We're arbitrarily picking a number when nature, mother nature, or why you said only God knows what the ought to be interest rate ought to be. It's like when we pick a number, it's a, we create a fake world. And when we pick a low number, we are creating, we are perpetuating that fake world and making it even faker. And that has been like our entire lifetimes as millennials. We've been living in a fake world because interest rates have been low for more or less our entire lifetimes. And now, like, we have to come to terms with that. And so now we've got to jack up the interest rates to pay our debts that society has been paying for decades prior to our even acknowledging of the problem. And so the release valve, like you said, is crypto assets.

Starting point is 00:23:20 And so the only reason why the Fed can create that fake world is because there's no escape valve to escape towards until Bitcoin comes in 2009. And here we are in history. There. David said Bitcoin that time, not Ethereum. I'm proud of you, David. That's great. I don't own any Bitcoin. Speaking, though, of Ethereum and being bullish on Ethereum, okay, one last thing. We got to go over it in the market section. This was a fantastic report. One of the best I've seen analyzing and predicting the price of ether. David, I know you haven't had a chance to read this. Let me tell you, I am so bullish. I want to invite these analysts on. And this is a report put out by Van Eck. So analyzing ether,

Starting point is 00:24:03 from an institutional perspective and throwing out price predictions based on the thing, like, based on totally, actually understanding the asset, which is so bullish to me. So they're doing, they have a base case, a bear case, and a bull case by 2030, okay? And the way they are calculating this is based on Ethereum's total revenue. So it's $2.5 billion annualized today. And they have a base case projection of $50 billion annualized per year by 2030. right, that's their base case. Their bare case is lower.

Starting point is 00:24:36 Their bull case is $136 billion per year. And the way they calculate those numbers is from, as we learned in our Justin Drake episode, congestion, which is ETH gas fees, and also contention, which is M-E-V. And also this thing that they call Ethereum Security as a service, which is the idea of using ETH, restaking ETH. They have restaking in this report?

Starting point is 00:25:01 Are you serious? Yes. Yes, and I just want to point out, like, of course, this is a projection. This is, like, this is not necessarily what the future, like, these numbers. It's their job to produce these. They got the variables right. That's what I'm so bullish on. It's not another stupid institutional analyst report.

Starting point is 00:25:18 So you're actually just like, I don't care about the numbers. The fact that they got the variables, the inputs into the models is, like, we're finally at that point in the history. Yes, yes. Institutions are getting the inputs right. They actually are understanding how to value this asset class. and it's taken like three to four years of education. I actually feel like bankless has been a big part of that. That is where we came from.

Starting point is 00:25:40 But this report gets it right. And by the way, it doesn't also include kind of monetary premium on top of this because I think you could argue that's very difficult. You can't measure that. You can't measure that. I don't know. If I'm an institutional investor and I'm reading this report and I'm seeing these numbers so clearly laid out, right?

Starting point is 00:25:57 Like it just makes so much sense. And it's not a meme coin style of like, pull it out of your ass number. Anyway, bullish on institutions, analysts actually understanding this asset. It's very cool. I am offended that their base case for Ether in 2030 is merely $12,000. But then you made the point that they didn't add in monetary premium, which is the right way to analyze that is it's a multiplier. It's like, how strong do you want the multiplier to be?

Starting point is 00:26:25 If it's extremely moneyness, it's like a 10x. If it's not very moneyiness, it's like a 1.5x. so then adding the money multiplier onto it, which I think is strong, 5x. Pulling that one out of my ass. Totally. But you can pull that. You can pull that wherever you, like, where you want to pull that from?

Starting point is 00:26:43 Because that's what money is. Yes. That's very much. That's the meme value of it. Anyway, it's bullish on that. We got to move on. What do we got coming up next? Coming up next, meme coin season, my favorite season.

Starting point is 00:26:55 I'm lying. Bitcoin catches the shit coin bug because of the meme, coin season was so strong that the virus has spread to Bitcoin. But you know how like when you catch a virus and like you can actually like change it like can mess with your DNA? That's what happened in Bitcoin this week. Bitcoin culture is shifting. The balance of power is shifting from the Bitcoin fundamentalists to the Bitcoin builders. The tribe that I resonate with. I'm pretty sure you also resonate with. So we'll talk about that as well. And then Brad Sherman's got that a hot take like we talked about, and I made a meme of him.

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Starting point is 00:29:19 It's meme coin season. We're going to find out what that means. Here's a question that bankless Twitter put out. Have you bought a meme coin? in the past month. I have not answered this question. I don't know if you have David, but why don't you tell us,

Starting point is 00:29:30 have you bought a meme coin in the past month? If you scroll down, you'll see my answer. Let me see. Oh, yes. You got a giff of like a bashful. A guy who's like sheepishly nodding you.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Yeah. So you have. So you have. Yes. So you are one of the DGens here. Yeah. I've bought two main coins. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:51 So what you say is going to be given with love? Or, wait, do you have bitterness that these weren't your meme coins that, that pumped David? No, I just, I'm bitter that I'm compelled to play the game just like everyone else because that's the meta where we are right now. You don't have to. You could just ignore it. It's fun. You know, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, you know? I have ignored it so far, but why don't you tell us what's happening? So here's the first tweet we're teeing up here. Yeah, okay. So this is, of course, Pepe coin. This started off by Pepe Coin.

Starting point is 00:30:23 launched the 16th of April. 1.5 billion dollar market cap as of today hit 1.7 earlier. 122,000 people wallets have traded Pepe at least one point in their lives. The stories for how these tokens just sort of like rocket out of corners of the internet into billion dollar market caps are always inherently dark and... Dark? Yeah, just like hard to illuminate. Not dark, like evil, but just like, mysterious. Opaic.

Starting point is 00:30:57 Yeah, I got it. Yeah, they come from like, I'm sure they start with like trading circles, you know, back channel alpha. Telegram. Yeah. Someone like figures out how to make something catch. I'm pretty sure that Pepe is just a freaking token and is just called Pepe. There's no utility to this thing. Is Pepe the Frog?

Starting point is 00:31:17 The Frog. Yes. So, like, this one token got minted and birthed. and somehow somebody got the market to accept that this is the appropriate token that correlates with the internet meme. And now because it got to $1.5 billion, it now is. So this thing is like sufficiently large and the memes and owners around this are sufficiently big. And people have made sufficient amounts of money yet that this is now like Doge is about the Doge meme and Pepe is about the Pepe meme meme. And now we have a new meme coin.

Starting point is 00:31:49 Look at this chart, David. Okay. So you're telling me this thing was valued. at zero. It was valued at zero. Let me switch to market cap. Zero, of course. But like reasonably when it got some liquidity,

Starting point is 00:32:01 I mean first kind of days of liquidity, 77 million in market cap. And this thing got to 1.8 billion? Yeah. So $1.8 billion, which was just created out of nowhere inside of one month. Okay.

Starting point is 00:32:17 This must have minted some millionaires there. There's always some winners from these Pepe coins. Here's a chart we're looking at top three dudes. We don't know if these are dudes, to be fair, have made $14 million. I will bet my entire net worth

Starting point is 00:32:29 that these are dudes. Okay, three of them made over $14 million on Pepe. And yes, they did cash out. That's why I was about asking. You were used as their exit liquidity. Okay. So the number one profit tier of Pepe made a 9x. The number two made a 14X.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Number three made a fourth. thousand seven hundred and eighty six x so they basically put zero capital at stake and bought no like all the tokens of very little price and then managed to hold it all the way up imagine making 14 million dollars just it's so dumb i mean like it's part of this industry it's like yeah we have our new money printers and like yeah i guess this is like the logical conclusion of it and i do appreciate that this tweet says here's the pefe profits leaderboard this is a casino like this is a leaderboard There are winners and losers here. There are net winners because there's $1.5 billion of wealth that's now on paper.

Starting point is 00:33:29 But it is a game that people are playing. Yeah. Well, here's the game. And we can see kind of the peak, at least so far, unless this has a resurgence, was on May 5th. At $1.8 billion. And now we're down to, back down to $700 million. Yeah, 700 million at this point in time. So who are the losers?

Starting point is 00:33:50 Yeah. I mean, like any kind of, people that have bought in since May 5th. If you've bought since May 5th, you are a loser. Yes. You bought too late. Sorry. In this local time frame. Was Pepe one of the coins that you, because there are many of these meme coins, right?

Starting point is 00:34:06 Yeah, now there's a Cambrian explosion of meme coins because it's meme coin season. And everyone's like, people got a 50,000 X. What's the next meme coin that also gets you a 50,000 X? So now it's meme coin casino season. There's like dogs. There's like, what else is there? I don't know. I bought, one of my friends sent me a contract address on arbitram.

Starting point is 00:34:27 And I didn't even look, dude. This is the next pepe. And you're just like, oh, okay, point to me. I don't care. I don't care. I didn't look into it. I'm like, all right. Whatever.

Starting point is 00:34:36 I mean, it's fine. If it's a very small amount of money, right? And this is what people want to do because they're bored in the bear market. Okay. It saddens me when people, like, get serious about this and gamble away their life savings, but they're free to do that. Yep. What analysis are we looking at here? Okay, so these are just more stats from Pepe. So like I said,

Starting point is 00:34:58 120,000 distinct wallets. Top five to six wallets listed here are all MEV bots. So you want to know the real winners of the casino games, Ryan? MVBots. Oh, really? How about Eath holders? Because they paid some MEV to ETH holders and also burnt some gas on this. Yes, if you don't know how to run any MVBOD,

Starting point is 00:35:20 and, well, it's hard to say the ETH holders are the winners here. It's all, they're always, ETH holders are always the house, but right now, MEV bots are first in being the house. Gotcha. It's more assured.

Starting point is 00:35:32 And also there's fewer of them. Specifically, this one MEPBot, Jared from Subway.eath, if bankless listeners don't know who that is. It's, it is the MEPBot that sandwich attacked Wintermute inside of the same. Oh, really? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:48 Jared from Subway. I didn't know he was doing this now. Jared from Subway is up to some shenanigans on the Ethereum blockchain. Wow. That's Jared fromsubway.eath. And you can see it all on chain. Here's a story here that says in less than three months, Jared reaped over $40.6 million in revenue

Starting point is 00:36:05 with a profit of $6 million. So Jared from Subway is just raking it in by running these bots. He's got to program them, run them themselves, and is making money on these, I guess, MEV arbitrage types of opportunities, right? Exactly right. So yeah, total revenue, $40.6 million, paid $34 million in gas fees, which is why if you pull up ultrasound dot money, the burn rate of ETH is just like cratering, or it's going up. The supply of ETH is just like going down bigly.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Yeah. Because MEVBoss are paying such high fees to the Ethereum blockchain. And so the $40 million of revenue has been turned into $34 million. Yeah, dude, it's been crazy. So Ethereum deflation is at 3% in the last seven days, which is crazy. Go to the seven day time frame. Did we break $10,000, or $10,000, Eth burnt per day? Are we at $70,000 this week?

Starting point is 00:37:00 Almost. We're at 67.8,000. Okay. So Jared from Subway.eath, this infamous sandwich attacker bot that is just printing cash, 238,000 sandwich attacks, attacking more than 106,000 victims. it. Jared from Subway sandwich attack. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm just putting that together now. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:37:23 There you go. 98.3% of Jared's transactions are sandwich attacks. And so the way that this works is that they, they, somebody, and the reason why this works is that these tokens are super illiquid. And so this is why that this is a game is that there's, of the one point, or now I I guess it's $700 million or market cap, it's like resting on like, 100, like, I think it's something like 20 million dollars of liquidity. So there's only so much liquidity that's supporting this market cap. And so since these things are really illiquid, this is

Starting point is 00:37:58 just a field day for MEV bots because everyone aping into these things without thinking about it and not doing their price controls and not using CalSwap are getting like sandwiched by Jared. Sandwiched by Jared. And so he's inserting transactions ahead of these buyers to pump up the price. And then the, and then he's. selling the tokens right after people buy inside of the same block, just printing money. So he's doing this for Pepe, obviously. And then also he's got the wallet holds 800 tokens that Jared controls. So he's just doing this for the entire Ethereum casino. And so there's this massive casino going on because of the shitcoin mania that's happening. And you're right when you say that

Starting point is 00:38:38 the ether holders are the house. But Jared from Subway's front running us by doing MEV sandwich attacks, which really... He's the dealer at the table. taking a cut. Yes. So he is a rogue dealer that is under the table like moving cards around and then instead of the casino making money

Starting point is 00:38:57 because the theorem's a casino, the dealer's making the money. And this really hammers home Justin Drake's M.E.V. burn. Why we need M.E.V. Burn. Because this one guy is taking all the money for himself instead of distributing it equally and fairly

Starting point is 00:39:11 to all the ether holders, which really imp parts of like why we need MEV burn. We want the sandwiches to go to the house. That's our casino money, Jared. Yeah. How dare you? Yeah, how dare you? I'd be a lot less bitter if that went to take your holders.

Starting point is 00:39:26 You're pretty, but you saw pretty greedy, David, because Ithas burnt a lot this week. I mean, that's been pretty good. Could have burnt more. You could always burnt more. Like twice as much. Let me ask you about this. Do you feel like moralizing about this? Are you kind of like meme coins are bad?

Starting point is 00:39:41 Are you of the mindset that like this is what's wrong with crypto? It's giving us a bad reputation. now Gary Gensler has additional fodder and so does Brad Sherman and they can go look at these millennials in their underwear living in their parents basement training these meme coins around that's all crypto is good for end of story are you like are you mad about this or what's your take yeah you're you're tapping into my slight uh spiciness attitude today i don't know i don't know like i actually i don't think i don't think that's a wrong take The reason why I'm in crypto is because Ethereum produces coordination platforms.

Starting point is 00:40:23 And one of the byproducts of that is shit coins. And that's good and natural phenomenon. I'm not going to moralize. Like, you can't use my blockchain for your shit coins. It's a little bit frustrating that this is like now my third bear market. And the whole like funneling and capturing money and giving it to public goods and being able to coordinate around public goods and being able to produce like the sci-fi future of human coordination and flourishing. is in like we're still doing the Pepe coins.

Starting point is 00:40:50 And so like there's a reason why we didn't cover Pepe coins in our weekly live stream. It's just like, we've done this before. Like we did this in 2017. We did this in 2021. Like we were doing it in 2023. Like how many times we're going to go around the sun and talk about. Why can't you be happy for people who got really wealthy here? Because there's very few of them.

Starting point is 00:41:12 There's a single leaderboard and we know who they are. It's supposed to be everyone. It's supposed to be a systemic level. Yeah, not all boats. All boats did not rise. Pepe is not going to make the world a more sustainable place. I get it. It is not a foundation for, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:31 I get it. I would say, though, one thing to quote you from last week is Ether money is a public good. And this does go towards contributing towards the economic security of Ethereum. So there's that, at least. My overall take is that this is just not. noise and I don't care about it. And I wish... It's a lot of noise.

Starting point is 00:41:50 It is noisy. I know. I would love to be able to channel this out and just like we're building. People are bored so they're doing this. I think there's some narrative problems around it, but mostly this is just noise. I'm not going to hate on the internet for doing weird internet things. I'm feeling funny today. Well, let's talk about the Bitcoin community.

Starting point is 00:42:12 Because Bitcoin's kind of feeling funny as well. Bitcoin transaction fees are up in good news. That's bullish because Bitcoin long term does not have a way to sustain the economic budget and the security budget of Bitcoin. So transaction fees going up, transaction revenue going up is kind of bullish. But why don't you tell us why transaction fees are going up? The innovation of the ERC20 has migrated its way to Bitcoin. So using the Ordinals protocol, we now have BRC20s, just because they're copycat

Starting point is 00:42:45 the name. They're actually, they're not like the ERC 20 token standard on Bitcoin because that doesn't work. You don't take the ERC 20 standard and put it onto Bitcoin via Ordinals. But the idea is that like, yeah, we're doing tokens on Bitcoin now. So using the Ordinals protocol, we now have shake coins on Bitcoin. And so it's more like the semi-fundurable for the people who like the deeper takes, the semi-fundable ERC-115 token standard. So fungible tokens, but they're unique as well. And so there is now a BRC token page. There is now a unisat.io marketplace. So we have a marketplace for tokens on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:43:23 The first token is ORD-O-R-D-Y for ordinals. And so if you want to access the UNISAT marketplace, you first need to buy a BRC-20 with a UNISAT wallet. And then you need to mint 20 new inscriptions into Bitcoin Ordinals. And the beautiful thing about it, so this is, this is like the utility, what does an ordi token do, which is the first BRC 20 on the Ordinals protocol? It gives you access to the marketplace. So it's like a token-gated access to the marketplace. And so the thing is like the crazy thing that this is genius, Ryan, is what they did is that in order to access the marketplace, you had to mint 20 new BRC 20 tokens.

Starting point is 00:44:05 And so in order to even enter the access, enter the marketplace, you had to supply 20 new tokens into the market. So the marketplace could have, yeah. You didn't need to do anything with them. You just need to. And so like what this did is this filled up the Bitcoin block space because everyone was minting BRC 20 tokens because they wanted to access the UNICEAT marketplace. And so what did that do?

Starting point is 00:44:28 It congested the Bitcoin blockchain. It got people talking about it. It went viral. People shared it on Twitter. Let's get to that. It became a movement. Okay. So BRC 20, the market cap of BRC 20 tokens,

Starting point is 00:44:40 $537 million. That's funny. It was 700 million literally two hours ago when I made this agenda. I mean, as you would expect, that's 206 million and 24 hour volume. It hit over a billion earlier this week. Can I just ask real quick about the user experience of something like Unistat? You can't ask me. I haven't used it. But it doesn't sound easy. This is not like Metamask, connect, pay gas fee, hit the button and swap.

Starting point is 00:45:06 I mean, we really are maximizing the capability of this T-I-83 calculation. here. And people are getting really creative with it. Yeah. Let me say that. You can play Doom on the TiV83 calculator. Like, there's a lot left of juice to squeeze, I'd say, actually. Okay. Well, so, this is a tweet from Eric Wall. This is a chart of what happens when somebody correctly circuits the Ponzi wires. What are we looking at here? And this is what I was talking about. So these are all of the marketplaces of Bitcoin to Ordinals, Ordinol's swap, Ordinol's wallet, and then Unisats. And because of the,

Starting point is 00:45:38 You Must Mint 20 BRCs in order to enter. or the UNISAP marketplace is just by far the biggest one, right? It's crushing like Magic Eden, right? Okay, this is, oh, the UNISAP marketplace. So this is Bitcoin. It's a Bitcoin. Yeah. And then the Ordi token recently got listed on a centralized exchange, now on Gate.

Starting point is 00:45:57 So we have Bitcoin tokens, Ryan. There's tokens on Bitcoin being traded on centralized exchanges, which is I never thought I'd see the day. I think that's kind of cool. All right. So here's the chart of the Ordi tokens. You're saying. It looks similar. It's not quite Pepe, but, you know, it's got some similarities here.

Starting point is 00:46:17 $290 million market cap also just got minted in like the last, when did that thing get started? Like in the last week. That's incredible. Okay. So, tell us. Bitcoin. Yeah. This is a Bitcoin denominated token. I mean, that's bullish in a way. But tell me, tell me about block space demand. So what are we looking at here? So this is two charts of ordinal inscriptions. So how many inscriptions there are made via the ordinal's protocol, and then also fees paid over time, which is just like the highest spike I've ever seen on Bitcoin. So inscriptions just is like one creation of an ordinal, creation of an inscription. I'm not using the best words. There was one day last week where

Starting point is 00:47:00 blockchain transaction fees on Bitcoin, transaction fees were larger than actual issuance, which I'm not sure that has ever happened in history of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yo, wow. Right. Wow. Wow. That's nuts.

Starting point is 00:47:17 And then they all went to the miners and got sold. Well, here we go. Daily fees, market fee share. Look at that. Okay, so it's hard to articulate this for the podcast listeners, but daily fees is flat and then it's just vertical. It goes so high, so quickly. I've never seen a parabola like that. And then this next chart run, okay, this is a crazy stat.

Starting point is 00:47:42 This is a once, this has never, this is a new record for Bitcoin in its entire lifespan. The amount of unconfirmed transactions waiting to be confirmed in the Bitcoin men pool at the highest price. Oh my God. Look at this. I did the one year. It has never been higher. Bitcoin has broken its own record. In how long has Bitcoin been around? 14 years, 13 years. We have never seen more pending transactions in Bitcoin ever, not even close because of ordinals. what's interesting here.

Starting point is 00:48:13 So the mempool is getting clogged, basically. So this means transaction fees on Bitcoin have to be going up, right? Yes. And maybe we'll get to part of that story. But this one observation here is, if you want to be a smart contract platform, you're going to have to deal with smart contract platform problems. Yeah. That's kind of what this is, right?

Starting point is 00:48:33 I mean, we talk about MEV. We talk about, okay, where do the proceeds for crazy congestible, Do they go to miners? They go to, or do we burn them to someone else? It's a same set of problems that Ethereum has had to deal with because these are common problems to any programmable blockchain. And with Taproot, the implementation of Taproot, Bitcoin became slightly programmable, just a little bit. Just programmable enough for some chick-cornery. So it's starting to get these problems, which is fascinating to me. Here is a tweet for Binance. We've temporarily closed Bitcoin withdrawals as the Bitcoin Network is experiencing a congestion issue.

Starting point is 00:49:11 Wow. Our team is working currently to fix until the network is stabilized. It will reopen Bitcoin withdrawals as soon as possible. I mean, fees going up, you know, $10 to transfer a Bitcoin. That's crazy. Here's the Ordnals marketplace going crazy as well. Tell me about, though, this cultural change that this has caused or like some dissent in the ranks of Bitcoin supporters. What's your take on this so far? So we have two main characters here, I'll say, the good kind of American main characters, Eric Wall and Nick Carter, who are coming on next Tuesday for the state of the nation. I'm going to, that I'm so excited for that episode.

Starting point is 00:49:49 Here's a meme of a dandelion, a weed, just growing out of concrete. The concrete is Bitcoin maximalism. The weed is taproot. And so Eric Wall is saying, here to go back to the tweet. Eric Wall is saying, what happened today was the emergence of the BRC 20 asset class. It wasn't an attack. It wasn't a DDoS. Taproot has just made it simple to productize the Bitcoin block space into any arbitrary protocol.

Starting point is 00:50:14 Chipcoin trading protocols is an obvious buyer of that block space. And so he's saying the expressiveness that we've had on Ethereum, smart contracts, is being created on Bitcoin via taproot. And then his next tweet is the, look at me, we are the Hornets now. It's the I'm in charge now meme, except he's got the Bitcoin Wizard hat and the Wizard beard because these are the memes of the Bitcoin space. And so this is like, look at it, look at me. We're in charge now.

Starting point is 00:50:42 Hey, Bitcoin fundamentalists who are like, get your shit coinery out of our chain. Our chain is for Bitcoin. We're in charge. We're in charge now. The builders are in charge. We have two camps now again. And this isn't the first time that Bitcoin has divided into two camps. Nick Carter wrote a great editorial piece about this.

Starting point is 00:50:59 And kind of the, remember the big blockers and the small blockers? This was back in, you know, the 2017. I think, 2017, 2018 blockchain, block size wars in Bitcoin. And basically the big blockers went and forked off with Bitcoin cash. They went in another direction. And the small blockers kept Bitcoin block space smaller and kept it as a premium asset. This is a similar split in the Bitcoin community where you have the hardcore, I call them maybe Bitcoin Maximus or call them Bitcoin fundamentalists who just, they just think

Starting point is 00:51:35 that this kind of activity. is beneath Bitcoin is unholy. Thou shalt not hold any other asset but Bitcoin. Right? So they don't like any of these memes, the Ponzi's, the tokens. They hate it. It's impure. And then there's like more Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:51:51 pragmatists. I think it's maybe a larger set of the population like Eric Wall, like Nick Carter, who are like if we want Bitcoin the network to succeed, we have to sell block space. That is fundamental. And you don't get to decide what the blocks space is used for. The credible neutrality of Bitcoin just says it, you know, provides a block

Starting point is 00:52:12 space to the highest bidder. It just is. And by the way, this is actually a good thing for the Bitcoin network because it's a source of economic sustainability into the future as issuance starts to run dry. So these are the two camps that are kind of competing for cultural mind share right now. Right. Okay. And the crazy thing is, is like even when you apply like crypto Bitcoin fundamentalist maxi principles, era, and Nick are still right. And so here's an Eric tweet. So he goes, 90% of lightning laser-eyed naxies use Noster, a centralized custodial lightning provider. And it's just like, it's a lightning network, which is deemed wholly by the Bitcoin maximalists, except it's centralized and custodial,

Starting point is 00:52:54 which is insane. And then he continues and goes, 90% of magicians, which is now the name of a tribe, which is how you know it's good, because it's got a name, trading ordinal's inscriptions using non-custodial, trustless PSBT atomic swaps. I don't know what PSBT is. So basically he's saying, hey, what Ordinals is, it's trustless, it's atomic, it is non-custodial, and all of the holy narratives of Bitcoin, which is, you know, Lightning Network is custodial and trusted and just like totally asked backwards. So if you scroll down, his next tweet is so good.

Starting point is 00:53:28 He goes, an IOU Bitcoin equals Fiat's, which is the custodial. Dogeal Lightning. The laser-eyed maxis are the shit coiners. And he follows again, he goes, we built a more trustless decentralized protocol for trading our horribly inefficient ordinal NFTs and BRC 20 tokens in two months. You're not even using trustless solutions to send micro payments after seven years. All caps, you failed. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. I mean, he's saying one set of users is banked and the other is bankless. That's exactly. Right. That's our parlance. And then Amin Soleimani follows up and goes,

Starting point is 00:54:05 I discovered this, this payments problem. Amin Soleimani was innovating on payment channels on Ethereum when we were trying to figure out how to scale Ethereum. He goes, I discovered this five years ago when I tried to use Ethereum state channels for my camsite. He made Spang Chain. Our work helped rule out state channels as a long-term layer two solution

Starting point is 00:54:23 and eth-nerds doubled down on plasma, which eventually became layer-two roll-ups and finishes off saying, good to see Bitcoiners catching up, to which Eric Wall responds, lull. I mean, this is because... This is because some Bitcoiners are realizing that lightning,

Starting point is 00:54:41 which uses state channel technology, isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are a lot of challenges with it. What is Michael Saylor saying? Should we play this clip? I think we should play this trip. Michael Saylor has an interesting take. So I think that what happened with ordinals and NFTs

Starting point is 00:54:56 is we crossed this chasm from what was a bearish scenario to a bullish scenario to a bullish scenario. scenario. If I was a minor, I would be ecstatic. I think that long term, there are a lot of implications. Long term, the implication is there's going to be a lot of applications on the Bitcoin base layer. Yeah, if I can inscribe a piece of art, right, an NFT is kind of an art, but I could also inscribe my last will and testament, and if my last well and testament is moving a billion dollars for me to you, how much is it worth to you to have that burned onto the blockchain? and cryptographically verified.

Starting point is 00:55:34 Yeah, at least a billion dollars for money. Would you pay $20? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, would you pay $100. Here's my contract. There you go. So there are interesting applications. It's funny because so obviously

Starting point is 00:55:45 Saylor is team, not team full Bitcoin maximism. He's totally okay with this. But it's so funny to like, yeah, NFTs are fine if they're on my blockchain. Of course. And if they're fantastic. So are tokens if they pump my bags.

Starting point is 00:56:01 There's some deep hypocrisy here, I think, among some members of the Bitcoin community. I don't see it in Eric Waldo or Nick Carter. No. Personally, this is a tweet from Nick Carter. Now, if Bitcoin could find a way to return this capital to holders instead of it being siphoned out by miners. So, of course, all the transaction fees going straight to minors. Lots of transaction fees.

Starting point is 00:56:22 Lots of revenue. That was the smartest thing Eith ever did, frankly. And I was skeptical of it. Eith, of course, burning these transactions. fees rather than distributing them to miners and stakers. So look, man, they're coming around. Eric Wall says this is probably the funniest year in Bitcoin ever. I agree. Because the laser-eyed maxis are now the laser-eyed reing maxis. And Eric Wall and Nick Carter, the people that I've always been aligned with and always thought were just like on the pinnacle

Starting point is 00:56:53 of what this crypto industry is doing are finally being, have the foundation for them to stand on. because they couldn't stand up to the cyber hornets without something like the Ordinals protocol supporting them and their points and their areas of emphasis. I'm cheering Bitcoin on in this. I'm, yes. I still think what's ironic is I still think... I've never enjoyed Bitcoin more than I have in the last like month or so. They're still kind of years behind on these things.

Starting point is 00:57:21 They're still like, they still are going through their state channels era, dude. I don't know if it makes me more bullish on Bitcoin or not, but it is it is fun to It's trending in the right direction, that's for sure. This is now a bullish Bitcoin podcast, at least semi-bull. Semi-bull. We need to get to the rest of the show, Ryan. And so coming up next is Brad Sherman's beautiful, beautiful soundbite that will be imprinted in the crypto industry. Somebody should inscribe it into the Bitcoin blockchain.

Starting point is 00:57:49 So we're going to get to that soundbite as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Metamask for all of the crazy crypto jargon that we use on the podcast. If you don't know what that means, go click. the link in the show notes because MetaMask Learn at Learn. Metamask.I.O. to learn about Metamask.I.O. to learn about Web3.com is hard. Until now, introducing Metamask Learn, an open educational platform about crypto, Web3, self-custody, wallet management, and all the other topics needed to onboard people into this crazy world of crypto. Metamask Learn is an interactive platform, with each lesson offering a simulation for the task at hand, giving you actual practical experience for navigating Web3.

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Starting point is 00:58:54 Go to learn.menomask.io and add Metamasklearn to your guides to get to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home.

Starting point is 00:59:20 Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Here it is, guys, Representative Brad Sherman at a U.S. House Hearing

Starting point is 00:59:58 this week. Here's what he said. Crypto bros make money literally by making money, and they've made over a trillion dollars out of thin air. They'll accuse the U.S. government of making money out of thin air. Maybe we do, but we're the U.S. government. There it is, David. It's bag by us all the way down. You just said it.

Starting point is 01:00:20 It's not okay when you print money. It's only okay when I print money. That's what he's saying. Yeah. I don't have another take. That's all you have to say. Brad Sherman has more takes. 60 years ago,

Starting point is 01:00:34 the Lake Great Robert F. Kennedy went after tax evaders as U.S. Attorney General. Today, his son is slated to speak at a conference for tax evaders. This is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is going to a Bitcoin conference in Miami Beach. And this is Brad Sherman calling the attendees of this conference tax evaders. Those in the country industry. conference for tax evaders. It's a conference for tax evaders, yes.

Starting point is 01:01:02 I don't about you, David. That's great for marketing. I pay my taxes, and it's a big, giant pain in the ass to pay taxes when you have unclear regulation and unfavorable regulation with respect to tracking these transactions. And I, and almost everyone I know in crypto, also pays. their taxes. And for Brad Sherman to just like blanket the entire industry and say, anyone who goes to like a crypto conference, anyone who's in the crypto industry doesn't pay their taxes, like,

Starting point is 01:01:37 what is this guy doing, man? It's insane, man. The anti-crypto army of Elizabeth Warren and Brad Sherman is just a bunch of geriatrics, dude. I don't understand. I can't look at this picture. U.S. government right now. This is a clown photo that David AI generated. Oh, no. That's a very much. real picture, actually. That is photographed. That's a photograph. This is not a photograph. What he's talking about? Photograph. It's a photograph. Looks just like it's not. Nice. All right. Lido, looks like they are enabling withdrawals. Finally, it's taking them a while, but here we are. What's happening? I guess we can't say the withdrawals is totally over because Lido still needs to enable

Starting point is 01:02:19 withdrawals. And so on on-train vote going out today, Friday, that will go live if the vote passes on May 15th, will allow for staked ether withdrawals out of Lido, along with some protocol improvements as well. And so Lido's getting a big upgrade, but the big news is that if there is demand to unstake from Lido, people are free to withdraw from Lido. So we will see if Lido can hold on to all of the eth that it has. And that's going to be a big area of attention next week.

Starting point is 01:02:46 Another Snow Globe shaking event. How about Arbitrum? They got some news this week about surplus revenue from transaction fees in the Dow. Yeah, this is really cool. Okay, so very good tweet thread, which we don't have time to go into, but I will summarize it for you, bankless listeners. So all users on Arbitrum 1 pay a fee, of course, when you transact on the network. Arbitrum, just like Ethereum, has a gas fee. This fee is split into two components, an L1 fee that pays for the L1 gas that the Arbitrum network pays to Pays to Ethereum to post its data, and also a layer 2 fee to pay for the layer 2 network costs.

Starting point is 01:03:19 That layer 2 fee is split into two components itself. one is called the base fee, which is pretty synonymous with the base fee on the layer one, and also a surplus fee, which is like profit on top of that, just for making sure the the network is profitable. So the layer one gas fee goes through the layer one sequencer, so the Arbitrum sequencer, fronts the cost of posting data to the blockchain for Arbitrum, and then the layer one base fee goes to to refund the sequencer for its costs. So at the present amount, the refund is about $6,000.

Starting point is 01:03:52 ether. So the sequencer cost 6,000 ether. And there is a 582 ether surplus that the layer one fees on, are from arbitram, a surplus that was not needed. And so it's going to the Dow. And so because the sequencer charged more fees than it needed, a surplus of 582 eth is going to the Dow. Now going back to the layer two fees. We have the base fee, which accumulated 1,308 ether, is going to the Dow. And then the surplus fee, which is anything for the congestion, like the model for this is contention versus contention and congestion. This is base fee and surplus fee, but this is arbitram terminology. Base fee, 1,308 ether, surplus fee, 1462 ether. All of that, going to Arbitram Dow. So if you tally all of this up, we're getting something like 30,400 ether-ish, 3,332

Starting point is 01:04:51 ether going to the Arbitrum Dow. That is profit for Arbitrum Dow. Is that since inception for Arbitrum? I think what's the time period here? I don't know actually. That's a good point. What's interesting about this is the model for a layer two is basically like a value added resaleer of Ethereum Blockspace. And so they're putting their value on it and then they're charging a profit and that's how layer two's retain profitability essentially. Now Arbitrum is delivering this back to the Dow. Very cool. This is an interesting new model. Here's a take from Plenia. And actually economically sustainable protocol in crypto, crazy talk. Arbitrum Dow netted $6 million. The cost of operation was $11 million. Pretty impressive. Layer 2s like Arbitrum

Starting point is 01:05:40 are profitable. That's good to see. Some sustainable economics in crypto. When EIP 4-4-4 comes in, Ryan, the cost of operation drops. So big. Yeah. Yeah. Brian's been busy. Brian Armstrong. Look at all these photos in the Middle East here with Brian meeting with various folks.

Starting point is 01:06:01 What's the story here? So this is the Brian World Star Bluff Caller Strong Arm segment. You get that one, Armstrong, Strong Arm. So why is Brian tweeting out a picture with the Minister of the Economy of the United States and Emirates? He's also meeting with her excellency SCE. CEO, Dr. Merriam, I don't know, somebody in Dubai. Also, the Minister of State of Foreign Trade from the United States of Emirates. And then he tweets out, the UAE deserves a lot of credit for being forward thinking on crypto,

Starting point is 01:06:34 first dedicated crypto regulator in the world, clear rulebook, published, very clearly published, business friendly, strong customer protections, really enjoying my visit so far. Brian Armstrong, absolute world star going on a world tour, talking to officials in pro-crypto countries. Why is he publicly broadcasting his world star-ness, Ryan? What do you think is the angle here, perhaps? It's like when you break up with someone, and so you start, like, posting pictures of all of these amazing experiences you've been having. Yeah. It's kind of like that. I mean, Brian's, like, look what you're missing. I mean, I am a U.S.-based company, entrepreneur. These regulators aren't crazy from these other countries, and so he's making that

Starting point is 01:07:17 very public. I think that's the signal here. Obviously, There's some expansion reasons that Coinbase is looking at the Middle East, but I think that's a core message and why this is so public. That's exactly right. Okay, moving on. PayPal has disclosed that it's safeguarding nearly $1 billion in crypto assets. Half a billion dollars in Bitcoin, $362 million in ETH. So PayPal has, for as a custodian, is a billion dollars in customers' crypto.

Starting point is 01:07:44 Nice. You know what they're going to want to do next, David, is stake some of that. I'm pretty sure. Nice. Elon Musk is tweeting about milady's. There is no meme. I love you, milady tweet.

Starting point is 01:07:54 What does this do to the price of milady's, David, when Elon Musk eats. I have not looked. I can only imagine it is up. Cool. So the story this week is miladies tweeting by Elon Musk and meme coins, huh? That's what crypto has given us.

Starting point is 01:08:07 Yep. Yep. All right, moving on. So apparently, Arthur Hayes and Suzu got some beef. What are we looking at here? This is a court document. Well, actually, I'm pretty sure. is just Arthur Hayes that has beefed with

Starting point is 01:08:20 Su-Zoo. So Su-Zu has filed a restraining order against Arthur Hayes. And so the order prohibits Hayes from using threatening, abusive, or insulting words and making any threatening, abusive, or insulting communication that would cause applicant harassment, harm,

Starting point is 01:08:36 or distress. And so three errors capital owes Arthur Hayes, excuse me, three owes a billion dollars in individual claims of which Arthur Hayes is some of that. And Hayes has just been absolutely harassing Su-Zoo on Twitter. And so here's a bunch of tweets that Arthur Hayes has.

Starting point is 01:08:56 Name a date, time, and location of Kyle and Suezoo. I bet some creditors would love to have a chat with them, followed up with, A little birdie told me Su-Zoo is in Singapore trying to keep a low profile. I know you ain't broke, bro. Come and see Daddy and make amends. I won't hurt.

Starting point is 01:09:09 I promise, kissy-face, kissy-face, kissy-face. So because of Arthur Hayes' posturing public tweet, he has now a restraining order against Suu. Come on. This looks pretty tame to me, David. These tweets look tame to me. I don't want. The two times that we've done a podcast with Arthur Hayes, he's been in gym clothes,

Starting point is 01:09:30 man, I don't want him. I don't want to owe him money. I mean, but like, what are these guys doing? I don't understand, unless there's more to it than just these tweets publicly. I mean, you've lost people millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, guys. With fraud. Yeah, people are going to be upset about that. With fraud.

Starting point is 01:09:48 They may say mean things to you sometimes on Twitter. It's not okay to do it with fraud. Yeah, absolutely. Here we go. Stripe expanding access to crypto on ramp with a new hosted option. You know what, David, Stripe has been more and more supportive of crypto over time. And of course, they serve a massive amount of merchants

Starting point is 01:10:08 through the payments API used by Brave, used by safe, used by one inch, used by lens. I think this is pretty bullish, longer term for crypto. adoption. WorldCoyne and the beloved orb finally has a mobile wallet. So if you didn't want to put your eye into the orb, you could still download the wallet on your phone. And so WorldCoin app is released.

Starting point is 01:10:27 Do I have to stick my eye into the phone now? It's like into the app? Scan my eye or say? I don't think the app scans your eye. It doesn't have the technology to do that. And so this is just a huge part of the WorldCoin tech stack, which I've been learning about recently, Ryan,

Starting point is 01:10:43 and it is, it's a crazy tech stack. I mean, man, it's an app. It is this crazy biometrics orb thing. It is a layer two stack. It is a token. It is, I mean, marketing. It's a crazy company. Anyways, the app is out.

Starting point is 01:11:00 And that is a very core component of this whole thing. It is the mechanism to which the UBI part of WorldCoin is going to get distributed. I am undecided on WorldCoin. It's very interesting to me because I, like, I'm not, I'm leaving the door open from. myself personally. It's got some strikes against it. It's very much like a VC type coin. The whole, it's called WorldCoin, David. Like, what the app? The branding is the biggest issue about WorldCoyne. But if you can get, if you can suspend your disbelief, the WorldCoin story is pretty

Starting point is 01:11:35 compelling. I don't know yet. There's like data privacy concerns. I don't know yet. Everyone's like, oh, but they got your data. But they actually don't. And it's really easy to cancel WorldCoyne for like the whole data thing, but they actually don't got your data if you trust that they don't. I'm at the point where I want to hear them out though. Yes. Like they're making some cool choices too, right? I'm building this as a roll up as a cool choice, not doing kind of an L1 chain and like pumping the price of WorldCoin from the get goes.

Starting point is 01:12:05 And I know there's some good engineers there too. Well, should we should we say? So David is doing an interview with one of the founders of WorldCoin and also Sam Altman. Oh, that wasn't it? But that is happening. Yeah, so we are doing a podcast with Sam Altman, yeah. Yeah, we're doing a podcast on WorldCoin. So we'll arm the bankless community with some knowledge here from the source.

Starting point is 01:12:26 And you guys can make a decision on, like, whether this is good or whether this is some dystopian future here. What's your alpha? I got breakfast with a DC builder from the WorldCoin project. ZK researcher at the WorldCoin. And so he, of course, brought the orb with him. So we got him put the little orb. Oh, God. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:12:45 There it is. Yeah, there it is. Did you stick anything into that? I have not been orbed. I did not stick anything into the orb. Dude, see, this is what I mean. This looks so, like, scary. I've been thinking about this is, like,

Starting point is 01:12:55 the worst thing about WorldCoin is that they have this, like, dystopian sci-fi, like, cosmetic layer to the whole system. But, like, okay, they need to scan your iris, and then they also need to layer on a bunch of other biometric stuff to make sure that you're not faking it. So the crazy innovation about the WorldCoin orb is not, that is just an iris scanning mechanism.

Starting point is 01:13:18 It's an iris scanning mechanism plus like 18 different layers of anti-fraudulent technology. And so it's a bunch of other scanners as well to make sure you're not trying to gain. You need the hardware to look like something and it just turns out it's like some sci-fi dystopian orb. Like what are you going to do?

Starting point is 01:13:35 Like try and turn it into a teddy bear? That's like even worse, right? So like they came up with the silver orb which I like it's like the least bad version of how this works. Anyways, one of the reasons why, like, me and other people have come around slowly to WorldCoin is that people like DC, builder,

Starting point is 01:13:54 generally beloved by the community, did not need to be compelled by WorldCoyn. But, like, I would call him incredibly neutral builder that got a job at WorldCoyne and got compelled by the vision. And there's been a few of those. And so, you know, trusting that they are smart people who are making good decisions. I don't know. There's so many questions still, though, too.

Starting point is 01:14:13 Including the question of Sam, Altman. He's already got some scary AI tech, right? Like, obviously open-A-. At least he's trying to solve for the problem that he's also creating. Maybe. That's why I want to listen. That's why I want to, I am in information-seeking mode, I would say, about this project. Speaking of solving AI problems, Ethereum attestation service, launching new feature, attest and verify any type of document or file. Why do you need to do this? Because it's going to be increasingly hard to actually attest to the validity and originality of content in the world these days. And so with the Ethereum Atestation Service, you can easily generate a hash of your content and let others verify against

Starting point is 01:14:55 the hash to say you are the creator of this content as the originator. Quick news, BitTex has filed for bankruptcy. BitTrux in the United States. Good night, sweet prince. That was my first exchange. Did you know that? Was it really? Never used BitTex. It was based on sale. Also, Blockworks announced a big fundraise. So this is, is the crypto media company that bankless throws a party with every year, a conference called permissionless, which by the way, you can get tickets to you right now. This is, you know, we got a lot wrong over the years, but one thing we got right was our early thesis. As crypto grew exponentially, the industry participants would demand better information, and so they built blockworks.

Starting point is 01:15:37 Blockworks, I feel like, is a crypto media org that's doing a lot of things right. I'm a big fan of Jason and the team over at Blockworks and Mike and what they're doing. So this is a $12 million raise on $135 million valuation. Wow. Well done. Who knew crypto media companies. Right. This valuable. Impressive. We're actually doing at Twitter spaces with Jason and Mike, the two founders of Blockworks. So two founders of Bankless, two founders of Blockworks, we're going to talk about crypto media. That's going to be sometime in two weeks from now. Unscheduled. But that's going to be pretty cool. So mark your calendars, even though I didn't give you a date. I think that's been a really interesting conversation.

Starting point is 01:16:13 Crypto Media. I do too. There's a lot of unique things about crypto that are difficult to get right when you're talking about media. Jobs. We got jobs of the week here on the bankless jobs boards.

Starting point is 01:16:24 I'm going to whip right through them. Bankless Ventures needs an investment analyst intern. Sickest job in crypto. Needs a staff blockchain engineer and a smart contract engineer and Phantom needs a software engineer and a software engineer

Starting point is 01:16:36 for front end and mobile. Premium needs a Web3 product management architect lead DeNeri needs a smart contract engineer. Uniswap, a whole bunch of jobs too. Oh my God. I can't keep up with all of them, but they're all available for you on the bankless jobs board.

Starting point is 01:16:50 That's bankless.pallet.com slash jobs. Get a job in crypto. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, we've got the questions from the nation. Is Eigenlayer, a threat to Ethereum decentralization? We're going to answer that one, as well as the hot takes from crypto, Twitter, and, of course, the meme of the week,

Starting point is 01:17:05 which is extra spicy this week. And we got a moment of Zen, which I think is the coolest marketing stunt has ever been done by a crypto exchange. Cracken funded this guy to scam scam artists. And so stick around for the moment of Zen. You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange

Starting point is 01:17:22 with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap. But Uniswop is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS. The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With a Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet. crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on ramp fees,

Starting point is 01:17:45 and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswop mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defi with the Uniswot mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defi. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. question is from Leaf on Earth. Is Eginlayer actually a huge danger for Eith decentralization? You've given only the positive side so far, but I found this article quite compelling.

Starting point is 01:18:21 He then links, they then link to an article from Galaxy, which is exploring MEV on eigenlayer, pointing out the dangers. Look at this, of cross-domain MEV, and how that could be a threat to the decentralization of Ethereum. So, David, what do you think? We've covered the benefits of eigenlayer? Are we downplaying the negatives from it? What would you say to this question? Yeah, I think that this is pretty prescient. And I would say the answer is pretty clearly yes. Is eigenlayer a danger for eth decentralization? Yes. This is a big cause of concern of a lot of the Ethereum core devs, if you will. I know Justin Drake is interested in this. I know Dankrat is interested in this. And I wouldn't say it's just because of cross-domain MEV.

Starting point is 01:19:09 And what that means is MEV across blockchains or across systems. If you are staking on multiple systems, there are MAV opportunities that you would have that are large, compared to if you were just staking on one domain, one blockchain. So that is one concern. Another concern is that if there's a bunch of networks that you are restaking your ether to, the more networks that you restake your ether to, the more computational resource requirements are needed to do that. And so if there are a bunch of networks that you need to re-sake to, you have to have a bigger and beefier computer.

Starting point is 01:19:42 And then also there's more MEV opportunities if you are validating more blocks. And so it's just tilts towards economies of scale. And so something like Lido or Coinbase, who has a very large amount of ether staked, are going to be able to have higher yields because they're going to be able to restake and provide more services in a more professionalized manner and be able to get more yields. So people are going to be like solo staking, I can't compete with Coinbase because they're getting more. more yield. And so they just take with Coinbase. So yes, I would say that is a concern. I would say this is a similar level of concern that we felt as an ecosystem at the genesis of MEV. And then what did we do? We spent three years to research to where we are now, which are

Starting point is 01:20:21 in-proticle solutions that are on the roadmap to solve for this. So I don't think that this is a disastrous problem. It is a problem that does need to be addressed. And so I think Leaf on Earth is very prescient and tuned in to some of the issues here. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's something that we'll have to address over the years to come. In fact, you know, our Twitter spaces we did as a follow-up to the episode with Justin Drake. He actually brought this up. And he thinks that some of the mechanisms, mechanisms from our episode with respect to like M-EV-Smoving and M-E-V burn, some of those same things can be at play in kind of the restaking

Starting point is 01:20:54 MEV subset of problems. So I think it's a matter of like the cat and mouse game, right? M-E-V is a tricky solution. And now it's kind of like migrating. The Moloch problems are kind of migrating to. restaking. And so what do we have to do? As a community, we have to plug this hole. Maybe this is the last one we have to plug. There will probably be others. I think decentralization is not a one-time fight where you like design a protocol and you get it right. It's a series of things that you

Starting point is 01:21:23 put in place over time to correct and to propagate decentralization and to prevent centralization. All right, David, let's get to what we're bullish on this week. How about you, my friend? What do you bullish on. There is this new project that has not launched, but they have released a bunch of information about what they are working on. It's called Nocturn. And so this is something that swept the Twitter sphere by storm when they released their docs, which is how you know that people are tapping into this. What is Nocturn? You're excited about documents, huh? It's so excited about documents. Yeah. So Nocturn is a layer one smart contract that is tapping into innovations in the world of account abstraction to build a private bank account is how I would simplify that in a very simple

Starting point is 01:22:10 word. Think of like ASSEC as a layer two, private layer two, but a private bank account on the layer one, a private smart contract. So privacy, using zero knowledge cryptography, as a private bank account. And so you can put your money into this single smart contract along with everyone else, but kind of like how tornado cash would pool up everyone, but then you would still get to like be, have your claim over your assets and then the smart contract manages it for you, gives you privacy for people

Starting point is 01:22:37 who are all using the bank account. And that is privacy on the layer one. Seems so simple that don't know why people haven't built this yet. I guess we just needed innovations in cryptography and your knowledge cryptography,

Starting point is 01:22:51 but this is something I'm excited about. Imagine having a private smart contract on the layer one. That's what I'm bullish. Yeah, because privacy in crypto is largely unsolved. I mean, Bitcoin is completely public. Ethereum is by default completely public.

Starting point is 01:23:03 And Aztec is trying to solve it in their own layer two. But what about all of the other layer twos that we use in the day-to-day? What about the Ethereum mainnet? How do we maintain privacy? So that's what this solves. And of course, Tornado Cash got recently outlawed for American citizens. So, I mean, the surveillance state ain't going to like this one, David. I think.

Starting point is 01:23:27 I think that's a take here. But we'll have to see how this plays out. out. Ryan, where do you both on? I mean, speaking of, I guess, the surveillance state, we had a really interesting conversation recording earlier this week. That was not expecting. I mean, I knew that the recording was on our calendar.

Starting point is 01:23:42 I mean, I wasn't expecting that I would enjoy this conversation so much. I was with Rowan Gray, and this is a guest we had on three years ago, almost. And I don't know how to put this guy in a box, like, from a worldview perspective. You don't know how to categorize him. Don't. He's uncategorizable, if that's a word. He doesn't like crypto. He doesn't love crypto.

Starting point is 01:24:06 And three years ago, we almost had him on in kind of a debate or some, what we perceived as at the time, anti-crypto legislation. We had a debate on kind of the merits of crypto versus what he's proposing. I feel like he's come around. Now he has a healthy respect for crypto, which is different.

Starting point is 01:24:23 But like, he's not, I would say, an institutional Republican or an institution. Democrat. I don't, I don't think you could characterize him as being right, but calling him like left is not quite right either because he's not like a kind of the neoliberal type left, but let me tell you what he's fighting for. He's fighting for not a CDBC. He hates the term CDBC because he believes it's, believed it's been co-opted by the central bankers and bankers in general. He's fighting for a digital dollar, an e-cash that preserves private. at the base layer and is available for all citizens of the United States to give people who don't

Starting point is 01:25:07 have banks, the unbanked, basically a way to preserve a cash type instrument as we migrate to the digital economy because dollar bills are going away. I mean, like, that's not going to be a form you can use. And so in the absence of that, you're just using like a CDBC, basically. Like right now, if you have dollars in your Wells Fargo account, it's almost like a proto-CDBC, right? Because these are really like dollar IOUs. You can't control it. I mean, if Wells Fargo wants to revoke your access

Starting point is 01:25:39 because it doesn't like your political opinion or something like that, I mean, they could send you a dear John letter for any reason, right? And so this kind of gets away from that and it preserves that civil liberty. And I guess what was interesting in this conversation, David, is the common cause we found with him.

Starting point is 01:25:56 that I was not quite expecting. It was almost like an olive branch from the crypto community. He called it an unholy alliance, which I think is right. An unholy alliance. And there is some common ground. He isn't completely on board with everything that crypto is doing. I mean, he's much more, I mean, he's much more. David has called him status, and that might be the right term for this.

Starting point is 01:26:16 He thinks that the government is a solution to far more. It's a blunt category for him, yeah. Yes. He thinks the government is a solution to far more public goods than I think you or I would say. we would say Ethereum is a public good, and he would say it's not a public good. It's an open, permissionless network. Right. The public is the word for the state.

Starting point is 01:26:35 Yes. And yet, even with all of those differences, there's some commonality here. And I don't know, maybe there's another way that we can influence members in Congress and members of government to actually support what we're doing here in crypto. Because we need some allies. And particularly, I think we need allies in the U.S. on the Democrat side of things, right? And where are those allies going to come from?

Starting point is 01:27:00 It's going to come from those who want to bypass the banks and preserve a digital private cash-type money system as we migrate into the digital age. Crypto can be a part of that. Maybe his idea of a digital dollar in e-cash is a part of that as well. But there's an alliance in the making there, I think. That's what I'm bullish about.

Starting point is 01:27:21 That was kind of an interesting conversation this week. we have successfully teased three shows on the podcast that are unreleased this week, including the fourth show that was the Justin Drake episode that we released last week. Man, we're good at our jobs. Yes, teasing other shows. That's why you come to the roll-up. Let's get to the meme in the week. David, this is Gary learning about a new term, the term OG. Let's take a listen. Oh, great. Gary? So what were the letters you said, O-D? O-G. Like, OG.

Starting point is 01:27:51 Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Does OG stand for something? I actually don't know. Original gangster. Original gangster. Thank you. Thank you. I actually love old Gary.

Starting point is 01:28:06 I love old Gary. This is MIT Gary and he was actually good. I wouldn't have to see in his class. No, it was my how things have changed. David, we've got a moment of Zen in the week. I'm going to fade out with wrist and disclaimers as usual, but why don't you tee this up for us? So there is this streamer on Twitch called Kit Boga, Kit Boga show. He's famous for scamming scammers.

Starting point is 01:28:32 And so scammers will try and scam him and he will record that and turn it into a stream. And then that's what he does. He's a streamer that like just sends scammers on a wild goose chase. And so he's partnered up with Cracken. And Cracken customized a live environment. So it's on Cracken.com, but they made him a fake account. So it looks like he is actually sending Bitcoins. And so the scammers are in on it.

Starting point is 01:28:53 and then he just like messes with them and it's hilarious and so just it's first off this is a marketing stunt by crackin and it's whoever came up with this idea is really creative and is good at their drops so props to that person uh and this is hilarious so that is the moment of zen you are about to hear everybody wins except the scammers that's how uh we like things i never knew that scammers could be so vulgar ryan they're rude they are rude they're not nice people They're not nice people. Who would have expected this? Risk and disclaimers, guys, all this stuff, crypto, we're talking about.

Starting point is 01:29:28 It's all risky, of course, 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. The scammer thinks I'm about to send him $455,000 worth of Bitcoin, but I type the wrong wallet address. Why didn't you copy and paste? Might be you type something wrong. Ah, no, I double-checked it.

Starting point is 01:29:48 Where is three? You type the wrong address. I didn't do anything wrong. B G KP. 3G KP. Where the B is coming from? I don't know. I could have swore. I know I typed it right. Dumb-B all these are four-tend to tell them that was not the right address.

Starting point is 01:30:06 How could you mess up this badly? I already gave you the right address. You had them said. Why did you do that? Joe? Why'd you pick a 3? It looks just like a B. You did it, damn-a. Literally, you are the most idiotic, most dumb-d-de-. Dumbus most motherfucked. I've literally no words at the moment and I'm that much angry.

Starting point is 01:30:27 $450,000. Are you f***ing serious right now? That money was supposed to go to you!

Bankless - ROLLUP: Memecoin Frenzy | BRC-20 Tokens | Brad Sherman

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