Bankless - ROLLUP: Microsoft Buys Activision | OlympusDAO Has Fallen | LooksRare NFT | IreneDAO

Starting point is 00:00:00 Simfi is becoming a thing. I know you're going to educate me and tell me what a simp actually is. And if I am one, because I don't know David. Hey, Bankless Nation, happy third week of January. David, what time is it? Hello, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll Up, Ryan. We're we roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. Yet nonetheless, we persist onwards through the gametes, the dark force that is crypto, unpacking it and distilling it and summarizing a full entire week in crypto every single Friday morning. So grab your coffee because we're going to get after it starting right now.

Starting point is 00:00:35 On the journey west, on the road to Mount Doom, throwing a ring a fireway. Oh, gosh. That's helpful. Topics this week. Facebook and Instagram adding NFTs. We thought they'd do it. Every social media platform joining the NFT army. Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for $69 billion.

Starting point is 00:00:53 I don't know if that's a me number, David, or... Okay. Olympus has fallen. The story of Olympus Dow in OHM price crash. We're going to dig into that. So, USDC finally flippant tether. We've been predicting that for like two or three years. It's finally happening.

Starting point is 00:01:08 So it's good to see. Simpfi is becoming a thing. Simphi. You're going to talk about the story of Irene Dow. That happened last weekend. I was barely paying attention, but I know you're going to educate me and tell me what a simp actually is.

Starting point is 00:01:19 And if I am one, because I don't know what a sim is. You don't know what a sim is? I kind of do. I know, I know what a symphist. Okay. But I still want to hear you tell me what it is. I just be saying that. Guys, this is going to be a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:01:31 hope you're hanging with us before we get into the markets we should talk about IRAs specifically alto IRA my big question is do you have a crypto IRA do you this is like this is a crypto dad question do you David you should uh I've I've had one of these ever since I got into crypto I know you need to get one right now this is like okay this is my message this is my pitch for David it's not for anyone else listening to bank lists we're doing it last first of all, it's super easy. Okay, but here's why I love IRAs 401Ks. It's because it's the only way to do crypto with none of the taxes. Okay? So every time you make a trade, you have to, there's a capital gains tax, or let's say you start staking, all right? Like, the income you

Starting point is 00:02:20 received, you pay taxes as income on that. Inside of a crypto IRA, you don't have to pay taxes. All right, David. Now, the flip side is you can't touch the money without a penalty until you're older, but like you could just set aside $6,000 in something called a Roth IRA this year. It's all in crypto. You can set it up in like a few minutes. This auto IRA solution is kind of an easy button for that. So it's already integrated with Coinbase. You have a Coinbase account as easy as that. And you never have to pay taxes on the thing. Wait, you have to pay taxes on crypto? Sir. Yes. Okay. Now I'm getting worried about you. In your regular accounts, you do. Also, this is kind of the advanced button here, but if you have a 401K from a previous employer,

Starting point is 00:03:06 you know, that's been collecting, you've had it in stocks for a while, you can convert that, roll that over into an IRA 401K type format with Alto as well. So you want to go all in crypto with your retirements accounts, you know, you're skewing younger, you can not use this money for a while, you want to buy and hold, this is the way to do it. And Alto IRA has the easy button. integrated with Coinbase, 125 different assets. So the things that are trading on Coinbase are the things you can invest in with this. Only 10, wait, is it, minimums of $10 with Alto IRA as well. So you can get started small. Did I convince you? Yeah, yeah. Well, I've been convinced by your presence

Starting point is 00:03:46 a while ago. But for, when I got into crypto, I started with mining, I did not know that you had to pay taxes in crypto. That is a true thing in 2017. 2018. I just did not know that. And so for those of you who are not paying attention to our taxes, let me tell you, you want to get started on that basically as soon as possible. Just think of yourself as an employee of your future self and do your future self, your future boss self a favor and get your taxes in order now because if you don't, it just gets worse. It just gets worse. It does. Yeah. Well, David, maybe speaking from experience there, but you're all taking care of now, right? You figure it out. In this

Starting point is 00:04:28 account, though, you don't have to worry about any of that, and that's a reason to open it up while you're thinking about your taxes. So go to alto IRA.com slash bankless. You can find out more about that. Okay, David, let's talk about the charts, market time, Bitcoin. What do we add in the week? Happy day today, flat week on the week. We started the week at $44,000, hit a low of $41.5,000, and we have, since starting this recording today on Thursday, we have climbed up to back above $43,000, but still just down 1% on the week. So a very marginally down week after a big oof week last week. Let's look at the one month.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Okay, we're still down. Obviously, in the one month. Hasn't been a good opener to the year. Keep on zooming out. How about year to date? Also bad for Bitcoin. One year? Well, wait, yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:18 That's because year to date is January. I forgot about that. I can't believe this. So on the one year, time horizon, Bitcoin kind of looks like a crab, doesn't it? It was a big crab year. Slightly up, slightly up, though. Started the one year time frame, started at $35,000, and we are currently at $43,000.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Kind of disappointing Bitcoin, though. That's interesting. Let's talk about ETH now. What's ETH on the week first? Yeah, Ether, down on the week, down 3% on the week, a little bit more down than Bitcoin. Started the week at $34, $3,400, excuse me, hit a low of like roughly $3,050-ish dollars and it has since resurged back up to $3,220, down 3%. Let's do the same thing.

Starting point is 00:06:03 One month. Oof. Oof. Three months. Oof. Also down. Year to date. We'll skip that.

Starting point is 00:06:09 But the one year. Looking good. Really good. Yeah. So roughly $1,200 one year ago and currently at $3,200. Just, yeah, just since November, just bad, bad feels. Okay. What's interesting about this cycle is it's not playing.

Starting point is 00:06:25 out like previous cycles, is it? It's a little bit different. This is its own thing. I think in crypto, we've been trained to expect like complete. Yeah, four year cycles. Yeah, four year cycles and sort of we're doing the same thing at 2017, 2018, but this is playing out much differently. How do you think it plays out overall? Where do you think it's going? The one that can, the way that everyone is confused and we keep on talking about it every single week. The maximum confusion is how it plays out. It's just unpredictable. Unpredictable. That's what you're saying. Yeah. But no, more four-year cycles. I never really was convinced that these four-year cycles were dependent on the Bitcoin happening. The Bitcoiners will definitely tell you that the four-year crypto cycles had to do with

Starting point is 00:07:04 the Bitcoin happening. I kind of think that was, I think there's plenty of rationale to say that that was a coincidence. I think I talked about this last week. But isn't that, isn't that just because, you know, Bitcoin percentage of total market cap in crypto used to be so much higher. I mean, there was a time where it was 95%, right? Now it's down into the 30s. I even, I would even claim that Bitcoin going up in price had less to do with the timing of the happenings. But I'm not deep in the weeds on Bitcoin on that one. Okay. We don't know the cycles.

Starting point is 00:07:34 Just buy and hold for the long run. You don't have to worry about the cycles. Let's look at the Eith Bitcoin chart here. Slightly down on the week. We started last week at 0.076. We are down to 0.075. I would literally like that 0.08 number, but I'm not really going to complain too much about 0.075 either.

Starting point is 00:07:51 We'll see what happens. Like the big catalyst for Ether this year is the merge, right? Bitcoin doesn't really have any catalyst this year. So I would expect this to change. It's got to change, right? It doesn't. I mean, next happening is... That's the deal.

Starting point is 00:08:05 Next happening is two years away still? 2024. Yes. I think. I guess that's the next big event that happens from a supply perspective. All right, the bed index, Bitcoin, eth, and defy. What are we looking at on the week? Down, I think half a percent on the week, start of the week at 120.

Starting point is 00:08:23 We are currently down to $123. So down half a percent-ish, give a take. There you go. Down half a percent. Doing the crab thing, a little down on the, on the year for sure. David, let's talk about this. Josh Stark wrote a blog post with Evan Van Ness, and they write this every year. I've read it every year since as far back as I can remember in Ethereum. And it's entitled the year in Ethereum, 2021. So this is sort of a summation of some big things that happened on the Ethereum network. And I want to draw a few of these out. The first is this, look at this, David. Total transaction fees 2021. You want to read this out? What are we looking at? Yeah, in billions of dollars, $9.9 billion in transaction fees in 2021 out of the Ethereum

Starting point is 00:09:11 network. Clocking in at second is Bitcoin at just over $1 billion. So Ethereum doing 10x the transactional volume, implying that there is 10x the demand to buy Ethereum Blockspace in throughout 2021, followed after Bitcoin's $1 billion fees in revenue in 2021, followed by Binance Smart Chain, clocking in at $0.9 billion. And then after that, we have Avalanche at 0.04 billion and Salana at 0.026 billion and Cardano at 0.008 billion. So that's where the demand is. That's transaction fees. You can look at another view of it by 2021, where you bring in all the defy apps.

Starting point is 00:09:58 And it's interesting that Ethereum's number one in transaction fees, Uniswap is actually number two. It even beats out Bitcoin. So an app on Ethereum is larger. But this was really cool to me when you start to compare this with traditional finance. And you look at how many fees, the revenues of Visa last year, which were 24. billion dollars. That's the revenue of Visa and Ethereum was 9.9 billion. Okay. And it finishes out ahead of Stripe, which was 7.4 billion. So Ethereum now doing more transaction fees and revenue than Stripe and it's creeping up on Visa as well. Another way to view this is total transaction

Starting point is 00:10:39 volume. Okay. So this is the amount of value settled on the Ethereum network. Ethereum actually surpassed Visa in 2021. So it settled $11.6 trillion. This is, of course, all of the ETH that gets transferred from address to address. This is all the stable coins, all the ERC20s. If you add up all of that value, all the tokens, everything, if you add that up and compare that to Visa, the Ethereum network is now settling more value than Visa. And that's quite astounding to me. Like, can you believe that we're actually surpassing Visa on that, on that, on that metric. Yeah, that's, it's a really, it's a great benchmark. And it's one of those benchmarks where like, okay, that should have, that's just like normal.

Starting point is 00:11:28 And like, because Ethereum should be like 10x because Visa is just one company, right? There's just one payments network. Ethereum is a payment network of payment networks, right? And so, like, this is now where the game finally starts, in my opinion. Like, it wasn't to get to this point. Like this is where we go from here is really the starting pistol here. What's the market cap of Visa? I think like last time I checked is like 400 million or 500 billion or something like that.

Starting point is 00:11:55 So comparable to Ethereum in terms of the market cap. $450 billion. What's ETH hanging out around that range too, right? About the same. About the same. And so and then Ethereum surpassing Visa and also just growing so much faster with so much more potential. And that's just transactional volume, which is to say nothing. about ether as a bond or ether as collateral. Like, that's just payment volume. It's funny. We talk

Starting point is 00:12:21 about the flippinging and we often mean like obviously ether flipping Bitcoin, but like at some level, I'm more excited about stuff like this. We just flipping Visa last year. Can we flip the world please? Speaking of flippings. Flippinning and flippinings. What's this flippinging? USDC versus tether supply. Tether, the king stable coin that has been around forever, the first real stable coin that got real adoption finally gets flipped by USDA. I feel like there was a number of predictions by this throughout

Starting point is 00:12:50 2019, throughout 2020, throughout 2021, throughout 2021. Yeah, finally took 2022 for something to dethrone Tether as the leading supply of stable coin. To say nothing about how massive Tether is, Tether's also growing up in supply. It's just gotten outpaced by

Starting point is 00:13:06 USDA. There is now over 40 billion USDC in existence and there is only just under 40 billion tether. And so congratulations to Circle. Congratulations to USDC for having that stablecoin supply. You'll love to see it. And this is just what happens when like stable coins, like asset, dollar-backed stable coins have to play nice with nation states. Tether did not play nice with nation states. U.S. DEC did play nice with nation states. So like no surprise to see all the tailwinds being captured by USC. Yeah, tether's always been sort of a mystery box.

Starting point is 00:13:41 Like we're not really sure what it's backed by and USDC is more, you know, traditionally regulated. And you kind of need to be when you're backed by dollars in a bank account somewhere or hopefully you are. What's this metric? This is from Ryan Watkins. It's comparing Uniswop versus Curve. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, we're looking at like market share of stable coin volumes between Uniswap versus Curve. And what we are seeing is Uniswap v3 really starting to eat into Curve's market share.

Starting point is 00:14:10 So more and more volume of stablecoin going into uniswap. I was actually hanging out with someone last night who actually kind of had a critique on this chart saying that there was a significant amount of volume being missed out of this chart. So this might actually not be accurate. Like curve volume missed or just overall volume? A lot of curve volume that just wasn't included. I don't know what's true,

Starting point is 00:14:31 but I'm going to find out, Ryan, on next week's show that we're doing called The Curve Wars, where we're bringing a curve expert on to talk all about curve. and I will verify this data with him as to whether it is accurate or not. But if it is accurate, then Uniswap v3 really eating, either way, Uniswap V3, stablecoin volume is going up through the roof. It's just a matter of maybe curves also doing that too. There's also a story, I think, about the fee market here.

Starting point is 00:14:58 So part of the volume rise on Uniswap for Stablecoins is, of course, the release of Uniswap V3, but also two months ago, it just introduced a one basis point fee tier. I'd previously been a lot higher. So who benefits from the curve in Uniswop wars? The consumer, lower transaction fees. That's a beautiful thing. Let's talk about this, David. So this is, Olympus has fallen.

Starting point is 00:15:23 Olympus is Dow. Olympus is down. Slide continues. So this is a headline in the block. Oh, HM market cap is down nearly 80% from its all-time high. 80% down. That feels like a pretty steep decline. A big, oof, decline.

Starting point is 00:15:38 That's a big oof is what is what we call that. Okay. Well, what's going on? Why? What's happening? Well, just for context, for reference, the market cap of Olympus Dow peaked on November 23rd at $4.3 billion. It is currently at $1 billion. So we've lost 75 to 80% of the total volume.

Starting point is 00:16:00 And what happened? Well, I mean, at the end of the day, what happened is people sold. Like, people sold and number went down. and I think there and one of the reasons why it went down so much was because I think a very rational theory and this is a got pulled apart by Cyrus unessy in this great tweet thread one of the reasons why it went down so much was it because it went up so much and one of the reasons why it went up so much is because of this meme out of Olympus Dow the 3-3 meme which is a reference to a game theory outcomes matrixy

Starting point is 00:16:32 and so you have possible actions that two people can take And this is like a prisoner's dilemma. Basically all theories, a game theory, an extrapolation of the prisoner's dilemma. So you can stake your own, you can bond your own, or you can sell your own. And if you sell your own, that's like a negative number. If you stake your own, that's a positive number.

Starting point is 00:16:51 So they're given like arbitrary outputs. And the goal is to convince everyone to stake their own instead of selling it. Because if everyone stakes their own, then number goes up. And so there was this culture instilled out of Olympus Dow to put the three, the three comma three thing in your Twitter profile, talk about how we're all going to stake, like no one's going to sell, we're all going to stake together,

Starting point is 00:17:12 and that's what made the token price go up. And I mean, sure, yeah, when you convince you and all your friends to stake and also instill a staking culture, like, well, then there's no one's selling, and so a number goes up. The problem with that is that people, until a lot of, like, Omi's, or what they called,

Starting point is 00:17:28 got really, really wealthy because the price went absolutely bonkers. Just a year ago, the price of Ome was, was, or the market cap of Ome was $50 million in June of 2021, before it goes to $4 billion in November. And that's because of this meme worked. Everyone was like, yo, if we all stake Ome, we're all going to get rich.

Starting point is 00:17:47 The problem is you can only be rich on paper like that. You can't actually be real rich because there isn't actually a long-term buying power, buying pressure, because it's mostly just a meme. And so what happened is like at some point, this is what a Ponzi game is. It's not a Ponzi scheme. It's a Ponzi game. but there's this culture of buying and not selling, and at some point that runs out.

Starting point is 00:18:09 At some point people want to take paper gains into real gains, and then the culture of staking turns into a culture of selling, and then we go from where it was to where it is. The reason, and so there was a bunch of marketing around Ome about how it's like this grand new central bank design, and Cyrus Unessy put a tweet thread together that really explained it in different terms, where it's mostly just, the Olympus Dow model

Starting point is 00:18:34 is mostly just a hedge fund. You put assets into the fund, they get yield on it, the value of the assets in the treasury goes up, but the value of the market cap of the OM token far, far out exceeded the market cap of the value of the assets in the treasury. So it was like a kind of a fractional reserve bank because it was like a, I don't know what the ratio was.

Starting point is 00:18:57 It was like five to one or 10 to one of value of the OM, which is a share of the treasury, versus the actual value of the treasury. And so at some point, like the culture of staking just ran its course and people turned from stakers to sellers. And now the value of the OMT token is falling more closely in line with the actual reserves in the OM Treasury, more closely moving to a one-to-one ratio, kind of which is where you

Starting point is 00:19:20 would expect an efficient market to land anyways. So that's my summary of what's happened. Yeah. So, like, I guess I don't understand why people are so surprised at this, is what I would. would say is because basically the way I break down what you just said and the way I break down om is like there is some reserve asset that's backing this so it's a mix of dollars and eth right and call that the threshold value kind of the utility value also and then tokens that are getting yield exactly and then OM is trading far above the reserve asset value or

Starting point is 00:19:55 the or the book value you might call it and all of the rest of that value that's above the book value or the reserve value, that's all like, maybe you call that monetary premium, or maybe in the early stages of things, you just call that meme premium, right? And let's be fair, that has a real effect. Totally. Okay? Because like Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin is 100% meme premium? Okay? A decent chunk of ether's value is also meme premium. And there is the potential that you can bootstrap that meme premium, actually turn it into monetary premium, if you convince enough people that the thing you have is money. And this was the path that OM has been down, which is saying, hey, this is a new approach to money. Just like Ether, just like Bitcoin, we've got an approach

Starting point is 00:20:45 is called OM, and this can be a global reserve money. This can be a central bank has been the comparison. Okay. Well, from time to time, that theory gets tested. Just like Bitcoin's been off 80%. It's been off 90%. It's been through the fires of people saying Bitcoin's dead. The monetary premium evaporates in Bitcoin. Many of these barricles that has been the case. Now it's happening to own. And so long term is OM a money or not? Well, you have to come to your own conclusion. If it is a money, it deserves some monetary premium. If it isn't, then it doesn't. And the market is in the process of figuring this out. What I don't understand is why people were so surprised, right? Because like, I thought you knew the game we're playing,

Starting point is 00:21:28 guys, right? This is, as you said, like Bitcoin and like Ether to some level, this is a Ponzi game. It's not a scheme because no one can rug pull you. It's fully transparent. You can actually see everything that's backing home. No one has rug pulled anyone else. But that Delta that you're playing with, like that pyramid game, if like, if we all hold together, then we're good, but if we all sell together, we're going down. That prisoner's dilemma, that's can that can quite easily happen. This is just a case of that happening. I don't think it's the end of Ome at all. I don't think it's the end of the, the mechanic of Ome, the way it works, right? And this whole protocol owned liquidity on trend, I think that's totally here to stay. But it'll have to

Starting point is 00:22:11 rebuild. And it might rebuild with a new set of narratives. I'm not sure. Or maybe they'll try another round at becoming a, you know, a money. Maybe that's not dead either. Yeah. And exactly. There's a reason why OM, the Olympus style model, got forked like a thousand times. There's like a thousand forks out there because the model works. It's just like it just got out over at ski tips with the whole like staking culture, the 3-3 culture. And now we're back down to reality. There's a big fat reality check. A lot of people lost a lot of money, sad. Sorry about that. Me too, by the way. I was in Ome. But I'm not complaining because like that's what you get when you're playing. You're playing the game. You're playing the game. You're playing the game. And the thing is like this is one of those things

Starting point is 00:22:52 where like this was Ome's first big like, like, you know, run up in price and then like kind of collapsed back down to reality after it got forked a bigillion times. And like to me, that kind of feels like the first time where, you know, Bitcoin had its proof of work fair launch forked phenomenon where Bitcoin got forked a thousand times. Then it pumped and had its first crash. And then it went back down to reality. And then it had a bear market for four years. And then it came back. So like the next story for Ome is does it come back? And no one. knows the answer to that question, but if you think it comes back, like, it's at a much lower price now. This is where the, like, does Olympus Dow have a community of people that are convicted

Starting point is 00:23:33 on it, not just trying to do the whole three three three thing? It's all, it's all about the community. It's all about the community of holders. And also the question is, will it keep falling? Because it could continue to fall. I don't think it's quite at its reserve price right now. I've looked into this, but I think it still could go away is eating and roading into that monetary premium. So do you want to play the game now, David? That's a question. I kind of want to play the game. I kind of want to play the game. Well, that's the game we're playing here. Let's talk about looks playing a different game, playing the NFT marketplace game, vampire attack, open sea. We just talked about that last week. It's just a baby, man. It's like

Starting point is 00:24:09 a week old and it's doing things. So let's look at the price. Crushing it in price. Wow. Yeah, it's starting to accelerate to a point where I'm a little bit nervous about It's acceleration. Why? Why do you think it's accelerating? What's happening here? Well, there is a decent amount of volume going through looks. And so there's a lot of NFT trading happening on the looks platform.

Starting point is 00:24:31 Because of this token and this token that's going up in price, they are paying for trades, basically. So if you trade your NFTs, you get looks token rewards. And as that token goes up in price, like you have more and more incentive to trade NFTs on looks. They're paying you to trade. So there's a lot of wash trading that's happening. So kind of like, in the same way that yield farming was just like the same people like leveraging up their yields and like it wasn't really true TVL because of the incentivized bootstrapping.

Starting point is 00:24:57 But that's what happens with a token. And so we have two graphs here. Let's go back up to the first one that you already showed. Like looks rare is crushing OpenC in terms of volume. And again, that's because of the token incentives. But then if you go down to the second chart, the actually number of users versus OpenC is like just nothing. Like it's, I think OpenC has got maybe 20x the number of users. users. But the token is pumping in price because of all this wash trading that's happening,

Starting point is 00:25:24 because people want to get the tokens. The thing I really, really, really like about the looks platform is that it sends ether towards the token owners. And so I've been staking my air drop that I got. And I've gotten like half an ether off of my air drop just by staking it. And that ether is coming from transaction fees. So in OpenC's case, it takes what is it 2.5%. In looks case, it takes 2%. But the looks, platform is sharing that 2% with those who stake looks token, whereas OpenC is keeping it as part of its revenue, part of its traditional business model. Exactly. Giving it back towards the token owners. And I've always like when I've, I've had my thesis is that I want as much ETH as possible,

Starting point is 00:26:04 but I will also sell my ETH for tokens that pay me in ETH. That give you more ETH? That gives me more ETH. And that has always been my game plan for EARC 20 token investment. And this is the first token that is actually spewing out ETH. And so, like, it's kind of hard not talking about to, like, it's real ETH. It's real ETH. It's like, real cash flows. Now, you could, you could say that that is going to evaporate once the token incentives, but, but it's still real Eith. Like, this is a real business model, tokenized business model. The interesting question, I think, or the question that's in for the space is OpenC, of course, didn't go this route. And we've talked to Devin Finsner on the podcast about

Starting point is 00:26:39 why they didn't go this route. Part of the, probably the unspoken reason is the SEC, Okay, that's why we don't get token airdrops in the U.S. That's why many of these companies are not tokenizing earlier in the process. And so they're keeping it private. There's probably other reasons for that. But the big question is, does this push open-sea or force their hand into doing something for its users? Releasing a token, maybe, doing something else? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:27:10 That's what happened with Uniswap. But Uniswap, of course, was in a much different state. Uniswap is straight up DFI, where OpenC is a little hybrid. Exactly. So what do you think? What odds do you give that of when Uniswop token? I actually have a lot of thoughts about this, and I actually think we should take the time to unpack that. OpenC is not going to do a token.

Starting point is 00:27:30 It's not going to happen. Are you certain about that? What kind of... I don't have insider information. I have body language and cues that I have picked up on. So nothing concrete. But here's my rationale. there are zero OpenC investors that are disappointed currently in its current state.

Starting point is 00:27:51 There are zero OpenC founders and employees that are disappointed with OpenC in its current state. OpenC is a perfect success for everyone involved, and they also have the eye of Sarron on them. The SEC is looking at them. All the regulators are looking at them. The world is looking at OpenC because OpenC represents NFTs. And so they cannot do a token because that's going to be legally and compliantly dubious and they represent us. And so they have to be sparkly clean and they need to bend the knee to the nation state and say, yes, we are a public company.

Starting point is 00:28:26 We're going to be regulated by you guys. We're going to play nice. And they are doing that to protect the whole entire industry by not doing something like SEC securities dubiousness and create some sort of like, imagine how bad that would be. If OpenC, the thing that basically represents all of NFTs, has to go to court with the SEC. We don't want that for the industry. So they have to play the role of Coinbase, right? Yes, they have to play the role of Coinbase.

Starting point is 00:28:53 Which opens the opportunity for a Binance. Yes. Who's a bit more fast and loose, which is maybe what looks is. They're the Binance to OpenC's Coinbase. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I tip the tip of the hat to OpenC, they've gotten a ton of flack from users lately just about being out of touch with what the users want, and they're not. They know exactly, they're very in tune with what the users want. They are just hamstrung by compliance, by regulation.

Starting point is 00:29:21 As we have seen a thousand times before, Coinbase is the same thing. They grew really, really, really quickly, as did the industry. And now their number one goal is to not F anything up. And I thank them for that strategy. I think it's the right and responsible strategy. and also that leaves room for things like looks tokens. It's all good. It's all good. It's great. It's just like, yeah, we have like rough spots, but like, yo, like we're, they're leaving the door open for a truly decentralized, truly protocolized version of an NFT marketplace.

Starting point is 00:29:53 And I think that's going to be fantastic. Yeah, as do I. And, you know, I'm glad we get to let both of these experiments play out in, you know, in parallel. Let's move on. OpenC is still crushing it in terms of their salesperson. volume. So January 2022 is the highest sales volume month ever. Ever. This happened with sushi and Uniswap too. Remember when sushi came on the scene, Uniswap's volume spiked. So it was like, you know, the sushi actually helped uniswap achieve more value rather than sucking it away.

Starting point is 00:30:30 Let's keep moving. One other thing with OpenC, actually this week, lots of OpenC stuff. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about is Dharma was just acquired by OpenSuite. So, Dharma is a D5 smart contract wallet. It's a great way to get onboarded. They were just acquired by OpenC. What do you think the reason for this acquisition is? Now, by the way, we predict, obviously, like OpenC has raised so much money.

Starting point is 00:30:54 Their last raise a month ago, two months ago, David, which is $300-something million. Okay, the numbers are getting so large, I can't remember. They can't hire enough. They don't need 330, you know, million dollars worth of employees. So of course, what are they going to do? They're going to start acquiring.

Starting point is 00:31:10 This was their first acquisition. Why do you think they acquired Dharma? Fiat on ramps. That's why. They want to use Dharma to allow users to just buy directly through Dharma, whatever they've got without having to like, you know, have maybe a custodial wallet or non-cissodial wallet, just an easier on-ramp to buying NFTs. That's why they're doing it.

Starting point is 00:31:35 I have kind of mixed, I think that's probably right. And of course, they have to compete against Coinbase, who's launching their NFT marketplace fairly soon. Coinbase already has Fiat on ramps totally locked down. I'm personally a little bit disappointed from a, you know, Dharma perspective, because I really like their smart contract wallet. And they're basically kind of shutting it down, right? So if you are a Dharma user, they're giving you like 30 days to move your funds out. Now, I think they're helping with the migration process. I think their support team is handling this as best they can, but it is at the same time. It's pretty disappointing that we lose a stellar defy wallet in the space. But maybe it gets rebirthed in OpenC in some way that's actually better for users. So I'm also, I guess, preserving the benefit of the doubt and seeing what happens with that integration. Anyway, OpenC making big moves. This wallet acquisition is yet another one. This industry is getting really interesting.

Starting point is 00:32:33 Yeah, and also congratulations to the Darmat. because they have been grinding since as long as I can remember. For those that don't know, Dharma has gone through a number of pivots. Do you remember when they were a peer-to-peer loan platform? A peer-to-peer lending platform, like compound, but instead of user-to-contract, like how compound is, is user-to-user.

Starting point is 00:32:53 And so you would be individually matched and set your individual rates with your assets, and you would generate, like, individual agreements with individual people about, like, loans, which was just, like, you know, way too much, like way too laborious. There's like a little bit skeuomorphic. They totally got just like,

Starting point is 00:33:09 compound was the actual successful model. And so then they pivoted into being a layer, a yield application, getting yield on top of compound. And then they pivoted into Fiat on ramps, straight into L2s, which is great, connecting to your bank account, which is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:33:26 Defi wallet. Defi wallet. And then boom, they get acquired by OpenC. So Nadav has, the CEO of Nadarma has been, The CTO, right? It's now going to be the CTO of OpenC.

Starting point is 00:33:39 So maybe this is also an aqua hire type thing. But congratulations, Nadav and Brendan from Dharma and all the Dharma team, because you guys have been grinding all the way through thick and thin, through the bear market. I'm glad you guys have landed in good hands. So congrats to you. Yeah, absolutely. I guess that's a lesson, too.

Starting point is 00:33:53 I mean, you just keep heads down building. Something good will come of it eventually. Guys, we will be right back with some other releases of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. So, you've got some money, but how are you going to use it? You want to spend when you know you should be saving. You never buy a house at this rate. But what if you could spend and save at the same time?

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Starting point is 00:35:28 lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. Metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I use to collect Po apps, NFTs, and do all my defy things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you got to try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at Metamask.io and load up your Treasurer, Ledger, lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web 3. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the Bankless Nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet.

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Starting point is 00:36:41 get all of your defy applications all in one place. Hey guys, we are back talking about the releases of the week. Let's start with this one. Polygon just released their own version of EIP 1559, this fee burning mechanism that's been so popular on Ethereum. What's happening here, David? Yeah, so the Polygon network is congested. It's filled.

Starting point is 00:37:04 That's what happens when there's demand for stuff. And so they are implementing EIP-1559 to take advantage of in-demand, block space. And so now thematic token is getting burned as a function of the demand for block space on Polygon. And we know EIP-1559 has worked fantastically on Ethereum for many, many reasons. And why not just implement it on Polygon? So that's what's happening. A much clearer link between the asset and the, I guess, the utility of block space where previously that wasn't as clear. So you're kind of enshrining the asset and giving it a sacred place in the ecosystem. And That means as block space demand increases, then scarcity ofmatic decreases, right?

Starting point is 00:37:48 Which is a good thing, assumedly for price. And that's the effect that is having on Ethereum. I think all chains really will take a similar path. Like this mechanism is just too good not to implement. Yeah. No, it's universally an accepted mechanism. And interestingly, it was EIP-1559 was actually implemented on other chains before Ethereum was able to get to it because Ethereum just moved a lot more cautiously and slowly.

Starting point is 00:38:10 It's also an interesting note to just know that like L2s are going to get congested too. Like everything's, everything, when you have supply, people are going to eat it up. L1s are going to get congested. We're already seeing Avalanche and Salana get congested. We're already seeing Polygon has been congested for a really long time. And so there's always going to be some sort of tension behind blocks space supply and block space demand. And while L2s are going to get congested, they'll still be cheaper. and the way that we solve for L2 congestion is just by like making more of them,

Starting point is 00:38:44 which is great because we can have as many L2s as we want. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about some air drops, David. This is really cool from Polly Market. So they just released, this is a prediction market. Of course, their polymarket is based on Polygon. They're deployed there. But they just opened up prediction markets for OpenC, Metamask, Board Apes, Zora, Phantom,

Starting point is 00:39:06 a whole bunch more. And basically the question is, when are these platforms, one of these apps going to air drop? All right? And so there could be a prediction market on this. If you look at Metamask, there is now a 70% probability that, no, sorry, a 30% probability that Metamask will drop a Metamask token by March 31st. OpenC, a 26% chance, okay? And this is according to prediction markets.

Starting point is 00:39:36 So people are, you know, the market is betting in one direction or another. And again, this is a specific time interval from, you know, now until March 31st, 2022. So this is what the market is pricing the probability of these various air drops at. And I think this is a, you know, a great prediction market to have, especially for crypto, because everyone's curious, like, what's the probability of an open C drop? I just asked you. And you said, like, you know, probably closer to zero, right? Well, the market is sort of agreeing with you. It's only saying there's a 26% chance that there will be an open-seat air drop in the next few months. Yeah, that's really, really interesting.

Starting point is 00:40:14 Are any of these standing out to you as, like, really good deals? I have my eyes on one. Look at Dharma. That dropped all the way down, I'm sure. This is a lot differently. By the end of March, what do I think is mispriced? Yeah, what do you think is mispriced? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:31 I think by the end of March Metamask is I'm going to say that there's an 80% chance that Metamask does a token but by the end of March really actually kind of throws I feel like 80 to 90% this year right that Metamask is going to do a token but I don't know this will happen in this quarter

Starting point is 00:40:52 I think things just take more time but look at this board apiot club definitely doing a token I feel like there's it's it's They know that. It's announced. It's pretty much coming, right? These markets are efficient in that way.

Starting point is 00:41:06 Anyway, it's cool to have that as a resource. That's on a polymarket for you guys. Include to link to the show notes. Oh, God, here we go. Fendi. Okay, Fendi is a brand, a purse brand, you know, a luxury brand of some sort. Not one that I know.

Starting point is 00:41:20 They just released a tweet that says, powering the Web 3 revolution with the ledger. And they created like this, this odd looking keychain that you could strap to a purse, It's a ledger carrying case. It's a... To hold your ledger. It's a flashy way to hold your ledger, and you can, like, hook it onto your bag or your coat or something.

Starting point is 00:41:39 These people trying to get wrench attached? Like, what is the advantage of flashing a ledger around in public? Well, I mean, it's just... We're just accessorizing our crypto stuff. Like, it's kind of crypto culture taking over. I mean, no one who's smart would actually take a real ledger and clip it to their... Like, maybe they have just a burner ledger. I have ledgers that I don't use

Starting point is 00:42:02 because I have like 50 of them So like maybe they're just trying to be flashy about their ledger But like you know actually before In 2015, 2016 In the very very early days Before Ether when Ether was trading around $5 to $6 I think at DevCon

Starting point is 00:42:19 1 or DevCon Zero Like people were there like wearing their ledgers around their neck as like necklaces No really? Yeah yeah Just because like there wasn't No one was rich. No one was rich yet Like it wasn't an issue You need to steal my $500.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Right. It's like people needed like to use assets just to like play with Ethereum, right? It wasn't about like investment. It was just about playing. And then Ethermoon didn't like that culture went away really, really, really fast. But this is just ridiculous. Yeah, I don't know what I think about that. Why are we talking about this?

Starting point is 00:42:51 Let's move on. I don't know. You know what you're getting for your birthday though next year. Okay. I got it now. Here's what comes next. David, me, How we use a number of his websites on the weekly roll up, the crypto stats, crypto fees,

Starting point is 00:43:06 you know, L2 fees. We use his stuff all the time. He is starting up crypto stats, which is, I think, perhaps like the culmination of all of his different segregated websites, as fee websites. And so he is trying to produce him in the community that he's bootstrapping, is trying to produce a highly curated, highly accurate, normalized, is the word that he's using crypto stats,

Starting point is 00:43:30 so that people like us can present on stats in a more like formulaized manner. Like we can actually start to like have a standard for these things. And so he's curating people in a Discord. If you want to go join the Discord and help the CryptoStats community, we'll get a link in the show notes to put that Discord there. But basically he wants to build out the like the Wikipedia for crypto data is what he says. This is the stuff here. You guys have seen this on Roll-ups before.

Starting point is 00:43:57 We love what they're doing tracking. tracking eth-burned, crypto fees, you know, how much, yeah, transaction fees are, all of these things. This is cool to you, David. So this is a new press release, got covered by Bloomberg. What is this? Yeah, Walter Bloomberg in his famous all-caps tweet says, Coinbase, partners with Blockworks and bankless, who, that's us, for Defy and Metaverse event called Permissionless. And so, of course, you guys have heard about this before.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Permissionless happening May 17th to 19th in Palm Beach. Florida. This is where Ryan and I are going to be meeting for the first time, so that's going to be pretty cool because he decided to not go to Eath, Denver. And so yeah, you've got to get your tickets because tickets are up only. They are roughly in the $450-ish dollar range. They're going to go up in a couple weeks. They're going to go up a couple weeks after that, and they're going to go up to like $2,000 by the time the event rolls around. So get your tickets now. Ryan and I are planning a bankless and beers satellite event where we will have beer and talk about stuff. Don't miss that.

Starting point is 00:44:59 That'll be awesome. You get bank lists together all in one beer all. It'll be a lot of fun. Also, the news here is partnering with Coinbase. Yes. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. At the actual announcement.

Starting point is 00:45:10 That's why we got in Bloomberg. It wasn't because of bankless data. All right. Let's talk about this. A16 Z on the raises front. They just raised another $4.5 billion. Okay, A16, Chris Dixon and company. Of course, we've had him on the podcast, number of times.

Starting point is 00:45:28 I'm sure they'll put that to good use in the Web 3 world. This is another one. FtX, they just launched a $2 billion fund with our friend, Amy Wu, who's been on the podcast. This is dedicated, I believe, to kind of the Metaverse, crypto gaming area. So 4.5 billion from A16Z, another $2 billion for FTX. It's another $100 million from Mechanism Games. They just launched a fund focused on Play-to-Earn gaming. I guess all this to say, massive amount of money, VC money, private funding coming into the space,

Starting point is 00:46:06 showing no signs of stopping. All of kind of the angel deals and VC deals, all of these things are red hot at the moment, and the money is flowing towards builders. Guess it good time to be building in the space? Yeah, I don't know. What are your other takeaways from all of this? There's just an infinite bid for games, crypto games. And I really truly hope that we aren't just cloning AXI Infinity and spinning out 50 different clones,

Starting point is 00:46:31 like how those stupid arcade games that we see just get repurposed over and over and over again in the Web 2 world. I'm very, very happy that billions of dollars are being funneled into building cool new games, like bullish on just fun. It's just a lot at the same time. How much true innovation can there really be? You don't get to bootstrap meme innovation into existence with a bunch of money. But there are going to be a bunch of games coming. We're going to be able to play a bunch of games.

Starting point is 00:46:59 That's the good side. That's the good side. It's great to see this money flowing in the space. I am kind of a sucker for the bear market builders, though. You know, like I feel like that's when the real work gets done. After all of the noise and the hype dies away, the people who remain and they're continuing to build. I mean, that's how AXE was built. It was a bare market story, a bear market game.

Starting point is 00:47:21 And they just soldiered through. And a bunch of their peers died. they kept going. They built something great. So I'm still a sucker for the bear market, but it's also good to see all of this infrastructure being built out. That'll lead to good things too. Speaking of raises as well, last raise of the week, Poap, just raised $10 million to accelerate their efforts.

Starting point is 00:47:43 Poet badges, they are a thing. They are a cool thing. I know both of us collect many, have many of them. Many, many, many. Yeah, so what do you think they'll be doing with this capital? Oh, gosh. that's a really interesting question. Maybe we should get Patricio on to actually talk about it.

Starting point is 00:47:58 They have a very long blog post about kind of their plans, but there was this one take that we had on the weekly roll-up a while ago about how Po-Apps are just digital tokens of memories. And so I'd like to see Po-Ap kind of lean into that. Like, how do we more instantiate our real memories better? And so perhaps that's what they're going after, as well as just, like, allowing people to increase their digital footprint for airdrops. Po-ups are a great way to farm

Starting point is 00:48:24 AirDrops if people ever use them for whatever reason because you can just like know who's exactly in your community but community identifying is really huge who's actually you know of course who's been where don't doing what I got my first POAP in East Denver 2019 I hold it very

Starting point is 00:48:40 dear to my heart I'm excited to get the 2021 one it's coming up soon congratulations to Patricio because he's been grinding on poaps ever since always believed in it and I'm also very very honored from Ryan and I, both are angel investors in this C-dron. So we were part of this, too. This is cool. This is a tweet we read out on Poap, not too long ago. I am my collection,

Starting point is 00:49:01 and my collection is me. The podcast coming out on Monday is really all about meaning in the metaverse. And I do think collecting things from various places you've been in the metaverse could be a key way to essentially find meaning, part of your digital identity in this new world of crypto. And Poaps are certainly part of that story. Speaking of digital identity, speaking of digital identity. Here we go. Finding your way in crypto. Do you have a job yet?

Starting point is 00:49:26 Do you have a job? Do you have a crypto job? That's what we mean. Yeah. You probably have a regular job. The job related to ether and tokens and crypto and stuff like that. You should have one. This could be the year.

Starting point is 00:49:36 Guys, go to the bankless job board, check out some of the jobs. We'll just read a few out. Senior full stack engineer at Syndica, a data engineer, a paper chain, a senior technical writer on the Ethereum Foundation team. That's writing in Geph for the Geth client. lead blockchain engineer Thor swap. There's a ton of others. We won't read them all, but go tune into bankless.pallet.xyz slash jobs. Sign up, get these jobs delivered right to you and get a job in crypto. Have you noticed how the list that Ryan has been reading out has gotten

Starting point is 00:50:06 shorter and shorter and shorter? That's because we've gotten people jobs. So if you want to list your job, go to the jobs board and list your job because we are good at placing people. Yes, it works. Guys, let's talk about news now. Dave, you want to start with Ethereum stuff? And we talked about this last week, which was sort of air drop season between looks and this other token that was about to air drop

Starting point is 00:50:29 before we recorded Fees.wtF. And I got to say, they've really lived up to their name with WTF because like, it's gone kind of, it's been a strange air drop to say the least. What's happened with this one? I'm going to go ahead and just pat ourselves on the back

Starting point is 00:50:45 because last week, Ryan, we talked about two air drops. One was looks and the other one was WTF. F. Fees and between you and I, our consensus was that like, okay, we're going to hold the looks air drop because that's interesting, but we're going to sell the WTF.V's airdrop. And in hindsight, the looks token has 2x and the fees.wetf air drop was a complete mess. So we got that one right. There's a, they charged, they charged for the airdrop. They charged 0.01-Eth in order to register your address to get the air drop. And again, once again, what the hell is the token even for in the first place. WTF, WTF, guys. Yeah, like what the hell's going on?

Starting point is 00:51:26 Anthony Sizzano had a quote in here that there's just very emblematic of who he is. Such a blatant cash grab. Look, if you have to pay anything other than gas fees for an airdrop, it's not an air drop. Right, yeah. You're just selling tokens. That's not an airdrop. You're just selling your eth. You just, yeah, you're essentially buying tokens with the Ead. That's what you're doing. Yeah. A lot of other things went wrong with this. I have a confession to make though, David. I actually didn't even take the time to claim this one. I have not claimed mine either. I don't even know how much is worth. Yeah, I don't even know how much is worth. Yeah. Well, it's, like, well, I got, I'm going to go check how much I can get. Like, if I can get something, maybe that maybe I will, but like, maybe I just don't do it out of protest. Like, this is done. The other thing is like, like, the claim button. I mean, you are, um, giving some signing authority to whatever, you know, website is, is, is, you know, um, you used to claim your tokens. And so I'm a little bit sketched out by that unless I know the reputation, the pedigree, like, do I even want to bother? That's another reason I didn't claim it.

Starting point is 00:52:31 I'm just lazy. Meanwhile, as I literally right now, the looks token just broke through $7. I might be a little bit overexposed here. David's bullish looks. Let's talk about blacklisting for a minute. This is a PSA from a few weeks ago, but I think the numbers were much smaller. This time, Tether just blacklisted $160 million worth of USDT. This is another reminder. USDT, Tether, USDC as well, this is not censorship-resistant money. These are tokenized representations of dollars in a bank account somewhere. USDC is basically like a bank, a US bank, abiding by all of the US banking regulations on crypto rails.

Starting point is 00:53:18 This is not what we mean when we say free uncensurable money. They're useful. They're a means to an end. But another reminder here with Tether blacklisting $160 million. And I got to ask,

Starting point is 00:53:30 what do they do with this money? Yeah, like who gets that money? Where does that go? They should implement a burn mechanism. EIP 1559 for Tether and just like, you know, give it back to Tether holders. Yeah, I mean, I guess

Starting point is 00:53:44 Tether just gets a pocket this money. That can't be how it works, right? Well, how else is it work? Like, who gets the money? I don't know. So they're freezing the representation of the tokens, right? The money, of course, is still hopefully. In the vault.

Starting point is 00:53:59 And it's not actual dollars, just some portion that are dollars. It's treasuries and bonds and other things that are backing this thing. But I don't know. It would be to Tether's benefit, I suppose, to freeze your funds. 160 million dollars worth of value that Tether no longer has an outstanding liability for, which makes it an asset. So, like, who gets the asset? Can I have it? Can I have it? I know a bunch of public goods that would love that money if anyone from Tether's listening. Well, I mean, they took it from somebody. Yeah. So who's the person they took it

Starting point is 00:54:31 from? Well, probably a scammer or, like, somebody, like, violating O-FEC regulations or something like that. Trust Tether. You have to trust Tether. And they can freeze anyone's account for any reason. Anyway, let's talk about this. Ethereum client diversity stats not doing so well. Yes. This is an area of improvement. First, let me say, amazing that Ethereum actually has more than one client. Right.

Starting point is 00:54:54 No other chain has more than one client. So you're already batting ahead. But like the expectations for Ethereum are so much higher. It has like five, six different clients for ETH two. And this is the proportion. 68% of the ETH two clients staking ETH in the beacon chain right now are doing so via Prism. Lighthouse number two with 22%. TechU 9.5%.

Starting point is 00:55:19 Nimbus, 0.3%. Ideally, you'd love to see, I think Danny Ryan's like, I'd love to see, I don't know, probably perfect world. 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%, something like this, or at least a third, a third, a third. No client having more than 33% of the network.

Starting point is 00:55:35 That's not the case today. Yeah, and just to emphasize why this is important. For example, if there was this, quick history lesson, here we go. The Shanghai DDoS attacks that happened in 2016, the reason there was one client, I think it was Geth, that got DDoSed, and all Geth nodes stopped working.

Starting point is 00:55:56 Ethereum stayed online because the parity nodes, the other client, took the weight of Ethereum. Saved its ass. It saved Ethereum. The multi-client design saved Ethereum, and there's been inflation bugs in Bitcoin, and because Bitcoin only has one client, that turns into a catastrophic bug where you have to roll back the chain.

Starting point is 00:56:13 Fun fact, Bitcoin has had the chain rollbacked, which is crazy because they yell at Ethereum for doing it. Way back in the day. Way back in the day. But yes. And so a multi-client system is a decentralized anti-fragile system, but Prism is such a good client that everyone is using Prism to stake. And so Prism has this outsized share. Just because they made a really good piece of software, they have an outsized share of the Ethereum to clients. And so there's this conversation happening in the Ethereum space about how do we get more people to stake not using Prism? It's a victim of its own success. It's a victim of its own success.

Starting point is 00:56:50 It's just really good. But the thing is, we have incentives baked into the Ethereum protocol, which I think is what you're about to pull up next. Well, the problem is these incentives are almost disincentives, so it's a bit more stick than carrot. But like, yeah, what are these disincentives? What is the stick? Right.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Okay. So in the event of a client failure, if there's ever a bunch of notes, you know, it's ever a bunch of nodes that all go down at the same time, slashing happens. And if everyone who's on Prism all goes down at the same time, everyone is getting slashed if there's a client failure. And because Prism is disproportionately a high portion of the clients, they get slashed disproportionately because we want to incentivize. It's like amplified. Yes, it's like an amplification effect that happens. There's like a crowd penalty. Like, oh, are you staking with everyone else and everyone else their nodes went down, well, you should have been staking with, like, fewer people.

Starting point is 00:57:43 Maybe you should have been staking on Lodestar or Nimbus, where there isn't the amplification penalty. And so staking on Lodestar, you don't have any loss if there is like a client-wide slashing event. And with Nimbus, which is the next most used client, like, it's only a little bit by comparison. And so these are these natural incentives to balance the resources of the Ethereum ecosystem to make sure that it stays decentralized over the long term. this is just what good incentive mechanism design looks like. So if you are running a node on Prism,

Starting point is 00:58:15 know that this risk to you exist because you are staking in the same exact way that everyone else is. And perhaps you should get out of the crowded room and go to the more empty room. Yeah, I do think that this is sort of a PSA, right? And particularly for exchanges, would love to see more client diversity

Starting point is 00:58:30 with the coin bases and crackens of the world doing this. So, you know, hopefully they are factoring these risks into the equation because the risk amplification if they're all using some of the top clients like a Prisma or Techio is just drastic. It's going to cost a lot more money in the event of slashing. Of course, I feel like some of this conversation is a little premature too because we haven't yet gotten to the merge. Everyone's ETH is still sort of locked in the beacon change. So that's another catalyst that could shake things up and change it all around. I'm hopeful for that. But there's a conversation about how

Starting point is 00:59:03 if this disproportionate weighting towards Prism actually might delay the merge because it's unsafe too merge when there is a super majority of steak. So that is up in the air. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't personally, I don't think it'll delay anything. But yeah, that that is a conversation that I've seen. Let's talk about layer two, David, our favorite subject. Oh, here we go. 20-22. Yep, yep, layer two time, all right? We get you going. Binance users are now able to deposit and withdraw ETH to and from Arbichum. That's our Fiat on ramp. Love it. Binance, starting to support Arbichum.

Starting point is 00:59:39 And another victim of its own success. They had to stop it. They had to stop it. Do you know why they had to stop, Ryan? No, this happened very quickly. Like, in a few days, they just had it on and they turned it off. Why they turned it off? The answer is why they turned it off?

Starting point is 00:59:52 Because they ran out of Eth, because everyone withdrew to Arbitrum. And so they need to, like, get their ferry of Eth from the main name back to Arbitrum. So users of Binance can go from Binance to Arbitrum. It was so successful that Binance ran out of Eth on Arbitrum. So, Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, I know you're listening. Take note. Like, there's user demand to exit from exchanges onto layer two's. Please do it. Please do it. Layer two, layer two, twenty, Brian, I have your number. Don't make me text you. I will. Optimism. Optimism as well. They're getting an AVEA implementation. So it looks like AVEA is getting set to deploy on optimism. Again, layer two is

Starting point is 01:00:34 happening. Also on Arbitram. Yep, love it. Ave on optimism and Arbitram right now. Ave coming to ZK Sync. That's what's happening. In the Argent wallet, that just went live this week. Also, optimism continuing to drive improvements. There's so much optimization. I'm optimistic optimism optimizations.

Starting point is 01:00:57 They just shaved 30% off their average transaction fee this week. And there might be more coming. This is not the 30% shaved off of transaction fees that we reported on last week. was a different time. This is another 30% off of transaction fees, off of optimism. So an ERC 20 token transfer or excuse me an ETH transfer on our optimism almost below a dollar, almost below a dollar. And there is still plenty of room for even further fee reductions on layer two. They're all competing with each other. I love it. It's so great. It's just they're all competing each other to drive down prices. 222222. Hot protocol. One billion in volume transferred. This is just six months after

Starting point is 01:01:38 launching people using bridges. How long will it take them to reach 100 billion is the question? Next, this year, this year, 100%. Definitely this year. Also, definitely, if you haven't used the hop bridge before, go do it. Just farm the airdrop. Like, they don't have a token. They're going to release a token. How are they going to release a token is from people using the bridge. Go use the hop bridge. Go from Ethereum to optimism. Go from optimism to arbitram. Go do other things. And then, I don't know, just end up back on Ethereum. Just start farming these airdrops. Why aren't you doing this?

Starting point is 01:02:12 Is Hop on there? I'm looking at the probability. Yeah, it's 34%. According to Polly Market, the probability this quarter is 34% that Hop will release an irdrop. I think they should really extend this out for the whole entire year. I don't know. I guess they need the markets to settle, but they should really extend the markets to a

Starting point is 01:02:30 one-year-time frame. I'm sure they will. But, you know, that's your probability this quarter, according to the prediction market. Let's go to NFTE land, David. This is huge news. absolutely monumental news. Facebook and Instagram, adding NFT functionality. They want to help you create, that's minting, and sell NFTs, in addition to, of course, displaying your favorite NFTs. This is super big news from my perspective. What do you think of this? Yeah, I'd like to know

Starting point is 01:02:57 the details. I did not actually read this article. Apologies, but there's not much in the article. It's just more of a stub because it links to a Financial Times article. It's kind of vague, but META's doing something. They're probably going to use their Novi wallet. Yeah. Okay. So, and it's not certain that this is like going to happen on open blockchain systems. Like maybe it'll be part of the, you know, the Facebook blockchain or something like this.

Starting point is 01:03:22 But from my perspective, this is still massive adoption. Right. Massive surface area for NFTs. Yeah. This kind of feels like, hey, we're doing stuff too. An announcement in this article, you can see Instagram leader, Adopt, him Missouri said in December that his social network was actively exploring NFTs. The technology is on the company's mind at least. It sounds like they haven't completely settled with what they want to do.

Starting point is 01:03:44 They just are telling the market that like, yo, we're totally doing NFT stuff as soon as we figure out what that is. Do you think they're also doing that thing where they're testing the lotters? Like they let stuff leak. Yeah, see if they're going to get canceled or not. How the market response. Yeah, something like this. And then they decide to double down or not. I keep on forgetting that people like to cancel people over NFTs. I forgot about that. That's happening. Yeah, that's the thing. Right. Irene Dow. Irene Dow. That's been a thing over the weekend as well.

Starting point is 01:04:09 What is this? What is going on? I've heard people refer to this as Simphi. Simfi, yeah. So Irene is a individual. I don't know who she was before this, but she has made a bunch of NFTs of her in, like, you know, attractive attire and, you know, very, very pretty and has made a bunch of NFTs.

Starting point is 01:04:29 And she has made Irene Dow, so there's a discord. And so, like, basically, she's just targeting all the simps of the world to get her to buy her NFTs. The floor place is 1.4Eath. Mike Novagratz bought one. A few other people have bought one. So people are starting to buy these just because it's kind of like a... Do you have one? I do not have... Ryan, please. Please, sir. Not an Irene simp. No. I mean, I'm down to be a simp for someone, but I don't know who Irene is. I want to choose who I'm going to be a simp for.

Starting point is 01:05:00 Our show notes say would be fun for David to explain what. a simp is to Ryan. Okay, so I didn't put this in there. Right. Must be Luke or editor put this in there. Luke, Luke, okay. Ryan. Okay, I know what a simp is, all right? I understand Luke what a simp is. Actually, what is a sim short for? Maybe I need to have what it is sims. What is sims? I'm going to look at this right. What is synth short for? Oh, I won't be reading that out loud. All right, well, that's what's going on. I don't know. A simp is somebody who is basically like, somebody that just like does anything or everything for like a girl right like oh like they're super interested in like oh doesn't have to be a girl does it i think so i mean are are we um ethereum sims

Starting point is 01:05:45 oh we are we italic sense huge huge huge ethereum sims that's exactly right yeah but like it's supposed to be like the opposite gender like oh i'll go get your coffee i'll go like i'll hold the door open for you i'll cook you dinner like i think like stuff like that yeah all right moving on uh china is getting into the nfts scene okay uh bitcoin bad NFT is good as long as it's deployed on the national China blockchain network. That's what's going on, in which case, is it an NFT? Per discussion last week, we're talking about the flow chain. It's just a JPEG. If you don't have property rights, it's just a JPEG. If your property rights are dependent on a nation state that can censor you, those are weak property rights.

Starting point is 01:06:30 I don't know. I think some people get worried when they see this about nation states co-opting NFTs and co-opting Web3. I don't personally, because of the protocol sync thesis, right? I think all of this ultimately has to settle, ultimately has to collapse to the most credibly neutral decentralized layer at the very bottom. So this is just onboarding for open, permissionless chains,

Starting point is 01:06:59 I think, I hope. But do you think that's a real threat? You think this gets co-opted by nation-states? At the end of the day, like, I don't really care too much about JPEG is getting co-opted by nation-states. Because you can still do stuff by, like, trading them. And, like, if all things to get co-opted, like, JPEGs aren't really the worst. But, yeah. But keep in mind, NFTs, like, they're starting as JPEGs, but, like, we believe they're going to be, like, fundamental property in the metaverse, identity, all sorts of things.

Starting point is 01:07:26 I mean, it's not any more, like, centralized and trying to already was. So there's that. There's that. Gap coming in the NFT world, releasing their first line of NFTs on the Tezos blockchain. So retailers joining the fray. What's this about? Yeah, I think that's it. NFT MAGAP. Gap, NFT on Tezos. End story. You want to hear something weird, dystopia. Here we go. Walmart is quietly preparing to enter the Metaverse.

Starting point is 01:07:54 The Walmart Metaverse. The Walmart Metaverse. How does that sound? The Metaverse we have at home. Yes. This just sounds awful to me, the Walmart Metaverse, but I guess they're filing trademarks. That's the news. It's the most boomer way to get into the Metaverse. They filed trademarks. That's the end of the story. Someone tell them they don't actually have to file trademarks to build on the Metaverse, please. Okay, this is the big story. This is the big one. I don't know why we buried this. This is the big one. What is this, David?

Starting point is 01:08:22 Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard, World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, that game studio, also, call us. of duty, that is getting bought by Microsoft at something like 40% above the share price at the time when this was released. 69 billion. $69 billion. Nice. And so Microsoft getting into the Metaverse via just an acquisition of a gaming company, I mean, Activision Blizzard hadn't even gotten into the Metaverse yet.

Starting point is 01:08:52 Whatever, again, whatever that even means, I don't even know. But Microsoft wants to be put into digital worlds and digital realms. And so maybe this is injecting Metaverse type stuff into Activision Blizzard. Yeah, at this valuation, this is more than a game purchase, it feels like, right? It's more strategic than that. This feels like more than a, just a game acquisition for kind of their Xbox platform, Microsoft, you know, game studios.

Starting point is 01:09:17 This feels to me at this kind of premium, this is a play for the Metaverse. This is a... They are phomboing into the Metaverse. Yeah, they're trying to chase after whatever Zuckerberg and crew are doing on the meta side of things. Facebook side of things. But you think it means, you think this is going to be a trend this year. Oh, yeah. This is my tweet. I said, you know, blank, public company enters the Metaverse will be

Starting point is 01:09:40 the headline of 2022. And then I followed that up with my ETH maxi take. Might as well read public company buys ETH because it's not the same thing. Yeah, definitely. To the extent it's going to be built on Ethereum. Coinbase partnering with MasterCard to let users buy NFT buy it cards. That sounds cool. What's happening? Yeah, so Coinbase has their NFT platform, their 2B-released NFT platform, and fortunately, MasterCard has categorized NFTs as digital goods. So because of that, you can buy them with MasterCard, so making it compliant to buy crypto things. You can't buy things like Bitcoin or Ether or cryptocurrencies with a credit card.

Starting point is 01:10:21 That would be bad, also irresponsible. But you can buy NFTs because MasterCard has called them, classified them as digital goods. So cool, we can now buy NFTs with our MasterCard, and as soon as Coinbase opens up their NFT platform, we'll be able to do it there. That's awesome. Breaking into mainstream. Here's another story of that. So Budweiser just purchased, I believe, a nouns.

Starting point is 01:10:44 Nouns out of NounDow, yeah. From Nouns Dow. This is sort of the, I don't know, this has some of the pedigree and some of the valuations that rival cryptocurrencies, right? I know it's not as mainstream. They're far fewer noun dows. I believe one is released every day. One noun per day.

Starting point is 01:11:01 There's a bid on it. I think the bids are like 50 to 60 eth per noun just because I don't know how they got that valuation so quickly, but they did. So great. Right. So Budweiser doing it. Obviously for some social cachet, for some street cred, for some brand awareness, for some coolness. And I believe are planning to incorporate nouns in a Super Bowl ad. Right?

Starting point is 01:11:21 Like Budweiser dominating Super Bowl ads. This is IP for one of their ads. super cool. Whoever is in Budweiser, like advertising or leading Budweiser or Bud Light, it's actually Bud Light, which I think are the same thing? Whoever's doing that, like, killer job, because they didn't do the very basic thing of just buying a Bored Ape. They went for a Nounced out. That is some, like, deep NFT knowledge. So like, whoever's leading Bud Light, give that person a raise, first off, and they're probably, you know, they're probably a reader of Metaversal, I would say. I bet you they read William Peaster stuff. I bet you they,

Starting point is 01:11:55 They got to. I mean, William Beaser is a big noun fan. So, yeah, maybe it's that. This is pretty obscure. This is pretty deep. This is pretty niche. This is a good move. This is a good move.

Starting point is 01:12:05 This is a very strong indication. Like, yo, we are actually cool. We are not just like the Hey Fellow kids. Exactly. They're not just buying another board aid, right? This is deep crypto stuff. This is real crypto. Feltier.

Starting point is 01:12:16 Well, okay, so how many crypto commercials you think we'll see at the Super Bowl? What's your guess? At least two. At least two. I'm going to go with five. Oh, fuck. Wow. I think it's going to be five.

Starting point is 01:12:27 And so I'm including something like this that's Budweiser that adds nouns down when I total five. But yeah, I think it's at least five. Cool. I think that's a low estimate. Polymarket, let's get this up and running. All right. This is cool to you.

Starting point is 01:12:44 So Rare, they just added Serena Williams to their board of advisor. So Rare, of course, is a NFT trading card platform. It's really for soccer, really for football. Fantasy football, right? Fantasy football, yeah. Yeah, so, and it's built on top of layer two technology, super cool, huge... ZK roll-up on Ethereum. ZK roll-up on Ethereum. Now, Serena Williams, jumping on the board. This is kind of a question. I think we'll see more athletes do this, more influencers do this, get into the NFT scene. I think she's really blazing a trail here, so that's cool. Or maybe we're just simping for Serena Williams, we're on the podcast. That's why we mentioned this.

Starting point is 01:13:23 Well, I accidentally talk shit because Serena Williams recently put a board A bester profile picture. Oops. Well, there goes that. Some post-show editing here. Last thing on the NFT category, what's this, David? Solana NFT's total sale volume crosses $1 billion. Congrats to the Solana NFT ecosystem. I don't know, actually, what is like the OpenC version of Solana?

Starting point is 01:13:48 Like, where do you go to this trade? It's a whole different set of apps. It's a whole different world over there. Although I think OpenC is going to support cross-chain, multi-chain, L2. Yeah, so we'll see how long all of that lasts. Bitcoin World, just two quick things. The first is Jack just announced that Block, formerly known as Square, is officially building an open Bitcoin mining system.

Starting point is 01:14:11 I feel like he already announced that, but maybe we're announcing it again. And also, the Cash app is integrating Lightning Network, letting U.S. users send Bitcoin globally for free, cash app of block, formerly square, going all in on Bitcoin, still seems kind of weird. That is just Bitcoin. Like, do Bitcoin, but like also do all of the other things. Right. I feel like maximalism holds people back a little bit. And any form of maximism, okay? If maximalism, Bitcoin maximalism, maximalism will hold you back in this space. Bitcoin, innovating on Bitcoin miners is just not where it's at in 2022. Like, come on, Jack. But also come on the podcast. But also come on the podcast. Last thing for you on the regulatory

Starting point is 01:15:06 side of things, I guess this is more crypto banking side of things. There was a breach at crypto.com. At first, it reports $15 million was stolen in this highest. Looks like it's closer to $33 million, the CEO of Crypto.com confirmed this. Do you know what's going on here? No, and neither do they. This is a quote from the article. It is not yet known how the hacker was able to steal the funds from crypto.com, but the exchange first announced that some users were reporting suspicious activities on their accounts in January 17th. At the time, the exchange stated that it was going to pause withdrawals while it was investigating the matter. And so, yeah, kind of big, big loss here with over $30 million in collective BTC and ETH. The ether on Ethereum got

Starting point is 01:15:48 washed through tornado cash. And so, poof, it's gone. Amazing. Sorry to crypto.com and anyone affected by this. My conspiracy is inside job. Inside job. Interesting. Many of them are. Not your keys, not your crypto. If you have funds parked in crypto.com, I think for this size of a hack, of course, everyone will be fine. Crypto.com is like printing money these days through all sorts of means. So it's going to be fine for this type of a hack. But you know, it's been a long time since we talked about a major exchange getting hacked. Can you imagine if like Coinbase was hacked, David? What a dark day that would be for crypto. We haven't talked about things like that. It has actually gotten hacked very, very, very, very, very, very in their early days. And as a, and I think that's actually a good thing

Starting point is 01:16:35 because they started to take security very, very, very, very early, and they have not been hacked since. So I actually kind of think, like, I consider Coinbase as like basically never have gotten hacked, before because like it almost doesn't count when they started in like 2011 or 2012 or something 2013 it's like they were just like the three-person startup on like a laptop and then and then boom as soon as they got any sort of traction like they have been fantastically secure ever since also also Gemini has not I had been hacked either so it's also good that we had Mount Gox happens so early in crypto's history that just kind of you know shook many generations but we're kind of far removed from that anyway I'm not wishing anything bad it's happening it's just no

Starting point is 01:17:15 if you have your funds in an exchange, that could be susceptible to something like this. Guys, we'll be right back with the takes of the week. And of course, the meme of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest defy-apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of defy activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their defy goals,

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Starting point is 01:19:58 What are we looking at? Yeah, so we have BTC and ETH side by side. BTC is a square representing a plot of land. And then next to it is Ether, also a square representing a plot of land. But on Ether Square is a cube, indicating that you can build something on it. it. And I actually really just enjoyed this visual metaphor. It's very simple. Remember when the few understand a meme was proliferating around crypto Twitter? Do you remember how that came about, Ryan? No, I was actually going to ask, did that come from defy circles or Bitcoin or circles?

Starting point is 01:20:29 That came from Bitcoin or circles. That came from Pierre Richard, who said that Bitcoin is real estate on the internet, internet real estate, implying like, yo, it's the native currency of the internet. There's only 21 million units. Therefore, it's like digital real estate on the internet. And then he said few understand, and that's what started the few understand meme. And then a bunch of people started making fun of that because this was a ridiculous metaphor, because you can't actually build anything on that real estate. And no, it's not real estate. It's just tokens. It's just a token. It's not real estate. Anyways, you can actually build stuff on Ethereum. And so it is the same surface area like Bitcoin. Ethereum has the same surface area.

Starting point is 01:21:07 But if we're using this real estate metaphor, like you can actually build stuff on your land on Ethereum. So I just enjoyed this metaphor. Yeah, that's cool. Literally building things on the blocks, on the blocks themselves. Exactly right. What's this? This was great. Okay, so this is a brand new PFP project that got spun up and somebody kind of did an oopsies. If you want to click on that first image, the first one, yeah, we have this brand new Women's Doodle Society coming off of the success of Doodles NFT. And Women's Doodle Society tweeted out something very, special is coming soon, please follow us and don't miss out, you know, implying they're going to start off their PFP profile picture. And then somebody with an actual doodle says, yo, there's still

Starting point is 01:21:52 a Fiverr watermark on your PFP. So like this woman doodle society just went to Fiverr and just like, yo, like, can you make us some NFT images? And literally didn't even pay for it because it's still watermarked, right? Exactly. Still watermarked. Also, the other thing about this is that this picture that we're looking at right here, somebody took a photograph of their screen and you can tell because of like the striations right around the mouth. Like that is a picture of a screen. So I mean, that's not a screenshot. That is somebody with their phone taking a picture of their screen. So that person is a boomer. That is what a boomer looks like. This is like, you know, this, you know, late stage capitalism is kind of that, that mean. This is like

Starting point is 01:22:32 late stage market. Yeah. This is what happens. I mean, does this feel a little topy to you? Yeah, super. But like, I've been feeling, I've been feeling top signals for roughly a year now, so I've started ignoring them. Well, but I think we've come to a place where there can be top signals in various markets, right? But like, not others. And so maybe this is a top signal in like cloned PFP segment of the market, right. But it doesn't mean that all NFTs have top signaled as a result of this. That's exactly right. Let's talk about this, a take from someone on Twitter. Yes. Another, this is late, if that was late stage NFTs, This is late stage defy. And what happens in late stage defy? I think this tweet is maybe summing up the current Zieg guys.

Starting point is 01:23:13 Do you want to read this out? Yeah, this is from Emilio who says, the current state of the new wave of defy. Talking about the newer defy apps that have come out about. One, individuals worshipped like gods. Two, burner addresses with keys controlled by the founders. Three, multi-million rugged, shook and off like it was nothing. For Dow members, doing whatever they want with the protocol treasuries.

Starting point is 01:23:36 And then Emilio finishes up saying, needless to say, this is not what I signed up for. And, I mean, Ryan and I are definitely defy boomers. We kind of stick to, like the defy 1.0 apps, I'd say, like Maker, compound, AVE, the thing, Uniswap, the things that came about while we were paying attention to Ethereum during the bear market. And there's just been, like, a newer wave of these defy apps, which are just like kind of not our vibe, I'd say. Just a little bit more like. I would say, so for me personally, I would say some of them are, some of them are.

Starting point is 01:24:02 But what this tweet Tweet summed up is individuals worshipped like gods, multi-million dollar rug, like people taking all of these excessive risks. There is an element of some aspects of DFI that I totally don't vibe with, right? What I love in DFI2.O is seeing builders building new things. What I don't love is this whole vibe of like,

Starting point is 01:24:26 you know, F everything. Like we're just going to build until it breaks and do what we've. want with treasuries and like that's that's that's a vibe that I definitely don't resonate with and that's the part that feels late stage I actually thought this um this reply for mark not that summed it up we have the bull market and we have the bear market he says in between them we have cringe markets when stuff like this is normal bear will clean it up cringe markets wow we have got to use that I'm going to be using that moving forward that's where we're totally where we've I feel like we

Starting point is 01:24:57 are right now we are in the middle of cringe market are you wishing for a bear market then to clean some of this up, as Mark says? Like, wishing for a bear market wishes for people's money to go down in a way, and I would never wish. Which I would never wish. But, like, I also at the same time, like, if anyone who's listening to this feels like they're latent to crypto, like, and you're, like, looking at your portfolio saying, like, oh, please moon, please moon, please moon.

Starting point is 01:25:21 You actually want a bear market. A bear market is where, like, if you have conviction, you stick around. You also buy assets at much lower prices. You learn who your friends are. real products get built with real innovations. You also have time to understand these things before the market moves on. Like, bear markets are blessings. It's a blessing. It's a blessing. Yeah, like, yeah, but then you're poor, so that sucks. I too am bullish on bear markets. I'm bullish on bear markets, yeah. You're poor temporarily. But the one thing, you know,

Starting point is 01:25:51 I saw, I saw this thread in crypto, Reddit. I think it was something like our crypto markets going to come back. And the truth is, some of them will and some of them won't. So like you also have to be very cautious of what you're buying, what you're investing. And this is why we continuously harp on evaluation of like fundamentals, right? The stuff doesn't tend to, fundamentals don't tend to matter during bull runs. But in the bear market, they certainly do. I guess the safest move overall is just to escape to Fiat for some period of time. But yeah, you know, that's what we're dealing with. Fiat and hard money and yield.

Starting point is 01:26:31 Let's talk about this. The SEC, the good old SEC, this was my take. Do you want to read it out? Yeah. This guy, Ryan Sean Adams, says, if the SEC deemed ETH a security in 2022, it would probably be the end of the SEC, not Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:26:46 which is just like so Chad, awesome. It's a little cheeky. It's a little cheeky, right? I just think so. So here's the thing. I feel like institutions have the most to lose. from a credibility perspective, right? And there was talk over the weekend that I saw of maybe Gary Gensler, maybe the SEC

Starting point is 01:27:06 coming out and saying something about Ethereum being a security, right? Like very heavy-handed move on the entire industry. And the reason I don't think they'll do this is because I legitimately believe that would be the beginning of the end for the SEC, right? That is such an erosion of the credibility of their institution. And let's remember all of these government regulatory bodies, they are institutions. They are social institutions governed by the people, right? And if they start to lose their credibility in major ways, you know, like that's an existential

Starting point is 01:27:40 threat for them. And to make this kind of a move to call ETH security, which is why I'm not worried about it. I don't think they'll do this. They don't want to ruin their legitimacy and credibility. But like, it's just not going to happen. And if it did happen, Ethereum would come out. of it more unscathed than the SEC on the other side of this thing. Like, Ethereum's not going away because a government body says it's a security. Right. Yeah. And like, I dare them to try first off.

Starting point is 01:28:08 Also, they should just play nice. Just be nice, SEC. Like, we could all help America. Like, just you don't have to do this. I don't know if they're doing it, but. No, they're definitely not. This is just like a conversation that people are having. Yeah, it's just a conversation with crypto Twitter. It's just one of those things where like, it would, the emperor would be revealed to have no clothes as in like, oh, you deemed Ethereum a security and like no one cares because, and we're still doing all of our Ethereum stuff. Like, like, do you think, I would like to see if Coinbase would actually delist Ether from the exchange if they did that or if they would leave it up as a protest. Like, I think, I think it would show how little power has. Yeah,

Starting point is 01:28:50 yeah, everything is, right? Well, Bitcoin has a, a, okay. I guess just Bitcoin. This is your take, David. Yeah, it's not really a take. It's me just kind of front-running what I'm excited about. But I tweeted out, East Denver is one month away. It can already feel my heart getting warm. I'm just so happy to have Heath Denver around the corner.

Starting point is 01:29:06 It's a great conference, great vibes. I've just stoked to see everyone there. Well, this goes into what you're excited about. Let me ask you, what are you excited about, Heath Denver in particular? What's the pitch for someone to come to Heath Denver? East Denver is just pure signal. If you are just fatigued from just the noise of a bull market or what we are now calling cringe market,

Starting point is 01:29:27 like, Heath Denver is the opposite of that. Like, everyone who's at East Denver, like, has, like, wants to be there for the right reasons. It's very deep crypto culture, very true to the ethos. It's just an absolute blast. It feels something like, it's a hackathon first off. There's a bunch of developers on their laptops, like hacking away. And as, like, a non-dev, it's kind of nice just to, like, watch them be like, oh, yeah, keep going, guys.

Starting point is 01:29:50 like keep building, keep building the stuff. Thank you. Thank you for your service. And it's just like, it's a festival. It's a cultural festival of just like crypto culture, which is, which is lovely. There's after parties. There's a bunch of, you're going to meet friends. If you want crypto friends and you don't, and you're talking the ear off of your family and your friends and they're tired of you, go to East Denver because you can find some other crypto people that can talk about crypto more than you can. And that's actually just one of the things I'm excited about, Ryan. The other thing I'm excited about is I did a layer zero with Santiago C-O. Santi Siri on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:30:22 People might know him. Big Argentine community member. It doesn't live in Argentina currently, but when Vitalik was going around Argentina recently and telling that story about how Argentines are using Binance to transfer money, like that kind of story went around the Twitter sphere recently. It was Santi that was like with Vitalik,

Starting point is 01:30:41 like guiding him around the country. Like, hey, we're gonna go talk to these people, like we're gonna go, like, who do you wanna go talk to, what part of the communities? And he's watched, Argentina go from like a very wealthy, highly just like great, great country, like with lots of agriculture. And then the money broke, the inflation happened, the corruption and the government happened.

Starting point is 01:31:03 He watched the downfall of Argentina. And he is now watching the rise of crypto society in Argentina. Wow. Where it's not like, you know, normal society that we consider normal inside the U.S. where you have like normal society and crypto people. crypto people are society in Argentina. Like it is completely just rampant as like a movement in Argentina.

Starting point is 01:31:25 And I've always had held Argentina close to my heart just, I think for reasons like that. A lot of great people from Argentina too that I've met in crypto over the years. Shout out Mariano Conti. Yeah, so I want everyone to go listen to the layer zero that comes out on Tuesday with Santiago Siri.

Starting point is 01:31:42 That's awesome, man. I can't wait to listen to it. Yeah. Ryan, what are you excited about? Look, it's this thing, Instagram doing NFTs. I think that's a massive deal. Like we called it over the summer. You know, in August, we wrote this post where we said Twitter is just the first. This is when Twitter announced that they were doing something with NFTs. They're just the first. You know what happens

Starting point is 01:32:03 next. Competition among social media platforms will ramp up. YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. The Metaverse will consume them all. This is the Web3 space race. And we're really seeing it happen. And what I'm blown away by is how fast this happened. Like this is happening at warp speed, especially when you compare it to defy, right? So the incumbents, the groups that should feel threatened by this, they're jumping aboard. It's taken much longer for the incumbents in the finance world, like the banks of the world to embrace defy. But in Web 3, Web 2 is just embracing it. They're just helping us roll out Web 3.

Starting point is 01:32:38 And that's amazing. And when I tweeted this out, some people were saying, well, but Facebook's the enemy, right? meta, Instagram, this is the enemy. But we always go back to that thing of if they adopt crypto protocols, they adopt crypto values. Oh, that line gives me shivers. Right. That's how, like, that's how, that's how we win. So this is an example of crypto winning. Other people said, okay, but what if Facebook is not actually using an open peritistence chain? What if they're using their own layer one? Or I just say like let them. Okay? I mean, that's fine. You can be AOL. You can mail CDs to everyone's house and onboard them to the fake internet so that they

Starting point is 01:33:18 eventually onboard to the real internet, right? That's what's going to happen because they can't persist in a closed ecosystem. I'm very bullish on the protocol sync thesis that ultimately all of this value, all of the people that Web 2 onboards will come into the real Web 3 economy in the world. And they won't stop at property rights owned by Facebook. You know, they won't settle for that. They want real property rights that they own on a public permissionless open system like Ethereum. So I'm excited about that. Like, this is Trojan horse stuff.

Starting point is 01:33:52 Crypto's winning. And this is exactly how we win. Super bullish. Yeah. I feel like crypto's already won. It's just a, we're waiting for the rest of the world to realize it. I think so. Speaking of which, meme of the week, you ready?

Starting point is 01:34:06 Here we go. We got two this week. We got two memes of the week. They're both fantastic. What's the first one? Explain this. All right. So for the viewers, we have the Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Duck season, rabbit season meme, except it's alt season or L2 season. Like, what's it going to be? Is it all L1 season or is it layer two season? I know where I've placed my bets. I think listeners wouldn't need to me to say that. But

Starting point is 01:34:29 Alt layer one or layer two. Is this also a comment about, is this also a comment about narrative rotation though, too? Because we see a well-known trader in this meme, right? And so like, you can kind of rotate from L1 season to L2 season, and I think this is implying that L2 season is next from a narrative perspective. Yeah. Not to be mean, but I'd like to know if

Starting point is 01:34:50 Three Arrow's Capital invested in either Arbitrum or optimism. I don't think they did, and so therefore they are on the Alt Layer 1 season camp. I think they've got some Starkware, though. They do have Starkware. They do have Starkware. So there's that. What's the second meaning? All right. Here's where I think my bets are. So this is

Starting point is 01:35:07 we talked about this meme actually forever ago but I just saw this meme was like wow this is so great this is a Pepe Frog character being childish hopping from couch A to couch B because the floor is lava

Starting point is 01:35:18 but couch A is optimism and couch B is arbitram and the floor is Ethereum the Ethereum main net he's hopping he's hopping from optimism to arbitram don't touch main net because the main net's lava and then there's somebody saying

Starting point is 01:35:32 Billy have you been wormholing again implying you know they're taking a bridge they're using Kinext or using to go from layer one to layer two, or excuse me, from layer two to layer two. And so I thought this was a cute meme. Look, I think that's a theme for 2021. And L222 is the floor is lava. Mainchain is lava. Mainchain's lava. So get on L2, migrate, well, you have a chance, when you have the chance. I think that's it. Meme of the week, we covered everything on the roll-up guys. As always, Bitcoin is risky. So is ETH. So is D-Fi. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west.

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