Bankless - ROLLUP: Saylor Getting Sued | Avalanche Playing Dirty?! | MERGETEMBER | Maker Drama

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

1st Week of Mergetember, 2022 ------ 📣 ConsenSys | Mint a Merge NFT! https://bankless.cc/themerge  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🌴 MAKER DAO | DECENTRALIZED LENDING https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE STAKING https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ----- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:33 MARKETS 4:36 BTC Price 4:56 ETH Price 5:23 ETH/BTC 5:52 Total Crypto Market Cap 6:32 Merge Estimator 10:15 Fed Watch https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/26/powell-warns-of-some-pain-ahead-as-fed-fights-to-lower-inflation.html  12:10 ETH Dives %10 After Powell Rate Hike Signal https://www.thedefiant.io/markets-dive-powell-speech  15:33 Avalanche Playing Dirty? https://cryptoleaks.info/case-no-3  https://medium.com/@kyleroche/my-response-b691563c255b  24:00 Tweet from Emin https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1564006450531377156  25:00 Maybe Not True? https://twitter.com/AriDavidPaul/status/1564253955785461767  26:44 David Take https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1565340995062882311  30:35 Saylor Getting Sued 31:40 Saylor Tax Fraud https://blockworks.co/michael-saylor-and-microstrategy-sued/  https://twitter.com/AGKarlRacine/status/1565031380471382019  https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1565040637044465666  34:37 Maker 34:40 Drama Summary https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1564716178819653632.html  43:05 NEWS 43:09 ETH 43:13 Coinbase Announces cbETH https://decrypt.co/108180/coinbase-announces-cbeth-wrapped-ethereum-staking-token  https://twitter.com/CoinbaseAssets/status/1562476695357358080  https://dune.com/Marcov/coinbase-wrapped-staked-eth  47:43 Abritrum One Upgraded to Nitro Stack https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1565041950142730245  48:48 Yesterday’s State of the Nation https://youtu.be/yYzQPRRAs6M  48:55 cOptimism Gas ATH https://twitter.com/MSilb7/status/1565131857464901633  49:55 Data Giant Shocks Ethereum with Ban on Mining https://www.thedefiant.io/data-giant-shocks-ethereum-with-ban-on-mining  54:04 Vitalik Book https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1564804705997361153  55:10 NFTs 55:15 Facebook & Instagram Allow Posting NFTs https://twitter.com/Meta/status/1564282540831248387  56:00 cReddit Subtly Launches NFTs https://twitter.com/itstimconnors/status/1562839909261447168  59:09 Ticketmaster Integrates with DapperLabs’ Flow Blockchain  https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/31/ticketmaster-taps-the-flow-blockchain-to-let-event-organizers-issue-nfts-tied-to-tickets/amp/  59:55 Goose NFT to Bankruptcy Liquidation https://twitter.com/dmitricherniak/status/1563587242777448448  1:01:06 Regulation FBI Issues Warning to Vulnerable DeFi Platforms https://decrypt.co/108542/fbi-issues-warning-over-vulnerable-defi-platforms  1:03:47 Crypto.com $10.5M Accident https://fortune.com/2022/08/31/crypto-com-accidentally-transferred-10-million-to-thevamanogari-manivel/  1:05:40 Releases 1:05:42 Orca Protocol Rebrand to Metropolis https://metropolis.mirror.xyz/ozkx0ZMwIzyahRJiQKpNv_8r7vAhOo-8tucjONhXJHI  1:06:20 Raises 1:06:24 PROOF $50M from a16z & More https://a16zcrypto.com/investing-in-proof/  https://twitter.com/proof_xyz/status/1564689271755137024  1:07:28 Reddit’s Ohanian’s $177M Crypto Fund https://decrypt.co/108560/reddit-co-founder-eyes-177m-crypto-fund-invest-strong-founders-discount-report  1:08:16 Genesis Raise $500M https://cointelegraph.com/news/everything-s-on-sale-reddit-founder-galaxy-and-genesis-execs-raise-big-money  1:08:50 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs  1:12:07 Questions from the Nation https://twitter.com/avi_g_/status/1565192839021363200  https://twitter.com/nextalphaa/status/1565011491304230912  https://twitter.com/HappyjoeNFT/status/1565031005475418114  https://twitter.com/teemu_lens/status/1565008572248899584  1:21:55 TAKES 1:22:00 New take on the cycle https://twitter.com/gasull/status/1564888312157876229  1:23:33 99% of Crypto is a Joke https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1564257934011379713  1:25:12 Gravity Turns Off https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1564637280379502593  1:27:17 Worlds Greatest Bitcoiner https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1565264636445745153  1:30:14 What David’s Bullish On 1:31:23 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:34:55 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/hegemony_inc/status/1564357396784263170  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

And David, before we get in, because it is Mergetober. Merge tober. No, MergeTember. Excuse me, MerchTember. Did I just curse us? Yeah. Hey, Bankless Nation. It is the first Friday of September.

David, should I say MergeTember? Because that's what month it is. It is the Merge month. And that means that all of the bankless episodes in September are called Mergecast, not podcast. How'd you like that? I did not know this. I did not know this about our podcast. You were ready for that.

Anyway, guys, this is the weekly roll-up. I said at this time, not David. What should people do when listening to the weekly-weekly roll-up, David? What beverage should they be drinking? Oh, of course. You know, I'm not saying that everyone has to be drinking coffee, but, you know, it's the coffee that I drink when I listen to the weekly roll-up every Friday morning because sometimes I do actually listen to it.

You know, to catch up in the weekend crypto, because that's what we do. You said the coffee that you drink. Yeah. I think you meant to say it's the beverage that you drink is coffee, but you said it's the coffee that you drink is a beverage. Yes, that's what I meant. Yeah. Same thing.

Sometimes I mix up trillions and billions. Sometimes I mix up beverage and coffee. You know how it goes. Friday rituals. Well, of course, if you are a weekly roll-up fan, you will know that if you add anything to your coffee, David considers that a beverage. No longer a coffee.

The only real coffee is black coffee. That's what I learned from David. Black coffee, espresso, water and coffee. That's how it works. I don't write the rules. No milk. All right, guys, we got some interesting topics this week. David, do you want to tease some of them up?

Yeah, we got some shenanigans going on this week. First off, avalanche playing dirty, question mark, using nation state legal systems to sue other alt-layer ones in order to get ahead, kind of just like taking a hack at your opponent's legs as you try and run a foot race. You know, not totally completely proven. So we'll go back on the details on that. But also, Michael Saylor getting sued in the District of Columbia

for not paying taxes. perhaps creating a forced Bitcoin seller. We're going to cover that drama. And then also, Maker Dow wants to depeg die. No longer, one dollar equals one die, perhaps. At least these are the conversations going on in the MakerDAO discourse. We're going to summarize all of this and more. But also a bunch, rather than all the negative stuff,

there's also some positive stuff, of course, also happened this week. Ryan, what were some of the good things that happen? All right, you got the bad things. A few of the good things. Some highlights are a new liquid staking token, ETH staking token, just launched on the scene and it's from one of the largest exchanges. I don't know if you guys can guess which one,

but we will tell you in the roll-up as it progresses. Also, a roll-up itself just upgraded and made Ethereum seven times bigger. That was the news this week. Starts with an A. I don't tell you which one until we get into the episode. And then Facebook and Instagram just expanded their NFT offering.

So there's definitely a lot to talk about on the good side. And of course, if you like these roll-up, you're listening on your podcast player. Make sure you like it. Make sure you write us a review. Give us five stars if you think we are worthy of five stars. And then also, if you're listening to this on YouTube watching it, I should say, make

sure you hit that subscribe button. And David, before we get in, because it is MergeTober. Merge tober. No, Merge Timber. Excuse me. Merge Timber. Did I just curse us? Yeah.

September, day one of September, and we're already off to a bad start. This might redeem me with listeners is, did you know you can go get a commemorative merge NFT badge, collectible, I suppose I should say. Consensus is putting this out. What is the program that they're running, David? Oh yeah, they're doing a free NFT mint. It's going to be the first, I think this is the plan, the first NFT mint post merge, therefore the first like green, naturally green Ethereum NFT mint. And so this is just an NF3 NFT. There's no like white list. There's no nothing. Everyone's available to mint one, one per transaction. And this is going to happen. So you can sign up in the link in the show notes to get notified. Of course, when the merge actually happens.

And then also the 72 hour mint window to celebrate the achievement of all the Ethereum core devs, client teams, and researchers. So free NFT mint marking the merge. So cool. This is a way to prove to your grandkids. You were there, right? Yes. I was here. I was present. I got my NFT to show it. You can find out more about that. Make sure you sign up at bankless.ccc slash consensus for some more details. All right, David, let's get to the markets, man. What is Bitcoin doing this week? Going down. It's going down, Ryan. Bitcoin started the week at $21,700. It went down at $9.5% to where it is now at $19,600. We are below $20,000. Oof. That's just about double digits,

man. That's a pretty steep drop. Yeah, we're below 2017 all-time highs. Okay. And Eath, is that showing us anything better because the merge is coming, David? Yeah. Yeah, the ether also down, also down, down 10% down. Start of the week at $17,010, currently at $15,030 down a little bit more than Bitcoin. Yeah. We're going to talk about this in a minute, but this feels awfully correlated to the NASDAQ and the stock market coming on the back of some of Powell's recent comments in Jackson Hole as he gave them. We'll get to that in a minute. But how about the ratio? Is that giving us any signal. Yeah, it did. The same thing it did last week where it plummeted down to like 0.073, 0.072, but it then recovered back to 0.0783. So it's overall down 1.3% on the week. It started

the week at 0.079, currently down to 0.078. But it hit 0.073 intro week and bounced back up. So still life in the ratio. Still life in the ratio. How about global cryptocurrency market cap? Are we above a trillion still? Barely. We are barely above a trillion. We started the week at 1.085 trillion, and we are at 1.002 trillion. So $20 billion away from $1 trillion. No, wait.

$2 billion. All right. So what is ETH right now? So it is $1,500 something? 1530. Okay. So it's still floating above the 2017 all-time high, I guess, or 2018, all-time high. I don't even know if people care about that number anymore.

Do you think that's like old news? Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Yeah, it feels kind of old news. All right. This is a prediction for the merge date, which of course we've explained is somewhat changing, ever-changing. What is this showing us?

Yeah, so this is Bordel.wtf, and there was another merge predictor website that we showed. Last week, that predicted the merge had moved up to like early morning September, and it even flashed into late Tuesday. day. But that was one calculation. And here's Bordle.wtf, which is a more conservative calculation. So this one moves a little bit slower. As hash rate comes and goes, the merge date changes. And so, like, people don't really know. And so the other, the calculation that we showed last week was pretty, like, aggressive in how much updates based off of recent hash power. The Bordle.wtf site changes a little bit slower. And this one is still showing that we are going to likely merge

around Thursday, noon UTC time, which is about 8 a.m. Eastern time. We will see. All right. So what happens with the hash rate? How is that related to the merch date, whether it's like sooner or later? Yeah, so total terminal difficulty. This is that TTD number. It's the replacement for block height. And this is why the date hops around every now and then. We didn't choose a block. We chose a TTT, a total terminal difficulty. What the hell is TDD? You don't really need to this, don't carve out space in your brain. This is really like the one time thing that's going to be relevant. But it's basically the raw number of hashes. So total number of hashes that goes into proof of work. Once the total number of hash hits that TTD number of 5,875 and then what looks like

20 zeros after that, I'm not, don't even know what number that is a significantly large number. Then we merge. And so the faster, the more hash power there is, the more that miners come online and do proof of work mining, the faster we grow the hash is. The faster we approach that TTD. number. If miners drop off the network, then we approach that number slower. And so it's a function of like how many miners are mining on Ethereum. And as that goes up, merge comes sooner. As it goes down, merge goes further away. I wonder if we'll see any drop because if we see some drop, like hash rate go down as as the Thursday of September 15th, excuse me, merge 10th approaches, then like that could extend it into like Friday. Personally, I'm hopeful it, it, um, hash, hash,

rate goes down a little bit so that we get like, you know, like two, three p.m. or so in the afternoon. It's just nice and casual, right? We could just kick back and relax, and this doesn't go super early into the like wee hours. I would like to have a margarita while the merge happens, yes. Same. Just like afternoon, early evening. That would be so relaxing. But, yeah, there's nothing we could do.

I guess we don't really know what the hash rate is going to do. Is there any reason to believe that miners might drop off as the merge gets closer? It makes sense for miners to not come online as we get closer to the merge. So that makes sense to me. Like if you have late, no one's investing in Ethereum Improvework now. That's too late. And so it only makes sense for it to stay the same or drop off. It's one of those things that there's a little bit of game theory behind this, right?

So if like 50% of miners the day before the merge, just like, all right, let's like pack up shop. Well, then you're actually making it twice as profitable for the 50% of miners that stick around for that last remaining day. Right. And so, like, I don't know. I kind of think if you will have a miner, minor, the only reason why you would want to shut down your mining rigs is to sell your GPUs before the rest of miners sell their GPUs. But I don't really know how liquid the GPU market is or how relevant that is. I don't know. It's probably likely, though, they'll just stay and continue to squeeze the remaining proof of work juice out of this.

It's still extremely profitable to be a miner or so. Yeah. All right, David. Let's get to our Fed Watch. That was our Merge Watch. coming soon, man. Just next couple of weeks, of course, the merge. But the Fed Watch. So as I said earlier, Jerome Powell was out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He gave a policy speech. And this sent markets tumbling. Here is a CNBC article Powell warns of some pain, in quotes, ahead,

as the Fed fights to bring down inflation. The Fed chairman Jerome Powell on Friday pledged, that's last Friday, that the central bank will use our tools forcefully to attack inflation. It's still running, and it's running near its highest level in more than 40 years. So he gave a speech. He said it would take some time. I think the TLDR of this is Powell is saying the Federal Reserve has to continue raising rates and even hold them at the higher level that's coming soon until at least inflation is under control. And that's at the cost of jobs possibly.

So unemployment could continue to rise, and Powell is saying he'll continue to be to be hawkish. So even though he's saying that, though, David, what's interesting is the market is still predicting that rate cuts will start around summer of next year, June of like 2023, if you kind of look at the like what the market is pricing in. So today, the Fed rate, the target rate is between, you know, two and a half, two and a quarter to 2.5%. And the market is pricing a 70% chance that we increase by another 75 basis points September 21st. So that would be the next time the Fed might increase rates. So Powell continued to be hawkish. Of course, this sent markets for a tumble, the NASDAQ, the S&P, and people are blaming this on the crypto dive as well.

This is why ETH is down 10% on the week. I think the other take I heard was that we had one month of inflation that didn't get higher. And then everyone was like, it's reversing. It's over. It's over. And then people were like, wait, no, that was just like one month worth of data. Like we're still in this few more months. Yeah.

And this is Powell playing kind of the bad cop and saying, yeah, we need more time. Inflation is not dead yet. And I will continue to try to squeeze it out of existence. This reminds me, though, David, next week we have Arthur Hayes on the podcast. Oh, yeah. And you ask him a really interesting question that I think you've asked a number of our macro guests and our merge guests here recently. And that question is, which is more powerful in the trading world, in the price world? The merge or macro?

I've been asking this question so many times to so many people. and I finally got someone to give me the answer that I wanted. And now that becomes the bona fide correct answer in my opinion. I think we all know what answer you wanted. So we won't even say it. But tune into that episode. It's a special episode coming out on the bankless podcast on Wednesday. On Wednesday.

On YouTube on Wednesday of next week. Wednesday. Arthur Hedys on bankless. What do we got coming up next, David? Oh, God. Avalanche playing dirty, suing other blockchains. Blockchain suing blockchains. Is that even allowed?

Apparently it is. Michael Saylor, gonna have to sell Bitcoin? Not because he wants to, of course, but because he got in trouble with the law, naughty, naughty. And of course, Maker Dow die drama. Is Dai going to depeg from Maker Dow on purpose? So all of these stories and so much more after that

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And Ledger is running its own validating nodes, offering a convenient way to participate in network validation, and it even comes with slashing insurance. Ledger Live is truly becoming the battle station for the bankless world. So go download Ledger Live. If you have a ledger already, you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets. All right, guys, we are back with the first news item. of this segment is avalanche playing dirty there's some drama in the space maybe some legal

things flying around i got to be honest david with with uh some of these stories coming out i haven't been following them in depth because i i guess maybe i'm at that point with like i just don't care that much well that makes sense coming from you because this is something strictly outside of crypto economics this is like meets based lawyer stuff and that's why this story is what it is is because, like, you guys, like, the claim is that Avalanche is playing a game outside of the game. And that's probably why you don't care. That's why I think about that. So catch me up.

Like, what actually happened? And then maybe at the end I'll tell you whether I care or not. Yeah. So this website, CryptoLeaks.Info, this is actually the first time I've ever discovered this website. CryptoLeaks.comfo published a very long and with lots of, like, content, whistleblower article that is basically claiming that Ava Labs and this one lawyer law firm, Rosh Friedman, is suing, like, systemically suing as many different like blockchains, L-1s as they can in order just to like play dirty. And so player number one, we have Ava Labs, the for-profit company behind Avalanche, led by CEO Eminem Goon-Sir, employees about 150

people. Player number two, Roche Friedman, a law firm that widely sues people in crypto, currently running 25 class action lawsuits, including Binance, uh, Avalabs competitor Salana, DFINITY, and a few others, and is being led by Kyle Roche, who's another big player in the story and employs about 30 lawyers. The claim here is that some years ago,

Ava Labs and Roche Friedman made a deal, a pact that was formed that involved Ava Labs granting Roche Friedman, R-O-C-H-F-E-Friedman. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. A massive quantity of Ava Lab stock

and Avalanche cryptocurrency A-V-A-V-X now worth hundreds of millions of dollars in its game for Roch Friedman agreeing to pursue a hidden purpose. And this is what this claim, this whistleblower Cryptoleaks. Info is claiming what that hidden purpose is. Purpose number one. Serapitiously causing harm to competitors. If there are two horses competing in a race, you can hack at the leg of the other and the other one will win. Their horses, Avax and Ava Lab stock, and initiating a class action lawsuit against competitors can harm them in multiple ways. So they have secretly weaponized

the legal system to do this. Even when they only make a weak case, such that, with a high probability that they lose their own litigation, this can still cause harm to their targets greatly profiting them in the long run. Moving the price of AVAX by only a small amount by harming competitors can produce big gains for them while they make sales from their huge hoard of Avax tokens and Ava Lab stock. Basically, the idea is that you go and sue your competitors and then they have to take resources to fight this class action lawsuit, whatever, this litigation in order to defend themselves. And so, like, Like, you only spend $5 to $10 million on, like, trying to sue them, and they spend tens plus millions of dollars trying to defend themselves.

And then the second purpose, luring regulators, including the SEC and CFTC, away from Ava Labs. They often litigate against competitors in ways that make them look guilty of regulatory transgressions. Directing the intentions of regulators towards competitors can cause further harm to them and also serves to lure regulators away from Ava Labs. and their ravenously commercial behavior, which regulators would otherwise be very interested in. Kyle tells that he litigates to create other magnets for regulators to go after, and they do this to crypto actors who are not obvious competitors, basically throwing other teams, organization companies under the bus

to make sure that Ava Labs doesn't become a target of the SEC or CFTC. Can I pause here and make sure I'm following so far? All right. So there's this website called CryptoLeaks, and they claim to be a website that supports like whistleblowers. So if you see something, you know, skeevy and scammy and sketchy, you email them, you give them the evidence of the data, and they'll report it on your behalf, right?

So what we have is a whole blog post full of maybe some evidence, looks like some video evidence, of this dubious law firm Roche, and the charge that basically Ava Labs gave this lawyer tokens. And equity. and equity in exchange for him going after their competitors in like kind of like sleazy legal type ways yeah which is just like um suing them for kind of dubious reasons right and like costing them money yes but then also like drawing attention from regulators away from like your entity your organization and towards the other entity so this is the charge so

far is this correct yeah there's like videos to support this is this yeah i've watched some of these videos and like it's a combination of these videos and this fact that this law firm does indeed own like used to own over one percent of all avax tokens and now owns uh less um but then also you know would assume it also goes with ava lab's capital as well uh and so like there's just like a lot of dots that all seem to line up to support these claims uh now there there is some skeptic skepticism to the legitimacy of this website that we're looking at in the first place. We'll get to that at the end. But let's continue into this story.

The concept, why this works is kind of like an exploit of the American legal system using class actions in which class actions can claim to be representing groups of people who they claim to be harmed. So like Roche Friedman says, I represent the token holders of Solana. And Solana is actually illegal security. And Solana went down in price. And so because I'm getting to represent salon holders, I'm going to sue so the Solana Founders. I'm going to sue the Salana Foundation, regardless of whether Roche Friedman actually is a salonah holder

or cares about salonah holders or actually believes the thing that he's saying. So, for example, they actually did file a lawsuit against the DFINITY Foundation, essentially parroting the false claims of Arkham Intelligent. I don't know who that is. The purpose is to damage the reputation of their targets and surround their brands in Fudd.

And so also, importantly, once Roche Friedman goes into litigation against a target, one of their enemies, the so-called, they can harvest and collect confidential information, which they are using them using in legal discovery. And then they can pass that discovery phase information over to Ava Labs. So Ava Labs can see what DFINITY is doing. Like it's like an espionade or like spy stuff.

It's ridiculous. This is like corporate legal like slees type stuff that's going on. Really is. That's allegedly going on. That's allegedly going on, right? So last little bit here. Roche Ruehman. can spend a few million dollars litigating against an Avalapse competitor and lose the case

and still come out on top if their actions harm or suppress a blockchain that competes with Avalanche, since their actions may drive the price of Avax significantly higher such that the size of their solings and they can make a substantial profit. And so Kyle Roche issued a response in his medium article that basically says that like this is all fake. He says a posting on recently launched anonymous CryptoLeaks website about me, my firm in Ava Labs, contained. numerous unsourced false statements and illegally obtained, highly edited video clips that are not presented with accurate context. These videos were recorded without my consent during private meetings with Christian Ager Hansen, whom I now know works for Dominic Williams, the creator of ICP

token. And the defendant is a high-profile securities fraud litigation my firm brought against him. Mr. Agar Hansen requested a meeting with me under false pretenses of venture capital investment in a technology startup, but his real motives are now clear to deceive and entrap me. When I agreed to the meeting, I was unaware that Mr. Agar Hansen specializes what he calls conflict management for eccentric billionaires like Mr. Williams, where he uses illegal and underhanded means, including covert recordings and social engineering to solve their legal issues. Basically, Kyle saying, like, yeah, this guy, like, I was framed.

I was framed. Yeah. But also, like, if you do watch the videos, like, yeah, like, I also, if I was Kyle, would not want those videos to go public. So we're not going to play these videos. You can go link him into the show notes. Also a tweet from Emin of Avalanche, who says, how could anyone believe something so ridiculous as the conspiracy theory nonsense on

crypto leaks? We would never engage in the unlawful, unethical, just plain wrong behavior claimed in these self-serving videos in inflammatory articles. Our team and tech speak for themselves. There's also some interesting tweets cited by some people in the community below this one, where Emin is retweeting one of Kyle Roche's lawsuit against Tether and the manipulation of cryptocurrency prices. And then another one.

Back in 2020, the Avalanche Twitter account and Avalanche blog makes a tweet citing introducing the initial litigation offering, bringing the $10 billion asset class of litigation financing to Avalanche and retail investors for the first time. Again, another like Roche, Kyle Roche law firm like part. partnership with Ava Labs. So like the part in this partnership and this weird like litigation fascination with Avalanche has a history. And so that's one of these dots that are being played out. Here's Ari Paul's, uh, Ari David Paul, who is the CIO of Block Tower Capital unrelated to all parties. So like kind of a neutral onlooker. Uh, and he, uh, he's reading this

case and his take is that I assume it's correct and it's as bad as his looks. Fits with everything I've seen previously from both Surier and Roche from a lawyer's from on Roach a few weeks ago, dumb version of mob lawyers bottom of the barrel. Oof. But then he also continues further down and says, I will say some credible lawyers at Ava Labs, I respect, tell me Roche's claims are false. They can't slash won't share any evidence of that due to attorney client privilege. I don't know what evidence they could have absence of a private conversation, but I respect them enough to, A, believe they're not lying and B remain, but, and B remain open minded to see what evidence becomes available. And so, and also this

CryptoLeaks website is generally assumed by also neutral third party onlookers to be like a front for ICP, DFINITY. What? Yeah. Yeah. So apparently the CryptoLeaks website is like something that the ICP. So this is not like an open source, like anonymous, someone trusted from the community. It's just this also could be a large corporation behind this crypto leaks website.

And these could be just two crypto networks battling it back and forth. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How dumb. This is just, it is quite ridiculous. Does this have a resolution in any way? It's like,

it just seems like back and forth. It seems sketchy, unlike all sides concerned, possibly. It's just like, this is some bear market stuff. You know, all right ones like start slinging mud at each other during the bear market. My take on this is that, you know,

I was going down this rabbit hole to understand how to report on it on it for this particular, this particular story that we're talking about right now. And there's a, click on that link that I'm quote retreating, Ryan. There's this guy that tweets out a couple screenshots from Ava Avalanche, like,

you know, Twitter supporters. And then this one Twitter account says, this is their intention to just make fud. I believe Avalanche and Emin as the father of blockchain would never do such a thing. Their only goals to prevent emergence of Avax, but they are not and will not succeed.

forward to the next screenshot, copy and paste the same thing. Fast forward to the next crypto Twitter account who's like supporting Avalanche, copy and paste the same thing. Like this text is a little bit different, but it says basically the same thing. And so like, and this goes, this reminds me of this article I wrote back in late 2020 about Avalanche and how they,

this is verified true. Like this is not like conspiracy would pay like frog accounts, frog crypto Twitter accounts in Avax tokens. for engagement on crypto Twitter? Frog Twitter accounts are just like pseudonymous crypto accounts that tend to represent themselves as like frogs and they seem like they're kind of bot controlled

or robot controlled, right? Yes, very like puppet, like sock puppet Twitter accounts that put on like both a Pepe Frog image but also with like an avalanche hat and they're like, oh, I'm an avalanche supporter, but like there's just fake engagement and then- Social engineering purposes.

Social engineering, yeah. And like we know this is true. There were chat rooms and I wrote this story called on frogs back in 2020 when I was going my first war with the frogs of like there's been like three now. And like there you there was actually just like concerted telegram rooms where like you would post your engagement. It's like, oh, I made a tweet about Avalanche. Here's my tweet. And then you would be given a tip in Avax tokens. Like we know that this happened. And so like this culturally, in my opinion, is like very aligned. Like they're willing to play dirty and they always have.

And so allegedly, David, we don't know for sure. But you know what? I got to say that the spiky sense that we've had about this sort of thing. And I think like you've had when you see these like sock puppet accounts and it feels organized and it feels concerted and they're all chanting the same chant, probably there's been like four times I've seen it like at a fever pitch. One is like chain link back in like 2019, 2020. And then that kind of died down. The other is avalanche, as you said. The other is Danny Sesta.

Yeah, he controlled the frogs for a while too. And he was a frog puppeteer. And we all know how that ended earlier this year. And the other was kind of like the terror community and Doe Kwan. And this felt like a lot of stock puppet accounts again. And I'm not sure that it totally was. But like all of those communities, when you kind of dip to toe in the water and you like put forward arguments, it just, something felt off something felt like not quite right something felt rotten in those cases and it turned out to be like at least in two out of the four so far things were kind of bad yeah right right yeah i mean doing there's like a deal with a devil that you make when you try and promote your blockchain and your asset without doing like the things that you should be doing which is trade up innovative protocol engineering and you start like you know you should

shooting people in the hamstrings in order to get ahead. Well, here's a call for everyone to get back to building. Yes, please. And to stop with kind of the social shenanigans and stop with kind of the legal shenanigans because we are sick, I'm sick. I think you are sick of talking about it in the roll-ups. But that's what, that was a big thing making waves this week. So we had to cover it.

What else we got, David? God, Michael Saylor is getting sued for tax fraud. So the District of Columbia is sued. Michael Saylor for over $100 million of unreported income or untaxed income that should have been paid to the District of Columbia, but Michael Saylor claimed to be living in Florida when he was actually living in his very large apartment in the District of Columbia. So, yeah. So Michael Saylor and his company facing legal accusations that led to systemic tax fraud and penalties that could amount to more than $100 million. Attorney General for Washington, D.C., said in a statement,

that Saylor has lived in the District of Columbia for more than a decade and has never paid local income taxes despite earning hundreds of million dollars in cash and micro strategy equity options over that period. And so there is a tweet, an actual tweet out from the District of Columbia Attorney General, yes, saying, today we are suing Michael Saylor, a billionaire tech executive that has lived in D.C. for more than a decade, but has never paid any D.C. income for tax fraud, blah, blah, blah. Saylor personally avoided more than $25 million of DC taxes by pretending to be a resident of other jurisdictions with significantly lower personal income taxes.

Michael Strategy is also named as a defendant in this, Ryan, alleging that the firm conspired to help him evade taxes. I mean, since Michael Taylor is the controlling owner of Michael of Micro Strategy, he can just tell Micro Strategy that that's how it's going to be. And then so a quote says, Michael or Sailor is going to have to probably peel off some Bitcoin, depending on where that Bitcoin is in the eventual judgment comes down. Almost nobody beats tax fraud allegations, but we'll see. There's nearly 130,000 Bitcoins that Michael Strategy held as of June 30th and was purchased for an average price of $30,600 apiece. Bitcoin is now trading at below $20,000 by the close of New York stock trading hours on Wednesday.

And Micro Strategy also reported a net loss of $1.1 billion due to the drop in BTC price. And still, Sailor, during the recent earnings call, says that the company would seek to continue requiring and holding Bitcoin long term with no eventual plans of selling. And another quote from the article says, everyone knows he's long Bitcoin. If Bitcoin continues to decline, micro strategy stock could go down by another 30% and get absolutely hammered. And at what point can you turn around to your shareholders with a straight face and say that you are not selling? End quote. Oof. Oof. Yeah. So I guess the summary is there could be some sell pressure. Sell pressure.

sell pressure on Bitcoin. But of course, this is... Yeah, because Michael Saylor has to get settled in court. So, right, this is a prosecutor going after a defendant. I'm sure Saylor will bring a case forward, and the courts will decide whether this indeed was tax fraud or not. Hard for me to like, I mean, definitely could have happened. I could definitely see it happening.

But also, in our system, we have to obviously presume innocence. And the court systems are the things that decide the. outcome here. So, you know, presuming, definitely in innocence, of course. However, Michael Saylor, there's a quote from Tier 10K that says TLDR, Taylor pretend to live in Florida for taxes, but actually lived in D.C. Frequent flexing on Facebook, private jet

flight logs and talking about tax evasion on podcast got him nabbed by the feds. So yeah, Sailor was known to talk about like all like the tax evasion tax. Oh, that'll get you. Yeah, as a very public person. So You know, there's always that rule that I like to live by, Ryan, is don't do more than one illegal thing at once. Otherwise, you'll get now for them all. That is now recorded on a podcast, David. You're happy to know that.

Here's somebody replying to this tweet, noted, if committing a crime, don't talk about it on podcasts. Don't talk about crimes on a podcast, yeah. All right. We'll try and apply this to my own life is what the poster says. Good lesson for us all there. Okay, maker drama. What is happening with Maker? Trauma just keeps on coming.

Okay, so Maker is a stable coin. It is one-to-one pegged with the dollar. Always has been. Always will be? Question mark. And this is what, so my following of this, I haven't read this summary from Greg here, which we're about to get into,

is Rune Christensen, one of the founders of Maker and kind of representative of a core cohort of Maker, is really spooked and really freaked out by the recent tornado cash OFAC sanction action. And he's worried that the current plan, which is backing die up by RWA's real-world assets, which has really been the strategy of multicilateral die,

might not be resilient enough for nation-state level attack that he seems to think is like on its way or imminent. And so is his answer to this? Again, David, I haven't read all the posts. I haven't gotten into all the detail. This is the answer to this, we depeg from the dollar. And so we no longer use the dollar as our unit of account. And we start to become a free-floating currency in order to get around this,

maybe use different collateral assets that aren't as real-world dependent. Is that what's going on? Yeah, so we could read this like 38 tweet thread, which I think really does a fantastic job summarizing the complete state of Maker-Dow. Yeah. But ultimately, Rune Christensen just put forth what Greg DePricio and the Sweet Thread calls a decently, like, radical plan, such as depegging die. And so Greg says, Rune's latest plans are nothing short of radical to depeg die from the dollar and to push all core units and non-cryptovults into the theoretical contract of meta-dows, which has been part of Roon's endgame plan for a long time. He has the support of fellow futurists and the decentralists, which Greg has put Maker Dows.

like political parties into three camps. You got the futurist, the decentralist, and then the centrist maker or Rune was definitely in the futurist camp. But this like, and like people like Amin Soleimani and Chris Black have found themselves in like the decentralized camp. It was like get rid of all real old assets and anything that's like, you know, potentially censorable like USC. And so like Rune used to be a leader of the futurist camp still is,

but now has like taken a large leaf out of the decentralized camp to, make Maker Dow more censorship resistant. So that's a quick TLDR of the state of maker right now. It's very strange that they've gone from like lending funds to like a Tesla subsidiary or something like this and like lending funds to like banks in Pennsylvania to a reaction from the community to say like let's get rid of real world assets entirely. Let's not even peg to the dollar. Real world assets has been in.

MakerDAO's core ethos since day one. Yeah, right? Like that has been the whole shift to multicilateral to die and that, you know, shift, what Rune was a key part of that shift. So it's very interesting to see this emerging. And like for my part, I don't know which party you would kind of represent

like the futurist or the centralists or the decentralists. I probably always viewed a bit more towards the decentralized side of things. But also like, I was very glad that the multilateral die experiment was playing out. So I also very much valued kind of the centralists and the futurist approach that I was taking because other projects have taken the decentralist type approach

where all of their collateral is just backed by ETH and they've depegged. Like Rye is an example of this. And that is a free-floating asset that you can purchase right now. It tries to damp the volatility of ETH, but is incredibly decentralized relative. to like die and the real world asset type strategy. So what a, like, what's your take on this? Maker, the reason why there's three political parties is for good reason. Like they all have justifiable grounds to support the thing that they support. Well, this is, I'm just like shooting from the hip here.

But like, why don't we fork MakerDal and have the futurist maker Dell and the centrist makerdell and the centrist makerdell and the decentralized makerdell? And each one can produce their own stable coin. we'll have to sacrifice that net liquidity that we get from having one central stable coin. But then we have the super decentralized dollar pegged die stable coin. We have the futurist dollar pegged die stable coin that's based off of real world assets that plays nice with nation states and makes them happy. And like we can make a version of Maker Dow that corresponds to each one of these like ethos. And I think there's also a world where we do that. And that actually the MKR token is like the thing that's shared.

between all three of these models. So, like, and you have, like, the MKR governance token, but then you have, like, three Maker Dow commercial banks that are governed by the same MKR token. That's, like, my quick take. I don't know how feasible that is. Yeah, that I think that is an interesting take, and that indeed might be what happens.

But you said it yourself, the sacrifice there is you lose the shared liquidity of die, which is incredibly important. But I was talking to Kirk from Volt, from Volt Protocol, and he's a big fan of just, like, we don't really get super robust stability until we have many stable coins. And so, like, having many options is good. And so there's also synergies that happens as a result of that, too.

So you create all of these options and then maybe you kind of like tokenize those options together into kind of one basket, one basket, which becomes the staple coin. Yeah. It's interesting. I do think all of these factions will play out to some extent as they have already. David, what do we got coming up next? Oh my gosh, coming up next. New liquid-staked Eth token on the scene. Got another competitor to Lido Staked Eth

and Rocket Pool's R-Eath coming out from a big exchange. I wonder what exchange that is. And how a roll-up just made Ethereum seven times bigger. That's a big number, seven Ethereums. We also got Facebook and Instagram expanding their NFT offerings, which usually is like a big headline. And so we'll get into that as well. But also, I think a really funny story,

it's not that big of a headline, but funny story. com accidentally sends $10 million instead of $100 to an Australian woman woman. And Ryan, guess who's got a new house? The Australian woman's got a new house. So all these stories and more. After we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use

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at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. All right, guys, we are back. A new liquid staking token is on the scene. That is staked eith, but liquid. So you can do all the things that you do with the staked eith token that you do with ETH itself. Coinbase is the one doing this right now. David, what are the details here?

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. C-B-Eth, alongside R-Eth from Rocket Pool and staked S-T-Eth from Lido, we now got CBE. I think this is the first significant stake deeth derivative token from a centralized exchange. So that also enters the world of defy, stake to eat derivative tokens in DFI, now coming from Coinbase. It is important to note that, like, Coinbase charges a whopping 25% of your staking fees

if you stake with Coinbase. And so if you buy this CBEath in DeFi, you're implicitly paying that percentage. And so like the yields on these things, there's going to be a yield war ride on these like stake teeth derivative tokens, like, you know, who, who's going to be able to inject the most yield into their state teeth token? 25% fee on this one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And here's a Dune Analytics board about this.

So there is 654,000 CBEth so far right now. So that is about a billion in market cap. That's a ton. And so are you worried, David, that, like, you know, the centralized exchanges will come? Like, they are the liquidity engines of the entire. market because they have the gateway to fiat unlike many of like the rocket pool doesn't have that for example are you worried that something like cb eth is going to take from just using raw kind of liquidity power of its of its stake derivative token take from all of the centralized uh you know

options and from solo stakers i don't know i do always believe that the ethereum ecosystem has like the natural antibodies to resist centralization like this. Dan Elliter, when he wrote this piece, The Death of Ethereum, the Delegated ETH, was predicting this stuff like this would emerge eventually, and he was totally right. So it's actually kind of cool to be able to fast forward like two or three years after he wrote that article.

Like, oh, here we are. I mean, the 25% fee versus Lido's 10% and Rocket Pool's 15%. That's got to, It's got to mitigate that somehow. And also, like, if Rocket Pool had a bug and we lost all the ETH, like, that's a protocol. So, like, no one's really coming to save you if that ETH gets locked. If Coinbase has a bug and, like, depositors lose their ETH, like, I bet you Coinbase is going to figure out how to pay back those, that lost funds.

And so, like, there's probably some implied, like, insurance mechanisms based into some of these centralized ones that are pretty compelling. I don't really know, but I'm happy to see there's more competition on the market per all, per usual. Yeah, so, so am I. I'm happy to see the competition. I, you know, I, part, part of me wonders if we won't just have another lesson to learn in crypto, like some of these derivative staking, centralized derivative staking tokens will become like very big. And then at one point, something bad will happen. We talked about some of the bad scenarios in our episode with Justin Drake earlier this week, right? So maybe there's a social slashing type event. Maybe one of

these, the staking of this exchange goes down, maybe they start like censoring transactions. Maybe they like straight up lose their keys, right? Not your keys, not your crypto, right? So any CBE that you're purchasing, essentially the backing of that ETH, it's an IOU for an ETH that is held by Coinbase. So it's not at all the same risk profile of an EVE. Now I guess all this to say, I think investors will, and, you know, the holders will probably make the classic mistake of the look at the rewards and they'll look at the

UX and the ease of use, but they'll forget about the risk side of the equation because risk is very hard to measure. And there are a lot of risks that go hand in hand with using a centralized staking provider to stake your ETH. And the only time we really recognize the risks is when something like Celsius happens or 30s capital or like the Terra Luna fiasco. And then we're like, oh, okay, this is why we need decentralization. Oh, right. The decentralization thing. I forgot.

That is my worry, but I do think over time, like over the long, long run, we'll have a good balance of centralized and decentralized staking providers. And I think the episode of Justin gave me more hope on that. Speaking of more hope, scalability on the way, we teach this a few times, but Ethereum just got a 7X upgrade. Okay, this is an episode we did earlier this week. Arbitrim released 9. Nitro, which their original Arbitrum roll-up, Arbitrum 1 roll-up, was one-eth worth of space capacity.

You can think of it that way. And Nitro, just 7x that. So now we get seven Ethereums in Nitro. David, how do they do that? And what's kind of the news? They do that the way that we always make all transactions cheaper on blockchain is through compression. Magic developer compression technology that's like outside of my brain. But basically they went from one Ethereum worth of scale to seven Ethereum.

This is like a very rough way of explaining these things, but it's directionally correct. And basically that means that they figured out how to compress a arbitram transaction or a bundle of arbitram transaction seven times more previous versus previous. And so now there's just like a smaller per transaction footprint on the Ethereum layer one, which translates into cheaper gas costs on the Arbitrumb layer two. Absolutely. We did an episode. If you're looking for all the details behind that, we did an episode earlier this week

that you can access on the bankless feed, of course. David, optimism, no slouch either. They are just hitting all-time highs, I think, in their metric of gas used. That is block space used, compute used on optimism as well. So it's not just arbitrary moves heating up, optimism as well. Yeah, all-time high usage of optimism. Like, I've said it a bazillion times before.

You've said it to, like, all of the ingredients for a layer two summer, a layer two season is like here. You can't say summer anymore. Can't say summer. Yeah. Well, no, so summer is like growth period. It's like blossoming period. Yeah.

It's more of an analogy than it. We're going into winter in the upper hemisphere, but we're going into summer in the bottom hemisphere. It's always somewhere somewhere. Crypto exists in both hemispheres. Anyways, you know, optimism usage all the time high, Arbitrum Nitro on the scene. The Arbitrum community is absolutely stoked about Nitro. You can just feel it in the chat in the YouTube chat.

And so like the the blossoming of layer two, continues to blossom once again. There's a data giant. I don't know if you saw this, but a cloud data provider called Hertzner, I believe. Never heard of it before. Yeah, I've not either, but apparently it's very large. They just banned all Ethereum nodes.

So you can no longer run an Ethereum node in the Hertzner Cloud. This is, I guess, like a mini Amazon Web Services or something, like banning Ethereum nodes. And I guess they said not permitted. Using our products for any application related to mining, even remotely related, is not permitted. Hertzner said in a message to its customers. Even if you just run one node, we consider it a violation of our terms of service. They're taking a hard stance against anything crypto inside of their cloud.

I have no idea where that's coming from. Maybe they're worried about sanctions, David. I don't know the details, but I guess one take is good for. centralization that we'll get some of our nodes out of these cloud service providers. What's your take? Yeah, I don't really think these stories mean much. I was doing a call with Coinbase, one of the or like education education calls, and somebody asked this question about like, is this bad? And like this is also a conversation on Twitter. Is it bad that we have a ton of nodes in like cloud infrastructure? And in my mind, like, though, like if you host a node in a cloud infrastructure,

it's the most meaningless kind of node possible. Like, why do we run nodes in the It's because the cloud gives you the easiest and cheapest computer. If you need to run a node, you can either go to the store, buy a computer, build a computer, host one of yourself, and keep it up and running in your own apartment, or you can go to AWS and run a node there. It's always going to be easier to do it in the cloud, no matter what your cloud service provider is, but it's also, therefore, the most inconsequential. So if it goes down, you either just go to another cloud server, or if all of cloud servers

go down and they just outright ban all of the theorem stuff, then you go and build your own note. And so it's the same concept of like water flows downhill and nodes will be spun up on the infrastructure that's easiest to spin them up on just to make development easier. But that doesn't actually mean if you if there are like if they say for say Ryan there's about like 10,000 Ethereum nodes out there, maybe 20,000. Maybe we add on like 20, 200,000 Ethereum nodes on AWS. That has no meaningful consequence on the direction of the Ethereum blockchain that doesn't give Jeff Bezos any undo control, it just means we have a ton of nodes in ADWS. Yeah, and if he bans them all, we just route around him. We just route around him. And like, if Jeff Bezos says like, oh, all of these

nodes that are in AWS, I want them to listen to the OFAC chain of Ethereum. Well, those are meaningless nodes because the more meaningful nodes are the ones that are run by individual community members that are just like inside of your own homes. Those are the more valuable versions of nodes. And even if you went to the worst case scenario where all the cloud providers together colluded, which is like very improbable, they all colluded and they said no Ethereum inside of our cloud infrastructure, it would be a pain

in the ass. It would be like a UX problem temporarily. It would slow us down, but then we'd route around. We'd use decentralized networks. We'd use like IPFS. We'd use like BitTorrent type, P2P type technology. And the network would still continue until they

relax their policies. You can of course always go to Ethereumnodes.com and see just a list of publicly available Ethereum nodes that you can hook into at any time that you want. I think, David, they'll be forced to reverse this kind of thing

because the greatest defense that crypto has and will always have is the value it brings to the world, the utility. Yeah. Right? And so once it would start, that utility starts to kick in,

then Hertzstner is going to reverse their decision to be like, oh, we like NFTs. Oh, we have to run Ethereum nodes in order to have all of these, you know, all of our customers who want NFT infrastructure, okay, we've reversed that decision.

I mean, that's how it happens. That's my take on this is like somebody just saw like, O-FAC, Ethereum, and then they're like, are we exposed to this? And then they say, oh, we are exposed to this. You know what we should do? Ban Ethereum. And like they put that much thought into it. Yeah, exactly.

Vitalik maybe put a lot of thought into the book that he is releasing. By the way, this book is on its way to my house, David. And if you've got your copy. I haven't gotten my copy yet now. It's called Proof-State. This is Vitalik's first book. I think this is like a rehash of many things that he's, written. It's kind of co-written with him and another writer who's taken some of his work. But I think

Vitalik's goal here is to actually talk to kind of the philosophy of crypto and the blockchain, as he does so often on his blog and not talk so much about like kind of the price and other things. So I'm looking forward to getting this. But he just released a digital copy, NFT copy with all of the proceeds going to Gitcoin. I think there's been like 100 eth or something. raised so far. Wow. I'm not sure what the latest is. It's great.

But pretty impressive. Yeah, we were making that joke. The first time this was announced that, like, all this Ethereum merge thing is for Fatalek to be able to sell his book. It's a terrible, terrible joke. I did ask Vitalik, hey, Vitalik, you want to come on Bank Cliffs? We can talk about your book. He's like, well, the book is just like an aggregation of everything I've talked on

banklis over the last, like, 15 episodes I've been on. But of course, I'm still going to buy it. I'm not going to not buy Vitalik's book. Obviously. Instagram, David. Facebook and Instagram are allowing the posting of NFTs. I think this is in some specific areas, but this is meta,

continuing progress on adoption of NFTs. Any thoughts on this? I still haven't seen usage of it inside my corner of Instagram. They're just testing it with some select US creators right now. Yeah. So, yeah. Wait, wait until the usage.

You're waiting for the usage? Waiting for the usage. This is what it looks like. I'm showing a screenshot here. just sold an NFTs. This is an NFT, I guess, on Instagram. All I really see is just like a bunch of surface area for NFT haters to hate more on NFTs. Wow, that's another subject. And it reminds me of our next link here, which is Reddit just launched their NFTs, but notably the term NFT is not mentioned. Yeah, smart. It's a situation. All of a sudden, everyone loves NFTs if we just stop calling them

NFTs. Do NFTs have a very bad name at this point? They're almost like, I feel like they're like ICOs were in 2017, except in a broader audience because ICOs didn't get very broad. Right. But NFTs went on Jimmy Fallon, went completely mainstream. And now suddenly everyone hates them. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's right. Why do you think that is? Just price? Yeah, it's like it's like that in-group out-group thing. Like why are people spending $10,000 on like a monkey instead of a instead of like normal stuff. And also just like I will always say that when there is NFT hate,

it's because we as an industry haven't created NFT, either the NFT that that person wants specifically for them or the form factor isn't right yet. Like all of these free NFTs or NFTs that you like naturally accrue in your like gaming app that aren't labeled as NFTs are going to win hearts and minds as soon as we figure out how to make those damn things. Because the brand of NFTs down bad. But, you know, I saw, speaking of Reddit, I saw a Reddit post.

And I just, like, clicked in it because it was, like, interesting title to me. It was, what's the most annoying way to start a sentence was the prompt, right? And so all of the Redditors, like, replied with their response. And one of the most, like, upvoted one was this. You start a sentence with this. As an NFT owner, I think that. So in the future, the statement as an NFT owner is going to make very little sense because NFT is just a form factor. It's just a, it's just a file standard. If you replied that in that,

in that thread, you would have been downvoted so hard, David. There's a reason why I don't engage in, like, I don't try and defend NFTs on Reddit, Ryan. I have better things to do with my time. Well, it's, it, but I also think that some people are, um, kind of rebelling or reacting to you the way they've experienced NFTs from like NFTs or like NFTs or like influencers who've tried to show them things. And so this is all part of the visceral reaction. Yep. This two show passed. Let's go to Ticketmaster.

What are they up to do you give? Also using NFTs in the flow blockchain to let event organizers issue NFTs tied to tickets. Now, I do think this means that the NFTs themselves are tickets, but they can also be other things as well. Simply like just memorabilia or like a ticket stub or something just to commemorate the event. You know, I was thinking about this, Ryan, I, we've, me, definitely, have been highly critical of flow as a blockchain because it's just like the ripple of NFTs. They're highly centralized. But I actually don't hate this use case for the flow blockchain. Neither do I, man. I don't hate it. I think this one is like, I don't even hate NBA top shots on flow. I don't hate any of it. Yeah, I think that's

right. Yeah. Like assets like a like a crypto punk or like a board ape need to be on Ethereum because those are very close to like financial assets with a lot of capital. But like blockchains are host data now and for and forever. And I'm not sure that like tick. I don't want tickets on main net Ethereum, do you? I don't think that makes a ton of sense. So this use case of flow does make sense to me. I think these are great use cases for like, you know, side chains and like even, even chains like we're talking with Arbitram Nova, which don't use Ethereum as a data availability

layer in are far cheaper or even like centralized, I guess like centralized databases, right? I mean, that's kind of what this is. But at some level, though, at some point, you start to get where the chain itself is so centralized and so closed. That's just kind of like, why do it anyway? Why is it a blockchain anyway? Why not just have a database? So I'm not sure where that line is, but. That's a good point.

Yeah. There's something there. All right. Do you remember the Goose NFT? Yeah. It's the ArtBlocks NFT. Yeah. That was sold for like $5.3 million, I think, to three hours capital.

Yeah. Yes. and I think Suu had the famous tweet, our thesis is, it looks like a goose. No, the thesis is we like the goose. We like the goose.

Yes. That's the exact quote. And it does look like a goose. And at the time, everyone thought, genius. This is amazing. This is the future. You know what that's worth?

$5.5 million because it looks like a goose. Wow. I wonder what it's worth now. I guess the goose was just sold a year ago on the 27th. Two, three hours capital. Two, three hours capital. And now it's a year ago. it's part of a bankruptcy liquidation process.

So people are speculating that's actually going to go for more than $5.2 million. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Just because of the story. I can't even know. It's now like, it's just like instantiated in people's brains. It's very legendary. This is what the goose took the trillion dollar hedge fund or the, you know,

$20 billion hedge fund down. Right. That's the story. The fund of straw that broke three error capital's back. The goose that broke three errors capital is back. Beautiful. See, now you're feeding into it. just made it more valuable. Good job, dude.

Totally. In interesting news on the regulatory side, the FBI just issued a warning over vulnerable DFI platforms, and they outlined three specific attack vectors, and they cited the $1.3 billion in crypto that was stolen just the first quarter of this year. So this is the FBI, David, saying, guys, get your stuff together. You're making our jobs hard. You're making our jobs hard. And also, like, basically, the America's enemies, like, are taking this money.

What percentage of GDP do you think North Korea made on crypto hacks last year? What percent of their GDP? Minimum of double digits. Right? Yeah. Like, that's incredible. So you can understand where they're coming from. How else does North Korea make money?

How do they – what's the North Korean business model? There is not much coming in. I mean, it's all kind of like – you know, raw, like materials, like physical materials and this sort of thing, right? Sadly, it's definitely not coming in from other sources. And so the FBI said, here are some attack vectors, defy, you should watch out for. Flash loans, watch out for those. And they name a project, Project BZX, where thieves got $55 million.

Exploiting a vulnerability in defies in token bridges, such as the Nomad token bridge. or manipulating cryptocurrency prices by exploding oracles. Like, this is the FBI getting to the details. They just described a flash load attack, a bridge attack, and an Oracle attack here. And I understand. So I guess what I would say is I very much understand where executive branch is coming from in these types of things because they're having to clean up, they're having to be the enforcement when things get stolen in the real world and go like this is this is this is who the defy companies the bridges got

they're calling the FBI and saying hey can you help us guys like criminals made off with our money and that guy's like what are you doing you left the doors open yeah get your stuff together this is kind of goes back to our conversation of like we need like new internet police like new we need like the the white hat version of like that sounds scary it does sound scary we need like the white hat version of like the Lazarus group like oh the Lazarus group just hack that bridge, well, we need like the un-Lasarus, the Lazarus undoers to, like, go hack the Lazarus group to get our funds back. Like, we need something like that. Yeah. And we need like Internet Avengers. More robust code as well. Internet Avengers.

Yeah, that sounds way better. Sam Cun would be, uh, would be on there. Yeah. David, give us the story. Oh, God, this is hilarious. Okay. Crypto, the crypto.com 10.5 million dollar accident. So crypto.com accidentally transferred $10.5 million to a woman instead of $100. The women user, customer of crypto.com, asked for a $100 refund, which they just happily refunded her, but they instead refunded her $10.5 million instead of $100. What happened was that they accidentally entered her account number into the payment field rather than the refund amount and then hit send. And of course, you know, irreversible blockchain transactions.

this is how this happens. And so after, and that was seven months ago. That happened seven months ago and they didn't realize it. So for seven months, this lady received $10.5 million. And you know what she did with that money, Ryan? I'm sure she gave it all back to Crypto.com the moment she received it. I'm sure she did not do that. So what she actually did was bought a 1.35 million four bedroom property in Melbourne.

and then smartly, immediately transferred the ownership of that property to her own sister who lives in Malaysia, which has made it extremely difficult for crypto.com to get their money back. Wow. Because she, like, quickly bought a house and then transferred ownership of that house to somebody who's, like, irrelevant. And so, like, I'm sure this lady's going to get in trouble. Like, yeah, like, you, that's, I'm sorry, no. Like, and that's money not, this is not yours. Yeah.

But she bought a house. gave it to someone. And so like, now they have to go undo that, which that has to go to courts. And I don't really know how that's going to unfold. A bank has made an error in your favor. Collect $10.5 million. And then go buy a mansion with it and give it to your sister. Wow. That's great. That's so funny. All right. Quick rebrand in the Orca Protocol world. Orca Protocol is now Metropolis. And they are opening up their pods for beta access. I did a, layer zero with Julia Rosenberg about Orca, now Metropolis, and about how Orca, now Metropolis, allows DOWs to become modular.

So Ryan and I believe that the future of blockchains are modular blockchains. And I also believe that the future of Dows are modular Dows rather than monolithic Dals. And Metropolis, Metropolis Protocol, is pioneering this future. So they are now having a rebrand and they are open for beta. Right, cool. Metropolis, like the city, I guess. Like the cities, yeah. Moving on to raises, you know, proof.

So this is Kevin Rose's initiative around the proof collective and the moonbirds community. Yeah, the one that's behind your head right now. Yes, the one that's behind my head right now. They just raised $50 million from A16Z and many more. I feel like at some point in time we're going to have to get caught up with Kevin Rose to see what they are doing with all of this funding. But I think they're going big on this stuff, creating a, an entire ecosystem, creating like entirely new worlds around proof.

And I'm pretty excited to see what they, what they deliver, what they build. And I feel like, thank God we have Kevin Rose building out this frontier of what you can do in this corner of like the Web 3 universe, like a real use case for NFTs with real value. Because he knows what he's doing. And he's putting all of his energy behind it. Like this isn't just like a side project. He's intentfully like building out. He's like he's pioneering this.

this frontier single-handedly. And I thank him for that service. Totally good. All right, Reddit. Do you know Alexis O'Hanian? I guess we just talked about Dig. Now we have to talk about Reddit, huh? Alexis O'Hanian. He just raised $177 million crypto fund.

So this is all going to crypto. The quote says, now is potentially a unique opportunity to invest in strong founders at a discount. This is from Lexus Ohanian and their marketing material. I love that he says a unique opportunity to invest in strong founders at a discount because back at the top of the market in 2021, like the favor was definitely in the hands of founders. And it's like, who wish, give me all of your money, VCs, because you're totally going to give it all to me. And now the tide, the tables have turned very much in favor of VCs with capital.

And so that leads us into the next raise with Genesis raising $500 million, Galaxy and Genesis, exactly. raised $500 million because, you know, power is in the hands of the VCs. And so there's still plenty of private money out there going into crypto startups. Well, I mean, very good strategy, obviously, for VCs to raise during the bull market and then deploy during the bear market. And of course, that's a good strategy for you, too, retail investor. Like if you're thinking about these markets, right? Better to buy during the dip or when things are quiet than by the top. David, got to talk about jobs. This is our opportunity, your opportunity, I should say, if you're a listener to Bankless,

to go get a job in crypto. We've got the Jobs Board here from Bankless. I'm going to read out a few jobs. Number one, from Superformist, senior back-end engineer. Bit Green, a full-stack developer. Oh, my God, David has lights this time, a software engineer. Market Data at Massari, another software engineer over media. D-Y-D-X needs a...

a back-end software engineer, steakfish, an HR business partner. What's that, David? Back-end engineer, full-stack software engineer at Steakfish, a front-end, and a DevOps engineer at Steakfish, too. Bankless needs somebody over media operations, doing podcasts and such. Boardroom labs needs a software engineer over Dow governance.

Go get a job in crypto. Now's your opportunity. We will include a link to the Bankless Job Board. You can subscribe to the job boards and get these delivered to you on a daily weekly bank. basis, we will remind you every week as well in the meanwhile until you get a job in crypto. And then we'll continue to say it, won't we? Yeah, we will. Get two jobs in crypto. Start

another podcast in crypto. What do we got next, David? Coming up next, questions from the nation. Lots of eath staking questions. So if you have questions about eastaking, maybe this is one of yours. And also an interesting question, what about bitcoin maxis do we agree with, right? Huh. Yeah. And then of course, following that, some hot take. from crypto Twitter. So stay tuned for all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. All right, guys, we are back. As a reminder, if you have a question for David and myself, you can ask that question. Follow bankless HQ. We tweet out a question every Wednesday, reply to that tweet, get your question answered.

This is the first one from avigupta.eith. It's a staking question, David. When I stake via all these providers like Lido Finance and Stakewise, who am I trusting my ETH with? And can my ETH get Slashed, David, who is Avi trusting when he is staking his ETH with Lido and Stakewise? Yeah, so, you know, not your keys, not your crypto, and not your keys, not your validator. And so when you stake with Lido, you're staking the Lido system, the Lido Dow. And so your ETH in Lido specifically goes into one of 24 validators. And if, if, it also, I guess, get commingled with all the other depositors. but say, for example, like one of the Lido validators, one of the 24 of them gets slashed

holistically, like they lose all of that ether, then I guess like Lido becomes like under collateralized by one 24th. Stakewise, like I'm sure they have like a network of validators too. But basically, you're giving up your rights as a validator, your ability to sign messages to whoever you trust. So if you stake your ether with Coinbase, you're trusting Coinbase. If you're staking with ether with stakewise, you're just trusting stakewise. If you stake wise, if you stake your ether with rocket pool, you're trusting the rocket pool protocol. And so can your eth get slashed? It's like, well, that's up to the facts and circumstances of every single provider.

Anyone can get slashed for all of the reasons that one would get slashed. It's definitely not something that is like accidental. Like you are either trying to attack Ethereum and your double signing blocks and that'll get you slashed. That's a big slash. That's a big slash. You don't just accidentally do that. You know, like, oh, I think I'm an accidentally attack Ethereum today.

If people like misconfigure their networks badly enough, that's when it can happen. seen that happen. But that's also extremely avoidable, right? It's the idea of like you have a redundant computer to start signing messages if your first computer goes down. But the risk of that, the reward of that is like not that much. It's just like minimizing downtime. Hopefully none of these stackers would do that and they're all professionals, but it could happen. That's one risk. And so like, yes, technically it can get slashed. It would probably be just negligence or just something, some crazy black, black swan accident by one of these steak providers. But technically you're out of control for that.

I wouldn't be too worried about that risk. One interesting slash condition, though, that Justin Drake mentioned on the call is kind of that, or on our episode earlier this week is kind of that idea of social slashing. So let's say a whole bunch of stakers that you were staking with decided to censor transactions, right? Well, then if the Ethereum community kind of like forked onto an uncensored version of Ethereum, you might want to withdraw your deposits from that staking pool. But I think you would see that coming from so far away. Yeah, you would. You would hear about like, you would hear me and Ryan Parker. Unless you were in a cave, like you just left it there for a couple of years, that sort of thing.

David, this next question is from 8-l.0.Eath. You're going to pronounce that? I tried. I tried 8-l.l.e. What would a homestaker have to do on a practical level to be slashed? I thought the recommended client software didn't censor by default and thus not be something to worry about. end are you solar stakers or plan to become question mark yeah so as a home staker what do you have to do to get slashed the most likely event is the one i talked about where you like you have your computer

you have your validator and it's staking as it should and then you want to get like fancy with it and you want to have a redundant computer with the same signing keys as the active computer and you have it configured so that the active computer if like the internet cuts out or like loses power or whatever then the the standby computer notices that the active computer is offline, and so then the standby computer goes online and start signing messages to maintain zero downtime. The risk here is that the standby computer comes online, and the active computer is actually still online for whatever reason. And then you have two computers signing with the same messages, and that will get you slashed. We've seen that happen

before. There's definitely ways around this. Look at DVT technology from OBLE, and also just don't do it. Just take the penalty. Just take the leakage penalty. The leakage penalty is so low. It is equivalent to how much ether rewards you are making, but in the opposite direction. As opposed to getting slashed and getting penalized, instead of you just make a negative amount of yield. And so just like, just take it. You're just like you set yourself back a day, two days, and how long are you away from home? And it's not worth extra extra risk. That's the most likely reason why you would get slashed.

This asker says, I thought the recommended client software didn't censor by default. Yes, all client software does not censor by default. You have to do something. You have to tinker with that client if you want to start censoring things. That's going to be at an ad hoc basis. So yes, it's not something to worry about. Are we a solo staker or do we plan to become one? Bankless does stake.

We stake with a friend of ours who is not located near us. They're at a different physical location. So I guess we're not solo stakers because me and Ryan stake together with the help of a friend. I travel a lot. And Ryan has kids that might kick over his computer. So who knows? I do actually plan to become a solar staker. David, though on the other side of the merge, just like running a little bit from the house.

I think that's important. I want to, you know, test it myself. Another question on staking from Happy Joe at Happy Joe asked, if I have 64-Eth, do I get more yield by staking two times 32-Eath or one-time-64-Eath? What's at the root of this question, David? Yeah, so actually, there is no such thing as one-time-64-Eath. There is only units, discrete units, of 32-Eather. So if you have 64-Eath, or 96 ether. If you have 96 ether, you have three validators. You don't make one validator with multiples of 32. You just spin up two validators.

And so that is, that is the answer. When David says two validators, by the way, you can spin up many validators on the same machine. So he's not talking about like, oh, you have two pieces of. One computer per valetator. Could you imagine? No. So you could have one computer. Like my MacBook, my laptop could probably run, I don't know, hundreds of validators.

A lot. Yeah. I think a raspberry pie is considered pretty damn safe to 10 validators. Easy, I think. I can manage 320Eath. Right. I think if you're on a MacBook Pro, like, yo, you can like really juice that thing up. I think people get confused about like the 64th because when you deposit in like a staking provider like Coinbase, it feels like, oh, I'm giving 64Eath into this thing.

Or 12 or arbitrary number. Right. But behind the scenes, of course, Coinbase. has to spin up as many validators is kind of divisible by by 32. And the total amount of ETH divided by 32 is the number of validators they are running in the background. Correct. Right.

And like when you deposit 16 ETH into Rocket Pool as a validator, 16 more ETH comes from other people to backfill that and then you get to 32, for example. Yep. So it's all 32 all the way down. 32, all the way down. It's like bits. All right. What are the things you agree with Bitcoin Maxis on?

This is Tmu.Lens asking that question. David, do you agree with Bitcoin maxis on anything? Yeah, quite a lot, right? It's like I agree with Bitcoiners have everything right on principle. Like our principles with what Bitcoin is, I think is really, really aligned. That Venn diagram overlap is significant. It's the execution that we disagree on. So things like a self-sovereign monetary policy that humans don't tinker with.

I want that. a calcified blockchain that doesn't change in the long term. I want that. You know, censorship resistance. I want that. All the same principles, we fundamentally agree with Bitcoiners. It's just like we disagree on how to actually apply that when it comes to a blockchain. So I think, you know, if you have a Bitcoin blockchain, you actually don't get censorship resistance because you have to do financial activity at the centralized layer.

Like there's no defy in Bitcoin. And so I disagree with how you actually achieve censorship resistance versus what Bitcoiners see. But the base principles are very, very aligned. I very much agree with them on most things in that camp. Well said, I have nothing to add. I pretty much agree with all of that. And one thing I will say, though, is Vitalik has said before that Ethereum values are Bitcoin moderate values, right? And I think that's an interesting take, too.

One, maybe area of disagreement with Bitcoin maximalists is because the question is specifically with Bitcoin Maximilus, they agree or they think that the only manifestation of this thing is Bitcoin, right? And like that is the departure, I would say, from what you and I believe and what they believe. And they're not like, there's not the pragmatism, I would say, that there is in kind of the Ethereum community of like, hey, there are different routes to get there and some are more pragmatic and, you know, not as cut and draw. as Bitcoin was created by Satoshi. It's never changed, fully immutable, 21 million forever, right? That's kind of like written in Bitcoin maximalist law. So the ideas are similar, but the, I guess, the manifestation of those ideas,

the implementation of them are different. Right. I'm reminded of that meme where it's a Star Trek meme where the lady is asking two dudes, like, are you two friends? And the Bitcoiner is like, no. And the Ethereum is like, yes. I totally agree with that. All right, David, some takes of the week.

Why don't you read this first one from Gasport? Yeah. Good times, create centralized projects. Centralized projects create bad times. Bad times creates decentralized projects. Decentralized projects create good times. I love this take. I thought this was so good.

I feel like this is just really emblematic of the tail end of 2021, where a bunch of centralized projects, which touted decentralization turned out to be centralized and created a bunch of bad times, Ryan. I think you name the blockchain. What comes to mind? Terra, sir. Yeah. That whole fiasco. Created some bad times.

Not only that, Three hours capitals, big centralized kind of fund on black box, Celsius, centralized lending provider. Also touting decentralization, but was super-deeper centralized. Yep, some bad times. But on the back of this, it says, bad times create a sense. decentralized projects. Does that mean during the build market right now? We are. We are here.

We're here. Okay. Bad times creating decentralized projects. I'm okay with being here for like a while. Like I could spend a good year here before we get to like the good times again. How long are we into this thing? Are we, is that 2022? Six months.

Or a second half of 2020? Um, I think stuff really started to go bad, you know, May of this year. May, June? Yeah. So we're, we're a little bit more than one quarter into it. Yeah, just a quarter. Okay. So I could spend like five or six quarters here before I'm feeling little restless.

Yeah. Or longer. I don't care. I'm down to have a wintry winter for sure. That's cool. Here's a take. Maybe it's maybe because of this take. Brian, shout out of him says 99% of the crypto industry is a joke, but the remaining 1% will change the world.

First off, any thoughts on that take since it's yours? But also, why? why? I just wanted to say this. It's a bit of, you know, of course, you know, the market cap of legitimate projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, many other projects that we think are fully legitimate is greater than 1%. So there's a little bit of hyperbole here. But the reason I wanted to say this, 99% of the crypto industry is a joke, is I think that we should say that explicitly to lower the defenses of people who aren't on the inside of our industry but are on the outside looking in. Like the very first thing we should say is,

guys, we acknowledge all of the scams, all of the shenanigans, all of the stupidity that you see it, that you see in here. You are correct. You are 100% right. We acknowledge that. I'm not trying to defend any of it. It's stupid. And then after that, you kind of say, but there's something here. there's like one there's a sliver of like incredible technology and political social movement and social layer that is absolutely going to change everything and if you stop at the 99% of the joke part you don't get to that 1% will change the world then you'll miss out on this thing but first step is acknowledging it specifically when you're talking when you're talking to someone outside of the crypto industry good take love it all right david now we'll get to

your take, this is you. The merge reduces eth's gravity by 90% David Hoffman take. Okay, I know it reduces ETH's issuance by 90%. Of course, we've talked about that. The triple happening post-merge, that's what's going to happen. Why are you saying the word gravity rather than issuance here? Right. Because proof of work minors, the theory behind proof of work miners is that proof of work as a mechanism fundamentally approaches 100% of cell pressure. Therefore, issuance plus proof of work, the combination of those two things, is always like a downwards pull on price. And so proof of stake is the fundamental opposite.

It's the complete inversion of that. So proof of stakers are competing with each other on who's more bullish. Because as more people stake more eth, the yields go down. And so like the way that this works is that the people that accept the lowest yields or always the last one staking. And so the most bullish people are always accepting the lower and lower yields as staking becomes more and more saturated. And so where proof of work, miners are on a race to sell their asset, stakers are in a race to be more bullish than the asset. So like with proof of work, it approaches 100% of cell pressure. And with proof of stake, it approaches 0% cell pressure. It goes in

the opposite direction. And so when we reduce our issuance by 90%, it's like, it's a it's another metaphor. Like last week I was talking about like the swimmer that has a swim upstream and it grows really strong muscles and then the current goes away and all of a sudden those strong muscles can move ether forward. The same thing with ether, ether issuance is that when we reduce issuance by 90% and go to proof of stake, it's like we're turning gravity off on the ether. It's like when it jumps, it's going to jump 10 times higher because the gravity is turned off on an ether. We have moon gravity rather than. Moon boots. We got moon boots. It's easy. It's 10 times easy.

year to get to the moon. How do you like that metaphor? I liked a lot since it's merged temper. I'm feeling in the mood for these kind of bullish tweets. I think you're always in the message. David, last thing. I'll read it from Eric Wall on the last take of the week. Andreas Antonopoulos was and still is a great man and probably the best bitcoiner who ever existed. And this is Kobe under it saying he's such a legend. And then a picture. What are we looking at here? Yeah, we're a picture of just Kobe and Andreas and Tenoblois posing for a photo with just a nice high five, which definitely looks like a London bar, I'm guessing, because that's where Kobe is. And Kobe says the world's greatest bitcorner, of course, Andreas, next to the world's worst Bitcoiner, which is, of course, Kobe.

I just thought it was a good photo. It's a nice black and white photo. Kind of looks like an oldie photo. I thought that was a good photo. Andreas is one of the people who got me into crypto, I will say, back in 2014. and he is, I know sometimes David and I give Bitcoin Maximilus a hard time. We're not giving Bitcoiners a hard time. Andreas, to me, is like the greatest Bitcoin or whoever existed. I think he exemplifies all of the good parts of Bitcoin.

And I wish more Andreas's were still counted themselves as Bitcoiners. Because, like, that is a person that does not embarrass me. When I call myself a Bitcoin, I'd be proud to be associated with someone like Andreas. He's here for the right reasons. He cares very deeply about the fundamental values of censorship resistance and immutability, like what we're building in crypto. And he stayed true from the very beginning. He's also incredibly articulate and very persuasive thinker. And a genuinely good person who's upheld his reputation over the decades.

How many other people in crypto can you say that about? So if you ever want an example of somebody, a bitcoiner that David and I think very highly of and would want to emulate and would want to be bankless to be associated with, it's Andreas Antinopoulos. He should come on bankless podcast. We still haven't made that happen yet. We've tried to. We've tried to get him on. He'll come on eventually, hopefully.

His Internet of Money books, Ryan, were they were the first piece of non-technical Bitcoin literature that really opened up my brain to what this thing is. And when I would listen to his talks on YouTube, and they're all just chalk full of metaphors. And like people talk about like bank lists. They're really good at their metaphors. Like I'm so honored that people say that about us because I look to Andreas Antinop, Antonopolis as like a personal hero in this space as somebody who really commands like the literary power of metaphor to help democratize access to the information behind crypto.

So like not only is in my totally in agreement that like he's the world's greatest bitconer, just straight up personal hero. Yeah. And if you haven't read Andres, is Antonopoulos' Internet of Money volumes 1 and 2, add that to your required reading material because it will grow your understanding of crypto.

Yeah, absolutely. There we go. All right, what do you bullish on this week, David? I'm bullish on Bankless's brand new live streaming infrastructure, which I think the viewers on the YouTube, I definitely got a taste of that because the formatting is a little bit different.

Still got some work to do. Still need to get some templates from our designer to make that black background more interesting. but the OBS, the broadcasting suite service that I use, and also this physical studio has now finally been done. Like, we're done here. It's good to go. Can you turn the lights on again?

Can you say that again? So, okay, oh, shit, I should have led into it. But so the, West, the guy that was helping me set this stuff up, he sets up the normal, like, lights, right? So like YouTube lies, got some blue in the background. And then once he's done with that, it's like, okay, I'm done setting up all the lights for the studio. But would you, like, party mode lights?

and I go for a half second, yes. Yes, I would like party mode lights. And so now I have party mode lights in my apartment. Wow, that's awesome, man. Are you going to use that outside of the podcast? Oh, gosh, I have people over. This is when I'm just working, like, writing and doing some work. We got party mode lights on.

That's awesome. David's in the club. It's good. That's cool, man. Ryan, we need a lot of use. Roll-ups. I think Arbitram. Retro earlier this week, right? So it's only been a year since roll-ups kind of came out, like EVM-compatible

roll-ups. And we just got 7x more Ethereums out of it in just a year's time, all right? Seven more Ethereums? Yeah. I don't, like, you don't have to do the math, but like if you do 7x every year, that's a lot of transactions per second. That's a lot of scalability. And not only did they do that, you also have like technologies like Nova, for example, which is like relaxing the requirement to put data on chain and store it elsewhere. What I learned in that episode we did earlier this week is like if the data availability piece, if that part goes bad, it just folds back gracefully into a roll-up.

I didn't know if roll-ups could do that, David. So it's not like that bad of a trade-off at all. And I guess all of this makes me kind of wonder about sort of the thesis for it. Like if you're a monolithic layer one, how are you competing here? right because you can't compete on a security from a security perspective right that's out of the question and now roll-ups are getting like just as fast as you and just as cheap as you so how do you how do you compete right you go sue other layer ones that's what you do well if you're shady but like if you're not shady and i think there are some like many layer ones out there that like aren't

devolving to shady practices maybe a salana for example right um trying to do i have more respect for Solana now than I used to. Well, trying to do things well, right? And so how do they compete? They have to compete on business development. This is why we see things like a Salana store. I genuinely believe they're trying to compete on business development. But I think the long term on this is that it's going to be difficult because I'm seeing

some of these rollups and their biz dev is firing up, right? So like polygons already crushing it. Right. Like optimism. We got ZK Sync. We've got Arbitrum. I'm hired that like former face somebody big ass big big company marketing development team they are they are learning like the business development skills and they started technical now they're learning the business development so it's going to be hard for the middle to hold and so what I think we'll be left with honestly is like on one side you'll have Ethereum which is kind of the the modular settlement layer strategy and on the other side you'll actually have cosmos right and like I mean the cosmos ethos not necessarily. necessarily Cosmos, but this messy array of self-sovereign chains, and I think there'll be not much

in the middle. I don't think the middle will actually hold. So it is back to kind of like, you've got Ethereum, and then you got the Cosmos ecosystem, and not much in the middle. And maybe this has always been the way this industry has kind of evolved, because these have been the two dueling visions. Anyway, that was kind of a realization for me this week, and I'm excited about the scale we've just brought to Ethereum once again. 100%. Yeah. I do think the era of monolithic blockchains is over. Like, you're

going to get out competed just by ROTEC. By the way, we're doing a lot with Cosmos in October, right? After the merge. After Merge Timber comes Cosmoswomen. So we have Zaki and Sunny from Cosmos to come give us the Cosmos vision. But, I mean,

we wanted to do it now, but like, can't do it now. It's merged Timber. So we're going to do Cosmover with them. Costover. There we go. All right, David, meme of the week time. What are we looking at? We're looking at the Drake drop. So Drake, the Drake, the Drake meme, you know, the one he's like shunning the first one, then pointing to the second one, is Drake is shunning his own Drake album drop. And then he's pointing towards the actual real Drake, Justin Drake, the dropping on the bankless podcast, Ethereum Uncensored. If you didn't listen to that episode, what the hell are you doing? Go listen to it.

It was real good. Did you listen to the second time yet? Yes, I did. Yeah. So did I. Yeah. It's because actually I felt like the first time we didn't listen to the entire thing because like connectivity was so bad between Justin and ourselves. Yeah. Like I missed entire sentences. That's a fun, a little piece of trivia on that episode is that we, it was the internet was so bad that we were using Skype, which I hate. We were all recording both video and audio locally talking to each other on Skype.

And then our like magical editors, Luke and Dave just like save this episode. And you know it sounds flawless. It sounds like even It sounds like even maybe better than normal. I didn't even know how they did that. But thank you. Magic, thank you.

Bankless team editors. Of course, our time to remind you, none of this has been financial advice. Bitcoin, DeFi, crypto, all of it's risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the journey.

It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. I screwed it up. This is the journey. Ha!