Bankless - ROLLUP: SBF Live Interviews | BlockFi Bankruptcy | Crypto Bottom Signals | MetaMask Privacy Policy | Earnifi

Starting point is 00:00:00 given Sam's history of masking his appearance and being very cold and calculating about his publicity, I could definitely take the argument. Maybe I would lean to the argument that this is also part of his plan, that this is also very much calculated. And he's using this kind of childish, I was too young, got caught up in things. I'm learning my lesson. I'm sorry. But that can't work, right? No, absolutely. No, because again, because he stole 16 billion dollars. Bankless Nation, happy first Friday of December. David Hard to believe, we're in the 12th month of the year. Best month of the year.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Is it? Why Christmas? December is the best month of the year. Oh, your birthday. I knew this. Oh, no, I'm not going to need that. That narcissistic about it. I mean, it's a contributing factor, but perhaps, yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:52 I didn't mean to imply. Yes. Of course, I'm sure you think Christmas and the holidays and spending time with loved ones. Yeah. Skiing, yeah. Nothing to do with you. your birthday. Right. Well, I mean, it's just one of many nice things about December. Yeah. Well, I'm glad for this year to be over in crypto. Yeah, also that. I want to put this behind us. Also, I'm claiming that it's

Starting point is 00:01:13 going to be a bullish month. Prices will be up in 30 days. Do you remember, I think the depth of the bear market was like December 2018? It was a 2019? Last time? Yeah. Right at the end of the year. But you don't think, you already think we've bottomed? I think so, yeah. All right. All right. We're going to talk about that. A few things to talk about this week. Number one, SBF, he's given interviews now. What the hell? All right?

Starting point is 00:01:38 Against legal advice? I can't imagine those lawyers are very happy about this. He's going on a tour, dude. Why? The SBF redemption tour. The redemption arc has already started. But before we get to all of that mess, we've got to talk about all the bottom signals

Starting point is 00:01:51 and why I think it's going to be a bullish month. Because bottom signals, Ryan, are abound. And there's also some bullish signals. The Ethereum ecosystem is winning some key information. infrastructure from other chains. Also, layer two ecosystem metrics are at all time highs. But there's one big announcement, Ryan, that I know you're super excited for. I'm super excited. Do you want to tease it? Well, this could be the biggest bottom signal at all. Maybe I'll just say it. Hopefully. We'll tease it. Okay. We acquired a company. What? We can do that. Like for real this time.

Starting point is 00:02:21 This is not a Wells Fargo prank. This is not, you know, us putting our bankless name on the Philadelphia Flyers stadium. This is real. We really did this. The podcast. A podcast did this. Seriously, guys, this is a new tool for the bankless nation. We want to tell you all about it. So we'll get to all of these topics. David, before we're in this episode, though, we got a shout out our friends, long-time friends, really, and sponsors at Opelus. Opelus is a seriously fantastic product for benefits, healthcare benefits and payroll. What does Opelus do, David? They help you go bankless. The Web3 world is not very friendly to independent. entrepreneurs or anyone who really wants to work in the chaos that is Web3, yet still have the fantastic order of the benefits that you would get at a normal 9 to 5 job, such as health care and payroll and tax services, like all of the requirements that you need to work and live inside of a nation state while also working in the freedom of Web3. Opelts can help you get that

Starting point is 00:03:27 done. And so it can, if you are just a Web3 entrepreneur, you're an NFT, You're working in a Dow, all of these loose employment structures, but you need all of the structure to, I don't know, have health care for your kids, too. Don't forget about that. Oblitz can't help you with all of that stuff to make sure that you can do exactly what you do best, which is work in Web 3, work on the frontier. So there is a link in the show notes to book a meeting with a membership success steward. And if you do that by December 31st of this year, which is coming up, you got one month, you will get a thousand work. work tokens and a thousand bank tokens. So start 2023 off right with health care and other things. That's right. Believe me, David, when you have kids, you never forget about your kids' health care. Yeah, number one, super important. When I told my mom that I lost health care between jobs,

Starting point is 00:04:19 she laid an impression upon me, and I haven't done that since. Well, okay, how long were you off of health care? Like two or three weeks. Just two or three. That's not bad. I mean, some people like do for like months. Even, even that. She was like, David, you can't do that to me. I think we just got health care set up. And you were like, for bankless for you and I, and you were like on a scooter one day, right?

Starting point is 00:04:43 Oh, yeah. Am I remembering this? And you were looking down at your phone. This is early days of the podcast. And you like flipped off your phone. And you showed up to a bankless conversation we were having with like a missing tooth and like a black eye. And I'm like, oh God, I am glad we got health care before this incident.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Do you remember this? I don't think that was. think that was well into bankless. I don't think that was at the beginning. Oh, man. It's all, it all blurs to me. That was a year and a half into business. We definitely had health care. But yes, I did land on my face after falling off a scooter. So you never know. It comes in handy. All right, guys, let's talk about Bitcoin. Is it falling on its face? Did it just fall off a scooter? Or is doing okay up or down? Can we forget about this scooter? No, I'm not going to get it. Bitcoin is up two and a half percent this week. So it stayed

Starting point is 00:05:25 on the scooter. Happy music. Yeah, it started the week at $16,500, ending the week at $17,000, up to 1⁄2%. Nice job Bitcoin. Well, and ETH this week, what's got? Motorized scooter? It's a good motelette scooter. God damn it. Ether is up, 6% on the week.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Start of the week at $1,200, ending the week at $1,275. 6%. You know what? David's so tempted to call the bottom. He's so tempted right now to be like, Ryan, we're never going to triple digits. And the last seven days proves it, aren't you? I'm not just reading your mind right now.

Starting point is 00:05:59 God, I would love to be able to call the fact that we're not going back to triple digits. I don't have complete confidence. Well, like, it's going to be a long 2023, and it's going to be crabbish. Like, yeah, I don't know. Damn, it feels good, man. I don't, I don't, we actually didn't include this in the agenda

Starting point is 00:06:18 because it was just a thing. But Powell had a meeting this week, and he was super doveish meeting on interest rates. It's just like giving very warm signals that, like, we'd reach the top as far as interest rates. stocks really popped after that. And I think crypto's up as a result of that too. So that could be playing in. Anyway, we'll talk about that in future weeks on the Fed Watch. But tell us about the ratio up or down, Eith to Bitcoin. Bitcoin ratio up 3.7%. We are currently at 0.0753.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Nice. This ratio is holding strong. In fact, it's like overachieving. It's doing great. Is that why some many angry Bitcoin maximalists are in my mentions these days? Is it new? It gets worse when the ratio. up. Believe me. I think there's a correlation. Let's talk about total crypto market cap. Where are we under a trillion still? Yeah, still under a trillion. We're at $890 billion. We gain $20 billion in market cap on the week. Okay, not a bad gain. Bottom signals. Yeah, we got some bottom signals. Okay, what are the bottom signals? So one of the big bottom signals is going on is just the absolute wreckage that is happening in the Bitcoin miner world, which sounds bad, which sounds

Starting point is 00:07:31 bearish, but that's why it's a bottom signal. This has always marked close to or the bottom in previous cycles where Bitcoin miners are not profitable. They are under water. They go to business, right? They go bankrupt, don't they? Many of them do. Yeah. So an ant miner 19, which is one of the most recent miners, Bitcoin ASIC units, one of the more recent ones, is now a negative unit at the average United States industrial electricity price. So if you have one of the more modern Bitcoin miners, and you have average American U.S. industrial electricity, you are not making money as a Bitcoin miner. So what do you do? You turn them off, right?

Starting point is 00:08:08 You turn them off, yes, right. You also sell bitcoins, by the way, which is what this graph is showing from Will Clemente. Bitcoin miners have been selling relatively aggressively, combined with a hash rate decline and thus today's hash ribbons bearish cross, which is what the graph is indicating. This indicates that we are indeed in a period of minor capitulation. So miners have bills they got to pay. They're selling Bitcoin. at the bottom to pay those bills. They're turning their miners off. And these are all things that happen at the bottom, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Poof, look at all this red. That's what a hash ribbon, bearish cross looks like. It looks like a lot of red. What about this one from Zach Vowell? This is from Zach Vowl who pays attention to the Bitcoin mining world. And he just documents everything that happens in mining in a month. BitFarms pays down $27 million of debt. Cathedral announces payroll cuts.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Iris Energy is unable to service loans and unplugged machines. Manitoba, I don't know any of these mining companies. Manitoba enacts 18-month moratorium on new mining projects. That's a Canadian province. Not a mining company, but... Oh, I had no idea. Canada facts. I had no idea.

Starting point is 00:09:15 New York Governor signs two-year moratorium on new mining projects. We've covered that last week. Hydro-Quibect, which I'm assuming is a Canadian utilities service, Ask Canada Energy to suspend allocations to miners. Oof. Applied digital launches a $100 million fund for distressed crypto assets, including mining. Stronghold reports a net loss of $50 million in Q3. Compute Norris sells mining assets to generate capital, its former lender, and a bunch of other mining related topics.

Starting point is 00:09:44 But yeah, just like a bleak month in the world of Bitcoin mining. Is it time to buy? Blood in the streets? Yeah. So if you are a capitalized miner, you are buying blood. Yeah. But you have to not be out of blood in order to buy. Yes, you have to have your own blood.

Starting point is 00:10:00 Yes. You need some blood bags. It is weird. Ryan Selkis tweet. You say this is another bottom signal. DCG's death. So we did a few episodes on DCG. We called this the last domino to fall.

Starting point is 00:10:15 And this is, of course, Genesis that we're talking about. This is Ryan Selkis tweeting. The reports of DCG's death are greatly exaggerated. DCG is fine. I'm sorry we'll report tomorrow. I guess they reported it today, but what's the TLDR of this? Is DCG actually,

Starting point is 00:10:32 maybe that last domino to fall hasn't fully fallen? Maybe it's just wobbly, or maybe the fall won't be as hard? Is that what we're looking at here? Yeah, I'm trusting Ryan Selkis' analysis and interpretation of events here, but he's just saying that, like, yeah, DCG got hit, Genesis got hit,

Starting point is 00:10:47 but they're going to make it. They're going to make it. They're definitely going to have a scar, but they're going to make it, which means that, that the contagion stops there, if that is true. You think the contagion stops there? If that is true.

Starting point is 00:11:01 Okay, if that's true, if that's true, the contagion is stopped there. I think some other veterans are calling for the bottom. And this is not yet backed by evidence, all right? We're seeing things like Bitcoin minor capitulation, which we see at the end of all bottom markets. We're seeing maybe the last of the contagion and sort of a restore of health. I still personally think, David,

Starting point is 00:11:20 we've got the doldrums ahead of us, where apathy comes into the market. talked about. But some OGs, some veterans are also saying that this feels bottom signally. This is a signally. Bottom signally. This is Phil Benella, who's been in the space for a while. Everyone, yeah. Oh yeah. That's right. Hey, Phil. Everyone that could be broken has been. Everyone that could be broken has been. There's nobody left to sell and no margin left to liquidate. The risk reward has not been this attractive in four years. It's not easy. But right now it pays to be an optimist among pessimists. By the way, that's what the bottom feels like. Yeah. It's like it starts to

Starting point is 00:11:58 really pay to be an optimist when everyone else is pessimistic. The opposite is also true, by the way. Yeah. You want to be pessimistic when everyone's overly exuberant and optimistic. What's your take on this? Yeah, I think I think this is a sentiment that is shared by many people. Chris Berniske recently like like formally flipped as in he's saying that he called the bottom. Uh, Eric Wall, who has had Barrick Wall as his Twitter handle for like over a year now, has now become Bolick Wall. I know it's a meme, but these are veterans that have seen these cycles before, and many people are saying, like, yeah, just like, this feels right. And we can do a bunch of, like, real technical analysis on charts. You can look at, like, minor capitulation.

Starting point is 00:12:41 You can, like, try and look at numbers. But, I mean, at some point, gut feel by veterans is just a valid as a sentiment, indicator as many, many others. Veteran holders in particular. We've been through multiple cycles. Those are the ones I pay attention to. Right. Yeah. And so, Ryan, you're like, oh, I totally could see just like the doldrum, the, what did you

Starting point is 00:12:59 call it last week? Like the apathy bottom where we spend a year of going flat and then people just check out because it hasn't, because crypto prices hasn't gone up. And then you get the last capitulation to watch people out. We kind of had that throughout the last bear market. So we had like there was a 20, the 18, the 2018 bottom at $82 was like the capitulation bottom, which to me feels like the eight. 175 ether bottom that happened last May.

Starting point is 00:13:24 We had a recent bottom at like a $1,100-ish, maybe a little bit lower. And then in 20, so fast forward out of the 2018 bottom at $82 into 2019, there was like another bottom at like $120 when it got down that low. And then there was the March 2020 COVID crash back down to $80. Briefly. I think without that COVID crash, we would have had higher lows throughout the entire crab market. So $80 in 2018, $120 in 2019. I don't know, $150 to $200 in 2020. But then we had the COVID crash and it took us down to 80 again. So like, that's why I'm like, David, don't call the bottom, don't call the bottom. Don't say what's wrong.

Starting point is 00:14:04 But also I really, really want to because. You know, like, you could be right. It's just to me, we're in the bottom range. We're in the bottom zone. You know, like what I would call for in kind of apathy layers like from Eath, something like 40% off where we are now. Like that could happen. But like I'm not. People were calling a few months ago for like $100 Eath. No way. We ain't going there. All right? We're too bottoming to hang out there.

Starting point is 00:14:28 And so I could see things like this happen. Plus, by the way, David is like, you mentioned the COVID crash. Yeah, it's kind of those black swan events that could pop up at any point in time and take us back down. But I'm in the bottom zone too. There's like more on the horizon. Sure. Yeah. I don't want to call an exact bottom because I'll always be wrong.

Starting point is 00:14:44 And I'd rather let you, you'd be wrong in this podcast with, with strict bottom calls, David. but I'm willing to certainly call we're in the bottom zone. It does feel like this. I think the vets are right. All right, let's juxtapose the bottom signals because we have all-time high

Starting point is 00:14:59 in layer two land. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, so this is a pretty awesome chart of the amount of weekly gas that layer one Ethereum block space that is being consumed by layer two's. And that chart is so awesome. So if you go all the way back to January 2020,

Starting point is 00:15:17 it's basically at zero. and it is just a hockey stick up into the right to where we are in November. And November was a killer month for Layer 2 gas consumption, seemingly almost double previous months of time. So what does that mean? That just means activity on the Ethereum layer 2 ecosystem is like huge, at all time highs in a very big way. This is a longstanding bankless thesis that is playing out.

Starting point is 00:15:42 Yes. And it's taken a little longer maybe than some thoughts play out, but it's totally playing out. directly directly it's been correct and it seems to be more correct this is a stat for arbitram what are we looking at here david yeah i want to highlight two specific layer two ecosystems one is arbitram which is at all-time highs of unique contracts deployed so contract addresses smart contracts that are deployed to arbitram had an all-time high apps yes exactly uh and also daily transactions which is the next tweet uh daily transactions on arbitram are also at all-time high here's hop protocol. So Hopp bridged a $158 million in the month of November, which is up from $98 million

Starting point is 00:16:21 the month before. Wow. 100,000 unique wallets, Ryan, bridged using hop. Look, layer two's can be the new centralized exchanges at some level. What I mean by this is like people, we saw the stats last week. People are moving their funds from centralized exchanges and they're going bankless. And you keep that on May net or you could go to layer twos. I'm glad to see people exploring the two universe. Here's an app on layer two. This is, I believe, on Arbitrum. Yeah, GMX, of course, heavy DFI power users will be familiar with GMX, had more daily

Starting point is 00:16:55 fees than uniswap. What? A layer two application generated more daily fees than uniswap on the layer one. That's insane, dude. This bears looking into. Yeah. I think we should do an analyst piece on this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:10 On bankless. I mean, we've had an analyst piece. Ben from the bankless analyst. If you pay attention to the bankless newsletter, you've known about GMX months ago when we covered it. Are you talking about me? I remember this. No, I'm talking about you, the listener.

Starting point is 00:17:22 Oh. I thought you were calling me out for not reading our newsletter. I would never do that. All right, wait till you see my Spotify rap scores. Bankless is not the number one podcast. That's just because I listened out of Apple, right? Yeah, right, right. What are we looking at here?

Starting point is 00:17:42 Oh, I think you've got some T. I got some T, I got some alpha. Okay. Alpha in a bad way, though. It's like coming from the rumor mill or sources? Yeah, so you know those tweets that people on Twitter make fun of when they say, here's a big claim, sources. And then like the sources, this is that.

Starting point is 00:17:57 So a source. You're doing that. I'm doing that. Yeah. A source has, so this is a tweet that says, is there a leaderboard for best performing VCs? Multi-coin 1, 2021, right? Like they were the best performer in 2021. What about 2022?

Starting point is 00:18:11 And I was just looking, I just wanted some data because I was curious. So a little bird came into my engines. Data on multi-coin? On VC, best-performing VC funds in 2021 and 2022. Got it. And so a bird came into my ear and whispered to me the state of multi-coin. Multi-coins fund one, fund two, and hedge fund. Spill it.

Starting point is 00:18:31 So after FTX, they lost money in FTX, after like the Solana, all the other, like, all-layer ones that they've invested to, didn't have great price action through 2022. fund one is at a one X. Multi-coins fund one is just a one-x? Is just a one-x, yes. Fund number two is at 0.4x. Wow. So what does that mean?

Starting point is 00:18:53 They're down 60%. Allegedly the hedge fund is also below watermark. And when they, when everyone was like, oh my God, multi-coin has made so much money. Apparently multi-coin, when they report the value of the fund, they mark to market their tokens. which is a big no-no, apparently, in the VC space. You just take the coin gecko price.

Starting point is 00:19:15 You multiply that by the amount of tokens, but there's not the liquidity to actually sell your entire stack. Yes. Also, like there's vesting and schedules. So like various funds, mark to market, their tokens with a discount, sometimes heavy discounts, like over 50%. Apparently, multi-coin was just like marked to marketing, the full value of their tokens without taking in any liquidity.

Starting point is 00:19:33 And where you could assume used that to flex. It's like, look how much money we made. even though like there's not enough liquidity there to support it. Yikes. First I will say, of course, this is sources. This is sources. Sources. All right.

Starting point is 00:19:50 So this is, you know, has not been confirmed. Remember David and myself. We're not LPs in Multicoin. We're also not journalists. So we haven't done the due diligence. But like I could see this being true. What's interesting is 2021 was just a absolutely breakout year for Multicoin. I remember even Ryan Selkis last year.

Starting point is 00:20:09 I think Multicoin Casamani was. on his top people who've turned things around list. Multi-coin in 2018 was sort of on the shit list, really, for the EOS and, you know, kind of getting fully behind that and for that kind of tanking, never recovering. And then they kind of had a redemption story in 2021. It looks like 2022 is fully reversed all of that, regardless of what the numbers are.

Starting point is 00:20:33 I think that is true. Some of these alternative layer one liquid investments have not paid off. And this is not just multi-coin, by the way. I think there's a class of hedge funds that have been playing in this space as well. I'm willing to bet multi-coin got the brunt of it because they were the fund that like exemplify the Alt Layer 1 trade. Also, I would say like when I was talking to the person that gave you this information, my response to them was like, it's crazy how strong the rule of fast up equals fast down played out in crypto. FTCX rose out of nowhere and became massive and then disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Starting point is 00:21:14 Same thing with, like, if you made money too quickly, it went away, ultimately when the bear market turned. Easy up, easy down. Yeah, exactly. Do you want to see kind of a jerk tweet? It's a little bit of a jerk tweet, but I think exemplifies it. So, fun fact, last year, December 31st, 2021, I tweeted this out. And this was like Alt 1st.

Starting point is 00:21:34 This was the top of Alt Layer 1s, yeah. Yes, so I tweet out, I think Altlayer ones are largely overvalued. And I was largely thinking of David Luna. I was thinking of Avalanche Avax. I was thinking of Salana, just that they're overvalued based on their fundamentals. And then I said, what's your best argument for why I'm wrong? A lot of people gave fantastic responses. Kyle comes in hot for a multi-coin.

Starting point is 00:22:00 And he's like, let's bet on the sole Eith price. end of year 2021 versus end of year 2022. So that would be now. I want to check on that price for me? Oh, no. Right? What is it? It is, it started at that moment. Is this time frame that you're showing on screen? Is that the time frame of the bed? Yeah, we are down 85%. So one Seoul used to be worth 0.046 ether. This is like the Bitcoin ether ratio that we talk about at the beginning of the markets, but now we're doing it for and now it's at 0.012. So that is a down of 0.046 divided by 0.0.1.2.

Starting point is 00:22:38 Almost four. A loss of, yeah. So ETH is up 4X versus Solana in that time. Yeah. Fun fact, we also didn't actually make a bet. Yeah, I know. Yeah, you wouldn't make a bet. You know, I wouldn't make a bet.

Starting point is 00:22:53 But yeah, that's how confident people were. I think, and look, I'm not picking on Kyle. I'll have the coin, but I think the alternative layer ones had a crazy explosive year in 2021. And it's basically reround all of that and gone backwards. Congrats to those who sold that trip. I sold the top. I think Kyle did.

Starting point is 00:23:11 I mean, he's just fine. Yeah, it's personal funds. Not the fun, apparently. What are we talking about next? What's coming up next? Sorry, Kyle. Coming up next, we judge SBF's ability to spin a narrative at the New York Times Steel Books Summit.

Starting point is 00:23:25 We'll judge it out of 10. How well did SBF spin a narrative? We'll also share some reactions from Twitter. And we'll also talk about the infura debacle. Is infura selling your data? Or is the internet selling your data and the infira system is just a part of it? We'll unpack all of that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors to help you go bankless. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape.

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Starting point is 00:25:20 So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop. ledger.com. David, I think people listening are like, when are these guys going to stop talking about FTX? And I really want to. I want to stop talking about SBF. I want to stop thinking about him. But he keeps coming back and hunt.

Starting point is 00:25:37 Like, I was trying to like do something else last night. And then he pops on for a one hour interview, uh, with the New York Times that was broadcast by CNBC. It was absolutely insane. I couldn't look away. Like we're trying to, we're trying to figure out the psychology.

Starting point is 00:25:55 of this guy. So give us the context here. What's this tweet from DC and how should we start dissecting the interviews SBF has been doing over the last two days? Yeah, so this is a tweet from DC, which is just giving his take on the summit itself, the deal book summit and the interview. And DC goes, I'm only 30 minutes in, but I want to thank Andrew Sorkin for not making this a puff interview, as we have seen from the New York Times in recent days. I was extremely skeptical at front, but yes, hard-hitting questions collected from the community. FBS harmed, good job. So this is one take about the Andrew Sorkin

Starting point is 00:26:31 SBF interview. This sentiment was not shared by everyone. Ryan, you said that it was insane. What part of the summit do you think was insane? Like the whole thing, the questions, what did you think? So I just caught, I think, probably the last maybe 45 minutes, I think it was fully an hour. And giving people context, it's called the Deal Book Summit, right?

Starting point is 00:26:51 That's how it's called? Deal Book. broadcasts on CNBC, I believe, New York Times kind of, I believe put this together, professional interviewer, Andrew Sorkin, and was not a puff interview. I mean, like, so Andrew was asking SBF questions like, what do your parents think of this? They're lawyers, law professors. How did they react when you told them? He was asking questions about, tell me about the drugs, Sam. Yeah. He was saying, like, where did all the money go? Like, like, a drug-fueled sleepover. This was, yes, that, that, um, he, at one point he said, uh, looked like a whole bunch of, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:28 friddling kids just in a drug filled sleep over playing with people's money. Right. And this is not wrong. And it's a great interview, honestly, from the interview's perspective. So you're giving a thumbs up to the interviewer. Yes. Okay. Where the, the weirdness comes in for me is Sam Bankman Fried. I don't know how many times he said, I'm sorry. I was irresponsible. Right. He looked like a kid brought into the principal's office. Uh-huh. Um, Actually, let me pull up. That was the pose that he took, too. Just imagine a kid, like, swinging his legs in a chair with, like, his shoulders hunched up, like, looking down at his feet.

Starting point is 00:28:03 Exactly. That was the posture. That was everything. Actually, let me pull up some of my tweets. I said, this conversation's insane. And he was just sharing everything. I remember that was like, it's like, TMI, man. Like, you don't have to do this, right?

Starting point is 00:28:17 Aren't your legal experts telling you to stop? And then it just started feeling like a full confession. Right. He was saying everything. It was all out there. He talked about, so he answered Andrew's question about what drugs he was using. And then there was this one question, Andrew asked him. So what did we learn from this, Sam?

Starting point is 00:28:34 What's your future, Sam? And then SBF's reply was, I don't know what's going to happen. A lot is not in my hands. I want to be helpful. I don't know where this all will lead. It felt to me, David, like this was like a child speaking. It was very childish. I mean, this guy stole $16 billion.

Starting point is 00:28:54 What does he mean? He doesn't know what's going to happen. Like, he's going to jail, right? And that's what should be happening. The whole thing struck me as very, almost like infantile. Like Andrew's speaking to a child coming to the principal's office. Well, that's what he said. It was like, it called it a sleepover.

Starting point is 00:29:10 You and your FTS leadership were having a good sleepover for, you know, months. And there was like theft and drugs involved. It was just like these kind of like golly G type responses. Like, I'm sorry. It didn't mean for this to happen. I don't know what's going to happen. and next? Dude, you stole $16 billion. Well, okay, but he, so you said that this was like a confession by SBF.

Starting point is 00:29:29 That's not what I saw. I saw, and so, okay, so if I'm going to rate the Andrew interviewer, I'm going to give him seven to eight out of ten, where he did not, he approached the right subjects and he did press. He did not, he was not informed enough or chose to ignore things that he should have doubled down on. And in my, if I was going to like, as a, as a somebody who like, you know, organize its interviews and does a lot of interviews, it felt like Andrew was like, okay, here's like six or seven topics. I have an hour. I need to ask two or three questions about each topic to hit all the topics and then we're done with the interview. That's great. Forgetting that like two or three questions might actually lead to more and you need to press Sam

Starting point is 00:30:15 when you are at the end of their questions if he has not answered the question. So he like, Sam answered the question to the ability that Sam wanted to. And then Andrew was like, okay, we're done with that. He let him get away with things. He did not press him in the way that I would have pressed him. So, very importantly, no one coming out of that interview would be like, oh, Sam stole money. Like, that was not an impression that you might have been left with. David, do you see the audience reaction?

Starting point is 00:30:41 Like, people were laughing for him. Like, Sam Bankman freed everybody. So at one point in time, Sam, Sam, was like, I'm not going to lie, it's been a bad month. And people laughed. There's like this pause. And there's like laughter at the audience. I mean, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:30:58 Look, some of this is, it's just human empathy type of reaction. Like, yeah. Like, so I get that. But I think, I think it's also very hard in these interviews because I think you're trying to understand the person. And so there has to be some level of like empathy in order to get into the person's mind. and yet you have to hold them accountable.

Starting point is 00:31:20 I don't know. I guess my expectations for Andrew and mainstream media interview going in were so low that I would even rank Andrew higher than like seven or eight. But we're probably largely in agreement on that. Okay. What about the Sam piece?

Starting point is 00:31:33 How would you rate that? You said it didn't feel like a confession to you. What did it feel like to you? I think I want to get to the answer, but Ryan, but I want to go through some of the tweets of this specific interview and then we'll eventually lead into that answer.

Starting point is 00:31:46 And so this is the very start of the summit where Andrew Sorkin is applauding Sam for even showing up and giving the interview. And then the crowd starts clapping. And then Andrew's like, Sam Beckman freed everyone. And everyone's like clapping for his bravery of even showing up in this particular moment. Yeah, these are some hearty claps too. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:07 And so like that's how this whole thing started. This one dude though, do you see this one dude? It's like crossing his arms. That's me. So Andrew leads this interview with an. email that was sent to Sorkin from a customer who had apparently his life savings inside of FTX. And this customer said, can you please ask SBF why he decided to seal my life savings? And SBF replies to this man and he goes, yeah, I'm deeply sorry about what happened. And like,

Starting point is 00:32:36 because what else can you say? I'm deeply sorry about what happened. Yeah. Okay. So next part that I wanted to bring up, I did not knowingly commingle funds. So this is like one of the first moments that SBF was pressured. And this was when he was asked about like, okay, did you know that FTX was sending funds over to Alameda? And Sam was like, I did not knowingly commingle funds. This is a straight lie, though. This is a straight lie.

Starting point is 00:33:03 Yes. Straight out lie. Yes. And so when asked about like where'd all the money go, Sam starts with US FTX, which he says to his knowledge is fully solvent. And then he turns to the international platform. And when he talks about the solvency of the international platform and where all that money went. He talks, he starts to talk about leverage and how margin systems work. And Ryan,

Starting point is 00:33:23 this is, in my opinion, the point to focus on. A complete dodge. Where is all of the money? And Sam goes to explain to you margin trading and leverage. And how what that is implied, and we'll get to this again throughout this conversation, is that instead of Sam taking FTX customer deposits and giving them to Alameda, he's saying that Alameda took out such a large margin position on FTX that it wiped out the entire exchange. So instead of an explicit transfer of value from customer deposits to Alameda, there is an implied, an implicit transfer of value through Alameda's margin position, which he claimed that he had no oversight over Alameda, and he should, and he apologized for not having any oversight of Alameda, but he was unaware of the

Starting point is 00:34:11 massive size of Alameda's leverage position on FTX. And because of the way that, of the way that margin systems work, and this is why he's explaining how margin systems work and leverage, that it was an implicit transfer of funds from customer deposits to Alameda. But then the interviewer asked, like, okay, but you're not allowed to do that with customer deposits unless because of the terms of service of FTCS. And then Sam goes, well, that's one part of the terms of service, but another part of the terms of service says, like, we'll give you yield if you do let us do it. And then he just dodges it. And this is the moment that Andrew Sorkin did not press him on that. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, I get it. So,

Starting point is 00:34:47 So Sam's like, I didn't actually steal the money. Right. What he actually did was like, I gave it to a friend. No, I let, I let the mechanism of margin trading allow an implicit transfer of value from anyone who is trading against Alameda to Alameda. Which is a lie because he also straight up sent FTX customer deposits to Alameda, which is the important thing to remember. There are other parts in this conversation, by the way.

Starting point is 00:35:14 I don't know if they're here, David, but like where, Andrew's asking him about the $300 million of property that he purchased in the Bahamas, and including, like, luxury apartments for his parents and this sort of thing. I mean, like, you didn't have much to say on that either. But what are we looking at here? Yeah, so another question from Andrew says, what are your lawyers telling you right now? Do they even want you to be here? And audience laughs.

Starting point is 00:35:40 And Sam Bankman Free, he's like, no, they totally don't want me to come here. but I have a duty to talk is an interesting. What is the game here? What is the game? Does this guy think he has like bulletproof armor? Like has he already purchased his get out of free jail card? Okay. So do you think that this is an accidental slip up by SBF or do you think that this is a calculated

Starting point is 00:36:02 move by him? I mean, I would have thought that the Gali Shucks thing, it felt very like accidental and the child getting called into the principal's office, right? It feels very much like that. It gives off that vibe. But I think, given Sam's history of masking his appearance and being very cold and calculating about his publicity, I could definitely take the argument.

Starting point is 00:36:33 Maybe I would lean to the argument that this is also part of his plan, that this is also very much calculated. And so this is also part of. of an apology tour. And he's using this kind of childish, I was too young, got caught up in things. I'm learning my lesson. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:36:51 Yeah. But that can't work, right? No, absolutely. No, because he stole $16 billion. Because he stole $16 billion. Okay. I don't care how old you are. So, okay, just a few more parts of this interview.

Starting point is 00:37:05 He was asked about where he got the money from all the political donations. And Sam Bergman Fried said, profits, his own personal profits from trades. Okay, interesting. We'll go on to the next one. And when he asked about why he made so many donations to media, he says, I wanted to support good journalism. Okay. Thank you for supporting good journalism, Sam. And basically, the summary of what Sam Bankman-Fried said and what he is trying to get across, this whole tour of interviews, and this is just the first interview, by the way, he is trying to say, that he is sorry because he failed to manage risk.

Starting point is 00:37:43 He did not steal $16 billion. He failed to manage risk. Not theft. It was a mistake. We just had poor risk management process. Yeah, poor risk management. Yeah. That was the first of two, right?

Starting point is 00:37:57 The second interview, which I actually haven't listened to yet, David, was on Good Morning America this morning. I mean, he's doing the full apology tour in mainstream media. What's this? Not going on crypto. in crypto media, that's for sure. So this is a clip out of the Good Morning America interview,

Starting point is 00:38:15 which we're going to play, which I think sums up a little bit of everything. You ready to play it? Yeah. One of the reasons FDX went bankrupt is because FTX deposits were used to pay Alameda's creditors. Carolyn Ellison said you knew about that.

Starting point is 00:38:31 Is that true? You know, best I can tell, Alameda did have a big position open on FTX. That position, I think, was very over collateralized a year ago. There is a total market collapse and specifically large correlated collapse in its assets over the last month and to some extent over the last year that I threatened that position quite a bit. And I think that's, you know, as best I can stand, a lot of what happened then.

Starting point is 00:39:02 I am no cryptocurrency expert. I'm no finance expert, but I don't think you answered my question. I always asked, did you know that FTCS deposits were used to pay off Alameda creditors? I don't know of FTCS deposits being used to pay off Alameda creditors. Are you, which creditors are you referring to? Carolyn Ellison said that you all knew that these funds were used, were put into Alameda. They were the funds owned by your depositors. So I can't speak for who knew what.

Starting point is 00:39:45 A lot of the customers on FTX did have borrowers either in dollars or Bitcoin or euros. But as you know, the FTC's terms of service tell the people who signed up, none of the digital assets in your account are the property of or shall be or may be loaned to FTCS trading. But you're saying that happened. My understanding is a few things happen. The first is there is a margin trading facility on FTCX by which users can lend out funds. by which other users borrow funds. And so there are explicit cases where there is, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:18 margin extent where there is borrow lending. If Alameda is borrowing the money that belongs to FTCS depositors, that's a bright red line, isn't it? There are a lot of cases where that's actually explicitly part of the programs and that are happening in people already. Here it says that the digital assets may not be loaned to FTCS trading. They can't be loaned out. There existed a borrow lending facility on FTX.

Starting point is 00:40:52 And I think that's probably covered, I don't remember exactly where, but somewhere else in the terms of service. But they'd have to approve of that. They're saying they didn't approve of it here. They're saying you approved of it. If you rewind to the beginning of FTX, where some customers were, I think, in line with sort of existing relationships that they've had, at least in some cases,

Starting point is 00:41:15 wiring money straight to Alameda research in order to trade on FTCS. So you do know and you did know that FDX deposits were being funneled to Alameda. So I was vaguely aware that that was how some wires were being sent in the first place. Didn't that set off alarm bells in your head? So there are a lot of people who were involved in that process. And look, I really deeply wish that I had taken, a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on there.

Starting point is 00:41:52 I knew that legal was involved. I knew that other groups at the company were involved, that there were agreements drafted up. But you're ultimately responsible. And ultimately, absolutely, like, I should have been on top of this, and I feel really, really bad and regretful that I wasn't. And a lot of people got hurt, and that's on me. Here's what Mark Cuban has to say about that.

Starting point is 00:42:13 Yep. He said, if I were him, I'd be afraid of going to jail for a long time. At the end of the day, you know, it's not my call what happens, and the world will judge me as it will. Are you worried about going to jail? There are a lot of things that are worrying me right now. And, you know, as best as possible, I'm trying to focus on what I can do going forward to be helpful. and let whatever regulatory and legal processes are happening play out as they will. I do want to move on, but just finally on this. This is really a yes or no question.

Starting point is 00:42:57 Carolyn Ellison says you knew that FTCS funds were being funneled to Alameda. Did you know that? I knew that there is an open margin position there and that that involved a dollar. I know, but that's all that I'm asking. If she's in court and you're in court and she's under oath and you're under oath, and you're asked, did you know that these funds were being funneled to Alamedia? What is your answer? I did not know that there is any improper use of customer funds.

Starting point is 00:43:30 My God, David, that pause at the end, just this long pause. Remember when we had our interview with him and Eric Voorhees and Eric Voorhees asked him to the Avey question and he had to repeat the question? Yes. He has to think about what to hell to say. Okay, but, so first of all, good job from these clips. I haven't watched the full interview, but George Stephanopoulos does a good job asking him the same question multiple times.

Starting point is 00:43:56 Yes. And I think this is what a good journalist does. Yeah. But what is Sam thinking going, like, this has a different flavor than kind of the childish kid in the principal's office. This has the flavor of somebody who's, I guess, on the stand. And there's a prosecutor asked them questions. and this person has no idea what they're going to say, like has not prepared at all, has not rehearsed.

Starting point is 00:44:20 Like, I can't, this is why it's also hard for me to believe that this is all, it just feels so amateur hour, David. It's hard for me to believe that this is all kind of contrived from this mastermind of PR who knows how to get out of this. Like, I can't believe anybody sitting, watching this, would come away from this thinking, yeah, like Sam's, Sam's Anderson, he didn't mean to, is just poor risk management gone wrong. Like, this has to be just him failing on the apology tour.

Starting point is 00:44:53 This is just like an embarrassing moment, isn't it? You would hope so. Other people have tweeted out that they totally believe him, which we will get there. So we'll go to some of the reactions on Twitter to get people's reactions to this interview. Left Harris tweets out, a man stole $10 billion. FCX just got interviewed and portrayed almost as a victim and got applause at the end, still free and fine. Aaron Schwartz, who downloaded academic journals to share with the world,

Starting point is 00:45:17 got $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. This will lead him to take its own life. Okay, so left terrorists not taking any shit, saying that this interview was a bunch of BS. Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman. Who is Bill Ackman? Bill Ackman is an American billionaire investor and a hedge fund manager,

Starting point is 00:45:33 founder, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. He tweets out, call me crazy, but I think SBF is telling the truth. And SBF replies on Twitter, I deeply appreciate that. I messed up. I'm going to do everything I can to make it right, even though I know I knew it might never be enough.

Starting point is 00:45:50 To which I replied, WTF is going on. Well, you can't. I'm sorry your way out of this, can you? Mike Dutis, who tweets out, call me crazy, but I think SBF is a pathological liar. Two contrasting points. Those are different. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:07 He's telling the truth. Mike Dutis says he's a pathological liar. What else we got? Mike Novagrat says it was delusional. Let's be really clear. Sam was delusional about what happened and his culpability in it. He needs to be prosecuted. He will spend time in jail. And it wasn't just Sam. You don't pull this off with one person. Really good point. I think we haven't emphasized that point enough. Other people also need to go to jail. Not just Sam. And then here is the point that I think really drives this home. This is from Nick Carter. Sam isn't behaving like a who is ignoring the advice of his lawyers.

Starting point is 00:46:44 He is behaving like he has a world-class crisis management firm and legal team constructing a very specific and deliberate public narrative. I think that is my take as well. How? So Nick's thinks that he's really playing 40 chess here. Yes. But it looks like he is just playing checkers. Yes.

Starting point is 00:47:03 Just doing a portrait. That is, that is. Right. That is the take. He's actually playing 40 chess. But when you look at him and like, oh, this guy, he's like, He's sorry. Is that the point to garter the sympathy?

Starting point is 00:47:15 I think so. How does that work in a court of law where you have prosecutors and facts? I think they are working the court of public opinion. Why does that matter? Well, that's... He's not running for a political office. I think it matters.

Starting point is 00:47:30 I think it matters. We'll see how this pays off for him. What's this take from Balaji? This is Belachi saying, jurisdiction isn't why SBF is getting kid gloves. Remember, the U.S. got a satellite state to throw Alex E. Persev in jail without charges for protecting privacy,

Starting point is 00:47:45 which happened in two days. So they'd lean on the Bahamas if they wanted to. They just don't want to. Here's, I think, Ryan, what could be the most egregious headline I have ever seen about this whole debacle out of Bloomberg. Sam Bankman-Fried fooled a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:48:03 but not S.E. Chairman Gary Gensler, whose warnings about risk and lack of regulation were well-founded. Absolutely. Absolutely. F off. It's coming out of Bloomberg, all right? Was this written by Gensler?

Starting point is 00:48:15 It's like Gensler's pseudonym, Max Chafkin. Oh my God. Incredible. Gary Gensler called FTX is the worst headline. He was sitting in a room. He had meetings with FTX executives. It's infuriating, dude. That is the worst opinion.

Starting point is 00:48:33 I don't know whether this is SBF's incompetence or if he really is playing 40 chess, but I know that Gary Gensler was not the, That was to be listened to in this fiasco. All right. So this is turning into a movie series already, a mini series on Amazon. Directors are bringing the FTX story. I don't know if that'll bring any truth, uncover anymore.

Starting point is 00:48:55 Also, I think we have to get to kind of our second story. Well, SBF is hitting the new circuit, going on Good Morning America, giving these interviews. More of the contagion is being felt. Of course, we know BlockFi was in a bad state when it paused withdrawals. after the collapse of FTX. They have now announced and filed papers for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. What this means, David, is

Starting point is 00:49:19 if you have funds in BlockFi, unfortunately, you're not likely to get them out anytime soon. You'll have to go through the legal process. It'll be sort of a Celsius style of thing. And this is a shame. I mean, we were just talking to Saga and Jetty from Breaking Points podcast.

Starting point is 00:49:37 By the way, that episode is coming out on Monday. He had funds. in BlockFi. Yeah. Right? This is sort of somebody who's crypto adjacent,

Starting point is 00:49:44 but supportive of the industry and he had some funds in BlockFi and was affected by this. A lot of people affected by this. You know, it's crazy here too, David, is the,

Starting point is 00:49:55 if you recall, of course, BlockFi had gotten in dire straits during three years capital and the terror collapse. Yep. Then FDX came, bailed them out.

Starting point is 00:50:03 This was their lifeline. David, do you know what that? Sam comes again. Yeah. Do you know, do you know what that that bailout was based on?

Starting point is 00:50:10 the FTX bailout? What do you mean based on? Okay. It was like collateralized by Robin Hood shares. All right. So this is, this is,

Starting point is 00:50:17 this is collateralized by Robin Hood shares. Walk me through what that means. This, I think this tweet walks you through it. BlockFi is a creditor to FTCS that lent to Alameda that led to Emergent,

Starting point is 00:50:29 which is a shell company owned by SBF, that bought Robin Hood shares that were pledged as collateral to a guarantee to BlockFi to loan to FTX that was used to bailout BlockFi itself. I don't understand. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:50:43 I don't understand what just happened. BlockFi is a creditor to FTX. Yeah. Okay, so BlockFi is a creditor to FTX. FTC's borrowed from BlockFi, and then FtX lent that money to Alameda. Alameda lent that money to BlockFi. So BlockFi borrowed from FTX, who lent to Alameda that lent to this shell company called Emergent. Okay.

Starting point is 00:51:05 That was actually owned by SBF. Okay. So Emergent is a shell company. Shell Company by SPF, which is the shell company that bought Robin Hood shares. This emergent company bought Robin Hood shares that were pledged as collateral to guarantee blockify the loan to FDX that was used to bail out BlockFi itself. Wait, okay, pledged as collateral. Yes.

Starting point is 00:51:30 Pledge has collateral to BlockFi. To guarantee to BlockFi the loan to FDX. Wait, who got the loan? bailed out by BlockFi. BlockFi gave the loan to FTCX and FTCX used that loan money to bail out BlockFi and that loan was collateralized by Robin Hood chairs. Yes. Which owns by a shell company.

Starting point is 00:51:52 Yes, that was owned by ESPN. Which got that money from Alameda research. Which got that money from FTS. What the shit is this, dude? What? If you don't laugh, you cry. And that's what Block Fyes bailout was based on. That's what the hope of depositors was based on since May, June of this year.

Starting point is 00:52:14 Do you think if you can just create a fucking mesh network of interconnected money to the point where all the money disappears because it's out of a smoke of confusion, you can just mint more money that way? I don't know, David. What do you think? I mean, absolutely. And look, this is heartbreaking for a lot of people who are in BlockFi, BlockFi deposits. I mean, we're really learning some tough lessons in this chapter of, of, of, you know,

Starting point is 00:52:38 of crypto for sure. But the fact that this is insane. I want to read this tweet again. BlockFi is a creditor to FTX that lent to Alameda that lent to immersion, which was a shell company owned by SBF that bought Robin Hood shares, which were pledged as collateral to guarantee the BlockFi loan to FTCX that was used to bail out BlockFi itself. What the,

Starting point is 00:52:56 okay, so this is the pattern that we saw throughout Sam Bankman-Fried and throughout FTX Empire. We also saw the same pattern with Fero's Capital, maxing out lines of credit, using anything as, collateral as possible, borrow everything that you can, create as much like interdependent connections as possible. And then like you create a super fragile system. And then like CZ tweets and then the thing falls apart. Yeah. Put it in the pond everything. Everything's pawned.

Starting point is 00:53:25 My God. Any collateral we have, Robin Hood shares at the collateral that backs that the, uh, to buy block five. Can you believe this? And remember, remember what I said was the whole summary of what SBF was saying. We forgot to manage risk. No. You did him. Yeah, you forgot a lot of things. You maxed out your credit card. You maxed out your risk, bro.

Starting point is 00:53:46 You set your house on fire. You stole from everyone your neighborhood. I don't know, man. You did a lot more than just not manage risk. All right. That's insane. That's FDX. All right, this week.

Starting point is 00:53:57 Maybe things get quieter from here. I don't know what Sam's next move is going to be. I'm kind of curious. Jail! It's got to be jail. We did an episode on this earlier in the week. if you guys want to catch that on the question we post was why is San Bang Refried not in jail? I don't think we got a satisfying answer at the end of that episode.

Starting point is 00:54:16 We did get an answer. We just weren't happy about it. The answer is that he paid the Democrats and the Republicans and the New York Times and all these journalists and all these nonprofits. And now no one wants him to go to jail because if he goes to jail, they'll have to give back all of that money as clawbacks. That's the answer as to why he's not in jail. David, my hope is that it's just too soon. that the justice system will wear that's okay right that's what i was thinking until i saw doing this with the interview tour yes i was thinking okay it's just too soon like people get confused by crypto they're waiting for the dust to settle we'll charge him he'll go to jail now with this speaking tour i have capitulated it's like oh he might get away with this like it he's talking as if he's got some sort of bulletproof armor some sort of shield over him like he's got the master and some people

Starting point is 00:55:04 are letting him do that okay we'll see how this emerges, I for one, would be happy not to have to think about him for at least a, at least a day. Don't hold your breath. All right, let's talk about Metamask privacy stuff. What is going on in this world? That was an issue last week as well. Tell us. Yeah, okay, so I'm going to speed run through this. So Inferra and Metamask got into a bunch of public heat on Twitter because it was reported that Metamask was reporting users IP addresses and mapping them to their Ethereum wallets, which and the reason why it was Meta Mask was because actually it's Inferra, because when you make a transaction through Metamask,

Starting point is 00:55:43 it routes it routes. It doesn't have to, but that's the default. But that's the default. And then people, okay, well, Inferra is the one that's mapping IP addresses to Metamask users. What the hell? Why are you guys doing this? And then both Joseph Lubin puts out a tweet thread, providing a bunch of clarity on this. But I actually felt that it was Dan Finley's tweet threads that were the most helpful.

Starting point is 00:56:08 So if you want to get a long-form answer, which we don't have time for, there is Joe Lubin's tweet thread, 21 tweets that explains it. And basically, the TLDR of this is that, no, Infura is actually doing the same thing that everyone else is doing, which is the minimum amount of user data retention possible. The only reason why Infura and Metamask are taking flack for this is they are also the most transparent about what's going on. To say this more simply, it's not infura that's capturing user data. the internet is just this place that captures user data. There's just like, we leak data all over the place. This is what David Trom was talking about, which is why he made,

Starting point is 00:56:48 which is why he made this whole thing called traffic analysis. Traffic analysis can map your IP address to your Ethereum wallet. It's not a result of Infura. It's just the fact that infura is a part of the internet. And then I am currently, I am regurgitating and restating what Dan Finley says, who, Dan Finley is one of my personal hero. in this base. So I trust him. So this is me bestowing trust upon Dan Finley. I think he's

Starting point is 00:57:12 a great guy. I've done multiple podcasts with him. And this is what he says and I totally believe him. So maybe you just have to fact check me. But I think that this is kind of a nothing burger. And I actually think again, to double down on the point, the reason why people are upset at Metamask and Infura is

Starting point is 00:57:28 because they are actually the ones that are the most transparent about what is going on. And so that transparency allowed for this rage to be like surfaced. So this was kind of spicy. So this was my crypto wallet tweeting out, which is a Metamask competitor, saying, angry that Metamask is going to start collecting even more of your information, now your IP addresses. We have never, and we'll never collect identifiable information for our users. So use our wallet.

Starting point is 00:57:54 And then Taylor Monaghan, now Metamask responds, except you do, you have, and you always, you will always, because there's no way not to, don't respect your users like that. You send every user's various on-chain addresses, IP addresses, info to MUAPI, which is themselves, blockchain.com, moonbeam network, on and on. The only difference is that you blatantly lie about it. Ooh, spicy. And then Dan Finley, who retweets this tweet, if you want to hit the back button, Ryan, says, other wallets are opportunistically acting like their centralized web infrastructure magically

Starting point is 00:58:25 isn't. It is. If they have any anti-denial of service layer and who can survive in crypto without one, they're storing data too. So I think the TLDR is like, this is the meta, and for you're not doing anything that isn't also done by anyone else, and it's also not their choice. My takeaway is just float around the internet using a VPN.

Starting point is 00:58:45 And this is less of a problem for you. You have to protect these things at the base layer, because assume your data is leaking everywhere. If you want to get super hardcore use tour, that's what we've got to do right now. David, what do we got coming up next? Coming up next, we got some really good stuff, some really, really good stuff,

Starting point is 00:59:02 which I'm excited to talk about. because that was some bad stuff. The Ethereum ecosystem scores some huge wins, which we're going to talk about. There's some solid NFT activity as well going around. And bankless, that's us, Ryan, acquires a company that helped put $150 million into people's wallets. Wow.

Starting point is 00:59:22 Good for them. Good for them. We're going to talk about that and more. Right after we talked to some of these fantastic sponsors to make you more bankless. The Brave Wallet is your secure, multi-chain on-ramp, into Web3, and it's built directly into the Brave Privacy Browse.

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Starting point is 01:01:15 Guys, we have some exciting news. David alluded to it before the break, but Bankless has just acquired a $150 million tool for the bankless community. We did? That doesn't mean we paid $150 million for this. All right, David. Let's just just be clear on that. This tool has created $150 million worth of value for bankless users, people that are on the bankless journey in D-Fi, primarily through airdrops and other claimable activities. The tool is called Earnify. You may have heard us talk about Earnify on the podcast before, I think, in the form of sponsorship. This is a tool we've used for a while, and we liked it so much. We wanted to bring it into the bankless family and give it more exposure,

Starting point is 01:01:56 give it more support, and scale it up. So a few reasons we did that. this. I can get into those. But give me your reactions first, David. Why don't you tell me why we did this? Why did we do this? Well, once upon a time, people might be able to infer I'm a little bit of a disorganized individual. So I had like 10, 12, 15 active Ethereum wallets during air drop season. And without Earnify, I actually would have missed like three or four uniswap airdrops. Yeah, I remember this. Yeah. So this is how the story started. So I was using Earnify to plug in all of my addresses that I didn't want to have to load it through Metamask, restore old private keys. I just had like an Excel sheet of my Ethereum addresses. And one by one, I plop them into

Starting point is 01:02:38 Earnify. And I found like tens of thousands of dollars that I had not previously claimed that I thought that I had totally claimed. The couch cushions. Yeah, under the couch cushions. The unidrop, specifically. Yeah, but some other ones as well. I also discovered that I had missed airdrops that had expired, sad face, which it also let me know. And then it also let me know that I had a pudgy penguin, little penguins available to mint. So like the amount of money I got from this thing was a lot. It was insane. Yeah, it was funny. I remember watching you do this and like discovering a tool. This is like in April. And it was just like, this is your tweet. LMAO, just found another wallet with the uniswap air drop. That is two years. Two years after the uniswap air drop.

Starting point is 01:03:19 You were just hitting me with these. Like, oh, found another 400. uni, this is like worth thousands of dollars each time, right? Yeah. And so I really at the time talked to you and I was like, who built this tool? It's fantastic. I started using it too. And I was like, wow, all of these addresses that I've used, I have air drops, unerned, air drops, uncleaned tokens that I can be.

Starting point is 01:03:41 So I reached out to the Earnify account and said, hey, thanks for helping David find all of his tokens. You guys up for a conversation about how we can collaborate. I was just thinking, hey, we want to give them some more. exposure on bankless. And that's when we met the founder of Earnify. His name is Dawson. Dawson. He is a bankless listener from way back, apparently. And he's a hacker. He's a developer. Something that, some skills that David and I do not have, turns out he has been hacking at hackathons last couple of years. And he's won a whole bunch of them that he's participated in. These are

Starting point is 01:04:18 like crypto-centric, eth-centric hackathons. He even has a podcast, Dave. specifically for DFI builders. So we started talking to Dawson, and we talked some more. He's got the original bankless t-shirts. Before we were even talking to him, he was wearing a bankless stuff. I know, I know. Anyway, talks went so well. We decided to bring Dawson on as a co-founder of this new entity, we're calling

Starting point is 01:04:41 bankless labs. And the purpose of bankless labs is to build tools, build equipment. All right? So if you think of bankless media, the thing that we're doing right now, the theme for us has been educated. The theme's been education. And our goal has been to bring crypto to a billion users. And we've done that through podcasts, through newsletter, through all sorts of media that

Starting point is 01:05:04 we're embarking. And we're still going to do that. But it's not, the bankless journey doesn't end with education. It also stretches into equipment, tools. We want to educate. We want to equip. And in order to equip, we need to start building some of these tools for the bankless journey. And Earnify, to me, David, is like a.

Starting point is 01:05:20 Top recommended tool. Like, if you're starting your crypto journey, the thing you need to do is get on bank lists, get on some other great podcast education material. That's the education part, right? Then you need some tools. You need metamask. You need a ledger wallet. You also need to plug in your addresses in Earnify so you don't miss air drop opportunities

Starting point is 01:05:39 or other notification events that will happen on chain because these things will keep happening. And if you don't have this plugged in, you've got to do all the work manually, and that's no fun. So we brought Dawson in. brought Earnify in. We're giving it some more exposure. We're scaling it up. We're building at the roadmap. And I could not be more excited to bring tools into the bankless journey as well. Yeah. This is a, there's a lot of potential here, which I mean, we'll refrain from turning this into a massive ad for Earnify, although you should put your Ethereum address into Ernify. Because it's an email notification service. You put your address in if a new air drop,

Starting point is 01:06:15 new event happens that you can claim it will email you. So the whole thing is that it saves you time. Go click my meme because I think my meme's really good. Oh, which one? Is this one yours? Yes. Yeah, that one. Yeah. So this is the, Rick and Morty, what is my purpose meme? What is my purpose? What is my purpose? You find me money. That's the pitch. You find users money. You always have this weird relationship with robots, David. I'm not always comfortable with. Okay. They're not just built to serve you. All right. They could be your friends too. This is my meme, by the way. They got forced to the bottom of the post. This little robot friend. Bro, I don't know what that meme is. That's great.

Starting point is 01:06:50 Anyway, guys, if you want to join the journey with us, go try it to earn a 5. Put some eth addresses in. It's free. So you want to scale that up, cover more addresses, and get some of the premium merit drops. So check that out. And we're releasing a whole bunch more in the coming weeks. Super excited to do that. David, some other stuff is getting released during this bear market.

Starting point is 01:07:09 What is this from Kasa? I would classify this as an Ethereum win, maybe? Yeah, yeah. Give us some context here. There's three big wins that we're about to go through, which are infrastructure that has previously been specific to other ecosystems, which are now opening the doors to Ethereum. So this is CASA, which is a key management system.

Starting point is 01:07:27 It's like a multi-sig system on training wheels. So think like no-sys, but with humans on the other end to kind of white glove your support. There's different tiers that you can access. There's, of course, free. There's an iPhone app. There's like a cheap $120 a year one. There's like a more expensive ones. But is it various?

Starting point is 01:07:47 just like help to self-custody your assets in a highly secure way. So it's like white glove for Knox services. Anyways, CASA has always been very highly regarded in the Bitcoin ecosystem as just really, really good product. And now Ethereum support is coming soon. So that's very exciting for the Ethereum world. This is a company that's been around for a very long time, very reputable. People love it. And now we get all of their products and services for Ethereum, which is amazing. That's a big step for them. It's a big step. It's a big step.

Starting point is 01:08:18 It's a big step. Javis and Lop has been a big coin advocate and pretty critical of Ethereum. And he, I believe, is a co-founder behind this as well. Yeah. And that is just the first. So we're off to the second. Phantom wallet out of Solana is now coming to Ethereum and Polygon. I remember like a lot of people, when they say, like, what do you like so much about

Starting point is 01:08:36 Solana? They say like the transaction times and Phantom wallet. Phantom wallet is great. Well, Phantom wallet is now also coming to Ethereum and Polygon at the same time. So that is now a new wallet in this side of the Ethereum ecosystem to add to the competition sphere, which is very much needed. And also, Trader Joe out of Avalanche. Avalanche's biggest decks. Yeah, this is like the uniswap of Avalanche is now deploying on Arbitrum.

Starting point is 01:09:03 So you know the whole idea, Ryan, that we had during the Alt Layer 1 summer, that all Alt-Layer 1s will just become roll-ups on Ethereum. Yes, I remember this. That might not play out, but all Alt-Layer 1 applications might instead deploy on Layer 2's on Ethereum because that is what we are seeing here. So I'm sure Trader Joe on Avalanche is not going anywhere, but they are also definitely coming to Arbitrum. So congratulations to the Trader Joe team for making the break into the Ethereum ecosystem. Yeah, okay. So on to new subjects, we were talking about Ethereum censorship in the last week, earlier or earlier this week, FIA, what's it called, flashbots, open sourced their block building services. Their block building software. So many

Starting point is 01:09:41 more people can build blocks. And that has recently turned over. the peak of OFAC compliant blocks that have been built. Even though 79% of Ethereum blocks have previously been OFAC compliant, that doesn't mean that tornado cash is censored. You can always still get a tornado cash transaction into Ethereum. But if you're a United States citizen, you go to jail. Anyways, flashbots open source their block building, and we have seen a downtrend in the percentage of OFAC compliant blocks.

Starting point is 01:10:11 Cool. HaZU responds to this tweet. this tweet, which is just a retreat of what we were just showing, plus more neutral relays coming online, which is an announcement of Nosis Dow and ultrasound money, plus the adoption of minimum bid, plus existing relays accepting submissions from external builders should make this chart look quite different over time. And this, Ryan, summarizes why I've never really been concerned about this whole, like, Ethereum's totally censored. Like, it's all, the amount of solutions that we had that were in the pipeline. And in the...

Starting point is 01:10:43 in a near term as well, just like we're massive. So I get so much fun about this. So much. People actually think that, that Ethereum is censoring. You can't get a tornado cash transaction through on the Ethereum network, which is completely untrue. And I'm just like, I just have stopped responding these tweets because like, just let time play out and, you know, knowledge will diffuse.

Starting point is 01:11:04 What's happening with the Avey, though? Are they pausing some markets on the DFI side? Yeah, so remember last week when we talked about the guy that did a short position on curve left to AVE with like $1.8 million a bad debt. And then Gontlet released that post recommending that Avey turn off trading on or turn off liquidity. Just pause them. Yeah, just yeah. Well, yeah, pause, turn them off. Temporary freezing the following market. So a bunch of tokens are no longer acceptable collateral on Avey. YFI, CRV, ZRX, mana, one inch bat, ample, Rye, L-U-S-D, steak sushi DPI maker, MKR.

Starting point is 01:11:44 Actually, some pretty big players. Why are all these things frozen? They're just not liquid enough. When you're at the bottom of a bear market, you are also at all-time lows in liquidity. It's just a risk parameter that Ame governance tweaks up and down, so they're freezing it now.

Starting point is 01:11:59 And I'm sure they'll turn them back on as they become more adopted, more liquid, et cetera, et cetera. Remind people that's designed in the protocol is supposed to function that way. And I'm glad governance is being proactive about that. David, let's talk about NFT stuff. some collectibles. First, you've got to talk about the bankless collectibles. God, we are just

Starting point is 01:12:15 shipping some cool stuff, man. Our second collectible is coming out tomorrow. The first was the SBF versus Vorhe's debate. David, do you want to tease what the newest bankless collectible is? Which podcast is this? Okay, so it is the, let me see. Well, I know you know the answer. It's all those teases for the listener. There are two foundational technologies that kickstarted the Renaissance. Oh, fuck. That's in a title. You broke it.

Starting point is 01:12:44 It's a crypto renaissance episode. Dude is trying to say, The printing press and double-entry bookkeeping. I should have just said that. Wow. That could have been the riddle. Anyway, you know what it is? Josh Rosenthal, the episode.

Starting point is 01:12:55 We are having a Twitter Spaces with Josh Rosenthal. We're talking about the episode as we're releasing this collectible NFT, having that tomorrow. So there's also a secondary market where you could buy and sell bankless collectibles that we've spun up to. That's kind of cool doing this NFT. podcast NFT experiment. It's going pretty well.

Starting point is 01:13:15 First ever podcast NFTs. And this will be the second ever. Pretty cool. We got two now. David, speaking of NFTs, cockpunch. Cockpunch.

Starting point is 01:13:24 My favorite NFT. Well, there's a date for this. December 7th now. We had the podcast, Tim Ferriss earlier this week. And this is what Brewster looks like. A cock.

Starting point is 01:13:34 Is that what you thought that they looked like, rock punch looks like. Ish. It's more 3D than I thought. But yeah, That's about it. Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 01:13:42 Yeah. So that's cool. So that mint is happening in seven days. Seven days now. All right. OpenC says NFT creators earned one billion in royalties. That's pretty big, man. That's a pretty big economy for the creators.

Starting point is 01:13:57 And that was over the last year, one billion in royalties. That's just royalties. God, NFT people got it so easy. Remember how long it took us to get one billion dollars locked in defy? It took us like two years, dude. Yeah, but NFT people are feeling pretty down bad, even worse than DFI. think. Maybe not. I don't know. We're both pretty correct. All right. Moving on, Pudgy Penguins. What are they doing this week? Yeah, so Pudgy Penguins had a sale in Sotheby's, which sell sold out. So 10 Pudgy

Starting point is 01:14:23 penguins got sold in the Sotheby's auction for something like $129,000, including the Pudgy penguin that is Coles. Cole, the founder, creator, creative Pudgy Penguin, his NFT, his Pudgy Penguin, his famous one, sold, along with a bunch of other bears. I don't think, I don't know. I don't. Don't test my NFD knowledge. I'm not with the penguins. I'm not up on it. But Telegram, I do remember this.

Starting point is 01:14:47 Telegram had a whole network, a smart contract network that they were launching, called the Telegram Network, I believe it was Ton. Yeah, Telegram Open Network or something like that. They raised like a billion dollars for this. This is back from my, circa 2018, 2017, 2018 days. I remember this being, it wasn't quite an ICO, but it was. It was definitely an ICO. It was definitely an ICO. Okay, it was an ICO. It was part of the token mania. Anyway, Telegram back doing some crypto stuff. Their founder, CEO Durov, is how you say his name?

Starting point is 01:15:17 I have no idea. No idea. He is saying that they are building crypto wallets and it's centralized exchange to prevent things like FDX from happening again. What is this, David? Is this just another like, I don't know, pump kind of thing? I mean, Nothing really came of the Telegram Open Network back in 2018. Is this more the same? So when I've read this article, and the details are more than just the headline, when I read this article, it's like, damn, what year is it? Turns out that Telegram sold $50 million in usernames using its own chain-based auction platform fragment.

Starting point is 01:15:55 So apparently the Ton blockchain is up and running. They're planning on putting a Dex on it, and they're planning on allowing Telegram to be a wallet as well. and it's also, Ryan, but up-a-da, not available to citizens in the United States. Wait, what? Yep. That's, but, okay, I, that's annoying. I don't ask too many questions. I don't know, dude.

Starting point is 01:16:15 Okay. All right. Well, I mean, think of this as an app chain, I guess. That is somewhat censored if you live in the U.S. Cool. All right. Let's talk about fidelity. This is actually huge news that went under the radar.

Starting point is 01:16:28 But fidelity crypto is a go. So remember, fidelity is a $4.5 trillion. firm asset management. They just launched retail crypto trading. Yeah, trillion with a T. Retail crypto trading. This is fidelity. And they're doing it now when the rest of the world hates crypto. Why is this a big deal, David? Well, just because of that $4.5 trillion amount, but it's one of the big, big signs of just like the correct amount of adoption, the best kind of adoption that you could hope for. Fidelity. They've been pro crypto for a very long time, mostly pro-Bitcoin, I recently pro-etherium, but now they're also pro-retail, which we love.

Starting point is 01:17:07 So nice job, crypto. Excuse me, nice job, fidelity, crypto. I've really liked their strategy. It's kind of like the tortoise type strategy, but they're slow and steady, and they do things very methodically, very carefully and very, very considered. Not by the winds of the market, yeah. But they're, but they're there, I mean, they're an old institution that's been at the forefront at some level and certainly leading their peers.

Starting point is 01:17:27 Really cool to see. Also, Binance, getting into the proof of reserve game. a little bit more. What's this, David? Yeah, Binance released their proof of reserves. I asked Nick Carter, hey, Nick Carter, who's like the king of proof of reserves, can you give me a comment as to how good the system is? He told me that he is writing an article about it. But Binance is not the only proof of reserve system that got announced. Oh, by the way, the Binance proof of reserve claims that they have 582,000 Bitcoin in reserve with only a liability set of 575,000, giving finance a margin of over 6,000 bitcoins. Cool. Bitmex produce a proof of a liability system,

Starting point is 01:18:06 meaning that if you are a user of BitMex and you've deposited Bitcoin, you can get a cryptographic assurance that your deposit is accounted for in the overall liability of the system, which means that all you have to do is cross-reference to how much liabilities they have, which how much Bitcoins they have. So cool. I like this. I like this market pressure. Yes, love it. Centralized exchange are like, oh, crap, we better put our proof of reserves, solution in place right now and prove for liabilities. Meanwhile, centralized exchanges are also the ones that's still with money anyway, are buying things. This is Binance launching a $1 billion raise for a crypto recovery fund to buy troubled assets. We need a lot of troubled assets.

Starting point is 01:18:45 We get through this bear market and this crypto winter and finance wants to snap up a whole bunch of them, a billion dollars to dole out, it looks like. Well, yeah, so a bunch of startups, a bunch of funds, a bunch of, it's just everything, lost money in FTX, right? And so Binance says, hey, we've got a billion dollars. If you're in trouble, we'll strike a deal with you. That's what that is. It's not just Binance. It's jump cryptos in here, Polygon Ventures, Aptos Labs. Interesting group of collaborators. It's like a freeding frenzy of like, you know, fire cell stuff. Some sad news over at Cracken, they are laying off about 30% of their staff, about 1,100 people. Wow, that is a big staff because of market conditions. So that's a sad and

Starting point is 01:19:26 unfortunate. But there's also some fantastic severance. So they're also paying 16 weeks of base pay, performance bonuses as determined by managers, and also four months of health care benefits. So doing it responsibly. So that's the way should be done. Imagine FTX employees right now. Yeah, they don't have any of these things. You don't have any health care. Yeah. On the releases side, Uniswap just released a big NFT aggregator. No. So actually, this got released a while ago. Now it's finally live. So we actually did a state of the nation with Hayden forever ago about this. I guess it took longer to actually... Were you talking about Jeannie?

Starting point is 01:19:57 Genie, yeah. They purchased Jeannie, right? Purchased Jeannie, and now NFTs are live on U2Swap the exchange. You can trade NFTs across marketplaces. Also, if you are a historical genie user, you are Airdrop $5 million. I bet you you should probably put in your Ethereum address into Earnified to check that if you are or not. Yeah, absolutely. Very cool.

Starting point is 01:20:22 I think that that was... This is a great meme, dude. Okay, what's this mean? This is the, this is the Bain versus, I don't know, with the guy in the pink, what that is. It's just like a face off between two entities who are doing the same pose, and Bain's bear market, and this guy in like this pink spandex suit is like, yeah, but NFT is on Univap. Not going to reverse the bear market. Sorry, guys.

Starting point is 01:20:44 It's still pretty cool. Building through the bear. Stripe also enabled fiat to crypto and on ramp. And Stripe is absolutely massive, just like an API that power so many things. things. Actually powers the bankless membership on substack as well. And so this is a big deal. allows customers to buy crypto, convert directly from crypto to Fiat, and make payments through Stripe. Yeah, we would have had, we had the conversations with the founder of Stripe to come on bankless to talk about this, but then FTX happened, so we had to reschedule them. Sad.

Starting point is 01:21:16 Yeah, they'll be on soon. Ledger doing debit cards. Reminder, Ledger is a sponsor of the bankless podcast. But we are talking about this because they've rolled out a crypto life debit card across the UK and Europe. What is this thing going to be? It pretty much explains itself. You got a debit card. It's got crypto in the back. As you swipe your debit card, you spend your crypto that is loaded up in your ledger crypto life. You have to move from your ledger wallet to this temporary place in order to kind of load your debit card. You do have to do that. Yeah. At least you don't have to trust a bank, though. It's very important till the end stage.

Starting point is 01:21:53 Well, speaking of Uniswop earlier, you know, they're still hiring, David. Yeah, because they need to hire NFT people now. That's right. It's jobs time. All right, bankless jobs board, bankless. dot pallet.com. We've got a Uniswap Labs, developer relations lead. We've got a Uniswap Labs, senior front end engineer.

Starting point is 01:22:09 We've got somebody from Rabbit Hole, business operations and strategy. Dottyland, senior blockchain engineer, diagram ventures, makerdial needs some people. Oh, look, Ernify needs some people too. Oh, weird. Bankless Labs is hiring. Full stack engineers and senior back end engineers, check out all of those jobs at the bankless job site, bankless.palat.com slash jobs. All right, David, what's coming up next, man?

Starting point is 01:22:30 Coming up next, we got questions from the nation, just one this week. Also, some hot takes on crypto Twitter. And also, of course, what Ryan and I are bullish on. And I think one of the better memes of the week that we've had in a very long time. So all of this and more coming up right after we talked to some of these fantastic sponsors to help you go bankless. How many total airdrops have you gotten? This last bull market had a ton of them.

Starting point is 01:22:49 Did you get them all? Maybe you missed one. So here's what you should do. Go to Earnify and plug in your Ethereum wallet, and Earnify will tell you if you have any unclaimed air drops that you can get. And it also does POAPs and mintable NFTs. Any kind of money that your wallet can claim, Earnify will tell you about it.

Starting point is 01:23:04 And you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire. And if you sign up for Earnify, they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose anirdrop ever again. You can also upgrade to Earnify Premium to unlock access to air drops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more. more wallets. And for just under $21 a month, it probably pays for itself with just one

Starting point is 01:23:25 air drop. So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you get. That's E-A-R-N-I.fI. And make sure you never lose another air drop. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis. The idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution, fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput for the web free world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized, opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, Fuel brings a powerful

Starting point is 01:24:05 developer experience with its own domain-specific language, sway, and a supportive tool chain called Fork. With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like Solidity, while adopting the improvements made by the Rust Tooling ecosystem, letting the fuel development environment, go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. It's questions from the nation time. We've got one question this week.

Starting point is 01:24:27 There are a whole bunch, but we had to pick one because we want to talk about something else. But the question was from Time 3 Dash, at Time 3 Dash on Twitter, why did you change your name? This is a very funny name referring to Sam Bankbenfreet. And what the question is referring to is the bankless Twitter account now, rather than saying bankless or our Twitter account handle, it says, bankmanless.

Starting point is 01:24:49 Right. Bankmanless. It was a funny joke. Sam Bankman Free. We did that, I think, like, the day all of this stuff came out. Weeks ago. It's been like this for weeks. So why did we change our name?

Starting point is 01:25:00 Well, it's a funny joke. Yeah. So like Sam Bankman Fried stole $10,000, $10 billion of user deposits. So we changed our Twitter name from bankless to bankmanless. I thought that was a funny name. Funny thing to do. But how long will it be funny? Because it's still bankmanless on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:25:13 And the joke's getting a little bit old. But I think we have a problem on our hand. So we can't change it back. Why? I don't understand this. So Elon took over and we switched our name with a new checkmark. You previously were able to change your name as much as you want. But since bank lists is a verified account, you can only change your name like once a year or something.

Starting point is 01:25:38 I don't know. But like we changed our name and now we can't change it back. So now it's stuck as Bankman list. We have emailed support. We have petition people. We may need to reach out personally. If you know Elon Musk. Tell him, we would like this change from bankman list.

Starting point is 01:25:50 Actually, we'd like him on the podcast first. We'll see that first. But also, while he's on the podcast, we'll make this your podcast. We'll ask. Yeah. So we are now bankman list for the foreseeable future. All right. It's not that far off.

Starting point is 01:26:02 It's fine. It's not that bad, but also it's just, it's going to be old. Like next year, this is going to be real old. Next year. God damn it. All right. I think it's time to shout out some of our heaviest listeners this year. David, I know your big Spotify user.

Starting point is 01:26:16 So am I. No big time. Got your Spotify. wrapped, which summarizes all of your year's listening habits, including podcasts. And we've had some fans that have been fully tapped in during the last year and have some incredible stats to share. First, I want to show. We got our bankless stats back from Spotify. Apparently, you and I recorded 16,092 minutes of new content last year. That is insane. We are insane people. This is, that's more than 99% of other creators in the business category. I wonder if it's like, we have to be in the top 10 of, of minutes of content. That's a lot of content. Do you know how many days? Do you know how many days of content? Do you know how many days of content?

Starting point is 01:26:59 No, I haven't. That is 11 days of content. That means you and I have been in the recording studio with the studio recording for 11 days. Dude, this doesn't even count debriefs. I'm, podcast. Oh yeah. This doesn't count debriefs. This doesn't count like bonus episodes. Oh yeah. Even more than that. Or YouTube on the episodes. 11 days. Are you kidding me? We are insane. Wow. All right. I don't know what that says about you and I, but let's talk about what it says about the community. Let's not talk about it. Okay, so we put out a tweet that asked for if you got banklets in your Spotify wrapped, tweet at us. So we could see how many of you listen to bankless for how long. So here we go. The fake shippie coming in at number one at 21,000 minutes.

Starting point is 01:27:43 It was bankless. I don't get the hell that happened. Okay, we had 16,000 minutes of recording last year. And Shippie listened to 21,000 minutes. It's probably listening right now. Shippie, shout out, man. That means you were listening to episodes multiple times, at least. Yeah, you got to be, they got to be listening to it as they go to bed or something.

Starting point is 01:28:05 Shippie. You have listened to more bank lists than both. Then we made. That's... That we made. Get this guy a T-shirt. We got to do something for Shippings. That's huge. That's number one.

Starting point is 01:28:15 Nice job, Shippey. Well done. All right. Let's go through the rest of them. Oh, no, that was that was it. Okay, we're not going through all of them. Okay, cool. There was so many. Thank you all to everyone who tweeted at us. So many of you listened to thousands and thousands of minutes. I hope you guys. That's a lot of bankless in your ears, David. All right, takes the week. What do we? Do you know and 93 minutes. If you've topped that, let us know and do something special for you guys. That's a lot. That's a lot of bankless in your ears, David. All right, takes the week. What do we? got for the first one. We got a tweet out of Zeneca 33. I know you like this tweet, Ryan. Why don't you read it? All right, because you didn't like it. Is that way? No, I just know. You like it. You put it in here. Fair market opportunities from Seneca. Number one, farm all the air drops. Number two. Get familiar with the AI tools. Number three, create content, written, audio, video. Yes, yes, yes. Number four, learn to code. Number five, join Dow. Number six, figure out how to manage Discord server. Number seven, read about Defi and layer twos. I actually liked it because of this last sentence. You ready for it, David?

Starting point is 01:29:14 Yeah. Wealth is sewn in the bear, reaped in the bull. That's very, very metaphorical. Some things that you can do right now during the bear market to be active. All of the airdrops that I claimed with Earnify in 2021, I became relevant to those air drops. I became, what is the word? Those airdrops. You actually earned them. I earned them. I got them during like 2019 and 2020.

Starting point is 01:29:40 Yeah, 2019. Yeah. And then you like harvest them in 2020. 20 and 21. Thanks for Earnify. There you go. And sponsored about Urnify. Sponsored by Unify. This is a Vitalik tweet. I want to actually read this out and get your take on this. Okay. So this is a Vitalik. The notion of governance rights as a narrative for why a token should be valuable is pathological. You're literally saying I'm buying X because later on somebody might buy it from me a bunch of other people to twist the protocol toward their special interests. This is a vitalic saying governance rights tokens are not very valuable. It's more. pathological. It's more kind of a meme. What do you think about this? I'd like to get Joel Menegros opinion on this because he was the one that said, yes, the governance of a token is actually the valuable thing. And that's the whole point. As in if you can govern over something,

Starting point is 01:30:28 you can dictate its influence. You can just vote in cash flows yourself. What you want, right? So governance is power. Governance capital power. These are all the same things. So the notion of governance rights is narrative. I think it's, I think maybe Vatelix just kind of of being critical of the hand waviness at this. I don't know. Yeah, I think he's saying governance rights on its own aren't as valuable as some people think that they are. But I don't think that's been the value proposition

Starting point is 01:30:56 that defy governance tokens have purported. It's more the idea or like the thesis that token holders will vote in cash flows, capital flows, to themselves, get a portion of revenue in the uniswap fee. Now, that hasn't quite materialized yet. No. Like Uniswop doesn't have a fee switch on to uni token holders yet, does it?

Starting point is 01:31:17 Yeah. So the TEL continues and says, as a regular individual, pay $500 to get a point zero zero one percent to influence the outcome of some votes. It's just not a good trade. The only people for whom it is a good trade are multimillionaires from hedge funds. Yeah, but isn't that kind of always the bet that like you can't, you don't have much say as a smallly capitalized individual? And so like governance power or like the value of Apple governance like as an retail

Starting point is 01:31:42 investor, I can't sway Apple governance, but hedge funds can, but that's why the price exists on the secondary market. Anyways, I'm confused by this Vidalic take. Yeah, I do think that governance tokens have a lot of problems. I mean, we had an episode with Hasu where we've recently talked about this, but yeah, I'm not as pessimistic as Vitalik on these things. Yeah. What's Van Spencer saying here? Van Spencer, 2022. Not the year everyone wanted, that's for sure, but probably the year we deserved. For context, Q4, 2019, Genesis had about $60 million of loans outstanding. In Q4 of 2021, they had about 50 billion. This is Genesis, the company. Genesis, yeah. 60 million to 50 billion in two years? Yes, right. Crazy. And then he continues, we are back to effectively zero C-Fi credit

Starting point is 01:32:31 available in the industry outside of Maple Finance, which is emergent. Ashes to ashes. Basically saying, the mania's gone. The credit's gone. We are at the. bottom. This is a bottom signal to me. He's not calling the bottom, but I'm in calling the bottom on his behalf. These numbers are pretty astounding. We grew from 60 million in C-Fi loans to 50 billion. And that's just Genesis. It's not the entire market. Now we're back at zero. A lot of things have been washed away, certainly in this market. But what do you bullish on in spite of all this, David? So DC investor put out a tweet and said, do you think the people that bought Ether at $120 are inconsolably upset that they did not buy at $80? No. Source.

Starting point is 01:33:11 me, as in like DC, one of the guys that was buying the dip with us throughout 2018 to 2020. And so I follow up on that tweet and I say, all of my sub $300 buys, ether buys, which like ether bounced between $100 and $300, like four times between 2018 and 2020. So I say, all of my sub $300 buys between 2018 and 2020, just blur into that one big dip I bought. And what I am bullish on, Ryan, is that same thing happening all over again between $1,000 I think Ether will bounce between one and $2,000, perhaps a couple of times over the next 12, 18, God forbid, 24 months. But then that period of time will just blur into that one big dip that we all bought as we all stuck through the bear market together. Before Ether goes to finally $10,000 and beyond.

Starting point is 01:33:58 So, I mean, this may be this obsession. I don't think we have an obsession. It's just an interesting number, but like triple digit, ETH, right? Whether it does hit triple digits and you buy at 900, or do you buy it at 1,200, you're not even going to notice if the price of Eith is 10K. Yeah, Ryan, so just buy it then. Dude, again, people are going to say, you guys are like permables, this sounds crazy, haven't been saying 10K for a long time.

Starting point is 01:34:23 Yes, we have, and we're not wrong. I'm sorry, Eith is going to 10K. Like, I don't know when. I don't know how long that will take. In the future. But I have not wavered one minute from that belief. And I remember when Eith was hanging out of 120. people thought it would never hit all-time highs again,

Starting point is 01:34:42 all-time highs being like 1,400 or something like this. And here we are. We already at 1,400. We did it over 10x since then. And this is the lower point during the bear market. All right. So anyway, I don't know what else to say, but I think he's totally right in that you don't notice a difference in the buys at this.

Starting point is 01:34:59 So don't time the bottom, I think is no way. Don't obsess with that. Just buy. Just goodbye. No, financial advice. Oh, Ryan, where do you bullish on? Bankless lap. David. We're doing going beyond education, tools for the journey. I think it's really cool to have

Starting point is 01:35:15 some more dev talent on the team. I'm really excited about the roadmap that we're putting together for Earnify integrating that into the rest of the bankless product. That's cool. It's cool. Building software, David. Who would have thought? Two podcasters. Look at us. A media company buying a software? Wow. A software tool. That's great. I think it's going to be great for people on the bankless journey and give us some time, guys, to integrate all of these things together. Right now, there's a separate membership that you have for bankless and for Earnify. I mean, we're going to work as we hired people up over the coming months to get this all integrated and feeling really nice and packaged. But I mean, already, dude, this tool, you know what's really fulfilling to me, David,

Starting point is 01:35:56 is like, you know, how the one time I've gone to a conference, all of the people who have come up to us and been like, hey, thank you for billing bankless. You help me on the my crypto journey. I got a job in crypto. I got financially independent as a result of this. I was bullish. You developed conviction in some assets that did really well and continue to perform. And then I'm a long-term holder on. All of these things, it's like, I feel like it's value that bankless has provided the community. And Earnify is another example of this. It's like a way to quantify that. $150 million and confirmed airdrops that people, have received in the bankless journey. You know that thing where we've said,

Starting point is 01:36:37 crypto pays you to learn about crypto? I said that forever. Now we have a tool where you can go harvest these things. You learn about it on a bank list. Now you can go pick it up. And to me, that's very fulfilling. Like, I want to grow those numbers. The number of people that have done well in crypto who got on the journey through bankless education, the number of people who have generated wealth from the crypto economy, those are the numbers that mean the most to me. And those are numbers I think we can grow when we have these sorts of tools. I am very bullish on what we were building next with Earnify and everything that's coming with Bankless Labs. 100%. Yeah, we've been teasing like Bankless 2.0 for a while. And we've started to have some of these things emerge. Bankless collectibles came out a couple weeks ago. We're now announcing this Earnify thing. We've teased a brand new website. We told people to subscribe to Bankless when that 25% off discount happened last week. But if you didn't, you should have. But there's still more to come. And the cool thing is all of these things do seamlessly,

Starting point is 01:37:35 integrate with each other once all these pieces are out. So I'm excited for 2023 as we, you know, shoot more than more of this ammo that we have of bankless 2.0 out the door. David, do you know what time it is now? Yeah, that's meme of the week's time. Let's look at the meme of the week. And you're particularly bullish on this one. This is, this is getting ridiculous. What are we looking at, man? This is an article out of the Wall Street Journal titled Sam Bakeman Fried is super jacked and handsome. The FTCS founder is super hot. He's amazing and we love him so much. And there's a picture of San Bacon Free just absolutely

Starting point is 01:38:06 ripped. Muscle bound. Yeah, looking good. Reminder, this is a meme. This is not real. Although, like, to this day, do you even know? I don't know. That's what's funny about it. I mean, you could actually see this in the Wall Street Journal. All right, guys. This one's kind of egregious, but stick around, though, for the moment of Zen. Actually, the moment

Starting point is 01:38:26 of Zen today, we are a quick conversation that you had with Dawson, who's the co-founder of Bankless Labs. So stick around if you want to hear about that. Of course, as always, got to tell you about the risk and disclaimers. We've got to say, none of this has been financial advice. It never is. Crypto is risky. So is ETH. So is Bitcoin. No matter what price you buy these things at. We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Hey, Dawson. What's Earnify?

Starting point is 01:38:51 Earnify is the AirJop checker. Earnify is a Web 3 notification tool that will let you know of all the the things you have to go claim for your wallet. Claim for your wallet. What does that mean? So claiming for your wallet is things like air drops, white lists, NFT mints. Earnify will check you for all these and let you know instantly what you have to go claim. Why do I need it? You need it because without Earnify, you don't know when you have unclaimed assets. This is tens of thousands of dollars sometimes that are just out there waiting for you for your wallet specifically. How many people use Earnify?

Starting point is 01:39:22 There are over 250,000 people who trust Earnify for notifications. Okay, so with Earnify, I plug in my Ethereum address and it tells me what AirDrops I can collect, right? Exactly. It allows you to do that for not just one address either. You can do it up to 10 addresses. Up to 10 addresses. And so how much money have you made people? There are over 150 million dollars worth of air drops that have been found through Earnify since launching two years ago. $150 million. So people have put in their Ethereum addresses, multiple of them, into Earnify. And Irnify has helped them claim $1.5 million. Not just $1.5 million, $150 million. Oh, excuse me, $150 million.

Starting point is 01:40:03 That's amazing. Why did you make Earnify? What inspired you to make it? You know, I'm a crypto Dgen, just like all of you. I found that I had unclaimed airdrops that I didn't know about. And so I made this tool originally for myself to check my wallets, and then it turned out that a lot of other people wanted the exact same set of features. So is it just Airdrops?

Starting point is 01:40:21 It is much more than just Airdrops. So Earnify began originally from a hackathon two years ago as the AirDrop Checker, and now Earnify is expanded to pull-up tokens, NFT, mints, white lists, and many other things like pull-up raffles for just all the free things that you don't know about yet for your wallets. So what do I get if I sign up for Earnify? If you sign up for Earnify, you're going to be able to check your addresses right now, but you will also be signed up for email notifications when you match a new claimable asset

Starting point is 01:40:49 in the future. So this means that when an AirDrop goes live, you can be the first to know that your wallets are in that air drop. But you can also pay for Earnify, right? What do you get if you pay for Earnify? If you're a serious defy user, you should pay for Earnedify. because you'll be able to watch more than just two addresses. You'll be able to watch up to 10.

Starting point is 01:41:04 And that means that you will get these email notifications for up to 10 of your addresses. So you'll know more about all of the addresses that you have and all the assets that you can go claim. How is Ernify different from any other AirDrop notification service? AirDrop's much more than just an AirDrop notification service. AirDrop is the highest quality. There is zero spam allowed. Everything is manually reviewed, tested, and checked to make sure that it's worth your time. not just your time, but also your money.

Starting point is 01:41:31 Because I believe, just like everyone else, who is on the bankless journey, that we should stay safe and avoid some of these spam issues, some of these bankruptcy issues that we've been seeing over in the CFI world. What are Earnify's plans for the future? Is there a roadmap? Earnify has huge plans for the future.

Starting point is 01:41:47 Beyond just air drops, Earnify is going to be checking you for all the things that your wallet can have. So when new NFTs drop, you can be notified of that. When your ENS names are about to expire, you can be notified of that. When anything happens on chain, you need to be enabled to respond to that with something like Earnify. To notify you right away, to go take action, maybe your defy loans are about to get liquidated. Maybe the ENS name you've always wanted is about to go up for auction and you can bid on it.

Starting point is 01:42:16 Earnify will notify you all these things in the future.

Bankless - ROLLUP: SBF Live Interviews | BlockFi Bankruptcy | Crypto Bottom Signals | MetaMask Privacy Policy | Earnifi

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