Bankless - ROLLUP: SHIB | WorldCoin | Twitter, Reddit, Disney NFT Platform | Facebook Meta

Starting point is 00:00:07 Hey guys, happy fourth week of October. This is the Halloween edition of your weekly roll-up. David, how you doing? Stark over there. I can't see you right now. Yeah, the viewers on YouTube are confused as to what's going on and why there's a blank screen in front of them. Should we do it?

Starting point is 00:00:21 This is not a mistake, right? No, that's not a mistake. Well, tell them what we're about to tee up. Okay, so... Well, I've got my costume on. A costume. We were supposed to wear costumes? Yeah, we were supposed to wear costumes.

Starting point is 00:00:30 You forgot your costume? Well, no, dude. So I knew this. I knew you were planning something big, okay? Because when I tweeted you and asked about the roll-up agenda, you tweeted me this picture of you and somebody who was like in your apartment applying makeup to your face. So I have no idea what I'm about to see. But here's my guess, David. I think that I'm going to see you as a rendition of your punk.

Starting point is 00:00:55 Okay? That's like my best guess. I feel like all the hints you've been dropping over the past few weeks about what you're planning to do. I've been pretty explicit about it. Okay. Maybe you've been explicit. But you have no idea. I have no idea.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Whether I even dressed up. You don't know whether I've been just playing you this whole time. You don't know whether you're going to see Cryptopunk on the other side. I think you bought a $15 Amazon Ninja Turtles costume, which you are currently wearing. What the hell? Does that sound like me? Yes. Does that sound like something I would do?

Starting point is 00:01:24 You're saying I would cheap out on like my NFT. I would never do that. Cream NFTs all the way. So we're going to do this reveal. We're going to do this live. I've never seen David. I haven't seen Ryan. Okay.

Starting point is 00:01:36 All right. All right. Ready? Three, two. One. Here we go. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Oh my God. David. Oh, my. That's a little bit more than $15. Tell me what I look like. I'll tell you what you look like. Yeah, you look like a ninja. Oh, wait, wait.

Starting point is 00:01:54 It's not done. You bought your first ever cigarette to have that right now, didn't you? How did you know, dude? I went to the gas station this morning. And I'm like, give me. pack of cigarettes and they're like what kind i was like i don't know the ones that you smoke all right so you yeah you are certainly a a ninja turtle well i'm actually i think you're just a turtle with with a blue blue eye mask on and now you have a cigarette i am yeah let me show you what i am have you

Starting point is 00:02:25 have you spent time like looking at this look hey that's a pretty good costume that's a pretty good Awesome. Yeah, it's pretty identical. It's pretty good. You did a good job. You did a good job. Oh my God. Okay. You look like, let me see. I see the colors, you know, you got definitely some whiter face. There's a little bit of a mind. Oh, God. I can't, sorry, I can't do this with a cigarette. Yeah. I put the cigarette down. Cigarettes over. A little bit of a mind vibe. No, no, dude. I see, okay, I see the smile now. I see the smile going down. Okay. I see the pixelation. Mm-hmm. I love the hat. But this is good, David.

Starting point is 00:03:02 That's good, man. Too bad. Good. That's great. Shout out to Haley for putting on makeup on me for my first time ever. This is my first time ever wearing makeup. I swear to God. It's awesome, man.

Starting point is 00:03:11 So are you going to do this again, like for actual Halloween? Or is this just for the show? Is this just special for today? No, I got to do it tomorrow too. I'm doing a layer zero with Griff Green after this. And so I have to like take it off or else he's just going to be. You won't care. Just do it.

Starting point is 00:03:27 All day. Okay. You are your punk today. I am my turtle NFT, my tiny turtle NFT, and that's just how it is. It's Halloween. They were doing a window washing in my apartment, so they had to come into my apartment, so I just opened up my door to talk to the facilities people, and I just was wearing this my crypto punk on my face. Oh my God. All right, then, well, let's dive in then. This is going to be the same roll-up, right?

Starting point is 00:03:46 All of the quality you've come to expect, except David and I are NFTs today. So, like, we're taking this extremely seriously. It's the most serious. Yeah. Why would we joke about crypto? It's the most serious thing on the planet. I can't tell if you're smiling anymore. I'm always, I'm always smiling. Everything's funny today. All right. Guys, first thing before, actually, what are we going to cover today, David? I think there's three things we got to cover. First is Shib, what is going on with his dog coin? It's going nuts. All right? That's going to be a big news item. Also, Disney NFTs are coming? Question mark. Disney, finally getting in the NFT game? I feel like somebody tweeted this out. I might have tweeted this out a month

Starting point is 00:04:24 ago. Like, Disney, where's your NFT game? We have so much IP. They're getting it. in. Worldcoin. What is this? Yeah, they listen, of course. Worldcoin, what is this thing? It's a new monetary system. You actually, you know, plug your eye into an orb and get coins. Is that how this works? We're going to dive into all three of those news topics. Of course, guys, we try to cram as much of crypto as we can, the week in crypto in your brain in approximately 90 minutes. Sometimes we go a little bit over. We're not always successful with that. But before we begin, God, I give a shout out to our friends and sponsors at Pool Together because they have released something pretty awesome that the bankless community should know about. And that is the four of the Pull Together

Starting point is 00:05:04 pools. This is a no loss lottery. So it has lottery in the word because you can actually win stuff every week. They're giving out a million dollars in prize, but the no loss piece makes this a bit more like a savings account. So you put savings in, you can't actually lose, you have an opportunity to win every single week. You win prizes, and effectively, you keep your principle. Pretty awesome. What else is special about version 4, David? The low gas fees on Polygon are an absolute tree. And the best thing about V4 is that all of these pools that are spread across all over Ethereum are now linked together. And so they're all one gigantic pool, or at least a fewer number of pools, I think just four now. And so you can actually enter these pools from different

Starting point is 00:05:47 parts of Ethereum. And so if you don't like gas fees, because who does, you can just go to Polygon and enter in the pool there. All right. That's awesome. Thanks to pool together for letting the bankless community know about that. Cigarettes got to go out of my mouth again. Okay, Dow Punks as well. This is a project that's kind of a spin-off from Bankless Dow. They're doing some minting. That's coming, that's starting tomorrow, I believe actually today and tomorrow, depending on if you got in the pre-mint or not. I think these are really cool. David, what's going on here with Dow Punks? Yeah, it's the first NFT project that is associated directly with a Dow. As we know, bankless Dow is actually one of the biggest DAOs out there, and there's only

Starting point is 00:06:27 1,111 Dow Punks as well, and they're pretty dope. They're the most realistic-looking versions of profile picture NFTs that I've ever seen. They're actually humans wearing attire, wearing crypto swag. And so if you are playing in the NFT profile picture NFT games, maybe Dow Punks might be for you. I know I'm going to get one. Not only that, David, do you know you actually get a shirt? So it's going to be like whatever NFT you mint, you get a shirt printout of the NFT as well. It's pretty awesome.

Starting point is 00:06:54 That's very cool. It's like a tie into the real world too. I mean, I'm super excited. People know that I like to have the physical relationships with my NFTs. So I'm very, very into that. I think today proved that. If anyone doubted, David really likes a physical relationship of his, he's becoming his NFT. So anyway, I am my punk.

Starting point is 00:07:11 My punk is me. I think 1,1111 or something, they are minting. So if you're interested, go check that out as well. All right, man. Let's get to the markets. What is Bitcoin telling us this week? We higher, we lower. What are we looking at?

Starting point is 00:07:25 Well, we ended last week at the high, the new all-time high last week. And so it's actually been a down week for Bitcoin, even though it's crazy that we are down 7% on the week in Bitcoin and we are still above $60,000. That is just fantastic. We started the week at $63,000, hit a low at $58,000 and a half thousand. The high of the week was $64,000. and we are currently at $61,000. There you go.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Still good for Bitcoin. Still good. Even though down week, but it's been a healthy month, that's for sure. How about Ether? Price of Ether. What are we looking at? Ether up 1% on the week. Start of the week at $4,100, hit a low of $3,950, hit a high of $4,300.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And we are currently clocking in at $4,220. Again, up roughly 1% on the week. That's cool, man. I thought we were going to get rugged on, what was this, Wednesday? Is it like, did you see that massive liquidation? Yeah, what, oh yeah, yeah, there was a big... Was it on Binance or FTX or something? Somebody got liquidated for like $130 million worth of ETH.

Starting point is 00:08:25 Yeah, the price of ether on Binance, I think dropped to like $300 inside of a single candle and then popped right back up, caused a bunch of liquidations. I think people would probably be pissed off at that because people got liquidated before they were actually supposed to. Yeah, I saw one like monster wreckage liquidation. I've never seen like $130 million or something. Anyway, good to clear out some of that. leverage that foliage and continue the bull run. That's where I think we're headed, David,

Starting point is 00:08:49 continuing the bull run this corner. Okay, what's the ratio looking like? Because that's an interesting indicator as well of bull run spirits. Yeah, again, ever since the Bitcoin Ether ratio has been up in Ether's favor. So we're up to 0.069 on the, this week. I think we ended last week at 0.064. So still again, still in that same range that we've been in ever since May. But again, also painting higher lows with ether versus brickham having a really strong performance there. Is that counterintuitive to you? Would you think that like Bitcoin ETF would reflect in the ratio and Heath would be down relative to Bitcoin? Because the opposite seems to be happening right now. Yeah. If we want to put on like the trader narrative hats right now, like they're the

Starting point is 00:09:30 momentum behind Bitcoin after it got its Bitcoin ETF like traders piled in because oh, Bitcoin's getting the ETF. It's going to pump. Traders pile in. It actually does pump because traders pile in. but then like the buying pressure for Bitcoin after the ETF just didn't come. And so then it fell down below. It's all time high. And then people are starting to, in my mind, people are rotating into Ethereum because like Bitcoin didn't have the energy to sustain itself. But you know what does?

Starting point is 00:09:57 Proof of steak. It's coming. The merge is coming. Like all the same reasons that people are bullish on Ethereum. NFTs are eating the world. And so like I think there's a rotation into ether right now coming out of most of the other blue chips, crypto blue chips. The equivalent of three happenings, people have called the,

Starting point is 00:10:11 the triple happening, right? Because it's like the equivalent of three Bitcoin happenings and 90% supply reduction is coming within the next six to nine months. So maybe that's starting to get priced in a little bit. Although I feel like if that was really priced in, we'd already be a whole lot higher. But this is good news, David. I checked this right before we, we jumped on. And DFI pulse index total locked value in DFI is still above $100 billion, my friend. Two weeks in a row, first ever time we've had two back-to-back weeks over 100 billion pretty exciting to see yeah i've actually uh i think defy pulse is actually starting to lag behind with a lot of the uh integrations of other apps so there's another website out there called defy llama that other people are using

Starting point is 00:10:54 and according to and i tweeted out like hey a billion dollars locked in defy like when we cross one billion dollars locked in defy all of crypto tip twitter absolutely blew up when we cross a hundred billion dollars in defy like it was just dead silent i think it's actually just Because, like, Defi Pulse is one way to count locked in DFI. If you go to DeFi Lama, we're actually already at, like, $170 billion. Or, excuse me, $240 billion. It depends what you count, right? It's like, I actually appreciate DeFi Pulse.

Starting point is 00:11:22 And I'm glad we're, like, using it since the beginning because it's, like, a standard metric, right? Because, like, I don't know what DeFi Lama counts or these other TLV. But, like, if they're counting stuff that's in Binance, I don't know that I'd count that, right? It's like, why would you count that? I mean, like, do we count that? count all of the, you know, liquidity that's custodied on Binance itself or on Coinbase or like on Gemini. I mean, so there's, again, what's the definition of defy? So at least with Defy Pulse, it's consistent. But like, I take your point. I'm not sure that all the projects are

Starting point is 00:11:55 reflected here. We might be above this. But I actually appreciate that DeFi Pulse is a bit more rigorous than, uh, than some other sites myself. Yeah. But I guess it's debatable. All right. Let's talk about the Defi Pulse Index, which is a measure of the value of Blue Chip DeFi tokens. There's a whole bunch of good Defy Blue Chip tokens inside of this thing. What are we looking at on the week? Yeah, start of the week at $34, hit a low of $324, hit a high of $380, and we are currently at $344 overall up just under 1% on the week, so mostly flat. I'll actually extrapolate the same exact thing I just said about Defi Pulse and total value

Starting point is 00:12:35 locked. DPI as an index for DFI, it's actually missing a lot of like the newer tokens, like the Rari token, the Ome token, the Toc token. You can talk about that, aren't we? Yeah. We'll talk about that and releases a little bit. Yeah. Because I think there's some solutions coming down the pike for that. 100%. Yeah. But and then, and then also like, I will say that my point zero one or my point one three bottom call for DPI versus ETH, I think it would have been sustained had DPI had Ome and token and all these other like newer tokens. So like, I will say that. I think I, I, I think I could, you know, eke out a victory here.

Starting point is 00:13:08 David's going to go back in time and retrofit the data and see if he was right. Using the right data, of course. But let's look at this. At least it's consistent over time. So DPI to you, Eith, the index, down again on the week. Where are we hanging now? Oh, it's on that same linear. It's the same rate of downwards that has been on the weekly roll-up for the last like four months.

Starting point is 00:13:29 We are down on the week. It's down. It's at 0.082. It's just down. It's just like there's this narrative now. that D5 can't really compete with ETH because ETH is like sucking in all of the value ultrasound ETH. And this is a year ago at this time, it was the exact opposite. Interestingly enough, everyone said ETH was dead and like D5 is the breakout application, but ether as an asset would

Starting point is 00:13:50 not accrue value. It's funny how it's the exact opposite, right. The exact opposite 12 months later. And I think I said the last time, but I'll reiterate it. We're used to seeing indexes in the stock market, ETFs like just go up, up, up against the dollar. And like the take is that, well, that's actually just a dollar going down in value, not the ETF going up in value. The take here is that, like, well, we have ultra-sound money that's supposed to get more scarce as the economy grows. And so where legacy dollar ETFs go up in price because the dollar's going down, defy indexes go down in ETH price because ETH is going up.

Starting point is 00:14:24 I think that makes a ton of sense. That's the thing that totally screws with your mind. We talked about this a little bit last roll-up is like it all depends on what you denominate things in, doesn't it? Like, if you're denominating in dollars, it's very different than denominating in ether, denominating in Bitcoin, or even denominating in gold. And when you start to change the denomination of your net worth, your wealth, it totally flips things on its head because, yeah, I mean, are you actually making money?

Starting point is 00:14:53 If dollars are just going up, not necessarily. Anyway, okay, let's talk about the bed index, which is a third, a third, a third, Bitcoin, eth, and DPI, all three of those smushed together. how are we looking at on the week? Yeah, start of the week at 172, hit a low of 157, hit a high of 180, and currently clocking in at 172, again, up a little bit under 1% on the week. So flat. That's why I like this index, because it's like kind of the...

Starting point is 00:15:20 So balanced. It's the turtle of indexes, you know? Just slow and steady. Win's the race, my friend, all right? Oh, my God. And I mean that in the best of ways, obviously. Okay. Of course you do.

Starting point is 00:15:32 Of course. Look, huge milestone for Uniswap. We're talking about numbers and markets. Over the weekend, Uniswap Protocol passed 500 billion in total trading volume since its launch in November 2018. Three years, $500 billion. Look at this. Look at this curve up.

Starting point is 00:15:50 This slope up. Great chart. Great looking chart. Every time we talk about Uniswap hitting these numbers and like a 20 person team, you know, like three years, I am blown away that no one is talking. about this. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:04 Like, why isn't CNBC talking about this? Why isn't this the startup of like the year? Like, this is an incredible story how fast this growth has been. It's beyond like blitz scale growth. And I still feel like no one's talking about it. It's because no one knows how to talk about it. Like, no one knows how to talk about it?

Starting point is 00:16:22 It's not that hard. It's so brainbreaking that like legacy media companies are just confused. God. I mean, why don't they invite people like us on CNBC, David? I don't know. I mean, like, serious people like us. It's very, very legitimate people who take their job extremely seriously. Why don't they take it and put us on air?

Starting point is 00:16:39 I don't understand this. I see NBC. If you're watching, Dave and I would love to come on your show. They'll even put on ties. As pictured. As pictured. I won't put on a tie. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:16:50 I'll just put on a tie over my turtle costume. Another big day for Polygon hitting some milestones. They just crossed a billion transactions processed in the Polygon proof of stake chain. It's just the beginning, says Mihalo, who is one of the co-founders of Polygon. They're just continuing to crush it. Pretty impressive growth there, and he takes. Congrats to Polygon and the Polygon team. I guess it's the market week of cumulative transactions here.

Starting point is 00:17:16 One billion transactions is a significant amount. And this just illustrates why we need layer twos. Layer twos are required for adoption and usage. Three comma club. You know, so I watched your Bitcoin debate versus Epe debate. I don't know if people caught that, but it was great for me to. dissent audience, David. Like, I enjoyed it. Like, it was literally popcorn time for me. While you were making your turtle, turtle, yeah, I was stitching it. This is not, like,

Starting point is 00:17:41 I didn't buy this on Amazon at this store. I stitched this together by hand. Well, I was listening to you debate, Bitcoiners. Anyway, one of the points I think one of them made at one point in time was like, well, look at like, look at all of these other chains, like Polygon, for instance. Someone's mentioned Polygon, more transactions than Ethereum at this point. And I want to wanted to stand up while I was like stitching away on my turtle shell and just be like, that's how it's supposed to work. Right. Right.

Starting point is 00:18:09 Yeah. Like more transactions should go on side chains and layer twos and Ethereum should be for highly economically dense transaction. It's a settlement layer. It's for settlement. Yeah. Right. Which is what they broadcast is what Bitcoin is for settlement.

Starting point is 00:18:25 Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. I don't understand why. Anyway, that was a good episode, guys, by the way, if you can catch that. Go go catch that. Justin Drake. Team Ether was me and Justin Drake. Team Bitcoin was Dennis Porter and Muneve Ali. Yeah, absolutely. And it even matched because they had like one tech guy, one money economics guy on both sides. I thought it was an even match. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, all right, we just passed. Do we just passed eight million Eth staked?

Starting point is 00:18:51 Eight million ETH staked a quarter million validators staking on the beacon chain. Well past that. Ethereum developers have talked about how they want to see a minimum of 10. million ether staked to the beacon chain in order to consider Ethereum secure. And we are approaching 10 million ether and we haven't even merged yet. That 10 million ether number is for after the merge, not before. And we are already getting very, very close to that. So that's pretty cool. Another memory lane thing, right?

Starting point is 00:19:18 Like a year ago, everyone was debating, will we get enough eth stake? We needed like half a million eth in order to launch. Are we going to make it? I don't know. Here we are 8.3 billion. 8.3 million ether earning 5.4% in ether terms. 5.4% in ether. 250,000 validators. I know you have a take on that later. We'll get to that. Okay, let's talk about this number as well. So this is Justin Drake, your debate companion.

Starting point is 00:19:48 One billion per day in Ethereum fees might not be far-fetched, he says. Okay, that sounds astounding. That's only, though, 16 million per day per shard. with 64 shards, okay? A single shard today, which is the main chain today. The one single shard, yep. The monolithic chain that we have in place already does $100 million per day. So if you just assume 64 shards doing a fraction of that, 16% of that, each of them doing an average of $16 million per day,

Starting point is 00:20:20 you get a billion dollars in Ethereum fees per day, which would that be like, I guess that would be another 10x? Just one more 10x. And honestly, like, what's a single 10x in crypto? Like, we eat 10x for breakfast. And like the whole... What would a billion dollars per day mean, David? It would just like we were talking about,

Starting point is 00:20:43 there's 8,000, 8.3 million ether being staked to a quarter million validators on the beacon chain. That means that, like, 70, 30-ish percent of that $1 billion actually starts going to those validators, actually starting earning the fees. And so the incentive to actually spend... up a node just like blossoms because of the fees are going to the validators. So more money, more fees being paid to the validators means more security, which means we spin up more validators, which again, we will revisit, put a pin in that because more validators means cool things happen. We'll talk about that later.

Starting point is 00:21:16 It also means ultrasound money. Think of how much eth we're burning in this case. A significant amount. $700 million worth of eth a day. Oh my God. I tweeted this out to you because, you know, okay, Zirifon, just a run. Dustin Drake's tweet, but here's the tweet. Some of you guys keep forgetting blockchain sell blocks. That's literally the product. Someone responded and said, yeah, duh. But like, I feel like this is a simple fact that a lot of people forget. The whole entire industry is based upon this. Yes, blockchain sell blocks. That's what they do. Okay? That's what they do. That is their product. Apple sells iPhones. Okay, Google sells advertising and eyeballs. Facebook, same thing.

Starting point is 00:21:59 What do blockchain sell? They sell blocks. That is their revenue. So if you want to look at the healthy, successful products that have product market fit, look at how much revenue they're driving from the sales of their block space. Okay? Ethereum over the last seven days, do you know what it was, David? 10x Bitcoin in terms of the sales volume of its block space.

Starting point is 00:22:21 The product that it sells is valued at 10x the value of Bitcoin block space. And nothing else is close. Nothing's close to Bitcoin in terms of the value of its block space. Okay? People forget this simple fact, but everything falls out from this. Economic security, ultrasound money falls out from this. Like the monetary premium that your asset is able to command. It's the proof of product market fit.

Starting point is 00:22:50 It's like the security. It's the essential. Everything falls out of the fact that blockchains sell blocks. So if you want to find the winning blockchain, sell or find the blockchain that is selling blocks for the highest amount of value it's that simple what blockchain has the highest quality product and you can tell that by seeing how much people are willing to pay for that block space with the crypto world we unlocked the power of immutability where we can make data immutable and we use this immutable data to make immutable transactions

Starting point is 00:23:22 because what's more valuable than money so we have like this the most valuable kind of data we've ever been able to create, which is immutable data. And the amount of immutable data that we can create is constrained by the system that produces blocks, but blocks sell immutable data. That's the thing a blockchain does. It's like, oh, I have this much amount of immutable data for sale. And a blockchain that has that immutable data actually valued by the market will see block space actually consumed.

Starting point is 00:23:51 And so many, many blockchains are out there can sell block space, but it's the quality of the immutability and the, you know, it's the quality of the immutability and the utility of that block space that determines the price for it. Absolutely. Take it from the turtle. Take it from the punk folks. We know what we're talking about. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:24:08 All right, guys, we will be back with the hot releases of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Macha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common eth and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Macha are free. And that's why you should be using Macha. Macha routes your orders across all the various D-Fi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance smart chain, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage. Masha has smart order routing that splits your orders across multiple liquidity sources. If Macha sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on

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Starting point is 00:26:32 David, let's start here. It's not quite released, but it is in the process of being approved by the index co-op. This is maybe an answer to the Defy Index problem that you were talking about, capturing some of the smaller cap up-and-coming D-Fi protocols. This is called the going to make it index, the growth index, GMI. and I think some folks from the bankless Dow proposed that this along with folks from the index co-op. And it's basically a, I guess, lower cap version of the Defi Pulse Index with a whole bunch of different, almost like we've called these before, Defi 2.0 type protocols. So unpack this for us.

Starting point is 00:27:12 What's in the going to make it index? When's it going to be released? Yeah. So there are many actually teams that we've actually talked to recently that have tokens here. So we talked to Olympus Dow, so the Ome token is in here. We've also recently talked to the token Mac team, the Tocot tokens in here. Perpetual protocol, the PURP token, the D-YDX token, Vizer, FLX, and a very large number of others, Rari, the governance token of Rari is in here.

Starting point is 00:27:35 And these are like the, it's just the newer DFI tokens. And there's actually a rule in the DPI index that you have to, these tokens have to have a certain amount of age to them. But that's actually kind of, you know, that's optimized for one thing. but like a lot of new things, a lot of alpha and crypto comes from newer stuff. And so they are making the, the GMI index to capture the newer things that are about DFI. Yeah, I love this. I think it'll be a good compliment, right?

Starting point is 00:28:02 So you can own the bed and then you can own a portion of something like this, and that's kind of like all you need. Let's talk about this. The across protocol has just been announced. I think this is announced for a release. This looks to me, David, like another bridge. So this looks a little bit like a hop or, a connects. This is a cross. What are these guys doing? I know. That's exactly right. Cross L2

Starting point is 00:28:25 protocols for asset transfers. This is a huge industry. So just another way to get across your money from L1 to L2, L2 to L2, L2 back to L1 or whatever. Thank you, bridge builders. Yeah. Literally bridge builders, yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about this. Argent is one of my favorite wallets has been for the user experience, but I think adoption has been slow because of gas fees and it's been built on Ethereum Maynet. Now, I don't think they wanted to compromise by going to like a side chain of any sort, right? Like Argent has always been like, let's be bankless, a bankless wallet.

Starting point is 00:29:01 It looks like they are coming to Starknet, though. This is, of course, a ZK powered roll-up, which is pretty cool. So this is Argent the wallet and then Starknet for computation and account abstraction. So Starknet speed plus Argent wallet, you, X equals rocket ship. Pretty cool. I haven't seen anything here yet, but I know this was in the works from Argent, so I'm looking forward to seeing this out in the wild.

Starting point is 00:29:27 I don't know when it's coming. Do you have any more details? Yeah, the world of smart contract wallets of which Argent is. The future is ultimately smart contract wallets. We just have to get there. And the world of smart contract wallets is hamstrung by the L1, by the nature of it being slow and expensive. Smart contract wallets on a layer two are going to be wallets with superpowers.

Starting point is 00:29:47 And so I know we're all frustrated about like the Metamask UI right now and just like the lack of wallet infrastructure. The wallets will take over the world with smart contract wallets on L2. You heard it here on bankless when Vitalik talked about this on an episode that we did with him. So if you want to peek into that information more, there's a show available to you on that. Absolutely. Also, new wallets are coming to the space. This is the X-D-I wallet. What's interesting about this.

Starting point is 00:30:13 X-D-Fi. X-D-Fi. Excuse me, not X-D-D-Fi. X-D-Fi wallet. I think we announced this like two weeks ago, or they announced it and we reported on it in the weekly roll-up. What's interesting now is it looks like they're going to have a token associated with this wallet.

Starting point is 00:30:26 One conclusion that, one implication of this, I think, is this is probably going to cause a token rush in the wallet scene, right? So when met a mask token. Men metamask token. We saw this with sushi, right? So sushi copied Uniswap and then released a token, and Uniswap didn't plan to release a token, decided it had to release a token in order to fight back.

Starting point is 00:30:49 Maybe we'll see something similar play out with Metamask. What are your takes here? Yeah, it's one of those things where I don't actually necessarily think that X-DFi wallet needs a token, but tokens are like steroids, right? You just inject growth community into your application with a token. And it's one of the reasons why we think everything is going to have a token in the future. You can have your product, and then you can also have your product and a token. And that just adds new features and capabilities to it.

Starting point is 00:31:14 Definitely a token arm. race going on. I think that's what this will propel. But Metamask is hearing users as well, particularly ledger users. I think that the experience between a Ledger hardware wallet, which I love and MetaMask, which I also love, has not been ideal. And I think a lot of folks listening to this will realize that and recognize that. There are lots of different updates, some browsers don't work. And there's, it's difficult because there's multiple parties involved here, right? There's Metamask, there's Ledger, there's the apps that you're using. There's Chrome. There's all the browsers. So a lot of parties have to get this right.

Starting point is 00:31:46 So it's not any one individual grip's fault. But Metamask is looking to smooth this out. It sounds like teaming up with Ledger to smooth this out. And it's coming soon. The new support they say will be entirely in browser. Seamless connection between Ledger and Metamask. My God, I can't wait for that. Seamless connection, please.

Starting point is 00:32:07 I would love to delete Firefox for my computer. Is that why you have to use Metamask? Yeah, Metamask and Firefox. ox and use my ledger yeah right i mean chrome is just completely uh chrome really really like heft the industry year a little bit uh let's talk about this david this is why optimism which of course is a uh layer two roll up that we love an optimistic roll up that we love i think that was a post written by the optimistic uh the optimism team rather what's going on here yeah this is justin j moses from the synthetics team we've had them on the show as well before and he writes a tweet

Starting point is 00:32:40 talking about why optimism, which is a take about the release. And basically he says that the reason why he likes optimism is because of the whole EVM compatibility, excuse me, EVM equivalence strategy that optimism is going for in contrast to EVM compatibility. What EVM equivalence means is that the optimistic roll-ups produced by the optimism team are as close to the EVM as possible, meaning that a lot of the, God damn it, I just realized why you did that. Meaning that the,

Starting point is 00:33:14 sorry for the podcast listeners, this is very visual show today. Meaning that like the EVM equivalence means that all of the developer tooling, the infrastructure, the nodes, anything that you need to run Ethereum, run Ethereum, you can also use to run

Starting point is 00:33:30 optimistic roll-ups run by optimism. So having EVM equivalence allows you to port all the network effects of Ethereum also to the optimism roll-ups. And that is the design design philosophy of optimism and really just a strategy to make everything into an optimistic roll-up, which is just by latching on to the network effects of Ethereum itself. So the line that the optimism team likes to give is optimism roll-ups from optimism are Ethereum. There are actually,

Starting point is 00:33:58 it's not a layer two. It's actually just part of the EVM at the base chain. So that's kind of a technical differentiation, but the strategy of EVM equivalents I'm really, really bullish on. Would you say, David, almost that it's like, it's, like, it's a technical differentiation. So that's, like turtles all the way down? Because it goes far as to say that. You can't just like skip to the conclusion of the announcement post and just say that because you're just going to confuse everyone. The reason why it's turtles all the way down is because, again, EVM equivalence, right?

Starting point is 00:34:27 It's Ethereum all the way down. And Ryan just skipped to the meme at the end of the blog post. It was the best. It was my favorite part, okay? You know, no further explanation needed. Okay. Ultra scalable Ethereum. David, you wrote a post this one.

Starting point is 00:34:40 week, why modular blockchains are the best scaling solution for crypto. We also did the state of the nation that was based on this post. I thought it went pretty well. We kind of prepared it last minute, but it was very well received. What's the TLDR of this post? I guess the reason it's in the releases section is because there hasn't been a lot released on modular blockchain design. So we did it ourselves. We tried to do it ourselves. Polynaia, Anthony Sasano, some others in the industry have been doing this, but we tried to wrap it up and package it for it. So what's the quick summary here? Yeah, so the whole idea of modular blockchains has actually been around for a while,

Starting point is 00:35:17 but it's that modular word that really unlock things. And we've talked about this a few times before, but the power of naming something of actually ascribing a name to something is really, really powerful because once you have a name for something, you can actually talk about it. And Polynia, I think maybe it happened elsewhere, but really Polynia is the one that really surfaced the concept of modular blockchains to just to the Twitter sphere, the public knowledge.

Starting point is 00:35:40 And so, Pauli Naya, it's a pseudo-anonymous writer. They write short blog posts. And so one thing that we do very, very well at Bankless is that when we collate a lot of ideas and collapse them into one single blog post. And so that is what we did. So if you are trying to understand the concept of modular blockchains, which is a really, really important concept to understand, the future of crypto is via modular blockchains. And I say this line at the very, very end. If we like went back in history back to like 2009 or into a parallel universe and we rolled the dice again about how the crypto industry would pan out, it will pan out into modular blockchains 99.9% of the time. Every single time it'll end up at a modular blockchain design construction.

Starting point is 00:36:23 And so this blog post goes through why that argument is true and how Ethereum is working towards a modular design structure allowing Ethereum to become ultra scalable Ethereum. So bankless listeners know all about ultra-sound money, ultrasound eth. Now we have ultra-scalable Ethereum. And these two things go hand in hand. I'm actually working on another blog post that talks about the relationship between the positive fly-wheel effects of Ethereum and how the more scalable Ethereum becomes. Actually, the more ultrasound ether becomes as a money.

Starting point is 00:36:51 And the more ultrasound that ether becomes as money, the more valuable becomes, the more scalable Ethereum is allowed to get. It's this positive feedback loop that the modular design structure enables that really just is going to propel Ethereum into this ultrasound money, ultra-scalable future. And the reason this is really important, guys, is because if this thesis holds true, it will really inform how you approach the space, how you think about the space, how you invest in this space.

Starting point is 00:37:16 So I think it's a thesis that is under-explored in the market right now and very much underrated. One of the comments we made at the top of this post is like, we feel like the ultra-scalable Ethereum story and the scalability of Ethereum story is as underrated. as ETH the asset was back in 2018, 2019. Now, folks remember from that timeline, no one thought ETH was worth anything, okay? Trading like $150, people said it was just gas, just a utility coin, was never going to be a money,

Starting point is 00:37:46 never going to be a store of value, okay? That's what the narrative for Ethereum scalability is like out there in the market. Everyone says, ETH will never scale. There are all of these improving, like, new ETH killers that will take its place. I think the modular blockchain idea inverts that. entire concept flips it on its head so you got to wrap your mind around that again we have this blog post we have the state of the nation from earlier this week david has even read out the post for you if you're an audio listener he's got this post on youtube you could just listen to it into your

Starting point is 00:38:18 ears rather than read right we've done all the things like go consume one of these things like what do you want me to read it to you do you want to listen to me and ryan talk about it you want to read the blog post you i don't know do something interpret a dance please yeah that's next All right, release time, big releases. Oh, my God, look at this one. Parallel. This is an NFT sci-fi card game just raised a cool, at a cool $500 million valuation. The card game has not been released, $500 million, but massive valuation, huge investor behind this. This is paradigm. David, what's the story here? When I hear a sci-fi card game, I'm thinking something like Harstone or Magic the Gathering, but now as NFTs. We've seen this model before with

Starting point is 00:39:01 gods unchained from Immutable. I like card games. I play Harstone every now and then. And now I really, really want to play this thing, especially when playing the game might earn me some really dope NFTs that I can sell for Ether, maybe. Look, Axi Infinity has just blown the doors, you know, through this entire industry. Now everyone's piling into these crypto games. I think it's going to be a next megatrend. NFTs are, yeah, go ahead. The amount that Axi Infinity moved the needle is absolutely insane. It's one of the biggest needle movers I've ever seen ever. Yeah, and it, and it happens so fast. It caught a lot of people by surprise, which is, I think everyone thought, well, my God, we're under-allocated. Now we have to, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:39 pile in. Okay, what another thing people are piling into is funds are piling into NFTs. What is this story with Metaphor Capital? Metaphor Capital raises $100 million to buy up rare NFT. So it's an NFT fund. Very unfortunately put the Meccaverse as the thumbnail to their, the article that they wrote. Mecaverse is an NFT project's not doing so hot. Really? What happened with this? It was one of those NFT projects that had the, like, the reveal scheme. So everyone would buy the unrevealed mecaverses, and then they would reveal them. And then turns out, like, my complaint about the mecaverses was that they were very undifferentiated.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Like, the rares looked like the mids, looked like the floors. And overall, like, I just, I followed the NFT flipper bot. So whenever I see somebody flip an NFT, the tweet goes out. And you just see people just like, failed, fumbled flip, fumbled flip, going from like people bought it for six-eath, selling it for like 1.5-eath. Big oof. Anyways, that's actually a side quest. Unrelated. Metaphor capital invests $100 million in buying rare NFTs, including things like Bored Ape Yacht Club and I think of many of the other NFTs that we know today.

Starting point is 00:40:43 Just crazy. This would be a crazy story. Like if you told me that, you know, last year at this time, there would be funds that are just dedicated to buying NFTs, not buying startups or NFTs, but $100 million just to purchase NFTs. Like, do you see this in the traditional world? Does anyone buy like Picasso, Michael, like art funds? I think so. I think there's fractional art platforms, but like... Yeah, there's definitely fractional. There's not funds.

Starting point is 00:41:07 I don't think there's funds. I've ever heard of a raise of $130 to just go by like, you know, items. Monase. Yeah. Monase. Yeah. Is there like an art ETF that exists? Is that a thing?

Starting point is 00:41:17 Hmm. I wonder. I bet there is. There will be in crypto, that's for sure. There definitely will be. It'll be way easier as well. We have the primitives to build it. Let's talk about this as well.

Starting point is 00:41:27 Blockchain infrastructure provider, Alchemy just clinched a $3.5 billion valuation. They raised $250 million. Our friends at A16Z are in on it. Chris Dixon from A16Z will be on the podcast on Monday. We just recorded with him this week. So catch that podcast on Monday. Just, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:44 Anyway, Alchemy, what do they do, David? They're basically a lot of the data infrastructure behind all, everything you see in crypto. Like when your uniswap page loads, some of that data is being served by alchemy, you know, all of the various defy apps use it as like kind of a data layer. People think that infura provides a lot of this. Actually, behind the scenes, it's a lot of it's alchemy. Some of it's the graph as well. So this is kind of the, it's not a blockchain layer, but it's like a data services layer.

Starting point is 00:42:16 It's almost like an AWS for blockchain specific data and indexing and APIs and that sort of things. So I can understand why it's worth what it's worth. I would like to know the business model, like how they actually capture value. Maybe it's like deal flow if they're routing transactions in the same way that kind of like Robin Hood sells its flow to Citadel, which kind of is an unfortunate analogy, but might work the same either way. They raised $250 million. That's a lot of money at a $3.5 billion valuation. That's huge. Yeah, I mean, but they're servicing NFTs. They're servicing like all so much infrastructure

Starting point is 00:42:49 actually bends on the back end, which is, which is alchemy, which is, I guess, cool. It's also a little concerning. I hope that there's a plan to sort of decentralize some of this stuff too. Let's talk about this. Hype just raised $2 million on a follow-on funding round. So this is something that's been, I think a lot of folks have been thinking about for a while. It's like we have NFTs, right? They're instantiated in the physical world. As you can see, if you're listening to this, there's also a passionate community of NFT holders,

Starting point is 00:43:21 but we don't have an NFT native social media platform, do we? We just like put it in our Twitter profile, but there's no way. really to like flex or tell the story of the nfts or create an nfts specific profile that's what hype is for that's what hype is trying to do is an nfti social media company a social community that's really focusing on the lore of nfts do you want to explain it some more what is this idea of lore behind nfts as well yeah it's like it's basically a social media page for you but not you for your nfts right so like so i i loaded up my page i you can uh and so there are just in the same way that there's handles there are hype handles right you can find Ryan at hYY dot PE that's the

Starting point is 00:44:04 hype website slash RSA for Ryan also slash David Hoffman for me can I like friend you David David I haven't yeah I'm trying to get Ryan to be my friend for years now and like I got dude I'm doing it now follow yeah yeah yeah so like any any time like like you get to create stories about your NFTs like yeah yeah now my NFT is going to come visit your NFT is like oh I can post on Ryan's NFT well I'll say hey, how's your NFT doing today? My NFT is great, man. How's your punk?

Starting point is 00:44:32 My turtle's doing great. Punk's doing lovely. It's a good day to be a punk, as always. And so, yeah, this is a social media platform for NFTs. So you can go sign up right now, and then you can start making posts about your NFTs and have a little NFT community. And it reads directly from the chain.

Starting point is 00:44:46 So you just plug in your mask wallet. All the NFTs can be verified. I'm excited to see what they'll actually build here. I'm actually excited to, like, follow. Maybe it's other turtles, other members of the community, see what you're doing. and see what you're buying. Like, it's going to be a whole social stream for NFTs, which is really cool.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Disclamary Ryan and I are seed investors in. We had to be. Couldn't ignore that one. Coinlist, what are they doing? Man, Coinlist, they're now valued at $1.5 billion. They just got a fresh $100 million in funding. I think they're up to 75 employees. They plan to double.

Starting point is 00:45:20 What does CoinBase actually do? That's where you can, if you're retail, you can sort of get in on recent and you're based in the U.S. generally, like you can get in on recent token launches, right? That's where I mostly know CoinList. CoinLis is one of the companies that came around during the ICO era and wanted to be like picks and troubles for ICOs and then actually made it through the bear market, right? And actually made it all the way through. And so that in CoinLase is basically a token launch platform.

Starting point is 00:45:47 It has like, it's just services and infrastructure, minting your token, compliance, KYC, you know, capital collection, all that kind of stuff. purchase anything from coin list? No, I get all my tokens from Unoswap. Yeah, I registered. I think I've done a few things, but not too much, but a ton of people have, and many of these launches have actually worked out very well for them. So not surprised at this listing. All right, that's our raises for the week.

Starting point is 00:46:14 Now, it's our weekly reminder to tell you to get a job in your prop. Listen to the turtle. Get a job. Listen to what the turtle tells you. The turtle's telling you to get a job. That might be a good idea. This is a serious business here. In crypto, we are building the future.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And there are a lot of fantastic jobs that are available for you on the big job for. Head of Ethereum research at Immutable. Oh my God. That is a dream job. Crypto gaming. Right. Ethereum. Research.

Starting point is 00:46:43 Layer two. Like research. That just means you go and learn stuff. Like, that's the coolest job ever. I had a research at Immutable. A head of tokens at Immutable as well. These are the most fun jobs ever. The master of coin is.

Starting point is 00:46:56 Is that what that is? Community builder and evangelist at Dexible. That sounds cool. Lead engineer at Hatsdot Finance Community Manager at, you say it. Egronanam. And a CTO as well at EGronom. And General Counsel, there's jobs for lawyers here. Smart Defi, Finance and Operations, Smart Defi, Senior Back-Ean Engineers, Smart Defi,

Starting point is 00:47:19 blockchain CTO, Merit, Community Manager, Argon. Founding Blockchain Engineer Highlight Senior Software. engineer popcorn also community lead at popcorn there's something for everyone here look at all those community lead you just go and hang out with your bros in the discord that's your job that's got to be the best job ever being a community lead right like your job is to be popular in a community i'll do that they all do that in my spare of time uh anyway i don't know how many job featured jobs that is but the bankless job board just keeps on growing guys um as we always say take a look at that board sign up for it you can get these messages so we don't have to bother you every single week by

Starting point is 00:48:00 telling you to get a job in crypto even though we'll keep doing it yep yep if you sign up i'm i guarantee you a crypto job is more fun than your non-crypto job yeah it's just how it works you can wear this to work come on what can be better all right let's talk about the big items of the week we're going to we're going to start with disney so we're going to hit disney what else we're going to hit uh oh shib Oh my God, and WorldCoin. Okay, let's start with Disney. Disney is going to NFTs. What's happening here?

Starting point is 00:48:25 Yeah, so there are a bunch of these like NFT firms that are popping up. And I think the way that this works is like the VVVVe, is this new NFT, like, I think it's like an agency more or less. I think it's a collection of like sales, marketing, tech infrastructure. It's like another type of bridge, right? Yeah, it's another type of bridge. Like, hey, Disney, you have all this IP.

Starting point is 00:48:45 We can, we will help you actually turn that IP into digital merchandise, which is basically what NFT is. are. So Veeve is announcing that Disney will offer non-fundable tokens, NFTs, of its characters as part of its promotion. And so like think of it as like anything that has merch, merch has IP behind it, right? SpongeBob merch, like whatever merch. What is an NFT other than digital merch, right? That's all it is. It's all it is. It's all it is. It's digital merch and a whole bunch of fans that want to buy it. Right. And so Disney is coming into the world of selling digital merch because apparently people buy digital merch. So things like Marvel,

Starting point is 00:49:20 DC comic Superman, James Bond, Star Trek, Back to the Future, Cartoon Network. All of these things are going to get NFTs. Mickey Mouse?

Starting point is 00:49:28 Imagine owning the Mickey Mouse Star Wars, dude. Yeah. Disney has everything. Yeah. There's a unsubsid... I don't know if this is completely true, but there's a speculation

Starting point is 00:49:39 that VV is built on Immutable X, which is a Starkware-based layer two that settles on Ethereum. So Mickey Mouse Mouse coming to Ethereum. That's also looking for ahead of 10. tokens. That's also looking for it. And so, you know, Mickey Mouse on the Ethereum L1 one day.

Starting point is 00:49:57 Look, man, the, the, can you imagine being in a Disney boardroom and being like, let's look at our balance sheet and all of the assets that we have, okay? And then looking at your IP, your intellectual property, all of the brands that you own, that is the core asset of Disney. The unmonetized IP. Yeah. And then it finds all of these various ways to make money on top of that intellectual property, right? It's like, and then it, buys new intellectual property that thinks it can make more money on and then seeing this nfti opportunity right what is the business case like for that right if you're disney oh my god now we can issue and sell nfts and we don't have to build anything in the physical world

Starting point is 00:50:37 we don't need supply chains which are broken anyways we don't need supply chains we don't need like more plastic toys we can actually like just distribute digitally and there's very little like variable cost for these things. I mean, every, I'm shocked it's taking Disney this long to get to this point, right? There's so much to unpack here. Like, there's like the narrative of like, it's actually, this is really good for societies

Starting point is 00:51:04 because we can like be consumers and do our consumer things without actually like wasting plastic and physical materials and atoms going into the ocean. We can just be like, and Disney's got to be so confused. They're like, we just mint these things and people buy them, I guess. Let me see this. How long do you think?

Starting point is 00:51:20 think it's going to take for Disney to open a theme park in the metaverse. Oh my God. That's a really good question. Holy shit. As soon as the metaverse, it like arrives. Yeah. Five years. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:34 That's what I'm going to say. Yeah, that sounds right. Three to five years. Three to five years. Because thinking of the dead time, you don't need to actually build the thing. You just pay a bunch of coders to make it in the internet. It's amazing. This is the future.

Starting point is 00:51:46 This is what's going to happen. This is just a small step. but like um you don't got to sign like a liability waiver like you don't need lawyers like people don't call this the media institutions are coming is that a narrative we can use i mean i feel like that's what's happening the nfts all right let's talk about shib that's the other big story the it just dominated it crushed so shib what is ship for people who are like don't understand this thing it's a dog i don't understand it either yeah it's a dog token i don't you do understand you don't understand why it's going up but like what is it's just a meme isn't it what is it i don't know

Starting point is 00:52:17 how it's like I can mention a token called like some sort of doggy token. I don't know how Shib got so much traction in that it did but like it's it was basically just a derivative of Doge after Doge started pumping a lot of dogs tokens came out. Shib being the leader and for some reason it just collected a lot of mean power and a lot of traders and like the amount of volume that went into the ship markets this week was absolutely insane. Billions just flipped and billions of dollars. It flipped Doge. It flipped the Without Elon Musk team. Yeah, right. Like, not even a billionaire supporting this thing.

Starting point is 00:52:51 The amount of money, like, so much of this trading volume happened on Coinbase. Because these are all these U.S. retail apes. Oh, yeah, TikTok. TikTok is a great answer as to how this happened. Like, apparently, the very low denomination of SHIB of 0.000. 0.078 cents per coin is very, very low. So, like, you buy, like, a dollar of these things and you have a billion of them. And so people like to think that them.

Starting point is 00:53:16 I'm a billionaire now because I have like a billion chip tokens. And people legitimately think this thing's going to a dollar. Yeah, people actually think this thing, right. And so it would be like a trillion dollar market cap, something absolutely insane. Yeah. And so ship like, pull up the chart, Ryan. The chart movement of it is absolutely nuts. Yeah, just hit refresh.

Starting point is 00:53:38 This is the trading view chart. Shib to, uh, what? Yeah. Zoom out to yeah, the one year at the bond. Yeah. I'd go to, three months is great. Oh my God. Dude, it goes.

Starting point is 00:53:50 That is the denominator in dollars, right? And so it started the year. It started this pump at point zero zero zero zero five cents. And then around September, it jumped, it did like a six X and then we ended up at like point zero zero zero three. We are current. Can I view this in market cap? Like what's this market? I have.

Starting point is 00:54:09 I have. Maybe you can, you might be able to type in the left hand corner Shib market cap. That might show up. I don't know though. Okay. I mean, but it is, it is. It is the market cap. Hit the log button because you can only really view this thing in log in the bottom right corner.

Starting point is 00:54:22 There you go. It doesn't even change. It doesn't even move. It doesn't even move. It's absolutely the same. So yeah, just like the, again, insane amounts of volume all piled into Shib. I don't know why it happened, but it happened. Shib just like dominated the markets this week.

Starting point is 00:54:36 Are you mad about it or do you not care? It's just frustrating how much volume is going into these things. And like I got, I literally got four text message from people, not in my like, like crypto chats or anything. It's like, hey, like, do I sell this shib that I bought? And I'm like, yes. What do you say? Yes, you absolutely sell that. How do you not sell that? But if you told someone that in the beginning of October, David, they'd hate you right now. Well, I mean, because it's gone like, but they didn't text me because it didn't pump. Yeah, if you, if you're texting me about whether you should sell shib or not, the answer is yes. The answer is yes.

Starting point is 00:55:04 That's, yeah. That's the top signal. So he's texting you. Four people. Four people. Yeah. And it's like, dude, I've been trying to get you to buy ether for like four years. You bought Shib without asking me without telling me about it like god damn it okay but people are people can be right in the short in the short run and they can be very right in the short run look at this person right this person had a wallet purchased this is an Ethereum address 800 $8,000 worth of ship in in last August you know dog token Yolo purchase $8,000 yeah like you know put $8,000 to throw $8,000 whatever yeah it's now worth $5.7 billion dollars so fucking insane. So crazy. From $8,000 to $5.7 billion in 400 days, we might actually be looking at the greatest

Starting point is 00:55:52 individual trade of all time. And it's a shib coin. It's a meme token. We haven't talked about it at all on bankless. Like, I don't know how much liquidity there actually is. Like, I don't think the guy could actually sell $5.7 billion. But he could get still a lot of money. It's still a fantastic trade. Oh, he could probably get a billion. Yeah, he probably could probably get a bit. A billion. You think a billion dollars can come out of the shib market and still be sustainable? Maybe. Or maybe once this kind of moves, if they see this address move. Who knows?

Starting point is 00:56:22 But right, you can get hundreds of millions anyway. Let's call it that. Great trade, no matter what you're doing. So like, what does this teach us, David? Fundamentals are dead? I guess so. It's everything. Stop listening to bankless advice.

Starting point is 00:56:35 We clearly cannot find the ship markets. Look, yeah, look at, you know, this is, yeah, I don't know what to say. Coinbase is number one in the app store. Look at how they advertise themselves. Trade, BTC, ETH, and Shib is in the title of the Coinbase application on. The three greatest assets of all time. Digital assets, our industry can bring you. Bitcoin, E, Shib.

Starting point is 00:56:59 Buy now, folks. God damn. Meme coins are going to meme, though. This is partially why I'm actually not that mad because if you're buying Shib, I mean, Shib is not actually pretending to be something it's not. I'll say that about Shib. That's true. Okay? It's just a dog token. This is what I actually appreciated about Doge. It's just like, it's kind of intellectually honest. It's here to be a meme and it's here to go up. And a lot of people will get wrecked by it, but like it's not trying to pretend it's something it's not. It's just a meme.

Starting point is 00:57:34 And I actually appreciate that at least. Also, unlike Doge, it's built on Ethereum. So, there's that. Where's the meme index? We've got to buy that. Here's, if you're an ETH holder and you missed out on Shib, it burnt 2,000 ether in the last seven days. Yeah. So it's an ERC20 token, right? That's the difference. Okay, Doge's got its own chain, has to provide its own security.

Starting point is 00:58:00 Shib actually leverages the security of the Ethereum. And every time a token is purchased, sold, transacted on the Ethereum network, it burns ETH, which is interesting. So here's my take on this. Okay, so like, this is why you won't get hot tips on what dog coin to buy in bank lists. Like, because quite honestly, guys, we don't know. All right. Like, we just don't know. And here's the other truth. Nobody does. Someone does. All right? Like, I don't think anybody does. For the one ship that's successful, how many meme coins have crashed and burned and gone to like zero? And how many like millions of of dollars have people lost on these things, right?

Starting point is 00:58:43 Or like tens of millions, hundreds of millions, okay? So my, our strategy is to keep buying the things. It's like, it's like, you buy the infrastructure. It's the Warren Buffett. Just be Warren Buffett in crypto, okay? You buy the infrastructure, you buy the things that are lasting. I'm gonna keep buying ETH because Shib is built on top of Eith. All the memes, all memes coming to Eith.

Starting point is 00:59:06 They pump and dump, they're gonna be burning some Eth, right? and ether is something that is going to be lasting, is sustaining, does have fundamentals, and you don't really have to, like, guess. So that's this dumb turtle strategy, but, you know, what do I know? Yeah, you're just a dumb turtle, but I'm just a dumb turtle. I'm also doing the same thing, so there's that. Yeah, so we'll see what the next one is, David. How do you think the sense?

Starting point is 00:59:31 Let me ask you that before we go to the, you think this is up only? The fact that it flipped Doge gives it a bunch of Lindy, so I think ship is, it's here to stay, man. Its meme is officially stuck. Flipping Eith next, flipping Bitcoin next. God damn. Oh, gosh. We will take the week off if that happens. Yeah, no rule up on that week, guys, if that happens. Third news item of the week, WorldCoyne, a new cryptocurrency that will be fairly distributed. This is what Sam Altman says. WorldCoin got a lot of, I think, like, negative attention in the crypto-native world. It got lots of mainstream attention. I'll definitely say that. But what is the experiment trying to do?

Starting point is 01:00:11 Yeah, we've seen a few of these experiments be attempted before. There was this initiative Q back in 2018 that tried to do the same thing. Basically, it wants to verifiably distribute the same amount of money, currency, new tokens, new cryptocurrency, to everyone. So everyone receives the exact same amount across the whole entire globe. And so this requires anti-cibel attacks, right? So, like, you can't just, like, spin up a bunch of sock puppets. You can't just distribute everything to, like, all the Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:00:39 addresses because I own multiple Ethereum addresses. So they need to verify that when they give this currency, they give the same amount to every single person. They don't actually allow people to get it twice. And so the way that they're doing that is with this weird orb hardware thing that scans people's irises. And so it uses a retina scan to check out your iris and make sure that it never gave you any crypto before you got your retina scanned.

Starting point is 01:01:06 This is it. Yeah. And so like apparently that is they've gotten just a lot of. people to get their irises scan so they can get this free crypto, right? And so they're using this orb as a mechanism to not to verifiably give everyone the same amount of crypto without giving any one person more than one share of crypto because they check all the irises against each other. I think you can see why crypto Twitter got pretty upset about this whole thing.

Starting point is 01:01:30 Why? Just like giving up your irises for some crypto. For air drops? Yeah. You do dumber things for air drops. Let's just let us register your DNA. so we can give you crypto. I actually, I don't know the privacy implications of this.

Starting point is 01:01:45 Are they like, are they deleting it? Is it just using cache? Is it just for unique identification? I don't know those details. Yeah. No, yeah. Apparently they scan the retina. They turn it into a hash.

Starting point is 01:01:58 They delete the actual scan retina, but they keep the hash. And so that's why it's private also. But like, it's just very, very dubious in my mind. It is also called a world coin, right? That's a bad name. I mean, that's going to get some resistance on just crypto Twitter. Very 2017, very 2017-ish. Well, it just sounds like something Mark Zuckerberg would come up with, right?

Starting point is 01:02:19 And so there's that. But here's some of the flip side of this, okay? So the flip side is, I go back to a Naval tweet that really, you know, struck me. I think he tweeted this since 2017, 2018. Like, crypto has tried a lot of monetary experiments. And generally, it's trying sort of the, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, up hard money type of experiments through Bitcoin and Ether, right? But the hardest part about money is actually distribution. And in crypto, we've never tried a civil-resistant distribution mechanism,

Starting point is 01:02:53 right? It's like, what if we could distribute this to a billion people around the world? And seed start up a money that way. Okay? Like, we couldn't do that with Bitcoin because while it was fair distribution, it wasn't like accessible to many people. You had to be sort of nerdy. You had to like like follow the right forms, be in the right internet chat rooms, like run a minor, all of these like nerdy difficult things. So the distribution wasn't very wide. It was maybe fair, but it wasn't wide. And so what about a monetary experiment in crypto where we're distributing this thing as widely as possible and seeding a non-sovereign money that way? So that's why the experiment, I'm not ready to go the crypto Twitter and totally dismiss it.

Starting point is 01:03:38 Like I actually want to hear more. The other thing that is interesting to me is this does not feel like we're building a better blockchain. Hi, we're in crypto. We're here to build a better layer one type of experiment, which you've seen play out so many times in the past, which just frustrates and annoys me. They're actually building this on a layer two. Okay?

Starting point is 01:03:58 Ethereum secured layer two. They're building this on some kind of a roll-up. I don't know the details of this. It's called Hubble, I believe. I never heard of it before. But there's some cool tech behind it, right? So they can actually compress and get that this is an ERC20 token. So it's a coin on Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:04:17 I think transaction costs are going to cost like three cents, three to six cents per transaction. Again, all fully secured by Ethereum on this rollup. So some of their technical decisions are actually kind of cool. So on the one hand, you've got like World Coin and you've got. and you've got like put insert your eye here on the other you've got maybe there's some opportunity to do a new monetary experiment that is distributed beyond just kind of the geeks and nerds that are into crypto today and also it's built on layer two so they're not trying to like create their own blockchain and um you know fix crypto that way um this was interesting take by uh by token tax so why don't you read this a fun little joke so this is the uh the trade offer meme format in a tweet, the trade offer is, we get your eyeballs. You get a taxable event. Because if you receive an irdrop, you receive a taxable event. So you're giving up your data and then you get a taxable event. I will agree with you that the pursuit of what they're trying to do, I think, is noble and it's a

Starting point is 01:05:20 very viable experiment to run. There's just that inevitable friction of like, all right, like, in order to achieve completely fair distribution, you have to verify the uniqueness of each human. And verifying the uniqueness of each human requires. some sort of data or property about how that human is unique, who that person is. So you are inherently going into the private lives of that individual because you need to establish uniqueness. It's one of those things that like maybe the experiment's unique, but just getting there is just too damn hard.

Starting point is 01:05:50 I think the other thing that gave crypto Twitter a bad taste and it was best when this first release is it was just chock full of VCs. It was just only VCs in the funding of this. And there were no kind of crypto-native type outreaches. like not a lot of community development yet. So we'll see how that emerges. But here's the thing. I think we should give them a fair shot on bankless

Starting point is 01:06:10 if they decide to come on the show at some point in time. And like just hear kind of the pros and cons. I'd be interested to dive into their layer two technology and hear more about that. So I'm not ready to completely dismiss it, but I'm also not ready to get my eyeball scanned yet. Yeah. The thing is like, how do VCs benefit from this

Starting point is 01:06:29 when it's inherently a global distribution, right? Like, do they have their own supply of the coin at the same time as they're trying to have this equitable distribution? Like, how do they? So many questions. Right. How do they get upside here? Yeah, definitely so many questions. Guys, those are your three news items of the day.

Starting point is 01:06:44 Let's get into some other news items as well. Our friends at Goldman Sachs, they just figured out the DFI has its advantages over traditional finance. That's what they said. They created a report that said, DFI is great. That's amazing. From Goldman Sachs, David. Thanks, Goldman. Would you have ever thought?

Starting point is 01:07:02 Never, never, ever. Well, I mean, one day, but I guess it's happening a lot sooner than I expected. Why are they doing this, do you think? Why are they doing this? Because they know DFI is about to come eat their lunch, and they have to come to terms with it. They remember, so Goldman Sachs actually, they invested in our friend Eric Peters firm. Maybe that's why I subconsciously called them friends. They filled their bags, and now they're shilling.

Starting point is 01:07:23 Nice. Good strategy. Good strategy. Good strategy. Fill your bags first, and then then chill is the strategy here. Fill then chill. Polygon. Okay, so I think hacks have been a theme this week in the Ethereum ecosystem. Polygon just dodged an $850 million hack, a white hat discovered this in advance. They paid out the white hat,

Starting point is 01:07:45 a $2 million bounty for finding that critical vulnerability. The largest bounty ever paid ever to anyone. Well deserved. Yeah, well deserved. Set the record for highest bounty paid to that one guy or girl. So congratulations. sue that white hacker. Thank you for not, thank you for taking the $2 million rather than the $850 million. We appreciate that. It's, it's an interesting trade. I'm glad that they're being paid so well for these things because like, you know, let's say you had no morality, no ethics were not involved, and you're just doing like an expected value analysis. And you have like, $850 million on one hand. But like you have to live a completely, I guess, pseudonymous life, maybe make sure that you're covering your tracks.

Starting point is 01:08:29 Like, can you actually get away with $850 million? Or on the other side, you get $2 million. You're a hero, free and clear. What choice do you make? No morals, David. Which one would you do? Oh, no morals? No morals, David.

Starting point is 01:08:43 What would he do? Yeah, see, like the cumbersome of living a life with $850 million that I can't use. Like, is it actually worth $850 million if you can't actually buy a house with it because you can't actually send that outbound? Right? Right. Yeah. And like, I'm a person that enjoys being liked.

Starting point is 01:08:59 And so I'll take, I'll take the praise of doing the noble thing. I would do that too. I mean, like, just no morals Ryan would do that too. Like, I would, rather than live like a drug lord. I mean, I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't want to live on the lamb like that. Mo more money, more problems. That's right.

Starting point is 01:09:16 Especially when it's stolen money. Not that I would know, okay? I'm not a hacker. Never done anything of the sort. Cream finance was exploited, though. for $130 million, here's a hacker who went in the other half of the direction. A black hat. So.

Starting point is 01:09:32 Yo, hacker, in one year, let us know how your life's going. Are you living like a drug lord right now? Are you wearing a turtle costume to like be in disguise? All right, but so, okay, this is actually serious. We shouldn't be laughing about this because people lost the money. Cream finance, it is a, I guess it's not a first-tier deep. Yeah, it's a compound. It's an AVE, but it's, yeah, it goes after the long tail of assets, which is inherently where the risk comes in. And they've been hacked before. There have been

Starting point is 01:10:05 issues before. This is the biggest one, though, $130 million. And I'm not sure how this is going to be resolved. I think the story is still developing, but I think I saw the message. Okay, this is what the attacker wrote. Babe Lucky, Iron Bank Lucky, Cream Not. Why dev? Incest bad, don't do. That was the cryptic message they received. Hackers are weird. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:10:31 Well, I mean, maybe the hacker isn't an English speaker, but they wrote English for some reason? I don't know. Okay. Or maybe they're trying to like disguise. Yeah. Incest bad, don't do. I don't think that's a mistranslation.

Starting point is 01:10:41 I think that's just being weird. Okay. Anyway, bad news for Cream. I think this is another, like every once in a while we get these things in Defi, and it's just another realization. that you have to be careful. Okay?

Starting point is 01:10:56 Like, this is, I thought Cyrus had a great tweet about this. In my opinion, DAPS that I'm willing to put greater than 50% of my total net worth into in no order. Number one, Maker. He previously worked at Maker, so do you know that. Yes, okay. But also, well, that's actually a good sign then, right? Yeah, sure. Because he's seen all the skeletons.

Starting point is 01:11:16 He knows what the bodies are buried, I guess. Maker, Avey, Compound, Curve, Uniswap, those are the five, right? So there are tiers of safety inside of even defy, right? So we always end the show with this. Like, defy is risky. You could lose what you put in. Be careful. We're headed west.

Starting point is 01:11:32 All right. But like some defy is far riskier than other defy as well. And there are some applications in defy that have reached the point at which, not that they're unhackable, but they are someone like Cyrus, who's on the inside, he's willing to put in 50% or greater of his total net worth. and I probably feel the same about these protocols. I don't know if you'd add any to this list, David, or would you agree with this list?

Starting point is 01:11:57 I definitely do agree with that list. These are the applications I consider like home. These are the applications I use and I feel familiar with. And there's a lot of like people often ask me like, how do I actually evaluate a defy app at the risk of a defy app if I don't know how to code? And I actually made a talk and paper about this. So if you want to go to YouTube and type in settlement assurances

Starting point is 01:12:17 and the protocol synch thesis at the ethereal virtual summit, I gave the equation of time value locked, where you just take the value that's been deposited into some of these applications and then you look at how long that value's been there. So there's two variables, how much value and how much time. And the more and more a protocol just lives with having a bunch of money inside of it is an indication of how safe these things are. And these five applications that Cyrus lists off have an insanely high time value locked measurement. So they've had a lot of money in there for a lot of time without exploits.

Starting point is 01:12:52 So these are generally a nice litmus test for how secure an app is. Cream, not that young or not that old, like it was built in DFI summer and not that much total value locked in it and also spread over a large amount of assets. So the risk is all there. So these are the nice little like quick mental calculations you can make to understand how to evaluate a DFI app. I totally agree. I totally agree with that metric as well. A couple other, I guess, you know, caveats too is. Often, if one of these major protocols upgrades, the Lindy can sort of reset a little bit, right? So you've got to be careful with a version 2 of Uniswop versus a version 3 because they could be a little different.

Starting point is 01:13:30 The other thing that has a bit of a different risk profile is, say, using Uniswap on a layer 2 versus using it on Mainnet, right? So we just saw a side chain, like Polygon, with a hack in it itself. So it's not as safe as on Maynet. So there's some stratifications of this. but yeah, I totally agree with that metric. That's the best way you can tell. I mean, you can also judge layer twos by the same metric, right? How much money is deposit onto layer twos for how much time?

Starting point is 01:13:57 Exactly. Let's talk NFTs of Reddit doing some stuff in the NFT space. What are they doing? Yeah, we've always known that Reddit is very, very Ethereum friendly. And they've been working with, I think, Arbitrum, when the Reddit is scaling bakeoff, and now they are integrating tokens into Reddit. There already are like rewards and, like, little icons that you can reward posters, and commenters.

Starting point is 01:14:17 I think now they're just actually, the problem with those little icons that you pay for is like they're just super inflationary, right? Yeah, who cares, right? Maybe now, like, with Reddit and actually like scarce rewards, scarce, like, praises. You can't sell them. You can't do anything with them?

Starting point is 01:14:30 Like, who cares? Yeah. Once they become NFTs, though, it really opens up the world of, like, actually incentivizing good content. And, like, when you actually receive a reward, that actually means something because it's actually an NFT.

Starting point is 01:14:40 So, cool. So Reddit, the biggest social media network, one of the biggest social media networks ever, one of the most trafficked websites ever is getting Ethereum to have its back end for NFTs. It's fantastic. You know, also I read recently, they're actually one of the least

Starting point is 01:14:57 valuable social media networks per user. Right, because they just can monetize. Yeah, Reddit users were making a joke and they're like, hey, we're the least valuable users of any social media platform out there. This was a Reddit post I was reading the other day. And it's true. So the cool thing about this, though,

Starting point is 01:15:13 is for Reddit, to Web 3 so quickly. It's because they have the most to gain versus these other social media platforms that have these legacy Web 2 models. And I think Reddit is realizing that. And they could gain big from this NFT and token emergence by adopting Web3 early. And there's a ton of overlap with the structure of Reddit and the nature of like Ethereum communities. Like every subreddit is a community. Every Dow is a community. Every Dole is a community. There's all communities all the way down. They're all doubt. Like yeah, they're all Dow's, right? There's a subreddit, Dow. And they're also fairly permissionless.

Starting point is 01:15:46 Like anyone can kind of spin up a new subreddit. Yeah, so I expect the integration between Reddit and Ethereum to just be a very long story. Me too. This is a story that's just starting, which is Twitter's integration with NFTs. We started talking about this about a month ago, but what have updates here? Yeah, so instead of just having a verified NFT, which is what we talked about last time, I mean, it looks like they're creating a whole new tab in Twitter. So for people familiar with Twitter, you have the tweets, you have the tweets and replies column,

Starting point is 01:16:13 you have the media column, and then you have likes. It looks like they are adding a collectibles, and so you can just look at... How big is that? Right, that's huge. That's like very, very core features into, like, your Twitter profile. So, like, you can just go to the collectibles tab, and you can see all the NFTs that you own, which I'm assuming would be verified. So it's just another, like, NFT gallery inside of, like, your Twitter app.

Starting point is 01:16:36 This is going to... This is the bulk case for NFTs, by the way. Web2 just basically adopts NFTs, and then they saturate even further. So, like, that's... why PFPs are so valuable. If we have this collectibles tab where we can put all of our NFTs, do we have to take our NFTs off of our picture? Because it's already there.

Starting point is 01:16:54 I think, no, I think the NFTs in your picture will be verifiable too. Yeah, right? Right, but what I'm saying is if there's a gallery for viewing your NFTs, like, do you really need an NFTs as your profile picture anymore? Can we just all go back to being humans now? You don't want to go back. Do you? Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:17:10 Would you go back? Would you ever change? I am my punk. My punk is me. I can tell. You're starting to look, resembling your punk more every day. I don't know what it is. All right, let's talk about this.

Starting point is 01:17:22 WordPress, NFT auction plugin powered by Zora. Okay, so WordPress is like the biggest open source website tooling in the world. Everyone uses WordPress. Most websites are WordPress websites, yeah. Now they have plugins for NFTs. Yeah, yeah, just like printing press for NFTs connected right into Zora. Really good alignment, I think, because Zora is like the most open source aligned out of all the So it makes sense that they hook right into WordPress.

Starting point is 01:17:48 The amount of NFTs that are about to be minted in 2022 is absolutely insane. Another institution that's coming to crypto is the Web2 institution. They are coming to crypto in a big way. So is Photoshop. So is Adobe. What's happening here, David? Yeah. So any user of Photoshop will know that when you are finished with a file, you can export it

Starting point is 01:18:11 as a particular file type. Apparently, Photoshop will get a prepare as a. NFT option. I don't know what that means, but that has, I think, some sort of verifiable with, like, you can claim that you are actually the first person to make the JPEG using Photoshop. I think it's like an inter, I think that's the vibe. But I don't know, NFT features going into software these days. Guys, that's just in one week, all this stuff's happening. The biggest software applications in the world now adopting NFTs, now adopting crypto. Pretty crazy. Pretty insane. Yeah, this is more on the, the Adobe

Starting point is 01:18:45 thing. I make all my memes in Photoshop. So I think when I export these memes, I'll just like export them as NFTs, I guess. That's very professional, sir. Photoshop memes. Wow. Okay. It's the only thing I know. The Economist last week, we mentioned that they were selling the economist cover. Guess how much it sold for? Not enough. $1,000 lower than it should have been. They sold it for $419,000, missing the classic $420,000, but whatever. Yeah. Good haul. That's amazing, right? $420,000-ish for, you know, and again, as we pointed out last time, this is going to be the first of many. Everyone's going to be selling their iconic magazine titles as NFTs.

Starting point is 01:19:27 Magazine covers as NFTs after this. So the economists had their meeting where like, all right, we're going to do a defy, like a crypto cover, right? And like one person in that meeting was like, you know what we should do? We should NFT it. Boom, $420,000 idea. Like, bam. Like, who saw that coming? I hope that guy got a raise or that girl got a raise, you know, definitely worth it.

Starting point is 01:19:49 Take 10% cut next time. Just work for a Dow where you get rewarded for these contributions. Okay, Bitcoin. What's Bitcoin doing? Some firefighters, a pension, firefighters' pension are purchasing Bitcoin. And Ether. And Ether. Yep.

Starting point is 01:20:06 And Ether, too? Yeah, look at that. Oh, wow. Okay. Wherever you see Bitcoin, you see Ether these days, this fund has invested $25 million into crypto. This is the first U.S. public pension plan. People are familiar with pension plans. They have a lot of money, a whole lot of money. In fact, that is the vast majority of wealth in the U.S. aside from like individuals, you know, rich like megabillionaires. A lot of the money

Starting point is 01:20:34 of the middle class, of the working class is held inside of these big pension plans. and now the pension plans who are historically very conservative are starting to invest in crypto. Makes sense. I'm glad the firefighters are first. You know, there may be more, a bit less risk-averse. Yeah. Good job firefighters. Firefighters are on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:20:54 All right. El Salvador, what did they just do? They bought 420 more Bitcoins. 420. We like the 420 number. Yay. This recent purchase brings the Latin American nation stashed to about 1,120 bitcoins. So El Salvador, laser eyes.

Starting point is 01:21:11 Stack and Sat still, El Salvador, okay. We talked about the implications of that many times. No need to get into it. But let's talk a little bit about regulatory stuff. So Coinbase is spending $800,000 on lobbying in the third quarter. That's how much they spent in the third quarter. So that's one quarter. So I'm glad to see that Coinbase is getting involved to help educate and protect this industry

Starting point is 01:21:35 from aggressors in D.C. It's fantastic. I hope that number increases over time. So this is just a tiny fraction of revenue. But if you took even just like 0.1% of the total market cap of crypto, the total revenue of crypto, and applied that to lobbying in the U.S., what kind of a difference would that make, do you think? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:59 We have money printers. We can make money. We should just funnel that money into fighting for having the ability to keep the money printers that we made. This is, I mean, I guess I hate that we have to do this, but this is also how the game is played. This is what Andrew Yang said in the podcast. He's like, I'm here to tell you that lobbying works. That's spending money in Washington actually works. And I wish that wasn't the case. I wish the protocol would change, but like, that's how the game is played. So good job, Coinbase. I hope we continue to spend in DC. I guess that's what we're going to have to do. Also, this was an interesting

Starting point is 01:22:33 story, David. Can you maybe give us some context? So this was a story that came out of Misari Mainnet. You were actually there when it happened. So what was the story? And then what's happening now? Yeah. So Doe Kwan of Tara was on an escalator down to give his talk at Mainnet and waiting for him at the bottom of the escalator were a bunch of suits and ties with a subpoena. So they served him his subpoena at Missouri Mainnet. People thought like, did they do that? Because like they knew that he was going to be on United States soil, and so like took this opportunity to serve him. Did they do it inside a mainnet to flex and like scare the industry? Anyways, Doquan has done the reverse Uno card and Doquan is now suing the SEC. I actually don't know why.

Starting point is 01:23:18 Do you know why he's suing the SEC? Yeah, he's saying that basically I, this is the entire, you know, document that defines it. I think He's basically saying the SEC was completely out of line, not within its rights to approach him like that and apprehend him in public at Maynette Conference. And the lawyer goes over the case as to why that's the case, why it's an infringement on Doquan's rights, why it is a breach of power by the SEC. And I got to say, some of these points make a lot of sense. Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know how this will stand up. But like, what a mad lad move.

Starting point is 01:23:52 Right. I'm like, you're subpoenaing me, SEC? No, I was suing you. I'll see you in court. Wow, that takes a lot of audacity. I'm reminded of the insanity wolf meme that was like five, ten years ago from the old days. This is like, Sue's the SEC. Like, bold strategy, I hope it works out for him.

Starting point is 01:24:17 Yeah, you know, he's got some points, but not going to make friends and influence people at the SEC. That's for sure. But look, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this. maybe some pushback is warranted for this sort of thing. And regardless, this kind of stuff's going to end up in court. So you bully us? No, we bully you.

Starting point is 01:24:35 We have lawyers too. MasterCard says any bank or merchant on its vast network can soon offer its crypto services. So Visa's been hard in the game lately. I guess MasterCard now following suit, going down the crypto rabbit hole, starting to offer crypto payment options to all of its merchants and customers. is pretty cool. Yeah. Just a reminder, Visa, MasterCard, these are payment networks.

Starting point is 01:25:00 They're not specific about any currency. They are payment messaging networks. You can put any currency you want on MasterCard. And so MasterCard wants more than just the dollars. It wants Bitcoin and other cryptos. Yeah. And also, I think it's going to use stable coins as well. We're actually going to have some folks from Visa on the show later in November to talk

Starting point is 01:25:19 about some of the plans for Visa and talk about the D5Mullet, David. That's what we do. some regulation rumors as well. A lot of people in Treasury are talking about apparently some rumors. They're talking about a push from Gary Gensler and others in the SEC and Treasury to increase the amount of regulatory scrutiny on stable coins in particular. So it feels very much to me like the eye of Soran is sort of turned towards stable coins. I'm like personally, I'm glad it's like not fully on defy right now. they've given Bitcoin and ETH kind of a pass with the ETF, but it definitely feels like the

Starting point is 01:25:59 IEF Soron is turning on stable coins and that's going to be a next target. I'm not sure how that's going to play out. The SEC apparently is claiming some jurisdiction, some folks even at the CFTC want jurisdiction. There's talk of making, like, essentially making stable coin issuers apply by bank rules. So FDI and C insurance and all of these other things. And of course, there's not a lot of clarity in this industry. So I don't know how this is all going to play out. It seems like various regulatory bodies are all fighting for some jurisdiction here.

Starting point is 01:26:35 David, do you have any takes? No, no takes here. Yeah, I think this goes back to you, you know, basically our conversation with Eric Peters, where he was like, hey, in the short run, this sort of stuff is going to happen. but in the long run, nation states will get on board with this and have to capitulate. And so, like, I'm less worried about this is another example of probably regulatory fud. That's all going to be okay for crypto. We'll keep marching on.

Starting point is 01:27:03 Yeah. The regulation's going to happen and the crypto world will exist exactly as it intends to regardless. Just got to wait and watch it happen. Speaking of Eric Peters, David, let's talk about this real quick. What did Eric Peter say on our podcast is being reported in crypto media? Yeah. Eric Peter says, crypto is the most interesting. macro opportunity and investment of Eric's recent title that he ever knows of. And so Eric Peters,

Starting point is 01:27:27 again, on the podcast, a very big deal in the legacy world. So when they were buying Bitcoin and ether, they were keeping it secret because they knew that once it got out that one river capital management was buying crypto, it would be a shot hurt around the world. As soon as it was announced, Bitcoin set its all-time highs of like $603,000 like earlier this year. And so people listen to Eric Peters. And Eric Peters on this podcast that I listened to called Bankless said that crypto is the most interesting macro investment ever. Do you know that was one of my favorite podcasts that we've done this year? I just thought it was phenomenal. That was a really great podcast. Yeah. And, you know, Eric is definitely leading the charge in the traditional

Starting point is 01:28:10 institutional world here. Last thing for you. And then we will get to takes of the week. Leading D5 prediction market, Polly Market, is said to be under investigation by the CFTC. They're also in talks to raise money at a $1 billion valuation. That's an interesting contrast, isn't it? Right. Yeah. The alleged thing that the CFTC is saying about Polymark is that it's letting customers improperly trade swaps or binary options, and it should be registered with the agency.

Starting point is 01:28:38 So it's basically just finding them or under investigation for just not registering, which they probably don't want to do anyways. Just kind of, kind of, you know, regulators cracking down and crypto companies raising war chest to fight that and I think this all gets resolved in the courts. Hopefully. Here's how this is going to end up. Again, I don't know anything, but like it's going to be like a two, three, four million dollar fine and they just raised at a billion dollar valuation.

Starting point is 01:29:03 So like, okay. Yeah, you think that that's kind of what we've seen traditionally, right? And the CFTC isn't the SEC. The CFTC is nice. Yeah. All right, guys, we will be back with the takes of the week and some more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors. that made this episode possible.

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Starting point is 01:31:33 tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your Defy apps all in one space. All right, guys, we are back with the takes. of the week, the turtle and the punk are here to give you the freshest takes in crypto. David, let's start with the punk take. This is your take.

Starting point is 01:31:56 This is all about the modular blockchain and kind of a handshake between ETH as ultrasound money and Ethereum as ultrasound scalability. What's the feedback loop here when what's the tweet? Yeah, this is why the ultra scalable Ethereum design structure is so incredibly awesome. In the modular design thesis with sharding, when you add more proof of stake validators, when more people spin up 32, stake 32 eth and spin up a validator, the more people that do that,

Starting point is 01:32:25 the more validators there are, the more shards that we can add to the Ethereum blockchain, right? So if we double the number of validators, we can just have more shards, which actually associates Ethereum security and decentralization with its scale,

Starting point is 01:32:38 meaning it can become more secure, more decentralized, while also becoming more scalable. This is the big unlock. Previously we had the blockchain trilemma where it said, like, well, if you want to be decentralized, you have to sacrifice scale. With sharding, it inverts it, where we get more decentralization.

Starting point is 01:32:53 We actually add more scale. Okay, so more validators get spin-up. We get more shards providing more data. If we get more data on the shards, like because roll-ups compress data and before they deploy it down to the L-1 shards, so adding one megabyte of data down to the Ethereum L-1 as like a gigabyte of data onto a roll-up because it's compressed. So when you add any amount of small amount of data to the Ethereum L-1, you add orders of magnitude. more data to the Ethereum L2s, which makes transactions go faster. You can do more of them. They're cheaper. They go faster. So faster, cheaper roll-ups, that allows for creating net new economic activity. We talk about how congestion and Ethereum pushes economic activity elsewhere.

Starting point is 01:33:33 It goes on to Polygon. It goes on to Solana. Well, when you actually recapture those things by having super fast, cheap transactions, you create more net economic activity that is happening on Ethereum. More net economic activity means more fees for validators because more total fees are being pushed down to the L1. If we have more fees for validators, you have a larger incentive to spin up a new validator because you are getting more

Starting point is 01:33:56 ether-denominated APY on your validators. And so when there's more fees being paid to validators, more validators will spin up. We started this whole thread at this point where if you start up more validators, you get more data charts, which adds to more scale of the roll-ups, which adds more economic activity,

Starting point is 01:34:11 which adds more fees with adds more proof-and-stake validators, which adds more data. The positive feedback loop is absolutely insane. And so really the growth of Ethereum, as it grows in decentralization, it becomes more scalable. And the cool thing about this is that when we have a bunch of fees, I don't include this in the tweet, but when you have a bunch of fees because of the economic activity, you're making ether more valuable, which increases the value of what is being paid out to validators. And so because of ultra-scalable Ethereum, we make ether more scarce, and because ether is more valuable,

Starting point is 01:34:41 you have the incentive to spin up more nodes. And so ultrasound money, meet ultra-scalable Ethereum. you're identical sibling. One is the network, one's the money, and they are both ultra. So that is where we are today. So make it simple for this turtle here, David. You tell me we should buy Ethan. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:00 You tell me, Ethan is a good investment here. Yeah. And not only is a fantastic investment, but Ethereum is a fantastic platform to hold that investment on. This is not investment advice, of course. Never is. But you can infer what you like by the bullishness of that statement. This is Ron Paul. He is not bullish on the Fed.

Starting point is 01:35:20 He never has been. I'll read the tweet out. By creating many trillions of new dollars out of thin air, the Fed set in motion in economic disaster. The warnings are over. Inflation is now here. Every excuse will be offered up as the reason for the economic pain. Don't be deceived.

Starting point is 01:35:36 The unconstitutional Fed is the reason. Ron Paul has long been saying this, that the Fed is basically inflating money supply. I feel like a lot of people were listening. to this message in 2000 after 2008 crisis and thought inflation was imminent and were kind of proven wrong in a way because they thought CPI inflation was imminent but they were actually like retrospectively proven right because money supply inflation actually happened in asset price inflation happened as well and now we're starting to see the inflation that everybody else notices

Starting point is 01:36:13 and everyone else calls inflation which is actually like consumer price index inflation. And so now a bunch of people are saying like, hey, see, we told you, you know, the chickens would come home to roost. We told you that this is going to happen. And Ron Paul, of course, is blaming the central banks and the Fed. I don't think he's wrong. But, you know, yeah, what's your take on this? I really just like the color of the unconstitutional Fed. We didn't elect the Fed. We didn't, we don't, as a democracy, get to choose the monetary policy that the Fed bestows upon us. also, by the way, didn't elect any members of the SEC.

Starting point is 01:36:50 It's a nice reminder that, like, money is a public good, and it's actually been captured by, like, 12 dudes behind closed doors. Yeah, and Janet Yellen. It's not part of the governance protocol of the United, the Republic of the United States. We are governed by the central bank, yeah, we are governed by the central bank, and we are governed without representation in the central bank. Here's another take that I think is related. this is Jack Dorsey saying hyperinflation is going to change everything. It's happening.

Starting point is 01:37:22 This term hyperinflation. It's a big word. Yeah, it's a big word. A lot of people were angry at his use of this word. Said it was hyperbole. Said it was exaggeration. Said he was just pumping his Bitcoin bags. I have maybe a kind of a nuanced take where I partially agree, but partially disagree. But what's your take? It's very polarizing, right? Like hyperinflation causes fear. It's just, scary thing. Hyperinflation basically is a broken economy. Like your economy cannot function. Your money no longer works. Money no longer works.

Starting point is 01:37:54 So therefore nothing works. That's exactly right. Hyperinflation is a bold claim because it's talking about like, oh, basically the destruction of the United States economy, which would be the destruction of the entire world. So it's it's a big deal to make this sort of thing. And I think the reason why he can make this kind of claim is because inflation has been really, really low

Starting point is 01:38:11 for a very long amount of time. And so markets and basically entire entire economy has operated under like a less than 2% paradigm for a decade now. And so if we ever saw like larger than that, which we are currently seeing, it breaks a lot of things. And so that's kind of why he gets to say hyperinflation in my mind. Yeah, I my take on it is like hyperinflation still is too, it's too much, right? It's too alarmist for what's going on. Like you don't have to use that word. I think when people think of hyperinflation, they think of like, you know, Zimbabwe, you know, crisis and people using wheelbarrows of money to just buy their daily goods and like using

Starting point is 01:38:49 money as wallpaper and like completely broken. I don't think that's where the U.S. is headed. And I think it's a bit of hyperbole to think that overnight the dollar is like suddenly going to be like a collapse absent the U.S. losing a major war. I don't see that happening. That said, that doesn't mean there won't be very high levels of consumer price index inflation. I just don't think of that as like hyperinflation. Like the money is just kind of dying overnight. But I think we could get to like double digit CPI, for instance. Which would break a lot of people's brains.

Starting point is 01:39:23 That's a really high number. Yeah. And some people would say, well, that is hyperinflation. So it is kind of a subjective definition of what hyperinflation, I guess, is. But interesting that people are like just blatantly tweeting this in, in 2021, right? Now you know inflation is here is because this can be tweeted with a lot of, a lot of support by a major CEO. Agreed. I think hyper-inflation, we can say that it arrives when, like, people really start

Starting point is 01:39:50 moving, talking about not storing their money in dollars anymore. So, like, taking their paychecks and then turning it into something else. That is, in my mind, hyperinflation. Which I've been doing ever since 2017. This is kind of my take on some of the talk about inflation. It's just this take on Fiat. Fiat only works because no one actually knows how Fiat really works. This is fine for decades. Then crypto came. Crypto pays people to learn about how money actually works.

Starting point is 01:40:21 It's gamified economics. And when a new generation learns how money really works, do you think they'll hold crypto or Fiat? David, you hold crypto? Crypto only. As much crypto is possible to pay your bills. Gobble, gobble, gobble, yeah. And part of the reason, like, and like, I feel the same way. And the reason why is because I actually learned about money.

Starting point is 01:40:42 And I wouldn't have learned about money if Bitcoin and Ether didn't pay me to go learn about money. Like, and by paying me, I mean a tremendous amount of upside in terms of like figuring out what the next monetary regime is. And in order to figure that out, you actually have to understand the nature of money. I think older generations just take money for granted. Like, they don't actually have to think about it. It's not a thing that actually matters to them because they lived in a stasis monetary regime. We live in a transition period where monetary regimes are not in stasis. They are changing.

Starting point is 01:41:16 Like, things are happening. This is a different time period. And what's also happening is now that crypto's here, it is gamifying. It is like rewarding you to go learn what money actually is. And the more people who learn what money is, the less they'll trust Fiat. And then the less people who trust Fiat, it's like the reverse of what you just said, that positive feedback loop for a, for a, for EFIA. ether. It's like an unwinding of that, right? Which is actually like I, I love many of Andrew Yang's

Starting point is 01:41:47 policies, right? And I love it particularly these governance protocol policies. I, I worry a little bit about UBI, right? Like, it's not that I don't believe in that as a wealth distribution function. Like, I think it could service that. But like, what if it also serves to collapse faith in fiat? Right. What, what do you lose as the nation state in like, um, And like if you do that, if you cause that and people are suddenly getting checks, where does it come from? Well, it comes from the money printer unless you're like taxing this. If you're just printing that UBI, then maybe that further erodes faith in money. So, yeah, I think crypto is just unraveling, it's going to start unraveling the entire fiat experiment.

Starting point is 01:42:26 And maybe that does lead to some hyperinflation. I don't know. It's not in the U.S., but, you know, we'll see. It would be interesting to run the A-B test as to like inflation in this world as it currently stands with crypto and then also without crypto. Like, what if the crypto industry didn't actually exist and we had COVID and we had the money printer gober? There were probably a lot less inflation because you, like you say, like you talk about how like crypto comes and it teaches people about money. But also importantly, it's an exit. It's an escape hatch out of fiat money, right?

Starting point is 01:42:55 And so that escape hatch actually can leak out a lot of value and cause the hyperinflation simply by having the option to sell your dollars and buy Bitcoin and buy ether, buy shib. Like you can, you actually create the hyperinflation that is actually the. narrative that Bitcoiners like run with like like they say hey the dollar is going to to hyper inflate one day buy Bitcoin so you can protect yourself from that the mere actually existence of Bitcoin can actually make it a self-fulfilling prophecy right because it can actually cause the inflation that is being discussed yeah totally there's an ape in the middle of you know Wall Street uh Coinbase is the number one app rampant inflation like what do all of these things have in common right it's the it's all kind of the story of crypto um

Starting point is 01:43:39 Let's talk about this take. This is from Matt. Matt Huang from paradigm. He goes, Stocks are worth $100. Print a lot of money. Now stocks are worth $200. Tax the unrealized gain of $100.

Starting point is 01:43:51 Rinse and repeat. So this is kind of like the very pernicious nature of like the association between having the ability to print money and also having the ability to tax money. We are unburdening the economy, unburning our massive debt by printing our way out of it, by just devaluing the debt. But at the same time, in order to actually fund the government, like they need taxes.

Starting point is 01:44:10 And so there's this very insipitous like method of taxation, which is going on, which is like, well, just pump out a bunch of money to pay for things. And then all your asset prices are going to go up because we inflated the money. But now that we made the asset prices go up, we're going to tax your unrealized gains. There's that conversation going around in Congress about like taxing unrealized capital gains. That's a huge change. That would be a massive change. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:33 So that's like if your assets go up, you actually have to pay the taxes on your assets. even if you didn't sell them, which is crazy. I think it's only being confined to like the top 700 richest people in the United States, but still as like a, it's kind of a slippery slope. Like first it's the top 1%, then it's the top 10%, then it's everyone. And like your wealth is just taxed inherently. Do you own something? Well, like now you have to give something to the government.

Starting point is 01:45:00 So don't like the dynamics going on right now. Yeah, there's a lot there, right? So like I think what Congress, some in Congress are trying to react to is this massive wealth inequality where it feels like billionaires are barely getting taxed, right? And rather than raise capital gains, they're talking about this ability to tax unrealized capital gains. Because if you raise capital gains, you just incentivize people like Jeff Bezos who stop selling. And they're not even selling anymore. They're just collateralizing the equity. He collateralizes his equity. And then he borrows against us. So he never realizes a taxable gain. Like, and I see that loophole, right?

Starting point is 01:45:33 So people are saying, well, what if we tax unrealized gains? But what are the downstream implications and ramifications of taxing unrealized gains. But there's also, I think, the subpoint, and this goes back to our conversation with Eric Peters. He's just like, hey, if crypto takes off and fiat starts to collapse, the government's still going to get theirs. And you know how they're going to do that? They're going to raise taxes on some winning element of the economy. And if you don't pay those taxes, they'll throw you in jail.

Starting point is 01:46:02 Remember, government still have the ability to put people in cages, and they have, you know, unlimited resources, yeah. Resources to do that. And they have like basically violence. We've given them the stick of violence. That's kind of the Faustian bargain we've made with with our governments. And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of tax policy starts to gain in popularity in this, over the next decade. I don't know what it means for everything.

Starting point is 01:46:29 But yeah, it's the government will try to get it theirs, that's for sure. I said this in the Eric Peters debrief through. so all the premium subscribers to bankless heard this. But for all the free subscribers, I'll say it here. I hope that the way that they tax crypto is via the off ramps. So if you have a bunch of gains and you sell your money into dollars for your bank account, they'll tax you then. And so they should put that tax there so that it just incentivizes everyone to go into the world of crypto

Starting point is 01:46:56 and only stays there. I think that's the best path forward. We'll have to see. I mean, there's so much that needs to get resolved in this decade, including this, including Facebook and social media surveillance. This is awesome. So talk about this. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:11 So the Facebook whistleblower that talked about, hey, there's like this internal structure at Facebook that everyone in Facebook knows that it's tearing apart the scenes of society and everyone's okay with that inside of Facebook. So that was the whistleblowers. Basically, Facebook knows that it's bad for like mental health. It's bad for society. And then she also says like, and everyone knows that and they aren't doing, choosing to do anything about it.

Starting point is 01:47:34 So that was like the big. And this was big news this month, right? She was on, Francis was on 60 minutes talking about this and like, you know, Facebook was freaking out and all sorts of things. So go on. So the tweet says, the Facebook whistleblower says she doesn't need financial support. Everyone's trying to give her financial support for being a whistleblower, I guess, because she doesn't need financial support because she bought crypto at the right time.

Starting point is 01:47:55 She is in Puerto Rico, in part to join her crypto friends who are there seeking, seeking as a tax shelter. You don't have to pay any capital gains in Puerto Rico. The cool thing about this is that, like, well, crypto is also Web3. Like, Web 3 is part of this whole thing. And so the Web 3 world funded the lady that blew the whistle about the Web 2 world. It's like, it's perfect. It's perfect. It's such a great story.

Starting point is 01:48:19 Web 3 really is taking down Web 2. It's already happening. I wonder what her thoughts would be on Web 3's ability to actually create a different incentive mechanism for the social media surveillance that's going on. Let's talk about this. This is a tweet from Blow. It's him at a concert, looking like he's performing

Starting point is 01:48:36 in front of thousands of people. Yeah, it looks like a massive conference. It's not a conference, concert. And so, yeah, it's a selfie. He's not taking the photo, but it's Blow in front of just a massive crowd. And then he tweets out this photo and he just says, one day,

Starting point is 01:48:50 they'll all own NFTs. Damn right, they will Blow. Part of the fan experience. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, David, let's talk about what you're excited about this week other than the physical manifestation of your Cryptopunk. What do you have for us?

Starting point is 01:49:04 I'm excited about two things. First thing, NFT, NYC on Sunday. I pack my bags going into New York for the whole week for NFT, NYC. So if you're out there, make sure to find me, I won't be looking like my punk. How will we know who you are? I have no clue. I'll be carrying around an iPad and maybe I can get Ryan to join me at times on the iPad. Oh my God. Yeah, I'll zoom in for you. And I already talked about this, but I'm just, the last time I was this excited about Ether and Ethereum, it was, we were on the cusp of like the whole ultrasound money revolution. And like, nothing's really different anymore, except for the fact that like we are progressing in Ethereum's roadmap. But having the ability to name something is really, really powerful.

Starting point is 01:49:47 And I think with ultra-scalable Ethereum, go read the blog post, we can finally talk about the way that Ethereum has gone after its scaling strategy. So I'm just really, really excited just to see, like, it's going to be ultra-scalable Ethereum. It was ultra-scalable Ethereum week this week. It'll be ultra-scalable Ethereum next week, ultra-scalable Ethereum now and forever. And I think I'm just excited to see this work its way into the brains of people. In the same way that ultrasound money did, ultra-scalable Ethereum is following in its footsteps. So that's what I'm excited about. Definitely a powerful narrative.

Starting point is 01:50:19 I share that excitement, David. Ryan, what are you excited about? I am really excited about crypto games in the Metaverse. Okay, so we had a great conversation with Chris Dixon. He talked about, and you'll hear this on the podcast on Monday, he talked about, what crypto gives you the ability to own your own inventory and move it from website to website, right? This idea of owning your own inventory, that is the primitive we've unlocked with crypto.

Starting point is 01:50:42 And I think that new property right that hasn't been available on the internet, that digital property right is now available to us. And this is what's going to create the metaverse. But in the near run, I think the metaverse will probably emerge through gaming, crypto gaming, like these virtual worlds, right? I think Ready Player 1 is not that wrong in that a lot of the Metaverse at first will feel like an immersive gaming type experience. And we're starting to see some of that activity start. Like I think the crypto gaming industry is just in its first inning.

Starting point is 01:51:14 Like Axi was the first breakout success. Now we're going to see an entire new wave of crypto games I'm super excited about. In particular, I'm excited about crypto games on layer two, okay? Because I think that unlocks something special. So we're seeing crypto games being built on immutable X. This is a roll-up. We're also seeing crypto games starting to emerge on Starkware's new solution, which is cool. There's two that I know of.

Starting point is 01:51:40 I'm also excited about this other experiment, which is like bottom-up building, where you actually start with the inventory and you build the game around the inventory. You start with the inventory. You create a Dow, you create a community, and the community kind of builds the game. Okay? So like, loot started to pioneer this. There's also a game called Dope Wars. This is doing like a loot idea, but it's like Grand Theft Auto kind of loot rather than like fantasy world loot. And they're doing it on layer two, which is super interesting.

Starting point is 01:52:09 I have no idea if these experiments will be successful. But this is a new model for the world. And again, it starts in crypto gaming, turns into a metaverse. And all of these people will be defy-pilled in the process. They will start to do their banking on crypto. This will be good and synergistic with Defi, and it all leads back to Ether as money. I mean, like, so watch the Chris Dixon video show on Monday for some more details on some of this stuff. But I've been messing around with some things this week in kind of that space.

Starting point is 01:52:42 And I just see the very first seedling of the Metaverse starting to emerge. And I think some big unlocks are coming in the future, too. So that's what I'm excited about. I'm as excited as anyone when it comes to the Metaverse, but for the sake of the conversation, I'll be the devil's advocate here. I'm actually kind of worried that like these, because the massive, the market cap, the total addressable market cap of crypto game is absolutely massive. It's, we talked about this with Ariana Simpson. Like, games are going to be the new economies. And this just means you're going to be paid to play these games.

Starting point is 01:53:16 We're going to make them really, really financially incentivized to play these games. What happens to the world when, like, we can just make our money playing games? Like, are we going to stop going to work? Do we do anything real? Yeah, what else do we do? We stop going to work. Like, we're just going to shut down bank list because I'm having way too much fun playing this game and I'm making plenty of money doing it.

Starting point is 01:53:32 Well, what are we doing now, David? Are we doing anything productive? Are we, like, are we playing a game? Well, I mean, no, I'm not literally playing WASD games. I'm talking about actual WASD banks. I know, but like, I guess, like, what is the difference between, like, what is the definition of, like, adding value? Like, I have a lot of fun doing this, right?

Starting point is 01:53:51 This doesn't feel like a job. This kind of feels like a game. And oh my God, like if we think about it, like from a meta perspective, you and I play games all day. We talk to our friends in Discord groups and we collect coins. Right. And we tell people about those coins. Like we're kind of playing a game in a way, right?

Starting point is 01:54:11 But that's different than what I was going after. And we're very privileged because we're in the crypto space. Imagine like all of the broken supply chain people. There's lack of shipping containers. there's not enough labor at the ports. Like what happened? We have a shortage of labor, and what happens when that shortage of labor

Starting point is 01:54:27 gets ten times worse because the metaverse is paying a bunch of people to play games? So you're worried about this idea of like escapism and people aren't, like we still need physical things. There still needs to be real human interaction. You still got to grow the food. Yeah, we'll still need all these things.

Starting point is 01:54:44 But what happens if everyone is like just plugged into a computer? And yeah, I get that take too. I think it's a cool future. Like, I want that future to happen, but I'm just where there's going to be a lot of industries that get gutted because of the magnitude of crypto gaming. Yeah, that's for sure. And at the same time, there also needs to be a whole bunch of new jobs for human beings, right?

Starting point is 01:55:05 Well, like artificial intelligence and, you know, you know, takes so many of the jobs that we're doing today. Anyway, that's it. Takes the week, guys. Let's get to the meme of the week and close this down, David. So meme of the week, what's the first one we're looking at here? I think we only have one this week. This one, I made this when Luke at Bankless tweeted out after reading the ultra-scalable Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:55:28 the modular blockchain thesis. Luke just says, like, can you scroll up so I can actually just read it? He goes, I don't know about you, folks, but at some point, all this stuff just starts to become obvious, really stoked to be taking the journey with Bankless. And I read that tweet, I'm like, oh, it must be so nice coming into the world of crypto in 2021, where things have just been like digested and like put into like articles and mental models. But coming into the world of crypto in 2017 was an absolute shit show. No one knew what was true.

Starting point is 01:55:57 No one knew what was real. Everything was like there was competing narratives, competing technologies, like polychain, like cross chain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I decided to slap together this meme where this is the army man protecting the sleeping child from a bunch of like raining grenades and knives. The raining grenades knives are titled A Bunch of Confusing Bullshit. And then the, sorry for the language, and then the Army Man is bankless. And so it's a little self-congratulatory, but that's what we try and do at bankless.

Starting point is 01:56:25 There's a lot of just crazy bullshit out in the industry, and we try and sift through the mess and make sure that we don't let confusing bullshit hit the ears of anyone. Are you worried, though, that we're protecting people from the shibs of the worlds, and they could be making insane gains dated? Well, podcasts are permissionless, so they are free, free. to listen to a different podcast. Yeah, that's true. We do try your best, though.

Starting point is 01:56:46 We try to parse and figure out what the truth of these situations are. Oh, there are two memes. Here's the second meme of the week. What's this, David? Yeah, this is a Ryan Sean Adams classic I've now learned where he slaps on a headline onto a picture of a regulator and everyone believes it. And that's kind of the sad part. The comments here or the caption is,

Starting point is 01:57:06 regulators worried that crypto might improve banking system. Quote, crypto might put the banks out of, of business. And then the tweet is, I'm worried that crypto might improve things. This is a depiction of Janet Yellen as well as a central banker. A lot of people thought this was real. But, you know, the fact that everyone assumes this is the meme is the real problem. That's what we'd say. Guys, this has been a special Halloween edition. I think this is the last time you will see me in an NFT turtle costume anytime soon. I don't know if we'll be seeing the the crypto punk again, David. Do you have plans for this? Yeah, maybe I do take my

Starting point is 01:57:41 Cryptopunks, NFT, NYC, it would be a good company, I feel like. You probably should. Guys, none of this, of course, was financial advice. Eth is risky. Defi is risky. So is Shib. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier.

Starting point is 01:57:55 It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: SHIB | WorldCoin | Twitter, Reddit, Disney NFT Platform | Facebook Meta

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