Bankless - ROLLUP: Special Guest! | Airdrop Week | Base Szn | The DeFi Wars

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup First Week of April, 2024  Major thanks to Anthony Sassano for filling in for Ryan as he takes some time off to update his firmware. https://x.com/sassal0x  ------ �...� CRYPTEX | GET INVOLVED WITH GOVERNANCE FOR THE FUTURE OF DECENTRALIZED MARKETS https://bankless.cc/Cryptex_pod  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🏠 CASA | SECURE YOUR GENERATIONAL WEALTH https://bankless.cc/Casa  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:02:24 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd  https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd  https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-btc  https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts  00:09:47 L2 Check-in https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary  00:17:19 ENA Airdrop https://twitter.com/ethena_labs/status/1775060005953421401?s=20  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethena  00:23:42 Wormhole Airdrop https://wormhole.com/w-launch-roadmap/  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/wormhole  00:28:14 Blobs Update https://warpcast.com/0xrob/0x0357eacb  https://warpcast.com/sassal.eth/0xae93359e  https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs  https://twitter.com/rob_0x/status/1775130717774626839  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1775494227222315274?s=20  00:37:48 Base Ecosystem https://warpcast.com/jessepollak/0x078c9b74  https://x.com/ptrwtts/status/1774963873936011638?s=20  https://x.com/Uniswap/status/1774465349716435298?s=20  00:43:10 Degen Chain https://x.com/syndicateio/status/1773351144858750990?s=20  00:52:48 The Issuance Debate https://twitter.com/mikeneuder/status/1774072228839117307?t=C4VaAFdu-LRU1yDM31GCFQ&s=19  https://twitter.com/jon_charb/status/1774182126608380041  01:05:02 LST vs LRT Dynamics https://x.com/hildobby_/status/1775123732534603919?s=20  01:13:10 AAVE vs Maker https://x.com/lemiscate/status/1775116242019299404?s=20  https://governance.aave.com/t/arfc-risk-parameters-for-dai-update/17211/9  https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1775157933501796465?s=20  01:17:48 Meme of The Week https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1774791420504674325?s=20  01:22:34 Check Out The Daily GWEI! https://www.youtube.com/@TheDailyGwei  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I think specifically going back to the whole Athena thing, people are like getting the reflexes triggered when they see a stable coin offering 35% APY. And they're like, oh, the last time I saw that was Farrell Luna and anchor. Bankless Nation, welcome to the Bankless Weekly Roll Up Where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, which is why we are tapping in. Substitute teacher, Anthony Zazano, while Ryan and Sean Adams is stepping out for some downtime, some software updates, some repairs. Anthony, how you doing, my man?
Starting point is 00:00:31 I'm doing good. Always happy to be back as the substitute teacher here. There's a lot to get through today. And I'm pumped, basically. There is a lot to get through. It's actually conveniently a pretty Ethereum focus week this week. A lot going on inside of the Ethereum ecosystem. There is a debate inside the Ethereum community. Should Ethereum, should ETH change its issuance curve. So we're talking about monetary policy of ETH, a very old subject that is now rearing its head once again. Convenient to have you here, Anthony. I know that you are, from, following this debate. And I think you can, you can kind of give us both sides of this. I have my opinions. I think you have your opinions. I think we're going to go back and forth on that. Also, what else is going on this week? Base season continues to heat up. The base chain is hotter than ever. It's getting its own layer threes. Are layer three is real? I think we're going to talk about that. And also some defy wars between Avey and Maker Dow. Things also getting spicy inside of the Ethereum app layer. These are all the takes that we're going to get through.
Starting point is 00:01:26 But before we get into a message from our friends and sponsors over at Cryptex Finance. which is a defy protocol to make crypto-native markets tradable. It's on Arbitrum. Cryptex produces a synthetic asset using Chainlink and Pith data oracles to produce synthetic markets, such as T-CAP, their first ever market. T-Cap is the total crypto market-cap index. If you don't want to think, you can just buy T-Cap. It'll give you a synthetic exposure to the total crypto market cap.
Starting point is 00:01:54 All indices are powered by CTX token governance, so holders of CTX can vote on upgrades in the management of the Cryptex markets and Treasury, and they want you to become a part of the Dow to help build the future of decentralized markets. There is a link in the show notes, bankless.com. com.com.com.com. Starting the week, slash Cryptex underscore pod. If you want to play in the world of synthetic market exposure and other things that the CTX governance wants to bring to the world. First, we're going to start with the crypto prices. Thanks to Cracken for the Bitcoin charts. Bitcoin starting the week is $70,300, down $5.5% to $66 and a half thousand. Ether doing something pretty similar on the week.
Starting point is 00:02:34 Last week, we thought we were going to resume up only on the trend, but looks like there is still a pause in this bull market. Coming up on almost three weeks of a pause now, since the first big 20% sell-off in Bitcoin and Ether and all the other blue chips. Anthony, just overall sentiment on where we are in the market right now. This is the first big pullback. And we're trying to get the engine started again.
Starting point is 00:02:59 Haven't really been able to do it. What's your read on the state of the markets? Yeah, so my overall read is basically that we haven't really brought in that much new money into crypto. I mean, besides the BTC ETFs, I think that generally there hasn't really been much fresh new money coming in from the retail investors, as we kind of like to call them there. And I think what's happened now is that obviously some of the flows have slowed down with the ETFs because the ETFs aren't going to be just like a huge flow, you know, kind of thing every day happening perpetually. it's a slow kind of moving beast. It's a passive thing. So people are kind of trading around that. But typically what you see when Bitcoin reaches, you know, it's old all time high is that it will kind of go sideways for a little bit. Like if you look at the previous kind of history of this,
Starting point is 00:03:41 the last two cycles, it stayed there for like a month at least before kind of heading up again. So I think everyone is questioning, you know, is that what we're going to do? You know, the harvending is coming up for Bitcoin in a couple of weeks. Like, are we going to continue up after that or are we going to dump? Like there's, you know, this competing kind of, I guess, narratives going around right now. But generally, yeah, I mean, for the last few weeks, it's kind of been a little bit boring there. I know that meme coins have continued popping off and things like that. But as I said, as I've mentioned on Twitter, for those who follow me there, I think that's just a lot of crypto-native money sloshing around. I don't think that's new people
Starting point is 00:04:10 coming in and being like, I'm going to go bid this meme coin on base. Like, they don't even know how to do that, right? So I really doubt that it's that right now. So we hit Bitcoin all-time highs around $73,000 on the 14th of March, and the day of recording it is the 4th of April. So we are approaching one month. So next week will be one month since the Bitcoin all-time highs. And this is, I feel like, generally pretty expected, especially when you zoom out and you look at the Bitcoin chart. The trend is 100% still intact, right?
Starting point is 00:04:43 So like after hitting the Bitcoin all-time highs of $73,000, we hit the 61,000 and a half lows on the 20th. of March. So just like a week later. And we haven't hit those lows since. All of the lows that we have been slightly higher than that. So trend looking good. Nothing is broken here. This is, I think, very, very expected. To say that, like, Bitcoin would break all time highs and then just, like, rock it and, like, do its whole, like, 2x3X thing, I think is pretty greedy, I would say. We got to hang out for a little bit. And I would say the longer that we can stretch out this period, the better. Definitely. Yeah, I think that, you know, if you kind of look at,
Starting point is 00:05:28 not just the history, but look at kind of the vibe and the sentiment, I think people are looking at the history or like in large part. Like I've seen this on, on crypto Twitter, a lot of people looking at the history being like, you know, we're just recharging. There's usually what happens, you know, and then we're going to go kind of up only from here. And then I kind of pause on that. And I'm like, yeah, okay, you know, it is based on history and there are kind of historical precedents here. But then people are like, oh, is it really going to repeat itself? Or have we kind of gone up too quickly and now we're going to spend like six months down here. So that's always the tricky thing with market kind of commentary is that you're right that the
Starting point is 00:06:00 trend is still intact, especially the trend on the higher time frames. But, you know, we could go sideways for like six months and the trend would still be intact. That's the thing with sideways movement is that doesn't necessarily break trends. For sure, for sure. Honestly, I would enjoy six months of flat at high prices. I could play that game. Yeah. Ether doing something pretty similar.
Starting point is 00:06:19 start of the week, $3,570, down 6.5% down to where it is right now at $3,340. The ratio at 0.050, which is relatively low on the long, on very long time frames. Anthony, what's your take on the read on the ratio? It has a lot of just like pessimism price into it right now. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a very obvious kind of thing to look at where essentially the market is pricing in that the ETH ETFs are going to get denied. right? Like that is the general sentiment right now based on everything that I've seen. And that's why Heath is a generally relatively weak on the USD pairs against like kind of other things as well,
Starting point is 00:07:00 but also against Bitcoin. You know, if we were seeing ETH BTC go up, I think that would be a sign that people are confident that the ETS are getting approved. But right now, you know, people are just like, well, why would I, you know, buy ETH when I'm not confident that these things are getting approved? No one else is. So I'm going to play the kind of trend of don't buy ETH until May 23rd, which is where we're expected to get a decision on a denial or approval, then I'll kind of play ETH. And the funny thing about that is that I think that if we get to May 23rd and people are still doing this,
Starting point is 00:07:26 it kind of means that there's no one left to sell at that point and there's no one left to kind of short ETH. So ironically, even if it gets denied on May 23rd, we could say ETH go up. Like, that's the funny thing about markets. Okay, so what you're saying is that it's likely, it's possible that many of the people who have, who would sell ETH on the expectations of an ETH ETF denial,
Starting point is 00:07:47 have already done that because the market has priced in denial. One piece of news that we got this week, one glimmer of hope potentially, is that the SEC has asked for public comments from Grayscale, Bitwise, and Fidelity about the spot Ethereum ETFs. And so previously over the last two weeks, people have been bearish about the Ethereum ETF getting improved, simply because the SEC has just not engaged, just like crickets, indifference, radio silence from the SEC. But this week, the SEC asked for comments from Grayscale BitWiwitwold. and Fidelity specifically about the spot Ethereum ETFs. Anthony, does this change anything? Is this news? Like, how do you interpret this? Yeah, I mean, from what I've seen, it's not necessarily
Starting point is 00:08:28 news. It's just kind of part of the process of what the SEC has to do. So I think that it's like illegal for them not to do this. So people were saying that, you know, this is just part of the process, basically. So I wouldn't say that it's anything to get too excited about, even though, you know, I really want there to be something to be excited about here because, I mean, I personally still have hope that these ETFs are getting approved on May 23rd, but I totally understand why I would assume the vast majority of the market just does not have any kind of confidence in this. And we've seen, you know, the Bloomberg ETF experts that we all kind of have been following since the BTC ETFs, they've basically lowered their odds to what, 20, 25% of approval by May 23rd.
Starting point is 00:09:07 So I think that generally the market is in that kind of range there. But that can change quickly. If we actually do some, to see some proper actual back and forth between the SEC and the issuers, you would very quickly expect the market to kind of latch onto that and basically say, well, look, this is what we waited for. It's what you wanted to see. You know, why would they be doing this if they were just going to deny the ETFs, right? So I think we have to wait a little bit, but I think that on the podcast that you guys did
Starting point is 00:09:31 with Bitwise, they basically mentioned that we have until really the end of April. But then if we leave it later than that, essentially there's not enough time to do all the paperwork to get them approved anyway. So, yeah. Right, right, right. moving into marcus total crypto market cap 2.7, 2.6 trillion dollars in the total crypto market cap. But let's get into some layer two conversations. The scaling factor, which of course is how many Ethereum's worth of capacity all layer twos have hit 11, which is an all-time high. This is a tweet
Starting point is 00:10:00 from you on a warpcast. Crypto prices may be down, but layer two activity just hit another all-time high. The numbers around layer twos are just great. I think they're great. We still are below that $39 or that $40 billion in TVL on layer two's, but to me it's just like a matter of time. Scaling factor 11.33% linear coming in at 51 transactions per second over the last week or so. That's a 200% increase base is just holding really, really steady 30 transactions per second over the last seven days. Anthony, I know these numbers make you happy. Give us your take here. What's your sentiment? Yeah, I mean, I think since Blobs went live on March 13th, we've had that kind of economic stimulus in into the Ethereum economy, where essentially brought fees down in such a massive way,
Starting point is 00:10:45 that it became like a narrative that, hey, okay, Ethereum can actually scale. Like, people actually saw that we are scaling, we know how to scale, we're just doing it differently to other blockchains, right? Like, there's been this perverse narrative, obviously, for a while now that Ethereum can't scale. But we all knew that blobs were coming, you know, anyone paying attention to the Ethereum roadmap. We just didn't really know how much it would actually scale because it's hard to measure these things on Mainnet.
Starting point is 00:11:07 But as soon as it went live, we all saw the fees just dramatically drop. And since then, we've seen base increase their actual kind of capacity on their side as well by about 100%. So they've doubled their gas limit, essentially, on their side. So that's decreased fees further. We've seen an arbitrium do some specific upgrades there. And then the other layer two is also working on their own upgrade. So we're really, I would say that we're just on the cusp of like such a big kind of scalability error for Ethereum now with the advent of blobs. But yeah, as you said, like these numbers make me really happy seeing kind of the scaling factor at all time high.
Starting point is 00:11:39 TPS numbers up, usage up across the board, and seeing people actually talk about it as well. Like, that's the main thing I like to look at is that, you know, I think I said this a while ago on my own show where I said that it's very hard to look at any metric in crypto or any metric for any blockchains and one, compare them to each other, but also take much signal from them because they're influenced by a lot of different things. But the one metric that I really like, and it's a subjective metric, but I really like, is just vibes, right? Like the vibes of an ecosystem gives me kind of like, I guess, like a good,
Starting point is 00:12:09 insight into how strong an ecosystem is. And there are bad and good vibes, obviously, not all vibes are the same. But I think the vibes around layer twos have dramatically changed over the last, you know, three weeks since Dan Kuhn went live because of the fact that people saw that they actually work. The fees can be cheap and they can still inherit the security of Ethereum and do what we've been saying that they can do for many years now. I think definitely to add on to that. The vibes, specifically around the base ecosystem, are definitely given some tailwinds, I think because of Farcaster, because the, The vibes on Farkaster, on Warpcasts are great. They're just great. Like, there's no, there's no bots,
Starting point is 00:12:45 there's no toxicity. There's, like, hearty, healthy debate, not, like, toxic, like, poo-throwing debate. And then Bays and Farkaster have this, like, unofficial, official, official relationship where there's just, like, a lot of activity on Farcaster that points to some sort of NFTment on base or just, like, discussions on base. And so, like, base, and we're going to talk about D-Gen here in a little bit. BASE just has this, like, its own native, like, locale for discussion where the vibes are, like, really, really good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, definitely BASE has been the main benefactor of all this new kind of activity and all
Starting point is 00:13:21 this new narrative energy over the last, I guess, like, three weeks or so. And obviously, that's got to do with the fact that Coinbase has just been so strong for, like, a while now. And everyone knows that Coinbase is obviously going to try and push so much of their users to BASE as well as people are kind of playing that. So, yeah, but I do want to stress, though, that even though, like a lot of attention has been focused on base, the other layer two ecosystems, you know, are strong and are growing stronger as well. Like Arbitrum 1 has been around for a long time now, and he's still as strong as ever
Starting point is 00:13:51 across many different metrics, you know, they have a lot of upgrades coming to their, to their chain as well. They have a lot of great ecosystems on there. So I think that narratives, you know, short-term narratives kind of stuff, maybe take with a grain of salt when you see them too and kind of look into other ecosystems as well because, yes, base has been a main benefactor here, but yeah, the other ones are definitely doing a lot of great stuff as well. Yeah, the whole D-Gen layer three thing, which we're going to talk about, that's actually an Arbitum orbit from orbit chain, which is interesting because it settles to base, which is an OP stack. So we got some chains interwoven with other chains, and this is just a very, very interesting part of the story. We have an entire section
Starting point is 00:14:30 to talk about the continuation of base summer and the D-gen layer three. There's plenty of blob market stuff to talk about. And then we're also going to talk about the three airdrops that injected $30 billion into the crypto ecosystem, wormhole, Athena, and also D-Gen, of course. So before we get into all those conversations, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 20 and 24. If you do not have an on-ramp to get into these chains that we are talking about, choose Cracken. There is a link in the show notes to get started.
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Starting point is 00:17:20 Three huge air drops this week, Athena releases their ENA token coming in at a 17 billion dollar market cap. What is Athena? Athena is a synthetic dollar. Don't call it a stable coin, but if you thought of it as a stable coin, close enough. This is one of the more controversial products, I think, that has come out of the space, mainly because of the dependency on centralized exchanges. This is the synthetic dollar that is produced by having staked eith on one side and the yield from that going into the value of the USDA stable coin. and then also shorting perps on centralized exchanges and other exchanges on the other side. And so this, as a result of this basis, neutral trade, collecting yield on both sides, produces a stable coin. That token is now life. Like I said, coming in at $17 billion.
Starting point is 00:18:08 Current market cap, $1.6 billion. If you bought a token right when it dropped, it dropped, I think, 60-ish, and then it has now at $1.15. So already some strong price appreciation. like we've seen with every single airdrop, air drops get dropped, and then they tend to, like, triple in price over the next, like, you know, days to weeks. It's just a trend that I'm seeing in the crypto space.
Starting point is 00:18:34 And they have already kicked off their season two of their air drop, so there is more tokens to come. They are focusing on building integrations with a mantle, eigenlayer, Pendle, Maker, Morfo, and Spark ecosystem. This is just 5% of the supply that was distributed at 750 million ENA tokens. Anthony, what's your take here? Give me your thoughts and reflections. Yes, I mean, I've been aware of the Athena project for quite a while.
Starting point is 00:18:58 Now, I should disclose that I am an investor in Athena from a while ago. I invested in them because I thought the idea was really interesting at the time. You know, and this kind of, I guess, like, as you mentioned, synthetic dollar that they called it, basically tokenizing this kind of perp trade that people already do on centralized exchanges. And you kind of mention it, you know, there are risks associated with this. And I think a lot of the debates recently, around Athena have focused on these risks. You know, right now funding is positive because there's a lot of demand for crypto, a lot of demand for to buy these assets. But what happens when funding goes negative for
Starting point is 00:19:31 prolonged periods of time? You know, do people start, because people start losing money, what happens? So they start unwinding their positions. And then what happens to the STEth backing that? Like, does that depeg? You know, as we've seen before, STEth can trade at a discount to its fair value. We saw this during the terror collapse. And then what happens in that environment? Does it lead to, I struggle to use the term death spiral because I hate that term. I think it gets overused, but does it lead to a, you know, a nasty leveraging event where a lot of people get burnt and hurt and then eventually does that affect the Athena protocol, you know, stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:20:00 But, you know, I think that those discussions are great to be having. And I'm glad that people are being very kind of, I guess, like analytical about it rather than, I guess, ignoring it because we saw what happened with terror. Not that Athena is like terror, but I think when you're comparing projects in terms of ones that were, you know, scrutinized by only a few people. people and then the majority of people were like, oh, this is going to work. You know, we've got an infinite money printing machine, so on and so forth. But this time around with Athena, you have a lot of people scrutinizing it, a lot of people questioning it, a lot of people saying, you know, what,
Starting point is 00:20:29 these are the risks, you know, this is how I can get crazy. So I'm very happy to see that. I'm very happy to see that that's actually a trend now within this ecosystem. But in terms of the project itself, I mean, as I mentioned, I'm investor in it because I thought the interesting, the idea was interesting. And it's just been crazy to see them drop the token at this valuation. Like, as you said, Like it seems to be a trend right now with these airdrops. You know, not all of them. You know, there are some out there that haven't really taken off. But, yeah, there are these kind of things that get air dropped.
Starting point is 00:20:55 You know, the market tries to find a price for them. And then they have these just huge fully diluted evaluations, which may or may not make sense. It's up to the market to kind of choose this. But I think that, you know, a lot of them, obviously, they haven't distributed tokens to investors yet. Investors have vesting. Team has vesting.
Starting point is 00:21:11 So I think a lot of people are basically trading these things based on the short to medium term hype around. bit, whereas they're not worrying about investor unlocks because they're not for a year plus. So they're like, you know, what can we, you know, trade this for the next six months, so to speak. So I think that's what you're seeing with a lot of the airdrops. But I'm really glad to see people getting, you know, all this money from aer drops because it means that we're basically creating more kind of economic activity on chain and we're getting more and more people to actually come on chain to claim these things and actually use these things. And, you know, there's this whole
Starting point is 00:21:39 point program stuff that's been going on over the last few weeks or a few months now, which has kind have spurred a lot of activity too. So I think on net, they're a good thing. Like I'm, I don't think they're a bad thing, but it's going to be funny when the music stops because like, as you said, most of them are going up right now. But eventually when the market kind of exhaust itself, you're going to see the reversal of that. And I'm wondering what that kind of looks like. Yeah, yeah, they're going up because there's no sellers. Everyone is like, why, why would I sell? There's no one to sell. All the, all the team is locked up. All the investors are locked up. And so it's like a safe purchase in the short term.
Starting point is 00:22:13 I think hopefully market participants knowing full well that's not necessarily safe in a long term because, you know, Bitcoin will roll over because it went up too fast because of reflexivity. ETH will roll over because it went up too fast because of reflexivity. And then although these investors and teams that are up some bajillion percentages will also be interested in selling. And this is what a bear market looks like. This is just how cycles go. I think specifically going back to the whole Athena thing, people are like getting their, like their reflexes triggered when they see a stable coin offering 35% APY. And they're like, oh, the last time I saw that was Tara Luna and Anchor. Even though like this source of this yield is materially different.
Starting point is 00:22:53 I would say this is a real sustainable yields that are generated by the market price. Rather, whereas Terra or the anchor ecosystem one, Tara was like, oh, we're just going to just mint UST and then offer 20% for the deployment. out of thin air. So materially different market structure here that's backing this thing. Not to say that there is no risks, but I would just say the risks are different. And you can't just kind of like copy and paste the risks of Terra onto the Athena system. Athena currently coming in at $2 billion in TVL, $2 billion of ETH that's deposited into the system. So pretty strong launch.
Starting point is 00:23:27 So far the product is working. Also playing a role in this debate that we're going to talk about later between Morpho, Ave, and Maker. There seems to be some borders going up between the world of the stable coins, but we'll talk about that later. Also, that came in this week is Wormhole and the
Starting point is 00:23:47 W token, so just one single letter for the token. Kind of cool. Wormhole is a cross-chain, cross-layer-1 bridge protocol. It's been very, very hyped. They just dropped their token this week. Coming in at a $14 billion fully diluted valuation,
Starting point is 00:24:04 current market cap $2.5 billion. So of the 10 billion total wormhole tokens, 1.8 are currently circulating. Price dropped at $1.3, and that went up to $1.45 since the recent sell off in the last like 24 hours. We were down to $1.16. Wormhole, what do you know about wormhole? Have you ever used wormhole, Anthony? No, I mean, I don't think so.
Starting point is 00:24:26 Whenever I bridge, I usually use jumper, which is like a bridge aggregator. And I don't think I've ever used wormhole via that. I mean, I don't do that much bridging, especially to other layer ones. I don't really do much, much bridging where wormhole is like specified for. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, like, wormhole is a big player in the Solana ecosystem. So they're all about, you know, bridge between Ethereum and Solana, you know, so on and so forth. But it's funny looking at the token and looking at what it's valued at versus other bridging protocols.
Starting point is 00:24:53 Like if you go and look at like Kinext or hot protocol or, you know, across, I think. And a bunch of the dollars, they're not valued anywhere near what Wormhole is valued at. So it's like when I look at this valuation, I'm like, okay, well, you know, either the market is wrong on, you know, the wormhole side or it's wrong on the kind of connect side and the hop side and so on and so forth. But I don't even know if the market is valuing this thing based on what it is. I think it's valuing it based on the hype behind it, not on the fact that it's a bridging protocol. And that seems to be the trend as well with other protocols like Athena, for example. I would struggle to think a lot of the people actually even know what they're buying, to be honest, because Athena is inherently like maybe more, more complex to understand than other projects because it's something that a lot of people don't
Starting point is 00:25:35 really kind of get exposure to. So yeah, it's just, it's just kind of wild to see these massive valuations on these things. And as you said, like in the bull market, it can kind of happen because of the fact that there's not really, you know, there's no sellers. There's all these demand and there's all these kind of narratives. But in a bear market, like that goes the opposite way. So I'm very curious to see in like a couple of years, if we're in the bear market, what these valuations kind of look like. Because, yeah, there are going to be investors and team that are vested. it out by then, not just for, I'm not trying to pick on wormhole here, but like for every one of these that, you know, who knows what's going to happen? Like, are they going to be selling? Is that
Starting point is 00:26:09 going to be down only? The demand going to be gone, someone and so forth. But yeah, I mean, you just brought up Connects and across. They're both worth what, $2.250 billion full-de-allud valuation compared to one. Not even. Connects is $230 million. Across is $290 million. Oh, yeah, billion. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like a huge difference. It's like a massive difference, like 100x difference, basically, in valuations here. And even if you just look at market cap, not just fully related value, wormhole's market cap is still like 10 times bigger than these other protocols. So, yeah. Like, it's just crazy.
Starting point is 00:26:48 Maybe this is a take from the hip, but because Wormhole is like a cross layer one bridge, it holds state in ways that a cross does not. And I think also connects does not. And so maybe to like advocate for wormhole here, just like holding state is bullish. Just because like it is there's additional like value capture surface area with holding state. Whereas like across is like more of like a port for market makers and our bots to fulfill intense. So across actually doesn't hold any state. And so maybe maybe there's like a market valuation going on there. But I will also say it's a shiny new token with zero sellers.
Starting point is 00:27:27 And so that is perhaps also why it's commanding such a strong valuation. I very much doubt that people are doing that kind of thinking on this, to be honest, like that you just kind of outlined. Like from all of the people, well, that's the thing. For all the people that I've seen speculating on these things in my community on Twitter and everything,
Starting point is 00:27:45 they don't mention any of this, right? It's always like the narrative stuff. It's always the hype stuff, which is fair enough. Like I actually think that that's probably the proper way to trade these things when they first launch at least because, as you said, like you're probably mid-curving it by kind of analyzing the fundamentals.
Starting point is 00:28:01 Trying to say it's because of state. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, long term, maybe, but yeah, I don't think like short term is focused on that at all, really. Let's get into some blobs because we lost the first blobs, but this is, of course, by design.
Starting point is 00:28:18 As 14 days approach, blobs, 14-day old blobs expire. It's a pretty cool graphic that we saw circulating both on Twitter and on work. This is blob storage. And you can see some of the blobs are starting to get pruned. So data is expiring here. This is this like deep red color right in the middle of the screen here.
Starting point is 00:28:38 Since we are 14 days beyond the introduction of Dancun and 4844, blobs are being pruned. Just to really set the stage here, why do we prune plobs, Anthony? Why does this mechanism even happen? Yeah. So by default, all the clients will prune these blobs after. So I believe it's 18 days. Yeah, I think it says that, yeah, 18 days just to keep the kind of node requirements basically steady.
Starting point is 00:29:04 So if we didn't do this, it would be an extra such and such gigabytes every 18 days added to the chain, which all the full nodes would have to store, and then it would put more of a burden on the network from that perspective. So that's why by default, all of the clients will prune this. Now, of course, that means that you can actually keep them if you want them as well. So, for example, I'm keeping all the blobs. I'm storing them on some. hard drives that I have in my NAS kind of storage devices there.
Starting point is 00:29:30 So you're a blob holder, hoarder. Yeah, I'm a blob hoarder, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Storing all the people's JPEGs for them. Yeah, yeah, just as a hobby. But the thing is, is like, there's plenty of services doing this as well where, like, they're going to be offering this and, you know, maybe charging for it, basically, if you want to access this historical data here.
Starting point is 00:29:50 But yeah, yeah, we expire it, we prune it because of the fact that we want to keep node requirements lower. I mean, that's at the heart of, I guess, Ethereum's design is right, keeping node requirements low. And this was the magic of blobs, really. And that's why we were able to add them, because we knew that there wouldn't be a permanent thing that people would need to store. Yeah, to really drive this point home, this is another chart of the increased capacity of the Ethereum layer one with the introduction of blobs, but also the decreased capacity of the consensus layer and the execution layer. So we got three different colors here on the screen on a graph.
Starting point is 00:30:23 we got blobs in green, which is like the dominant part of this graph, and then we have the consensus layer payload and the execution layer payload, just the sides of Ethereum. Consider this the size of Ethereum, like how much like overhead or just like state that it has. And it's gone up bigly with blobs. And so like compared to where it was before Dankoon, like, just like this is like really rough napkin math, but like three to four times larger as state as just like overhead capacity
Starting point is 00:30:50 of the Ethereum blockchain. The thing is, we prune. The big stuff. All of the green gets eventually pruned. And so only the permanent parts are the consensus layer and the execution layer, which are the blue and green parts of your screen here, which are now, as a result, you can see those parts are actually much smaller since the introduction of blobs. And so this is just what I consider a good optimization.
Starting point is 00:31:15 So Ethereum both grew in capacity, which is the green part, but also shrunk in long-term state growth. So Ethereum is both larger and faster and quicker in the first 18 days until we prune the blobs. But then post-18 days, it is slimmer, it's leaner. It is faster as well in terms of just like total state growth. I just call this a good optimization. Definitely. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:39 And I mean, I think like what this chart is illustrating from understanding it correctly here, I think I saw this other day, but I didn't dive deeper into it, is the fact that instead of using kind of like cold data as well or it might be a different chart, like because is layer twos or roll-ups using blobs now instead of call data. Essentially, what happens is that we take load off the network from that side of things, take state growth off from that side of things. And yeah, as you said, it's gone to blobs, which do expire. So we've, yeah, we've kind of like increased that capacity there.
Starting point is 00:32:06 Here's a tweet from you that I saw on Warbaster. Blobs are now ranked fourth on the ETH fee burn leaderboard over the last seven days. So we got Uniswap, of course, coming in the number one, just always a gargantuan, burning 3,500 ETH in the last week. ETH, regular old ETH transfer, 1700 ETH, moving tether around on main chain, 1100 ETH, and then blobs coming in as 6702 ETH burned over the last seven days. And I kind of expect that to continue to go up only, especially as more and more and more layer two's come on to the scenes. Inscriptions also burning a lot of ETH people are really paying because they want their JPEGs on the layer one, even though they're going to be pruned 18 days later. Where do you think this is going?
Starting point is 00:32:46 Are we approaching an equilibrium? Is this going up? where do you think that's gone? So I think that a lot of this was due to the inscription stuff because of the fact that inscriptions are just pushing up the base fee of blobs, which just pushed up the price of blobs for everyone. But I think that what it gives us an insight into is that once we add, as you said, more layer twos, more roll-ups, once there is kind of more people using blobs, like the price naturally
Starting point is 00:33:09 goes up like it does on the non-kind of blob transactions. And that translates to more fees being paid and more fees being burned, obviously. So I think this is going to go down again because like if not for inscriptions, it is just going to go down and kind of like reach a kind of plateau there because the roll-ups are very like, I guess, efficient in how they use the blobs in that like they don't want to overpay if they don't have to, obviously. And they have different ways of kind of measuring this and and kind of seeing when the best time the post blobs is and things like that. But as the, you know, as more roll-ups come online, as the crawl-ups have more activity, they're going to need to be. use more and more blobs, which means that while blobs are at what they're at today, you know, target at three max of six, then essentially what happens is that even without inscriptions, the roll-ups will be taking up a lot of capacity and then we'll see their fees go up there.
Starting point is 00:33:58 But it is worth noting that we're not going to be stuck at three blobs as a target in a max of six. We're going to keep increasing both the count and the actual size of blobs as well over time, which is really the magic of blobs is that we get to do that. But, yeah, I mean, over the longer term, though, I mean, I expect the kind of fees to go up, just based on demand because, yeah, like the demand will go up on the L2s, which will trickle down into the data, which is the blobs, and then we'll see the kind of prices of blobs go up. Yeah, even in the last, like, one or two days,
Starting point is 00:34:29 we've actually seen some inscription fatigue, I'll call it. The supply of inscriptions going into blob space has gone down. And so we've actually seen a reduction in blob fees. And the reduction in the number of blobs going below the target of three blobs a block. So we're down to like 2.2. 2.3, yeah, blobs per block. And so this is kind of like when gas fees are under the target that EIP-1559 sets as a result, then the gas fees go down.
Starting point is 00:34:58 So actually in the last like, you know, 12, 18 hours, blobs have actually been free because people are just like not posting inscriptions, getting inscription fatigue. People are bored putting their JPEGs onto the chain. And so as a result, like layer twos have more, they are basically free once again. I think people are overall surprised about like how much total space they're, are for layer 2s to leverage blobs. I kind of consider like inscriptions as like backfilling whatever layer 2s don't use because layer 2s will outbid inscriptions like any day of the week.
Starting point is 00:35:28 Like a layer 2 is going to outbid your interest in purchasing blob space to put your JPEG on the chain. But like when there isn't that much demand from layer 2s, then like people will go ahead and put JPEGs in. But we've seen just a reduction in overall usage of inscriptions and layer 2s aren't totally using all the blob space. Do you have any comments about those, like, how much slack there is in this system and where this is going?
Starting point is 00:35:53 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell because obviously there isn't just one layer two, right? There are many of them, and they're all going to have different kind of usage profiles over time. And some of them will be used more than others. And some of them will be more scalable than others. Like, as I mentioned before, base increased its capacity by like 100% because that we're hitting their capacity on the execution side. So, I mean, there's really two parts to, I guess, like two high-level parts to,
Starting point is 00:36:16 roll up here that you have the execution side and the data side. The data side is obviously on a theorem L1 with blobs, but the execution side is squarely on the L2. So they need to increase their capacity. And then essentially, once you reach capacity on the data side again, because of the execution side, data gets more expensive, execution is cheap. And then it's like a balancing act between those kind of two sides there. But as I said, like there's not just one L2. There's going to be more of them coming online, more of them using blobs. And that's going to affect everything as well, not just these layer two's getting more scalable, but also the number of layer twos using blobs here.
Starting point is 00:36:52 Yeah, we're only like two weeks into this whole thing. But when we get the reduction in cost to layer twos, which is what this tweet that I'm showing on my screen is showing, is a total spend on blob fees over the last like 24 hours. I think this is a daily chart was $1.9 million. So $1.9 million was spent purchasing blobs. What it would have cost had blobs not existed to purchase the same amount of call data is $50 million. And so like, you know, for going down from $50 to $2 million, what does that do?
Starting point is 00:37:21 That opens up more viability for more layer twos. And now we're only 14 days into blob. So like people haven't like decided to make more layer twos in the last 14 days. But this is kind of the idea is as soon as you like do what is a 25x reduction in the cost to, you know, maintain a layer two is like, you're going to get more layer twos. I think that's kind of like the overall prediction. And that is what the whole like roll-up-centric roadmap is. It's like, let's reduce the cost to be a layer two so that we can get more layer twos. Let's dive in specifically to the base ecosystem. Because as you said, like the big constraint now is not necessarily the size of blobs,
Starting point is 00:37:58 but it is the execution side of layer twos. Last week we talked about base increasing their gas target, basically their block size, their throughput, by 50%, which they did. And then they did it again this week. And so I think we were at 3.75 milligram per second last week. We are now up to 5 milligram gas. So that's 5 million gas a second, which is an interesting way to measure scalability. This is Jesse Pollock saying fees are declining quickly and expecting them to stabilize lower,
Starting point is 00:38:29 though this, of course, may increase demand with a long-term goal of one giga gas, which is 400 times more. So Jesse and the base team are targeting a 400x, increasing capacity on the base layer two. And they said they will be sharing how they are getting there in the weeks ahead. Maybe that happens on a bankless podcast when we schedule that one with Jesse. So yeah, this is exactly what you're saying here. Like base is trying to get real big, real fast.
Starting point is 00:38:56 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, they definitely are. And I think that as they get bigger here, you're going to see them hit the data constraints again, or at least like they're going to be bidding like really big for these blobs because they're going to be posting so much data. to kind of like L1 here, but also at the same time on this chart that Digesty has posted, the reason why I really like this chart is because it shows you the concept of like basically
Starting point is 00:39:20 induced demand. If you look at the longer term one, so this chart in particular is only the short term one, but it still shows you kind of what the effect is. So before this spike in the blue line, earlier in this chart, there's another spike in that blue line. And the yellow line is the fees. So the yellow line will go down every time this spikes. But the thing is it went down last time and then started going up again.
Starting point is 00:39:40 because there was that demand that was latent and then it came in once fees dropped again. And essentially what it becomes is basically a cat and mouse game of, okay, we increase the capacity and then all these new people come in, all these new users come in because they're like, oh my God, there's more capacity for us. Your use cases come in too, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And then once you see that, you'll see the kind of fee spiking up again. And then you're like, okay, we have to increase the gas again because of this.
Starting point is 00:40:03 And essentially, like, for the foreseeable future, while we grow out the whole crypto ecosystem, this is not going to be a thing where it's like, you know, spike and that's it like based on an event it's going to be a constant thing it's like a constant demand for block space um because of the fact that we're not even anywhere close to the you know i guess like the adoption that we want to be at when it comes to crypto um but yeah that's why i like that chart is it basically shows you that there is a lot of demand already waiting and as soon as you as soon as you as soon as you scale up a little bit air that comes flooding in and then you're back to square once you have to keep scaling up and i think the base team definitely understands that that's why they've set such an
Starting point is 00:40:38 ambitious goal. But with that goal, there's a lot of work involved in getting there. It's not just as simple as what they've done over the last week of increasing the gas limit. They have to do a lot of optimizations to make sure that they can actually run the software that allows for that to happen. So what I'm showing on the screen is a dune graph of the median layer two fees in orange, the median layer one fees in blue. And so, of course, that gap between these two charts, these two colors on the chart is the profitability of a layer two. And then the gray line piercing through the middle is the total transactions over the course of time, which I think is 24 hours. Base cleared 7,000 transactions inside of one minute, so over 100 transactions a second.
Starting point is 00:41:18 Apparently Arbitron is also doing the same. 100 transactions per second. Is that high? Is that low? Like other chains, Anthony, are boasting like 20,000 transactions per second. Like, how do we make sense of these numbers? Yeah, so the TPS metric is not one that can really be translated across chains. there are different ways that different chains will kind of meter TPS and there'll be different ways
Starting point is 00:41:42 that the chains handle transactions. So I don't think that we should be kind of maybe comparing these chains to each other in terms of kind of TPS just because they're different, especially chains that are not EVM. Like if you're comparing an EVM chain to like the SVM on Solana, for example, like it's not going to be a one-to-one comparison. They have a different architecture. So I don't think it's apples to apples. I think that when people are comparing these things, they shouldn't compare that. But at the same time, you know, when it comes to T-VARrow. PPS, there's also a concept of like the weight of a transaction, right? Like, what are the actual transactions happening here?
Starting point is 00:42:13 Because if all you've got is like spammy transactions that are basically doing nothing and it's just people sparing because the fees are so cheap, then to me, that's not really kind of like weighty transactions, right? It doesn't really add much value to the ecosystem. Whereas if you have like, you know, transactions that aren't just doing that that are actually kind of real activity on the network, then that adds more value in my mind. So I think that people can disagree with that view, but I don't know. Like the way I kind of view it is that I want to see like high quality valuable transactions happening on these networks.
Starting point is 00:42:43 Even though it's a permissionless network and people can do whatever they want on them, I have no issue with that. But at the same time, I would rather these networks be useful to people rather than just being a playground for spam essentially. Other things that are going on on the base chain, Uniswap passed a billion dollars in 24 hour volume on base. I think that's the first time that a billion dollars has been crossed on a layer two. I wonder, Anthony, if we're going to see a flippinging of uniswap layer 2 volumes versus uniswap layer 1 volumes this cycle. The trajectory is definitely pointing us there. But really the biggest thing that's been going on on the biggest base ecosystem, at least from a tension standpoint, is this whole DGEN chain. So this is coming out of the syndicate Twitter account.
Starting point is 00:43:21 Today we're excited to announce the launch of DGN chain. A layer three for the DGN token community built with Arbitrum, with an Arbitrum orbit on base, using base for settlement, and then Arbitrum Any Trust for D. So really just like a super juiced chain. So like Arbitrum technology, of course, absolutely fantastic. Settling on base, which is super cheap. Using off-chain data availability, which is, of course, super cheap. And then the native token for this layer three is D-Gen. And so I don't think a lot of people know this, which I think actually kind of explains
Starting point is 00:43:54 the crazy, crazy D-Gen price action. But when you put your ether on base and you bridge it over to the D-Gen bridge, it sells your ether for D-Gen. and then gives you D-Gen on the D-Gen layer three, of which is like kind of more or less a casino, like almost by design. So there's a bunch of meme coins on there. People are speculating.
Starting point is 00:44:16 Being D-Gens, it's literally called D-Gens. And so this has kind of like created a question inside of the Ethereum community and just the broader crypto community. Are layer three is real? This is actually not the only layer three that's going on. I think there's like three or four of them. I think most of them are settling on base, because everyone realizes that like imagine having coinbase as your top of funnel for your chain.
Starting point is 00:44:40 Well, that's what base is. And so, you know, really Dgen is actually just a layer two, but your layer one is base. And like the Ethereum layer one is actually kind of just like irrelevant from the perspective of the Dgen chain. At least that's kind of like the way I think about it. Anthony, what's your take of like all of these layer three DGen shenanigans? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the debate like as you mentioned is centered around what's the point of a layer three basically. because there are very strong opinions from the top L2 teams on these things.
Starting point is 00:45:09 So I think it's obvious that Arbitrum is in favor of them, considering that they built the Arbitrum orbit infrastructure in order to tell out this to happen. But then you have, you know, I've seen some of the Polygon guys saying, you know, we don't really see the value in layer threes. Like we kind of, you know, see layer threes as this thing that doesn't even, it shouldn't even exist, you know, we can just do it at layer two. And then there are other people with similar opinions. But look, I haven't got like a strong opinion either way at this point.
Starting point is 00:45:32 I think for me, this just represents more experimentation happening within the Ethereum ecosystem. And it really represents like the, I guess, like the modular thesis, right? Because as you mentioned, this chain is built using Arbitrum orbit orbit, but it's settling down to base, which is built on OP stack, but it's using any trust DA, which is Arbitrum's DA solution here for data availability instead of settling that down. So there is a lot of experimentation happening here with modularity in mind. And I actually think it makes perfect sense for something like D-Gen to be doing a layer 3 to be utilizing this because they get they get their own chain which basically becomes their own
Starting point is 00:46:06 casino essentially they get to have users on there that really are just wanting to do DGen stuff essentially like so it's not a shared environment it's more of like a specific environment and yes it may be like super centralized but I think when it comes to layer 3s and it comes to these kind of our specific things it's kind of it's kind of the point they don't really need to be you know too decentralized or anything like that so I think that if that's your kind of environment that you want to create and people are happy with that and people want to kind of bridge into that, then, you know, who are we to say otherwise, essentially? But I think some of the arguments definitely kind of double-clicked on the fact that we could just do this with an L2 instead of an L3, you know, just do L2 with DA off-chain
Starting point is 00:46:44 if you want to keep the cost slow. And then we, you know, and then instead of an L-3. But that's more of maybe a deep architecture question and more of something of like how easy is it to do that? Because I think it was very easy for D-JN to spin this up. Like, it happened within like a few days from what I saw. And then they were able to get people bridging in straight away. there's better bridging kind of infrastructure coming as well. So, yeah, I mean, my general take is that I'm all for the experimentation. Like, I love that it's happening because whether people find it valuable or not, we're not going to know until we actually kind of do this experimentation in a live environment.
Starting point is 00:47:15 Yeah, kind of the crazy thing about this whole Dijan thing is some of the stats that have been painted over since the launch of base chain. Two million transactions, over $57 million bridged, 24,000 active addresses, 0.1 second average block times. These numbers are actually starting to rival some of the layer ones out there that are commanding like multi-billion dollar chain valuations.
Starting point is 00:47:41 And now this is happening as a layer three. I did an episode with Will Papper and Yossack from the D-Gen who created the D-Gen token just to kind of like peek into their heads about what's going on here. A lot of why they answer to like why they say why do we do a layer three instead of a layer two is just like, well, of course, base has all the
Starting point is 00:48:00 users, like I said, Coinbase is your top of funnel, so just like tapping into that. But also, they get to have a lot of opinions about how to build an ecosystem. So they get to be much more opinionated than optimism or arbitram or base could because they're kind of building something closer to an app. Like they have a very narrow, specific direction for what they want base chain to be. And so they get to become much more opinionated about how to build that thing. And really, especially as a layer three, when like, rather than having the Ethereum layer one, as your settlement layer and therefore like settlement costs like imagine settling onto the cheapness
Starting point is 00:48:33 of base which we just saw like has increased their capacity by 50% twice over the last two weeks you have no constraints and scalability like transactions are like billionths of a penny and so like that's that's a free transaction uh and they with actually without any sort of like constraint on like block size or anything like and so this is a hyper specialized chain to do a hyper specialized thing which is to be a DGEN casino by design Exactly. And it's kind of funny because it reminds me a lot of like, I guess the Cosmos thesis, right, where there were like, you know, app-specific chains. And I think that I've been, you know, I've been talking about this for a while, but basically like the Ethereum L2, L3 kind of modular ecosystem seems to be realizing that. But it's realizing it in, I think, a more scalable and better way than I think Cosmos was originally architected where essentially they wanted to have everyone be their own kind of, you know, super sovereign chain, bootstrapped their own security and nodes and things like that. Whereas with a, the layer two and a layer three, you don't need to do that. You can just reuse Ethereum's essentially and kind of inherit that there.
Starting point is 00:49:36 So a lot of the monolithic people out there are seeing like the Ethereum people like tweet and like dance around about their layer threes and they're just like, layer three is like, you guys haven't even fixed layer twos. Your layer twos aren't even decentralized yet. Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterine comes in with a tweet on Warpcaster saying, re-uping my posts from 1.5 years ago on layer threes. And so he wrote an article on his website saying what kind of layer threes make sense. And so if you didn't know that this article existed, he wrote this in late 2022.
Starting point is 00:50:08 He says he's now updated it, especially with the modern context that we have today. And so definitely go read that. There is a link in the show notes to get access to that article. There's some drama, Anthony, that I want you to help me unpack as we progress further in this episode. There is a big debate about the eth issuance curve. So we are now talking about the issuance curve of ether. There are some decisions to be made and some controversy that has been had around changes to the eth issuance curve. There's also LRTs flipping LSTs, and there's just a new equilibrium between the liquid re-saking tokens and normal liquid staking tokens.
Starting point is 00:50:44 There's also drama between Maker and AVE in the Defi lending app layer. Lots of drama this week. So we're going to get to all of these subjects and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand-new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses EGENLayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects for. from all around the Web Free space for Mantle.
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Starting point is 00:52:08 and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now Sello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a layer two. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Sello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized, sequencer, off-chain data availability, secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you?
Starting point is 00:52:30 With Sello layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using Social Connect. But Sellow is a community-governed protocol. This means that Sellow needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation into Cello forums. Follow Sellow on Twitter and visit sello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. All right, let's go into one of the bigger debates that I've seen in the Ethereum ecosystem. And this is a debate over the Ethereum protocol, which we have these every now and then.
Starting point is 00:52:59 This is a particularly lively one. And I would call a very, very important one. There was a recent proposal from Casper and Ansgar to Ethereum EF core devs about proposing the need to change the issuance curve of Eath. So we are now talking about the monetary policy of ETH, which is always a very delicate subject. Mike Noider, he releases blog posts, very comprehensive blog post decently technical, at least just trying to really get very concrete and detail-oriented about some of the debates here. It's just titled, issuance, issues, and then he has a TLDR. Issuance on Ethereum defines how Ethereum pays for security. Entering mid-2020-the-2020, the realities of staking have changed seismically since the inception of the beacon chain at the end
Starting point is 00:53:45 of 2020. The future remains uncertain, but we can explore the impact of issuance on solo staking, eth the asset and protocols building in and around Ethereum consensus. Overall, changing, like I said, changing the eth issuance curve is a touchy subject because we are talking about the monetary policy. The last thing that I think anyone in the Ethereum ecosystem wants wants any sort of resemblance to the Federal Reserve, but this is kind of the pattern that is being invoked here. Meanwhile, there are some very good arguments about like, hey, we still have a pretty blunt issuance curve. We never really put all that much rigor into how and why the issuance curve is what it is.
Starting point is 00:54:23 And so let's revisit that conversation and generate a more precise issuance curve. Anthony, like, what are your reflections on this debate? How would you characterize the two sides? Yeah, I would say this debate really stirred up the hive. But as you said, like it is the nature of any debate around Ethereum's monetary policy. It's always going to be a subject of intense scrutiny. And as it should be, the bar for changing Ethereum's monetary policy should be one of the highest bars, if not the highest bar in changing anything about Ethereum in kind of like my mind here.
Starting point is 00:54:55 But I think that the reason that I wouldn't say like the conversation got too toxic or anything like that, but the reason why it got so heated, I would say, is because I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding about a few things here. So firstly, I'll say that the proposals put forward were just that. They were proposals. There were no EIPs or anything attached to them. They were essentially research posts from the kind of researchers, a few of them, as you mentioned, some of their names there.
Starting point is 00:55:18 And they wanted to get feedback on what they wrote. They wanted to start a discussion on this. There was no EITs. They certainly started one. Yes, they certainly achieved that goal. But there were no EIPs attached to this. Now, I think the reason why people got ahead of themselves on this is because in the research post, they said that they wanted to target this to go into the next Ethereum network
Starting point is 00:55:37 upgrade, which is called Pectra or Electra, which is slated for, could be happen at the end of this year, but probably early next year. And everyone was like, no, it's way too soon. We can't be changing the Ethereum monetary policy that. that soon. Now, I agree, like, it was probably a mistake to put that wording in there, because that's what people focused on, which means that they didn't actually focus on the actual proposal itself. Because the actual proposal itself is, in my mind, pretty sound with its analysis of the risks and concerns. But I think that the implementation details are
Starting point is 00:56:07 probably the thing that I would disagree with most. So I think the two top concerns are that one, I know, we're concerned with too much stake going into, you know, coming online just generally, and too much of that going into like these liquid staking protocols or liquid restaking protocols and not going to solar stakers, which essentially would squeeze solar stakers out of the network and essentially, you know, get rid of solar stakers. That's like the main kind of risk here. But the second risk is that in, I guess like a downstream of the first risk is that ETH as an asset gets replaced as money by an LST, like STEth could replace ETH or some other LST could replace ETH as a money. And the researchers are worried about the implications of this.
Starting point is 00:56:43 So in terms of like analyzing the risks and and kind of like seeing the risks and and identifying them, they did a really great job in doing that. But I think where it kind of broke down was trying to get this or at least it's suggesting that they could get this into the next Ethereum network upgrade, which is obviously not going to happen, I don't think. But also probably not making their case well enough, not doing a good enough sales pitch, I think. And I think they've tried to rectify that. They've gone on, you know, they went on the Uncommon Core podcast to try and rectify that. you know, Mike put out this post that that came later than the original proposal. But, but yeah, and I think that a lot of the, I guess, risks have assumptions tied to them as well, the people kind of disagreed with, whether we're like, you know, we disagree with the assumption
Starting point is 00:57:24 that 80% of ETH is going to be staked, for example, 90% of ETH is going to be staked for such and such reason. And that is a fair thing to disagree with. But then the researchers will say, well, if our assumptions are correct and we get to 80% eat staked on the network, then putting this fix in, if you want to call it a fix, is too late at that point. It doesn't actually fix anything and we can't rectify this. It's a bigger disturbance, the more ethistaked. Exactly, exactly. For the reasons outlined in the posts.
Starting point is 00:57:49 And I mean, this is a very broad topic. But I think that kind of summarizes it. I mean, as much as I can summarize such an in-depth topic there. But yeah, as I said at the top, like it, no matter what the proposal is, no matter of the details of it, anything that ever touches the Ethereum monetary policy needs to undergo, you know, the highest scrutiny and needs to go through the most intense, process to make it into the network because, you know, I mean, for so many different reasons, but it really should be the toughest thing to change, I believe. Yeah, I think that was a great
Starting point is 00:58:19 summary. Really, I'll segregate the issues here into two camps. There's like the EIP process, which people are throwing a flag in saying, hey, you guys are being too aggressive. You guys are you're violating the process. We need to, we need as a community, need to process these proposals. And so there's that side of the debate, which I think is where most of the contention is about just like, hey, let's respect the process, let's slow this thing down. And then there's a proposal itself, which is like, hey, let's change the eth issuance curve, which I think is less contentious, but still needs like to be processed. I would say like personally, I'm on the pro let's change the issuance curve side of things. Really this debate falls on the side of like,
Starting point is 00:59:01 are we okay with 100% of ETH being staked? Because I think there are pretty strong arguments to say if we approach 50% of ETH being staked, of which we're at like 26, 27, 27, 28% right now. If we approach 50%, the difference between 50% and 100% is actually not that much. I think once we pass 50%, we will more or less zoom pretty steadily up to 100%.
Starting point is 00:59:24 Like not super fast, but like we'll get there. It's almost inevitable. And so like this is one of the reasons why Ansgar and Caspera have presented some urgency about making informed choices about this is they are saying, hey, if we do get to that point, imposing a change will be harder and have more stronger consequences. And so let's consider this with haste, which is where some of the process concerns came about.
Starting point is 00:59:50 So like totally understanding the process concerns, we want to respect the process, can't force anything in. I would say like there are being, there are two curves being proposed here. If you're looking on the screen, it's the same curve that we have, but with less total issuance. And so if we have less total issuance with a 100% eath staked. And then the second curve is kind of like an S curve. And so this is what is called stake targeting. And so we can actually target a specific number. And no matter the external incentives around eStaking,
Starting point is 01:00:21 the LST, LRT incentives, the eigenlayer incentives, it will rubber band around a particular point. Call it 25 million eath or we could do 30, 35, 20, some sort of point. And if you go too far away from that point, issuance will actually drop to zero. If there's so much external demand from eigenlayer, and what this would do,
Starting point is 01:00:43 if we targeted 25 million eth-staked, or some 25%, what this would do, this would actually preserve the value of vanilla eth, which I actually think is pretty important. And so this is a difference of like, do we want only LSTs,
Starting point is 01:00:57 only Rocket Pool ETH, only Lido-staked Eth, only etherfi-E-E-Eeth. That's the only version. of eth that you'll see inside of the Ethereum ecosystem, or do we want to preserve vanilla ether as a first-class citizen? And that's actually kind of where my position is. I don't know if you have landed on a position or a side of this debate, Anthony, about what we should do with the issuance curve. But if you have, I'd love to hear it. No, I would say that I'm neutral still right now. I haven't made my mind up yet for a number of different reasons. But I think that I do want to go
Starting point is 01:01:29 back to what you originally said about the fact that what we have right now is a rather kind of simple I'm not I struggle to call it dumb but like simple issuance curve right like as you said like there wasn't that much kind of effort put into it because of the fact that like it was part of the wider proof of steak upgrade and it wasn't something that we were looking at too closely and obviously with the advent of all these LSTs and restaking you know things have changed substantially here but I will say that even back then when the previous stake was being designed there was still chatter around potentially capping the amount of eath staked on the network. And the original form of this was basically capping the active validator set. So how this would work is that there would only
Starting point is 01:02:05 be X number of active validators on the network at a time. So you would still have, like, say you had 60 million each state, but the only 30 million of that each stake would be active at any given time. So during the year, maybe only for six months of the year, 30 million ath would be active. And the other 30 million ath wouldn't be active, right? But the rewards would still kind of be be the same for everyone. But that's, I guess, like, a similar concept to what's being proposed now. We're essentially just lowering the kind of reward curve, you know, to a point where essentially it kind of preserves, as you mentioned, like, ETH the asset, so it doesn't get
Starting point is 01:02:38 supplanted by the LSTs and essentially makes it so that not too much ETH gets staked because we actually don't need that much. Like, I think people don't understand that there is a big diminishing return to ETH being staked because the node operators, as they exist today, right they are basically going to be the same for you know a while basically they don't change that often there are a lot of note operators on the network but essentially uh if you if you're adding more eat stake to these node operators you could argue that doesn't really add much more security right like we already have so much economic security stake too we already have tens of billions of dollars
Starting point is 01:03:13 worth of east eight steak tier so like how much more are we getting by staking more eth and then the argument can be made well if we're not really getting much from it then what are we doing just overpaying for security essentially. And this was the original argument around Ethereum's monetary policy, which is actually minimum viable issuance. So it's essentially this notion that we should only be issuing enough ETH that is viable to secure the network. Anything more than that is overpaying for security. And that is, I think, at the heart of what these researchers are arguing is that, like, you know, outside of all the other risks that they've identified, we are pretty much overpaying for security in a world where, you know, 50% ETH is staked, let alone 100% of ETH is staked. So I guess, I
Starting point is 01:03:52 the arguments on that side, but I also get the arguments on the other side of we shouldn't be messing with the monetary policy at this stage. Like that's, that's the, that's really the against side, I think, is that they feel like that touching the issuance curve or touching the monetary policy at this point in Ethereum's life is not great for a number of different reasons. One of the major ones being the fact that ETH is undergoing institutional adoption right now and it, you know, poses a risk to that. But there are other arguments as well. So there are good arguments on both sides, and that's why I'm rather neutral here, because I want to see this play out. But I, definitely think that this is not going to go into the next Ethereum upgrade.
Starting point is 01:04:25 I believe there's a 0% chance of that happening. But I'm excited to see more discussions happen over the next, you know, maybe 12 months or so. Yeah, of all types of conversations about the Ethereum Protocol, I think Ether, monetary policy is like one of the more interesting ones. And it's also one of the most broad ones where I think a lot more people can get involved. I had no, like, contributions to add to the conversations around 4844. I was just like a net receiver of information. I actually feel like somewhat equipped to actually like help move this conversation forward here.
Starting point is 01:04:56 And I think a large part of the Ethereum community also feels that way, which is why we're saying so much contention come from so many different corners of Ethereum with this conversation. Exactly. Some LRT and LST dynamics. Lido has now the highest eth-staking outflows out of any protocol, while Etherfi and Renzo, two of the leading LRT projects, liquid resaking token, have the highest inflows. Also something I noticed because of you, Anthony,
Starting point is 01:05:21 was that Etherify, the number one LRT by ETH deposits actually flipped rocket pool. So we have an LRT that is now bigger than an LST. So really some changing dynamics as a result of the eigenlayer ecosystem. Actually, kind of one of the points that Casper and Ansgar were saying is like there are new influences around the staking and monetary dynamics of ETH. And we're actually seeing it play out relatively early in the eigen layer process. like reminder, Eigenlayer's not even live yet. And we have LRTs actually like trumping LSTs.
Starting point is 01:05:56 Give me your thoughts and reflections here. I mean, if you've been paying any attention over the last few months, this should be obvious to you that people are definitely aping into restaking. I think it's just become such a huge thing, especially given that there is this kind of, I guess, like, Yield Burger you can have or Points Burger essentially where you, you know, by putting your eat into it. Yeah, yeah, I'll explain what I mean by this.
Starting point is 01:06:20 By putting your eth into etherfi, you could farm etherfi, you know, before they did the token. I think they're doing another air drop as well. And then they put that ETH into EganLayer and you're farming eigenlayer points. So you're basically like getting a points burger like all these kind of ingredients in there. Well, you're also getting all of the future AVS tokens. And so like call it, you're getting the meat and the patties and the bun. But like all the AVS is are like the lettuce, the tomato, the condiments, if you will. Yep.
Starting point is 01:06:48 Yep. So you're just basically following the kind of. incentives here. And Lido right now is not an LRT by kind of like a natively an LRT, which means that it's not equivalent to something like an etherfi, but you can take your STH and put into IgenLayer, but there are caps on that. Whereas, you know, Etherfye and others got around the caps by essentially solo staking that ETH as part of EGN layer and spinning up eigenPods, which got around the caps that eigenlayer put in. So there was a lot of inflow going there. But it is very interesting to see the fact that people are not only going into etherfi, but other protocols as well instead of LIDO.
Starting point is 01:07:22 You can see this, there's, I mean, not on this screenshot, but if you go to Hill Dobby's dashboard where he tracks all of this, you can see the actual kind of inflows over the past week, past month, past six months, and you can see where they're flowing into. It's not just the LRT protocols. Like Mantle, for example, is doing the thing where you bridge your eth into Mantle, the L2, and then they actually stake that eth. And you can see there over the past six months, they're number three in terms of inflows. Lido is not number two, but the thing is, is that they're number two by a very small kind of margin.
Starting point is 01:07:52 Sorry? But they're losing. They're losing. Yeah, exactly. It's going away from Lido. Yes, because you can see, Etherify is number one, and then you count all the other ones and put them all together. Lido is a very small percentage of the total flow going into staking right now.
Starting point is 01:08:07 So, yeah, it's not just, you know, the LRT protocols, but it's also more and more competition has come online now within the staking space. And it's really, I think, like, chipped away at Lido because of the fact, that Lido has such a large market share that really, like, if there's all these other protocols offering incentives, no one's going into Lido, and then all the STEath holders are like, why am I holding this when I could be getting all these kind of incentives over here? Yes, it may be more risky, but people are taking on that risk there. So that's why I think you've seen this play out. And I remember I said this ages ago on Twitter and on my podcast, the best way to kind of take
Starting point is 01:08:39 Lido's market share down was for there to be more competition. And I think with the advent of restaking, that competition has just blown up completely. Yeah, that's totally right. And you're actually seeing Lido drop below 30% of total market share, which it has not been that low in a very long time. I remember for a while during like the air of the cycle of Ethereum in which everyone was like screaming about like Lido being 32.9%. It's like really approaching that 33.3%. And everyone's like ripping their hair off. Like Lido's going to cross the 33% barrier. We are now down to 29.7%. And that trend is seemingly going. going to continue. Yep.
Starting point is 01:09:19 And I think as well, just to remind people that Puffer, one of the other RRT protocols, has over a billion dollars worth of STE that they're about to vampire from Lido, which is going to knock another, I think, like at least percentage point off of Lido's market share just from that, which is crazy because they're actually going to be withdrawing the eighth from Lido using the STA that they have and then staking it again as part of Puffer's system, which is the very definition of a vampire attack here. So I know that Lido is probably going to do their own native restaking thing eventually, but I'm going to be curious to see if that actually stops the bleeding
Starting point is 01:09:53 or if they keep bleeding Marcusia to these other protocols. Yeah, and this is kind of the story of I think this new bull market is a lot of very hungry new players are arriving to build somewhat similar, but also novel products to entrenched incumbents. We're about to get into Morpho versus Ave. And they are able to move faster. They don't have like, they don't have baggage. They are able to play in the arena that is more modern. And so like all of these, what we're looking at here is this chart of LRT,
Starting point is 01:10:23 the total supply of LRTs, which are approaching 2.4 million in ETH. This bright green, excuse me, cyan color is puff Eth. That's all of the Lido-Staked Eth. So this cyan bar here is all Lido Staked Eich, which is going to be pulled out of the beacon chain. And the steak teeth will go away and it will turn into point. Puff-Eath. And so these are all the result of like modern-day eigen-layer-based the meta that are nipping away. Like we're just seeing Rocket Pool fall behind the leading LRT. And now we're seeing like Lido start to get really tripped away here. And this is before
Starting point is 01:10:59 the Puff-Eath vampire attack, as you said. So this is kind of like the, a big theme of this bull market is that newer, hungrier disruptors are coming for incumbents. Exactly, exactly. And I think that It's kind of funny to see the incentives play out because LIDER already has a token that's been trading for a long time. They can't really do another air drop, whereas these other protocols have new tokens, right, that have just come out or haven't done their token yet and they have these points programs. So as I was mentioning before, that's just the incentives, right? That's just the incentive of people coming along and being like, I'm going to farm these protocols. I'm going to get these points which are going to turn into tokens eventually.
Starting point is 01:11:39 And then obviously at the heart of all of that, it's the mother of all tokens, which is Eigenlayer, which is the thing that everyone. is farming through all of these protocols that, you know, people think is going to be like the biggest air drop ever or whatever. But that's, that's the incentive, basically. Yeah, it's pretty crazy to see the etherfi token price at a fully diluted valuation of $5.2 billion, which in comparison to Lido, Lido's at $2.6 billion, which, like, if you're just comparing the amount of Ethan Lido versus the amount of Ethan Etherfi, Lido's like super dominant, but they're commanding half of a market cap, a fully diluted market cap versus etherfi, and which probably just goes back to the same thing that we were talking about earlier
Starting point is 01:12:17 with the Athena and the wormhole tokens. Shiny new token, zero sellers. Everyone's locked up. And so, like, true price discovery hasn't been seen. But, like, we've got, we've got at least one full cycle before true price discovery actually kind of like happens in these things. So right now, they have a lot of collateral, a lot of leverage to work with that, like, Lido shot at shot last cycle, because it's just like a last cycle kind of project. Yep. Yep. And this is, I guess, a trend with crypto generally is that like the newer protocols, yes, they're newer, but they have the fact that they haven't done a token yet as like a huge thing that they can lean on where the older protocols can't. And that's how market share is kind of distributed. But if you were to take like a very long
Starting point is 01:12:58 term look here, I do still believe that the protocols that offer the best products are the ones that are going to win out over the long term because token incentives can only get you so far. But at the same time, like as you said, during a cycle, those token incentives can get you far. That's for sure. Right. Right. For sure. All right.
Starting point is 01:13:15 Coming up with one of the last subjects of the day, there has been a bunch of drama in the defy app player of Ethereum. There has been a brewing war, a brewing division between AVE and Maker. And it's especially with the introduction of both Morpho and Ethena. And so here's Mark Zeller, who's one of the leading, like, call it operators of Avey, the Avey Dao, writing a proposal to remove the collateral status of Dye. in AVE, citing risk concerns due to what MakerDAO is doing, integrating the new ETH, USDA from Athena, brand new synthetic dollar, using that as what AVE thinks is too much collateral to back a die,
Starting point is 01:13:59 presenting a systemic risk in die the stable coin. So as a result, AVE is reducing its exposure to to die inside of AVE, but just removing it as collateral. Stani from Avey, he comes into the Avey governance forum saying personally I am in full favor of offboarding die from all AVE markets completely. At this point I see little value for the AVE DAO with his new risk direction maker Dow is adopting would suggest a temp check for full offboarding. The offboarding process should start immediately in case of a favorable outcome. Maybe in the background of this is the incentive of like well AVE has the GHO, the GO stable coin and so AVE would like to enshrine its stable coin above competitor stable coins.
Starting point is 01:14:39 But then also at the same time, there is, is this like brand new introduction of ETH, USCE from Athena into a collateral of MakerDAO with a pretty healthy credit line, I think $600 million with a proposal to increase it to a billion dollars on this brand new synthetic dollar, which is like, you know, still getting tested. Still, the risks are still being stress tested. So Maker Dow giving a very healthy credit line to this brand new stable coin to which Avey is saying like, that's risky.
Starting point is 01:15:08 Don't do that. So this is the drama of the week in the last week. in the Defi layer. Anthony, what's your take here? I mean, I would say that I totally get Abe's point, or the Ava Dow's point here about the risks associated with this and kind of Maker Dow's new direction of taking on more risk. You know, I think for a long time, people assumed that Maker was this kind of slow-moving
Starting point is 01:15:28 beast. It was the least risky kind of protocol within Defi. It would basically do, you know, a proper analysis before integrating anything. But then recently, as you just explained, they had this proposal of it, maybe not even a proposal. They just wanted to do this thing. They essentially put like $600 million to a billion dollars into Athena, which I mean, is like objectively a very new protocol and an untested protocol. And there's a lot of like real risks associated with it.
Starting point is 01:15:54 And then the Aver Diao is like, well, this is just crazy. Like that just increases the risk too much for Dai, which basically means that we shouldn't have it as a collateral asset on AVE because that could hurt the Aver ecosystem. So I totally get where they're coming from there. And, you know, I don't know kind of like what side I sit on here. I don't think it's something that I've paid that much attention to to enough to have a side. But I think that I get the logic surrounding it here. But, I mean, you've got a Hazu tweet here about Athena's risks being over-exaggerated.
Starting point is 01:16:22 Maybe you want to get into that one as well. Yeah, this is Hazu saying, kind of like what we were saying, is like the risks of Athena are over-exaggerated, at least to like what people understand when they make comparisons to Terra Luna. That's what I'm saying. Haso says, Hasu says, it's not a widemaker trade like G-BTC and BTC, let alone Terer Luna. It's very common and relatively low-risk trade many firms employ, even more so if you can use a prime broker like copper fireblocks pretending otherwise is either uninformed or disingenuous. Current rates will obviously come down as the funding rates shift.
Starting point is 01:16:52 Then USDA will become less attractive. It's already starting to happen. Finally, this Ave Maker War is destructive for both parties. The involved parties seem to go to prioritize ego over value creation. I actually am doing a podcast with Sam McPherson from Sparks, which is like the Avey-Veuvre. fork for the MakerDAO ecosystem. So basically MakerDAO and Mark Zeller from from AVE. And so we're going to have both of them on a podcast tomorrow morning. That'll come out sometime, sometime next week. Yeah. And that should be like a good podcast, I think, to get the different perspectives there. But I mean, I agree with Hazu. There
Starting point is 01:17:29 probably is a little bit of like subjectivity in this and a little bit of ego in this. Like there always is when it comes to these sorts of things. But as I said, like I understand Aver's position here. I understand makers position of wanting to increase their revenue, their net revenue of the maker ecosystem, wanting to increase the supply of dye as well generally. And, yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to listening to that podcast that you do there. That should be an interesting one. All right, coming up as the last bit of the week, this is a little bit late since it's April 4th and not April 1st. This is going to be our meme of the week. I think it's kind of cringe to do a meme in April 1st on the April 4th, but we're doing it anyways because I thought
Starting point is 01:18:06 it was pretty funny at the time. Sad, this is me tweeting out, sad to announce my time at Bankless HQ has come to a close, but the Bankless mission still burns to my heart. In pursuit of that mission, I'm stepping into a VP of decentralization at the Salana Foundation. Stoked to work with Anatoly and Austin Federa on Salana. This was our April Fool's joke. Bankless says what I think is a very funny April Fool's joke every single year. And then as a result of this, my DMs are just flooded with people saying, David, congratulations on the new move. Like always knew you were a Salana Maxi. really stoked to see what's going on here. And then there's like the satisfaction I get of saying like,
Starting point is 01:18:44 guys, come on, April Fool's joke. April Fool's joke. I think this is why everyone hates April Fool's. Like, at least kind of for me, it's become so like annoying, especially because I'm in Australia. So I get to experience it twice a year, which is super annoying since I'm like in the future, so to speak. But yeah, it's kind of funny.
Starting point is 01:19:02 Like when I went on Twitter on April 1st, I was scrolling through. and I got like caught in so many of them where I was like, oh my God, like, this can't be true. And then I'm like, oh, fuck, it's April for, well, technically it was April 2nd for me. So that's why it didn't immediately kind of ring to me. But it's funny that you got so many DMs about this because I'm sorry, but you take one look at this and you actually read what you posted and you can see that it's a joke. I mean, look at the quote from me at the bottom, like the quote that you put in there, like saying that, you know, I always knew David pissed like pissing off Heath Maxies. It's like what? So, I don't know, people just read the headline, I guess,
Starting point is 01:19:38 and wanted to be nice about it, but it's always funny seeing those responses. I think it's just one good date a year to just inoculate people against just headline spinal reflexes of just like, yo, like, let's double check the headline here. The... Yeah, but people don't seem to learn.
Starting point is 01:19:56 They keep... Yeah, they don't seem to learn. Granted, we did have our designer Photoshop on a pretty well, like a Solana logo, onto the t-shirt that I was wearing. I've never worn a Salana t-shirt, but now in this graphic that I had. So it's, like, kind of not fair
Starting point is 01:20:10 when you employ your graphic, your very Chad graphic designer to, like, make something look very, very legit. This was actually Ryan's line. I really just want to help Solana decentralized, said Hoffman, in a tweet announcing his new role. This goes beyond the Nakamoto
Starting point is 01:20:24 coefficients for me. This is about actually making a difference. Anyone with a data center should be able to run a salona validator. You see, like, if you actually read that stuff, you would know that it was a joke. But as you said,
Starting point is 01:20:35 people seem to just read the headline and go off of that. But I mean, yeah, I've all said this was one of the better, I think April Fool's kind of jokes because the whole point of it is to trick as many people as possible, right? Like, and I think you tricked a lot of people.
Starting point is 01:20:47 Oh, for sure. Yeah. Okay, so there is also just a discussion that I think some people have had about like, hey, April Fool's shouldn't be good. We should not accept April Fool's in the crypto industry because it's, I don't know, do they do April Fool's in Australia, Anthony?
Starting point is 01:21:01 Not really. I mean, there's some of it, but that's just like us trying to import American culture. But no, it's not really a big thing here. April 1st is kind of like a U.S.-centric phenomenon. Yes. And so I got messages that Asian media saw this report and started broadcasting it in Asia on Asian news channels as truth
Starting point is 01:21:22 because, of course they would. It's not, April Fool's isn't a thing in Asia. And so apparently, like, there's a bunch of people in Asia who actually think I'm the VP of decentralization at Solana. And so, like, I think there are also other April Fool's jokes that, like, accidentally moved token prices because I kind of thought that their April Fool's joke was irresponsible. And so, granted, I take the point that, like, we do need to be careful as a crypto industry where we have, like, markets and cross-cultural differences where, like, actually April 1st is kind of just like a U.S. only phenomenon. But nonetheless, like, we can't, we can't not do it. We are a media platform.
Starting point is 01:21:58 We kind of have a lot of opportunity here. Yeah, yeah. I think I remember I did it last year just like as a thing for my viewers on my podcast where I introduced myself as Charles Hoskinson instead of myself. And that was like as far as I was like if you get if you get fooled by that, that one's on you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:22:15 So that's, that's all I really did. But yeah, no, it's definitely like a very US centric thing. And that's why I think people are, you know, in crypto have an issue with it because of the fact that crypto is global, right? Like as you said, like there's these Asian media outlets that reported on this and and Europe is a huge player in crypto as well. So all those people, maybe seeing this being like, well, we're not going to double check the day with. This isn't a thing that we do sort of thing.
Starting point is 01:22:36 So, yeah, that's how I kind of view it as well. Yeah. So just as a takeaway, if you do an April Fool's joke, don't move markets in the crypto space. Anthony, thank you so much for stepping in a substitute teacher. We always appreciate you when either me, I need to climb a mountain or Ryan needs to go hang out with his fam. We always appreciate you coming in. If people don't know anything about you who are living under a rock and they just appreciate your take, I think you have a place to send them. Where should they go?
Starting point is 01:23:03 Yeah, I mean, you can just find all of my content at the DailyGway, or if you've got my Twitter, it's on there. If you want to just search me up on Twitter, all the relevant links are there. I mean, I do a daily, like every weekday kind of news recap of what's happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. Pretty technical, pretty deep dive. Like, it's not going to be kind of for total nubs to the ecosystem. But if you want to learn more about Ethereum, yeah, you can go check that out. Yeah, very consistent 30-minute videos about what's going on in the Ethereum ecosystem. Anthony does the whole thing in a single breath.
Starting point is 01:23:32 So it's very, very efficient. And you can get that. I listen to it on podcast. You can also get it on YouTube. Bankless Nation, thanks again for running through the week of news with us, with me and Anthony. Risk and disclaimers, of course, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But we are headed west.
Starting point is 01:23:48 This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the bankless look journey. Thanks a lot.

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