Bankless - ROLLUP: Stripe's Billion Dollar Stablecoin Bet | Noteworthy Investor Longs BTC | Kraken's New L2 | Self Custody Is For Losers??

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

This week, a record-breaking billion-dollar crypto acquisition has caught mainstream attention, highlighting its significance for the stablecoin market’s future. Kraken joined the Layer 2 race, while Worldcoin launched its own L2, WorldChain, and Scroll’s airdrop received mixed reactions from recipients. Meanwhile, Paul Tudor Jones is bullish on crypto as a hedge, while Michael Saylor stirred controversy by criticizing self-custody, calling it a move for “losers.” ------ 📣 0x v2 | NEXT GEN PRICING ENGINE https://bankless.cc/0x   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖 0G | MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE, INEVITABLE https://bankless.cc/0G  ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/84?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 Start 02:23 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd  https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd  https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1849120571222536262  https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts  06:22 L2 Updates https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary  https://x.com/lukeyoungblood/status/1849217477668171831?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://x.com/lukeyoungblood/status/1849217477668171831? s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  08:09 Paul Tudor Jones Bullish Bitcoin https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1848735063615152136  10:46 Election Check In https://polymarket.com/elections  https://x.com/Polymarket/status/1849451658788384797  15:26 Kraken's New L2 https://x.com/inkonchain/status/1849443457883885801  https://inkonchain.com/en-US  19:23 Stripe's $1 Billion Dollar Bet https://x.com/Stablecoin/status/1848390849215730100  https://x.com/zcabrams/status/1848391342524641533  https://x.com/benhoneill/status/1848390493425504388 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1848108613631390155  22:24 Michael Saylor Against Self Custody? https://x.com/AdamSimecka/status/1848131598044074289  https://x.com/Sina_21st/status/1848450657205789161  https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1848754319019151873  https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1848876323026178429  https://x.com/ercwl/status/1848737997463695827  28:59 Balance on CEX's https://x.com/leonwaidmann/status/1848780740969795917? s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  32:38 Uniswap Integrated Across https://x.com/AcrossProtocol/status/1849106135443202069  https://x.com/danrobinson/status/1849142590131904650  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1849182167748022600  35:47 Scroll Airdrop https://scroll.io/blog/introducing-scrolls-first-airdrop-a-celebration-of-the-global-community  https://claim.scroll.io/  https://x.com/Andrey_10gwei/status/1848441546645135672  https://x.com/redhairshanks86/status/1848653068554166339  39:12 Ethereum Blobs https://x.com/Data_Always/status/1848789160888332340  42:46 WorldCoin launches 'World Chain' L2 https://world.org/blog/announcements/world-chain-now-open-every-human  48:46 Central Bankers https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4985877  https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/working-papers/unique-implementation-of-permanent-primary-deficits  52:11 Buenos Aires Issues Decentralized ID's https://zksync.mirror.xyz/kWRhD81C7il4YWGrkDplfhIZcmViisRe3lnsmbvOEmg  56:19 Nigeria Drops Charges https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-23/nigerian-court-releases-binance-executive-jailed-since-february  57:44 Meme Of The Week  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1849206541255389459  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Bankless Nation is the fourth week of October's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. Okay, where do we start? We got a record-breaking billion-dollar crypto acquisition. It's catching mainstream attention, and it could be a really big deal for stable coins. We also got multiple layer twos adding to the Ethereum Settlement Network this week. Cracken adding its layer two to the super chain. What's its plan? What's it called?

And then also, World Chain from World Coin is online. And in addition to all of that scroll, another Ethereum Layer 2, their airdrop this week. Was everyone happy or was everyone upset? It's an air drop. So what do you think, David, at this part of the cycle? Was it like all the other ones or did it break the trend? Also, Paul Tudor Jones, notable investor, is buying crypto and we'll talk about why.

And then Michael Saylor, another notable crypto investor. He's on the hot seat for basically saying self-custodies for losers. Yow, yeah, yeah, hot take, bold strategy for him. We're going to get to all of this stuff and more. But first, I'm going to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Zero X, the OG builders, building critical defy infrastructure ever since 2017. I remember reading the ZeroX Y paper in 2017. One of the few white papers that I actually got value out of and stood the test of time.

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Getting into the markets this week, let's take a look at our friend Bitcoin. Where are we at the week? Up 1.3% on the week, start of the week, $67,000, ending the week at $67,000. thousand seven hundred so okay okay week how about so kind of flat but okay yeah how about ether uh not great down 2.8% on the week start of the week at 2,600 uh fell pretty low fell below 25th 2,500 for a little bit currently at 2,500 and 25 dollars almost 3% down on the week this explains my timeline eth holders and shambles uh eth is dead uh et cetera et cetera this is the sentiment going on on crypto and but what are we seeing in the in the etf flows maybe we should start with bitcoin because it had a banger week Should probably start and end with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin ETF flows coming in hot. I'm just going to start reading out some numbers. October 11th, 250 million, October 14th, 550 million, October 15th, 370 million. The next day, 450 million. The next day, 473 million. The next day, 294 million. The next day out 80 million. And then yesterday, the most recent day, in 192 million.

Just racking in the numbers. There's a total inflows of... 21 billion and like 3 billion, 2 billion, came in in the last like 10 days. All right. So Bitcoin at the big week. How about either? I mean, just not too much action. We're at negative 475 million.

It's like marginally inflowing, but not anything comparison to what Bitcoin UTS are doing. Yeah, it's probably not even a tenth of the inflows net inflows in that same time period. So just basically take the numbers that you heard and like, you know, take 10% of And that was basically what Bitcoin did. Let me show you a chart that's going to make you even sadder, David. You ready? Yeah. I mean, like, we're looking at the, we're about to look at the ETHBTC ratio.

And the ETHBTC ratio reflects the inflows that we were just talking about. It is down to 0.0372, which is a three-year low. Down. Wait, a three-year low? You say a three-year low? Three-year low. Yep. Okay.

So the lowest level since April 2021, according to our sources here. You know, Trader, Ben Cowan. he has predicted this ratio for actually some time. Remember he came on the bank list? He basically told us this. He thought he was kind of crazy back in, you know, 2022 and 2023. But his range for the last three years has been 0.03,

so still some ways to go to 0.04. But he says that we are in the bottoming process right now. He says that's kind of the home range. And over the next few months into maybe the first two weeks of January, that's when we're going to bottom. We might be at the bottom right now. according to him. Bottom mesh, yeah.

Or we could go a little bit lower before we resume some ascent here. And his base case is just reversion to mean because he reads kind of the TA lines and the logarithmic charts and that kind of thing. So this could be the worst of it, David. But it's definitely feeling kind of bad in sentiment land.

Yeah, we've been here before. I've seen that .03 handle, but it was all the way back in like 2018, 2019. Most people don't remember that. No, most people were not here for that. No. That's where the crucible was. That's where a lot of ships got sharpened.

Well, I have nothing more to say to Heath Holders other than this. It's conviction time. Let me just say this. It's conviction time. And something that you often say, which I like, David, is you can't copy trade conviction. So you either have it for this particular asset or you don't. And if you don't, I mean, better sell. The actual line is you can copy someone's trade, but you can't copy someone's conviction.

I like it. I like that line. Total crypto market. cap where are we out in the week coming in at 2.4 2 trillion dollars below that 2.5 trillion mark but you know I bet you we see 3 trillion by the end of the year yeah I mean I think so particularly if we start talking about well I don't know by the end of the year but like stable coin is included in this number too and you know that that's destined to go higher let's do a quick L2 update drive-by of course there's some major updates on L2 some big launches happening that we'll

get to for a second I just wanted to highlight this and thanks to our sponsored and friends over at Mantle for for supporting this section of the roll-up. L2 fraud proofs are coming on base next week. Okay. So this will elevate base from stage zero on L2B to stage one, which is a big upgrade in terms of Coinbase's inability to yoink your funds. Basically, when you have fraud proofs, you as a user of the base chain have the ability to exit to L1. no one can steal, permissionlessly, no one can steal your crypto assets on base. There's a pretty big milestone,

and there are a lot of people out there who said, it would never happen, base is never going to decentralize. All the L2s are not going to decentralize. Of course, Opie Mainnet did it not too long ago, and now they're rolling that out to base. I think that'll become relevant when we talk about Crackensley or two a little bit later.

This is Luke Youngblood, saying in about a week, base will become a stage one roll up with permissionless fault proofs, while Arbitrum has been ahead of base, their system only accepts fault proofs from a white list set of actors, so base will leapfrog them for a bit. I love this competitive pressures of which L2 ecosystem can become more decentralized and

like the pressure to be on the frontier of that. This is just about property rights. So with stage one and even more so with stage two, your property rights on layer two are given much stronger, almost equivalent assurances to your property assets on the, Ethereum layer one. So it's all about just like permissionlessly expanding Ethereum's property rights settlement network. So, you know, a very necessary part of the Ethereum roadmap. Moving into markets, some big news out of the world of Paul Tudor Jones on Squawk Box. There was an interview on Squackbox where he says, all roads lead to inflation. And the

interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin asks him what exactly he's long if he thinks all roads lead to inflation. Let's go watch that clip right now. Given all of the things you're saying, are you off buying gold and Bitcoin and and and I think all I think all roads lead to inflation we're going to end up if you so but does all roads lead to inflation therefore gold is a good investment is Bitcoin a good investment to you I'm long gold I'm long Bitcoin I think commodities are so ridiculously underowned so I'm long commodities I think most young people find their inflation hedges via the NASDAQ that's also been great it's probably some combination I probably have some basket of gold Bitcoin commodities NASDAQ, something like that, and I owe zero fixed income.

I really like the framing actually that he's so long commodities or he believes that commodities are just super undervalued because I kind of think if you go to coin gecko, you just look at the market cap. You got Bitcoin Ether like all the other ones. These are all commodity monies. Every single layer one asset is a commodity money. So to me, that statement is just like secularly bullish the whole entire crypto industry. Yeah, I agree.

When he says all roads lead to inflation, some people will hear that and think he's just talking about consumer price index inflation like CPI and they'll be like well no power's got that under control look at all the reports i mean it came down from 8% to now it's like roughly 2 to 3% and that seems to be sustainable moving forward that's not what jones is talking about here he's talking about the increased supply of money he's talking about currency debasement essentially he's talking about asset price inflation and ways to hedge against that when there's more and more liquidity and more our fiat dollars in the system. That's the type of inflation he means. That's why he's pointing out there are some hedges out there like commodities. He says those are undervalued. And even like the

NASDAQ can be a inflation hedge as well. And certainly we think our crypto monetary assets are the best of the best with respect to inflation hedges because they are completely outside of the fiat system. Just some stats on this, some metrics on this just to put some numbers here. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government we'll clock a $1.9 trillion deficit this year by the end of 2024. And that's on track to grow to $2.8 trillion by 2034. So in a decade, we're going to have a $2.8 trillion deficit. All of that, that's just net inflation.

All of that, how do we cover that deficit? Inflation. We are 11 days out from the election. So let's do a check in on polymarket. And what we're seeing on the 2024 election forecast, at least on polymarket, is Trump still up? 61% odds of winning for Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris at about 39%. I've actually been surprised at how Trump's lead has held for so long.

Gone up and then held its position. Exactly. And so what I sort of expected to see if this was more kind of short-term noise or maybe even market manipulation was, you know, Trump's 60% like fading as the days progressed. And what we're seeing is some sustained lead here. So what does that tell us? I mean, the more volume that's coming in at these current valuations, like percentage likelihoods, just the more true the number is as according to like the market, right? But in addition to that, I think I saw this market.

The Senate control after 2024, 84% chance Republicans, which obviously Donald is the far more pro-crypto candidate. But I think there's a lot of consensus that it's actually really the Senate. That really matters in terms of the crypto industry because the Senate is going to be the people that does or does not pass pro-crypto regulation. And when the Republicans have an 84% chance, up 10% on the week, 84% chance to win the Senate, that just bodes so well for the industry getting legislation passed that we needed to. I do think that's like, think of that as like, you know, higher percentage likelihood of getting fit legislation actually through. So we understand what's a commodity and what's a security in crypto, higher percent likelihood of getting stable coins. legislation through lower percent likelihood of having like regulators who are sort of unchecked

by by laws so you're like definitely the election is moving in crypto's favor here. David, we got more to talk about. Crackens layer two. We have all the details. Also, that monumental crypto acquisition will tell you what that is. We think it's going to mainstream stable coins. And let's get to the Michael Saylor gossip. Did he really just turn against self-custy?

Is he just another banker now? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsor that made this episode possible. Cracken, our recommended exchange for 2024, also the exchange that is bringing you a brand new shiny layer two. Let's go hear from them now. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Cracken. One of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Cracken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system,

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So check out the simple, secure, and powerful way for ever. everyone to trade crypto, whether you're a complete beginner or a season pro. Go to crackin.com slash bank lists to see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss. Tired of juggling multiple wallets and websites just to navigate Web3, meet Magic Eden, the home of Web 3. It is becoming a super dab where you can do everything cross-chain all in one place. They're solving Ux issues by building products across every chain ecosystem,

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The Uniswap wallet is officially the preferred wallet of banklists. And it's the one we use any time when we want to transact on chain. Whether you're on your browser or on the go, Uniswap wallet makes it easier than ever to swap anytime, anywhere. Use your wallet to transfer funds directly from a top centralized exchange and tapping thousands of tokens across Ethereum and over 10 other chains like base, arbitram, and optimism. Uniswap wallet delivers deep liquidity, fast execution, and reliable quotes with zero gas swaps through Uniswop X. And when it comes through security, you can rest easy knowing it's backed by Uniswop Labs, one of the most trusted teams in Defi. Their code is

open source and independently reviewed so you know it's protected. So why wait? Download the Uniswap wallet today on Chrome, iOS, and Android. And don't forget to claim your free uni.eith username directly in the mobile wall. Start swapping smarter with uniswap. Introducing ink the brand new opi stack layer two out of crackin. Cracken's going on chain and they're doing it with it. Their chain called ink. That test net is coming in 17 days with main net coming in Q1 2025. It's cool. They're actually introducing this at devcons. They're going to have hackathons, that sort of thing. So really getting right into the Ethereum community. Of course, we've been waiting. There's been rumor for a very long time that Cracken was going to launch

a layer two. And there was rumor of them discussing, like talking to various layer two solution providers and it looks like they've been doing that for the past year, David. This isn't just coming out of the blue. They're coming out with an announcement and they're like, yeah, we're like a week or two away from a test net and we're going to launch main net in Q1. So why is this a big deal? It's a big deal first because this is a total win for Ethereum and the Ethereum economy and kind of the layer two roadmap. What we're seeing here, David, is all of the centralized exchanges, they either have a layer two or they have a plan to launch a layer two. I mean, the one outlier is Binance who has its own kind of layer one chain, but you wonder what the trajectory

of that is when everyone else is building out a layer two. So they're bootstrapping security and decentralization from the Ethereum network. So that's bullish. And this is something that we long hope for and long predicted at bankless, that all of the crypto banks, we call them, the centralized exchanges of the world would actually start to move more and more on chain with the eventual destination of all their assets and their order books are fully on chain as well i mean that's a long time out but you could see the migration the progression here base has its own layer two uh the crypto dot com with cronos has their own layer two that's on the zk sync stack okay x has a layer two as well and this is crackin joining their ranks a few cool things about this that i think are cool anyway

it's going to be on the super chain. So that's going to be a very interesting cohort. You already have base there. You have Unichane there, which has just announced earlier this month. You have Zora there. You have an interesting amalgamation of other layer twos. And a lot of liquidity, a lot of centralized exchange liquidity, the largest decentralized exchange with Uniswap being there as well. I think that's going to be very interesting. And it positions both Cracken and Coinbase on the same ecosystem and the same economic zone. In the same family. Yeah. So what are they doing? Well, they're not quite competing against each other inside of the super chain. They're sharing liquidity because across the super chain, all of this liquidity, we were talking to Ben from optimism yesterday. It's all going to be shared.

And so what feels fragmented right now on the super chain is going to come together and feel like one single chain. And so it's an interesting position for both base and the Coinbase's L2 and Crackin to have kind of an all-boats rise. type scenario where what's good for base is good for ink and what's good for ink is good for base. I love that dimension of it and I think that's going to be interesting to watch. Of course, they're bringing the Krakken devs with them. We're talking to the lead of this project.

His name's Andrew. He's got over 100 developers at Krakken working just on Krakken on chain exercises. So this is a big deal. First, the crypto banks with L2s, then the actual banks, the actual like real world so-called banks will have L2s. And our prediction is that every ledger in the world will eventually end up with some sort of crypto-based, you know, layer two, layer three ledger inside of the crypto ecosystem. We're all going on chain, David. We did an episode with Andrew from Inc.

I'd actually never met before, but very eloquent. Really interesting to see him come out. So Inc. is actually this a subunit inside of the Cracken system, so independent from the Cracken organization, owned and operated by Cracken, but still independent, kind of in the same way that bases. but then also Ben Jones from optimism. So if you want to learn more about that, we did a podcast episode that's probably, that's actually already out in your podcast feed. It's also on YouTube as well.

Moving into crypto's largest acquisition to date. Stripe acquires a stable coin startup called Bridge for $1.1 billion. Just blowing the water out for all previous acquisition records. So what is bridge? Bridge allows businesses to create store, send, and accept stable coins. It was founded in 2022, which is crazy. It's a $1.1 billion acquisition for,

a company that started just two years ago. Well done, guys. Really good job from two former Coinbase executives, Zach Abrams and Sean U. their intention was to compete with the Swift Network and with credit cards. Honestly, pretty easy people to compete with, especially we have stable coins on your side. Yeah. Largest acquisition for Stripe as well as the crypto industry. If you're not familiar with Stripe, it's just a payments company, kind of Web2

FinTech payments company. Definitely the most valuable, definitely one of the most valuable FinTech companies in world it operates over 135 countries millions of businesses uh work with stripe if you guys have used that little tap to pay on that little square thing the square white thing or you put your card into the square white that's that stripe uh it's kind of like um point of sale for consumer payments for businesses on the ground uh and now there's just like very intimate stable coin integrations into this stripe uh vertical i think this is absolutely huge i don't think it's hyperbole to say like stripe is basically internet payments today they kind of like modernize

and revolutionized payments on the internet made it super easy with kind of their set of APIs. Like everybody on the internet uses Stripe in some form or fashion. And this is a big vote of confidence for stablecoins. You have to think if Stripe is doing this, they are betting that stable coins are going to be a big deal. Maybe they even see regulatory tailwinds on the horizon, right? And so they're looking at, well, you know, Congress in 2025 or 2025 or 26 could come up with with stable coin legislation. Yeah, we're looking at $150, $160 billion stable coin market now. You flip the switch on some legislation that goes pro-stable coin in the U.S., and you quickly

turn into like a multi-trillion dollar market for stablecoins. So all of this is hugely bullish. Zach Abrams, the co-founder of Bridge, wrote, we started Bridge because we thought stable coins could become a core global regulated payment platform and the first wave of interest of cross-border companies. Today, we're moving many billions in payment volume, but more important, We're now helping hundreds of developers all around the world. Chris Berniske, he tweets out, the importance of Stripe wholeheartedly embracing blockchains as a signal for other FinTechs is not to be underestimated. So this is also kind of the conversation that is going around in the crypto VC land, is that

stable coin deals are about to get very hot because we just had a provable exit opportunity for any VC investing in stablecoin deals. And then also, you would think that like any other Stripe competitor is looking at what Stripe is doing and be like, damn, do we need to be doing that? Yeah. Like, how hot is that sector? Like, are we behind here? And so there's perhaps a little bit of a gold rush coming in in the stable coin startup

sector. And so that's kind of been in the conversation behind the scenes there. Moving into the drama of the week, Michael Taylor feeling some heat after he called anyone who takes self-custody, a paranoid crypto anarchist, if you hold your own keys, which is kind of a hot take for an industry that literally invented and has imbued deeply into a culture, the idea of self-custody. Ryan, what was your reaction when you heard this? I can't believe a big, like a notable Bitcoiner actually said this. The Bitcoiner's Bitcoiner. You know, you know what? We should just play the clip so people can decide for themselves.

Here's Michael Saylor being interviewed in what he says. If there is more Bitcoin, is held with these third-party custodians, what risk does that pose having greater supply held by fewer large institutions. Does that increase the risk of seizure and confiscation like we've seen with gold? And is that not exactly what Bitcoiners don't want to happen? No, I think it's the opposite. I think that when the Bitcoin is held by a bunch of crypto anarchists who aren't regulated entities who don't acknowledge government

or don't acknowledge taxes or don't acknowledge reporting requirements, that increases the risk of seizure. You have an OG crypto community. It's very hardcore about it. But if you look at where all the money is, 99.9% of the money is actually in the traditional economy. If you consider the Great Depression, I mean, people thought that their gold was safe in banks

until the executive order of 1933. So we're not entirely safe. I mean, I know that's kind of a wild thing to suggest may happen again, but history does repeat itself. So people's Bitcoin wouldn't be entirely safe. People say that, but mostly it's paranoid crypto anarchists that say that. My God. Okay.

Because it's a myth and a trope that goes on over and over again. But first of all, he didn't really seize the goal. People voluntarily turned in the goal. They didn't go and kick in everybody's door, arrest them, shoot them, and take their goal. That never happened. Well, they did make it illegal and basically send people to prison if they didn't turn in all of their gold. And this was a federal law. You know, at the time, this is pretty crazy, honestly, coming from Michael St.

who is the bit-oiner of bitcoins, at least according to some. So let's talk about the reaction. So this is Sina from 21st Capital saying this is a terrible look for Sailor to become a shill for the government and banking system and call all true Bitcoiners paranoid. Sailor is on a mission to relegate Bitcoin into an investment pet rock and halt its usage as a currency. Spooky vibes. It's interesting, too. This comes off of news we were talking about last week where, of course, sailor is amassing all of this. Bitcoin's well known that he has dollar cost. averaged his way into micro strategy holding like over 1% of all Bitcoin supply. And he was talking about launching a micro strategy Bitcoin bank essentially on top of that. Well, that is not bankless

at all. That is all custodied. And so like maybe, maybe, David, Michael Saylor is doing what's in Michael Saylor's best interest and not in the interest of this decentralized bankless movement that most of us are here for. There are two pillars of Bitcoin that you do not violate. One, 21 million units, which Michael Saylor loves and knows and it's spouses and the other is self-custody, strong property rights, permissionless custody over your assets. You have to have both. The reason why, like, actually those fit very well together is because the inability to inflate Bitcoin is property rights over the amount of Bitcoins that you have. 100%. But you also have to match it with actual real property rights, the ability to hold your own

bitcoins. And Saylor just denying the other half, the other yin to the yang of Bitcoin system is kind of just like an affront, an offense to the idea of Bitcoin is sacrilege, which all the takes on the OGs repeated out this week. Eric Voorhe says, Saylor is getting trash for the self-custody comment as he should. Vitalik said, I'll happily say that I think Michael Saylor's comments are bat shit insane. He seems to be explicitly arguing for a regulatory, a capture approach to protecting crypto. Eric Wall, I thought, put this meme together that I think encapsulates everyone's ideas. This meme format is the guy riding the bike who sticks a stick through the bike's pegs and then falls over.

Churchill sees the gold, Roosevelt seized the gold, Germany sees the gold, Japan sees the gold, Russia sees the gold. There's nowhere on earth you could have kept your gold. And then now in 2024, Michael Saylor says, Loll, no one is going to kick down your door and seize the gold that never happened. Fucking paranoid cyber hornets.

Yeah, so kind of a hot take. So there is actually some people saying, actually this is positive EVE from Sailor. Sailor is being listened to by the status quo, by the incumbents, by the banks, by the regulators. And this is like a good look for Bitcoin. If you have like Mr. Bitcoin saying like, oh, yeah, you know, the old system is like totally fine and good. Like Bitcoin has got to pay their taxes.

It's totally okay to custody it with the system as like a prisoner's dilemma strategy of trying to cooperate with the system to make Bitcoin less sketchy. That's kind of the defense of Saylor, which I think kind of there's something there. Is that what Saylor is actually doing or is he actually, you know, should we take him at, face value, I kind of think we should take him at face value. Yeah. Personally, I don't think there's anything like there. I think that this is just a little bit of sailor bootlicking. This is the comment Mitchell Hoddle says, Sailor's willing to stomach criticism from the maxis in order to make Bitcoin less sketchy and provide cover for institutions. That was basically the case. And he was talking about the crypto holders not paying their taxes.

Like self-custy has nothing to do with not paying your taxes. Yeah. It has to do with like not having a third party have all of the like own all of the fiat and all that you get is nai u you it's i mean it's the entire purpose for for bitcoin for crypto for for going bankless i got to say it was uh relieving to see some of the crypto ogs you know come out and and say hey this is not okay by the way sailor kind of retracted a little bit of this at least he had a tweet statement i don't if you saw that we don't have it in the show but he was just basically like i support the right of all bitcoin holders to like be self-custody he didn't exactly apologize for what he said He just sort of, I guess, reiterated that he is supportive of self-custody.

So maybe he's trying to walk that back. But Bitcoiners should be wary of this type of thing. Everybody in crypto should be wary of this type of thing. Culture Matters. Did you see this, you know, farce satire book title? It's called the Compliance Standard. Michael Saylor's biggest fans. Rather than the Bitcoin standard.

I think there's an element of that here. Fun fact, David. You ready for this fun fact? I am ready. Right now, balances of. ether on centralized exchanges are lower than Bitcoin. They continue to be lower than Bitcoin. So of all of the ether that's out there, only 10.4% is inside of centralized exchanges. For Bitcoin, that number is actually 15%. Okay. So 10% for ether, 15% for Bitcoin. And you can see kind of like

a flippinging that has happened here over time with ether started out with more uncentralized exchanges. And now, you know, where we are at this point, 2024, is less in centralized exchanges and more in like decentralized exchanges and L2s and kind of like the bankless world. So does this mean, David, that ether, the asset, the monetary unit is more bankless than Bitcoin? You ready for me to, sorry, douse some water on this? Sure. Go ahead. I'm pretty sure that this charts, we need this to be fact checked by the listener because I think this is true. The percentage of centralized exchange ether that they go in stake like Coinbase CB, ETH, or anything staked by Coinbase is not reflected in this chart.

And so like, yeah, they got us. Yeah, they got us. Yeah. So there, there's an anomaly there where any, if ether is being staked by centralized exchange, it doesn't count as being on the central, on the, on the, on the, centralized exchange. I think the, uh, whatever metric we're using and we should get like kind of the right metrics for this, this is a really important dimension of crypto, which is percent that's decentralized. The percent that's in, you know, like held by by, by code. and not by third party institutions and intermediaries, whether this is Bitcoin or whether this is ether or any any asset. It's all about going bankless. It's all about decentralized finance.

David, we got a lot coming up next. The scroll, Airdrop is live. So, of course, everyone is really happy with this and grateful. How's the token doing? And who got it? Also, the World Coin L2 has launched. What is this about? So not just cracking on the week, but Worldcoin with that L2.

And some uplifting news about the Binance exec. who was stuck in a Nigerian jail. We get to all that and more. Before we do, we're on thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening?

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Zero Gravity is turning the dream of on-chain AI into reality. Curious about how AI and Web3 can reshape the future, you can visit Zero to explore the infrastructure as revolutionizing decentralized AI. Pretty cool announcement out of the world of Across and Uniswap. Uniswap in the app and also in their wallet has integrated across kind of directly into

their front end and then also when the transaction is made into the transaction itself. And so Across's intent-based bridging has now gone directly into the Uniswap swapping. And so you can swap and bridge right into Uniswap. inside of the app. And this is overall a part of the story of Ethereum's layer two's kind of just being woven together by various different technologies, this one being across and intense. And it's also pretty cool if you want to go from layer two to layer two, at least the one that they showed in the demo from Arbitrum to optimism, two seconds and two cents. And so this is a bridging standard, a bridging solution being integrated right into Uniswap, Ethereum's

biggest exchange. And I would have just imagined this is kind of actually the first step. We can see this today because people who are using uniswap kind of know a thing or two about bridging and all this stuff. And now that solution rather than, because usually I would have to go to uniswap and then over to a cross. And now these two solutions, these two products are being collapsed together. And I think as we go on, even more abstraction layers just kind of smooth this entire process over. I've always wondered to what extent Ethereum's fragmentation problem would be, quote unquote, solved just by like intense. You were talking about bridges just a minute ago. And by that, you meant like across this particular, your take on bridging and getting assets from one place to another, one chain to another is through using intents.

And we've talked about intents for like a while now, probably, you know, 18 months plus. But to see them go into production and some standardization around this, because correct me if I'm wrong, I think the next step is a ERC 7683 standard that's co-authored by both Uniswap Labs and across. I expect that to be widely deployed across the super chain and then probably picked up by other layer two environments. Anyway, I'm kind of like wondering to what extent you think intense will just basically solve the fragmentation problem. I don't think it'll get us to 100%, but there could be the case if you see standards like this widely deployed that it gets to like 70, 80%.

And again, the feeling for the user is just like the chain is fully abstracted. You know, like my asset can move from here to here in three seconds. That's what a cross in Uniswap is doing right now. And it won't feel like you're crossing over bridges because Intense is kind of like, you know, solving the gaps in between. I think Intense and a few other interrupt standards solutions start to fill in Ethereum's fragmentation from like the top down as in like the kind of the top of the tech stack. And then there's also some like bottom up solutions as well. They literally talk about the bottom of the tech stack is in the Ethereum protocol. And so some snarking needs to be added to the Ethereum Layer 1.

We need to increase the capacity of the Ethereum Layer 1. And all of a sudden, the solutions that are higher up, these interop standards, these intents all just work more effectively. And we just kind of just start to fill in the gaps between all of these different chains. And then ultimately everything just gets completely fixed, completely defragmented by the cosmetic layer, which is just the app layer. Scroll's firstirdrop is here. Let's talk about this for a minute.

So what happened this week? What is Scroll for people who don't know? this is another layer two. They're not an optimistic roll-up. This is a ZK roll-up. What's unique about scroll? So as we have enjoyed EVM equivalency across many of the other optimistic roll-ups like Arbitrum and Optimism, this is the first ZK-Evm that is one-to-one equivalent with all

the other smart contracts that have ever been built and deployed, including all the toolings around the Ethereum ecosystem. So they just announced their SCR, their scroll, airdrop. So with a total supply of $1 billion scroll, we have a little. have 190 million scroll in circulation from the airdrop. It's clucking in at just under a billion dollar fully diluted valuation with a 177 million market cap. Price currently clucking in at 93 cents.

So who received the airdrop there has been a very long like air drop farming campaign just to earn marks, which is kind of their points. 570,000 wallets will receive 5.5% of the token supply. And so there, of course, were eligible participants. some ecosystem projects, industry contributors, pretty standard air drop campaign. The airdrop claim is open on October 22nd, which was two days ago. You can go to claim. Or you can go to bankless claimables, bankless.com slash claimables to see if you earned a scroll

irdrop. That claim period is open for 90 days. So do not forget. That's why we have bankless claimables. And so you guys have 90 days to claim your scroll air drop if you received any of the marks. There were some complaints, as there are, Ryan, for all air drops. There were people making complaints.

An account put, so yeah, there's some analysis about who got what. Apparently, the top 100 whales farmed 30% of all of the marks, which kind of compressed what the long tail was able to receive. A wallet with about 1,000 marks. Again, points will get about $98. And the claim here is that some of the whales were able to just gain. the game sucked up so much of the supply, leaving very little for the long tail. But this is also the same story that we've seen with every single air drop. We know that the air drop meta is broken. Scroll has been doing their point farming systems, and even before we all realize that the

air drop mechanism was broken. And I remember we did this episode entitled, This Cycle is Cooked, talking about this era of token distributions. There's always eras of token distributions. points farming and airdrops, seems to have been cooked. One of the complainers was pretty straightforward, who talked about this saying, seeing Scroll launch at a $240 million market cap, it's down since then. It shows me that the universe is healing.

Every VC in their latest round is down 30% from their initial investment. By the way, I farmed Skroll with 300 wallets and pass their scribble flawlessly, perhaps one of the guys contributing to the ending of this meta. I still fud done the lattice of all before bothering to claim my tokens. sometimes only sometimes it's more important that your enemies lose that you win.

This is the people that the kind of people that we're rewarding with this AirDrop meta. Please move on from AirDrops. We need to find a better way. These accounts are so blatant about it. They're like, this is such a scam. And ha-ha, I was one of the scams. And I like, you guys let me scam you. This is your fault.

Yeah, like ha-ha, suckers. That's why this meta is so cooked. It's also one thing that was pretty interesting. It actually heated up Ethereum blobs. So while people were claiming all of their scroll tokens, blob capacity, blob consumption jumped up. And so we had about like 12 hours, maybe even 18 hours of blob contention. Price discovery?

Price discovery for blobs. Blobs started to get sold by these different layer twos. I think Ethereum collected something like $15,000 during this era from layer two's buying layer one blobs. Ethan's back, David. Value of cruel. We fixed ether. That has since gone down.

we are now once again below the blob target, which is good. It's like, in my opinion, way too early to be selling blobs. I personally want to sell blobs for free for years. You do. You're a free blob guy. It's cool to see that like, you know, the pricing mechanism, the pricing mechanism blobs actually does need to get fixed, but like layer two's are buying blobs. Can Bly Blobs will pay Ether the Layer 1 protocol for blobs. But like right now we have a target of three blobs in the future. We need to target. We are going to target. We are going to target. in the Ethereum protocol, 256 blobs. I hope blobs stay free until then,

because I want more layer twos buying more blobs. I want Ethereum Settlement Network to expand how many orders of magnitude is that? Two orders of magnitude from three to 256, almost two orders of magnitude, because that's the roll-up-centric roadmap. I want all of the settlement networks to settle down to Ethereum.

Then we can start talking about blob price discovery, but you can only imagine when there is 256 blob targets being consumed by, you know, bagillions of layer two's, how much net de blob demand there might be. This is a small taste of that future. We don't want that future to happen yet. We want to do some penetrative pricing in the blob market

is what we're seeing today. It's actually hilarious to me how the market can interpret this bearish if it wants or can interpret this bullish. And it's like really up to you as an investor. You can either interpret what's going on with Ethereum and it's not burning anymore because blobs are very cheap. You can either think that's like, bullish for either the asset or you could think that it's bearish for either the asset because it's

not accruing value at any point at this point in time right and so it's just like the market sentiment that we're in I feel like um Ethereum's having a hard time on the narrative side like winning right so you know now people are pointing to you blob space being consumed and they're like well there's not enough blob space or they're looking at the 15K burned and they're like just 15K what a joke of an asset you know what I mean like it's just uh It's funny how this can be interpreted multiple ways. My chosen interpretation, right, is that similar to yours, this goes in cycles. Ethereum blobs is going to get cheap, penetrative pricing.

L2 is kind of hooked into the network effect of Ethereum. And then ether is exported as a monetary asset. Eth is money. And it's net beneficial for all of crypto because we have, you know, decentralized chains and also ETH as a monetary asset inside of these layer two economies. you know, this is good for ether, whether it is burning at the moment or not. That's my chosen interpretation, but others are super bearish, like for whatever reason. Oh, you're like, we're going to expand more blob space and more L2s to take all of the Ethereum's users,

and this is bad for Eith, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of almost like done with the debate here. We'll just see what happens. Yeah. Like you said at the beginning, it's conviction time. We have the data. We've had the conversations. We've had the debates.

Now we just need them to play out. All right, so Cracken announced Inc their layer two. Scroll launched their AirDrop. And now World Coin launches the World Chain Layer 2 built once again as an OP stack chain inside of the Super Chain. Super Chain kind of just like collecting some dubs left and right here. But this is actually definitely one of the more interesting Layer 2s. And it's going to use Reth, the client out of Paradigm, the Georgios Constantopoulos client. It's like a hyper-scale ETH client, right?

EVM client. Yep, super scalable. Smart. ETH will be the native token, but users can pay fees using the WorldCoin token WLD as well. But also, interestingly, I think this is the coolest thing. World ID holders, people that have the World ID app and have scanned their eyeball, will have priority access to block space. So it's human reserved block space.

Oh, humans get the advantage, not? Humans get to front run the bots, yeah. And there's an allowance for some free gas for a transaction. So if you are verified human, you get an allowance of free gas to transact on the world chain. Ryan, do you know how many users there are of World ID? How many World ID people have scan their eyeball and have the app? I do because I'm looking right at the number in my notes, David. But I didn't before this.

So why don't you tell me? Seven million. There are seven million world ID holders. Yeah. And so this has always been the strategy of WorldCoin is you pay for the token to get people to scan their eyeballs. download the app and then get on chain. It's still,

whenever you say scan their eyeballs, it sounds so like dystopian and sketchy. Have you been orbed yet? Have you got an orb? I have not been armed. My personal policy is that I will not be orbed until there's a very large incentive for me to get on world chain.

And as soon as there's a good reason for me to get on world chain, I'll go get my eyeballs scanned. Oh yeah. Right now, you're not worried about kind of the privacy of it or like you don't think it's like a biometric, you know, dystopian, the whole idea of getting,

I think the technology checks out. I mean, I'm not a ZK expert, but like, I do believe in the ethos. Yeah, they say, yeah, they're going to do with my eyeball. Like, they can't do anything. Yeah, your eyeballs's already on the internet in all sorts of ways, probably, right? I accidentally signed up for clear one time. Like, I know that was a mistake. It's like, you know, the 23 and me, like you get your DNA tested. And that sounds like a really bad thing. Oh my God, some third party company has my DNA. And like, you know, I agree with that. like I understand why that that feels really bad. And yet also like somebody could grab my DNA, extract my DNA.

If I just like, you know, leave a skin imprint on a glass that I use at a restaurant or something like this or a follicle of my hair false and they have my DNA that way. I don't know. I think there's an argument for a dystopia, of course, of like one world ID and it's like run by corporations. If we can keep it to centralize, like maybe that's not so bad. And also. It's the same thing with with layer twos and fraud proofs and being a stage two is.

Like, sure, the sequencer can suppress your transaction, but you always have your property rights. It's just like you use fraud proofs. You use zero knowledge proofs to have strong assurances. And it's the same thing with your eyeball. You get your eyeball screen and you have the assurances of ZK that no one can do anything evil with it. Yeah. And I might be more worried at this point in time in the dystopia that's coming from a different direction of like, I have no idea who's a bot and who's a human online. Right.

And now we have like, you know, AI agents that are spinning up meme coins. You don't fully know whether that thing is, that's another story, but that thing is human operated or not. And like, who are the humans and who are the bots? You could have a dystopia that way if we can't separate, if we don't have a proof of humanity without a passport. So there you go. Okay. One thing that's interesting, though, I want to ask you. So Worldcoin is going to be in the super chain along with Tracken, Inc, along with base, along with Uniswap.

Zora. And so if the world chain specializes in kind of like decentralized proof of humanity, that's going to be available to this growing network of chains and economies inside of the super chain. You could come up with some really interesting primitives that way. Shared liquidity across all of them. I mean, once they fix the interop fragmentation problem, that could be a pretty interesting sector. So the World ID app used to integrate with OP Mainnet. Actually, I can remember the number of somebody fact check on me on this, but the like share of transactions on OP Mainnet that were WorldCoin was something like six.

C or 70%, like stablecoin transfers, world ID like setups. That's why they're starting up their own chain because they have their own sovereign blockchain. And like the same pattern of, so like the world ID, world chain is taking all their transactions away from OP main net and they're taking it onto world chain. And it's the same pattern of just like the Ethereum layer one is getting, is being layer twos or parasitic to the Ethereum layer one. Super chain chains are parasitic to the OP main net. Because they're all deploying their super chain chain. But the one difference is that all super chain chains do pay 15% of sequencer fees to the OP MayNet.

And so OP MayNet does have their take rate, their 15% take rate that the Ethereum Layer 1 does not. But the Ethereum Layer 1 as a credibly neutral settlement layer just takes the blob fees, which again are free right now. It's the same pattern. It's a fractal pattern of these chains settling on chains, settling on chains. Yes, yes. And like look at kind of the upside, right? So you're just talking about value accrual of like, you know, that may be going away or being diluted for ETH holders.

But on the same token, 8 million users? It's not users yet because they're not fully on chain, but like potential users growing to 100 million, growing to who knows, how many like world chain is going to onboard. And having ETH as a monetary unit inside of that chain, I mean, I just think that's like net bullish for ETH. when you're asking the question of where all the users and you have eight million potential users of world world chain so yeah that's the tradeoff here let me take you to central bankers david because they you know the first they ignore you then they laugh at you it's not a line that i enjoy

well first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they then they fight you then you win i think we are getting even closer to the than they fight you phase uh there were two interesting papers released this week one by the european central bank that claimed that those who acquired Bitcoin in an earlier date, basically it was an unfair system because it would, non-holders should recognize, they said, that Bitcoin's rise is fueled by wealth redistribution at their expense. There are compelling reasons to advocate for policies that curb Bitcoin's growth or even eliminate it.

The stakes are high. Pro-Bitcoin politicians could skew wealth distribution further, threatening societal stability if non-holders don't push back. So this is a European central banker authoring a paper that's saying basically like hard money, strong property rights outside of the hands of the central bankers and the nation state is like we can't move the dials as much on wealth redistribution. So they're kind of like waking up and realizing that. Simultaneously last week, I thought this was a really interesting paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Recall the Federal Reserve Bank has all of these

kind of like regional chapters and this is one of them. And they produced a paper that suggested that assets like Bitcoin should be taxed or banned in order to help government's maintain deficits. Help them maintain. This is them staying the quiet part out loud again. So they said in an economy where the government tries to maintain permanent deficits using nominal debt, Bitcoin creates problems for policy implementation. And this is a quote.

It introduces balanced budget trap, an alternative state where the government is forced to balance its budget. Oh, no. An alternative where the government is forced to balance our budget. Oh, no. And so what do they recommend in their conclusion? They recommend, and this is a quote, a legal prohibition against Bitcoin that can restore unique implementation of permanent primary deficits or also a direct tax on Bitcoin.

They're basically saying like, hey, if this whole crypto Bitcoin thing takes off, then we lose the ability to run this thing at deficit and print money. And it's like, yeah, that's what we've been saying. Yeah, yeah. That's why we're here. That's what we've been saying the entire time. So, but at first they were ignoring it. Then they were kind of laughing at it. And now I think we are moving, this is week by week, we'll see this. And probably over years and maybe over decades, the central bankers are like, oh, shoot, this is, this is picking up. This is actually working. And they'll shift more into the now they fight us face. We'll see how that goes. I just love it when we watch like nation

state powers that be just like tussle with this idea of Bitcoin. Remember that quote like two or three weeks ago where the one of the risks of the IMF saw of Bitcoin El Salvador is that like we need we need to control public access to Bitcoin? Yeah. You just think that you can do that? Like the statements that they're making are just super indicative of exactly the thesis of permissionless finance, permissionless money on the internet. And it's just like, you guys are just saying this out loud for us to hear this? Like I thought this was all in smoke filled rooms. Nope. They're there. It's actually saying that this will allow them to no longer print as much money as they want to.

That's so funny. All right, a tale of two governments, a tale of two powers that be. On the flip side of things, the city of Buenos Aires, which has 3.6 million citizens, by the way, is the first city to issue digital IDs to its citizens. So there is this application app called Quark ID inside of Buenos Aires. It's a local app for accessing municipal services, documents, documents like your birth. records, documents like health care records, drivers licenses. And so all of this is going on chain with verifiable credentials and ZK proofs to let users show that a document has indeed been authenticated by the government without disclosing the information that is relevant to the task case. The classic example of like, okay, like why, how can zero knowledge proofs be used to help people in their daily lives? The classic example is when I'm going up to a bar and they say, ID, please. Let me check if you're 20, 21 years old or not. What are they also getting with my ID?

They're getting my name, my last name, my birth, my birth date, my address. Your photo. Your eyes. Their or being used. Eyes, yeah. And all they need to know is this binary, are you over or not over 21? That's the only thing that they need to know. You disclose all this extra information, mainly your address being the big one. Yep. And so ZK. Proofs has been like, well, you can actually just submit a ZK. Proof to tell somebody if you are indeed over or not over 20. You need to know all of the rest of the information. It's just a binary yes is over 21 or no is not. Yes, correct. And this is what is being rolled out to 3.6 million citizens of Buenos Aires.

So what kind of documents can be stored there? They say over 60 different types, birth certificates, gross income taxes, vaccination data. But also importantly, no third party, not even the municipality of Buenos Aires, has control over the documents. So the documents are trustless. So cool. They're trustless. Once they are issued by the government, They are bearer assets by the account that controls them. Thanks to the ZK proof. Thanks to the ZK proof system, user data is protected against identity theft and data tampering, which is so sick. All of this is deployed on ZKSink.

I think one of the cooler wins of the crypto industry coming out of ZKSink here. My prediction here, this is on the ZKSink era. I think Quark ID is going to eventually in the future. This is my hypothesis, my prediction. Quark ID will make the quirk. will make the Quark ID ZK chain on the elastic chain, and then we will have the chain for Buenos Aires, and then therefore, Argentina is getting the chain.

And protecting citizen privacy at kind of the base level. You know, one of the most dystopian things I do in modern life is, I must do this like multiple times a month now. Whenever I'm like moving money with like TradFi or like getting, you know, credit investor or something like this, you have to do the, your selfie of yourself and you submit your driver's license, or your passport and they do the selfie of yourself and they get you to turn left turn right like

they scan your face and this is going to some third party company i have no idea probably in china they have all of this information about me my passport my life my driver's license is just basically everywhere and um like they have a perfect scan of my face too i mean if we have zk cryptography you don't need to share any of that information it can just cryptographically check whether i am know, AML, KYC, or, and, you know, like resident of the U.S. or not. I don't have to share all of that information. This is such an upgrade, and this is going to protect us from so many, like, privacy failures of the modern Internet and, like, the modern digital landscape that it's very

bullish. Who says crypto doesn't have real-world utility, David, okay? It's not just about number go up here. At Bankless, we say we want to help you front-run the opportunity. I actually did an interview with the leader of the court-guerite effort, Diego Fernandez, who is the Secretary of Innovation for Buenos Aires. He's like right next to Javier Malay back in January because we like to front run the opportunity here on Bankless.

So if you listen to that, you kind of saw this coming from a long way off. If you are curious about what's going on there, there is a link in the show notes to get that done to watch that. Some uplifting news to close us off on the week. I was so glad to see this. So Nigeria has dropped the money laundering charges against the finance exec, Tigran Gambirion, who was stuck in jail in absolutely atrocious conditions.

He's been stuck in jail for seven months. His health was affected. I mean, last time, like, people saw him in a clip, a video clip. He's, like, walking with a limp. Anyway, a lawyer representing Nigeria's government prosecution said that Tigran wasn't serving a key role at Binance. Finally, they're admitting this. And they were going to let him out and drop the charges.

This is after almost eight months being held in custody in a Nigerian jail. But, you know, thankfully, this comes to an end now. I'm not sure what kind of pressure was pushed behind the scenes to actually make this happen. I'm sure there's a lot of folks that were involved, hopefully in the U.S. government side of things. Hopefully we did something. Yeah. Certainly, Binance was pressing for this the entire time. And from my perspective, Tigran was basically a political captive.

He was just like nabbed because what the Nigerian government didn't want Binance doing things, messing with their fiat system, messing with their banking system. system, giving citizens economic freedom. They were doing the kind of a central banker thing that we were talking about, which is, you know, probably coming to many economies. Anyway, great news there. Somewhat uplifting way to end the week. And that's the all the news of the week. We don't really have a meme of the week. We kind of a tweet of the week. I didn't put this in the agenda. One of the bankless team members did, but this is the tweet from me because, of course, ETH price comparatively, not great compared to Bitcoin, not great compared to Seoul.

I tweeted out when I invested my entire net worth into Ether in 2018, it was under the thesis that most other crypto market participants are dumb and wrong. And I'm grateful to have a second opportunity to do that all over again. And that's kind of what I feel. It hasn't been this contrarian, I think, since 2018 and 2019. And it's starting to kind of feel like that level of contrarianness once again. And I think that's pretty cool because it feels comfy, feels like I'm at home. David, ending the week with some Eith conviction here. I got to imagine this tweet was not very popular on that app that people call Twitter, right? I'm sure that. Well, Twitter's pastime, crypto Twitter's pastime is just like harping on bankless from like whatever corner.

Like if you're an Ethereum, you harp on banklets. If you're a salonap person, you harp on bankless. If you're a Bitcoiner, you harp on bankless. I'm just honored that bankless has so much contention about it. People really care one way or another. Yep. That's right. Well, Bankless Nation, thank you for joining us on the week. We appreciate it. As always, got to end with this. You know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in.

None of this was investment advice. You can't take our conviction and make it yours. You can't copy trade that, right, David? But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.