Bankless - ROLLUP: The Inscription Infestation | Solana Flips Ethereum Volume | Restaking Heats Up

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup 3rd Week of December, 2023   ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT   —— 💳 AMBIRE | V2 Browser Extension is now Live! https://bankless.cc/ambire-v2   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:   🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠   🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku   ——— 0:00 Intro 3:10 David in Argentina https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1737955700415037856 4:40 Markets https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://www.coingecko.com/ 11:45 Bitwise ETF Commercial https://twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1736755061127020794 13:50 Phishing Scams https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/approval-phishing-cryptocurrency-scams-2023/ 17:30 Solana Flippens https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/1735842380257869974 https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1737414501610479893 21:00 Celsius vs Ethereum https://twitter.com/JedBreed/status/1737311679795400788   27:00 Inscriptions Invasions https://twitter.com/0xCygaar/status/1736581628259107314 https://x.com/0xCygaar/status/1736581694826992071 https://twitter.com/Dogetoshi/status/1736813432983130186 https://dune.com/hildobby/inscriptions https://twitter.com/BFreshHB/status/1735837409336520935 https://twitter.com/hkalodner/status/1735768514433032432 https://mempool.space/   33:20 Gary Gensler and the SEC https://twitter.com/GaryGensler/status/1735686262625902968 https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/gensler-coinbase-petition-121523 35:30 Coinbase Super PAC https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1735716481541996640 https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1736714975152869845 https://www.standwithcrypto.org/ 37:20 Elizabeth Warren Strikes Back https://theblockchainassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sen.-Warren-Letter-to-CEO-Kristin-Smith.pdf https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1737119021483557347 https://twitter.com/CampbellJAustin/status/1737132781015114003   44:00 EigenLayer 1 Billion TVL https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1737516837506851207 https://restaking.nethermind.io/ https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1737550720092840385 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1736903040605794511 45:50 zkSync Hyperchain https://twitter.com/zksync/status/1735297361251897405 46:20 Celestia on Arbitrum Orbit https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg/status/1737156267645546650 https://x.com/jackmelnick_/status/1737540854477173065 47:45 Solana Phone https://x.com/solanamobile/status/1735835498025832651 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=solana+saga&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1 https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1737501717808185544 50:50 3AC Assets Frozen https://www.theblock.co/post/268758/bvi-court-freezes-three-arrows-capital-founders-1-billion-in-assets 51:35 Solana Hacker Guilty https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-security-engineer-international-technology-company-pleads-guilty-hacking-two https://blockworks.co/news/nirvana-hacker-pleads-guilty 52:40 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/iiintimus/status/1735630582904721425   —— Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://bankless.com/disclosures 

Oh, you're going to make me say this? Yeah. Salon flipped Ethereum in what metric and what is our take on that? Bankless Nation, it's roll-up time. And I think, David, this is our last roll-up of 2023. So happy holidays to the Bankless Nation wherever you are listening. Man, it's been a crazy year, hasn't it? It certainly has.

It's our last weekly roll-up. Next week, the Bankless listeners are going to get the yearly roll-up. We're doing the whole entire year, and that's going to ship, of course, the last week of December. And we know that because we pre-recorded it this week. We are not working during the holidays. But during next week, actually, I think we're releasing four podcasts. Something crazy. You have some pent up.

You know it's a bull market when we are doing minimum one podcast a day. And sometimes people are doing two. You will have so much content. So much content. Unwrapping presence next week. So I hope you guys enjoy. But David, we got a packed agenda today. What's first on our list?

Inscriptions have had their exodus from Bitcoin and now are infecting every single chain that it can get his hands on one by one by one. The inscription locuses are taking down chains. We're going to talk about that. Big clog, I guess. Like you're clogging up your drain pipes. I want to hear your take on that. I don't think that one's going to stick.

We also have commercials. Hopefully these stick. Bitwise released its first Bitcoin ETF. I think the big question is how many millions of people are going to see the Bitcoin ETF. But after that, Elizabeth Warren writes a nassiegram to our entire industry telling to us to stop defending ourselves and just bow down and take it. Why are you fighting back? Why are you fighting back? Then we got a ton of crypto-native stuff to talk about as well. What else is coming up? I can layer. They hit a billion in Eith, total locked value.

So restaking, that narrative's heating up. I think we'll see a lot more of that in 2024. I know we got some episodes tuned. David, we got to tell them before we get in about this fantastic wallet is coming. This is a next generation wallet because it's based on smart contract technology. Tell them what it is. The word smart in it. Yeah. So the Ambire team is launching V-2 wallet. Ambire was one of the first smart contract wallet to really ship a wallet into mainnet into users' hands. They're launching V2 updated for the year 2024 through a browser extension. So browser extension wallet like we already know, except when you click on it, you get a smart contract wallet, not a vanilla EOA wallet. So entering, of course, the world.

of account abstraction and smart contract wallets. There's a bunch of things that Ambyer wallet can do for you. If you want to feel the power of a smart contract wallet, there is a link in the show notes. Bankless.c.c.combs.combeer-vier-vier v2. Probably just go click the link. Oh, definitely go click the link. This is something you're going to want to test.

It also works with the hardware wallets too. So Treasor, Ledger, Grid Plus, lattice, whatever hardware wallet you have. David, we got something else to mention too, because you are, right now, you're in a, the state of Washington. So you're just outside of Seattle somewhere, I believe, recording from your childhood room, I think, although you correct. Almost. Not your childhood. Crypto childhood. Oh, wow. A different kind of childhood where you're maybe born again into crypto.

Oh, God. That's right. That's how it felt. It's definitely how about it. Okay. But you're going to Argentina. Is that right? Tell us about it, David. How can we experience a bankless in Argentina? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. There is a bankless meetup in Argentina. Friday, January 5th. TBD on that date, that is the current date that is locked in, but we have 100 slots. And in the one hour that I sent this invitation out, 80 people. He's telling you.

So we might need to move it a different day. TBD might be Thursday. If it's not Friday, it's Thursday. No. Okay, so on Friday, you can't rent out the whole bar. You can only rent out a part of the bar, which is what we did. On Thursday, we could rent out the whole bar. Anyways, either on Friday.

The current time is Friday, January 5th from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the wine bar in Palermo, in the Palermo neighborhood. If we get so much more demand, which I'm guessing we are, we might move it to Thursday. I might as we move it today. Guys, because David is spending, I believe, what, two weeks in January, Argentina? One week in Buenos Aires, one week in El Chalten, one week in Torils del Paiene. Yeah. Well, I really want to hear what the crypto scene is like in Argentina because I know I've known. Yodo Se Quantos, Personas. a bank list and Buenos Aires, but apparently much. Much of purtones.

Yes. Absolutely. So if you want to see David in Argentina, go check that out. All right. Let's talk about the markets this week, shall we? Bitcoin price. And this is like the year-ender because I don't think we give our like up-to-date prices in the yearly roll-up.

We get yesterday's prices in the year-to-roll-up. Today we give today's prices, which is actually yesterday for current listeners. Oh, wow. So once again, thanks to Cracken. We don't know why we do this section. We don't know why we do it. But thanks to Cracken, because I know these charts are looking really good. And they've held us up all year.

But you know what? Let's just just salute Cracken, salute these charts, salute our progress. Sir, if you want to scroll out, you need to set larger candles. You are at the one hour candles. You need to go one day candles. Thank you, David. Here we go. One day.

This is what 22. I like the charts, the yearly charts. This is what 2023 looked like for us. Exclusively up. That is an up chart. We started at 16K. We started the year with a short squeeze from 16K over to like $23,000 on Bitcoin. Look at us now.

Look at us now. $44,000 Bitcoin. Great year for Bitcoin. And how is that on the week, David? Tell me about that because I know that's important in the roll up. We got some muted response at the top of the market cap stack. Bitcoin up 1% on the week. But, you know, 1% a week. Can't complain about that. Bitcoin starting the week at 43100, ending the week at 43,500, up a modest 1%. We love it. We love it.

I think that's about 153% on the year. So big, big year for Bitcoin here. Let's give the same treatment to Ethereum. I'm going to zoom all the way out on the crack and charge here. Okay, the beginning of January 2023, we were 1,200 each price. Just above. not loz, but just above 1,000, Eth. Now, where are we? We are at $2,200. So a choppy, crabby, up chart for Eth. That is a upy crab pattern right there.

Makes me a little crabby. I feel like it should be hired. Why is Eth like not following the market, not trending with the market? I mean, there's 10,000 different answers. One of the answers is that it like overperformed versus the market. in 2022. ETH was the best asset to hold in 2020. You lost the least amount of money.

If you were down further in the market cap, like you lost more money. And so part of ETH's lack of performance in 2023 was because if, you know, it was overperformed in 2022. It was the consensus bet to hold in 2022. And then as soon as risk went on the table, there was like, why would you buy ETH?

Everyone already has ETH. It's not going to pump like some of the low market cap stack. And, and then also like, Celsius has been, I think we're going to talk about this, Celsius has been dumping like a bajillion dollars, $250 million of ETH over the last week. And Michael Saylor's been buying a ton of Bitcoin. And so Eath can just not capture a narrative. It can't capture a wind. I think some people would look at this and be like, guys, you're 80% up. Like, be thankful for that. People in, you know, the stock market. Trad people. You're like, you almost doubled.

Like, why are you upset about that? But, yeah, I, I think ETH has had an okay year, but not a strong year for sure. So we'll have to see whether that turned around. I mean, think about this. Bitcoin started the year at $16,000 ending the year at $43,000. That's almost a 3x. It's almost a tripling. To say like Eth almost doubled, these are like different numbers.

Yeah, I know. Okay, how about the ratio down or up? I mean, a little down. 0.051. It touched 0.05. It touches basically the lower that has been in a long-ass time. Nobody's looking at the ratio, except for the ratio, except for the bank this weekly roll up now.

Total crypto market cap, 1.7 trillion. So the lows, if I recall it, January 1st of 2023, were about $800 billion, maybe $840, $850 billion or so. So that's like a nice doubling on total crypto market cap. Oh, more than a doubling, yeah. Yeah, I mean, pretty impressive. How about Layer 2's? What did we see in terms of growth?

Layer 2's had an astounding year in 2023. At the start of 2020, we had $3 billion deposited onto layer 2s. We currently have $16 billion. I outperformed most metrics in terms of dollar value out of anything that you can see. And then activity, actually, like usage of layer 2s, I think also did a nice old like 7X. We are currently at 7 Ethereum's, studying new highs. Thanks to inscriptions. We'll talk about that in a second.

But sending new highs. And I would say accelerating highs in terms of layer 2 activity dominance. Yeah. Okay. Tell me about the movers because we got some lower down the stack market cap movers. We talk about a couple of tokens. Which one do you want to pick out this week, David? The one that is unequivocally at the top of the chart right this week is say, say with a 50% move week over week and 140% move on the 30 day time period. So say what is the market cap of say right now? it is scroll up a little bit. Fully diluted valuation, $4 billion, $4 billion with a float of $900 million. So like 4 to 1-ish float. What is saying for the people don't remember?

It's, I think it's a parallelized EVM. I think they just pivoted into being a parallelized Ethereum virtual machine chain. And there's a crop of these showing up recently. And I kind of think it's going to be a pretty hot narrative in 2024, layer ones that are using the Ethereum virtual machine, but they've, you know, taken it, they've decontrifice. constructed it and then recomposed it to be just far more performance, far more parallelized. Monad is doing this, say, pivoted to doing this because they realized the monon strategy was correct. And I think that's going to be a big thing in. Yeah, I think so.

I think we'll get Monad sometime in like the first half of 2024, which will be another one to this list. And you could see kind of the justification for it. To me, it kind of flows down from Ethereum. So you have Ethereum, what's that? You know, 250 billion or so market. cap and what is Salana now? Is that about 40 billion market cap? Something like that? 37, 37.

37. And then you have say over here and people are like, well, if this is like Solana but faster and EVM and it's only $4 billion. It has everything we like about the EVM and none of the baggage of the EVM. Uh-huh. So if it was valued at Solana's valuation, it would be a nice 10x, right? And that's how these types of markets work now that you have a narrative, which seems need to have some product to market fit. Narrative, like, fundamentals. Who knows? You can't really

separate the two during the bull market in this way. It has to kind of burn off during the bear. But yeah, you see this. Look, they're comparing, they're benchmarking Salon and they're saying, yeah, Salana does 10,000 TPS. We do 20,000. We do 20,000. Parallelized. Yeah, it's look, it's, it's a high TPS layer one season. That's what it's been for the last couple of months. Moving on back to Bitcoin. You saw this commercial going out this week, Ryan? This is a commercial from Matt Hogan from Bitwise. He's been on the podcast.

He's been on the podcast a couple of times. I actually learned a few things about ETF and stock market commercials. You can't actually advertise the ETF. You can't say buy the ETF. You can't show the ticker on the commercial at all. You can't advertise the ETF. Just, you know, securities, regulations can't sell financial products on TV. commercials. We can sell pharmaceutical drugs here in America on TV commercials, but you can't

sell financial instruments. Yeah, because finance is dangerous. Yeah, right. Okay, so with that context, here is the Bitwise Bitcoin commercial. It's going to be a little bit rough for your podcast listeners, but we'll unpack it afterwards. You know what's interesting these days, Bitcoin. Look for Bitwise, my friends. Hey, David, it feels good to have the most interesting man in the world chilling our bags right now. I got to say, that's good commercial. Well done, Bitwise. Just good branding. Bitwise, it's a great name. It's a great name for like Normies to understand.

Bit as in Bitcoin, wise as in wisdom. Like this is a financial word. Like this matters. Hey, you can't pick a favorite ETF, David. You can't. I, yes, I can. I pick a favorite chain. I can pick a favorite ETF. Oh, really? You're supposed to be more agnostic, more neutral than that. What about Vanek? They got the hoddle meme. Remember we just had Matt Siegel? VanX great. Okay, but are they your favorite? How about Black Rock? What if, what if Larry think comes on bankers? Black Rock is going to be just fine with or without my support. Like, they don't need Mui at all.

They already owned the world. I like Matt Hogan. So we like, we like Matt. We like Bitwise. Yeah. Uh-huh. A message to all the Bitcoin ETFs out here. You have to compete for our love. Yeah. Okay. You went with commercials. With commercials or whatever mechanism you have. Okay, David, here's a question for you. As we end in the year, fishing schemes have really picked up. People trying to pickpocket your crypto wallet and doing it bad. How much do you think has been stolen the last couple of years by fishing attacks on crypto?

Last two years, 2020 and 2023. Over 100 million, over 100 million. Over 100 million. You're right. over 100 million and that feels like a very safe bet it's 10x that it's one billion dollars okay drained so there's actually this is okay no looking at the notes one billion dollars since may of 2021 okay so that's uh two and a half years it was 800 plus million in 2020 and 22 and 23 okay uh what did i say that's different you said you said we can just run with that

you can just take the correction i don't want to take i don't want to take corrections No, that's out of scope. Get corrected, bro. Live. Just take the L. Take the L. Shut up, Ryan. Okay. Yeah, so here's the interesting stat about that, David.

There's actually more last year in terms of total value drained than this year, which it feels like it's really intensified this year. But last year was about $500 million. This year was $370 million. Yeah, but last year our assets were price higher. Exactly. So they probably stole more in units, but got less value. me, that was it.

The largest fishing scam so far was $44.3 million. This is crazy. And according to the chain analysis, by the way, this billion dollar figure is just the tip of the iceberg. So there's a lot that might not actually be measured in these estimates. It's a problem we have to solve, man. It's a problem crypto has to solve. The worst thing about these numbers, like, okay,

2023, there was $376 million fish, 22, $516 million fished. Like, sadly, fishing, fishing attacks are also like long tail attacks. So they're not like fat tail attacks or like the wormhole bridge gets hacked and then jump capital spends a billion dollars to bail them out. These are like individuals. These are individuals clicking links on Twitter and Discord. Like these are individuals losing money. It's not sadly.

It is like the worst type of loss. Well, you can imagine when AI gets combined in here where you could have like somebody like deep fake call you and pretend to be like your mom or your. grandmother or something like this. Like you can really ramp up the the scale of these attacks. So, you know, my method is I just don't trust anybody. I just don't trust anyone. Just don't trust. Not even you.

Yeah. You shouldn't trust me. Someone could this, somebody could be deep faking you. You can log on fake Ryan on a Zoom and deep fake me. Like we already have. Here's a production for 2024. Somebody will use AI and all of the data of you and me on YouTube to create recreate a video about just like how everyone should click this.

link and ape into this one airdrop or something like this. And that will go out on Twitter. And it will be our likeness. And that will probably happen in 2024. Will we get sued for that? Oh, God, maybe. Because if I like this, I don't think so.

You can't get sued for that. They would start with Vitalik. We're far less trustworthy than Vitalik. But, you know, maybe with a long tail of fishing deep fakes. This is probably a global call to action for people who are about to have a bunch of text messages from their friend saying, hey, like, what should I do when I get into crypto? Like, give them your answer and then tell them. And if you're not careful, you will be fished and you need to be very cautious. Like, that should come with your onboarding statements to your

friends and family. That's a big, it's a big UX problem for sure. David, let's talk about a flippinging of a different kind. You teased it during the intro. And I'm like to say, you say it. You say it. Salana has recently flipped Ethereum in Dex volumes. So I think on Tuesday or Monday or Tuesday of this week, Solana had $1.5 billion in total Dex volumes on chain, and Ethereum had 1.1. This has since reverted, Ethereum has 1.6 currently and Solana has 1.59 currently. So pretty close, actually, pretty neck and neck. So I guess congrats to the Solana Dex ecosystem for flipping volumes. Now, I will say, here is my caveat to that. When you have extremely low fees, painting a million dollars in volume costs very, very little. That's the feature of

the Solana blockchain. And I think we're going to enter this bull market and all these people are going to compete on narratives and stuff. And not all narratives are apples to apples. Like Solana has less TVL, less stables on Solana. And it's doing like more movement per stable coin on Solana than on other chains, which is cool because that makes it a great payments chain. But having low TVL makes you not a great defy chain because that means your liquidity is not that great. You get to have a lot of dex volumes on a lot of low supply of coins because your transactions are very, very cheap. And so just brute forcing these comparisons to be apples to apples, we need to take facts and circumstances in. Like, I can go take like $500. I can buy one USC, and I can spend all that $500 on that

spending that one USC. And I can create like some $10 million of volume sending that one USC around. And so these are some of the nuances between these two chains, not to diminish or belittle the fact that, like, you know, that's like $1.6 of volume going on Salonadexes. That's a number. And if we want to be, want to be sophisticated in our understanding for how these chains we are, we need to understand that differences in gas fees do create differences in how these metrics need to be evaluated. Yeah. I think all that's true. And it's also true that this is a pretty massive accomplishment for Solana. And the first time ever, it's actually surpassed.

Ethereum in terms of volume and all those points. Like I think when transaction fees are low, there's obviously a lot of wash trading that could happen. So you can't take one of these metrics and be like, this is the one, this is the one. But I don't think sensible people really do that. I also think the other thing you need to take into account, of course,

is all of the other layer twos. It's interesting that there's like Ethereum, Arbitrum, and like, Ethereum and Arbitrum. Oh, it's just a Lana versus the Ethereum Layer 1. Oh, they're not including Ethereum Layer 2s. It's still, it's still a big freaking deal, right? Because Salam... There's $700 million of trading on Arbitrum. That would put Ethereum between, add all the other layer two is like... Well, this is part of the problem with

Ethereum narrative right now. It's like, it's kind of fractured across all of these sub-brands. Like, you know, Arbitrum is Ethereum, but people don't see that. They see just Arbitrana. They see just a big move from Salana. And that's not the only flippinging, David. Actually, sole price. The price of soul, we like this one. Just past the price of XRP. of Ripple right now. We like that. We like Sala being on top of the bank chain.

That is deserved for sure. Yeah. Why do you like that? Because you think XRP is a security, David. Is that what you think? No, that's just saying. Do you coin buy banks for banks? I don't enjoy Ripple.

I don't, I've never understood why Ripple is value. It's still valued at $33 billion. Yeah. So I wish I could say there's something there, but I don't know what's actually there. Salana 100% deserves to be above Ripple. Okay, so it's number five. Number five, and by the way, maybe closing in on Ethereum. It's got a cool 8X to go before it's put in the Ethereum.

So we'll see what's in store for 2024. Meanwhile, Celsius is absolutely dumping on you, Heath Holder. Dumping on you, you can't catch a break. On-chain data shows that Celsius, you remember Celsius. Alex Machinsky's old, you know, scam, banks are not your friend, and apparently neither was Celsius. Selzies was your worst enemy. They are now selling as a result of their bankruptcy, a lot of their ETH.

And I say their ETH, but it's really customer deposits. It's really your ETH. So they're dumping on you with your own assets. Wow, insult to entry. Over the past 30 days, they sold 243 million ETH. And the good news is they got to run out sometime. I think they're getting closer, although they don't have a stat. Do you know how much more ETHs?

they have to dump on us, David? I don't know. I kind of assumed that they would be done. But what the hell do I know? $250 million is a pretty good amount. Yeah, that's true. And I also know that the FTX bankruptcy has a lot of assets that will be available on the market here soon.

So some of the bankruptcies are getting cleaned up. Yeah. So what do you think of all that? Is this part of the downward pressure that ETH is feeling? Well, yeah. So like the Bitcoin ETH ratio, like why is that down so bad? is like, oh, because Michael Saylor bought like $800 million of Bitcoin in the last like quarter. Why is ETH not able to catch a bid?

Oh, because Celsius just sold $240 million of ETH in the past 30 days. Like, ETH is just taking just wallop after wallop after wallop. And like there's this actually like fantastic synergy for the Salana narrative. Whereas like Solana is actually still like pretty small in comparison to Ethereum. Like it's got a ton of energy. But in the grand scheme of things, it's kind of still just like. like a spec. And so like it's not ether that's vacating ether going to Solana, but it does appear like that in this in a simultaneous nature of Michael Saylor buying a F ton of Bitcoin and the ETH

BTC ratio going down and Celsius selling all of his ether. And so the ETH is just underperforming. Meanwhile, coincidentally, Salon is having a like a renaissance of its narrative. And I think like all of these things are like lined up to make like ether the currently probably the most hated asset I have ever seen in the crypto meta in my entire time. Well, people say that I said, I had that claim that tweet earlier this week and people said that Ethereum has a persecution complex. It's still number two. It's still $250 billion. That's like them playing both sides, right? Like when it comes time for Heath to be defended, they're like, why are you defending yourself? You're number two. But it's just like, if you go onto Twitter, just like, it's totally universal. I think that in 2024 will kind of

be the year. This is just partway through the story. So let's see what happens in 2024 for sure. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, inscription locuses are out of control, plaguing all the chains hopping from chain to chain to chain, heating them dry as they go. That's a bad image. Second up, Elizabeth Warren, even worse image, with a holiday nastygram for all of us here in crypto. Before all of that, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, who's been with us throughout 2020. and is fighting the SEC, and we appreciate them so much for it. And it will also be our favorite exchange in 2024 as well.

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and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. Arbitrum empowers you to explore and build without compromise. Visit arbitram.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app on Arbitrum. Inscriptions, they're invading everywhere. They're clogging up our chains.

David, what are inscriptions? And why are they taking down multiple chains this week and causing massive gas spikes? So inscriptions were the ordinal's phenomenon that came out of Bitcoin where you could write arbitrary data to a single Satoshi, which unlocked a bunch of cool features starting with NFTs, but really expanding from there. And then that same primitive has hopped to other chains where what are inscriptions, they are just using chains as data availability chains. All chains are data availability chains to some degree. And they're writing inscriptions. They're writing packets of data, bundles of data, what kind of data, whatever. data you want open-ended like turn complete fully expressive and so they write just a packet of data

onto chains and it is very resource intensive because data is the thing that is expensive in the crypto world so inscriptions are just going from chain to chain to chain who's bringing them there i don't really know kind of the free market a lot of bots a lot of this is bot activity because there's no way that you can take down a chain without just having just it's basically spam it's basically well well be you call it spam but i you know i don't know if it like i don't know if that's uh entirely true, right? So for Bitcoin, you know, famously earlier this year, they've been using inscriptions for like a primitive NFT type of network and for containing BRC20s, which are like Bitcoin's kind of version of a token. And they've kind of-

And it's not spam, but when inscriptions show up on arbitram and then take down the chain two days later, or that's because like people just bought it the hell out of it. It's spam if it's bots. I don't even know if I can get behind that. Low utility. They pay the same gas fees that everybody else does for yeah but the data that we're putting on chain is not it's not interoperable it's for one single purpose like who no one very few number of people care sure ryan one person cares but what does that do to the arbitram or celestia or polygon i think these even happen on solana these don't benefit there's no welfare for users here right there's no global usefulness from these things but so it's not are you saying it's not out of bounds of like the protocols ability to do it

but you think it's like outside of kind of like some loose social contract of like what's quote unquote utility or what's valuable and you're you're saying it's you're not shunning inscriptions though you're just like observing it and being like ah that's annoying it's yeah it's it's an annoying thing like if i took one ether and i like took all of that gas money and just loaded up dick butts and place that on the ethereum layer one would be annoyed by that that would be annoying that would be annoying for me okay i i i didn't expect to get in a in a debate over a inscription. So let's put that aside. I don't know how I feel about them, like spam or not. Anyway, let's talk about what they've been doing on other chains, non-Bitcoin chains. So I said

they've taken down multiple chains. What's, what's been going on over the past week? So Arbitrum's sequencer briefly stopped working because they were just overloaded with transactions, specifically like just BRC 20 tokens on other chains, which is like totally an an anachronism, but like, whatever. Avalanche, Kronos, ZK, Sink, also experienced degradated performance. It briefly also hit Celestia as well. Celestia, I believe, stopped producing blocks, bro. Wow.

I think that the Celessia hasn't confirmed that, but people are like, yo, like Celestia block explores stopped showing anything for like 20 minutes, even plus. And so, yeah, it's kind of nuts. It's just like consuming the resources of all the chain. in a very relatively cheap manner, it's kind of a question of resource pricing. Like if we are spamming, spamming chains,

because data on these chains are cheap, and they're also taking down the chains. Well, then either we need to figure out our shit or we need to increase the cost of data, one of these two things. But I think it's good because every single network is being stress tested at the moment in like a live production real environment.

And it's not happening on Ethereum, though. Why is that? It's just too expensive. So it's too expensive and Ethereum has perfect liveliness. So it's just people can't afford to spam the network using call data because there are higher value use cases that purchase that block space ahead of Ethereum. Ethereum called out of space is meant to be for layer two chains and people who have a ton of eth. High execution, like high TPS execution environments, we're definitely going to have to deal with this, right? This simple attack.

It's really, it's very cheap. to civil attack a chain with like quote unquote spam. Here's a tweet from Hunter from the Arbitrum team where he says, Arbitrum one hit an all time high of 4.3 transactions in 24 hours today. 4.3 million. 4.3 million transactions in one day from inscriptions. And if you can go to like a layer 2B and you'll see just like the massive spike in activity. And so he says, but cooler than numbers was the incredible support for that came from the other

layer two's and layer ones for the Arbitrum community. It feels like we're going to see more camaraderie. as this bull market kicks into gear. And yes, I'm excited. Oh, I hope so. So, yeah, distributed sequencing where rather than having one single extremely high performance sequencer and splitting that into like two or three or four can maintain liveness while still having like the vast majority of the scale, like reducing total

scale, total throughput by just like a few percentage points, but then also like having, you know, 99.9% uptime. And like I said, this is ultimately going to be good for all single, all chains because we're all going to get stress tested by like bullshit before we get stress tested by Normies with their bullshit. Meanwhile, just to say, inscriptions started on Bitcoin, haven't left Bitcoin either.

So inscriptions continuing to surge there as well. There's almost 300,000 unconfirmed transactions. Oh, there are 350,000 unconfirmed transactions in the Bitcoin Mempool, $37 per Bitcoin, the typical transaction in Bitcoin over this last week. But when they're on the Bitcoin, David, they're not spam, right? Yeah. You know, when they're on Bitcoin, they're not spam.

We don't have to open that again. Because like, I don't know. This is all, it's all just fun. Let's move on. Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren, the anti-crypto army, the generals in the anti-crypto army, they are on the attack again this week. They couldn't even give us a break during the holidays, David. Can you believe that?

So today, this is Gary Gensler tweet. I'm an after a week and lazy. Yeah. The commission denied a petition for rulemaking filed on behalf of Coinbase. You remember a few months ago, Coinbase was just like, hey, SEC. Please give us rules. Can you give us, like, clarity on the rules? And the SEC didn't respond.

You're like, denied, you know, providing clarity. Held out to the buzzer. Yeah. And then so Coinbase was like, fine, we'll get a court to make you. All right. And this is the court made the SEC respond. And they didn't make the SEC provide rules. No.

They made the SEC respond to the inquiry about whether they are going to provide rules or not. Yeah. And I don't know if you want to hear what Gary actually wrote, but he published his own sort of a statement on the SEC website. First, existing laws and regulations apply to the crypto securities market. We already have the laws. Second, SEC addresses the crypto security's markets through rulemaking as well. We already do rulemaking. You already have the clarity that you need. Third, it is important to maintain commission discretion in setting its own rulemaking priorities. you can't force us to do anything. Basically, you already have what you need and don't come to me, like, asking for more clarity. That's what Gary is saying here.

Thanks, Gary. Thanks for the help. We appreciate it. Merry Christmas. This is Paul Grawell from Coinbase saying today the SEC denied Coinbase's petition for rules for crypto after 18 months of silence. Oh, wow, it was 18 months, David. We went to the court to get their response that the law requires with appreciation for the third circuit later today. We'll again seek its help. So they're going to they're not back this again. We're going to do that. We're going to keep on. No, we actually want an answer. Like, we actually deserve an answer from our regulators on like just some basic rules for clarity on what's a security and what's not. CFTC is saying things are not securities. That's saying something different. It won't really tell crypto what's a security. It's just drop dropping these

charges. Yeah. And Coinbase is really gearing up for the big fight. They're keeping. the furnace warm with the SEC by continuing to not back down versus the SEC. But then also this week, they're also launching a super PAC. I don't know if it's fair to say Coinbase is launching it. A super PAC, a political action committee, a lobbyist group for crypto. So the Fair Shake, Super PAC is a brand new political action committee on the scene and all of its affiliates representing the nation's crypto community. And they have raised, Ryan, $78 million, $20 companies and leading voices inside of the industry to support bipartisan crypto forward candidates in 2024. So $78 million, which is a large amount going to help support crypto politicians raised in only Q4, Ryan.

Yeah. You got it. It's a federal independent committee supporting candidates committing to securing the U.S. as the home to innovators building the next generation of the internet. So where did this $78 million come from? Andresen Horowitz, Brian Armstrong himself, Circle and Coinbase, of course, Cracken, Framework Ventures, Jump Crypto, Multi-Coyn Capital, Paradigm. So basically, Coinbase and the VCs, which is great. And I think that is just the perfect role for these particular players, like the exchanges, Coinbase, Cracken, and the VCs.

Like the big leaders who have a lot of capital in this base, who have the most to gain and the most to lose, right? And so, but also like there's plenty of place for, for us as individuals, plenty of ways that to help out. Go to standwithcrypto.org if you want to learn more. Yeah. Call your congressperson email, congressperson. There's lots of individuals can do. But I will say Elizabeth Warren did not like the industry fighting back against this.

She didn't like this? No, this is where we get to the nastygram. And she sent this letter not only to Coinbase, but to the blockchain association, which is a crypto-friendly education lobbyist group in D.C. Kristen Smith there, who we've met before is the CEO. Yeah, she's fantastic. She also sent it. They also sent it to CoinCenter, okay, the same templated letter.

So here's Jerry Brito. He calls this, CoinCenter received the same impertinent letter from Elizabeth Warren as the BA and Coinbase. That's the Blockchain Association. Read it for yourself to see what a bullying publicity stunt is. So I did read it for myself. basically Elizabeth Warren is saying crypto is

being facilitated by Hamas for terrorism that's like super obvious and then she cites the Wall Street Journal article that's been debunked for two months it's been freaking debunked many times

anyway she's like look crypto and terrorism they're basically the same thing and then she goes on and says if you like coin center Coinbase how dare you get people from the government or used to be employed by the government, like working on your behalf, right? Because she's upset that crypto has hired people from DC to like push back against this.

And she has asked for it. By the way, how politics in America is this. In every industry. It's like, it's how it works. I hate that we have to spend $80 million on a super PAC. I hate that we have to do that. Get money out of finance. But what's the alternative?

Don't defend yourself. Because the things are doing it. Let them slap us around. Yeah. What do we do? The banks are supporting are doing the revolving door. The banks are supporting Elizabeth Warren. Yeah.

At least ours. We can't do it. At least ours leads to like individual rights. Like it's not fighting for like it's at least ours is fighting for, uh, digital civil liberties, like holding your own private key and running your own validator. Okay. Like ours is actually doing something productive for, for, for the individual, not just fighting on behalf of a bunch of rights.

Anyway, she, she asked in the. this letter that all of these organizations who she sent the letter to tell them how many former military civilian government officials or members of Congress are on their pay payroll and like list them all out. It's kind of a demand. It's a little bit of a demand. It's a hundred percent. Therefore, I ask you to provide the answers to these questions, to the following questions,

no later than January 14th, 2024. How many former military civilian government officials or members of Congress are currently employed on behalf or by your organization? For all of the officials listed in question around, please provide a summary of their responsibilities. Are they registered lobbyists? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's more like you don't really care about these answers.

You're just being me. It's a PR stunt to just basically say crypto plus Hamas, and they're using the revolving door of DC to like influence us. Look at these corrupt people. That's what she's doing. And like she doesn't actually expect to reply. It feels like an inquisition. Oh, it's doubt.

Yeah. This is, yeah. And she knows it's not going to be effective. Anyway, that's what the anti-crypto army is doing. Austin Campbell had to take, I never thought I would see the day when Elizabeth Warren became a proud champion of big banks. And that's sad.

You know, I remember when she rose on the scene, it was like, for me, anyway, my first exposure to Elizabeth Warren from the aftermath of 2008 financial crisis. And she was like, anti-bank, anti-bank. And it was just like, hey, we got to rain. Like, why are they getting bailouts? It's kind of like the whole Bernie Sanders message. Do you remember those days?

Yep. Feels very different from that. Here she is like partnering with Jamie Diamond basically saying, yeah, all crypto surveillance states, you know, scams and frauds and let's clamp down. Meanwhile, this is a peer-to-peer decentralized money system for the people, by the people, bottom up. And why would she be on the bankers and the institution side for that? It doesn't make sense.

It's not consistent with what her messaging used to be. I'm pretty disappointed as well. I share awesome Campbell's sentiments there. I've talked to friends of a friend who, the friend. that I was not talking to, the one one removed, who was a previous intern for Senator Warren's office says it was kind of just like a very top-down, like, shrill, did not respect the interns, was like fall in line, do as you're told, kind of crabs in the bucket environment. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I wonder if other political internships are like that. But anyway, not loving what

I'm seeing. We'll see if the table's turning in 2024. But we've got some defensive mechanisms, at least, David. What do we have? Coming up next. Coming up next, we got some crypto things to talk about. Yay. Lord. Igenlayer has raised its cap and then it got filled inside of 48 hours.

One billion dollars has been deposited into eigenlar. We're going to talk about that. And also, Ryan, did you notice that first the Solanophone was kind of marked up as a flop? And then 15,000 units got sold last week. What the hell happened there? And then finally, ZKC and construct another one with a new centralized exchange layer two from blockchain from crypto.com, their new chronos chain can become a ZKK synchrine, and we'll unpack that. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors

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And then they also raised the Lido-Stateeath cap. All of that got filled immediately. Crazy. The heat and the energy around EigenLair and restaking is definitely crescendoing liquid restaking tokens, Ryan, have just absolutely captivated my attention lately. I'm going to write an article about that. Liquid restaking tokens, I think, is the next meta. I think this Airdrop Mania and the growth around eigenlayer and the number of liquid restaking tokens is kind of a bunch of stars. The TLDR is you can use ether, the monetary unit of ether to secure all sorts of other apps.

We call these ABSs, right? What is ABS? Well, that's TLDR of restaking. Liquid restaking tokens is just like Lichester. liquid staking tokens, but you also get the restaking yields of eigenlayer baked into these liquid restaking tokens. So like the whole LST war is starting brand over, brand new again, is starting fresh with the liquid restaking wars. And I'm absolutely here for it. You're here for it? Yeah, a huge theme in 2024. This is Sri Ram saying Ethereum expanded on Bitcoin, but could not be built on it. Eigenlayer expands on Ethereum by building on it. You know, Sri Rom, definitely putting out kind of

some narrative tweets here about Ethereum alignment as well. Ethereum acceleration, not necessarily Ethereum alignment. We're going for acceleration. Different A? Oh, yeah. It's acceleration, particularly of ETHI asset, I would say. ETHI asset, ETH yields, ETH the monetary unit, being accelerated by EGEN layer. ETH becomes more money. ETHC.

Maybe bring ETH is money back for 2020. Oh, ETH has always been money. I know. More money. People forgot. David says, things are not. bullish enough on Eith and re-staking. That's a good way to summarize.

You have Eith acceleration. All right. ZK. Sink got a new layer two joining the hyperchain. What is a hyperchain? That is the ZKSink version of the Optimism super chain. Kronos has announced the launch of their layer two, the Kronos ZKEVM, joining the ZK sync hyperchain.

So crypto.com, actually a pretty large exchange going to have its ZKEVM on a hyperchain. This is cool to Celestia, of course, a D. layer, so data availability layer. They've launched, of course, and many folks got an airdrop from this. It's worth a lot, actually. Celeste is now available for builders on Arbitrum orbit. So with Arbitrum orbit, you can select a non-Etherium DA layer if you'd like, and Celestia is now an option for that.

I was actually curious, David, with these new DA layers, how inexpensive layer twos that use non-Etherium DA layers would actually be. And this tweet says, the benefits of ZK-proving for L2s with a 99% cost reduction. Right. Versus layer 1 DA. So here's like that. L2s are about to be free, bro.

The cost savings. This is another Manta network. It's a different layer two. So it's, it's not Arbitram Nova, but Manta network is tapping into Sestia for, for DA. And look at how cheap these transactions are.

Right? It's like transactions on layer to use are going to like fall off of a free. They're going to be free. When they, when they don't use Ethereum for data availability, they're going to be incredibly cheap, practically free, and probably going to be subsidized by many of the layer two.

Because if it's micro fractions of a penny, why introduce that friction for your use it? Just call it free because it's basically free. Why do you think we're getting the inscription spam attack because everything is free these days? Oh, cool. So we get more spam attacks. We'll have to solve that for that one too.

David, tell me about the Salana phone. Yeah, okay. So like about a month ago, the Salana organization, I think kind of just called, the Salonophone a flop. And they had like, they were selling like 30 to 50 phones a day at peak and it slowed down to like two to three phones a day. And if you're going to move, if you're going to have enough phones being sold to induce a developer ecosystem to build apps for the phone, you need to move a lot more phones, like tens of thousands of phones. They had 20,000 phones in their first batch.

The bootstrapping problem. It's a bootstrapping problem. And I think they only sold like four to 5,000 of them. I talked to Anatoly about this earlier this week. So it'll come out next week. And then they sell 15,000 last week. What? What the hell happened? Well, because the original Solana phone came with a bonk air drop on it. And the bonk token has appreciated significantly in price to be about half the cost of the phone. So the phone was 50% off. And the thing is, is that this is not the only air drop on the phone. There's like a handful in the teens number of airdrops that you get from having the phone. And so people are,

these phones are now going for $2,000 to $5,000 a piece on eBay. Are you serious? It's an ARB opportunity then. Well, it's not an arm opportunity. It's an investment. It's a speculative investment that all of these Salana tokens that are on the Salana Saga phone are going to pump in price.

And so like you are over at a $5,000. You are way overpaying what you can pull out from the phone in terms of tokens because you can only pull out $400. But they're kind of just a, rare commodity. It's a bet on Solana. It's like it's kind of like uny socks a little bit, but also with the potential of these air drops, like appreciating bigly. Well, that's got to help them with the, the entire bootstrapping problem, I would guess. It has that as a side effect. It's basically like, it found its product market fit and that's like attaching spectral tokens to it.

Yeah. What a crypto thing to do, huh? Yeah. So Anatoly says we haven't seen a ton of signal, whether that's compelling enough to sell 50,000 units. They're at 20,000 units now, but I think 25 to 50,000 units feels like there's a hardcore user base for developers to compel to ship application. So they need another reason. They can't, lightning can't strike twice like this. But if they can get to 50,000 phones, all of a sudden, that becomes like a strong user base. Funnily enough, Ryan, MKBHD, he's one of the, he's the biggest tech reviewer in YouTube,

like one of the most watched YouTube accounts. Ray did the Salana phone, the worst phone of 2023. Oh, oh, sad. This is bust of the year. Salon of Saga phone. Oh, this is part of a whole thread where he's rating phones. And he got to that one, huh? Yeah.

And he says the balk. The bong. Yeah, he says no amount of bong can save this phone. Oh, no. Well, I mean, I guess a cynical interpretation of this is like, oh, great. Another, like, crypto speculative, like, bubble crap just trying to show, you know, the phone that's not great. I guess a more optimistic take on this is like, hey, tokens really do solve the initial

bootstrapping problem. They really do. It really is. So now you have at least some critical mass of phones out there, and maybe that creates a network effect for more development for it to improve down the line. I don't really have a take. I don't have one of those.

But David, three hours capital in the news again, this time a billion of their assets were frozen? What's this about? Yeah, so the BVI British version aisles, I believe that's Bermuda, has frozen a billion dollars of three arrows capital assets. So we kind of saw this definitely, like people think about this happening when Susu was arrested.

trying to leave Singapore. And he was only arrested for a very small thing, but the bet was that it was going to like spiral into a big thing. And we are watching this. So, Thuris Capital can say goodbye to a billion dollars that are monies. Yeah. If it look, if it's in a bank account, it can be frozen, David. Maybe. Yeah, he should have to look at that a little bit more, you know. Yeah, you know, it can't freeze Bitcoin. Can't, it can't freeze that ether on chain. David, there was a pretty large court case. Actually, the first defy hacker to ever plead guilty in the first ever smart contract fraud conviction. This is a Salana defy hacker.

What happened with this story? This is Shikib Ahmed, who pled guilty to charges relating to two Dex's, one Nirvana finance, the other one, Kremah finance. I think these were on Salana. These were Salonid? I think so. Is that right? Can you read?

Yeah, they were definitely in Salana. Sold $12 million from Salonadexes. Faces five years in prison will be sentenced on. March 13th, first ever conviction for smart contract hacks and fraud, according to a U.S. attorney. So that's just a message for all the incoming scammers of 2024 and 2025. You will go to jail. Yo, theft is still illegal.

Yes, theft is still theft, even if it's crypto. This is where I'm a little bit, Gary Gensler. I'm like, oh, we already have rules in place against theft. We don't need additional crypto-specific rules to tell people not to steal. It's always been illegal, guys. You can't steal. It's still illegal just because it's crypto. just because it's on chain.

David, as we close out this holiday episode, we got a meme of the week. Relating to the Salata phone here, what are we looking at? It's a meme from that one movie, which is, sell me this pen. And the man responds,

and it has 10 million bunk tokens on it. That would buy the pen. That would buy the pen. That's where we'll leave things, guys. We got a moment of Zen coming up. Do you want to tease that? We got a moment of Zen from Argent, who puts a yearly promo,

yearly recap every single year. They did it last year. They did it this year as well. If you want to get excited for the bankless yearly roll-up coming a week from today, actually our timelines and their timelines lined up pretty well, except they put it into a minute and 30 seconds and we did it in an hour. It's a good year-in-review for crypto, I would say. So enjoy that, guys.

I've got to end with some disclosures. David and I are advisors for ZK Sync and Igenlayer. I think we mentioned them both in the episode. And as a reminder, we are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all bankless disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. Wow, what a year it's been.

Thank you so much for being with us on, well, 51 roll-ups for the entire year, David. I don't think we missed a week. If you one-weekly roll-up. Oh, my God. So it's all 52 weeks, and you guys have been along for the ride. Thank you so much. Got to remind you again as we close out, 2023. Crypto is risky.

You lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier, not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. What is Operation Chokepoint? the crypto businesses might end up completely on banks. Investors in the banks will not be protected. Crypto banks Silvergate shutting down.

And the lack of compliance by these crypto platforms means that you don't have basic investor protections. World's biggest asset manager, that is BlackRock, filed to list an ETF backed by Spot Ethereum on the NASDAQ exchange at some point. The need for crypto. Hallelujah. Ether and you.