Bankless - ROLLUP: The Institutions Are Here | Vitalik & Brady BFFs | Verge of the Merge | Senator Warren, Sup?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wait, who said that? The Metaverse is rendered at the periphery. Did we say that? That's my line. Yeah. That's a great line. That's a David Hoffin original, brother. Wow.

Starting point is 00:00:07 Yeah, you like that one? That's great. No, I love that one. Uh-huh. That's, yeah, we should start a podcast. Hey, Bankless Nation, happy fourth week of March, David. It's Friday morning. What time is it?

Starting point is 00:00:22 Oh, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll of Ryan, where we cover the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. This week's pretty tame. It's pretty okay. It's going to be fun, though. There's a lot of interesting things going on. Right. There's some hot headlines.

Starting point is 00:00:36 So tell us what's going down this week. Yeah, usually you're more intimidated by the length of this agenda. But this week maybe feels manageable, David. Is that you're telling us? Yeah, this is a five out of ten on the crazy scale, which is modest for crypto. Five out of ten. All right. Okay, so here's what we're going to talk about.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Yuga Labs. The Apes bought the punks. Well, actually, that happened last week. Okay. But this week, they just got $450 million in funding. Okay. What are they going to do with this? They're going to build?

Starting point is 00:01:02 a real metaverse. A real metaverse. And a 16 Z is in on this, of course. And we have the deck. We have the slide deck. We know exactly what they are planning to do. So we're going to comments on that. Also, Vitalik, Boutrin, made the cover of Time magazine.

Starting point is 00:01:19 This led to a lot of hilarious Twitter threads, I think. Hilarious Twitter threads. Yeah. We're going to talk about that. Also, GameStop released their first NFT marketplace. That's out. it's built on loop ring and the loop ring community is absolutely stoked about this couldn't be more excited uh number going up a little bit so we'll talk about that to you and of course more of our

Starting point is 00:01:43 weekly cringe out of elizabeth warren she's proposing new things in congress anti-crypto things shadowy supercoder things so of course you know we got a comment on that because this sort of stuff can't happen in a free western liberal democracy where uh property rights um should count for something. So we're going to talk about that too. The consistency of cringe out of Elizabeth Warren is just every single week at this point. But also, Elizabeth, come on the podcast because we're friendly and we don't bite. It's true. David, before we get in, we got to talk about the permissionless conference that is coming up. We are on the road to permissionless right now. This is going to be the Defi conference of the year,

Starting point is 00:02:25 not just Defi, also the Metaverse. Also, we're going to talk about like institutional stuff as well. A lot of people are going to be there. Who are some of the speakers you're most looking forward to seeing? Oh my God. Some of my best friends out there. Justin Drake, we're going to be talking about Ethan's ultrasound money, of course, on the verge of the merge.

Starting point is 00:02:44 Is that a panel title? We're working to the verge of the merge, Ryan. Because the permission list is in two months. Two months. You have two months to get your ticket. And in two months, we will be on the cusp of the merge. I mean, excuse me, pardon me, the verge of the merge. So Justin Drake is going to be talking all about that.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Of course, Chris Dixon from the famous Web 3 Mental Models podcast. You guys know all about Chris. Nick Carter is going to talk about stable coins. Eric Peter is Eric Peters, who's been on the podcast before. I'm going to talk about some changing world order type content, I'm guessing. And then we also got Gho from Axi Infinity. Jake Chravinsky for all the legal minds out there. Ryan Selkis, Stani from Ave.

Starting point is 00:03:24 It's going to be, I think, the hottest event of the summer. And this is, of course, where Ryan and. and I will meet for the very first time. So it's going to be a fun time. Bankless books their Airbnb. So Bankless has an Airbnb. There's going to be the bankless party. It's going to be sick as a lot. It's going to be very sick. Excuse me. And I'm looking forward to. It's going to be Palm Beach, Florida, too. The dates are May 17th through 19th. And David said you have two months to get these tickets. You kind of do, but also you kind of don't. Because number one, they're probably going to sell out in the coming weeks and number two they just get more expensive over time all right so there was a time you could

Starting point is 00:04:03 purchase these tickets for like $15 I don't want to tell people that but like the price has gone up a lot since then and it will continue to go up until the date of the conference so book now of course if you have a bankless premium membership you get a discount on this big discount not a little discount is it 20 20% 30% 30% a generous a healthy discount so go check that up it pays for your whole entire premium membership it really is does. Some no-brainers there. Also, another no-brainer. Connect your wallet to Zerian. Zerian is like the best. Like, when I first discovered Zirion getting into crypto, right, it's just like, oh my God, I can bring my assets to the interface rather than being locked inside of the interface,

Starting point is 00:04:46 like with a Wells Fargo account. And they were adding features all of the time. Some of my favorite features that they've added recently is like multi-chain support, Ethereum, optimism, so L2s, avalanches, alternative L1s. They also have phantom support. They just added Solana support. So this is like their first non-EVM chain. So you know how you have your assets scattered all over the crypto universe here? You can organize that.

Starting point is 00:05:13 You can track them all in one single mission control center user interface for your defy antics. Also, David, there's some bridging capability here. Bridge all. I know you like to bridge. Yeah. So what can you do here? Yeah, so we're going to be in a multi-chain world, whether with multi-L layer one, multi-layer two,

Starting point is 00:05:34 it's going to happen. And you shouldn't have to go to the optimism website or the Arbitrown website to go and use their portals. You should just go to Xerion because they got it all for you. Imagine just like a triple monitor, five monitors set up, and you have like all, this is what Zirion does. It's your battle station for the multi-chain world, and it makes it extremely easy to bridge

Starting point is 00:05:55 to all the other layers. two's. One of the fun stories I like to tell about why people should load up their address to something like Xerion. Like the first time I did it, Ryan, you discovered things? Yeah, you know how you sometimes you discover $20 in your pocket? Yeah, like Xerion will tell you everything about the state of the tokens that you have. So there's a decent chance. You have tokens that you don't aren't even aware of. So go check your pants pockets by loading up your address into Zerion. All that change in the cushions of your couch, you know, shake all that out. Go find it. Go turn it into ETH.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Yes, yeah. I honestly, I found some NFTs this way, too, because they have an NFT viewer. These are not my NFTs, but I was like, oh, I own some okay NFTs, and they're actually, like, worth something, which is kind of cool to know, especially NFTs aren't worth as much as they were maybe a month or two ago. And then what happened next was Ryan pulled out his tax document and started up. That's true, too. True story.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Anyway, guys, go check that out. Go connect your wallets to Zerian and get this all in one place. Of course we will include a link in the show notes because that's what we do for you. Market time, David. Bitcoin. What do you got to say about Bitcoin? Happy Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Happy Bitcoin. Happy crypto prices this week. Yeah, Bitcoin started the week at $41,000, ending the week, right where it is right now at $44,000, up 7% on the week. A little bit of chop from A to B, but here we are at $44,000. So the bulls are bullish. I thought we were down only. How are we doing this?

Starting point is 00:07:23 This is like almost, you know, it's rising above. some of these local peaks the last like early March peak. Is this a pre-war conflict peak here? That's exactly right. We are starting to get higher than where we were, pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine. That is crazy. And how about Eath? What's that looking like? Same, same, same. Yeah, started the week at 2,800. That was the low. And we are currently just below 3,100. Basically call it $3,100. We got up to $3,120 right before recording dipped a little bit down right below it. But again, chop between the A to the B at the start of the week to the end of the week. But overall, when you zoom out and look at it smoothly, it is a lineup.

Starting point is 00:08:04 You know, I think I've told you before that, like, that 3K number is really important to me. Anytime it's above 3K, it's a good day, right? It's like feels bullish. It feels like we're escaping via the pull of the bear market. So, wow, up on the week. And is this on any news or anything, David? Like, why are we going up? There's a bunch of reasons I could hypothesize about.

Starting point is 00:08:26 But I don't really have any strong conviction about any of them. So I think like the trade, if you're a trader, putting on your trade or hat, is just an overall mean reversion. So like, Ryan, zoom out to like the four month, four month timeframe or something like that. Three months. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the mean reversion trade has actually started to already kind of play out going from 2,600 to like 3,200. But there's also the mean reversion trade of going from like 3,000 back to 4,000.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And so like two different trade timeframes for trades on the menu. But, you know, sometimes people are like, well, the sellers just got exhausted. And there's not enough sellers to keep on making price go down. And even though macro is still super bearish, crypto, like whenever crypto disassociates for macro, it's usually to the bullish side. Yeah. And I think that's perhaps what's going on. Yeah, that's at some point, I'm definitely far from calling this sort of thing, right? I still believe we're very much in kind of like a crab market season, sideways action.

Starting point is 00:09:27 But like at some point, prices get high enough. It does break the back of the bare market and the bare market fears. I don't know what price point that is for ETH. Certainly higher than 3,100. Yeah, certainly higher. Do you think it's all-time high? Like what are we all-time high for Eith? I mean, okay, so we're going to look at some, we can definitely look at some trends, right?

Starting point is 00:09:47 4,600. 4, but also like if you, can me make that window go away? Like the 3,300 number is kind of where. We were hanging around 3,300 between August and September of 2021. We were hanging around 3,300 at the start of 2022 before we broke it down. So I would say breaking 3,300 and getting into the area between 3,300 and 4,000 is like... Starts to feel... That's the next window.

Starting point is 00:10:16 And then it's just absolutely confirmed by the time we get above 4,000, obviously. because bullishness against bullishness. But there's very little price action above 4,000. Like we haven't spent a lot of time, only a couple months of time above 4,000. And so above 4,000 is price discovery. And so if you're not into the trade by then, you've kind of missed out on it a lot.

Starting point is 00:10:39 But that's when you can kind of start to ask yourself, like, well, there's not really much information here about what happens next. Therefore, you have permission to be bullish about price discovery once again, especially, because it's not going to just like zoom from 3,000 to 4,000, and like it's not going to do it in one month. I mean, it's done it before.

Starting point is 00:10:58 It could do it, but like it's probably not. But like, you know, you start to look out at the two, three, four months time horizons and like that's when the merge happens. So once again, the alignment between the timing of the merge and the shape of the charts is interesting. And we will actually be able to see that, Ryan, when we look at the ETHBTC ratio. I think that's where we're going next.

Starting point is 00:11:17 But I got to say this is kind of not supposed to, to happen that way, right? According to a lot of, according to the sentiment that I'm feeling like, it's like the sentiment is we're in kind of this crab market and we're still destined to go down. But it seems like we're kind of starting to reverse those trends and we'll see if that continues. But what's the ratio? The sentiment doesn't cause market action. It generally follows it. Okay, so this is the long-term view of the ETH-BTC ratio. Back when things are really, really crazy in 2017, 2018, and then we had the 2018 to 2020 bear market. And now you can see this channel that we're forming. And the ETH-BTC ratio, we were talking about how for like there was three to four

Starting point is 00:11:58 months of straight downward price action, both in dollar terms and in ETHBTC term, starting in like November, December of 2021 to basically like three weeks ago. And we bounced off the bottom of that trend line. And like kind of the self-fulfilling prophecy meme is that you bounce from trendline to trendlined. And so we go from 0.07, 0.065, where we, at the bottom, to like something like 0.09, 0.095, which is really bullish. What's our flipping watch number for this? Oh, I know that one.

Starting point is 00:12:32 0.158, Ryan. I do have it memorized. Oh, nerd alert. Yeah. So we need to basically a doubling, a little bit more than a doubling of the ETH price with the current Bitcoin price stank. It's up here, huh? Yeah, it's pretty high.

Starting point is 00:12:46 It's pretty high up there. Never been there before. Never, no, no, we have not. The spikes on the very far left, this is Coinbase, the spikes on the very far left are noise. You don't see that on any other chart, fun fact. You got it. Okay, cool.

Starting point is 00:12:59 That's somebody who observes his ratio right there. I'm another Steve Hoffman. Bankless bed index, a third, a third, a third, Bitcoin, and DPI. What are we doing there? Yeah, start of the week at 97, ended the week where we are now at 113? Wow, that's higher than when I wrote it down a couple minutes ago.

Starting point is 00:13:15 We are up roughly eight and a half percent bullish. Overall bullish on the market. I will take that. Let's talk about these outflows. It's really cool when we see big outflows, I think. You can track it all on chain. This is Into the Block doing it. The largest outflows in 2022 so far.

Starting point is 00:13:33 Over 180K ETH was withdrawn from centralized exchanges in a single day. The last time such a magnitude of EVE left exchanges was in October 2021, preceding a 15% price increase within 10 days. Also of note, 190K-Eath was also deposited into Lido's staking ETH contract into the Lido's staking pool. What's happening here? Are people like withdrawing their ETH to stake it? Is this like merge hype catching up with like the actions of the market now?

Starting point is 00:14:07 Is this what we're seeing? Well, I mean, this happened at around the same time that we saw a very large increase in the Alligator queue, the queue to get into e-staking. For those that don't know, you can't just, like, go and send your E through a smart contract and begin staking. You have to enter and exit out of a queue. And that queue is just meant to stabilize the security around the proof of stake chain, right? Like, we want to make sure that this security of the chain doesn't go up and down too fast. So they have, like, they have like a bottleneck to, you've got to wait to get in and out. The weight to get in, I think, is above a couple weeks right now. By the way, you can't get out right now just for every.

Starting point is 00:14:42 So it's a one-way ticket now, but there will be a way out, and we'll also have a cue out. Yes, yeah. And so, I mean, you tell me that there were significant outflows out of exchanges, and there's significant eth queuing for the validator. Like, well, I mean, I know how to interpret data. Do you know how to interpret bullish data data? I think so. I think so, yeah. Plus, like the other reason why this is always bullish, we always like to see, for a number of reasons, why ether leaving exchanges. Same with Bitcoin. Bitcoin leaving exchanges going into either private keys,

Starting point is 00:15:15 self-custody addresses or smart contracts. One is bullish just because a lot of price discovery happens on centralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges determine what the price is. So any new buying demand goes on to centralized exchanges first. And so any new demand for ether is now that there's 180,000 less ether on centralized exchanges, and dollar worth of eath purchase means a lot more to the price, just because things are a lot more sensitive when there's a lot less ether on secondary markets.

Starting point is 00:15:46 There's a lot less volume. And so that's the bullish side of things. There's also the philosophical side of things, is we have 180,000 more ether that's bankless, or bankless ether. There's people using smart contracts, people using defy, people moving their ether out of centralized exchanges, which definitely seems to fit the narrative,

Starting point is 00:16:06 of the trend of the last two months or so of nation states, like, looking over at crypto and being like, I don't like what you guys are doing. And so then, you know, what we do, we withdraw our ether. Sanction you. Yeah. That's the name of the show is bankless. So 180K in one day just went bankless. More assets, more bankless.

Starting point is 00:16:28 It's awesome. This is why we're here. We're here to build. Decentralization. Absolutely. Let's talk about the world Doe Kwan is here. build. We talked about this a little bit. You like these segways. They're getting better, David. Yeah, they are getting better. Doquan reveals a plan to increase USTs. That's the stable coin on

Starting point is 00:16:47 the Luna network, the Terra network, I should say. Bitcoin Reserve, just jack that up to $3 billion. So last week we talked about Doe Kwan saying, hey, eventually I want at least $10 billion worth of Bitcoin backing UST. So UST is like an algorithmic stable coin. Primarily it's backed by Luna, the value of Luna. And we've seen a lot of Algo stable coins, like not to not to be like the old geysers on the podcast, but like you and I have seen a lot of algorithmic stable coins rise and fall in our day. Many of them, right? And I've always thought of them as interesting experiments, right? And like, maybe we can get one right at some point in time. But haven't yet. There's always been sort of a crash in a cataclysm. I think Doe is wanting to mitigate that a little

Starting point is 00:17:43 bit by adding multiple collaterals to his algorithmic stable coin, not just Luna, but also Bitcoin. So increasing to 3 billion Bitcoin that is going to be backing this. What are your thoughts here, David? I mean, it makes sense, right? Multi-collateral back staple coins. I've heard this one before. Maker Dow is this model. I'm currently in a little bit of a Twitter tussle with Doe Kwan

Starting point is 00:18:08 because he made this tweet saying, by my hand die, the die stable coin will die, like, have a death. Wait, what did he say? He said, by my hand, die will die. As in, like, he wants to kill die. He wants to, like, out-compete die. And I'm like, I'm like, I know the- Elon Musk's shit, man.

Starting point is 00:18:27 Right, right? It's some Icarous level stuff, dude. What he's really saying is like MKR price is going to go down while Luna price is going to go up. But like, dude, you can't kill die. It's like one of the most battle tested decentralized stable

Starting point is 00:18:42 coins of all time. Like sure, we can talk. We can talk. Yeah. Plus you're just recreating the maker the maker down model in a different way. Anyways. There's more like more steps in some ways, right? There's more custody. Although, you know, maker and die to be fair,

Starting point is 00:18:58 a lot of like centralized staple coin backing it at this point in time. Certainly. But go on. Do tell. Say more. Okay. So I tweeted after to his response, my money is on die.

Starting point is 00:19:09 As in like no, Doquan, you're not going to kill die. And so on Twitter, he gives me this. Let's see if I can, uh, that's,

Starting point is 00:19:15 no, that's not going to, yeah, Nick Cage, like, oh, really? And then does like the, the empty brain,

Starting point is 00:19:22 like, empty brain meme, just making fun of me. And like, it's just always funny when I see like L1 founders and engaging in just like kind of degenerate Twitter antics. Anyways, I have DMs out to Doe Kwan to do an AMA on bankless all about what he's up to with Tara and all this.

Starting point is 00:19:39 So all of the Luna shills that are in my DMs trying to get me to get Doquan on bankless, go to him, go to him, tell him, because he has the invite. He has the invite. DM's inbound, though. We'd love to have you on the show. I want to talk a little bit more about stable coins. Hear about your plan to. kill die. I'd love to hear it. Also, what's going on here? We've got a, I guess a burn watch we should

Starting point is 00:20:08 talk a little bit about. So six billion eth has been burnt to date. Six billion dollars worth of ETH has been burnt. We're not even a year into EIP 1559, David. We've got six billion ETH burnt. But also, this, the burn rate right now, as of when we are talking about this, this week in the last couple of weeks, has plunged to a seven-month low. That is why, because gas fees are low, because blocks-based demand has decreased. So transactions are cheaper, a byproduct of that is we actually burn less Eth. Even though we're burning less Eth, though, we're still burning a lot. This is ultrasound. Money, again, where you can simulate the burn on the one day, for instance, in a post-merge world,

Starting point is 00:20:57 when's the merge going to happen? I don't know. It's a June, David? June to August. June to August. We'll talk about that. We would be still burning 0.9% of total ETH supply per year. So that would be deflationary.

Starting point is 00:21:12 That would be ultrasound ETH in this scenario, in a post-mortemortem. merge world. So still a lot of ETH being burnt, but not as much as before. What are your thoughts here? Ryan, if the amount of ether that was burnt was a token on coin market cap or coin Gecko, it would come in 24th, right ahead of Bitcoin cash. It would be the 24th highest market cap token, the amount of ether that's burnt. So there's your fun fact for the day. Well, that is a fun fact. We haven't talked about the burn in like at least like three or four shows so you know got to bring it back because it happens i bet we have on a weekly basis don't fact check us don't fact check us bankless nation uh okay a maple finance they just originated one billion dollars worth of loans

Starting point is 00:22:00 this is a protocol for defy services for institutions which is kind of cool because i think that is a theme of markets yeah aggregation loans yeah and that's a theme of today's episode which is like hey the institutions like they're not coming they're already here here. And this is them here in Defy. So what is Maple Finance again? Can you refresh us? Yeah, it fixed money market. Like it aggregates a bunch of loans and simplifies it and it just makes life easier for institutions who are trying to get yield in Defy. Maple Finance has been grinding for years. I remember talking to them back in my realty days, 2019 to 2020. Australia. Australia based, Australia based. Yeah. So definitely like true to the good ethos,

Starting point is 00:22:44 true builders of good DFI products. So just tip of the hat to Maple Finance. Congratulations for breaking $1 billion. Look at this. Congratulations on this tie, Sid Powell, from Maple Finance. Hey, that's what happens when you have to deal with institutions. You wear ties. That's just for the headshot, right?

Starting point is 00:23:02 All right, guys, we will be back with the releases of the week. And of course, the hot news of the week. We're going to get to Vitalik on the cover of time and some other things. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. And that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet. And brand new to the ledger lineup of hardware wallets is the Ledger NanoS Plus, a huge upgrade to the world's most popular hardware wallet.

Starting point is 00:23:27 With more memory and a larger screen, the NanoSplus makes it easy to navigate and verify your transactions. And the paired Ledger Live desktop app gets you increased transparency as to what is about to happen with your NFT. What you see is what you sign. The NanoS Plus gives you the smoothest possible user experience while you're doing all of your crypto things. So go to the ledger website to check out the features of the new Ledger NanoSplus and join the wait list to get yours. And don't forget about the Crypto Life card, also powered by Ledger. The CL

Starting point is 00:23:54 card is a crypto debit card that hooks right into the Ledger Live app, right next to all the Defi apps and services that you're already used to doing, like swapping tokens and staking. So if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger and take control over your crypto. If you're going bankless, you need Metamask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi. without giving up custody over your private keys. Metamask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any decks or aggregator.

Starting point is 00:24:24 Metamask swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the defy exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the Metamask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. Metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about,

Starting point is 00:24:39 which I used to collect Po apps, NFTs, and do all my DeFi things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you got to try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at Metamask.io and load up your Treasurer, Ledger, Ladis, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date.

Starting point is 00:25:02 With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest defy apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of defy activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their defy goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof-of-stake side chain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midin, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases. If you're a developer who wants to build on the Polygon ecosystem,

Starting point is 00:25:33 go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy, you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. Got to start with this release. This made some waves. Loop rings LRC, their LRC token is up.

Starting point is 00:25:55 And that's because there was a beta release of GameStop's NFT marketplaces built on loop ring that was just released. This is a little bit of what it looks like. You can connect your wallet. You can add funds to loop ring. layer two here. GameStop plus Ethereum layer two. That seems like a good marriage. Now, we also, I think, heard about immutable doing this with GameStop as well.

Starting point is 00:26:24 So I'm a little bit confused because it feels like... We're getting some mixed messages here. Yeah. GameStop's definitely on layer two, but like they're dating two different layer twos right now, it seems like. Yeah. And well, actually, when you do the whole like log in with your wallet, there is actually no like loop ring or actually. actually, for that matter, immutable, like, branding or anything?

Starting point is 00:26:43 So, like, what is, what layer two is this? Like, there's the formal relationship between GameStop and Immutable X, and they have that $100 million fund. But then, like, okay, so the backstory here is that there is a former loopering business developer. We've had them on the show. Matt Feinstone. Great, great guy. That's fantastic.

Starting point is 00:27:05 But got poached by GameStop to start building out their NFT ecosystem. So loopering business developer went to GameStop. I'm sure Matt, with knowing loopering in and out, connected GameStop to looping, and that's the connection there. But then GameStop, I think, elected to go with Immutable, which, I mean, makes sense because loopering, Immutable X is a validityam, which is off-chain data, but on-chain transactions, on-train asset. So it's super fast, super cheap. Loopering is more fully...

Starting point is 00:27:36 Cost you nothing to mint things, right? It costs you nothing. Well, it costs the network something, but it costs you, the user not. Pays for it. You know, Mutable just pays for it. Which makes sense because, like, with loopering, you still have,

Starting point is 00:27:46 like, 30 cent transaction fees and everything's on chain. So, like, it's actually better for, like, very, very high value transactions. Like, I would feel more comfortable having my Cryptopunk on loopering than I would on Immutable.

Starting point is 00:27:57 But, like, for gaming, makes less sense. And so, like, there's no reason why they have to pick one NFT marketplace, one NFT platform. But, like, the mixed messaging here is a little bit confusing.

Starting point is 00:28:08 So what are they actually doing with loopering? don't know. It's also interesting that loopering is tweeting about this and not necessarily GameStop. Yeah, I was just going to say that. But of course, anytime you tweet something about GameStop, like it does quite well. It gets a lot of attention. Like, look at this. And LRC price is up a little bit on this news. But maybe not a ton. I think that like the bigger spike with the price of the loop ring token actually happens like, look at this back in November. when the rumors started cranking.

Starting point is 00:28:42 The first rumors about the Matt Fine Stone Bridge loopering relationship with GameStop happened. But then GameStop announced their relationship with the mutable, and then it kind of tanked back to the pre-price, but now it's up just a little bit. Got a little blit. Yeah, market confused.

Starting point is 00:28:57 Market confused, but not super excited about that, which does maybe tell you something. Also, let's talk about this. A protocol called TimeSwap just launched on the Polygon Network. This is a fixed income lending in bar, protocol for ERC20s. It's built on Polygon. I guess, you know, we've seen a lot of these lending and borrowing protocols. The special sauce here is no, no Oracle somehow. So that makes it,

Starting point is 00:29:24 you know, permissionless. There's no like governance apparatus. They're saying non-liquidatable. They're also saying it's got fixed maturity lending and borrowing. So you can kind of lock in the date at which these these assets will mature. And of course, this is in DFI, built on Polygon first. I guess, like, my observation about this stuff, and, like, I think we cover as many as we can and as many as we see, but so many launch that we're just, like, not able to fit into the roll-up every week. But once observation I've had is, like, we're starting to see more innovation on the edges. And what I mean by that is, like, the new protocols are being. developed and launched like the new weird stuff on layer twos and on side chains first not on

Starting point is 00:30:15 Ethereum and once they prove themselves in kind of these like more local jurisdictions then maybe they make their way back to Ethereum and they kind of launch on Mainnet but the innovation is starting to happen at the edges so I guess one message is like be on the lookout for cool new projects on side chains and layer twos that's where the action is going to be. That's where the innovation is going to be in the future. The alpha is always on the frontier. That's why we have the going west metaphor. It's the new frontier. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, we were in Colorado, I guess. Now we're just headed. We're headed west towards California. Going to the gold rush. California, baby. Yeah. Come visit me. Just more and more space.

Starting point is 00:30:58 And this makes sense, right? Because innovation needs to have cheap fees. If you're going to take risks, you need to have cheap fees. Because why would you take risks? when you have to pay the fees of the Ethereum L1. So I think the process for this is that developers, and the cost of innovation goes to zero on the layer two's, developers are free to experiment, free to innovate, and then they are free to experiment and get their product market fit.

Starting point is 00:31:21 And then if they do get it, it justifies returning back to Manhattan, back to the L1, and you can have your ceremony of just like, yo, we made it, guys, by deploying your contracts on the L1, because you have proven that there is sufficient demand to justify it on the layer two.

Starting point is 00:31:37 The New Frontier. L222. You liked that one, Ron? I like it a lot, David. I don't know where you come up with this stuff, sir. It's just genius. Robin Hood, they're coming up with some stuff too. A new debit card that offers crypto rewards.

Starting point is 00:31:52 Well, where have I seen that? Some of the quotes are interesting here. Of course, everyone's trying to get Gen Z now. Sorry, millennials, you're no longer hot. It's all that you can see. And the idea is to turn non-crypto natives onto Bitcoin. So basically, it's a debit card because according to this article, Gen Z doesn't like credit cards. They just want debit cards? I don't know. This article says, David, I don't know. Is the

Starting point is 00:32:19 alpha the alpha for this? I'm not sure. I don't know if that's true. But we do know, they do like crypto. And so when you use your debit card, you can like, like basically, if you're paying something and it's, you know, 90 cents, you can just round up to the dollar. And that 10% gets allocated to whatever you want, including crypto. You buy some eth with that, you buy some Bitcoin with that, little excess on your debit card. So I think the story here is like Robin Hood becoming more crypto-friendly and actually taking a page out of the crypto bank's book, right? Gemini does this already with their card, as does BlockFi, as does Coinbase. They're all going to do this. And now FinTech is coming to crypto for like the new features, which is sort of interesting to me.

Starting point is 00:33:04 I will have to say that a crypto-themed credit or debit card is like, okay, cool. Like, you get the thumbs up, but like there is no innovation points on that one. It's just something. It's probably table stakes. It's probably something you have to have to keep going. All right, man, you want to get to some raises? Yeah. Okay, let's go with this one.

Starting point is 00:33:24 This one's awesome. The mega race? The mega race. Yeah, so BoardApe Yacht Club creators, Yuga Labs, raises $450 million. That is a large number to build the first. version of the Metaverse. These are my words, first version of the Metaverse. But we talk about the Metaverse a lot. Like, oh, NFTs, they're part of the Metaverse. UgaLabs, they're part of the metaverse. Uga Labs is on a race to build out the first fully fledged version of the

Starting point is 00:33:50 metaverse. So complete with land, complete with NFTs, being the Bored Apes and all the other IP that Yuga Labs owns. You know, complete with people running around in their avatars doing board ape things. They have the ape coin for the currency of that metaverse. So they are not doing just one part of the metaverse. They're doing the full entire metaverse. This funding round evaluates Yuga Labs at $4 billion. And using that kind of like frame of reference for what Yuga Labs is building, as a team that has been known to execute and execute very, very well, you know, remember when Ryan when board apes used to be considered like the poor man's punk and now they're almost like two X the floor price of punks.

Starting point is 00:34:31 And how they just like bought like punks last week. And they bought the punks. Yeah, I remember that. And so like people are looking at the ape coin drop at the current valuation of $13 billion and being like that is ridiculous. That's way too high. Usually air drops happen. They have a spike of interest, but then they just basically bleed to zero. People in my mind are valuing this ape coin based on the value of like a completely fully fledged first first functional metaverse ever.

Starting point is 00:34:58 coming out of Yuga Labs. Right. And so that is the value, $13 billion, that is absolutely insane. $13 billion airdrop. That makes the minting of a board ape. Perhaps one of the greatest investments of all time. I think it was 0.08 to mint an ape. So that's now like 100th.

Starting point is 00:35:17 Don't remind me, okay? That's painful. But then you also got the ape coinirdrop, Ryan. You also got probably, I think they got mutant apes air drops as well. Maybe they had to mint those too. But yeah, minting an ape. one of the best investments of all time. Dude, you know what?

Starting point is 00:35:32 Maybe William Pister can do a Metaversal post on that. You know what? I'd love to see the best NFT investments of all time. Like compare like the original Cryptopunks, you know, like mince to this. But this is their slide deck, okay? It's bullish. It's a pretty Chad deck. It's a Chad deck.

Starting point is 00:35:49 Well, when you've got a slide that just lists like, you know, 12 different celebrities and their names are Shaq, Post Malone, Snoop Dog, Justin Bieber. Timberland, Future, the Bebes, Serena Williams, and they're all like apes, right? You've done something really well to kind of penetrate. And this is all about, I mean, there's so much in the slide deck, we'll include a link in the show notes. But, and we think, like, our conspiracy theory, right? It's like, I think you said this, that this was probably leaked to hype up what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:36:22 So people like, Bankrupts would go talk about it. The intentional leak. Yeah. So this is basically like they're saying everyone's done crappy versions with the Metaverse. No one else gets it. We have the brand and the ability to actually pull off a Metaverse. The thing that Zuckerberg is talking about, like that's the thing that we can build and

Starting point is 00:36:44 we are going to build. And Apecoin is the currency of this. You know, the NFT early community and all of our brands will be sort of the NFT layer and come hang with us and you know this is going to be really awesome and now all we have to do is build it. So if you want to hear more content about this, this news actually dropped while we were live streaming on the state of the nation on Tuesday about this exact topic. So you can go watch that state of the nation. It's about Yuga Labs buying the punks but we also talk about what they're building. We had a number of builders on that show who were saying like, okay yeah, Yuga Labs

Starting point is 00:37:20 executed on the branding behind Bored Apes. But like building a metaverse, building digital land and all the other things that they're talking about, like, that's hard. And that's something new. So sure, they have the ability to execute in one domain. Does that mean that they have, that it carries over to the ability to execute in like three other domain simultaneously? TBD. I kind of agree. I kind of agree with that take, which is like you have one category of execution that you've absolutely crushed.

Starting point is 00:37:49 And that is like narrative building, story building, branding, marketing, marketing, marketing. total points there. You total crushed it. But the Metaverse, that is a different type of execution ability, right? And the question is, can you now pull that off as well? And I guess we'll have to see.

Starting point is 00:38:11 But they're definitely funded to do that. A16Z was involved in that funding round. They did their profile pick of a, you know, whatever board ape that they hold. A 3D glasses, board ape with an astronaut suit. The astronaut suits a nice touch. You like this one? They put it as their profile pick.

Starting point is 00:38:29 For a very short amount of time. That's one day. You know, the announcement day. The announcement day. That's all you get. Just one day. Okay, let's keep moving. FtX is backing a $500 million

Starting point is 00:38:40 crypto gaming platform on Terra. What's super interesting is these Alt Layer 1 ecosystems are also accruing their own funding, you know, funding rounds too. And $500 million for a crypto gaming platform, like, that just blows my mind the money that is flowing into this space right now. Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, no thoughts other than just there's absolutely. You would have no idea what the price action would be if it being down for the last four months based on the valuations that are being pulled in the private rounds.

Starting point is 00:39:13 Absolutely. These private rounds are not bearish. Yeah, it's like, do you remember how the private rounds like dried up in 2018, 2019? Like, you know, like people couldn't raise money. I remember talking to founders and they're like, it's really hard. Like, we don't know if we're going to be able to survive. This is not that type of bear market at all. Thank you for printing all the money, Federal Reserve.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Appreciate it. All right, FDX, they just invested $100 million in an app, banking app called Dave. Yeah, Ryan, I have a banking app that I sold for $100 million. Is that yours, Dave? Banking app called Dave. They have Dave.com. I'm surprised that wasn't yours, Dave. Have you used this before?

Starting point is 00:39:58 I have not used this. This is the first time I've heard about this. Okay. This is the first time David has heard about Dave. Anyway, this is an example, I think, of FTX, like, I don't know what you'd call this, but like going toward the Tradfai side of things, right? So, FDX is obviously like a crypto exchange, a crypto bank, and now they are investing in Tradfie FinTech companies, $100 million worth.

Starting point is 00:40:21 So, you know, smart move, but this is all, like, we've had this thesis for a long time that crypto banks would just become basically neo banks, and this is, looks like what they're evolving into, kind of see, cool to see crypto get involved a bit more in fintech. I don't know very much about Dave, but you should invite these guys to Dave Dow, David. Oh, they're in Dave Dow. Just right just because of the name. World Point. Oh, boy.

Starting point is 00:40:49 Oh, boy. Okay, they just raised $100 million. I feel like they just raised. The last time we heard about WorldCorn was because of their raise and their announcement. Okay. So I wasn't making that up. They raised $100 million this time at a $3 billion token valuation. What is WorldCoin for people who forgot about this thing?

Starting point is 00:41:09 We're talking about a lot of raises. There is a particular niche in crypto that has been tried a number of times, and that is the Sybil-resistant token distribution, as in can we distribute the same amount of tokens to everyone in the world? And so the attempt here is to make your token valuable by fairness. So if everyone has an equal amount, then that's super, super fair. And humans value fairness, humans value legitimacy. We did a great podcast on this with Vitalik Beter entitled Legitimacy.

Starting point is 00:41:41 You should definitely listen to that if you haven't. And so this is an attempt for that. When they released the first time around, they got absolutely slothed. on Twitter and in the public sphere because of how they actually went about trying to solve civil resistance. And they did it with these like super dystopian silver ball looking things that scans your iris. And it uses your iris and your fingerprints as like an anti-cibil mechanism. So it's the classic Web 2 model of like give us your data and we'll give you money. And so they got absolutely slaughtered on crypto Twitter.

Starting point is 00:42:14 And they were funded by like a very big name, like three hours capital. A16 Z. Coinbase is now in this one. Coastal Ventures. Right. And so they were in the news cycle. So we reached out to them to host them on state of the nation

Starting point is 00:42:31 because it was hot in the news cycle. That's what we do. And they were afraid to come on. We told them, like, you guys need to come on because you guys are getting slaughtered in the narrative. And if you ever want to justify or explain your project, you guys need to, you guys are welcome to use our platform

Starting point is 00:42:46 to explain what you guys are up to. and they were too scared. Do you think they were, they backed out at the last minute, which surprised us. Oh, fun fact about that. You know what episode we did in lieu of that episode, Ryan?

Starting point is 00:42:57 You remember? No. It was ultra-scalable Ethereum. Oh, really? One of the most popular episodes of all time. Oh, the one that we were just like, oh shit. We don't have like a last minute episode.

Starting point is 00:43:08 We got rugs. Yeah, they were like, yo, like we don't want to come on anymore. We're not ready for the PR. And then I went back to the CEO and DMed him on Twitter. It's like, you're making a huge mistake. Like, Bankless is one of the most. fair platforms you'll ever get ever and you're not going to get this opportunity again and then he just didn't respond. And so instead, we ground it out and produced the agenda for ultra-scalable

Starting point is 00:43:28 Ethereum. It was great. It was one of the best episodes of all time. I remember being very stressed with the cancellation there. Like, we don't usually get cancellations. I don't think like, look, I am actually optimistic. Like, I was cautiously optimistic about this. I think they may have gotten an unfair rap on Twitter. And in the crypto community, I wanted them to kind of explain themselves because they have made some really cool engineering decisions. For example, they've built this thing on a really interesting layer two set of technology. So it's all like ultimately settled on Ethereum. And I do think fair distribution this way is a monetary experiment that we've never been able to successfully try. So can we mitigate the privacy concerns that people have? Like,

Starting point is 00:44:15 I do think that they should spend some time with the crypto community and explain this. So I guess despite what we've just said and despite the previous invitation, I would still welcome these guys on, at least somebody from their project to like talk a little bit about WorldCoyne. But what they're in the news for is more funding, not necessarily like actual traction and progress. Right. So like we would know that there would be traction if people saw little silver balls in their neighborhood and we saw cues of people lining up to get their Irish. is scanned. So bankless listeners, if you've seen that, tweet at us and let us know if you've seen that, because I certainly haven't. Yes, and I will not be first in line for that one. I'll skip that. That's a good to experiment. Yeah. I'll just wait for it. At least come on the

Starting point is 00:44:58 podcast first and we'll talk about it. This is kind of neat. This is under the, I guess, the title of why work at a crypto fund when you can go start your own? Katie Hahn, she was at A16C. She was a partner. She started her own fund recently. She just raised $1.5 billion for a Web 3 fund. Again, more money in the space, more people breaking off from the funds that they were in and starting their own. Here's another. This is a former polychon chain capital founder who just launched a $125 million fund. Now, I guess the twist here is this fund is actually destined to become a Dow at some point in the future. Let me describe how that works. It says, after the full $125 million is invested, that's the initial fund about, the fund will be dissolved.

Starting point is 00:45:48 And the Dow, and Dow 5 will return the limited partnership capital to investors and convert the fund into a Dow, which, of course, is an online community that uses smart contracts, cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera. So that is the plan for this, kind of a unique twist on things. Why join a fund when you could start your own, David? When bankless Dow, when bankless fund? Are we going to do a fund at some point? I mean, we've talked about this. The answer is yes.

Starting point is 00:46:16 If people are interested. I have too much to do. We're not anytime soon, guys. But yeah, why start a fund when you can build your own? That is the question. And I think it's a question for everyone, right? Like, these crypto economic tools make it easier than ever to, like, coordinate capital. So why not try some capital coordination experiments?

Starting point is 00:46:39 If you're listening to a bank list, if you're plugged into defy, you're probably on frontier and you're probably able to make some pretty good investment decisions, at least if you've been in this space for a little bit and have seen some cycles play out. Let's see what Qualcomm does in the space because... This one's mine, Ryan, because Qualcomm is based right around the corner from me. They're in San Diego, right? They're in San Diego, yeah. The drive by their office every now and then.

Starting point is 00:47:03 A hundred million dollar Metaverse investment fund, and this is actually pretty interesting. And when I was reading this article, I was reminded of Kathy Woods' whole The Future near than we actually think, and there are like five megatrends in technology. One of them being blockchain, another one being basically like, kind of like AI chip, what Qualcomm's up to. So Qualcomm is putting $100 million into a Metaverse fund to build out things like VR headsets and things that demand chips. So because, though, they are investing in the Metaverse because they think the Metaverse will create net new demand for microchips, for Silicor, for Silicon. It's like the hardware side of the network.

Starting point is 00:47:42 side of the Metaverse, right? And so this is the intersection of industries coming together to build out the future. And so Remindor, the Metaverse is not just crypto. It is so many more other things. It is data centers and servers that can host persistent state of many, many different people from across the world, like significantly more massive MMRPs. We need chips for that. It's headsets and immersive experiences. So these technologies are coming together, and Qualcomm is putting 100 million. million dollars into that investment. I do think crypto people forget about the hardware side of things. I mean, we are focused on the content. We're focused on the property to populate the metaverse and the people. But there's a lot of like hardware in, you know, data center tech underneath all of this. This is another one. The teams behind the Mina, Mina protocol, I think that's how you say it, Mina protocol. They just raised 92. Mina. Mina? Okay. I don't know. The Mina protocol. They just raised $92 million from Thero's Capital, FTA. and others. This is a layer one chain. Okay. And it is a privacy focused chain. I don't know very much about this, to be honest, David. I haven't, you know, gone down the rabbit hole on this one.

Starting point is 00:48:55 I imagine it's probably proof of stake. I imagine it's using some advanced cryptography. I imagine it's also a smart contract platform. Beyond that, I got to ask the question. Like, do we have any more room for more layer one chains? Well, we have room. for more layer one investments, Ryan. We got lots of that. Lots of room for that. At some point, it's got to become a bad investment, though, right? It's like, at some point, when does the window fully close on layer ones?

Starting point is 00:49:25 Well, okay, so privacy is hot right now because of the whole conversations of sanctions and nation states and crypto. And so privacy tools and privacy tooling is in vogue at the moment. So I think that kind of explains that a little bit. I just always ask the question is you'd have to have a really good reason to build a layer one when you could also just build a layer two from an economics perspective. And sometimes I wonder if the reason to build a layer one is just investors will fund your project for a lot of money and you can sell tokens.

Starting point is 00:49:57 That's been the status quo for like almost five years now. Let's talk about this. Paradom just invested $8.75 million in Ribbon Finance. What's this about? So in the Tradfai world, we have these things called, structured products, which is basically like, I think an analogy is like kind of like a yearns custom strategies. Like you can load up yield strategies. So it's like a, it's like a yield strategy, defy product. We have these things in tradfi, but basically anything you can do in tradify,

Starting point is 00:50:26 you can do even better in defy. So that's what Ribbon is. Their project's declared mission is to create sustainable alpha for everyone. Financial products are bundled per specific investment strategies. So they just raise $8.75 million from Paradigm. I think this is a cool defy protocol. And if people want to check it out, of course, bank lists for a tactic about this you just an article, how to make money with ribbon finance. And William Paster describes it as a prepackage and cross protocol defy investment strategy. So if you want to learn how to use this thing, yeah, at the time we wrote it, APIs range from 10 to 54% on this thing. So pretty good APYs, go check out this article.

Starting point is 00:51:08 We'll include a link in the show notes. Dallio, Bridgewater, investing in a crypto fund. Finally. Dallio's warming up a little bit to crypto. Finally, yeah. What do you think about this? It's so frustrating.

Starting point is 00:51:23 I know you and I are both reading his book. I don't know if you finish his book or not, Ryan. But like, it's impossible to read his book, which is titled like how principles for living in a changing world order. And the changing world order is something, we talk on bank lists about all the time. He just nails it. The decline of the dollar, the decline of institutions.

Starting point is 00:51:41 Here's what you, here's, this is why we talk about how it's risky to not go into crypto, while crypto is also risky itself. Things are risky and things are volatile and things are chaotic when we have changing world orders. And Ray Dalio is so tapped into this. What he's missing.

Starting point is 00:51:56 And he talks about how the phoenix that rises from the ashes of like one broken world order moves into a new world order and then the phoenix rise from the ashes and we do it all over again. He talks about like these new, these new nations always work well when they have their own internal financial markets, their own internal equities markets, their own like places of trade. And like, it's so frustrating when I'm hearing this and I'm like, oh, okay, so Ethereum, it's got its own uniswap. It's got us own like, DYDX. It's got us own money markets with compound and Ave. It's got all of the financial institutions that Ray Dalio says it's critical for the arising of a new of the new neo nation the next step in the world and i'm like ray it's right in front of

Starting point is 00:52:41 you it's right in front of you it's ethereum it's defy it's crypto he he literally goes he's like here here's the history of you know denmark in like amsterdam's the first exchange and then we got london right that that that was another financial we invented the lc it's like yeah yeah we have dows now exactly and then and then he's like and then he's like well what's going to be next the question is what's the next nation state on the rise is it going to be china maybe It's like Beijing is the next. I'm like, what about Ethereum? It's Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:53:09 It's Ethereum. It perfectly fits into the trajectory. It really does. And I don't think he's, I just don't think that's on his radar. The raise, like the rise of what we would call like the, you know, this new institution, the digital nation, these new protocols. I think even if you are, if you believe that nation states will get a whole other big cycle, like financial cycle and be kind of the empire, then even, even if you are,

Starting point is 00:53:35 Even in the most, like, I guess, bearish case for, you know, the bankless concept of a digital nation, crypto is still the perfect bridge between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. So you at least want to be in crypto because you don't know what the future big nation, you know, new world order is going to be. And like, so you want to be in crypto in order to get across that bridge because crypto is going to be essential for getting across the bridge and establishing a new world order. So we tend to think that, hey, the new world order will probably be based on crypto because it's the only credibly neutral institution to actually do the job in the digital era, right? It's going to just slurp in all of the value,

Starting point is 00:54:21 just like the internet has slurped in all of our communication content. But even if you don't believe that that's true, you know, crypto is going to play a massive role as the bridge between old paradigm and new paradigm. Anyway, all that to say, raise, raise getting it though. He's investing in crypto funds. So it's starting to happen. There's a reason why we call it the bankless nation. And it's not just because it's a good name. It is a direct reference to exactly what Ray Dalio is talking about. We're building new nations in the sky and they shall be bankless. There you go. Guys, if you want to get into the new nation, you got to get a job in crypto. That's what it takes. We got some fantastic jobs. We tell you every week to get a job in crypto. I think

Starting point is 00:55:04 we just got a massive dump of new job postings on the bankless job boards. I'm ready to check that out. I'm ready to dance. You're ready to dance because I'm ready to read. All right, let's go. You've got the easier. Yeah, well, blockchain engineer, Dows, Massari is hiring that. What a fantastic role.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Software engineer for market data. Also at Masari, go check those roles out. Operations Manager, Syndica. Senior product designer, smart defy, a senior Go Rust Engineer at Syndica, a senior full-stack engineer at Syndica, a senior software engineer, AirDrop Labs, a product manager for crypto at Nouri, a bankless web developer at Bankless, an editor at Bankless as well, a Senior Project Engineer at the Bankless Academy, a senior product engineer at Super Rare. Got a bunch more positions open for Misari. You should take a look at

Starting point is 00:55:49 Gauntlet as well. David's done dancing, and I got to take a sip of water because I've been reading a little bit. I would like to emphasize the Bankless Web developer would be in charge of building out one of the coolest websites of all time. I shouldn't even call it a website, we need a better name for it. But if you want some alpha, you got to apply to be the bankless web dev. If you are a talented web dev who wants to lead bankless into the world of Web3 and into the frontier, pay attention to that one. Yeah, why would you not? Get a job in crypto. Companies are still hiring like crazy. This is not like the last spare market. This is a ton of hiring going on. All right, man. Well, let's get to news, okay? Yeah. And let's get to you

Starting point is 00:56:30 Vitalik on the cover of Time magazine. Look at this picture. Look at like an absolute king. Well, he's not a king. He's the Prince of Crypto. Excuse me. Excuse me. It's on the cover of Time magazine. It says, the Prince of Crypto has concerns on Vitalik's shirt.

Starting point is 00:56:44 And then it says, Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buter, and fights to fix the world he created. And this isn't anything new. Vitalik in 2017 made similar sentiments on Twitter saying, like, yo, if this whole industry just turns into, like, pump and dump ICO Ponzi schemes, like, I'm out of here. And then the bear market happened, so he stayed. Thank God. But now, now once again, like, it's always the hotline. Like, Vitalik's a very, like, pragmatic modest person.

Starting point is 00:57:09 When he sees, like, all the scams in crypto, he's like, yes, those are bad. Like, I don't want Ethereum necessarily to be used for these things, but I understand the value of open permissionless systems. But, like, it's a really, really hot line for something, something like Time Magazine to be like, yo, the guy that invented crypto says it's bad. But you know, you know what? That's a catchy. Look, we do it too.

Starting point is 00:57:29 It's called, we call it legit bait, okay? which is like you say something, but like it has to have some legitimacy. And in the article, which was absolutely fantastic, I think everyone, if you got like, you know, 15 minutes, go read this article. Vitalik does, you know, put in place some of his criticisms about the current state of crypto. And many of these criticisms are always well-reasoned, but they're also very valid. But yeah, like they put him on the type. But not everyone liked this image of Vitalik, David.

Starting point is 00:58:00 So when this got out, of course, everyone in Crypto was very excited to see Vitalik. And like, if you've met Vitalik, I mean, this is pretty much what he dresses like and what he looks like. This is tame Vitalik. But there's no pretense in the guy. Like, you're never going to catch him in a suit and tie and, you know, fully buttoned up. Usually it's in a unicorn t-shirt. But, I mean, some of the responses, some of the quote tweets on this were absolutely like, Ridicably.

Starting point is 00:58:31 Yeah. Pretty terrible because crypto has a bad rap, right? So here's a quote tweet from the Time article. This guy looks like the clone of Tom Brady. Can you go back to the other one? This guy looks like the clone of Tom Brady keeps locked in his basement to periodically feed on to stay youthful. My God.

Starting point is 00:58:50 There's a few others. This is if Tom Brady was on dog food. How is it possible to be this rich and still be ugly? Oh my God, get a hair transplant or a Botox or. new wardrobe something. Okay, this one, I want to dwell on this one. This is why I love Italic because he doesn't care about his image. He is a person. He is him. And like he shows up in ruffled hair that he didn't comb and it's in a unicorn t-shirt because he has no ego. And who do you want most to be the founder of your of your crypto project to have someone with zero ego?

Starting point is 00:59:27 We are missing L1 founders with zero ego in this world, in my opinion. There's not very many. There was Satoshi, I think. There's Vitalik, and I don't know if there's another I can think of. Maybe Zuko. He's a pretty cool guy. A fantastic person as well. My wife actually sent me this one.

Starting point is 00:59:45 It was like, oh my God, everyone's being mean to Vitalik on the internet. Like, I could do something. But I did. I tweeted out. I was like, most of the comments here suck. And this is so true. Vitalik is one of the best human beings I know He'll be remembered as a historical figure

Starting point is 01:00:00 Of monumental importance Petty people can't get past How he looks in this image We don't deserve him I 100% stand by that I think One of the best humans I know Not only that

Starting point is 01:00:13 I think the Vitalik is going to be remembered Across history Like he is going to be one of the most important people I think of this century For his work in Ethereum him, but the other things he's going to do in life as well. And it's super petty that people just, you know, take this picture and use it to insult him. Pretty annoying, actually, to me. But we got a funny exchange out of it, David. I'm reminded of the layer zero I did with Santee Siri from

Starting point is 01:00:44 Argentina, and he called Vitalik, while he walked around Argentina in his, like, sandals, he called Vitalik, like this monk figure. And I think that's a very, very apt description of Vitalik, right? has no, like, is not interested in material things, is mostly interested in making good things happen for the world. Very polite, very respectful, very grounded. Even, yeah, yeah, very grounded individual. Yeah, I just, I know both of us have, you know, had the opportunity to interact with him on a number of occasions, and he's just a fantastic human being and represents the best of us. And I think the best of this industry as well. But at least we got some fun out of this as well, because there was some back and forth on the Tom Brady. Why don't you tell us what happened here between

Starting point is 01:01:29 Vitalik? Vitalik can take a joke. He can take a joke very, very well. He's been used to getting just berated in all different capacities ever since he's been in crypto. So he retweets all of these like terrible, terrible comments on him on Twitter. And he goes, the quote tweets on the New Time article about me are truly amazing. These are barely even cherry picked. It's pretty much one piece of awesome after another. Highly recommend scrolling. And then he follows up his own tweet saying, I don't even know who Tom Brady is, had to ask people around me. My best guess is that he is the actor from Mission Impossible. And so there's like, he quotes, like, four, Fatalic, sorry. So he quotes, like, four tweets,

Starting point is 01:02:11 like calling him Tom Brady. Like, anyone else looks like Vitalik looks like Tom Brady on meth. Bro looks like a dystopian Tom Brady. Tom Brady was a reverse Captain America's super soldier serum. The Prince of Crypto kind of looks like Tom Brady after two years of retirement and no weightlifting. No. Okay. And then what happens? Tom Brady retweets Vitalik. Vitalik's tweet saying, I don't know who Tom Brady is. And Tom Brady says, what's up, Vitalik? You may not know me, but just wanted to say I'm a big fan of yours. Thank you for everything you've built in the world of crypto. Otherwise, Autograph wouldn't have been possible his NFT platform. Hope I get to meet you someday, you're the goat, which is a tip of the hat to how everyone calls Tom Brady the goat.

Starting point is 01:02:53 he's like one of the most Super Bowls by all time for and ever. So the goat of Super Bowl, of football, is calling Vitalik Buterin the goat. Hey, Real Recognize Real. Also a slight shill of his autograph platform. Yeah, but also Real Recognized Real, you know, like one goat seeing another, it's really cool to see. And I love that the story came together that way.

Starting point is 01:03:18 Anything else on this, David? No, it was a good story. It was a good story. The last time we saw Vitalik engaged with celebrities, it turned into a really funny video of Milakunis and Asyn Coutcher and Vitalik in the living room. So I'm hopeful something like this happens with Tom Brady. Yeah, absolutely. All right, man. Let's move on to some other Ethereum stuff while we're talking about Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:03:39 And, you know, we got to just mention EIP 4844. Okay, I'm going to say that again because this is the first time we've talked about this Ethereum improvement proposal. that's what an EIP is on bankless. EIP 4-844. Remember the name. Remember that number, okay? Because it is like 1559 in that it is going to be of that level of significance, I think, in the future. We don't talk about EIPs very often, but this thing is worth talking about.

Starting point is 01:04:12 Now, we're not going to go in detail. It's probably a bunch of future bankless articles and probably some shows that will put together for you in the future. And there's kind of no rush because it's still in the early stages of development. So we got a long time on this one. But David, could you sum up what EIP 4844 is going to do for us? Yeah, it's a new type of data sharding structure, which takes a leaf out of distributed systems like BitTorrent. It kind of copies a BitTorrent model.

Starting point is 01:04:43 So on the website, it'll read, EIP 4844 introduces a new kind of transaction type to Ethereum, which accepts blobs of data to be persisted in the beacon node for a short period of time. These changes are forward compatible, not required for EVM execution, and small enough to keep disk use manageable. So it's basically allowing Ethereum's data layer to be a little bit more expressive and using distributed systems, again, like BitTorrent. We will get better and better at explaining these things as we come to understand them more. But the TLDR is that this is from Proto Lambda out of the optimism team.

Starting point is 01:05:18 data blobs are the first milestone towards full Ethereum charting, enabling roll-ups like optimism to grow a hundred times in capacity. That's already after roll-ups like optimism have 10x in capacity coming from their own innovations. And so we were just previewing this very, very significant subject for something that's going to have a huge scalability increase,

Starting point is 01:05:40 both to the Ethereum L1 and, of course, orders of magnitude, more scalability to the Ethereum layer two's. And in particular, this is going to scale out. remember we've talked about in our modular blockchain show the three the three kind of layers of the stack here, the consensus layer, the data layer and the execution layer, and the Ethereum scalability roadmap, the execution layers is all roll-ups, basically. And the consensus layer is the beacon chain, of course. This is bringing massive scalability to the data layer, which

Starting point is 01:06:11 roll-ups, of course, need in order to scale. So what we get when this thing is deployed, and it's a much more simplified version than the full data sharding spec. So the hope is it can be deployed a little bit faster than the full data sharding spec is roll-up fees, as David said, up to 100 times faster, like 100 times more space on roll-ups. So look at what you pay on Arbitrum or optimism or any of the ZK roll-ups you use, right? And it's going to be 99% less in terms of costs. So if you're paying like, you know, one cent now or 10 cents now, you're going to be paying like fractions of a cent in the future for a transaction. So lots of cool stuff to unpack there. And we will unpack it in the future, just not on this particular episode.

Starting point is 01:07:02 Well, we're talking about that, though, David, should we talk a little bit about the merge? Because some people brought to our attention that like, we should emphasize something. Yes. Okay. What should we emphasize? Last week we went through like the superphyses analysis on like five different points that indicate that the merge is coming in June. And then we talked about how bullish the merge is and emphasized June, emphasized June, emphasized June, emphasize June. June is possible, but it is not, it's not fact. It's not canon.

Starting point is 01:07:34 So the merge is coming perhaps sometime in Q3, sometime between June and August. But it could also come in 2024. It could come in 2025. It could come in 2030. It'll be ready when it's ready. Bankless is not the Oracle for when the merge comes. That's what the developers jobs for. So apologies if any of the Ethereum developers felt any pressure by the narratives that Bankless likes to beat the drum for. The merge is, if it came in June, that would be fantastic.

Starting point is 01:08:05 People are hypothesizing that it'll be sometime between June and August, but June is not actually scheduled. That's just an estimation. So I just wanted to say that. And I do think that people got a little bit skittish after there was a bug in the kiln test net, right? And they were just like, ah, wow, given that bug, you know, the June date might not happen, right? And so that's some of the feedback. Anyway, there's still a chance.

Starting point is 01:08:32 It happens in June. Of course. But it could also be July. It could also be August. It could also be later. It's ready when it's ready, as David said. The best time for the merge is when it's time for the merge. which is this summer

Starting point is 01:08:46 I don't even know if that makes sense I don't know either but moving on this summer let's talk about NFT stuff and first we got to talk about a pretty massive fishing scam

Starting point is 01:08:57 not because it's the biggest in dollar amounts but because it seemed like it was targeted and very sophisticated we've had Arthur Zero X on the show before he is the founder

Starting point is 01:09:09 of Defiance Capital which is a D5 firm he just got 1.7 million dollars worth of NFTs yoinked from his Ethereum wallet. David, like, what happened here and how did it happen? Yeah, so I think somebody spun up like a shared Google Doc and sent it to his email and it kind of looks like somebody was sharing a Google Doc, but when he opened it, that did things. And I'm noticing that that dock is a Docx file.DUCX. And that is the same file type that Hugh Karp had his Nexus mutual tokens stolen from.

Starting point is 01:09:47 And so be wary about people sending you files, basically, which makes it really, really hard because maybe we could talk to somebody technical about this. I don't know if this functionality is possible inside of a PDF, but a Doc X file can have embedded data in it that can swap out your metamask to a clone of a metamask that looks like metamask that does things that you shouldn't do. and so even people as sophisticated as Arthur ZeroX got fished. And so it can happen to you too. If you want to have maximum security about how to not have this happen to you,

Starting point is 01:10:25 the best way to do this is to work on one computer and sign transactions on a different computer and not to open up files on that second computer and keep that other computer relatively clean. And that's how you can protect yourself from this. I think that is especially true. The other thing you should do is go read this article that William Pister put together on Metaversal about this hack and how it happened and how you can protect yourself. Because I think you were talking about the Hugh Carp hack who's a DFI founder.

Starting point is 01:10:53 The crazy thing about this is with Arthur as well is he's likely stocked, likely targeted, right? So if you have kind of a public reputation in DFI, I think you should be especially cautious of this type of hack. because not only was he targeted, he was likely targeted by a known group in crypto, the blue Noroff group it's called. And there's some speculation that this might be a group out of North Korea that's actually assembled to go attack some of these individuals in crypto and kind of like hunt them down, learn their patterns, and actually see where their vulnerabilities were. Because this email that got sent to Arthur was actually somebody from one of his

Starting point is 01:11:39 portfolio accounts whom he trusted. So, like, they had inside knowledge of who Arthur might trust and the type of link he might click. Anyway, William concludes this article with a few other resources for you on self-custody operational security tips on, you know, how to guard yourself, how to store Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. So go refresh yourself on that if you, especially if you're one of these like public high profile people who you know might be might be susceptible to a group like this yeah the same strategy was used with Hugh Carp where he clicked a document that just made sense for him to receive it came out of like the Nexus community call and so somebody was like okay Hugh Carp here's this document it's part of the

Starting point is 01:12:28 nexus community call information that we were talking about so somebody was using relevant information to Hugh Carp so that when he received this file. He's like, oh, this totally makes sense that I'm receiving this file. I will totally click on this. Yes. This is why we also talk about cold storage so often and like, you know, the ledger keys. That didn't, that didn't protect Hugh Carp. Hugh Carp got rugged from his ledger. You're right. It can't help with some things, but it doesn't help with this kind of fishing, fishing attack. The best thing you can do is just make sure you know exactly what you're signing and sometimes that's tricky too, but be vigilant, plus up your OPSEC if you can. Let's

Starting point is 01:13:06 Let's keep moving. Hollywood in our Hollywood section. So Disney just released something called Pixar pals. What are these? These are the most simple types of NFTs you'll ever see. They are NFTs of Pixar characters, like Woody from Toy Story, Buzz from Toy Story. They are pictures of characters. You can buy them the NFTs coming out of TV. And it's Disney. Disney's getting in on the NFTs. So is the DC universe, right? The creators of Batman, of Marvel's rival. So what are they doing? in the NFT space? Digital trading cards of their characters from the Marvel universe. You can buy them as NFTs. Pretty simple, open and shut. They're at the very simple

Starting point is 01:13:46 stages of NFTs, right? Yeah, you've got to imagine these are just like tests and prototypes and it's going to get more complicated from here. Let's talk about the institutions a little bit, David. So check this out, man. This is Goldman Sachs. Holman Sachs. Shall I read it? What's this say? Yeah,

Starting point is 01:14:02 read it. Big word, digitalization front and center with the subtitle from cryptocurrencies to the metaverse, explore the meta trends, mega trends that are reshaping economies. That's it. Just the word digitalization, cryptocurrencies and metaverse, now on the front page of Goldman Sachs. So crypto making the front page of Goldman Sachs is if it's like a pillar of their strategy moving forward. But are they going to get it right? This is Ben's take.

Starting point is 01:14:30 He's actually from the bankless team. Why don't you talk about this? Yeah, Ben, bankless analyst, head of the G. EMI index, one of the methodologists, says, per command F, where you know, you find something, this Goldman Sachs report on the Metaverse and Web 3 does not include a single mention of either blockchain or Ethereum. This is a perfect example of why DFI natives are going to eat their damn lunch. Well said, Ben, that's what we love to hear.

Starting point is 01:14:56 That's the right take. Chad Ben's the best Ben. Yeah. If you don't know what's up, we're just going to learn how to eat you. This is the rise of the individual against the institution. Like if you don't know what defy is and you're not reporting on it, we're just going to eat your lunch. Yeah, I think we got like at least five years of knowledge on these guys and they're just kind of getting into the space. And I bet they're going to not understand it for a while.

Starting point is 01:15:17 But they could if they start like consuming the right content and actually using these protocols and getting in the space. But I think that's kind of few. That's not the many we're going to go on that path. They just also as well announced the first OTC crypto trade. Of course, we talked about their partnership with Galaxy Digital last week. Apparently that partnership went forward, and they're actually spending money on crypto right now. Yep. That's that.

Starting point is 01:15:43 Let's talk about our friend Elizabeth Warren. What's she up to these days? Being cringe. She introduced a new compliance bill for crypto on the wake of the whole sanctions conversation with Russia. And so it's using the Russian narrative of we need to regulate crypto because you can use crypto to get around sanctions, even though there's absolutely no evidence that that's actually. happening. But in addition to that, the bill goes beyond Russian sanctions. An additional provision in the bill would authorize FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, to force users to report transactions larger than $10,000 if they send them outside of the United States. So if you're a

Starting point is 01:16:26 crypto person, you send $10,000 to somebody else that is outside of the United States, you have to report it. But that also begs the question. In what jurisdiction is a smart contract? if it exists on Ethereum. Like, does that smart contract, is that outside of the United States? Like, it's on the Internet. Is the Internet outside of the United States? Not only that, but the bill also tries to attempt to regulate publishing code, which is a legal battle that we have already fought before.

Starting point is 01:16:54 There's this line that code is speech that came out of the cypherpunks. So basically, you are not allowed to put strings of characters together in a way that creates code and then publish that to Ethereum if this bill goes through without it being regulated. So Elizabeth, reign it in. Rain it in. Yeah, we're disappointed. David and I are disappointed and continually disappointed.

Starting point is 01:17:17 There's absolutely no reason for this. Number one, there's no evidence of Russians actually, like Russian oligarchs actually using crypto to like, you know, launder money or evade sanctions or anything like that. But, you know, even if that was the case, what they actually want to do is basically, put you in a database. They want all of your crypto wallets in a database so they have an ID and they can match your eth address, your crypto wallet address to your identity, right? And that's what

Starting point is 01:17:47 would happen. If it was any 10K transaction that I sent from like one place to another, I would have to actually make sure the government IDs my wallet. It's absolutely crazy, absolutely insane. This is I guess, you know, the surveillance state trying to reach its tentacles into crypto. What I was super disappointed with is actually one of my senators in Virginia, Mark Warner co-signed this as well. So I sent some tweets his way as, you know, that said basically this kind of financial surveillance is garbage and is what's going to make the next generation leave the U.S. that I was sad to see him to support this. So it's another reminder. tweet at your Congress representatives, tweet at your senators, tweet at the people who are behind this bill.

Starting point is 01:18:35 and get your opinion out there because this sort of thing can't be pushed forward. It's unlikely that this will go through, is what I would say. But the fact that... They're even trying? Yes, the fact that they're trying and they're couching this in language as if this is being tough on Russia, when really it's just being tough on American citizens. No, it's like, it's like it's an authoritarian anti-speech provision that they're trying to push down our throat using Russia as a... a justification for that and is a reason for doing that.

Starting point is 01:19:08 And if you want to get a taste on the, what's the right descriptor, the dishonest intentions of Elizabeth Warren, there's a clip of her asking somebody who's an expert in crypto about how somebody can use cross-chain bridges to, like, to launder billions and dollars of Russian oligarch money. And the guy attempts to answer the questions, like, well, Elizabeth, Senator Warren, you can't really, there's not enough liquidity in, she actually referenced the wormhole bridge between Solana and Ethereum. There's not enough liquidity to support $10 billion going from one chain to another. And she's like, and she goes, I don't care about the liquidity. Can you obfuscate

Starting point is 01:19:50 funds by going from one chain to another? Can you obfuscate funds by breaking it up into small little wallets and using tumblers and mixers to obfuscate, do obfuscate transactions? And the man attempts to answer is like, Senator Warren, like, it's too much money. The liquidity isn't there. And she goes, I don't care, but stop asking about the liquidity. Can you do this? And she just refused to listen to the answer. David, they just, okay, so what I feel like is nation states and people like, politicians like Elizabeth Warren, they feel like because everything's digital,

Starting point is 01:20:18 that they should have a license to see it all. This is like, imagine if she put forward a bill that said basically, if you keep any valuables, I need to know the physical locations of all your vaults. You have gold bars in your home. You have jewelry. Like you have any gold. Which room? Which room was it in?

Starting point is 01:20:35 Which room in your house, the actual location, we need an identification system for your physical vaults. If she proposed something like that, that's essentially what she's proposing here. But because it's digital, they think they have a right to inspect all of this and to have everything registered with the state. It's absolutely ludicrous to me. And if this kind of thing goes forward in the U.S., crypto will be fine over the long run. but the U.S. will get left behind. Right. And that's my big concern here.

Starting point is 01:21:08 It's like there's like that giff of like this sword coming down and like hitting the thing and a sword just shatters. Like that's what's going to happen if you keep on trying to swing the sword at crypto. Absolutely. Well, let's keep moving. So FIFA World Cup, Crypto.com being a sponsor of this. It's like crypto is taking all the sports it can. Yeah. What's going on?

Starting point is 01:21:33 No, that's about it. Yeah, crypto.com. In addition to crypto.com arena is now a FIFA World Cup sponsor for an undisclosed to some. Wow, crypto's getting everywhere. Guys, we'll be right back with the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap.

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Starting point is 01:24:12 What was once inconceivable is now within your grasp. All right, guys, we are back with two David Hoffman takes in a row, back to back. This is a great one. All right, I'll read this out. This cultural difference between Vitalik and the other co-founders is such a crucial part of this industry. And you were talking about a cultural difference. This is a quote from Laura Shin's book, Cryptopians.

Starting point is 01:24:43 Should I read this last paragraph? Is this where the good part is? Yeah, yeah, it's that last paragraph for sure. Okay, this is from the book, Cryptopians. As Ethereum's promise became apparent, people jockeyed for positions. Charles, this is Charles Hopkins. Right, from now Cardano, who had lobbied to be CEO. Do people know that?

Starting point is 01:25:00 He lobbied to be CEO in early Ethereum? Anyway, he'd casually asked Gavin over a game of chess to be his chief technology officer, CTO. Gavin, who on Wednesday sent the first Ether transaction from his laptop to Charles asked Vitalik if that was cool. Vitalik being less interested in a title or in ordering people around than in conducting

Starting point is 01:25:19 research or learning Chinese said sure and gave himself the title C3PO. We got a CTO. We got a CEO and he wants to be C3PO. So this is going back to the whole monk perception of Vitalik. The guy does not care about status. The guy does not care about material things.

Starting point is 01:25:40 So when everyone else is jockeying for position, Vitalik is just letting it go. In the same way, Satoshi let Bitcoin go and go off into the world. Vitalik is like, oh, you're going to be CEO. Fine, I'll be C3PO. And like, this is the culture that's been baked into Ethereum, not completely, but more than any other smart contract chain, that is really what makes me feel good about being part of Ethereum. This is the culture that I align with because if we're going to make a new financial, world order, if we're going to make a new money for the whole entire globe, we can't have people

Starting point is 01:26:14 like Charles Hoskinson who's jockeying to be a CEO of the new monetary world order. Yeah, yeah. You know what? So people say Vitalik has too much power in Ethereum. So first of all, I disagree. But I do agree that Vitalik does have some power in Ethereum. But there's a difference because the type of power Vitalik has isn't hard power. It's not top-down authority power. It is soft power. And the fantastic thing about soft power is soft power is earned, right? It's like, it's a decentralized form of power because it's only power if people actually like follow him and actually believe what he's saying. It's not something that he can enforce on others. They have to consent. Yeah, they have to opt in to that sort of like, yeah. And just the kind

Starting point is 01:27:02 of power a monk would have or like a religious leader or like the Dalai Lama. or something like that. And I'm not trying to exalt him into like a religious leader, but there's an element of that type of leadership of soft power that I think Vitalik wields very well. And that's the sort of leadership you need

Starting point is 01:27:20 in a decentralized system I've come to realize. And it's just this charm in the, oh, you'll be CEO, I'll be C3PO. The charm of that is just what gets people to believe in this man. And not only that, but like even after Vitalik was a billionaire based on his Heath holdings, he was still staying in hostels

Starting point is 01:27:40 trying to spend the minimum amount of money just because that's what is downhill for him. That's what's natural to him. Yeah, just a good person, all around. Does second David Hoffman take? Second David Hoffman take, yeah. This is about music NFTs, and I was going, I was just kind of like thinking about,

Starting point is 01:27:57 like, why do JPEG NFTs, why are they so much more viral than music NFTs? And what is it music NFTs? So basically, the difference in my mind, between JPEG NFTs and MP3 NFTs is that you can fully experience a JPEG basically instantaneously, like because it's an image, you can receive it all at once. And music NFTs take time to experience. Like if we're talking about a song, that's like three plus minutes.

Starting point is 01:28:19 So like JPEGs can be instantly viral, right? MP3s take too much time. And I follow that up with the next tweet, Ryan, where you can apply the same thought to like profile picture NFTs. Some NFT art is more viral than others. Like Cryptopunks, extremely obvious aesthetic. Same thing with Bored Apes. Also why I'm bullish on MFers, right? Like it's just so obvious what their vibe is.

Starting point is 01:28:41 It's easy for these NFTs to live rent-free in your brain. Kind of like a meme, right? These are memes. It's harder. Like, songs definitely go viral, but like pictures go viral on average, way more than songs do, just because, like, of how laborious it is to consume a whole entire song versus how laborious it is to just view an image.

Starting point is 01:29:00 Do you also think that there's an element of there was an existing hole for PFPs to fill in a way there's not for MB3s. Here's what I mean. Like there's like in all of my social media profiles, there's no place where I can like set my profile song, right? Like that was like maybe in the MySpace days people did that. And people would put it on Mew anyways. Right. And people hate that, right? But for PFP's profile picks, I have so many places where I can just like display my image.

Starting point is 01:29:36 There's so much surface area in Web 2. And I wonder if that's an insight too. It's like in order to do really well, at least in this phase of the NFT game, the thing that will make the NFT category popular is does it have surface area in Web 2? Does it have like a ready made hole? It could just like plop in and fill. I think that might be part of it too. And this is not to say that music NFTs aren't a thing.

Starting point is 01:29:59 Like, they are absolutely a thing. They just will be a different thing. It'll be a different thing. It'll feel a different niche than like the profile picture NFT. It's not going to go like, music NFTs aren't going to like go viral in the same way that that JPEG NFTs will. Yeah. But we've got it all figured out, guys. That's how it's going to happen.

Starting point is 01:30:16 This is a good take. I hear a lot of people saying this that, hey, you guys talk about ethosound money and deflationary. Like, isn't deflationary bad? Here's a hot take from a. Kevin Fischer, I think deflationary systems are kind of whack, and it's frustrating that deflation is becoming core Ethereum meme. Thanks, bankless guys. You can say that, but he's on the optimism team, by the way. Okay. Deflation mainly really benefits the people who already have stacks to sit on. I thought this is a fantastic, and that's not the take. This is the take. This is the response from

Starting point is 01:30:50 Polyniya. Do you want to read this, David? Yeah, Polynia says, Ethereum is inflationary. Deflation is not given it is earned through surplus demand the current gas price is 14 way at this level there is no deflation if deflation is earned it means that the network is undervalued it's a self-correcting system that minimizes deflation okay so like kind of how like eip 1559 throttles up or down based on demand probably and i is saying a similar dynamic is happening there's a governor to the system as in if uetherium has a ton of utility if it's very very useful then the block space becomes very, very useful, and block space becomes a very high in demand,

Starting point is 01:31:29 and a lot of ether gets burned. If Ethereum stops becoming useful, then there's less block space demand, therefore less ether is burned, and Ethereum starts to become inflationary, decreasing the value of ether, making it easier to transact on Ethereum, but as Ethereum becomes more useful,

Starting point is 01:31:44 more ether's burned, making it deflationary. The whole its earned concept, I think is beautiful, and that's a fantastic take. Ethereum is only deflationary if it is earned by being useful to the world around it. So the answer, if someone asks you, like, isn't a deflationary system like Ethereum bad? The answer is Ethereum is inflationary.

Starting point is 01:32:06 If it's not selling any blocks, it's inflationary. But because it's in demand and selling so many blocks, it actually turns out that's deflationary. At some point in time, it's going to hit this nice equilibrium where those things kind of line up. And then the whole network and block space and everything is. kind of fairly valued. The supply of ether is not going to zero. It's not going to zero, right? It's just going down a lot.

Starting point is 01:32:31 Well, Justin Drake, so we're talking ultrasound money case, like 100 million or so, right? Like under 100 million, right? Like, that's probably the long-term projection. I bet the equilibrium of eth supply is like somewhere between like 85 and 100 million over the very long term, like 50 plus years. I bet, too. I bet.

Starting point is 01:32:50 Let's talk about this. This is an Arthur Hayes piece, probably my favorite written piece of the week. Do you want to pull out some takes from this? The title of this is, Energy Canceled. Yeah. Energy canceled.

Starting point is 01:33:01 What's Arthur Hayes thesis here? What's he saying? Yeah, so this is part of the whole macro conversation that's happening with oil and energy in Russia, but not just that and all over the world. And also the energy that is basically imbued into currencies and how currencies are basically a store of energy, basically. And when you expend that energy by inflation,

Starting point is 01:33:23 your currency, well, then you're deleting the last bits of energy that your currency has. Anyways, Arthur Hayes says, the current petro-dollar-slash-euro-dollar monetary system ended last week, which is a huge statement, with the confiscation of the Russian central bank's fiat currency reserves by the U.S. and the EU in the removal of certain Russian banks from the Swift Network. In a generation hence, when this hopefully sad episode of human history concludes, historians will point to 26 February 2022 as the date upon which the system ends. and a new, currently unknown to us, system sprouted.

Starting point is 01:33:56 Also, shout out to Ray Dalio and the changing world order. This is the same energy, same vibe. Great take. What do you think about that, Ryan? Yeah, I mean, he goes on. I mean, we've been saying that, basically, too, is like this kind of could mark the end of U.S. dollar monetary supremacy, right, as being the reserve currency.

Starting point is 01:34:15 But, you know, he says what's going to happen is energy will cost more, food will cost more as a result of the sanctions. And everyone's going to increase their military spending. We'll further crowd up the civilian economy. And I said because of the sanctions, I mean, it's why were the sanctions put in place? Because Putin decided to go invade Ukraine. Ultimately, that's like the root cause. That's like the reason why in this case.

Starting point is 01:34:42 But I do think it's going to cost the U.S. This is going to accelerate the paradigm shift that we're talking about earlier and that Ray Dalio talks about in his book to a new world order, Arthur's thesis in this article is basically we'll have to go back to commodity money. Like Bretton Woods V3, basically. So we had Bretton Woods original V2-1946, U.S. dollar would be the global reserve currency backed by gold. And then we had Bretton Woods v2, which is like when Nixon got us off the gold standard in the early 1970s.

Starting point is 01:35:19 and that's been the regime right now. Bretton Woods v. 3 is something new, something different. Nation states will have to kind of go back to commodity-backed money. And Arthur's thesis is actually the nation state money just because of its history will probably be gold. So he actually ends this article being like, I'm bullish on gold, but I'm also super bullish and even more bullish on crypto. And for him it's specifically Bitcoin, but I would also like lump ether in that category

Starting point is 01:35:49 and say like more bullish on ether than than Bitcoin, but those are words in Arthur's mouth. Anyway, commodity money, like a death of the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency system, that future, I think, is accelerating. It still could take many years to play out. It's like not a transformation that's going to happen instantly, but this is another step in that direction and I think has accelerated things, sanctions, the war, like conflict in Ukraine and the global, global world response to that. I think one other piece that I maybe want to mention is he puts you in the shoes of China. And he says, China is probably thinking deep and hard about the value

Starting point is 01:36:31 of inside money claims in its FX reserves now that the G7 just seized Russia's, right? So he's saying, like, are nation states going to store up their reserve currencies in the dollar with this kind of global distrust? Not a few U.S. can seize them. Yeah, after watching the U.S. just rugging in the entire country of Russia, China's like, well, I don't want to get rugged. For sure. So it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting decade for sure. And like, I think this is just accelerating the regime change. Yeah, Ryan, we have our closing statements at the end of the podcast. Crypto's risky. D5's risky. Staying in the same spot. Also risky. Also risky. You don't want to be caught in the same spot during a paradigm shift. Donald Glover, he's not getting caught in the same spot. What's this take here?

Starting point is 01:37:18 No, Donald Glover gets it. So he says, this is a quote about NFTs. NFTs are going to be a thing, but not in the way that people think they're going to be a thing. Like, it'll be way easier to not fake things online. And it's going to affect a lot of other stuff in a way that people won't understand for like another five years. Oh, yeah. Remember when we had all that corruption in this section and now it's gone because you basically can't lie about this? That's probably what's going to happen. This is a live quote out of Donald Glover from South by Southwest. Very rare to see a hot. an accurate take from a celebrity. Nice job, Donald. Nice job Donald. We love it. We love it. Yes. I think this man's brilliant. I think he's a genius. Yeah, so I'm not super surprised that he gets NFTs, but well articulated. Last, last take of the week. Another NFT take, David, what's this one from Jimmy.com. Yeah, Jim, Jimmy, J1MMI, Jimmy.Eath. He was recently on the overpriced JPEG's podcast, we're talking about a very similar subject. He goes, in the future, most NFTs will be all data and no media. And I think we will look back on the current state of NFTs with embedded photos that aren't

Starting point is 01:38:25 actually embedded as like analog NFTs. Skemorphic. And so this is a little bit like the loot NFT vibe where instead of having like this point to a picture, instead all of the value of the NFT will be embedded inside of it. And we're actually starting to see this. While listening to this podcast, I learned that the Cipher Brokers NFT project, they have a bunch of SVG files, like all the properties of a profile picture NFT, like the blue shirt, 3D sunglasses, beanie caps,

Starting point is 01:38:56 you know, like cypherpunk hair or whatever, all of these properties for the cypherpunks NFTs are SVG files that are embedded into the Ethereum, into Ethereum, on chain. And then what the project does is that it just takes all the different permutations and it layers on all the SVG files. And so every single thing about the NFT is on chain. And so completely trustless, completely decentralized, completely cypherpunk, super bullish on that whole entire concept. And so the idea that, like, we are going to point outwards for the data that our NFTs represents is short term, short term.

Starting point is 01:39:29 Yeah, that's a really good take. And for people who aren't following what an SVG file is, right? So that's basically like it's a different type of image format, but it can be all distilled to a bunch of numbers, a bunch of data, basically. And that's different from like bitmap style images. of which a GIF is one and a JPEG's one, which can't really be distilled into like data and can't be embedded on a chain. So with like JPEG NFTs,

Starting point is 01:39:57 which have been this current era, this current generation of NFTs, all you can really do on chain, except in cases like Cryptopunks where the image is like really small enough and able to be fully embedded on chain is like you're generally putting a pointer out to an external bitmap image somewhere, right?

Starting point is 01:40:16 With SVGs, you can just put all of the data on chain, and then, wow, the Metaverse could fully manifest this particular object or image in any way it chooses to do so, because all of the data behind that image is on chain. So that's part of it. I don't think Jimmy's saying, like, there's going to be no graphics on chain, and it's all going to be, like, data, but it'll be more like vector style images rather than maybe like bitmap style JPEGs. GIFs. When we did our defining the Metaverse episode, Ryan, the line the Metaverse is rendered at

Starting point is 01:40:52 the periphery perfectly aligns with this. That's cool. Data at the center, compressed, highly dense data at the center, and then it's rendered locally on your computers because they're just given instructions on how to render it. So when Jimmy says the future of entities will be all data, the data is instructions on how to render the Metaverse and your local computer wherever you are in the world. Wait, wait, who said that? The Metaverse is rendered at the periphery. Did we say that? That's my line. Yeah. That's a great line. That's a David Hoffin original, brother. Wow. Yeah, you like that one? That's great. No, I love that one. That's, yeah, we should start a podcast. What are you excited about this week, man? Oh, my God, Ryan. Okay, so I made this meme earlier this

Starting point is 01:41:36 morning about like, all right, what narrative am I trying to promote on Twitter? Do I want L2-2 or do I want the merge. And so it's the, uh, the meme is the guy like sweating his face, like doesn't know which button to press. Like, what do I shill? L222, or do I shill the merge? Uh, because like, the thing is, I think they're both happening around the same time. Uh, I think L22 and the merge is going to happen towards end of Q2, start of Q3, mutual climax time. I think that's, I think that's what's about to happen. Wow. Very exciting year. Uh, sounds like, of course somebody would be excited about that. A new article by David Hoffman, The Mutual Climax Thesis. Wow, this is the type of content people subscribe to Banks, this floor. That's exactly right.

Starting point is 01:42:22 Ryan, what are you excited about? I don't think I can top that. Mine was going to be the institutions are here. They're not just coming, but they're here. And that's also an unfortunate turn of phrase. But anyway, the institutions are here is the bottom line. So there was this phrase repeated over and over again in 2018. The institutions are coming. The institutions are coming. Like there won't be a bear market was kind of the implication because like institutions would buy our bags.

Starting point is 01:42:52 And that really never happened. Nope. The institutions were nowhere in 2018, 2019. Golden Sachs was not talking about digitization on their homepage. They were not buying defy. No one believed in it. Ethereum was dead. Bitcoin was just hanging by a thread.

Starting point is 01:43:09 But now they're here, okay? Like this week, digitization on the Goldman Sachs homepage. They just announced their first trade. We talked about that earlier. Bridgewater, Ray Dalio, massive fund, not only like in terms of assets under managed, but in terms of like institutional respect, right? This guy's like a global leader. They're doing crypto now.

Starting point is 01:43:31 Qualcomm, even, if they're Metaverse fund, right? The institutions are here. They're not coming anywhere. They're here. and that is like, you know, that is a shift. I don't know when it happened. It feels like I kind of thought in the days of, you know, 2019, 2019, when I somewhat thought that that meme could be true,

Starting point is 01:43:52 that there would be like a big announcement and somebody would be like, yep, we're here now, guys. Well, it's actually just happened without people knowing about it. It's happening on a week by week basis. But they are quite obviously here. And what I think that means, David, is, like, we kind of won. Crypto is not going anywhere at this point in time. The world's biggest institutions are behind it.

Starting point is 01:44:18 That means nation states will eventually fall in line. Because of lobbying. Yep. And it'll be a slow trickle at times. Sometimes it'll feel like a stampede, but the institutions are already here. And I feel like I've just realized that maybe in the last week or two. It's not as cool as yours, okay? But it's what I had.

Starting point is 01:44:40 Hey, the institutions are here for the mutual climax. That's right. That's the dirtiest we are ever going to get. All right, meme of the week, guys. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, this is, sorry for the podcast listeners. This one's not going to translate very well, but we're going to watch a short video

Starting point is 01:44:57 of two high schoolers in a lunchroom having a break dance competition. So we have a guy who's decently good at breakdancing. I'll give him a soft five out of ten. going up against like a kind of a white, skinny, nerdy kid who doesn't, you wouldn't expect to be good at breakdancing. But he absolutely kills it. And then the caption is three months later, he created Ethereum. That's amazing.

Starting point is 01:45:21 Yeah, look, I just feel the vibes of this video. I don't know exactly why I like it, but there's something about it, right? Vitalik Buterin, surprising everyone. That's what that means about, too. More or less, yeah. I think that's it. None of this has been financial advice. It never is.

Starting point is 01:45:38 ETH is risky. So is D-Fi. So is Bitcoin. You could definitely lose what you put in. 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.

Starting point is 01:45:47 Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: The Institutions Are Here | Vitalik & Brady BFFs | Verge of the Merge | Senator Warren, Sup?

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