Bankless - ROLLUP: Tornado Cash Fallout | Ethereum Merge Updates | $350m a16z Flow Buy | Sudoswap NFTs

Starting point is 00:00:00 Are they arresting developers now, David? Hey, Bankless Nation. It is the third Friday of August. Hope you're doing well. It is time for the weekly roll-up. That's what we're about to do, David. Every Friday coming at you. You're in a different place.

Starting point is 00:00:16 Are you going like mountain climbing or something this week? No, not mountain climbing. I'm just going to go climb a mountain, which is meaningfully different. Oh, okay. Me and the four Alpha Alpha boys are right after this. We're about to go to the Olympics in Washington. So I'm going to go have a little cabin weekend. and then we're going to go to the high divide trail.

Starting point is 00:00:34 This is so, so this is different. There's a distinction between mountain climbing and climbing a mountain, which is like you're not using your hands? Is that the distinction? Yes, we are just walking. We are just walking a lot. Man, I've been getting into the mountain climbing documentary scene. There's quite a, like, free solo.

Starting point is 00:00:52 You see that? Alpinist. Yeah, donwall. Have you seen Donwall? No, is that the next one I should do? Donwall is better than free solo. All right. Does the guy die?

Starting point is 00:01:00 in the end, though, because I can't do that. No, he does not. No, he does not. Well, in one of these three movies, he does, but not in the one I've just mentioned. You're right. No spoilers, guys. Sometimes it happens. It's a dangerous freaking sport, which is why I'm glad you are climbing a mountain rather than mountain

Starting point is 00:01:16 climbing because this podcast would be pretty boring without my co-host. I have done ice. Since we're on the topic, I have done ice climbing in the past, and let me tell you that it's fun. Yeah, I know, and that worried me. But, like, with, like, all strapped in, not like pre-sola. Oh, super strapped in. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:01:33 I am not a lunatic. But still, you're edging, like ice climbing is not, uh, adrenaline. Not a team sport. Anyway, okay, some adrenaline and crypto this week as well. Certainly. The tornado cash saga continues. Are they arresting developers now, David? Uh, the answer is yes.

Starting point is 00:01:50 There's an arrested developer. Yeah. Arrested. That's crazy. That's a big step up. And the question on the back of that is, is Ethereum really censorship resistant? We're going to get into that. What else?

Starting point is 00:02:00 we covering David. We're also covering the bad boys. Contagion topics are back. We got three arrows capital on the front page of the New York Magazine. So we're going to talk about that. Also, the Genesis CEO has stepped down and 20% of staff is being laid off as a result of the crypto contagion. And also more updates on Celsius. So bad boy season. And also coming in in the third hottest thing of the week. There's an exact date for the merge. We knew this last week. Precise. But somebody has guided it down to the minute. So we're going to talk about that as well. David, while we're talking about things, we should talk about our friends and sponsors at SmartCon.

Starting point is 00:02:40 They wanted us to give the Bankless Nation a message, which is they are hosting a badass conference at the end of September, the 28th and 29th. Who's going to be attending SmartCon? What is this thing about? SmartCon is ChainLink's annual conference. This is the first ChainLink SmartCon conference that is happening in real life. So there are some absolute Chad's in attendance. We got Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Sergei, of course, founder of Chainlink.

Starting point is 00:03:06 Apology, of course. We just had him on the show. SBF, we all know SBF Ed from Arbitrums. Donnie from Abe, Kane from Synthetics. So that is coming to New York. At the end of September, there is a link in the show notes if you want to take a peek and get a ticket. Also, if you do get a ticket, make sure to use the code banklist to get a healthy discount on that ticket price. A substantial discount.

Starting point is 00:03:27 this is numbering in the hundreds of dollars. Yeah. So you definitely want to check that out. All right, David, let's check out some markets, man. What is Bitcoin telling us this week? Bitcoin, slightly down, slightly down. Down 4.7% started the week at 24,500, ending the week where we are today at 23,400. Okay, slightly down on the week. No clear signal.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Above 20K. I'm not feeling good about Bitcoin unless it's above $3,000. 30k. But how about ETH? What's that looking like? Yeah, Eith, down 2.2% on the week, start of the week at at 1900, currently clocking in at 1860. Are you surprised? I mean, we're going to get into all of the the O-FAC stuff, the Rested Developer, censorship stuff, in a bit more detail. But are you surprised that this action didn't hit Eith even harder? Like, Price just kind of shrugged it off. Yeah, I guess that is a good point, that like all, the tornado OFAC stuff was a big, deal is a big deal and like it's been it's going to like now it's two weeks in a row that like crypto

Starting point is 00:04:32 twitter has been dominated by this like tornado cash ofack conversation am i surprised that it didn't hit eth harder um maybe i guess so i guess in a different state of the market i would have expected that to hit the price a little bit more but like it goes back to are we in a bear market are we in a bull market are we in a crab market and like one of the big indications the like actual solid indications of what kind of market you're in is what do what does news do to prices and if bad news doesn't tank prices you're in a bull market if good news makes prices go up you're in a bull market i agree and i i do think back to the the statement i don't care if we say it every week on the roll up it's fine uh sentiment follows price sentiment follows price and so i think if prices on eth were down like 15

Starting point is 00:05:18 percent on the week there'd probably be a different narrative spun out those all o-fac all censorship That's why ETH is down on the week. So because it's flat, that really wasn't part of the narrative this week. And I do think it's maybe an indication that we are not in a bear market. It's also worth considering that these seven-day price updates that we do every single roll-up, like since we have what is basically one month on the screen, the seven days, it's just that red square that I'm moving my cursor around right here. The trajectory, the trend is clearly up.

Starting point is 00:05:50 And so if we went for 14 days, it would be green. And so like the seven day, the inside, the seven day of just like just down 2.2%. It's actually in like a monthly long uptrend and it's still fitting there. True, true. So by the way, that's my cursor, David. That's not your cursor. Well, you can't see your cursor. Yes, they can.

Starting point is 00:06:08 I'm the one who's recording my screen. No way. I didn't know that. You can't see my cursor. Yeah. Oh my God. I thought it was my cursor this entire time. No, I do, I do capture your cursor.

Starting point is 00:06:18 I also capture my cursor. There's double cursors that people are saying on YouTube. Yeah. And also, Mine's bigger. See, I just place my cursor over your cursor and you can't, and your cursor is gone. Unbelievable. All this time and now I find out. I guess I actually should have watched a roll up on YouTube to see that previously. Or on Spotify, by the way. On Spotify, you can catch that. Coinbase. Sorry, coin gecko. Coin market. Coin market. Yeah. What's the, what's the crypto market

Starting point is 00:06:44 cap this week? We are, where? We are slightly down on the week. We ended last week at 1.2 trillion. We were at 1.17. So down $30 billion. Basically noise. Above a trillion. Okay. This is a metric we've been paying closer attention to and it's gotten a lot more interesting

Starting point is 00:07:00 in the last few months. That's the ETH Bitcoin ratio. What is that like on the week? Yeah, it is up on the week. It is up 2.4%. Almost breaching 0.08. It broke 0.08 earlier this week. Fell back down, but now we are at 0.097-957.

Starting point is 00:07:18 So the ratio, looking real good. The trend on this has been up. We've got a another graphic we'll show a little bit later when we when we talk about it. But let's talk about the bullishness that is the merge because we can't not. I'd love to. I'd love to talk about this. We're like less than a month out, okay? It's like less than four months.

Starting point is 00:07:36 A month from now. Four weeks. Yes. Let me not fund the merch. Four weeks from now, we will be in a post-merge world. And this is what that world will look like. Monetary issuance rates, if you compare a fiat, the debt, dollar, Ethereum proof of work, gold, and Bitcoin, and proof of stake. I'm going to read

Starting point is 00:07:58 these numbers from you. And this is from a Bloomberg report, actually, where they're increasing their coverage of Ethereum. It's getting me pretty bullish. So if you look at the Fiat issuance rate from the 1970s until now, it's been about 12.8%, 12.9%. If you look at just the dollar, it's issued. This is different than inflation. This is issuance at 9.2%. Okay? Per year. These are all annualized numbers. Ethereum has been, under proof of work, 4.2%.

Starting point is 00:08:30 All right, so already significantly less than Fiat, but gold is even better than that. They only mine about 1.8% gold from the ground, new gold issuance every single year since the 1970s. Silver, a little bit better than that, 1.4%. Bitcoin, better still. Of course, right now. That number that they are showing on screen is post-2024 happening. So they are jumping forward in future.

Starting point is 00:08:56 So the current issuance rate is about 1.7%. One point, yes, 1.6, 1.7. Which makes Bitcoin on par with gold. Basically. And that's currently. Now, if you want to project forward to the next happening, that'll be cut in half again. So it'll be 0.8%, 0.9%, something like this. But Ethereum, under proof of stake, coming in,

Starting point is 00:09:19 in four weeks from now at 0.18%. All right? And then if demand recovers, with current fees, yeah. Issuance. And then that's with current fees. And if demand recovers to the fees that we were generating during the bull market or over the past year or so, it will be deflationary at negative. 0.43%.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Pretty stunning numbers here, David. Yeah, we've been talking on previous ruleups. I'm like, man, Ryan, we might not be deflationary post-merge. But then if you look at this graph right here and it's like, oh, we'll be 0.0, but will be 0.18% inflationary. It's like, oh, like, it does. It's the difference between 0.18% inflationary versus negative 0.43% is like actually relatively small. It's like still fundamentally bullish. These scales for Fiat and gold are like 50 year scales.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Right. Right. We're going to be like this is when you're a monetary asset, you have to look in 50 year scales. There's another number that was on this graphic that I want to get you way in your way on is if you actually look at Apple stock buyback, okay? That's a deflationary asset too at negative 3.7%. And so some people, when I posted this, they said, well, actually, if you're saying ether is a great store of value, you should actually be saying Apple is an even better store of value. And that's an interesting take. But the difference between Apple and Ether

Starting point is 00:10:43 is Apple is not a monetary asset, all right? It's not used within the Apple economy. You can't pay anything with Apple dollars or Apple as a unit of exchange. There is no reservation demand for Apple stock in financial. Well, actually, okay, so you could like stake, you could like collateralize your apple stock if you're a billionaire and you can like make that deal with Goldman Sachs. Slight amount. That's it. Right.

Starting point is 00:11:08 But like other than that, like it's not like inside a permissionlessly global networks that have defy applications that are also permissionlessly built. And it never will be because it doesn't have the credible needs. Because Tim Cook and team can change the issuance policy out of wind. Stop those buybacks, right? Doesn't have the credible neutrality, doesn't have the decentralization, is not used as a store of value unit of exchange. And what's the other one? Medium of exchange and unit of account.

Starting point is 00:11:37 It's not used as a money. Right. And so like, but ether actually gets like the best of both worlds. It gets the stock buyback mechanism of EIP 1559, which is the same mechanism that drove Apple stock to be like, quote, unquote deflationary. So it gets that, but it also gets the reservation demand of being like collateral money inside of defy. It gets to have both. Yeah, I agree. Compare it to equities, compare it to monetary instruments. You kind of have to compare it to both. And in both, it's pretty favorable. I've got to say, we are bullish on Eath. And so are you, David. Here's a

Starting point is 00:12:09 tweet from you. Yeah. So here's a nice metaphor that I was cooking up. And I say, think of the merge as a current, like an ocean current or like a river current. Swimming again. the current, which is equivalent to swimming against proof of work issuance, is hard. If you are a swimmer and you are swimming upstream, you are swimming and you're probably not going very far. You're becoming a really good swimmer, but because you have to swim against the current, which is swimming against the structural cell pressure of proof of work minors, you're swimming against the current.

Starting point is 00:12:41 Like you're a strong swimmer, but you're not going anywhere. And so I say Bitcoin and Ether have become strong swimmers in order to sustain their current prices. They're swimming against the current. They're developing their muscles, but they're not really going very far. They're not moving. But the merge kills the current because it kills the structural cell pressure of all of the proof of work minors. And so as Ether has become this like jacked swimmer swimming upstream, all of a sudden, the stream doesn't stop being upstream and it actually starts being downstream. And so Ether goes from swimming against the current to swimming with the current. And so I continue in the tweet thread that I say like when Ethereum's network activity increases, EIP-159 actually increases the speed of the current that is pushing ether forward.

Starting point is 00:13:31 And so like the speed of water that the swimmer is swimming in increases or decreases as a function of gas fees, as a function of EIP burning. And so the more network activity, the faster the current is that's pushing ether forward after ether's already developed all of these jacked muscles swimming really fast. And so, like, that's like the metaphor of the merge and ether like supply economics. What I love about David Hoffman metaphors is you could just close your eyes and just visualize them. So if that didn't stick with you the first time, close your eyes. Rewind this podcast and listen to that again. Merge ASMR. That's what's happening.

Starting point is 00:14:06 And the question, I think, is, is the merge priced in or not? We had an excellent episode with Hal Press, who's, I think, the best writer, the best thinker on this, the best investor on this. He literally bet his fund on the money. merge trade. He wrote a fantastic post in the bankless newsletter that you should absolutely read. It's fairly long, but it is incredibly detailed. Send this to somebody with a tie, financial analysts as well. They'll enjoy this. And we did an episode with him earlier in the week that you can catch on the feed. But, David, we've got to get the contrary take a little bit. Okay?

Starting point is 00:14:39 And the contrary take to all of this bullishness is, hey, Heath Bulls, Crypto Bulls. Here's a tweet from Clark. You weren't playing any ETH merge. You were telling yourself a comfortable story while you longed the S&P. I think he is showing a correlation between Ethereum, maybe, and the S&P price on the start. I'm not sure

Starting point is 00:15:00 if that's what we're looking at you. Yeah, that's what's going on. Yeah, that's what's going on here. So basically the tweeter is saying, hey, ETH Bulls, like, you're getting so excited, but look, NASDAQ's up. And we all know risk-on assets do really well when NASDAX up. And that's what you're actually trading. Cut out the ETH

Starting point is 00:15:16 B.S. This is actually just the NASDAQ and SMP stocks are up so ETH goes up in, you know, a higher beta form. And they're probably right to some degree. And, you know, perhaps E's a decent degree. Like maybe it's actually greater than 50% of the effect. But we know with complete certainty, at least I'm completely certain, that it's not the full story. And we know that that is true because of the ETH-BTC ratio has rocketed off the floor going from where it was at like 0.05 to where it is now at 0.08. And so did Bitcoin follow the S&P 500? Perhaps yes. Did Ether follow the S&P 500? Perhaps yes. But Ether was like a 2x multiplier on what Bitcoin did. And so like only one of these things followed the SMP and one of these things followed

Starting point is 00:16:04 the S&P even more. And Ether did it even more. And my argument is like that's clearly because of the S&P or because of the merch. I agree. So we're looking at an ETH Bitcoin chart. And this is actually from an Arthur Hayes article, basically talking about how bullish he is on ETH, the asset and the merge and the trades. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. He just published that this week. It's great article as well.

Starting point is 00:16:27 And he's showing like, this is ETH Bitcoin ratio, and you could see that line of the merge probability increasing, and ETH is just gaining strength on Bitcoin. But also, interestingly enough, David, Alt, layer ones, are not doing the same thing. Ether is.

Starting point is 00:16:42 Okay? They are still not up relative to ether. So that's another. You might say, well, of course, eth is up relative to Bitcoin because it's more, you know, risk off, risk on, excuse me. But all layer ones have not appreciated relative to ether. So I think this really goes to the fact that people are pricing in the merge. That's kind of what we're seeing in the ether price right now. At least all the evidence points towards that.

Starting point is 00:17:10 David, got a lot more to talk about. What are we going to cover next? Coming up next, are they arresting? crypto developers? And is that the future of crypto? Because there's already one in jail. So we're going to talk about that arrest and why that happened and our speculation around that. And leading to the broader question, is Ethereum really censorship resistant? I'm pretty sure, Ryan, there's a bunch of listeners that don't pay attention to crypto Twitter. So they kind of get it through this. So we're going to speed run them through the seven-day conversation that was the Ethereum community on crypto-twit

Starting point is 00:17:43 about his relationship with censorship, because a lot happened on that conversation the last seven days. So we're going to give that conversation to listeners. And also, of course, bad boys, bad boys, what are you going to do? Three hours capital is on the cover of New York Magazine. Not in a good way. Alex Mishinsky took over trading of Celsius in the last days and really drove that thing into the ground in a grand fashion.

Starting point is 00:18:08 And of course, the Genesis CEO steps down and lays off 20% of employees with it. So all of this spicy, spicy stuff. and more coming right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Lens Protocol is an open-source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our Web 2 apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made.

Starting point is 00:18:32 We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control, rather than them controlling us. Lens isn't a social media app. It's a protocol to let a thousand Web3 social apps bloom. Lens is a permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto, and on Lens, we say not your keys, not your profile. With Lens, your followers go with you to whatever social media application you want to use. And instead of being trapped by an algorithm chosen by that app, Lens lets you choose the way you want to experience your social media.

Starting point is 00:19:01 Lens is the last social media handle that you'll ever need to create. So in order to get started, there is a secret code word in the show notes. Enter that code word in the Google Form linked, and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of of 3 social. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use defy and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, while defy protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges including finance, FTX, Whoobie, and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees allowing you to explore new frontiers of the

Starting point is 00:19:37 crypto universe. New to Arbitrum, for a limited time, you can get Arbitrum NFTs designed by the famous artists Ratwell and Sugoy for joining the Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is an eight-week-long event where you can play on-chain activities and receive a free NFT as a reward. Find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.g.g.g. slash arbitrum. You can also bridge your assets to Arbitrum at bridge. arbitrum.io and access all of Arbitrum's apps at portal.arbitrum.com. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be fast, cheap, secure, and fiction-free. no longer suspected. We do know that this is actually the tornado cash developer. And this is F-IOD.NL, the website, which is a Netherlands website as to where, because that's where this

Starting point is 00:20:21 individual, this developer was arrested in Amsterdam. So on Wednesday, August 10th, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam who was suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing cryptocurrencies through the decentralized Ethereum mixing service tornado cash. F-I-O-D is the Netherlands investigation of financial services and financial crime organization, and they arrested a tornado cash developer. Now, it's one thing to arrest open-source developers. That would be egregious.

Starting point is 00:20:55 We're not totally sure if that's what happened. And so there's speculation out there that not only was this person happened to be a tornado cash developer, but they were actually perhaps also assisting and, like, aiding people in laundering money. But we don't actually know because F-I-O-D release a statement that basically didn't give us any clarity. Ryan, what's your take on this? Well, my take on this is, you know, first of all, it seems very much like possibly they didn't have another reason for arresting this tornado cash developer rather than publishing the code. As David, you said, we're not certain of that. That is kind of the base case assumption.

Starting point is 00:21:33 And if that's the case, a man was arrested for writing code that served as a public good for people to maintain their privacy online. That means they put a man in jail because people use his open source code. And I don't think, David, that can stand in any free society on earth. As you said, we still don't know if there are other reasons that this arrest was made. But I believe on the 16th, Fayad provided some sort of statement on this. but it wasn't really clear. This is Jake Chavinsky saying, they refuse to say what charges are alleged, if any,

Starting point is 00:22:11 so we still don't know if they think writing code is a crime. Does Fayad think writing code is a crime? Two outcomes I see here is that there is an ongoing investigation that they don't want to show their cards for, and this is me trying to retain my grip of bullishness on humanity as in like there's a really good reason. I'm trying here. Is that like this guy, like, aided and embedded, like, money laundering of criminals and actually committed crimes versus they didn't say anything because they know that, like, they just arrested this guy for building tornado cash, which is the outcome I do not want.

Starting point is 00:22:45 So it's possible that the first outcome, the book, still be bullish on humanity outcome is still out there, right? And so we need to remain open to that possibility. But I will say a few other things happen congruent with this, which is they de-is. activated the tornado cash discord. Right. Okay. They killed the GitHub repos of all devs. And these were centralized companies doing this.

Starting point is 00:23:10 So you could argue this is kind of a chilling effect, but still the chilling effect is an effect, isn't it? It's a legally defined term, as you explained last week on the tornado cash episode. And then this is the backdrop where OFAC actually banned not individuals, but they banned some smart contract code. So what does the weight of evidence point us towards? this arrest. It's very possible that they made an arrest of an open source developer who just published an open source code. Bad guys used it. And that's why they want to send him to prison.

Starting point is 00:23:42 And if so, that is a big, big problem, I think. Not for, we'll get to these stakes later. Not necessarily for Ethereum, not necessarily for crypto, though it is a problem for the technology. More a problem for the countries and the citizens that live in those countries who are restricting their First Amendment freedoms. First Amendment, of course, is a, I guess that's a U.S. only term, but like freedom of speech, freedom to write and publish code. Some of these things are very important in any free democratic society, and these are the things that are in threat of being breached right now. And without evidence that these FIOD arrested this developer because they actually committed explicit and real crimes, then I think as a community, we have to assume that the man is innocent and didn't do anything.

Starting point is 00:24:30 Until they tell us, then in my mind, this guy just got arrested for writing code. So what are the legal experts telling us at CoinCenter? This is a crypto lobby group that investigates this. And as lawyers on staff, what are they saying, David? Yeah, so CoinCenter released a very thorough and detailed statement analysis, legal analysis, of the OFAC ruling of tornado cash being on the SDN list. So here's basically some excerpts from it that I think are important. They write, if the tornado cash application is not property in which some foreign country or national has an interest,

Starting point is 00:25:03 then the tornado cash application cannot properly be added to the SDN list or blocked under the specific powers granted by Congress to the president in the IEEPA. IEEPA is what gives OFAC power. Someone should be able to challenge the designation as being made outside the bounds of the statute and therefore invalid. basically saying OFAC, CoinCenter saying like, someone should be able to challenge this. There's like strong legal grounds or somebody challenging this.

Starting point is 00:25:31 And Coincender basically lays out the two big claims as to why somebody could challenge this. So claim one, OFAC's designation of certain autonomous contract addresses denies Americans their liberty and property without proper procedural due process. Yes, cover this. And claim two,

Starting point is 00:25:47 an overbroad interpretation of the IEPA substantially chills First Amendment protected speech. So those are the, the main core claims that CoinCenter believes that there are legal precedents, there's legal ground for someone to take CoinCenter to, or excuse me, someone to take OFAC to court. And CoinCenter is not the only organization focused on freedom to release a statement like this. The EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an organization just dedicated to promote, protecting the frontier, basically. And they put out a tweet that says,

Starting point is 00:26:19 the EFF is deeply concerned that the U.S. Treasury Department has included an open source computer project tornado cash on its list of sanctioned individuals. Tornado Cash is an open source software project and website that published a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer, and then they go on in their tweet thread and also release an article backing this. And so now we have our lobby groups, our protection, our like our frontier protecting agencies putting up a flag and say, yo, OFAC, no, back off. Yeah, and so important to note that OFAC didn't arrest this developer. It was the group in the Netherlands, of course. But it's all part of the same thing, isn't it?

Starting point is 00:26:58 This global kind of financial apparatus trying to enforce these, quote-unquote, financial crimes. And is privacy one of those financial crimes? This is a great tweet from Alex, David. What are we looking at? Just if you want to get the scope of other notable money laundering scandals in perspective, and let it be known, of course, tornado cash was used by some bad guys for money laundering. I think you pegged the percentage at like 35%

Starting point is 00:27:23 according to you to Anvilis. So at least 35% of the funds inside of tornado cash was like North Korea and some other like bad actors, money launderers. But that wasn't the only use case. And let's compare it to other money laundering scandals in history. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, so we're looking at a graphic of just the previous biggest money laundering scandal. So coming in, and number one,

Starting point is 00:27:44 1. At 390 billion, we have the 2010 Wachovia Wells Fargo case, which was allowed to allow drug cartels from Mexico to launder almost $400 billion during 2004 to 2007. Damn. Coming in at number one. Coming at number two, 265 billion standard chartered British banking giant 2012 accused by New York Department of Financial Services of its failure to control money laundering then helps the Iranian government to circumvent U.S. regulations to clear money to the tune of $265 billion. Damn. Donk's Bank. Donk's bank?

Starting point is 00:28:21 Money laundering scandal arose in 2017 to 2018 when it became known that 200 million, 200 billion euros of suspicious transactions flowed from Estonian, Russian, and Latvian sources through the Estonian bank branch of Denmark Bank, Donk's Bank, from 2007 to 2015. $228 billion. Damn. And so, again, to go back through those again. 390 billion from Wells Fargo.

Starting point is 00:28:45 What happened was a $160 million fine, no arrests. The standards chartered, the number two, $265 billion. The bank paid a $842 million fine and disciplined 10 employees. I wonder what that means. It's a severe discipline. Coming in at $228 billion, the Danks Bank, result, 10 employees were arrested. So 10 people went to jail. Okay, all right.

Starting point is 00:29:08 No fine. Maybe not to jail, just initially. arrested. We don't know what the outcomes were. Coming at number four, 8 billion HSBC. The result was this a $300 million fine, no arrests. Coming in at number 5, 11 billion Westpac bank bank paid a $1.3 billion fine, no arrest. Tornado cash coming in at number six. Tornado cash, open source. Possibly. We don't know. At its highest point, it held $500 to $900 million, but while authorities linked some of these addresses to North Korean hacker groups, it's unclear how much of that total was a use for illegal purposes.

Starting point is 00:29:44 Ryan, earlier you said 35% was in tornado cash. That was in tornado cash at the moment of it getting added to the OFAC list. And that's after the Nomad Bridge High heist, all of these other recent heists. When I was using tornado cash as for my own personal use cases, like in 2021, it was really before, pre-sanction, importantly, pre-sanction. It was really before all of the bridge heist that we've seen. And so like I bet you back in 2021, it was way below 35%. I bet you're something down below 20%.

Starting point is 00:30:17 And the scope of this, we're talking like, look, $100 million to $300 million, all right? Look at these things. Insane. 300 billion. Our friends Wells Fargo in 2010 did this. Standard Charter, 265 billion, billion with a B versus like $100 to $300 million, right? And these are banks. These are banks doing this.

Starting point is 00:30:38 So what, David? Should we shut down the banks? Like, just shut down banks? I'm sorry, no bank has ever given me any privacy services. Like, what have they done for me? Tornado Cash gave me privacy services. These banks didn't do shit for me, Ryan. If the rationale is that smart contract code can be used by money launderers,

Starting point is 00:30:57 we also know that banks can be used and are used by money launderers. And by the way, these are just the ones we've caught. Okay? So in that rationale, we're trying to sanction the smart contract code. Should we also sanction all banks? Right? Like, this is not the way to handle the situation. It appears very egregious to me.

Starting point is 00:31:15 But, David, maybe we should talk about the conversation on Twitter. And that is part two of our story here because there are a lot of implications. There's some backlash, too, but there are a lot of implications of getting smart contract code on the OFAC list. What is the first implication here? And what are we looking at? Yeah, this is going back to the chilling effect that has been created as a result of this OFAC SDN list of tornado cash. So Micah Zoltool, he put out a tweet saying, adding to the shame list, open C, D-Y-D-X, and Microsoft, because Microsoft owns GitHub. And he says, all of these companies have gone beyond what the sanction laws required.

Starting point is 00:31:52 They didn't just obey an unjust order. They went out of their way to do additional injustice. And so there's been this meme created about these, the over-compliore. And so, like, ah, I'm over-complying. Did you see the OFAC additions today? modifies no to censor transactions. Seven hops from tornado cash, fire an AML report. There's all these people in the ecosystem

Starting point is 00:32:14 that are just like doing these things that was not requested of them, not related to the OFAC SDN list, and is censoring and prohibiting freedoms and users from doing the things that they want. Well, it's true. Everyone on Ethereum with an eth address is probably two or three hops,

Starting point is 00:32:28 maybe four hops away from a tornado cache effect. That was an analysis. Like the 90% of Ethereum addresses are two hops away from a tornado calf user. And I mean, that's probably because of like the aggregation of centralized exchanges, but whatever. Sure. So some of the people doing this, Avey had a front end block. So Anthony Sazano, one of the recipients of to Sazel.Eath, a 0.1Eth from the tornado cash like dusting that happened.

Starting point is 00:32:51 He got blocked from the Avey front end. Ave has recently, has since then pulled back all of this front end blocking. But they, it was a third party that they use for the blocking, right? And they said, we've got to get more control over the third party. And it's just the UI, not the smart contracts. But still, even just the U.I. I get it. D-Y-D-X blocking tornado cash user.

Starting point is 00:33:10 So if you've used tornado cache, you get blocked from D-Y-D-X. And these are things that, like, are, they are not required of them. And so this triggered a conversation on Twitter. It's like, yo, like, is Ethereum, like, going to just bend over backwards and become, like, the censorship chain? And this triggered a huge conversation inside of the Ethereum community. Well, there was back and forth that I had over the weekend with Antonio. And I want to make kind of like, because it's important not to get overly, like, purist about this as well, right? And so I tweeted out, and this is around the time of where I was starting to see UI blockages from the OSAC.

Starting point is 00:33:49 It's time for defy to gross a backbone and fight back instead of just blocking eth addresses. Unelected bureaucrats, blacklisting citizens without cause or due process is unconstitutional, illegal, and incompatible with the free society. if it doesn't stop here, it just gets worse. And then Antonio, who is the founder of DYDX, he was like, what am I supposed to do, Ryan? Like, are you saying you want me to go to jail? And if you're saying that,

Starting point is 00:34:17 then why don't you spin up a front end of tornado cash? Like, why don't you put some stake in the game? And to be clear, that's really not what I'm saying, right? It's like, I replied to him, no, it's not time to go to jail. Let's be smart. But also, on the other hand, it's not time for Defi, David, to sit down and die. And I really feel like this week has been a wake-up call for Defy. We have to catch our breath. We have to organize. We have to develop some strategy around this, deploy some resources, and execute. I'm not saying now is the time to go to jail for, like,

Starting point is 00:34:53 an organization like DYDX. But we have to find strategic legal ways to push back on this. to protest and to move crypto and D5 forward. And I think this has been a wake-up call for that. Yeah, certainly. But it's actually gotten even worse. There has been a conversation of like this fork of geth, which is facetiously being called OFAC geth, which is a version of guess that does not propagate transactions or validate

Starting point is 00:35:22 blocks with sanctioned transactions. This is Defon from FlashBots, who is actually going to come out on the podcast on Monday. But he's being facetious about this. I'm not saying he's actually like creating OFAC death. But the conversation, to bring up the conversation is that like there's this world where like we have these Ethereum clients that download a list of sanctioned Ethereum addresses and just like don't include transactions from those Ethereum addresses. It's in the base layer software. This is a base layer software which creates protocol level censorship, which in my mind is bad.

Starting point is 00:35:56 But the point is it triggered this conversation, which is really, really, it was a great conversation that the community had on crypto Twitter. And then so the next part of this conversation, I think, was really triggered by Lifteris. And he, Lefteris, can't pronounce his last name. Sorry. He goes, question for Lido, Coinbase, Cracken, staked US, and Bitcoin suites. These are all the biggest Ethereum stakers. And he asked them, if a regulator asks you to censor at the Ethereum protocol level with your validators, what would you? you do? Would you, A, comply and censor at the protocol level, or B, shut down the staking service

Starting point is 00:36:31 in order to preserve network integrity? And he's retweeting a tweet that talks about just like, if you add all these stakers together, you get something like 80 or 90% of all steak. And so this conversation really triggered the conversation that flowed. And so Eric Wall, a man with very sharp edges, who's also very poignant, says, question for the Ethereum community. If a majority of stake chooses A in this poll, and this is the poll that left has put, would you, one, X, consider the censorship an attack on Ethereum and burn their stake via social consensus, and we'll define what social consensus is, or Y, tolerate the censorship. And then he scrolls down and actually puts a poll.

Starting point is 00:37:11 And so the poll is, you know, X or Y, X burn the stake, Y, accept the censorship. And coming in at 61%, we have the people chose X. 9% of people chose Y. So a very stark difference, and then 30% of people's, people. show results. And so really this is this is not really something that you can put into the protocol level

Starting point is 00:37:33 that the Ethereum community will state we will burn your stake if you censor. This is something that we need to communicate to each other as a community. These are our values and we're going to make these values explicit. Well, can you just walk through that for people? Because I'm not sure everyone understands the mechanism

Starting point is 00:37:50 of how social, like, how a social fork could essentially burn people's stake and create a fork that is nonsense like uncensored while the censored fork happens could you just walk through a scenario here so let's say those stakers and left rest's tweet become evil we call it evil coinbase crackin all of them you know and they decide to say some of them yeah and maybe it's not evil they just they just say we have to comply with o fact and so we are now going to only validate blocks from uh every other block that is not on an OFAC sanction list. So essentially, they create an OFAC sanctionable

Starting point is 00:38:31 Ethereum base layer. And because there's so much stake there, essentially a lot of blocks are not getting, they kind of control it. So what happens in this scenario? What is Eric while actually teeing up? What does the Ethereum social layer, layer zero do about this? Right. So the scenario here is that if all of those listed entities, Coinbase, Lido, crack in, all the big stakers, all followed OFAC sanctions list and didn't propagate any blocks that included transactions that came from an OFAC sanctioned list. Basically, if you are an OFAC sanctioned list address, your block, you only get like one, like five out of a hundred blocks that will be validated by a staker who's not following the OFAC sanctions list. So like five out of a hundred blocks of your

Starting point is 00:39:14 transactions only go through. So making Ethereum just really hard to use. And the Ethereum community through this poll where like 61 to 9 say that we will not tolerate that and we will send we will burn their stake via social consensus what does that mean in a theorem we have this concept called slashing and slashing is this very objective event of you're a proof of stake validator with a stake bond and you try to process an invalid block you lie to the blockchain uh you do you did some irregular thing and that is completely objective objective you publish two blocks and they're conflicting, trying to fork the chain, basically doing something invalid and you're trying to attack the chain. That's what we do with slashing that is objective and built into the

Starting point is 00:39:58 protocol and it's going to happen automatically. Then there's this thing called social slashing, which is something is going on with a validator. Maybe it's Coinbase, maybe it's Lido. They're censoring an address. Maybe they're censoring every single transaction. And so like imagine like all of these people, all of these 90% of stakers, Lido, Coinbase, Crack. in like the government comes and says, hey, we want you to shut down Ethereum. And since you're producing 90% of blocks, we want your blocks to be completely empty. And they then if they had a gun to their head, they would probably choose to not die and only publish empty blocks. And that would be censoring 90% of blocks that would go through Ethereum, making the blockchain really, really

Starting point is 00:40:42 just troublesome and useless. And so in the event that this happens, you can't actually slash that person at the protocol level because it's more subjective as to what is going on, as in Coinbase is not processing transactions that interact with Uniswap. They're still processing blocks, and the blocks are valid. They're just choosing to not include transactions that interact with Uniswap or interact with Tornado Cash or do something. And so how do we, as a community, get back our ability to use these Defi apps? There's this thing called social slashing or a user-activated soft fork.

Starting point is 00:41:17 So what this means is that because we have this like unique property in Ethereum that Coinbase, Cracken, Lido, these blocks are being proposed by specific Ethereum addresses. So we know these specific Ethereum addresses are censoring transactions. And these specific Ethereum addresses have some amount of ether staked with them. And so what we can do is we can fork the chain and we can do something that punishes them. We can either freeze their stake. The most nuclear option is you can just delete their entire stake. That would be pretty damn nuclear.

Starting point is 00:41:50 We probably wouldn't do that on the first iteration. The thing that we probably do first is we would do what is called an inactivity leak. We would prevent them from being able to validate the chain. And they would be forced to withdraw their ether stake from the network. And during that time, they are no longer able to process blocks. And then you could also slash them some arbitrary amount. We would have to decide this as a community. But I think the first step would be like, hey, we're just going to kick you out of

Starting point is 00:42:17 validator pool. We're not going to delete your ether. We're going to inactivity leak you, which means you are losing as much ether as you otherwise would be gaining if you were staking. So forcing you to exit and kicking you out of the validator pool and only allowing validators who have not been censoring. And this is a social slashing event. This is a user activated soft fork. This is something that the community would have to coordinate around saying, hey, OFAC made Coinbase and Lido and Crackin. They made them by the power. of the nation state, the monopoly on violence, they may dump censor transactions. And we do not accept that in the base layer. And so we are going to coordinate around a fork. And when that fork does,

Starting point is 00:42:58 is that kicks these validators out of the validating pool and they must withdraw their eth, or else it's just like in limbo if they don't. And so this is what's called a user-activated soft fork. And it's something that can only be done by social consensus of the Ethereum community, which is why this poll from Eric Wall is so important because it's showing that a 61 to 9 ratio of Ethereum community members says that we will do this if our entities censor transactions. Now, this is a Twitter poll, of course, right? It's like it's not necessarily reflective of everyone, of course. But like what David's describing is basically the end game scenario here. So a bunch of stakers, centralized stakers, decide that they are going to censor Ethereum via

Starting point is 00:43:41 OFAC. Okay. The community says we're not running that software. We're continuing to run the original non-O-FAC version of Geth, we'll fork you. This is the true Ethereum. And then they're trying to run an OFAC version or a censored version of Ethereum. And then like, it's forked. So you have

Starting point is 00:44:00 eth on both chains. You have every defy app that needs to select which one to spend their resources on. The community has to decide a set of validators which one to essentially run, which software to run. And it's a fork war. And may the best

Starting point is 00:44:17 fork win. And I think, David, in every single case, what will happen is, as long as we have a social layer around Ethereum that says, look, censorship resistance is baked into the base layer of the Ethereum project. This is the true Ethereum. That the non-censurable version of Ethereum will win in the end. And the reason it will win, we know this from a game theory perspective, is why would China go deploy and trust the OFAC version of Ethereum that has completely, completely U.S. controlled. They're not going to. So the state will continue to collect to the non-sensurable version of Ethereum and the community will eventually win. Like this is what I mean. As long as you have a layer zero, a social layer that is upholding these values and willing to

Starting point is 00:45:02 run the original version of like Ethereum that is non-censored, we win. And this is what would happen. It would be a messy outcome. The cool news I think is if you're an Heathholder, you just get ETH on the OFAC version of the chain. You could sell that if you want to. Dump that because it doesn't align with your values. Dump that. It doesn't align your values. If you want to or you could keep it, you could do whatever you want. And then you could run validators on the real Ethereum chain that is uncensored. That's where you'll find me. You're going to find me on the non-censored Ethereum chain. I think a large portion of the community, you'll find them there too. By the way, this same mechanism plays out in Bitcoin. Does it not? Yes. And this is a great history lesson.

Starting point is 00:45:44 We can move forward. One of the reasons why I focus on this, yeah, this conversation on Tenerative Cash happened on crypto Twitter. It's really important that this conversation happened because a lot of new people came into Ethereum in the last like 12, 18, 24 months that are still learning concepts like this. And so we have to have these conversations out in the public where the Ethereum community defines. Like, hey, like these are our values. Like no censorship at the base layer.

Starting point is 00:46:07 And so this conversation continues. Eric Connor retweeted Eric Wall and says, I do agree with Eric. we should make it known as a community that we, stakers, will burn the stake of any entity, burn at the stake, any entity that tries to censor transactions no matter the reason. These are the values that we're indoctrinating, we're instantiating into our layer one. Now, going back to what you just said about this user-activated software has been a mechanism that the crypto world has seen before. We've done this once before.

Starting point is 00:46:37 And so Eric Wall put out this fantastic Twitter thread, which I'm going to read here. And he goes, as the Ethereum community, community gears up to prepare for its user-activated soft-work defenses to force any validator to think thrice before bending over to OFAC, there's going to be a lot of snark from Bitcoins. And so, we'll talk about the Bitconer relevancy here. It's envy. User-activated soft-forking is the single most exciting thing that you can do in crypto. Bitcoiners had their user-activated soft-fork moment in 2017, and it is their proudest moment. I am a Bitcoiner, and it is my proudest Bitcoin moment. The idea that Ethereum would be even close to achieving something similar

Starting point is 00:47:15 is the most annoying thing that could ever happen. They'll never let you have it. The entire Bitcoin rhetoric relies on the reason that they were able to pull off their user-activated soft fork is because users ran full notes. This is the basis for the entire design philosophy. It is true that the ability to run a full-note is useful in a user-activated soft fork, but annoyingly, Ethereum can still pull it off, annoyingly to Bitcoiners. First off, Ethereum users can run nodes, despite what Bitcoiners will tell you. Even if the default is to sync using state commitments, that doesn't mean you can't enforce a user-activated software.

Starting point is 00:47:50 You, of course, can. Secondly, the outcome of a user-activated software is much more of a market phenomenon anyways. You still win a user-activated software just by demonstrating superior pricing power. So, meaning that if you're not a person who doesn't know how to run a node or doesn't want to. You can still dump all of your OFAC, Heath, and buy all of your censorship resistance. What's the true Ethereum? Is it ETH class? It's the one that has a higher price. Yeah. And so, Eric Wall continues and goes, all of these things should be narrative violations

Starting point is 00:48:18 for Bitcoiners. Ethereum's should not be able to user-activated soft fork is a core Bitcoin thesis. And I'll say this, Bitcoiners are better at user-activating soft fork than Ethereum's. They are, but they weren't born without ability. They were taught that they had this power. What is that word, Ryan? I have no idea. Chal and fry? I don't know. Ethereum's can be taught the same, basically saying that Bitcoiners don't have a monopoly on the concept of a user-activated soft fork.

Starting point is 00:48:44 What most people don't know is that if Ethereum's master user-activated soft fork under proof-of-stake, they gain access to a weapon that is more powerful than the user-activated soft fork of Bitcoiners. This is because a user-activated soft fork in proof-of-stake can selectively punish censoring validators. I talked about this earlier. Bitcoin, you can't selectively punish a minor in proof of work if a majority of hash-rate censoring, you have to build a build more hash rate than the attacker, which is possible. It just is hard and takes time. The non-censoring minors also in transaction fees that the censoring minors do not.

Starting point is 00:49:13 I wanted to mention this earlier. If you have like OFAC guess and you have 90% of blocks that are block stakers that are not processing OFAC non-compliant transactions, the remaining 10% of stakers actually make more money because they do get to process those transactions. Right. So you're actually rationally like incentivized to process the illicit transactions. If you can't over a power the attacker and proof of work, the only option is the nuclear one. You change the proof of work function and vaporize the entire billion dollar

Starting point is 00:49:42 mining industry in one shot. But you also kill the honest miners. In proof of stake, there is currently $25 billion of E securing. If 10 billion of that is involved in censoring, you can surgically vaporize the bad part and you keep the $15 billion of remaining honest takers on your side. And you vaporize it on your fork, the non-sensored force. You can't. The non-sensored work, right? So it's like punitive actions. Like, hey, you're going to pay for this guys because your fork's not going to be successful. Ours is. And on the successful Ethereum fork, you won't have any of your ETH. That is like the stick that social fork can yield. It's brilliantly elegant because you reward the honest people and you punish the negative people. Now, Ryan, like, I've

Starting point is 00:50:23 always been curious about this. Like, because you and I could take our crypto Twitter conversations into this weekly roll up quite a lot. And I'm actually cognizant that I think maybe like 25 33% of listeners are actually on crypto Twitter. And so I've always been kind of curious, like, damn, like, from the perspective of the listener, like, damn, Ryan and David are always concerned about, like, the Bitcoiners and, like, the Bitcoin maxis and, like, the tribes. I want to go to the quote tweets from Eric Wall's first tweet. And so this is the set of quote tweets, people that retweeted Eric Wall's tweet.

Starting point is 00:50:56 And you're going to get two classes of people here. One is Ethereum's retweeting the tweet saying, I vote X. I vote to slash. And the other is you have Bitcoiners trying to brigand, brigade brigand the poll and saying, Bitcoiners, vote why? Because it makes it Ethereum look bad. Can I just say whenever you're saying Bitcoiners, I want to make sure that you are talking about like not everyone who owns Bitcoin, but a specific subset of Bitcoiner, which is a Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:51:23 maximalist who wants all other chains to fail and only Bitcoin to succeed. That's what you're talking about when you're shorthanding Bitcoiners, when Eric Wall is doing that as well. If you're not on crypto Twitter, you're not exposed to these tribes that are for war and the zero-sum games that are being played. And we're over-exposed. And we're over-exposed to these people. So, yeah, if you want to like scroll down, Ryan and just see some of these conversations. Because like if the quote tweets, the list of quote tweets, let's keep scrolling, just go through all of them.

Starting point is 00:51:52 There's so many. The list of quote tweets, again, it's like, here's stats, sex, and snacks at it's time for Bitcoin. Imagine what it would feel like to know the integrity of your favorite shit coin depends. entirely on both stable coin custodians in a status mulrat that lives in a $100 million dollar L.A mansion to do the right thing even though it could sink them cry harder. Who's the Lerat?

Starting point is 00:52:11 I don't know. Like these Bikoners are insane, dude. These Maxis are insane. And so like, again, like there's two types of quote tweeters here. People that are Ethereum saying, I vote X, and then people that are Bitcoin Maxis trying to like manipulate and attack the Ethereum community because of exactly what Eric Wall was saying.

Starting point is 00:52:31 It's envy, he says. says. The user activated software incorporates the most single exciting thing you can do in crypto, and Bitcoiners don't want Ethereum's to have this power, because right now it's the only thing that the Bitcoiners have. Maxis. Maxis. Maxis. Yeah, I think that's what's going on. What are we looking at here, David? This is just a meme. Again, the Ethereum community is taking this opportunity to meme into existence. This is the prexx to doubt a meme, but it's press X to slash. So the entire Ethereum community is like, yo, we will absolutely slash anyone who invalidating. our values. And look, so here's the thing. A lot of this is talk, conversation on Twitter,

Starting point is 00:53:07 blah, blah, blah. I mean, at the end of the day, if this ever happened, by the way, this is set, I just want to emphasize this is still incredibly remote. There's a conversation on crypto Twitter, but there is no talk of OFAC or like the coinbases of the world or any of the validators running, you know, sanctioned code or running, running censored code here and complying with OFAC's sanctions. And OFAC is not even asking about it. So, This is just a remote probability that I feel like the cryptospace went and ran with this week as a thought exercise. But it's a useful thought exercise, but it's still incredibly remote. And this is, by the way, we have the stick, but we also have like the kind of the carrot, I think, for people who are centralized staking providers.

Starting point is 00:53:52 So Brian Armstrong actually replied to Lefteras's tweet when he asked, if regulators ask you to censor, do you comply and censor? or do you shut down your staking service if you're a Coinbase? Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase says it's a hypothetical, important to note, we hopefully won't actually face. But if we did, I pick option B. I would exit. Coinbase would stop staking. It would not censor transactions.

Starting point is 00:54:21 It would not run the OFAC sanctioned validator code. It would... Worth to note that the Coinbase staking is extremely profitable. They make a ton of money. And Brian is saying, instead of censoring the chain and compromising the integrity of Ethereum, we will shut down that business. Just we won't do it. And what will happen if they shut down?

Starting point is 00:54:39 More people will have to kind of run their own nodes, obviously. So I think we've got a lot of defenses against this level of state, the state level of censorship resistance. And I think more defenses in a proof of stake world. And it's definitely worth noting that these large entity stakers like Lido, Coinbase, etc., They're highly incentivized to not censor the chain because they don't want to piss off the community. Like they will punish you. We have that power. And so like the fact that this conversation is happening in the Ethereum community is planting a flag saying,

Starting point is 00:55:13 hey, if you censor our transactions, we're going to kick you out. We'll fork you. And so like they'll burn your stake. And so they have to pick B because the community is forcing them to do that. They have a fiduciary responsibility to pick B because they could get screwed. Imagine if they got slashed. lost all of their depositors money. Right.

Starting point is 00:55:32 What are the costs of that? So even just the prospect of us being able to do this and this rhetoric on Twitter of like, you do this and we'll fork and we'll slash. Right. That reins them in. They can't take the risk. It's about having this user activated software as a threat

Starting point is 00:55:47 without actually using it. The fact that it's an option. Nuclear. Keeps us from having us to use it. Mutually assured destruction, baby. Exactly. Exactly. Do it.

Starting point is 00:55:55 Don't do it, though. Please. This will be fine. We don't have to fight. There were some bad takes, though, I think, on this, terrible takes. And love Ryan Selkis, previous guest on Bankless, respect a lot of his ideas. He did not have the best take this week. But I think it's a summation of a lot of people who were saying, like, Bitcoin was looking great,

Starting point is 00:56:16 and Ethereum was looking very censored. What was his take here? Yeah, Ryan Selkis says, Ethereum is amazing, but I don't get the sense most in the Ethereum have the stomach to push full decentralized without compromises. USEC, of course, and OFAC imparting that. And then he follows up, Bitcoin remains metal A-F. Both are important for the decades ahead, but let's be honest, ETH is FinTech 3, not Web 3.

Starting point is 00:56:40 Oof. Absolutely terrible take, Ryan. Come on. Love you, though. Love you, Ryan. And so I follow up and I say, Tornado Cash is banned in the United States. Yet, Tornado Cash is up and running. Ethereum is fulfilling its promise on unstoppable applications,

Starting point is 00:56:57 Metal A.F. Like sub-tweeting Ryan Selkis here. And so like, you don't get points if you don't even have privacy at the base layer. Right. And so like, people are just obsessed with giving Bitcoin so much credit. It's like, well, you didn't see Bitcoin get banned. You don't get credit for not having any useful applications. It did show up at the game.

Starting point is 00:57:16 It's on the bench. Okay. Like, Bitcoin is just like this neutered app chain. Like you can only get like coin mixing at the centralized level, which has also been banned before. Bitcoin, because besides. transfers, Bitcoin uses, basically, it's banking layer, it's privacy layer.

Starting point is 00:57:34 It doesn't have one. Doesn't have a privacy layer. But if you did want to use, quote, unquote, privacy, it would be through centralized exchanges, which are fully OFAC compliant. Yeah. You're not in the game, guys. I love you.

Starting point is 00:57:45 I love Bitcoin. It's really important, but you're not in the privacy game. That's why OFAC is not bothering you. Nation states aren't bothering you is because you don't have a tornado cash on chain. That does not make you Bitcoin stronger. Okay?

Starting point is 00:57:58 That just makes them. not participating in the game that Ethereum's playing. We're jumping around here, but here's a tweet of all these, like, annoying bitcoins that are on crypto Twitter that are extremely toxic. Eric Wall, again, says, Bitcoin Maxis want you to fail. You haven't even started and they're already laughing their ass off. This doesn't even include all Bitcoiners, though. I'm a Bitcoiner, and I will help in far as I'm able.

Starting point is 00:58:17 And he's put in four screenshots of just, you know, the typical example of, like, a toxic Bitcoin Maxi. And this is like Dr. Bitcoin, MD, a famous crypto-Bikwiner on crypto-Twitter, just like laughing at the possibility of a user activated softwork in Ethereum. Basically, there's like this cohort of Bitcoiners that want to see Ethereum fail, and they are, they think that they are just like about to dance on Ethereum's grave right now because they don't think Ethereum has the guts.

Starting point is 00:58:42 From a base, from a base principles perspective, like, so for me, the value said, the base principle is freedom, it's decentralization, it's privacy, it's censorship resistance, okay? And any chain, it doesn't matter what it is. Any chain that supports those base principles, I support. To the extent Bitcoin supports that, I'm a bitcoiner. To the extent Ethereum supports that, I am Ethereum. To the extent Solana supports that.

Starting point is 00:59:05 Or freaking Tron supports that in the future. Or Cardano, I'm a Cardinian? Is that a Tronian? Saladian? I don't know. But like it's not about a specific tribe or a specific coin or specific asset. It's about a specific set of ideals that we're protecting. Another take here, an equally bad take.

Starting point is 00:59:25 I think this is from Kevin O'Leary. another previous bankless guests. We love you, Kevin. You've got a lot of great takes. This was not one of them. This is a hell no. Kevin O'Leary says, essentially, I'm glad the Tornado Cash developer was arrested.

Starting point is 00:59:40 Now we get to move on. We get to be more regulated. I'll read some of the direct quotes. I think we're getting to that stage now, Kevin says. Maybe we're in the third or fourth inning towards that, but I'm tired of this crypto cowboy crap. He's talking about privacy here in Tornado.

Starting point is 00:59:52 I want to get involved in a regulated place where we can bring billions of dollars to work. I want that too. I don't need to be a crypto cowboy, and I don't want to be one because I work in the regulated world. Okay, understand that. But this is the take that really gets me. At the end of the day, it's okay to arrest that guy, the tornado cash developer. Why?

Starting point is 01:00:11 He's messing with the primal forces of regulation. What do you think we're doing here, Kevin? If we have to sacrifice him, that's okay because we want to have some stability in that institutional capital. It is not okay to sacrifice an open source development. who is working on the public good, I know why I'm here, and it's not for that. He says, we are messing with the primal forces of regulation. That's why I'm here, right? That's what I'm here to do. Well, it's just there's different kind of cohorts and reason for, like, so we get some, you know, like we get different tribes, crypto tribes,

Starting point is 01:00:50 certainly warring it out. Well, we also get people who are just here for the money, and that's okay, but you got to rest on top of the base principles of why, the social layer is here. Another bad take. But the question of all of this is, David, what can we do about this? All right? So what is this J.W.

Starting point is 01:01:06 Verrett person doing, who is, I believe he's a legal professor and a lawyer. What is he doing? Right. Wrights very eloquently. He tweets out, I bite OFAC in the nose

Starting point is 01:01:16 over their vague sanction of tornado cash. I applied to OFAC for a license in a way that would either obviate the harm that they did or give my nonprofit, the Crypto Freedom Lab, standing to sue them if they deny my license.

Starting point is 01:01:29 I think he's basically saying, I've put OFAC in a corner, either answer that they give me, opens back up tornado cash. And he wrote this very eloquent, like concise blog post about the choice rule that he's forced OFAC into. And basically saying like either way,

Starting point is 01:01:46 like I'm taking, like either they do, they take option A and like tornado cash becomes freely accessible to everyone again. Or option B, and then they give me grounds to sue them and I will sue them. So we have this individual going after OFAC right now.

Starting point is 01:02:00 It's great. J.W. We applaud you. They might just, OFAC might just take option C, which is don't reply to these things, which they often do. But he also stated that he will sue them for as well. Nice. Good job. J.W. has all his bases covered. We applaud efforts like this. Also, coin center is doing some fantastic things. So just, you know, three of what they're doing. First of all, they're seeking to engage OFAC. So let's not, let's, in all of this, let's not attribute to malice, which may just be incompetence. They may not know what a smart contract is.

Starting point is 01:02:32 They may not know the importance of privacy. Let's make some space for that. Preshex to doubt. Coin center is going to help OFAC with some of these things, maybe. Second, there are some innocent Americans who have funds deposited in tornado cash, and they don't know whether they can take the funds out or not. My guess is probably not. None of this is legal advice.

Starting point is 01:02:53 Don't know. but Coin Center is helping those citizens. And then finally, they said they are beginning to explore with counsel a court challenge to this action. Stay tuned. All right. So that's what our crypto lobbyist friends are doing. We applaud Coin Center for doing that. I think, David, there are a few long-term things we could work on, all right?

Starting point is 01:03:13 The very first politician who comes out with a recognition and a need that we all have for a digital bill of rights, I am supportful of that platform. Because, David, we need a digital bill of rights that protects our privacy, that protects our cryptography, that gives us the right to own our own private keys, that gives us the right to run our own software that recognizes that code is speech for all citizens. Some of these rights are implied in the Constitution with freedom of speech. I think it's now time as we transition to this digital era to make this more explicit. I would support laws on the books towards this. That needs to happen, but it's going to be a slow process.

Starting point is 01:03:50 The other thing we can do, of course, is start to form prototypical crypto nation states, network states, as Bilaghi calls them. So imagine a crypto-native country. This is a decades-long project. It'll take years to get to this. But imagine if we set up such a constitution for digital freedom, where we enshrined property rights and Ethereum and other smart contract chains. We made sort of, you code as law from financial perspective. We backed our currency by Ethan Bitcoin. we had a citizen level IDs that are maybe verified credentials or solebound NFTs. We use defy as our banking system. We use Dow's for capital formation. And that idea from Bellagis burned in my head of like, let's start to work on this project.

Starting point is 01:04:35 We can eventually get UN recognition, maybe years down the road. Even if we fail, this could be a prototype that other countries look at and they're like, huh, you guys had some good ideas here. Like maybe we should incorporate some of that because it's been successful. So that's another thing we can do. And then lastly, David, what is Gitcoin up to? And how can we help actually donate as individuals? Well, there's plenty of privacy forward and also open source software freedom projects

Starting point is 01:05:02 on Gitcoin. And so Gitcoin in like four grant rounds a year, I believe. The next one coming up on September 6th, 7th, there is a $3 million matching fund, as in there's $3 million out there to be matched for other donations. So Ryan, you put out this bundle or the $1,000. this request for bundling of the top three to ten projects fighting for free speech and privacy and give them money because you know what moves the needle the most money oh so you don't say yeah and so uh there's go in the get coin there's going to be uh this privacy bundle which you can just like

Starting point is 01:05:36 donate to in net uh and like all of your money will be matched by this three million dollar matching fund uh coin center i'm sure will be in there um their other efforts as well uh but money money moves needles Save your money for September 7th. We're going to kick this off. We're going to promote it on bank lists. And yeah, we're going to fund where our values are in the future. Wow, that was a lot. But I think it was a lot, but it was very significant.

Starting point is 01:06:02 It was by far the most significant thing that happened. Totally agree. All right, with that, let's move on to some other things, David. And on to the bad boys of the crypto industry. Celsius owes $6.7 billion in crypto assets. And they only hold, Ryan, 3.8 billion of crypto assets. Rutrow, those are different numbers. That's a delta there.

Starting point is 01:06:21 Yeah, there's a small delta there. I mean, this isn't anything new, but we're just getting more and more insight into the state of the Celsius books. And it is what you would call down bad. It's a sorry state. Did you know, David? Financial Times reported that Alex Machinsky actually took control of Celsius trading right before the bankruptcy. So he was like, oh, things are going bad. I know what to do.

Starting point is 01:06:43 I'll be the captain. I'll start trading. I'll fix this. I'm pretty sure this is what's called revenge trading and I know it's hate trading Yeah, it's just like, oh, one last trade To get us out of the hole And so we watched Celsius do this

Starting point is 01:06:59 They were like instead of paying down their debt They were just adding more and more collateral To their maker doubt positions You gotta take riskier and riskier bets To get yourself out of the hole Right and that was Alex That was Alex doing that Nice job Alex, nice job Alex

Starting point is 01:07:12 Just complete disservice to your entire company and customers And also grifting off of the whole defy name, just a grifter of the ages. It's not, yeah, it's pretty crazy. And actually reminds me sort of the Three Ours Capital Story. They just kept doubling down and doubling down. And they made the cover of a magazine, the New York Magazine, but not in a good way.

Starting point is 01:07:33 The title of this magazine is, how two Wall Street washouts with a can't lose crypto head fund vaporized a trillion dollars. The crash was using a trillion dollars. Can you imagine? Imagine having that associated with your name. Are we at the point where we can laugh about this, David, a little bit? I mean, I've been laughing about this through and through. If you're going to bleed out your eyeballs about this thing, you're just not going to make it in crypto. You got to, you got to, like, see the silver lining of this.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Yes. I guess. The cover of New Yorker for the podcast listener is kind of odd. It's like those two, like, bit moji type emojis for Suzu and Kyle. And then the actual article itself is like these just, like, actually kind of cool illustrations. of them with like sparkles in their teeth. Yeah. I don't know what to make about that.

Starting point is 01:08:23 In the small excerpt from the article, among crypto's smartest observers, there's a widely held view that Three Arrow's Capital is meaningly responsible for the larger crypto crash of 2022. As market chaos and force-selling since Bitcoin and other digital assets plunging 70% or more, erasing more than a trillion dollars in value. I'd say that's true.

Starting point is 01:08:43 Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Sam Bankman-Fried says that in the article, I suspect they might be 80% of the total original contagion. They weren't the only people who blew up, but they did it way bigger than anyone else, and they had way more trust than the ecosystem prior to that. Yeah, so, like, this article is basically claiming

Starting point is 01:08:59 that a trillion dollars of vaporized wealth was due to three hours capital contagion, which that sounds about right, yeah. I'm kind of done with it, David. Like, I know we want to, like, cover it in pieces, but, like, I hope this is getting near to the end of talking about these guys. And I saw Doquan did an interview last week.

Starting point is 01:09:15 I don't even care. I'm not going to watch it. I just don't care anymore. Right. Like, let's move on as an industry. Um, learn what we can from these mistakes. It's going to happen again. Is no one going to jail? I don't know. Is no one going to jail? Developers gone to jail. Potentially. You're telling me Alex Mishinsky, who traded customers funds outside of the scope of the product, not going to jail. Three Aeros Capital who defrauded investors, not going to jail. Uh, like, what, who, why is it? Doquan's not going. Why aren't people going to jail? Because they didn't write free open source privacy software, David.

Starting point is 01:09:52 Jesus. Where's the justice in the world? I don't know. Maybe in time it'll sort itself out. I'm not sure. But like, hey, it's back to layer zero. We've got to protect these freedoms and hold people accountable in the right ways. Some more crypto contagion, though.

Starting point is 01:10:05 Genesis CEO, this is the largest, like, centralized crypto lending and borrowing OTC desk on the planet. By far, the CEO just stepped down. He'd been working as CEO. for like seven years. And Genesis also cut staff by 20%. This was more Three Ours Capital Contagion. Just took, I guess, a couple of months for it to catch up with Genesis

Starting point is 01:10:25 and for these headlines to break, I guess, you know, more down bad. All right. And that is the recap of that thus far. I hope that this is kind of like the last recap of this that we get until somebody gets charged with something that would actually be a turning of the page

Starting point is 01:10:41 of this whole story. Or I get my Celsius money back. Or Ryan gets the Celsius money back. Coming up next in the weekly roll-up, of course, the exact merge time, down to the second, although it's going to change. We have down to the second, the current predicted merge time. And Taiwan, using IPFS ahead of just trying to protect themselves from China cyber attacks, what is going on there? That's an interesting development. So we're going to get to all of these developments and more right after we hear from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

Starting point is 01:11:11 Rocket Pool is your friendly, decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your eth with Rocket Pool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in Defy at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocket Pool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocket Pool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating notes. Running a rocket pool node is easier to set up than running a solo node, and you only need 16Eth to get started. Why would you do this? You get an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH, so your APY is boosted. So if your bullish E's staking, you can increase your API and get some extra token.

Starting point is 01:11:45 by adding your node to the decentralized rocket pool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent validators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocket pool.net, and also join the rocket pool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. Juno is bringing crypto-friendly banking straight into your checking account.

Starting point is 01:12:03 With Juno, you can send money from your Juno checking account straight onto a layer two, like Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and they have ZK Sync and StarkNet support on their way. You can skip the ACH wait times, you can skip all the gas fees, and go straight from your checking account to an Ethereum layer two in seconds. Inside Juno, you can buy and sell crypto

Starting point is 01:12:20 with zero dollar fees, and your Juno checking account comes with a metal master card that gives you up to 5% cashback on your spending. Juno is also giving you $10 cash back on your first crypto deposit and $100 when you set up a direct deposit. This ad just writes itself, so go sign up at juno.finance slash bankless.

Starting point is 01:12:37 All right, guys, we are back talking about the projected exact time, a precise time that the merge will happen. This is Marius. a tweeter from Twitter, tweeting out. He's finally back from vacation, and he ran some computation to confirm the TTD date for Mainnet. And the projected date, according to the TTD,

Starting point is 01:12:57 is September 14th at 1057 Paris time. And what that translates into is about 457 Eastern time. The TTD is not actually a clock. It does not listen to the sun or go with the rotation of the earth. So as minor hash power goes up or down, this number moves forward or backward. But if we hold hash power constant, we are merging at September 14th at 10.50, at 5, 457 p.m. Eastern time. That number's going to change.

Starting point is 01:13:30 The number's definitely going to change. I love the precision of the suite and this estimate. But like it's coming, right? Like 14th, 15th, 16th, somewhere in that range, probably more likely the 14th or the 15th, would you say? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, I'm going to guess that this date moves up as it comes earlier because I think

Starting point is 01:13:49 miners will turn off, right? Like, no one's investing more into hash power now. Hatch will go lower. Hash will go lower. It will either say exactly the same or go lower. Not, hash rate's not going to come online now. It's too late. Oh, what time do you hope it is?

Starting point is 01:14:03 I hope it doesn't like happen on the 14th, like, early in the wee hours of the morning. Yeah, I would like to be awake for it. Yeah. Yeah, because you want to just do a party. you want to just like, you want to just like, some celebratory activity. It should be like early in the morning.

Starting point is 01:14:17 Yeah. All right, merch party's on, guys. That's what that means. There's also another air drop this week. Actually, pretty significant one,

Starting point is 01:14:25 I think. Yeah, this is a big deal. Yeah, the safe air drop for the Gnosis safe. And so this happened, this is breaking as of, well,

Starting point is 01:14:33 today, the time of recording. NOSA safe published an eligible wallet address list. 50 million tokens, about five, are available for AirDrop, AirDrop claimers if you have a NOSA safe wallet that had a certain

Starting point is 01:14:49 amount of ETH in it. So a little bit of a surprise. I don't think people saw a NOSIS safe wallet token coming. So if you had a MULTIG, a NOSIS multi-sig, with more than 10th in it, and it also made two transactions, you got the Airdrop. Wrapped ether or ether are considered no other assets. And the minimum distributed was 400 tokens, although I don't know what the total. total supply is.

Starting point is 01:15:14 Go pick that eardrop up. We will include a link to the show notes where you can click on that, see if you're eligible or not. I guess they just raised money recently, so, you know, air drop on the back of that maybe. I guess so. Why does a multi-sig need a token, Ryan? I'm confused. Hey, you said everything that can be tokenized will be tokenized.

Starting point is 01:15:33 I recall you saying that on a bankless podcast, my friends. So I did say that. I guess this one confuses me. Well, it can be tokenized. So according to Hoffman's law, it will be tokenized. I don't even agree with Hoffman's law anymore, but it's still working. It's still working as a law. It hasn't yet been disproven, all right?

Starting point is 01:15:54 So it's still a good thesis. OpenC, what are they up to you on the NFT world? Yeah, so there's been this controversy with OpenC's policy on stolen NFTs. So if an NFT was stolen by an exploiter or hacker, that hacker might go and then sell that. and then OpenC would report that NFT is stolen and then freeze it. But the problem is a buyer, a legitimate buyer, would buy a stolen NFT, and then OpenC would freeze that legitimate buyer's NFT,

Starting point is 01:16:21 basically freezing them out of the liquidity of OpenC. This caused a big consternation, big problem with the community because you had legitimate buyers coming to buy NFTs on OpenC that were sold by thieves before OpenC could flag these NFTs as stolen. So OpenC is changing that policy. What's going on is that they are. are still freezing stolen NFTs, but if a police report is not filed within seven days, then they are automatically lifting that freeze on that NFT.

Starting point is 01:16:49 And basically this is a tactic to get around false reports. So people could like grief other people and say like, that NFT is stolen and then OpenC would freeze it. And then the owner would be like, it wasn't stolen. That's my NFT. And so they're still freezing stolen NFTs, but they need to show the owner, previous owner, a current owner needs to file a police report. And if they don't do that, then that lift is automatically released. And so it's not frozen.

Starting point is 01:17:15 I want to get in the headspace, get out of our crypto bubble for a minute, and get in the headspace of enforcement agencies like the local police, okay, right here. So think about this. You're a board ape yard lot, yacht club owner. You have an ape. And you lost it because you did something real stupid with your private keys. You know, just left him out there and somebody took it. And you have to file a local police report.

Starting point is 01:17:36 Yeah. So what's the police going to do? They're going to be like, what are you doing? Like, why did you do this? They show up... What are they going to do? What are they going to do? What are they going to do?

Starting point is 01:17:45 If I was a cop on the beat, I would be incredibly annoyed. Right. Just at the prospect of NFTs even existing. Now, I have to go hunt for, like, stolen digital property online. Like, what am I supposed to do with this? Right. And the tie here is actually, like, the OFAC sanctions, you notice, came on the back of North Korea hacking their own side chain, right?

Starting point is 01:18:03 FBI has to get involved. All of these smart contract hacks, the defy is basically, saying to the FBI, hey, come help us sort this out. The FBI is probably like beyond annoyed. Like, no, how about you guys write your code better? So it doesn't get hacked. Don't lose your private keys. Yeah. And so what do they do, right? Government responds and it's like, we're going to sanction O-FAC. I just think that this is like, these are all somewhat related. And if we get out of our crypto bubble once in a while and we put our, you know, headspace in the minds of like enforcers, right? They're probably like pointing crypto and be like, hey, I understand

Starting point is 01:18:37 what you're saying about that whole OFAC thing, but also how about you get your stuff together and like don't let North Korea hack millions of dollars worth of crypto. Yeah, I think what we're really missing here is like virtual police. It's like our local law enforcement is not, there is here to settle like physical disputes. We need like virtual police to go after this. Digital police. But I don't even like that. I'd rather just us get our shit together. I think that's a solution. Same here. Here's pseudo swap. Royalty fee, Swedish swap is finding favor with NFT traders. Basically, this is a news report, talking about the absolute fantastic volumes going through

Starting point is 01:19:13 pseudoswap. So the pseudo swap is just like an NFT liquidity primitive. And it is doing some great volumes. So $10 million, I believe, in the last accumulative trading volume. So congrats to pseudo swap. Liquidity is coming for NFTs. And we really need it because of what it's about to happen next. Well, what is about to happen next then?

Starting point is 01:19:33 With this liquidity comes great responsibility in power, doesn't it? Yeah. So I've talked about this. for. We've talked about the concept, the category of collateralized NFTs, where you put up your NFT for collateral and borrow against it. We know Defi loves to do collateralized stuff. It's like one of our biggest things. And so there's this application called Bend Dow, which does this, allows for collateralization of NFTs and allows you to borrow against it. And this Twitter account, Cirrus NFT, says there's currently 32,000 ether, about $60 million worth of NFTs being used as

Starting point is 01:20:06 collateral for a lows on Bendow. For the first time ever, a lot of these are at serious peril of liquidation. And he puts together a thread of the biggest risk to the NFT market that no one is talking about, a little bit hyperbolic. Basically, board apes and mutant apes, these two NFT categories are on the precipice of a cascading set of liquidations because this Bendow puts collateralized apes or collateralized NFTs up for auction at like probably a discount, five. 10% discount to the floor price, hoping that someone comes and scoops these up.

Starting point is 01:20:40 A lot of them are collateralized. And so a lot of these are going to be put on the market. And there's just like, just like we saw that the 70% drawdown in crypto, like, because of Avey liquidations and CFI liquidations, we can see on chain that there is cascading liquidations of board apes and mutant apes ready to go because of this like NFTE collateralization. Like, I'm sorry, Ryan, how many times I'd talk about how this was. going to happen on the weekly roll-up over the last like nine months, at least like four or five

Starting point is 01:21:09 times I mentioned that this like as soon as we get NFT collateralization, we're going to have DGens going along on their NFTs and then they're going to get liquidated and lose their NFTs. That's all right. That's efficient markets, man. So people who are risky lose their money and that's okay. It's a pawn shop NFT. Everyone's going to be okay, I think. Yeah. Yeah. This is my true that I say. Like we're too degenerate as a community to not trigger cascading liquidations on our NFTs. And since there's an update on this, the first liquidation of one is about to happen. There is one board ape,

Starting point is 01:21:40 board ape number 533, which the floor price is about 72 ether, but it's being sold for 68.4 ether, which lowers the floor price, Ryan. And so, you know, the floor price keeps on dropping, which could potentially liquidate more NFTs. Hey, if you're looking for deals on it,

Starting point is 01:21:57 if you're looking for deals on NFTs, though, head over to the pawn shop. They're liquidating. Yeah, liquidated me. Great deal. Like, the fact that it is the apes, I think, is just like, of course. Hey, there's some crypto punks in here, isn't there? There's got to be. No, it's all apes. It's all apes. Never mind. You know, Mailchimp as well. So Bankless, of course, has a newsletter,

Starting point is 01:22:16 and we use a substack right now. We're looking at transitioning something else. But did you know, David, Mailchimp has created a crackdown on crypto newsletters, including Masari at the edge. It's basically if you have a crypto newsletter, they are not sending the emails out. So your crypto newsletter got rugged. Sorry, Missouri. Again, I think they're back. I think they've resulted somehow.

Starting point is 01:22:39 I don't know with MailChimp or with someone else, but the hazards of centralized companies if you're decentralized, if your crypto media publication, like us, David, this is kind of a wake-up call to us to make sure that we have redundancy here. Also a wake-up call for Taiwan in the face of cyber attacks from China,

Starting point is 01:22:59 they're actually looking to Ethereum's IPFS tech to help out. I don't know if this is a big way or what or if this is sort of a small trial. But David, I think what this speaks to is interesting that nation states themselves will start to increasingly need to use decentralized technology like Ethereum, like IPFS, like, of course, cryptography, which they already used today, in order to defend themselves against other nation states. That is the reason at first, the U.S. Mark Andresen told us, on the podcast, the U.S. did not want to adopt SSL.

Starting point is 01:23:33 Did not want to. Did not want to allow crypto technology, cryptography technology in the browser, on the web. But they had to, in order to protect all of their stuff from other nation-state actors. So they just said yes to it. I think that is the destination for Ethereum, by the way, and why the OFAC sanctions will not hold up,

Starting point is 01:23:51 because eventually they're going to need these decentralized asset money networks to protect against other nation states. Maybe we're seeing a whiff of that with Taiwan here. Certainly, like cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency, blockchains, these are technologies that supersede nation states. They are a level, they're a dimension higher than nation states. And so when you are a minority, like nation state entity, like Taiwan, it's advantageous for you to adopt these crypto protocols,

Starting point is 01:24:18 these cryptography mechanisms, because the cryptography mechanisms, cryptography supersedes nation states. So if you are a subdominate nation state, you use cryptography, you use IPFS, you use blockchain stuff to get out under the thumb of a larger nation state. And so the IPFS, for those that don't know, is the interplanetary file system. It's a decentralized peer-to-peer network that lets users backup and store files and websites by hosting them across a network of nodes, eliminating central points of failure, and circumventing censorship efforts. The storage and file referencing system for a theorem is frequently compared, like IPFS, is frequently compared to, a file sharing protocol kind of like bit torrent.

Starting point is 01:25:00 And there's, I don't think there's any coincidence that the news of this IPFS upgrade of Taiwan, I don't know what it means. Like, I'm sure it's not just like universally like Taiwan in. No, no, no. I think it's probably a very small way. Yeah. And also the important stuff. But comes right after Nancy Pelosi shows up in Taiwan and then China starts flexing its muscles.

Starting point is 01:25:19 Like that's no coincidence that this is happening. Crypto is entering the geopolitical nation state level conversations here to centralized tech is. David, do you remember all the way back from 2017? Do you remember Dragon Chain? The Dragon Train? Dragon Train, Dragon Chain Bros? This is like Disney's version of Ethereum? I remember it was, it was, Disney

Starting point is 01:25:38 was, they couldn't officially associate their brand with it, but like for some reason it got like a wink wink-wink associated with it. Yeah, like ex-Sysney people and like it was, it was one of these things that pumped to the absolute moon in 2017.

Starting point is 01:25:53 Also back in the days where we had a Asia had an Ethereum killer called Neo. Disney had an Ethereum killer called Dragon Chain. It was all of these Ethereum killers. Dragon Chain. Right now, so the news is not that, not Dragon Chain. It's kind of dead. But the SEC is filing suit against Dragon Chain all the way back from 2017.

Starting point is 01:26:12 So this is like five years coming and now it's happening. Now you comment on that in and of itself. But just if you go to the price of Dragon Chain, David, do you know all-time highs for Dragon Chain above $5? $5.50. Yeah, it pumped for. from like, it started below a penny and then it pumped to five and a half dollars. I made a lot of people very, very rich. You know what's trading it now?

Starting point is 01:26:32 I'm guessing it's down bad. It's down real bad. Real bad. Two cents. Oof. $5.50 to $2 to $2 as a 99.9 something X drop. That's a deletion of wealth right there. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:47 So you weren't into Dragon Chain. I was not, my friend was, but not me personally. Like, I just like Dragon Chain, like, I have this. the name itself, I was like back when like names were important, I was like, Ethereum, Dragon Chain. Ethereum, Ethereum name is way better. So I'm going to stick with like the serious name. It's worth noting that the SEC statute of limitations is seven years.

Starting point is 01:27:10 So if you issue an illegal security and the SEC doesn't come after you for seven years, you're good. Five years. They almost made it. They almost made it. But, you know, you're not out of the woods for seven years. And a dragon chain got caught at five years. Yeah, I guess it takes a long time to go through the process of this.

Starting point is 01:27:29 It's another lesson for crypto where we think things happen fast. On other news, in other news, Ontario, cracking down. What's this tweet from you, David, and tell us the news? Yeah, there's new regulatory changes coming out of China for centralized exchanges. They are, if you're a cryptocurrency, that is not... David, you said China, but I think you meant Canada. God. Well, I mean, that's actually...

Starting point is 01:27:50 That's what's funny about it, that you did that Freudian switch. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so it's Canada. It's Ontario. specifically, but Canada, go ahead. So all other crypto assets that are not Bitcoin, Ether, Lightcoin, or Bitcoin Cash. These are the four cryptocurrencies that you can buy without any limits. All other cryptocurrencies in Ontario, there's a $30,000 limit a year.

Starting point is 01:28:12 A individual retail investor can buy crypto. So that includes Solana. And I would say, as much as I give Salana, it is way better than Lightcoin. It's so much better than Bitcoin Cash. There's no competition there. Like, like, this is living in 2017. And so like only the, there are, now these like enshrined cryptos that are like, okay, you can buy as much as this.

Starting point is 01:28:33 Like Bitcoin and ether good. Like coin, Bitcoin Cass, absolute trash. But then all the other cryptocurrencies are like, like, you're not allowed to touch them for more than $30,000 a year. This is very similar to accredited investor laws where the more wealthier you are, the higher your limits are. But like, dude, what the F? What the F?

Starting point is 01:28:49 What is terrible? Ontario. What are you doing? It's going on. It's not all provinces. of course. It's Ontario, and this is kind of Ontario's version of the SEC doing this. And some people actually, when I tweeted this out too, they said, these rules have been in effect for a while. They're just kind of now getting rolled out.

Starting point is 01:29:05 So they were in effect starting last year. They're getting now, they're getting rolled out. The other, like, tweak on this is it's basically they're enforcing this at the central exchange level. So there are ways to circumvent it, which is like you could open up nine different exchange accounts, I guess, and get $30,000 of Solana on each if you really want. want to. You could also buy a ton of ether. You could buy it and then send it to Uniswap and then have no limits there. So it's not a ban on like you buy in Uniswap, for example. It is the principle of the thing. Regulator knows best. These are the four crypto assets. Ontario regulators have sanctioned you for Bitcoin, ETH, Lightcoin, and Bitcoin Cash. These are the safe ones, guys.

Starting point is 01:29:47 And you can put as much as you want him to. I don't understand it. But, uh, it. For people to know, I actually grew up in Ontario, so I'm a Canadian and American, but I moved to the U.S. when I was kind of in middle school. That was a freaking tough move, by the way. Another story. I moved to another country in middle school. I'll ask about it in your layer zero. But now, like, I just feel like I have to look for where I live with like, how free you want to be? Yeah. How free do I want to be? And like, this is like, if I ever wanted to move back to Ontario, I'd be second guessing it if stuff like this is coming down the pipe. Right. So anyway, Canadians got to resist too. We're working on it on the OFAC side, but there's lots of regulatory fights to fight.

Starting point is 01:30:30 Yep. Coming in next, we have the House passes the massive climate tax and health bill titled the Inflation Reduction Act and is now being sent on its way to Biden to receive his signature, which he's totally expected to sign. $437 billion inflation reduction act. 15% minimum tax on large corporations, 1% percent. excise tax on chair buybacks tax credit for electric vehicles there's 369 billion spending on climate and energy policies and also allocate 64 billion to extend affordable care act program to

Starting point is 01:31:04 reduce insurance costs interesting that there's all this extra stuff which is like stuff that we hear about all the time like you know affordable care act you know green energy investment but it's inside of this like inflation reduction act the name itself is like kind of like the patriot act like inflation reduction tax like you can't hate it and also there's something completely oxymoronic about spending over hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and new spending to reduce inflation like you should be that that's what creates inflation like you're spending more money to to be fair so a couple things so one is this was actually i think the article we're looking at is from friday Biden did already sign it so it's a lot now it's done and um yeah there there are obviously some

Starting point is 01:31:47 tax pieces to this too, right? So they are raising some income, not just spending. They're doing a little both. But call me skeptical if this is actually going to do anything to reduce inflation. It's just not, I mean, the Fed has impact on inflation. This is just a micro drop in the bucket. Obviously, before November elections, which makes sense. Nice bill to call us the Inflation Reduction Act. Not going to happen. Not going to do much for it, though. David, what's this? We're on the releases side of things. Gallian portfolios? What are Gallian portfolios? Yeah, people, new listeners, people that came in the last few years, probably aren't familiar with this thing called token sets or set protocol. It was a big, all of the rage back in the bear market, 2018, 2019.

Starting point is 01:32:29 But basically, people could create their sets of tokens and, like, I created my set, other people created their set. Galleon is working, building on top of set protocol to make just like more, it's a little bit like index co-op. So Galleon portfolios, there's four of them. You have like the merge portfolio, the fees portfolio, S-East. SPI. And it's just a collection of tokens for in different ecosystems. So the merge index, 50% rapstaked ether, 20% liquidity providers like Gladiol, Rocket Pool, 30% Defi primitives, UniAve, S&X. You have the Spartan Index ecosystem SPI, which is S&X, Lyra, Thales. The VE token index for holders of vote is all the VE tokens out there. So Curve, CFX, FXS, BOW, Butterfly. So it's just a new index,

Starting point is 01:33:14 index machine out on the world, Galleon portfolios. So cool. Nice release. There you go. On the raises side of things, we've got A16Z. They just gave $350 million to flow. This is Adam Newman's company. A16Z, this is one of the biggest checks they've ever written. Values flow at $1 billion.

Starting point is 01:33:34 Adam Newman, of course, is the entrepreneur, in quotes, behind... Visionary. There have been many documentaries about him, some kind of scandalous. But A16Z is a believer. it's funny that like three or four months ago, David, flow was actually a crypto carbon company. No, that was flow carbon. This is flow carbon. It's the same kind of thing. It was Adam Newman. Flow carbon was the name. They shortened it to flow. And now it's a completely different thing. So I'm not sure. It'd be an interesting story to hear like what Adam and the team decided about the crypto carbon market, deciding it wasn't ready. And then the pivoting completely to real estate.

Starting point is 01:34:15 but the other side of this is this is an absolutely colossal raise with a massive evaluation and Jason Calcanus has a take on this. What's his take, David? Yeah, Jason Calcanus from the All-In podcast and he states, if a startup is worth $1 billion before it launches a product, it's probably a scam. I try to do some research on what this product actually is. I actually can figure it out. And that was actually a comment in one of the articles I read is that we still haven't been able to figure out what this product actually is. So that's the juxtaposition because we also know that Mark Andreessen is like one of the best investors of his generation.

Starting point is 01:34:52 And he's pretty savvy and pretty smart. And this is him giving justification for why they're doing $350 million in this thing. Interesting juxtaposition, I think. Not super crypto related other than this used to be. That's what it is. People are like trying to look into the quote from one article that came that came from some investigative journalist said that Adam is building a next generation multifamily property management system with but proprietary payment system, adding that the system will include full financial services wallet, a tokenized reward program, and crypto payment method.

Starting point is 01:35:24 What? Yeah. What? Yeah, I don't know what that's about, David. I don't know what that's about. All right, Dragonfly, they're a crypto hedge fund. They bought another hedge fund called Metastable. Metastable was like a 2017-2018.

Starting point is 01:35:36 In fact, they were earlier than that to crypto. They bought them for $400 million all their assets under management. kind of some consolidation in the crypto hedge fund world. David, let's talk about jobs, though. Let's do it. We talked about raises, so we've got to talk about jobs. A lot of hot crypto jobs going on. What do we remind folks every week, David?

Starting point is 01:35:56 That you should get a job in crypto, because the private markets have a ton of money, and these private markets are going into the jobs that you see here on the jobs boards. There is a ton of jobs in crypto. Ryan, read them off. I got you. D.DX is hiring a software engineer on the back end. Steakfish wants an HR. business partner. It's not technical.

Starting point is 01:36:13 Stickfish also wants a back-end full-stack engineer and a front-end software engineer and a devops engineer. Bankless, we need somebody for media operations podcast videos, that sort of thing. Software engineer for boardroom labs, a manager of crypto marketing at Mantecore games. We need a thread or at bankless. A Vertex Protocol needs a marketing coordinator. Non-technical. A financial analyst from streams, product manager for bankless account. I could go on, but I don't need to because you can get all of these jobs at the Bankless Jobs Board. Bankless. Allot.com slash jobs. Go check it out. David.

Starting point is 01:36:45 What's coming next, man? Questions from the nation. Every single week, we ask the nation what you want us to answer. So we got those questions coming up next. Does staking before the merge matter? And also, what comes next after the merge? And also some hot takes from crypto trader. So these fantastic questions and the hottest takes are coming up

Starting point is 01:37:03 right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. ZK Sync is an Ethereum Layer 2 network that is pushing the frontier of high-performance blockchains that don't compromise on security or decentralization. ZKSink has combined the power of zero knowledge roll-ups in the Ethereum virtual machine, enabling developers to build the greatest web three projects possible, ones we haven't even seen yet. Crypto needs its killer applications to onboard the world, but crypto-killer apps need ZKSink as a platform to build on first. It's generally accepted that zero-knowledge roll-ups are the conclusion of crypto blockchain scaling technology, and ZKSink is leading the charge into the final frontier of crypto economics. So if you're a developer

Starting point is 01:37:41 who wants to build your app on a future-proof foundation, which gives your users the best UX possible, check out ZKSync's website at ZKSink.I.O. And yes, there's also going to be a token, so give them a follow on Twitter 2 at ZKSink. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet, with over 60 million monthly active users. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the secure, multi-trained crypto wallet built right into the browser. Web3 is freedom from Big Tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy, but there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. And most crypto wallets are browser extensions, which can easily be spoofed.

Starting point is 01:38:14 But the Brave wallet is different. No extensions are required, which gives Brave browser an extra level of security versus other wallets. Brave wallet is your secure passport for the possibilities of Web3 and supports multiple chains, including Ethereum and Solana. You can even buy crypto directly inside the wallet with RAMP. And of course, you can store, send, and swap your crypto assets, manage your NFTs, and connect to other wallets and defy apps.

Starting point is 01:38:35 So whether you're new to crypto or you're a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions, and it's time to switch to the Brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. All right, guys, we are back. Your reminder, getting to the questions. If you have a question for the weekly roll-up, you can reply to the tweet threat. Bankless HQ on Twitter tweets out every week and get your question answered.

Starting point is 01:38:56 This is the first question from skiing. Dot lens on Twitter. Is there a reason that east should be staked prior to the merge versus post-merge? Does staking post-merge carry any negative connotation, such as missing out on rewards versus possessing already staking. either going into the merge. Should I stake now or should I wait until after the merge, David? What do you think? I think that it does not matter. I don't really, there's nothing really special about staking through the merge. Like, you get to say that you did it and that's the

Starting point is 01:39:23 biggest thing. It's like you get to say that you were there. Like the financial ROI, like, you're going to guess like 0.005% more ETH between like now and the merch because like you're just staking for such a little amount of time. I would say if you are not already staking your ether, the risks might actually be higher because there might be some weird shenanigans with the merge. So as I would say, if you're not already staking your ether, I would just say hold on to it and then stake post-merge and do that. But this is my

Starting point is 01:39:49 take to you and this is personally what I'm doing. It's like, why stake now? Why not wait until after? Like a year ago when issue when stake rewards were much higher, it was like something like 7%, something like that, maybe there's some reason for it. It was never 7. It was like 6. Oh, it did start off very

Starting point is 01:40:07 early. Started off high when it was very low. Anyway, I could see that, but that's gone down. And for me, like, there's maybe some execution risk in there. But also, like, I wonder about forking. So if there is a P.O.W.Eth version, do you think they might disclude anyone who's staked from that version? By definition, you will not get the proof of work staked. Again, I know you're not very bullish that there's going to be a high value P.O.W. But that's another reason you get more of that forked token if you don't stake.

Starting point is 01:40:39 pre-merge. So I'm going to wait. I think that's the right call. What's our next question from pete.eath? He says, where they say, what will be the next thing to look forward to you post-merge? What do you think, David? Yeah, I think the meta of conversation will shift into 4844, and this is going to be the thing that, like, cuts layer two transaction fees by like one-one-hundredth. I think that'll be kind of the next thing that the general Ethereum community focuses on. And there's always something to focus on, but I will say it's also like, like the merge EIP-1559, like staking, we'll be in the review of you. We do have to like, at some point, like, the Ethereum chain just like runs, guys.

Starting point is 01:41:18 At some point, like, there is no next thing. Appreciate that for a little bit. Yeah, we do just, you should just appreciate that. Yeah. But it will be 48444-4 that we talk a lot about. So 4844, probably next year, probably sometime in 2023, hopefully. And this gives scalability to roll-ups. It makes roll-ups essentially free.

Starting point is 01:41:36 Yeah, basically. I'm using hyperbole, but like close to free. It's good. It's good hyperbole. I think after that I would also say a proposer builder separation, but that is in the very distant. That's like 2024 stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:47 And by the way, rolled up into the next, next fork, which could happen in 2023, is also withdrawals. So if you stake, you're locked in there. Stakers are like, you guys, I'm totally looking forward to withdrawals. Yeah. I would like to get my eth back. Yeah, exactly. And that's coming.

Starting point is 01:42:05 That's right now it's bundled. the same fork. They're going to co-release those things, but that may not be the case. They could release them in separate forks too. All right, David takes to the week. This one from Peter Van Valkenberg. He is a crypto lawyer at Coin Center. He's the one that wrote the Coin Center report. And he says, I don't know who needs to hear this. But if the big regulatory battles are being fought about a different cryptocurrency, it's not because your preferred crypto is more decentralized. It's because governments aren't worried about the things it does and how it does them. And then, of course, with some nice context, Ryan, Sean Adams says, I think I know who needs

Starting point is 01:42:40 to hear this. Basically, this is sub-tweeting all the Bitcoiners who are like, ha-ha-ha, like, Ethereum is being targeted by like regulatory and like nation-state regulations. And then, like, Peter is saying, yeah, it's because like your Bitcoin, the government's not worried about Bitcoin is not a threat to them. Let, let bankless, let you and I, David, make a public commitment. Like, I just want people to hear this, right? Is, bankless is about freedom. It's about decentralization. It's about censorship resistance.

Starting point is 01:43:11 Doesn't matter what chain. Yeah. All right. If Cardano needs to fight the fight around this, because they're being unfairly targeted, if Tron needs to fight the fight around this, if Solana needs to fight the fight around this, or Bitcoin needs to fight the fight around this,

Starting point is 01:43:27 we show up. We show up. And I hope anyone in crypto shows up for these fights because we're all in this together. Right? It's like, I think the tribalism doesn't want us to believe that we're all in this together. But the end of the day, we are. This is the crypto nation.

Starting point is 01:43:42 We are all fighting for the same things, at least if we are preserving those basic essential rights. So I just want to say that publicly. 100%. And I'll say that again, like, if you aren't on crypto Twitter, like in these, like, trench warfare with tribe, intertribal warfare, like, I understand how, like, weird it is that me and right are like, oh, these bit corners, big corners. Like, they are so annoying in my mentions. I'm talking about, like, how Ethereum is, like, the centralized scam coin that's controlled

Starting point is 01:44:10 by Vitalik's basement. Like, it's just so exhausting. It could be that Twitter Algo-tricking you, though, that David didn't, like, put just, like, we're going to screw this baby today. Let's put all these things in. No, the Bitcoiners are like, they target my tweets and they descend on them, and they just harass me. I know. There's some hat.

Starting point is 01:44:26 This is another take. Do you want to read it? Yeah, Ryan, Sean Adams says, people going to think twice about staking their eth and centralized exchange now. Thanks, OFAC, for. for promoting decentralization. What do you mean? What do you mean?

Starting point is 01:44:38 The meta take here is that this is getting us all thinking about decentralization and where the centralization vectors are. And I think it's super good for the space long term. So we're thinking about our front ends, right? Maybe more of these should be on IPFS. We're thinking about validating staking. What happens if major validators go rogue and promote something that's centralized? What does the Ethereum community do to react?

Starting point is 01:45:00 We're game strategizing all of these potential outcomes. super healthy. I'm pretty excited. So this is the beauty of crypto, I think, is anytime you get kind of like censorship or massive crackdown, like it's just like kind of the water balloon. It just kind of squeezes through the authoritarian fingers and like manifest somewhere else. And so yeah, I think this is what progress looks like is the bottom line, what I would say. It's actually a good thing. Is that, Is that weird to say? I mean, people are like rose-colored glasses. How are you saying that this OFAC sanction thing is a good thing, but in a way it is.

Starting point is 01:45:39 Right. It's Ethereum, Crypto, these are organic systems. These are anti-fragile systems, and the community is the antibodies. And when the community gets faced with a stressor, we respond and we make it things. When something comes to attack Ethereum, we fix it and make it more decentralized. So if there was a weakness, we solve it. And it only happens when there is stress. Like animals, organisms, they respond to stress.

Starting point is 01:46:05 Ethereum is being stressed by this OFAC sanctions thing, and we are responding to it by making us stronger. Yep. We're just ratting around. Right. What are you bullish on this week? Ryan, this one is going to be atypical for me. I am bullish on mountains. I'm going.

Starting point is 01:46:21 I'm turning off Twitter. I'm deleting Twitter. I'm going into the mountains. I'm not connecting, disconnecting from cell service. You can't get cell service out there. You're going to hang out with four of my homies and only think about trees. You're going to release all of the digital toxins from your body. Yes.

Starting point is 01:46:38 Because it's going to happen. Yes. This is my first non-crypto trip since like 2019. Oh, dude. You did a long time coming then. Yeah. Enjoy it. Enjoy the grass.

Starting point is 01:46:49 I will. Enjoy being outside. Yeah. I'm going to see grass for hours. Yeah. I'll keep everyone at bay on Twitter for you, all right? Yeah. All the maximalists.

Starting point is 01:46:57 Thank you. That'll be on me this weekend. I'm bullish on. zero cell reception. Ryan, what do you bullish on? I am bullish on layer zero, my friend. So what is layer zero? That is the people underlying all of the guarantees, all of the security that we have in crypto. You have a podcast called Layer Zero, all about the people in crypto. Because ultimately, this is our only defense, our best defense against everything that comes at this industry. And people don't realize this, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's Ethereum, whether it's

Starting point is 01:47:26 Solana is the thing that enforces all of the immutability and censorship resistance and anything else that makes a blockchain, a blockchain, goes back to the layer zero, right? And that's what we've been talking about, right? So it's like if enough people believe in censorship resistance for Ethereum as a core value and a core property that the project needs to have, they will run the software that makes that possibility a reality. So it all comes back to the people. If the people stop believing this, then we lose and we don't get the censorship resistance. This is why I think movements like bankless are so important is because we are working on that layer zero.

Starting point is 01:48:08 And the tech can be great, but if you don't have the layer zero to support it, to run the software, to say no in the face of censorship and to say yes for immutability, you don't really have a blockchain. And I was bullish this week, I guess, back to bullish, on what I saw in Ethereum. and the X movement of like, I vote to fork out any censorship resistance and run a different chain, sell my assets on the censored chain, burn the stake if I need to, and preserve censorship resistance. I'm very bullish on that, David. Yeah. And it's the community that supports the blockchain that makes the blockchain, right? And like I said earlier, so many new people came into this cryptocurrency industry in the last, like 18 months. And they probably haven't been exposed to

Starting point is 01:48:54 these very tough questions because like some people didn't even think about that people are learning about what this means right now. And we need to have these conversations every two years because new people come in and they haven't had one of these conversations yet. Totally. And so we just have to keep on rehashing and reinstilling what our values are on a regular basis because otherwise we'll lose them. It's like 2022 is been the year of learning lessons, right? We learn the hazards of centralization and centralized lending providers with Celsius in BlockFi and others. We learned the hazards of massive speculation

Starting point is 01:49:27 on margin through A16 or sorry, through three hours capital and others like them. Now we're learning the value of censorship resistance. This has been a fantastic year for teaching us lessons. This is why bare markets are so awesome. I love them.

Starting point is 01:49:42 I love bear markets. Me of the week, David. This is hilarious. What are we looking at, man? We are looking at Vitalik's new album which drops September 15th called the merge.

Starting point is 01:49:57 And so for, this is not actually his album, but for the podcast listeners, this is a very, like, a very, like, dark looking, like, rap album with a metallic and like this shadowy,

Starting point is 01:50:07 like look, just staring right into your soul. Parental advisory, explicit content. Yeah. The merge. It drops September 15th. That's awesome.

Starting point is 01:50:16 That's it from us. We got a moment of Zen for you. But before we do, we got to tell you, None of this has been financial advice. It never is. On bankless, 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. Thanks a lot. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to

Starting point is 01:50:41 free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend to joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscription. to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,

Starting point is 01:51:14 Ask Me Anythings, and weekly roll-ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Tornado Cash Fallout | Ethereum Merge Updates | $350m a16z Flow Buy | Sudoswap NFTs

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.