Bankless - ROLLUP: Uniswap Front-End | Elizabeth Warren Shadowy Super Coders | COVID-19 Crypto | FTX & Binance

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Bankless Nation. This is the fourth week of July, and it is time Friday morning for your weekly roll-up, David. I am super excited about this weekly roll-up. We've got so much to unpack here. We always do, and this is always, like I say, my favorite piece of crypto content to produce. In this weekly roll-up, just like every other weekly roll-up, we go through the markets. What is the market saying? Then we go through the releases, what got released in the last week of crypto. Then we go through the news cycle. events. And then we go into some ecosystem takes. Who has some interesting opinions in the week of crypto? Then we go to what David and Ryan are excited about and we finish things off with the meme of the week. Oh, the meme of the week. Can't wait, man. This is going to be a great episode. David, before we get in, we've got some PSAs, man. Let's talk about the first public service announcement. You have COVID, dude. I'm looking at your background. It's looking like you have COVID right now. I have the COVID. Yeah, I got it. I got it at ETH C. in Paris took a negative test, which allowed me to get out of the country because you have to

Starting point is 00:01:16 take a negative test. And so I got my negative result back. I'm like, oh, great. I made it through ECC without COVID. Came back home and then started having allergy symptoms, which were very normal for me in Seattle, so didn't really think anything of it. But then on Tuesday I got really, really achy. So went and got a test, came back positive. Did my responsible thing of tweeting that out to make sure everyone knew that if they got in contact with me in ECC that I had COVID, I don't know who I got it from. Obviously, there's a bunch of people around ECC who also got COVID, so I'm not the only one. But there's a very interesting theme of a bunch of people who all got vaccinated. I'm vaccinated. A bunch of people who got COVID were all vaccinated.

Starting point is 00:02:04 And so we're all, we all have like relatively mild symptoms. I'm not, I'm not like dead or anything. I'm still doing the weekly roll-up as normal. I feel pretty achy, but it's just like a relatively normal cold. Then there's a bunch of people who also have all of these same symptoms, but when they got a test and it came back negative. So that's kind of weird. That is super weird. Yeah, and I can attest to that, David,

Starting point is 00:02:28 because we recorded podcasts the last two days. Well, you've also had COVID. And you've seemed like you're not feeling great, but still okay enough to do podcasts. Still okay enough to like do some work, you know, that kind of thing. So it's not been as bad as some other cases. And you think that's because likely your vaccine mitigated that, huh? A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Starting point is 00:02:51 And one of the reasons why I wanted to put this PSA in there is because like, well, now that I have my firsthand experience with COVID and also having a vaccine and then also tweeting about it as like a public figure in the space, you actually realize how many people are out there who are like the never-vaxxer anti-vaxer camp. and it is like kind of sobering and frustrating. And so I cannot imagine what this would feel like without a vaccine. It would be way, I'm generally really achy. Like sitting in this chair is not even like a comfortable thing.

Starting point is 00:03:21 And that's with the vaccine. I cannot imagine what it would be like without a vaccine. And I want to go to all the, one of the ironic things about the, my Market Monday this post this week in bank list was talking about like the importance, the importance of being in person and how much I value being in person at these events. then I come back with COVID. But I totally intend on going to all the other, like, in real life crypto events. And one of the reasons why, like, we haven't been able to return to normal in society

Starting point is 00:03:48 is because people are refusing to take the vaccine and or wear a mask when they should. And so, like, it's they, those in my mind, those people are getting in the way of having all these, like, beautiful, awesome crypto-etherium events that I want to have. And so if you want to go to those events, you got to get a vaccine because you're making it bad for the rest of us. There's your PSA, guys. All right, let's talk about another PSA. This is, this is another conference that's coming up. You actually don't have to attend in person. It would be great if we had more conferences in person, but not all of those are practical, but this is called SmartCon. We've been talking about it the last couple of weeks on the roll-up.

Starting point is 00:04:25 This is sort of your last chance to sign up, guys. So if you're listening to this on Friday, go click the link in the show notes, the Smart Contract Summit.comit.io. This is a free conference put on by the chain link folks, tons of defy researchers, tons of defy developers, tons of people with projects. David, you and I will be there with a DeFi, with a panel on EIP 1559, actually. We just secured guests for that panel. Who's going to be on that panel with us? Yeah, we got some guests that have not been on the bankless program yet, and then one who has. We have James Wang, who recently put out a report on Ethereum, talking about the combination of

Starting point is 00:05:02 EIP-159 and proof of stake. We brought on Squish Chaos, who coined the term the triple halvening, and also to how Ethereum people should dream bigger dreams about what could be with regards to the value of ether under the ultrasound money paradigm. More bullish than us. More bullish than us. Wow, that's hard. And then familiar territory, DC investor coming in to fill up the panel.

Starting point is 00:05:26 And so we got those three absolute rock stars joining us on an EIP-159 and overall bullish ether panel. So check that out, guys. get some tickets, come check out that panel, all of the other educational events. It's like a two to three day conference and make sure you're there. David, PSA number three next week is actually EIP 1559 week. This is the week EIP 1559 is scheduled to launch. It looks like we're all on track to launch. That could happen as early as August 4th, but it might bleed into August 5th. And that seems a bit more likely because it's based on the,

Starting point is 00:06:07 an actual block, block time, not a period of time. And there's something called the Ice Age, which is slowing down block time here lately. So it's difficult to pinpoint exactly when that will launch, but it's probably going to be between the fourth or the fifth of August. And what are we doing next week to celebrate EIP 1559 week?

Starting point is 00:06:26 I know we have a ton of events scheduled. Yeah, we have three different things that we are doing. On Tuesday, we are doing our regular state of the nation. but it's also not a regular state of the nation. We are bringing on Tim Beko to help us moderate a EIP-159. How would you call this?

Starting point is 00:06:42 Like the most forefront expert panel, all-star panel, right? So we've done, we did our EIP-159 episode with Hazu, which was absolutely great. And again, if you need to get up to speed with EIP-1559, go listen to that podcast episode. It's titled EIP-1559 because it is the full entire subject matter of what EIP-1559 is from zero to 100. Really great episode. Hazu is going to be there on that panel. But in joining him, there's also going to be Barnaby from the Ethereum Foundation,

Starting point is 00:07:10 Matt Garnett from Consensus Mesh, and then Mika Zoltu, who's a just a major EIP-159 contributor. These are not your 101-201-201-level EIP-159 people. This is the leading forefront experts as to what EIP-159 is, along with Tim Bako, who's going to help us moderate, to ask us some of the questions that, like Ryan, and I aren't even smart enough to ask. And so this is going to be, if you are trying to become God status in terms of EIP 1559 knowledge, you got to turn into it.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want that? God status, EIP 1559 panel. Hopefully I'm hyping it up appropriately. And that is just the first event. That's just the first event. That's on Tuesday. On Wednesday, which is in theory maybe when EIP 1559 goes live, we are going to be

Starting point is 00:07:57 teaming up with the boys over at ETH Hub, Eric Connor, Anthony Sizzano for our live. stream. Many of you have joined us for the proof of steak, a beacon chain kickoff live stream, which we did at, I think, like, four in the morning. My roommate got very mad at me that day for having that live stream go, and I woke him up. But we're doing that again for EIP-159. When that gets, when as we get closer and closer, we will be live streaming that with the guys from ETH Hub. So join us for that. That'll be on the YouTube. And then, as we just discussed, Thursday the fifth is the smart con panel with James Wang, Squish Chaos, and DC Investor, all about Ethereum in a post-EIP-1559 world, and overall, what's next for the role of ether as it relates to EIP-1559.

Starting point is 00:08:42 So get stoked for EIP-159 week. That is next week. And a good way not to miss all of that, of course, is if you are watching this on YouTube, subscribe to this YouTube channel. All of this will be published there so you can check that out. David, another PSA. Another PSA. Another PSA.

Starting point is 00:08:58 We've got a live stream that is happening tonight. So this is Friday when folks are watching that. That is a daily Gway live stream. I don't know if you guys are celebrating the next PSA, which is it's Ethereum's sixth birthday as you guys are listening to this, as you guys are watching it or what. But tell us about that live stream tonight. Yeah, Anthony and I, we try and do these every now and then,

Starting point is 00:09:19 but it's been getting harder and harder and harder as COVID has gone further and further into the, you know, people are going back and doing their daily lives. And so the Friday evening time has been harder to get, live stream scheduled. But since I'm in quarantine mode, Anthony and I, and so Anthony is in lockdown mode because Australia is like super duper locked down. We will be doing the bankless daily great live stream tomorrow evening, or excuse me, Friday evening tonight for the listener. So if you guys are also in quarantine mode for whatever reason, or just want to tune into me and Anthony talk about what's going on in the world of Ethereum, tune into that, which again,

Starting point is 00:09:53 like Rand said, a significant part of it will be dedicated to the fact that it is Ethereum's sixth birthday, today, Friday. I can believe that. July 30th. The first block ever for Ethereum was mined on July 30th, 2015, and it is Ethereum's sixth birthday today. So, happy birthday Ethereum. Happy birthday Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:10:13 You know, six years old, $250 billion network. Not too bad for a six-year-old. I can't believe it's still so young. Half the age of Bitcoin at this point, we've come a long way. So definitely something to celebrate. Wow, guys, a lot of PSAs today. Before we go any further, Ryan. Yeah. Here's a Ethereum birthday pop quiz trivia moment for you. What block are we on right now?

Starting point is 00:10:36 Dude, I don't know. I don't know that. I don't measure things in block time. I'll never forget the time when, what's it, Vitalik, who told us like a block time when we were going to schedule like a conversation or something. I don't speak in block time. So why don't you tell me. I'm going to fail this quiz. Roughly 13 million block number is what will be out tomorrow at the time of recording. Yeah. 13 million. Okay, there you go. That's a lot of blocks every six seconds. Impressive. All right, David, do you want to get to markets? Let's do it. All right, markets. Where are we going? Where have we come from with Bitcoin this week? Bitcoin, we started the week at 32,000 and a half, 32500. And we hit the high of $41,000. And we are currently just below $40,000 at $39,800. So Bitcoin, pretty good week, up into the right for basically the whole entire week. Interestingly, there was this price drama going on and this rumor that Amazon would be

Starting point is 00:11:37 accepting crypto and Bitcoin as payment. And that turned out to be a false rumor, but that rumor jacked up the price specifically on the 26th. Is that what this huge spike is? That's what that huge spike is. Yeah. So Bitcoin on the 26th, it went from 35,000 and then like just a few moments later, it was at 38.5,000.

Starting point is 00:11:57 And this actually caused a significant, non-period of the $1,000. number of short liquidations. Usually you only see long liquidations come when people were over leveraged and then the price goes down. But we actually saw short liquidations, which caused the price to jump up. So that's what happened in the last week of Bitcoin price. Yeah, that's funny. I tweeted out that it seemed like somebody told Jeff Bezos that Elon bought had Bitcoin, you know? So he's like, he's like, uh, fomowing in with billionaire stuff. But it turned out none of that is true. I don't even know if Bezos is interested in crypto at all. I've Never heard him comment on it.

Starting point is 00:12:32 So I guess that remains true. So what's the story behind a whole bunch of the shorters who are liquidated with this price drunk? Yeah, I would say so crypto markets, they have momentum to them, significant momentum. And that's why bear markets can just be super prolonged regardless of like strong, fundamental positive catalysts and vice versa. While bull markets can go on for way too long, even though prices get out way too far ahead of its ski tips, Cryptomarkets have momentum. And I think people have been trying to position themselves using that frame of reference, right? Oh, like, you know, Ether capped out at 4,000, Bitcoin kept out at 60,000. And now we had that big wreckage moment where everyone got liquidated. And then now it turned, it went from time for number to go up into time for number to go down. And I think a lot of people piled into the number go down trade. And too many people piled into that trade. And also, I think the four-year cycles are broken, in my opinion. And so too many people got short too quickly, and they were betting on a down market, but instead they got a crab market.

Starting point is 00:13:37 And in a crab market, things also go up, like at least for the short term. And so a lot of a hopping crab. Yeah, it's a hopping, hopping crab, right? Yeah. I remember it was either last week or two weeks ago, Ryan, we were talking about how the market was crabs with bear arms. To this week, it's a crab with bullhorns. Yeah, with strong legs, able to leap and jump.

Starting point is 00:13:59 do all sorts of tricks. So one billion of Bitcoin futures was liquidated in a 12-hour period of time. This is on July 26. That's what you're talking about. All right, what's the story with ETH? So we are happy because we are above 2K. That is a good sign. But where were we and where we come this week? Yeah, Ether started at $2,300, hit a low of $2,250. The high for the week is $2,350, and the current price is $2,325. Pretty flat week for. for Eath, if you keep on zooming out, Ryan. It didn't really do too much. Not a lot of volatility in the last like seven days or so. But, you know, generally pretty flat with a slight up into the right trend, I would say. It kind of followed that Bitcoin jump with the Amazon news and then sort of, you know, track similar to Bitcoin. But let's talk about that. So how about the

Starting point is 00:14:51 ratio? What are we looking at this week? Yeah, the ratio is in this, what I would call a falling wedge pattern. Again, not a trader, but this is the pattern that I'm seeing. We are at kind of a low price of a 0.058, a local low, still a historically high price. I would like to see that number come up above 0.06, but still in that crab season territory. So nothing's too significant to the report here. There's generally a theme of people kind of piling into a Bitcoin trade right now. Bitcoin tends to lead the market. And so while we are in crab season, people are kind of looking for Bitcoin. to be the first thing to break that crab season trend. And so there's just a little bit of rumors going around of people just kind of rotating into Bitcoin, be thinking that it's going to be the first

Starting point is 00:15:37 mover to break out of the trade. We will see. Yeah, definitely we'll see. How about DFI Pulse? What is the total locked value of DFI this week? Yeah, if I remember correctly last week, it was something like $56 or $57 billion, and we are up to $66 billion locked in DFI. So it definitely broke out of a local trading or local, it's funny to call it a trading range, but still kind of works. The chart, it's higher than it has been in the last like month or so, coming in at $66.6 billion locked in DFI. More getting locked up. And then how about the DFI Pulse Index? So this is a measure, of course, of the health of DFI tokens. Where are we on the week?

Starting point is 00:16:18 Yeah, same story. Slite up into the right trend coming in at just roughly $300 per DPI token higher than it was. I believe it was like 285-ish last week as well. So same story as ether, not as up as much as Bitcoin is, but still up and to the right. Yeah, it seems like they're all kind of correlated together to like defy, Bitcoin and Heath in this last week's moved in the crab market in general. It's been sort of the case. How about the DPI to ETH chart? I know this is a ratio we've been tracking for a while to see if we are on the precipice of another defy summer season. come we're in july going into august and we still haven't seen defy summer is that the story is the story continuing there yeah the the deep defy tokens are definitely not going to be the first ones to move in my

Starting point is 00:17:05 opinion uh if people are waiting for bitcoin people are going to be waiting for ether before they're waiting for uh defy token so coming in at point one to eight five dpi per eth which is below my point one three bottom call but still in the proximate area so i'm still pretty happy about it yeah So has it been two weeks that we've been below, David? No, we were at 0.0.035, no, we're fine. Okay. We'll check next week. We'll be checking back on those bankless listeners.

Starting point is 00:17:37 Got to hold David accountable for his calls here. All right, let's talk about this. The bankless bed index. So this is a new index put together by the bankless Dow, of which we are a huge proponents of, super exciting because it is an opportunity to get a third Bitcoin, a third ETH, and a third defy. So that's through the DPI index. So it's like an index within an index, but you just kind of buy it, set it and forget it. A nice asset. I think we're going to be looking at this on a weekly basis. This is kind of a proxy, I guess, for crypto success in general,

Starting point is 00:18:10 for crypto monies and also defy. And we are up on the week from it looks like 100 to about 115 on this. And we did make a promise, I think, or you did on Twitter, David, that somebody who, what's going on here? Is this a pancake? Is this an Olympic? Yeah, so people make pancake art, right? And there's a lot of memeery jokes with the whole bed index, like, you know, get in bed with bank lists, getting breakfast instead. Yeah, you know, eat all your three food groups, Bitcoin Ether, DPI. And so there was an Olympic pancake art made. And then we tweeted out saying, if somebody makes this for the bed index, we'll feature it in the roll-up. So here it is. Somebody's making the banklist. And this is also bankless Dow, this is an index out of the Dow. Bankless Dow, the beta index pancake, here it is for all the viewers on the YouTube. So make sure you eat all your food groups and also your yummy pancakes as well.

Starting point is 00:19:07 Got the color scheme right too, which is impressive. So like, you know, not just the design, but the color. Who do we have to thank for that? It looks like XOFI3 with the ultrasound money meme emojis in the Twitter handle. So thank you for that. Ryan, if you go back to the bed page, bankless listeners who are religious listeners of the weekly roll-up, they will know that we go through Bitcoin and then Ether and then DPI. Well, what is the Bed Index other than Bitcoin and Ether and DPI?

Starting point is 00:19:38 And so while we talk about Bitcoin and Ether and DPI separately, when we want to really summarize the market section, we're just going to turn to the bed index. And that is what it's for. And so while we'll talk about Bitcoin was up this much, Ether was up this much, and DPI was up this much, when we summarize it all together and show that the bed index was up 11% of the week, there is your weekly average defined by the bed index. And that's why the bed index is so cool.

Starting point is 00:20:03 It is literally all, like I said, the food groups of crypto assets. And I put out this tweet thread. There's only three food groups. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Bitcoin, Ether, and DPI cover everything. So I put out this tweet thread that kind of goes into why I think, the bet index is going to be the best performing crypto asset index ever. And that's because it hits all of the major groups. It hits the crypto monies and the crypto finances. And it does it,

Starting point is 00:20:32 in my opinion, in a 50-50 ratio, right? So Bitcoin and Ether, these are crypto monies. And DPI is crypto finance. But Ether itself is also an index of Ethereum itself thanks to the power of EIP-1559. because EIP-159, it links the Ethereum application layer, the Ethereum economy, to the value and scarcity of ETH. So as finance on Ethereum grows, Ethereum grows more scarce. This is the ultrasound money thesis. And so Ether, the asset, which is why we all love it so much, is one part money, one part exposure to Ethereum, the economy. And so it's a little bit of both. It's 50% money, is 50% finance, Bitcoin is 100% money, and DPI is 100% finance. And so this is, in my mind, the most balanced, perfected index of all time.

Starting point is 00:21:20 And while you think it's such a simple index, because it's only three tokens, Bitcoin, Ether, DPI, DPI has 14 tokens inside of it. And while Bitcoin and Ether are forever and they're never going to change, DPI has the ability to update and iterate and evolve as the Ethereum app layer does. And so you get the balance of monies that should not change,

Starting point is 00:21:41 should not be tinkered with, and then finance, which always changes and always updates. And so it's both, it's both the long-term hold and the flexible token that updates along with the growth of the industry. I just think it's super elegant, and that's why I'm super bullish on bed. Yeah, I

Starting point is 00:21:56 think it's a great mix here too, David. And, you know, largely super positive feedback, but, you know, some people have Pingmeen have been like, well, you know, been listening to Bankless, it's clear you guys are a bit more bullish eath than you are maybe Bitcoin, or though we are bullish both. And I would have loved to seen

Starting point is 00:22:12 maybe a ratio of 50% to some lower percentage of Bitcoin. But like, you know what the response to that is? Buy some additional ETH. Sure. You could buy bed and then buy some additional ETH or maybe Bitcoin. And then LP it and get those fees. Yeah. Exactly. You can LP it into Uniswap. And so take advantage of the success of bed index trading transaction fees. So there's lots of ways to play this guys. Really cool, new primitive. I think that's been added to the stack. We'll be talking about that in the future too. There's also a comment to be made there about the credible neutrality.

Starting point is 00:22:46 that is part of the bankless thesis. Bankless, we like credible neutrality. And that one-third, one-third, one-third allows us to be unopinionated as to what's going to do well. And the indices are supposed to rebalance, right? So as one outperforms the other, the indexy rebalances. And so that one-third split between all three is a credibly neutral way to do this. And that's what the bankless thesis is all about. You know, the only thing I would have loved to see, if there was some sort of a completely trustless version of Bitcoin on Ethereum, which we don't have now. This uses wrapped BTC, which is still somewhat banked when you have BitGo as a custodian. But perhaps in the future, I think this index could change.

Starting point is 00:23:24 It could add staking assets of Eath. It could add different variations of Bitcoin as well. David, let's talk about this. Axi continues to grow. And some people thought it was like just to blow off the top, but it is still crushing it in terms of market cap. Let me switch to market cap actually here. So we had almost hit $3 billion. almost 3 billion market cap for AXE Infinity.

Starting point is 00:23:50 We're down a little bit on that. But is that really the story here is like AXE hasn't stopped. Like it's just continuing to pump in terms of price. That first peak, $1.5 billion, that's where we had Gio on from State of the Nation. And like I kind of facetiously behind the scenes said like, oh yeah, this is when Bankless is getting the AXE guys on the show. This is probably a local top. I was completely wrong about that.

Starting point is 00:24:14 there have been two more tots even after that show. And so the just magnitude of this run by AXS has been absolutely insane. It just has no signs of really stopping anytime soon. Yeah, I just want to, I want to zoom out more because let me check that. You want to check this date? So this date, 2020, time in 2020, is when we first profile the, like, you know, like the first bankless article came out about AXI Infinity. and how crypto games were going to be absolutely massive

Starting point is 00:24:47 and how AXS was a really interesting asset and game in that space. At the time, like, market cap was under $10 million. Now, here we are, 2.3 billion. Guys, it pays to stay attention in the space. But did you buy any of it, Ryan, at the time? I'm not talking about my bags, David. Isn't my show for bag talk? It's because the answer is no.

Starting point is 00:25:10 You'll never know. You'll never know, sir. It's like you don't know the full extent of my NFT collection. I'm not dox. Oh, is it you that I'm trying to get my crypto punk from? No, I don't sell. I only buy. All right.

Starting point is 00:25:26 So that's, guys, that is the Axi story. You know, another cool story is layer two summer. Optimism. Optimistic whirlups just launched with optimism launching uniswap on it. And this is their daily protocol revenue, David. So they've cleared some days, verging on 10K. in terms of daily revenue, which is really cool to see. Any takes here? Yeah, the comment here is that so it begins. This is just even more data for Ryan and I to talk

Starting point is 00:25:56 about in the market section. It's lovely to see these L2s generate fees because that is cryptoeconomic sustainability. And I expect there to be just be so much data about fees generated on L2 from the economic activity that they host there. You know what? I'm going to go to website while we're here at Cryptofees. Info. Let's take a quick look. I don't know if David's updated that fast. You know, it doesn't have it, but I'm just throwing this out there. Look, Cardano.

Starting point is 00:26:25 The L1. $8,000. Yeah, the L1, $8,000 in one-day fee. That is about the same that optimism is doing right now. In a clodium, in a beta. Yeah. I don't know if it's beta or not. It's kind of out there.

Starting point is 00:26:40 I don't know. like Cardano doesn't have its smart contracts. This is not a whole section about Cardano. What we're talking about is the way you know that a blockchain has product market fit is if it has full blocks that people are paying for. That's how you know. So really good metric to see layer two doing that. I think it's going to catch some layer ones by surprise who actually don't have that demand.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Let's talk about this headline to you, David, in the market section, more than one in 10 Americans invested in crypto this year. So it's 10%. I don't know if that's higher or lower than what you think, but what I found was really interesting is kind of who they are, like the demographics. It's actually more women than traditional stocks. If you compare investing in cryptocurrency to traditional stocks,

Starting point is 00:27:26 more investors of color, lower income investors, less fewer college-educated investors. But the big one here for me was, the average age of a crypto investor, 38 compared to 47 for stocks. We're definitely skewing younger, although 38 to me, it's like, that's a little older than I thought crypto might be. I guess it does skew in that direction though. Right. Yeah, I've always been, if you actually pile into the data, you'll actually find that

Starting point is 00:27:53 just like this. I remember when I was working at a startup before bankless, we were trying to get an average profile of the typical customer. And the average age, I think, was something like 48. And so if you actually look into the data of like who uses these platforms and who crypto people are, it's actually a little bit older than what you would think. Yeah, which is pretty crazy. It's not just like 20-somethings and like, you know, kids using this stuff. There's definitely, you know, the average is 38. That feels about right. Maybe it's a little bit younger for D5, but probably not much, to your point. The data that the chart showed tells me a story about how crypto is more inclusive. Yeah. I hope that's the case. And I hope it continues to be the case.

Starting point is 00:28:34 I think we have a lot more work to do there, but I think it will continue to be the case. Guys, we're going to be back with the releases of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app.

Starting point is 00:29:04 And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D-Apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. Defi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all the details.

Starting point is 00:29:30 defy apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D-Apps all in one place. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants

Starting point is 00:30:15 program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unigrant at Unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap.

Starting point is 00:30:56 swap for sponsoring bankless. Hey guys, we are back talking about the releases of the week. David, we have to start here. This is a hot apparel drop. I'm super excited about this. I was so excited. I already bought some of this. Ultrasound summer set includes

Starting point is 00:31:12 Ultrasound summer t-shirt, ultrasound summer shorts. These shorts, swim shorts. Am I right? So where these are the pool? Run around the sprinkler. Do your slip and slide. Whatever you do in this summer?

Starting point is 00:31:24 Just in time for EIP 1559 for this. drop and this was created by the bankless Dow and somebody in the bankless Dow Sinjin who is incredibly talented designer. Yeah, man, I'm super excited about this drop. I bought mine. I don't know if you bought yours yet, but oh, I bought two sets. You did? Well, I'm going to wear it so much. I'm going to wear one out. Okay. Yeah, you want to you want to have one for a few, a couple days of the week, right? You know? Right. Yeah. I guess. Plus, if I ever get fat, I, I, I, I, I got a medium and I also got a large just in case. Oh, that's smart.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Right. It's just, somebody on Twitter jokes just like, yeah, one for cutting season, one for bulking season. And you're goddamn right. That's exactly right. It's kind of true. Yeah. Plus, when you add the shorts and the trunks together, the price is $155.90. I wonder how that happened.

Starting point is 00:32:19 A perfect fantastic calculation. You know what also came with this too, David? Well, it didn't come with it. But it is also part of this drop is the best. Bankless Nation puzzle by Percy, which is just fantastic. A thousand pieces, I think. But yeah, just a great piece of art. I think talks about all of the themes we talk about on bankless.

Starting point is 00:32:40 So where can people pick this up, David? Yeah, if you're on Twitter, just go to the Bankless Dow Twitter page. But you can also go to shop. net factory. com. hopefully you got some of that stuff too. This is going to be a seven-day sale. And so if you do not buy it in the next seven days from the time of recording,

Starting point is 00:33:07 then, so that they'll end, I believe, like next Wednesday. If you do not buy it by Wednesday, that is it. That is it. That's all you got. And so you can buy as much as you want between now and then. That's why I bought two, because I knew I wouldn't be able to buy another one later. And so if you have seven days from the time of the course, So really six days if you're hearing this on Friday to buy this drop.

Starting point is 00:33:31 And that is always going to be true for all future drops. And this is how a metafactory and bankless Dow work. We like scarcity in the world of crypto. We like the prestige. We like the status of being some of the few people that have some of these really cool drops. And so you can only, you only have one opportunity. And if you are hearing this, you've got to get it right now. And so there'll be a link in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:33:53 Or you can go to Bankless Dow Twitter page. It'll probably also be on the bankless Twitter page. as well. Crypto culture you could wear, guys. That's what bankless style is up to. All right, Ben, let's talk about this. Polygon, doubling down on gaming. Good time to double down on crypto gaming and NFTs.

Starting point is 00:34:08 They just launched a $100 million fund, I think with Atari. So remember the old Atari system? They were back in action. They published some games, and they're partnering with Atari and creating this fund, I think, to continue funding and doubling down on this new play-to-earned-earned crypto gaming model that we've seen be so successful with Axy. And in particular, David, side chains and layer 2s where gas fees are low to nothing and block space is plentiful, that's the place to do it. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:34:44 You need that instant finality in those cheap transactions. Otherwise, just gaming's not a thing. And it's really advantageous for Polygon and their Polytoken, or their, excuse me, their Matic token, which has done really, really well, to start to turn themselves into a fund to invest on their own L2, their own side chain. And so that's exactly what they're doing. There is, while it is kind of cool news that they are working with Atari, I do have information that when I, fun fact, my first job in crypto was with an ICO advisory company back in 2018 and Atari was one of our clients. The Atari name is actually kind of just a shell company that has been, the name has just

Starting point is 00:35:23 been passed around. So it's no longer the Atari of old. It's the same company. It's not the OGs from the 1970s who created the first like Atari gaming system. But it's not it's not filled by the people that made the OG games. It's the brand that is the brand. Right. And so while it is exciting that Atari is working with it with you know people in crypto they've been trying to do this for ages now. And so that unfortunately is not really the cool part of the news. The cool part of the news is that Polygon is investing with a hundred million dollars into gaming on top of Polygon. That's the news that you guys should take away to should take away with this from. And so I love games. I play games all the time. I would love to

Starting point is 00:35:58 play games with combinations of crypto assets. So I'm excited to see what happens, what comes out at the end of this $100 million gaming fund on Polygon. Me too. I think it's going to be boom time. I mean, people have seen the success of AXE. Now we've got the funding taken care of. So it's all going to be a lot of experience playing out here in the future. All right. Let's talk about this, David. Ave Arc. We've talked about it a few times, I think, in the theme of institutional defy compound of course released a treasury app targeted towards institutions and now avey is doing the same they have released avey arc i know you're with stony actually last week talking a little bit about this but but what is it and did stony give any indication on

Starting point is 00:36:44 when it's coming david yeah it is just like you said it's the uh the avey's version of compound Treasury called Ave Arc. Love the name. Love the branding. And it's just basically a fractal off of Ave itself that has, that is the permissioned fractal, right? So it's built on top of the AVE protocol or built, excuse me, not on top of, but in adjacent to, also governed by the AVEA token holders. So that's interesting. And it's just a, it's just a K-Y-C-A-M-L compliant version of AVE that allows some of these institutions to be more comfortable with who they are engaging with. And so it's basically a protocol, protocolized version of Ave for institutions. And the main question that I asked Stani when I interviewed him at ECC is, why did you build this?

Starting point is 00:37:32 Did you build this because you think you can entice institutions with it? Or did you build this because institutions are asking for it? And Stani unequivocally said that it is the latter. It is because institutions have come to Avey and said, Avey, we love what you're doing. We want some of these stuff, but we can't compliantly use it without this, this, and this. And so AVE went and went ahead and built this, this, and now there is AVEA Arc, which is AVE for institutions. He said that they'll be launching some time towards the end of this month, but it is currently the end of this month, so maybe it's now in the Soon TM category. Yeah, absolutely. And shared liquidity with the rest of the AVEA protocol, is that correct? So will this be a separate liquidity pool,

Starting point is 00:38:16 or does it share the rest of liquidity with everything that's non-ML KYZ? I do not know. I don't know for certain, so do your own research on this. I think it has to be separate liquidity because the liquidity has to come from KYC individuals. And if you're using AVE, you are not KYC'd. And so institutions can't touch you by that rule. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:38:39 I think, yeah, I definitely think there's a sub-theme here in D-Fy that we want to continue to explore this institutional access to Defi. David, let's talk about this, though. A fractional is a way to take a piece of art that you have, an NFT that you have, say a crypto punk, and sell pieces of it. You can keep the majority, but you could sell, say, 5%, 10% of it, you know, 50%, 60%, however much you want, you can fractionalize your NFTs and sell it. If you are a buyer, you can also purchase a fractional NFT. I know we had the founder of this on the podcast earlier this week with an ask me anything to talk a bit about it. There's a really cool story. You want to give the TLDR of like the rest of this what I didn't cover?

Starting point is 00:39:26 Yeah, there's two parts. One you covered, which is you put the ERC 721 into a contract and then many, many ERC 20s come out of that. It allows you to get liquidity, allows you to do things you couldn't normally do. And then there's the other half of it, which is after you put the ERC 721 into the contract and then you break it apart into thousands of different of tokens, how do you get the thing to come back together? And so there is this reserve price sort of auction type mechanism that allows there to hot swap or atomically swap ether wherever the ERC20 versions of this NFT are out and about. Perhaps they're collateral in AVE.

Starting point is 00:40:04 They can be collateral and AVE, but then these tokens can be sold and atomically swapped for for ether dictated by the price that it was sold at. And so this is how it can maintain collateral in these applications because AVE or any application that needs collateral doesn't like it when collateral just gets a yoint from the protocol. That would be terrible. That would be completely broken. But that's what needs to happen in order for these fractionalized tokens to come back

Starting point is 00:40:33 together back into a whole unit. But the way that fractional fixes this is that it yonks the NFT collateral. in AVE, but it replaces it with the stale proceeds, which are ether, which is already collateral in all these lending and borrowing applications. So really compelling application. I'm looking forward to seeing what the DFI builders can do with it. Yeah, we use really technical terms on the bankless, like yoinks and, you know. This is a really cool protocol, David. I was like stunned. And what I think that this does is it makes the entire, every single NFT that's out there more valuable. Why? Because you get a liquidity premium on it.

Starting point is 00:41:10 Now you're not just locked into... Yeah, exactly. Now you're not just locked into a very expensive NFT. You can sell portions of it. So it becomes much more liquid like other ERC20 tokens. Very cool, primitive. I can't wait to find out what happens with this in the future. David, we should talk about this.

Starting point is 00:41:28 I think this is a big piece of news. Binance is now allowing deposits and withdrawals to and from the poly chain chain. chain, the polygon chain, excuse me, which is super cool. This is something we predicted would happen, right? Maybe the idea that the gateway to defy users won't actually be from exchange directly to Ethereum Mainnet. It could start to be from exchange to side chain or exchange to layer two. We might live our entire defy lives in the future on layer twos, in fact, that are secured by Ethereum. So this is the start of this. And if finance does it, you know, CoinBes,

Starting point is 00:42:08 base is going to do it. You know, Gemini is going to do it. You know, Krakens going to do it. If they're doing it with Polygon, you know they're going to be doing it with Layer 2s, like Optimism, ZK roll-ups that are coming in the future. Arbitrum, this is just fantastic for the user experience and adoption of Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem and side chain ecosystem. So it's super cool to see. Absolutely. Binance actually does have a stronger relationship with Maddoin than most other tokens because Maddox actually did their IE. on Binance years and years ago. And so Binance is really, really friendly to the Polygon network.

Starting point is 00:42:44 And so that's probably why they got them out the door first. And this is just another story of overall L2 development. Now you don't have to go to Ethereum to get your money on Polygon. So it's pretty cool. Congratulations, Mihalo and the Polygon team. Yeah, very cool. All right, let's talk about this. Ether scan.

Starting point is 00:43:01 Look, where would be without Ether scan? The most, like, the most unappreciated project in this space. And I just mean like they don't get enough credit for everything that they do this space. Everyone uses EtherScan for something in their bankless defy journey. They've just added a really cool feature. What is this feature? Can you describe it, David? Right.

Starting point is 00:43:20 So if you are, if you've ever moved on your assets onto Polygon or Optimism or any other layer two, you move your assets to your same address because your private keys are your private keys for your address no matter what chain you're on. The fact that you're on a different chain doesn't change what address you use, which means that your address can be traced and tracked by EtherScan no matter what chain you're on. And so your address is the same onmatic, it's the same on optimism, it's the same on Arbitrum as it all is on Ethereum, and as it is on Binance Smart Chain for that matter, right? The whole thing about private public keys is actually agnostic from the blockchain.

Starting point is 00:43:59 And so if you have the private key for one address, you have it on all of the blockchains that use the same, the, I can remember, I think it's the BIP 32 route technical details. But that means- And a short cut is like any EVM compatible chain basically, right? No, no, the EVM is actually separate from the private key, public key pairs. That's a separate thing. Just all of these different, I'm pretty sure even Bitcoin follows the same like algorithm for producing a private, public private key pair.

Starting point is 00:44:29 I could be wrong about that. Anyways, your private keys work across all different chains. And so you can see what an address. Now, this update from EtherScan is that you can go see where your address is doing on Ethereum, but then you can go and just like click a button and see what that same address is doing on all the other chains because it's the same address. And so that's pretty cool. That's a nice little feature.

Starting point is 00:44:49 So if people, people like I remember when I started first using Polygon, I would go and send my money there, but there wasn't really a block explorer. Like I kind of felt like I was just feeling around in the dark. And now EtherScan has all of the infrastructure. up and running for it. And now it's just got this easy button to see like, okay, like see what this address is up to on the other chains, which is a really nice feature. This is all part of the story of, I think, Ethereum and Defi, re-architecting towards a multi-chain, more scalable world,

Starting point is 00:45:18 not just the Ethereum main chain, which is super cool to see. This also, you know, follows that through line. Rabby release announcement. So Rabby is a browser extension wallet. So it's like Metamask. It was put together by the folks at D-Bank, and their claim to fame is a smooth multi-chain user experience. So you can use this across Ethereum. You can also use this across PolyGon and the other layer twos as well, another layer twos as well.

Starting point is 00:45:49 And I haven't used this yet, David. You know, definitely a huge MetaMask fan. I love what they've done. You know, couldn't do anything in Defi without a combination of like MetaMask and maybe a ledger and some other tools in the space, but it's also good to see some competition in the browser extension wallet market. I know there's another segment of wallets

Starting point is 00:46:11 I'm super bullish on, which is smart contract wallets as well, of the kind that like Argent is creating. But this category, aside from MetaMast, doesn't really have a ton of competition on Ethereum. So competition breeds better user experience, better consumer choice, that's a good thing. And I'm hopeful they bring this.

Starting point is 00:46:29 Like I said, I haven't tried this yet, I don't know if you have, but it's good to see some new entrance into the space. What's your take? Yeah, I've got it downloaded, and it seems to be very similar to a user experience as MetaMask, maybe with a little bit of an improvement on the UI, maybe. I haven't created an address yet, but I'll probably get in do that relatively soon. Like just like you said, competition, really, really good for the consumer. The one hurdle that Rabi is going to have to get over is that now all of our favorite apps

Starting point is 00:46:59 AVE, Compound, NOSIS safe, all the things that integrate with Metamask, they're also going to need to also integrate with RABI. And so that is going to be the challenge for the RABI team is to promote their own integrations into all the other DFI apps that we all know and love, because while it's fantastic that there is a second browser extension wallet that we can all now use, it doesn't mean anything if we can't connect it to Compound or AVE or all the other DFI apps that we use. I also think that the hair, because Rabi, Sandsa, for rabbit means rabbit. The hair versus the fox meme is going to be kind of fun.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I didn't even catch that. Yeah, absolutely clever. Let's talk about this in the releases. Lira, the Dow, raised $3.3 million. This is an options protocol that's going to be native to L2. So options are the biggest financial and options derivatives, the biggest financial markets in the world. And they've certainly caught on in crypto, but they've just been centralized up to this point. So the Bitmex and Binance and the FTX, they have massive options, massive derivatives markets right now. But the defy markets aren't of comparable size, right? Like Uniswap almost like surpassed Coinbase for some days. Last year, it's getting to Coinbase size in terms of trading volume. But the defy derivative space and option space is just just tiny compared to what's going on in

Starting point is 00:48:26 centralizing exchange. So everyone's asking like why. Why haven't derivatives and options taken off in Defi yet? And the reason I think that some companies are saying is basically because we haven't had cheap gas space. The computation required to create some of these products has not been available. It's been too expensive up to now. And so that's what Lira is doing. They're basically deploying, I think, on the optimism network. They'll probably do Arbitrum as well.

Starting point is 00:48:56 And they're starting there. They're not even starting on main chain in order to make a product that is competitive. And we'll see what happens with this next generation of Defi options and derivatives products. Yeah, I fully expect options to be a fully built out financial paradigm in Defi by the end of this year. And it's going to be on L2. Like you said, this couldn't even have worked out on the L1. This is not an L1 product that could happen. You need scale.

Starting point is 00:49:25 You need scalability to be able to make this work. And so now that we have L2, we are now going to see options. And so I'm excited to be able to finally tap into a very, very important financial primitive on Ethereum, directly on Ethereum security. Other derivatives products to look out for in the D5 space, of course, DYDX, which is fully migrated to a layer two, a ZK roll-up layer two, and also take a look at perpetual protocol. They are on X-Dye as sort of their side-jerkut.

Starting point is 00:49:57 chain type experience. So it's all happening on layer twos and side chains up to this point. David, let's talk about this. The blockchain unicorn, another blockchain unicorn project, fireblocks just raised $310 million, backed by Sequoia, Stripe, Spark Capital, a bunch of VCs, including Thailand's oldest bank. I think we should have fire blocks on the podcast in the future because it's a really interesting story around institutional defy, I think they're providing. So they're providing like staking services. It seems to me like a bit go that's a bit more forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of protocols that they're supporting. So it's meant for institutions who can't custody their own assets but want to get involved in staking, defies, some of these other things.

Starting point is 00:50:47 And it seems like a big market. These VCs are anticipating a really large market for this. That's why Fireblocks is getting the funding and gearing up to scale even more. $310 million, dude. I mean, how do you even spend all of that? That's definitely like a bull market raise here. So I think that's it as far as we have for raises, David. We should also talk about jobs, man.

Starting point is 00:51:09 You know, I've been getting pinged here a lot recently from folks in the bankless community who were like, hey, I just made the leap. I was in the traditional job. I just made the leap into crypto. It was partially because of the bankless program. If you are in bankless, if you're absorbing this content, chances are you might be looking for a job in crypto in the near future.

Starting point is 00:51:29 We put together a jobs board just for that purpose. There's close to 40 jobs on here. One was just posted this week as a senior product manager from a mutable. Mutable X. These are the folks behind God's Unchained. They're building some really cool gaming scalability technology. We've got a full stack engineer from Palet. Those are the folks actually that helped create this job board.

Starting point is 00:51:51 So thanks to Palet for that. senior solidity engineer from quant finance chief investment officer yield app software engineer from arbitram a senior designer from pool together guys there are a ton of opportunities right now in crypto now is the time to get plugged in start looking see where you can add value in this ecosystem and take the next step on the bankless journey and don't think that these jobs aren't for you these jobs are for you so depending on your skill set depending on what you can do and And also just the magic of working with other crypto people inside of crypto is completely different than just like consuming bankless podcast for the rest of your life. Like get a job in the industry and you'll get ahead even faster than listening to bankless, which is something to say.

Starting point is 00:52:40 Yeah, you're telling us to get a job, huh, David? Yeah, I'm telling you get a job. Get a job. Get a job. All right. Let's go to news. Man, a lot of news this week. We hopefully will have time to cover it all. The first is this, PayPal's crypto division wants to roll out a super app. So not just PayPal's crypto division, but I think all of crypto wants to evolve their app into something that's a bit more complete, like a super app.

Starting point is 00:53:06 This kind of reminds me of the conversation the recording we just had with Richard Turin, who was talking about China's central bank digital currency and China's fintech infrastructure where they have real super apps like AliPay and WeChat where you're doing your social. media and also all of your banking inside of one super app experience. It's your life. It's your whole thing, right? Like I text you to pay you and it's all inside of WeChat. It seems like PayPal is trying to get there too. And maybe, just maybe, David, they're going to rely on some crypto features to help them get there. Maybe not relying so much on the traditional banking system. I don't know. That's a hope. We'll have to see. What's your take here? Yeah, I have honestly have no idea what's coming. Those term super app definitely jogs my mind into exactly what you just said. But the other place that my mind goes is that like, we were joking with Jim Bianco when he came on the podcast and all of

Starting point is 00:54:02 his friends were like, all right, I downloaded Coinbase. Where's the defy? And I think maybe PayPal is trying to make like the defy page. It's like, oh yeah, here's like borrowing and lending. Maybe they do the obfuscation as in they have compound of a, you know, all these apps in the background, Uniswap, you know, Machia. they're all in the background and then PayPal just does all the interface like kind of like Instadap, right? Maybe it's like the Instadap model is where they just kind of obfuscate everything.

Starting point is 00:54:30 I'm not too sure what's going on. Maybe they're also doing identity, who knows? Well, here's the thing, David, it's like from our conversation with Richard Turin, right? So the banks in China, and you guys will hear this podcast. It comes out not next week, but the week after. This is all about Chinese Central Bank digital currency.

Starting point is 00:54:47 It's a must listen to your episode guys. You're going to be hearing about us and me and Ryan talk about it in the future. Yeah, it's going to blow your mind, right? But so, but in China, they basically allowed their fintech companies or big tech companies to eat the banks, right? In the U.S., in Western countries, we didn't do that. So like if PayPal wants to build a super app with like social media and also the super advanced banking and payment infrastructure, I don't see how they're going to be able to do it. The closest they can get is not with the traditional banking system, but they almost have to build on crypto rails, right?

Starting point is 00:55:26 So your point, like maybe they're thinking about an Instaap. I have no idea if they're thinking about that. I have no idea if they're there yet, if they understand Defi enough to start to do that. But they're almost going to be forced to in the future because they can't build a super app on traditional banking infrastructure from the 1970s, can they? Right.

Starting point is 00:55:45 Yeah, you're absolutely right. They cannot do some of the banking stuff that they want to do but they can do defy right they can grow the defy mullet uh and so maybe that's kind of maybe the super app maybe the super app branding and marketing isn't for you and me ryan maybe it's for like the legacy people who are who don't know what defy is and then PayPal and this has always been the promise of the defy mullet uh from from day one is PayPal can hook into uniswap hook into compound hook into maker hook into whatever and then they can just present that as their own finance product to the in the front end it's like oh hey here

Starting point is 00:56:19 Here's Paypal's like exchange feature. Here's PayPal's, you know, in low interest loans. Like they don't have to advertise it as AVE or compound. They can advertise it as PayPal. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, exactly. How do you get a 4% savings account? Don't worry about that.

Starting point is 00:56:36 Don't ask. PayPal's brand new product. Yeah, and we'll insure it and it'll be fine. Right. You know, exactly. Yeah, I think that could be the case. All right, let's talk about this. This is maybe partially why Bitcoin price,

Starting point is 00:56:49 ETH price went up and then kind of fell back down. Amazon Jobs just released a digital currency and blockchain product lead job description. So they're trying to hire someone for digital currency and blockchain products. I wonder what this means. I can only think that it's mean that crypto's taking over the world. And now it's finally trying to take over Amazon. So if you are in the local Seattle area, go and apply to Amazon for getting this job. And also Amazon, come post this on the bankless jobs board.

Starting point is 00:57:19 Oh, definitely. They should. You're in Seattle, David. Currently in Seattle, only temporarily while I'm in quarantine. Okay. All right. You would apply for this, I'm sure. I'm sure this would be you. I think I could be a product lead. I don't think I want to work for Amazon. I think you'd do anything. I believe in you, David. You could do anything. All right. Definitely be. We're going to get somebody else for the next week, bankless week they roll up. See me at Amazon. All right. Let's talk about this. Jack, Jack Dorsey, the Eith troll. I don't know, man. What's up with this tweet?

Starting point is 00:57:50 Yeah, so it's the Olympics. And so all the three letter country codes are now have flags associated with them. And Jack decided to tweet out hashtag ETH for Ethiopia with the Ethiopian flag. But granted, there are many, many, many countries that have the flag with them. And Jack decided to tweet out specifically hashtag ETH, which everyone kind of, everyone kind of interpreted as a troll to the Ethereum community. We all know what it mean. We all know what it means, Jack. He's a known Bitcoin Maxi.

Starting point is 00:58:22 And so, you know, Twitter, if you do hashtag BTC, you get the Bitcoin logo. If you get, if you get like, or dollar sign BNB, you get the Binance coin logo. And if you do the dollar sign ETH, you don't get anything. And to some degree, the Ethereum people don't really want it. But it definitely shows by Jack's colors as like very much a non-Eath person who's trying to troll Eith. And I kind of got upset about this because, and you're not supposed to get upset about this because you don't want to feed the trolls. But what did upset me is that I am a big proponent of mindfulness.

Starting point is 00:58:56 And maybe that's ironic that I just said I got upset about it. But I'm a big proponent of mindfulness. And so is Jack. And so is Jack. Yet he is so goddamn biased about Bitcoin versus Ether. And he just wanted to troll the entire Ethereum community. And so it bugs me that a guy who's like a proponent of mindfulness is also just like unable to get out of his own maximalist show.

Starting point is 00:59:18 Yeah, I do think that's going on. Now, you could interpret this troll as like just a lighthearted jab. You know, like I like this sports team. You like that sports team. And I'm just going to be like just a jab at you. Although I will say, look, man, Jack has just come out recently talking about building defy. Right. Jack's version of Defy at Square on what? On Bitcoin. Like he, big sigh. His value system that he purports is very much like open source, protocol central. decentralizedization, right? That's what he preaches. And then we have this whole defy ecosystem that we built out in Ethereum. And it's, Jack totally ignores it. I just don't understand why at this point, but one explanation is like all in Bitcoin, you know, you know, maximalism. But let's talk about the cool story here, which I think that's only the first part. But like, what did the Ethereum community do as a reaction to this? Oh, they just completely owned it. They were like, oh yeah, I guess we're

Starting point is 01:00:17 friends with Ethiopia now. Like, oh, Ethiopia is ETH? We're ETH. We're Ethereum. Now best friends with Ethiopia. So, yeah, you saw all these great memes of like Ethiopian flag and like Ethereum together and like Ethiopian foods and all sorts of things. Anyway, it was a, it was just a fun meme, I think, for the internet. And good thing to do if you are being trolled in this way is don't fight back. Just own it. It's a lesson for everyone on the internet. And even coin gecko got in on the fun. So if you go to Ether or Ethereum on Coin Gecko, it now has the Ethiopian flag on it. And then this tweet got 4.6,000 likes. How many likes did Jacks tweets get? A bit more there. Oh, 28,000. All right. Well, he's the founder of Twitter. So, okay.

Starting point is 01:01:01 Yeah, 28,000. That's right. Homefield territory. Yeah. He's got a lot of followers, I'd say. All right. Let's talk about this, David, because this was alarming, I think, to summon the crypto space. token access on app.uniswop.org, that is the front end of the website that is officially hosted by the Uniswap Labs team. They delisted, at least in the application layer, some assets, particularly synthetic type assets. The types of assets that centralized exchanges have been delisting, you know, like the synthetic Tesla and the synthetic stocks and this sort of thing. And this appears, and I think they say explicitly in the post, this is as a result of increased regulatory scrutiny on the space.

Starting point is 01:01:45 So a whole bunch of people in crypto, of course, like, you know, Bitcoin Maximus jumped on this and said, Uniswap is never decentralized in the first place. And other folks who have not been in the space as long also started saying, hey, I'm like, this is really concerning. What happened to this permissionless open decentralization thing if Uniswap can just delist assets? David, you know, what actually happened here? What's the real story here?

Starting point is 01:02:13 Okay, so there's two uniswops. There's uniswap the protocol, and then there's the uniswap application front end that Uniswop Labs operates. And the Uniswop Labs has an exchange. Think they have their own exchange. Think it's like it's a Binance, it's a Coinbase, it's a Gemini, it's a Uniswap. And that uniswap, instead of having their own order book on their centralized data layer in a database, instead like all the other ones I just listed, instead they just tap into

Starting point is 01:02:41 uniswop the protocol. And so uniswop the front end run by uniswap labs taps into uniswop the protocol. The uniswop the protocol, and this is not about that at all, nothing changed about uniswap the protocol. Uniswap labs their front end,

Starting point is 01:02:57 you can no longer get these synthetic assets to appear. And that's what they mean by delisting. But the tokens themselves still have liquidity. Still are assets on the uniswap exchange and you can go to the uniswap protocol and trade them as you see fit. that has not changed at all.

Starting point is 01:03:13 And so treating Uniswap labs front-end as an exchange, they want to not get involved with any regulators whatsoever. They're just a front-end. And so they compliantly delisted all of these synthetic assets so that they wouldn't have to deal with any regulation issues. That's not even what they're trying to do anyways. They don't even make money from providing a front-end to the Uniswap protocol.

Starting point is 01:03:34 Now, just like you said, two cohorts of people I notice made a bunch of noise about this. like the Bitcoin Maxis or the people who generally just don't want Ethereum to succeed. And so they said, oh, yeah, Uniswap's always been like completely centralized, completely like censorable. We knew it all along. And to me, that's just like they are just broadcasting how incredibly naive and biased they are because they're just showing you. I got called scammers. Oh, I'm sure you did. I said uniswap. Yeah. I'm sure you. Daily I get called scammer. But, but like specifically in this event, people, right.

Starting point is 01:04:09 Bitcoin or Maximilus were very angry, and they felt like this was a chink in Ethereum's defy armor. They're refusing to learn why we're so excited about this whole defy thing in the first place. It's so incredibly ironic. They come to you and they tell, Ryan, you're a scammer. You said Uniswap was decentralized. And if they are telling you that you're a scammer because of this, they're the scammer because they're trying to create a false narrative about you don't know to try and get them to buy Bitcoin. And it's like, oh, yeah, DFi. I could have never worked. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:41 It gets so frustrating. And the thing is... So that's the one group, right? That's the one group. And then there's like the newer people who come into the space and say, oh, uniswap delisted tokens. I thought the whole thing about this was censorship resitions. And you're totally right.

Starting point is 01:04:54 And it absolutely is. And that's why it's important to understand the difference between the front end and the back end. And the back end is a censorship resistant protocol built on Ethereum, doing all the things that Ethereum is supposed to let them do. And the crazy thing is, the most frustrating thing is, we've done the way. this before. Like we did this two years ago. It was the same story. And so, Ryan, you wrote this in December 9th, 2019 titled Unstoppable Liquidity. Tell us why you wrote this article. I was just scamming people.

Starting point is 01:05:21 I was just scam people. Left and right. Why did you write this article? I wanted to scam everyone. No, it was because a similar incident happened in 2019 where there was a regulatory scare around, I think so fack countries. So these are countries on basically like the international ban list or like the U.S. is banless. So Iran, North Korea, some other countries that the U.S. has, like, legal trade embargoes against. And so what happened was uniswap was unavailable. The official uniswap site became unavailable to specific countries. It was like kind of like, if you have an IP address coming from Iran, you can't access the official uniswap interface, right? And so what did that mean at the time in 2019? Well,

Starting point is 01:06:09 actually does the opposite of everything the critics are proclaiming because it actually demonstrated how unstoppable the uniswap protocol is. Because within minutes, this is what happened in 2019, and it's what happened in 2021 last week, within minutes, all of these other new uniswap interfaces surfaced, right? So like anyone can build a uniswap interface. They could just fork the uniswap interface code as well and like deploy it somewhere else. They don't even have to deploy it on Amazon servers or centralized servers. You can even deploy it in something like IPFS. If you don't want a dot com domain name, that's also kind of a centralized domain name, you can host it on ENS or some sort of decentralized domain name service. And so this is what you found in 2019. You had

Starting point is 01:06:59 Uniswapexchange.eath.eith. You had uniswapexchange.eith.com.comit.compteith. Link, totally uncensurable. accessible anywhere in the world, all the assets listed. It's because all of the good stuff, the logic, the liquidity, the assets, everything. That's all on chain. That's all uncensored, unstoppable on native Ethereum. And so like the interface isn't even the thing here. And this is exactly what happened. You can access uniswap in all of those synthetics that were delisted on the official app in any of these other, you know, third party websites. And anyone can spin these up. you can even run it yourself, David. If you want to get super geeky, you know, download the Git code, you know, repositories

Starting point is 01:07:42 and just run the interface on your local machine and trade that way. Right. And this is what it means to be an anti-fragile decentralized system. If you cut off the head, then 10 more show up. Like, I don't even go to Uniswap to trade my assets. I go to like Macha or any other number of Uniswap front ends. And so, like, this, if you just go somewhere else, like, it's just an interface. It's just the front end.

Starting point is 01:08:07 And so, Ryan, I'm looking forward to doing this again in 2023 when something happens. And then the Bitcoin Maxis once again, throw up their arms and be like, oh, yeah, we knew Ethereum was centralized. Like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, here's the other thing. I don't know why people, like, what's your solution? If you're a Bitcoin, like, God bless you. If you're Bitcoin, like, what's your solution to this problem? Right.

Starting point is 01:08:30 You guys don't even have a un-swap. Right? go to Coinbase. Right. I guess the solution is don't trade any other assets. There's only Bitcoin. But that's not a satisfactory answer. It's not where we're a Bitcoiner.

Starting point is 01:08:43 Bitcoin, Maxi. All right. All right. Let's talk about this. This is super exciting. I feel like this still went under the radar. You know it was a big news last week. Right.

Starting point is 01:08:52 Is Reddit's community point system is scaling on Ethereum using Arbitrum. So layer two technology. And that's just huge because Reddit has been talking about a community. point scaling system like tokenizing. It's, you know, how Reddit has subredits, David, all sorts of different subredits out there. Each subreddit can have a notion of community points that are rewarded for different behaviors in the subreddit.

Starting point is 01:09:17 And they created like a pilot project of this. And they just knew the Ethereum Mainnet wouldn't scale. Anyway, they finally come up with their scalability solution for achieving this project, and it's on arbitram. And the thing about Reddit is 450 million active monthly users. Like, that's insane. I mean, we have probably 1 million, maybe 2 million people in Defi right now, right? This is potentially adding 450 million, like a total addressable market when you include

Starting point is 01:09:47 social media into the defy ecosystem of the future. And they're doing it on Ethereum's Layer 2. And the reason they selected Layer 2 specifically for Ethereum is DECD, centralization. That's what they said in their post. So this is the protocol sync thesis at work, right, where organizations don't want to build on finance chain as controlled by CZ. They want to build on something that is credibly neutral at the base layer. And it's really cool that Reddit is seeing that. And I think this is going to be a big story of how Web 2 social media starts to interact more and more with, you know, Web 3, defy and and this, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:29 internet of value that that's being built out right now. Yeah, that last take that you just had, how Reddit is going from a Web 2 to a Defi world. Like this is Reddit getting a huge upgrade and stepping into the world of Web 3. And there's a decent amount. Web 3 is kind of largely undefined. No one really knows what it is. Everyone has their own kind of definition for it. But I think as soon as you integrate financial assets with community engagement like hubs, which is what Reddit is, then we start to drift into the world of Web 3. incentivized communities, incentivized participation, incentivize content curation. And like, think of the magnitude of how many users Reddit has and how many, they're all going

Starting point is 01:11:12 to be introduced to Ethereum, maybe not directly. And kind of the point in the long-term, like, bullishness of Ethereum is that it actually just is an invisible operating system in the background that no one really thinks about anymore. And this is kind of this instantiation of that. Reddit is going to use optimism. Optimism is so fast and instant that. that just feels like a normal website, yet it's secured by Ethereum. And now Reddit's like millions and millions of users are now touching Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:11:38 at least with maybe a couple degrees of separation. First, there's Reddit built on top of optimism, which is built on top of Ethereum. But it comes back, all roads lead back to Ethereum at the end of the day. And so Ethereum is about to touch so many more lives. And that's going to be really cool to see. They're going to figure this out, David. There's like 30,000 different subreddits, right? I'm at like, what is a subreddit?

Starting point is 01:12:00 It's a community, isn't it? Right. Like 30,000 subredits, all of these could potentially become DAOs. Right. If you have sort of some community points token. If you expand the definition of a Dow, it could just become a subreddit. Who knows? I just have no idea what like the experimentation is coming, but it is coming.

Starting point is 01:12:17 And I think this is made possible by some of the layer two tech. Super cool to see. David, let's talk about EIP 1559 for just a minute because this is like an embarrassing take. by CNBC. I'm glad they're talking about ETH and EIP 1559 on CNBC, but they don't, they still don't really know what they're talking about. So this is Michael Juan Wong with the tweet from Brian Kelly on CNBC. What would happen here? Yeah. So Brian Kelly thinks EIP 1559 means proof of stake. I mean, I remember when I was trying to learn about crypto and Ethereum and I was making

Starting point is 01:12:51 statements like this. And so like to some degree, maybe Brian is just like learning. But also, if you're learning, don't present this on CNBC, like, become a little bit more educated. And then also the Ethereum classic on the, the Ethereum classic graph on the screen while talking about Ethereum, it's frustrating. And like, to some degree, I'm like just not convinced that our legacy, like, media institutions are actually ever going to do it for us. And so, uh, there's always been the conversation of like, are we, when are the institutions coming versus like, oh, are we just going to make our own new institutions? And like, this is evidence for the fact that, oh, we're going to make our own new ones.

Starting point is 01:13:29 That's a great take. And I definitely think it's the second in all sorts of categories, not just media, but definitely media as well. David, let's talk about this. BitGo and Index Co-op have partnered up, which is super cool. We just had Index Co-op on the state of the nation earlier this week. And we're talking about institutional defy. Now they have teamed up with BitGo, it seems like.

Starting point is 01:13:54 Bickgo provides crypto custody service. Because a lot of these institutions, David, they can't hold their own private keys in an institutional structure, right? So they can't have millions of millions of dollars on MetaMask or somebody's ledger or something like that. So they have to use custodians like BitGo. And now I think what's happening is BitGo is providing access to all the index co-op products. So that's the bed index. That's DPI. That's their Metaverse investment product.

Starting point is 01:14:24 that's ETHFLI. It's all of their products. Exposing that to institutions, that's a super big move because, of course, there's a lot of money flowing out there in retail, but there's even more on the institutional side and giving them access to these DFI products is kind of neat. Yeah, especially with the bed index,

Starting point is 01:14:45 which is really meant to be a buy and hold, having that go straight into like custody coal storage, really, really useful. Institutions, buy the bed. Get into bed with it. that. You think we have institutions listing? Oh, yeah. Sure. Well, members of institutions. Absolutely. All right, NFT stuff, David. Shopify is allowing merchants to sell NFTs directly through their store. They are using the flow blockchain to do that,

Starting point is 01:15:14 to sell NFTs directly to customers. So we have a Shopify store, right? And this is where, like, you could sell merch, this sort of thing. You spit up a Shopify store. And I guess now they've just integrated an extension to allow flow NFTs to be sold on top of Shopify. This is mainstreaming NFTs. What other takes are there here? Yeah. Flow NFTs are not actually NFTs. They're fraudulent, illegitimate NFTs because flow isn't actually a crypto-economic system.

Starting point is 01:15:43 It's a centralized database. But it's a foot in the door for NFTs to become integrated to the rest of the world. Shopify owes no homage to flow. And as soon as it wakes up and realizes that NFTs on a, on flow are illegitimate, then maybe they will wake up and maybe they just need the scale. And so maybe we, maybe they should, we should introduce them to immutable, because immutable is a Starkware L2 that is specific built for NFTs. And so if they need NFTs on a scale platform, they should be talking to the guys over at Immutable X, not the guys over at flow.

Starting point is 01:16:15 This is strong, this, I want to hear what you said, though. This is strong language. I think NFTs on flow are you'd say illegitimate? What do you mean by that? Okay, so NFTs, non-fundurable tokens and NFTs at large, concept of the Metaverse is defined by user ownership, which means that any NFT that is not deployed on a decentralized, permissionless blockchain is not an NFT. It is something else that they have sold to you as the scarce asset that they're never going to reproduce. But do you actually own it if they can either shut down the blockchain or censor your ability to touch it? and just like overall dictate control over what assets that you own. It's kind of like if you were to go into a game, like, you know, Fortnite or any other game, you know, Harthstone, and you purchase items in the game, but then they can just revoke your

Starting point is 01:17:10 account or like cut you off or revoke your items. Are they really NFTs? No. NFTs are synonymous with maximal settlement assurances about ownership over the asset and flow, does not give you that in the same way that like any sensors any you know centralized database you don't own anything you ask this though david what about uh nfts on a side chain something like x i or even something like polygon right are they nfts or are they not nfts uh they are they can be i mean depends on they can become tokens on ethereum right so if you have a token on x die or on

Starting point is 01:17:46 polygon it is a token also on ethereum uh and so you can make that trust assumption as the user to put your tokens on Polygon, and that's your choice. You are taking that choice. So even if you go and you mint that token on Polygon, you have the ability to go back to Ethereum, and then you always get your maximum settlement assurances. Flow is a completely different blockchain. You can't go from Flow to Ethereum, so you can never access the maximum security of Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:18:15 So what I think the flow people would say is they are a layer one blockchain, and they have some tradeoffs with Ethereum on the decentralization spectrum, and they're not as decentralized as Ethereum, but they would say this may be maybe a case they would make or somebody would make, but you don't have to be maximally decentralized for NFTs, for instance. Like the use case doesn't require that. Or maybe you might say, like, flow is a property rights system, but it is not, it doesn't provide as strong security guarantees as something like Ethereum. But it does provide some security guarantees that are not quite Fortnite level centralization database.

Starting point is 01:19:00 Like there's a spectrum there and maybe they're not all the way left to Ethereum, but they're also not all the way right to Fortnite. They're kind of somewhere in between. Don't know how far in between, but somewhere in between. What's your take on that? Yeah, the place that that spectrum that you're talking about. about the place where it should be expressed is at the layer two's of Ethereum. If you want to compromise on decentralization, you go to an L2 where you actually don't have to compromise

Starting point is 01:19:29 on it. That's the whole point of the L2. So optimism and arbitram, they have speed and low latency because of the innovations in optimistic roll-ups or ZK roll-ups if you're talking about ZKSink. And so I know, denied because like we have better solutions. as L2's on Ethereum, where you don't have to make those compromises. How about, let's say there's a bridge from flow to Ethereum, right? So there's a bridge from flow to Ethereum. And so flow just becomes like the L2, if you will, not an L2, sorry, like a side chain with that bridge, that connection back to Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:20:08 So they get people in the NFT world, they get them excited about it. It's not maybe a pure real NFT, but then it has the ability to bridge across to something like Ethereum, what's your take there? Now, it's like, I'll separate something because I think part of what you're reacting to is some marketing around flow and quite frankly, other layer ones that says, we're just as decentralized

Starting point is 01:20:30 as Ethereum. And you have the exact same, you know, assurances, trust assurances, settlement guarantees as Ethereum. And like, that's a lie. And like, I think partially what you're reacting to is that. I just see a world where this brings in a whole bunch of new, NFT users, right, into the ecosystem.

Starting point is 01:20:50 And it's kind of like you have to start with Gemini and Coinbase first before you get into default. Maybe you start with flow first. Maybe flow is just actually a side chain to something like Ethereum. Thoughts on that. It's important as to where the token lives. Where does the NFT live? So if you have an NFT on flow and you can bridge it over to Ethereum, if that NFT still lives

Starting point is 01:21:14 on flow, then you still have compromised trust assurance. If once you get that NFT over to Ethereum and then that token then lives on Ethereum, then we're good. Then it's an NFT because then you have the assurances that Ethereum. It's all about assurances. It's all about user sovereignty. And if an NFT on Flow, if Flow accidentally had a hiccup in the blockchain or they just went away because of regulation, do you still have your asset? And in my mind, if it's on flow, the answer is no. And if you move that token from Flow to Ethereum, but all the data still lives on flow.

Starting point is 01:21:47 right where Ethereum is checking flow as to whether the NFT exists or not, then it's still compromised. Ethereum needs to check Ethereum to see whether that NFT is real or not. So it's a matter of where does that NFT live. And in order to be a legitimate NFT,

Starting point is 01:22:03 it has to live on whatever is maximally decentralized, maximally censorship resistant, maximally permissionless, and whatever is the most maximal is the most legitimate place to issue NFTs and that place is Ethereum. There you guys. I didn't know we were going to have that conversation.

Starting point is 01:22:19 There was a full episode right there. I'm glad we did. That was a full backup podcast. All right, David, let's talk about this. This is still an NFT world. Stoner Cats. Milakunis, she has a new animated NFT show, Cats again, shutting down the Ethereum blockchain. I don't know. I was actually trying to mint one of these just because I thought it would be fun. And I couldn't get my transaction through. I didn't make it because there was such high demand for this. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. But like, tell us about the story and what happened earlier this week. Yeah, Milakunis, Ashen Kutcher,

Starting point is 01:22:54 Vitalibbuterin, and a few other big names out of the Hollywood space. They produce like these animated short videos. And if you want to watch these, you have to own a stoner cat. And stoner cat, I think there's like 13,000 of them or something. You know, generative cats. And, you know, pretty typical NFT project, except for the fact that it's backed by these big, big-name celebrities, two people out of that 70s show, which were one of my favorite shows. And gas spiked to like 600 gway because everyone was aping in all at the same time. The sale was delayed by 24 hours because they had a bug in getting the sale contract out the door, so they delayed it by 24 hours.

Starting point is 01:23:35 And then because everyone was aping in at all the same time, there was so many failed transactions. So there was something like, I think like over $100,000. in cumulative like burnt i saw a report where it was like 750 000 saved it of 350 failed transactions yeah 750 that's a that's a large number of literally burnt money that went straight to the miners so the miners are really happy that kind of makes me concerned about like the genesis of this nft like event because it like it had a bug in the in in the day and for one day so they kicked the sale out a day and then a lot of people got burnt trying to buy these things to like not really starting off with a good impression.

Starting point is 01:24:17 But I mean, we'll see these. We now have Ashen Coucher. Insane demand though, right? Sorry? Like insane demand. Insane demand. Insane demand. Like, that's a story in itself.

Starting point is 01:24:25 There was one of two NFT drops that had insane demand. They were not even covering the second one. But that day, there were two events, two NFT drops that spiked gas like 600 Gwet. I was just like, can we start doing NFT launches on layer two, please? Like, when can we start doing that? Right. Let's just do that.

Starting point is 01:24:42 Right. Listen to bankless. Come on, Mila. Listen to bankless. Come on bankless. We'd love to talk to you, Mila. Coca-Cola creates its first collection of brand-inspired NFTs. Coca-Cola, that is an American classic brand. That's a Warren Buffett stock. Now they're doing NFTs. Probably not Buffett-approved. Probably not. What's the big deal about this? Is it just Coca-Cola? Yeah, it's just Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is now making NFTs on Ethereum, picking the right blockchain. So that's nice. And I mean, when Coca-Cola, like one of America's biggest brands ever, issues, NFTs is really legitimizing of the infrastructure. So cool. We just got a little bit more legitimate today, guys. Also, the auction is donated to the Special Olympics International. So kind of cool that they're doing that as well. David, people pleaser. And you remember we had people, you had people

Starting point is 01:25:32 pleaser on the podcast, wrote an article about her uniswap art. Now her digital art is on the front page of Fortune magazine. This is the digital. version and it's really bringing crypto culture, I think, into mainstream acceptance. I see crypto punk. I see some other things, unicorns and such. Oh, hang on. That's not just a normal cryptopunk. That's Santiago Santos. That's his crypto punk. We also got the Banteg Bunny right here. We got Crypto Dog as well. We got, I think that's loom dart in the, that you can't see with the Pepe with the orange cap. We got Tetranode on the DJ station. We got the Kobe Bitcoin glasses. And there's going to be a few other people. Maybe that's Chainlink God. Maybe. Is that

Starting point is 01:26:17 who that is? It's a green frog. I know that. Then we got the people please their stars on the wall. Yeah, there's just a bunch of little Easter eggs here. Oh, look, there's the fractional logo from even earlier in the show. There's a ledger right there. There's a compound logo because shout out Robert, Robert Leshner. So yeah, there's a bunch of little hidden gems. And so we have actual crypto-tweeter, crypto-culture people on the front page of Fortune magazine. So nice job and congrats to people pleaser. That's super cool. Guys, not too much Bitcoin stuff, but I think all of the Bitcoin information is probably

Starting point is 01:26:49 tied up in the regulatory discussion that we want to have. There's a lot of regulatory discussion in Washington this week. So let's start with this. Elizabeth Warren, she called Cryptocoters shadowy super coders. Shadowy Supercoters. She would think of us like that, huh? I just, I was like, why do you have to make it sound so cool? cool Elizabeth Warren. You're just going to get more people to do it. Shadowy supercoser. So did you say,

Starting point is 01:27:18 did you see some crypto companies, David? They started like changing their job post descriptions to shadowy super coder. No, this is perfect crypto culture. Just taking lemons and turning it into lemonade. Can I read her quote here? I'm going to read her quote. Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super coders and miners, which doesn't sound better. to me. She's making the case against crypto in this hearing. A lot of that, a lot of that this week. And then all of the crypto Twitter turned it into one gigantic meme. Yeah. She also sent this letter to Janet Yellen, so Treasury Secretary. And I won't read the whole letter, obviously. It will be

Starting point is 01:28:02 available for you in the show notes. But I want to highlight this, risks from decentralized finance. Okay. She also tweeted this letter out, and she called it. Defi refers to a fast-growing and highly opaque corner of the crypto. If I had my soundboard, I'd be hitting the buzzer right now. Sir, highly opaque. This whole thing is called open finance. The traditional banking system is highly opaque. That's why we have open finance. That's why we are building a new system. She says, given the participants and project developers may remain anonymous. Defi could present severe financial stability risks. So making the case that crypto could destabilize the traditional financial markets and wreck everything. I'm just kind of like, who's asking for this? I don't understand if this is a narrative that some politicians are grabbing on.

Starting point is 01:28:57 And like there's like anti-crypto is, I don't know, there must be some contingent of the population who just likes it, just likes hearing about this. because it's not actually going to deliver any results for the things the American people care about to be anti-crypto in this way. I do not understand it. And it's also coming from a very misinformed view. Right. I mean, we just had index co-up on. They have their entire financial statement. Everything they do, it's on chain, visible, live update, transparent. This is not opaque, live updating. Like a 10K every six seconds, you get a 10K report. You could query it from anywhere. Like, this is, a regulator's dream. I don't understand. Like, they should want to build the entire American financial system on open finance. They have access to see everything. And individual investors

Starting point is 01:29:50 have access to see everything. I don't understand, David. What's going on? This is, it's just so easy to just refute all of this. And like, you should scroll up just a little bit so I can see the rest of that paragraph. It just shows Elizabeth Warren's cards. Right. an opaque financial market, which leads to stability risks. We have the most volatile crypto assets of all time, and it's the most, and everything works regardless of that. We are built for stability. It's the whole point of over collateralization.

Starting point is 01:30:25 We are built for transparency. And so this is how you know that Elizabeth Warren doesn't give a flying F about what is true about this industry, but she's trying to paint it into an image. She's trying to give it a branding, which it does not have and is completely and fundamentally the opposite of what is actually true. And all of my family loves Liv Warren. I didn't vote for her. I was a Bernie bro, and then I was a yang guy.

Starting point is 01:30:50 But I would have, she would have been, she would have been third. Except every time she opens her mouth about a crypto, it's just dead wrong. And so like, I finally feel resonance with like these ultra libertarians who just get frustrated about politicians coming into their industry, tinkering around. about shit they don't know about. Like, get out of my industry. You don't know. I know more than you, Elizabeth Warren.

Starting point is 01:31:11 I know more than you. Get out. Stop. Sorry. We have some more takes on that, by the way, because I think regulatory is definitely a, like, there's a lot of fun over the past few weeks about this. So some more takes in the take section. But before we get there, some other news for the week,

Starting point is 01:31:30 the White House says crypto tax enforcement will help pay for this new massive bipartisan infrastructure bill, David, the biggest infrastructure bill in U.S. history. I mean, the biggest ever that's been proposed in the world. There's a lot of support for this in Congress, and crypto tax enforcement could pay for a portion of it. But unfortunately, do you know what this means? It means they are potentially slipping in some reporting obligations into this infrastructure tax bill. So reporting obligations above and beyond what we have today. So if you sell crypto in the U.S., of course, that is a capital gain. And you have to treat that as you would any property, stock, bond, real estate, whatever it may be, right?

Starting point is 01:32:16 They want to go above and beyond this. And potentially, the wording of the legislation right now, again, this is not passed. This is like draft legislation still is that even wallets, David, might have to report out the tax obligations of wallet users. potentially even maybe defy exchanges would need to report this stuff out like some of this is the way it's worded it's not even practical

Starting point is 01:32:42 it's not it's nonsensical it's nonsensical no one can do it but there's definitely a target to pay for this infrastructure bill and they think they could raise $28 billion from the crypto industry with some of this like it's not even the taxes that are so much the issue

Starting point is 01:32:59 it's the nonsensical reporting the methodology nonsensical reporting obligations. I thought Anthony Sizzano had a good take here. Explain this meme. Oh, yeah. So it's the classic Scooby-Doo, who's under the mask meme. And so first panel we have, I don't know who this guy's name is, but he's the blonde guy.

Starting point is 01:33:21 The monster. Oh, no. Yeah, the preppy blonde guy. He's about to rip the mask off. And before he does, it's labeled infrastructure bill. And then he rips the mask off. And under it is insane crypto regulations. that's how it's going to get paid for it.

Starting point is 01:33:35 That's not what we wanted. Regulators, Elizabeth Warren, I know you're listening to this podcast. If you want to tax this industry and actually want to get the money out of it, you have to do it in ways that makes sense. Otherwise, you're actually going to get even less taxes because you're just going to piss people off about how you can't, the way that you are asking them to report and be tax is nonsensical. And so you're going to incentivize people to avoid doing the things you want them to do. You've got to make it easy for people to pay their taxes.

Starting point is 01:34:03 you've got to do it the right way. Totally agree. Totally agree. Thank God we have some people in Washington like Coin Center who are pushing back in this. So the Coin Center is like, I'd call them just a crypto lobby grip. And this is how. We all like them. Everyone likes them.

Starting point is 01:34:18 We're friends with these guys. This is how the billmaking process like works in Washington. It's basically like there'll be a section that pertains to a certain industry. And the industry will get that section. And they'll essentially advise. legislators on how to change things, how to edit it, how to make it more, I guess, palatable for the industry, right? This is what lobbying really is. And so Coin Center is up in the mix, and they are trying to make sure that nonsensical crypto tax regulations don't get embedded

Starting point is 01:34:50 in the bowels of this bill. Because this is an infrastructure bill, okay? You could either support that or not. But it's an infrastructure bill. It does not have anything to do with reporting requirements for crypto or it shouldn't. And it's certainly shouldn't create, you know, nonsensical obligations. So we have folks like Jerry Brito from Coin Center pushing back on this and thank God we do. All right, David, we're going to burn through the rest of these really quick. The first is the Binance squeeze is ongoing. So FtX and Binance just removed their highest leverage ability. They used to have like 100x leverage. You could get on these exchanges to a maximum of 20x. It feels very much like they are trying to get on the

Starting point is 01:35:30 good side of regulators with this move. Binance is also decreasing the daily withdrawal limits. So used to be without KYC. Yeah, you could you could withdraw two Bitcoin up to two Bitcoin. Now it's like 0.06 Bitcoin per day. And they didn't even give a two-week notice, which they usually did, which you know is how you know the regulators are constricting on them. And to me, this means Binance is largely dead.

Starting point is 01:35:56 Like, it's kind of why Binance was used in the first place as an anti-KIC exchange. They're a, yes, yes. And they're definitely a bank now, right? Yeah, I mean, 100%. They're heading that direction. End of an era. Definitely. Binance, U.S. IPO. This also seems to be like another defensive posture.

Starting point is 01:36:14 Binance is shrinking their non-KYC withdrawal limits, as we mentioned, and maybe it's because they want to IPO in the U.S., which would be interesting. Also, this David in China, there's a regulatory squeeze, Huobi, which was the largest Chinese exchange, as far as I know, they just dissolved all their Chinese entities. So they're no longer a Chinese company. I don't know where they're going, but this is as a result of the Chinese regulatory squeeze. So again, that theme back again. Do you want to talk about this? What's Robin Hood doing, David? Robin Hood is trying to get into maybe Defi, like all the Defi products and services that we know, borrowing, lending, and swapping. Robin Hood's trying to get into

Starting point is 01:36:56 that. Not too many details, but they said they are. eyeing crypto lending and staking services. So cool. Ahead of its IPO as well. Yeah, ahead of their IPO. I think this is, they expect this to be a revenue generator for them. Speaking of IPOs, BlockFi is also pursuing plans to go public, even as regulators close in. So we mentioned that last week. Regulators kind of closing in, New Jersey, you know, called BlockFi interest accounts a security. Now they're planning to go to IPO, maybe in a defensive posture in some way. I'm not, I'm not sure exactly why. Let's talk about this last one, David.

Starting point is 01:37:31 Goldman Sachs, they just applied for a defy ETF. Goldman Sachs, they're getting into defy. Good news. Oh, yeah? Let's find out what's in it. Oh, wait, absolutely nothing. Like, there's zero crypto tokens in this defy ETF. And so, fail.

Starting point is 01:37:47 Big fail. What is in it? I heard that the highest, the largest asset, like 7% of the ETF was actually Nokia. Yeah, followed by like Facebook and then Google. It's basically they attached some interns. with finding any traditional equities company that has any sort of surface area to like crypto and blockchain and Ethereum

Starting point is 01:38:06 and the intern did it and he still effed it up and then now Goldman Sachs is marketing this defy product. Like in the same week that index co-op and bankless Dow launches the bed index in my opinion, going to be the best performing crypto index of all time.

Starting point is 01:38:21 Goldman Sachs just completely flops with this defy ETF. Who do you think is going to build out the future? To be fair, one thing I will say is they're actually using this, this, um, defy index right here from a company called, um, Soul Active,

Starting point is 01:38:34 I suppose. And this, this, these are the companies we mentioned. They could change this. They're from. They fucked up. They'll maybe change it.

Starting point is 01:38:41 They'll maybe change it though. Okay. They might not go to market with this. They made it somewhat vague in their SEC filing. So I will say that. But yeah, absolutely embarrassing if they go to market with that. Right.

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Starting point is 01:41:27 All right, guys, we are back with some of the hot takes of the week. David, let's start here. This was from a comment Mark Zuckerberg made. Facebook, he says, is becoming a metaverse company. That's interesting in and of itself. But what's this take from Claire Silver? Yeah, in 2014, Facebook acquires Oculus VR. In 2020, Facebook release a beta for Facebook Horizon, a world creation system for Oculus. And in 2021, Facebook says they are transitioning into a metaverse company. Now, the word. Metaverse, I think, is, it depends on who you ask. They'll define it differently. I think metaverse in this context is being more closely associated with like Ready Player One type of a

Starting point is 01:42:09 world, but that very world is very much like synonymous with like owning assets and digital assets. And so it's very, very proximate to a lot of the NFT conversations that we have in this industry. And so there's a take here. It's like, ooh, how do we want like our Metaverse to be constructed? Do we want it constructed on open source permissionless software? Or do we want it constructed by Mark Zuckerberg? Well, I mean, I know you've seen Ready Player 1, right? Right? Like there are all of these like tokens, money, collectibles in Ready Player 1 items,

Starting point is 01:42:41 all of these things. And so they have to be registered somewhere because they're digital property with real value. And so you only have like, I guess maybe three places that you could register this. One, with some sort of a digital version of a nation state, right? or two, it's the property of the companies. It's like Facebook is the property management system, essentially, the property registry, or it's a credibly neutral, permissionless system, right? Like, I don't think the nation state is going to come up with a digital property rights system

Starting point is 01:43:14 on the internet. Facebook certainly would and can, but like, do we want them to? My God, Zuckerberg already knows everything about us. Like, do we want him holding the keys to all of the assets, all the digital assets, the world that are like... Dystopic. It does. I think those are the choices, though. Good take.

Starting point is 01:43:36 All right. Let's go to this one. Defy regulation. This is from Rune Christensen on the topic we were just talking about earlier this week in the news section. Why don't you take this, David? Yeah, he says, if the U.S. bans or seriously interferes with the innovation happening in DFI, it will be an own goal 10 times worse than China cracking down on DIDI, which paralyzed innovation. Do you know what DIDI is?

Starting point is 01:44:01 I don't actually. Oh, I don't. Okay. Rune continues, DFI today is the most rapidly innovating sector in tech, and most of that innovation is U.S. centric. What Rune is basically saying is that DFI is like the last bastion of permissionless innovation for the U.S. financial system in stark contrast with what's going on with the Chinese bank digital currency.

Starting point is 01:44:23 I'm going to write an article about this because my brain's been chewing on it, but there's a conversation to be had about how many just light years ahead the Chinese CBDC is ahead of anything the U.S. is doing or even understands itself to be doing. While China marches ahead with this super innovative new product and so is DFI. The United States is just floundering, like doing status quo. It's doing nothing. It's not even doing nothing. It's going backwards, like hindering its biggest.

Starting point is 01:44:53 ally. And that is why Roon is calling this bad regulation around defy could be the United States own goal. They need defy to combat the Chinese bank's digital currency, yet they are trying to tax it in these weird, nonsensical ways. It's absolutely insane. And I couldn't agree more with this take, David. And you absolutely should write that article because it maddens me. The U.S. has a real shot here. And free, open, permissionless systems have a real shot here to pull ahead. And like Roont's right, a lot of this has been built in the U.S. There's a hotbed for defy innovation. And if the U.S. regulators and those in government start to strangle, like choke out this industry, what are they doing?

Starting point is 01:45:36 Squandered opportunity, missed opportunity, just completely hijacking, you know, basically our generation, future generations. So I totally agree. David, crypto economies are booming right now, crypto gaming economies, I should say. is take from token terminal that only crypto enables in-game economies. So revenue for Axi Infinity was 1.2 billion. That's annualized for the last 30 days. Remember, candy crush, 1.2 billion. That was first realized in 2020. So the users for Axi are 600,000. Users for Candy Crush are 237 million. Revenue per user for Axi is 2,000 per user. Revenue per user for Candy Crush, $4.4. You know where the differences in those numbers comes from?

Starting point is 01:46:28 It's because the Axy users gets that revenue. Where the candy crush users, it's GDP. Economies have GDP. Exactly. Right. And where a candy crush, that just goes to the corporate holdings. Yeah, it's super cool. I can't wait to see what's going to happen in Crypto Gaming the future. David, this is take from Anthony Sasano. Eith is Digital Oil. And then he listed table with the market cap of all of these commodities, including oil. which price per unit, $65, market cap of, I guess that's $107 billion. Okay, that's going to be billion. So it's $107 trillion. No, that's $107 billion. No, that's $107,000 billion. Yes, $107,000 billion, I guess.

Starting point is 01:47:14 That's weird. I don't know. Look at the chart. Just look at the chart. Look at the chart. So if the bottom line is if Eith price were the same market. cap of oil, ether price would be $932,000, which is quite impressive. I just overall enjoy the comparison if ether to other commodities, one of three ways to value ether is as of a commodity. And even that's only one of three ways, it's still so incredibly undervalued compared to other commodities, at least in Ethereum's current form. So, you know, we've got a long way to go before Ether starts to get up there with the rest of the commodities. Yeah, I like that take.

Starting point is 01:47:56 And I don't want to take it too seriously because that's probably just the take is what you said. But I also think that, like, Ether is more the money and Blockspace, Ethereum Blockspace, is more the commodity. So I get the analogy, but also, like, eth is not oil. Etherian block space is oil. But the value of the block space is instantiated in Ether. though. There you go. There you go. I'll buy that. All right, David, it's that time, man. What are you excited about this week? Hey, I'm like trying to make lemons out of lemonade. I guess I've said that three times in the show, but like, hey, I got coronavirus. But I got the coronavirus after I got the

Starting point is 01:48:33 vaccine. And so like once I come out of this and once I come out of quarantine, I'm going to have the vaccine and the antibodies. I'm basically going to be Superman. And so once I'm done with my quarantine time, I'm going to be stoked to go back into the real life and travel the world even more protected. But yeah, specifically in that order is the right order to do things first the vaccine and then getting the antibodies. I don't recommend the alternative order. I'm just glad you're feeling okay.

Starting point is 01:49:00 Yeah, they could have been brutal. Ryan, what are you excited about? I'm excited about EIP 1559. Shocker. Look, we are a week away. Look, it's by the time people are listening to this will be like six days away from EIP 1559, maybe five days away from EIP 1559. And it's finally happening.

Starting point is 01:49:18 So we are burning ETH. We are entering the ultrasound money era. This is the first part of that era where we start to burn ETH. The one thing I've thought was missing from Ethereum this entire time was not like the community, not like the product market fit. We've had all of those things. It's been monetary policy, issuance policy of Ethereum. What does the issuance policy look like in the future?

Starting point is 01:49:41 That is the one thing, in my opinion, David, that has prevented Ethereum and ETHI asset from gaining mind share as a store of value. Popular mind share as a store of value. Well, now that's getting fixed. Now it's getting changed. We're going to have a monetary policy that creates ultrasound money out of eth the asset. And the first step of that is EIP 1559. So look, ultrasound summer, it's kicking off this summer. Then we get the merge, which drops proof of work issuance. We get an issuance reduction of like 4%. And it's like it's all coming together. But it's finally happening. That's why I'm excited. EIP 1559 is the biggest Ethereum event, certainly since staking and the beacon chain launched. But it's different

Starting point is 01:50:24 than that. I'm not going to say it's bigger than that, but it is almost as important, maybe just as important as that, I would say. Yeah. And to rally off of that, I'm also excited for all the cool numbers and metrics and just the data we get to look at due to EIP 1559. Burn data? Yeah, burn data. Yeah. I wrote about this forever ago in my last final puzzle piece to Ethereum's monetary policy. Not only do we get eith burn rate, we get the aith burn to issue ratio to so many new metrics like unlock for us to like to be able to talk about and digest. And the more things like that, the more real it becomes. And so that's what I'm excited about, about what you're excited about.

Starting point is 01:51:07 All right, man. I know we're both excited about that. All right, let's talk about this. Meme of the week. Mee of the week. David. I actually don't know the movie. This came out of chief cultress

Starting point is 01:51:17 Hillary Duff. Well, yeah, but what's the movie? I don't know. It's a movie where she's a twin, I think. I don't know. The chief cultureist Michael Wong over at Bankless, he understands things way beyond even we do at sometimes. But this is Hillary Duff holding hands with, I think,

Starting point is 01:51:32 who is also Hillary Duff, and it's Ethereum holding hands with Ethiopia because Ethereum is an inclusive community. And if we get branded with Ethiopia as Ethiopia, we're going to run with it. So Ethereum, best friends with Ethiopia. Coming up next is our moment of Zen featuring a song about Superfiz

Starting point is 01:51:51 from the Heath Stakers community. This is the story of Superfiz. How we try to get a stone or a cat? With a snap, we're in the gas, $13,000 just like that. This is the story of Superfith. Who knows all about a theory for what he's done? And we chill for having just lost the punches.

Starting point is 01:53:06 Sometimes you get wrecked. And then you have to tell your sweet heart, honey.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Uniswap Front-End | Elizabeth Warren Shadowy Super Coders | COVID-19 Crypto | FTX & Binance

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