Bankless - ROLLUP: Vitalik's Endgame, Pepsi & Adidas NFTs | Crypto Congress | ETH : BTC

Starting point is 00:00:00 Now, Pepsi, getting into NFTs, Pepsi mic drop. They're rolling out an NFT collection. And I guess they beat Coke to this. We haven't seen anything with Coke. On the other hand, I'm a little bit worried with these company, the large corporations and brands entering. This is kind of a top marker? No, at least the PFP.

Starting point is 00:00:16 Don't say it. The 10K PFC. We can say a top every single week. It doesn't matter anymore. There is no top. A, Bankless Station, happy second week of December. David, what time is it? Oh, it is the Friday weekly roll-up time, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:00:31 where we roll up the whole entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, especially when you're on the road. Yet, the bankless nation does not stop. We must always record the weekly roll-ups. You are not just on the road, though. You're on the island. I'm on the island, man. Puerto Rico is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:00:47 It went when I was six, and I haven't been since, but it is just as lovely as I remember. Okay, so, like, what's the Puerto Rico crypto scene like? I mean, and what part of Puerto Rico are you in right now? I'm staying in Condado, Condado, which is like, the beach side of San Juan. So capital of Puerto Rico. Yesterday I was in Dorado, which is where a lot of the perhaps the crypto wealth has ended up on the crypto side of Puerto Rico. I also met Joey Kroog last night, former podcast guest, yeah, for the first time. Yeah. How's Joey doing? He's doing great. He's doing great. Yeah. Puerto Rico, overall, a fun time. A nice combination

Starting point is 00:01:25 of just island vibes with like a burgeoning metropolis kind of which the you know it's just got a little bit of everything and the internet speeds here are great which is really important okay i was wondering about that and i've noticed your internet speeds are fantastic probably better than mine to be honest it doesn't take much okay guys that's a low bar all right but like um any thoughts like i know a lot of people were talking cryptos talked about moving to puerto rico many actually have um would you ever do that? I would definitely do that. If I hadn't just moved to San Diego and also fallen in love with it, like Puerto Rico would be pretty damn high up on the list. The life, life is nice here. I can't complain. I can see why people do it. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, you are plugged in

Starting point is 00:02:09 to the weekly roll up, which is where you find the best crypto news topics of the week. Three Arrows Capital, David. They just bought 400 billion in Eath. I guess they are now unabandoning Eath, is that what's happening? Yeah, you know, I've always been a proponent of slow trading. Like, people's like, a lot of people just like chase pumps. And then Thrio's Capital opened up a short two weeks ago. Yeah. But now they're buying. Like, come on guys. We're going to get into that, guys. That's going to be topic of the week. Also, how to protect yourself. There's a Badger Dow hack. You want to know this is a PSA on how to protect yourself. Cardano has shills everywhere. It seems we're going to talk about the reason why. And we finally learned why. Oh, my gosh.

Starting point is 00:02:50 And it's so obvious. I feel like I knew a little bit of this. But we're going to find out. more. Also, sushi swap. There's some drama this week. OpenC. I P-N-P-N-FT drop. That just happened. The waitless opens today as well. So we got a lot to unpack on the roll-up. Not a lot of time to do this. David, we're going to consolidate this down to an hour today, aren't we? No. I will not be putting my money on that. Yeah, don't put your money there, guys. It's never going to happen because there's so much to jam-pack. But this is still the fastest way to get updates. David, before we get into it, want to share some information from our friends over at Metamask, they are sponsoring this message, and they want you to know

Starting point is 00:03:27 that they are upgrading their hardware wallet experience. David, why don't you tell folks what that means? Oh, so much. Yeah, Betamask and the combination of Metamask and Ledger or the hardware wallet has always been clunky, especially in the last year, but they have been teaming up because it's a very hard problem because they don't have Google on board to fix and smooth out some of those clunky clunkiness about that. So the performance of Metamask plus Ledger should be a lot significantly improved but also integrations with other hardware wallets as well, including the lattice, which we are big fans of, and Keystone, a brand new hardware wallet on the scene now,

Starting point is 00:04:01 which is an air-gapped QR code-based hardware wallet. Overall, the power of going bankless while using Metamask as your portal into Defi has never been stronger. So go to banklist.c.c.c. slash Metamask, download Metamask. Plug in your hardware wallets, whichever ones are right for you, and get into the world of Defi. How about one of each hardware wallet?

Starting point is 00:04:21 You know? It's not a bad plan either. A little bit of redundancy. I have like four ledgers. I might as well just collect four of everything else. Yeah, retentancy is good. Do you know what? It was funny, David.

Starting point is 00:04:30 So earlier this week I tweeted out, hey, what's the silliest thing you've ever purchased in crypto, right? I got all these responses. You know, people buying Dragon Coin in 2017 and such. And one guy was like, when I first got into crypto, I purchased 10 ledgers, 10 ledger wallets, because I thought you needed a specific ledger for every single, Eat the dress that you. you spun up. So we bought 10 of them. And it was just kind of funny. It's like I, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:57 I feel like I might have done that in the early days as well. But of course, hardware wallets, you can have infinite addresses on your hardware wallet. So you don't need to buy many, many hardware wallets. You just need at least one hardware wallet to protect those private keys. Anyway, let's get to the markets, man. You ready? That's yes, absolutely. What's Bitcoin telling us? Beew! Bitcoin is down on the week, started at 56 and a half $4,000 hit a low of $46,600 currently is at $48,400 right now. So overall, down 15% on the week. Big oof.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Big oof. People talking about crab month, Crab month December. I don't know if that's what's happening right now, but maybe ETH tells more of a story. What's the week we look on Eith? Yeah, started the week at $4,500. Hit a low of $3,800 on that big dip, which happened on.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Sunday I believe and then we are currently clocking in at four thousand one hundred and seventy five dollars we were we were much higher earlier we almost got above four thousand five hundred dollars this week not quite I was getting real bullish but looks like we still have exactly what Ryan saying which is some consolidation December going on right now which I think is just perfectly fine I think everyone should just nice be nice and relaxed for the holidays just relax through the holidays don't you don't want to be checking crypto prices do you remember

Starting point is 00:06:22 You know, 2017, where he's like, couldn't even pay attention to anything else. 60 times a day. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's a lot of fear out there. I don't think there's anything to be fearful of. Consolidation is good. The funding rates are really, really low, which means not a lot of people are taking leverage,

Starting point is 00:06:38 which means there's not a lot of people to liquidate if things go down. I'm just very, very happy with where we are right now. And I think January is going to be really, really cool. Does it feel healthy? It just feels healthy to me. It feels balanced, yes. 2017 was exciting but unhealthy

Starting point is 00:06:54 okay it was just like cramming a bunch of fast food and candy and then 2018 it was unhealthy to the other side that crypto was dead 2018 2019 2020 was this weird place where it didn't feel healthy didn't feel unhealthy it was I don't know what it was but right now it feels like just the way it should be do you remember when we had Ben Cowan on the podcast he was like hey if crypto really breaks up

Starting point is 00:07:16 breaks out to the upside in December, I'll start to get kind of worried because the cycles are getting longer. It's going too fast. We need to slow down, take a breath before 2020. But all of this feels kind of primed for next year, to be honest. Now, I'd be happy for a quiet December myself. Yeah, I agree. I think the last time we saw really fast movement was last May, and we all know what happened then. We went from, Ether went from like $4,300 down to $1,700. That's what happens when things move too fast. So a lot of the first, the unicyclers, the first cyclers are fearful, and a lot of the veterans are just very, very content.

Starting point is 00:07:53 And so there is that dichotomy there. So sometimes listen to the veterans. Just be content. I don't get the fear. I don't get the fear, to be honest. I have no fear, absolutely. Unless you're looking at this and your Bitcoin maxilist. This is the ETH Bitcoin ratio,

Starting point is 00:08:07 and it's doing things. What things is it doing this week, David? Yeah, the ETH is up 7.5% versus Bitcoin on the week. we started at 0.085. We are currently clocking at 0.087, really moving, setting new highs every single day for the last week or so, above and beyond what we set in 2020 and 2021. And the number of days that ether has been higher than Bitcoin has continued to drop

Starting point is 00:08:36 is down, I think, below 110 days. And every time we go up is fewer and fewer days, either getting close and close to complete, unknown, unpriced, price discovery. It was the word I'm looking for. Price discovery. What's the number to beat? It's just got to basically,

Starting point is 00:08:52 the ratio has to just basically double, right? I think, for the flip. For the, yes, yeah. Yeah. Not for the flippening, but. Yeah. Well, for the flippinging, actually is pretty damn close to there as well.

Starting point is 00:09:02 I think if we double in ETH price and Bitcoin stays flat, we do flip Bitcoin. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So like the short-term traders that are looking for just the nice old round number of point one. If we can get to point one, I think,

Starting point is 00:09:15 I think the, It's game on. It's game on. What are, like, you've been known to hang in some of these circles a little bit more than I have, David. But like, what's the Bitcoin maximalist sentiment right now? Are they just sort of, you know, fingers in their ears kind of ignoring it? Or is there a little bit of anger, disbelief, maybe happiness? I think it's a forced ignoring. I think the silence that I've heard from these sides is just absolutely deafening. When you heard Bitcoiners talking about like, the death of Ethereum when it was going down below 0.02, the Bitcoiners were not shut up about how Bitcoin, about Ether was going to absolutely die. Everything's down in Bitcoin terms, and it's been up only since then for the last, like, almost three years. 2019 was the darkest year for all of that. There was a lot of that conversation lately. So maybe it's just quiet resignation.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Well, granted, now all the ETH people are getting really, really, really loud. So this could just be like the inverse, you know? Who knows? Humility. Humility, folks. Let's learn some. Are you talking about me? No. I'm talking to both of us, as I do, David. 105 billion in D5Pulse. A little bit crabbing as well.

Starting point is 00:10:26 So kind of just the sideways movement, I guess, flat from last week. Let's talk about the DPI to eat index. It's down. It's down. It's down. No, actually, no, let me see. Is it down? Oh, here it is.

Starting point is 00:10:42 It's down. Look, it's below that red bar, David. Oh, come on. That was the far was forever ago. We know it's been down. We know we know their bottom call was wrong. For adding this into post-prod. It's never going to get old.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Yeah, okay, but like, okay, hey, let me, can I take the inverse of this? Because this is funny to me, but like I think it's down too low, David. I don't think this is going to go down forever. And I think the bleeding against Eath is going to stop and has to stop. Ryan's calling the bottom. I'm not knowing. Ryan is calling the bottom. What's the number?

Starting point is 00:11:16 0.068. Ryan is calling the bottom. No, no, no. I'm looking at this image. Draw the line, Luke. See that look on my face? That look of like glee and exuberance or whatever that is. That's the kind of look that people get when something has topped or when something has bottomed, right?

Starting point is 00:11:34 Sure. I'm not saying it's like I actually don't really care too much about this ratio. I'm bullish on both. I'm bullish on defy and I'm bullish on ETH, right? This is kind of a funny place to be in. But I feel like too many people right now are discounting Defi. It's like saying that ETH is going to, you know, appreciate relative to DFI forever. And it's just not going to happen.

Starting point is 00:11:55 This is just another cycle that's playing out. Defi had a crazy year last year. It's not going to do two of those necessarily in a row. It was time for Eith to recover relative to DFI. Of course. Now people are talking about like DFI as if it's dead or something. He's never going to recover. I'm not calling the bottom.

Starting point is 00:12:14 You're calling the bottom. I'm not calling the bottom. Ryan has joined the bottom callers. I'm looking forward to seeing another line on this craft next week. Just saying a bottom exists and it's got to be close is all I'm saying. But Luke's going to turn this into another blue line, I guess, for Ryan calling the bottom. All right. Anyway, bed index.

Starting point is 00:12:35 What are we looking at, David? Down 7.5% on the week. Start of the week at roughly $175, currently clocking in at $144. Good combo, though. Bitcoin Eat and Defy. It's kind of the all-weather portfolio. It's just kind of crabbing out, though, right now as it does. Hey, well, nobody noticed, David. Guess what? Die got a little bit more decentralized, which is kind of nice. What's the story here? Yeah, there's always been a big critique about die because up to a point, something like 65% of total collateral and Maker Dow was USDC, which is a big centralization risk, especially when USC has a white list, which is controlled by a central entity. So by proxy, Dai has that. that centralization risk. And that was like ever since the COVID crisis, right? Exactly. Remember we had that Black Thursday in crypto where dye kind of depegged and almost, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:24 died? Totally, absolutely. And now USDC collateral is below 30% coming in at 29.4%. Ether collateral is at 43%. So all die is backed by up to 43% of ether, almost 15% of WBTC as well. So starting to move back into the non-sovereign store of value monies. That's good, a little healthier, I think. And look at this from Chris Dixon, speaking about markets moving.

Starting point is 00:13:51 Another way to track markets' attention. And he's doing Google Trends for Web3, and interest is going up over time quite a bit. Bigly. Yeah. Web3 is really finding its moment right now. I mean, I think it's going to continue. But previous to this year, the Web3 meme was sort of, dead? I don't know. It just, it was kind of zomified. And now it's made a big resurgence. What do you think

Starting point is 00:14:20 this means? Yeah, for the podcast listeners, it looks like that the search terms for Web3 volume has roughly 10xed since about the middle of September 2021. Wow. So that is pretty cool. You know, a slow growth for all of a sense that the whole entire 2021. So slowly up into the right, but once September hit, boom, like 10x since in the last like two months. Well, Dixon has been a champion for that model so for Web3 as a meme and so I'm not surprised he's tweeting this out and folks if you want to understand what Web3

Starting point is 00:14:50 actually is I would refer to you to that podcast we did with him which are the five mental models for Web3 go check that out it's somewhere in the archives as well David here's a big story man we were talking about this was it two weeks ago three weeks ago the whole zoo

Starting point is 00:15:05 Three Aros Capital abandoning Eith talk about that story and what just happened was Three Arrow's Capital snapped up $400 million in Eath. They've unabandoned Eth, it seems like. Traders gonna trade. Yeah, so what happened was that there was a bunch of drama between Kane, war work of synthetics and Suu.

Starting point is 00:15:26 Kane was just calling out just traders who didn't really have long-term beliefs and were just kind of going from bag to bag to bag to shilling their bags along the way. And then Suu just doubled down on that and saying like, yeah, well, like I'll abandon Ethereum because Ethereum abandoned its users because of really, really high gas fees. That's why I'm chilling like Avalanche. So that was two weeks ago. They opened up an on-chain short against ETH at the time. And now they are now buying ETH. Traders gonna trade. Granted, that short did work out because the whole entire market went down. Also granted, the whole entire market went down, but ETH went down the least in that same time frame,

Starting point is 00:16:06 which really frustrates me because they were wrong and right at the same time. They ended up making money, but they could have made more money if they had shorted anything else, but now they are buying. I'm totally okay with them making money and being traders and like doing well in all market conditions, totally okay with it. I think where the community had the big problem was this disparaging of builders, this idea that Ethereum was somehow rejecting its users when no, it was actually protecting its users. It was making sure that the network stayed decentralized long term. And this is, I guess, a control, a command Z, you know, of like an undo button that Suzu and three errors capital pulled, not less than two weeks later. And this was also interestingly, at least the local top on the avalanche appreciation relative to ETH, right?

Starting point is 00:17:00 And like that's gone down a whole lot since that tweet too. So it's just totally a top trade. And this is Suu talking about it, he's saying, look, I couldn't. let you guys jerk off watching the burn without me. That was in his original tweet too. Heath layer two is still unstable for newcomers. Layer one, excuse me, is still unstable for newcomers. Show it to your gram if you don't believe me. So you're saying I'm still right, doubling down on that. I'll still bid it hard on any panic dump like this weekend, obviously. 100K, ETH is dust for what it's worth. More coming. What does this tell you?

Starting point is 00:17:35 This is why you can't just follow traders because they trade first, right? Like they, They move quickly and like it's just because they're buying one thing this week. It doesn't mean that you have no idea what they're going to buy next week. Just following traders doesn't work. I mean, maybe it does. I don't know. It's just like it's so much mental capacity. That's why Ryan and I are big fans of long-term thinking.

Starting point is 00:17:57 It's it's it's there's plenty of upside and long-term thinking. In fact, I kind of think there's more and there's also a lot less stress. People think when they come into the space that they just need to be a trader. So many people ask me, it's like, oh, you're, you're in crypto. So you trade, right? I'm like, no, no, I podcast. I don't trade. Yeah, it's so, very, very pressure.

Starting point is 00:18:14 It's so true, David. You don't have to be a trader. You don't. It's like when you enter an RPG, right? Mass multiplayer RPG is like, it's like choose your character class. You're going to be the barbarian, the warlock, the necromancer. Oh, are you going to be the trader? Are you going to be the holder?

Starting point is 00:18:30 Are you going to be the builder? Are you going to be the settler? You get to pick, and you don't have to pick the character class of the trader. So many people default to that. And it's actually like one of the hardest character classes to play. And I think one of the least rewarding in my opinion, right? But like this is, I picked my character class and I'm holder, investor, settler, right? And I don't even want to dabble with trade.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Like I'll do it from time to time. Like I'll cast a few spells, whatever. But like, that's it. It's also the most crowded class. Everyone picks the trader, right? And like, and one of the reasons why is because people feel, people feel phomo about crypto, right? So like, all right, how do I feel FOMO? How do I get more crypto outsized other than just buying it?

Starting point is 00:19:12 And so, like, that's where a lot of people, like, think that they can trade or they just take on leverage. There's other ways to take on leverage. And what I mean by that is, like, building something is leverage, right? Like, if you build something successful, you can have outsized returns. If you want to be a connector, be a podcaster to every other way, like social capital, there's other ways to have outsized exposure to this industry other than just trying to maximize your trade and profit. And so I will leave listeners with that to chew on. There's other ways to get outsize exposure,

Starting point is 00:19:42 and it's not just necessarily trading or taking leverage. Oh, totally agree. One of my favorite ways to do it, by the way, is join a Dow early that has some juice and then contribute, right? Start building out that Dow is a great way if you're the settler character class, I guess. Let's talk about this too. We tease this in the intro. Why are crypto-influencers shilling Cardano, the ATA token?

Starting point is 00:20:06 this is a comment from somebody on Twitter who gives actually the answer to that. And first I want to just say, I feel like I see a lot of shilling of Cardano around quote unquote specifically YouTube influencers, right, which is not like you and I, David, I guess we're accidental YouTubers. Like I don't even know how we. By necessity, yeah. Right. So like we started the podcast.

Starting point is 00:20:29 Like we're just trying to get the bankless message out. And YouTube is another way to do that. but I wouldn't call us like native YouTubers, but there have been crypto native, like I guess crypto influencer type YouTubers. This has been a very large, you know, I guess class of individuals and a lot of like very popular ones that I don't frequent. But I've noticed a lot of them are shilling all sorts of things that we don't talk about very much on bankless.

Starting point is 00:21:00 Why do you think that is? And then what's the answer here? Yeah, so certain tokens and certain projects very much understand the surface area, the massive amounts of surface area that's generated from social media platforms like YouTube. Where do people go when they want to learn about something? YouTube's often the first place. So it's a great place to throw a net to capture eyeballs. And then when you throw in an incentive structure, which is being what is uncovered by Jack in this tweet thread here, that's really where the fuel goes into incentivizing these YouTube chillers. And so if you scroll down right into the second tweet, he goes, when you look at crypto, make sure to look at the incentive structures.

Starting point is 00:21:37 These are the mechanisms that make price rises and falls. Who's motivated to hold to advertise to buy and sell? The key mechanic for Cardano, staking. About 70% of ADA, Cardano's token, is locked in stake pools. The rate on your staked Cardano is about 5% stake per year, roughly matching about the ether staking per year, give or take. But what about the rate for someone who runs a staking pool, which is a, a component of Cardano, which is part of its design structure about how you stake. You stake inside of a staking pool because you delegate your way your stake.

Starting point is 00:22:10 That's not part of Ethereum structure. So the rates for those who run a staking pool is over 100% a year, as in you almost double your stake rate every single year. So that's like if you've staked 32 ether in one year, you'd have 64 ether the next year. Validators are doubling their money yearly off the locked front of stakers, while stakers are only earning about 5%. This is roughly how banks work. Banks like, hey, come give us your money.

Starting point is 00:22:35 We'll give you a very, very low APY, while they go yield farm in TradFi and get like 30% APY, and then they pocket the difference. This is the same business model. If you're a Cardano, you got to incentivize people to promote the asset. The more you pay the validators,

Starting point is 00:22:50 the more they will work to promote ADA, that and you get to stake it. If you've got a captive audience, it's a beautiful business model. So the system works like this. Your neighbor, Greg, Watchers a video shilling Cardano. They buy some ADA.

Starting point is 00:23:02 They lock it up in their favorite YouTubers valetator pool. They make 5%. The YouTuber doubles their money yearly. Greg waits for ADA to moon. This is not just a conspiracy theory. Cardano actually recommends that validators set a part of their budget aside for running a YouTube channel. They are actively promoting this as part of the structure for YouTube. YouTubers talk about how easy it is to set up nodes like there's no conflict of interest.

Starting point is 00:23:25 So how much do these validators earn like a lot? a lot, a lot, a lot. And this is exactly the same model that BitConnect had in 2017. The amount of BitConnect YouTube videos, YouTubers promoting BitConnect was off the charts. You could go anywhere without it. It was the business model was like, hey, and all Big Connect was a Ponzi scheme. This is a Ponzi scheme. This is a how these things work. YouTubers promote the thing, like, hey, come in, deposit your money. And it's just more and more. And it's just how you get inflows. And this is why Cardano has. pumped in the ways that it has because it is a gigantic Ponzi. And I'm not afraid to say those very

Starting point is 00:24:04 harsh words. I said this on the Wolf of Wall Street podcast forever ago saying Condor Cardano is basically a full-fledged scam. And all the Cardano shills, of course, took offense. Charles Hoskinson took offense. And I feel like this is exactly what I was kind of talking about. I had the gut take then. Now we actually have the data. It's crazy that like most of it of crypto people didn't actually realize this very simple thing was happening because no one who's actually in crypto actually pays attention to Cardano, there's nothing actually there. And Rand. And rant, David. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So if you want to understand what the outcome is, you have to look at incentives. And the fact that somebody might hear what you just said and say, but David, what's different?

Starting point is 00:24:46 Let me talk a lot about ether and that has a staking system associated with it. And so like, aren't you just pumping your bags in this way? But what's different here is like, this is, like, this is rewarding and incentivizing YouTube influencers and marketing above like utility of the actual project, right? Of which there is none.

Starting point is 00:25:10 It is providing, yes, of which there is none or there's very little right now or it's definitely does not match the market value compared to other projects, right? So there's all of this incentive to talk about the asset, to stake the asset, particularly with like the marketing arm of the network, which is these YouTube influencers.

Starting point is 00:25:32 And other networks don't incent in the same way. So yeah, it's troubling. But like it's just it just kind of explains things to me a little bit more. And now I can go back to ignoring Cardano because I'm not using it to go bankless because there are no applications that I can actually use. And that that's at the end of the day what you should be looking for if you're in the crypto journey. I feel sad sometimes.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Like, I feel bad for people who are new because you have to develop an expert bullshit radar in this space. In particular, if you're new, that's pretty hard. Like, you have all of this noise coming at you and you have to stay very tuned into what channels you consume, what information you consume, what resources you consume. It's very difficult to separate the, like, the signal from the noise. But that's a skill you have to develop if you're on this. journey. One of the best things you can do is actually if you want to see and validate what someone's saying is actually start using the networks, use the projects, right? So for me, Cardano has never

Starting point is 00:26:37 passed that test because there's nothing I can actually do on it. So it's just relegated to the ignore category for me. But this does explain some of the price pumps that we've seen, particularly over the last 12 months or so. Okay, Uniswap Labs. Over the last two weeks, Uniswap V3, 24-hour volume record, 4.8 billion in 24 hours. That's a new all-time high, a weekly all-time high value of 21 billion. More ETH to U.S. dollar value than Coinbase? Incredible. I mean, the Uniswap story I felt like was a big deal last year, and that was kind of its breakout year, but it's still a big deal. In the background, Uniswap is just chomping liquidity and continuing to crush it. Omn, nom, nom, nom, that's my comment.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Guys, we are going to get to the releases of the week and the raises, of course, and talk about some of those news items you can't miss. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof of work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized.

Starting point is 00:27:52 Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32-Eth and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32-Eth, and you need to pool your Eth with others so you can access staking yields. Lido offers a solution, for both. Simply go to lydo.fI, choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible, and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra, or Seoul, and get liquidity on your stake, go to lydo.fi to get started. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide.

Starting point is 00:29:03 And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot defy tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid dye markets. Gemini just launched their Earn Program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in defy or you don't want to worry about defy exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on

Starting point is 00:29:31 is the Gemini Crypto-back credit card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH, so whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free.

Starting point is 00:29:49 free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, guys, we are back talking about the hot releases of the week. The first is this, Poap plus Gitcoin combined Git Poap. What is this? And for people who aren't familiar with Poap, maybe you could give a quick explainer on Po app itself. Oh, I think more people are going to be familiar with Poeap than GitHub. on this channel. Really?

Starting point is 00:30:20 That's true. Okay. Proof of attendance protocol. It's basically you scan a QR code and you get like a pin. It's basically like a virtual digital pin. Kind of like an I voted sticker, but it can be for anything.

Starting point is 00:30:32 So I got one when I went to the Metaverso conference yesterday. I also got one when I went to East Denver 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021. I gotta collect all the POAPs. Got one for Mariano Conti's birthday party. Just like, you know, fun little, like I attended like stickers. And also,

Starting point is 00:30:48 many, many other things as well. You also get one if you're a bankless paid newsletter subscriber. We give you the bankless premium POAP badge. Because you were there. You were a subscriber in 2021. And these are great community generation tools and they can be used for so many different reasons. Get a hub, which is where a lot of developers come and deposit their code. It's a code repository. It allows for asynchronous collaboration and adding an appending code. with the thing here is like, hey, like if you did something, did you complete a bounty or did you just submit code? Did you do something? You get a POAP. And this is a great way to actually create the footprint, create the surface area for rewarding people. At least that's the first use case that comes to mind for me. Poep's really, really good for just finding out who actually participated in what. And so if you can now GitHub can integrate with POAPs to actually generate. some sort of like registry of people that actually contributed among many other possibilities. So that's really cool.

Starting point is 00:31:50 I think this is a really important primitive, David, because it's like recognizing rewarding contribution and like being early and actually doing something. So it's rewarding activity. But really what I'm really looking forward to is all of the applications that we build on top of this primitive, on top of poaps. Because I feel right now that poeps are kind of like a little bit like two dimensional in that you kind of collect them. You add them to your stamp collection, but still there's not a lot of utility built on top of it. So I think the next chapter for POAP and projects like this is

Starting point is 00:32:25 what all of the things that you can do with your badges. So proving that I was a bankless member, look at all those. David's shown his phone with all these POAPs, right? It's like, so these are all social proofs. And what can he start to do with these in the future? What can he unlock? What additional benefits does he get? There's some early experiences with this, but I think an entire ecosystem is going to be built on top of these things and things like them. David, let's talk about this. Misari governor.

Starting point is 00:32:53 Misari is an analytics firm, a media firm as well. They just released a governor interface, and it's an application that allows you to, it's kind of an aggregator across all sorts of different daps on votes. It's like, what are the proposals going through? in all of these different DAOs out there. And let me search for bankless. I can do that, I think. So this is the bankless Dow.

Starting point is 00:33:18 These are the different proposals that are up for discussion. You can connect your wallet. You can view the status. And this is not just bankless, of course. This is like, you know, let's type in uniswap, uniswap, deploy uniswap V3 Polygon, POS chain created 20 days ago. Status succeeded, category integration. Really cool to see a user interface on all of the big decisions

Starting point is 00:33:44 that these digital organizations are making in Web3. So a nice add to the space. Any thoughts there? No, that was a great comprehensive roll-up, Ryan. Nice job. That's what we do here. We just roll it up. Why don't you take Argent?

Starting point is 00:33:59 StarkNet launch. They just released something this week. Yeah, we talked about this in the last two roll-ups. It's finally here almost. It's right here for developers. It's currently a developer tool. But Argent on Starknet is now available in the Chrome store. And so this is going to be, I think, a really fantastic way to engage with crypto on a very secure smart contract wallet.

Starting point is 00:34:21 Smart contract wallets are definitely the future. Argent is one of them. Being on a layer two is much better than being on a layer one. And so now that is now released in the Chrome store as a developer tool. It'll probably be production released. I believe by the end of the year is what they've hinted at. That's what they've hinted at. I can't wait to say GM to the Argent app.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Um, another thing I'm looking forward to you. Yeah, this is great. Ramp Network. They are a Fiat on ramp and here's their commitment. Over the next few months, ramp network will provide universal global on ramping to all major L2s. All of them. And then they list them, optimism, arbitram, ZK sync, Starkware, loop ring, boom, all of them. Nice job.

Starting point is 00:35:00 All of them. This is exactly what we need. This is ramp doing this. All of the exchanges are going to follow suit. All of the Fiat. ramps are going to follow suit. We're going to have bridges onto layer two's directly so that we don't have to deposit individuals in the middle of Manhattan, which is main net, and give them like a few dollars for a cab, right? And like say, enjoy your day. Enjoy your holiday in New York City. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:35:24 that's a recipe for like not enjoying New York and, you know, sleeping out on the streets. Instead, we're going to deposit them to layer two, which is the way it should be. These on ramps are coming. expect this early next year, Ramp Network doing big things in that space. David, let's talk raises. FDX. Seeking $1.5 billion in new funding at a $32 billion valuation.

Starting point is 00:35:49 Wow,zer. They also just raised $420,000 and $69,000 not too long ago. That's right. I feel like this is like two months ago. Less than that, maybe. Six weeks. 32 billion dollar valuation. That's within striking distance of Coinbase.

Starting point is 00:36:03 if I'm getting my numbers right. What do you do with $1.5 billion if you're FtX? Buy sports leagues at this point. I don't know. Yeah. You're just pushing it into marketing. More names and more different parts. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:16 I mean, they're killing it in every single direction, basically. So, like, you've got to say congratulations to SBF. Well, his congratulations SBF. Maybe now you can unblock me now that you've heard that. But, like, so what do you think the, I mean, his goal was what, JP Morgan? No, bigger than Goldman. Goldman Sachs. Yeah, he wanted to buy Goldman Sachs. He wanted to buy Goldman Sachs. How big is Goldman Sachs, I wonder? Bigger than, yeah. Everything about, everything about crypto and F.EX, Nisa 10X. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:47 I mean, getting close, though. Every six weeks gets a little bit closer. Let's talk about this. Volts, interest rate swap automated market maker just announced its raise, $6 million, led by framework ventures. What is Volz? Yeah, Volz is part of this new category of defy apps that are separating principal and interest rates to allow for just an interest rate markets integrating with an AMM, which is pretty revolutionary. We've had Van Spencer on the podcast a number of times for our bulk case for DFI.

Starting point is 00:37:19 Very big episodes. We like France, Vance. We also like France. Yeah, freedom of future of finance, right? And so yeah, this is, it's not live yet, but they did raise a $60 million seed round of which Ryan and I were a part of. So disclaimer. Yeah, we're definitely bullish on that. You know what else we're bullish on, though, is jobs. Let's talk about jobs. Do you have a job in crypto? If not, you should. David can't dance because he's in Puerto Rico, but like imagine him dancing. Oh, fuck it, fine. He's, imagine him dancing in the background as I'm saying this. You know, I can't watch because I got to read these things out.

Starting point is 00:37:57 Senior backend engineer at SmartDefi, product manager, smart defy, accountant SmartDefi, senior software engineer, popcorn, community ecosystem lead. That's at DYDX. Check that out. Crypto research analysts. You've got to be an NFT specialist for Bitwise. Another one for smart contract platforms and Web3 and another governance specialist. All of those at Bitwise. A head of growth at Dex Guru. Technical lead at Draftley. Head of Ethereum Research Immutable. Head of tokens immutable. Community manager, Dexible. lead engineer, hatstop finance, community manager, Eagramum, and also CTO, Eagronom.

Starting point is 00:38:34 Thank you, David, for getting us through the jobs of the week. That's not all of them, though. If you want to see the full list of jobs, go to the bankless job boards at bankless. comat.xyz slash jobs. Hit subscribe, and you can get access to that. David, thank you, man. Thanks for your contribution.

Starting point is 00:38:51 You really help me. If you want to make me dance for longer, you can hit up the bankless Twitter account to submit your job. And I dance as long as the jobs list keeps on growing. I can also read slower, guys. I mean, I can. I will stop dancing.

Starting point is 00:39:06 All right, guys, let's get to the news. Hey, let's start here. There was a big hack last week. This happened after the roll-up or just, like, while we were recording last week's roll-up. But now we've got the details in what happened. Badger Dow was hacked. This is a tokenized Bitcoin protocol on Ethereum. But the hack was somewhat unique.

Starting point is 00:39:26 Okay, so first of all, one thing that was unique is a lot of money, $120 million in wrapped Bitcoin. That's big, right? In all of the scheme of hacks. Also, the way it was hacked as well, most defy hacks that we've seen up to this point have been like, there's a bug in the smart contract wallet, there's an issue with the oracles. You know, some code has gone wrong somewhere or some system is down, flash loan, okay? This was an attack on the user interface side of things. User interface level. So the first time I've seen this.

Starting point is 00:39:57 Me too. Could you describe like what happened, David? So how did this attack happen? Yeah. So I'm not too sure what a front end interface means. But I think it's a man in the middle attack. I think it's right. Well, the front end interface is like it's so it's not on the smart contract code, right?

Starting point is 00:40:11 It's like in the API layer. Right. They somehow injected. So like when you're clicking a link on the website, you're interacting with the front end. And it was in that layer of the website in the doubt that the malicious hacker injected this code. Right. So some data was hot-swapped. The data that was supposed to be sent to Ethereum was snagged by an attacker and was replaced with a different set of data. And then I'm assuming somebody with their private keys approved that. I don't know how that it resulted in the whole

Starting point is 00:40:41 entire treasury of Badger Dow getting snagged, but that's what happened. So it was really so it happened. So it happened like an address at a time. What actually happened. So I think anyone who's used List and Bankless and use Defi has seen this before. When you're using MetaMask, and you're doing something in a defy app, or you get this approval message in Metamast. You want to approve this website or this app access to your ETH tokens or your EARC20 tokens. Okay, so the hacker actually hijacked that message

Starting point is 00:41:15 and made the message actually grant approval to their address to then siphon all of the funds out of the... addresses. So I believe what happened, David, is like an address at a time was stolen, you know, around like two hours or so. And I guess the insidious thing is, I don't know how many times I've clicked a link that just says approve without going into details and actually looking at it. Oh, okay. Sure. I'll prove that. Yeah. Okay. That's like approving somebody to like, oh yeah, you're free to walk into my bank account, my fault and just like do whatever. Yeah. kind of becomes like how often do you read the terms of service, right?

Starting point is 00:41:57 When you like sign something, right? You get just too many approvals and you can't check them all. But this is a- This is why I migrate private keys every now and then. I don't know a lot of people who do that. Also for air drops. So I just move, yeah, it's been great for air drops. Let me tell you that.

Starting point is 00:42:12 Yeah, I just move wallets for like roughly once a year. And just like, thousands of addresses, infinite addresses. Yeah. Let me tell you, Uniswap was fun. You got to find him, though. Don't lose them. This is a PSA from CryptoCat helping us out with that. So a little bit of Metamask hygiene can go a long way so that this doesn't happen to you.

Starting point is 00:42:35 The first tip he has is know what you're approving. Check the approved address yourself. Don't trust the site's user interface. Take the address manually from the Metamask data and look at the contract on EtherScan, okay? How often have you done this? Never. Okay. If it's a large sum of money, make sure you are doing that.

Starting point is 00:42:54 And then what are you checking? You're checking is the contract brand new? You're checking who deployed it. Where do the funds come from? Just double check. Go check in ether scan, double check. Is it a proxy? Secondly, I think this is huge.

Starting point is 00:43:05 Know how much you are approving. All right? When you get these approval messages on Metamask, you don't have to blanket approve all of the tokens, all of the assets in your address. You can just set a custom spending limit. So if the trade is only one eth, then just set it for one eath.

Starting point is 00:43:22 Don't give them access to all of your ETH in that address necessarily. Make sure you're setting approvals per token. Be extra tight with your approval on proxies. It's the fourth thing here he recommends. revoke.com is a great tool. So do some quarterly review of your approvals. You can click this app revoke.cash and enter your eth address. And it will show you all of the websites you've previously given approval.

Starting point is 00:43:52 should go ahead and revoke those on at least a quarterly basis. Consider those like STDs. Like you don't know which one is going to be going to be the one that gets yet. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this is just good hygiene, as we said. If you're doing infinite approvals, you should have a good reason for it. It should never be your default.

Starting point is 00:44:09 Stay safe out there. That's the PSA, guys. I think it's something we can learn from this exercise. Also, interesting Nexus Mutual didn't pay out. Why didn't they pay out, David? Right. So Nexus Mutual is an defiant, defy insurance. it protects against hacks.

Starting point is 00:44:24 It protects against smart contract hacks. This was not a smart contract hack. The smart contracts for Badger are un... Well, I don't know if they're secure, but it wasn't an exploit. It wasn't a smart contract exploit. So those, in theory, those smart contracts are still fine. The front end is what got hacked.

Starting point is 00:44:40 Nexus Mutual doesn't cover the front end. So the Nexus Mutual is not paying out people that lost money in Badger, which is kind of like, you know, kind of the same old things that we see in traditional insurance. Like, oh, let me check the terms of conditions. Oh, that was like, you know, volcanoes, that wasn't covered in your insurance. Like, you don't get that one. I guess so, but it's also fair. I mean, their contract has always, their, you know, insurance has always been about smart contracts.

Starting point is 00:45:05 It doesn't cover economic risk, workable risk, doesn't cover user interface risk. So it's also fair. That actually was in the terms. So I understand that side of it too. And this is why it's important to go bankless because Celsius Network was a centralized borrowing and lending agency, had money in Badger Dow. So Celsius, you put your money in. It's kind of like Compounder Ave,

Starting point is 00:45:26 but basically they go out and they yield farm in Defi on your behalf. And then kind of just like a bank, they get some amount of APY. They pass some of that APY onto you. They pocket the difference. But they are farming with users' monies. And so there's a misalignment of incentives there because they can take on risk

Starting point is 00:45:44 and they need to take on risk in order to get the yield. And so they lost a decent amount of money in this Badger Dow's. defy hack and overall i would suggest that if you are going to use celsius make sure you aren't just using it out of convenience use it for a specific reason for specific uh you know metrics uh don't just use it because it's easy custody is really really important and something could have happened that could have completely wiped celsius out we don't know um it's kind of like tether it's a black box we don't know what's going on behind there and the defy alternatives are just far super

Starting point is 00:46:20 in my mind. So that's my personal PSA there. Yeah, I agree with that to you. And I think like BlockFi, anyone who's taking custody of your assets and generating some return, if they're like a crypto bank, you have no idea what they're actually doing with it. You just don't know. It's a black box. Now, in this case, Celsius said, look, guys, we'll cover all of, if you lost money, we'll cover it. Not a problem, right? You understand that Celsius is growing so fast, so big at this point. They have the funds store to do that. That's not so much what I'm worried about. What I work about with these schemes is it's kind of like the traditional banking systems where you just don't know you put in the black box you don't have transparency and I guess that's okay but that is an element of trust right. And with defy like you deposit your funds in Wi-Fi you can right-click view source and understand exactly where it's all going. You want to you can understand the risk profile of what you just did whereas this is a black box type system. So yeah just be cautious of this. According to Twitter speculators, Celsius may have lost up to $50 million as a result of the exploit.

Starting point is 00:47:25 I don't know how much research went into that number. Again, just speculation. But oof, big oof. Yeah. And Celsius can afford it, and they will because it's about their brand. But what if it was 500 million? What if it was $5 billion? Right.

Starting point is 00:47:39 I mean, next time it could be, right? This is kind of what we're dealing with here. Anyway, another exchange got hacked. This centralized exchange, in this case, Bitmart. I didn't even know this existed. I guess this is Walmart for Bitcoin. I don't know. Bitmart.

Starting point is 00:47:54 $196 million was hacked and lost. That's a big number. And by the way, the Badger Dow defy hack, $120 million, also a huge number when it comes to defy hacks. Usually defy hacks are the single digit millions, maybe like double digit millions. Triple digit millions do not happen often. They happen way more with centralized exchanges. But even this centralized exchange of hack of $196 million is a big hack. That's big.

Starting point is 00:48:19 The reason why centralized exchanges are often bigger than defy apps is that centralized exchanges consolidate so many deposits into the same wallet. So there's a big, big honeypot that doesn't necessarily happen with defy apps, by the way, the nature of their construction. But yeah, over $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on Ethereum and then $96 million on Binance smart chain was hacked from Bitmart. One of the multi-sakeholders, like one of their accounts was compromised, something to that effect, right? It's like when you put your funds in a centralized exchange, it's like just a

Starting point is 00:48:51 gigantic vault, right? And they have to have a good security process as multi-six signers, but sometimes that goes wrong. You know what I was also interested in is what did the hacker do when the hacker took the funds? Okay, this is just sort of interesting to me. So let's say you just go, you make off with $196 million dollars and various crypto assets, David. What do you do with it? All right? Well, this individual went to one inch, swapped the assets for, you. ETH, okay? And then went to tornado cash and then sort of mixed them up privacy style. What's interesting to me about that is like how quickly when a hacker goes and steals something,

Starting point is 00:49:29 they go to the best money possible, the most base money possible, the most saleable good possible, right? The good money with the strongest settlement assurances, the strongest property rights. Yes. And that happens to be Eith, particularly ETH when you have a privacy layer in between. So it's all going back to Eith. I guess hackers know the best money. You want to know what's money? Go see what the hackers, you know, translate it into.

Starting point is 00:49:56 Let's talk about this, David. The Free Ross Movement, they took a leaf out of Constitution Dow's book. What is that headline telling us? Yeah, so for Ross Ulbricht, the famous Dread Pirate Roberts from the Silk Road, the guy that spun up the Silk Road and then went to jail for life for it.

Starting point is 00:50:12 I think two life sentences plus 40 years for a non-violent first offender. absolutely crazy. They just made a huge example out of him. And the conspiracy is not because he was selling drugs, but because he was using Bitcoin. That's a different story for a different day. He's in jail for life. But he is all he follows because through the help of his mom, he follows the crypto world just because he's interested in it. And he is releasing NFTs to raise funds to help free himself, but also to help pay for loved ones that can see other loved ones in jail. So one part charity, one part trying to free himself from jail.

Starting point is 00:50:48 The pleaser Dow has started up Free Ross Dow. And so they made Free Ross Dow. They contributed some of their own funds to Free Ross Dow. They collected over 2,800 ETH in order to bid on this Ross-Ollbrick's NFT. They won. They won with a winning bid of 144, 1,446 Eth. So Free Ross Dow owns the Ross-Obrick's NFT, and I can't imagine a better Dow to own.

Starting point is 00:51:15 it. There's now a community around this NFT, and I believe the plan is to fractionalize it and turn it into a currency and take and continue on the story. So congratulations to anyone that donated money to free Ross Dow. This just reminds me of the Constitution Dow. Of course, it's a smaller story. It's not the Constitution. It's something smaller, but it is an example of a community, you know, buying something together toward a common good and tokenizing and turning into a Dow to do something more. What's Free Ross Dow going to do next? Yeah, no, I think the plan is to fractionalize it, probably with fractional, and then turn it

Starting point is 00:51:52 into an ERC20 token and make a currency out of it, and then use that to fund further developments that can also help free Ross. So there could perhaps become an economy around this Free Ross movement. Yeah, there's just really interesting experiments going on. Before you move on, something that I think is super sickening is that a bunch of Bitcoiners, we talked about this when Ross minted the NFT. They hated the fact that he was minting an NFT saying like, how do you,

Starting point is 00:52:19 how you lose your base in one easy step? You mint an NFT and because the base being Bitcoin maximumist. Forgetting that Ross Ulberg's not a Bitcoin maximalist. He just used Bitcoin in 2013. So a bunch of Bitcoiners were trying to generate funds in order to buy the NFT in order so that they can burn it just to spite the movement, which just tells you, again, how much they lost the plot.

Starting point is 00:52:44 They're just like burning their hero at the stake, and they've done this so many times because you can't go against Bitcoin. And so like they were trying to do, they were trying to do the same thing that Free Ross Dow was going to do, except instead of making it public a good, they were just trying to burn it

Starting point is 00:52:57 and eliminate it from existence. And, you know, you can't beat Ethereum at capital generation. That's what we're good at. So once again, like beaten by Ethereum, you can't bet against Ethereum. It doesn't work. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:53:10 that it's very weird to excommunicate members of your community. I just don't understand it. Definitely we've seen this in religious circles. I guess we see it in crypto tribalism as well. New York Times, though, I guess maybe they're getting on board. They just use the word tokenomics in one of their articles. Yeah, and that's the whole story. Tokenomics is now part of the New York Times vernacular.

Starting point is 00:53:33 Cool. Maybe it's going to be Webster's word of the year next year. We'll see. Perhaps. Let's talk about this. Google, their former CEO, Eric Schmidt, he just joined ChainLink as a strategic advisor. So I remember Eric when he came on board at Google,

Starting point is 00:53:48 he took over for the two co-founders who were like in their late 20s or something and said he was going to provide adult supervision for Google, right? That was kind of the joke. And get them through the kind of the IPO in the 2000s. So it's a pretty big name in the tech scene. And now we're seeing Web 2 graduates getting into Web 3, which is pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:54:08 So joining ChainLink. I think that's a big step, and I wonder if we'll continue to see more of that moving forward. Let's talk about this, David. So, interesting thing I was kind of tracking is this idea of censorship. All right, we'll get back to a story about DFINITY in a moment in the concept of censorship, but I think it's important. Here's a Chris Dixon tweet. YouTube suspended my account for posting a Defy Hackathon video. He's quoting someone else who said this.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Apparently, maybe YouTube suspending account. for content it doesn't like. Now, we don't know why exactly what triggered the suspension algorithm, but we're starting to see that more and more. Here's another one. This is on Twitter this time. A Nancy Pelosi portfolio tracker and a Maxwell trial tracker. These are accounts spun up to track Nancy Pelosi's portfolio, I guess,

Starting point is 00:55:01 and to track the Maxwell trial, their accounts were suspended. Yeah. These are big accounts, too. Two, two hundred and seventeen hundred thousand followers for the Nancy account and then over half a million followers for the Galene Maxwell trial tracker suspended. And, you know, the Galen Maxwell trial did not get any coverage by legacy media. Instead, there was a bunch of just news of like, you know, but others, other stuff, other drama. And the conspiracy is, we all know Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. And now people are saying, well, the Galen Maxwell trial is being suppressed.

Starting point is 00:55:36 So censorship is bad. Well, is it? So, yes, censorship is bad. But like, we don't even know why these accounts were suspended, right? And that's the whole problem with it. Like, they broke one of Twitter's rules. You want to find more information? Look at our privacy policy.

Starting point is 00:55:53 But what rules did they break? Why were they suspended? You're once again reminded, this is not a public protocol. This is very much your in a corporation's playground, right? And so they can suspend you. They can kick you out of their restaurant for any reason. they feel like, and they don't have to justify their actions, except maybe in the court of public opinion, okay?

Starting point is 00:56:13 This is what we're talking about. This is the potential for censorship. This is why we want to build Web3 platforms that don't have this loophole. The original Web 1 platforms didn't have a censorship loophole either, right? HTT, HCTP, right? These protocols basically didn't have the ability to give any centralized actor censorship over them. They were credibly neutral. They were free.

Starting point is 00:56:37 Anyone could use them. You could use them for good purposes. You could use them for bad purposes. But they were free. Okay? Web2 has moved away from that. This is sort of what I worry about. This gets back to the point where I'm relating this maybe to a crypto project in DFINITY.

Starting point is 00:56:51 I saw this governance proposal in DFINITY. Someone flagged my attention to it. And it was basically a conversation. A DFINITY, of course, is a decentralized kind of like storage, compute protocol. It can be if it's vision. is fulfilled, very complementary to many of the other things we see in crypto, right? It's like, particularly, but maybe an Ethereum, maybe a uniswap front end could be stored on top of DFINITY. And the promise of something like DFINITY in the internet community is censorship

Starting point is 00:57:19 resistance. Okay, so we don't have the problems we just saw with YouTube and Twitter and Web2. But here's this governance post. It's basically talking about one of the DFINITY nodes, a container, some content was posted on top of it that Nintendo is saying, we own. And this is copyright infringement. It's like a Super Mario 64 emulator on top of a DFINITY contract. And so governance posts in the community saying, community, what should we do about this? We would propose that DFINITY add the ability to remove certain content, a remove canister, remove some things if it infringes, if the community votes for it to be removed.

Starting point is 00:58:04 Okay. And it's like, to me, red flags start to go off when, when crypto communities talk about that. Okay. It's like, okay, Mario, we'll just like have a vote and we'll just remove the thing. You sent us an angry letter, so we're just going to remove it. Okay. This is just like a very small case of this. But what happens if a nation state basically says, hey, if you use the word, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:58:27 voter suppression or Maxwell case, right? We want all of that content removed. And it's not Nintendo sending you that letter. It's like the FBI sending you that letter. Or it's like the CCP in China sending you this letter, okay? It's like if you have the ability to censor content and turn it off, then it's not decentralized. It's not censorship resistant.

Starting point is 00:58:52 And then I go back to like, what's the point? And the thing with in the DFINITY case is they're saying, well, it is, still decentralized because the community gets to vote whether this specific piece of content gets removed or not by token vote. But like who owns the tokens? All right. Definity Foundation, like members of the community, insiders, shareholders in a corporation. So I'm like back to like, okay, if we're leaving a token vote loophole open for these things that matter a lot, aren't we just reverting back to the shareholder? Like, what's the difference between Twitter shareholders saying, no, you can't have that content, and DFINITY token holders saying,

Starting point is 00:59:33 no, you can't. So just an example, and I'm not bashing DFINITY. I think, like, maybe they're trying to do fantastic things. Okay, but like, this is just, I'm not specifically bashing definities, what I would say. I'm bashing the concept of token vote on the protocol, dictating important governance decisions, because if, if Nintendo sends you an email, like, please remove our IP, right? Like, that's just like a breeze of the sort of, you know, resistance that's going to come for content in the future. And if you're falling over at that, you're never going to make it. You're never going to build something that is censorship resistant. And anyway, I tweeted this out.

Starting point is 01:00:12 I got some back and forth from people who are like, but Ryan, it's copyright. It's an IP. Are you saying that child pornography and like, you know, terrorism should be allowed on these platforms? Like, what are you actually supporting? I'm like, what are you supporting? These are censorship resistant. Don't give me the child porn and terrorism

Starting point is 01:00:32 schick that mainstream does about this. You either believe in a credibly neutral, open, free system of expression, or you don't. And you believe in the benefits of that system versus the cops, or you don't. But let's not

Starting point is 01:00:48 have this censorship resistant decentralized theater. Anyway, there's my long rant. You got one earlier, Dave, but that's my long rant. on that. Yeah, if you go back to the governance proposal to remove the thing about the terrorism and child porn, like, well, here's actually from a post. While the internet computer is designed to be censorship resistant, in order for it to be adopted as the world's computer by the mainstream, it's critical to abide by laws against terrorism and child porn, etc., as well as

Starting point is 01:01:17 regulations around copyright infringement and intellectual property rights. Let's not equate copyright infringement and intellectual property rights with terrorism and child porn. And it, and it should start, the sentence should stop here. It says, in order for it to be adopted by a world computer by the mainstream, it is critical to abide by laws. What? No, no. The cool thing about crypto is that it is a new set of laws. That is the whole point.

Starting point is 01:01:45 We do not abide by old laws. The whole point about crypto is we are a new social scaffolding structure that is not the same as the old social scaffolding structure. And so this is the difference between on-chain governance of a token vote and ether holders. If you want to be a proof of state validator on the Ethereum network, you have absolutely no control as to what goes on the Ethereum network. You just validate it. You just approve it. That is the difference. And so this DFINITY is a Web 2 protocol with decentralization theater layered like theater just layered on top of it.

Starting point is 01:02:21 It is not what we are here for. There's no property rights. There's no self-sovereignty of the user. Yeah. It just doesn't exist outside of the existing property rights we already have, which is, if you're saying the nation state gets to control different regulations, different jurisdictions get to control this, then you're not Web 3. You're not crypto, are you?

Starting point is 01:02:42 Just another Web 2 thing, which is cool, but like we already have that. May as well host an AWS. AWS will respond to Nintendo's letter too. This is just what frustrates me about this, David. It's like I feel like there's a lot of decentralized theater going on. And I feel like we need to, because we're here early, like we need to stand up for cypherpunk values, right? It's the entire point of this thing. In general, I do worry about having like coin vote being sort of a proxy for centralization.

Starting point is 01:03:12 And I'm most worried about that at the base layer. The things that are supposed to be most essentialized. I don't care if a Dow has a token vote. Who cares? Coin vote happens at the app layer. when it's appropriate. Yep, agreed. Anyway, moving on, let's talk about this.

Starting point is 01:03:28 Sushi Swap. Speaking of drama, there's some more drama. What's actually happening with the Sushi Swap drama, David? I think this drama really got triggered because of the falling sushi price. Overall, like, DFI's down, the sushi token price is down even more. And so that causes a bunch of community angst. And so there's been a lot of friction between the leadership behind Sushi Swap, which is, you know, a very flat organization.

Starting point is 01:03:53 It got started just as a vampire attack on Uniswap and also started branding itself as like the non-VC version of Uniswap and generated a lot of community attraction that way. Built some cool stuff. Built some cool stuff. And meanwhile, it's run into just organizational issues. How do you actually organize as an entity without creating hierarchy? And so I really wanted to be a very flat organization.

Starting point is 01:04:17 Flat organizations are really, really hard, especially when you don't have typical organizational structures to make people comply by, right? A lot of the anonymous developers of Sushi Swap just don't have a lot of transparency. There's not a lot of transparency going on between the devs and the community. There's been a lot of friction there. Joseph DeLong, the CTO of Sushi Swap, really just declined. What's the right word? Pushed back against all the community fud against the sushi communities,

Starting point is 01:04:47 Fudd against Sushi, the team, and said, This is ridiculous guys. Like I work my butt off trying to get sushi swap. In fact, I actually want a pay raise. And if you don't pay raise, if you don't give me this pay raise, I'm just going to leave. The community decided to not give him the pay raise. So Joseph DeLong has resigned as CEO of Sushi Swap. And there's apparently a lot of the Sushi Swap communities was just like harassing him

Starting point is 01:05:14 inside the Discord and on Twitter. And then there's other sushi swap teammates. members as well, which have been accused of just trying to pay themselves, using the sushi shop treasury treasury to just fund their own pockets. And we've seen this before, like wherever there's governance and control over things, people try to access that. That's just what happens over time. That's where incentives go. So overall, there's a bunch of sushi swap drama that's going on. And it seems to be that sushi swap is going through a tumultuous time. Sushi swap has gone through tumultuous times before, it's come out bigger and brighter on the other side. I have nothing

Starting point is 01:05:53 to say if it's that's going to happen again. Every single obstacle presents its own challenges. We will see where this goes. Governance is hard, right? You know, particularly like Dow, Defi, token governance, and there's this idea of the tyranny of structurallessness, which is like if you have structurallessness, that actually is a governance decision and that comes with its own tyranny as well and I do feel like sometimes in crypto we're guilty of just saying like it's decentralized right like as if that is is a complete fix on all governance issues and if that is the optimal way to make decisions in every type of organization right and yeah I think there's just some growing pains happening with douse as a result of figuring this stuff out yeah without structure

Starting point is 01:06:41 and hierarchy and order like everything kind of devolves into like who's the most greedy and also the most loud and most aggressive loud greedy cabals almost like violence right it's like anarchy you know anarchy completely um anyway there there are systems and designs around this but i think they'll take some time to evolve too uh david vitalic wrote a fantastic post it's called end game post so good it crashed his website so i actually couldn't access this when it was first published but i've read it it's a fantastic post and really this is an extrapolation i think on the end game for Ethereum, for other L-1s, and also for roll-ups. We don't have time to get into all the details,

Starting point is 01:07:21 but we will link the post and the show notes. And I guess maybe this is some homework for bankless listeners. Go read this post because we're going to have Vitalik on the podcast toward the end of this month. I think it'll be our first podcast of the year where we're going to go over this post. We're going to go over the Ethereum roadmap, his thoughts on crypto, and see what he's thinking towards 2022.

Starting point is 01:07:40 So PSA, this is out there. Stay tuned for that episode. It's coming soon. Let's get into some NFT stuff. Ubisoft. All right. So there's some, I guess, good news this week in NFT land that Ubisoft was going to become the first major gaming company to actually embrace and launch in-game NFTs. They were doing this on Tezos.

Starting point is 01:08:02 After years of dabbling, they said it was time for Ubisoft to take NFTs in crypto gaming to the next level. So that was exciting at first. That's the first thing that happened. And then apparently they put out this video on YouTube, a trailer of what they had in mind. And this trailer on YouTube was so disliked, David. Like the downvote ratio to upvote is like 5% upvote ratio and 95% downvote. It got so bad that Ubisoft actually decided to pull the trailer from YouTube. And I don't know that that means they're going to pull all their NFT plans.

Starting point is 01:08:39 But that was definitely like they saw that shot across the bow from the community. saying, we're rejecting this. We don't want this. We don't want NFTs in our game. And so I was thinking about this a little bit. I know we sort of talked about this before. But like, why is this happening? Because this isn't the first time.

Starting point is 01:08:58 All right. So you remember a couple, a few weeks ago, we were telling you guys about Discord. And they were, the CEO of Discord was teasing an integration with Metamask. And then not two, like less than two days later, he came in back and said, nope, we're not actually doing that. That was just a test ideas. Walked it right back because the community hated it so much.

Starting point is 01:09:19 Now, video gamers and video gamers are huge users of Discord, of course. They're chasing Ubisoft away from NFTs. So I'm trying to figure out why. Like, why do gamers hate NFTs? And I, you know, ask the community, talk to some people in the space, talk to some crypto gamers, listen to some YouTube videos. And I feel like I now have a much more nuanced answer. But before I get into some of the things that I found, David, what's your take?

Starting point is 01:09:46 Why do gamers hate NFTs? I mean, I think some in the crypto community will just say, they're ignorant. They don't know any better. They're using like environmental fud as a reason for hating it and they just want to hate things, so they hate it. I think there's more to it than that. But what do you think? I think gamers really care about games and the games that they like to play. And a lot of people just don't like change.

Starting point is 01:10:11 regardless about crypto or like rather than anything people don't like change and gamers are really a really sensitive cohort of people really really really picky oh yeah oh big time yeah kind of kind of whiny people just snobby like a little hipster snobby type yeah yeah like kind of spoiled brat type i i mean i i consider myself a gamer but the gamers that really care about gaming they're they're yeah they're just picky and whiny uh and so we we have to understand that like when you integrate nfts into a game it's changing the game. Like things change when that happens. And people don't like change, especially gamers.

Starting point is 01:10:46 Gamers want what they want. And, you know, game companies have historically listened to their communities because that's where all their revenue comes from. So, like, I'm not really surprised. The difference is, is that NFT integrated games, like asset integrated games, can produce brand new communities that are completely new from completely different subsets of the world. And those communities don't exist,

Starting point is 01:11:09 because NFT games don't exist yet. And so the future communities of the world, like the unborn childs, don't have a voice. They're not born yet. And so there's no other community to push back against them because the whole point about adding NFTs

Starting point is 01:11:22 is to create something new. And so this is like trad gaming. We now have trad gaming, Ryan. And we have any confidence. We have the trad gaming community who just doesn't want to see change happen. Yeah. I saw a take from Scott Lewis of a DeFi Pulse

Starting point is 01:11:36 who was very much of like, you know, gamers are big, escapeists, right? Like the world out there is scary and crazy and, you know, making a life for oneself in careers really, really hard. And so they go to their game where nothing really matters. And when I say nothing matters, I mean, like, yeah, nothing economically, nothing matters when you play your game. There's no assets inside the game. And so when you actually put monetary assets inside the game, things matter a lot more. Like things become really, really real

Starting point is 01:12:03 when you find gold in the game, if that actually translates to something that you can sell on uniswap, your decision start to become a lot more, have a lot more consequences. And that really removes the concept of escapism. And when a lot of these gamers are just used to being able to just dabble around and not think too seriously, as soon as you put money into the game, it's going to get a lot more competitive and a lot more real. So like, imagine what like professional, like, we know like yield guild games, right? That is a Dow of gamers who are taking Axi Infinity seriously.

Starting point is 01:12:36 and then they are playing that in order to make money. And so like, like, gamer, casual gamers are not going to go up against like VC-backed gamer dows where they're going to after, they're taking the game really, really seriously. And so again, change is hard. Change is rough. And the future community gamer communities of NFTs, of which are going to actually fund real lifestyles and real salaries and real careers don't have a voice yet. There's only the trad gamers out there.

Starting point is 01:13:05 Yeah, I think that's good. And just, you know, to maybe get, imagine you're a gamer, right? And you're working kind of a dead end job that you don't really like, right? You go, you log into your game during the evenings. And like, you know, you're a badass in that game. You're a level 60 warlock. Yeah, your armor's dope. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:24 And you're like a clan leader, right? And you have this alias. And you're just a badass. Imagine now you have to compete economically against Suu and three areas. capital for like the dragon armor that you really want right and they have all of this capital from the real world from the outside world they're going to just like decimate you yeah you've just like your your status your escapism everything that was fun about that game has now been kind of destroyed and so i get that and i think that's um that's maybe a kind of a hidden motive about this and

Starting point is 01:14:01 the way that you know i think gamers might phrase this is yeah when you add five financials, it just stops being fun. What gets paid, gets played is how bored Elon Musk, you know, responded to this. I would also say there might be a few other things at play. I think possibly U.S., you know, maybe Western gamers are kind of just missing it. I heard from someone in this thread, somebody from Indonesia, and he's like, all the gamers I talk to in Indonesia are all about NFTs. I don't know what the U.S. is missing, but you guys are behind, right? And so that's an interesting take. This might be sort of regional.

Starting point is 01:14:36 Also, back to your point about like, kind of this not coming from the bottom up community, I do think that the Ubisofts and the EA sports, like these are like corporatized companies that the gaming communities traditionally hate and they've dealt with like downloadable content. It requires a fee. They've dealt with like microtractions,

Starting point is 01:14:59 that require a fee. And it's funny. It's like the investors in the boardroom at Ubisoft talking about NFTs. It's not coming bottom up from the community saying, hey, we created this fantastic Ubisoft mod, and we built it and it's community first, right? So it's coming top down rather than bottom up, which is a problem. They just haven't seen the killer app yet, right?

Starting point is 01:15:23 Axi Infinity wasn't for them. They're waiting for like this AAA level game. They just haven't seen it yet. So I feel like it's something that's going to be resolved, but I don't know if it's going to be resolved this cycle, okay? Because what we're seeing is like a lot of large corporate gaming companies enter the NFT space, like kind of when it's really hot in order to make money, the way they saw dollar signs with microtransactions and downloadable content.

Starting point is 01:15:49 And I don't think that's the way you're going to get the gaming community on board. It has to come from bottom up. So maybe that's what's going on. And I think this fits into just the broader theme that we see with crypto is that the traditional already established institutions out there are going to be replaced by brand new institutions rather than coming along from the ride. And it seems to be the community saying, like, hey, like, don't go there. Like, don't, like, stay here, which leaves a lot of room for new gaming studios. And nothing, like, there's a lot of things that need to get disrupted in

Starting point is 01:16:20 the world. Banks being, like, probably at the top of that list, gaming companies are not far behind. There's a lot of entrenchment. There's just a lot of just, like, with record labels. Lack of innovation. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, I think, I think, think that just leaves a huge opportunity for brand new gaming studios to embrace NFTs in a way that the corporatized like big big gaming studios never really could anyways because they're boomers and they don't get it you know trad gaming blah blah blah and so i i think perhaps the next gaming studios are going to just be birth because of this movement because of this resistance yeah i agree and so from that perspective look you know gamers crypto stands in solidarity this is a bottom up movement let it be

Starting point is 01:16:59 your movement, start embracing NFTs as neutral technology and building on top of them. That's how you get ahead. Also, perhaps take life more seriously and stop being such an escapist. That's David's tough life advice here. Yeah, yeah. What's happening with OpenC? All right? So there was talk of maybe a token, but now it looks like they're going in the IPO direction.

Starting point is 01:17:23 So they're taking a chapter out of Coinbase's book. And so members of the community are like, Come on. We want a token. What's happening here, David? Yeah, we kind of suspected this for a while. OpenC. It's a centralized company. It's a centralized protocol. It's basically just like eBay for NFTs. It's got smart contracts on Ethereum, but they're not openly verifiable. So I think they're kind of just leaning into the whole centralization thing, much to their benefit and success. And it's just going to be continued by apparently an IPO. I think it's basically an open secret at this point, even though this

Starting point is 01:17:57 IPO is not confirmed. It was just a hint, but I mean, I'm going to go ahead and put my money on an IPO. And of course, people are users are bummed by not having a token. We want tokens. We like air drops. We like being gifted equity because we want these things to be community owned and community operated. But OpenC, apparently that's just not their vibe. That's not their ethos. They want to do an IPO, which once again leaves a big void for the Dow version of OpenC, the DFI version of OpenC, of which there are some. And so that's how the cookie crumbles, I guess. Yeah, I agree. They are also hiring the Lyft CFO to become the OpenCC. CFO.

Starting point is 01:18:36 Yeah, they have hired. And this CEO, I think, was pretty instrumental in getting Lyft over the finish line towards IPO. So that's the direction they're going in. It's kind of the coin-based direction. And I don't hate it, but to your point, David, it just leaves room for a more community-oriented competitor. So I expect to see that emerge, too. Every niche will be filled in crypto. Don't worry, guys. It just takes some time.

Starting point is 01:18:58 And every stocking will be stuffed by crypto stuff. So this came out of the Wall Street Journal. Metaphorical stocking. Yeah. So crypto, NFTs and Tungsten Cubs, a guide to giving cash in 2021 on the Wall Street Journal. And so Wall Street Journal kind of wrote a very quick short article. So, hey, here's a bunch of, like, you know, Christmas gift ideas. Digital.

Starting point is 01:19:19 You can give people some NFTs. You can give people crypto and also Tungin Cubs. I guess they somehow like that is. is a physical thing that can go in your stocking. However, it'll probably stretch her stocking out because they're really, really heavy. Interesting to see this being part of Bloomberg. Excuse me, Wall Street Journal. Yeah, are you at the point where you'd give an NFT for Christmas to somebody, David? Okay, I did, I had, no, because my family's probably tired of it. I have given, your sister, give it to your sister. Yeah, she doesn't want it. She doesn't want it.

Starting point is 01:19:48 I have given an NFT as a gift before. And let me tell you, onboarding people by giving them crypto either with money or NFTs really, really works. Like a lot of the objections that people have just go out the door when they just own the damn things. So like if you ever really want to get somebody into crypto, just give them something. Like it'll work. I promise. But you don't, you don't have anyone on your list who's like, because my thing is, uh, a lot of my family are people on my Christmas shopping list. Like they just wouldn't appreciate it. Right. They'd appreciate it maybe as like a free bonus gift. But if I'm like, this is the thing I bought you for Christmas. You know, it's an NFT.

Starting point is 01:20:26 You can look at it. They'd be like, oh, cool. Is that really what they want? Yeah. You give people what they want, not what you think they need. Well, how excited would you be to receive an NFT then? I mean, the last NFT I was gifted was a cool cat, and it went from like 0.02E at the time of ownership. To 2Eath, and then that's when I gave it away, and then I watched it go from 2Eath to like 15th.

Starting point is 01:20:46 I'm like, hmm, shit. I will say, if you do plan on giving NFTs or crypto, to someone during Christmas, make sure that you retain a copy of their private keys because they will probably lose them. So do them a favor and be their custodian. He just wanted to do with our small bankless team. We should do an NFT Secret Santa and somebody should write the app so we could just all buy NFTs for me, you know, for each other anonymously, secret Santa style. Maybe someone do that. A little holiday fun. Ryan, I don't want your turtle.

Starting point is 01:21:20 Man, you saw right through that. It's not even working on you. I guess we've been podcasting together too long, huh? The Matrix, they just sold out. So the Matrix is releasing a new movie. I'm excited to see it. 100,000 unique PFP ERC 721 NFTs were put up for sale to celebrate the Matrix, and it's all sold out. A hundred thousand.

Starting point is 01:21:46 A hundred thousand. That is crazy. That's so many. Look at this. This is all on a side chain, right? So people don't have to pay for gas fees, of course, which makes onboarding easy. I don't know. Are people buying to speculate, do you think?

Starting point is 01:22:01 Or are these a lot of fans? Are these people insiders? What is going on, huh? You can buy it with a credit card? Yeah, the big takeaways are there was 100,000 of them. For reference, there's only 10,000 Cryptopunks. There's like 8,88 Cool Cats, I think. There's 10,000 board apes.

Starting point is 01:22:17 100,000 is a lot of people. You could buy these with a credit card. So that just is great consumer adoption. And you can buy them on a secondary market that is on the palm side chain, was an Ethereum side chain, I think, spun up by consensus. And they're also denominated in die. So I'm seeing a lot of like hybrid. Denominated in die.

Starting point is 01:22:37 That's great. Like you can buy it with a credit card, but when you resell it, you resell it in die. So like this is really doing a great job of meeting consumers where they want to be. First, it's, you know, The Matrix, a very well-known movie. Yeah. And again, buy them with a credit card. you don't need crypto and then you have NFTs and I bet I bet you they obfuscate gas I mean I don't know if that's true or not but I bet you they do and like these things are done denominated in dollars on the front page so it's like dollar sign 120 even though it's denominated in die because you can do that so like it's really just a perfect meeting in the middle of like just enough crypto but still a lot of just like consumer like ux that consumers are prepared to expect there you go these are selling for like 130 on the full I don't know I don't know I don't Don't know what makes these things Matrix NFTs.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Granted, I haven't seen the movie, but these are just like normal people. These are just people. Yeah, you're not seeing it. I'm sure there's some better ones up. If we go up the base, I'm sure like there's probably Neo somewhere in here, right? He's got to be the rarest. Who knows? I haven't looked at this in depth, but pretty cool look.

Starting point is 01:23:39 Every game studio is doing this. So is every brand. Adidas just entered the Metaverse. They bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFT. Is that right? Yep. Yeah, and then they dress them up in Adidas swag. So the Adidas swag is not part of the OG board apes, so they kind of drew that art on, but the ape is real.

Starting point is 01:23:56 They've also been collaborating with G Money, who just through the Metaverso conference that I was at. And so Adidas taking NFTs seriously and getting right into it. That's awesome. Yeah, Cryptopunk purchases, NFT purchases. Now Pepsi, getting into NFTs. Pepsi mic drop. They're rolling out an NFT collection. Did they be coke to this?

Starting point is 01:24:16 Microphone NFTs. Like the NFTs are microphones. Yeah. So they are dropping the microphones. And so it's like, you know, generative, you know, profile picture NFTs and their microphones, like the 50 style. So that's kind of cool. So this got announced literally as Ryan was pulling up the links for this. I saw this on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:24:35 And so we've, we last minute buzzer-beater threw this into the agenda. The wait list for this opens tomorrow as in today on Friday for you listeners, tomorrow at the time of recording today for you, the listener right now. And so you can join the wait list for this and get. the mic drop Pepsi and if on the wait list for the mic drop Pepsi. You sound excited for this. Are you excited for this? Sure. Like I'm not going to put too much into this, but like I'll,

Starting point is 01:24:59 I'll be a part of this for like, really? I do not want a microphone NFT, but like, I don't know, it's Pepsi. Yeah, no, it's cool. And I guess they beat Coke to this. We haven't seen anything with Coke. On the other hand, I'm a little bit worried with these company, at least large corporations and brands entering. This is kind of a top marker?

Starting point is 01:25:16 No, at least the PFP. Don't say it. The 10K PFP. We can say a top every single week. It doesn't matter anymore. There is no top. There's no, I don't know, though. I do feel like on the back of her Kevin Rose podcast

Starting point is 01:25:30 where we talked a lot about like, hey, there are a lot of PFP projects spinning up, right? There's Cryptopunks and board apes and some of the blue chips, but there's a whole slew of Longtail, and it's getting crowded out there. I don't know. See what the appetite is, but all the Matrix NFTs sold. This one's really cool.

Starting point is 01:25:47 This is in geekwire.com. Tech Entrepreneurs opening Seattle NFT Museum. Ryan, can you scroll up because I'm reading the headline. To showcase digital art form in a physical space. We're getting our first physical NFT museum. It's in Seattle. I think that's really cool. So when I go home, well, it's not going to open until mid-July, January.

Starting point is 01:26:04 But next time I'm in Seattle, after it opens, I'm totally going to go check it out. It's a digital art museum. And so kind of like I was talking about on the state of the nation that came out yesterday, the world of displaying NFTs is pretty nascent and needs a lot of maturity in development. And so I'm really excited to see what they got and show a physical museum, a physical space with NFTs. And that's really, really cool. I expect that we see more and more of these as NFTs mature. Do you visit museums? Do you visit regular museums very often?

Starting point is 01:26:34 Sure. Yeah, totally. When they suit my interests, 100%. I love a good museum, particularly like a good history or art museums. Yeah, big history. Yeah. Yeah, really cool. NFT museums, man. They're coming. Okay. What's this from Blau? Real quick. Blow, we've had a on the show two times, and he has just had his first Christie's auction issuing waveform. This is a physical piece of art, so this is not an NFT. Well, it's actually both, though. It's both.

Starting point is 01:27:01 It's a physical piece of art. It's a waveform. So if you've ever recorded audio, you see that waveform show up. It makes sense because Blow's an artist, so he's editing music. And so they say one-of-one NFC produced by Blow that grants 100% of the rights to the owner of the waveform. So yes, it is an NFD. There's master recording, publishing rights, entitled to reproduce, commercialize, edit, remix, rename, and release waveform or any derivative of Waveform master. And from the beat's original form.

Starting point is 01:27:31 So, like, you get the OG content, and then you also get to remix it and sell all possible rights ever. So you get full sovereignty as the owner. The auction ends on December 7th at 12 p.m. Eastern time. No, that already ended. We already sold it. It already. And so, yeah, congratulations to whoever bought this. And again, congratulations to Blow for pushing the frontier and the fringes of what it means to sell an NFT

Starting point is 01:27:57 and also in connection to the actual artist. So really, really cool. This is kind of cool, right? Because he issued it on his platform, which called Royal, which contains NFT rights. I was just listening to this a little bit in the background as you were talking, David. It's a pretty sweet jam. Nice. You could make a good podcast intro.

Starting point is 01:28:14 Nice. Ours is taken. Well, wait, we can't buy it because somebody already bought it. That's true. Well, you could always buy it secondary, you know, just out of markup, I guess. All right, what's, uh, what's going on here? We're into Bitcoin news. Okay, so, yeah, so, uh, Bitcoin is really, really bullish in November because of Plan B's stock to flow model predicted 100,000 K to happen by, by December, or 98,000. No way. I didn't realize that by December. Yeah, so in order for, for Plan B's famous stock to flow model,

Starting point is 01:28:46 uh, stock to flow. This is, this is Bitcoin, canonical. This is very important in Bitcoin circles, right? Because it has been right for the model has been accurate. Right. A lot of people think stock to flow is just complete nonsense and I find myself in that category. Basically, stock to flow is saying that supply creates the price. And so it's basically saying scarcity will create price. And so because Bitcoin is becoming more scarce, therefore price will go up. I think that's completely backwards. A lot of people agree with me. a lot of people support this model anyways because of the immaculate nature of Bitcoin's manifest destiny to just go up in price.

Starting point is 01:29:25 And so this is like this is the gospel of the Bitcoin Stock to Flow like model. And it was supposed to hit $98,000 by the end of December, by the end of November. But instead of going to that level, we are seeing Bitcoin covering in the 40s, high 40s, low 50s. And people really capitulated right when Bitcoin went from like 57,000 down to, to 47,000 inside of an hour when it was supposed to go from 57 to $98,000. And so this is the first miss of the model. And I kind of think like in a, uh, uh, uh, uh, Raul Paul says, like the reason why stock to flow has been so accurate is because it's accidentally mapping on to network growth,

Starting point is 01:30:06 network adoption. Uh, yeah, it's a logarithmic. It's a proxy for network adoption, basically. Yeah, it's like, yes, it's an exponential curve. But no, you don't just get to create scarcity and then have that create price. And so a lot of Bitcoiners feel shaken right now. There's a, there was a Bitcoin magazine and CK from there, hosted a Twitter space saying, we are in uncharted territory as in like, oh, Stock to Flow finally hasn't predicted anything.

Starting point is 01:30:32 And I'm like, yeah, come on, guys. Like, Stockbrook's fucking stupid. Sorry. Well, so like, okay, so this might be rejected in Bitcoin Canon then, Bitcoin Maximus Canon, right? Or maybe there's a way to like tweak it and adopt it. So like, you know, in the future, it was like, always right, which is with this one tweak, we missed the first time around. I'm not sure how the culture is going to kind of evolve it.

Starting point is 01:30:55 But to me, it just seems like the fundamental idea that supply would predict price is wrong. Because like, from an economics perspective, it's the cartling the horse. It's supply and demand is where you get price. So if you don't know the demand function, right, like you don't know where demand intersects with supply, how can you possibly? get to price. There's two sides to that equation. If all you're looking at supply and saying that somehow triggers demand,

Starting point is 01:31:23 you're just looking at, it's like having a pair of scissors and just removing one blade and trying to cut with the other blade of scissors. Like you need both blades of scissors to get to price. Supply and demand, two blades. I don't understand how that works. But, you know, Bitcoiners will figure it out. Bitcoin's still going to go up.

Starting point is 01:31:45 I'm still bullish Bitcoin. Just, I just not, never really understood that model. Never understood that model. It seemed like there was a lot of hope pinned on. Yes. One tiny perspective here. Meanwhile, He's got a lot of hope.

Starting point is 01:32:01 Meanwhile. Yeah. Micro Strategy bought 82.4 million dollars more of Bitcoin. One thousand four hundred thirty-four more Bitcoin. Can't stop. It's at this point, it's just kind of like I start to cringe every time I see it. Really? Yeah, it's just too much. Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:32:18 Yeah, of course it's going to pay. Do something else with your money. You already have like half a percent of the Bitcoin. Like, why do you need anymore? Well, you know part of it is, part of it is like most people in the dollar cost average in, it's like quietly, right? You're not like making a big production of it. But Microstrategy and Saylor is like, I bought this week and like it's blasted on the press everywhere. So everyone knows it.

Starting point is 01:32:39 Well, actually, well, they don't actually blast the press. This is the, this is the block and all the crypto media firms. It's true. attention to it. Right. And so like, yeah, we report on it every single week. So actually, we're the victims here. Maybe we should.

Starting point is 01:32:51 Yeah, okay. So we're causing this. Excuse me. Yeah, we're not the cause. We are the causes of this. Maybe we should stop talking about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:56 Well, apologies to, uh, to our listeners. But, you know, we're trying to find Bitcoin stuff to talk about. So sailors, sailors, sailor is buying the, you know, the dip, I guess. Uh, let's talk about this. This is big. U.S. House committee. They brought six crypto CEOs in front of Congress. One of them was SBF, we were talking about earlier.

Starting point is 01:33:16 This is in front of the House, I believe. Yeah, the House Committee. So, look, it's a full video here. People can watch it if they have time. We'll include a link in the show notes. You can watch it on YouTube. It's four and a half hours, all right? I did not watch all four and a half hours.

Starting point is 01:33:31 I don't think it's worth it either. There's plenty of quick TLDRs, and we'll try and give them to you right here. Let's give him the TLDRs. Guy you go for TLDRs. Jake Javinsky, what's he's saying about this? Yeah, Jake tweets out, today's House Finance Senate Committee, I think that's what that means, was the most. positive constructive and bipartisan public event on crypto I've ever seen in Congress ever.

Starting point is 01:33:52 I mean that literally is a testament to the effectiveness of the industry and the community engagement in D.C. in recent months, we've made shockingly big progress. He's got some follow-up tweets as well. That's huge, though. So like something bullish, you know, Jake is kind of a straight shooter, right? He's a pretty pragmatic. Very pragmatic. And for him to be coming out of this four and a half hours. I guess I'm sure he consumed all of it. Positively, like, constructive was his words. Bipartisan, public event on crypto, the best he's ever seen, literally. That's awesome. Something good must have happened. I think part of this is it's some people, members of Congress, actually coming to the defense of crypto, actually understanding it for the first time. So in previous sessions that I've watched,

Starting point is 01:34:40 David, and this is part of the reason I didn't watch this whole thing is because I feel like I've seen this show a hundred times and I just don't want to watch it again. But previously what you'd see is a lot of staunch critics of crypto, right? Like the Brad Sherman's of the world, which would talk about, like harping on how terrible crypto is, how dumb it is, how stupid it is, how it's, you know, terrorism linked and just money laundering and drugs and all of these things. And then everyone else kind of just sitting back and listening. There were no defenders. No one was like, hey, wait a second, here's the good things that crypto is doing. Now, here's a congressman from Ohio tweeting this out. Today, we have a hearing on digital assets and blockchain, Web3. There's

Starting point is 01:35:22 that word again. The bulk of commentary in Congress has been on individual assets and relating to the traditional finance world. This misses the bigger picture entirely. Fundamentally, Web3 is a computing revolution that has the potential to solve some of the internet's most frustrating problems by putting power directly in the hands of the builders and users who make it all possible quotes a chris dixon tweet web three is the internet owned by builders what chris dixon said the potential of web three is enormous and the biggest mistake we could make now is rushing to overregulate a space that is in its infancy and so very true so very few in Washington truly understand so you listeners have heard that a thousand times on bank this is what we preach this is what we've been the drum on so many people heard

Starting point is 01:36:08 that for the first time because a congressman said it like not one of us a leader in this space and so like yeah maybe that was just like basic like you know a summary of the principles of what we talk about but so many people like it means it hits differently when a house of representatives member says this and it says it in the right ways and in accurate ways that is just fantastic and you see the tweak it's less on the crypto's money narrative and more on the web three narrative that gets a a different cohort I'm also seeing kind of the lobby narrative efforts of crypto actually paying off as well. Like lots going on behind the scenes, I think, to make these kinds of statements possible. Here's another take from Jake, though, when someone asked him,

Starting point is 01:36:50 hey, in 20 words, Jake, what actually happened here? He said, the committee members said surprisingly supportive things and asked good questions. The witnesses were great, too. Also, Brad Sherman was there. Brad Sherman strikes again. This is crazy. What was Brad Sherman on about during? during this session, David.

Starting point is 01:37:09 Do a few things here. Here's a tweet. Why don't you read it out? Yeah, Brad Sherman was trying to, I think, make a farce of crypto. And there's plenty of things to make a farce about. Like, Ryan and I make a farce about farses about crypto all the time. Cryptos stupid. A lot of the time.

Starting point is 01:37:22 A lot of the time. A lot of material. A lot of stuff. And so this comes out of blockwork, summarizing what Brad Sherman said. Today, when testifying during Congress, represented Brad Sherman, said that Doge could potentially replace Ethereum. And hamster coin could potentially replace.

Starting point is 01:37:37 Doge. He also asked, what about Mungoose coin? As a result of this, hamster coin is up 66%. Mungus coin token was created. So Brad Sherman just tried to say like, oh, there's a bunch of just craziness going on. It's totally fake. It's just weird memes. It's just like memes and tokens. And like, why are we even talking about this? And so he's just tried to make a farce of the whole entire industry to just discredit and discount us. And my response to that is like, all right, Brad, like if we were a farce, why are we talking it? Then stop talking about it, man. It's just a farce.

Starting point is 01:38:09 Like, why are we talking about it? Stop bringing it up. Like, whatever. Yeah. Just ignore it. Yeah, you could just ignore it. Why are wasting your breath? Exactly.

Starting point is 01:38:17 Why are we literally having a committee meeting in Congress about this if it's just a complete farce. Just go home, Brad. Like, why do you, if you don't need to defend Mungoose coin, if it really is a joke, unless you're really threatened by Mungus coin, Brad. Yeah. Maybe you are. Maybe that's what's going on. Jake Chervancy follows up saying,

Starting point is 01:38:34 short break in today's otherwise extremely supportive House Finance Senate Committee hearing for Brad Sherman to ramble incoherently about his hatred for crypto. It reminds us that he has a primary challenge in next year's midterm election from our friend and fellow bitcoiner and crypto supporter, Akita Rhodes. So let's see if we can get Akita. We will get Akita's Twitter handle into the show notes. Go follow her. We're going to support her and her election so she can get Brad Sherman and Mungoose Coin conversations out of Congress and perhaps some more informed and more accepting versions of Web 3. And so where is Akita Rose? What does she represent? What state or city? Let's see. 30th district. Let's see. California. 30th congressional district in

Starting point is 01:39:18 2022 in California. Okay. So if you live in California and you are voting in California, vote for Akita Rose for the 30th district, San Fernando Valley. So if you are listening that and that is and she is your representative, please participate. If you can do one thing, thing when it comes to voting, just at least vote for her. Absolutely. Maybe that's why Brad is feeling a little threatened. Jake, at the end, kind of summarizes this all. It was great, but let's not get too carried away.

Starting point is 01:39:47 He says, I don't want us to get too carried away by how well yesterday's hearing went. The House Financial Services, that's what it stands for, David. House Financial Services, it's not Senate. They've come a long way, but it's not like our antagonists have just disappeared. Senate banking has a hearing on staple coins next Tuesday. fair warning, it may not be so friendly. I think that's the case. I think there is some regulation coming for stable coin.

Starting point is 01:40:10 That's a key area. And I'm completely fine with that too. Stable coins, I'm fine with stable coin regulation. That's fine with me. If it's centralized, it deserves to be regulated. That's exactly right. So, but I'm just like, don't apply the same rules to something that's centralized and decentralized.

Starting point is 01:40:24 Anyway, look, man, Congress, it's 2021. Congress is maybe starting to get it. Maybe it's starting. I think that's the efforts of this community. efforts like people like Jake, if you've ever donated in any of these like grants for political advocacy for crypto, then you've played a role too. If you've ever called your senator or Congress, then you've played a role in all of this too. David, let's look through some of the other highlights.

Starting point is 01:40:47 Overall, I will summarize that whole entire thing as a cautious W. It's a cautious win. And we don't get many Ws. Yes, that's a huge step up. Even if the cautious kind in Congress, it doesn't happen. Doesn't happen. Now we've got to work on the Biden news. administration. Anyway, Gemini is partnering with Columbia's biggest bank for crypto trading.

Starting point is 01:41:08 This is pretty good, big news. The partnership will allow ban Colombia customers to trade a number of popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, ETH, and Leichoin. Traditional crypto banks, crypto exchanges, getting into traditional banks and doing it at a jurisdiction at a time. Pretty cool to see. Yep. Countries, getting crypto-pilled. Let's do this. Thank you. Thank you Winkle by twin for helping crypto pill the country of Columbia. We're working on it. Meta. This is Facebook.

Starting point is 01:41:37 I always forget when someone says meta. Meta's crypto wallet, formerly known as Facebook, Novi, just launched on WhatsApp. Why is that a big deal? Yeah, it's a big deal because it can start contrast to all the lack of progress on the Libra front. It seems that meta is actually making progress on the Metaverse front. Crypto wallets now in WhatsApp. WhatsApp has like a billion users or something like that, something absolutely crazy. And so there's now crypto there.

Starting point is 01:42:02 And so progress actually happening this time in start contrast with Libra. There we go. Guys, we are going to be back with The Takes the Week. You don't want to miss them. You don't want to miss the meme of the week. It's a good one. And neither do you want to miss the moment of Zen. But before we get to all of those great things,

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Starting point is 01:44:26 ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. The first one from Naval, who's my favorite, one of my favorites on Twitter. When building a portfolio of investments that can have non-linear outcomes never sell early. You may be right most of the time, but the one time you're wrong will cost you most of the returns. Okay, when building a portfolio of investments that can

Starting point is 01:45:09 have non-linear outcomes never sell early because the time you're wrong will cost you. What do you think he's saying here? Well, I think his follow-up tweet is really helpful as well because not selling can actually be really, really toxic, right? Like you can not sell while something goes to zero. And so he follows up saying valid reasons for selling. You've completely lost faith in the project. You can redeploy into a better investment. It accounts for too much of your net worth. You have a personal expenditure to make. So like trying to be pragmatic about the things. But what Naval is saying, you want to buy a house, you want to pay off student loans, something like this, right? Right. And so what Naval is saying is like especially in the world of crypto, where exponential

Starting point is 01:45:47 returns are actually commonplace. Humans don't think in exponentials. We think in linear terms. We think in incremental returns, like this, especially the tradition. stock market before it turned into basically a casino for for traditional head funds which is what it is now it used to be like very modest 5 to 7 percent so a good day would be 0.1 percent like let's not get too crazy crypto comes along and bitcoin goes from zero to 60 thousand dollars in 10 years and Ethereum does that same like same movement in half the time or not the same movement half the movement in a quarter of the time and and so like people it just blitz it breaks people's brains exponentials break people's brain. So what's Naval is saying when you are on the cusp of something that has the potential to do

Starting point is 01:46:29 a thousand X, the worst thing that you can do is sell at a 10x. Like even a 10x is crazy. And like the worst thing at it for 10x is you can sell at a doubling and it goes all the way down the line. So if you really, really, really believe in something, why sell? And so like this is why I never sell ether because I'll sell all like I will make the mistake of selling too early on a tokens that I believe could at 10x or 100x just because I also fear that I will get. lose out on ether denominated returns. And so like two things are going to tax. There's a difference there.

Starting point is 01:47:00 But like when you have exponential returns, you have to leave some on the table. This is the only actual like trading advice I've ever heard Vitalik say. Maybe not trading advice, but like financial advice. He always says, don't sell everything. Always keep something on the table.

Starting point is 01:47:16 And so I've taken that to heart and that's definitely benefited me in the past. Where if something goes 10x, I don't sell all of it. I sell 90% and I leave 10% on the table. table. And that has treated me very, very well in the past. Yeah. That's the other thing you can do exactly right. You know, you don't have to sell all of it if you do sell, right? But I do think that the way people lose money in crypto, the thing that cost them the most in crypto is two things.

Starting point is 01:47:41 Either they don't get in early enough. They wait too long, right? If you're listening to this, it's probably not you. You're probably already in crypto. So the second mistake is the mistake you're more likely to make, which is you sell too early. You sell the thing too early. And what we're talking about here is, again, things that are nonlinear, which is almost all of crypto. It's like, it's either going to the moon or it's like not going to be worth anything. This thing either works out or it doesn't, completely unlike other assets that you're used to. And so the mistake that you're more likely to make is you sell for a 5x or 10x thinking you did really well in one cycle. But long term, you kind of lose out.

Starting point is 01:48:19 So this is great advice. And I've gotten the habit of like never selling things, like pretty. like pretty close to that like i very rarely sell things that i have high conviction because you just don't know when they're going to pop right um as long as i asked myself hey did my investment thesis for this asset change the answer is no just wait longer what do you have to lose right but if you lose convictions and the reasons de val was saying then maybe those are reasons to sell but you're going to lose a lot of money in crypto by selling too early and i think that's the takeaway here it also really really helps to have actual conviction in the assets that you buy that really

Starting point is 01:48:54 helps you not selling. Yeah. You have to. And how do you develop conviction, David? Fundamentals. You research and you pay attention to fundamentals because fundamentals are real. And then once the fundamentals are real, then you start making memes about them. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:07 It also takes time. Yeah. Like it takes time to develop conviction. You don't get conviction on something overnight. It takes a lot of research, but also like time holding the asset. And all of this, why is this also good? It's good for your life too. It's not just like, it's life advice, okay?

Starting point is 01:49:22 Because then you can start to be zet. during these downturns. Oh, you know, ETH Bitcoin lost 20%? Whatever. Nice. What's 20% in the face of 100x? Right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:34 It's all temporary. All right. What's this take? Punk 1-4-5-6 says, Eth flipping Bitcoin won't be the end of this bull market. It will be the beginning. Oh, ooh. Chills.

Starting point is 01:49:45 And so we talked a little bit about this last week, and the shift around crypto will completely change. The whole structure of crypto will change when Eth is number one. Ethereum is number one because it's not just like Bitcoin is just Bitcoin. Ethereum is like Web 3. There's so much to do on Ethereum. The optionality for doing anything is infinitely more, like infinitely more than what it could be on Bitcoin. And so I think when Ethereum flipping Bitcoin, it flips Bitcoin and you see that Ethereum in that number one spot, people will actually look into like I've always thought that Bitcoin is pessimism about the future.

Starting point is 01:50:19 It's like the risk off crypto asset, which is weird to think Bitcoin is risk off, but it really, really is. is, Ethereum is the optimistic future, as in like the potential future. And so you can mint tokens on Ethereum. You can do Dow's on Ethereum. You can do whatever you want on Ethereum. And that culture, that just installation of values as the potential to have anything in the app layer, that being the number one thing and the top of the charts really sets the tone for the whole rest of the industry. And so just the surface area for potential being number one.

Starting point is 01:50:54 I think will completely redefine what it means to be crypto. Do you literally think that's the beginning of the bull market, though? No, it's more of a, yeah, if we're talking about specifically asset prices, I'm taking this on a little bit more of a metaphorical high level. I'm bullish on all things crypto, sometimes that's not just price, but more about potential, right? You know, just innovation, bullish on innovation. And so maybe I'm taking this maybe in a different direction than Punk 4156. that would be really, really cool.

Starting point is 01:51:26 If that is the super cycle, if Eith flippins Bitcoin and then we continue to do another cycle, yeah, that would be cool. That would be. I mean, we might see some big downturns between now and then, but yeah, leave to the listeners.

Starting point is 01:51:37 Downturns means liquidations, folks, so don't get out over your ski tips. Let's talk about this. I thought this was a really good post by our friend Pachy McCormick. And it's really, he talked, this is the concept of the Pareto Frontier, okay?

Starting point is 01:51:50 So he does two things. On a graph, you've got one axis, and another axis, X and Y axis. And on one axis, you have money on the other, fun. You have all of these dots. Work and leisure. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:03 So money is like stuff you have to do, and fun is like everything else. So I think he doesn't actually just mean like, you know, fun. It's more like, as you were saying, like fulfillment, leisure, all the other stuff that isn't incorporated in money. And he's basically, it's a gross, oversimplification, but human beings do things that optimize money and fun, right? And so he gives examples. Reading a sci-fi book, that's a seven on fun. It's a two on money. Reading a finance textbook, that's a two on fund.

Starting point is 01:52:33 Not very fun, but six on money. It's going to help you later in life. You're working in investment banking, 80, 90-hour weeks. That's a one-on-fund. But, hell, you're getting paid for it. That's a nine on money, right? And he's always like, the things we decide to do are all of these dots. And what we're trying to do is get kind of the dot that's closest to the Paretoeo

Starting point is 01:52:52 efficient, closest to the top. You see that here. Try to maximize the money and fun. How do we find the 10 fund, 10 money? That's probably impossible, but you want to maximize both numbers as much as possible. Yep. And he's like, the 10, the 10 fun, 10 money, that's what we're all looking for. And if given the choice, we choose that over like a five fun, five money, obviously.

Starting point is 01:53:12 And he's like, okay, so that's the Pareto Frontier. That's how you define it. What does Web 2? What does Web 3 do? Oh, it combines fun and money. So it moves the Pareto Frontier. up. So now, rather than doing a 10 fun, 10 money type of activity, we could do a 15 fun and 15 money activity. Those are bigger numbers. I like that. We had no more points because we're

Starting point is 01:53:35 combining fun and money. And this is kind of like what I talk about, like even us doing this roll up. I was thinking to myself, you know, what is this? Right. It's just like it's money, right? But it's also fun. Right. It's pretty high on both scores. This is web three. This is crypto, right? It's like combining your interests, all the fun leisure stuff activities, all the hobbies that you'd be doing for free anyways, if you could, with money. Like, people who are deeply invested down this rabbit hole tend to do really well and are doing well. You've been a bankless listener for like the past two years. And if you've actually like gone down through this rabbit hole with us, you're probably doing pretty well. Like it's probably worked out for you, right? And you've

Starting point is 01:54:20 had fun while you're doing it. Hopefully. So I really like this analogy. There's more to this article, we'll include in the show notes, but the optimization of money and fun that Web 3 and Crypto bring, I think, is the true revolution here. And what's this doing for humanity? Well, we're no longer stuck at 10 fund, 10 money. Now we get 15 fun, 15 money, 20 fun, 20 money, right?

Starting point is 01:54:40 It's like better, progress. That's what this maps to. I wrote about this in my Future of Work article on Bankplace when I talked about what it means to work for a Dow. because DAOs are opt in in multiple ways. You get to pick which DAO you want to work for. And then inside of that DAO you also get to pick how you contribute, right? And so we finally find ways where humans can labor in ways that align with their human incentives,

Starting point is 01:55:06 with their human values. Pick which DAO is the most fun. Pick which work is the most fun inside of that DAO. Get paid for your contributions. And so the future of work is just more fun. That's great. That's great news. I love it.

Starting point is 01:55:19 That's great news. Yeah. Here's a take Eric Borges, our friend, own Ethereum because it moves fast, own Bitcoin because it doesn't. I've heard this a lot. I think this is really emblematic of when Eric came into crypto. And so the meme here is that Bitcoiners criticize Ethereum because it moves fast and break things. And then Ethereum's criticized Bitcoin because it doesn't move at all. And so while like I actually disagree with both of these things, Ethereum moves really, really slow.

Starting point is 01:55:50 And like we can see that in the fact that we all thought proof of stake and sharding was going to come in 2018. And now it's 20, the end of 2021, 2022. We have proof of stake kind of, but it's on a different chain. And we don't even have any sharding. And so like it's weird that Bitcoiners criticize Ethereum for moving fast and breaking things. And then also that they never ever ship any actual other promises. Right. But the things you talked about, David, that's lightning speed for Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:56:17 Really? Like everything you just rattle off, they're like, oh my God. so fast. Right. And so Eric says, like, Bitcoin, it's a rock. It doesn't do anything. It's going to be the same Bitcoin in 2010 and 2020 and 2030. And that's the investment thesis behind Bitcoin. It's stable. It's going to be exactly what it promises you in whatever timeframes. And Ethereum's like, I'm sorry, but that's unsustainable because the way that Bitcoin is built is long-term unsustainable because of the security budget and all that stuff. You have to actually move forward at least a little bit. And meanwhile,

Starting point is 01:56:50 Now, like Ethereum, Ethereum doesn't move fast at all. The governance process for Ethereum is so slow. Developer consensus is very, very methodical and very, very secure. We are the slowest moving blockchain, and except for the fact that Bitcoin is the only difference, and that's one standing still. You know what's moving fast and breaking things? Both Avalanche and Solano,

Starting point is 01:57:11 which have actually gone down because they go too fast. That's too fast. That is too fast. Ethereum is in the perfect Goldilocks zone of moving forward, but not getting out over the ski tips. Bitcoin is standing still, and that will be the death of it. And if you go too fast, then you're too centralized. I actually probably would have agreed with this take as written in 2018, 2019, a lot more than I do now.

Starting point is 01:57:39 Yes, right. Because I think at that time, there was so much uncertainty in Ethereum's future that I now see much much. much more certain. Right. And so the idea of holding Bitcoin in case Ethereum fails was kind of a good value proposition then. Right. But Ethereum has come so much further since then, right? Shipping the beacon chain, EIP 1559, you know, the roll-up strategy is actually working,

Starting point is 01:58:11 that I feel like this no longer, I'm at the place where I feel like you need a lot less Bitcoin to provide. redundant like to provide a hedge against Ethereum failing Ethereum execution risk Remember that conversation we had with Preston Pish Just a few months ago and he was very like why do I why do I prefer Bitcoin so much over Heath? Why do I shun eat? Why do I Execution risk he kept going back which is I love that excuse because the more people that say they don't buy Ethereum because of execution rich It just means that they're all going to be buying ether after a sharding and proof of stake ships which means they'll

Starting point is 01:58:48 people are going to be buying ether at $10,000, which is how we're going to $20,000. I guess, right? And so much execution risk has just been boiled out and so much, you know, there's not that much execution list risk left, at least from my perspective. Maybe you and I are kind of living in too much in the theorem land, though. I don't know. I think that's it, man. Let's get to what you're excited about this week.

Starting point is 01:59:11 What are you excited about, David? This one's a little bit retroactive, but also looking forward into the future. I've spending time at Metaverso. Metaverso is a really cool conference because it's specifically a very core group of people that really understand crypto, right? Like there's a lot of people at like Mainnet. Mainnet was huge. It brought on a lot of people that were brand new to the space and like I'm talking to them

Starting point is 01:59:32 and they asked me like, oh, like, what do you think about Defi and what do you think about NFTs? And like, oh, come on, guys. I go to the Metaverso conference and like people are talking about these cool new experiments, these brand new artists, these new concepts, new solutions. and people at Metaverso understand it. They get it, right? So props to G money and serotonin

Starting point is 01:59:51 and all the people that helped through the Metaverso event. And I also felt the same vibe at MCon in Denver right before Mainnet, right? Very core group of people who are really on the fringes. And a lot of the same people that were at MCon were also at Metaverso. And so what I'm really excited about Ryan is that there is just this very core group of people

Starting point is 02:00:11 that travel around the world for all these different conferences and we all vibe together. And it's just like this digital group of nomads that don't really actually, there isn't actually one spot that we meet up at. We just meet up all over the world. And so I feel very privileged to have this group of people that I resonate with in different corners of the world. They all get it.

Starting point is 02:00:30 And so if you are interested in tapping into this energy, I predict that the next time this group of people all get together. And people float in and out. There isn't actually like a curated list of who these people are. But it's more about the installations of, the vibes that these conferences attract. I think the next conference that's going to attract this kind of energy is ETH Denver. So I guess the answer of what I'm excited about Ryan is I'm really excited for ETH Denver. It's coming up in the third week of February. It's where I got

Starting point is 02:00:57 into crypto in the first time. And just the vibes have always been good there. And so I'm looking forward to one more round of good vibes at Denver. Make sure you print out some articles and pass them out there, David. I don't think the listeners know that reference. That's David's original Eat Denver story, guys. So, yeah, story for another time. But your first Eat Denver, as I recall, David, you were actually, like, you printed out an article that you wrote. You're really excited about. Three of them. Actually handing out physical copies of your articles. Yeah. I had like 20 pounds of paper in my backpack. I was like, hey, will you read this? Like, please give me feedback. That's awesome, man. It's a great superhero origin story, man. And that was like 2018, right?

Starting point is 02:01:35 So it was like three years ago. February 2018, yeah. Wow, how far, how far crypto is come? It'll be How far we've got? It'll be four years ago when we do it. Yeah, four years ago, of course, because we're going to 2020. Incredible, man. Incredible progress. What are you excited about, Ryan? Look, can I be the guy who's excited about defy right now at a time when the

Starting point is 02:01:53 defy narrative is like in the toilet? Okay? I'm not calling the bottom. Because you've called the bottom. You've called the bottom. Right. Ryan's calling the bottom. I'm calling the bottom without calling the bottom.

Starting point is 02:02:03 Without naming a number. Look, man, I'm just like, yeah, that's a safe way to do it, David. Because then people can't make graphs about you and memes about you. I'm looking on even just token terminal and the price to earnings ratios of these things which is like the capital that you know these assets are generating relative to their value of the revenue that they're generating are just so low look why earn 7.45 p e ratio okay uh dy dx is 10 axi infinity 12.4 makerdow 18 uh mcdex mcdex 24.52 I mean, these are priced as if they're like Proctor and Gamble. Okay, this is like general electric PE ratio prices. And we're in defy. Like the fastest growing money system, financial system that the world has ever seen.

Starting point is 02:02:57 And so I feel like it's only a matter of time before some of these things and you catch up. And, you know, NFTs at this time last year were like not a thing. It was all about defy. Everyone's talk, crypto gets, crypto gets obsessed with narratives and then they go overboard with it. But like the time to make a buy, make a purchase, look at investing in something is when no one's talking about it. And I feel like the world is still pretty,

Starting point is 02:03:21 it's quiet right now on defy. This feels like NFTs from last year. Maybe Dow's are in a similar place, but I'm getting increasingly bullish on defy again. And I'll just remind folks that layer two is going to open up a whole new generation of defy protocols. So the other thing that might be true is the winners of the previous DeFi cycle might not be the winners of the next cycle. But think about DeFi as an

Starting point is 02:03:44 asset category because I'm thinking about it. I think there'll be a lot going on in Defy in 2022. That's it. I definitely agree with that. I think Ether needs to stop running up so aggressively in order for DeFi to turn around. And so we don't want that to happen. We definitely don't want that to happen. So I think why can I have both? If I had my perfect future, Ether would run above 0.1 BTC and then maybe crab for a while there just to not get out over our ski tips and then D5 makes a big move.

Starting point is 02:04:15 That's my perfect version of the future. Are you ready to make a prediction on the future, David? Shut up. Give me some numbers. I would like to say that I made the mistake of making a call that I did not really have too much conviction in. But at least you made the call is what you're about to say, right? Yeah, sure.

Starting point is 02:04:32 It's true. It's true. It takes courage to do that. Remember Raoul Paul? Yeah, I will not be doing that again. He said, but Raoul Paul, he made the, what do you say? You're in prediction. This was like four or five months ago when we had him on the podcast. He said like, do you say 30K, Eith?

Starting point is 02:04:45 30. Something high. I'll go back and look. See, people forget. So sometimes you can be safe about these predictions because people will just forget them. Yeah, we bring it up every single week. We don't forget it. I need to strip it from the agenda.

Starting point is 02:05:00 Yeah, strip it from the agenda in my memory. But like, we'll stop talking. about eventually. David, meme in the week. Let's get to it, man. What is this? What are we looking at parking signs? Yeah, we're looking at parking signs. Yeah. Raj Gokal says, attempting to access wealth generating capital markets as a non-accredited U.S. investor. And so we have a parking sign like a like pole with a bunch of parking signs on it. And so here's the first one. No parking. 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. street cleaning. Toe-o ways on school days, no stopping 7.30 to 4 Monday through Friday. School day exceptions. 15 minutes.

Starting point is 02:05:33 Monday through Friday, 7.30 a.m. to 8 p.m. school business. Toaway school days, one hour parking time, some other times. District permits exempt number four. Toaway zones, one hour parking, non-school days, Friday from Sunday to 12 from Friday to six. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of, so like, the idea is like, here's how you, like, make sure that you compliantly invest and stuff. Follow this, like, litany of regulations. And then, and then you can invest. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, Raj should know. Raj is one of the, the co-founders of Solana, of course, and they did their crowd sale, or their funding, rather they did do a crowd sale. So they benefited from getting through this regulatory gamut, huh?

Starting point is 02:06:11 Well, they did it for accredited investors. And here's the thing about Salana. It's like, I don't, it's not their fault. It's honestly not their fault. It does matter, but it's not their fault. It does matter, but it's not their fault. It's the SEC. It's the accredited investor laws.

Starting point is 02:06:26 Basically said, if you have a million dollars and you're rich, you have access to a whole set of investments. The cool ones. Dumb poor people can't. Right. By poor, I'm saying people with less than a million dollars in assets. These are our credited investor laws on the books. Anyway, we're getting all serious, and it's a meme of the week time, but I hate accredited investor laws.

Starting point is 02:06:48 Memes are very, very serious, Ryan. Or the least the best ones are. They are serious. They are serious. Down with accredited investor loss. Guys, that's it. None of this has been financial advice. Of course, it never is.

Starting point is 02:06:58 ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. DFI is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. And now here's your moment of Zen.

Starting point is 02:07:12 Crypto is culture. Crypto is a vibe. This is new and hip with all the money on one side. Crypto is culture. Crypto is a vibe. This is new and hip. With all one side. Bitcoin could be displaced by ether.

Starting point is 02:07:37 Ether could be displaced by Dodge. And then there's Cobra coin. And what could Mongo's coin do they Cobra coin? Crypto is culture. This is new is culture. Crypto is a vibe. This is new and hip with all the money on one side.

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