Bankless - ROLLUP: Why BlackRock CEO is Bullish Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup 1st Week of July 2023 ------ 🚀 Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off. 🚀 https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro  4:20 Markets   22:50 NFT winter has come  https://twitter.com/hosseeb/status/1675925861030334465  https://twitter.com/asvanevik/status/1675745010191601664  https://twitter.com/waleswoosh/status/1673781004031361025  https://nftpricefloor.com/  https://twitter.com/loopifyyy/status/1675517840542056448  https://twitter.com/avichal/status/1676090350291816448  37:50 BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Says Bitcoin Could ‘Revolutionize Finance’ https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1676685754922151941  https://twitter.com/thekriskay/status/1676686395862024195  https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-says-spot-bitcoin-etf-filings-are-inadequate-390336e8  Eric Balchunas https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1674777296438165505  47:35 Is Gary resigning?  https://www.thecryptoalert.com/post/sec-sources-confirm-gary-gensler-resignation  Should Gary be actually resigning?  https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1674464911714398229  58:12 Cameron Winklevoss sent a final offer to Barry Silbert  https://twitter.com/cameron/status/1676024844641550337  Base 1:05:30 https://twitter.com/BuildOnBase/status/1674543151388966912  1:10:00 L2s keep improving - Impact of Bedrock update  https://twitter.com/OPLabsPBC/status/1674823794949603350  1:15:00 Polygon 2.0 architecture -  ZK-Based protocol architecture https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1674538238835343361  1:17:30 Can Solana become an L2? https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko/status/1675146337174843392  1:21:00 Vitalik’s AMA on Tau Day   https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1674017688300011520  1:23:15 RFK wants to make holding Bitcoin an inviolable right as a President  https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1673812201457479681  1:25:55 Belarus banning peer-to-peer crypto transactions https://www.theblock.co/post/237523/belarus-wants-to-ban-peer-to-peer-crypto-transactions  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1676606907233054721  1:33:34 Questions from the Nation 1:37:45 Takes https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1676920622415245312  https://twitter.com/rss_d4/status/1675220831461335042  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1675955239466196992  1:50:50 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/zengjiajun_eth/status/1675677672566030336  1:52:00 Daily Gwei  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvCp6vKY5jDr87htKH6hgDA  1:54:30 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is hitting the mainstream media circuit and he's pumping Bitcoin? Bankless Nation, happy first Friday of July. It is time for the bankless weekly roll-up. This is a first of its kind. David is out this week. He is going climbing up mountains. I think he's got three mountains over the next 10 to 15 days he's going to climb. So I am here with Anthony Sasano and we are taking the roll up to you this week.

Anthony, this is the first time you and I have done this. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm pretty excited. Yeah, me too, me too. Thanks for having me on again. But yeah, I've only ever done these with David. So definitely excited to do one of these with you finally. So last week was, of course, the 4th of July in the U.S. So a lot of people had off, took a holiday.

Is there like an equivalency in Australia? Is there like an, you know, Independence Day equivalency? Or how did this work out in Australia? You didn't have to rebel against the Brits, did you? No, no. I mean, technically we're still a colony, which is funny. We tried to become Republic ages ago, but it didn't happen. So we have like royal assent and things still like that. It's just, it's kind of weird. But we have Australia Day, which is like in January and late January, but I don't think it's on the actual day like that we got our independence. And as I said,

technically we're not actually like fully independent. But but yeah, like people do barbecue, do barbecues because it's summer in January here and things like that. It's definitely something that people celebrate, but it's not to the extent that Americans do it. You guys are crazy around July 4th. Yeah, America goes crazy. I grew up in Canada, actually, and so there's a Canada day on the 1st of July, and it's much more muted than when you come to the U.S. I didn't even hear about it on Twitter or anything. I know. There you go. Much more muted. Anyway, we got some hot topics of the week. A lot of things to discuss this week. The first on my mind, Anthony, is Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.

He's suddenly become a Bitcoin Stan. All right, versus five years ago when he seemed to hate it. So we're going to talk about that. I also want to talk to you about NFT prices. NFTs are down real bad. There's some tweets that kind of show this, but we can also look at the price charts. I want to get your take on it. Can they recover is a question today.

There was a rumor that Gary Gensler was resigning. Is that all fake news? What's going on there? Cameron Winklevoss sent a final letter to Barry Silbert. This is the final, final letter, I think, Anthony, asking for his money. Like, you better give you my money, Barry. Both bad things are going to happen. We'll talk about that.

And lastly, of course, the building season continues. Particularly, I think, Layer 2 season, Coinbase Layer 2, the base launch. There's some news on that. We're also going to talk about Polygon, V2, the upgrades there. And a question I want to pose to you, Anthony. Will Solana become a layer 2? Actually, Anatoly of Solana answered that question. I want to get your perspective on it.

So you ready for all that? Yeah, let's get into it. All right, well, before we begin, Bankless Nation, also want to mention ETHCC. This is a conference that is upcoming in July, actually. If you have a ticket to that, there will be a bankless event. If you are a citizen, make sure you check that out. That's on Tuesday, July 18th. It's called Bonjour Bankless.

We are hitting Paris with the Bankless Nation. David's going to be there. A whole bunch of people from the Bankless Nation are going to be there. So make sure you check that out. This event was sponsored by our friends at Sega. So go check that out. They have a yield product as well. And then also wanted to bring your attention to you, if you can't make ECC, of course, the big event to go to is permissionless.

The second permissionless conference we've ever hosted, this is happening in Austin, Texas, September 11th through the 13th. This is the conference to go to. I'm going to this one. It's fantastic, whether you are a builder, a defy aficionado, a crypto native of any type. this is the conference to go to. We've got a fantastic list of speakers, people like Eric Voorhees, people like Hester Perce, people like Tom Emmer, all sorts of folks that you've heard on the podcast, coming live in person. So there'll be a link in the show notes, and you can get your ticket that way. All right, Anthony, let's talk markets. We've got to start with our friend over there. We still start

with Bitcoin on bankless. Anthony, you probably don't on the daily way. You're like, you know, like starting with the ETH, but I've got to talk about Bitcoin. Current price right now, as of the time of recording, is $30,898. Of course, this will be very different by the time you listen to it. We are up about 2.4% on the week. What do you think of this Bitcoin chart just in general? If we kind of zoom out a little bit, Anthony, how does this chart look to you? It looks like there's a new narrative in play right now, which we all know is kind of the ETF hype, right? it looks like the market finally had a reason to go up and finally something that people could latch onto and that has continued to i guess play out especially with comments from larry think this

week which we're going to cover of course um and i think people have just latched onto that and especially traders who love the volatility right and whenever there's a new narrative around they love to kind of cause volatility in the markets and play on that in order to to make money so i i definitely think that's reflecting that but also i mean there was um news a few days ago that sailor bought like another what, $250, $300 million worth of PTC. Yeah, he did. So that definitely played a part in it as well. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of, the chart still looks neutral to me.

I don't know. I kind of feel like there's, we can kind of point to the reasons why it's bullish. And ironically, that's sometimes bearish for me because it means that everyone knows the reasons why it's going up. So they're like trying to play, you know, the markets and things like that. So I don't know, I'm still very kind of neutral right now on the whole crypto market. but I do think it shows early signs of a bull market potentially forming. Early signs of a bull market, but you are still feeling neutral about it.

Is this kind of this chop? Is this traders playing trader games? Like it feels like from what you're saying, and I guess my own feeling reflection on it is we haven't seen a new set of buyers, right? So you just mentioned it's old Michael Saylor, dollar cost averaging in, of course. That's what he's been doing for the last two years. It's traders maybe playing this ETF narrative game. By the way, we'll get to it later in the episode, but there was news that Gary Gensler resigned, right, like this week.

And that hit Twitter. And you kind of wonder whether that was planned by someone or not to make some money on some of this volatility, some of this trading activity. But is it the case in your mind that until we get net new buyers, Bitcoin is kind of just going to be like this crab market side to side, up down, that kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think obviously you need net new money coming in. for the price to go up like you can't have the price i mean the price isn't really going to go up too much if it's just the same money sloshing around uh it's kind of like professional poker if everyone's if everyone's as good as each other not not many people are going to be able to make much money

from that so you you need you need the nubes to make money from right like that's it's it's it's the same in i think every market is where you like the more experienced people do better than the less experienced people um but the less experienced people the ones that bring in the you know the fresh money and they're buying discriminately but generally yeah i mean if you look at the shorter time frames, it's always just going to look very choppy, right? You're on the kind of like hour chart here. I'm looking over the past couple of weeks. It's pretty choppy. But as I said, I think that the market definitely is running on a narrative right now. And if that narrative runs out of steam, it might sell down again because it was just traders playing that narrative.

But then, you know, eventually it'll start going back up because of those net new buyers. But yeah, I'm not seeing any signs of like a huge influx of new money right now. Maybe here and there is a little bit. But yeah, I'm definitely not seeing like people come. coming in en mass and being like, I'm going to buy everything, right? I'm going to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy all these other stuff. That hasn't happened yet. Okay.

Let's talk about Eith. I'm guessing it tells a similar story. We are at the time of recording at 1919. That's up 4.8% on the week. So a bit higher than Bitcoin's 2.4%. Does this chart tell a similar story, Anthony? Is Eith just basically trading like Bitcoin in kind of this crab market territory? I think so.

I think it's just following Bitcoin on the USD pair. On Heath BTC, the Heath BTC tells the real story where it's come down from like 0.07 and went down to almost 0.06 based on the ETF stuff, which is obviously more positive for Bitcoin from a narrative point of view than it is for for Heath. Even if you believe Heath is going to get an ETF, it doesn't matter because the narrative is obviously setting it around Bitcoin. But I think, you know, Heath BTC has been stuck in this range for a long time, like 0.06, 0.07 which, you know, it's quite an annoying range.

But I don't think anyone trades it. I think what they trade is BTC and ETH. And you can see the different narratives reflected in the ETH-BTC ratio and the different kind of like trader mindsets reflected in it as well. So Anthony, we were talking prior to the recording and you said something interesting. You said that you believe actually the bull market maybe began a month ago. And now it's just a matter of getting the world to realize that and getting the world to kind of wake up to that. what did you what do you what did you mean by that so i mean i mentioned before that i'm i'm neutral

and i still am neutral for probably the rest of of this year but bull markets can begin without you realizing that they've begun until like 12 months down the line but you're like wow okay that's when the bull market began right um and i think this this has happened every cycle within crypto and the reason i think it i mean there's a few different reasons there's a big reason is gut feel after being in the ecosystem for a very long time you tend to have a gut feel about these things and my has actually been pretty good over the last few years, especially, for both timing kind of tops and bottoms of the market. But obviously, I'm not perfect. I'm not going to get everything right. But a major reason why I thought this over the last maybe a few weeks is the ETF stuff.

I think that there has definitely been a big kind of like win change. And I discussed this a little bit with David on the last roll up I did with him. But there's been a win change where it's, it's kind of like, okay, well, you know, these trad-foy institutions, they're not only saying that they're going to get involved with crypto, they're directly making actions. And it's not just anyone, right? It's BlackRock, which, as everyone knows by now, is the largest asset manager in the world. So when you have those kind of things happening, and prices has actually been relatively muted, I think, as well, you can kind of say, okay, well, you know, in 12 months, we're probably going to look back on this and think, okay, that's when the bull market kind of

started. That's when the early, early signs were. Yes, it took a while for the market to become convinced. And yes, the price still kind of crabbed around, went sideways, chopped around. But I think that you can, you know, revisit in 12 months or something like that and look back on it. But, you know, and that's why I think it's so hard for people to pick it because a bull market can start and the price can still go down. I know that's a, it's a, it's a, it's a funny thing to say, but it's all about kind of timing it. And if the price is just range bound and the bull market actually did begin, but buying in that, buying in that range was actually positive, you know, six, 12 months down the line, because the bull market had began, I had begun,

sorry, I think that is, is the way you'd play it. And, you know, it's not me saying that in the next couple months, Bitcoin or ether going back to all-time high. I don't think so. But I do think that we're in the convince the market that it's not a bare market phase anymore. Well, I think one of the things that could convince the market is, is, you know, even the narrative of the ETF getting approved. If an ETF gets approved, that will prove to everyone else that we've sort of hit a bottom on a regulatory fud, right? Basically, I mean, I think part of the story of 2023 is like, it seems like the US is out to get crypto, right? And if we have major financial institutions like Fidelity, like BlackRock, that have an ETF approved, you can no longer support that narrative, right? It looks a bit more nuanced.

It looks a bit more mixed. Yes, maybe US regulators will be harder in crypto in some areas, but they're clearly not going to like ban the asset class. And that is sort of the worst of the flood that we feel. So I think it has that effect as well. But what do you do in these types of like crab markets. Do you trade at all? Like, do you trade kind of on the weekly? Are you just, you know, stacking away? No, I don't, I don't trade. I definitely don't trade. Funny enough, I do more trading in ball markets where I, where I kind of see an opportunity to rotate out of things into other things. And, you know, I do that over longer timeframes. I never do day trading or week by week. But let's say I've held an investment for a while and it's gone up a lot, but

Heath hasn't gone up a lot yet, right? I think to myself, well, okay, I better take these profits and then take them into ETH rather than going to cash. So I do a little bit of that in ball markets and it's worked well for me historically, but generally, no, I don't trade. I definitely do not trade the daily or weekly. And what I was talking about before about my gut feeling, that's like on a year time scale. That's definitely not like a short term thing. That's a long term thing where I have to basically pay attention for a long time and then eventually my gut will start saying, hey, hey, it's a bare market or, hey, it's a bull market. And then I listen to it and it usually goes all right.

But maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe the bull market doesn't start for another couple years or something. I don't know. But that's just kind of my gut feel based on, you know, based on various things that have happened over the past few months especially. And the regulatory stuff is actually very important. I've maintained for a long time that I never thought that the US was actually trying to kill crypto.

And I've maintained that I feel like a lot of what Gary Gensler has done is just been for personal benefit. don't think he actually hates crypto. I think he just knows that crypto was an easy target to get nice headlines for himself. And I think that's actually been the case because you don't have Larry Fink, a huge Democrat backup, by the way, being positive on crypto while Gary Gensler, a Democrat appointed SEC chairman being negative on it. Who's going to win in that world?

Who do you think's going to win? It's the guy of the money, right? Yeah, I think Larry Fink is more of a puppeteer of the politics than Gary Gensler. But okay, so let's talk about another chart here, which, and I was actually shocked to see this, because I don't typically look at stocks very much, Anthony. So do you know the NASDAQ is like 10% off its all-time highs? Like, that's crazy. So NASDAQ over 15,000 this week.

What's your take on that generally? We're back to kind of like the stimulus check like COVID highs almost. Is this unexpected or what's your take? Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely not an expert on like the stock market and I don't really spend much time looking at it. But I have kind of maintained a position for a while that because the economy, not the economy, sorry, the stock market is so closely kind of intertwined with retirement accounts and money just keeps going into retirement accounts, obviously. I feel like the stock market can't actually go down for very long because you have that kind of buyer there that always buyer of the of the retirement accounts that are ready to buy whenever. And if you look at the stocks, sorry, if you look at the indexes as well, it can be a little bit misleading because, for example, not the NASDAQ, but the SMP 500, there's like 10 stocks in that that account for most of the market share. And those are the strongest stocks like Apple and Amazon, things like that, right? So they can skew the data. But if you actually look at a lot of the individual stocks, especially the ones that were really popular during 2021 and 2020, you know, the COVID boom sort of thing that happened there, a lot of them are down as much as some crypto coins are down, like 90 plus percent. Because, They were just completely overvalued.

They went through the same thing that the crypto market did. But in terms of things like strong companies, like Apple and stuff like that, you know, of course they're going to go back up. There's a bid there for that, right? Apple is not a super speculative stock like an early stage kind of tech company that just IPOed or something. So, yeah, there's a lot of that going on. But I think a huge portion of buying for these things comes from a retirement accounts. And there's trillions of dollars in that.

Obviously, you know, BlackRock is the one money manager of those kind of things and so is, you know, there's a bunch of others out there. So that's my general take on it. But then you have the other side of it where a lot of the macro pundits are saying, you know, this is a dead cap bounce. We're going back down because of all this, all this economic data here. You know, things are going to blow up. The inflation is going to come back, you know, roaring back and the Fed's going to have to raise rates to such and such. I don't know. Honestly, I don't listen to those people because I just don't have enough insight into these things to know who to believe. But at the same time, I try to avoid people who just think in binaries. Like,

There's a lot of dumerism out there still for some reason, but yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, it's very interesting. If you listen to kind of macro pundance, even kind of the inflation, the story of inflation, right? A lot of macro folks thought that inflation would be even a bit more persistent right now. And here we are down to 4%. And you can kind of look at maybe the five-year chart here is we definitely took a pop up close to 10%, and now we're back down to 4%. And so there's sort of this macro debate.

We had Rao Paula on the podcast earlier this week, and he's a big believer in actually deflation. He doesn't think we're going to see an inflationary decade. He doesn't think the demographics point that way. He doesn't think that, you know, like technology will be a deflationary force, and that will overcome some of the inflationary forces here. So there's this, I guess there's these two camps that try to push either inflation or deflation. I think your perspective has always been, hey, it doesn't matter. Like, don't worry about macro so much.

Like just regardless of inflation or deflation, we know that the government is going to continue to print money. And we know that we're in for a decade of fiat debasement where we have 0% or negative real returns, most likely negative real returns on bonds. And in that climate, you want a non-state asset of some type. You want an ether in your portfolio. Is that kind of still your take? It's just like ignore the macro noise. Do you really, you take that into account at all when you're, when you're thinking about when to buy and how to invest in this space?

Yeah, definitely. I don't think I've ever actually looked at macro kind of things and applied them to crypto and use them as a way to, you know, trade within crypto, buy or sell things. You know, if you, on the inflation chart, if you look at where it peaked, it peaked around June, I think, of last year. which was the ETH bottom. I did not buy ETH because I thought inflation picked. Let me tell you that much.

I bought ETH there because I, again, that gut feeling I had based on a number of different factors. Like I saw 3AC puking up all of their ETH because they had all these debts they had to pay. I saw these, you know, the amount of fear in the market. I saw the ETH getting. Yeah, exactly. I saw ETH getting oversold. And I not once looked at inflation and was like, oh, wow, inflation is like nearly 10% still. Maybe it's not a good time to buy Eid.

No, I didn't look. at that at all. So I generally maintain that crypto is largely kind of outside of the scope of the macro environment, at least for now, just because it's still relatively small, and it's still got a lot of growth ahead of it, definitely. And as you said, like it is non kind of like state-backed money for things like BTC and Eath, which is even more, I guess, like powerful now where a whole new generation has working up to the fact that the economy generally is in very delicate balance. And at any time, it can get thrown out of balance to any extreme degree. And if you want to protect your wealth, if you want to make sure that, you know, one year,

you have, you know, such and such amount of money. And then the next year, you actually have the same purchasing power, at least the same purchasing power, right? Even though all your bills have gone up, you're not going to get that from Fiat. Fiat is literally designed not to give you that. That's why everyone invest their money. That's why you're encouraged to invest your money. And that's why retirement accounts don't just hold Fiat, right? They invest the money.

So yeah, I think the whole new generation, probably Generation Z, to be honest, a lot of them have come into adulthood recently and coming to money, obviously, from working jobs, full-time jobs, things like that. They've been kind of crypto-pilled, I think, over the last couple years, for sure. Yeah, certainly. What you choose to denominate, what you choose to store your wealth in is actually a much more difficult decision these days. And that's why Anthony keeps stacking Gway.

It's a good move. You know, another really interesting chart this, week was the Coinbase chart. So Coin the asset, a big move, like over the past couple of weeks, a big move up for Coinbase. So it's almost at its highs from April. Do you think Coinbase as an exchange, as an asset, has been underrated, maybe was punched in the face too hard by all of this regulatory fud and prices are being restored to balance? Or what's your take on Coin the asset? I remember, I think near the bottom, I gave a take on it when I did a roll up. with David. I think it was probably towards the end of last year. And I said that I was not bearish

on coin, but I felt like if you were betting on coin, you may as well just buy Ethel BTC, especially Heath. But at the same time, like, Coin's performance has been, I think, around the same as Heath. Maybe not, maybe if you factor in stake, Heath, you maybe inch out a little bit more. But I was talking more like long, long term. I wasn't talking, you know, six months or something. I was talking on the next few years or something like that. That was my general take on, on, you know, whether you were to buy coin or eth or something. But generally, yeah, I felt like because Coinbase is so closely,

closely tied to crypto and crypto kind of markets, because most of their revenue comes from trading volumes, it would act the same way as kind of the crypto markets. I would go down with all of crypto. It would go up with crypto. And I think that's played out here as well. But also Coinbase was named as the partner in a lot of these ETF, filing. So that's been a positive kind of thing for them. They obviously got sold down pretty

brutally along with the rest of crypto there. So yeah, I feel like they're probably poised to do very well. They're the biggest US-based exchange. Yes, they're being sued by the SEC. But honestly, they're either going to win that lawsuit or it's going to be some settlement that that is in Coinbase's favor or the SEC is going to withdraw it. I don't foresee a future where they lose that. But I also don't think the market cares because the market knows that that lawsuit's going to be going on for years. So even if Coinbase, for some reason, loses, that's still like, you know, many years down the line. So I think the market looks at this and is like, okay, if the crypto markets are going to get hot again, Coinbase is the biggest company in the US. They have the blessing of all these

big tradfrey institutions. You know, coins probably a good bet here. Yeah, it's also increasingly hard to start a crypto exchange, right? Like you're going to look at who are the competitors to Coinbase and Cracken and these types of exchanges. And I mean, I look at a lot of startups as to you. I haven't seen anybody trying to start a new crypto exchange from scratch. The last person who tried to do that was SBF and look where that ended up. This is also a high contrast week from the perspective of NFTs versus defy. So NFTs were down bad. We've got beans down 69%.

Azuki, 58% moonbirds, 24%, Port Apes down 23%. And relative to defy tokens. So comp was up 80%. Pendle, 66%, Maker 32%. DPI, which is a defy index, up 12.6%. Now, some of these are just probably picking assets to prove a point. This is only the seven-day performance. That said, maybe this is a sign of some sort of decoupling. I mean, NFTs have been on a tear, have probably overperformed defy in a lot of ways,

at least during the last bull run. Is this defy coming back? What's your takeover all on defy tokens? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard because there's so many of them, right? And you can pick out any bunch of them. And, you know, maybe they have good performance over seven days for just no reason at all. Maybe they just went up because speculators were speculating. So I agree with you, seven days is probably too short of a period to draw any kind of conclusive narratives from.

But if you look at the assets listed here, like comp and MKR, right, maybe it's going up because people are betting on the fact that the trad-fight people are coming and they know how to, invest properly. They know how to look at price to sales ratios and they're going to buy the bags that actually have kind of metrics behind them. They're not just going to buy things for speculation's sake. And that's a fine thesis to have. But at the same time, I think that's more of a narrative than reality because I don't foresee these tradfai institutions buying random defy tokens or just defy tokens generally for a little while still, not in any kind of size either. And I don't expect like a comp or MKR to get like an ETF anytime soon, right? So I feel like people are just betting on and speculating on that side of things.

With NFTs, honestly, I'm not like an expert on NFTs, but from everything that I've seen over the past few weeks, I think the common sentiment is that people finally work up to the fact that a lot of these NFT projects have no intention of ever actually driving value to the NFTs themselves. They have no intention of building a community or an ecosystem. They took the money and they're just keeping the project alive to make it look like it's not a rug, right? That's my general opinion on a lot of these NFT projects, actually. Anthony is cynical on NFTs. We got more stuff around NFTs to talk about, including, is this an NFT winter? Is there a way out of this pain?

Is there going to be utility in the NFT market? Also, I'm going to talk about the SEC and these Bitcoin ETFs. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, came out very strongly. He's on a mainstream media tour talking good things about Bitcoin. and we'll get to you the Cameron Winkle-Vos letter to Barry Silbert as well. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange, Cracken. Go check them out.

Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I used to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Cracken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience

to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Cracken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a season pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Cracken Pro for their crypto trading needs.

Visit pro.crakhan.com to get started today. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first Dow-led web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, A brand new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses eigenlayers' data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility,

providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 gaming, and buy bit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding

to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledd layer-2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xy-Z and follow them on Twitter at Zero-X Mantle. It looks like NFT winter has come. Maybe it's been a long time building, but this week certainly confirmed it to me.

This is a tweet from Wall Street Betts, meme account. Someone purchased this board ape NFT in October 2021 for $3.4 million. Today, the highest bid is $57,000 from $3.4 million to $57,000. Apparently this was purchased in a Sotheby's auction as well. So this wasn't just kind of like a wash trade type purchase. At least it doesn't appear to be. The meme account continues to go on. The buyer could have purchased this 120 foot yacht instead. Instead, they have a picture of a monkey or instead of purchasing a monkey picture for 3.4 million, the buyer could have owned this mega mansion compound, just really rubbing it in. And this is the NFT price floor.

So a lot of pain in the board ape community. Cryptopunks are still kind of faring okay. Azuki's down to kind of number eight. We can look at some of these things in terms of ETH denomination, which is how I think both of us like to look at this. And so, like, Bored Ape has, at its peak, floor price was 128th for an ape announced down to 30. So when you look at not just dollar denominated, but ETH denominated drops, we have kind of a disturbing picture here. So maybe just continuing your thought from the last.

So you think this is basically the market waking up and realizing that all I have is a dumb monkey picture. Is that kind of it or is that too cynical of a take? What do you think, Anthony? Yeah, I mean, I think, as I was saying, that illusion that had been kind of prevalent with these projects that they were actually building out ecosystems, that they were going to drive value to these NFTs in some way, whether it be through creating like a video game or some kind of community thing or some kind of social thing, I feel like with the Izuki mint, that illusion was completely shattered because Izuki's is one of the biggest

NFT projects, they've raised a lot of money, and they came out with this new collection that literally, as you said, it was a derivative and it barely changed anything, right? People couldn't even tell the difference between the NFTs. So I think that triggered a massive sell-off where people were like, people finally waking up and panicking and being like, oh my God, if this is what they're going to do, then what are my azuki's actually worth? Like, if this is the best that they can come up with, even though they have all this money, you know, this is really bad. So, and I think that sentiment just kind of played out very quickly across the whole kind of NFT community. And also, it's a lot more efficient to trade NFTs these days because of marketplaces

like Blur, whereas in the past, we didn't have these marketplaces. So the price discovery was actually less efficient. But people were blaming Blur saying, oh, it's Blur's fault the NFT prices dropped. It's like, well, on the flip side, you could blame the fact that there wasn't an efficient market around before for these NFT prices going up so much because it wasn't real, it wasn't like, I wouldn't say real price discovery, but maybe it wasn't the most efficient. price discovery. And now that you have more efficient price discovery, you can actually see the true value reflected of these things, right? So, yeah, that's my general tech. I'm not an expert on NFTs. I don't know what these things are going to do, whether they're going to go up or down from here. I do subscribe to the fact that most of these projects, especially the PFP ones, are just going to act like every project in crypto, or most projects in crypto? They're just going to like go down only a lot of the time. And they're not going to outperform either the long run. So, yeah, that's my general take. But as for specific NFT project, I don't pay enough attention to know which ones are going to do well and which ones aren't.

So I refrain from kind of making those kind of comments. Do you know, I want to ask you kind of a meta question here, Anthony, because I know you are a collector of real life things, of real life, you know, action figures, all sorts of different collections. Even I'm looking kind of behind you and I see all sorts of different things in your room that you've collected. So that has appealed to you. And you are also a crypto native.

But the NFT thing hasn't really. stuck to you. Why is that? Why hasn't there been an NFT that appeals to Anthony Sissano yet? So generally, I like physical collectibles a lot more than digital stuff. Even though I spend so much time in digital realm, I don't get the same connection to digital collectibles as I do physical collectibles. And it's not just because they're physical and it's kind of a different thing. It's more that like I like putting things on display and having them around me and kind of having like, in my office right now, you know, I've got all these figurines around me, have my collectibles around me. It's kind of like a vibe, right? I don't know how to describe it.

It's like a vibe. It's like a comfy place for me to be. It's my safe space. And I like that sort of stuff. Whereas with digital collectibles, I never had that feeling because a lot of these things, there's no like in-game world you can go to and like put on your crypto punk as your face. Yeah, you can't create a vibe. It's more of a social status game, wouldn't you say? Yeah, exactly. And I don't care for those games at all. because if I did, I wouldn't be hiding all this figurine stuff in my room, right? I'd be opening up like a showroom for it or something. But I actually don't care about that stuff.

So, yeah, it's partly because of that. The social status games don't really appeal to me. But also, yeah, the fact that a lot of these things are art as well, like the most valuable, like pieces, not the PFPs, but the other things that art, I'm just not someone who is kind of partial to traditional style art or kind of like contemporary art. I'm more partial to art as kind of like things like, you know, a lot of my figurines are from anime. A lot of my other collectibles are from things that maybe I grew up with and stuff like that, like video games. So I'm more partial to that stuff.

But I understand why people like the NFTs, they make it their, like the PFPs, they make their identity. But that could also be very bad because you're speculating on these things and there's a market for them, whereas my figurines, there's no market for it. It's like eBay, but like I don't check the prices every day. So I'm not crying over it if it goes down and in value or anything like that. I almost see you as more of a collectibles purist then. You're actually doing it because you enjoy the vibe of it, the feel of it. You're not doing it to play kind of status games. I feel like that's much different than at least this version of NFTs in crypto,

where it's just board ape. You're joining a club. You're joining a group that can flex on others because they spent $3 million on a monkey JPEG and they could put it as their Twitter profile. It has always felt to me much more like a Rolex type. of social status game only in the digital realm than what you're doing here. Here are some takes from folks in the NFT community. Lopify. I've changed my position on most NFT projects. I'm infinitely bearish on 99% of ones that exist today unless things change. I'm not talking about random new ones.

I'm talking about the top established ones. The speculation isn't even around a future product. No one even knows what is being built for most. And if they do, the value accrual towards the NFT isn't clear. On the art collectible side, there are still some collections that I think remain pure, punks, autoglyphs, fedensas, ringers. I'm not sure how long this extended bear lasts, but this week certainly marks the next stage. They go on.

Are NFTs done? No, that's a silly statement. But if the bull market resumes, it doesn't mean any existing projects have to pump. That is another realization that I think has been reflected in the product, which is NFTs as a superclass may be very, successful, it doesn't have to mean the last generation of NFTs will be the ones that pump. I mean, some could remain, but this Twitter account, Lopify is saying 99% of the ones that

exist today will probably go to zero. It sounds a lot like ICOs. It sounds a lot like, you know, 2017, 2018. Avichal continues a thought that is related. NFTs are this cycle's alt coins. We are seeing liquidity flee and rotate out as the excess comes to an end. Just as we're with the ICOs, the ADIQ belief is actually right, just too early. Ethereum, Solana, layer two's, defy and stable coins all came out of the excess of the ICO boom. It just took a few more years. Some marquee NFT projects will survive this cycle. A few new projects will learn the lessons from the cycle's excesses and invest in real user value. Avichel goes on. Humans need to socially signal to each other. Luxury goods, collectibles, video games, more applications will run on

NFTs in a decade. The world's richest man sells physical NFTs after all. Who are we talking about there? Are we talking about Elon? The world's richest man sells physical. Yeah, I'm not sure. Anyway, this idea that NFTs are this cycle's alt coins. What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think I said it before where I said like it's the same as any projects within crypto. Like most of them are going to fail, will go to zero, right? And I think that's true for the NFT market as well. But the NFT stuff is a little bit different or the NFT ecosystem is a little bit different because it has the art side of it. And I think when it comes to art, it doesn't actually have to do anything. Art doesn't have to have a roadmap. It doesn't have to have like a future

value or cruel plan or a team behind it. All that art does, good art does, is need to exist and invoke emotions for people or, you know, be nice to look at for people or whatever people find valuable or social signaling, things like that, right? And that's actually why I think punks have held up, you know, relatively well to other NFTs is because there's no roadmap for punks, right? Punks don't exist to, there's no expectations. Exactly. It's literally, this is what you get, right? You get like a JPEG and it's a pixelated JPEG and it's a kind of pure NFT collection because it came out like, it wasn't the first, but it came out of like 2017 where NFTs weren't really a thing except like crypto crypto-c Crypto-Kitties, I guess. And it is a social

status symbol too, because they're still relatively expensive. You can basically imprint yourself on it because a lot of these things look different and you can find one that looks sort of similar to you. You can use it as a profile picture, things like that. But yeah, and it's the OG, right? So it has OG status. But I think the number one reason it's still so valuable and relative to others and it's done so well is because of the fact that there's no expectations here. No one's expecting Cryptopunks to be more than just Cryptopunks. Well, let's move on from NFTs for now.

So Anthony, some other big news out of this week, BlackRock CEO, Larry, Larry, he think is hitting the mainstream media circuit and he's pumping bitcoin here here he is in a clip on fox business i'm going to play this and also i do believe the role of crypto is it is it's digitizing gold in many ways it's a it's a instead of investing in gold as a hedge against inflation a hedge against the on the onerous problems of any one country or or or the or the devaluation of your currency, whatever country you're in. Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. It's not based on any one currency.

And so it can represent a asset that people can play as an alternative. I would call it the foundation of Black Rock is about hope. You invest for retirement because you believe tomorrow is better than today. There you go. The foundation of Black Rock is about hope. I love that line. Larry Fink. So remember, Black Rock, of course, is an asset manager with over $8.5 trillion in assets. This is where I think the baby boomer generation really has its money. And Larry Fink is one of the most influential people on Wall Street for that reason. And here he is. Doing a mainstream media circuit. He's talking about the virtues, the value of cryptocurrency, being a non-state store of value,

a non-sovereign money system. Very interesting as well when you contrast that to what he was saying in 2017. This is Chris Kaye pointing that out. In 2017, Larry Fink, the same guy we just heard from Anthony called Bitcoin an index of money laundering. All right, that was I guess five, six short years ago. It went from an index of money laundering to this beautiful non-state store of value to protect us from government supply inflation. What do you think is going on here, Anthony? So he wasn't the only one that said stuff like this. Like obviously, Jamie Diamond's pretty famous for saying kind of bad stuff about Bitcoin, Warren Buffett as well, you know, Rapp Poison Square, all that. So there was definitely a lot of these traditional finance guys,

just being very skeptical of crypto, Bitcoin, whatever it was. But I think a lot of that skepticism came from, one, these guys are like CEOs of massive companies. They don't have the time to pay attention to crypto. And all the exposure that they get to crypto is probably via their morning read of the mainstream media news. That's probably all of their exposure, right? But then what happens is I think over time, and it takes it a while. If it survives, which crypto has, they pay more attention, right? They start getting more and more involved with it.

They pay more and more attention. They start hearing about it more and more. And they think, okay, well, maybe there is actually something here. And I think that these guys are changing their tune because they do believe right at this point in time that there is something here. They believe that crypto currencies, you know, Bitcoin, ether, stuff like that can be alternatives to gold. And it's actually pretty wild to hear him say that crypto is digital gold because it's literally one of the main narratives that we've been saying for a long, long, time and now we have the world's largest, sorry, the CEO of the world's largest money, money manager fund saying this. So yeah, and this is what I was talking about earlier,

about this kind of like wind change where we haven't seen anything remotely close to this before in terms of positivity. When you have people that have been super successful in the traditional finance kind of market and super influential there, saying positive things about something that five years ago or six years ago that were saying was just used for money laundering, we're saying it's wrapped poison square, things like that, that is a marked difference and a marked change of opinion. And I don't expect them to change their opinion back just because we'll go through another bull bear cycle, things will blow up again.

I don't think they're going to change their opinion. I think they're going to financialize this asset properly within the traditional system, benefit from it, of course, as they do because they're for-profit companies. But yeah, I think this is finally the time where the institutions are actually coming to crypto. Yeah, I agree. I think this is a total C change in terms of. messaging and this to me it proves that we have already bottomed on regulatory flood i don't see how the um you know elizabeth warren's anti-crypto army and gerry gensler and all of the anti-crypta folks in

government can stand up against kind of the onslaught and lobbying of the larry thinks of the world and the fidelitys of the world like that's just not how the political apparatus is uh up i think you gave a very kind of like positive take. It's just like, these guys needed time to get educated, right? And they needed crypto to survive and prove it's Lindy and prove that it exists. There's another more cynical take, which also might be true, which is basically like, yeah, Larry Fink and Black Rock, they filled their bags. And that's why they are now pumping it. I mean, they have an ETF application basically in the works. So they have a reason to say nice things about crypto and Bitcoin and plant that narrative. Why? Because now they have a product for it. They were anti-crypto because they couldn't

sell anything that was pro-crypto. And now that they can, again, maybe more evidence that the ETF is coming relatively soon, if not this year, they'll have a product. So of course they're going to start to say good things about it. Those incentives line up to me as well. Yeah, I mean, I think so, but they could have done that in 2018 and 2019 as well. And honestly, I don't know. I don't feel like Larry Fink needs to fill his Bitcoin bags. I'm pretty sure he's doing all right. I think he's doing all right on the money front. I was laughing, by the way, when we were playing this clip from Fox Business,

look at the assets that are behind on the screen. We got Bitcoin, we got Ethereum. We got Lightcoin, baby. We got XRP. These are the top four crypto assets, according to Fox Business, worth reporting. That triggers me hard. I don't know.

Oh, man. Like coin and XRP are just those assets that just won't die. been grandfathered in as the traditional finance approved assets. I don't know why, but yeah, it's just weird. And XRP, mind you, Ripple still has an active SEC enforcement action against them. So it's just crazy. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is, again, proof that we are early, of course, if mainstream media is still, you know, talking about like coin and XRP is the top four. A few things on the ETF that will update you on this week. So one bit of maybe bad news. earlier in the week, the SEC said that spot Bitcoin

ETFs, the ones that were filed recently by Black Rock and Fidelity, they were inadequate. So the SEC reviewed them, called them inadequate. And that seemed like bad news. An ETF analyst said, hold up a second, though, is this really bad news? This isn't as bad as the headline. The key paragraph is deep in the story.

Basically, the SEC wants them to name the crypto exchange and give more details in their application. That's understandable, arguably good news. So some people are saying, well, maybe it's good news that there's some back and forth. Dan McArdle seems to agree, yeah, quickly engaging back and forth with applicants versus staying silent, simply waiting out the shot clock for many months, and then rejecting them seems like big change. So the SEC even saying that the filings are, ETF filings are inadequate, at least that shows

that they are talking. and that could be a good sign. So a little bit of back and forth on this. And the market's not sure, and analysts aren't sure really how to interpret this. I guess my take is, I don't know, I still think he gets approved maybe this year. I predicted that on the last roll-up

because I think it feels so close. And the SEC going back and forth with Black Rock, Black Rock also updated some of its filings, added some additional information. you know, fidelity submitting. I think that like the Larry thinks of the world know what's going on in our in conversations with the SEC and know that there is a path towards approval. And that's why this back and forth is happening.

So I still think it's bullish for the ETFs. We're going to have an episode with some ETF analysts tomorrow on bankless to get the full story. But what about you, Anthony? Are you over under a Bitcoin ETF happening this year? Yeah. I mean, it's more likely than not. I think I thought that before this recent spat of news came out, but as Dan says, yeah, the fact that the SEC is actually going back and forth here, instead of just waiting it out to reject the, the ETF is huge because why would they go back to these kind of applicants, unless they want to troll everyone, but why would they go back to these applicants and say, hey, you need to fix your application?

In my mind, there's only one reason to do that. It's because they want to approve the ETF. They just need to dot the eyes and cross the T's. So unless they are just trolling us all and they're going to rug us at the last minute, which could happen, right? Like, it's not impossible. I do feel like, yeah, it's likely that these ETS are going to get approved. Yeah, I mean, it seems like the typical SEC approach is just to plug their ears and ignore if they don't want to do something.

They just ignore rather than discourse, right? So discourse is making a bullish sign. Speaking of the SEC and Gary Gensler, there was a rumor this week that Gary Gensler was resigning from the SEC, which is very interesting. This new website popped up that I had never seen before. It's called Crypto Alert had an article posted. SEC sources confirm Gary Gensler resignation. So of course, crypto Twitter took this up. There's all sorts of tweets. I was waiting for it to be verified. It was never verified, Anthony. So this is fake news. Interestingly enough, this website crypto alert um you know coin telegraph scan this this article itself um 97% on

AI detector zero dbt that the text was generated by an AI all right so this entire story was very likely generated by an AI this entire website is new it popped out of nowhere okay and it has this story generated by uh AI um this is very interesting like because I I think what Why is bankless even talking about this? I think everyone listening, crypto investors need to know. There will be all sorts of sources of fake news that hit crypto. We don't know the intent of this with someone producing this maliciously. Were they trying to troll crypto?

Are they trying to cause some volatility, open up some trading positions and manipulate the market that way? I have no idea. But with all of the AI tools these days, I mean, the cost of fake news is basically dropping to zero. So you as a consumer of crypto media and crypto news have to be very careful with what you believe. And you have to not trust, but verify all of the sources. I think that is the lesson here. What are the takeaways from your perspective? Yeah, no, I think that's the right way to think about it.

I mean, I saw this and immediately in my mind, I was like, no, that's not true. Like, especially because I looked at the website, the crypto alert. And I'm like, what is this website? I never heard of this before. This makes no sense. And then I saw a few people post that. I'm like, guys,

like, I can guarantee you this is fake news. Like, there is no way this is, this is true. And the thing is is that if there was an anonymous source, why would they go to crypto alert? Why wouldn't they go to like the block or coin desk?

Right. But I agree with you. You have to be careful. You really have to kind of, I feel like the default of when you read anything online is to second guess it. Like, always second guess it. guess it. Like don't just believe anything you're told at face value. That should actually be the

default now. Not just because of AI, but because of the incentives at play where obviously everyone wants to get clicks and attention to monetize and stuff like that and to get engagement from different people. So you always have to second guess things. And that's been my approach for a while whenever I see stuff like this, even from reputable outlets. Like I even with the block or coin desk, I'll be like, hmm, that doesn't actually make sense. If I think it doesn't make sense just because it's come from them doesn't mean I believe it. I look at it. I'm like, That doesn't really make much sense. Let's see what the details are.

Let's cross-reference this. Let's see what everyone else is saying. And even if you do cross-reference it, even if the reputable publications all post the same thing, it could still be fake news because they could still be tricked into publishing it. So you have to be really, really careful. But obviously, this was just prime crypto-tweater bait right here. Everyone on crypto-tweathering.

Well, everyone wanted it to be true, didn't they? Yeah, exactly. He's like enemy number one. But at the same time, I actually think even if it was true, true. This isn't a, like, necessarily a positive outcome because he could get replaced with someone that's worse for crypto, right? Or he could get, or his replacement could just be like neutral and not care about crypto at all. And that means we wouldn't even get like legislation, oh, sorry, regulatory frameworks put in place for crypto, which is even worse because that's what we want. We don't, you know,

so it's just, it's really just an article that, that, um, paid the people's biases and everyone wanting him to resign. But I don't know, I feel like if you think that's going to change anything, Don't hope for something that might not come. Yeah, you think, Anthony, that the government is basically a hydra too. You cut off one head and like three others grow to replace it, basically. Yeah. You know, that said, there might be a compelling case for Gary Gensler to actually recuse himself, though, from issues related to crypto. At least Jake Trevinsky makes that case.

He and the Blockchain Association wrote an entire letter, kind of an open letter, making the argument that Gary Gensler has perjured himself by saying digital assets are securities and that basically SEC commissioners like Gary Gensler are meant to be neutral arbiters impartially weighing the evidence and arguments presented by the SEC staff and the enforcement targets of the prosecution of the defense. But when it comes to digital assets, Jake Trevinsky claims, Chair Gensler is far from neutral since his appointment, he's recently reportedly stated that his view that all assets other than Bitcoin are securities end of story. I think there's something

to that. Like for whatever reason, politics control, otherwise we don't really know. It seems like Gary Gensler has it in for crypto. And so how can you play your role as a regulator and be a neutral arbiter of the space if you just hate the asset class so much? At least that's the argument Jake Trevinsky made. So maybe he's not resigning, but maybe he should or at least recuse him. himself from some of these crypto things. We also had an episode earlier this week with Representative Warren Davidson, who's created this hashtag fire Gary Gensler. He's actually proposed a bill in some legislation to curtail the power that the chair of the SEC actually has and distribute that power more to the entire commission, all of the SEC commissioners

rather than just Gary Gensler, who kind of has a power structure such that he reigns as as tyrant king. I would at least like to see that in the U.S. But as you say, Anthony, these things are probably like modest changes at the end of the day. You know, Gary Gensler has kind of been painted as our core enemy, but I don't think he ultimately has fangs in this industry. I think the forces at play around crypto aren't going to, like, mean that he will not be a long-term impediment to us. What's your take on all of this? Yeah, yeah, I generally agree with that. And I agree with what Jake said as well, that like he obviously, like, as I said earlier, I don't think he necessarily hates crypto, but he's obviously got his own kind of incentives

at play here for him to go after crypto. And he's not being impartial at all, right? And, you know, we've seen plenty of clips of him saying things that contradict other things that have been said in the past and basically make it look like he just has it out for crypto and wants to go after crypto for whatever reason. So yeah, he's definitely not someone who is fit to run the SEC, definitely not someone who's fit to run these cases against these different companies. I just don't understand why they brought this case against Coinbase, given that Coinbase has tried to play ball with them for so long now. And the only kind of rationalization I came to was that it was like a massive headline case for Gary Gensler and gets his name in the news and, you know,

improves his own standing. But other than that, I don't know. I feel like if you have a company willing to work with you, why wouldn't you work with them instead of going through the, I guess, much longer and more arduous process of suing them, right? So it didn't make much sense to me that that kind of happened there. So, yeah, I agree with Drake's thread here, but I don't think Garragansler is going to recuse himself. There is no, I guess, requirement for him to do that. And there's no one that's going to make him do that.

If his incentives are to get in the news and to build a career on this, why would he recuse himself? Exactly. And while Democrats are in power, I doubt they're going to like can one of their own, right? So like there's a, there's a, there's a representative in California who's basically, I don't think she's brain dead, but like she's got she she's kind of suffering from all these mental conditions because she's so old. And the Democrats aren't even replacing her. So you think they're going to replace Gensler? No, I don't think so. I think they're going to let him do what he wants, unfortunately. But it's just the way it is, I think. Guys, we got more coming up on the show. So Base is preparing its mainnet launch. Of course, that is Coinbase's layer too. We're going to talk a little bit about that. And also, Cameron Winkelvoss sent a last and final nastygram to Barry Silbert asking for his money back.

We'll talk about that and some more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our friends over at Metamask who want you to check out their portfolio application inside of the MetaMask wallet. But there's a link in the show notes. Metamask has something new. Introducing Metamask portfolio. Metamask portfolio is the best way to view your crypto portfolio from a holistic level. See everything across all the chains all at once.

In your portfolio, Metamask will report the aggregate value of all the assets in your Metamask wallets and even the other wallets you import too. But Metamask portfolio isn't just a passive portfolio viewer. It is a place to do all of the money verbs that make Defi so powerful. You can buy, swap bridge, and stake your. crypto assets. So not only is Metamask the easiest place to see your wallets in aggregate, but it's also a powerful battle station for all of your DeFi moves. So go check out your Metamask portfolio because it's waiting for you to open it up. Check it out at portfolio.

Metamask.io. Are you planning to launch a token? Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Toku will help you navigate across the life cycle of your token from easy-to-use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing post-cliff taxable events with payroll. For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll, and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that

you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space, Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more, to manage their token complexities. So, if you are interested in signing up with Toku, check out Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. What an absolute mess this has been.

This whole Gemini versus Barry Silbert thing, Cameron Winklevoss just sent a final offer to Barry Silbert. At least that's what he calls it. this is an open letter posted to Barry Silbert. I love how this all plays out over Twitter and social media, Anthony, by the way, so we get to kind of see what's going on behind the scenes. He says this, Barry, today marks 229 days since Genesis halted withdrawals and 174 days since I last wrote an open letter to you.

As a reminder, I wrote you on behalf of the 232,000 Gemini Earned users who have over $1.2 billion of assets trapped in general. Genesis, a company owned and controlled by digital currency group, a company owed and controlled by you. Basically, he goes on to say, you better get my money, Barry. And if you don't, I'm going to drop a lawsuit on you. And you have like two or three days. That was the content of the letter.

He goes on to explain, you know, I think this is more written for the public than for Barry Silbert. He goes on to explain all of Barry's misdeeds. So there's a bit of PR behind this. But the reality is DCG owes Gemini and Gemini earned customers a hack of a lot of money. It's just a shame, Anthony, that 232,000 crypto users, people who thought that they were maybe using some sort of a safe product are now out of their money, 1.2 billion assets trapped. And this definitely hit retail fairly hard. What's your take on this whole fiasco, right?

I don't know that Barry, that DCG will, you'll pay the money back. But like, what's your overall take here? Yeah, so it's funny because Barry has been around for quite a while in crypto. He's had his company, digital currency group for quite a while. They have a very large portfolio of companies under them, ones that they've invested in, that they own and control, things like CoinDesk is part of digital currency group. So they're not a small player. But I don't think a lot of people are aware that Barry's like the original.

original crypto villain because he did a lot of villainous stuff. He's actually responsible for Ethereum Classic. He was the one who got it listed and started pumping it really early on and made it a thing, or at least one of the chief parties that did that. So he's definitely one of the OG villains of the industry. But because he made so much money and he had his kind of like tendrils in everything in crypto, people wouldn't really call him out. And they didn't really think that he'd be someone who would get into this position where he basically owes another billions of dollars, right? So I think that it became as a little bit of a surprise for people, but at the same time, the fact that he hasn't even bothered to engage with Gemini or the Winklevox

twins here and try and work out like a peaceful resolution is or has to be incredibly frustrating for the Winklevoss twins. Like I'd be incredibly frustrated as well. I mean, it's the same thing with what we saw with three hours capital, how they're not working with their liquidators through the bankruptcy process. Imagine how the people they own money to feel, right? So it's just like a really poor kind of showing, even if you can't pay the money back, at least work with them to try and work out a deal, right? But yeah, so this, I guess, like, as you said, is the final letter that they're going to send. And as you said, it is more of a PR thing, I think, to kind of maybe drum up support for Winkle Voss

Twins and make sure that there's not really much support for Barry Silbert. And then they're going to, you know, do this lawsuit, which everything's going to come out in that, right? Well, I think there's an element of retail kind of wants blood, too. they're like, Barry Silbert, you have the money. I mean, look at other assets. You're like, you know, a billionaire. You can pay this if you really want to.

And then other people are saying to Cameron and Tyler, hey, aren't you guys billionaires too? Because incredibly wealthy? Like, can't you? Like so. And then, of course, no one wants to pay because this is a very large sum of money, a massive amount of money.

One other contrast point here, though, for me, Anthony, was like from 2020 to 2020, If you wanted to lend out your crypto, there are basically two ways to do that. One is you could use a centralized third party, an exchange, a C-Fi bank, let's call them. So you could go to Celsius, you could go to BlockFi, you could go to Gemini. You could lend that way. The other way was through Defi. There's Ave and Maker and Compound, these other things.

Of course, we all know what happened. The centralized lending providers went bad, a lot of them, almost all of them, basically. and one line was interesting from this letter. In addition to, Cameron says this, in addition to dragging out a resolution, they have ballooned professional fees to over $100 million, all of which have gone to lawyers and advisors at the expense of creditors and earn users. Just the waste. Here we are almost a year later from the blow-ups, so kind of the start of the blow-ups. A hundred million dollars at least has been stent on lawyers and professional fees, and we're not a lot. We're not a closer to settlement, right?

Contrast that to defy. Everything was on chain, right? The liquidations happened in a fair, orderly, efficient way. You know, the thing that SEC says is their mission, fair orderly, like efficient capital markets. It happened. Basically instantly, everyone got their money back. It was fully transparent.

It was fully regulated. There weren't $100 million in lawyer and professional fees that had to go and to arbitrating this and trying to settle it. Like, just contrasts those two systems. And man, what a win for Defi when you zoom out and look at that context. It is so much better, particularly for these things called collateralized loans than the centralized providers. That to me is when you look deeply, the actual bullish thing is the kind of the contrast point

here. What do you think? Definitely. I mean, I totally agree with that. And I think, you know, where was the SEC? on this sort of stuff, right? Like these aren't new companies that just came onto the scene suddenly and, you know, I guess like we're under the radar.

They're big billion dollar companies and it seems like none of the regulations that existed, you know, had any effect here, unfortunately. And the same is true for all the other blobs we saw like FTX and things like that, right? I know FTX technically was domiciled in the Bahamas, but there's FCX U.S., which, and then there was the whole SBF, you know, cozing up to politicians and the SEC and stuff like that. So, you know, at the end of the day, like, you can either have, you know, I guess like, not control, but like an orderly unwinding via the defy system or you can have an unordily unwinding via the traditional system because the traditional system, as was noted here,

costs a lot of money, right? It costs a hundred million dollars in lawyers and advisors to actually arbitrate this. Whereas within defy, it's all run by code, right? Yes, the code can have bugs and there are exploits and stuff like that that happens. But I mean, more money has been lost on these C-Fi platforms than all of Defi combined the last time I did the math on it. So I think Defi is winning here. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Let's talk about Base.

So Base is nearing its mainland launch. This is Coinbase. Coinbase is a layer two, of course. They just announced the completion of their audits. And so they fulfilled four out of five of their criteria for main net launch. Of course, base is built on the OP staff. We've talked a lot about base. What do you think about base in general, Anthony?

Are you bullish? What do you think kind of this progress to main net means? It certainly sounds like base will be released this year. What will be the effect? Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think it definitely will get released this year in case something happens to delay it. We still have like six months left of the year.

So it's plenty of time. And Jesse Pollack, the lead of base at Coinbase, has teased this year as well on Twitter. So, yeah, it seems a pretty strong signal that it'll be released this year. But I've said this a lot of times. I'm incredibly bullish on this. I think base is going to be to Coinbase, what BSC or Binance smart chain was to finance.

Really? That big, huh? Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think so. And it's launching at the right time, too. Like, if you're a believer that the markets is going to heat up again towards the end of this year into next year, then you should believe that there's going to be a lot of new people coming into Coinbase who are then going to get onboarded to base. Because as well, and this is not something that I think a lot of people think about.

if Coinbase is under scrutiny by the SEC for assets that they list, are they going to list any more assets? Like, are they going to list any of the new assets? Probably not. But what they're going to do is they're going to have an asset page in their website. They're going to say, hey, you can go trade this on base, right? Our layer two. And here's how you do it. So they're going to bring a lot of new people on chain in my mind. And I think that that will translate to new people on not just base, but other L2s and Ethereum generally. So I think what's going to happen is we're going to have a potential layer two summer, maybe not in summer, but like what we're having with Defy Summer, where these layer twos get so much usage from all these new money and all these new users pouring in because of of base. I really do think base has a potential to kickstart that because of those users that Coinbase has.

And BSC or Binance Smart Chain definitely kickstarted a lot of this EVM stuff, this old EBM stuff that we saw, this Alt Layer 1 stuff that we saw play out. So I do think that base can kickstart. or at least continue the growth of the L2s and make it into something similar to DFI summer where we just had so much money coming in and it was so much activity happening. And it really kind of, I guess, kickstarted that massive growth trajectory for things like DFI. Anthony, if I'm bullish on base, what asset do I buy?

Because Bays has already said they're not rolling out a token, okay? And I already have my bags packed with Eith, right? I'm going to continue to dollar cost average that. Is that maybe a case for coin? or like the stock that we were talking about and the outset of the episode, or are there some other assets that might actually value as a result of the potential success of this?

Yeah, I mean, I think crypto natives generally are going to buy crypto assets instead of coin, even though coin probably seems like the obvious bet as well. But if we're talking like people in crypto and crypto natives, I think when you look at base and what it is, it's an L2, and then everyone's going to shill that it's built on like OP stack and then people are going to be like, oh, well, optimism has a token, right? It's OK.

And then they're going to go. I don't know if the thing is. It's just my OP, huh? I think that's what's going to happen. But the thing is that if we do have like an L2 summer or layer two summer, what's going to happen is that people will just buy anything related to L2s, right? So I feel like if you are of the belief that that's going to happen, then buying any of the L2 tokens, at least the popular ones could possibly be the winning move, as well as

eighth, of course, because it will obviously benefit from this. But yeah, I don't think it's just going to be one asset. But if any of the most, sorry, if you go for the most obvious one, it would be OP because everyone will be saying, I've built on OP stack, right? Yeah. What's also very interesting to me about this model. This is also true of the Coinbase wallet is if base is successful, if Coinbase wallet is successful, it kind of cannibalizes Coinbase's underlying centralized business, right? It's like they can't take the transaction fee, the trading fee that they take on the centralized exchange if it's a disqualizing. centralized exchange built on base with uniswap so i i always i always admire companies that take those

steps because i think they're like very it's very bold to say like you know steve job style we're going to take the ipod we're going to completely cannibalize it inside it's just going to be an app on the ipone right that's the future and we're willing to cannibalize our business model i think that's a bold step and i'm glad they're taking it um a few metrics from opi while we were talking about it This is optimism. There was a bedrock migration. This was a new optimism migration that happened a few weeks ago. Some pretty substantial metrics that are worth celebrating here.

So after that upgrade, OP Mainnet users are paying 54% less layer 1 gas per transaction. So a 54% optimization, average transaction fee of about 14 cents. So far, this is saved community. members, 1.36 million in fees. There's some other stats here that I think are pretty impressive. But in general, how are layer two is able to achieve these optimizations without any kind of Ethereum layer one upgrade, Anthony? Yeah. So the biggest thing that they can do is what's called call data compression. So call data is basically the data that they put onto Ethereum L1 and that's the most expensive part of an L2 because they post two things.

They post the call data and they post a proof. The proof is very cheap to post. The call data are very expensive. And in terms of numbers, I think the proof is like maybe 5, 10% of the cost. So call data is 995%. So what they've done here, at least one of the optimizations that they've made with Bedrock is that they've compressed that call data down. So just like you would compress.

It's like compressing a file on your computer, like zipping it. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can think of it that way and use that analogy. It definitely fits. So that's one thing that they did. There's other optimizations they can always make to how the actual code of the optimism network,

you know, runs, how efficient it is, things like that. And there are some other tricks that they can use as well. I get these costs down. But honestly, I didn't think that they would get the cost down this much. Like, that's a huge, huge reduction. And as you said, there was no L1 change here. There's no increased gas limit on L1, you know, bigger blocks or anything. there's no upgrade specific to L2s that have gone live yet.

Obviously, those are coming later, like EIP 4844 or Protodanks charting, which will actually reduce fees a lot more than this. So just to quickly explain for people, it replaces for L2's call data with something called blob-style transactions, and these are much cheaper. So it's the same data that can be posted, but it gets posted as a blob instead of call data, and that reduces fees from 10 to 100x.

It depends on the L2 and how they're constructed. Did you guys hear that? 10 to 100x. By the way, it's 48444. Do you think that's roughly still slated for this year? Yeah, I mean, on my estimates, put it in November, I'm pretty confident in a November date. It could come earlier, but yeah, the upgrade that it's a part of, Den Kuhn, I feel like that's going to go live in November. That is so big. That is so big for roll-ups.

Exactly. It will require the roll-ups to take advantage of that. I think they have to change how they do things. But, yeah, I mean, I would expect these. And also, another big part of it isn't just a reduction in fees. it creates a separate fee market for these L2s. So if gas spikes on layer 1 Ethereum, say it goes from 10-gway to 100-gway, the price of blob transactions of where they're storing their data,

the price of that stays the same. It doesn't spike with the rest of the network. So it's actually a segmented fee market from the rest of the network, which means that even if the rest of the network goes crazy because some NFT mint is happening, these L2 should still have those low costs, which in my opinion is the bigger upgrade. You know what? You just taught me something.

I didn't actually know that. So it really bifurcates the actual kind of block space market then. Yep. Yeah. It's a kind of thing that is, I think, live, I think Solana has this actually. And it was something that was spoken about as part of EIP 1559 a while ago, this multi-dimensional fee market where essentially you have different segments. But because it has a roll-up centric roadmap where we're pushing all the execution or user-facing

stuff to roll-ups, we figured, well, let's not do it for every transaction on Ethereum because that would be too complex. Let's do it for just the ones that the roll-ups take advantage of. And that's what we're doing with this 40-8-44. It's so interesting. Ethereum is giving a massive subsidy, basically, to layer twos. Like, it is a massive upgrade for that. There is a trade-off, though, in that the call data or the blobs expire after a month. And what that means is that you can't.

So if after a month, you haven't downloaded that. data, you wouldn't be able to access that, again, unless someone else had downloaded it. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist on layer one. It exists as part of the state. It's just that you can't access the specific data that was part of that, right? But you only need to access it if something goes really wrong, right? I mean, it's not even that. You only need to access it if you need access to the historical balances of account. So let's say you want to know what the balance of. So you only need it for like tax related purposes and stuff like that, right? And there's going to be third party.

services that keep this data and it'll be it'll be fine um but yeah that that that is the trade off because as you said it is a big subsidy that ethereum is giving these roll-ups and it can't be stored forever because it would balloon the the um the size of the chain but uh but yeah it's still i think amazing because it's a really smart approach and i think we're seeing it in the innovation right it's so it's not just these optimizations from arbitram and optimism and other groups on compression as well um so late last week polygon labs just uh proposed their polygon 2.0 architecture. We're going to have Polygon actually on the show next week to go into this in some detail.

What's the TLDR at the highest level on Polygon 2.0, Anthony. What are they doing here? Yeah, so it's kind of funny because it's not just Polygon that's doing this, but like you have OP stack, you have the ZK, ZK stack from ZK Sync, and now you have Polygon 2.0. What they're all doing is they're building this L2 infrastructure that can all be interoperable with each other all settling on Ethereum, right? But basically where anyone can spin up their own Polygon L2 chain or their own ZK-Sink L2 chain or their own OP chain, right?

Have you standardized the term for this? Are we calling them super chains or what are we calling them? Well, optimism calls it a super chain. I think Polygon has their own name for it. And I think ZK Sync has their own name for it as well. May the best meme win. I kind of like super chain. Yeah, we'll see that.

Super chain is a pretty good name, I think. But it's all about unifying, as Polygon says here, unifying the liquidity, unifying the kind of like scalability, making sure that all of these things can interoperate with each other without having to go through, you know, third-party bridges and stuff like that. So they can natively interoperate and giving developers the optionality of what to build, right, whether they want to build an app chain or maybe they want to build a generalized chain. So that's what it seems like all of these L2's coalescing around, which I think is pretty cool. but I don't know how many of these we can have because it gets to a point where you have too many and then it just doesn't make much sense. So I feel like you might have a handful of them that succeed

and maybe some others don't really succeed because they just came too late to market or didn't do the BD right or stuff like that. But if anyone can pull it off, Polygon definitely up there in terms of being able to pull it off in my opinion. Yeah, certainly. It should mention both Anthony and myself are advisors to Polygon as well.

We've been very bullish on this project since the very beginning as well as many other layer two out there. Speaking of layer twos, Anatoly from Salana asks himself the question, would it be possible for Salana to eventually be an Eth layer two? Do I recall, Anthony, you asking him that question, you bring that up to him in person? There was some sort of interaction like that where he was very much against it. It called you sort of, I don't know, maybe said some things. I'm not sure what happened. But to me, it was interesting that Anatoly actually brought that up as a hypothetical. And his conclusion is, uh, no, it's not, it's not. Yeah. Of course, as,

as one would expect, what's your take on this? Yeah, I don't think it was me that said that to publicly, but I have actually said this a lot of times over the years that like Salana, in my opinion, would work better as a layer two. But look, it depends on what you want Salina to be. Now, obviously, Anatoly and like the core Salina community, what they want Salana to be is this chain that essentially allows you to send transactions across the globe at the speed of light. That is like one of their main selling points that they're going on about, right? And they want to do this in a distributed way, you know, distributed across the globe with validators, you know, placing different places around the world. But to achieve that, you need to bump up the hardware

requirements to levels that just are not sustainable, right? In my opinion, and then just not at a point where it would lend itself to everyday users being able to run nodes, run infrastructure, be part of the consensus stuff like that. So that's the kind of tradeoff there is there. But that's what they want Salana to be. But if you just want to harness Salinas execution technology, so it's like paralyization technology and kind of the underlying architecture, you could build that as an L2.

You just wouldn't get the same salana you would get as an L1, because a salina as an L1 is going towards that, you know, speed of light transaction kind of finality, stuff like that. And that's what Anatoly says in this kind of tweet here, But as an L2, you can still harness, you know, Salana's benefits in its execution layer side of things. But I don't think the Solana chain as it exists today is going to be an Ethel 2. I don't think that they should be an ethel2 because that would be really bad for them, I believe. I don't think it would be good for them to do that because it would mean that they basically aren't competing with Ethereum anymore.

And I think that's one of their selling points, that they're competing with Ethereum, that they're better architecture, they're competing for different apps. And there are certain apps that they're trying to build that aren't necessarily possible on Ethereum, at least layer one. And they want to do it at layer one. So there's these apps where basically it's decentralized infrastructure, things like helium, which is that hot spot where you can buy this piece of hardware. You put it in your home. You know, you generate kind of, I guess like they have their own coin that you can kind of farm or mine or whatever it is. They want to do that sort of stuff. And there's a few other things that they're focused on.

I don't think they could do that as a layer two. So all the power to them on that front. But in terms of harnessing Salinas technology, you know, there's paralyization, its transaction technology that the EVM doesn't have, it could be built as an L2. And I think there's actually a team building that as an L2 on Ethereum. That's interesting. I love in crypto that we get to let all of the experiments play out and run. And ultimately, we get to make bets on all of these experiments too.

So if you're bullish Salana, you can make that bet. If you're not bullish, Salana, you're more bullish on Ethereum's modular. approach with later 2, so you can make that bet too. So may the best chain win. This is a vitalic Twitter thread. One thing I think was notable, he just said, I'm taking an AMA on Twitter. Someone asked him how he's feeling about the U.S. policies approach to crypto, and he said this. The one comment I'll make is that I feel bad that Salana and other projects are getting hit in this way. They don't deserve it. And if Ethereum ends up winning, though all of their blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that's not an honorable way to win, and in the long term,

probably isn't even a victory. This is especially true since the real competition is not other chains. It's the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak. I wish all honorable projects a fair outcome in this whole situation. Of course, Vitalica, as usual, kind of rising above the tribal fray and wishing well on all honorable projects, painting kind of the true enemy as the centralizers. What's your take on? on Vitalik's take here. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with him. I've always not been a fan of the way, you know, certain groups in crypto, like Bitcoin

maximalists use the state as a weapon, which is just completely ironic and just hilarious to me that they would do that to take down, you know, the competitors in the ecosystem. So, yeah, I don't want the state, any state, basically choosing winners and losers based on some arbitrary rules that they've come up with. I want these things to win or lose based on the free market, right? And I think that up until this point, crypto has been a relatively free market and that actually has been a pretty decent arbiter of what is valuable and what isn't over the longer term. Over the longer term.

That's key. Yes. Yes. Short term, not so good. Not so good. Long term, pretty good on net. I know there are some things that the market's not going to ever be able to optimize for and not going to be able to sort out.

but on net it's it's been pretty good um you know over over the long long term uh but i still wouldn't want a state to come in and say okay you're not a security you're a security you know you're not allowed to operate in the u.s you know you are allowed to operate in the u.s we're going to ban you know mining but we're going to keep staking i don't want ethereum to win like that i want ethereum to win on its merits and and that's why i completely agree with batalic on that on that front well speaking of kind of winning in nation state level actors it is notable i think that a presidential candidate is now making crypto part of his platform. This is RFK Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I believe he is running as a Democrat in the 2024 election. Here's what he says about crypto.

This is from the Bitcoin Miami Conference. Let's just hear a clip. Proud to make an historic announcement, our campaign will be the first presidential campaign in the history to accept Bitcoin donations through... through the Lightning Network. As president, I will make sure that your right to hold and use Bitcoin is inviolable. Interesting. As president, I will make sure that your right to hold and use Bitcoin is inviolable. Interesting words, I think, from somebody on the presidential ticket.

Now, Bankless, of course, is not a political podcast. We'll make no comments on the merit of this particular politician. But just seeing crypto rise to the level of being a presidential issue. Now, I haven't heard Trump weigh in on this. I haven't heard Biden weigh in on this. But here is a presidential candidate who's, you know, the critics would say pandering to the crypto audience. I think supporters would say trying to protect, trying to enshrine Americans' rights to hold their own private keys. What's your overall take on this?

Is this surprising to you? Or is this playing out as Anthony Sassano would have suspected all along? Well, I mean, I wouldn't say it's surprising just because crypto has been, you know, for the last few months at least talked about more and more in the political sphere, obviously with the regulatory stuff, but also as part of Democrats and Republicans going at each other, right, in the U.S. over this issue. So it's not surprising to see that a presidential candidate like RFK, I mean, I don't know him very well.

I don't follow US politics that closely. But from what I see from him, he's definitely the underdog candidate. So obviously he would try and appeal to the communities that other candidates aren't appealing to. And I think it fits his platform for what I've seen. But yeah, I'm not surprised that this has become a thing now, given that it's already a thing in, you know, in the existing politics and has been, at least for this year, I think it's been a big part of it. And I think since the FTX blow up, definitely, it's just become more of a more of a talking point. So, so yeah, and even though, like, I don't make any really comments on the candidates themselves and whatever and their policies, just the fact that crypto is there, right? And he's being discussed in these circles and he's kind of front and center for a lot of these people is in of itself, I think pretty bullish for crypto overall.

Yeah, I think the contrast point is something that Belarus is doing. Belarus wants to ban a peer-to-peer crypto transactions. Wow, actually ban peer-to-peer crypto transactions. So if I send you my Eath and I was Belarus, that would be potentially illegal. This is a bill that looks like it will go into law. I think this is kind of worth a broader conversation, though, of something to be wary about. Of course, this week in the U.S., it was kind of Independence Day, which is sort of a celebration of the declaration of independence and is enshrined, you know, at least to Americans as kind of a document that purports freedom, freedom from tyranny. I do think, Anthony, that you have to, like, we should be in the West very careful about what our countries are doing with respect to like peer to peer transactions and bankless wallets, like non-custodial crypto wallets. Because if we get to a place where they start to talk about banning these things or making them illegal or limiting them in ways that are very gatekeeping, I think that is a terrible sign.

And in fact, it might be a sign. And the crypto is an acid test for like how authoritarian your government is. And I think it's like confirmation that your society is veering towards an authoritarian surveillance state. So it's something that's always in the top of mind for me. And of course, you know, I think it's worth fighting for in your respective jurisdiction wherever you're listening in is to fight for these rights to hold your own private keys in your country. But I'm worried that they won't be upheld. what's what's kind of the state in uh australia like there hasn't been anything close to this in the u.s of like a ban on peer to peer transactions or a ban on crypto wallets um but

there can be a slippery slope of if you start to get your travel rules and these kinds of things that limit exchange withdrawals uh over a certain size you can start to see us like veering towards that what's your overtake on this and what's the climate like in australia yeah so i mean i guess first i give my overall take is that I think it's funny that for the last maybe 10, 15 years, at least Western governments, I mean, not just Western governments, even China, been trying to get rid of cash, right? Cash is not very easily traceable. Cash is, you know, not very easily taxable, stuff like that.

And then along comes crypto. It's like, here we go. Here's digital cash. So it's just kind of a funny contrast. But I agree with you that, you know, if your country's trying to ban peer-to-peer any transactions, I think that's a big red flag and definitely a, you know, or a potential harbinger of other things to come. But in terms of what the climate's like in Australia,

crypto is not really a talking point for our politicians, really, at all. I don't remember the last time I heard one of them talk about crypto, but I mean, we're just a very small country as well compared to the US. I mean, there's only like 25 million people here, right? So very small. So our politics is generally very muted compared to the US. Like, just to put this in context, the, I guess, campaign for when the new prime minister is getting voted in is like six weeks.

The campaign in the US for a president is like, what, 18 months? Yeah, at least. Yeah. And we have the same terms, I think, like four-year terms for our leaders. But the only stuff that I've seen lately has been our biggest bank, Commonwealth Bank, saying that they were going to impose a $10,000 deposit limit to crypto exchanges per month because of scams. And they weren't just using that as a cover point.

I looked up the stats. Last year in Australia, $3 billion was lost to scams, not crypto scams, just scams generally. Of 300 million of that was crypto scams. And I think they walked that back. I haven't seen that documented anywhere on the website or anything.

So I think they actually walked that back. But I think they were just trying to protect people from getting scammed because a lot of these, what they do is these scams. is say, hey, send this money to this crypto exchange address, right? The fiat to this deposit address. And then obviously it gets exchange for crypto. And then it gets sent off.

And there's no way to ever recover that money ever again because it's gone, right? Which speaks to how sensitive-sendipresistant and decentralized something like Ethereum and Bitcoin is as well, mind you, as a side note there, which is pretty funny. But other than that, no, not really. Haven't seen anything yet. But in saying that, Australia is known for being quite not authoritarian, but definitely doesn't question authority very much as a populace. So I would say that something like this would unfortunately be probably not hard to get through if you really wanted to get something like this

through. And generally people who are into crypto in Australia, we have a very big gambling culture, unfortunately. They like the speculative side of it. So they probably, you know, they probably wouldn't cry over the, over something like this. I would love an amendment to, you know, kind of all worldwide charters of freedom and in Bill of Rights and Constitutions. It's like a right to private keys, to own your own private keys. I think that's very important to enthrine. In the meanwhile, though, Bankless Nation, I guess the message is stay vigilant for these sorts of things. Banning peer-to-peer transactions is an absolute no-go. We got a few more things to discuss, Anthony. I want to get your take. Well, it's actually a question from the Bankless Nation

about optimism switching to ZK proofs and the idea of a super chain. In the super chain environment, will we still need a bridge? I also want to talk to you about Mark Zuckerberg's new Twitter killer and see if that is worth setting up your early thoughts on that. A few other things, what are your holdings during the bear market? We'll get to all of those things and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. You know Uniswap.

It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card, with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on main net, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswap mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web 3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts,

or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defy with the Uniswot mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defy. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1,

producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be.

Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Questions from the nation this week, this one from Kyle Kaplan, Bankless Citizen. The question goes, so if optimism switches from optimistic fraud proofs to ZK proofs and chooses the ZK Prover, will it reduce the need to bridge between networks? And would that make it the hyper-superchain? Well, the hyper super chain, that's a new marketing that I've not heard of. But this idea of optimism switching from optimistic fraud proofs to ZK proofs, choosing the ZKSink prover, what does that do for bridges in general when an application deploys on the super chain,

let's say. Do we obviate the need for bridges? So from my understanding, the bridge is enshrined as part of the stack, right? So the bridge is still there, but it's enshrined. in that all, for example, the OP stack chains can use that bridge and have the same security guarantees without having to have like extra assumptions baked in like these third party bridges. That's my understanding of it. And I think that's true for any enshrined bridge. So, for example, there is an enshrined bridge on Ethereum Layer 1 for the optimism chain, right?

The OP mainnet chain that you send your funds to and then you get them on OP mainnet. And that gives you the security of Ethereum L1, obviously, because of the OP mainnet chain. it's on Ethereum L1. So if you have a bridge enshrined as part of the actual tech stack, which is what OP stack is doing with the super chain from my understanding, then you would get the kind of similar benefits to that. In terms of choosing like the ZK Sync Prover instead of something else, instead of their homegrown prover,

I don't know for sure what this would look like, but my intuition says that it wouldn't make it like a hyper super chain because you would still have, you would still have separate networks from my understanding. You would still have like the networks built on the ZK Sync ZK stack, the ones built in the OP stack. And while they're sharing the same Pruvar, they probably have other parts of their stack that are different enough

that it wouldn't give you the same guarantees. But I think it's still very early days for stuff like this. I don't actually think anyone would have a good answer to this just yet. Maybe some of the people that are actually developing this would have those answers. But yeah, it's still very early. And the fact that Carl is even asking this question speaks to how close he's paying attention to these sorts of things. I mean, to the extent we can kill and eliminate the need for like bridges with bad like multi-sig bridges, these types of things. There was a story this week that we didn't get to jump on.

But this was a let's see, another bridge that had a massive hack or something. I think I deleted the. There's poly network. They had a hack. Yeah, they've already been hack. And apparently they like again. The second hack for this bridge, right? I mean, it was a multi-sig one where they compromised, I think.

I don't know if it was like a two or four or something, but they compromised multiple signers on the multi-sig and that's how they were able to do it. Yeah. So with this type of technology, like kind of the super chain technology, I don't know, I don't know about the ZK sync Prover. We are in layer two is kind of obviating the need for these types of multi-sig bridges. Like we're trying to eliminate bridges because bridges are. are basically security risks.

Is that an oversimplification or is that roughly right? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, there are different types of bridges, right? Like there's bridges that literally just act as an account that does like balances where it takes in assets and then spits out an IOU on the bridge chain. And then that could be protected by a multi-sig. Then there are bridges that more look like unisop liquidity pools,

for example, where you essentially are trading out of an asset into another one in order to get out of that L2 into another L2 and the people providing liquidity are the ones taking on that risk essentially, that withdrawal risk or whatever. And then there are the kind of enshrined bridges where, as I said, optimism has one, arbitram one has one, where you send funds to on a firm L1 and then you get issued them on the L2. So there's different types of contracts. But yeah, those kind of like easy bridges I like to call them, the ones that have multi-sigs

on them, those need to go. Like we do not need those. We need to kill the easy bridges, that's for sure. Some takes of the week. Okay, threads. Is threads worth checking out? So this is, of course, Elon put through some Twitter rate limiting this week. There was a maximum number of tweets that Twitter users could actually view. I didn't get to a point where I exceeded that maximum. It didn't affect me. But a lot of people are talking about the meta competitor, the Zuckerberg competitor called Threads. I think

crypto Twitter was talking about it a little bit. Is this worth looking at? switching to you. I mean, for me personally, Anthony, I'm really waiting for like a Web 3 Twitter alternative replacement, something like a lens or a farcaster to really take off. I'm not so excited about another centralized company. So you switch from Elon to Zuckerberg. Like, wow. But it does feel like, I don't know about you, but like Twitter is, they're making some interesting design choices these days. And I don't know that that's a good thing. It hasn't proven to be a good thing to me. Have you taken a look at threads? What's your overall take here? Yeah, I mean, I sign up for an account because I already have an Instagram account. So it like

forces you to sign up with with Instagram, which is I guess like, typical meta because they want all their products to be integrated with each other. So it makes sense. But yeah, I mean, I've spent the last, you know, five, six years building up a Twitter audience, building up that network effect. You know, everyone's already on there. I don't have the energy to do that again on one of these platforms, right? I really don't. And, and people really do. undervalue how hard it is to break a network effect. Like, I agree with you that Twitter has been going downhill since Musk bought it. I think that they're actually going to go bankrupt relatively soon because they're just

bleeding cash. They're bleeding cash so badly that the reason they put in that API limit was because Musk didn't want to renew the Google cloud contract with Google. Because it expired. It's shutting the lights off. You can't do that. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think what's going to happen is that like, Elon probably, I don't know if he's ego is going to let him do this, but he's probably going to have to sell Twitter, right? Like, unless he changes something to a point where it can actually keep making money and keep the lights on, I don't know how he's going to keep the lights on when it's bleeding so much money as is, because it's not cheap to host something like Twitter. And then threads comes along. Threads, okay, it's going to be run better than Twitter just because it doesn't, you know, it's, it's new.

It's, it's based on like Facebook and Instagram and they're run all right. You know, they're not doing any erratic moves or anything like that, but it doesn't have the network effect. and can it build their network effect? Can it actually peel people away from Twitter? I actually don't think so because, as you said, it's basically just a clone in that it is centralized. It's the same product, essentially. It's not offering anything new, right?

And also, on top of that, it gives me Google Plus vibes. I don't know if you remember Google Plus, but it was the social media platform that Google created to try and kill Facebook. Yeah, and it didn't kill Facebook at all. It got shut down eventually because it just didn't really do anything good. So, yeah, as much as like Threads has that massive kickstart or headstart of a network effect with the existing Instagram and Facebook user bases and stuff like that, I don't think that it's what they've got, the product they've got right now is enough to draw people over. It's literally a Twitter clone. It doesn't offer anything new. I hope that crypto can kind of do something here.

Some sort of Web3 social messaging type tool with a crypto wallet embedded. There's something there. And we haven't quite found it, but I'm hopefully that is the real kind of Twitter killer. One thing that's interesting, though, is these platforms like Twitter, the idea of them becoming basically like data sources for AIs and AIs being kind of free riders. This is a comment from a Twitter user saying, the timing of Elon Musk data scraping rules, basically limiting the Twitter API, an open AI widening the release of browsing function are not a coincidence.

pretty much all the content IP is going to need to move behind paywalls to blockchain or something similar to charge micro transactions for interactions and page views. I don't understand how ad-based internet business models are going to work if you can create content that's gobbled up by an LLM once and then shown to thousands of other people who might ask a similar question. Are advertisers paying when chat GPT says clicking on a link? This idea that like kind of the LLMs and the chat GPs of the world are basically just

slurping up all of the Twitter content, all of the web content, all of these things, and kind of breaking the ad model that has held Web 2 for so long because they're essentially free riders on top of all of this free content. I think that's a fascinating idea and part of what might be going on at the highest level. Do you have me thoughts? Yeah, I mean, maybe, but like Musk is involved with OpenAI. I mean, he's one of the early, I guess, like investors, I think, and also on the board. So I don't know if I buy that argument, but at the same time, I get this, right?

I get that it is definitely a concern. But there's also the other side of it where a lot of these kind of Web 2 companies existed on VC money. They were subsidized by VC money, maybe not Twitter, but other companies that have existed. And their IPO and their stock went to crap because they're not actually worth what they say they were. They don't make any money, right? They have revenue, but they don't not have profit because they were just subsidized by VCs. and a lot of them have to raise their prices now because that subsidy has run out because obviously VCs aren't interested in subsidizing anything once it's IPOed

because they've exited, right? They're gone. That's that investment done. So there is a point here about data scraping and stuff like that. But if you're just going to paywall everything or limit things, what's going to end up happening is that the open platforms are just going to win anyway. I don't believe that this is going to succeed. I don't believe you can paywall everything.

It's interesting. I do feel like there's some sort of evolution the internet is going to take in the 2020s that it's going to surprise everyone. One other take I want to run by you this week. It's a take that I tweeted. It's one of those tweets where I don't know if I fully agree with it myself, but I partially agree. And it's just calling to question a mood right now. And that mood is crypto feels lost right now. Maybe it's just crypto Twitter, but the vibe, the mood has felt off in a lot of ways. At least some people have felt this way. And my question is, how can it find its way? I think you answered this question in the tweet. A lot of people had a lot of great answers, including like, hey, Ryan, you're wrong.

Crypto isn't lost at all. Like I think you said something to the fact that, yeah, maybe crypto is lost, but Ethereum isn't. That was your take. What do you think about this feeling, this idea that that, that, that, that crypto is lost. Do you think that's just bare market sentiment? What's your overall take? Yeah. So my reply actually got like a few replies that were upset with me and they basically said, this is just the same thing as when Bitcoin maximalists say, you know, Bitcoin not crypto, which wasn't my intention at all. I said, you know, crypto may be lost, but Ethereum isn't.

Yeah, the Ethereum is doing just fine. And I didn't, yeah, I didn't say like, I see someone's replied, you know, this feels like a Bitcoin not. moment for ETH bros. I'm like, I didn't say that at all, right? Crypto is a really broad term. If you say crypto, you're referencing literally every single project in the crypto ecosystem, right? Every single token, coin, and whatever you want to, whatever you want to call it.

Including Sam Bankman-Fried and FTCS and Celsius and Alex Mishensky and all that. Yes. And most people would agree that 99% of that stuff is garbage, right? This trash. It's going to zero. It's literally not valuable. So I don't know why people will. attacking me over this. But that's why I said crypto may be lost because crypto consists of a lot of

that stuff, whereas the actual true signal, such as Ethereum, and there are other signals out there. I'm not going to name any specific ones, but there are other signals out there. They are doing just fine. But for me, I said Ethereum because that's the one I focus on, it's why I pay attention to. That's one I could speak to specifically if someone asked me. And it really does feel like Ethereum is doing fine from that lens because we have the L2's thriving. Defi is having a renaissance with DeFi, a new DeFi project coming online, real world assets, stuff like that. So that's why I said this. But generally, yeah, I mean, I agree with your take that that crypto feels lost because

there was this kind of narrative in 2021, the multi-chain narrative, right? That was one of the big narratives. Like everyone's saying it's going to be a multi-chain world. We're all going to use these different L-1s. They're all going to talk to each other, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, okay. Like I got that thesis back then, but even though I didn't agree with it, but I think that's This has mostly been disproven that it's not just going to be all these different L1s.

It's going to be L2s. And where do L2s live predominantly and almost all of them? Ethereum, right? So that's why Ethereum is doing just fine because we've just seen crypto explode and just go to zero, basically a lot of the time, whereas Ethereum has thrived. So that was my main take on it. Yeah, there's certainly more like blockchain Ethereum infrastructure being built than at any point in history.

It's like absolutely phenomenal to see. This is Eric Wall's take, which I thought was also interesting. What you're experiencing is the realization that crypto isn't the new coolest thing. AI is the new coolest thing. That might be part of it too, right? Crypto really had kind of a cultural moment in 2021, 2022, and then sort of an epic downfall in culturally. And now everyone is talking about AI.

And so I think maybe that mood has sort of propagated across crypto Twitter as well. But let's turn to something maybe even more interesting, Anthony, which is what you're bullish on. And the thing I want to ask you this week is actually, what are you holding in terms of assets through this bear market? So I tweeted out earlier. So I was just thinking about it, things I'm not selling, things I'm holding during the bear market. I still have some Bitcoin. Layer two tokens, to me, they're still very bullish.

And blue chip, defy. Those are probably my highest conviction holdings. A lot of other things that are like not as high. conviction, but these are things I'm holding during, I held during the bull run and I'm continuing to hold during the bear cycle. My take is selling these in the bear market would be a colossal mistake. How about you? What does your list look like in terms of categories of things that you are holding during the bear market? Yeah, I think we have probably similar lists here. I haven't actually bought anything except eighth for quite a while now with like

fresh fiat or anything like that. I usually just just buy eighth. But in terms of positions I've held for a while, I mean, I've been public about Maddick being my kind of like second largest holding. And I've held that for a while. That, as you mentioned, we're advisors. So that was kind of from there. But I could have, you know, I could have sold it all and be done with it. But I held it because I'm obviously bullish on Polygon as a project, but not to single them

out. I'm bullish on Al2s generally. And Polygon is obviously at the heart of it, but along with optimism and arbitram. And a lot of these things I'm an angel investor in, too. So I have a long list of companies that I've Angel invested in. Some are liquid, some are not, right? There's vesting times and stuff attached to it. But in terms of public market stuff, it really is, yeah, just 8th.

The L2 tokens generally, you know, as I mentioned, defy. Defy has been a funny one for me because I don't currently hold any, like, large positions in defy tokens. I have Angel invested in a few of the new DeFi protocols that I was talking about, the ones that feel like you're actually innovating. but I haven't bought any on the open market or anything like that in a little while. And then I have some other tokens like Rockapool, RPL because I'm a Nodeop Radar and part of the ODAL as well, which you're a part of too, or which bankers is a part of, I should say.

So yeah, just stuff like that. But I would say it's all heavily concentrated within the Ethereum ecosystem. I own no Bitcoin, like literally zero Bitcoin. I own no Alt-L-1s. The last Alt-L-1 I had was Dot and I had that because or Pocodot. And I had that because I bought it at the ICO end of 2017. And then it went live like three years later and I traded it for Eath. And that turned out to be a good trade because ETH went up after that.

But other than that, no, it's just heavily concentrated in the Ethereum ecosystem. And I'm the same as you. Like, I think selling any of that stuff now is a colossal mistake because bear markets aren't for selling, right? Unless you're forced to sell for whatever reason or unless you're selling something that you truly believe is just dead and is not going to go back up in the bull market. But other than that, no, I feel like, yeah, selling during these bear markets and these crab markets, just not the way to play it. I feel like you should be accumulating your favorite things.

You think they're going to do well. And then if you want to sell, you sell when things are hot when people are coming up with narratives like super cycle again. Yeah, I mean, look, investing is as simple as a sell when it's going up and you buy when it's down, right? I mean, I don't know. It's funny. You say it's simple, but like that, you know, you unpack that and complexities approach infinity. because it should be that simple. But humans being humans, we make it complex.

We do definitely make it complex. Speaking of that, we got the meme of the week this week, Anthony Sissano. So this is a tweet that I think both of us found humorous. If you believe in the Gansler step-down news, you're exactly the person Gansler want to protect. So there's a lesson here in this. I guess retail needs to up its game, be smarter about trusting sources. Is that the lesson that this? meme is sharing for us? Yeah, I mean, there's layers to this meme. And, you know, I, I, I loved it because

basically what it's saying is that if you don't want to be regulated, stop being someone who should be regulated. Like, that's my takeaway from it. Like, if you want personal responsibility, right, you need to take personal responsibility when things are bad. Yeah, if you don't want to be treated like a child, don't act like a child. I mean, that's disparaging on children, but like have some You have some personal responsibility here. That's what basically crypto is. It's all about taking responsibility over your money, your finances, your life decisions. Hopefully you're ready for that.

Bankless Nation, this has been the roll up this week. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. By the way, can you do a quick tell us about the daily way, okay? Tell us about the refuel and what you're doing every day on your channel. And I think you guys are spinning up a new podcast. you and Eric Connor as well. Not, I should say, resurrecting an old podcast and making that new again. So give us the latest there.

Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of people, if they know me already, they'll know me from the Daily Gway, which is kind of, it's like it's an Ethereum media, I guess, ecosystem. Similar to bankless. But it is definitely more of a kind of like public good where it's like nothing's monetized or anything like that. But I've done that on purpose because it's really just. me every weekday, you know, going for about 30 minutes talking about Ethereum, things happening

in Ethereum for anyone who wants that and going deeper into a lot of things as well, like pretty deep on something sometimes. People will know me for my rants on there about certain things. Not, not bearish rants, bullish rants, as they like to call them. I go on my bullish rants a lot. But, but yeah, it's basically just there for people that want to stay up to date with Ethereum. But I also do it a lot. I guess I get asked this question a lot by people. Like, why do you do it? You know, why do you do it for free? You know, you could easily monitor ties this, blah, blah. I'm like, well, for me, it's just like something that I do to keep myself engaged as well, like, and, and keep myself up to date with things. Because I find that the more

I repeat something, the more it just sticks in my head. I know that's not, you know, a unique insight, but for me, that's, that's kind of like how I work really well to retain information. And I feel like it's a waste to just keep it in my head. So I want to, I want to impart that kind of knowledge and wisdom on other people. And you mentioned the podcast that has been resurrected with Eric Connor. Yeah, So for those who are OGs, you'll know that Eric Connor and I used to do a podcast called Into the Ether. Back, we started that in late 2018. We did that once a week where we recapped the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. And then we kind of sunset etob during the, I guess, like, bull market, essentially.

And then we've resurrected it recently where every two weeks, Eric Connor and I on the Daily Gway, will be doing a podcast for about 45 minutes an hour, just talking about our views on Ethereum. And Eric brings a lot of unique insights to, you know, to the refuel, or not the refill, to the Daily Gway. Because, you know, people listening to me all the time, you know, you can kind of get used to my insights, but Eric has really great takes on things. So I'm excited to be back with him on that one there. But yeah, thanks, Ryan, for letting me do my little, my little shill there.

Well, big plus one on those resources. No one works harder and goes deeper than Anthony Sasano in the Daily Gway. And really excited to see Into the Ether being resurrected in this new forum. It's always been one of my favorite podcasts. Bankless Nation, got to end with this. as we always do. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky.

You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everyone.