Bankless - ROLLUP: Wonderland $TIME | Crypto Price Bear Market? | Odell Beckham Jr Bitcoin | Twitter NFTs

Starting point is 00:00:00 News time, David. Oh, boy, here we go. Are we ready to get into this? Here we go. This is a lot. This is going to be a mess. Let's do it. What do we even talk about?

Starting point is 00:00:06 What do we even call this? How do we even start? Hey, guys, it's the fourth week of January. David, what time is it? Ryan, it's the Friday weekly roll-up. Where? We roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, especially this week. Some drama has gone on this week.

Starting point is 00:00:26 So we're going to cover all of that and more because it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-up. I don't know where to start with this. up, David, but I think it's got to be somewhere with bare market, okay? Because we've been feeling some bare market vibes. After we hit the stop record button, after the last podcast, something happened in the market. We're going to discuss it. It was not good. It was down only. It felt like. It was the biggest oof we've seen thus far. Yes. Stacked oofs. Massive raises as well. That's still happening. So we'll talk about that. Ark investments. Kathy Woods firm

Starting point is 00:00:56 has been on the podcast. She just put out some insane price targets for Bitcoin and Eith. I guess they're not bullish. We'll talk about that report. They're not bearish. They are very bullish. Yes. Excuse me. They are not bearish. They are very bullish. Hayden Adams got canceled by his bank. Is Hayden Adams going bankless? We'll talk about that to you. Forced banklessness.

Starting point is 00:01:15 And what about this last one? This is some of the drama you were alluding to you. So, uh, man, a lot of different names here. Blast from the past. Quadriga was a Canadian exchange. Apparently the co-founder of the shady exchange popped up on the radar. He's a multi-sig manager for some pretty large D-5 projects. Who knew?

Starting point is 00:01:33 We got to discuss that as well. An ex-convicted felon for identity theft is now discovered as the Anon multi-sig signer for the Wonderland project. And a lot of drama is currently unfolding as Ryan and I were prepping this agenda. So we're going to do our best to unpack all of that story. It's some drama. This is crypto, right? It's like bare bull markets, you know, change in the world, all this amazing thing.

Starting point is 00:02:00 people making money, and then we've got like just entertainment. So straight shenanigans. Some people are here for the money. Some people are here for the tech. Some people are here for the political change. Some people are just here for like the popcorn and entertainment, man, because that happens on a weekly basis as well. And I feel like it's one of those weeks too.

Starting point is 00:02:15 Yeah. So definitely grab your coffee because we have a lot to go through. And if it's for some reason in the evening time for you, also grab the popcorn because it's going to be one of those. Coffee and popcorn bowl. All right, we've got to start here, David, because you know the last couple of rollups we've been talking about tax optimization stuff. and I caught this from Odell Beckham Jr.

Starting point is 00:02:32 You know who that is, Ryan? He's one of my favorite athletes. As you know, David. He plays sports. Okay, he plays sports. Well, he started getting his sports paycheck in Bitcoin. I think this happened last year, maybe the year before. Anyway, here is a tweet from an article.

Starting point is 00:02:50 On November 12, Odell Beckham Jr. signed a deal with the Rams worth 750K. Nice. He announced he would take that in Bitcoin. Ooh, also nice. At that time, Bitcoin was worth $64,000. Today, it's worth $35,000. Today, that deal is worth $412,000.

Starting point is 00:03:10 That's where things get interesting. So he lost 50% because Bitcoin went down. But, you know, holders are holders. Bitcoiners are Bitcoins. Still okay. One Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, but here's the problem, okay? Taxes come in, David. Odell will be taxed on the 750K.

Starting point is 00:03:25 and the federal and California state tax is about 50%. So that means net. O'Dell has only made 35,000 K or 35K, excuse me, from the Rams contract this year. So he signed a deal for three quarters of a million dollars, and his net on that is going to be $35,000. Because, Ryan, you know what he didn't do? He did not optimize his taxes.

Starting point is 00:03:53 He did not optimize his taxes, David. That's why we talk about this. And you know what? I'm just going to fit this in because crypto IRA is something that I think people need to have. And this wouldn't have worked for Adele Jr's case. But this could work if you are a retail investor because it is a tax-free account, tax-deferred until you retire. So any trades in and out, any income you receive to this account, any staking, anything like that is tax-free. You don't have to pay it.

Starting point is 00:04:23 And I've set this up a couple of years ago. It was a lot harder back then. But crypto IRA, Alto IRA has created an easy button for this. So I encourage everyone listening as sort of a tax optimizer reminder. Don't be like Odell Beckham, okay? Figure out your taxes. This is one step you can take. It's one small step you can take.

Starting point is 00:04:45 Open up a crypto IRA, start depositing, roll over a previous 401K, start depositing, turn that into crypto, and you don't have to worry about this. You don't have to pay taxes. You can find out more at altoir.com slash bankless and check that out. There you go. Tax lesson for the day. Yeah. Don't lose 95% of your paycheck to depreciating crypto and taxes.

Starting point is 00:05:08 That's such a bummer, man. Sorry, O'Dell. Sorry that happened. Let's talk about markets, though, David. This is the sad music, bare territory. We are down, down. What's Bitcoin showing us? Bitcoin started the week.

Starting point is 00:05:21 at $43,000 and has gone down 12% hit a low of $33,500. So almost down a whole $10,000. And it's currently at the price of $36,200. Oof. It gets worse. It gets worse. Ether. It gets worse.

Starting point is 00:05:39 Ether. It's the start of the week at $3,250. Hit a low of $2,220. So down a full $1,000 on the week. We are currently clocking in at $2,450 down a massive 20% on the week. Rutt, bro, rut, row. We'll take a look at that from all-time highs in just a minute here, too. So bad going down, people feeling bearish.

Starting point is 00:06:07 I think a lot of people have started capitulating and saying that this is a bare market. Maybe we should define that in a little bit. But before we do, let's talk about a few more numbers here. ETH Bitcoin ratio is going down as well. What happened this week? Yeah, when markets go down, the ETH-BTC ratio goes down. We start of the week at 0.075. We are currently at 0.067.

Starting point is 00:06:28 So down a pretty significant chunk on the seven-day. Bear market indicator as well. And the bed index, that's got to be a story of down as well. Yeah, start of the week at $123, currently clocking in at $98? Oh, wow, it's up from when I wrote down these notes, but still down 13.6% on the week. Not as down bad as ETH is, but still down on the week. So let's talk about this. I put out this like, you know, Twitter survey.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Are we in a bear market now? 60% of those answered said yes. 40% said no. What do you think, David? Are we in a bear market? I don't actually think people are allowed to, according to markets, right? Markets determine whether we're in bare markets, not Twitter polls. But sometimes it doesn't really matter.

Starting point is 00:07:13 Just sentiment is like when people are feeling bearish, bearishness kind of begets bearishness right so like now that we've been talking about being bearish on this podcast for like the last five minutes everyone else is probably feeling really down and bearish right like these are how like market psychology's kind of work uh so bear market is it's a vibe it's a feeling um do you feel like we're in a bear market i actually don't you don't feel like we're up on the year we're up on 365 days by a lot by like two s okay not not up since january but up on the year yes yes we definitely it depends on your your holding horizon doesn't it i mean uh do you do you remember back in the days of 80 dollar eth yes wasn't that long ago still less than two years ago

Starting point is 00:07:58 that that was going on really yeah oh yeah 80 dollars in march 20 20 20 do you remember right less than two years also march 2019 also march 2018 80 dollars like three times but so i think like you know we've said before under 3K, Eath, we're not feeling great in general. So this is, you know, not feeling great. The question is, how long does this last and how low do we go, right? That to me is kind of the definition of the bear. It's like sentiment on Twitter just changes on a dime. But the question is, is this another crypto winter or are we going to come out of this? Arthur Hayes, founder of CEO of Bitmax, actually wrote a great post. And, you know, he's a traitor, but like, has, I think, some insight into this sort of thing that we can glean. You could read the

Starting point is 00:08:44 entire post, it's a link in the show notes, but he talks about resistance levels of 28,500 Bitcoin price for ETH and 1700, sorry, 28,500 for Bitcoin and 1700 for Eith. And he says, I don't believe in the bottom until these levels are retested. If the levels hold amazing, this prong has been met. If it doesn't, then I believe a mega liquidation candle will happen in the 20K to 28K range for Bitcoin and the 1,300 to 1700 range for ether. And then he goes on to say, if we breach the previous all-time highs, which were 20K for Bitcoin and 1400 for ether, respectively, he doesn't even want to think about it. So that's like a worst-case scenario than it's like down, down, down.

Starting point is 00:09:35 But he feels like we're going to test resistance at these levels, 1,700 for ETH, 2,800 for Bitcoin before all is said and done. What's your take on this? Oh, I also don't want to think about it. Can we move on? Well, what do you think? You think this happens? How long is this going to last? There's a sentiment that I've had where like bear markets are when like you see the market coming to a decision point and it just always goes down. And we've kind of seen that happen like three times over the last like three, four weeks. It's like, oh, and it goes down. And it goes down. But like we're also just following macro. Like the difference between this bear market is downtrend versus the last one is like the last one ether went from like $6 up to $1,400 on this fake ICO phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Meanwhile, what's happening right now is that the Federal Reserve, which is completely an exogenous to crypto, is raising interest rates and doing quantitative tightening. And so like it's less not to say that crypto prices didn't get out over their ski tips. they were pretty high. $4,800-eater, pretty high. Like $69,000 Bitcoin. Nice, also pretty high. But, like, it's not, like, it's much more, that kind of felt much more real.

Starting point is 00:10:52 Crypto feels much more real this time. And now this market pullback is simply just because the Federal Reserve is making the price of money higher. And so it's really a function of, we are tied to macro. And as soon as the S&P stops going down, crypto will stop going down, probably.

Starting point is 00:11:07 Knock on wood. Different flavor. Different flavor of Y down. 2018. Yeah, I'm going to take on that later. We'll say that to the end. But a few other things to do the carnage this week. The top 10 coins down by percentage from all-time high.

Starting point is 00:11:21 I always think these numbers are interesting. Doge is down 83% from its all-time high. These are sorted in order. Shib token, another dog token, down 77%. Cardano down 67%. Solana, 65%. That's Avalanche. 61% ETH in the middle of the pack, 52% down from all-time high. Bitcoin, 50%, Binance, 49%, Matic, 47%,

Starting point is 00:11:48 Luna, 41%. So it's quite a spread, yet the coins you'd expect, like ether and Bitcoin, they're kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd expect them to be leased down from all-time high. And actually, Maddoch and Luna and Binance are the least down from all-time high. So I think that's interesting to track as we get into the bare market. Only 50% down, you know? Only 50%. Oh, there's a silver lining, David. 50%. We've seen that before. In previous dips, the typical average crypto dip is somewhere between 20 and 40%. And this dip is significantly higher than that. But also, like, we've seen 50% pullbacks before. For Bitcoin, David, it's happened four times in the last four years. Yeah. So like, it's an annual tradition.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Like, we all know crypto's volatile. Like this, there's, I think there's plenty of, like, rationale to say that, like, this is just the one big pullback. Granted, like, bankless is known for being perpetually bullish. And so maybe, like, I have infinite amounts of conviction for crypto. And sometimes that blinds me to short-term price movements and a lack of willingness to accept. Just hold through them, though.

Starting point is 00:12:59 Who cares? Like, there is actually a silver lining. And I think we were talking about this a little bit, which is, like, 50% pull back, you get to see who the tourists are and who the settlers are, right? And the tourists start to get scared. They start to leave. Okay, the settlers that know why they bought with conviction, they're the ones who stay, and it gets a lot less noisy. I think you've got some lessons to at the end. We'll share in the takes section. But let's look at our friends in the equities world. Stonks. What are we doing here, man? It's pretty volatile. Nasdaq.

Starting point is 00:13:29 NASDAQ investor sentiment is worse now than it was in March of 2020 during the big liquidation candle back then and historically when everyone is like oh it's a bear market it turns around and so you can see that red line down the bottom corner the market sentiment is so in the gutter and typically like look at look at how low it was the last time it was this low it was literally the bottom of the march dip that there was a COVID crash the COVID and then it was up only from then on out right so you know it's kind of weird that all of this much ado, given, you know, because of Jerome Powell, because of Fed intervention, you know, raising rates and just even whispering the raise of rates. This is a stat on the S&P. It had a really bouncy day. I think this was January 24th, so a few days ago. What happened that day?

Starting point is 00:14:20 Yeah, so we had the, this is the day where Bitcoin and Ether bottomed and then also researched just a little bit. And the tweet, this tweet says, the S&P 500 has recovered from an intraday loss of more than 4% only three times. January, and so in October of 2008 and again in October of 2008 again, I guess the housing crisis, the SMP went down negative 4.5% and negative 2.4.2% respectively, and then also respectively closed up 4.2%. So an intraday move of 8% and then 1.2% the next time. And so in January 24th, like three days ago, the S&P 500 went down more than 4% and then recovered positively. We had a green day, which is crazy.

Starting point is 00:15:10 So, and then, yeah, like crazy, crazy volatile moves. Markets don't know what to do at this point. Even stocks up and down, don't know where they're going. We'll see how that continues in the future. but let's talk about some happier news, which is defyometrics, still knocking out of the park. Unistop just crossed a milestone.

Starting point is 00:15:30 They now have greater eth and stable coin volume than Coinbase and Binance. Love it. Okay, so it's happening. Decentralized exchanges are taking on the centralized exchanges. I think that's great news

Starting point is 00:15:41 from a big picture perspective. Some other things going on. Phantom is becoming the third largest defy protocol by value locked. I consider that sort of a, I mean, it's its own, layer one. It's sort of a side chain, very small set pool of validators, but they are onboarding more people to crypto as well. And some projects surged 52% last week, you know, to bring the total

Starting point is 00:16:08 value lock to all-time highs on Phantom. Any thoughts on that, David? No thoughts. Congratulations to Phantom. Overtaking Binance smart chain, no easy task. Coinbase is listing Solana ecosystem some tokens as well. And I think this is part of their attempt to just list everything, just be like credibly neutral and be listing maximalists and not maximalist to any particular chain. Any thoughts on that, David? Yeah, the hard part about this is that Solano tokens aren't ERC 20 tokens. It's its own standard. And it's easy for Coinbase to just add another ERC 20 token because they already have all the implementations. It's just like add a new contract address.

Starting point is 00:16:47 Which is similar to anything on the EVM, like Avalanche, for example. year C20. Solana tokens are a different beast because of how they just are a completely different standard than the EVM. So that's why Solana tokens haven't really been able to get on the Coinbase Exchange up until now. And Coinbase is now signaling that, hey, we're working on getting the Salana tokens on a Coinbase.

Starting point is 00:17:06 So really important step for growth for the Solana ecosystem. Arc Invest has taken a hit from a stock price. But they put out this fantastic report. And it was their big insights report, I believe, for 20, 22, what's going to happen in the future. They are, of course, we talked to Kathy Wood a few months ago, just bullish exponential growth curves, bullish technology in general. And the largest section of their report was actually on crypto.

Starting point is 00:17:35 What were a few highlights from that, David, that we should talk about? The price targets, Ryan. I think that's the whole. They have a fantastic report that covers so many different things. But of course, since we're in the market section, we want to talk about the price targets of what they predicted Bitcoin and Ether to do. So they say that one Bitcoin could exceed $1 million by 2030. That is eight years.

Starting point is 00:17:59 So according to Arc, what's Bitcoin at right now? $33,000. That $33,000 could turn into $1 million by the end of 2030. If you hold. That's the Hopian bankless listeners signed up for a little less to start. Arc is also saying that Ethereum's market cap could exceed $20 trillion in the next 10. 10 years. And so for those that want to do that math, that's $180,000 ether, $180,000 per ether. And that these two predictions put Bitcoin and ether roughly at comparable market caps.

Starting point is 00:18:33 She, Kathy Wood and Arc says that Bitcoin will have a $21 million trillion market cap by 2030. And then they also say that Ethereum will have a 20 trillion market cap in the next 10 years. So just two years longer than that. So comparable market prices. Are they more bullish than us, David? What happened here? Couldn't be. Couldn't be.

Starting point is 00:18:53 20 trillion's a big number. My price started for Ether is infinity, Ryan. There you go. All right, guys, we will be back with the releases of the week, the hot news items, everything else you come to expect from a roll-up. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest defy-apps, the Polygon ecosystem

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Starting point is 00:20:40 assets quickly and securely, go to across.to to bridge your assets between ETH, optimism, arbitrum, or boba networks. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet. But the ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Leisure Hardware Wallet, the Leisure Live app, and soon the CL CryptoLife card powered by Leisure.

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Starting point is 00:21:43 we have to start here with this release in the midst of the bear market when prices were we're getting sland if this is the bear market we're not in the midst of the bear market i guess not comes ahead at the beginning of it uh twitter just released a pfp profile feature to link your nfti to your twitter profile instead of the the classic twitter circle for profile it would be displayed as a hexagon so they released this fantastic commercial that we're looking at right here and the feature simultaneously. How big of a deal is this? It's just lovely to see Web 2 platforms adopt Web3 stuff.

Starting point is 00:22:22 This isn't, in my mind, I'm a little bit underwhelmed by this, but I'm also just not going to just be a negative Nancy and just say, hey, Twitter, nice job for doing NFT verification. There are some kinks that need to be worked around in the sense that I can just like take a screenshot of a JPEG, mint that as an NFT, and then boom, I have a hexagon with my fake, fake NFT and it's kind of like it's kind of like a workaround but like you then you can like talk about verification via open C APIs stuff like that it's a great fantastic first step people are loving it people

Starting point is 00:22:54 having a fantastic time not everyone though there's been some pushback um like some yeah there's been a little bit like if I see a hexagon you know I just automatically unfollow have you not not not from the crypto people though not at all well fuck them from the from the from the from the like we hate NFT type community. Sorry for sure. There's been that sentiment. But like, okay, so did you do it? Have you actually tried it? Well, no, because my profile picture is my crypto punk, but with some Photoshop stuff going on. So like I have my cool cat hanging out on the hat of my crypto punk. And so like that's not an NFT. That's two of my NFTs. So I've decided to not do that. So I did it. And some other downsides to you. You have to have Twitter Blue, which is like this

Starting point is 00:23:38 premium service. I've never looked into it until now. I just wanted that to try it. one of the hexagon because it's a new crypto feature. So I do think that Twitter can't always charge for NFTs. Like I think this is going to be table stakes. Every social media platform will have to include this for free just to be competitive. The other thing I would say is the other reason I do think this is a big deal, David, and even this is just a very small step, is because, look, Twitter has 400 million monthly active users. Okay. And like we talked about memetic desire. You know, like when I see someone, with a hexagon profile photo.

Starting point is 00:24:14 I want that too. I want to do that too. And so I do think that there's this, again, this is another example of Web 3 using Web 2 to propagate itself. And that is also bullish. I'm also seeing, like we saw meta last week, Facebook, Instagram, say they were going to add NFT features. Just this week, we'll get to it.

Starting point is 00:24:35 YouTube adding NFT features in the future. So this is also going to have all the other social media platforms bandwagon onto this feature set and add NFT and crypto features. So I think that is good too. Okay. So this was a fun little Twitter spaces where this was something about the Lemons NFT project. I can remember the full name in the lemons. But there was a Twitter spaces and two people showed up with the same NFT as their profile picture. Wait, where is it? On the right side. Yeah. The lemon with a little sprout come out of head. And what is a circle? One's a circle. and one's a hexagon, so you know who's got the real one.

Starting point is 00:25:15 So there's an imposter among us. That's great. That's very cool. And it is great that it validates directly on chain. Little Lemons and FD. Look, Reddit as well. Here's the table stakes you were talking about. Yeah, the table stakes I was talking about.

Starting point is 00:25:30 So Reddit is apparently working on NFT profile picks as well. Everyone's going to do it. Very cool to see that happening. David, this was another cool feature rollout from the makers of Etherscan. Yeah, I saw you having fun. with this. I was having a great time with this. This is called a block scan chat. And what's cool about this is you can basically just send a message from your eth address to some other eth address. So you're like David Hoffman.eath, right, David? Yep. So I sent you a message. Did you ever respond to me?

Starting point is 00:25:58 Oh, that goes to my Argent wallet. I need to get my E&S email. Oh, okay. That's why. Okay. So I just had fun because like it's just you, you know, log in with an eth address. If you have Metamask or something, and I have one that's called bank.eath is my E&S address. And I just started like DMing some people I know. So I just like DMDC. I DMD-San-San-O. I DMD you somewhere in here. I think Vita, like this is DC, a little back and forth.

Starting point is 00:26:26 DC, I didn't know it was him at first. Like I had to actually label his dot-eath. And this is what he replies. He's like, hey, I'm launching a new one-eath giveaway. Please send me your C-phrase to enter. So I'm like, oh, my God. Did you send me your seed phrase? No.

Starting point is 00:26:39 No, I was like, okay, it's my first spam. It's my first spam message. And I'm going to block this account. So I blocked him. And then like I tweeted out that I blocked it. And he was like, hey, why'd you block me? So anyway, it was just fun going back and forth with people. Actually, Vitalik, I sent one to Vitalik.

Starting point is 00:26:55 Iseth honey? I asked him. And he replied, I think it's funny personally. That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. Classic Vitalik. Wait, go back to DC's chat with him. Because you say, what did you say?

Starting point is 00:27:09 Did we talk? I hope we didn't talk about you, David. I don't know. I'm about to make fun of D.C. You say we're living in the future D.C. And D.C. goes, ha, ha, strong 1992 feels. I was born in 1992. There you go. DC investor. Oh, man. That's great. Yeah. You know, D.C. always talks about, like, when you did that layer zero with him, he was talking about, like, the birth of the internet being very much like the birth of crypto. And I was just thinking, like, does David actually understand this? How much of this is he picking up? I had an AIM. I had an AIM account.

Starting point is 00:27:43 There you go. You had an AVE account. This is AIM. This is Ethereum Instant Messenger. So super cool experiment. That just rolled out. You guys can try it. This is another one, David.

Starting point is 00:27:52 What's this? SOS. SOS Market.I.O. A new prediction market on the scene. So in addition to Polly Market, we now have SOS Market, which has prediction markets for stuff. So check them out if you want to go bet on stuff. A lot of ways to bet on stuff in crypto. sure. I'm bullish on this. So Opera just launched a dedicated crypto browser. Okay. Opera is a browser

Starting point is 00:28:14 has like one, two, three percent of market share, so it's not widely used. But they are going all in on crypto features. So imagine if MetaMask was also a web browser. How much more usable? How much more, you know, extensible would it be rather than an extension? And that's what Opera is doing here. A Brave is doing some stuff. And I think, you know, Chrome and Firefox, they're going to be late if they don't join on the bandwagon as well. So it's good to see opera innovating here. Right now this is in beta. I've used it.

Starting point is 00:28:45 It's okay. It's kind of clunky. I can do some of my defy stuff, but not all of it. But I'm sure it'll get better in the future. Anything to add on that, David? More wallace is always better. Google should just buy Metamask. Google should buy Metamask?

Starting point is 00:28:58 Yeah. I don't want that, David. They'll kill it. I don't want them to buy Metamask. Well, the guy to do something, and they have infinite money. That's true. Now consensus does, too. We'll be getting to that shortly.

Starting point is 00:29:11 But let's talk about this. Robin Hood is doing something. What are they adding? Robin Hood deploys beta crypto wallets, allowing select customers to transfer off platform, which is a very needed feature so that you can... About damn time. Yeah, you can actually withdraw the crypto assets that you buy through Robin Hood.

Starting point is 00:29:26 Rather than just buying exposure, you can actually buy crypto assets. Imagine that. This is them trying to catch up to like the rest of the crypto ecosystem, but a really important feature to, you know, unlock... Because they're printing money. with their, with Dogecoin, they just printed a bunch of money. And so they know that there's money there. So they need to just lean into more crypto stuff. And so that's what they're doing here.

Starting point is 00:29:46 Yeah, that's great. I don't know, 30 million users, 40 million users, like a lot of retail users using Robin Hood. So another good onboarding. Also, Zora V3. This is an NFT marketplace. I feel like it's a bit more crypto-native, David, and V3 is rolling out. So what is coming on Zora V3? Yeah, Zora V3, I think is the most like bankless aligned marketplace, NFT marketplace, that it exists. It's very much aligned with the protocol sync thesis. And if the word, the phrase protocol sync thesis doesn't land with you, please go listen to the podcast or read the article on bankless about it. It's a fundamental bankless thesis. And what the protocol synch thesis is in a nutshell is it's a very deep protocol. There are very zero trust assumptions, very little trust assumptions.

Starting point is 00:30:31 Things can be built on top of Zora. NFT marketplaces can be built on top of Zora V3. It's like a meta protocol. And so not only is Zora a marketplace in of itself, but there's the Zora marketplace, and then there's the Zora Protocol, and the Zora Marketplace is built by the Zora team, and so is the Zora Protocol. So they built their own marketplace on top of their own protocol, but many, many, many marketplaces can be built on top of the Zora Protocol. So it's kind of like 0X and Macha, right?

Starting point is 00:30:59 Like, Macha is an application built by the 0X team that uses the 0X protocol. But anybody can use a 0X protocol. And so this is the same kind of idea with going on with Zora, just trying to scale out trustless NFT marketplaces. So they've released their Zora V3 article. There will be a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. And at some point, we're going to be doing some content with Jacob from Zora about this because he's a deep thinker and this is a very bankless ethos marketplace

Starting point is 00:31:29 that we definitely need more of that in the world of NFTs. Almost everything on chain with this style of NFT minting. Actually, William Pister from Metaversal wrote a fantastic intro to Zora v3-2, so you can go check that out at Metaversal.banklesshq.com if you want more on that, too. Let's talk about this. Dala HQ, they're just launching full support for forming Dow LLCs in the U.S. from anywhere in the world. I just thought this was pretty cool, David, because, you know, Wyoming passed that legislation about being able to link DOWs to Wyoming LLC-type entities and get bank accounts.

Starting point is 00:32:06 And now here is a third party Dala who is making that easy. So you can just kind of click and generate, you have a Dow and you can generate an LLC entity for that Dow and register it in Wyoming, get a tax ID, get bank accounts. This is another form of interoperability, another form of bridging. This is a bridge from the new world of crypto to the legacy legal world of nation states. And it's cool to see that get developed. 100%. 100%.

Starting point is 00:32:37 Let's talk about this. Pack.xYZ. What we're looking at? Yeah, so we discovered this after doing our Curve episode last night. That was live streamed Wednesday night. Fantastic episode, by the way.

Starting point is 00:32:50 And pack. dot XYZ is a way to vote on the quality of certain Congress members, certain representatives, or potential representatives on how crypto-aligned they are. So this is your,

Starting point is 00:33:03 are you a friend of crypto-score- card and it's public and everyone gets to vote as to whether they think somebody is crypto aligned or a crypto hater. And it's just basically calling out all the crypto haters out there that are giving them a score. Giving them a score from negative five to positive five. And so there's a number of crypto haters out there. There's also Mitch McConnell comes up top. Elizabeth Warren is a big crypto hater. But this changed from yesterday, David. So yesterday Elizabeth Warren was on the top. Yeah, somebody came in and really dumped some negative. five votes on a lot of people. Yeah, Tom Cotton, John Kennedy, Susan Collins, all got negative

Starting point is 00:33:39 fives. Right. And the community votes on these things, right? Community votes. Yeah, this is community generated. This is kind of like a community generated list. But we also have some winners on there. So we have Erica Rose up top. We have Tom Enmer coming on the podcast in a couple weeks. Pat Toomey, Ted Budd, Cynthia Lummiss. So if you are trying to figure out where your congressman stands, or if you have an opinion about where your congressperson stands, crypto, you can check it out at pack.xy Z. Nice app. Nice website. Also, that curve episode is awesome. Go listen to that too. I learned so much. It felt like, it felt like the finance MMO RPG, like things that I've predicted would come to crypto like years ago. Yeah. Curve Wars are dope. Totally.

Starting point is 00:34:23 This is a Curve Wars episode of Bank. Let's go check that out too. Let's get into the raises. This is a story of raises. All right, here's the theme, right? Just like a few months ago, many of these companies were like already massively valued and now they're just raising at an even higher valuation. I'll start with consensus. So they just raised more, it looks like. They're raising. They have not raised raising. They are raising at a $7 billion valuation. And just not less than two months ago, they raised at a $3.5 billion valuation. These private markets are just cranking. What's the next one, David? Yeah, we got fireblocks clocking in at $8 billion after raising $550 million.

Starting point is 00:35:06 They just raised. They just raised. During the summer, do you remember this? I think the last time we talked about a fireblocks raised, we were also saying how they had just raised. Yes. So, damn, if you think...

Starting point is 00:35:18 $2.2 billion, I think, over the summertime when we talked to Fireblock CEO. Amazing, amazing. And it doesn't end there. We also have Block Damon, which is a public blockchain's infrastructure service, like staking as a service, node stuff, raised $207 million.

Starting point is 00:35:33 at three and a quarter billion dollar valuation. Crazy. It's like the Oprah Winfrey meme. Like, you get to be a unicorn. You get to be a unicorn. Just handing out these billion dollar valuations everywhere. Yeah, meanwhile, while our crypto assets are taking a tumble, the valuations of some of these companies are just through the roof.

Starting point is 00:35:51 And coming in last but not least, FTX US scores an $8 billion valuation after raising $400 million. This is just FTCS's U. subsidy, okay? FDX writ large is like already in the 20s of billions, maybe 30s of billions by now. But I have a take about this, Ryan. What's your take, dear? My take is some gargantuan raises happened last week, and every single one of these investments is going to underperform ETH and BTC over time. Every single one. So if you, as the listener, are frustrated that you were not able to get into some of these rounds, just buy Bitcoin and Ether because they're

Starting point is 00:36:27 going to be the winners. Do you really, do you think that that's just like, that can't be true in 10 years when the price of ether is $20 trillion, as Kathy Wood and team predict, right? So, like, it's got to be the case that some of the value capture happens higher in the stack as the market matures, don't you think? And are you just saying that, like, Ethan Bitcoin still have a ways to go before that point? Or do you always think that Ethan Bitcoin will outperform kind of app layer style investments? I think if we are investing hundreds of millions and dollars into billion dollar valuations, then at that point, like, a lot of that upside has already happened.

Starting point is 00:37:10 And so these are, these are, like, these are people trying to take, like, risk off investments, which is weird because it's risk off investments onto an industry that is living on top of these risk on assets. So just take the risk, like, it's hidden risk because, like, they're trying to, like, oh, we're going to go the safe route and invest in equities rather than crypto assets. But the equities are based on the crypto assets. Just buy the crypto assets. Yeah, this has definitely been true historically. David, let's talk about another true thing historically. That's getting a job in crypto is awesome. And also bullish. Also bullish for you. Yeah, bullish for your life. Bullish for your career. Go to the bankless job boards and see what jobs we have.

Starting point is 00:37:54 Maybe 2022 is the year you get a job in crypto. A few I will read out. Senior Go Rust Engineer at Syndica, a smart contract tech lead at StarX, a senior full-stack engineer at Syndica, a lead data analyst at MakerDAW, a data engineer at Paper Chain, a senior technical writer for Go Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:38:14 the Ethereum Foundation. There's more to go check at the bankless job boards, bankless.pallet.xy, to sign up, check those out, get them in your inbox as well. You know, this is an interesting tweet from the Blockworks folks. It's a whole thread on all of these weird job titles

Starting point is 00:38:31 and the corporations that are starting to hire for them. Nike is hiring a Metaverse director. Who? Who is? Nike. Sorry. I said Nike. A Metaverse director for Nike.

Starting point is 00:38:44 And that's not the only one. They have a whole Metaverse category. So Principal Innovation Engineer, Metaverse category. Senior 3D game designer, Metaverse Engineer at Nike. crazy, crazy. Metaverse engineer at Nike. That is a... Well, I bet they have like, you need three years experience working in the metaverse or something like that. Probably, but seriously, Nike, come post on the bakelustod board too. Yeah, we'll get you a job. We'll get you a true crypto native,

Starting point is 00:39:13 a true person who's actually been working in the metaverse. I mean, there are a few people, maybe three years. Have you been three years in the metaverse? Oh, my whole life. Ever since I got into Diablo, Diablo was in the metaverse. Yeah, that's when you started. All right. Back in the early 90s when you, you know, started the, they joined the internet with DC, right? All right. News time, David. Oh, boy. Are we ready to get into this?

Starting point is 00:39:34 Here we go. It's a lot. It's going to be a mess. Let's do it. What do we even talk about? What do we even call this? How do we even start? This is like, would you call this a defy scandal?

Starting point is 00:39:44 Yes, I think I would. Defy hubbub. But it's scandals layered on top of scandals. Okay. We're invoking an older scandal because it's coming relevant again to talk about this defy scandal. Okay. Okay, let's set the stage a little bit.

Starting point is 00:39:58 We have to talk about Danny Sesta Gali, Danny Sesta on Twitter, who is a DFI builder, very talented DFI builder as well. Some people have compared him to like Andre Cronier. He's like the Andre Cronier of, you know, 2022. Andre, of course, you know, built Wi-Fi, tons of fantastic protocols in 2020. And like, I guess that's some background on him. He's got a guy behind the magic. internet money, wonderland, time, spell, like all of this, apricadabra, all of this, like,

Starting point is 00:40:32 defy mafia. He's got quite a following, too. So, like, how would you describe, like, the tone and tenor of how Danny operates on Twitter and kind of messaging that sort of thing? Very, very populist. His following is very aggressive, of which I personally discovered, accidentally. You've been on the brunt end of that. I've been on the brunt end of this.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Yes, indeed. Yeah. And it's a very, like, working for the people. anti-suits, I work for you, kind of... Big Frog Army leader. He, I think in his

Starting point is 00:41:03 like Twitter bio, he's like CFOC, oh, something, something... Of the Frog Army? Something in the Sea of the Frog Army, yeah, of the Frog Nation. And so, like, very much like a 4chan populist type.

Starting point is 00:41:15 And the projects are interesting, too, because he has a tendency to, like, you know, ship fast, very fast. Forking things, taking whatever... Got to appease the frogs, right? Right. So, Abercadetetet Aber-Kadabber, and he's made a lot of people a lot of money, I would say, is some of the

Starting point is 00:41:29 context. Like token price has gone up. Abercadber. Money is a Maker fork, actually, that takes some of the guardrails off of Maker, I would say, makes it a little bit more risky, a little bit more. Some people say interesting. Conservatism out of Maker-Dow, yeah. Yes.

Starting point is 00:41:45 And Wonderland is a more recent project. The Time token is part of that. It's kind of an Olympus fork, and that's on Avalanche. Okay. So that's Danny. That's who he is. we got a first revelation this week. And this is, you know, Twitter confirmed, so it's somewhat unconfirmed, but, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:04 it seems like it could be the case. What was this first revelation, David? Yeah. So in the bear market, a lot of the, quote unquote bear market, especially in the last week, a lot of his projects are based on collateral and collateralization. And when the value of collateral goes down, bad things happen. And so there's been a thread from Jack Winton-Neilwald that, like, I don't follow his projects too closely,

Starting point is 00:42:25 and that's why I got the brunt of the frog army. But we'll go ahead and read this thread. Time is the largest own fork by market cap, Olympus Dow fork by market cap. Ryan, if you just go down. And it's been used as a playground by Danielle, I think is how Danny VCs ambitions and more creative ideas. It's offered five-figure APY to Stakers,

Starting point is 00:42:47 but now as a result of the price crash is trading at its below its treasury value. Abercadabra money, which is the spell token, is a lending platform that lets users take out positions against crypto collateral and yield generating positions. This allows users to take out loans that pay themselves off. These loans charge interest and get liquidated and fees go to the spell holders. Danny and other team members have also taken out loans against their wrapped memo, one of the tokens using spell, meaning they can cash out without actually selling. So using their tokens as collateral to borrow against so they don't actually sell their tokens,

Starting point is 00:43:21 but they can get the value out of them. But if those positions get liquidated, they have all the money, and it's basically for selling. They didn't press the sell button, but somebody did. And so people talked about how this strategy would be perhaps exposed or liquidated if the value of these collaterals went down too much. So they borrow all the money that they can against it. And if it goes down, then everything gets liquidated.

Starting point is 00:43:44 And like that, you have a cascading liquidation. So this strategy was talked about on Twitter, causing time to crash below the, value of the assets in the treasury, possibly triggering a liquidation event. Buybacks were supposed to be in place to keep the token price at the treasury value no matter what, but this didn't happen and the devs were silent leading to accusations of a soft rug. Danny locked his Twitter account during all this drama, but fired back with an admission that time buybacks were not working as expected and a plan to fix time in Bilser's spell came out simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:44:17 And so that was kind of like the start of this whole thing. And what is this idea of a soft rug? That's an interesting term. What do you think that means? Yeah, that's just talking about how like he's not he's not like capitulating his own assets. He's just putting his assets into a collateralized position, borrowing as much money as possible on that. And then if the value of those things go down and then there is a liquidation event, like it doesn't matter because he had he borrowed all the money anyways. So it's like a roundabout way to exit without actually pressing the sell button. I got it. And that's the charge again somewhat unconfirmed. And that was just. the first part of it. If that alone happened, we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now, but something was added to that, which is the second revelation. And this is going to take a little bit to explain. So same person, same projects, but a completely different bit of drama going on with this. Okay. So what is this bit of drama? Because it's, yeah, it's, it is unrelated, but it's kind of related to the entire, you know, scandal story. Actually, before, before we get into that, it is TBD about whether Danny and some of the other big leaders of the projects were doing the soft rug, that is an

Starting point is 00:45:25 accusation. They also could be using that same money to pump, to bolster the time price. That is what I think Danny has stated he was intending to do with that in order to prevent a cascading liquidation. So, so like this is not, this is still kind of unraveling and we're still kind of figuring this out. But in the meantime, in the meantime, there is a bunch of other drama that that came about. So are we ready to go into this? Yeah, let's go into this.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And there's some backstory here. So I guess maybe the high level is that a former Quadriga co-founder just emerged. And apparently he's been the right-hand man, right-hand person of Danny, managing a lot of the money behind the time treasuries. On the multi-sig. On the multi-sig. This individual, Michael Patron, has an incredibly shady past. How should we best explain this? Like who is Michael Patron?

Starting point is 00:46:21 What is this shady past? What is Quadriga? Do you want to tell some of the story here, David? Yeah, well, Michael Patron has been off the radar, off the grid for a very long time. But this individual Zach XBT, XBT, tweeted out private DMs in Telegram with Danny. And he says to Danny, I came across something rather odd about OX-Sifu, which is one of the multi-six signers on the projects. And he goes, I've discovered something about Sifu. And Danny goes, what's up? And X, Zerok, ZsbT says, well, he's the quadringa guy. The quadringa guy that was a

Starting point is 00:47:05 convicted felon for identity fraud and has been off the grid for a while. And Danny goes, I cannot confirm, but I have thought a lot about that. And he responds, dangerous to be working with him, sir. And that's one tweet. And then that's basically that. And so he tweets out, this needs to be shared. Zero Xifu is the co-founder of Quadringa CX, Michael Patron. If you are unfamiliar with that, it's the Canadian exchange that collapsed in 2019 after founder Gerald Cotton disappeared with $169 million. I've confirmed with this about with Danny over messages. And so this is a really big deal because this is an individual with a very shady passed and has discovered to be a multi-signor on this defy protocol on avalanche that has a ton of tvl

Starting point is 00:47:55 and so managing millions of dollars millions of dollars of people's money and like what's what's egregious about this is that danny knew about this for about a month without raising the alarm about the significance of this individual so there's this fantastic summarizing article that we're going to read some of the things about it just because it summarized it so well. After all of this came out, after ZeroXBT revealed this, Danny, if you want to scroll down a little bit, Ron, Danny posted on Twitter, today allegations about our team member Zero X-Zifu will circulate. I want everyone to know that I'm aware of this and have decided that the past of an individual does not determine their future. I choose to value the time we spend together without knowing

Starting point is 00:48:40 his past more than anything. Danny also issued an official statement, reiterated. his beliefs in his second chances and reassuring everyone that all the funds are safe, even though a convicted felon is watching over the Treasury. I found out about this one month ago, and I am of the opinion of giving second chances, as I've mentioned on Twitter. I've seen the community very divided about my choice of maintaining him as the Treasury manager after finding out who he was in his past. He added that patron patron will step down from his position at Wonderland, and there will be a vote as to whether or not he rejoins the team. That vote is ongoing at the time of recording. Wonderland has

Starting point is 00:49:14 the say to who manages the treasury, not me or the rest of the Wonderland team, says Danny. Yes, also, this is a, again, funny backstory on this Michael guy. Michael Patron is former convicted felon Omar Donani, who legally

Starting point is 00:49:31 changed his name to cover up his criminal past. Patron left Quedringa in early 2016 after he and Cotton allegedly had a quarrel in split ways. Prior to founding Quondringa, patron was one of 28 people arrested in connection to operating an identity theft ring called Shadow Crew. He pulled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in U.S. federal prison.

Starting point is 00:49:50 Upon his release, he was sent back to Canada, where he went right back to doing the thing he was always doing all along, which was moving money. And so that's kind of the story. The take at the very bottom of this article has a take on this individual. He says, Patron is a one-trick pony. He's not clever enough to reinvent himself,

Starting point is 00:50:09 and his hubris makes it impossible for him to simply disappear and go quiet. enjoy a life somewhere. Kind of pointing out he's like a serial shenanizer. Okay, all right. So just I wonder if you, like, so just to follow this, large defy protocol managing lots of money with a very esteemed builder,

Starting point is 00:50:30 defy builder in the community, Danny. The community finds out that the person that Danny set in charge of the multi-sigs and this community treasury is a convicted felon, super shady individual. Nefarious individual, yeah. Nefarious individual, probably many in the community would say should not be trusted with money. And furthermore, that Danny knew about this for a month, didn't disclose this to the community.

Starting point is 00:50:55 And so, and then it was interesting because Danny decided to double down and say, hey, you know, second chances. I believe in giving people's second chances before then going back to the community and say, what do you want to do with this individual? Should he still be managing the funds or not? And so this created quite a stir on Twitter, I would say. Quite, you know, back and forth. Quite the stir. People were disappointed with Danny about the kind of the lack of transparency, disappointed with, you know, the project in some of the statements.

Starting point is 00:51:26 Michael Patron made a statement as well. Do you want to get into that or skip that, David? Yeah, it's more or less like, hey, I've had a fantastic time working on Wonderland. I'm sad that I'm going to have to go. I understand why I have to go. but I'm leaving and I love all of you. And then a bunch of emojis from the community in Discord. We'll put the tweet in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:51:48 Yeah. So here I guess some takes that I have early on. First of all, we reached out to Danny actually and he's going to come on the podcast, I think, hopefully next week and talk about this. So give him a chance to kind of explain his actions. I've given him my calendar link before and he hasn't clicked on it. Hopefully he comes on the pod. Bankers crossed.

Starting point is 00:52:07 That's what he publicly committed to. Danny, we are very fair and we are very, very, very. fair and rational individuals. So we can do this. Yes. At least David is. I'm not so much. But takeaways, for me, like, this is a very bad look for Defi. This is kind of the fodder that Elizabeth Warren wants to bring to a Senate committee. Like if she found out about this, right? So, like, you've got a convicted felon managing millions of dollars of investors capital without them knowing about it. What's her answer to that? Regulation, more regulation in the space. So, you know, one take, for me is like, hey guys.

Starting point is 00:52:41 Sorry to cut you off. This is a shadowy super coder. Yeah. That's who this is. Literally. This is like, oh yeah. I told you so. And we'd have to be, we'd have to say, okay, Elizabeth, in this specific case, you were right.

Starting point is 00:52:54 Right. And here's the take, I guess. If we don't regulate ourselves, they'll regulate us. Yeah. Okay. And I think this is why the original poster for this was it, Zach. XBT is doing God's work in surfacing this and shedding a light on this, taking a risk.

Starting point is 00:53:16 Yeah, because this, the frog army is not something that you want to mess with. And this is going straight for the heart, David. I'm sure he's gotten threats to the people in his DMs. I'm sure it's like, you know, even legal threats, all sorts of things. But an individual whistleblower shedding a light on this is more of what Defi needs in order to keep itself going.

Starting point is 00:53:36 Yes, Zach, XBT. Nice job. Well done. Nice job. Thanks for having the courage to surface this. And I guess my last takeaway on this is just in general. We have to be very careful of trusting people in DFI. Okay?

Starting point is 00:53:51 Like trusting people in crypto in general. Especially, it's a red flag for me whenever someone asks you to trust them. Okay? Like the takeaway here is never trust anyone in crypto that demands that you trust them. And people who are continuously saying, no, it's fine. Like I've got the multi-sigs. Just like trust me. I have your best interest at heart.

Starting point is 00:54:13 That always sends red flags and shivers up my back because the whole philosophy is crypto, of crypto, is verify, don't trust. You shouldn't have to trust people. We have systems in place to make this entire space trustless, and we don't want to depend on trusting a small set of individuals. It's not reputational trust in this space. It shouldn't be.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Anyway, those are some of my takeaways. What do you have? Anon developers are always a hairy topic because, like, it's good overall, but also. I'm happy that people are able to be anon in this industry if they so choose, but also the combination of anons on multi-sigs is a little bit rough, because reputation is a fantastic piece of collateral to have, to hold someone accountable. And if you are an anon, like you remove that option from the community to hold you accountable because of how you're anon.

Starting point is 00:55:06 This guy, Michael, literally changed his name. Yes. Right? Literally changed his name. How much easier is... To cover up a past, right? To cover up a past, how much easier is that to do on the internet where you could just, you know, change underneath the dress, create a new, you know, online reputation and start from scratch. Yeah, so it's something that we have to work on. Here are some takes from around the community.

Starting point is 00:55:28 This is Andre Cronier. Who works very, very closely with Danny. Yeah, once you read this. This is just the, oh, it's so tiresome meme. It's also tiresome. And Andre says, I just want to code. And he has some commentary further down as well, where he says, I still support Danny, still planning on working with him.

Starting point is 00:55:45 But there are lines. A history of consent, consistent fraud, theft, and malicious behavior isn't a mistake. That's intent. Having Sifu managed funds, especially user funds, can be argued as negligence. That's all I have. Danny knew for a month. And in that time, Sifu was handling funds. I don't know what Scyops.

Starting point is 00:56:01 I don't know what's going on. I want to get off Willie Wonka's magical ride. There you go from Andre. a similar kind of builder in the field. What's this take, David? Yeah, so Danny wrote somewhere that he said, like, I thought I could fix him. Like, oh, I thought I could fix this convicted felon person,

Starting point is 00:56:19 which is a brunt of some jokes on crypto Twitter. And then Simone Pop, who's a fantastic female community leader in the space, goes, the female urge to know that that never works. Yeah, I can't fix them. And I think, look, I think, the important thing here was transparency and disclosure, right? So like if the community had have known who this individual was managing their funds, then they could have gotten ahead of this and voted on it.

Starting point is 00:56:48 And they're in the process of voting now, and I expect they will not reinstate this individual as the manager of their millions of dollars in treasury. We would show the snapshot, but it's got the feature of it. The votes are being hidden. So we don't actually know like who's winning or who's losing this vote. It would probably be available by the time you guys. listen to this. Anyway, moving on. It ends January 28th at 9 p.m. Pacific time, I think. Yeah. There you go. Well, that's what's happening in Defi, the kind of the latest thing.

Starting point is 00:57:19 That was a good one. A lot of drama. That was a good one. It took us a while to get through. I hope you're hanging with us. Let's talk about some Ethereum stuff. Big moves this week. So Ryan Wyatt, he is an executive at YouTube over their gaming division. He's leaving YouTube. Yeah, he was. He's leaving. He's joining Polygon. studios. He's joining a layer two development studio as their CEO. And we've, we've messaged him privately. And he's basically said, yep, burning the ships, all in Web 3. Here I come. Nice. Super cool to see that Exodus. I think that's going to be big things. He's coming on the podcast too, right? Damn it. That's what I was going to say. Oh, sorry. Do you know what he's also

Starting point is 00:58:00 joining Ryan? Front. The bankless podcast. Yes. We're excited about that to you. We're going to talk all about it. YouTube also wants to help content creators capitalize on NFTs. That's the headline. But apparently YouTube execs aren't satisfied by the rate of Web2 movement. So just saying that you're going to do NFT stuff, not enough to keep the talent on the ship. Yeah, that's right. But this is a cool message from the CEO of YouTube, who is stating that they are going to focus on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators capitalize on emerging technologies, including things like NFTHA.

Starting point is 00:58:36 NFTs while continuing to strengthen and enhance the experience creators and fans have on YouTube. YouTube adding NFTs. We'll see that this year at some point in time. That's big. David, something happening in the Solana ecosystem as well. We don't have time to get into all of it, but what is the TLDR summary here? Yeah, so during all the liquidations during the big oof candles that happened last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Solana did the whole go-down thing again. significantly, again, significantly degraded performance that basically prevented the average individual from pushing a transaction through the Salana chain. They couldn't even pay enough. Like with Ethereum, gas prices rise, but in this case, they could even pay enough to get their transaction. It just wouldn't work. Yeah, the network just wasn't accepting transactions, accepted in very specific scenarios.

Starting point is 00:59:26 Solana network consensus is different from what I'm used to. And atolli, the CEO of Solana goes. A quick summary of the recent performance issues in the network. Liquidator bots started spamming the network. with 2 million packets per second, hitting a single node with mostly duplicate messages. These messages unearthed a bug and how the network was handling duplicates. The code responsible for D-duping messages

Starting point is 00:59:44 was after the signature verification, blah, blah, blah. Since then, the network has seen much better performance, but there's still some starvation happening with the liquidator spam. Underload blocks are smaller with fewer than expected transactions. And here's the part that it's a really big red flag for me.

Starting point is 01:00:01 To address the general issue, engineers plan to introduce flow control in version 1.9 with QOS by stake weight. Stakeweight is like the stake of the Salana token. QS stands for quality of service. Ah, thank you. But now implementing this feature in 1.8 is the highest priority. This implementation uses QUIC.

Starting point is 01:00:20 Do you know what that one is? Quick, no. Okay. To rate limit senders. This should be rolled out in the next 45 weeks. Okay. Introduce flow control by stake weight. In plain English,

Starting point is 01:00:33 which Anatoly seems to be allergic to, He is saying that transaction input, transaction inclusion in the blockchain will be controlled by your level of Solana's stake. And so if you have significant stake, you get to add your transactions in more consistently. And this is the thing that has always bugged me about Solana because if you cannot validate the chain, then you are at the whims of the people who can. And so... In this case, in this case, they are giving validators with stake as a proportionate. of capital, they are elevating them. The validators, you know, more capital have the ability to censor transactions, have the ability to capture MEV and get their transactions in ahead

Starting point is 01:01:17 of the PLEBs. So the significant stakers of the Salana ecosystem, the massive exchanges of the world that run the validators, are able to get their transactions in first before the users. So if you have a race condition to save your position from being liquidated, you will be losing to somebody with a significant amount of stake, which is always, almost always a very well-capitalized individual. So your transaction as an individual to save your position is going to lose to somebody with a lot of capital who's going to liquidate you. Welcome to Robin Hood again. Welcome to Robin Hood. Why are we, why did we get upset by GME in the first place? Like, this is the traditional finance system where the bankers win. Like, this is why, this is why

Starting point is 01:01:59 this specific network design of Solana does not sit well with me. Yeah, I just don't think it's situated to be a layer one settlement, you know, a layer with this kind of design. I think that, you know, Sam and Salana might see this as a feature. Oh, okay. We're, you know, improving, we're making sure the network doesn't go down by implementing this, this quality of service by stake weight feature. But it is not a feature. It's a bug. It's a bug in the system.

Starting point is 01:02:24 It's like, hey, we found that another way to introduce centralization. There you go. Enough of that. Sorry. Sorry. I don't like being negative, but. It's concerning. It's extremely concerning. Okay. Okay. One more thing about this, Ryan. What happened in 2008 when the markets turned into a gigantic mess? When markets and financial markets, we had our episode with Tarun Chitra, who talked about every single financial innovation is about the process of removing lawyers. What happened during the bottom of 2008 was that markets broke. And because of the collateralized debt obligations and all the mess of who owns what, everything broke and so they had to reintroduce lawyers back into the system to determine who owns what.

Starting point is 01:03:07 If the Solana blockchain goes down and halts and the clarity on who gets liquidated and how is broken and people's legal rights feel violated, it goes from a world where we have consensus determined by a blockchain to back to lawyers. And the goal is to never go back to lawyers. And so we need networks that have 100% uptime because the difference between 100,000, percent uptime and 99% uptime is that all of the important stuff happens in that 1% and that 1% is when the lawyers get called in and that's where regulations happen and that's where Elizabeth Warren gets upset and then we do not want to piss off Elizabeth Warren. No, especially not.

Starting point is 01:03:48 I don't want her to find out about the Danny thing, to be honest. I hope she's not listening to this podcast, Elizabeth. Yeah, I hope people aren't hearing from that like, oh, David hates Salana, bankless hates Salana. Ryan hates Salana. It's like, no, we don't. I mean, I think Salon is a fine execution layer. I think it is fine in doing what it's doing and onboarding lots of people. What we are saying, though, is with things like this reveal that it is not suitable to be a layer one settlement layer for the world. It's not suitable to be compared to what Ethereum

Starting point is 01:04:21 is doing. And anyway, enough said on that. Let's keep moving. Layer 2, 2022, it is the year of layer to you. Let's go through a few things. So synthetics just launched incentives, token incentives on optimism. This is great. Tocons on top of tokens. This is going to juice up the L2 ecosystem. I hope more projects do this. Any other thoughts, David? Yeah, 50,000 SNX will be distributed over a one month period to people that LP, Ether, and SNX on Jolato network on top of optimism. So cool. Congratulations So optimism, conglasses synthetics. Let's get these yofarms out the door, guys. Yeah, this is another cool thing that's going on, a battle for fees.

Starting point is 01:05:05 In the battle for fees between all of the roll-ups, users win, because fees just go down. Arbitrum just published an update that lowers transaction fees. Once again. And their big transaction fee lower hasn't even been implemented yet. That is called Nitro. And look at them all competing. So Arbitrum is screenshoting that, and they're like, ha, we're lower than optimism now. Just last week, they weren't.

Starting point is 01:05:27 keep trading blow for blow. It's like, oh, optimism is like, well, we push an update and now our fees are lower. Now our returns are like, well, we push an update, now our fees are lower. And I love it, right? And so this is optimism talking about, you know, transactions going up, savings going up as well, get you a chain that can do both. This is the kind of competition we need in the space, right? Because it's... Can you click on the graph? Click on the graph. Yeah. So on the, what's the, the red line is the number of transactions per day, which as soon as optimism did their update last week, which reduced fees by 30%. It just hockey. It just hockey sticks. And then also what also hockey sticks is the black line, which is the multiple times cheaper

Starting point is 01:06:04 versus the Ethereum L1. And so we went from like 50-ish 60 times cheaper to over 200 times cheaper with that last update. And there are more updates to come. When you make the blocks cheaper, there's more demand. That's what this graph is saying as well. Crazy. It's great. Fuse has also just deployed on Arbitron as well. That is from Rari, of course. This is a pretty big deal, too. ZK Dow. Huge. This was just approved.

Starting point is 01:06:33 ZK Dow is a Dow specifically dedicated to the ZK Sync ecosystem. That is, of course, ZK roll-ups from the folks at Matter Labs. They now have $200 million to play with. They're going to deploy that to users to, actually not users, developers, ecosystem participants in the ZK roll-up network. And there's all sorts of ways you can reach out and get involved. So these layer twos are well capitalized as well. And it looks like they're going to use the funds to grow their ecosystems.

Starting point is 01:07:05 $200 million for the development and bullish, bullish. That's great. NFTs. You bullish NFTs still, David? Yeah, can we just burn through these? Brands and NFTs? Everyone's coming aboard NFTs, okay? Do you want to start Prada?

Starting point is 01:07:19 Prada and Adidas, which has recently ventured into the Metaverse. Even once again, no one knows what that means, are partnering to launch a collection of NFTs later this month. Also on Polygon. Also on Polygon. Gucci taps into toy brand super plastic to drop 10 super Gucci NFTs in February.

Starting point is 01:07:38 I do not know some of these brands. Super plastic. Bud Light. Bud Light. The worst beer ever. Beer giant Hanhouser Bush launches an Ftie project for Bud Light. Cool. Cool. We don't know if it's the worst beer ever. Have you had all the beers?

Starting point is 01:07:54 I've had it. Some bad Bud Lights. They're all the same category, the light beer shenanigans. Hey, this link won't load, but Paris Hilton, apparently she's giving away Paris Hilton NFTs. She's a brand in of itself. He's giving those away on Jimmy Fallon. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:07 Again, we're propagating everywhere. Yeah. Elite shows are becoming like NFT propagation engines. What's this? This is something different on the NFT side. So OpenC is doing a thing. What are they doing? Yeah, so OpenC support has tweeted out on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:08:23 To address feedback, we've received about our creator tools. So we've updated our collection storefront contract limits to only support a creation up to five collections and 50 items per collection. So basically what that means is that if you're using OpenC to mint your NFTs, your NFTs, you only have five different collections at 50 apiece. So you have maximum like 250 NFTs

Starting point is 01:08:44 before you have to like make a new account or something. So like putting in like throttles on creators minting NFTs. And I actually don't know why that's going on. some definitely some negative pushback from the creator community on this one. Huh. That's interesting. Wow. Okay, Bitcoin News.

Starting point is 01:09:02 El Salvador. They just purchased more Bitcoin. Buying a dip here. 410 more bitcoins. The nation now owns 1,500 bitcoins. And also plans to issue a $1 billion 10-year bond this year. So we have Michael Say it. A 10-year Bitcoin bond, right?

Starting point is 01:09:17 Bitcoin bond. Yeah. So we have MicroSailer and Strategy. And now we have Naib Taub or however I can remember his name. and El Salvador. Not Buckele. Buckele. Buckele.

Starting point is 01:09:28 Taleb is a... He loves the other one. Yeah. He hates Bitcoin. He does. Great writer though. All this, all the NF, IMF is saber rattling

Starting point is 01:09:38 and urging El Salvador to remove Bitcoin as legal tender, kind of threatening them, basically being like, hey, you're going to be cut off from the IMF, from the global finance community, buy-bye credit debt facilities,

Starting point is 01:09:51 if you continue doing this. IMF not happy, waving their finger at Buckelly and El Salvador for doing this. Granted, taking leverage on Bitcoin as a nation state is like, well, maybe you shouldn't be giving any more credit in that case. I wonder if Bitcoin like, you know, five or ten Xs in the next few years, I wonder what the IMF will say. And then banks are like, hey, guys want to borrow some money? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:16 I wonder if this message will change at all. Let's talk about this. I guess this is regulatory-related-ish, bank-related-ish. Hayden Adams, creator of Uniswap, tweets this out. This week, J.P. Morgan Chase, closed my bank accounts with no notice or explanation. I'm sorry, I'm laughing, Hayden. This has happened to me, okay? Bank of America, I've gotten canceled by banks as well.

Starting point is 01:10:39 He says, I know many individuals and companies who have been similarly targeted simply for working in the crypto industry. Yep. Thanks for making it personal. This part's hilarious to me, David. It's like, Hayden, Bill. Uniswap before he was pissed off. Okay? What's he going to do now? These laser eyes, Hayden Adams. Let's see it. Let's see it. Bad move, Chase, J.P. Morgan. This is a take from Brian Quintez. What does he say

Starting point is 01:11:05 here, David? He goes, likely a shadow debanking of crypto by the Federal Reserve or the USOC, office of the comptroller. Is that what that is? Bank examiners with direction from the top. So Brian Quintes, very highly informed individual, says that this is direction from the top. Former CFTC commissioner, right? We should. Yep. And he says, if the examiner told a bank that a certain customer is too risky and that bank ended that relationship, the bank is contractually prevented from telling that customer why. So I think my take is that, like, they saw Hayden Adams as their customer of their bank. They probably saw his bank account go from like zero to plus one million dollars very, very quickly. And they were like, we don't like this guy. We're got to

Starting point is 01:11:48 rug pull this guy. This guy is getting too big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's just a uniswarking software developer with rainbow socks on. Like, we can work on him. Yeah, what's he going to do about it? We'll just, like, we'll just shut down his bank accounts. Right. What's he going to do about it? Meanwhile, all of his wealth is in crypto.

Starting point is 01:12:01 Welcome to the bankless world, Hayden. Yeah, welcome. You're forced to go bankless. Forced banklessness. You know, this is unfortunate, right? But this is going to happen more and more. And what it's going to do long term is completely erode the institutional credibility of the banking system. They can just exit Hayden from the banks, right?

Starting point is 01:12:20 And people see this. People are smart. They'll know. They're figured out. Where, what happens to the money in his account? Like, do they just cut him a check or something? No, this is what they did for me. They're like, they literally cut me a check.

Starting point is 01:12:31 They're like, in 30 days, we're going to send you a check. And they sent me a check by mail with the money I have. They hold on your money for 30 days? Yeah. They can't. Did they give you interest? You can't log in. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:42 Yeah, 0.01% interest, probably. How do you know? Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Zuck coin is dead. You remember Libra? Remember how that was going to take over all of crypto that Facebook was going to be the blockchain? This was a narrative in 2018, 2019.

Starting point is 01:12:56 People thought that this was going to kill Ethereum. Everybody thinks everything is going to kill Ethereum. Just like, just stop saying that. Mark Zuckerberg, his ambitions unravel around a stable coin Dium sale talk. So they're actually talking about selling D.M itself. Whatever the assets are. Yeah, I'm right. May JP Morgan.

Starting point is 01:13:14 You guys could buy that. Should we buy it, Rohn? How much? No. I'll offer $5,000. There you go. It's probably overpriced. Zuckerberg, if you're listing, $5,000 bankless will buy DM for you.

Starting point is 01:13:27 And we'll complete that project. We'll just make it a stable coin on Ethereum like it should have been. Okay, next one. New York City Mayor Eric Adams receives first paycheck in the form of BTC and Eath. New York City Mayor receiving crypto. Make sure to sign up for Alto IRA, sir. Nice. That's cool, though.

Starting point is 01:13:46 Look, crypto-friendly politicians. It's happening. There's a few of them now. He's trying to boost his ranking on the pack.xyZ website. I think that's Eric Adams' strategy here. All right, guys, we will be back with some takes of the week, and there are a few hot ones. Of course, we'll end with the meme of the week as well.

Starting point is 01:14:04 So stay tuned for that. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Alchemix is a defy app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchemix allows you to deposit the die-stableness, coin into its faults, which earns some of the highest yields that Defy has to offer. You can then take a loan from Alchamix of up to 50% of the deposited die, and that loan automatically pays itself back from the yield that is generated from your deposit.

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Starting point is 01:15:02 If you're going bankless, you need Metamask. This is your tool to unlock the world of Defi without giving up custody over your private keys. Metamask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any decks or aggregator. Metamask swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the defy exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the Metamask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. Metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I used to collect PO apps, NFTs, and do all my defy things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you got to try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at Metamask.io and load up your treasurer, ledger, lattice,

Starting point is 01:15:47 or Keystone Hardware Wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system, where trades are matched with other humans, uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy.

Starting point is 01:16:16 The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at Uniswopgrant. And help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. This is the first one. This is something you said in the market section.

Starting point is 01:16:41 Oh, did I record your take, Brian? Sorry. No, it's worth repeating. It's that good, okay? Okay. Do you want to read the take? Yeah, sure. Since I already said it earlier, Ryan Sean Adams says, this isn't 2018. In 2018, crypto died on its own. No macro to blame. The market decided the substance didn't justify the hype. Today is different. In 2022, crypto is crashing alongside all risk on assets.

Starting point is 01:17:03 Fed policy caused this. This is a macro shakeout. This winter won't last two years. That's great. I think that's true. I don't think it's going to laugh. I don't think people are saying it's 2018. I don't think it is. As soon as the S&P reverses, so does. crypto and it will reverse even harder. That's right. Yeah. So temporary. Maybe I don't know how long it lasts, but I don't think it's going to be 2018.

Starting point is 01:17:25 I don't think it's two years. This is something I ran across in the R slash anti-work subreddit, which was interesting and sad. There was some drama, by the way, this week in the R-slash anti-works subreddit. It's 1.6 million subscribers, I believe, to this subreddit. And, you know, that I guess is out of scope of the podcast. But I ran across this. It's the headline.

Starting point is 01:17:46 no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life survey shows. I feel like that is very much why R-slash anti-work got to 1.6 million subscribers. It's because people are fed up, they're tired, they're jaded, they're exhausted by their shitty corporate jobs or their shitty jobs in general. And it's led to them feeling like working hard no longer pays. And I just, I guess I just had a thought on it. First of all, like, I understand the sentiment completely, but also it's not that working hard is the problem, is it? It's working hard in their wrong systems. That's the problem. The problems are all systemic yet again. And I've seen so many people that work hard in the right systems. So I would say in crypto, like, it's much more meritocratic at this stage. So you work hard,

Starting point is 01:18:41 you hustle, you connect with people, you level up, you learn on a weekly basis, you spend time at this, you meet people, you develop some skills, it will pay off, it will lead to a better life. Like, you will benefit. And so I guess, I know if anyone from anti-work is listening, but I think that crypto actually holds some solution to the problem here, people being jaded with their jobs, and isn't it a shame that working hard doesn't lead to a better life now? I think in crypto, it can. This is why we're on this journey as well. Oh, I subscribe to anti-work crypto, so I'm hearing you, Ryan.

Starting point is 01:19:21 You hear me? Okay, reframed. This is what Chris Berniske said when we had him on the podcast, not the Arc podcast, but the one before that, where he said the returns on capital will always outpace the returns on labor, as in the stock market is going to go up faster than your biweekly paycheck, goes into your bank account. The house price that you are looking at is going to go up faster than how fast you can work for your money. And so that's why this headline is saying people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life because all the assets are outstripped from their hands.

Starting point is 01:19:53 And you know why that's an issue? Why that's an issue is because the Federal Reserve prints a bunch of money. It makes the cost of money easy to benefit all the people with assets. And that's why Ryan is saying that in crypto, your work actually turns into actual capital because we have a new monetary system with new assets, with new upside. And so it's about the, this, when Ryan says the systems, I hear it's the assets. So go and work around the assets that are new and novel and working for you, rather than just like your wage slaves that you find in your typical 9 to 5 job. Absolutely. Well said, David. All right, let's go to the next one. This is Hayden Adams again. Fire in some tweets this week with a take. The Metaverse is having an account, identity, history,

Starting point is 01:20:39 assets, et cetera, that can be brought with you wherever you go. That's what the Metaverse is. He says, not a bunch of Zuckerberg 3D avatars that hang out in virtual rooms together. Look at, click on DC's. D.C.'s response is just this Metaverse guy thumbs up, clearly out of like some Facebook thing or something. That's great. Yeah. It's right though. I mean, we've said it before in our Metaverse episode. The Metaverse is about property rights, digital property rights. That's what the Metaverse is. It's not like a weird 3D lobby. We hang out. I'd rather have a two-D lobby. And that's what Zoom is.

Starting point is 01:21:11 Yeah. That's right. By the way, a great episode on the Metaverse earlier this week too. If you guys want to, you know, tune into that.

Starting point is 01:21:17 We talk about some of these themes. David, let's end this take with this. Five reasons to be excited for the bear market. You wrote this. It's a post in market money and bankless.

Starting point is 01:21:27 I want to be excited about the bear market. Okay, David. Tell me. Why should I be excited? This post was so easy to write. And it's these thoughts that I've been having ever since the bull market started. It's like,

Starting point is 01:21:37 oh, wait, the bear market, it's actually nice. Maybe a sarcombe syndrome. David's, see, here, David's been craving the bear market. That's why we're down. Okay, so here's five reasons to be excited about the bear market. One, long-term wealth.

Starting point is 01:21:48 One of the most frustrating things about the bull market and when ether was like $4,000 plus is I would take much paycheck and I would go to Gemini and then I would put in the number and the number of ether that I would get back from that paycheck would be so goddamn small. I was like, well, what the hell is the point anymore? Like, I can't even move the needle. So that was extremely frustrating. And so now that ether is like less than half those prices, like your money actually translates into more, more real money. More eth, more eth, more actual money.

Starting point is 01:22:18 So it's very, just much more rewarding to be buying prices when they're lower. And so like, yeah, you like you actually get to move the needle on the size of your stack. And so I'm looking forward to that again. That's reason number one. This is when people build generational wealth. Generational wealth. It's not during the bar markets. It's not doing the, people in the bull markets are trying to get wealthy, like inside

Starting point is 01:22:37 of 12 months, people in the bear market are trying to make their children's children wealthy. That is the difference. The secret of the bull market is you actually aren't making the money in the bull market. You make money in the bear market as long as you stay for the bear market after the bull market. Okay. Also, number two, long-term relationships. Financial capital, money is just one flavor of capital. And this is not something that I realized I was doing during the bear market, but it actually has been the most rewarding thing ever since, which is building social capital. Social capital was one of the best things that I earned in the 2018 to 2020 bear market. What is social capital?

Starting point is 01:23:11 That's your friends, your homies, your allies, your business partners. Did you guys know that the way bankless started was that I got good at Twitter, I got good at writing. I was in Discord all the time. And at some point, I realized that there's this nice guy Ryan out there. And so I DMed him and I said, hi. And that's how bankless started. And I have so many friends that I made throughout the 2018, 2020. bear market. I'm going to people's weddings in countries, and I was invited to people's weddings

Starting point is 01:23:39 before I had ever met them in real life. And that can be true for you, too. Build friends in the bear market, because you know that those people that are around in the bear market are the long-term people, the long-term thinkers, the people that you want to be around, people that you can actually learn from. So build social capital in the bear market. Just do it. You can do it over the internet. David and I have never met in person. My mom still doesn't believe that. What's next, David? Yeah, this lends itself to the same one. The amount of signal during a bear market is significantly higher than the amount of noise.

Starting point is 01:24:11 Bull markets are noise-dominated markets. Bear markets are signal-dominated markets. There are tons of projects that exist in bull markets that exist on just attention and attention alone, not fundamentals. And that is opposite of what's true in bear markets. Bear markets are only times that only projects with strong fundamentals, can survive. And so just the amount of alpha that you get comes to you. And like, it's kind of shocking, like, oh, wait, this is just straight pure alpha. And like the reason why no one's taking advantage of this is because it's the bear market. Like all the bull market tourists are gone and

Starting point is 01:24:45 they're leaving all of the value on the table for me. That's what should be your attitude should be. Next one up is building. Just long story short, bankless started in the bear market. It's easier to build in the bear market. Things are quieter. You can put your heads down. You can concentrate. you can think more clearly. There's not a new pumping dog token to, to like, pay attention to. It's just easier to build in the bear market. And as a founder, you can find talent better because other people are also in there for the right reasons. They actually care for the right reasons. And then lastly, also overall, the net effect of all of these things is that crypto gets stronger. Crypto itself is anti-fragile. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. And at this point in crypto's lifespan, there's no way to

Starting point is 01:25:28 kill it. We've already won. We have already won the game. It's just a matter of time for waiting for the rest of the world to realize it. And so think about what while you are going through this bear market, which I don't think lasts all that long. So you have six months to do all these things. What friends will you make? What will you help build? What skills will you develop? What reasons will you create to make you stay in crypto? And so that is why I look forward to building throughout all this bear market with you if it is really bare of which i'm not convinced well said though david is bullish on the bear market that's the bottom line and he's i hopefully he's made you more bullish too uh david what are you excited about besides the bear market you seem to be very excited

Starting point is 01:26:13 about okay i have three things that i'm super excited about right one of them i was quoted in uh the washington post and i was actually just kind of like cracking up uh with the washington post some of the quotes i had that they decided to use i think goodbye to all nonbelievers says david Hoffman. Co-owner of Bankless tweeted on Sunday as prices continued to plummet. Listen to this. We were all born in the bear market, so finally we're back home, David says, noting Ethereum is now worth $2,400.

Starting point is 01:26:41 And last time, it was $80. Oh, God. I love this, man. It's a great article. Bankless in the Washington Post. And to summarize it up, I say, obviously, no one is happy to see their portfolio shrink 40% in seven days. But it's a question of, do you believe?

Starting point is 01:26:57 that crypto is the dominant financial platform of the future. My man calling for conviction. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Who's convicted out there? All right, all right. Sorry. Next thing I'm excited about, Ryan, is this link that I just sent you in Zoom if you want to pull that up, is I finally set up my gallery so you can check out all my NFT displays.

Starting point is 01:27:14 And so I'm going to wait for Ryan to pull this up. There we go. Boom. Gallery. Dot SO, I recommend that you guys sign up for it. It's a great way. Are these the crypto-covens? These are the crypto-covens, of which I think are fantastic, pure straight-froids.

Starting point is 01:27:27 royalty. There's also my Cryptopunk. This is my NFT-Pfp section. There's my crypto punk, my cool cat, my couple of penguins, and also the Dowd punts out of Bankless Dow. But then also, if you keep on scrolling down, those are my one-of-ones from Nate Muller, who I'm super bullish on. And these are just fantastic. And then if you go down, you have my Metaverse plants. I love plants of all types, including Metaverse plants. And so I'm just excited that I got Gallery up and running. This is awesome. How hard was that? Super easy. It's super easy. Just had to sign in with my Ethereum address. Might have to do this.

Starting point is 01:27:57 And then the last thing I'm excited about is the layer zero that's coming out on Tuesday, of which I did an interview with the two founders of the Boys Club, and the Boys Club is all about onboarding women into Web3. It's not what it sounds like. And it's a really funny name, and they really lean into the humor behind it. So if you are a lady who is looking to find other ladies to use lady-specific language and just onboard people that you know of that are of your vibe into Web 3, Boys Club is for you, check out the layer zero that's coming out on Tuesday. And if you are a dude who's

Starting point is 01:28:31 trying to get your lady friend into crypto, maybe send them to the boys club. Send them to the boys club. That's awesome, man. Thank you for bearing with me through my three things, Ryan. What are you excited about? Look, I'm excited to show you my gallery.s0 turtle collection pretty soon because I'm going to fire this baby up. I'm excited. I'll be excited to see it, Ryan. You know, the real thing I was excited about was I'm back to this blockscan.com chat, okay? because this was, I think, the first time where I actually used my eth address as an identity.

Starting point is 01:29:00 Like to log in and interact with somebody else who also had an eth address. And there's some fun use case, this is a silly app, but there are some fun use cases from this, like, you know, support emails for something, you know, you ship an NFT, how do you verify that the person

Starting point is 01:29:14 who's owning the NFTs on the other side of a support message? This could work for that. Also, like, you know, talking to hackers, for instance. But also if, like, I see an NFT in your gallery, that I like, maybe instead of going through OpenC, I just like, I message you on this.

Starting point is 01:29:30 I'm like, David, I want to buy some flowers. Hey, hey, dude, like, point two-eath for that. And I'm like, no, Ryan, two-eath, two-eath. I'm like, I'll give you point-to-eat and two turtles. And you're like, yes. No, I'm like, no. This is cool. This is cool.

Starting point is 01:29:45 And it just reminded me of like the AOL. It's Messenger days. And I'm really excited to see that. It was just a lot of fun, too. A bunch of people reached out and said how much. much they, you know, love bank lists, all these messages. I can't wait for all the spam. That's going to be incoming in the future. So I'm sure, you know, Ether scan will add features and make it cooler over time. But it was great.

Starting point is 01:30:06 New versions of Nigerian print messages. Well, it's like, look, your Etherdress is not just a bank account. It's also your digital identity. And I think this is one small application. We did say, I think 2022 is going to be a breakout year for some early use cases people don't anticipate. Non-financial use cases of your private keys. Yep. That's it. All right, meme of the week time. Let's get to it. Here we go. What we got, Lynn Alden.

Starting point is 01:30:28 Lynn Alden with a meme that almost got 10,000 likes on Twitter or probably 10,000 likes by this time tomorrow. This is a Simpsons meme of Grandpa Simpson talking to all the kids. And Grandpa Simpson says, back then, the whole world would stop and listen to one guy, say what he was going to do with the price of money. This is what's happening. This is why we're talking about a bear market is because everyone's talking about, What is, is the federal reserve going to make the money more expensive or is it going to make the money more cheap? And everyone's super fearful that the old guys at the Federal Reserve are going to make the money more expensive. And the thing I love about this the most is it just strips the way of the curtain.

Starting point is 01:31:05 So the emperor without the ropes. This is ridiculous that we listen to these old, old people behind closed doors, talk to us about what the price of money is. Just let the money price itself is good at that. Yeah, it's definitely what we need. do and the way they analyze your own pals every word and like gesture and you know intonation right is uh it's painful as well it's insane that we do that it's insane i i hope we're not still doing it seven years from now guys stay tuned right after this for your moment of zen thanks a lot thanks a lot

Starting point is 01:31:44 it's not for everyone down bad like solana never lost the comma constantly refreshing tvs on defile llama i only catch knives when i'm trying to catch a bounce from my savings on the jpeg when i I really need a house. I need a tax harvest. I got hells I could lend you. Portfolio paid to the freaking dollar menu. You're headed west. This is the frontier.

Starting point is 01:32:08 It's not for everyone. Glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. But of course, got to remind you, none of this has been financial advice. Eith and Bitcoin are risky. Defi is risky as well. Sometimes it's extra risky and full of drama.

Starting point is 01:32:25 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.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Wonderland $TIME | Crypto Price Bear Market? | Odell Beckham Jr Bitcoin | Twitter NFTs

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