Bankless - Vance Spencer: The FAANG of DeFi (S.M.E.L.L)

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

On the show today, we’re bringing Vance on to talk about S M E L L. Not an odor, but instead 5 different assets. The FAANG of Crypto? We walk through all 5 assets and talk about the merits of each, along with the other subjects running around the current crypto meta. Let Vance loop you into what he thinks is worth paying attention to. ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 📣 SAFE CORE | Smart Wallet Infrastructure https://safe.global/core  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap%E2%81%A0   👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ----- CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 06:37 Takes on Friend.Tech 13:02 Good Or Bad For Crypto? 17:40 The SocialFi Narrative 20:17 S.M.E.L.L 23:23 Synthetix 27:55 Maker 35:34 Ether 41:26 Lido 47:10 ChainLink 50:48 Can They Outpace ETH? 56:35 Where's Uniswap 59:22 Solana? 1:01:29 Closing and Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Vance Spencer  https://twitter.com/pythianism  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Thankless Nation. Super excited to introduce you to another state of the nation. David, I smell the bull market. That's what I smell. Yeah. We're going to be talking about some bull market narratives today with Vance from Framework. What's on the agenda? We're just trying to talk about smell.

There's a reason why Ryan just said he smells a bear market. Do we have the fang of defy, fang, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google. Oh, God, what's the other one? I don't know. I don't own equities anymore. But Fang, it's like all of the staples of TradFi, the staples of Silicon Valley. Bant thinks that there might be the fang afoot in Defi, the tokens that are going to brew the staples of a DFI portfolio. Smell would be the acronym.

We're going to get into what is comprised in the smell. But also there's some other bull market narratives that we want to touch on. Friends is sweeping through crypto Twitter is the app of the moment. Is that a sustainable narrative? or is that a fad? And then there are some other narratives that we're going to talk about as well, such as ETS and gaming and staking and on-chain casinos.

And so this is going to be the topic of the show. On-chain casinos. Guys, before we begin, we want to give you a message from our friends and sponsors over at SAFE. It was kind of funny. David, you and I were going through our SAFE multi-SIG. Just part of this episode. Almost confirmed the transaction, but didn't quite do it.

But what does SAFE want the Bankless Nation to know? Yeah, so SAFE is working on their proposal. for a modular open source protocol framework for account-obstracted wallet, smart contract wallets. We all know that we are now in this world of externally owned accounts, which is just probably the wallet that you have. But eventually we are going to get into being into the world of 99% point 9% smart contract wallets. And SAFE is introducing their safe core protocol to help with that transition.

So there's a link in the show notes. This is for all the devs out there that they want you to check out as their proposed way to move forward into the transition for smart contract wallets. It needs to be a unified standard so that we can all agree that this is a standard that we move forward for. It's unopinionated, and they think that it is the right place to go. So if you are a dev working in the world of wallets, there's a link in the show notes. And they also have a hackathon, another thing for the devs.

They have a hackathon in early September for people who want to build on this platform. So there's a link in the show notes to get started with that. David, as we get in this episode with Vance, I know he's one of our, you know, one of our favorite marketed commentaries has a really sharp sense of when the cycles begin, when they end. And so I really want to get a sense of what he's looking at right now, what some of the narratives he's looking at are. I know we've talked in the roll-up a little bit about you and preparing your bull market

battle station. That's I think what you call it. I think this, for me, will be an episode to start exploring kind of what the bull market narratives might be. and that is an important component, I would imagine, of the bull market battle station. What do you think listeners should know going into this episode and coming out of it? Yeah, I think that's right. I think generally the sentiment on crypto is that there is a bull market afoot.

It's not here yet, but we're getting whiffs of it in the air. We're smelling it. That was you that time. Yeah, right. But there's a bunch of narratives as to what it could be. we're starting to get a direction, but we still haven't found the source, the source of the smell, the source of the bull market. And so I think this is kind of the state of crypto-twaters. Like, there's all these different narratives. Some of them, multiple narratives might be correct.

Some of them might be wrong. And since we are, you know, preparing ourselves for this potential bull market, we need to try and figure out where the source of all the smell is. And so that is what we're doing here today on the show. We're just going to be smelling our way through this episode. But guys, we'll be right back in just a moment. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors who made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange, Cracken. Go check them out. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry.

The place I used to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Cracken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen.

With Cracken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Cracken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.crakken.com to get started today. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first Dow-led web3 ecosystem,

all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, A brand new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries,

which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 gaming, and Buy Bit for TV. and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects

that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledd-Layer2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantel. And follow them on Twitter at Zero-X Mantle. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum-scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1

with flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. Arbitram Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social apps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now, Arbitrum Orbit, allows you to use Arbitrm's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user, Arbitrum Orbit, lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully use. EVM compatible.

Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitram.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Vance and Framework rode some legendary assets out of the grave of the 2018 to 2020 bear markets to their all-time highs in 2020 and beyond. Link, Avey, Synthetics.

These tokens might ring a bell. These tokens were generally massive contrarian bets after the ICO mania of 2017 turned everyone off of tokens. Today, we're bringing Vance back onto the show because of smell, S-M-E-L-L, not an odor, but instead five different assets. The Fang of Crypto is the question we are asking. We're going to run through each one of these, talk about the merits of each, and also some other bull market narratives that is running around the current crypto meta-vance. Welcome back to Bankless. Thanks for having me. Good to be back.

Yeah, so let's start with the current narrative that's running. around which is a social phi because we got to get this one out of the way before we get into smell social fi friend tech is not sweeping through crypto starting to poke through to mainstream maybe overall like even if i don't think anyone really thinks that friend specifically is the app that's going to take crypto mainstream maybe you disagree but overall like what are your learning lessons your big takeaways from this whole friend phenomenon that's going on yeah i mean first of all you never know. These things are like the stuff that looks like a toy oftentimes ends up being really powerful. And I was on Instagram this morning and this influencer that I follow was like all about

their friend tech shares. And this is someone who hasn't been involved in crypto since the last bull run. And let's just pause because what that entails is they actually have to do some fairly sophisticated crypto native stuff to get their their ETH assets on the other side. Right. They have to like Their shares are, I guess, keys are trading now. So they've done it. Wow. Wow. Yep. And I actually, you know, we invested in BitClout.

And it, you know, I don't think it worked. I think it's okay to say that. But I thought it was an interesting idea in terms of, you know, how do you kind of unify the creator economy with a lot of the fungible token action that we saw in chain? And I don't think the question is like, can, and I said this before, It's like, it's not like, can you build it? It's like, can you kind of, can you find a legal framework that you can fit it into where, you know, you don't get taken to the cleaners by regulators immediately. And I don't think changing shares to keys is probably enough.

For context for the bankless listeners, friends.com. You used to call them shares because you're buying shares in your friends this last weekend. They rebranded to keys. Oh, my God. I totally missed that. One can only imagine why. Yeah, they're called keys now. No longer called shares.

But like I really am a fan of the dev team, Racer, and I forget the other woman's name, but I think they're in crypto for the right reasons. I like them a lot. And if people remember, they built steel cam, which was a consumer app that was around, I think earlier this year. So maybe they weren't expecting this to catch fire like it has,

but it certainly did. And I think now the question is like, how do you expose facto kind of stick handle your way round of obstacles that exist. So you can make this interesting. But I think there's a path. Like, you know, this influencer on Instagram that I saw, you know, they were telling their friends and like one thing leads to another. I don't know. So what's the concern here from a regulatory? Am I just seeing obvious by saying that Gary Gensler would, would maybe think of all of these, these humans trading shares and everything's a security? I mean, it's hard for me to

say that because like Gary just seems to think everything's a security. So of course, I mean, it's not even clear to me whether he knows of Pokemon cards, if they're like instantiated as an ERC20 are a security or not. Is this the main concern that this is going to run afoul of sort of SEC as a regulatory body? Is that what you're inferring here, Vance? I think that's the question. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the answer. But, you know, there used to be a market for the secondary to trade shares and athletes.

So you get it like a percentage of their contract and that was like highly regulated and existed on a traditional exchange. And so there's like precedent here. But I'm just they obviously think that they have a workable framework. I think people on Twitter, you know, there's opposing views. I think the question is who's right. And you know, doesn't matter. I think this conversation as to whether or not these things are like should be considered and categorize as financial assets that need to be regulated. It's part and parcel with this other half of crypto.

Twitter that's kind of taking a more resentment stance towards friends saying, like, great, the breakout consumer application that we have is a Ponzi game that allows us to, you know, financialize our friends and speculate on them. And great, this is clearly our breakout apps are all Ponzi's. Ponzi games, not Ponzi schemes. And so, like, there's this growing resentment out of, you know, a decent portion of the crypto landscape is that we can't actually make any application that's not about speculation and financialization and something that kind of resembling gambling yeah what's your take about that speculation and financialization are okay they're not evil in and of themselves um i think if you think about the definition of a ponzi scheme it's literally

something that is financially unsustainable by design these are not Ponzi schemes these are just tokenizing shares of a person and if they go up down or sideways there's no perpetual motion machine that someone's trying to create. And, you know, if we could live in a, if we lived on a small island together where we could set the rules, you know, I think this would be something that would be okay with me. I think it's something that creators want, you know, their alternatives are selling like, you know, coffee scrubs or like sugar bear hair, you know, vitamins for people to regrow their hair. It's like the options for creators to monetize themselves are actually really shitty, honestly. And I think if you got a way for people to incentivize a community and also pay them,

fairly for what they've contributed or a way to transact with the creator directly, they would want that. And so I don't think it's morally wrong or the speculation is inherently bad. I think we're bootstrapping an economy and painting everything with a wide brush is one way to just kind of like delegitimize the crypto industry. And I see that people are trying to do that. And I think it's okay to push back because this is not that, frankly. Yeah, maybe asking kind of another case. So I tweeted this out last night and I said, you know, is friends.com good for crypto or bad for crypto? Good for crypto. It was 50.

It was in my, it was not divided. Yeah, you are not divided. But in my Twitter followers, which obviously skew heavily crypto, is 55 to 45. Wow. And 55, yes.

So by some margin, but not a lot. And 45% no. And I think this comes from the back, in advance of like, you know, 2022, which felt like there are a lot of short-term type games.

We don't even have to instantiate the P-word for that, the Ponzi word for that. Just short-term. games being played. So people look at this and they see a bunch of like crypto elites getting rich again. Look at them. Influencers like making all of this money.

Maybe there's some resentment there. Maybe there's like a sense of an I got left behind. I think more broadly it's to some people in crypto, it feels like straying from the mission. Like I thought you were here to revolutionize finance. I thought you were here to bank the unbanked. I thought this was about like a global permissionless money system. Now here you are stuck, you know, on. on kind of like this tourist trap and you're back to your like JPEG selling shenanigans again

of speculating on like shares. And so even within the settlers who are still here, right, there's like this sense that I don't like where this is going. This is not where I sign up for. And you could tell them, you could say, well, then just ignore it. Just opt out. You don't have to do it. Like whatever.

But I think there's some worry that the, I guess the social layer of crypto is, it gets kind of corrupted by the. these short-term games and this kind of shilling, or at least in, or maybe we, we get off mission, off focus. What do you think about this? I think, I generally think people like to rewrite history in crypto and like what provokes the immune response from like, you know, crypto Twitter to immediately seize on this thing and throw it out the window. I can't say exactly what it is, but I think it has something to do with, we are now going into a territory that has historically not been crypto's domain. Like we're trying to onboard influencers and entertainers and

people who are not just the crypto Twitter set onto this. And I think that's a noble mission and it's okay to be upset as well. But I do think ultimately expanding the pie is good for everyone. This is also one of 10 concurrent narratives that we have today. And like, is it my favorite? It's not. You know, it's, I don't think it's like the most interesting. I don't think it's going to scale the most. But I think it's really awesome that entrepreneurs are taking shots on things that are, you know, difficult to understand, complex to build and difficult to navigate from the regulatory perspective. So I don't know, I'm never going to really, you know, take a poor view of an entrepreneur for pushing the envelope. I just think people need to, if they don't like it,

just focus on something else. Life is too short to be upset. I think one of the most fascinating things about this will be sort of any regulatory reaction to this, because this will be kind of like an acid test, right? And so if the U.S. bans this or does something quite drastic, won't it just move offshore where these types of laws, these securities laws, don't exist? I don't know. I think that's going to like force the question even more of like what is an actual security and what's not. And if you tokenize something at what point does it become security. So I'm actually kind of bullish about this as an acid test for answering some of those questions. I mean, does the SEC really want to be in the business of like, like painstakingly regulating all of these

influencer tokens? Like, is that what they want to be spending their time doing? Are they equipped for that? I like it from that perspective, too. To be clear, no, only the crypto industry is adding to the conversation, the regulatory angle about friend shares. SZ hasn't done anything you that's true you wait for the video though david it's coming maybe it has already moved offshore it's a it's a very like u.s condition that all the people who i've seen backlash against this are u.s based and they say no it's a security we can't have that it's over it's like well maybe it's our like do you know where racer the anime girl on twitter whose twitter account is locked in private do you know where he she or they live maybe it's in a country where this is allowed i think it's more

of a decision on on a per i guess key basis for each person where are you based sure yeah okay so this is one of many narratives that that we need to get through on this show so vans let's wrap let's wrap this one up social phi which is what people are calling this what are your big takeaways and learning lessons from this friend's movement like what what are you now thinking of that you weren't thinking of maybe two weeks ago um honestly it's a continuation of the recovery, continued interest, and continued experimentation of crypto. I think that was the thing that I was looking for is like, you know, when are we going to really get that?

I guess it might have been kind of like the NFT, the BitClout moment where we start spreading our tentacles outside of like, you know, the winter's cave that we've built for ourselves. And I think that's basically now. You know, with base, with this, like you have enough sign that it's starting to happen. Games are going to come soon. I think it's just a continuation of a positive trend that's happened since probably. November of last year. I can't believe it's

been 10 months. It's FTCS blew up. It's crazy. But it's like, we've made more progress and we're a better place than I would have expected at that point in time. Okay, so your big takeaway is that it's a strong plus one to the idea that appetite is returning. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure it is. If you hate it or love it,

it's just, it's a fact. What do you guys think of this progressive web app thing, this bypassing of the app store? Is that significant to you? Do you think that's a model that will be replicated and useful for us? I think so. Many people are effective. So there's two advantages, right? You can pin a app to your homepage on your phone. That's one. And the second is historically the problem with getting crypto on Apple or on iOS has been that if you're on the App Store, you owe 30% to Tim Apple. And that's just really hard if you are selling digital goods for a variety of reasons,

let alone like what happens when it's a secondary market transaction. With this, you can use Apple pay outside the confines of the iOS app store and you don't have to pay that tax. So like expect people to move more and more towards this model as a mobile first paradigm where we don't actually have to deal with the app store, which is super bullish. You know, it's the tax. It's also the asking for permission. It's also the gatekeeping. I remember when Uniswap, we were talking about their wallet and it took them, I don't know,

like 10 months a year to like get the permissions process to actually get listed in the app store. And so you could bypass this. I mean, I was amazed at how fast friend. Dot Tech was spun up. And it was pretty clunky. I mean, let's be honest. Like, the UX is just like lacking.

But they were able to do this because they didn't have to ask for permission and go through like a months long process of getting listed. It's awesome. Okay, Vance, let's get into the fang of defy smell. We're going to go through each one of these tokens just to, because I actually have not actually heard which tokens or which. I can, you know, speculate. I can guess, but I actually don't know.

I don't know if it's ever been uttered before what tokens correspond to what letter. But before we get into the specifics, what makes you think that we are actually in a place where we can have a fang of defy? Because a fang implies some sort of, you know, lasting power. It's not going to go away. It's a pretty stable foundation. Why do you think that we have a fang of defy in the year 2023? Yep.

So before I get into that, a couple of disclaimers. Number one, when I talk about these. When I talk about smell, I'm talking about the actual products, not necessarily the tokens, not financial advice, not talking about token price. And the last disclosure is we own all of these tokens. So smell in my mind was an exercise in coming up with, okay, you know, bomb went off in July, November of last year. And basically everything was just completely decimated, the hundreds of Uniswop copycats. the hundreds of stable coins that shouldn't have existed. But amidst all the wreckage of that, you did see that there were a lot of protocols

that frankly were generating earnings. They had real traction. Their networks were picking up an activity. And I think, you know, if you look at the dot-com bust of 2000, you know, what happened to the NASDAQ was very different than what happened to individual stocks. In terms of the NASDAQ just absolutely got crushed, there was so much vaporware out there that basically, you know, it weighed down the index for years. But if you looked into the internals, you saw things like Amazon.

You had the Google IPO in 2003. You know, there were enough companies with enough fundamentals where that led the new meta and it led the reconstruction of the industry. And that's basically what I think is going to happen here. And, you know, there's amazing projects that are not in smell. It's not to disparage them. But I think in my mind, that is, you know, our core portfolio in terms of, like, what do we think is going to be really from a fundamental,

perspective, in attraction perspective, valuable. And so, you know, smell is synthetics, maker, Ethereum, Lido, link. And, you know, that's it. That's, that's smell. And we can go through each of them. Did you, I get asked, did you come up with the acronym first or the company or the projects first? So one, I came up with the companies first. And then I rearranged all the letters enough times where I was like, you know, there's only one combination. Smell was the best you could do, huh? It's not bad. And we can go through each of them.

But I think, you know, there's a sense in my mind that these are the companies that have the enduring advantage, the talent, the traction. And they're going to kind of lead us out of the bull market or out of the bear market in terms of just having products that work at scale. Sure, yeah. So let's go through each one because I think each one provides. adds its lessons to the crypto world. So starting with synthetics, right?

Framework already had a big win with synthetics coming out of 2017 to into the 2020 bull market. Why 2021 bull market? So why synthetic? So what signal did synthetics provide you when you said that a bomb went off twice in 2022? What signals was syntax giving you that it was going to be able to make it? The main one is just frankly the reformation of this new team. around the products. And, you know, synthetics was something that always kind of had fits and

starts, a product market fit. Kane is an amazing entrepreneur. He took some time off last year. He was just frankly burnt out. And this is public knowledge. But, you know, he came back. He's re-energized. They have this amazing new core talented team. They launched perps. They launched V2.5. And they're about to launch V3. And really, V3 is a culmination of the, effectively since I've been involved with synthetics, all the learnings, all the products that we've wanted to build, and you can see it in the traction. You know, they're doing $500 million days. They've got tens of front ends, probably 100 at some point this cycle. And if you look at, you know, last week, there was like a million two in fee income. And it was just people getting blown out, liquidated, paying funding rates.

And, you know, one of the worst days of the year in terms of price action was as a, and I think we're one of the larger stakers, was our most profitable. And if you annualize what they're doing, you know, it basically equates to about 50 to 60 million of earnings that go directly back to token holders. And like there's the, you know, finding product market fit part, there's the creating value part, and then there's the capturing value part. And synthetics has done all of those. And if you didn't know anything about crypto and you were dropped in the middle of it and told to point to the profit centers, you'd point to Binance and you point to all their perps

markets. So if we can get 1% of that, I'm going to be very, very happy with where synthetic is. And Infinex, which is Kane's new kind of like quasi centralized exchange, that's just going to be another boon to the volume. And so I think it's a pretty clear story. And frankly, all the other perps companies have died for the most part. So there's a lack of competition. Maybe as we go through all of this, smell, S-M-E-L, one question I have to maybe help frame

this thing is that we have successful apps, successful protocol teams, right? Each one is we're going to talk about each one. but the way that you've selected them like perps and you know synthetic assets in of itself is also just a fundamental vertical that exists in crypto and so there's one part is like we have you know five different teams that we're going to talk about each one is you know being successful that's why we're talking about them but then there's also the value landscape that exists irrespective of these teams and i think synthetics you're saying is it's a successful team for all the reasons that you just articulated and it's building inside inside of this very

valuable landscape called like synthetic assets and perps. Is that like kind of a model for how we should think about these things? Because we're about about maker and decentralized stable coins, which, you know, another big, valuable vertical in this crypto world. Is that kind of how we should think about these things as we go forward? Yeah. So the things that I would, I would keep in mind in terms of the two pieces of context that underlie all of these is that number one, these are crypto endogenous markets. Like, we don't need to create anything new. The cash flow already exists. it just happens to sit inside the centralized exchanges. And so that's the first one.

And the second one is we're riding a tailwind that already exists in terms of the transition from centralized to decentralized. And if you look at last month, it was 40%. 40%. Dexas did 40% the volume of centralized exchanges. Unswap did more volume than Coinbase. So like it's already happening. I'm not like reinventing the wheel. I'm just lucky to be able to ride with these entrepreneurs and protocols to the promise land. So the last thing I'll say is there are basically,

2020 is brutal. All other protocol teams, you know, uniswap clones, derivatives clones, stable coin clones. They're all dead. So like, you now have number one incumbents in each of these categories that are poised to just compound their advantage. And that's another theme that we can keep talking about. Yeah, the number one rule of cryptos do not die. do not get washed out, stay in the game, right? And so if you're still in the game at this point in time, you're doing well.

All right, so that's the S. How about the M? We got Maker, I think you said. Tell us about why is Maker in the smell acronym? M for Maker is a new one for us, fairly recent. We've been in DFI forever. We hadn't held Maker in forever, just because we didn't really understand the stablecoin model in an era of low interest rates.

We thought the expenses were a bit out of control. But, you know, Rune is, is an interesting, really singular figure. And I was always kind of, like, interested in kind of like his leadership of the project. And, you know, I think people have, you know, personal views on whether it's like too much leadership or like not enough. But like, those to me are like personal issues. And like this is like just, it's just like investing. It's just business for me, at least.

And so I think when I first came around to Maker was just reading, end game. And it was, it was very bizarre. Like, everyone read end game. And I think people's, the most of reactions I heard were like, this is absurd. AI for governance, having a separate token, you know, rebranding, redenomination, all this stuff. But to me, it just encapsulated a lot of what I was feeling in terms of like, what are the lessons of the last cycle? You know, like, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's redomination, rebranding is a good way to restart. You know, they have all this USC and the PSM, if they can redeployed into treasuries, that can be a base of 150 million of revenue that they can build on. You know, the sub-dows, having the allocator model, that makes a lot

of sense to me, you know, spinning out those things so that Maker can focus on just being a really cohesive core unit that's basically a central bank. And so, like, you know, all of those things were really good indications to me that Maker was turning itself around. But also, like, you know, I've been historically disillusioned with central banks and that type of thing. And just this felt like an opportunity to create a decentralized central bank. And I thought that was just fascinating. And I think endgame is the right way to get there. So, you know, those are the things which I really like.

It has, you know, I think 150 or 60 million of revenue today. Earnings are probably 80 million. Is that annualized revenue? That's annualized revenue. And I think it's just going to keep scaling as they deploy more of the PSM into the treasuries, but also their lending business ramps up and they're the ramping interest rates. So that'll go up. And sub-dows are super interesting in my opinion.

Like I want to go farm them. I want to go figure out what's going on. I want to go participate in these new governance experiments. And I think it's a really hopeful view of crypto that I like. And I like that about what Rune is saying. And I've never met him. But just from what I can understand, like it's it's just the right direction. So, you know, it's a.

That and a lot of the capitulation around the token has got me pretty excited. I think when the best time to buy something is when nobody believes, but you have to know why. And there's the why. It's on chain. It exists. You can go read it. And I think it's just really interesting. It's the first DeFi protocol that will probably hit 100 million of earnings.

And that's just like fascinating to me. It's interesting to me because like Maker is the OG of OG protocols. It was like Maker was the defy app that got me into the space, got me actually excited about. Yeah, before we called it defy. And they're definitely pushing the frontier of like governance, right? They're stretching the governance thing as far as they can. You got kind of the narrative of real world assets and that sort of thing. Not once in your description, Vans, did you mention staple coins?

Like, die. That's the actual product that they're creating. Does that matter less in this world? Or is, is dye still important? I mean, you were talking about this is sort of a central bank. I guess maybe implied there is Dye is a stable coin. But I think the narrative right now is that basically, you know, PayPal's going to come up with their centralized stable coin. And you've got USC and you've got Tether.

And you have the fall of Valgo stable coins. And like, you know, people aren't as excited about Dye as they once were back in the era of like 2017, 2018. What's your take there? Is that a factor in this project? I mean, tether is a really bad stable coin for us as an industry to embrace, in my opinion. It also doesn't have a lot of the utility of something like dye where you can stake it and earn yield through the DSR. You can go farm with it in sub-dows. You can go finance, you know, bridge and construction loans like they already do.

Like there's a lot of things you can do with die that doesn't exist today. And non-stable coin dye supply bottomed at $1 billion in November 2022. that like that was a point where I think you could as a rational person say that this might die die might die whatever but now it's like you know funny whatever so now it's like a billion it's grown 5x and so like there's a recovery underfoot and the question is where does it top out where makers business model is very simple how much die is there what is the interest rate that they are earning on it I think die is going to go from about five billion today to probably about 15 to 20 billion in the next, you know, a few years. And I think rates on that are probably going to be

around where Treasury bills are and say that's like, you know, four to five percent. You know, 20 billion times five percent is a billion in earnings, you know, and the DSR will have to be taken out of there and we'll see where that lands. But like, wow, what an incredible different project. And like, I don't think of it, I guess it is a stable coin. I think of it more as like a central bank, but I think the hope is that we can actually like fix the money and help fix the industry. So I think the mission is noble as well. And, you know, re-denomination is one hell of a drug, frankly.

Like if you, I remember when Antshare is rebranded to Neo, that's like super OG, you know, that's like Chinese crypto. People probably are not with me on that one. But like you can really reform communities around this stuff. And if you have a new brand and I'm excited to see what that is, like I think there's a lot to be excited about. And, you know, if you lose money on vaporware, you feel stupid. But if you buy things with fundamentals, in my view, I can sleep a lot better at night. The inclusion of Maker in what we are calling the fang of defy, and yes, like loosely held,

it's still in the early days, of course. But that's to say that dye is the stable coin that's won the stable coin wars. There's, you know, massive stablecoin wars that have existed both in the centralized and decentralized landscape. So are you saying that do you think that Maker has actually won? the decentralized stable coin wars. It's earned that throne. Oh, I think it's going to, I think the wars are going to get so intense in the next 12 to 24 months.

Why would you hold USC if you can go stake, die in the DSR and earn yield, you know? And so like the addressable market for that trade is circles market cap or USC's market cap, which is like 25 billion. So like, I'm not just pulling this like 20 billion number out of my ass. Like there's, there's real, um, you know, sub-dustash, sub-dows are going to add more die demand uh the DSR is going to add more die demand um all the different projects that are in the maker ecosystem but also just like people want a better stable coin i have that distinct sense and so i think both sides of the usDC eth pairing and i tweeted this

are going to turn to be focused about yield why would you at lp not be doing s die and wrap steak ETH in a pair on uniswap. What's the point of LPing if you're not maximizing your yield? Maybe there's something else that I'm missing. But, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of momentum there. All right. The E's, the E's, the E is, uh, I don't know if we need to really unpack this one too much. EASE is ether.

Let's get a minute, though. E ETH, okay. I think, um, for me, the reason why I think ETH is just so interesting is because, I mean, there's a few things. Number one, it's just, it's such a unique network, you know, it passes, you know, 20% of the fees to ETH holders. It burns the rest. It has this web of L2 model. And I think everyone was waiting for Cosmos to play out with this model in mind. And it just happened to have played out on ETH. And I'm talking to Cosmos teams that are moving to ETH now, just saying like, we've trudged up this hill. We've tried to get our validators going. But it's just easier to launch an L2.

And I, I think, you know, the demand that's sticking. to Ethel 1 is the defy. It's the high quality NFTs. That's not going anywhere. I'm not moving my money on any bridge. Absolutely not. And so like you have defenseability. You have this web of chains playing out. But you also have just like, ETH is the super unique

asset for the network. And like all FrenTech shares are Price and ETH or I guess keys or price and ETH. You know, all of the interesting bridge pairs are ETH as well. It's just like the language. It's the asset of just I don't know. It's

speculation, but also just like this digital world and digital economy that we're building on chain. And I think that's really cool. So I don't know. There's not much to say about ETH other than its network effects are compounding. The multi-chain thesis has gotten worse, not better. And if you talk to all the trad-fi people, they're, it's like, it's like, you know, they're not putting anything anywhere unless it has nuclear grade censorship-resistant guarantees. And that's what ETH is. And so like all the real-world assets that you see, those are going to ETH, and those are just going to keep increasing. And that's like one of our core

the thesis for ETH going forward is all of the tokenized stocks, bonds, assets that exist or that don't exist yet, those are going to go on ETH. And if you look at the dashboard of real world assets, there's about $680 million. They're growing 30% per month. And so

you're probably looking at like $10 billion of fixed income on chain at some point next year. And so that's going to be a huge boon. Each cycle, ETH just swallows more, real-world assets. Last cycle it was stable coins. This cycle, it's going to be fixed income. Maybe in 10 years it'll be, you know, some crazy ETFs that we don't, you don't even know about yet. But, you know, you said that the, the institutions out there, the big money, the outside players who are coming in to allocate, that they really value censorship resistance. Why is that? Can you just unpack that conversation? What is the trad conversation around ethie asset and Ethereum the network like?

I think the conversation is pretty simple. It comes from a place of you're telling me I can lower my costs, I can increase or I can decrease my settlement times. I can offer my product to more people if I put it on chain. Okay, that's the, that's the pro side. The con side is what happens if the chain goes down? What happens if ETH is a, or if the underlying token is a security? What happens if someone steals my token somehow?

It's all the same questions that you think you'd get from Normie's. but they're like 10 times more loud just because these people have real money at risk. And so, eth is, you know, it's like, you know, are you going to host your company's website on AWS or like some new startup, you know, AWS competitor? Like, you're always just going to choose AWS. There's no risk that you can take that would make it worth it for you to go with some other, you know, platform. So that's the effect, basically.

Part of the implication, I'm wondering if this is true. So with Fang, right, you have sort of the Fang tech stocks, and they're all somewhat on the equal footing. You know, they're all tech companies. You have ETH in the middle of a set of defy assets, essentially apps, right? And so sort of like the bankless idea would be that, no, actually ETH is not side by side these other sort of of defy applications. It's even more important. It's like base level. It's almost like buying a NASDAQ index. It's an index of all of them. Or it's almost like, you know, betting on Silicon Valley or like, you know, the nation state of the U.S. or something like this. And

I'm wondering if you see it that way as well or if you treat this as, you know, it's kind of similar to synthetics or maker, link or, you know, Lido and the other assets. Do you give it any special status? I mean, like, is a unit of denominator? Heath, Heath has special status for us. And it also has, you know, turbo special status in terms of our portfolio waiting. But, you know, I mean, your point is right. You know, everyone's bridging assets to ETH, whether it's roll bit, whether it's DMT

from Sanco GameCorp, like everyone wants the liquidity, the profile. It's the main stage of finances. This is where you want to be. And it's the same thing on the L2 side. You know, everyone is creating an ETHL2. If it's a game, you need your own L2. I saw a real world asset L2. I saw, like, I've seen so many.

I think one of my questions is, how many L2s are there going to be? Is it going to be, I think, I think like earlier in the year was my mind was hundreds. Now it seems like probably thousands. And it's like, you know, thousands of L2s, each one ETH stakers, one ETH per day. And that's like a super weird, interesting economic model that doesn't exist anywhere except for crypto. And so I think, you know, ETH is super well positioned. You definitely need the E in order to make smell, though, the acronym. So that's why it has to be in the middle here.

Exactly. All right, moving on to our first L. Does Lido or Link come first, and does that matter? It does matter. Lido comes first. Why does Lido come first? It doesn't actually matter. But I mean, Lido is just, first of all, the team is just incredible.

like Constantine Hasu, all the guys in the telegram, you know, seraphim, like all those dudes. Like they're just firing on all cylinders. They just hit 8.3 million ETH today. And they've had like 50,000, 60,000 Eth input days, which is just wild to see. And you can see it on chain and there's a really good dashboard on Dune. It's just Lido Finance extended if you want to keep score at home.

But, you know, let's say, I think at the end of the year, when we bought Lido last year, my expectation was that by the end of this year, they would hit 10 million at each staked. I think they're on board on they're on track to hit or exceed that. And so like, you know, check mark. Um, end of next year, maybe it's 15, maybe it's 20. Either way, they are the dominant LST provider. And on their tech roadmap, it's DVT, it's staking modules.

It's effectively decentralizing it and making it more and not less ethelined. And I think that was always one of the existential threats is like, would the EF just like, tell everyone to go home at some point. And I don't know how they would do that, but I don't think they want to anymore. And so my hope is that, you know, people like swell, people like rocket pool, people, you know, like figment.

Eventually they just become node operators on Lido, and it becomes less about like this like one monopolizing factor and more about we've created this platform for everyone to run nodes on safely so we can make the cost and the overhead of running eth nodes as low as humanly possible. And I think that's a really noble mission. and I think it's really ethel-line.

I think it's really, you know, personally aligned. And you can do the math. You know, let's say that Lido has 20 million eth in at stake at the end of next year. And let's say, you know, just for all intents and purposes, that the price of ETH is $5,000, whatever, new all-time highs. So they would have $100 billion in TVL. Let's say yields are 5, 5%. They have 5% or they have $5 billion in.

in yields flowing through them, and they take a 10% cut of that, which is 500 million. Wow, what an amazing business. You know, lever to ETH, super unique, super defensible. Steath has its own network effects because it's money. It's used in defy. It'll soon replace all the LP pairs. Just like, wow, that doesn't exist anywhere else. So I think it's really interesting.

How do you think the fee dynamics play out, though, is my big question here. Because we have another, like we had the stable coin wars. Now we have the LST wars, liquid staking token wars. I mean, everyone wants to be the winner. Everyone wants to be the monopoly. Everything like that's on the, if you are an LST, you want to be the dominant LST. And so the thought is that all the fees just compressed to zero. And even under the model of, okay, everything just fits under the Lido umbrella with all

their staking modules, how do you think about the fee dynamics playing out over the long term here? Sure. So just to lay it out for everyone, Coinbase charges 25% on CBEath. Rocket pool charges about 12% on our ETH. Our ETH. FRAX is similar to Reith. Swell is similar to Reith when it's done with its incentive period. But like, the cost factor that is most predominant for these staking providers is how do you pay your node operators?

Like there's a cost to running nodes. And if you don't have good quality nodes with good quality. operators, the worst thing is going to happen, which is you get slashed and you lose your eth. And so like the price can, and let me go even further, if you look at the centralized staking providers, Coinbase, you know, figment places like that, they're like a seven to nine percent fee. So there's not like there's some like external force saying like we can do it for so much cheaper. It's like that is the rate. Like we've kind of already competed with each other down to what fees are going to be. And if you think about, you know, the really small subscale operators,

like the new startups, and we're investors in a lot of them, there's a certain point where you can't actually pay your note operators correctly if you're subscale. And I think subscale in my mind is like anything less than a million eth. So a lot of these people are going to face, you know, cost pressures in terms of like, how do we pay our note operators effectively while keeping some margin for ourselves? And I I think long term, the answer for that is that a lot of them build on Lido's DVT and staking module platform. The nodes are already there. You can already source them.

You can compete with each other for fees if you want. It's going to be a marketplace. And that's how cost pressure to come down. In terms of, you know, where are node operators today with the, with the, you know, it's a 10% fee for Lido, five goes to the Dow, five goes to node operators. Node operators are running probably like a 20, 30, 35% margin business. Like, there's not that much room to cut and keep them high quality. Say the price of Eath goes to 10K, they probably shouldn't get five and five,

you know, half of the total fee split. They're going to be running hugely profitable businesses at that point. That makes no sense. And so, like, you know, as the price goes higher, I think the share captured by the doubt probably goes higher. But I don't see any real aggregate cost pressures coming. I just don't think it would be safe. Yeah.

Yeah. I learned a lot just there. Let's move on to Link. Time for the last L. Link, why does Link get to be part of a smell? I mean, perennially disrespected, you know, people don't take it seriously. People think it's a joke, whatever. The fact is that most of D5 relies on Chainlink oracles.

And if they were to rip out tomorrow, a lot of it would fail. And they finally launched CCIP, which is incredible. It's a cross-chain messaging protocol. call so you can, you know, borrow in one chain, lend on another. You can, you know, cross collateralized derivatives transactions, whatever you want, you can build. And so it finally has this economic model, which is frankly, I've been holding chain links since, man, I guess it's been like six, six or seven years now. But they finally have an economic model, which was always kind of what bothered me. It's like, when is staking going to come? When is this thing going to act, look,

or feel like an L1 blockchain that has some security guarantees. And now it does. And so that's very positive. And they've already got all the oracles integrated. It's just a question of like, what else can they sell? Is it cross-chain messaging? Is it asset transfer?

Is it random number generation? Like they've got a lot of products in there. And so I think, you know, Link Marines are amazing as well. Don't count them out ever. They harass us. They harass us a lot. They're going to harass us now.

Good. Oh, don't encourage them. Makes you grind harder. Okay. So here, and here's why. It's like, I at least from my opinion as to like why I get scared about Link is exactly what you said. Like if Link when goes down, if the chain link goes down like all of Defi collapses, that scares me. And I actually don't want that to be the state of things.

I think that we should be more resilient than that. And so I would like to have some sort of bottom up more emergent solution to some like top down here is the state of all prices, Oracle provider. And so that's why I get scared of Link. I think it's okay to be scared. I get scared sometimes. But I think it's, I don't know, like I'm not, I would never self-delude myself into thinking that it had an economically secure model. And that was the scariest time for me.

It's like in the last bull run, we run chain link nodes. We're just getting paid chain link. You know, like we didn't have to stake. Like, how does this work? Now it's much different. And I think we have reasons to be optimistic about, you know, why it's going to provide a more secure backbone for defy, but also do a bunch of other things outside of oracles. And I think everyone should use uniswap oracles as a range bound indicator of

like are chain link oracles correct. But it's, it's, it's, oracles are so hard. You know, there's no answer. It's just like, hopefully a bunch of them combined can do something, you know, better than the status quo. And I think chain link is moving in a, in a positive direction to make everything more safe, which is good. So for me, just one observation, and then I have a question for you, Vance. So my observation is this. When you mentioned the age of like link tokens and how long you've been holding, it struck me that like, damn, these are some old tokens.

This is some boomer defy, if I may say so myself. So we've got synthetics. We've got Maker. We've got Link. Lido is the only kind of newer kid on the block. But this is some like defy one. 1.0 stuff that you are advocating here. So that's my comment.

And then my question is, but what about, and I know you're talking about the projects and not the tokens themselves, but now it's our time to kind of inject the token question. All of these assets, I haven't really looked at the charts of independent assets, but like I'll tell you directionally, that we all know, they've all disintegrated

as denominated in ether. So my question is you might be bullish on all of these things, and you've given a compelling case as to why. Why would you be more bullish on these things than just holding ether? So how about rather than the smell portfolio, the E portfolio, which is just like just a whole bunch of ether. And that's been kind of the problem of, I feel like, defy tokens in general. I mean, look at Maker, it's just flat for the last five years and probably down substantially

as denominated in ether. Can you shade in that part of the story? Look, I can't get too much into token prices, as you guys know. So I don't want to disappoint too much. The thing I will say is I see a lot of Twitter commentary about, you know, this asset is never going to break. It's all time high in terms of ether. It's like, well, yeah, no shit. It's down 95% relative to.

It's not recoverable. Well, it's like it would take like, you know, it would take a 20x gain against the ETH pair for it to, you know, break its all time high. But like if it like it can go up three X versus Eith with and still be down 70% against it. And in that scenario, you know, you've three or four X, your Eith. And so like, I don't know, the myopic, you know, it'll never break its all time high against Eith. I don't think that's what you're saying directly, but I do see that said a lot. And it's just entirely misses the point of relative performance.

And I think, you know, smell is just a way of expressing like, there's a lot of different things that are going on that are really positive in crypto. It happens to be mostly around the incumbents, defy 1.0 dinosaur coins, as you might have said, as you might have kind of alluded to. But I think last cycle was very VC driven. You know, we invented this thing, Salana, you know, in the last fair market. And, you know, it's, it just happens to be ready or like, DFINITY. And these charts are just tragedies. Like they just, they, you know, the holders of

these things, the private holders, just sold them into retail and just absolutely eviscerated them. I think it's actually cool that we have the dinosaur coins that have real fundamentals that are have been up 100x and down 99% and are now kind of back from a fundamentals perspective. And you have enough price discovery that it's not like, you know, there's some guy waiting around the corner to sell his tokens into you. It's more fair. And I like that as well. Can we call this episode Smelly Dinosaur Coins, please. Smiley Dinosaur is the most interesting thing about smell is actually what's not there. I would notice if we're talking about dinosaur coins, where's Uniswop?

And that will also open up the can of worms that is the fee switch conversation, which is not just for Uniswap. I think that's a conversation for many, many defy tokens out there that are also called themselves governance tokens. So these conversations and more are coming up right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Are you a Metamask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are.

The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. Metamask portfolio is the ultimate one-stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once. You can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens, and NFTs in one convenient place just by connecting your wallet. Metamask portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio, though. Inside the portfolio, you can do all the incredible money verbs that make you. make defy so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your defy moves right at your fingertips.

So if you're looking to do more in Web3 your way, Metamask portfolio is the answer. I already know that you have Metamask wallet, so go check out your Metamask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio. Introducing ETHX from Stater. Ethx is a liquid staking token designed to maximize rewards all while securing Ethereum. With Stater, you can run an Ethereum node with just. just for Eath, which is 85% lower capital and 35% higher returns versus just solo staking. Stater has a multi-pool architecture with both permissionless and permission node operators

to enable decentralization and scalability. Stater has extensive experience in building liquid staking solutions on six proof-of-stake blockchains and is trusted by over 70,000 stakers. Stater has partnered with over 40 leading protocols on these chains to bring defy utility to their liquid staking tokens. Stater is actively building integrations and partnerships across Ethereum to bring the same great defy utility to the ETHX token. While smart contract bugs are always a risk in defy, the ETHX smart contract has received three independent audits and has a million

dollar bug bounty with Immunify. Go to staterlabs.com slash ETH slash stake to access the stator staking protocol today. You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap. But Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low Fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitram, and optimism.

On the Uniswap mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to D5 with a Unifte. Uniswop mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defy. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. And we're back rounding out this smelly conversation with why it's not a Smalley

conversation with a U. God, I hate myself for these puns. Vance, Uniswap. Where does Uniswap land in your register and why I didn't end up in the smell index, smell portfolio? Could have been Smell you. Didn't end up being smell you. But so I think, you know, one of the things,

of smell is that there's just such strong moats around all of these, synthetics, it's the front end maker. It's the actual die stable coin. Ethereum, it's just the network of chains and the lindiness of defy and NFTs. Steeth as a network effect because it's money. And Link, it's just because like, nobody's going to rip out their oracles. There's just no shot. People have tried to. Uniswap is different. It's, I think, probably the most vulnerable to disruption in terms of payment forwarder flow models. And you swap X is. is a move in that direction. You know, private order flow being sold through a different venue.

There's going to be a lot of that. That feels like the central difference between this cycle and the last is that we now have a bunch of these more sophisticated financial protocols, you know, companies that are starting to build payment for order flow on chain. And I just don't know how uniswap is going to compete with that. Uniswap X is also, in my mind, just a different direction for the protocol that probably doesn't have as much of a connotation around the token as, you know, I would like. And so, you know, like, I think if there was to be an addition, it would be probably Uniswap. But right now,

I just, I don't have the confidence that, uh, they're going to fend off, uh, all the payment forward to flow that's coming on chain. Okay. So say I'm Uniswap and I aspire to be a part of Vance's smell index to turn it into the smell you. What do I need to do? Like, how do I, how do I pledge the, the index the smell index what do i need to get there do to get there um there there's a lot of stuff you know it's like whereas the team based it's still the u.s that's tough um you know what what does the protocol look like in the facebook payment for overflow frankly we're only going to know once like uniswap x really launches and you need before um and so i think it's just time and like i just one other common theme of all of these of smell and and also i guess uniswap is that

everyone has a plan. Synthetics, it's V3, Maker, it's endgame. Ethereum, it's the scaling roadmap. Lido, it's DVT and V2. Chainlink, it's CCIP. They all have like an answer for like, where are we going? Uniswap, it feels more ambiguous. And, you know, there's the company, there's the token, like, who accrues what, why. Those are unanswered questions for me. So, you know, love Uniswap. I use Uniswap a lot, but just didn't make it. Guys, you guys are missing a tremendous opportunity. It's not smell you. It would be you smell, okay?

Yeah, that is true. This is so obvious. And then if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if salonah really pans out, I think I reserve the right to append that to, you know, or smells smells smells. Smells. Smells. Smells.

Smells. Smells. You smells. I don't know. It's a, it's a slana potential contender here. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's interesting. I think it's a model for a chain, which doesn't involve 100 L2s. I think you could argue the L2s.

who's are like leaking value from ethyl one. You could also argue that they're doing things ethyl one could never do. Salon, it feels like those two things are simpatico. So I think it's interesting. And if you look at teams like Gito that are just showing up in an environment that's just a barren wasteland and like just eating glass all day, every day, that just feels like it doesn't matter what chain you're on.

If you do that long enough, you're going to be successful. I've never heard you say such good things about Salonovans. That's, uh, that's new. that's interesting. I'm I'm I have ideology around crypto and I think it's noble and important and I want to be in this industry for the rest of my life, but I'm open to new things. I'm not myopic. Yeah, I share, I share these sentiments. Really just to hammer out this last little bit about the uniswap fee switch. How do you think about fee switches? They're off generally, but they could be on. Is that like, how do you even think about and consider this when you make an evaluation on a token? I think there's,

going to be an amazing time to turn the fee switch on when regulatory clarity arrives in the United States. And I don't think that day is too far off. But I don't think that day is today either. So that's the main calculus. It's like political. And I really hate thinking about politics in the context of like investing. I like thinking about it in the aggregate because I find it fascinating. But I just I can't bet on things that have political, you know, connotations to them. So, Van, as we close this out, there's a ton of other narrative. that we could talk about. We could talk about real world assets.

We could talk about ETFs that I think we all think are coming. We could talk about, you know, gaming in Asia. We could talk about the Bitcoin happening events. All of these things seem to be in the future. And you've got a bunch of them listed in a tweet. But I want to ask you kind of the overarching question here. Do you think that we are in the early phases of a bull market? I mean, is it too early to call that?

Or like, what phase of the market cycle do you think we're in right now? I can't answer that. But I'm optimistic that the technology is improving and will rapidly improve, you know, in the coming years. And I think crypto is inevitable and we're kind of just stewards of it to some extent. And people come and go. There's like been a revolving door of main characters that have been blown out over the years, who once were our standard bearers. And I think it's just going to continue to be the same.

And the goal is to not be the main character. The goal is to just quietly shepherd the industry to where I think it's going to go. So is there a bull market, bear market? I have no idea. I think we're coming out of a bear market. I'm not sure what we're headed into. I think it's going to be better than the past couple of years. That's for sure.

Well, congrats on never being the main character, at least up to date. I hope that you will remain a supporting actor, Vance, and we appreciate it. He's coming on a bank list. Just cameos, you know? Just cameos. Awesome. Gotta end with this. Of course, risks and disclosures.

Vance mentioned his disclosures a little bit earlier about these smelly dinosaur coins that he holds bags in. We also hold some smelly dinosaur tokens. We hold these things, especially the E and smell. If you want to see all of our disclosures, of course, they are always available at bankless.com slash disclosures. Just a reminder, David and I are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all of our disclosures there in the show.

show notes. And got to end with this, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.