Unchained - The Chopping Block: Crypto’s Best and Worst in 2023 - Ep. 583

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, after an incredibly eventful year for crypto, The Chopping Block crew makes its picks for the best and worst of 2023, including its biggest winners and losers, biggest surprises, best memes, best or worst pivots, biggest flops, best comeback stories, favorite podcast guests and predictions for 2024. Hear why some in the gang consider Solana to be the year’s biggest winner, Circle the biggest loser, MicroStrategy the best and worst pivot, Coinbase the best comeback and a renewed boom in crypto lending one of the top predictions for 2024.  Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly  Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Links Surprises:  The Chopping Block: Was Crypto Just Debanked? What Is Depegging in Crypto and Why Does It Occur? Flops: The Chopping Block: Why the Azuki Elementals Drop Was a Big Flop The Chopping Block: Michael Lewis Swindled, SBF’s Effective Altruism Ruse, Ethereum Protocol Enshrinement The Block: Worldcoin unveils integrations with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram and Shopify CoinDesk: Future of Solana's Hyped Saga Phone Is 'Under Internal Discussion' as Sales Figures Fail to Wow ApeCoin DAO Governance Winners: Unchained:  SEC vs Ripple: Judge Rules XRP Sold on Exchanges Is Not a Security Anatoly Yakovenko on Solana’s Astounding Recovery and Its Future Plans  Bitcoin’s Daily Transaction Fees Surpass Ethereum’s for First Time Since 2020 What Are BRC-20 Tokens? A Brief Introduction The Chopping Block: Wizards vs. Laser Eyes for the Future of Bitcoin Memes: Dexerto: What is TikTok’s viral NPC fetish? New streaming kink explained David Beckham’s memes Favorite guests: The Chopping Block: Top White Hat Hacker Samczsun Discusses the State of Crypto Security The Chopping Block: How This DeFi Hack Negotiator Gets Hackers to Return Stolen Money The Chopping Block: Why Vivek Ramaswamy Wants Less Crypto Regulation The Chopping Block: Coinbase’s Paul Grewal on Why the SEC Is Going After Crypto So Aggressively Others Unchained:  Ledger Library Compromised, Causing Confusion and Panic in Crypto Community Vitalik Buterin Supports Integrating Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines Into Main Ethereum Chain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My biggest loser is probably Luke Dash Jr. and Jack Dorsey because they started this mining pool that tries to not process ordinal transactions and it has been a mega fail. Not only have they had bugs in it, they've been unable to attract people. Jack Dorsey, you know, got to be one of my least favorite tech moguls because he just seems to make no sense. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are

very involved. D5.E.5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. The quick intros. First you got Tom, the Defy

Maven, and Master of Memes. Hello. Next to you got Robert, the Cryptoconisuer, and Tsar of Superstate. GM, everybody. Then we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Aloha. And finally, I'm perceived the head hype man at Dragonfly.

We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block. That XYZ for more disclosures. So, boys, it is the end of the year. We're coming up on holiday season. So I wanted to come back and have this episode to be a review of the year. So for those of you who have been longtime chopping block listeners, you might remember,

at the end of every year, we do a year-end, kind of like best and worst of the year. So we look back over certain categories and we each share what were our biggest picks of the year. Now, this year's been absolutely bonkers. This has been definitely one of the most stressful years of my life and certainly of my career. Just the amount of sheer craziness that we were dealing with from like, you know, banking collapses to everything in crypto being securities and all the the exchange is getting sued and it's been, it's just been, it's been wild. In some ways, it's been a very good year, right? In terms of price action, you know, Bitcoin's up like 150% this year.

So it's been a good year in that regard. But it's also been a very intense and chaotic year. So here's the game plan. So we're going to go through a list of questions and we're each going to share what were our answers for these different categories. So the things are going to be starting with biggest winner, biggest loser, biggest surprise, best mechanism, best meme, best or worst pivot, biggest flop, comeback story, favorite chopping block guest, and then predictions for 2024. So that's how it's going to play.

We'll go ahead and start with the first category, which is biggest winner of the year. So we'll go around. Robert, why don't you start? Who is your biggest winner for 2023? So this is a really boring biggest winner. And you guys are going to ridicule. me. But the biggest winner in my mind has been just the rebound across the board in asset prices across the entire ecosystem. January 1st to now, Bitcoin is up, you know, almost, you know, 3x. Most assets are, it really has been wide and broad in terms of the recovery and asset prices following an incredibly brutal 2022. And I think the most obvious winner of all is just asset prices for the investors that hold crypto assets.

So us. So we are the big ones. Most people listening to this show are the biggest winners. The Chopin Block listeners are the biggest winners. That's good. That's good, nice, good way to open up the show. It's a populism. I like that.

Tarun, who's your biggest winner? The Solana ecosystem. I mean, think about January 1st of this year, right? Like, everyone wrote them off. I think they had, you know, like I said on the show before, nuclear level destruction event, like an event that if your community is not very good, everyone just leaves and says, fuck you, I'm never coming back. And I think it was proof that that's like a real community and not just a set of mercenaries.

I think, you know, if you look at a lot of other L-1s, they don't have that level of dedication or commitment to their community. And I certainly don't think, you know, the biggest scandal ever in crypto being very tightly associated with your ecosystem is very easy to get around. And the sheer level of perseverance from some of those teams is just, it's something obviously very commendable. But I mean, sure, the price reflects a lot of that.

But I think the, you know, if I look at the, the GitHub commits, if I look at people who are working in that ecosystem, I think they have to, to me, just be the number one winners, right? There are a lot of other L-1s that didn't have anywhere near the level of extinction event, but just didn't even make any progress, relatively speaking, any progress this year. Just look at their code bases, look at things like that. Whereas, you know, people in that ecosystem, through the adversity, we're just continuing to grind and I think they have to be the biggest winner in my mind this year. Good pick.

See, I'd put them down for the biggest comeback story and you scooped me. Okay. Sorry. No, hold. No spoilers. Those spoilers on future. Yeah. Can't be spoiling your later picks.

Come on, Robert. All right. Tom, who do you got for biggest winner? I will answer it. But before I answer, I want to give a quick shout out to the petite flickering candle in Truing's table in his background. It's just really bringing the... holiday ambiance's episode.

So thank you, what holiday cheer? Oh, my goodness. Did you light that before we recorded this? Or was that just, the funny thing is I'm always lighting candles or incense in my house. And it's the first time I've been back home in like two weeks or something.

So I was just like, I got home and I immediately with a candle because that's just like how. I will also know, Tarun is wearing red and he has green hair. So it's actually also very festive. Yeah. I guess I am Christmas. He's drinking a red bull.

Oh, hey, hey, they're a true. Kind of white. I'm not sure you guys. Nice. Oh, well, look at you guys. You guys coordinating on this. Yeah, I was like, it's sweater season, Troom.

Let's whip it out. And this is where we're at. Great. My biggest winner is Tether. I think Tether from now versus a year ago is just, it was totally different, right? I think the sentiment, end of 2022 was Tether is illegitimate. Circle is legit. Tether is going to get shut down eventually.

Everyone's going to migrate to USC. Market starts turning. Everyone's going to move out of staple coins. These companies are going to collapse. In fact, like the exact opposite has happened, right? Tether has grown substantially that they're actually higher than their 2022 peak, whereas USDC is, I think, at half or less of its 2020 peak. Due to rising interest rates, Tether is now printing money. I think they're made several billion dollars in revenue this year. Most of that in profit, given kind of it's a pretty low OPEX, CAPEX operation. And three, they're really trying to legitimize themselves. I think Cantra Fitzgerald, which cussities their treasuries,

one of their executives, just went on CVC yesterday singing Tether's praises. If you go to Turkey, if you go to Argentina, people want. not tether on Tron, I mean, of all places, but they use it for payments. They use it for their sort of, you know, daily currency. And so Tether has really sort of emerged as this like legitimized practical story. And also it's just a great narrative for crypto around real world use case and, you're providing value to people's lives. So that's my 2023 winner. Yeah, very good call on that. So my winner, for the biggest winner, I had Brad Garlinghouse. The Brad Garlinghouse is the founder of Ripple, one of the founders of Ripple. And,

very famously, he was being sued by the SEC under the claim that Ripple, XRP was a security. And he probably had what was the most major legal win for crypto this year was the ruling by Judge Torres that XRP was not in and itself a security. And XRP kind of blasted its way into being once again a hero of crypto, despite the fact that, you know, I think over the past few years, many people were detractors of XRP. But they've kind of stood out in front for the whole industry. standing up to the incursion of Gensler and the SEC, claiming that everything in crypto security and this whole industry is,

you know, the whole industry of tokens, I should say, is grounded in, you know, this kind of legal illegitimacy. So big kudos to Brad. He's fought a fight for the whole industry and he's,

at least for now, seems to be winning that fight. So huge kudos to him and I think the people who are holds of XRP, you know, rightfully rejoicing over the performance of their token. So, all right, so we got picks for biggest winner. Now let's reverse it and say biggest loser and we'll go in reverse order. Okay.

The biggest loser I have for this year, Michael Lewis. So Michael Lewis, he was the famous author who wrote a book about SBF called Going Infinity, I think it was what it was called. And it was the first, it was like the first blockbuster book about SBF after he was apprehended and it was released like right as the trial was kicking off. and it was like he just he has been lambasted for the tone of this book which has been a very sympathetic to sbf very pro like oh he's a tortured genius and he just made one little boo-boo and you know it was all uh it was all an accident he had the best intentions and i think now after especially after the spf trial the tone of this book seems just laughably naive and so i don't think michael lewis has aged well and i think you know going forward it's hard to not see this book as a pockmark on what's otherwise been a very impressive career. here. That's my pick. That's a good one. Tom, biggest loser? I actually had maybe sort of the flip side of yours. I had the SEC. I think for the past, let's say, four or five years in crypto,

the SEC has been this, you know, boogeyman, especially under Gensler and people are, you know, terrified to, you know, really operate or feel very, you know, sort of oppressed to do anything in the U.S. And I think this year we started to see a little bit of that sort of fade away. Obviously, with the ripple loss, but it's generally sort of bipartisan pushback on Gensler and the SEC sort of overstepping their area where they operate. I think there's also obviously the Chevron doctrine sort of being questioned and sort of reevaluated. And so I think overall just a lot of a lot more skepticism around what the SEC is doing with respect to crypto, but operating overall. And it feels like that momentum is going to continue into 2024 and beyond. So that's my pick.

Yeah, it has really bit of phase shift this year. Like I think people were much more differential to the SEC last year compared to this year, especially with both Coinbase and Ripple. And the ETF news sort of picking up, it feels like, you know, really they're, the cards are starting being forced against them. Right. I remember back when Coinbase pursued the SEC, there were so many legal commentators saying, this is insane, this is suicide. Why would you sue your own regulator? And now it looks like, oh, yeah, of course, like 100%. This is the right move. Well, now everyone's doing it too, right? Like, now people are like, like, SEC comes after me, I sue them, which, you know, yeah, I think that once the floodgates

are open, the capital and legal entities in crypto are ready to fight. What was just not true a couple years ago, I think. Right. So, okay, Tarun, who's your biggest loser? I'm going to have to go circle to take the kind of opposite side of Tom. Good choice. You know, obviously the SVB stuff was bad, but like I also just feel like maybe it's just maybe my personal experience going to other countries, going to places like Turkey and people are still angry about the DPEG. It's like, I just think like there's a, there was a really

huge amount of brand destruction. And it wasn't their fault, right? Like, for the record, like, I'm not, I'm not trying to say circle themselves even did something. That's like the sad part about it, right? Like, they actually tried to do everything by the book, right? They like, used U.S. banks. They, like, had the right auditing. They did all the stuff that they should have, but I think they just kind of lost the market of the real non-speculative users. I think, obviously, in D5, CIRC still has a huge toehold, but I just think the market share destruction, it really does sort of feel like a one-way function. I'm not sure how they can come back from it. So I think they're the biggest loser, but again, in a way where it's not their fault necessarily, you can, you can't like attribute causality to like they did something that caused them to be in that position directly, but they, they definitely seem to have taken this huge blow.

And I think the interesting thing, right, is in the current run up, the majority of the new USC you see is actually just going to Solana. You don't see that much USDC, net new USCL. So I really think like the tether dominance thing is, it's going to be very hard to overcome that. Makes sense. All right. Robert, what's your biggest loser for the year? Well, I'll start off with a, you know, micro answer, which is SBF is an easy one to pick,

simply because, you know, we all very publicly watched him lose in his defense. But more seriously, you know, this is actually similar to my first answer. I think the biggest loser in aggregate are the listeners and residents of the U.S. and large, because this is yet another year where there's been really no progress on legislation. I was very optimistic at the end of last year on our episode that this would be a year where we would finally start to see legislation adding clarity, not the judicial system, but, you know, proactive legislation. and it's yet another year where the year has come and gone.

And there's been a couple things that have made it out of committee, but there's really no progress on crypto legislation in the U.S. And I think, you know, this was a major year coming in the shadow of SBF, coming in the shadow of collapsed last year. And, you know, there's a lot of people that were more optimistic that this would, you know, finally be the moment. But yet another year has passed. And we have not seen legislation.

and creating clarity in the U.S. Wait, so, okay, so chopping block listeners is the biggest winner. Americans are the biggest losers. So how does it put American chopping block listeners? You know, it's a grab bag. Horseshoe theory. Horseshoes theory. That's right.

Yeah, it's both good and bad simultaneously. It makes total sense. Total sense. Let's move on. Next category is biggest surprise, which might be a tough one in a year full of surprises. We'll go to different order to ruin Europe first. Biggest surprise. That is actually a bit of a difficult one because I feel like a lot of the things we mentioned already sort of qualify.

Maybe I'll go for something on the technical side. I think the biggest surprise is that layer twos can be beaten by Ponzi multi-sig bridges by a long shot. Good choice. In the sense that like, you know, I feel like we've spent so much time on security. and so much time on like analysis and making sure these things are safe. And what we've learned is users really just want one number, which is points or yield. And I guess maybe a secondary surprise is this idea that these point systems

have somehow become ubiquitous, where point systems are things where you use a protocol, you aggregate points, think like almost like rewards points on your credit card. And then based on, how much usage you have, you get some type of airdrop. So it's a sort of a, if you think about air drops in 2021 or 2020, it was like, hey, how much capital did you put in the system or how much,

how many resources have you committed? Whereas now it's sort of action-based. Like, did you do this many actions or this form? But I'm still surprised they kind of took off the way they did. But is it really biggest surprise so much as biggest reminder of human nature? I was going to say it's best mechanism. I would say best mechanism. Yeah.

All right. Well, we go to that's up next. So let's not front run. Let's not front run ourselves. I think to me it's just more surprising that that point system completely overrides any security concerns, which is what we learned. Fair enough. Fair enough. I mean.

Right. In the sense of blast, right? It's like purely it was like, like, hey, we're going to give you points. We're not going to tell you how. Okay, here's $800 million of TVL. Sure, sure. I mean, yeah, I think that thing, that kind of thing happens all the time in crypto. It's just not generally like on our timelines is the way that I would put it.

I just didn't see that size of it was a, you know, like to anti-quote doquan, that size is size. True, true, true, true. All right. So my choice for a bigger surprise was crypto unbanking the banks. So if you remember the banking crisis, which kicked off in the U.S. and was this huge monumental thing on a global scale, it started with crypto banks. It started with Silvergate and then it became signature and SVB, which SVB was not really, you know, that significant portion of the deposits was crypto.

But it was true for Silvergate and for signature. Now, in retrospect, when we look back, at the time, you know, people were really trying to pin the tail on the donkey that crypto caused this. This was because of crypto that the banks went under, which at the time, I mean, in retrospect, when you do the full accounting, it's like, well, it wasn't really because of crypto. I mean, maybe Silvergate was because crypto deposits were flighty. But really, the underlying cause was interest rates, right? And the fact that their balance sheets were all loaded up on treasuries and yields just did something very bad when interest rates went up on bonds that were purchased in the zero interest rate environment.

There was a hot second when everybody in the world was convinced that crypto, had broke the banking sector. And that was incredible. You know, it wasn't exactly true, but it was this moment that we were like, oh, wow, crypto can absolutely change the world, not in the direction that we were imagining. And that, the fact that we as an industry could be at the center,

or at least appear to be at the center of one of the most monumental events this year, that was a huge surprise. I was definitely not prepared for that. That was very frustrating to sort of watch in the news, especially when it started to hit non-crypto-related being like First Republic, right? And there's always some new scapego. And there's always some new bullshit, even though, you know, the answer I think is fairly obvious, but it's crypto makes a great scapego, I guess.

My biggest surprise actually maybe playing off in Turin is actually the rise of L2s. I think there is a narrative in 2021 and 2022 that, you know, why do I need an L2? I can just make my own EVM compatible L1. I have a bridge. It's good enough. And now I can have my own token. I can bootstop my own network. And it's super fast and super cheap.

And everyone kind of loves it. And that's where all those kind of, you know, EVM chains came from. And no one was really paying attention to L2s or just like, you know, why am I paying Ethereum for security? What does this token do? There was a lot of sort of fudding around it. And I think 2023, the was the exact opposite. I was actually looking, obviously not the best metric, but L2, TVL,

is up almost 5x from January of this year. And that's not just optimism that's not just Arbitrum. There's obviously some of the new L2 that are launching like ZK Sync, but it's also the entire OP stack ecosystem of like base and people running all these broops as a service. And so it really feels like this is kind of the new meta of, hey, if you want to, instead of launching a new chain, launch your own rollup if you're an app, if you're an exchange, if you're a new ecosystem, you know, whatever. And so that has been sort of the biggest surprise I mean, it's basically just this total 180 from kind of this 2022 narrative around L1s and bridges. Good answer. All right, Robert, biggest surprise.

You know, this is a year where I feel like there was very few surprises, especially in terms of magnitude versus the prior year. 2022, I felt like there was earth-shattering surprises, you know, lurking almost every other weekend. For me, the biggest, you know, when I look back, shocking event was related to what folks have already said, but it was the USDC DPEG. That was the only thing that caused me to legitimately express a moment of shock that I wasn't prepared for mentally or intellectually. And there was a huge amount of expectations in the ecosystem that because of the level of transparency and the quality of infrastructure around USC that it couldn't depeg, that the market would be rational enough, that it would understand that. And, you know, amidst the banking crisis, we saw USCD bank 18% when it was still money good, when it was still a dollar in the bank over just one wild, wild weekend.

And that to me, I think, is the biggest surprise. You know, it's funny because I mentally don't even like remember it. It feels like five years ago at this point. But that was the only thing where like I wasn't expecting it. All the other things, like crypto being scapegoated, you know, for all the problems of the world. Not a surprise to me. Like totally expecting, you know. But I think that was the biggest surprise.

Hopefully, 2024 has very few surprises. I am sure that will not happen anyway. Yeah. Yeah, again, for a record, I kind of feel bad for the circle more than anything else. Because, like, I don't think they did anything wrong. Like, in some ways, it was like exogenous things, like completely. It was also because of the transparency about what was backing USC.

That's, like, actually part of the culprit. Tether didn't have. the same issue because nobody knew at the time what was backing tether. It was, oh, well, you know, USDC has 10% of its cash with Silvergate or SVB, one of those here. I forget which one at this point. And it was because of that level of transparency that people like, that weekend, did Tether also close redemptions? No. No. So, so, so, so yeah, the problem was not, yeah, the problem was not the SVB affiliation was an issue, but the problem is that circle was not doing redemptions over.

the weekend, right? Coinbase En Circle, we're not doing redemptions over the weekend. So there was no exhaust valve for any money that wanted to get out. I do think, I mean, so I agree with you, that was a fucking harrowing weekend, probably the most stressful weekend this year, or probably the most stressful moment this year was seeing the deep end. Like, that's the only thing I can think of this year that felt on par with the FTX collapse or the Luna collapse last year in terms of just the raw craziness of the moment and the intensity of that time. And just the fear, that I felt looking at what is happening in this industry. But Tether didn't turn off redemptions,

even though, like, you know, the 24-7 clearing networks were both shut down at that time. So the thing I think that Circle did do wrong, or maybe Circle and Coinbase together, is that they took way too long to assuage markets that, like, you know, UCC was good. They basically took this kind of legalistic stance of like, we should not say anything

until we actually know for certain that, blah, blah, blah, instead of saying, yo, we're good for it. We have the equity balance sheet that even if SBB goes to zero, we will be good. They should have gone into the markets and said so. And I think to this day, they're reaping the damage of not having calmed the markets that way. Totally agree. I agree. I think at the same time, there is a little bit of a curse to going to, you know, public channels and saying we're totally solvent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. You're not, I agree. You're not. different say you're solvent versus like, yo, we will back this if something goes wrong with SBB. I mean, my mothers are functionally similar. Even like the SBB president was going on Twitter and saying, no, we're totally fine,

you know, hold your cash here. I think every collapsed exchange or protocol or whatever has also kind of said the same thing. And so I hear you. I guess it's in my mind, it's a bit of a coin flip of, hey, are you able to build the momentum back to sort of stop the outflow or, oh, shit, why is this person going on on Twitter? and trying to convince me of something bad and shouldn't need to be convinced about that my bank is solvent or my stable point is solvent.

I mean, look, once your stable coin is trading for 82 cents, it's time to start talking like, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like, you need to get out there and start controlling the data. Like, I mean, look, a stable coin DPEG is just the, it's like, this is it. There's nothing else to wait for, you know? Like maybe when you're at 98 cents, it's like, okay, you know,

just whatever, it'll repag. But once, I mean, it was, like a day that it was like at 90 to 80. And that there was so much damage caused by just the waiting and everybody panicking. The furthest thing goes, the more people panic. Anyway, let's move on. Next question is best mechanism. Best mechanism of the year. Since you guys already blew your load on this one, Robert will start with you. What do you have for best mechanism? Well, my pick was points. You know, we've already touched on this. But the idea that you have a lot of of different crypto applications or protocols or L2s or quasi L2s, you know, that are using this

concept of points to start attributing value to users before distributing a token is brilliant. It's nefarious. It's, you know, what crypto deserves. You know, you have a bunch of folks now. It gets around a lot of legal issues. It gets around, but maybe it creates new ones. like elsewhere. Like it's, you know, I don't want to say it's like the inevitable outcome of all this stuff, but it's both an incredibly effective and somewhat disappointing outcome in that you have

not people doing things to get magical internet money, but people doing things to get magical internet points that aren't even magical internet money. And it's just kind of amusing to me at a fundamental level. But I think I want to give it as a mechanism because it's so fundamentally effective. I know so many people that are totally appending the way that they interact with crypto economic systems because of these points. And it seems so juvenile, but it's the reality. Yeah. I'll touch on points briefly, but I'll also just choose something new for the sake of choosing something new. I think the other thing that is very about points is it's basically liquidity mining with a human in the loop. The issue with one of the issues with liquidity mining,

right, is it's sort of you can set it once. And then you can't really change it again, which is not really how you wanted to you paid acquisition, right? You would never say, I'm going to spend a million dollars on Google ads for this week. And here's the copy. And I hope it works out. It's always very iterative. It's always there's a feedback loop.

And you sort of constantly tailor it to make sure that you're not overspending, that you're making sure that the money that you are spending is being used effectively. Points in my mind fit a little bit of that bucket where you can give out a bunch of points to people and then sort of retroactively. filter out the sibling, decide, okay, this was actually the more useful activity, this is the less useful activity. Here's the conversion rate I'm going to do. And that's something that I think has been missing in a lot of sort of liquidity mining systems where you just give out the tokens and sort of hope for the best. Well, to your point, you also have the ability to not just

retroactively change things, but on a going forward basis, change how points are created on a week-to-week basis. I mean, there's been multiple projects that are like, now this week we're giving out points for X. And then a week later, it's like, now we're giving up points. for Y and then the next week, now we're giving out points for Z. And it allows them to keep on modifying their going forward behavior. Yes. It's wild. Yeah.

I think it seems like kind of the future for the way people are doing liquidity mining and incentivization. But my other best mechanism is going to be not FrenTech, but specifically the royalty creator mechanism within Frent Tech. And so, you know, Front Tech, obviously you can buy someone's token. You'll get into their chat, have a conversation with them. I think the product obviously has its own issues. I think one of the really clever things they did beyond sort of the points was

killing two birth with one stone. One is how do you properly compensate creators? Two is how do you solve this royalties problem with, you know, NFTs or assets where you can't actually on-chain enforce that royalties get paid on on different trades. They sort of solve both of these by saying, hey, instead of having to you clear something to sell new tokens or having this weird creator token that you don't really know how to monetize other than, you know, maybe you can sell it, you're actually going to monetize on the exchange fees themselves, which I think is is quite clever. Two is, you basically by having this very integrated app and not outsourcing the trading to, you know, you to swap or to open

see and saying, hey, if you want to go to go trade the assets that we're creating, go to some third party, where you're sort of relinquishing control over the royalties, they sort of didn't really make them tokens at all and sort of bake them into their contract natively. And then they can sort of enforce their fees, enforce their royalties, enforce sort of the monetization system that they want. And so it's almost, again, sort of the opposite of the way

the industry was previously going, which is we just make the token, we just make the NFT, you go somewhere else to trade it, and we don't really have control over it, to going totally vertically integrated, which is maybe a bit antithetical to how the rest of crypto operates. but I thought it was a very interesting experiment at the very least.

Yeah, good answer. So my answer here was organic yield for best mechanism. Now, it's a little bit of more of a meme of a mechanism than an actual mechanism. But organic yield is this idea, you know, it's kind of, I guess, name for millennials, I suppose. But the idea of organic yield as opposed to normal yield is that in organic yield, you're getting the yield denominated in some other base asset that is not your stupid projects token. So you're getting your yield in USDC or you're getting your yield in ether. And the reason why this organic yield supposedly is because it's coming from some kind

of organic activity that's actually willing to pay revenue. And this organic yield meme, now I think this started with GMX. And now I think base has co-opted this idea that, okay, they're giving you organic yield because, you know, if you put your money into base, you're getting yield from real revenue-generating activities such as, you know, staking it through Lido or putting it into compound or whatever it is that they're doing with USC, I actually don't know. I'm just sorry, MakerDow. That's what it was, putting it into Maker. So this organic yield meme, for whatever reason, it seems to just really animate people. We could just call it yield. I think that's like a more obvious name for it, but the term

organic yield just gets people so excited. So it seems to me like it's a mechanism that, seems to be taking off. Terun, what do you got best mechanism? Yeah, I kind of have like two answers. So I'm going to give the highbrow answer and the lowbrow answer. The lowbrow answer is ordinals. So really shoving extra data into taproot. I mean, my biggest loser is probably Luke Dash Jr. and Jack Dorsey because they started this mining pool that tries to not process ordinal transactions and it has been a mega fail. Not only have they had bugs in it, they've been unable to attract people. Jack Dorsey, you know, got to be one of my least favorite tech moguls because he just

seems to make no sense. Like, his choices make no fucking sense as well as fashion choices. I'm also not a big fan of. Your fashion choices are definitely better than his. Great. Thank you. I'll take that. I'll take that.

I just like, I just, you know, Jack Dorsey really, I don't know what this is. Anyway, so Ordinals, finding this very clever hack of,

hey, here's some extra data we can shove in. And, oh, look, we can actually now store metadata for NFTs or, oh, look,

we can now store something that looks vaguely like a token contract, although without any of the security of a normal token contract. And I think it's one of the most hilarious things, is that they're, called BRC 20s. Like Bitcoin wasn't even,

the Bitcoiners didn't even try to come up with another name for their token center. They're like, well, Ethereum calls it ERC 20. Why don't we just call it BRC 20? Now, that's a Justin Sun move. Yes, it is. He originally called it TRC20s.

And you think Bitcoiners with their purity and like the we fucking hate Ethereum. Dot dot dot would somehow succumb to to some type of purses. D-Test. 20 just needs token at this point. Yeah, exactly.

Are there even 19 other BRCs? I want to see the GitHub, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like actually ridiculous. But if you look at the volume market cap, the fees that have been generated for Bitcoin, it is the thing that's making Bitcoin look much more sustainable. Bitcoin for the first time in years at this point was able to beat Ethereum fees on a on a daily basis a few times.

And I think you have to give people a lot of credit for ingenuity of like hacking something that like almost looks, you know, like, hey, you could write a little extra data somewhere and turning it into, you because I wouldn't, it's not, is it a clever mechanism? No. But is it a mechanism that found a way to to rile up Jack Dorsey? Yes. And I think the highbrow one is just like the concept of recent. I think that has shown up in 20 different places and like everyone and their mom is doing it.

You know, I would say some things that aren't live look a lot like, you know, there are a lot of things that aren't live that are restaking. But there are things that are live that basically act as restaking. A lot of the Oracle, the way Oracle's work in some other networks like in Cosmosland looks very similar to restaking. And I think, I think 2024 will have that that is going to be. to be the thing that has huge growth. Maybe I'm front-running my own answer to the 2024 things.

Okay. All right. So let's move on from the relatively high-brow question of best mechanism to the lower-brow question of best meme. Turun, we're going to start with you. What is your best meme for 2023? I think the David Beckham meme. The one was like the...

I don't even know that one. What is that? Yeah, what is that? You know, there's like the David Beckham and... and his wife, I forget about her in which spice girl she was. But she, I guess there's some documentary or something. And he's, she's like, oh, yes, I grew up like poor or whatever. And then David Beckham like opens a little door and there's a picture.

And he's like, oh, really. And then it's like, okay, yeah, we had a Rolls Royce. But then people really like edited that meme format. You know I'm talking about that like. Yeah, we'll throw. We'll throw one up on the screen for anybody who's watching the video. Yeah, I think those memes were like my favorite because people really found a very obtuse way of using this. I know it's an end of the year meme, so there's obviously some recency bias, but I also just feel like crypto people were kind of sad until like April.

So like the memes kind of sucked. So I'm just like throwing away the first quarter of the year. Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah, the meme velocity around the FTX collapse is also extremely high. So there's a very, that's a very generative time. But not, not fun. A lot of them weren't necessarily fun.

No, no, no. Very depressing. Yeah, yeah, very sad and kind of end-of-the-world type memes. So I had two best memes. One, which I don't even know how crypto-related was, but Pinky Doll I had as the best meme for the year. Oh, yeah. Without question.

For those, okay, so for those who don't know, because I imagine most of our listeners probably have no idea what that is. So Pinky Doll was this phenomenon, I think it was like the middle of the year, maybe the summer. She was this lady who is on TikTok, and she was making very strange reactions to notifications that were popping up on the screen. And she was saying things like gang gang and ice cream so good and all these random things in a very robotic way repeatedly based on different interactions. And so people were like, what on earth is going on? What is wrong with millennials or Gen Z? Gen Z.

Gen Z, yeah. They're the problem. Genzi, I guess. And so it turned out that what this is is what's called an NPC fetish. NPC stands for non-playable character. And so basically it's somebody who is pretending to be a non-playable character in a video game. So it's that if you tip them a small amount of money, they will give you a canned reaction. And apparently this is like a big thing. And wasn't it like DJ Collet or something as like a big consumer of NPC content or somebody like that? Some rapper was like one of the top.

Like, yeah, I remember Timberland spent like 200K or something on. It was Timberland I was thinking of. Yeah, just like, yeah, it's like so really,

it's like the modern strip club like in a TikTok form. Yeah, but it's not sexual. It's not sexual. That's the thing. I mean, like, she is.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. It doesn't seem sexual, I should say, you know, from the face of it. So I also had,

I also had a tie. So the two I had was Pinky doll. number one and the number two is modularity. And I'll just present that with that comment. Tom, what do you got best memes? I was going to go, I'm trying to figure out how to sort of describe it, but there's sort of this crypto to AI spectrum from like milady, Romilio to based redacted gang to like Little Clear Pill to like Chloe 21E8 and effective accelerationism. And I feel like that sort of pocket of the internet has really had an outstanding year in terms of people leaning into being pro-AI into sort of taking the clear pill, I believe is the phrase.

And so this is in my mind is sort of the adjacent maybe next evolution of sort of the milady remilio gang. Huh. That's above my head. Yeah. I'm not cool enough to me. I realize there was a connection there. I kind of agree with you, actually.

I was in San Francisco and I went to some EACC party and it did feel very much like. going to a milady rave. But mine is the music. Wait, how do they pronounce it? Do they not say EAC? Well, some people do. I, but I just, I guess, what did they say? At the, at the, at the, at the, at the, our lady rave.

They say EAC. I don't like the way. It sounds kind of weird to me, so I spell it. But it's like a milady rave, but with no music because it's San Francisco and people don't really have good music taste there. Yeah. Sorry, we should, we should explain. for the audience, what is EAC maybe just for like 10 seconds?

Okay. It's sort of the, this movement that was sort of founded by this internet character named Beth Jaisos, who was recently doxed by Forbes, although people have been unable to determine whether that was a purposeful docs or not. There's a lot of, there's a lot of conspiracy that he did it to like launch his company

because his company launched the next day and had like this big announcement. but basically what effective accelerationism is is the antithesis to effective altruism where effective altruists are loves spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to ensure that there's AI safety or AI alignment such that the AIs don't kill us or eat us. In theory they do. Yeah, in theory, in theory. Of course, instead they spend it on life coaches for themselves or whatever bullshit that EA people love doing.

castles in the English countryside. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All that type of shit. You know, Seed knows. Henthouse condos in the Bahamas. I don't actually, but I've read about it, but I don't have any for space. And effective accelerationists or people are like actually know we should just try to like make the technology as good as possible, as fast as possible. And like accelerate are achieving, you know, the singularity.

I would say the effective accelerationists are like Gen Z Ray Kurzweil. You know, they've kind of like, they have his ethos, but like for people who are younger. And then, of course, there's the Vitalik. Vitalik wrote a really nice blog post comparing and contrasting the two and putting himself sort of in in the middle, but closer to the accelerations side, I would say. He said cautious accelerations. So. Well, is it deac is like defensive.

Deac. Yeah. Defensive. Yes. But the EAC people are just like, let's move as fast as possible. And like, you know, after the Open AI stuff that we saw, wow, I can't believe that was only like three or four weeks ago, but it feels like months ago. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Yeah. He actually is like, bring it on. Like, let's. Yeah. They're the other side. And like, you could argue they're the biggest winners culturally from the open AI thing in my life.

It's TBD. TBD. We still don't know the board composition. But I don't know that having Larry Summer. on your board means that you're going any faster. I don't think having Larry Summers on your board means that you're going to be good at AI safety. Yeah, I don't know what it means, to be honest. Anyway, all right.

Let's move on. Best meme, Robert. Well, this is somewhat of a meme, but the Bitcoin ETF, I think, has been the most successful meme of 2003. How is that a meme? What? Because it's a meme because right now it exists primarily in idea form. and the idea is mimetic in nature.

And it has spread virally throughout the crypto and non-crypto communities. And the idea of the Bitcoin ETF has been the most successful replicating and spreading idea in our industry, in my mind, over this year. And it has, I think, transformed a lot of the institutional attitude towards crypto. I think it's transformed a lot of the retail attitude towards crypto. And I think it's also transformed the regulator and legislative attitude towards crypto a little bit. So I think in terms of the impact on our space, Bitcoin ETF number one most successful meme. Fair. All right.

So I assume you're not implying that the substance of the ETF is not going to live up to the hype. That's not what I'm applying. I think just looking at it as an academic analysis. of what is a meme, I think it's a tremendously successful meme. It will exist in a 99% likelihood at some point in, you know, reality form. But like right now as a meme as an idea, it's, you know, unbelievably powerful. Fair enough. I, I will say personally, I hope to never fucking hear about that thing again as soon as it launches. Like literally the most boring. It's like the most boring for something that's supposed to be revolutionizing finance, the most interesting

thing you can think of as a fucking ETF, that's kind of embarrassing. Well, price going up is plenty interesting for me. I'm fascinated by seeing numbers going up personally. Sure, but like I just personally, I feel like, you know, should be something more interesting.

Okay, let's move on. Next category is best or worst pivot of the year. So I'll go first. For worst pivot of the year, I picked it, I'm going to the worst. for worst pivot of the year, I have the SEC social media team.

I don't know what they were doing before this, but I will say this year, I do not like the direction they're taking the SEC Twitter. Or do you've been publishing these. Twitter or just Gary. Imagine if it's just Gary running that account. It feels like it's just Gary because the levels of cringe and the ways in which they're trying to elevate Gary Gensler

as like this, you know, Smokey the Bear for SEC and Crypto Protecting it. It's just so ridiculous and as invited nothing but ridicule. So I don't know why they're doing this or like where the budget for this is coming from, but I would strongly recommend going back to just like writing boring articles saying, you know, please protect yourself because I feel like that was a more effective use of their time and energy. All right. Tom, best or worst pivot of the year. Worst pivot of the year, paradigm pivoting to AI in case you forgot that happened.

I don't know. Okay. All right. All right. I know best pivot actually, uh, pudgy penguins. Um, I think I, when I heard about pudgy doing this raise of, hey, we're going to go sell plush animals at Walmart. I'm like, what the fuck is like an NFT collection?

What do you, what do you mean? There is no IT. It's like, what's a picture. And I was very, very skeptical that they'd be able to pull this off. And I think in spite of my skepticism, they actually have pulled this off. I think they've been selling. millions or tens of millions of dollars of these plushies. As you see Pudgy's now in a lot of like non-crypto contexts and non-crypto circles, they've been doing a really good job as sort of pushing

the Pudgy image and not even tying it back to the NFTs. But the NFT price has also pumped in in response to all this excitement. They're now like 10 eat or something. So I give a lot of kudos to the Pudgy Penguins team for sort of, I think, blazing a different path for, you know, how NFT teams can monetize and what sort of the future of I don't NFTs look like. That's my best pivot. Nice. All right.

Robert, best or worst pivot? Well, this is an abstract one, but I'm going to give simultaneously worst and best pivot to micro strategy pivoting into a levered Bitcoin trade. The real Bitcoin ETF. The real Bitcoin ETF. This time last year, I would have given it worse pivot simply because it put the company in an incredibly precarious position. This year, with the recovery and prices, it looks like one of the best pivots of all time, going from a software business into a levered Bitcoin trade.

Oh, you mean like when they originally bought the Bitcoin in, what was it, 21 or something? Yeah, transforming their company into a levered Bitcoin. Okay, got it, got, got, yeah. As of, you know, the end of 2023 with assets on the rise, this looks to be one of the most obviously dangerous, silly, you know, crazy pivots of all time. but it's starting to look like a genius move for them. And so I am reluctant to give them the title of best pivot, but here in December 2020, I am forced to acknowledge that this is best pivot.

Fair enough. To ruin, what do you got? Mine is maybe not a single entity, but I think watching almost every single Alt-Layer one do what I would call a simp and pivot to saying they could be a data availability layer after seeing Celestia reach over a $10 billion FDV has been hilarious because it's like all of these people made fun of L2s, right? Their entire social media presence was like L2 suck, use a layer one,

we've made it better, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden now they're like, oh, actually, actually, actually, actually just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. Celestia is worth a lot. We should be worth a lot. We're going to do DA. It's a very funny social media pivot. I think, like, there is this interesting thing, though, of, like, it makes sense.

It's just, I think some of the ways that the social media teams have marketed this is a little bit, like, shameless cringe in some ways. And it's, like, every single all one. Like, there's no one who hasn't already done this, and it's sort of this. It's interesting. It's interesting. I think, like, we're going to see this, this kind of explosion of DA layers as a way of servicing roll-ups and inevitable, right? But I think it was just a little bit shameless, like they needed, like, the price of something

to go up a lot. And then all of a sudden, everyone said, we're going to, you made this, we made this. I don't know. It's just like the social media team for some of these places, I feel like, could just be a little, more like appreciative instead of being like no fuck you like we already could do this you know it's like there's there's there's somehow this lack of kumbaya amongst somehow i wonder i wonder where that came from it because they took lots of money from investors in a way that i think like you know people who like like vitalic or anatoly you have to have a lot of respect for it because they they don't do this

they don't do this like you made this i made this thing and uh kind of that's true but they are sitting on like tens of billions of dollars that network value created. So it is, to be fair, like I would say if you are a founder and you have an L1 that no one's using, rebrand yourself all day. I 100% endorse telling everybody that you're a DA layer. I'm not, I'm not going to hate on it in that way. I'm just going to hate on the way it sounds always comes off as like very disingenuine. Fair enough.

Okay. next category is biggest flop of the year. There's something that had a lot of promise, but underdelivered and didn't achieve the stardom that I'd hoped for. Therun, you're up first. What's your biggest flop of the year? As is always common, somehow board apes have to show up. But I feel like all of the ape coin proposals, all of the like,

do you remember? Yeah, yeah, I completely forgot about the other side. They're still working on it. I mean, I actually just saw a proposal from Arbitrum to, like, have Ape Dau be an Arbitrum Stylus chain. You know, obviously, O.P. made a proposal a few months ago. It's just like a testament to the lack of intellectual center in that community that they can't even figure out how to do even one-one-millionth of the things they promise.

True. That is an amazing insult to accuse someone of having a lack of an intellectual center. like that's that's so that's so good i need to start using that in my day-to-day life i don't know i don't know who else i don't know who else you know like they promised so much you know you're talking about pudgy penguins did they though what did they actually promise big metaverse game yeah like they promised other side right but they're working on it well in the meantime they've released like multiple new like token staking games where they made new NFTs for like the other side deeds and then they made these like gems that like,

you know, your deed needs in order to make another NFT. That's like, they just like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I like, I can't even pay attention to it. Like like as sort of a duel to Tom's answer before, right? We're like they actually did sort of the minimum viable thing with their IP, which probably had like Thomas hinting at like almost zero value and they turned it into something with value. And board apes one's the exact opposite way.

And like I don't know. Yeah. Like it's extreme NFT dilution in like the board apes land where like they just keep on coming up with new collections. And it's like you have to be paying attention 24-7 just to like continue to get all these like sillier and weirder NFTs. All right. Robert, what do you got? Biggest flop of the year.

I feel like you took a juicy. one that's salacious. I can't really think of a biggest flop this year. The biggest flop in my mind is probably the presumed Binance supremacy, especially with the settlement with the U.S. government. There was a time where Binance was like the most important exchange, and I think just the intellectual mantle of importance is declining for them. So I wouldn't call it a flop per se, but a dethroning. If you consider that flop-like or flop-adjacent, I would say it's finance. All right. Good answer. Tom, what do you got biggest flop? I got two. I don't know if one qualifies because I don't know if there was ever anything to be that optimistic about it in the

first place, but the Saga phone. I remember when they announced Saga, people were excited about the idea or a lot of people were excited. And I think they've sold fewer than 10,000 phones. that they cut the price at half. Like, I think even Anatolian went on a podcast recently. I was like, it was an experiment and we're trying something new. And so, you know, I don't know how much faith of resources were actually placed behind it. But it just kind of felt one of those things where like,

obviously this was not going to work and it didn't work. But I therefore, I'm like, I don't know if it's a flop. It's just something that was never good in the first place. But my real flop, I think was actually Azuki Elementals. I think the execution for everything else Azuki has done has been so top notch, so thoughtful, just really sort of attention to detail and like, attention to the craft. And Elementals just felt like an intern made it. You know, it was like, clearly there was going to be backlash. You had this sick business

model of being able to sell JPEGs, just make the best fucking JPEGs possible. And it felt like this was a total whiffed layup. And so that's going to be my big flop. Well, it was too Zuki. They cloned to their original project and added a couple traits. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do, I do think it's kind of funny if you think about it that NFTs are very, highly represented in this category. A flop. Interesting. Very true.

Very true. All right. So what I had for biggest flop of the year was WorldCoin. So now WorldCoin, if you look on a price basis, world coin is not exactly a flop. Right now it's trading, I think, like $25 billion FDV, but on extremely low float. So, you know, I don't think there's that much price discovery right now.

But when WorldCoin, I think now, you know, when WorldCoin actually launched, There was huge amounts of backlash. It was being pushed out of many different countries. There were people like basically lining up to get their eyeball scanned. And then it started getting banned in different places because of the privacy concerns about the eyeball scanning. And I just haven't heard anything about it. It's become like this kind of meme coin for Sam Altman because Sam Altman is a presumptive co-founder of World Coin.

But it's just, like to what, to the extent that it was purported to be the identity system for crypto by using biometrics and scanning your eye. balls. It has certainly not achieved that. Actually, I don't know. I don't really know what it has achieved besides trading at a very, very high price with very low float. Well, they did just announce some new integrations for your scanned identity. Did they? What would you have? Like two days ago. Reddit, Discord, stuff like that. Yeah. And I think they're there are now they're going to have an OPE stack roll up or something. I forget if it's OPEC stack for sure, but I think I'm totally off on this. I think it's already on an O.P. Stack, right? Yeah, no, I think they're going to build their own.

They're on OPMA net. Oh, they're on, oh, yeah, yeah. I think they're actually one of the largest consumers of gas on OPMA net at some point. I'm not sure if that's true today, but there was a little while. I think they have sort of some future. I do think the interesting thing to me is that clear, you know, the airline was like, hey, we made this digital identity thing that has a lot of similarities to blockchains, but it's not a blockchain.

In some ways, you could argue that, like, Clear and WorldCoin are kind of the same thing in a lot of ways. They are, they are definitely similar. They are definitely similar. I mean, the ZK stuff is different, whatever, but like from the average end user who has used Clear at an airport, they probably don't think of World Coin that differently, like if they don't know the technical details.

Right, but one has a token and the other one doesn't. Well, Clear probably isn't Clear probably, Isn't clear public now? They stack or something like that. So, okay, hold on just so I understand. Wait, what's clear trading for? Can we compare this to WorldCoin? Yeah, let's compare clear.

I'm Googling this right now. All right. Clear. Three point seven five billion market cap. Whoa, that's pretty good. Yeah, five seven rather. So like, that's a pretty good business. 13% of WorldCoin.

Fully diluted, right? I mean, look, World Coin is like 300 million trading. something. Yeah, it's like 300 million circulating, right? But like 1% of the supply or something. Oh, it has a PE ratio of 1,183 for Clear. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure I'm sure WorldPoint isn't isn't is in the same strategy. Clear. Clear monetizes pretty well. How does it have such a crazy PE ratio? I mean, I guess it means it's like on like the border. Well, they had some scandal, right, where it didn't work and people were able to get through who shouldn't have recently. a bunch of airports ban on.

Don't you have to scan your your ticket? I scan my ticket when I go in. I think it's like if like the eye scanning team doesn't work, they have a backup system that is like deemable or something. Yeah. Oh, I see. I see. All this says is that their one job is to not let the bad people through.

They should agree with the WorldCoyne. Clearly, that's the problem. The greatest M&A in history could be WorldCoin being like, we're going to give you 50% of our FDB to buy clear. that would be pretty sick that would be pretty sick i mean it's all right you know i i i wouldn't put it past sam moment of all the people who'd be willing to do that he might be i'm not sure anyone else had tools for humanity would be okay with it but he's okay but how do you log in to reddit or discord with with with your you scan your eyeballs to what what does that even like what

what does that even mean i think it's like you can use your your World Coin Passport that gets created when you scan your eyes to basically like OAuth into these other sites. So the same way you can use like your Google account or whatever to log into Reddit through OAuth. I'm guessing you can also use your World Coin Passport, which you set up once you scan your eyeballs to get into Reddit. Why we want to do that, I can't tell you. But um, okay, but you can't like log into Reddit on your computer now because it's like tied to the wallet on your phone. I guess you can export your wallet. I think they have some sort of way to Yeah, a lot of your failure, you know, something like that.

Okay. All right. Wow. Anyway, okay. Next category is comeback story of the year. So who would you say, Tom, comeback story of the year, ended up braving the most to end up on top? I have coin base.

Oh, me too. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I think we might have all had Coinbase. Tarone, who do you have? For comeback of the year? Yeah, who do you have comeback for the year? I yeah coinbase is just too obvious so long. Oh, four for four.

I already, I already said, but I'm almost, I almost would be willing to say it again. Comeback of the year that's unexpected. Maybe, maybe like, that's kind of hard because they're really, the main comeback stories are those two. Okay. All right. Tom, give us the story for Coinbase. I think, yeah, just give us a story for Coinbase. Yeah, I'd be like Coinbase is sort of like,

the whipping boy for crypto or it's just it's very people have very bipolar feelings on it right when markets going well people love coinbase and then when the markets you know in the text for like coinbase fucking sucks it's not listing any assets you know it's going to get eaten by finance blah blah blah blah and so it feels like there was a sentiment low at the end of last year where it was like or even going into this year right they had the SECU lawsuits they you know people that know finance is going to take over all that tx market share quite is and never going to be successful again. I think its stock was in the tank.

They had a bunch of layoffs. And I think what you see over the past year is they've been fighting back against the SEC. Their larger unregulated competitors are starting to sort of tumble one by one. They successfully launched offshore, which seems to be doing decently well. And overall, I think Coinbase has just been, the story has been surviving every single cycle and using that survival to set yourself up for success in the next. cycle. So I give props to Coinbase for A, fighting the good fight on the regulatory fraud, and then B, just surviving and being sort of a dependable platform and not getting

caught up in any of the nonsense that's hit any of the other exchanges. I have one now that I thought about it. But you're all going to groan because it's not that different. But Kyle Samani. Yeah. I feel like I feel like Kyle really fucking crushed it coming back this year, not just in Salana, but he like found all the, he, he, he meaning multi-coin, but I mean, he is the face of multi-coin. Really was always in a lot of these projects during the bottom was like the only source of funding for them, you know, in the things we co-invested or I co-invested with him. Like, like, he, he actually was really present for a lot of these projects where like every founder was in the doldrums and like, I'm going to quit Solana, whatever.

I'm like, you know, I think a year ago you'd have been like, wow, he like sent the multi-coin sent this like 90% down whatever letter. But I think for a fund to go to have that much of a U-turn and to not have had just like complete chaos explosion is pretty impressive. So like I want to, I would say multi-coin slash Samani. Yeah. Deserves. No, absolutely. I mean, yeah, Salon is up. 9x since the bottom.

So, but also, but also the things that multi-coin led at a time when no one else was leading them like Gito and Pith actually to some extent. Like he really did, you know, if there's one thing I'll say,

he might be the crypto investor with the most strict conviction because he like really has never changed. He like has one fucking thing and he and like a respect because like it, I think in this industry is very hard to have such a steadfast thesis, but he, he's, I mean, since I've ever

known him, this is like the only thing he's ever really, he's just like beat the table on. And yeah, I think I remember maybe last year, we maybe said he was in the biggest losers, right? Because of the FTT stuff and whatever. So I think he does, he definitely deserves the great, great call. Great call. No, I, it's something I tell people often. And I have some people believe in this at the beginning of the year that I think Kyle Somani is probably pound for pound the best investor in crypto. I disagree with him on a lot of stuff, most of the stuff that he says, but he's probably one of the only crazy stuff. He's one of the only true contrarians in the space. In a space that's already, you know, contrary in the space to be investing in. But he, he sticks to

his thesis. He does not, like, you know, you got to give him the most credit for that. And I think like Absolutely. His thesis this year was recovered. Yeah. So, okay, let's move on. We're winding down. We have two more categories left. So second and last category is favorite chopping block guest. So who has been the standout this year of guests that we have had on the show? Tarun, you're up first. Favorite guess. Tarun is not done his homework. All right. We'll start with somebody else. We'll go back to I have recency bias, but having two security-focused anon's come on the show, pretty much back-to-back.

I thought it was a highlight. I thought it was a really nice way to sort of end the season and take a different approach to what we were discussing. So shout out to security-focused an-ons. Yeah, I had Cryptoogle, who was the first of the two security anons we had on the show. Crypt-Ogle, I didn't know him very well before that show. He reached out to me, or he responded to something I was talking about. about on Twitter saying that he was negotiating with the Khyberhacker.

And I was like, holy fuck, we got to get this guy in the show. I want to know what a crypto hacker negotiator is like. And this guy was just absolutely incredible. We definitely have to get him back on the show sometime next year. But probably in my mind, the best show of the year was Cryptoble. Tom. I was also going to pick Ogle, but I knew you guys were going to pick it. So I had to pick something different.

So I went Paul Graywall from Coinbase. Oh, I think it's rare that you meet, I think, a lawyer who's, speak so transparently and openly about their work and what's going on, but also speak so eloquently and it doesn't sort of get lost in their own words. And so Paul was a delight to have on and just sort of a sneak peek into what's going on on the regulatory fraud and Quivius's own battles with the SEC was great. So that was my favorite guess. It was funny. When Paul was on the show, I was telling this one of my friends, when Paul was on the show, so we did that show in person, I think it was, I think it was in SF during. In Palis was.

Oh, that's right, in Palo Alto. And I was sitting, I was sitting right next to him as we were talking. And I realized, as I was looking at him during the show, I realized he, like, looks a lot like my dad. And so I had this, like, incredibly nostalgic feeling as I was listening to Paul Growl, give these very calming answers about legal. It's like, oh, the industry is going to be okay. And I was like, oh, dad, thank you. Sorry, it was kind of weird, but I felt like, I,

That show did have a special place in my heart because I felt so much better about legal after that. All right, Tarun, who is your favorite top blog guest for 2023? I will say more because it was a crazy one, Vivek Ramoswamy. I always use my favorite from a content perspective by any means because, like, you know, no offense. I'm not voting for him, but I, uh, in any chance. But I thought it was interesting to see someone who learned their platform by talking to us. Because anything he said or discovered in the conversation, he started repeating on every other podcast. So from that perspective, I think it's interesting because we served as tutors to one of our guests, whether we intended to or not.

Well, if you launch a virtual candidate, come on the chopping boy. We'll set you up. Yeah, you're looking for a presidential run. Unless you're, who's the Puerto Rico guy who wanted to run for president, the Eos guy? Oh, Brock Pierce? Oh, Brock Pierce. I don't think he's running again. Is he not? Okay.

Okay. I thought he was just running to anyone who's not Brock Pierce. I thought he just ran to get the SEO results to like only show that he was a presidential candidate and like, you know, clog Google. I like that theory. That's a very clever spam attack on Google. Yeah. I love that.

Yeah. I wonder if chat GPT, when you ask them who is Brock Pierce, how far down you have to go to CEOs or Tether? Yeah. Or other stuff. Or other stuff. Yeah. Or other stuff. Yeah.

All right. Okay. So last question is predictions going into 2024. So, Robert, what do you have predictions for 2024? Okay, I have three predictions. And if all three happen, I will be somewhat surprised. But here's my three predictions. One, and these are boring.

I'm going to preface that. One, Bitcoin ETF. Two, really going on a limb for that one. Oh, going out on a limb. Okay, here we go. Two, I think we get a proposal for what a CBDC in the U.S. looks like. That's a controversial high risk. Proposal from whom, though? Somebody that's credible. I think we start to see the outline. Okay. And three, I predict that total stable coin market

cap is going to decline as assets shift back into volatile crypto assets and other four. forms of low-risk assets. You think stable coin market will decline because people want more crypto. Let's just see how it plays out. We can change this in a year. Okay. Also, like interest rates going down next year? You don't think that's going to affect people?

Do you mean stable coin market share, like percentage of overall market cap, right? You mean absolute terms? I think the total dollar value of stable. You think absolute market cap, not relative market. Yeah, this is a controversial pet. that's interesting. That seems very a historical relative to what's happening.

The relative one I could buy the percentage of the overall crypto market cap. By default, that one's probably going to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That seems, I will definitely take the other side of that. Do you want to bet on that? I'll bet on our PayPal.

It's true, we do have our PayPal bet. But it's not the end of the year yet. So next show, next show for the end of the year, we will go and adjudicate the PayPal bet. when we get to 31st, but we still have a bunch of Red Bulls writing on that. Okay, so interesting bet. Some very, very non-controversial and some extremely controversial. But I like the spread there, Robert.

Okay, I'll go next with my predictions. Going in 2024, I predict we are going to see a major L2 hack sometime in 2024. I think we're going to see a major L1 do a rollback. So like a Dow style, hey, we fuck this up. we're going to take a retcon that. And I predict that Binance is no longer going to be the number one exchange by market share. So those are my three predictions. Weirdly this morning, we just had a crazy supply chain attack against Meta Mask. Again, did not. I'm sorry. Ledger. Ledger. I'm sorry, not MetaMask. It seems like we are getting into the season for hacks and more, more bad things

are likely coming our way in 2024. The hack advent calendar. Tis the season. That's not good. Please know. Tom, what do you have predictions, 2024? Speaking of this ledger supply chain attack, this is actually on my list of predictions is not so much that there was going to be a supply chain attack, but basically there's a few sources of pressure going on the front ends. There's obviously been a number of DNS level attacks, supply chain attacks, regulatory

pressure on front ends for defy applications, as well as just teams, including, you know, trying to monetize their front ends. They'll be sort of seen with you to swap. And so I think there's going to be sort of a split in, in, in, in, in, FI front ends where there's going to be more app-based monetization of front ends, which is way safer, but it's more probable to do than, you know, issuing a token. So I would not be surprised if we see more teams do that. And then the other side of this, the other sort of end of the barbell is more teams

offering locally hosted or decentralized front ends. So instead of, you know, you pinging the team's server and then, you know, sending you the files for the front end, you sort of download it and run it locally like an app store. And you get around all these other issues that we're sort of seeing in the market. So I would not be surprised if we see more of that response to a bunch of these different pressures going into 2024. The other, I think, prediction I have is big and maybe the flip side of Roberts is we're going to see, I think, another boom, we're going to run back turbo on crypto lending. I think just do it like two weeks ago.

the short term or the AVE USDC yield. Sorry, Robert, surpassed the short term U.S. Treasury yield for USDC. And I think, you know, there's a big gap in the market right now when it comes to, you know, C-Fi lending or defy lending. People are going to be looking for more yield. I would not be surprised if we see another 2021-2020 type lending cycle. But ideally, with more risk control, more transparency, ideally using more defy this time around. But I think that's going to pull up going in the next year, especially as rates come down. That is a great prediction. I think I'm on board of that one, sadly.

Therun, what do you have predictions to close this out for 2024? I think there will be a time this year where the Dex market share relative to centralized exchanges touches 50%. We've actually had... For spot? For spot. Dex market share. There is 50% of spot, meaning they're one to one. Because we've been holding steady between 15 and 20 right now.

And there have been these bursts that we've had a couple of them. I think the thing that's the dual of the finance thing is, yes, there will be a ton of centralized exchange volume, whatever. But I actually think there's especially an L2 land. I think if the user onboarding for Solana and L2 continues to be direct to chain onboarding, I think the user experience has been actually getting quite fantastic. Like using Jupiter on Solana, using Phoenix on Solana, I mean, those UXs are like 100 times better than what people are doing in 2020.

I really do think that some of the newer exchanges are, just like finding very nice ways to make the experience better. And I think there's going to be a point a little bit like DeFi Summer where suddenly the market is crazy and there's a ton of new assets that, whether there are NFTs or whether there's spot, whatever, that exist mainly on chain and the centralized exchange is going to be slow to list them. And there's going to be some time window. I'm not saying it's like over 50% for, I just, I'm going to be.

I just saying it's going to touch it. And I think that that's one one prediction. I think another prediction is that there's going to be a point system that blows up. So it's like sort of a different version of a hack, but something where basically the point system blow up. Well, as in someone messes up the point to airdrop conversion, right? Because the points are like, hey, I'm generating these points. and then the developers normalize the points in some way to be like, oh, these actions are actually worth less because people did too many of them

versus other. You know, like, people may have this discretion, but I think someone's going to mess up, like, their code for doing theirdrop. Like, it's not a hack, but they may have, they mess up the translation and the air drop completely the wrong, like the inverse of who they wanted to. I think the odds of that are pretty low, but let's see. It's very contrarian. Very contrarian of you to ruin.

Yeah, it's a very esoteric thing to. Well, I just think I could imagine that these point systems just get so complicated that it's very hard to keep track of exactly the mapping from point to airdrop. And someone will accidentally write some code that flips, like they incentivize the wrong action. It's a little bit like, hey, like the user error. And like I could totally see that happen, especially if people are rushing to do these things because there's a frenzy. Sure.

Okay. And I guess the final question, my final thing is, I think that Ethereum DeFi tokens, which have languished over the last few years, will finally make a little bit of a comeback. I don't think they're going to be able to have these kind of like infinite price to TVL or price to revenue or whatever type of ratios like you see with DA and the long. of coins, but like maybe they can get a little bit of a sale in their wind. Yeah, no, I think that's likely given that Interestrade environment for next year is going to look much better.

So I think the risk appetite on chain is going to go way up in a full-on bull market. And that's what I think, why I think there'll be on-chain decks activity going up also. But that's all. Yeah, that one is an interesting claim. I can see it happening for like a day, especially if there's a crazy air drop or some, you know, wild activity happening on chain. But I think it's unlikely because, you know,

when you get into a real bull market, like right now, retail is still not really back, right? Like if you look at, I think a good barometer for this is just look at Coinbase on the app store. Like, Coinbase is still like not even the top 25 on the app store. So retail is not really engaged yet. And I suspect that sometime next year you're going to see retail

wake back up and really get back into the market in a big way. But right now it's still, it's like a relatively small number of people who are driving the volume and pushing prices up. So I suspect that, I mean, again, this is a guess. Who knows what's going to happen? But I suspect that next year we do enter into a full-on retail cycle. But those people generally come in through the front door, which is centralized exchanges. So anyway, we'll see what happens. So next week, We are off. Please, you know, tune out of crypto for a second if you can. Everybody spend time with your families if you celebrate the holidays. But we'll be back for the last week of the year to adjudicate our PayPal USB bet. We've got a lifetime supply of Red Bull writing on it.

But until then, thank you, everybody, for joining us. And I hope you enjoy the holidays. See, everyone.