Unchained - The Chopping Block Recaps 2022: Crypto's Biggest Winners and Losers and Best Memes - Ep. 437

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the year 2022 in the crypto industry and share their biggest winners and losers of the year, what were the best mechanisms, the biggest surprises and the best memes, and their predictions for the upcoming year.   Show topics:   why stablecoin bulls performed so well in 2022, as well as journalism, DeFi, and the EVM how the reputation of the industry suffered tremendously in 2022 how Solana had to endure multiple hacks and challenges and whether it’s having its “ETH moment”  whether ETH is the only crypto with good tokenomics why MEV has seen such a massive adoption, even if it’s technically not good for crypto  why the investment landscape changed so much in June whether Arbitrum is the winner among layer 2s on Ethereum and the role of retroactive airdrops why so many lending companies went bust this year whether proof of reserves is a useful concept whether developers will go back to build on Ethereum rather than alternative layers 1s     Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Robert Leshner, founder of Compound  Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital   Links   Last year's episode: The Chopping Block... 2021 in Crypto: The Biggest Winners, Biggest Losers, and Best Memes - Unchained Podcast   FTX: The Chopping Block: Can Exchange CEOs Like SBF Be Crypto True Believers? The Chopping Block: FTX: The Biggest Collapse in the History of Crypto? The Chopping Block: Why Lenders Didn't Liquidate Alameda When It Was Underwater The Chopping Block on FTX/Alameda: Is Sam Bankman-Fried 'Crypto Kanye'? The Chopping Block: SBF Wants to Win in the Court of Public Opinion. Will He? The Chopping Block: Was FTX a Scam From the Very Beginning?   Tornado Cash The Chopping Block: Why DeFi May Be Over-Complying With Tornado Cash Sanctions The Chopping Block: Did OFAC Overstep by Sanctioning Tornado Cash? Solana The Chopping Block: Anatoly Yakovenko on Why Solana Is Building the SAGA Phone The Chopping Block: Why Solana’s Frequent Downtime Doesn't Bother Kyle Samani Terra: The Chopping Block: Kevin Zhou on Why He Knew Terra Would Crash  The Chopping Block: Does the New Terra Have Any Chance?  Others: The Chopping Block: Here’s What Was So Bad About Three Arrows Capital  The Chopping Block: SBF on a Crazy Week of Bitfinex, Wormhole and ENS Drama  The Chopping Block: Do Kwon Pitches a Decentralized NFT Publishing Service The Chopping Block: Did Andre Cronje Pull an Epic Crypto Rug Pull?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eat is the ultimate problem. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. All right.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First, you've got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes. Next up, Robert, Crypto Gondasurer,

and captain of compound. Then you've got Turun, the gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gondlet. And lastly, you've got myself, M.Sib, the head hype man at Dragonfly.

All four of us are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.

So it has been an absolutely insane and harrowing year. So much stuff has happened this year. It's one of those, I think it was, wasn't it Stalin who said there were weeks when

nothing happens, or no, years where nothing happens and then weeks where decades happened or something like that. This feels like a year where centuries happened. Can I ask you one question?

Do we start with the good news first or the bad news first in like, you know, if I're in your storytelling style? I think it's hard to begin with bad news because the year started pretty good, right? Like, I mean, Bitcoin was at 50-something K when the year started and like things were feeling. I remember, so I listened back to our end of year. The first ever episode of The Chopping Block, actually, was December, like, 20th something. last year. So it was basically the same time of year, last year. And we were looking forward on the year and reflecting on what went well, what went poorly. And we were also optimistic. It was like really crazy how even the things that were negative last year, in retrospect,

we're so small and minuscule compared to the horrible things that have befallen people in this industry in 2022. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through actually in the same order that we went through the winners and losers, the biggest winners and losers in all the different categories for last year. So just as a sneak preview, the categories are going to be biggest winner, biggest loser, best mechanism, biggest surprise, best meme, and then we're going to make predictions for 2023. So that's the game plan. We're going to start with biggest winner. Okay. So just as a reminder, last year, what we said in 2021, the biggest winners were Alt-L-1s, Coinbase from its IPO, Solana, OpenC, Lido, and Dogecoin. Okay? That's what we said with

the biggest winners of 2021. 2022 biggest winners. I know it's hard to find anybody who won this year. But Robert, why don't you start? Who is your 2022 biggest winner for this year? So the biggest winner of 2022 are, I don't know if you've seen this meme on Twitter, stablecoin bowls, the people that were stablecoin maxing, who were posting memes of like ripped blue USDC bowl.

and anyone who basically was following a market neutral, stable coins-esque strategy. So there were some corners of the industry where people all year were maxing out their stables and just chasing yield wherever they could find it. Now, some of these people chasing yield got felled by CFI landmines, by, you know, defy hacks, by whatever. But for the most part, the stable coin bulls were one of the. rare pockets of winners this year. It's funny. I've got one guy who replies a bunch to my tweets, who is constantly writing

threads about, let me explain to you how this thing is actually going to change the world. Here's a thread. And you wrote one about USC. And I was like, what is going on? But that guy, that guy printed this year. That guy did amazing this year compared to the rest of us. Yeah, the people who were chasing, you know, half a percent a month yields, you know, did fantastic this year.

There was a U.S.T. Bull. So maybe not, you may want to, you may want to, you may want to, like, put a boundary around all the different bull meme accounts. Even, even U.S.T. bull did great this year. I mean, you know, sorry, not U.S.T. Sorry. I thought you said U.S.D. No, no, no.

U.S.T. bowl. There was a U.S.T. bowl that, that, of course, you know. Yeah, I'm sorry we're going to call it. That was one of the many stable coin. mannines that it exists. But also, Tether didn't blow up this year, even though there's a couple moments where it traded off, you know, two and a half percent. You know, in general, the stable

coin bowls, you know, were in my definition, the winners. Totally agree. I mean, also, I think just from an issuance and transaction volume perspective, you're hitting new all-time highs and stable coins. So not only did they do well from a portfolio perspective, but like from a usage and metrics perspective, stablecoins are kind of killing it right now. Bullish, bullish on stablecoins. Nice. Okay. Tarun, what is your biggest winner for 2022? You know, I'm not trying to butter up our host too much, but I actually think

Laura Shin had an amazing 2022. She had an amazing book that came out. She had a bunch of amazing scoops with both all of the villains as well as with Martin Schrelli last week. I think she had like probably the best year in crypto journalism of everyone. Like the mainstream media completely blew it. like Forbes looks stupid because all they were doing was like constantly lapping up at SBF every week. You know, like they did all those crazy articles that like people cite.

All the VC funds, we know how well their media strategy went. So like I got to say, Laura Shin's kind of like last journalist standing, like really like killing it this year. So I'm going to give her my, my, my, and again, I'm not trying to, this is not like me sucking up to the teacher, you know, being like, oh, like, I actually think she had an amazing. year. I think you're absolutely right about that. However, I should add, you know, being that we are on this show, we also had a pretty amazing year in lockstep with Laura, right? Like, we had almost every crypto villain on the show, except for three hours.

Three hours is the only crypto villain we didn't have on the show. Who has wanted to be on the show? That's true. And we, I think we've, we've had a pretty good track record of calling stuff out. I think FTCX we messed up. FDX, we did not call out pretty much at all until after. FDX blow up. But almost everything else, I think we were fairly prescient before things ended up exploding. So I think overall, we end up looking okay. I think Laura definitely looks better

than we did, but I think chopping blog was a pretty good year for us. I mean, Laura had an unreal year, like, journalism-wise. Like, I think, like, she might, this might be like the bumper year. Well, I'll add on and say also citizen journalism on crypto Twitter this year had a real breakout performance. I mean, this is one of the years where in general, crypto Twitter was scooping a lot of major stories that later were covered by media organizations, you know, ranging all the way from like, you know, Kobe, you know, finding the insider trading at Coinbase to people, you know, revealing some of the weaknesses at Celsius, you know, people doing research on FTX as it was collapsing. You know, there was, you know, Zach XBT, you know, breaking all of

these different, you know, scams and rung polls. Like, this was a year of citizen journalism on crypto Twitter. And in addition to Laura being great, in addition to us being decent, crypto Twitter did an awesome job this year. And a runner up to Block Explorers. Like, so many of the big stories this year were told through Block Explorers. And I think a lot of people, a lot of journalists especially got acquainted with Block Explorers for the first time this year.

All right. Tom, you're up next. Biggest winner. You know, I was still feeling pretty good about my last pick. There's Lido, and they still seem to be crushing it. But in the interest of doing something new, I'm going to go with DFI. I think, you know, this is the story that we kind of keep telling time and time again, which is, yes, you know, a lot of these C-5 Ponzi's have blown up. But D-Fi is still doing well. You know, other than the, you know, hack here and there, sort of the core D-Fi primitives are still solvent.

The users still have money. They're still functioning. There's still issuing loans. a lot of them are making a lot of money. And so I think, you know, this has been sort of a crucible for the industry overall, but I think also a great narrative enhancer for why defy is important. And also obviously a great, it feels like sort of the redemption arc from March 2020 of a lot of these things blowing up or incurring losses or realizing they need to be fixed.

This is sort of the flip side of that, of them sort of coming home and showing that these things are very resilient and they work as intended. And they're necessary now. You can't just rely on the trust of any single centralized actor with Defi that the proof is on chain. Yeah, it's such a good point. I think you said on a previous show that Defi really went through a hero's journey. I think it's a perfect metaphor for kind of the experience of Defi from 2020 when COVID started to, I guess, 22 when COVID ended in some places, that Defi really showed its metal,

given a challenge of similar proportion to what happened in March 2020, but with a totally different kind of hardened skill set and maturity than what we saw the last time we saw crisis for defy one uh actual question is if there's really a hero's journey who's going to make the movie um i don't know there's going to be for sure an ftx movie but i don't know if that's going to cover defy robert who would you want to play you play you in the defy five movie yeah who's going to play robert that's a great question zach alfinack i would love for zach to defy well the thing about does but here's the thing about Defi is that if Defi succeeds, there can't be a movie about it because there are no characters. Hey, hey.

It's true. Hey. I like that. Yeah, that's true. But I do kind of feel like there's still a story. Like, even if the characters made, the characters are more transient. Like they like have some importance and they go away. A narrative film without characters.

So it's kind of, you know, it's like, you know, Koyana Scottsi or something. Yeah. And so you need some, uh, a non, needs some voice actors. You know, it can just be like someone voicing DGEN Spartan, and yeah, that's sort of the movie. I guess it has to be an anime, right? Is that what you're sort of now? I would 100% watch a defy anime. That sounds amazing.

Sounds amazing. All right. So my 2022 biggest winner of the year is the EVM. So the EVM has absolutely crushed. Its primary competitor last year was basically a combination. of the Solana virtual machine as well as wasam. There were a bunch of wasam-based chains that were really trying to make a run at EVM. And this idea was coming around that maybe the EVM, which is the Ethereum sort of operating system, so to speak, wasn't going to win or was going to be displaced in the near future.

It's become increasingly clear that that is not going to happen. Now, with the downfall of Solana, nine of the top 10 chains by TVL are all EVM-based. The EVM has just become completely and utterly dominant in everything smart contract-based. And it's very hard to see that turning around at this point. I think one of the clear winners in a year with not a lot of wins has been the EVM. It's a great pick. Fair enough, right? So, okay.

I guess actually one addendum maybe to that is, you know, I think one interesting thing to watch is sort of like whether the ZK EVM kind of version of the world will be the next iteration or whether it will be other virtual machines that host a ZK EVM. And like right now we're starting to see like what's the future of the EVM. And I think that's like something I look forward to in 2020. Because it's like very, it's not clear at all what the final state is for like the next. What's the thing Pokemon do? Evolution. Yeah, there you. Evolition.

That's your basis for evolution is Pokemon. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. What's that thing that animals do? Yeah. That's good.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely 100%. What I want to clarify, actually, in saying that I think the EVM is now dominant, does not mean that the EVM is done. Or that we've reached the end of the line, and this is, you know, the charis art of virtual machines, as you will. In fact, it's a sign that there's much more work to do, because clearly the EVM is not going to get us to the Promise Land.

The EVM is still super janky. It's basically unchanged from when it was originally developed. We are like in the action script stage of JavaScript's development. There's so much more that's going to be done, I think, to one, improve the EVM, but then second, other virtual machines, I think, will still take a run at the EVM and try to improve it at the margin or build upon it and innovate upon the foundation of the EVM but change things underneath it. But I think EVM is probably going to be now just the lingua franco, right?

The core concepts behind EVM are probably going to be enshrined in how blockchains work. Do you remember how like in the 2000s slash early 2010s, there was like a new JavaScript framework every year that became like the like hot thing for a year and then it would disappear? And do you feel like that's going to happen here? Because like I'm, I guess you could argue like the hard hat foundry kind of transition looks a little bit like that.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the dev tooling and framework, you know, in vogue within crypto turns over over time. But like the consistent bit is the EVM, which is also, you know, true for JavaScript. Yeah, it'd be cool to see just like a diagram of like the comparison, like the timelines of these two types of things. Because like I feel like there is like a lot of parallels. Totally. Totally. Okay. So biggest winner, it's kind of a feel good section.

I think it's going to be the biggest loser section is probably going to be quite a bit meatyers. this year because it was a year of a lot of losses, let's say. Should we do two per person? Because I feel like there's a lot of space. If you want to do two, you can do two. I'm going to do one. Okay. We'll let people do what they feel in terms of losers.

So just to recap, what did we say as biggest losers last year? We said the gray scale GBTC trade, which, ooh boy, did we have no idea what was coming on that. Bitcoin, as one of the biggest losers. which was an early Tezos NFT marketplace, and then Eos. Those are what we said was the biggest losers last year. In retrospect, very naive to say that any of those had really lost compared to what was coming for them. But okay, biggest loser?

Hey, GBTC gets some credit. Come on. That one was a good, that was a good prediction. Even if it had the wrong rationale. I'm saying there's much more pain coming. There was so much more pain coming than what we imagined at that time. Yeah, I'll take credit for naming GBTC last. year. It was also one of the big losers this year. But, you know, that we'll see what happens

next year. Maybe it'll be the big winner next year as it gets unwound. So what's your, what's your pick for this year, Robert? Well, I'm going to state the absolutely most obvious award winner for the biggest loser this year. And this might be a slightly controversial take, but I believe that this year the biggest loser was the reputation of the industry from the perspective of outside. So starting off with the implosion of Terra and UST, which was one of the fastest growing algorithmic stable coins and alternative L1 blockchains of all time, which did about directly $60 billion worth of damage and indirectly a couple hundred billion dollars worth of damage

to the rest of the industry. Following up with the collapse of every single C-Fi lender, some for innocuous reasons, some for terrible blunders, some for deliberate fraud, you know, the collapse of every single C-Fi lender culminating in the collapse of FTCS, externally the most respected exchanges of all time with one of a, you know, with a founder that was widely, you know, revered outside of our industry. You know, for better, for worse, all of these things, in my opinion, have done, you know, a tremendous amount of damage to the reputation of the industry and collectively, you know, shared the award for our industry's loss of, you know, respect to this year.

Yeah. That's a very sobering answer. I think you're very right. It's something that I think all of us have experienced just in retrospect, thinking to what it felt like December last year when all of my friends thought the coolest thing in the world was to be a crypto VC. And now it's like the cringiest thing in the world. world to be a CryptoVC.

Anecdotally, I have heard from a lot of my friends that if they're single, that their dating prospects massively changed between this year and last year, just because crypto has lost so much face culturally compared to what it felt like in 2021. Look, I hate to say it, but all four of us are unfortunately, for better or worse, tarred and feathered with being closer to Ian Bellina than we are to sanctity. This is true. That's true. All right.

Well, Tarun, what do you say? Biggest loser of 2022 in a competitive field. My two, I kind of have two that I'm tied for on the tech side, because I'm going to try to maybe more focus on, like, technology side. And I'm reticent to call out both of these, because I actually think they do have vibrant communities, and they clearly made them mark. One, obviously, is the Solana ecosystem.

I just think, like, this sheer number of blows that they've taken is unreal. and if they survive, this is like an ETH $88 event. Like, like if Solanas, ecosystem survives, like, I think they just are a cockroach after this. But if they die, like, this is an insane amount of death blows to get at once. Let's start with the beginning of the year. Wormhole hack, mainly affects Solana and needed sort of a centralized gatekeeper to step in with the capital buffer, right? Like, it wasn't able to like kind of reconcile telephone. And then, you know, I think a lot of the interesting thing was there's a lot of ties between the Solana ecosystem and some extent the Luna ecosystem, partially because bridging was actually easy between them. And, you know, that started really like the spiral of like people just starting to remove money. Then there were a bunch of hacks, partially because a lot of the Defy protocols in Solana were just never open source and were not audited. And like, I think in like the Gaga days of 2021, no one really cared.

But obviously this year, I think people started to pay more attention. And then, of course, you know, you have the Mango Hack, you had FTX. The thing that's interesting is the people who are still around in Salonaland do seem to have the mentality that I feel like East people have. So I'm hoping that they can get a little bit of a reprieve just because, you know, there's a lot of really smart, hardworking people in that ecosystem who are not like just like Djan, NFT, whatever traders. they actually are like trying to build new technology and that has a particular philosophical vision of what it should look like and there's pros and cons to it.

Yeah, I mean, also I forgot to mention the biggest one in my mind to some extent was the loss of serum because a lot of their defy ecosystem was built around serum as sort of like the main liquidity center. The thing that's really interesting is that actually one of the predictions you made last year

was that there was going to be a massive hack within the Saloon of Axe ecosystem, which you had like many times. over. You were definitely right about that. But a lot of us thought last year, you sort of called out the close source nature of Solana. It wasn't really because of hacks that Solana ended up bleeding out its defy. Actually, that was happening much more aggressively on BFC, which has actually been more resilient than Solana on the defy side. It seems like Solana Defi really was a death by a thousand cuts because of liveliness. Is that just the blockchain kept going down this year,

especially for the first half of the year due to all these like crazy NFT kind of thundering herds. But also the hacks. Even the bridge hacks caused liveness losses, right? But the bridge hack was made whole, right? So like people actually didn't lose money on the hacks in Solana. They lost a lot of money on BSC. A lot of the defy users have lost money. So in Solend, for instance, one of the craziest things that you would see right after the Wormhole hack, because at that time, wormhole had synthetic assets. So like you lock up Eith on ETH and you get this like IOU, like, Weth like thing on Solana. And the peg, that thing depegged significantly. And so people were using as collateral being marked one to one on Solana as it goes equal to Neath, but it actually was

redeeming for much less. And the Defi users actually took some huge losses in the hacks that are different than just like people crossing, like lenders on the Salana side who lent to USC Solana huge losses. So my point is like there's all this stuff that it is definitely death by a thousand cuts, but there's a lot of stuff that went wrong. And I think part of it is like all the things I grew last year needed to give this like, kind of pump effect to each other constantly. And so like when that all explodes, even if you actually are like the one who

has a lot of things that didn't intrinsically blow up, you're being constantly in the shrapnel is going to just like really, really hurt you from many different versions of the world. So I, but like I said, I, you know, I, even though in my mind they are the certainly the biggest loser on the technology side, I think a lot of other things that were sort of weird were like, I think the Solana phone was kind of like a crazy thing that's like an idea that people, you know, makes a lot of sense because like actually it's like really hard to get phone manufacturers to like build trusted enclaves for certain types of keys and stuff like that,

right? But like it feels like they did a bunch of stuff prematurely that like now doesn't look that great in hindsight. So I put them, and the other thing I tie with them is probably the NFT ecosystem. him. I just think like, I, it's like, there's just so much that went wrong there. I feel like this year. And I don't know where to start with that.

Robert quit NFTs. Robert quit NFTs this year. That's true. That's true. I quit NFTs this year, yeah. I mean, if you look at NFT monthly actives and you look at NFT mince, actually those numbers look pretty healthy. So I think it's not,

It's a mixed story. I was going to say, NFTs are surprisingly resilient. I think they're like kind of isolated. They're in their own little world for the most part. And so yeah, from like a user numbers and activity perspective, NFTs actually look great. Obviously the prices and volumes and maybe not kept up with with 2021, but independent of that. Yeah, I think NFT holders are poorer, but there's still a lot of them and they're still pretty active and they're still pretty animated about what they're doing. But I think the envy of normies of the NFT world, that has gone away. That's done. Actually, another loser I'll add, the word normie. I think, I think, I think, I think, I don't think it

had a good year. Is it time to hire the word? We'll bring it back in the next bull market. I think for now, we'll put it in the pantry. We'll pull it out when we need it. You guys agree. It kind of, it like started the year is this like, I'm better than you, like, whatever like asshole like Dubai Miami crypto person like stick and like by the end of the year it's like wow don't you wish you were a normie yeah exactly I felt that feeling quite a few times all right Tom what is your biggest loser for 2022 you know again I'm still feeling pretty good about my 2021 pick of Bitcoin where this year we saw real inflation we saw a worse macro picture and Bitcoin you know just kind of traded like every other

asset. And so the inflation resistance narrative is kind of dead. And then, you know, in comparison, obviously, you've had it had a great year with, you know, issuance going negative for a brief period and merge completing successfully. But again, in the interest of picking something new, I had Ponzi's as a category overall. And I think what we saw this year, yes, there were many different independent collapses, but they all kind of had a similar shape to them, which were kind of byproducts of like a zero-intrate environment, very pro-reflexivity, very pro-leverage. And sort of, you know, you know, when that momentum started to stall out, they all sort of fell. And if that could be a Luna, that could be an Aux, that could be a literal, you know, three arrows or FTX or whatever it is.

But it feels like all the big losers this year had that in common where, you know, when the gas starts to run out and the momentum starts to die, these things get hit the hardest. So I think it's good probably that these are no longer with us. But overall, that's kind of how I see, you know, a lot of the big failure stories of 2022. This is actually exactly. one of the things that I picked. I called it tokenomics, which is, like, I think this is a terrible year for tokenomics. Anything that you wrote a medium post about last year explaining the tokenomics, every single one of them got absolutely destroyed this year. So whether it's Luna, whether it's AXI, whether it's, you know, VE tokens, whether it's like all this DFI2.0 crazy

recursive nonsense. Almost everything that had anything interesting about his tokenomics just got absolutely exploded. So I think the, even the term tokenomics, I think, might have to go in the pantry alongside Normie because it just, it has not aged well as a term. It's a little cringy. It's a little cringy now. Yeah. So actually, I, when I talk to entrepreneurs or founders about tokenomics, at this point, I tell them, like, don't even think about token. Like, just don't say the word. Tokonomics is a distraction from just build a good product that people want to use. And if you do that, then maybe you have a chance of building something valuable. But tokenomics, won't get you there. At this point, we basically don't have examples of when tokenomics

actually created great products. Tokenomics are a zero interest rate phenomenon. Well, I would actually equate tokenomics to financial engineering, right? So absent financial engineering, you know, companies on Wall Street have to be successful. Otherwise, they go bankrupt and that's the end of the story, right? There's also examples, you know, look at the 1980s, using debt, right? Look at, you know, the 1990s using new equity structures, right? There's examples of financial engineering complementing strong underlying businesses to be, you know, one and a half X successful or two X successful, but there has to be an underlying, you know, value and success driver there. Otherwise, you know, whether you call it financial engineering or tokenomics,

that's not going to, you know, change the core. It's just going to put. put lipstick on a dead pig, right? Like, I do think there is a world, you know, maybe in the future where there's lots of successful crypto networks, crypto protocols, crypto things that augment their incredibly sound core with, you know, innovative token design, right? And I think that's an enhancer when done correctly, but I think there has to be like a really strong foundation. It's a good point.

I think arguably the only real protocol with good, token. at this point is Ethereum itself. Almost everything else that you would admire for its token, like its tokenomics, just has been an absolute dog. And usually it's some kind of cart before the horse thing where the tokenomics is the interesting part and the product kind of sucks. Now it's very clear that that's a huge anti-pattern. But very attractive in a zero interest rate environment.

The way I like to describe it is, if you took steroids and you didn't work out, you're not getting jacked. That's how I described it. That is a perfect, that is a perfect encapsulation. So I had a double feature. So my other big loser for the year, last year I said the biggest winner was Kyle Samani. And this year he's also the biggest loser. So Kyle Samani is the managing partner at Multi-Coin Capital, which is a big Solana and FTX-affiliated investment firm.

They made huge bets on Solana, which did extremely extraordinary well last year. one of the best performing funds in venture history. This year gave a ton of it back. Road Salana down, we have public statements that they've made, or not public statements to their own investors. They lost 10% of their net assets on FTX in addition to owning FTT, having invested into FTCS equity, and owning Solana, as well as a bunch of investments on top of Solana,

almost all of which have gotten really destroyed this year. So I feel for the guy. I like Kyle. We've had one on the show, a great dude, but he has just gotten, absolutely hammered this year, and I feel for him. I'd say alongside Kyle, I'd say growth investors. You don't include hash?

Hashed? They've, hash definitely got hit, but they were working on a much smaller base than what, I think, like, multi-coin was really just, they were just, you know, champions of the universe at the end of last year. They could do no wrong. And I think now this year, they've just taken a beating that, on a different scale than hash. Shashers, you know, they weren't that high up when I think they got really hit by Terra and everything

that happened in that ecosystem. I mean, it was still like $3 billion lost, right? Something like that, like three, like they had like a Luna position that was like gigantic, lunandios. Right, right. I mean, multi-coin had a big Solana position too, plus FTCTX equity. Salon's not zero. True, true, true, true.

The FTCX equity is zero. Salana not zero. Yeah, they lost a lot as well. It might be close tie. It might be close. the other the other the other separately i'd say also growth investors as a category when it comes to investors growth investors just got absolutely shafted this year i don't think there's any investors any growth stage investors in crypto who have made money now i'm pretty sure every single one is down

very significantly and of course half of them put money into fdx so it's been a bad year for growth the best thing about last year that i remember that i was very confused about was when people who are gross investors were like oh i you know what i'm I'm going to do, I'm going to start doing early stage investments by trade by basically investing in whatever FTX investors. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, I thought you're supposed to be a growth stage investor. Why are you like copy trading seed stage investments from one of your growth stage investments? That was like, that was one of the crazy things of like December 2021 that like, you know, I don't think we're going to see it for a while.

There's also the opposite seed stage investors investing in late rounds and growth rounds. That was equally disastrous. So, you know, it goes both ways. Yeah. The lesson overall is like, stay in your lane, stick to what you're good at, otherwise you're going to get hurt. And in a bull market, everything gets rewarded, right? It's like you're riding on a slip and slide and everyone's going to make it to the water. In a bare market, you are like driving into oncoming traffic. And you'd better be, you better know exactly where you're going and time all your turns because otherwise you are just going to get wrecked. And that seems to be the story of investing this year. We've got some biggest losers. Let's move on to best mechanism. Okay. This is ultimately is a podcast about crypto and crypto mechanisms.

Last year what we said was that the best mechanisms were Univ3, convex finance plus curve, the whole symbiotic ecosystem there, Ome and ESD, which is empty set dollar. Those were our picks for best mechanism last year. Let's see what our updates are to those best mechanisms. Robert, what do you got, best mechanism? Well, I'm going to simultaneously award best mechanism and worst mechanism to the same recipient, because this is a slightly abstract one. I'm going to award MEV on the Ethereum blockchain, both best mechanism and worst mechanism. So I think this year, more than anything was a year of extreme normalization of MEV, of embedding it directly into the block manufacturing process with MEV boost, you know, the extreme success of flashbots and, you know,

there's starting to be a few other block builders. But MEV, I think this year, uh, reached its inflection point. And I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, But I think from the perspective of what mechanism has been wildly successful, has seen significant growth, and almost a unilateral adoption. Well, MED, I think, you know, as a mechanism has won this year. Now, I don't think this is a good thing. You know, I think in some ways, you know, it, you know, runs completely counter to the interests of, you know, the users of the blockchain, Ethereum. And I think it's, you know, a little bit ironic and perverse to see, you know, MEV essentially, you know, officially condoned, so to speak.

Because I don't think it runs along the long-term interests of the users of the blockchain. But it's definitely the most interesting and successful mechanism. In future years, we might say it was the least successful mechanism or that cannibalized user base or had these negative externalities or whatever. but for the time being this year, MEV. Yeah, that is a very good point. I think since the merge, there's been so much more conversation about MEV

outside of people who are sort of defy insiders and kind of understand the machinations of how MEV auctions and flashbots and all this stuff really works. Now it's impossible to not be aware of the politics of MEV. That, I think, is new. It was in Elizabeth Warren's proposed bill.

like mv mv got a mention in there about like malicious activity that needs to be stopped like pretty directly oh fascinating i didn't i didn't i didn't know that that's crazy okay so mv turun what is your vote best mechanism 22 so last year my mechanism uh i i'll i want to defend it a little bit because it actually did survive which is the own bar because ome because ome didn't go to zero like And most of the reason was the bonds actually locked people up for a long time. And, you know, you'd have the steady exit out of the main token instead of this like rush to the exit behavior. Now, the Ponzi staking coin shit that I'm not, I'm not going to try to defend that. But the own bond, I think is actually a very, is like, I think that will be over time, like bond-like mechanisms will somehow make it to defy.

You know, there have been many attempts. Some of them gave up, some didn't, whatever. But like... Drew, this is a weird hill to die on, but okay. Do I ever die on very normal hills? I don't know. That is true. That is true. You would only die on an extremely weird hill.

That is very true. Yeah. Are you doubling down? This is your best mechanism is still on bonds? No, no, no, no. Okay. So I think there's... This year has been actually a year where it reminds me of 2018,

where people went from, you know, like, 2017, like, high, you know, like all these crazy ideas, like X on blockchain or Y is a new blockchain, to like, oh, like, let's like invest in hard technology, like StarCware got founded then and stuff like that. And so I actually think the interesting thing is that there's a lot of new mechanisms that have not been tested that have come out theoretically this year.

that I think will be successful in next few years. And those are the ones I'd probably highlight of things like eigenlayer, which, you know, whether it's implemented by eigenlayer, whether it's implemented as someone else, the idea of restaking your locked assets to offer other services as a validator is going to be kind of a really big thing, especially in a world where there's a lot more ZK-proof generation.

And I just think like this was a good year for like theoretical, mechanism design and less on the apply like the stuff in practice like yeah like kind of like like rober said like any v is like kind of the only thing that got better better in some efficiency sense that maybe because theoretical designs are not marked to market whereas everything else is so it it looks good when there's no price on it i think it's actually like in a bull market people do the like hey let me copy pasta like take something existing tweak it a little bit put that out right and one thing is crash, people like, okay, I need to take a much larger bet. And I feel like those are the mechanisms

that I think we're good this year. I think all the ones implemented were people just trying to like relive last year's hurrah, but with high interest rates. I generally agree with you, but I don't think that we actually entered that phase this year until relatively recently. I think most of this year, although prices were declining. Post-Luna. Like the moment Luna happened And it was quite fast. Yeah. Like all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all the investors I knew who last year, oh, this is another big loser in my mind, the phrase web three.

But like all the investors who are touting dog shit NFT stuff, which, you know, listeners of this show have literally said the same thing to me about like they can't believe all these funds invest in this stuff. The idea that like they all flipped the moment Luna happened to try and be like, oh, we're going to do hard tech again. No more like random wallets or like some NFT like hype thing. And it was like such a fast flip from the investment side that it like also drew all these kind of like new mechanisms. And so like the Luna thing was clearly like either LPs of all these funds got angry at them or the funds were like, oh shit, we can't like invest in dog shit NFTs anymore. I don't know what it was. There's just like

huge transition like June, July of this year, you just saw like the investment landscape change. dramatically. That's totally true. That's really true. But I do feel like after FTX, like after Luna, things felt like, okay, we're not in bull market anymore, right? Like things are, we've been kind of chastened by the realities of, hey, bad things can happen in crypto.

But I think it's really after three arrows collapsed and then after FTX, that it really felt like we were in a bare market. I think like three arrows was the feeling that, okay, not just did bad things happen. We're in a bare market now and like we kind of deserve it. things aren't going to go back up anymore. And then, like, the party's over, right? After three euros felt like the party was over. Whereas, like, Luna felt like somebody knocked over a vase.

And it was a very expensive vase. And it's a big deal. And, like, we're kind of in trouble. But, like, the music's still playing, right? After three arrows, the music stopped. After FTX, it's like, oh, like, one part of the house exploded. Like, things are very, very bad. And the feeling, I do actually think that what you're describing to ruin,

this feeling that when entrepreneurs come in the space, it demands much more seriousness of them. I think that really started after FTX. And I think now when I talk to entrepreneurs, there is just no sense that anything cutesy is going to work in crypto anymore. I feel like there was a big tonal shift in the way that entrepreneurs view

starting a startup in crypto. Yeah, I don't see any more puff posts, and I see all these funds hiring cryptographers instead of like celebrities. So like you can, there's like such a gigantic change. I mean, there's one fund I'm talking about in particular, which is pretty obvious who that is for that. Like, you know, they, like, literally flip from, like, celebrity endorsement, like, people to, like, oh, we're hiring a ton of cryptographers. Like, you know, that has literally started in June.

It was, like, such a, like, the Three Arrows Luna thing was a complete shift to, to the way people's behavior was. And I think that's one of the reasons I'm very negative on NFTs for quite a while, because I don't think any of these, like, larger players are going to come back for a while. Okay. Tom, what do you got for Best Mechanism of 2022? This one's maybe a little esoteric, but I went with liquidity mining on Blur. Blur, for those that don't know, is the NFT aggregator. It's an NFT aggregator. And there's sort of been this thing where basically last year, OpenC really blew up. And everyone saw how much money they were making. And now there have been, they basically have this target on their back. And there have been a lot of competitors that have come out,

trying to take down OpenC, like a looks rare, an X2, Y2. And they always, you know, launched OpenC, but with a token. And the idea was that what we can use the token to incentivize people to use our platform. And then maybe we can use that to overtake OpenC. And they were always so terribly designed. There were always some like permutation of trade mining, which we know has all these issues. And that's why you see these stories coming out about NFT wash trading and you see these tokens kind of getting farm and dumb.

It's like, it's like so obvious, I feel like if you're in the space that like these, you types of token incentives don't work if you're just incentivizing people to wash trade. Blur was really one of the first that came out. Well, A, it had a great product. B, it was an aggregator on day one. So even, you know, the day one experience without needing supplemental liquidity is going to be superior just to showing up to some random exchange. But three, they actually incentivize people to place bids near the floor.

And as you get compensated more, the closer your bid is to the floor. And so it creates this sort of incentive to provide liquidity, which is like what every NFT exchange or every exchange period sort of lives and dies on. And so that's why you've seen them be so successful, not just on a volume perspective, but more importantly, from a user perspective, from a depth of liquidity perspective, they, I think, had a very clear line on site on how to take on the giant in the room, which is open sea. And so far it seems to be paying off pretty well.

So that's my number one mechanism, I think, for 2022 is a blizzard. going after this big prize. Yeah, great pick. It's been really impressive to see the growth of blur just in the last couple months, even at a time when NFT volumes are in the toilet,

and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of, it's very difficult for startups to grow in an environment where things are trending downward, but Blur is one of those really rare exceptions that has managed to be one of the breakout growth stories at a time when not much is growing. I mean, it seems like the year of the aggregator in general, right? Like, NFT volume and aggregator

seems to like basically killed. of the main exchanges. And the main exchanges have to either build or buy their own. Yeah, it's wild to me how many people I've spoken with who are starting or pivoting to an NFT aggregator. I think it's kind of those memetic things where people see something working. And then they all try to, you know, copy paste it, even if it doesn't really make sense for them or they don't have any unique insight.

So also cool to see Blur kind of poke through the aggregator space with, you know, a fresh product. Well, what I got my pick for best mechanism of 2022 was tornado cash. So Tornado Cash has had obviously a rocky year. It was sanctioned by OFAC earlier in the summer. They ended up basically, I mean, one of the founders and developers of Tornado Cash, Alexi Perzav, is still being held in detention in Amsterdam without charges being brought against him just for the act of writing code. However, the whole idea of Tornado Cash was that it was a permissionless, decentralized way to achieve privacy on chain. And guess what?

it still works. People are still using tornado cash. We talk a lot in crypto about the idea that your protocol should work without human intervention. Well, guess what? The only protocol, or one of the few protocols

that I know of that actually answers to that name because it was forced to is tornado cash. You can still use tornado cash. You still don't need anyone's permission. You don't need any human beings to help you. It's all permissionless code on the blockchain,

and it just works. And if anything, it's a testament to the power of what they built. Now, again, not to endorse it or to say that good actors or bad actors, use Traneo Cash. Obviously, many bad actors do. And you should not use it because if you're subject to U.S. sanctions, you should not use Trinor Cash. But to me, I think, best mechanism of the year is Trinado Cash. It's a privacy protocol that works without any human intervention, and it's proven it multiple times over.

Yeah, that's a great pick. There's a Twitter account that tweets out the Tornado Cash volume every day and, you know, occasionally show up in my feed. I'm always surprised. It's always like a few hundred K, you know, kind of low mills. And it's like, yeah, it's still going. People are still using it, you know, even without, you know, even with the main site being down and everything that's happened to the devs and everything. Yeah, I think my personal measurement of like whether it's a net direction that the IQ of Bitcoin Maxis is tending in is like their tornado cash posts. Because like they'll all be like, oh, it represents like Ethereum censorship and whatever.

they're like, wait a minute, but you still see transactions going through? Like, oh, like, it's not censorship-resistant. Like, this is the most censorship-resistant thing in Ethereum. What are you talking about? Like, everyone that's trying to throw the book at it and still running. Totally, totally. On top of all that movie boost relers, they're trying to censor it, and yet you can still get a Trinidad Cash transaction mined within, like, you know, a few

minutes. So, yeah, there's a lot of, like, Bitcoin Maxi Cope because I feel like they, like, tornado cash philosophically. and they're like, oh, we like, Ethereum censoring it. Ethereum sucks because, like, it's not working. And there's a lot of, like, very complicated Rube Goldberg logic machines going on

that don't make any sense. All right, guys, let's move on to biggest surprise. So biggest surprise. Again, a year full of many surprises. It's going to be a tough choice. But here's what we said for 2021. 2021, we said the biggest surprise was, one, the rise of NFTs.

And, you know, concurrently, the flipping of, Board of Bia Bia Club over Cryptopunks. We also said Luna, the success of the Luna burn as one of the biggest surprises. And the last one was the rise of a one-bip pools on Uniswob v3. Those were our picks for the biggest surprises of 2021. 2022, Robert, what do you got? Biggest surprise. Well, I'll preface by saying that Tom sort of scooped me a little bit earlier in this show,

but I'm awarding the biggest surprise to, one, inflation, exceeding the expectations of the market in general, leading to higher interest rates than the market expected, both in the U.S. and globally. But three, and this is really the root of the surprise, the assets like Bitcoin that had been, you know, discussed for years as inflation hedges, seeing their first really inflationary and not rising to the occasion. So this was a surprise to me because, you know, the narrative that had been built up for the last decade plus was that, you know, oh, wait for inflation. That's when you're really going to see Bitcoin shine.

That's really when you're going to see, you know, non-correlated assets across the board, you know, shine relative to traditional asset classes. And, you know, I'm sorry to keep on beating a bear. Irish drum here, but, you know, Bitcoin in particular, as well as pretty much every asset class, did not benefit from inflation. And this was, you know, a direct counter argument to one of the loudest narratives of the past few years. It's hard to see what other narratives get, you know, used for assets like Bitcoin in the absence of, you know, it's an inflation hedge. Now, this has been in a lot of ways disproven. But the big surprise to me was inflation.

how fast it grew, how fast it exceeded anyone or the market's expectations. And the performance of asset classes that we've been waiting really 12 years to see how they would perform in the face of it, seeing them perform for the first time. Yeah. I mean, this has been a, as a professional investor, I'm always thinking to myself, what are my LPs paying me to do? and one of the things that I've always believed is that, look, we're not macro investors. RLPs don't think we're macro investors.

They don't think that we're qualified to be able to opine on the direction that macro is going. But this is the one year when, no matter what asset class you're investing in, you are a macro investor. Because the higher-order bit for everything this year has been macro. And so it's been really challenging, but also incredible education, just to see how many people have been able to get the same things. wrong and how much it ended up massively impacting what your performance was, how you did as an investor, no matter what you were trading or no matter what you were investing into, just by being able to get some very basic big questions right. For sure. Tarun, what do you got? Biggest surprise of 2022. It's actually quite hard because there's like way too many options.

You just pick one. My main surprise, my number one surprise is that Arbitram really like stole defy away from every other L2 this year. Like if you just look at it. If you just look at it, at like the net volume and defy on arbitram. It's like clearly trouncing everyone. Like like Polygon, obviously there's tons of activity, but it's actually way more than an FD side now. Like the defy side is shrinking quite a bit. Optimism is sort of like in this weird,

like they have like weird liquid be mining grant rewards things that like don't seem. It's like kind of not pushing the needle. But the GMX and a couple other places on arbitram seem to just like have it's not that I guess I'm surprised that there is a dominant L2 defi-wise as much as I'm just surprised that like Arbitrum has done it with like no incentives what do you attribute that to so I think it does have some of the most reliable L2 infrastructure uh in terms of you know like stuff that makes it easy to develop on Like, for instance, like Bedrock, the new optimism upgrade, is going to, is actually going to move towards something that Optimism, that Arbitram did, which made it very easy to predict how, like, when your transactions executed within a block, whether you measure things in block time or real time.

And, like, there's some, like, very tiny nuances there. But one kind of crazy thing that happened was the way optimism counted blocks messed up certain yield farming programs because some of them use timestamps and. correctly and basically like the farming rewards ran out early. And so there's a, there's a lot of like very interesting like nuanced stuff like that. Which they use like the internal blocks within optimism rather than using like the blocks on Ethereum. What was the difference? It was sort of that, but there's also this notion of like how how they're producing, like are they produced blocks like drawn from like this like person distribution of fixed time or are they actually like a much wider distribution and like that change that actually changed some of the like the ways people had

because they were using blocks to approximate time yes exactly exactly i see i see i see okay yeah yeah okay i mean this is all the stuff like it's not people didn't know this would stuff would happen but i think arbitram actually tried to be very consistent with ethereum and i think a lot of the other l2s were much more loose and and it actually i think it's like one of the interesting things is that like farming contracts work better on arborchrome for a while. And like, now everyone realizes that and they're going to upgrade and change stuff. But their developer friendliness in certain ways seem to win people over. And I think for Polygon, I think the difference is like, Polygon's just been focused on NFTs.

Like they've been killing it out of it. Right. They like basically have like taken all of Solanas, and stuff like in the last, you know, six months. They've like slowly eaten everything. So I think it's just interesting though that Arbitron became the D5 place, right? I don't know if I could have predicted that at all at the beginning of the year. I would have just like rolled a three-sided dice and said like it's arbitram optimism or polygons. Well, one of the things you see anecdotally or hear anecdotally from users right now is that there's a lot of users on arbitram because within the community, there's still a lot of expectation that arbitram is going to release a token and it's going to be retroactive towards its users, whether or not that's, you know, reality or hope or rumor, you know, I think a lot of the activity

is, you know, preemptively designed to target that. A lot of the other L2s at this point, you know, all have tokens. Arbitrum is sort of a last man standing of a blockchain that doesn't. And so it's possible that a lot of the usage there is just really designed to try to capture a token if and when it doesn't. Yeah, I wanted to say that this proves my tokenomics point, but it kind of doesn't because of retroactive airdrops. Retroactive air drops are this kind of like reverse causation that kind of muddy the waters of like what's actually happening there. Part of it is certainly that like, yes,

Arbitrum is not, you know, pumping out liquidity rewards because it's just they built a good mousetrap and people like the mousetrap. But part of it is like, yeah, to rob it to your point, once they actually do have a token and whatever airdrop they will do is done, then you can say, cool, here's like real actual, completely organic usage.

And unfortunately, we no longer can do clean A-B test because of retroactive aerobbs. I agree, but I also think it's interesting that, like, Polygon completely won the NFT war. And Arbitroman, there was a time where Arbitram was actually the highest L2 NFT volume, probably like at the beginning of this year. And it completely lost that, right? It even lost, like, the Reddit thing started there, but then moved to Polygon. Do you remember, like, it was actually a Nova chain?

Yeah. So my point is, it is interesting. that the users have segmented, and some of it actually does seem to be, like, UX and quality. Like, obviously, not all of it. Like, clearly a lot of its economic incentive described. But it does seem like they found certain things to developers and users, people like that. I suspect that a lot of it for Polygon 2 is that actually for onboarding new users, the UX of a new L1 is actually a lot simpler than the UX of an L2. An L2 implies that, okay, it's ether, but it's not ether on Ethereum.

If you have ether on Ethereum, you're in the wrong place. You've got to like point your lasers at the right thing, you know, manage your RPC and all this stuff. Whereas for, for Matic, it's just like if you have Ether, you're in the wrong place. Ether is the wrong thing to buy. You don't need Ether. You need Maddoch. Go on your exchange, buy Madic. That's the thing you want.

You know, so it's, I assume, I mean, not only one, they have the network effect of just having a ton of users already compared to what Arbitrum has in terms of, you know, just monthly or daily actives, but also just like UX wise, if you're Reddit and you are going to have hundreds of thousands of people touching this blockchain, if you lose 10% of them because they don't understand what a layer two is, because, oh, it's on Ethereum. Arbitrum is on Ethereum. So therefore, okay, I've moved my money onto Ethereum. If even 10% of people make that mistake or 5% of people, then it's just not worth it because the underlying, the underlying, the line chain doesn't really matter to you that much so much as just, hey, I need an open sea and I need, you know, a chain that can beat super low fees. So anyway, this is a theory. I don't know if this is true, but that's my assumption. Yeah, I still would say if I look back at January, I wouldn't have necessarily predicted that they would be the defythe chain right now. Okay. Tom, what do you have biggest surprise 2022? Yeah, maybe a bit broad, but I have usage durability. There's, you know, sort of this phrase that, you know, the map is not the territory. And I think in crypto, it's like the price is not the product. And I think, you know, in my mind, a lot of kind of

defy, you know, obviously exists in part to offer leverage. And so naturally it's sort of gotten hit in terms of overall, you know, TBL or usage by sort of this, this wind down to these, this different macro market. But I think if you sort of peek under the hood, a lot of parts of crypto actually look pretty fantastic from a usage perspective, like, we were talking about NFT Mints earlier. NFT Mints are still at 50% of all-time highs. User numbers are still at 50% of all-time highs. Even Defi.

Yeah, you know, in some dexes, maybe, you know, volume is down. But user numbers are actually looking pretty darn good. And I think that's true in these, you know, different areas of outperformance. Like the Reddit NFT example, you know, 4 million people minted their Reddit avatar or Tyler Hobbs, generative art artist. His QQL minted out, like, you know, 17. million dollars. And that was like two months ago, which was supposed to be sort of, you know, the middle of this NFT winter. And so there are all these different areas where if you sort

of look under the hood, there's actually like pretty interesting activity going on. People are still really excited and, you know, the numbers don't really lie. But you kind of have to go go find those. So I think in my mind, $200,000, eight pictures, it was maybe, you know, partially a macro byproduct, but there are still a lot of people out there who are excited about these things. And so I think in defy, in NFTs, in other areas of crypto, there's still a lot of usage, even despite the price drawdowns. I'm pretty sure the line the price is the product was coined by Cal Samati last year. So, yeah, I think it is fitting that this is the year of the dissolution of that meme. So, yeah, well called out.

So my biggest surprise, and by the way, I just want to point out for the audience, you can tell we're all being cute and we're all dancing around like the actual biggest surprises. But whatever, I'll continue in the theme of being cute. Well, because we already said them. We kind of already said that. We already said that because like the biggest losers or the... Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I just want to say that in case we don't actually say it.

So in my case, the biggest surprise I'd say was the death of all the lenders. So it doesn't surprise me that lenders died, right? Like, okay, of course. Prices go down. Some people were leveraged. Some people made bad loans. They died. It turns out every fucking lender in the industry died.

Every single one of them. We basically had a great financial crisis level extinction event for every single lender. That was surprising to me. Basically, nobody has made money in lending since inception, which is really just mind-boggling to me. You would think that in a cycle, there would be some people who sort of went too far toward the tide and ended up getting carried away when the tide increased. But the people who were closer to shore would be okay.

And there would be some people who were like, oh, I had better risk management. I did this. I did that. And that's why I didn't do what those crazy people. people did. Doesn't matter what you did. Almost everybody died from this generation of lenders. And I would not, even if you told me that prices in crypto would have drawn down, you know, 50% plus in a single year, I would assume like, well, you know, BlockFi is going to be screwed, but like other people will be fine. But turns out, no, every single lender died. And so anybody

who's building a thesis last year about, well, I'm going to underwrite this lender because they're better than the other. Yeah, okay, blockfi is crazy. Celsius is crazy. But these guys going to be fine. Nope, the entire category all got destroyed this year. I do remember talking to some people who were investing in BlockFi last few rounds and I had just been like, oh, like, what's your thesis?

Like, why do you think they're going to be really great? People always said the same thing for all of these mega lender rounds. Like, sell us blockfi, like, not Amber. The person Amber used Babel, like stuff like that. I just like, people would always basically say that following.

Yeah, they have these like really great borrowers. who are market makers. Everyone said the same thing about all the lenders. So, like, maybe this is just like, the cycle of life. It seems so. It seems so. And until, I mean, there's a lot of lessons about, like, why did, why fundamentally, or what could you have arrived at to know that the entire category was just not underwritable?

And I think a large part of it comes from the fact that, so lending on the whole made a lot of money last year, right? So, you know, people made an aggregate, you know, in the billion. last year. Obviously it was a crazy year for crypto leverage, period. And so a lot of that was just ended up getting recycled as crypto leverage. But the difference between lending, so there are some very successful lending companies in Web 2, traditional startups. But most of them have some kind of innovation. And the innovation might be, you know, a point of sale integration, like buy not pay later. It might be, you know, some clever underwriting or being able to like, you know,

model out exactly what your repayment schedule is going to be or something like that. Nobody in crypto had. All of these people had bad. They all did. They all did. But they didn't die, right? They didn't die. They didn't die. That was a lot of just repricing due to rates. Right. So like the attractiveness of these lending, you know, basically being able to get high-risk debt, just on the whole got destroyed because of rates going up. Right. So like that's ultimately what a lot of these lenders were really doing was packaging up high-risk borrowers. But they didn't die. Everyone in crypto died. And I think part of the reason why that is is that ultimately the lenders in crypto were competing. on taking risk because there was no way to compete on technology. Nobody had any better technology. There was no actual innovation. Normally, when VC's back a sector, they do so because the person who has the better,

you know, structural advantage is going to win. The person who has better technology, who has better vertical integration, who has better execution, whatever. They're the person who's going to win. And venture capital is in the business of finding that one person, giving them lots, lots of money, and achieving the outside success. But if there's no vector for competition besides risk, besides just taking more risk, then basically every single person that is venture backable

takes a bunch of risks, and as soon as the tide increases, they all drown together. And that's basically what happened. And so I think for me, that's a big lesson about just what it looks like to find a category, even if it's making money, that actually has the properties of venture. The properties of venture should be that as a company gets bigger, it becomes more robust, not less robust. And that seems to be what happened to the lenders, that as lenders try to, to get bigger, they became less and less robust.

In traditional finance, like, you know, lending is not a venture-type business. It's something that, you know, like obviously lending is a big business. It's massive. But it's not the kind of thing that, you know, small players grow overnight through some kind of magic growth hack or structural advantage and then end up becoming these big incumbents. It's the opposite. It's a very slow-moving industry with very entrenched players. And so that...

Well, I would... One thing I would dispute about that characterization is that a lot of, like, edge lending that requires like either novel underwriting standards or like packaging up loans in some weird way. Like buy now pay later a good example or like type all these like invoice factoring type of things. Like they were venture-backable because they had some sort of like there's this outsized premium that like that market is going to grow like and like the current users are just small.

Right. But I think that that also points to real innovation, right? It's like understanding there's a class of users that nobody else understands how to underwrite, and they have some technological way to underwrite them in real time or in much faster sales cycle than anybody else can, right? That's both buy-not-pay-later and buy. In spite of certain VC's asking me to stop calling VCs dumb on the show. Wait, who asks you to stop going to dumb? I will say that when I'm not telling you, but I got it. You have to call them out. What are you talking about? I'm not calling them out. I'm just going to let them hear that I said that so they know.

I think the problem is VCs just took the model of like the pipes of the world like, oh, let's translate it to this like edge asset that we don't understand, but people are securitizing in some way. And oh, like it seems to be growing. Like, like I can kind of see like the growth investor story. Because they're just like, what's the spreadsheet of the numbers? And it's not really about the technology. Like that is sort of the difference between like late stage growth investors and C investors. If you're investing in growth stuff, you're not actually underwriting the technology anymore at something. You might be if it's like SpaceX, but like most fintech stuff, it's not, right?

And so I think like there's a sense in which calling it not venture investable is not totally true. But it is true that the growth investors maybe were not so sophisticated. And, you know, I'm not going to call venture investors dumb. So I'm just going to say that. leave it at that. I think one of the things that makes it interesting from a venture perspective is that at a hypothetical level, lending is a business that could require a lot of capital for something that is mostly just software and a little bit of people. And I think, you know, venture investors get excited about businesses that could require $5 billion just because

you know, that's something that you can deploy assets and capital into its scale, unlike most other businesses in our space or, you know, in finance in general. Like, it's one of these things that could soak up just huge amounts of capital given the right conditions. And, you know, it gets better as it gets bigger because, you know, when it's small, it's like, oh, why would we bet on this like, you know, with the odds is making any sense? As it gets bigger, I think people's eyes widened when they see how much capital it could, you know, ask to soak up.

And that's what makes it interesting from a business perspective in a way that, you know, we're building this protocol or we're building a new blockchain. Like, it's very different. I think there was true in a bull market when there was tons and tons of money and that money was trying to find a home, right? So I think it was very true last year. This year, I think many fewer people are thinking of businesses in that context. And I think this is exactly where it, in the counter analogy, of course, is that,

you know, BlockFi had a huge employee base. All these landers had tons and tons of bodies. Whereas, you know, Robert, to your point about compound, compound, AVE, they don't need employees. They just kind of run their super capital light. That is actually traditionally what VC's like. VCs like the idea that with a small amount of principal investment, you can build something really big. That's the advantage of software businesses, is that they don't scale through people.

They scale through software. And defy is the apotheosis of that. And so I think the regular lenders we were saying were not. Yes, I will take this opportunity. Yes, I will take this opportunity to say that defy is better than, the old way of doing business with tons of people and spreadsheets and like making up decisions on the fly and choosing who to lend to based on how much they bro out with you or tweet good tweets.

You know, defy is vastly superior to all of these businesses that have failed in almost every way. And there's a reason why defy has performed exceptionally this year in terms of the resilience and the smoothness of their operating versus these CFI. And the fact that defy does not trust your self-certified balance sheet, it checks. Like you got to put the collateral in the fucking contract. And so that... Yes, it's very hard to scam a smart contract. It's very easy to scam a human at a lender.

Speaking of that, I'm ready for our last category because this ties into my best meme. Okay, let's move on to best meme. So just as a reminder, so last year, what we chose is the best memes of 2021 were the term Web 3, Dog Coins, Grimes tweeting, what was it, what was the actual tweet? It doesn't exist anymore. Three, three, three. Oh, okay, you're right. And then last was SBF's shoes when he went to Congress.

Those are what we chose is the best memes of last year. SBF shoes. I'm like, forgot about that. He's going to be wearing very different shoes this year. I saw a pretty, well, I saw a pretty morbid tweet recently where it's him walking around without laces because obviously when you go to jail they take your shoelaces from you and so it's a you know the shoe lace meme but in a very different light all right that got heavy uh robert you want to go first best meme of 2022 i'm going to go literal and i'm not going to go with like a big metaphorical meme

concept i'm going to describe the best one jpeg meme that i saw all year in its simplicity and wonderfulness. If everyone's familiar with the low-wit, mid-wit, high-wit, you know, IQ-Bell chart meme, historically this is used to indicate that the low IQ and the high IQ generally agree on something, it's the midwits that disagree and they're wrong and they're silly. But the meme that I saw this year was the low-wits saying, it was, you know, I got wrecked on Terra, you know. The mid-wits were saying, I got wrecked on Celsius and the high-wit, you know, saying, I got wrecked. got wrecked on FTX. And, you know, I thought it like perfectly encapsulated this year and that, you know, there wasn't an outlier. It wasn't like the midwits are wrong and the low IQ and the high

IQ like are both completely correct in their own opposite ways. This year, everybody was an alignment and it was just the flavor of what attracted them, like moths of the flame to their demise. So for the low, low IQ, it was generally terra. You know, for the midwits, it was generally C-Fi lenders and for the high IQ, it's, you know, it was like market makers and traders and people who had assets still on FTS when it, you know, went under. So that was my best meme this year that I saw, you know, I tried to like it and retweeted and stuff, but it wasn't a concept, just a literal JPEG. I love that.

Bear markets are the most democratic because everybody gets shafted, but in a different way, a way suited to your social status, you will, they'll find a way. They'll find a way. way to destroy you one way or another no matter who you are. All right. Turun, you're up. You were giving us a little bit of a teaser about your meme. What is your best meme for 2022? Proof of reserve, which is, you know, it's kind of been a very stupid meme where like every exchange is like showing themselves on the foot to be worse at getting audits that claim they have enough assets to withdraw post-FTCX, mainly because you can't see liabilities and you can't see the chains of liabilities. And when you're talking

about defect contracts where you can see the entire liability chain, or hopefully in the future where it's like, you can't see the liabilities, but I can give you a proof that all the liabilities are correct while still giving some privacy to the user. It is just like so

superior in this case that it's actually like reading some of these audits is like painful. It's like, oh yes, we attest that like these wallets are finance like signed a sign to sent us to sign signature from these things. But actually, we can't tell you anything

about the methodology outside of exactly, and not just Binance, that I'm not just thinking about Crackens audit was dog shit, like Bitmex was dog shit. All of these things are like, okay, they're fine, but like, is there really a dog in the only show? Doesn't crack, okay, hold on.

I think there's like such a massive chasm between what Binance did and what Cracken is doing. But even these Merkel Perth reserves things are not very good when it's like an exchange that's actually quite complex of like what its liabilities are. Maybe the cash flow is shown in those preferences come from outstanding loan. Sure, sure, sure.

But doesn't Cracken also have like an audited statement saying that like these are our liabilities? If I remember correctly, the only exchange that a big four, I could be wrong about it. Cracken has this now. But like last time I looked was it was Coinbase. Like they're the only one who's convinced like a big four. I can believe that. I can believe that. I don't know if it was a big four auditor.

That was what I heard. I'm all speaking with hearsay. I'm not an authority on this. No, I think BitMax and Cracken have been trying to do this like, hey, we're going to do Merkel Proofs, or whatever. But that doesn't tell you that much, right?

These entities could have like, you know, 500 subentities, like they all do in reality. Like FTCs, where it's like, oh, like, this thing is minus $50 billion dollars. Plus $50.01 billion. And like, you don't, you know, you don't see the minus. You only see the plus. And you're like, oh, okay, great, it's working.

So, like, I just like, I just think like we, you know, I'm happy people are doing it. I think it's a dumb meme personally. I think you should have the liabilities represented and understood in the way that I does. And it's just cleaner, right? Like, you can believe the audit. I agree with Turin because I think this meme is counterproductive in that if people get complacent and say, oh, my God, we solved it. We're just going to use these exchanges that do, you know, the proof of.

reserves in this way and then later they get scammed even more, like it's going to be problematic. And I just think it like creates an extra layer of complacency as the reaction to FTX, even though it's probably not the objectively correct way of going about it. You know, the low wit and the midwit are going to get confused and convinced by the concern, but like you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, right? like this is way better than what we had before, which was absolutely nothing. And if you cannot generate even a like slightly convincing proof of reserves, that is a very good signal to no matter what wit you are, that hey, something is probably wrong at this

exchange. What we want to avoid is another FTX. FTC could not even done anything remotely like a proof of reserves. Now, can an insolvent exchange fake a proof of reserves? Yes. The same way that an insolvent company can also fake an audit, right? as we learned, some of the great financial frauds of the past. The point is to make this stuff harder, not to make it impossible.

It'd be great to make it impossible, but we don't have a tool that does that. Quadriga, I just looked this up. Quadriga had an audit before, like by a reputable Canadian firm before they went under. Well, but that's not proof of reserves, right? But, I mean, their auditor claim to have done it because it was, like, for doing a listing on the Canadian Stock Exchange. So these things are, like, kind of like, everyone wants, like, the, like, the, like, the like feel good thing.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's my point. It's like, look, it's not perfect. Nobody's claiming that proof of reserves is perfect. But it's clearly better than not having anything. Otherwise, like, what's the alternative? I agree. I'm just saying it's a meme that came out of this FTX fear that I think will probably be net negative.

Like, I just don't see it being a positive meme in the long run. All right. This is nothing against any of the exchange owners. You kind of have a, you're in a rock and hard place. It's kind of like hard. You're either showing everyone like every. everything of all your entities are on, right? And it's like, it's not, it's not, I don't envy their job doing this.

I'm just pointing out that like, it's just, it's a very big meme right now, right? Like, everyone is like constantly talking about it. Yeah, even the SEC is unhappy about it. So they, they are cool. All right, Tom, what do you have for best meme of 2022? Mine is also not a literal JPEG, but I have the ladies. The ladies went through a rise and a fall and a rise again. and I feel like they have this sort of, you know, anticyclical nature to sort of the ethos of what they

represent. And I think in my mind, they've also kind of branched outside of crypto, which is actually like the thing that has taken them into best meme status for me, where you see people in like the effective accelerationist movement and like other random AGI people are super into milades. And so in my mind, like, it's, again, when I was talking about the price is not the product, this is sort of in that bucket of like, yeah, the price is not done super well. You know, yeah, it's not a big. I think the ladies have done well actually this year as a, I guess it's not, you know, a big mainstream, you know, NFT like crypto punks or whatever. But it's in the sense of cultivating an online community and sort of having a different tack to what the rest of crypto is doing.

I give them the ladies my best. I've heard that one of the commonalities. among a lot of milady's holders that there's a very high density of convicts among people who hold miladies have you observed this to be true of convicts people who've been to jail or prison I've never heard that's one of the first things

Screlly did when he got out was in a milady I don't think it's just Screlly apparently there are others this is like a thing I don't know this is your say okay malady if any chopping bog listener who is a

malady holder who disagrees with Hesiv needs to go like tweet at him right now right when you're listening Yeah, has Steve just called me to be clear. To be clear, I said a higher than normal density, that could still be a very low number. I don't know. There's 10,000 of them, right? So, you know, I don't know.

Good, good choice, Tom. So myself for best meme, I guess I took this fairly literally. I thought Gabriel Haynes was probably the best meme of 2022. I will never forget that iconic video of him, like, walking around in front of a country road with a shirt off and a machete. basically the day after FTCS was collapsing, he was like the one thing that I could show my wife that like, look, I can't explain to you what's really going on, but you should watch this guy. This guy will explain it better than I can. I think just having a little bit of insanity amplification at a time of just like otherworldly insanity really helped me.

Yeah, he's a vibe. Yeah. Cool. All right. But honestly, the entertainment you need in the dark. Definitely. Definitely. He's doing God's work.

Okay, so predictions for 2023. So we made a number of predictions last year. There was a little bit too much detail from all of us for me to aggregate them. But let's just really quickly aggregate up. What are our predictions for next year? It's been a rough year. Hopefully there's some light to look forward to in 2023. Robert, what do you got predictions for next year?

So my prediction for next year is that developer activity sort of re-centers around Ethereum. You know, last couple years, we've seen extreme fragmentation of developer activity, spreading out to a lot of competing L1s and L2s. To your earlier point about the EVM, you know, having its moment, you know, the EVM was a format. And it actually made it really easy for alternative L1s using the EVM to capture applications and developers. And I think 23 is, you know, the real start of the reversal of that. I think, you know, you're not going to see people trying to launch another EVM clone. I think, you know, as, you know, the price of ether is low and gas costs are low, I think like a lot of activities going to return to core L1 Ethereum.

I think, you know, we're going to see it be more of a, you know, composable ecosystem for applications again. One of the trends in the last, you know, year two has been, there hasn't been a lot of composability between applications because everyone just building their own application in a silo and they didn't really care what else was being built in our ecosystem because they could just jump to an old L1, you know, and just like start from scratch. But I think I think 2020 is going to be a year where we start to see a network effect grow

for developers and people start to reembrace the composability of a lot of development activity being in one place. So that's my prediction. I could be completely wrong. But I think it's a year of possibility. Okay. So the inverse of the reversal of the fragmentation we've seen this year. Teroon, what's your prediction for 2023?

I predict we will get our first, maybe consumers the wrong word, but average user ZK application. I'm not sure if it will be like some big defy thing or whether it will be NFTs. I'm not willing to make that bet, but if you just look at the number of people who are downloading, starring, and forking surcom, which is one of the main ZK tool chains for building provers and building circuits, Admittedly, it's extremely primitive. It's like, you know, a bug I ran into which someone else told me about, so I was trying to reproduce it, is like, you know, you can do a for loop to 99 elements, but you can't to 100. What? Like, there's just like some of the weird, stupid limitations that, like, have to do with, like, how.

Wait, it's base 10? That's not that. It has to do with, like, the circuit site. Like, they only use a certain amount of memory that stores the circuit. And that amount of memory happens to be 100 gates. It's some random. It's annoying, not worth discussing. I kind of think, like, people are experimenting with writing ZK circuits in a way that does feel a lot like smart contracts.

Whether it's in StarCware and it's Cairo and it's like, you know, going that direction, whether it's people writing custom circuits for doing things like bridging or whether it's sort of people building games that take advantage of ZK elements. I think like we're going to finally find one application this year. It's not going to be what we expect. It's going to be a little bit like Uniswop where it like looks totally different or dumb or something. It's going to have some affectation to it that's going to make you think like, who cares? Like why is. And like, does do IDX count?

Are you talking about like just an application built in a way that's provable? An application that takes advantage of the verifiability and like incremental verifiable of the computation and like actually uses the bridge. Right. Like dark forest is. This is an example of something that actually uses a ZK proof as part of its mechanic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yes, yes. Not just like taking advantage of pure scalability. Right. Okay. Yeah, my guess would be that's probably either bridging or identity is going to be the use case. Yeah, for sure. That's what gives me a cop-out answer because I know the bridge stuff is, is like quite far. Right.

But I do think there will be one that like you will be able to use the metamask kind of easily, relatively easily. It'll be as easy as using an L2, hopefully. Well, the number one this year was also my pick earlier, which is tornado, which I don't know that it'd say it's easy, but it's certainly, you know, it's usable. You could use it. Yeah, like there's dot guides for how to use it. It's not just like, hey, read my code and figure how to use it, which is like 90% of ZK stuff. True, 100%.

All right. Tom, what do you have your prediction for 2023? Yeah, I'll try to keep it somewhat short. I think in terms of the industry, my one big. prediction is we will start to see the first companies fold and shut down. There's this concept in venture capital of a J-curve. Basically, you invest in a bunch of, make a bunch of investments. The companies are going to fail, fail before the companies are going to succeed. And so you sort see returns, you know, drop from those failed companies in the short term. And then in dealing

the long term, you see those successful companies sort of, you know, lift your returns. And yeah, we've seen a lot of companies blow up as we've been discussing this entire podcast. But we haven't seen many companies shut down because they can't secure additional funding, they can't make enough money, they don't have product market fit. And so I think in my mind, that sort of truly signals the bottom when we start to see people wind down simply because they haven't found PMF or they aren't generic enough revenue. So I think we will see that in 2023. I think in terms of like memes and trends that we'll probably see, I think RWA is going to become a big thing, again, like people looking for productive assets. There's just new site RWA at XYZ, makers leaning really hard into

RWA, I think we'll see real world assets become a big thing within DFI. Account abstraction, also see people seem really hyped about it now, I think because of EIP 4337, basically allowing people to bundle different transactions or sort of arbitrarily sign and create transactions as opposed to just relying on an EOA. This is something I've personally been excited about for a very long time, like since back when I was at zero X. So excited to see if this actually hits mainstream next year. And then ZKEVM, it feels like it's kind of been, you know, bubble. the past few months, and I think it's kind of finally sort of spill over next year.

And independent of that means something on mainnet and live that people are using. But it feels like that's sort of where the forefront of excitement in cryptos is happening. Yeah, I think we're going to see more excitement congeal around ZKVMs. I don't know that they're going to be really that production ready next year. I think there'll be things that you can actually play around with and deploy things on. But I think there's still a lot of rough edges to ZKVMs, I think for all of them that I don't know that it's, it's going to be time for ZKVMs to overtake optimistic roll-ups in 2023. But I agree with you.

I think the story and the star is going to rise. So it'll be more and more excitement around it, I suspect. So my predictions for 2020, two. First is the rise of roll-ups, I think both ZK and optimistic. Of course, we have the big Ethereum upcode repricing that's going to take place next year that's going to massively lower the cost for posting roll-up data on chain. That is going to make roll-ups now suddenly competitive with Alt-L-1s in terms of pricing. And that's going to be a huge, huge shift.

now all of a sudden the the ux difference and the and the just you know the the the cost difference between l2s and a polygon or a salana or whatever will shrink not you know collapse but it will shrink significantly the point where you know if it's a fraction of a cent or if it's one cent you don't care you know it's not we're not using order books we're not doing anything that's super high throughput for most people and so for any normal use case one cent is basically the same as a fraction of a cent so I think that is going to be a big catalyst for roll-ups this year as well as just the development of zKVMs and then my second second prediction for 2023 is that as a direct result of FTX, we are going to see the exchange

stack get disaggregated, meaning that we are going to see finally the breakdown of this idea that you have these verticalized exchanges that do everything. They do the trade execution, they run the order book, they do the clearing, they do the brokerage, and they're the custodian. These things are going to get separated out, not all of them, but some of these functions are going to get separated out into separate players. And fairly soon, I would guess by the end next year, you're going to see more and more, especially professional traders, but even just like, you know, kind of prosumers, being able to say, okay, I want my custody here, and then I'm going to use exchange for the coin base for exchange, and I'm going to do my lending and borrowing

through this other person. That is going to become more and more common in crypto, and we're going to move toward more of like a trad-fi-like structure that makes things like FTCS basically impossible, because the same party that runs the exchange doesn't actually have access to the funds. So my guess is that's going to be one of the biggest immediate consequences from FTCS. downfall. Looking forward to your future and on account called MPC Bull. I do think the NPCs are going to be beneficiaries of it. Unfortunately, we didn't invest in the maybe fortunately given that everything's down, but we didn't invest into any of the NPC platforms, but I am, I do think they're going to be big beneficiaries of this. Yeah, seems like it.

Yeah. It seems like it if your prediction comes here. Well, if my prediction goes through. Cool. Well, guys, it's been a absolutely insane year. It's always, a pleasure. By the way, this is the one-year anniversary also of the chopping block. Just as a quick refresher for those of you who weren't there at the time, before we started the chopping block, we actually started this as a Dragonfly Robot Ventures happy hour that we would do on Twitter spaces like every Friday or something like that. And it was just like a casual thing where we were chatting. We were like, huh, this is really fun. We got like a good vibe. We have interesting takes that nobody else seems to really propound in public. So we should like do this as a regular thing.

We got to know Laura. We built a relationship and we decided to start. trying this out as a regular show. And it's been absolutely amazing to just get all the feedback this year from everybody who watches the show. Like it's crazy for me. Like I go to a conference and I think, you know, people respond to us and I get emails and stuff like that. But it's especially true when I go to conferences. The number of people who listen to this show and get value out of it, especially in a year with so many crazy things happening that nobody else understands how to explain. It was not an insider. It's just been absolutely an incredible experience to do the show with you guys. Plus one, this has been a lot of fun over the last year.

So if you have things you'd like us to talk about or do or change or whatever, your feedback is also welcome and encouraged. My big goal for the shopping block for 2023 is to get Turin a good night. And second goal is to get to jump on time. Hopefully, hopefully I can cede to your requests. I just want to say really a lot of thanks to all of the listeners, especially those of you who've reached out. and like talk to me about stuff. You know, I think our listener base is extremely broad. And that's thanks to Laura.

She's like obviously built up this like amazing listener base. Like that includes everyone from like people in normal finance, LPs at funds, like technology people who are not in crypto who are just like, okay, this is the one thing I listen to every week to like see if crypto is still alive or dead. And like it's been a lot of fun kind of learning who's listening to this and then what you all are interested. And then, yeah, as Robert says, like feedback on anything would be awesome. Yeah. So one change that we're going to be doing going forward into the new year is we are going to start doing fewer live streams and trying to do more podcasts. So in general, we've seen that you guys really love the show. There's a lot of uptake of the podcast, much more so than the live stream.

And just because all of us are kind of traveling around all the time and in different parts of the world, It's a lot easier to do these shows if we don't have to commit to doing live streams. We may still do live streams from time to time, but we're not going to have every single show be live streamed as we did in 2021. So that will make it easier for us to do the show with a tighter cadence and make it more consistent and also allow us to get the editing down. So just prepare for that in 2023. You're going to be hearing more of us, but it's not going to be live streamed quite as often as it was last year. We hope you all have happy holidays. And we hope that 2023 ends up being a gently.

year to your portfolios than 2022 was. And I guess that's it from us. Happy holidays, everybody. Have a good New Year. Happy New Year.