ROLLUP: ETH CC Paris | BED Index | Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Cathie Wood & Bitcoin (3rd Week of July)

3rd Week of July ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ 📣 SMARTCON | Register for Smart Contract Summit 2021! https://bankless.cc/SmartCon ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:20 MARKETS 2:32 BTC Price 3:20 ETH Price 5:25 Google Search Trends https://coinmetrics.substack.com/p/coin-metrics-state-of-the-network-7e2 8:18 Market Cycles https://twitter.com/LilMoonLambo/status/1417483927132987403?s=20 11:00 ETH/BTC Ratio 12:20 DeFi Action 13:22 Institutional Demand Bad: https://cointelegraph.com/news/institutional-demand-for-bitcoin-evaporates-as-btc-struggles-below-31k Good: https://blockworks.co/fidelity-71-of-institutional-investors-plan-to-buy-crypto/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T 17:00 UNI Token https://twitter.com/tokenterminal/status/1404045729560150017?s=20 21:00 RELEASES 22:00 BED Index https://www.tokensets.com/v2/set/ethereum/0x2aF1dF3AB0ab157e1E2Ad8F88A7D04fbea0c7dc6 25:07 SushiSwap Trident https://twitter.com/Blockanalia/status/1417460991940571136?s=20 Rivalry: https://twitter.com/josephdelong/status/1391083986181525508?s=20 28:48 ETH Issuance Model https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1416022071914729473?s=20 31:35 Yearn Risk Dashboard https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1416103246670749698?s=21 34:15 Grayscale DeFi https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/07/19/2264846/0/en/Grayscale-Investments-and-CoinDesk-Indexes-Launch-Decentralized-Finance-DeFi-Fund-and-Index.html 37:12 OKEx Polygon https://twitter.com/JayHao8/status/1415214114654224385?s=20 38:45 Axe DogeSpray https://twitter.com/AXE/status/1417175117440995328 40:26 Immutable - IMX https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1418032781343428613 42:11 Visor Finance Raise https://twitter.com/VisorFinance/status/1417093827295334400?s=20 43:56 OpenSea Raise https://twitter.com/theblock__/status/1417462989888835584?s=21 45:03 FTX Valued at $18B https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-exchange-ftx-valued-at-18-billion-in-funding-round-11626800455 46:13 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 47:00 NEWS 47:20 The B Word Conference https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/112158/elon-musk-says-spacex-owns-bitcoin-and-he-owns-ethereum-in-jack-dorsey-talk 49:30 ETH Settling $8T https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1415737374194249729?s=20 52:22 Decentralizing Maker https://blog.makerdao.com/makerdao-has-come-full-circle/ Legacy: https://twitter.com/RyanWatkins_/status/1417626182875586563?s=20 57:29 Infinite Garden Doc https://twitter.com/ljxie/status/1416202730687717377 58:38 Masterpiece https://masterpiece.so/ 59:18 Jack, BTC, Square https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-on-bitcoin-jack-dorsey-launches-new-square-division-to-make-it-easy 1:01:20 USDC & Mastercard https://www.circle.com/blog/mastercard-taps-circle-for-usdc-settlement-pilot What’s in USDC: https://cointelegraph.com/news/auditors-reveal-usdc-backing-as-jim-cramer-sounds-alarm-over-tether-s-mad-money 1:04:34 Tether https://www.coindesk.com/tether-executives-cnbc-tech-check 1:07:30 New Jersey & BlockFi https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1417499622319210508?s=20 1:09:15 Binance Ditching Stock Tokens https://www.reuters.com/world/china/binance-stops-selling-stock-tokens-after-regulatory-scrutiny-2021-07-16/ 1:11:00 TAKES 1:12:00 2018 Bear Feels? https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1415988858039062528?s=20 1:17:45 First New Asset Class https://twitter.com/QwQiao/status/1417081872467771397?s=20 1:18:20 Jake’s Concerned https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1417928217550376960?s=20 1:20:58 100k Blocks Left https://twitter.com/preston_vanloon/status/1417551852577624077?s=20 1:21:47 Deflationary? https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1415758024321372161 1:23:53 Vitalik Take https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E60ss3QWQAAZ3GY?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E60ss3QWQAAZ3GY?format=jpg&name=large 1:27:45 David Take https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1417886459907002376?s=21 1:29:00 What David’s Excited About 1:31:58 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:34:30 Meme of the Week ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the 3rd week of July. David, what time is it?

• 0:11David Hoffman?

  It is the Friday Weekly Roll-Up, the special David in Paris edition of the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. And this is where we go through the weekly news of crypto, which there always is a lot of. So, we go through the market, what's happened in the market, we go through what got released, and then we hit what happened in the news cycle, and then we finish up with what the ecosystem takes, who has some interesting takes in the world of crypto. We finish up with what David and Ryan are excited about, and then we top things off with the meme of the week.

• 0:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  We might have a moment of zen at the end, but I'm excited about this. This is the first weekly roll-up broadcasting from Paris, so, pretty awesome, man. How is Paris, by the way?

• 0:52David Hoffman?

  I am absolutely exhausted, but it's been kind of fun. Yeah, it was the rave last night.

• 0:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Ave rave wore you out?

• 0:59David Hoffman?

  Ave rave, yeah, wore me out. Yeah, I got home at like 4:00 in the morning last night.

• 1:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, man. Well, thanks for doing the weekly roll-up, David. I know the crypto community appreciates it, all your hard work and dedication. David, before we get in, we should talk about the Smart Contract Summit that's coming up. I am psyched about this thing, because it's basically a free DeFi conference that anyone can register for, whether you're a developer, you're not a developer, you're just trying to learn about automated market makers, Layer 2, MEV, Oracles. All of these subjects will be covered. There'll be 200-plus DeFi projects, and founders, and speakers, lots of different panels, lots of different sessions. David, you and I will be there. This will be a couple of days, hopefully, right after the deployment of EIP 1559.

• 1:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, we are hosting a panel on EIP 1559 and the progress. It's just fantastic that this kind of a conference is being put out as a public good. It is a Smart Contract Summit. You can find a link to it in the show notes. Make sure you grab a free ticket, August 5th through the 7th.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Oracles are really important to blockchains because they allow blockchains to connect to the rest of the world and so any type of application always can have the oracle side of it, right? So oracles touch everything. So every time we, everything that Ryan and I talk about, there's always the oracle conversation right alongside with it, which is why Chainlink is throwing a summit. So makes a ton of sense. So see you guys there.

• 2:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they're a perfect aggregator for that. Alright, David, you ready to get into market stuff?

• 2:31David Hoffman?

  Let's do it.

• 2:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright, Bitcoin market. Tell us what is going on in Bitcoin world. Where do we start? Where do we end?

• 2:38David Hoffman?

  Hey, we, so we dumped down below $30,000, which is a scary number to break through and then we hopped right back above it. So we are currently at the price of $31,700. We started the week a little bit higher, but overall I would kind of call it a flat week. A flat week with like a dip into like the terror zone and then we didn't like that. Then we got right back out of it.

• 3:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, below, again, it's just this, this holding crab week, crab season. I can't even remember how long we've been here. It's like one of those things where it's like, have we been here for months? Years? How long have we been in crab season? Yeah, but like under, under 30K for Bitcoin does not feel happy and under 2K for ETH does not feel happy. So tell us about ETH because we're kinda, we went way under 2K, not way under, but decently under 2K and now where are we?

• 3:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we found the, a new bottom at around 1730 in the middle of this week, $1,730. Started the week off right at about $1,920 ish dollars and yesterday and this morning, depending, I'm in Paris, France, so depending on, you know, whatever that means for you, we actually jumped above $2,000. So we jumped almost $300, which is a big move for Ether, especially inside of one week. So definitely a volatile week and I think this might be on the, kind of the hype of Elon Musk announcing that he owns Ether. But I kind of also think that like decently, the market was ready to gobble up a lot of $1,700 ETH. So I kind of

• 4:11David Hoffman?

  think this pump might have been under its own weight and then with the Elon Musk, I own Ether announcement also just kind of added a little bit of momentum to that too.

• 4:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, some people say there's like part of the reason we're in crab season is because there's really not a lot of sellers under 30k Bitcoin, under 2k ETH, right? Especially when you get to 1700 ETH. I'm not sure, honestly, but you really think that that hop up was due to the Elon announcement and that Elon conversation?

• 4:39David Hoffman?

  The the timing was there, certainly, but but like I said, I think also Ether just completely rejected like 1700 ETH. Like, I think that there are a lot of buyers at that level and what and to to say, to go on what you were saying, the reason why we're in crap market is that there's a lot of buyers at like the 1700 level. And like, there's also turned, they turned into sellers at like a really low level of like 2200, 2300. That's when the buyers turn to the sellers. So like, there's like a narrow band. We got buyers at the floor, but like sellers on the ceiling, right?

• 5:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't deal with any of that, David. I'm just a holder, man. Just a simple lowly holder. You know?

• 5:18David Hoffman?

  And you're a buyer, too.

• 5:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm a buyer, yeah.

• 5:21David Hoffman?

  I've been buying.

• 5:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dollar cost average in, guys. That is the way to do it. I saw this on CoinMetrix, David. I thought this was super interesting. This is actually Google searches for Bitcoin, keyword Bitcoin, Google searches for keyword Ether, Ethereum, actually. And so what's really interesting is during this sort of bull cycle 2021, did you know Bitcoin in Google Trends did not actually hit its all-time high search? You can see this graph here. It hit all-time high search in 2018, the last bull cycle, which is interesting. It's down, of course, from the all-time high. So the all-time high was probably like April, May or so. For not the all-time high, but the local high for the Bitcoin search in Google Trends.

• 6:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That that just means people are searching Bitcoin as a as a keyword, like there's buzz about it and it's going in the Google search. What's interesting about Ethereum is all-time high was actually this bull market cycle. See the difference?

• 6:18David Hoffman?

  That's twice as high as it was in 2017.

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Twice as high, which is interesting. Now, it's, of course, way down because, you know, people stopped searching, I guess, NFTs. SNL, Ethereum, whatever they were searching. But the fact that it got much higher. Sort of the conclusion from CoinMetrix is, well, does that indicate that Ethereum has been more driven by retail? This cycle, whereas Bitcoin has been more driven by institutions this cycle. Of course, institutions don't have to Google Bitcoin. There's fewer of them. They just have lots of money to pour into it. I thought that was a really interesting takeaway. And I was actually surprised that Ethereum far exceeded. It's last all time high in Google Trends in this in this bull cycle. We'll see where this goes next.

• 7:05David Hoffman?

  Even where we're at right now in in 2021 Ethereum Google search trends is actually like meaningfully higher than most of Ethereum in 2017. And so that that's also interesting. The other thought I had is back on the Bitcoin chart. While Bitcoin got like the all time high of search trends was was in 2017. Look at the area under the curve, which is, I think, is like sustained Google searching. Because in 2017, it really looks like a flash in the pan. It's like a spike. But in 2021, it's like sustained Bitcoin searching from for the last like year or so. There's a lot of area under the curve for that. So that's something to note as well.

• 7:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other thing I I note is like, A, everything's a fractal. Look at this early 2017. You had that spike up and then a wave spike down. And the summer of 2017, no one, people weren't searching for Ethereum as much, right? Kind of how we are today. And then you got a huge spike, you know, October, November, December, January, February, back again. So maybe this is just a a local, you know, down. This would be the theory that, hey, after after this summer, this is going to repeat similar to 2017. And the bull market shall resume. We'll have to see how that plays out.

• 8:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk about this. David, I I thought this Lil Moon Lambo tweet, great name, by the way, great handle, Lil Moon, well done. Was was very like, it felt right for this week. And he says this, a year ago Bitcoin was 11K and ETH was 320. A year later, everyone is panicked. Because Bitcoin is 29K and ETH is $1,700. The lesson here is don't worry about the short-term price movements when you're in it for the long run. When in doubt, zoom out. Good reminder. Look, man, 29K a Bitcoin, 1,700 ETH a year ago. If you had told us at this date a year ago, these would be the prices a year from now.

• 9:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone would be excited. Everyone would be jubilant. It would be considered a smashing success. But human nature just has this weird effect. When you rise like really fast, really high, and you're off those highs, you feel like you've lost something. We have not lost anything. We are up on the year in a big way.

• 9:19David Hoffman?

  The fact that this tweet got over 5,000 likes and the meat of this tweet is using the word panicking. It says, he says, a year later, everyone is panicking. That's just like a buy signal to me. It's like if people are panicking, everyone is liking and retweeting this tweet because they're all resonating with the word panicking. And so like, that's just a buy signal to me. And I've been, there's been a number of people that have come into crypto that are in my own circles, my non-crypto circles, people from college, from high school, just friends. And they're unicyclers, right? This is their first cycle. I keep on trying to convince them that the best thing for them that could ever happen to them is Ether dipping really, really hard.

• 10:00David Hoffman?

  Like, if you are bullish on Ether, you want the price to go down. You want it to go low. And this has been one of the most frustrating things with Ether at like $1,700 or $2,100 because I was spoiled when I got into Ether. I was buying Ether between like $1 and $300. And so now when I go to Gemini and I make my purchases, I'm like, oh, I only get this amount of Ether these days. This is as far as $1,000 gets me. $1,000, you should get me three Ether. Now it's like one half of an Ether. Like, that's frustrating. And so I keep wanting Ether to go down more and more and more so I can finish accumulating. So if this is your first cycle for you, be okay with the number going down. Like, that's when you get bullish. Yes.

• 10:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Be happy about it. It's a buying opportunity. Yeah, I agree. But it's really hard to get people to, I mean, these conversations didn't happen in 2019, 2020. No one was interested in crypto exactly when they should be. Yeah, it's such a mind trap that way. All right, let's keep moving. Ether-Bitcoin ratio, what's the ratio telling us this week, David?

• 11:06David Hoffman?

  Last week, I was talking about how Ether is starting, the BTC ratio started dipping below 0.06, and that is starting to get into like the danger red territory, but also kind of fitting with that trend of a higher low, and that's exactly what happened. We painted that floor at like 0.058 a couple of days ago. And then with the jump in the markets yesterday, we are now back to 0.062, which is a great number. And like I've been saying, the ETH BTC ratio above 0.6 is a historical high, and it's holding that level really, really well in the midst of crab market, bear season, whatever. So the fact that Ether is holding that ratio versus Bitcoin is just indicative of, I mean, straight up of crab season, because it's not going anywhere.

• 11:50David Hoffman?

  But it's holding its ground in the midst of a testing time, and I think that's really awesome.

• 11:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, I do think that this is indicative of a, people aren't letting go of the bull market, right? This thing could recover. When this ratio starts to get like, bull markets are to Ether's benefit, and if we're going to have a bull market, and we talked about this before, but ETH needs to go up, the ratio needs to change in Ether's direction, and it's holding steady, so it's not losing ground right now, which is good to see. Let's talk about total locked value in DeFi. That is also holding steady. We were like 55 billion last week. I think we're like 58 billion this week. Just hang in there.

• 12:31David Hoffman?

  And AVE dominance up about a percent and a half. So congrats to AVE for continuing to dominate.

• 12:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about the DPI. This is the best index. Yeah, the best index is, these are DeFi tokens, but it's down on the week. Why down?

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  I guess the pump was really focused on the L1 assets, Ether and Bitcoin. Some tokens have definitely like recovered since when Ether dumped down to 1750, so did a lot of the tokens. Not as a strong recovery in the tokens, but I'm gonna call it noise.

• 13:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Elon does not own DeFi yet, so maybe that's why. But I do consider ETH the DeFi asset, Bitcoin too, for that matter.

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  We'll talk about this later, but we need to get Elon Musk to get into the bed.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get his bed. Well, you should probably, well, we'll explain it later. That might not make sense to you right now, but we'll explain it later, listener. Okay. This is interesting. These were two contrasting headlines that we picked out this week. The first is this headline. Institutional demand for Bitcoin evaporates as Bitcoin struggles below 31K. This is from CoinTelegraph. Juxtapose that. Okay, juxtapose that with this headline from Blockworks. Fidelity says, this is a survey from Fidelity. 71% of institutional investors plan to buy crypto. Even amidst a major sell-off, the majority of institutional investors surveyed by Fidelity expect to hold or invest in the future.

• 13:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super interesting. Institutional demand for Bitcoin evaporates. This one's saying institutions are going all in. The majority continue to buy and are holding during this period. What do you make of this contrast?

• 14:09David Hoffman?

  So here's some alpha that came straight out of ETHCC that can speak directly to this. And so I talked to two people that have privileged information. One of them is Tony from AVE, the other one is Santiago from Perify. And it's Tony, while I was interviewing him, which is going to be out on the podcast on Monday, so definitely tune into that. I asked him about AVE Pro, which is actually now going to be called AVE Arc. It's the institutional version of AVE. It's like, it's like the Coinbase.

• 14:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a better name. I like that name.

• 14:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, me too. And it's like Coinbase Treasury, but for AVE, you know, kind of whitelisted accounts.

• 14:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  You mean Compound Treasury?

• 14:42David Hoffman?

  Yes, that's what I meant. That's what I meant. And so he said, I asked him, are you building this so that you can then take this to institutions? Or are you building this because of demand? And he goes, oh, we need, we have to build this because everyone, all these institutions keep on asking for them. And so there's institutional demand for AVE Arc, and that is why they are building it rather than the inverse. So that's really important to take away. The other thing, I was just talking to Santiago from Perify Capital. This is in line at coffee, casual conversation, and he goes that. You know, institutions and funds are hitting us up like every single day knocking on our door to ask questions about Ether, specifically Ether. And he said, and we kind of like went down that train-

• 15:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Specifically Ether?

• 15:25David Hoffman?

  Specifically Ether, right? And the train of thought was that like Ether just has a lot of surface area for investments. Like funds, they like, they like the tech startup vibe of Ether. They like the fact that there's products on Ethereum rather than just Bitcoin, which is just Bitcoin. So Ether and Ethereum has this product focused thing with all the surface area for investments. That makes them like Ether, the asset. And so institutions knocking on the door to ask Santiago, who's a great brain. He's one of the DeFi panelists that we had, so you should also be watching that video, saying that there is institutional demand for specifically Ether.

• 16:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look, I, I, I tend to go where the data goes, right? And like those stories are definitely important and so is Fidelity saying seven out of 10 institutional investors hope to gain crypto exposure in the near future. I think the juxtaposition of these headlines is, one is just short run, you know, like you gotta say something when, you know, price is going down. And the other is like, Fidelity's been doing this survey for a while and they've been charting it over time. And these numbers are up, up, up from the last time they did this survey. So, look, the institutions are here. It sounds like they're getting excited about Ether. It sounds like they're getting excited about DeFi. I don't think they're going anywhere this round. This is a real asset class.

• 16:45David Hoffman?

  And the thing is, it doesn't take a lot of institutions to meaningfully move the market. And so that's why you should really still be optimistic.

• 16:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  There we go. We are not, we are not bullish today, guy, or we are not bearish today. Maybe, maybe, maybe we never are. I don't know.

• 17:00David Hoffman?

  We are literally never bearish.

• 17:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Token Terminal. This is super cool. It's hard to be, it's hard to be bearish when you see stuff like this, David. We are literally seeing a new asset class being birthed before our eyes. Caught this tweet from Token Terminal. This is about Uniswap's past year, okay? We talk about the birth of a new capital asset, something that has discounted cash flows that Wall Street can even value. Trading volume for Uniswap over the past year, 273 billion in trading volume with a B. Little tiny protocol, 15 people, 273 billion dollars.

• 17:34David Hoffman?

  Unicorn logo.

• 17:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unicorn logo, like weird, like-

• 17:38David Hoffman?

  Weird vibes.

• 17:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Simple interface, like, yeah. Definitely not Wall Street, definitely not like banker, you know, friendly, I guess. LP revenue, 812 million, that's how much liquidity providers made in this protocol. Uniswap revenue, 130 million, 16% of LP revenue. The costs for Uniswap, just 10 million in grants. Uniswap earnings then, if you do the math there, 110 million minus 130 million, 120 million. What is the fully diluted market cap right now, about 12 billion? So what does that make the price to earnings ratio? 102, 102 price to earnings ratio. If you benchmark that with other exchanges, traditional exchanges,

• 18:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  you've got CME Group that has a PE ratio of 40. You've got the ICE exchange, which is 30. You've got CBOE, which is 27. You've got NASDAQ, that's 28. Super interesting that Uniswap is being priced at a premium, but not at an excessive price to earnings premium to these legacy exchanges that are barely growing. Right? And you've got Uniswap, which is just crushing it in terms of growth. So also, I would argue like a fair market value based on price to earnings ratio. Maybe undervalued. Anyway, it's super cool because we've been talking about the birth of a new, of DeFi as capital assets. And here it is, it's happening.

• 19:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have the numbers, we can do the analysis, we can, we can, we can show the valuation here. And man, I'm just like, I'm psyched about that.

• 19:15David Hoffman?

  And just one small asterisk, and I'm pretty sure this is true, is that the token terminal tweet says uni revenue as 16% of LP revenue is 130 million dollars. That's once the fee switch gets turned on. So the fee switch is five basis points of fees goes to the protocol. And that would represent 16% of LP revenue. And so that's where they get that number from.

• 19:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, Facebook pre-revenue before they they put on, they turned on all of their, you know, advertising models and that sort of thing. So you see the growth, you see the potential, they just have to turn the switch and put it on, but they haven't done that. So it is also somewhat pre-revenue. That's a good asterix, David. All right, man, we are going to get to releases in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 20:00David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 20:44David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your Ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your D apps all in one place. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi. If you've been using Ethereum for the past 12 months, you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing DeFi. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. That's where Arbitrum comes in. Arbitrum is a layer two to Ethereum, which means Arbitrum can increase Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying.

• 21:29David Hoffman?

  When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security. And you want to save on gas costs and make an overall better experience for your users? Go to developer off chain labs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps building on Arbitrum. Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects, and will be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the Arbitrum Layer 2.

• 22:13David Hoffman?

  To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord.

• 22:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the hot releases this week. We got to start with this one. David, it's finally here. The Bankless Bed Index. Jump into bed, now you can say it. What does that mean?

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  It means we're getting into bed. We're all getting into bed together. You, the listener, we're all getting into bed. Bankless Bed Index, it's live. Wrapped Ether, wrapped BTC, and the DeFi Pulse indexed 33% each. And that composes the Bed Index. I think that this is going to be one of the best passive tokens that you can buy. And the advantage of buying it is a multipurpose. It's nice because it's all on Ethereum, so you don't have to own Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, which, you know, don't tell us to a Bitcoiner, but it's really cumbersome to do that. Just own it on Ethereum. And now you can get that portfolio of Ether, the store value of Ether, the store value of Bitcoin, and then the Ethereum app layer in DPI. Extremely passive, all in one asset, tax advantaged, very low streaming fees.

• 23:17David Hoffman?

  And Bankless Bed Index brought to you by the Bankless DAO. So nice job, Bankless DAO.

• 23:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's super exciting. I mean, this is basically the Bankless thesis rolled up into one single asset, right? Because it's a bet on crypto monies, and it's also a bet on DeFi. So it's a bet on the entire banking system that is being created in crypto. So, super exciting. What I love about this is you could protect your friends from buying stupid crappy crypto assets. And like FOMOing into things and then selling other things too early. And the way to protect them is like, one click, you buy bed. And what do you? You get you get a taste of DeFi, you get some Bitcoin, which you need, you get some Ether, which you also need, and it's all bundled up into one asset, right?

• 24:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is like an ETF, except it's tokenized, and all you have to do is own that. So I'm super excited that the tools are available to make a product like this. It's also a cool story that the Bankless DAO actually collaborated with Index Co-op, DAO to DAO, to bring this to market and to launch this thing. So save your friends, one quick, one click, like no hassle, just get crypto exposure, set it and forget it, sleep well at night, get in bed, that's all you have to do.

• 24:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I think now that this is out the door and actually on Ethereum, the next step is to turn this into collateral. And so the next step is for the Bankless DAO to go reach out to Ave, reach out to Compound, submit collateral requests for these applications to turn bed into collateral.

• 24:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know where I'd also like to see it? Right on fiat exchanges. I'd like to see bed on Coinbase. I'd like to see bed on Gemini.

• 24:56David Hoffman?

  Tyler, get it on Gemini.

• 24:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They will, they need to see the liquidity. He's already close to 650,000.

• 25:04David Hoffman?

  That is a high number right out of the gate.

• 25:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not bad. All right, who else is releasing things? Sushi Swap is releasing things. Trident, I think they released this at ETHCC. So were you there for the announcement? Do you see this? What's kind of, what is this thing? What is the buzz?

• 25:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I followed up with Joseph DeLong, who was the person that announced this at ETHCC. And so this is actually a, one of the reasons why Sushi Swap was always different from Uniswap to begin with, is that Sushi Swap is not Uniswap. It's not just a fork of Uniswap V2. It is a DAO that it can do anything it wants to do. So it doesn't have to follow the progression of Uniswap. It can take its own path. And so what Sushi has done is they have built out a suite of new products that are completely independent from the original fork of Uniswap V2. And so they have these concentrated liquidity pools, which is kind of what Uniswap V3 is doing. But they also have weighted pools, which is kind of like what Balancer is doing. And they got hybrid pools, which is kind of what Curve is doing,

• 26:02David Hoffman?

  that is specifically good for trading like. Kind assets. They also have this bento box application. And so what you what applications can do is they can build on top of sushi swap. And they can deposit assets into sushi swap.

• 26:20David Hoffman?

  And then sushi swap will credits those applications with those deposits, but then it goes and gets yield and defy with those assets. While they are also getting liquidity in in the AMM. And so it's just a collection of a bunch of the really cool products that we've all been using. But now it's all collapsing condensed into the sushi swap protocol. So really, really bullish for sushi. That's a really cool step into a brand new direction. And it's always just one of the one of the if you buy our bullish on sushi token, you're really bullish on their ability to build new build and ship new products, which they have been proven out to do. Joseph de Long has been in a Twitter, a fun like.

• 26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what's this? Is this fun, dude? Is this fun? Because I saw this. It's yeah, why don't you read the tweet?

• 27:06David Hoffman?

  It's pretty fun. And so Dan Robinson, who is at Paradigm and basically built Uniswap V3. And Joseph de Long, who is one of the lead devs behind sushi. They've been having like a Twitter war of sorts. I don't know how how mean it is. I kind of thought it was always like it's frenemies, frenemies, like, you know, good, good, but also hard hitting jabs at each other. And so Joseph de Long on May 8th. So this has been a while in the making.

• 27:34David Hoffman?

  He tweets out to Dan Robinson, I want you to watch me destroy the house you built on 7/20/21, which was ETH CC. And that was two days ago. And so that was that was the announcement. And so Joseph, you know, fiery fiery tweets.

• 27:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of funny to see the rivalry between Uniswap and Sushi Swap. I like it because it keeps them both on their toes, to be honest, David. I think like even when we had Hayden on the the podcast. He basically said, yeah, we saw what sushi was doing with their token. We moved up plans to issue uni token. That's been super successful for Uniswap. So I like this little rivalry. As long as it remains friendly, we're all trying to build a decentralized financial system, of course. This was interesting to me. I read in the tweets, part of this announcement, David. One existing piece of the roadmap coming post-launch is franchise pools. And these are designed to be compliant KYC AML requirement, compliant with KYC AML requirements. Think AVE's institutional lending pools.

• 28:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Somewhat interesting, sort of buried in the announcement, looks like Sushi Swap is getting into this institutional DeFi theme as well. That we've seen Compound go down the road of, and you just mentioned AVE too. So, kind of cool. Team is, team continues to ship. David, you know, you know what else I thought was cool this week was this graph. It was put together by CAD Labs, the CAD Labs org team. But this is like a graph of EIP 1559 and the merge. And you can basically model out based on different scenarios, like validator adoption,

• 29:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  or at what date the merge actually happens, or how much ETH is actually being burnt, like the GUE price on a given day, an average. You can actually model ETH issuance, right? And see where it gets into deflationary territory. I thought this was super cool education material. And people can actually, like, there's a GitHub with this model inside of it. So I encourage the team to like, post this on a website so that people can actually start tinkering with the dials, not have to be developers. But pretty awesome that this is so close, EIP 1559.

• 29:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that ETH's issuance policy, its monetary policy is really getting, I think, cleaned up and solidified with this move. And that's super exciting.

• 30:00David Hoffman?

  In this screenshot, it looks like they have the dial set to 100 GUE gas environment. And I remember during DeFi summer, when, when gas would get down to 100 GUE, people would tweet out on Twitter, yo, gas is below 100 GUE, like, do your, all of your things, because that gas is so cheap. Now, now we're in crab season, and so gas is really low. It's been in between like 10 and 30. But even at 10 to 30, you're still deflationary. A hundred, if we ever get back to like a hundred for, for Guey on, on the Ethereum main chain. Ethereum isn't just like a little bit deflationary. It's really, really deflationary.

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at this.

• 30:35David Hoffman?

  Look how steep that curve is. I mean, granted, this goes out to 2026, but like, I mean, I'm going to be around in 2026. And the, the target of hitting a hundred million Ether, that looks like we could hit a, a supply floor of a hundred million Ether before 2030. That's crazy. That's crazy.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Somebody I know once said there is no supply floor in this new, in this new paradigm.

• 30:56David Hoffman?

  Sounds like a really smart guy.

• 30:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, you look, if you set the model, right, it, it's kind of when we had Justin Drake in the podcast, like Ether Supply doesn't get above 120 million very likely and could indeed drop all the way close to 100 million over the next five years or so. Really cool to model this out. And of course, it's, it's variable. It's based on validator. It's based on when the merge actually happens and it's based on block space demand. But if you know those variables, like you, you can model out exactly what ETH's issuance policy will look like in the future. And we've, we've not been able to do that up to this point. So super cool. Let's talk about this. So Urn continues to ship.

• 31:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This looks super interesting, David. What are we looking at? Something that assesses the risk of various Urn vaults?

• 31:45David Hoffman?

  Right. So Urn Vault, so I have all these various different strategies and there's different assets and there's different applications for every single vault. Uh, and so what they, what Urn has shipped is like a risk, uh, risk management or risk disclaimer, I guess. Uh, what's, what's the right way to, to describe this?

• 32:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like transparency, right?

• 32:03David Hoffman?

  Risk exposure. Yeah. Risk, risk, transparency, risk, risk exposure. And so it tells you for every single vault, what, uh, the, the exposure to specific DeFi apps is. Uh, and so, uh, as, you know, different strategies get, uh, built out and deployed to, uh, to Urn. It'll tell you like this strategy is like 55% dependent on Compound and 32% dependent on Sushi Swap. Uh, and so it, it, it's a great way to just actually transparently look at the risks that you are taking on when you use Urn. And this is something that only you can, you can only do in DeFi. You can only do something

• 32:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 32:37David Hoffman?

  that you can, uh, query the Ethereum blockchain and get all of the data you need. And so this is like basically a live update system, uh, because we have all the data at our fingertips. And so it's, it's like, it's like risk in the moment that you need to know it. Uh, so that's pretty cool.

• 32:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's so cool. It's like the traditional financial world. I don't know if you've ever invested in like a mutual fund, but like I, I literally still have some mutual funds and they'll uh, send me paper copies of what's called a prospectus, right? Like once yearly. And if you go through like this, this book sized uh, description of everything that's in there, you can maybe glean what the mutual fund is kind of invested in, what the risk exposure is. Um, this does that automatically in real time and there's no accountants, no lawyers involved. You just query the blockchain. Uh, so crazy, so cool that this can be done. And it's good to see more transparency about risk, I think in DeFi.

• 33:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because uh, we, we need some of that in order to make investment decisions. Like where's the yield coming from? When you deposit USDC in a year vault, this kind of shows you that.

• 33:44David Hoffman?

  And also, one of the big problems with risk disclosures in the legacy world on paper is that it's largely the lawyers just like doing everything that they need to do to CYA, to cover their ass. And right, they'll, they'll just put in every single like risk disclaimer possible. Even if it's like, not even like relevant, like, you know, acts of God, like stuff, crazy stuff like that. It's, it's like lawyer speak, and this is not that. This is straight up. Let me tell you the actual parameters of the actual protocol in real time with a visualization paradigm shift.

• 34:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's huge paradigm shift. Um, all right, let's talk about this. This is kind of a paradigm shift, I think. Grayscale, which of course they have the Ether E uh, Grayscale Trust that you can buy inside of a brokerage in a, if they're in US in a retirement account. They also have a Bitcoin trust product. They have just relaunched, launched a DeFi trust product, David. So now institutions who maybe for whatever reason can't hold DeFi assets uh, and custody those DeFi assets. Or if you're looking for um, to, to buy DeFi in a brokerage account, you don't want to go the self-directed IRA route, which we recommend by the way.

• 34:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, and custody it yourself. You can actually just buy this product inside of your brokerage account. Now there's fees associated with it. But I'm pretty impressed by the index and um, and its weightings, right? We've got Uniswap, we've got Ave, we've got Compound. This is sort of a, it looks like some sort of um, market sized index of the top maybe 10 or so DeFi assets. So it's, it's cool that this is now becoming available.

• 35:21David Hoffman?

  The other interesting thing about this is that this is a partnership between Grayscale and CoinDesk. So Grayscale made the index and CoinDesk is, uh, Grayscale holds the assets and CoinDesk is doing the portfolio like management and indices. That's exactly what Index Co-op is doing, but on DeFi. And that's what Bankless Dow did with Index Co-op, right? And so Bankless or DP or DeFi Pulse is also doing it. Like the Index Co-op model is like, hey, we'll actually do the infrastructure. And but you guys make the index and then you guys market it, right? And so that's what DeFi Pulse did. So they partnered with Index Co-op to make the DPI. And then this is the same thing, but in legacy finance, which is actually kind of cool. But also, uh, what's cooler is doing it in DeFi.

• 36:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's way cooler. Let's be honest, it's way cooler. Like, I don't know why you'd buy this product unless you really had to compared to like a token. Regulations, getting it inside of your retirement account. If you're an institution, I get it. If you are crypto native, man, go buy some sets. It's way better.

• 36:22David Hoffman?

  Totally, totally. The other thing about this is that Uniswap is 50% of the whole entire index. That seems a little bit high.

• 36:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I just noticed that, yeah.

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, Abbe's at 10%, Compound's at 8%, Curves at 7%, Maker is at 6%, Sushi's at 4%, Synthetix is at 4%. If I was designing-

• 36:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not market cap weighted, then.

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I would have, I would have cut down, like, Uniswap's a great asset, but like 50%, that's a large allocation. I would have diversified that out a little bit more.

• 36:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's interesting, guys. Well, do your due diligence on this if you choose to use it. I'm not sure, actually, now that you mention it, David, what the index is based on.

• 36:59David Hoffman?

  They have a link for the index methodology right there. So you can click that link in the show notes and then click the link in there to go find out.

• 37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're not going to, we're gonna move on.

• 37:08David Hoffman?

  That's up to you.

• 37:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got token sets. We can do that there. Um, this is cool, David. OKX is a, an exchange, fairly large exchange. They now support Polygon main net deposits and withdrawals. David, we said this was gonna happen. It's happening with Polygon aside chain. It's gonna happen with rollups, layer twos. These are additional fiat to rollup- Fiat to layer two bridges that are starting to come online, starting with Polygon. I love it. Super exciting to see this happen. OKX, not an exchange that I've ever used personally. I know it has a lot of users, but like it's just a harbinger of all of the other exchanges that are going to flood into providing this Fiat gateway directly to layer two. Super cool.

• 37:52David Hoffman?

  So the metaphor that we always use is that DeFi and Ethereum L1 is the Manhattan. And now with Polygon and the other layer twos, those are like the suburbs. And so, you know, you fly into New York and you then you have to take the cars out to the suburbs because you know, in the Ethereum metaphor, there's only Manhattan, there's nothing else in the world exists. But now this is like, we have a new airport that's dedicated out for the suburbs. So when you fly into the world of crypto and you're coming from your centralized exchanges to get over the hump into the into the crypto world, you actually now have the option to not actually land in Manhattan. And you can go in straight and land in the suburbs. And so that's the metaphor there.

• 38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can land in the suburbs, you can live there, you can shop there, you can do all of your commerce there. If you want to pay the extra Uber ride and get to Manhattan, you can, but you don't have to.

• 38:39David Hoffman?

  Yep. Manhattan is now optional.

• 38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. All right. Let's talk about this. Oh my God, I can't. So Axe body spray. Do you remember Axe body spray?

• 38:52David Hoffman?

  In middle school?

• 38:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you want to smell like a middle school locker room, I guess you can do so with crypto now because Axe body spray has just come out with Dodge can, a Doge, Doge can, sorry. Doge can, Doge body spray. I guess I'm not, I have no idea what that smells like. If that smells like success or mooning, or it says a crypto scent with a dank musk.

• 39:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Had to include this one. Not super important, but.

• 39:23David Hoffman?

  I would love to know what a crypto scent is. What, what do you think crypto scent smells like? I have no clue.

• 39:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm almost curious enough to buy this.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a little bit actually. Okay. And so that's my take here is that this is why I actually think Doge has way stronger fundamentals than what people give it credit for. Because companies like Axe or like Taco Bell gives out free promos for Doge coin holders or whatever.

• 39:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Free marketing. How much would you pay for this? If you're Tron, how much would you pay for this?

• 39:51David Hoffman?

  I have no clue, but a lot of money, right? And so Axe, Axe, who, who, you know, I don't know who follows the Axe Twitter account, but this tweet got 2,200 retweets and almost 8,000 likes. People use Doge for engagement and they, and they do it consistently. And that's the fundamentals behind Doge and why Doge, I actually think is kind of an underappreciated asset.

• 40:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's hilarious. Is this, is this crypto culture, David? Is this what you're talking about when you're talking about crypto culture?

• 40:17David Hoffman?

  I guess so. This wasn't really exactly what I had in mind, but okay, it's, I guess it's what I signed up for.

• 40:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, it's something seeping into you, uh, into mainstream. All right, moving on, uh, let's talk about Immutable. They have just launched, uh, announced the launch of IMX, a token that is going to power the growth of Layer 2 for NFTs on Ethereum. This is some cool tech behind Immutable, what they're doing with, with Layer 2, and I guess a token to economically power that, David. What's the scoop here?

• 40:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So this is part of the Layer 2 summer narrative, the, the thing that we all thought was happening. Uh, and so the IMX token, the token that powers the Immutable Layer 2, uh, is getting released. Uh, it's not released yet. It's going to be released in the future. So I guess this is an announcement of a future release date or something. Um, but, um, this is, the, the whole concept is that Layer 2s are probably going to have tokens too. And those things need to be owned by the community. And so they want to get the IMX tokens, you know, distributed. Maybe they do yield farming. Uh, we'll see. The details for the token distribution are in the post. Uh, we had Robbie Ferguson from the Immutable team on a, on DeFi Apps on Layer 2 panel forever ago. It was a fantastic panel, uh, and we also had, um, representatives from Synthetix and, and Loopring there as well.

• 41:30David Hoffman?

  Uh, and, uh, and so congratulations to the team to, to get this out the door. Uh, I'm stoked to have the token out in the wild. Disclaimer, I'm an investor in the token.

• 41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's cool about this is it's a ZK rollup tech, right? Which is different specifically for NFTs, which we haven't seen. Of course, Immutable is the company behind God's Unchained. So you can at least expect God's Unchained to adopt this. Probably many other NFT, NFT games and marketplaces as well.

• 42:00David Hoffman?

  And this is also part of NFT Renaissance. This is some of the NFT building during the NFT bear market. And why people are still really bullish on NFTs and NFT infrastructure. This is stuff like that.

• 42:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk releases, David. So the first is Visor Finance. Visor Finance is just gotten 3.5 million in funding from one confirmation. This is an active management protocol. So I think the idea here is generally becoming sort of a more active manager of something like Uniswap V3. And do you remember when we had Hayden Adams on? He talked about the advent of these professional market makers on the new Uniswap V3 curves. It takes a bit more skill to, to come up with the right liquidity setting for Uniswap V3. It seems like Visor is trying to execute on that.

• 42:50David Hoffman?

  Totally, totally. And this is going to, this, the cool thing about Uniswap, it has so much surface area for stuff like this. Uniswap V3. But also the bad thing about Uniswap V3 was that it killed lazy liquidity providers. Like in Uniswap V2, all you had to do is throw in your assets and you could be an LP. There was no, there was no competition. And so it really democratized access to being a market maker. It also was really capital inefficient. And so there was trade offs with Uniswap V3. We have way more liquidity in Uniswap V3, but now it's super competitive. Kind of pushes out the small guy. But then protocols built on top of Uniswap V3 come back and re-enable lazy liquidity providing for people who just want to collect the fees and don't want to be pressing the buttons all the time. So I expect this product to be in pretty well used.

• 43:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm actually really excited about this and really excited about this segment developing because providing liquidity to Uniswap V3 is challenging. Like, it's not for the faint of heart and you have to constantly sort of adjust your position and know exactly what you're doing. So it can be tricky and anything that democratizes that is, I think, a step forward, particularly for the passive investor.

• 43:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this massive raise, absolutely massive. OpenSea, NFT marketplace, just secured 100 million in their Series B. That's a round valued at 1.5 billion. This is like the first NFT marketplace unicorn that I've seen. Incredible valuation. OpenSea's been crushing it, so well deserved. Also, wow, like billion-dollar valuations for Ethereum applications, essentially. Not just, not just Layer 1 chains, which is what we saw more in 2017, 2018. That's a shift, too. What's your take on this?

• 44:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and it's a 1.5 billion dollar valuation without a token. You know, usually the unicorns that come out are, come out because tokens just have some sort of premium to them. This is the pre-token. I don't even know if they have plans for a token. I hope they do.

• 44:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think? They've got to have plans for a token, right?

• 44:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, how do you not have? Everyone wants tokens. Tokens are product-market fit. And so maybe, maybe this is like the last round that they do before they do a token. This is just speculation. But yeah, 1.5 billion dollars. Congrats, guys.

• 45:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember we were talking about last week that SBF wanted to buy JP Morgan?

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  At that time, valuation was lower, but apparently now FTX valuation is 18 billion in their newest funding round. If I recall correctly, JP Morgan is still 130 billion. So SBF has a ways to go. But this is an absolutely massive valuation round. And take a look at the investors involved. There are a whole bunch of hedge funds, Paul Tudor Jones, Alan Howard, Third Point, Millennium. We're all among those participating in this, in this funding. They are definitely piling into crypto bank investing at this point in time. Absolutely massive round. What's your take?

• 45:47David Hoffman?

  Also SoftBank, big, big investor as well, which is always interesting to see what they're throwing their money at. It looks like FTX is going to be here to stay.

• 45:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so what do you think? They're going to take on JP Morgan?

• 45:59David Hoffman?

  They're not going to buy JP Morgan. It's not going to happen.

• 46:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, those are the raises.

• 46:05David Hoffman?

  I would eat my sock.

• 46:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't promise that, David.

• 46:08David Hoffman?

  It's just a sock. It could be worse. Other people have promised worse things in this industry.

• 46:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, I recall. David, let's talk about the jobs of the week, man. The jobs board is hopping this week. We've got a senior solidity engineer in demand from Quant Finance. We've got a chief investment officer that Yield App needs. We've got a software engineer that Arbitrum is looking for. Also, senior designer from Pull Together. Man, the talent market is hot, guys. If you are looking for a job in crypto, now is the time to get on that. Demand is in shortage. You know, labor supply can kind of, you know, set the terms and they want you. So, take a look at that. If the jobs link will include that in the show notes. Lots of great companies, lots of great protocols hiring.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

  There are 31 jobs available on the job board of all different types of labor and skillset. So, go check it out if you want to work in crypto. And like Ryan said, and I've, and this is what I've been experiencing at ECC, everyone is talking about how finding and retaining talent is difficult, which means that you have the ball in your court and you have the advantage as the person with talent. And so, get a job. Go to the Bankless Job Board.

• 47:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk about some news of the week. You know, we've got to start here with Elon Musk. So, we mentioned that in the market section. So, apparently, did you see the conversation that Elon Musk had with Kathy Wood? I think Jack Dorsey was there, too?

• 47:32David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. Was it a Twitter event? Was that the deal? I wasn't there, yeah.

• 47:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not sure. It was the B Word Conference. I missed it, but I saw some of the headlines. I think one of the major headlines was Elon actually came out and said the crypto assets that he owns. So, outside of his company's stock, Tesla and SpaceX, he said he owns just three crypto assets, and those are Bitcoin, no surprise, Dogecoin, no surprise, and Ether. Surprise. I was surprised by that.

• 48:01David Hoffman?

  I was not really surprised. Like, he's tweeted about Ethereum before, but yeah, everyone was looking for confirmation that Elon Musk does indeed own Ether. He's never actually stated it before.

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, he did say he has much more Bitcoin than Ether or Doge, which is also probably not a surprise. So this made waves, I guess. I mean, people like to know what Elon owns and like to ape into those investments. I think they also talked about a number of other things. Bitcoin as a base layer of the monetary system. Elon says it can't be by itself a base layer for the world monetary system, but it could be on a layer two, depending on how it's implemented. They talked about some energy production proof of work sort of thing. I'm gonna go catch up on that conversation. Sounds like that was at least interesting. Any other thoughts here?

• 48:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's always interesting to see what Elon has to say. I'm kind of worried that Bitcoiners are hopping right back into Elon's in our...

• 49:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Billionaire worship?

• 49:02David Hoffman?

  We like Elon again because now he's saying good things instead of bad things.

• 49:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 49:07David Hoffman?

  I think we learned our lesson. He's just a guy. He's just a guy.

• 49:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's just a guy figuring this out like everyone else.

• 49:15David Hoffman?

  It is interesting that he owns zero other equity assets other than his own companies, though. That is kind of interesting.

• 49:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's a pretty interesting portfolio right there. Tesla, SpaceX, Bitcoin, ETH, and Doge. That's what he owns.

• 49:26David Hoffman?

  It's the millennial portfolio. That's a zoomer portfolio right there.

• 49:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's talk about this. Ethereum is settling 8 trillion in transactions this year. That's trillion with a capital T. I think we may have mentioned this on the last roll up. What's super interesting to me is Jerome Powell, in a congressional hearing, he said that cryptocurrencies have completely failed as a payment system. Caught that. Completely failed as a crypto system. Yet Ethereum is on track to settle 8 trillion in transactions this year. It's 2.5 trillion so far. But if it just basically continues in the way it's been going, 8 trillion transaction. We must have a different definition of what failed means.

• 50:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because 8 trillion in settlements on a global peer-to-peer, permissionless network? That is nothing to scoff at, even if you're a central banker like Jerome Powell. What do you make of this? Is this just unaware? Is this intentionally misleading? Is this... You know ostrich with this head in the sound? Yeah, what is this? What? Why?

• 50:38David Hoffman?

  I bet you.

• 50:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Powell saying this kind of thing?

• 50:40David Hoffman?

  I bet you $8 trillion that Powell has never made a crypto transaction. Like, it's the only explanation. Everyone in this industry jokes about going to banks and making money transfers. And like, all, all funds are just like, please just send us stable coins. If you want to invest in us, send us stable coins. Seed investors, we use stable coins. Like, everyone just uses stable coins. It's way easier to use stable.

• 51:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Way better.

• 51:04David Hoffman?

  It's the UX is just orders of magnitude improvement. This has been a constant theme between you and I ever since we started Bankless. It's like, it's just easier to use crypto. What the hell does completely failed even mean? Like, no, you're just saying random words, Powell. Like, get out of here.

• 51:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, every time I have to write a check, I wrote this in the Market Monday this week, I, um, it's just like, why are we writing paper checks? It's 2021.

• 51:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, and we're still writing paper checks and we're waiting days for ACH transfers to settle.

• 51:35David Hoffman?

  We're signing them with a pen.

• 51:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're.

• 51:38David Hoffman?

  What? I don't even own a pen.

• 51:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  The legacy banking system feels like it completely failed. It's failed to innovate for the last 15 years. How long have we had the internet, David? We're still writing with a physical pen on a check.

• 51:53David Hoffman?

  Paper? What? We have computers now.

• 51:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't understand. I don't understand how people can think that the US has the best banking system in the world. This is not even a debate about centralization versus decentralization, which we can have that debate. It's just a debate about like shitty banking and like good banking. And the US has shitty banking. Sorry, pal.

• 52:15David Hoffman?

  Plus, we'll revisit the subject when we talk about Mastercard later in this weekly rollup, but we'll, we'll, yeah, moving on.

• 52:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's, let's move to happier news. This is cool. Maker Dow has come full circle. That's the post headline. You know more about this. You're actually with the team this week. What's happening with Maker Dow?

• 52:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the MakerDAO Foundation is finally dissolving. And this has been on the roadmap for forever. And Maker has been very much a move slowly and cautiously kind of vibe. That's their deal. And so the Foundation is finally dissolving. The Foundation has spun out into what they are calling core groups. And so the DAO is being a DAO, right? And so people are taking the leadership of different sort of like micro DAOs. And this is how sophisticated Maker is. And people really just underappreciate Maker and what it's done. MakerDAO is now a DAO of micro DAOs. And so there's different core groups, which are like the DAOs, like little DAOs, inside of the overall bigger MakerDAO. And each one is taking on certain responsibilities and roles.

• 53:14David Hoffman?

  Just like how BanklessDAO has guilds, MakerDAO has core groups. And so the Maker Foundation is finally dissolved. So people no longer are employees for the Foundation. And they are now taking the reins for the DAO. And they have to now go to MKR token holders and ask for permission to have funding for their core group. And so that's what's going on. And so the whole, the MakerDAO is now going full circle is actually because when MakerDAO was started, it was started with tokens on Ethereum. And then they made the Foundation because they thought that they needed to start this thing off as a centralized company. And then they have finally dissolved the centralized company. And they are going back to tokens. And so they've gone full circle.

• 53:59David Hoffman?

  Congratulations to MakerDAO. This was the plan all along. And so shout out to Ruin and the leadership at Maker. They had this vision from like 2015 or 2016 when they started MakerDAO. And they haven't wavered in this path. And so the MakerDAO story, I think, is one of the most underappreciated and undertold stories in all of Ethereum. And I'm going to see if I can figure out how to weave this story together. Because so many different stakeholders in the Maker ecosystem have only their side of the story of what has happened over the last four or five years of MakerDAO. Because it's a really awesome one.

• 54:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's really awesome. And look, a lot of people are skeptical that Rin Christiansen and the leadership would actually leave. I mean, I know people called him sort of a like, maybe benevolent, but a dictator, right? And like, do dictators ever, you know, leave powerful positions? And here he is doing what he said he would do, the community doing exactly what it said it would do. I'm just impressed that Maker kind of set out with a mission six years ago, has kind of delivered on that mission, right? Like, DAI itself has,

• 55:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, there are some things that aren't amazing about it, right? The fact that it's part like largely collateralized by USDC at this point in time.

• 55:16David Hoffman?

  I have a take on that, if you want it, by the way.

• 55:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, like, so I want that take, but like, that aside, this is exactly what they said they were going to create with multi collateral DAI, and they delivered it, and they did it at a time. This is one of the, this is one of the first DeFi projects I ever used. It's when I had a magic moment with with DeFi, when I realized, oh, my God, I can get a collateral backed lend loan without going to a bank, filling out paperwork with a few like clicks, and even the janky interface they had at the time. It's like mind blowing to me. I know you kind of got your start in crypto too, at least down the rabbit hole, actually writing about Maker. This is a very special project, and it's really cool to see them make this progress and and completely decentralized and basically keep their commitment to the community. Very cool.

• 56:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they have not skipped a beat. They have not missed a step at all. And like you said, before I started writing about Ethereum and Ether, I was actually writing about Maker DAO and MKR, just because that's kind of what captured my attention to begin with. Going back to how 60% of DAI is backed by USDC, I was talking to a few people from the team there, and they completely understand that it's a trade off, and it's like less than ideal. But the trade off is, do you want a stable DAI and have and have it be backed by USDC? Or do you want an unstable DAI and have it be backed by like, non non centralized crypto assets?

• 56:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 56:38David Hoffman?

  Basically, it was a trade off for stability versus, you know, purity in the collateral. And as a stablecoin, you got to promote. Stability.

• 56:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You had to pick one. It's a trade off. You can't have everything. I totally understand. This is the legacy they left to the financial legacy they left. You can kind of see that their quarterly earnings are triple digit percentage growth. So they've produced forty three million in earnings. Up to to Q one, maybe Q two, twenty twenty one. So you know, pretty impressive financial growth too. Stall around, great protocol, great story.

• 57:15David Hoffman?

  And great group of people too. They're one of my favorite. The Maker Dow community is like one of my favorite groups of people in this place. Every time I go to a crypto event, as I am right now, and Maker Dow throwing an event, I go to the Maker Dow event. It's like the best group of people. Shout out.

• 57:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. All right. This is kind of cool. The ETH documentary, Ethereum documentary we mentioned last week was completely funded. Two million in funding. David, I think you have a story about these guys because you've met them actually at ETH CC. What's going on?

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm in the documentary. I mean, they filmed me interviewing Vitalik and I am Iaguchi and a few other people at ECC. And so they, it's really, really cool to see like full production, like big, heavy cameras, boom mics. Going around the Ethereum world. And so I'm really stoked for a hype.

• 58:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  About time.

• 58:03David Hoffman?

  Yes, it's it's about damn time. And really excited to see what they put together. The name, The Infinite Garden of the movie is absolutely fantastic. Shout out to Mariano Conti, who's number three of the funders for this movie. Mariano Conti was the lead smart contracts at Maker Dow. And so, like I said, amazing community and he's he's super excited that he's the number three funder of this whole entire project. And I'm looking forward to seeing this movie when it comes out. Ryan, I met with the director while here at ECC and she said she wants to talk to us.

• 58:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interesting. To discuss that. All right, masterpiece. What is this? This is in our NFT section. Is this a new NFT platform?

• 58:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this I don't I don't know if it's new. I actually just met the guy here at ETH. God damn, ECC is so hard to say. ETH CC. And he showed me this website and I thought it was really cool. And so I just kind of wanted. To shout it out, it's masterpiece dot S O and he kind of branded it as like the coin market cap or coin Gecko. For N F Ts. And so if you want to like, figure out what N F Ts are and like you want to show your friends what N F Ts are masterpiece. So is a great website to point them towards. It's kind of.

• 59:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is an aggregator of N F T platforms, basically.

• 59:14David Hoffman?

  It's like a catalog of N F Ts.

• 59:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Very cool. Um, all right, let's talk regulation and traditional finance. The first is. Well, actually, before we do, let's talk about Bitcoin stuff. Uh, Jack Dorsey is launching a new square division. That will create a DeFi. It's DeFi offerings, apparently. We're not sure the details of this. Um, but he made it very explicit that this is DeFi on Bitcoin, likely Bitcoin only. Uh, so I it's interesting because it's Jack Dorsey and also Jack Dorsey, of course, not just CEO of Twitter, but also he's still CEO. Of Square, a very influential uh, pa- payment processor, payment platform in the U S, of course. And he is getting into DeFi, but doing it on Bitcoin. What's the take here?

• 1:00:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the the take here is he's just trying to make Ethereum. Uh, and so, uh, that that was basically what he got blown up on Twitter in the comments by all the Ethereum people. It's like, dude, you're making Ethereum. Just just admit it.

• 1:00:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is he though? Because Ethereum is decentralized, right? Like it feels like he wants to maybe make a crypto bank like a block. Fi, but just call it DeFi.

• 1:00:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:00:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or launch a side chain and call it DeFi.

• 1:00:28David Hoffman?

  And I I thought that's this is what Sovereign is doing. Why is the the take here is like, why is it so goddamn hard to do DeFi on Bitcoin? Is why are we doing Ethereum in the first place is is the answer to that question. Like it's hard to do DeFi on Bitcoin. It actually perhaps perhaps is impossible. So, uh, Jack, just give it up, man. Just give it up. It's not happening. It's not.

• 1:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also come on bank.

• 1:00:49David Hoffman?

  I want DeFi to be on Bitcoin, but it literally is not capable of being built on Bitcoin. And that's what we realized. And that's what we realized like six years ago. And that's why we have Ethereum.

• 1:01:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  But so why this insistence then? Is it just I'm Jack Dorsey? I own a lot of Bitcoin and. Okay, that's it. I mean.

• 1:01:09David Hoffman?

  That's my very unsophisticated take.

• 1:01:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't find a different explanation that that makes sense, but we'll see what Jack comes up with. Given the benefit of the doubt, maybe, maybe he's got something brewing there that we don't know about. To be continued. All right, back to regulation and TradFi. Mastercard is using Circle, that's USDC for a settlement pilot. So this is payment networks like credit card companies. We've already heard Visa doing a lot in this space. Starting to use stablecoins. Good sign for adoption.

• 1:01:38David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. So this is what I was talking about with Jerome Powell, who said that cryptocurrencies have completely failed as a settlement network. Well, Mastercard, which is literally a payments company, is experimenting with USDC for a pilot. And so watch what people are doing, not what, you know, regulators are saying, like, see what's actually being going, what's actually happening in the real world. And in the real world, Mastercard and USDC are moving closer and closer together.

• 1:02:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about what's actually in USDC and Tether. Some information, interesting information came out about that. I don't know if you've ever thought about that, like, but when you own one USDC, you don't actually just own $1 that's redeemable in a bank. So USDC has had a recent audit. 61% of every dollar in USDC is cash and cash equivalents, right? So that is a dollar in a bank account somewhere. 13% is certificates of deposit. 12% is treasuries, 9% commercial paper, 5% corporate bonds, and then just a little bit municipal bonds and US agencies. All in all, a very conservative backing for USDC.

• 1:02:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's interesting that it's not just straight like dollars in a bank account. There are some high, like mildly higher yield assets that are bundled in this thing too. And that's just being financially prudent. Now, USDC releases these audits. I believe now maybe like regularly, I'm not sure if it's monthly. And Jeremy Lehrer, the CEO, talked about actually oracleizing this, David. So like publishing some of this information on chain. So maybe that sort of creates another audit trail for USDC. But it's not just a dollar in a bank account. It is composed of some other assets that you are trusting. Now, what's interesting is we could talk about this in a second. Contrast that to Tether.

• 1:03:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  They have a much more diverse and risky set of assets that are supposedly backing.

• 1:03:38David Hoffman?

  Allegedly, we don't even know.

• 1:03:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Allegedly.

• 1:03:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this is what you're buying when you are buying a stablecoin like USDC. I find this kind of interesting.

• 1:03:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there's two takes that I have here. One take is that this is just straight up the circle business model, right? Like very low, very pretty low yields on a lot of supply. And so $22 billion, even just a couple of basis points of interest that they get behind the scenes with all of their, with all their money. It's actually pretty lucrative and also a relatively simple business model. And what was my other take? Oh yeah, my other take, you talked about how Jeremy LaRue wants to protocolize the, or oracleize the actual treasury reporting and audits. The rumor I've heard is that he's just trying to really just get ahead of regulations and he knows that like it's coming anyways. And so I'm just gonna do it. He's just gonna do it himself. And so yeah, very smart and also just really, a really good look for the industry.

• 1:04:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good looks for the industry, but this is a bad look for the industry, I think, Tether. I don't know if you've heard Jim Cramer from Mad Money, CNBC host, is grilling Tether and has been, you know, talking smack about Tether for the last few weeks. And it's because he's basically like, we don't know what's inside of Tether. This is a Tether general counselor, counselor telling Jim Cramer on CNBC that an audit is months away. So like, it's still months away. I don't know why this is so difficult unless, unless they have some shady dealings.

• 1:05:07David Hoffman?

  Stuff, yeah.

• 1:05:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fix some stuff first, right? Like USDC has an audit. This goes back to like, we all have choices over what assets we use, what stablecoins we use. I'm not sure why people would, would choose Tether over USDC in like, in like any kind of legitimate case. But Tether is still larger than USDC. Do you understand this? Is this just the Binance exchange kind of effect? I thought USDC would flip in Tether like months ago, sometime this year anyway, but it hasn't happened yet.

• 1:05:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The thing is, like, Tether has such a strong Lindy effect that I think it's kind of here to stay. And there has been like probes into Tether that, you know, were done by like, I think the New York Attorney General a while ago. And they come up and they didn't find anything, which like kind of eased a lot of people's minds. But yeah, just overall, the lack of options and taking a peek under the hood is decently concerning. And also kind of like a magnet for regulation of this industry. And what concerns me is that like there could be a world where like regulation begets regulation. So like Tether gets like, you know, regulated and then that that just starts a whole process of even more regulation. So I'm a little bit worried about that.

• 1:06:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, maybe we'll skip to this. This has been a off-sided white paper, actually, in in Congress congressional hearings this week called Taming Wildcat Stablecoins, right? And so this is a paper put together from the Yale School of Management. Anyway, the TLDR of this paper from academics is that they want Tethers and they want USDCs to actually charter a banking license and to be regulated as banks. And of course, this would put a ton of regulatory infrastructure. This would essentially make the banks, only banks could be the issuers and owners of stablecoins.

• 1:07:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this puts a lot of like regulatory overhead that's probably not needed on top of stablecoins. And yeah, anyway, the industry is dealing with this among other regulatory pushes this week. And it's kind of concerning to me on that story. It's just the recent vitriol against stablecoins.

• 1:07:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'll see what comes out of this. This definitely feels like MMT energy and statism, which is definitely antithetical to crypto. So we'll see where this goes.

• 1:07:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. New Jersey Attorney General issues cease and desist order against multi-billion dollar Bitcoin financial service provider. This is BlockFi that they're talking about, cease and desist order. I think the crux of this is New Jersey Attorney General is saying that the BlockFi interest accounts might be securities.

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  What?

• 1:07:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not awesome.

• 1:07:53David Hoffman?

  How does that work? How are they securities?

• 1:07:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I, I don't know. I don't know what their argument is. But here's what Jake Trivinsky did.

• 1:08:02David Hoffman?

  Definitely less than ideal that this is happening.

• 1:08:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Bureau's action comes amid rising concerns. This is a quote from the, the action itself. The Bureau's action comes amid rising concerns over the proliferation of decentralized financial platforms like BlockFi. So New Jersey actually thinks BlockFi is DeFi.

• 1:08:20David Hoffman?

  Which?

• 1:08:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Jake Trivinsky says that's how badly we need to educate our regulators.

• 1:08:24David Hoffman?

  As a DeFi bro, that's kind of funny and also terrifying at the same time. It's, it's just like, granted, when you come into the space, like you just don't know how to use the words correctly. But again, that's why Jake is saying we have to educate our regulators. What, what is concerning is that like, are they going after BlockFi because they think they are DeFi? Because does that mean that DeFi is in the crosshairs or BlockFi is in the crosshairs? Who's in the crosshairs here? I can't really tell.

• 1:08:51David Hoffman?

  But.

• 1:08:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know either. I don't, do you think they know? Do you think regulators are just?

• 1:08:55David Hoffman?

  I have no clue. This, this story definitely needs to get like unpacked and like evolved. It's gonna have to be a wait and see type thing.

• 1:09:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zach Prince, CEO of BlockFi thinks they're going to be fine. They remain optimistic through this, but we will see as that story evolves.

• 1:09:10David Hoffman?

  He would, he would think that though, wouldn't he?

• 1:09:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You'd have to say that if you're Zach Prince, definitely. Let's talk about this. Binance is ditching stock tokens.

• 1:09:19David Hoffman?

  Binance squeeze.

• 1:09:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, these are like synthetic, uh, stock tokens that they recently, I think, announced that they were going to, um, start trading on, on Binance. And this is like the ability to buy a synthetic apple on Binance. Who do you have to trust? You have to trust sort of Binance in order to do that. They are ditching that entire plan in order to, I think, uh, quell some of the regulator concerns recently.

• 1:09:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is the, the third week in a row where the Binance squeeze has been a theme. Binance, they just got squeezed out of one of their products by regulators. And so the Binance squeeze tightens.

• 1:09:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we're going to talk a bit more about regulatory takes when we get to the subject, but first, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:10:02David Hoffman?

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• 1:10:47David Hoffman?

  you can set and forget your DeFi trades, and they will go through automatically while you're away. New to Matcha is an integrated fiat on-ramp, so you can purchase crypto directly with your credit or debit card and have that fiat be instantly traded for any token that has liquidity. When you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Banklist is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous

• 1:11:32David Hoffman?

  code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again: DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor

• 1:12:17David Hoffman?

  for Banklist, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist.

• 1:12:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Let's start with this one from Jason Choi. "Does this feel like 2018 to you?" He says, "Some of you weren't around in the 2018 crypto bear market. Here's what it felt like to him." He said, "Everyone was bitter on Twitter. DeFi wasn't even a thing. NFT, just a few guys, bag holding crypto kitties. Just a few discords active, that's it. Many investors in the space completely abandoned tokens. They pivoted to equity. Small crypto funds shut down left and right. People went back to tech and traditional finance. Media attention completely dried up. Crypto, Twitter traders who LARP as VCs and builders today were just mostly shitposting, had nothing else to do besides that.

• 1:13:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even people within crypto stopped producing content. Fundraising was tough. Investors wouldn't pay a dime for today's tier one projects. On the good side, you had some time to build, but on the bad side, that's all what 2018 felt like." I think he's painting this picture, David, to kind of contrast. Some people are saying we're in a bear market now. And he is painting this picture, I think, to contrast what a real bear market feels like versus where we are now. I'm curious, you were there in 2018. Like, does this land with you? Is this what a bear market feels like? How did you feel in 2018 versus how you're feeling like now?

• 1:13:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, how did I feel in 2018? I was, so in 2018, I was still like in my learning process about crypto. I was still like coming to terms with what crypto is. And so that was still exciting for me. And that's the difference between people that like, you know, only come from the bull markets versus the people that were born in the bear markets. But yeah, like, like a lot of what we know of today was built and like established in 2018, 2019 by the people that stuck around. And it doesn't, this era right now in crypto does not feel like that at all. There's still a ton of attention. There's still a ton of energy. News cycle events, just like, you know, tweets going into the mainstream. Elon Musk tweeting about crypto still. Like, no, this does not feel like 2018 at all. Granted, like, you know, we're still on the, you know, the recent super highs of 60,000 Bitcoin.

• 1:14:33David Hoffman?

  And four thousand ETH is still like relatively recent. And so like in theory, if we kept on going down and longer, that's what this would turn into. So it's maybe it's not the right comparisons. But yeah, the 2018 bear market was absolutely brutal in terms of a price action. But also, I think really, really rich in terms of the people there. And in his number five tweet, he talked about like only a few people were producing content. And or number four, was it? But like the people that remained in in the world of crypto during the bear markets was like the people that you definitely want to to hang out with, right? Because those are the other people who are definitely in it to win it over the long term.

• 1:15:10David Hoffman?

  And and I actually still feel like I see that now. I feel that like that energy now. I think the difference right now is that people are coming into crypto. Even with these like slightly down prices that we've seen, right? And so I think the amount of like the the snowball of crypto is rolling and rolling and it's already it's already hit escape velocity. And more and more people are going to come into this industry regardless of prices, just because there's so much more things to do here. And that is a very like very different from what we saw in 2018.

• 1:15:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally agree. Totally different feeling right now, even though we're off all time highs by a decent amount than 2018. 2018, just the the level of

• 1:15:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  like sadness, like every crypto was dead at the time. Ethereum was dead. DeFi would never work. It was never coming back. It was just this niche thing. That blew up with with ICOs. No one was talking about it at all. Completely different feeling than where we are now. So yeah, echo that sentiment.

• 1:16:09David Hoffman?

  The last thing I'll say is that in 2018, we felt like there was it felt like we were in like a Schröndinger's position of like everyone was really, really like excited and bullish and optimistic about the future because we saw that there was these really cool things happening in Ethereum and DeFi, yet the prices were just completely separated from that.

• 1:16:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And and when when prices separate from what you see as fundamentals, like you wake up, you wake up every day and you're just like, am I wrong? Right. And you're like, and then you dig in, you're like, no, I can't be wrong. Right. Like this is the future. I'm absolutely not wrong. You start. Using this stuff and but it's a it's a it's a constant assault, I guess.

• 1:16:48David Hoffman?

  Cause you don't you don't have assurances about if you're right or not until the markets actually turn around, right?

• 1:16:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 1:16:55David Hoffman?

  Am I crazy? Am I for thinking that this Uniswap thing is absolutely groundbreaking? It's like, am I crazy for this? Why do I? Why do I think this is so cool? And why does no one else think this is cool?

• 1:17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why does no one else think this is a big deal? Why is no one paying attention to this? And look, if the markets say you're wrong for long enough on a long time horizon, you're wrong.

• 1:17:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Like, if that goes on for, I don't know, I don't know what the time span is.

• 1:17:20David Hoffman?

  All of your life, all of your life.

• 1:17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of your life? You were definitely wrong. And it is important as an investor to like peel away from wrong decisions and not delude yourself into something that the market is clearly into. That's why that's why it was so difficult. Completely different feeling now. Market, the market is still validating this, but so is mainstream. And we don't have the level of depression and sadness we had in 2018. Maybe it's because of this, David. Why don't you read this next tweet?

• 1:17:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this tweet from Kao Wang, crypto is the first genuinely new asset class since the 17th century. Let that sink in. And that's that's kind of like what I always felt like in 2018 is like, it doesn't matter like I'll always like have my insecurities about whether like this is actually just going to be a niche thing and crypto isn't going to take over. And I'm spending all this time in this industry. But but wait a second, crypto is a new asset class and it's the first new asset class in like 400 years. Like whatever that is, sounds exciting. And so I'm here for it.

• 1:18:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm here for it too. But these could be some headwinds in in the short run. This is from Jake Trivinsky, who we quoted before when he was talking about the New Jersey, yeah, blockFi issue. But he says, I don't have much hope here for you. It is how it looks. Pretty grim. That's how he starts this tweet. And for background, we've had Jake Trivinsky on the show. He is formerly legal counsel at Compound. Actually, he might still be legal counsel.

• 1:18:48David Hoffman?

  He's at a variant fund now.

• 1:18:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, variant fund now. Okay. And but he's very plugged into the regulatory landscape, talks to regulators, legislators, often very just plugged into that world. And for him to say he doesn't have much hope. Is is kind of a concerning to me. Now Jake has always been one to to like basically raise the flag on we need to educate regulators and we need to educate the world about this. So I think part of this is a message for crypto. Look, we should be worried because our regulators and our government institutions don't actually understand crypto. So I think this is part partially him raising

• 1:19:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  the flag and saying we need to work harder to educate you know, those those in power, those in charge. But also, I think it's him reacting to some of the news about stable coins this week, New Jersey, BlockFi, like the Binance squeeze, all of these things kind of compounding together to maybe put a vice on the crypto industry and like marginalize it. I think that's what I don't think, look, governments can't kill this thing, but they can attempt to marginalize it and squelch it in the short run. What's your take here?

• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

  It is concerning because Jake has like a vantage point that no one else has. It's one of the best vantage points in the industry. But also crypto has a the the nature of crypto is to route around problems. And so I believe in our ability to overcome through innovation, any problem that that we see ahead of us. It's just a matter of just like, is this going to be easily solved without any problems? Or is this going to take us a little bit longer and we'll have to problem solve for a few more years first? It's that's kind of the my take there.

• 1:20:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  People have asked him to expand his thoughts and he says he's writing. So maybe after he publishes something, we'll definitely we'll definitely push that out in the bankless newsletter and maybe have him on the podcast to to talk further about what's going on in the regulatory. But that could definitely be some some short run headwinds if some regulatory action comes down the spike. In better news, though, Preston Van Loon says there are 100,000 blocks left until London activates on Ethereum mainnet. This is the next Ethereum hard fork. This is the one that contains EIP 1559.

• 1:21:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  100,000 blocks left. David, I'm not sure that I can translate that into time, though. Like, what is 100,000 blocks?

• 1:21:20David Hoffman?

  Oh, 100,000 blocks is 100,000 blocks. I don't know. It doesn't matter about the time. It's 100,000 blocks away. And this was actually two days ago.

• 1:21:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that how you keep time now?

• 1:21:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm working on it.

• 1:21:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, blocks?

• 1:21:30David Hoffman?

  Now that I'm in Paris time, and then you're in EST, I'm in PSC, we should just start using block time.

• 1:21:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Block time? Okay, yeah. So, uh, we're gonna do the next, um...

• 1:21:40David Hoffman?

  Next week, we learn, yeah, in roughly 50,000 blocks or so, yeah.

• 1:21:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  50,000 blocks. Something like 50,000 blocks, there you go. And speaking of the hard fork, David, EIP1559, Tim Baker does some calculations about making ETH a deflationary asset. Uh, why don't you talk about this?

• 1:21:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there's been some controversy about whether Ether it will be deflationary after EIP1559. Uh, and it is, there's, there's a take here where like, straight up the fact that we are burning ETH gives it a deflationary element, and then Ether becomes actually deflationary when gas burning, or Ether burning actually supersedes Ether issuance. And Ether issuance, at the moment of EIP1559, will still have proof of work, so there will still be Ether issuance, which means for Ether to become actually deflationary, as in the actual supply of Ether is going down in number, after EIP1559, that gas number is 150. And so every day that you see gas at 150 or higher, Ether is, uh, deflationary.

• 1:22:42David Hoffman?

  We are burning more than we are issuing. Once we go to proof of stake, and once Ether becomes ultrasound money, because we don't have to issue very much Ether at all under a proof of stake paradigm, that gas number goes down to 11. 11. And like, Ether has, Ethereum has almost never been below 11 Gwei ever since like, probably the start of 2020. Uh, and so, uh, Ether's definitely going to become deflationary. Like, I can't imagine a world where we don't have, like, uh, there's less than 11 Gwei on the main chain. Uh, and so, in proof of stake, Q1-ish 2022, Ether becomes definitely deflationary.

• 1:23:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm more surprised about this first number. Actually, I hadn't run the math in this way. But so this first number says that even before the merge, while we still have like 4.2% issuance on the proof of work chain, if we have gray prices of 150 or above, we are actually turning ETH into a deflationary asset on the days that we maintain that average. That's pretty crazy to me. I didn't realize that.

• 1:23:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And like, there has been times where Ethereum has stayed above 150 gray for months. And so these are not crazy numbers.

• 1:23:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's go to this take. This is a take from Vitalik. This is from ETHCC. I don't know if there was much buzz about this take, but why don't you read it out, David?

• 1:24:02David Hoffman?

  This is just one of the slides that he had while he was presenting his talk yesterday. And this, I thought the slide itself was interesting. And this was about what his talk was about, was non-financial applications of Ethereum. Ethereum is a world computer. It's actually, the vision for Ethereum is not just decentralized finance and money and assets. It's actually a complete reconstruction of the internet itself. And so that's a whole like rabbit hole that we actually haven't really gone down much of bankless. Maybe we shouldn't do that. But the take on the slide is, the vision for Ethereum, and much of crypto beyond Ethereum, has always been to take decentralization, trust minimization, and mechanism design experimentation far beyond finance. And so one of the examples that Vitalik talked about was like logging in with your Ethereum

• 1:24:45David Hoffman?

  address. We've talked about that on the Bankless podcast plenty of times. All you have to do, like no more email passwords, just sign a message with your ledger, and then you can log into a website, establish your identity there. Identity is another Ethereum use case. The whole money and finance things, that just comes first, because that's like the fun part. That's the part where everyone gets rich. But there's plenty of other technological innovations brought on by the powers of cryptography and Ethereum that have nothing to do with money and finance. And so Vitalik is turning his attention there. And that was kind of the purpose of his talk at ETHCC, was to call attention to this side of Ethereum that he thinks is getting an undeserved, too little attention these days.

• 1:25:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's interesting. Like, so Vitalik's maybe talks like five years ahead of where things are, right? So he first actually used the term Legos, like Money Legos, in 2014, right? Before anyone could sort of conceive of it.

• 1:25:42David Hoffman?

  So he actually said Ether is the Money Lego. I still have my claim on the Money Legos meme.

• 1:25:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I know that. I know that's important to you.

• 1:25:52David Hoffman?

  I want to differentiate that.

• 1:25:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, yeah, and so he was like, talking about that in 2014 when no one saw that. And I think now he's talking about stuff that that is kind of like, no one sees and is like, five years in the future. I still do very much feel, though, this is kind of a take that I think people like Hasu have and Arthur from Defiance Capital. It's still like, digital scarcity, the creation of digital scarcity, like money is going to be one of, if not the primary use case for this thing that we've created, right?

• 1:26:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:26:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, so like, I think that Ethereum will do other things in decentralization and identity.

• 1:26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, even, even if you look at ENS names, right? That ENS names, well, some might not call that finance. They are an asset, aren't they? Right? Like, you buy it and trade it, they're an NFT. So, I don't know, I'm not saying I'm totally, I'm like skeptical of this take. I just think it might be farther in the future than than people think. And still, there's like, so much left to do with creating a decentralized money system. We're still like in the 1800s of that, like, we still have collateral-backed loans, you know? And we're still just getting the lending, building Money Legos, TM, David Hoffman, built out.

• 1:27:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, like, yeah, it's, but it is cool. I, you know, I guess that's all I'll say about that.

• 1:27:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think we can definitely take the trend that we've seen in Ethereum is that if you build out this cool thing on Ethereum, it's all cooler if you can add an asset to it, and then the community likes it a lot more. And so if it can have an asset, it probably will.

• 1:27:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It probably will and maybe should.

• 1:27:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Oh, what's this David? You got a selfie in here?

• 1:27:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is selfie. So at the, this is the first ever Maker Dow event that is not led by the foundation. So this is the Dow throwing a Dow event for Maker Dow. And while they were presenting, I totally hijacked their stage and I ran up on stage and took a selfie with the Dow. Because like I said, Maker Dow is so underappreciated. And I'm actually really excited to see what the Dow can do now that it's out of, out of the umbrella of the foundation. The foundation was really restrictive on like what a lot of the Dow members wanted to do largely around marketing and promotion. And so now, now they broke, they broke free of the foundation. They, they took off the chains, took off the shackles. Now they can actually be MKR and Maker shills, which there have never been in ever.

• 1:28:31David Hoffman?

  And that's why people consider Maker to be like boomer finance is because the foundation prevented them from shilling MKR as like a regulations protect, protection, like a strategy, which probably, probably a good strategy. And so now-

• 1:28:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they can be less conservative. They don't have to be as conservative.

• 1:28:47David Hoffman?

  They can all be Maker shills. They can all be Maker shills. And Maker Dow definitely could, could use some, some shilling. And so this is what I'm doing right now. Shilling Maker Dow. Don't end the rest of Maker Dow.

• 1:28:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're part of it. All right, Ben, what are you excited about this week?

• 1:29:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm excited for the podcast that is coming out on Monday and I recorded it while I was here at ECC. And so that will be in your ears on Monday morning. So definitely tune into that. The podcast is the ECC experience. If you did not get to experience ECC yourself, you stayed home, couldn't have made it, didn't get a ticket.

• 1:29:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was me.

• 1:29:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but and you want to feel like what, what it was like to be at ECC, you should listen to the podcast. So I interviewed a bunch of different names from the ECC events, Donnie, Kane, Vitalik, I am Iaguchi, a number of others. And so like 15 minute clips about what ECC is like for them. And there, and then also a little bit about each project, right? So some really big names and it was a ton of fun recording at ECC. I had a little studio to myself. So it's going to be one of the most off the, it's going to be a brand new podcast format, format. Cause Ryan wasn't there. Ryan wasn't at- ECC and Ryan actually interviewed me at the intro for what it was like for me to be at ECC. So that'll be in your pod, in your podcast RSS feed Monday morning. So check that out.

• 1:30:02David Hoffman?

  And then the other thing I'm excited about, Ryan, is that Bankless, the Bankless podcast has never missed an episode since Genesis.

• 1:30:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 1:30:12David Hoffman?

  Every single Monday for like over a year and a half now. And then we started doing the State of the Nations and we have never missed a State of the Nations every single Tuesday. And then we started doing the Bankless weekly rollups and we have never missed a Bankless weekly rollup in your inbox every single Friday. And so what I'm excited about is,

• 1:30:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, consistency?

• 1:30:33David Hoffman?

  We're, this is a Bankless shield moment right now. We did it, man. Like, we don't miss. And so people thought it was weird that I literally checked my iMac computer on the plane so I could take it to Paris. Like, dude, this is your first time in Paris and you brought your iMac computer? What the hell? No, gotta deliver the Bankless podcast.

• 1:30:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Badass, David. David Hoffman. Absolutely. Look, if you are a content producer, consistency is key, right? It's like a trust relationship that you set up with everyone who tunes into your material and you have to keep it consistent. Yeah, wow. Good. I didn't realize it's been that long and we'd been so consistent, but we really have.

• 1:31:07David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:31:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Incredible.

• 1:31:08David Hoffman?

  And like, I definitely feel the energy and the appreciation from the community here at ECC. Like, it's hard to walk like 100 feet without somebody saying like, "Hey, man, I love the Bankless podcast." And my default response is like, "Hey, man, me too."

• 1:31:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, that's awesome. We should meet in real life sometime and celebrate.

• 1:31:25David Hoffman?

  Right. So that's the third thing that I'm excited about. I got three this week is that if we can convince the Infinite Garden people, if they're actually going to include us in the documentary, which I hope they do, I think it'd be really cool if the part that they actually, what they actually like interviewed us is like when we meet for the first time.

• 1:31:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:31:43David Hoffman?

  A fun little, a fun little like bit.

• 1:31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, where should we do it?

• 1:31:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'd have to meet in the middle. We have to meet in mutual territory.

• 1:31:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know about the middle. Yeah, Colorado would be nice. I'll do Colorado. Let's see that. Let's see.

• 1:31:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm excited about the bed index. It's finally here. So this is exciting on multiple levels, right? So it's exciting because it's kind of the bankless thesis and it's really played out, right? This thesis of there's going to be crypto money, you should invest in that Bitcoin, Ether and DeFi, and you should invest in that. We've had this thesis since like 2019 and we've been preaching it. Now there's a product that embodies it. That's the first level. Second level is this is a way to onboard your friends, right? When we started Bankless, the mission was really simple. We want to onboard a billion people into DeFi, into going bankless. And the first step to going bankless is actually holding some bankless assets, some assets that aren't backed by a central bank, some assets that you have complete custody over

• 1:32:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  and control over. And now DeFi has evolved to the point where you can do that in one click, right? So a really easy product that you could just like talk to your friends about getting into crypto. If you want exposure, you just like purchase it and buy it. That's really cool. The third thing that's cool is the Dow like created this. So do you remember you and I like thought this would be a good idea? We talked to the Index Co-op folks about it and we posted on their governance forum. This evolved into the Bankless Dow, kind of taking it over, bringing it across the finish line. And now you've got Index Co-op and the Bankless Dow and they are bringing a product to market. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Those three things plus this, the memes that are going to come out of the bed,

• 1:33:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  get into bed, like you hop into bed, ditch your other assets and like go sleep in bed. I don't even know what the meme potential of bed index is going to be, but I know it's going to be hot and I'm excited to see that fulfilled in crypto Twitter and other social media. I'm excited for the memes, David. Very excited for the memes. That's what I'm excited about this week.

• 1:33:44David Hoffman?

  I hope I hope Crypto Wife, who has produced some very, very good bankless memes. I hope she makes a bankless bed meme. So maybe, maybe we can reward her with some bank tokens if she does that.

• 1:33:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 1:33:55David Hoffman?

  Kevin O'Walkie's talk at ETC was about how the coordination, because he's all about coordination, but he talked about a mesh network of DAOs all coordinating with each other and making that rising tide. And when I see Bankless DAO and Index Co-op producing a product together, no centralized companies needed, like we don't need any of that. All we just need is Discord and Ethereum and all of a sudden we can make products. And so I'm really bullish on DAO to DAO collaboration and having a brand new bed product is fantastic.

• 1:34:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so am I, man. It's awesome. All right, David, you ready to get into the meme of the week?

• 1:34:29David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week? Let's do it.

• 1:34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, man, this one kind of hit me. What are we looking at here?

• 1:34:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we're looking at a picture of payment with a big crack in it. And then the crack has a Band-Aid over it. And the text is, and this is labeling the crack, "The soul-crushing reality of being a young person in this late-stage capitalistic hellscape." And then the Band-Aid's got a label and the Band-Aid label is "A DAO with the homies", indicating that the Band-Aid's going to help you cope with that. But that's what DAOs do. DAOs are just like, you know, you and your homies like doing DAO stuff and allows you to like, you know, come into a new world that is separate from our old world, which I think causes a lot of existential angst to young people. And so that's the meme of the week.

• 1:35:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this meme of the week is really good because like, I don't think anyone's saying that DAOs in the here and now in their current form, none of us are saying they're going to solve all of the wealth inequality problems, all of like the political instability, all of the late-stage capitalist-type problems that the US is facing or the world is facing. No one's saying that, but like, they do give a little bit of hope, don't they? And when you're partaking in a community, like a self-sovereign community, so people forget this isn't just a movement about self-sovereign individuals. It is that, absolutely is that. It's also about self-sovereign communities. And when you're part of a DAO and you're sort of, you know, creating something, collaborating together on a project, that does give you some hope, right?

• 1:35:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a new coordination mechanism that is kind of outside of our existing, I guess, late-stage capitalist world. Something I think a lot of younger generations are going to resonate with. And maybe they kind of need David, right? Like millennials, zoomers, when they look around about the future and like, what's going on? Where do they find hope?

• 1:36:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:36:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I feel like crypto is the most hopeful thing. Like that is happening. It's the most hopeful social revolution. It's about building something brand new. That is like, doesn't have the problems that our existing system has. Not tearing it down, but building something new from the ground up. So, man, I didn't expect to get this deep on a meme dude, but like, that's why this hit me.

• 1:36:42David Hoffman?

  It's a good, well, sign of a good meme. And shout out to Kevin Owoke again. I was watching his talk at ECC, like I just said, and he had had this line that that also hit me. Ethereum is a shelling point for the hopeful. So if you are hopeful, you find Ethereum.

• 1:36:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we are going to lead out with the moment of Zen. David, you're gonna have to explain this for the podcast listeners. What's happening?

• 1:37:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this one came out of Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account. And so this is actually going to be easier if you are watching it on the YouTube, but it works on the podcast as well. So you're going to hear three voices. Ashton Kutcher asking his, I think, wife, Mila Kunis, a bunch of questions, because Mila Kunis is actually getting into the world of NFTs. She has her own NFT platform. And so he's asking her some, he's just making a joke, asking her some random questions about crypto. And then the last question gets answered by somebody different. And I think you'll recognize that that person's voice.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Hey babe.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  What's crypto?

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  It's digital currency.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Hey, hey babe.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  What's blockchain?

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  It's like what information is stored on. So like, it's, you know, what information is stored on?

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Hey babe.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  What's decentralization?

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  Oh, there's not one person in charge of anything. So it's everybody keeps everybody else in check. So there's not one big like unit or entity to uphold everybody to the same code. It's the people holding each other responsible.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  Hey babe.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  What's Ethereum?

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain. So unlike other blockchains like Bitcoin, for example, that are just designed around one application, so the way that Bitcoin is designed around digital money. Ethereum is an open platform that allows people to build their own applications on top. And anything built on top of Ethereum gets protected, secured, everything is checked by this entire network of thousands of computers around the world that are protecting and checking every transaction on the blockchain. But because it supports a programming language, developers have this unlimited creativity

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  in what kinds of things that they actually create on Ethereum. So you can use Ethereum to make cryptocurrencies, or NFTs, or many other kinds of things.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:39:27David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto-investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts, and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups, where we summarize the week in crypto

• 1:40:11David Hoffman?

  and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.