ROLLUP: Silvergate Trouble | MetaMask & Unity | Robinhood Mobile Wallet | ETHDenver 2023 | Bankless Ventures

Bankless Weekly Rollup 2nd Week of March 2023 ------ 📣 RhinoFi | Makes DeFi Frictionless https://bankless.cc/rhino ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/metamaskpod ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi 👻 PHANTOM | CROSS-CHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:10 Markets 8:20 Total Crypto Market Cap 9:30 Ethereum https://twitter.com/tomuky/status/1630417197125255169 10:55 NFT Royalty Truth https://twitter.com/hildobby_/status/1630231567061733376 14:42 Crypto vs Gary https://twitter.com/AlexanderGrieve/status/1629816811360337920 15:55 Unregistered Securities https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1631106283163074560 19:00 Jake Chervinsky’s Take https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1629871537217044481 19:50 Logan Bolinger’s Take https://twitter.com/TheWhyOfFI/status/1629649343627116545 20:55 Emojis are Financial Advice https://twitter.com/LisaBraganca/status/1628868429540126720 23:41 Robinhood Received Crypto-Related Subpoena Request From SEC https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/27/robinhood-received-crypto-related-subpoena-request-from-sec-10k/ 25:00 1st-Ever Hearing on Regulatory ‘Attack’ on Crypto https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/new-congress-body-to-hold-first-ever-hearing-on-regulatory-attack-on-crypto/ 27:40 Brian Armstrong CNBC Op-Ed https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1630997178683457536 29:45 Silvergate Distressed https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/03/02/silvergate-stock-tumbles-45-after-going-concern-filing/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/silvergate-slumps-28-after-delaying-annual-report-warning-about-viability-2023-03-02/ https://twitter.com/nlw/status/1631281983836901376 32:24 MetaMask in Unity Store! https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/game-on-metamask-x-unity https://program-ace.com/blog/unity-vs-unreal/ https://assetstore.unity.com/decentralization 37:50 Robinhood Wallet https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/robinhoods-wallet-app-is-now-available-to-all-ios-users/ https://twitter.com/0xproject/status/1630916008381927424 40:40 Scroll Deploys on Goerli https://twitter.com/scroll_zkp/status/1630258973856395264 42:00 ERC4337 Deployed to Ethereum on Smart Contract https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/03/01/ethereum-activates-account-abstraction-touted-by-founder-buterin-as-key-advance/ 45:30 New Yuga Labs' Collection will be on Bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/02/27/yuga-labs-announces-generative-ordinals-nft-collection-on-bitcoin-blockchain/ 46:46 Jump Crypto and Oasis.app ‘Counter Exploits’ Wormhole Hacker https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/24/oasis-exploits-its-own-wallet-software-to-seize-cry pto-stolen-in-wormhole-hack/ 51:35 Coinbase Scheduled Downtime https://status.coinbase.com/ Solana Unscheduled Downtime https://decrypt.co/122284/solana-weekend-outage 54:38 FTX Ex-Engineering Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/28/ftx-ex-engineering-head-nishad-singh-pleads-guilty-to-criminal-charges.html 56:50 Bankless Ventures Bankless Podcast Raising $35M Crypto Venture Fund https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/02/hosts-of-bankless-podcast-raising-35m-crypto-venture-fund-sources Disclosures https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16XcKXcH5e4CDc-Qek4WN4FUBPpnViAhLGgvtXat7NBg/edit#gid=0 1:00:13 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 1:02:36 Questions from the Nation 1:10:16 2016 Etherum on Coinbase, 2023 Coinbase on Ethereum https://twitter.com/anajolsson/status/1629101335001067521 1:11:40 The Secret to Success in Any Bear Market https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1631316358712508418 1:15:35 What David’s Bullish On https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1631119466284343296 1:18:50 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:21:02 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/MatterTurbulent/status/1631150786154463233 1:22:50 Risks & Disclaimers ---- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hosts of Bankless Podcast, raising $35 million crypto venture fund. Hey, that's us, I think. What's this about?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Ryan, you and I and our friend Ben Lakoff are starting Bankless Ventures.

• 0:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the first Friday of March. David, what time is it?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Oh, Ryan, it's the ETH Denver version of the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup, where we cover the entirely weekly news in crypto. And so much of that news is happening at ETH Denver. So much of the announcements that we're going to talk about are being announced at ETH Denver. So if you don't have coffee, grab it because you're going to need it to get through this weekly rollup. I definitely am.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so you're in Denver right now. I am not, but the conference, per usual, as is tradition, the conference hasn't officially started though, yet, has it?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  So it's different this year. The previous years at ETH Denver has been held in this venue called the Sports Castle, but we outgrew the Sports Castle by a wide margin last year. So we had to go to the Ethereum, excuse me, the Denver Convention Center. So the official canonical ETH Denver event does start today, but so much has already happened already. There are so many side events. There was this interoperability conference that was Monday and Tuesday. There was WalletCon yesterday. So to say that ETH Denver hasn't started yet is missing like the forest for the trees, because so much of other events have already happened and have been ongoing all week. So ETH Denver Week has definitely been a very big thing. Plus, the Hackathon has already been going on. So the canonical ETH Denver

• 1:30Speaker 01

  event starts today, but so much is already underway as well.

• 1:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's because when people talk about ETH Denver, it's really a shelling point for getting a whole bunch of crypto people together.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  It is now, yeah.

• 1:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's the vibe? Like, on the ground, what's the vibe? How are people? And by the way, by the way, we're recording this Thursday morning, but this goes out Friday. So the official ETH Denver event will have started by the time you guys are listening to this. But yeah, what are the vibes? Like, what's kind of, how are people feeling?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  So the It's very much more diverse in in subject matter. Last year, ETH Denver, I think there was like 13,000 to 14,000 people that came and the venue only held 7,000. So that was an issue.

• 2:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And last year was in February when the market was like just riding all time highs.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  It was very, very close to highs. Yes.

• 2:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  I haven't, we haven't gotten official headcounts yet because it's really hard to get an official headcount because there is no official head counter. But people have been giving me estimates of 15,000 to 20,000 people.

• 2:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you serious?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Dude, I was at, what was it? The ZK Day? And it was, it was all about zero knowledge. The room was absolutely packed. The ZK Day, the one day event about all about zero knowledge was more than ETH Denver 2020 as a whole.

• 2:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a bear market.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  If you told me back in 2019 that there would be a single one day conference specifically about zero knowledge stuff happening in 2023, I'd be like, well, I mean, I guess I would, why, why I'm here in this industry? I expect that to grow, but like, it's crazy, man. Yeah. So like, it's so large that people are subdividing into different streams, different talks, different tracks. The energy is very, very large and it's hard to keep track of everything. It is literally impossible to go to everything. You cannot, you have to pick and choose what you want to do.

• 3:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, as far as content goes, I know David is going to bring us back a ton of content. We've got a bankless, full bankless media team on the ground at ETH Denver. And we're calling this like a virtual conference pass, which is basically what we're providing. And I think, I like to think, David, you're doing this partially, you know, in service to people like me who don't go to these events. And you go and you record, you get some of the highlights, you talk about the takeaways and we publish all of this on the Bankless newsletter. And of course, on our YouTube channel and for premium subscribers, we package this all up into some RSS episodes that you can capture as well. So I bet you're coming home with a lot of content.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I go to the content, Ryan, so you don't have to. At the Interoperability Summit, I recorded, I think, eight interviews with Sriram from Eigenlayer, with Sunny from Cosmos, people from the Axelar Layer One, which has piqued my interest in. Interestingly, so many different people in specifically outside of the EVM Ethereum ecosystem, the rest of the non Ethereum world, all about the interoperability summit. Also Ledger from Up Only, he was there as well. So I got to meet him for the first time. And so that was eight interviews at that event. Luke and the rest of the Bankless Media team and I are gonna go to the actual canonical Ether event today and tomorrow, and probably do that again. So Ryan, I might have like 16 interviews for you.

• 4:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rest that voice, rest that voice.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Do you hear it?

• 4:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit, and I'm worried about you. Like, so I've been told that what you have to do in these, look at me, armchair quarterback, I don't even go to these things, but what you have to do is like you speak with a lower, like a lower voice. So it comes more from your throat and that tends to, yeah. So, yeah, exactly. It's totally normal. It's totally normal, David, in person. He sounds like an octave deeper too. Anyway, we got a lot of things to cover too, and we got a short amount of time to do it. So topics of the week, Gary coming out swinging against crypto, Gary Gensler, of course, he thinks everything is a security, but not everyone in the rest of government agrees with him. Neither do we. What else we got, David?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Things not looking great at Silvergate, the main bank of crypto, looking pretty distressed. So we have to talk about that. And then the big news, which got announced yesterday, Metamask, everyone's favorite wallet, has released an SDK to go with the Unity game engine, planting a very firm flag that gaming is going to be the next big wave of adoption, servicing 2.7 billion people. Robinhood released a mobile wallet, and I was actually able to try that out. So we got the details as well. But then there's already so many other announcements as well. DevCon gets announced in 2024. Account abstraction is live on the Ethereum Layer 1, but I thought you needed a hard fork for that. We'll talk about that. Yuga Labs is doing ordinals. There's a lot to talk about.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  And Ryan, I have to go in literally under 90 minutes because I have a talk at Shelling Point. So we are going to race through this weekly roll up.

• 6:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's burn through it. And before we do, we want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at RhinoFi. Respect the Rhino is what I say. This is a really cool interface on top of DeFi. There's all sorts of what David and I call money verbs that you can do here. You can trade, you can swap, you can invest pools. Tell us a little bit about RhinoFi, David.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  RhinoFi is a multi-chain aggregator. So all of your different layer two opportunities are being put into the same interface. So whether you want to trade, whether you want to stay or pool or invest or access some vaults or whatnot, you can do this all on app.rino.fi. This is built on StarkX technology. And so if you want to just have all of your cool DeFi layer two stuff all in one place, check it out. There's a link in the show notes again, app.rino.fi.

• 6:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, now is the time to go explore things while we're in the bear market and the build market, of course. So go check this out.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  This is just like banking interface 2.0. Like, go like, go look at your dumb old Wells Fargo.

• 7:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want me to?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And then go look at this and tell me which one looks more fun.

• 7:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  This looks way more fun. I hate my banking user interface. It hasn't changed in the past like 15 years. All right, let's get to markets.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Speaking of new, cool interfaces, again, all crypto interfaces are way better than all previous financial interfaces. What we're looking at, of course, is the Kraken charts, where we're going to look at the Bitcoin price, starting the week at $23,300, exactly flat on the week.

• 7:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you serious?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  0% up, 0% down.

• 7:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly flat?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly flat.

• 7:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you just doing that because you didn't want to look up the numbers, David? You're just, ah, it's flat.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  No, it's literally flat, Ryan.

• 7:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's hilarious, man. Okay, how about ETH? Flat too?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Flat-ish, starting the week at 1,600, ending the week at 1,625, up 1.5% on the week. I call 1.5% pretty flat. That's nice.

• 7:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a bull run for ants. We're just going, who cares about this? How about the ratio?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Ratio? Well, I think you can do the math on that one. Even I can. We are up 1.5% at .0697.

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, thanks for making it clear. And thanks to Kraken for these fantastic charts that you can find at pro.kraken.com. Because I'm a pro. I'm a trading pro, David. I don't know about you, but these charts make me feel like it.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  When I think Ryan Sean Adams, I think trading pro.

• 8:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you do. That's a meme that's, you know, real life too. Okay. Global crypto market cap. Are we above a trillion?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Above a trillion, $1.11 trillion in total crypto market cap. Down 2% in the last week or so.

• 8:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, uh, let's talk about a few stats going on in the crypto markets. I, I kind of skipped the, the Fed this week, David, because like, nothing's really going on in macro. At least this, this is what I feel like the state of macro is. There's a lot of doom and gloom types of, of things, like a lot of doomers out there and

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Doomism is in right now.

• 8:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there are a few people who are predicting a glorious recovery, right? But like, I don't think anyone really knows. It could go one way or it could go the other. So it's really impossible to talk about this week, but I do know this.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  The bulls and the bears are in perfect balance right now.

• 9:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's why we're flat on the like, the last couple of weeks, it's been flat. Um, all I know is I zoom out whenever I don't know the answers in the short run and look at the long run. And the government is going to continue to print money. Crypto is going to continue to eat the banks. And, uh, this is a decade long, long bet. So who cares about the short run, uh, noise? Who cares about the week to week prices that we bring you every single week on the roll up? It's all noise. It doesn't matter, but let's talk about crypto, David. Let's talk Ethereum. It just had its highest month of earnings ever.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 9:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  We love talking about Ethereum. We love talking about its earnings, but I, I thought that this chart was really cool. Um, just seeing it depicted all the way from back in October 2016. This is the monthly Ethereum earnings and you'll notice here, David, it's been negative.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethereum has been unprofitable from October 2016 all the way

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Massively.

• 9:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Until when? Uh, the merge.

• 9:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  When did that turnaround happen?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the merge. Yeah. Proof of stake makes blockchains profitable. So really, when I see this chart, I just see proof of work versus proof of stake. Uh, and so if you want to have a expenditure positive blockchain, you need to have proof of stake. Uh, and that is what we are seeing. And so this is another way of saying the burn. So instead of talking about, uh, instead of being on the website of ultrasound dot money, instead we are at this one.

• 10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  We tricked you.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Well, it's a different way of looking at this thing, right? And so burn is at all time high. Monthly Ethereum earnings is at all time highs as well. Uh, but this chart is just really putting it into perspective as to what that means in, in comparison to Ethereum's history.

• 10:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what's also in stark contrast is a lot of earnings reports are coming out for equities and securities and they're all kind of down, like profits are down. This is funny because Ethereum profits are up. When you look at issuance as kind of the cost and you look at transaction fees as their reward, Ethereum's profitable right now, even in a bear market. David, this was a really interesting take from Hill Dobby about NFT royalties that we've been talking about for a while. And this is somebody who dives into the data. There are a few discoveries here that I think bankless folks should know about. What is Hill Dobby saying here?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So Hill Dobby is walking us through the royalties stats on Dune Analytics boards. By the way, shout out to Hill Dobby and all of their amazing Dune Analytics boards. A lot of the time when I go to Dune and I find a board and I find a good one, I go look at who made it, it's always Hill Dobby. Not always, data always also comes to mind. So a quick shout out there. So Hill Dobby is walking us through some data analytics about creator royalties. And the big theme lately has been the royalty wars and how royalty percentages are going to zero as a result of this fight between Blur and OpenSea. And so while, what's interesting here is while percentage of royalty pay is going to zero, so like the percentage of what is paid on a NFT transfer is going lower and lower

• 11:48Speaker 01

  and lower because margins are getting compressed, total aggregate royalty payments are actually at all time highs.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Surprising, right?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  How does this, how do you square this? Well, it's because even though percentage on a per transaction basis is getting compressed, total volume is going up. So while royalties are getting compressed, total actual royalty payments are at all time highs. And that is a result of competition between these two major NFT trading platforms. So an interesting alternative look at the royalty wars.

• 12:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's great news for creators. Royalty revenue is actually going up, which is cool to see. David, we've got a lot more coming up. What's on tap?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Gary, the destroyer is absolutely unhinged. We had the bankless meetup yesterday and Mike Selig is there. No, Mike Selig, our nice securities lawyer, who we've been on a couple of times with there, he dropped some comments into my ear, so I will share them after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  A leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto. Kraken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Kraken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Kraken UX is simple, intuitive, and frictionless, making the Kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto. For those with experience, the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs, integrating key trading features into one seamless interface. Kraken has a 24/7 365 client support team that is globally recognized. Kraken support is available wherever, whenever you need them, by phone, chat, or email. And for all of you NFT-ers out there,

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  the brand-new Kraken NFT beta platform gives you the best NFT trading experience possible: rarity rankings, no gas fees, and the ability to buy an NFT straight with cash. Does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Kraken does? And if not, sign up with Kraken at kraken.com/bankless. Learning about crypto is hard, until now. Introducing Metamask Learn, an open educational platform about crypto, Web3, self-custody, wallet management, and all the other topics needed to onboard people into this crazy world of crypto. Metamask Learn is an interactive platform, with each lesson offering a simulation for the task at hand, giving you actual, practical experience for navigating Web3. The purpose of Metamask Learn is to teach people the basics of self-custody and wallet security in a safe environment.

• 14:16David Hoffman?

  And while Metamask Learn always takes the time to define Web3-specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon-free experience for the crypto-curious user. Friendly, not scary. Metamask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience. So, are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? Go to learn.metamask.io and add Metamask Learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3.

• 14:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary the Destroyer, he's on the attack. It seems like he's on a mission to destroy crypto. I don't know what's up with Gary, but what's he doing this week, David?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Declaring everything a security. So in the New York Magazine, he's made some statements which basically summarized as, "Everything is a security except Bitcoin. Every company in crypto out there is in violation. Crypto is pointless, but blockchain is kind of neat." And this is a summary from Alexander Grief, who finished it up, "Hard to argue you're acting in good faith if you're admittedly trying to stamp out an entire industry." I saw another tweet, I can't remember who tweeted it, but it was basically like the meme of, "The Wright Brothers discovered planes and flights, and every other plane after the Wright Brothers is illegitimate." As in, like Bitcoin is decentralized, but every single other chain after Bitcoin is not legitimate. Which is a big Bitcoin maxi take.

• 15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's like, is Gary a Bitcoin maxi? Or what's he doing?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  He's acting like it. He's acting like a Bitcoin maxi regulator. And I'm not saying this to like, to say that this is what Bitcoin maxis believe, but like, if you were someone who only wanted to like fence and protect Bitcoin and attack everything else, if that was your agenda, that would be Gary Gensler's agenda.

• 15:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't understand. So I was bored yesterday while you guys were at the party. So I went on a tear of the, did you see this tweet thread from the bank this guy?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  We had the team dinner last night, and we were all like, guys, let's ride up to it.

• 16:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's doing this?

• 16:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I was just in a parking lot somewhere. I was waiting for one of my kids to get done with something. And so I was just like going through all of the potential things that Gary might consider in the real world, unregistered securities. Here's a Chili's gift card for $25 that you can buy in any local gas station. David, if the Paxos BUSD stablecoin is a security, I ask you, my friend, is a Chili's gift card also a security?

• 16:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a question I would post to Gary Gensler.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  If I'm Gary, I'm gonna say, yes, yes.

• 16:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, we got a security. Here's another example. Pokemon cards. Are they securities?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  100% a security.

• 16:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, profit?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Profitable upside, yeah, yeah.

• 16:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Efforts of others?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 16:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Howie test?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pokemon cards must be a security. Here is a sword. I think this is a Diablo sword.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  That looks pretty Diablo-y to me, yeah.

• 16:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, king sword, noble sword. You know, an item drop in your favorite video game's gotta be a security, right?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, god, yeah.

• 17:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you have Chuck E. Cheese? Did you go to Chuck E. Cheese when you were a kid? These tokens!

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Not exactly.

• 17:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  This looks like an ERC20 token to me.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Why do you think we call them tokens?

• 17:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. They stole it from Chuck E. And those are also securities. Classic cars.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Classic cars that appreciate in value. Well, is that the effort of others? Well, somebody else built it.

• 17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Taylor Swift, she's got kind of a, you know, a songwriting artist, a signed autograph. That's worth something.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Reputation of others, yep, yep.

• 17:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about hotel points? Unregistered security or no?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, the value of a hotel point has to be determined by how much that hotel wants to make those things valuable.

• 17:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they can inflate that at any time?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  They can inflate those away.

• 17:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  They can change the value of it. What's the supply schedule of a hotel point?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's not deflationary, let me tell you that.

• 17:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, how about a human organ? Got a little carried away here. Fortnite V-bucks, definitely, right? A puppy. I don't know, like, you can buy a puppy. There's a market for, like, puppies?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Well, you can breed cattle, and cattle can produce dividends. And that's an effort of that cattle.

• 18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Milk? The milk is the ERC20 that comes out of the cow? It's fungible.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  It's a profitable enterprise.

• 18:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get it, yeah. Kohl's cash. Look, man, this is my Canadian upbringing. Canadian tire dollars? The Canadian watchers will know what these are.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I do not want to know what these are.

• 18:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a Canadian thing. Anyway, all of these could be securities. That's what's so ludicrous about this whole thing. There's no rhyme or reason other than, does Gary hate it? If yes, it's a security. That's the way it seems to me.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the point that we're making, like, rather than talking about specifically what Gary has said is that this is the implication of like,

• 18:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Everything other than Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain is not decentralized and is totally a security. All crypto exchanges are complicit. Probably Bankless is complicit because we talk about these things so tight. And really, that's the news of this week is that this is the stance that Gary is taking publicly.

• 18:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a really hardline stance, and I don't understand it. This is a take from crypto lawyer Jake Trivinsky. What's he say here?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Jake says, Chair Gensler may have prejudged that every digital asset aside from Bitcoin is a security, but his opinion is not the law. The SEC lacks the authority to regulate any of them until and unless it proves its case in court. For each asset, every single one, individually, at one time. Which is why we titled this section Gary the Destroyer, right? Because he's coming in, he's doing the whole like chilling effect thing, which is unconstitutional. And trying to scare everyone and just being a megalomaniac, dude. He's just doing the power grab thing. Like, it's becoming clear and clearer and clear that Gary does not care about his job or his role, but is simply trying to grab the power.

• 19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. Well, Mad King Gary. That's...

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Mad King Gary, yeah.

• 19:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Logan Bolinger. What's he say?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Logan says, friendly reminder that Gary Gensler's opinions on what is or isn't a security are not legally dispositive.

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good. We don't have kings here, right? This is America.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  That's right. In this country, judges, not SEC chairs, ultimately determine what the law means and how it applies. Doesn't mean his thoughts are irrelevant. They are just not dispositive. That's a new word for me. Dispositive?

• 20:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. They're just not dispositive.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 20:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 20:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gabe Shapiro, what's he say?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Gabe Shapiro, one of a very well-respected lawyer in the crypto space, now says that now that Gary Gensler has made clear he regards every single token, including stablecoins other than Bitcoin as securities under US law, can we start asking, what's the plan here?

• 20:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a really good question.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I'm sure his plan is like, well, come in and talk to us. So I can put handcuffs on you.

• 20:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  This has got to be part of Operation Choke Point. And so, David, I guess the good news is this goes to the court system. But I'm not so sure this is good news. Like, it depends on whether we have reasonable judges in the court system. This was a take I saw last week. So a federal court just ruled that these emojis, this is the rocket emoji, the graph going up, and the bag full of money, the chart, yeah, the chart emoji and the bag full of money, objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment. I believe this is from the NBA Top Shots legislation. The judge says this in their ruling, pointing at an exhibit of NBA Top Shots tweets.

• 21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Each tweet promotes a recent sale or statistics of recent sale of moments on the marketplace. And although the literal word profit is not included in any of the tweets, the rocket ship emoji, in quotes, stock chart emoji, and money bags emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment. If you are doing the rocket emoji or the money bag emoji, David, you are giving financial advice on Twitter, whether you know it or not, according to this judge. Absolutely ludicrous takes, David. And I, like, I don't even understand if these people don't understand how the internet works. Like, you can't just say an emoji is financial advice, can you?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  I mean, they're not wrong. That's why they're putting the emoji in there, though. The problem is that this is the official NBA Top Shot account. I think if it was a random user of NBA Top Shots, that would be, that would be ridiculous. I think, I do kind of think like, yeah, well, if you're putting the upwards chart and rocket ship and money bags emojis into your platform and you are that platform, like, yeah, we kind of, I kind of get it.

• 22:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's in bad form, but what are you, what are you gonna do? You gonna ban certain emojis? This is the stupid thing. If I do a Pokemon card rocket emoji, what am I, like, and I'm the issuer of Pokemon? I guess that's an illegal tweet?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what is that? I don't understand what's going on here, is kind of the bottom line take. And I just, I don't know that the courts are going to interpret things in a reasonable way. Maybe this, uh...

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you...

• 23:01Speaker 01

  It's hard. It's hard because like you're, there are like promoters laws, right?

• 23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you don't want to buy a freaking movie of an NBA top shot, don't buy it. Like I, I, I think people have to have a bit of responsibility when it comes to-

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I think, I think that's really like, there is confusion and gray area. And so what do we do in this environment? We push power and control and responsibility back to the individual rather than by doing this to the issuer.

• 23:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're not going to-

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Taylor Swift tickets, rocket emoji. Like that's going to be a thing too. It is a thing.

• 23:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it is a thing. You, you're not going to like filter kind of the internet from these sorts of things. And I think doing so is a, is a dead end. But there is a chilling effect that's going into place.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Big chilling effect, yeah.

• 23:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robinhood received a crypto-related subpoena request from the SEC. And it's basically just saying, the SEC is saying to Robinhood, hey, there might be securities on Robinhood. The subpoena concern, among other things, lists Robinhood's cryptocurrency listings and custody of cryptocurrencies and platform operations. So Robinhood clearly doesn't have clarity from the SEC. Coinbase is suspending Binance USD stablecoin. So that's been delisted on the back of the SEC. And I believe financial regulator in New York, New York, doing this. Mastercard is holding up their crypto plans. They put that on hold. There's a report out that Visa was going to do that as well.

• 24:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  But then Visa put out a statement, I think from Kai Sheffield, who's been on the podcast, saying the story is inaccurate as it pertains to Visa. Here's the reality. And he talks about how Visa is continuing to partner with crypto companies. Anyway, there was this like chilling effect on the industry and that's a result of Mad Gary's actions here.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yep. Nope. That's all come out. And so this is, this is Gary, once upon a time, being like a crypto hardliner. And now this is why we're calling it Gary the Destroyer. Gary, Gary the Megalomaniac. Like, and, and so like this is going so far. That this is actually starting to get pushed back from people outside of the crypto industry. And so this is news saying a new Congress body to come to hold a hearing on the regulatory attack on crypto. So they're starting finally to get pushback from Congress.

• 25:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Congress, yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so walk us through this news, Ryan, if you will.

• 25:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Congress, David, is holding a digital asset subcommittee within the House Financial Services. They're scheduled to hold their first ever meeting on March 9th. And the hearing is titled this, "Coincidence or Coordinated: The Administration's Attack on the Digital Asset Ecosystem." I think we would say this is certainly coordinated activity, but it's really Congress's job to rein regulators in when they go after power vacuums and are seem intent on killing an entire industry. It's good as well that a lot of the blame is being pushed back on those that are responsible for it, namely the SEC and Gary Gensler's leadership over there. Senator Tim Scott called this "the elephant in the room" and said, and Warren Davidson

• 26:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  called Gary Gensler's "selective enforcement" on the crypto industry, I think referring to that as troubling. So that's specifically what this meeting in Congress is going to be about.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is how this has to end. Gary has gone from being a hard ass to being absolutely unhinged. So this, we're gonna, this is going to be a fight. And now we have to fight him. And Congress is picking up wind that like Congress doesn't like Gary necessarily, like Congress has no interest in supporting Gary. He is a rogue actor in a rogue agency.

• 26:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope, I certainly hope that's the case. Yeah. Brian Armstrong put a fantastic op ed out in CNBC, and this is, let me just read a quote from it. This is part of the pushback and fight back. "Yet while other jurisdictions progress," he's talking about outside of the US, "the US seems more focused on turf battles between regulators. No other country in the world has spent as much time and energy trying to convince its citizens that crypto assets are securities." Let's remember this whole securities thing, it's not even a topic of conversation in Europe.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  No. They're laughing, Europe is laughing at us, dude.

• 27:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  We were just talking about media legislation, which is like, you know. Decently, like, folks we talked to give it like maybe a B minus. It's reasonable. It doesn't, it is completely sensible on its interpretation of what a security is and what it's not. This is a rogue agency in the US. I'm not sure why Gary and others are making this such a big deal. It's absolutely stupid. And I think in general, the context for me is this, this US anti crypto posture is, is crazy. It's a complete self own. I mean, you've seen it like the US has the talent. We have the entrepreneurs. We have the capital to lead in crypto.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  We have the demand.

• 27:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah. And yet our regulators are saying to the builders, yeah, go build somewhere else. We don't want this here. I think America is, America is forgetting that has to compete.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  On like, it has to outbuild the rest of the world if it's going to stay competitive. And those in government just don't understand it.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is like my worst favorite thing about humanity, about how like one bad person can fuck it up for like billions of people.

• 28:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Thanks, Gary.

• 28:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Certainly some of the, the class of 2022 scammers certainly gave him more fuel to be able to wage this war.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  You know who doesn't care about Gary or anything that he has to say? All of the scammers of 2021 and 2022. Like they just don't give, they don't care about this at all.

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. It's frustrating. It's frustrating. Some other news too, that is somewhat related, Silvergate Bank. What's this, David?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Silvergate Bank, as of this morning, stock tumbles 45% after a growing concern about the solvency of Silvergate. And so Silvergate reported a $1 billion loss in the fourth quarter. And this has caused a sort of run on the bank. There has not, there's not been any actual symptoms of insolvency yet. There have been concerning murmurings from actually Silvergate itself, as well as other indications as well. Coinbase has no longer accepted or initiates, initiated payments to or from Silvergate.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And has rerouted customer deposits to a different bank.

• 29:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  They were using Silvergate, Coinbase was.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yes, they have, they have other banks, but they have started to route payments to a different bank, just that they stated as an abundance of caution. And so it was stated that Silvergate sold additional debt securities to repay debts this year, and they have said that further losses would mean that the bank would be less than well capitalized, is what they said. So this is, one, one part of this is like, okay, banks take risk, that's what they do, that's the part of their business model. Crypto is risky, there's not that many banks in the crypto industry, therefore, the few banks that do serve crypto bear the general risk of kind of the entire industry. We all know what happened with the insolvencies of 2022.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And so that has impacted a large amount of Silvergate's clients, which makes them unable to pay back their, their loans to Silvergate, which means Silvergate has to eat some losses. And then in addition to that, Operation Choke Point has really reduced the interest in investing in Silvergate or making Silvergate like a credit worthy bank. And so all of this has like led up to this moment right now, where like Silvergate's stock tumbles 45%, Coinbase doesn't want to use Silvergate out of an abundance of caution. And so this is one part, like kind of a cell phone out of the crypto industry. Then like magnet, like blown up because of Operation Choke Point because of, thanks, Gary.

• 30:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  They can't get, they can't get banked anywhere else, basically. And it's, it's Gary, it's the entire administration that seems to be involved in Operation Choke Point, and the stock is certainly taking a tumble, as you mentioned, Silvergate's stock has a result.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Not great.

• 30:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  The question is, where are crypto exchanges going to actually bank in the US? There's Operation Choke Point.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  This is not the banklessness that we want. This is the bad banklessness.

• 31:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this does not help liquidity inflows into, into crypto, and it cuts off a way for people to become more bankless. That's the bad news this week. The good news, though, David, is.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Good news from here on out.

• 31:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good news from here on out, all right? We got through the worst of it. MetaMask is now in the Unity store. David, do you know much about Unity, the gaming platform?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very well adopted, very high profile game engine that many of your favorite games, if you are a gamer, is built off of. MetaMask has released an SDK for incorporating MetaMask into Unity. What does that mean? Web3 games, asset-powered games, sign in with Ethereum in your Unity game, anything that you can think of that has to do with your private key on Ethereum into a Unity game engine. So like the topic of what that means is massive, but simply think of a more seamless injection of private keys into Unity games and all of the positive second-order effects that come with that.

• 32:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you know, David, there's 2.7 billion users and developers that use Unity for a game or a set of games?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Do you think 2.7 billion users who are playing with securities inside of their games run?

• 32:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, God, I hope not. Don't tell Gary.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Well, we'll just DDoS Gary, you know?

• 32:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  2.7 billion of us?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  With all of the gamers. Gary's like, "Everything's a security." It's like, "Well, all of the gamers are playing with unregistered securities, Gary. Go get them."

• 32:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  A court case for every airdrop. I can't wait. Take all the 12-year-olds on, one by one. Enjoy that. This is the Unity Asset Store, David. They have a whole section called Decentralization here. That's where you see this. So if you scroll down, you can see-

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Asset Store. That doesn't mean crypto assets. That means like gaming assets, right?

• 32:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not a crypto asset, Gary. Don't worry. Don't worry.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Or is it? Sorry. No.

• 32:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are assets in the store.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Like gaming assets, like download this package or whatever. Right. Yes, yes, yes.

• 33:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because Unity is a-

• 33:02Speaker 01

  But I don't know, maybe Gary's like, "Ooh, I can regulate that."

• 33:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you say asset?

• 33:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, pops Gary. No, this is a different type of asset, all right? It's a software asset. Anyway, Unity is a technology platform for gamers. I didn't realize how big it was. Holds about a 50% market share. The only other, like, next biggest gaming engine is the Unreal Engine, which, you know, and oh, Pokemon Go, by the way. That is built with Unity. So can you imagine, like, oh, Metamask wallet inside of Pokemon Go to collect your Pokemon? Can you imagine that?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  I can imagine that, yeah.

• 33:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know. You're a Pokemon Go player, aren't you?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I haven't played in a while, but yes.

• 33:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, anyway, watch out for those Pokemon securities, but it's pretty cool. I think this is going to be huge. This is going to help bring crypto mainstream. And I think crypto has some work to do with the gaming community. Can we just say that? Like, they don't like NFTs right now.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  This is that.

• 33:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're digital collectibles. They're not NFTs, though. It's a totally different thing. All right, what do we have coming up next?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Coming up next, oh my gosh, so much. Robin Hood wallet is out. We got the Deets. Scroll ZK EVM soon TM. Oasis, you like that one, right? Oasis clawbacks money from a hacker to give back to its rightful owner, but was it the right thing to do? And DevCon is heading to Southeast Asia in 2024, which I don't, they didn't announce the specific city, so I don't have my flight yet, but you know I will soon. All of that and more, but first a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

• 34:33David Hoffman?

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• 35:18David Hoffman?

  So get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta. There's a link in the show notes, or you can go to phantom.app/waitlist to get access in late February. Hey, Bankless Nation. If you're listening to this, it's because you're on the free Bankless RSS feed. Did you know that there's an ad-free version of Bankless that comes with the Bankless Premium subscription? No ads, just straight to the content. But that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you. There's also the Token Report, a monthly bullish, bearish, neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month. And the regular updates from the Token Report go into the Token Bible, your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto. Bankless Premium also gets you a 30% discount to the Permissionless Conference, which means it basically just pays for itself.

• 36:02David Hoffman?

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• 36:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robinhood has a non-custodial crypto wallet now. They said that we're going to do it last summer. Now here it is. It's available on the iOS App Store. David, did you have a chance to download this and check it out? Can you give us the details?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazingly, in the middle of ETH, I'm ready to have a chance to actually download this. Okay, so here's the deal. It's an Ethereum-only wallet at the moment and Polygon. You can deposit and outbound and send tokens on the Ethereum Layer 1. You cannot trade tokens on the Ethereum Layer 1. You can only send in and out. If you send into the Polygon network on the Robinhood wallet, you can trade and the trades that you make on the Polygon side of Robinhood wallet are gasless. That's the full extent of the wallet.

• 37:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like when you say trade, you're doing it on a decentralized Polygon protocol. Is that right? With some liquidity pool or something?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  This is a collaboration between Robinhood, Polygon, and ZeroX. And so ZeroX has this relayer API that's used to swap. And so the Robinhood wallet calls the ZeroX relayer API, swaps the tokens, and that's all gasless and automatic and basically synonymous with the UX that Robinhood users are used to in their normal wallet. No other blockchains are supported. No Solana, no Avalanche. I mean, I'm sure they probably have plans to incorporate them at some time. But like right now, it's a pretty constrained.

• 38:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Limited functionality now.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Limited functionality. I'm sure they are going to add more. But right now, it's just like on the Ethereum Layer 1, it's inbound and outbound transfers. And then on the Polygon Layer 2, it's inbound and outbound transfers and swaps via ZeroX.

• 38:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  How was that haptic response, though? Remember their CEO telling us about that?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I did not notice any haptic response.

• 38:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's supposed to like, like when you hit a trade, it's like vibrates in your hand. You feel good?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I haven't been able to trade because I sent in 25 USCC to the Ethereum layer one. And I was like, okay, swap for ETH and I couldn't.

• 38:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  But I'm sure they are going there. I'm sure this is just the first debut. I'm sure they've got.

• 38:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love that they're doing this.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  The UX is great. If you are used to the Robinhood app, it is almost the same kind of UX and UI layer. So it's great.

• 38:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And why do we care so much about this is because it's bankless, non-custodial wallet. It's super cool to see Robinhood developing this and building this out, using their resources to do that.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  In just expediency, I did save my private keys to the cloud, which was a native feature in there. And I'm like, ooh, I hope, I hope they got that one right. You can also save your own private keys to yourself the normal way. You can also trust Robinhood to save it to the cloud.

• 39:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's fine. As long as people know what they're like getting into, right? For $25, how much do you care?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Well, I did $25. Other people would.

• 39:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the future. I know. You, as long as they have the option, I'm content with it. It's a great first strike.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  They do have the option.

• 39:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's going on with Scroll? Another, first of all, what is Scroll?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Scroll is a ZK EVM that is trying to be EVM equivalent, which is an ambitious endeavor, to use my words at the start of every weekly rollup. But they are going all the way down into the bytecode, making circuit things to make the EVM a ZK EVM. But also Ethereum equivalent. Very ambitious, very bullish if they can get it done. They are getting it done. The last I checked with them, they had, they had like a 600 gigabyte RAM requirement in order to run their prover. And then they dropped that down to 200, which is a huge order of magnitude of improvement, but still have a long way to go to make that accessible to more and more and more. Anyways, they have announced that their ZK EVM is live on a gorley testnet, 100% permissionless.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  And so this is the last major step that they need in order to go to the Scroll mainnet.

• 40:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what? This is way faster than I thought it would be, David.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  All the ZK EVM stuff is happening very, very fast. So it's 100% open sourced. Scroll has even frozen some of its codebase to pass to auditors for review. So like the Scroll, the Scroll ZK EVM mainnet, you can see it on the horizon. It is not that far off. So congrats to the Scroll team. Ryan and I are angel investors in Scroll.

• 40:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, true. You find that on our disclosures page.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Always.

• 40:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  This CoinDesk headline Ethereum says ERC 4337 deployed, tested in the beginning of the era of smart accounts. David, what is this ERC? What does it do? I can tell you're bullish about it.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, ERC 4337. What's the difference between EIP and ERC? Well, an EIP is something that gets hard forked in. An ERC is a smart contract standard. That's not technically the difference, but it's good for these purposes.

• 41:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like an ERC 20 is just a standard that everyone agrees to. It's not something that needs to be forked into the code of Ethereum.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yes. So ERC 4337 was deployed to the Ethereum Layer 1. What does that mean? Somebody just wrote a smart contract. There is ERC 4337, which is the account abstracting standard that has been worked on by Yoav Weiss, who is the man that we are looking at in this picture here, and many, many others. It is account abstraction inside of a smart contract. So typically, the way that people have thought about account abstraction is needing to enable it at the protocol layer.

• 41:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's honestly, going into this, that's how I thought it was going to happen. It needed to be forked in.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that is still the long-term conclusion. But in the meantime, we have ERC 4337 as a smart contract to enable account abstraction as a smart contract. And so you can start to do smart contract wallet level stuff, account abstraction level stuff on the Ethereum Layer 1, starting today. Instead of at the protocol native level, it's just a smart contract that you can use. But this has now been deployed. This caught a lot of people by surprise because I think you, like you, Ryan and me, was like, oh, you can do this through a smart contract? That's pretty cool.

• 42:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And so smart contract wallet capabilities is now on the Ethereum Layer 1. And this really is just like a middle step between native support at the protocol level. And but it can also hasten that because we can have more iteration, more development, more experimentation and more innovation on the actual protocol standard that will eventually get incorporated into the Ethereum layer one at some future date and time.

• 42:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the reason, by the way, guys, we're so excited about account abstraction is it enables a new era of smart contract wallets, which is basically like if you think about the, you know, the user experience of fintech, a mobile app like Venmo, for example, or Revolut in the UK and in Europe, this enables that, right? Like many of our wallets right now, they do not have seamless user experience, right? You're signing transactions, you have no, you have no idea what you're signing. Smart contract wallets will smooth all of that out, make it incredibly easy to use. This is a big UX upgrade in the future. And this is the infrastructure for that UX upgrade.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  The metaphor that I've used to explain this is that all of your wallets, your MetaMask, your Ledger, anything with an, it's called like an externally owned account, anything with a private key, that is a Bitcoin of a wallet, a Bitcoin version of a wallet. It's, it's done and simple and not programmable. Account abstraction, smart contract wallets, like kind of a hard word to understand. It's the Ethereum of wallets. It's a wallet with a chip in it. It can, you can program your wallet to do anything. And that is how we get over a lot of UX and UI hurdles.

• 44:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like people have coffee mugs, but there's an amber mug which has a chip in it, which you can heat at any time. That is the equivalent, has a chip in it.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  I don't know about that metaphor.

• 44:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm enjoying my amber mug.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  I think my metaphor is a little bit better.

• 44:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not to sponsor the podcast, I'm a fan. Board Apes, they are doing things on the Bitcoin blockchain. What are they up to?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Yuga Labs, so not Board Apes, Board Apes parent Yuga Labs, people know the Board Apes, but Yuga Labs is the software company behind Board Apes, said Monday, it's planning to release an NFT collection minted on the Ordinals Protocol. The 12-fold collection will feature 300 generative art NFTs created by Yuga Labs and placed on a 12 by 12 grid, which serves as a visual allegory for the cartography of data on the Bitcoin blockchain. It will include 3D elements as well as hand drawn features. Interesting, kind of divergent from what Yuga Labs typically does. This new collection does not come with any extended utility or has any affiliation with the current Ethereum based collections out of Yuga Labs. Cool.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I mean, this is what we're looking for out of ordinals is adoption by players who are here for the long term.

• 45:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is what Bitcoin needs.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Ryan, is, is, we talked about ordinals usage being up for a month straight. Ordinals demand is down for two weeks straight. But, I mean, there was a hype mania. It's, it hit a peak. It could hit a trough and go back up, but we are down two weeks in a row on, on ordinal usage.

• 45:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, this is good for Bitcoin, whether Bitcoin maximalists know it or not, they need block space demand in the future and this helps with that. David, there was a bit of a controversy in DeFi circles last week as well. Oasis exploited its own wallet software to seize crypto stolen in the wormhole hack. That is the title of this article. Can you tell us what happened?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so oasis.app, it's a DeFi app. It seized assets, it clawed back, it clawed back assets related to the $140 million exploit of the wormhole bridge, if you remember that one last year, and then returned them to the authorized third party, Ryan, after being ordered by a court to do so. So, a DeFi app was ordered by a court to seize assets that were stolen to return them to the rightful owner. Who was that rightful owner, by the way? That was Jump Capital, so the money got sent back. Our favorite people got sent back. Sorry to all the good people at Jump, but you guys have done some, not some great things. And like, I'm not afraid to admit that, and neither should you.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Anyways, so, so oasis.app clawed back assets that were stolen from the wormhole bridge that were Jump's assets, gave them back to Jump after being ordered by a court. So like, the instance is like, cool, we gave, we stole money back from a hacker and gave it back to the rightful owner. But what precedent does this set? What are your thoughts on this, Ryan?

• 46:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, first of all, it's a surprise. Shouldn't Oasis not be able to do that? I think that's the first thing. If it's truly decentralized, then the makers of the protocol or the application shouldn't have the ability to go claw back funds, go reach into a multi-sager, into a smart contract, and take those funds out. So, can you talk about that side of the story? Because what we always say is, it's not, don't be evil, it's can't be evil. Like, there is no ability to change an immutable code, but what happened in this case?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the contracts for Oasis were upgradable, which meant there was a hole for Oasis to upgrade their contracts to get that money back. This goes back to my philosophy of if you can be regulated, then you ought to be regulated. And if you can't be regulated, then you won't be regulated. And I think this is the case of an example of an app that could be regulated because clearly a court was able to order someone to do something to get the money back. And that puts Oasis in the category of can be regulated. Now, if they want to not be regulated, they shouldn't have upgradable smart contracts. I feel like that's a pretty safe claim to make. However, I do understand the utility of having upgradable smart contracts because you can,

• 48:12Speaker 01

  you know, prevent from exploits. You can, you can protect your software, you can protect your users. Plenty of reasons to have upgradable smart contracts. But this is the tug of war, the push and pull between decentralization and centralization. What does decentralization get us? Immutable money, which is great, also comes with the costs. And so this is just an example of where those two ends meet.

• 48:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's a reminder that there are many DeFi protocols and even layer twos and other things that you think are maximally decentralized and immutable that still have these upgrade hatches. And so we should be conscious of that. Now, for many of these protocols, they are temporary, but that temporary period of time could be months, it could also be years. So people should be conscious of that. It's also like people are pretty upset with Oasis Labs developers saying that it sets a bad precedent. One thing I'd say, though, is put yourself in the shoes of an Oasis developer. You have, you know, you have this escape hatch. And by the way, this wasn't, here's an important point. This wasn't, as I understand it, David, an intentional escape hatch.

• 49:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was actually a bug, a flaw in the way that the code was written that the Oasis Labs devs happened to know about. Anyway, they received this court order and it's just like, well, you have the ability to withdraw the funds. And if you don't do it, you're going to get in trouble with the authorities. Authorities, metaphorically, go to jail if you don't do this, right?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  It would be so much simpler if you could just be like, we can't do it. There's no ability. There is no access point for us to withdraw this and that is maximally decentralized. So you're not put in the place where you have to make that decision. But as far as like morally, ethically, should they have resisted and gone off to prison? And I mean, the money was stolen, right? So I'm not very upset at the Oasis devs for this. We just don't know what happened behind the scenes.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  The calculus is simple. Hey, your app has stolen money in it. Give it back or go to jail. I'm like, well, personally, I'm like, okay, I'll.

• 50:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Live to fight another day.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'll give the money to the right person and I won't go to jail. That's a win-win. And then maybe burn the private keys later, right?

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. I, you know, that's just where we are as an industry and I think we should, we should admit that's the case. David, Coinbase had some scheduled downtime this week, but I don't know if that's the story you wanted to get to.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  No, this is, this is really just the lead into the next story. Coinbase has upcoming planned scheduled downtime. So this will be on Saturday for eight hours. Upcoming, yeah. I don't know how frequent this is. I think this is perhaps like a longer than normal, but this is totally like a normal thing for Coinbase to do. What's not a normal thing to do is have unscheduled downtime for a layer one blockchain. Solana had 19 hours and 20 minutes of downtime. The Solana Foundation said is still investigating why the network went down during the outage. The network, the users could not process transactions, including NFT and DeFi trading. And so I was asking some of the analysts who pay attention to Solana DeFi on the Bankless team.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  By the way, the analysts on the Bankless team play attention to much more things beyond the Ethereum centric nature of you and me, Ryan. And so I was asking, okay, so did this like impact any like DeFi apps? Did anyone get liquidated when they shouldn't have like what happened? And they were like, well, there's not much TVL left in Solana DeFi.

• 51:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess, I guess now it's more. It's NFT. It's kind of cultural. I guess it's more, it's become more of that and less DeFi.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's like, we said this, Ryan, the last time Solana went down, it was a good while ago. It was, I don't know, six, nine months ago, the last time Solana went down. But like, man, you really not need to start building up Lindy. And you have to reset the Lindy clock now. Your chain went down for 19 hours. Imagine if the world of finance was built on this. Like, the whole point of crypto is to have 24/7, 365 immutable smart contracts and DeFi services. If your Layer 1 chain goes down, you get to, that puts, that gives certain people power. And other people not have power, because some people can process transactions when other people can't. And they will be able to have God mode over DeFi, over all DeFi on Solana in that one moment of time,

• 52:28Speaker 01

  while that network is down. And that, you can't do that. And so, we have to set the Lindy clock back on Solana once again. And so, like, it's...

• 52:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I know, but it's gonna sound like we're kind of over, like, Solana bashing, but like, I just, I just...

• 52:43Speaker 01

  This is so important!

• 52:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I totally believe that certain things disqualify you from the race of Layer 1. Right? And you frequent downtime, long periods of downtime, or you have to do an offline coordination to kind of restore. It's one of those things. So, I know Solana, the, the community is, is working hard on this and building, and we wish them the best for this. But this has to be fixed during this bear market.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  You need to start building Lindy. Every time you reset it, you go back so far.

• 53:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Like, the Lindy is at zero. Like, other, even non-Ethereum chains have better Lindy than Solana.

• 53:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not to harp on Solana too much, but apparently the Solana stores in New York City and Miami are also closing as well. So, sign of, sign of these bearish times, I suppose. David, the FTX ex-engineering chief, Nishad Singh, pled guilty to criminal charges. So, I believe he joins Gary Wang and Caroline, and some of the other FTX criminals. Still outstanding is Sam Bankman-Fried, but with all of his executives pleading guilty, he can't be too far behind. Is there anything else you want to add to this? Story.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sam Bankman Fried. It's not that he had many friends left, if any, but another definitely one off of the list of potential Sam Bankman Fried friends. This guy, I'm assuming, is going to work with the authorities to settle his case in a favorable as way possible, which is not going to help Sam Bankman Fried. Meanwhile, Sam Bankman Fried, this like 29 year old, youngest dude, just living at home with mom and dad.

• 54:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just watching football.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Watching football on a VPN.

• 54:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  After stealing $15 billion.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Strange. David, this is the DevCon news. Tell us about it.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  DevCon 7 has been announced coming to Southeast Asia in 2024. No specific time, no specific place, other than Southeast Asia, very large place. But keep your calendars open for 2024.

• 54:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  For 2024?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  To go to Southeast Asia if you're interested in DevCon.

• 54:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Are they doing these every two years now? Or is it every 18 months? Because the last one was in 2022, right? In Bogota?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, that was 2022 in Bogota in October. So I've talked to Joseph Schweitzer about this. There's no hard and fast rule for what they're doing. DevConnect is the smaller sister event to DevCon. And they are, the F has committed to doing DevConnect every single, not every single year, on a reoccurring basis. And so I think the vibe here is that DevConnect and DevCon are like this binary star system that rotate around each other, to use a metaphor, with one star being bigger than the other, DevCon being the big star, DevConnect being the small star. This is just how my brain works.

• 55:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And one of them has a faster orbit, right? Which is Dev.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  No, no, I think every nine months is like one, one, every nine months, you get the DevConnect, which is the smaller one. And then nine months later, you get the DevCon, which is the big one.

• 55:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, that's cool. Southeast Asia, always interesting places that they host.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  I haven't gone, I haven't gone to Asia yet, Ryan. This is gonna be my first trip to Asia.

• 55:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Get ready. Book 2024, so you're available. David, this is some bankless news, and this is under our raises section. I'll read the headline. Hosts of bankless podcast raising $35 million crypto venture fund. Hey, that's us, I think. What's this about?

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Ryan, you and I and our friend Ben Lakoff are starting Bankless Ventures. We are still pretty early in this process, but we are starting up a venture capital firm. Why are we doing this? Well, as people who listen to the Bankless podcast know, Ryan and I do a bunch of angel investing. We also do a bunch of advisory work and we enjoy supporting founders who are helping explore the frontier of crypto and the frontier of what it means to go bankless. And so all we're really doing is now we are putting all of that effort that we're already doing into a structure that we are now calling Bankless Ventures. And so I think this really, this conversation really got started, Ryan. We were like, hey, man, we're doing a lot of angel investing. Like, we should hire an analyst. We should like help like, like make this process easier for us. It's a lot of work.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  And so then when the conversation continues, like, well, that just starts to look like a VC firm. So really important point of emphasis, we're already doing all basically everything that it takes to do a VC firm, private market investing, angel, angel investing, advisory work. And now we are putting that inside of a structure. The only thing that's really new here is now we're doing that with outside capital for LPs. And so that is kind of, that's the, really the thought process behind this.

• 57:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing changes with respect to our schedule, still coming at you with all the content that, that we always have. And of course, our disclosures are always updated. So if you want to get a feel for the types of angel investments we have been doing, the types of things that we'll be doing in the, in the fund itself, you can head on over to bankless.com/disclosures, click the link there and you'll see all of these things. And the reason why they honestly need to be organized in some sort of a different structure. But David, I don't know if I'd trust a guy in this kind of a jacket here, and it looks kind of like a crypto rebel here. If I give this guy my money. Was this taken last night?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  That was, that was at the Bankless meetup. Yeah. And the first question that everyone probably like asks is like, all right, how does Bankless Ventures affect the media side of things? And the very big and easy answer is that it just doesn't change anything at all, and intentionally so. When we first thought about doing Bankless Ventures, our first exploration was a long conversation with lawyers. It was like, what would we have to change on the media side of things to do Bankless Ventures? Because we don't want to change anything on the media side of things. We want to preserve media to the maximum degree. And so after that conversation with lawyers, like because we have literally the industry's best disclosures, we also never do any paid content ever on principle. And we already have an editorial policy that makes all of our personal angel investments not impact our content decisions.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Like, we just learned that everything that we are already doing on the media side of things doesn't impact Ventures, and Ventures doesn't impact media. And so when we have been chatting with potential LPs, at the very beginning of these chats, we make a very firm statement that at the very beginning of our call, that Bankless Media in no way will support Bankless Ventures. If any portfolio company wants to come on the podcast, and we've gotten plenty of questions or like requests from our portfolio companies to come on the podcast before, they will always have to do it the old fashioned way, which is by building something worthy of covering and sufficiently interesting to the Bankless audience.

• 59:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And with the investment funds that's flowing into crypto all over the place, of course crypto is always hiring. You can check out the latest jobs on the Bankless Jobs Board. That's bankless.pallet.com/jobs. Uniswap Labs needs a senior software engineer. Bankless is hiring some writers, analysts, social growth leads. Consensus wants a director of engineering. There's still that Adidas role. A global head of Web3 strategy and planning, a whole bunch more. Go over to the Jobs Board and check that out. That's bankless.pallet.com/jobs. David, what do we got coming up next?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Coming up next, we got the questions from the nation. We've got some good ones, as well as what Ryan and I are excited about, as well as the takes of the week. So don't go anywhere. We're going to get to all of that and more, right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 59:51David Hoffman?

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• 1:00:34David Hoffman?

  dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. How many total airdrops have you gotten? This last bull market had a ton of them. Did you get them all? Maybe you missed one. So here's what you should do. Go to Earnify and plug in your Ethereum wallet, and Earnify will tell you if you have any unclaimed airdrops that you can get. And it also does PoApps and mintable NFTs. Any kind of money that your wallet can claim, Earnify will tell you about it. And you should probably do it now, because some airdrops expire. And if you sign up for Earnify, they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it, to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again. You can also upgrade to Earnify Premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics

• 1:01:17David Hoffman?

  and are able to set reminders for more wallets. And for just under $21 a month, it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop. So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you get. That's E-A-R-N-I dot F-I. And make sure you never lose another airdrop.

• 1:01:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got some questions of the week for you. The first from the Bankless Nation Discord. Simon Bruce1974 here, saying, "Using Base as an example, if a chain is built on the OP stack, that's the optimism stack, does it still require a bridge to move assets to another chain built on the optimism stack or optimism? Or is it as simple as sending the asset as a normal transaction?" That's the question. What say you, David?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  The answer is yes and no. Right now, the answer is yes. The idea about the OP stack is in the future that answer will be no. And the answer won't be ever perfectly no, but the answer trends towards no. Why is that such a confusing answer? So the idea that... Well, the idea is that base and optimism are both on the OP stack. Because of that common denominator, the bridge between these two chains has less risk and less dependencies and more standardization. And so the bridge between base and the OP stack is less bridgy than it would be had it been to like, I don't know, base to Arbitrum or base to Polygon or something.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Because of the common denominator of the OP stack, a lot of complexity is removed. And as further innovations, more innovations come to the scene, a lot of that complexity becomes abstracted and obfuscated away. And so, yes, there will always be a bridge. Right now, that bridge is pretty bridgy, to use a very technical term. And then in the future, it will become less bridgy. And that is also true for all OP stack chains. And so the bridginess trends towards zero. However, it will never hit zero. But the idea is that with additional technologies, you can obfuscate and abstract a lot of the bridginess. I made an OP stack video. If you go to YouTube and type in "bankless OP stack", there's my face next to a thumbnail that's titled OP stack.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  If you want to learn more, click that video.

• 1:03:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all part of the same kind of, I guess, nation, security apparatus, if you will. It'll be more like traveling from New York to New Jersey than like New York to cross the border to Canada or something like this.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so imagine it's like, okay, we're in the United States in the 1700s. You can get from New York to Washington state pretty easily. Well, not pretty easily. You can do it without crossing a passport control, but you still got to walk. And then you fast forward 300 years and then you can just fly really, really fast. The bridginess gets less bridgy.

• 1:03:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  No high-speed rail though, yet, which makes me bitter every time I think about that.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Not yet, yes.

• 1:04:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Come on, American. Okay, here's a question from Captain Randall Wall. I think I said that right. Sorry, Captain. Apologies if that has already been covered, but what are your thoughts on the Eigenlayer and the potential impact of ETH staking and price? Do you see this as helpful to alts in terms of securing validation? That first question of what is Eigenlayer first? Maybe you have to define that. And what's the potential impact on ETH staking and ETH price?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Eigenlayer has just absolutely swept the world of crypto by storm just because of what it is. And if you are curious about this answer to this question, it would behoove you, I think, to listen to the interview I did with Sriram at the Interoperability Summit that I went to a couple of days ago, where we talked about this subject in particular. What is Eigenlayer? Eigenlayer is taking normal Ethereum staking and adding on additional, like additional, what I'm calling like mods, if you will. And so like, not only are you staking your ETH to Ethereum for all the normal reasons, but you can also use that Ether stake that you've already staked to also secure something else. So rather than having to have like-

• 1:05:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And when you say "secure," the idea is like a bond, right? It's like economic security.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's what you mean by modding. You're like, "I'm going to secure this Ethereum mainchain thing, but then for some additional risk and reward, I'll also do this other thing."

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Right, so imagine like Chainlink, you stake the link token to do the oracle network. With Eigenlayer, you can stake your ETH to Ethereum, again, for normal staking reasons, and then also have that same stake also secure an oracle network, or a data availability network, or generally anything that needs economic security. And so the idea is that this produces additional yields for ETH stakers because they can secure more things, but with additional slashing penalties if you lie or do something wrong for whatever additional thing that you're doing. So the question is, what is the potential impact on ETH staking and price? For all of the, there was a tweet that we talked about forever ago. "Eigenlayer will enable whole all alt-layer ones for ETH maxis."

• 1:06:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Which also deserves unpacking, so I'll do my best. The idea is that like, all of these alt-layer ones, like Celestia, Subnets on Avalanche, like all of these reasons to produce different alt-layer ones that would trigger the decentralization maxis. Now you can just use Ethereum staking, normal Ethereum staking, to do all of that same kind of services without having to have additional tokens or additional like chains or all that kind of stuff. And so it produces additional yields for your ETH, and it really imbues a lot of the reasons to make additional alt-layer ones and imbues that value into Ether and Ether staking. So in the pendulum, I talked about this with Sriram, there's like a pendulum between Polychainism, mesh network of many, many, many chains and bridges.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  That's one end of the spectrum. And then the other end of the spectrum is like, single one dominant layer one chain. There's always a spectrum of like where we are in the pendulum. And Eigenlayer really pushes this towards there's really only needs to be one dominant chain and everything else is is less necessary. There's going to be a tug of war between these two things, but Eigenlayer is definitely pushing towards like, all you really need to do is stake Ether and then sign up for additional yield opportunities if you want.

• 1:07:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think to the question the captain is asking about impact on price.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it's bullish.

• 1:07:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is incredibly freaking bullish. Do you remember the idea that we'd come out with a couple of years ago about Ether, the internet bond, which is the idea that Ether is an internet bond for the Ethereum ecosystem. That's what happens when you're staking, you're actually bonding it and it accrues monetary premium in the way that a bond might. This is now Ethereum being able to export Ether, the asset as a bond to other foreign chains or foreign protocols. And that is incredibly powerful because these kinds of monetary premium games, like bonding type games, are all power law games, right?

• 1:08:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  So why would you bond with some other chain's native asset when that is far less liquid and far more volatile than Ether, the internet bond? So this is like if Eigenlayer really picks up, and that's still an if, right? We don't know for sure. But if it picks up, it is incredibly bullish for Ether, the asset as that the meme that we predicted a couple of years ago, as the internet bond. Ether, the asset really becomes a bond for securing things economically on the internet. And wow, that is a powerful place to be. So that is why this technology is not just bullish for more chains, more experiments, more scalability, more expansion, but it's also incredibly bullish for Ether, the asset. And I don't even think we've come up with a model for that yet.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the most bullish way to articulate this is that go to CoinGecko, filter out all tokens and only do layer one chains. And as you go down the market cap stack, think of like all of those things, those special purposes, things that those chains do, and Eigenlayer allows Ethereum to eat all of them. That's like the most bullish articulation about what Eigenlayer does.

• 1:09:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. It's definitely possible. Crazy, right?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, some takes this week, this one from Anne Olson, that's A N E dot E. May 2016, Ethereum launches on Coinbase. May 2023, Coinbase launches on Ethereum. My, how things change. This to me is a perfect-

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  That deserves so much more likes.

• 1:09:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a part, well, I, look at me, I didn't even give it a like. There you go. This is the perfect articulation of the Protocol Sync thesis, I think, which is-

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Yes, it does, yes.

• 1:09:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. The most credible neutral technologies sync to the bottom of the stack and become the basis and the foundation for everything else. Coinbase was started before Ethereum, and yet now it's building on top of Ethereum? That's incredible to me. And yeah, it, perfect articulation of what we've been talking about.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  When did we develop the Protocol Sync thesis? That was like 2019, I think, so four years ahead of it. I'm pretty sure this was one of the main articulations, he says, like, eventually Coinbase will build its own chain.

• 1:10:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  And it will use its own chain to produce its products and services. That was a prediction that you and I made in 2019.

• 1:10:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  At the time, we had no idea it would be on a layer two. The concept of layer two wasn't really-

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Didn't even matter. That is an aside detail, the idea is that protocols slip under banks. And that was the, always the articulation. And so like, this is what, this is what it means to be a thesis-driven media company. Man, yeah, sometimes, sometimes we get things right, Ryan.

• 1:10:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sometimes we do. Here's something else I think we'll get right, David. This is my tweet, why don't you read it?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Ryan Sean Adams says, "The secret to success in any bear market. One, learn. Two, build. Three, accumulate." That's it. Walk us through this, Ryan.

• 1:10:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's really your job in the bear market. You're listening, so this is a bear market for you. And you gotta do those three things. Learn, build, and accumulate. Number one, like, learn. Find people that are smarter than you in this space. Tune into informational resources that are trusted, that are long-term oriented, that have ideas and theses, and back those things up with research rather than kind of the pump and dumps. Use as many DeFi protocols as you can. Travel in a pack, in a community, rather than alone. You'll learn faster that way. Join chats, join discords. Follow people on crypto that you respect and want to learn from. That is what learn means, and you have tons of time to do that during the bear market.

• 1:11:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Secondly, build. This is applying your talents, your skills, whether you're a podcaster, maybe start a podcast, or come on a podcast. If you're a writer, write something. If you're an artist, create art. If you're a musician, do music. Experiment with NFTs. If you're an engineer, my god, there's so much you can do with that skill set. If you're a front-end designer, if you're an organizer, you can organize things, you can govern things. There's so much that you can do by applying your talents in this crypto space. I know, David, that's very much what you did when you kind of entered in that 2017, 2018 era. It's like, you're really good at communication, and you like talking about narratives. And so you did these things. And that progressed from kind of like, you know, part-time type work to it became your full-time gig.

• 1:12:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a massive opportunity to build. So much needs building, and so much is getting created right now, and you have the opportunity to be on the ground floor. And then third, don't forget to accumulate. Don't forget to buy. This is important. Don't forget to buy the assets that are going to appreciate if your ideas around learning and kind of the building phase are successful. You have an opportunity to get a piece of, I'll call this equity, not the Gary Gensler security equity line of thinking, but more like in the upside of this entire industry. Sometimes, David, I see people that they've been in crypto, they've done incredible things, they know all sorts of things about it, and they've built it. But they've made the mistake of not accumulating along the way, right?

• 1:13:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they don't get to share with the rest of the community in that upside. Make sure you don't become one of those people. So whether that means dollar cost averaging in, again, don't risk more than you can afford to lose, but the percentage will vary depending on like who you are, your stage of life, your risk tolerance, all of these things, or lump sum. I mean, now is the time, it's still a bear market. Now's the time to accumulate. You don't want to accumulate during the top of the next Pico bowl run. You want to accumulate now. So that's it. Like anybody else who's selling you other things of like 10 secrets to getting rich on crypto in like 90 days, it's that's all garbage. Only three things you need to do. This is proven, this is tested. Everybody who's doing well in crypto that we know, David, has done these three things. Learn, build and accumulate.

• 1:13:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the last thing I'll say is these things are all on you. It's stuff you have to go, you're not going to get spoon fed this stuff. You have to go pick up, take some responsibility in yourself and do it your own. There you go. This turned into, you know, RSA dad talk, but I love it. It's so important. It's so important and you have time right now. You're listening, you're here, you can go do these things, don't wait.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll just add, this isn't necessarily easy to do these things, but it's also not necessarily hard either. And it is fun and it is fun to do it along the way. And so like, it's just a very simple roadmap. Don't overthink it and make sure you have fun along the way.

• 1:14:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. That's what David always reminds me of, to have fun along the way. This looks fun. I'm sorry I missed it. What are we looking at, David?

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had the first ever Bankless Nation meetup. The Bankless Nation manifested in real life. Sometimes network states of what this is certainly becoming, Ryan, had manifested in real life at a brewery. Man, it was awesome, Brian. It was also packed. Look how many people there are. There was like over 150 people there. Yeah, it was, it was the

• 1:14:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what's the vibe? How's the, how's the Bankless community doing? How's everyone doing?

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  It was so many different people from so many different walks of life that all had like different reasons for like what, why they like Bankless and why they listen. And so like there were people from, from Asia talking about like, people from Korea talking about, hey, like I do a lot of translations of Bankless content into other podcasts and other newsletters. The Bankless Brazil guys were there. They're always, they're, Bankless Brazil is a more event than you are, dude.

• 1:15:24David Hoffman?

  Oh, man. That's amazing. I love this guy.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Anthony Susano was there. Yeah, we had a ton of previous guests. We had the Alfalfa Boys, my friends from, from San Diego. It was just a really cool time. I, I realized like halfway through, I was like, oh yeah, there's a microphone in the stage. I'm not used to going on a microphone alone, but like, I gotta say something. So I hopped on stage and just

• 1:15:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what'd you say? You say, thanks everyone for coming?

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  I said, yeah, thanks to everyone for coming. And then I kind of told the story of like, yeah, Ryan and I just started the podcast and newsletter with the intention of making content. But then we hired a few people and then, then we hired a few more. And, and then I said like, hey, if you're from HQ, everyone raise your hand. And then introduced the HQ one by one by one. And I just was able to make a big thanks to all the team that was able to support this. Cause like we, I would not, we would not be able to do organize a meetup without the actual team behind us.

• 1:16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  And so this particular East Denver is the, the event where the Bankless HQ team has showed up the most. I'm currently in an Airbnb that we're calling the Bankless Dorm. We have six or seven other people here. So we got Luke and Dave helping me record content, which is why the in real life conference interviews are going to be the highest quality, high production interviews that we've ever done at a conference.

• 1:16:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And even though they're there, they're still going to get you this roll up out too.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Dave's sitting right here. I'm looking at him right now.

• 1:16:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  God bless you, Dave.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  He's looking over at me, giving me a wave. And then there's Chrissy who is handing out all the POAPS and like talking to everyone in the Bankless Nation. So this is, I think the choice, Ryan, to move beyond just a Fun little lifestyle business and grow this into what is becoming a network state of sorts. I think was a good move.

• 1:17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's really cool. I know, like, so I haven't met as many of you guys, Bankless Nation, in real life as I'd like to. But the times that I have, it's always felt like just like instant connection, like kindred spirit, like different place in the world, maybe different language, all sorts of differences, and yet we're all kind of like one group that is going west together.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the most diverse group of people from all around the world, from all these various like different interests and like meaning and purpose for being here. Yet everyone just like gets along so well. It's really, really cool.

• 1:17:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. Really cool. All right. Well,

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  That's what I'm excited about.

• 1:17:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that what you're excited about? That was your, what's excited about? Okay, cool. Well, I guess, David, I'm excited about how this this bear market is shaping up. Like, I don't care what anyone says. This is my favorite bear market ever, maybe the best ever. And that's because the tourists are gone, the settlers are here, they know why they're here, we have product market fit. We're not going to run out of money this time. I think we're like fairly well capitalized. This was not the case in 2018 and 2019. The riffraff and the scammers are quiet. They're either going to jail or they fled to, you know, places where they can't get caught. And the builders are building. And I think that's what you're seeing at ETH Denver is just a whole bunch of builders getting together more than ever.

• 1:18:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  During this bear market, they're not dismayed by what's going on. They're not put out by the regulators. They're just heads down building. And so that's why this is one of the most exciting times. Honestly, I've been in crypto and I can say that, like, I don't know. I mean, 2017 was exciting. It's kind of like discovery. 2018 and 2019 were kind of a grind of figuring this out and finding product market fit. 2020 was exciting because it felt like some of the thesis was coming true. 2021, ah, things were starting to go off the rails.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  First half of 2021 was great. Second half of 2021 was a slog.

• 1:19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally. And then 2022, I was just like, it sucked. I was very disappointed with 2022 and all the shenanigans that went on. 2023, it's feeling like it's shaping up to be my favorite year in crypto yet because we got the settlers. We got the product market fit. We got a little bit of money. We got funded. And so now we can head west and build out this movement and be ready for the next wave of adoption. So that's what I'm excited about this week.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the only thing bad about 2023 is Gary Gensler, but there are so many ways to turn that evilness that Gary Gensler is bringing to us into something like really, really good. Like we're banding together. We're learning to fight in Capitol Hill. And I think there's a way to make lemons out of lemonade.

• 1:19:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's gonna level us up, man. It's one boss. It's not the final boss still, but it's a boss fight. And so, okay, bring it. Let's do it.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  And like everything else in crypto is coming together. Yeah.

• 1:19:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. David, meme of the week. I haven't seen this yet, but I did see the parent tweet. So this was you and Anthony Sisano. It says, caption this. That's David in his jacket and Anthony, you guys together at ETH Denver. So I think we're about to look at a caption. Yeah?

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So this is the third time I've met Anthony Sisano in real life. Like I first saw him at ZK Day and gave him a big hug, but then had to run off. I was like, oh, that's one of my best friends I haven't seen in so long, but I gotta go talk to this person. But then I gotta come back to him. But it's just like so fun, like how casual it is like, oh, Anthony in real life now. But it's always so good to see him. So we took a photo and I put out this caption, this header on the photo. And we're about to look at the winner.

• 1:20:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the winner. Okay, let me look at this.

• 1:20:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Gimli, of course, Lord of the Rings. Thank you. You told me I'd like this. Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an elf. That is Gimli saying this.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  And of course Gimli is of course Anthony because of, you know, the beard, the big, big beard.

• 1:20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get it. Well, you guys are not opposing tribes. You guys are same tribes. So you're both dwarves.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we're just super snarky with each other. Yeah, we're like brothers who fight all the time.

• 1:21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. All right. Gimli and his brothers. He has a lot of big dwarf family.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  I'm like a loss and he's Gimli.

• 1:21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I'm an elf, apparently.

• 1:21:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course you'd want to be Legolas. I understand that. Sorry for that, Anthony. David loves you though.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Well, Anthony was a big fan of this response as well.

• 1:21:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's good. All right, guys, that's been it. The ETH Denver edition. I guess next week we'll be talking a little bit about ETH Denver too, but David's getting ready.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  The conference is actually starting right now. I am literally about to run off to Shelling Point to give my talk and then ETH Denver conference for the rest of the day. So you boys gotta leave.

• 1:21:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we'll get some content to you guys though, pretty soon. So you'll feel like you're there. Risks and disclaimers, gotta let you know, none of this has been financial advice. It never is. It's not legal advice either. Who knows what a security is? I don't even think Gary Gensler knows.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:21:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:22:04David 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, podcast 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.

• 1:22:41David Hoffman?

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