ROLLUP: Markets Turn Bearish | Trillion Dollar Bank Launches L2 | Massive Pudgy Airdrop | DeFi Drama

Joining us this week is Anthony Sassano! We'll explore whether the current price downturn signals the end of the bull market or just a minor hiccup in the cycle, analyze the Fed’s latest rate cuts, and assess institutional adoption trends keeping crypto’s momentum alive. Big L2 developments are making waves: Kraken’s Ink chain hits mainnet early, Deutsche Bank ventures into zkEVMs, and ENS selects Linea for scaling its Namechain. Meanwhile, Pudgy Penguins launch the PENGU token, sparking controversy and volatility. Plus, fresh insights from the 2024 Crypto Developer Report and a closer look at the Aave vs. Polygon drama. Stick around for Anthony’s On-Chain Spotify Wrapped and tips on spotting market tops! ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 📈 iYield: YOUR FINANCIAL PICTURE, SIMPLIFIED https://bankless.cc/iYield 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Start https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/18/fed-meeting-live-updates-traders-await-december-interest-rate-cut.html https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1869627735267840135 00:02:45 Market https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/18/fed-meeting-live-updates-traders-await-december-interest-rate-cut.html https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1869627735267840135 00:09:10 Where Are We In This Cycle https://www.grayscale.com/research/reports/the-state-of-the-crypto-cycle 00:12:04 ETF Flows https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518 https://farside.co.uk/btc 00:16:09 Mover Of The Week… Fartcoin? https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/fartcoin https://www.infinitebackrooms.com/dreams/conversation-1721540624-scenario-terminal-of-truths-txt 00:26:48 Developers, Developers, Developers https://www.developerreport.com/developer-report https://x.com/MariaShen/status/1867295574242078980 https://x.com/MariaShen/status/1851702783319126277 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1867324885732671778 00:34:54 Kraken Ink Chain Live https://x.com/inkonchain/status/1869417386761470219 http://inkonchain.com/dashboard 00:38:34 Deutsche Bank Announces zk L2 https://thedefiant.io/news/tradfi-and-fintech/deutsche-bank-s-1-5-trillion-project-dama-2-develops-ethereum-l2-zksync-38f6221f 00:41:32 Caroline Crenshaw Vote https://x.com/BrendanPedersen/status/1869055922238279940 https://x.com/standwithcrypto/status/1869151080300548383 https://www.citizen.org/article/support-comm-crenshaw/ https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx? DocumentID=409421 https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/1867301980890165398 00:47:14 Aave vs Polygon https://governance.aave.com/t/arfc-adjust-risk-parameters-for-aave-v2-and-v3-on-polygon/20211 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/1868612366822461817 https://x.com/sandeepnailwal/status/1869153510756909475 https://x.com/stanikulechov/status/1869182600008679563 00:54:06 Pudgy Penguins Launched Their PENGU Token https://x.com/LucaNetz/status/1869005071624904959 https://x.com/suji_yan/status/1868682237488894422 https://claim.pudgypenguins.com/ https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pudgy-penguins-pengu https://nftpricefloor.com/ 00:58:15 Ethena Launched Its New Stablecoin https://x.com/ethena_labs/status/1868657723799470361 https://x.com/ZeMariaMacedo/status/1868673718911713602 01:00:35 Bankless Wrapped Just Launched! https://bankless.com/wrapped 01:04:37 How to Recognize Bull Market Tops? https://imgur.com/a/Vaw3TSW 01:10:42 Check Out The Daily Gwei Shoutout to The Daily Gwei for Ethereum-focused insights and updates. https://www.youtube.com/@TheDailyGwei ------ Not financial or tax advice. 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.

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the third week of December. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. I've got Anthony Sassano here. David Hoffman is off, not climbing mountains this time, Anthony, but he's like apparently circling around them somewhere in Argentina right now. So this is like a hike expedition, not a mountain climb expedition. How you doing, man? Actually, it's super late where you are. So I want to thank you for doing this recording. You're all the way in Australia. It's like, I don't know, it's like 12 a.m. or something like that. And I know you always wake up bullish, Anthony, but my question to you is, do you also go to bed bullish?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yes, well, thank you for having me on again. And yes, I wake up bullish, I go to bed bullish. And I sent to you in a message before, I said, "It's okay if we have to record this late because I'm always bullish on ETH, so it doesn't matter."

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks, man. Well, we appreciate that. I'm amazed, actually, that you go to bed bullish because like I tend to wake up bullish. And then just the day, you know, if you spend enough time on crypto Twitter, it like beats you down until you're like not as bullish as when you woke up. And you have to like go sleep and dream about like, you know, high crypto prices in order to refresh yourself for the next day. But I'm impressed that you stay optimistic and you're able to go to bed bullish, too.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it can wear everyone down over time, depending on how much time you spend. You know, people get burnt out, things like that. But I don't know, like it's, it's, it's, for me, I spend the whole day talking to a bunch of different people within the ecosystem, just researching a lot about Ethereum, checking out all the new updates. And it just keeps me going, keeps me bullish. Yeah, it's just very hard to be bearish. Like even if the prices are going down, just so much stuff happening in Ethereum, which obviously we're going to talk about a bit today. But yeah, just very, very easy to be bullish, I think.

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, speaking of prices going down, that is pretty relevant to the topic today. So prices are down, Anthony Sassano. We're going to talk about that. Also want to get some takes from you and others on where we are in the cycle. So there was the Fed Chair Jerome Powell, there was a meeting this week. They did something with interest rates. We'll talk about that. Also, some big Layer 2 news on Ethereum. So Kraken's Inc., this is their Layer 2, it hit mainnet. This was unexpected. This was ahead of schedule. We'll talk about that. Also, there's a $1.5 trillion bank launching a Layer 2. What does that mean? And E N S, you know, the dot ETH domain names, they picked their layer two, so we'll discuss that too. Pudgy Penguins also did an airdrop. Talk about that. There's some DeFi drama. I want to get your takes on this.

• 2:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got crypto developer numbers, a whole report. And guys, stay tuned to the end because what we're going to do is I'm going to get Anthony's dot ETH address. I'm going to plug it into the bankless on-chain version of Spotify wrapped. And we're going to actually see his score to see how bankless he is, what he's been up to on-chain this year. So all of that and more. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the Bankless Weekly roll up. All right, Anthony, let's get to prices. And you know, not as good as they have been previously, but actually, at least at the time of recording, we're still up on the week. The last time we recorded, we're up on Bitcoin about 1.5%. So Bitcoin is hanging out at 101,000. So we're still above 100K.

• 3:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got an ETH price down more significantly, down about five to 6% at the time of recording, from 3,900 last week to 3,682. And the big question is, are we down because the Fed cut interest rates? I thought cutting interest rates was a good thing, but apparently, some of the news, the Fed had their meeting this week, bringing the target interest rate from 4.25%. Sorry, from 4.5% to 4.25%. But they indicated that there would only be two reductions in 2025. And the market was hoping for four reductions, not two. What's your take on the prices this week?

• 3:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like in general, like, why are we down? I thought this was a bull market. I thought we were just like infinity up only.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it can feel like that. I think once you get towards the ends of a bull market, you will start to get like that up only every day or every week for kind of a few weeks or a couple of months or something like that. But I think people obviously always need to zoom out and kind of contextualize things. One week worth of price action is not really going to tell you much. And people will always look for different reasons as to why movements happen. Obviously, today, people will be pointing to the Fed stuff. Tomorrow, they'll be pointing to something else. So for me personally, I don't tend to pay too much attention to. The short term kind of movements, I tend to zoom out and I think on both ETH and BTC, they they look really amazing when you when you zoom out there. I think ETH honestly, obviously it has lagged for a little while now, lagged BTC.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  It usually does do that until later on in the bull market. But I think if you actually look at what ETH is doing, it's consolidating between around thirty six hundred and four thousand. And I feel like four thousand just seems to be this very strong resistance for some reason on ETH. I I say for some reason, but I think it's quite obvious why, because if you actually zoom out over multiple years, you can see that four thousand has always been a tough area for ETH. But I feel like in in the new year, things are going to pick back up and ETH will definitely get through that and go on to all time highs. So yeah, I'm I'm more of a zoom out guy than anything. I mean, anyone who knows me knows that for sure, that I take a very long term view on these things. So these week to week or day to day movements definitely don't affect me too much. And I think when it comes to the macro environment with stuff like the Fed, no one's an expert on this.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Like even the macro people who follow this aren't experts. It's it's very hard to kind of be across all of this stuff. So I I honestly don't spend too much time on it myself because you can you can make yourself go crazy trying to find a reason, right?

• 5:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  A hundred percent. You can make yourself go crazy and who knows what the Fed is going to do and how that'll affect markets. It did it did seem though in the charts that, you know, the the Fed announcement, you know, correlated very closely with this this crypto sell off. So here's the Fed press conference right here and we were, this is the Bitcoin price charts, about a hundred and five K. And then after that conference, you know, Powell and we're dipping below a hundred K on Bitcoin. There was Matt Hogan, I always appreciate his takes, they're always like pretty, pretty seasoned, pretty rational. He he wrote a brief thread on today's move in crypto, the down move and why, he said, I don't think it alters the bullish trend. I want to hear if you agree with some of this. He said, obviously, the big catalyst today was the Fed announcement, we just talked about this.

• 6:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  But that being said, he says, the initial pullback wasn't the end of the story. Leverage is a fact in crypto. He points out that some of these sharp pullbacks get amplified in crypto because there's all of these leveraged positions. So this was like a six Million dollars of leveraged position that just like gets blown out in crypto. And I'm not saying that like leverage is, you know, crypto is the only market to have leverage, but it does have a lot of leverage. The big question, though, is this a hiccup or a reversal? And Matt says it's a hiccup. The reason is because the Fed is not even like relevant to crypto. It's less relevant at least than it has been in the past. And he points to these four things that we still have as as tailwinds going into 2025.

• 7:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  The pro crypto reversal in DC, rising institutional adoption of ETF flows, which you're going to talk about Bitcoin purchases by government and corporations, and major breakthroughs in smart contract blockchains, primarily scaling them. Right. And this, this is coming through Ethereum layer twos. So what do you think about that? He says it's just a hiccup. It sounds like you tend to agree.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely think so. I, you know, as I said, like you can make yourself go crazy looking for different reasons when it comes to the macro stuff. But I agree with Matt here that the Fed macro stuff isn't very relevant to crypto overall. Maybe over the longer term, when you're talking about different kind of assets and their price movements and stuff like that and how that reacts there. But in terms of where crypto is going in 2025 and in terms of what's on the horizon, I completely agree with Matt. There are these massive tailwinds, like the pro crypto policy in Washington, in DC. And on the, on the political kind of side here is, I think, still way underpriced. I don't think people realize.

• 8:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not priced in.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. I think people realize just how bad it was, especially the last two years, and how different it's going to be. There is obviously those kind of doubts from people that say, well, they say it's going to be different, but what if it's the same? And I understand that it's not like a guaranteed thing. But everything that I've seen so far points to it being very different and points to it being a very, very favorable environment for crypto to thrive in. And that will actually lead into the rising institutional adoption, because they'll be able to get involved. They have those regulatory frameworks in place to get involved, which will then translate to more ETF flows. So it does tend to feed on itself, just having this, I guess, clearer guidance and clearer regulation and a much, I guess, not maybe not safer is not maybe the right word,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  but like clearer picture for these institutions to get involved. Because they're very risk averse, especially the bigger ones that are managing lots of people's money. They don't want to get involved with something that could bite them in the ass, so to speak, later on. And I think that's, this is what they've been waiting for, just clearer regulations.

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's some structural differences this time, particularly in the regulations. I totally agree with that. And also, there's some similarities. I mean, crypto goes in cycles. And I wanted to get your take on this because another question during weeks like this, people ask themselves. And again, at the end of 2024, starting a new year 2025, is like, where are we in the cycle? You know, these four-year cycles. Grayscale put together a report here where here's kind of Bitcoin price over log scale. And they they show kind of the cycles. And you can see sort of when the price goes above the line, right? That's like bull cycle. And when it's below the trend line, then you're kind of in the the bear cycle. But it tends to follow this log, this log trend line. Of course, this is also, you know, the log line is fitting the data. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy, all of these things. I get that.

• 9:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's another chart that's showing Bitcoin price by cycle with the number of days. And so we are how many days in? We are over about 800 days in, something close to that, into the the bull cycle. And this dotted line, you can see where we are in the cycle. Basically, their conclusion is we're in kind of the intermediate stage of the cycle. So we're not early in the cycle. We're not late in the bull mania part of the cycle. It's not over. We're in the intermediate phase of the cycle. What's your take on this kind of analysis and these cycle types of metrics?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is the classic four-year cycle that crypto has become known for, especially, obviously, led by Bitcoin, because that's the asset that tends to get us out of the bear markets, tends to run first. You know, Bitcoin dominance goes up and then that liquidity gets pushed into other assets as time goes on. People can become more risk on. And then we have a full blown bull market. So I do agree with this analysis that we're pretty much like not at the end yet, but not at the start. We're kind of in the middle. Maybe, maybe, I guess, like, you could say three quarters of the of the way through, so to speak, getting to that that really crazy phase that I suspect we're going to see in 2025. But again, I think I've mentioned this on the roll up before and also a lot of times on my own show. This cycle's been a bit weirder than other cycles, I think.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  You know, we've had weirder price action and different kind of price actions. I mean, BTC went to all time high before. It's halving and that has never happened before in the four year cycle. And obviously this was driven by the ETFs and driven by Sailor as well, doing, doing his big buys and things like that. So there has been differences, but a lot of similarities. So as they say, you know, the history doesn't repeat, but it does often rhyme. And I think that's what we're seeing here. But I think going forward as the asset class matures, these kind of cycle analysis that people do is going to become less and less reliable because it'll just become, uh, I guess more well known and it won't be as self fulfilling as it probably has been in the past. And there'll be different, uh, I guess, um, ways to access these assets. Like right now BTC and ETH have an ETF, but nothing else does.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And that tends to distort things because there's this whole pool of capital that other assets don't have access to that BTC and ETH do. So there, there are differences, but similarities for sure.

• 12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, speaking of ETFs, let's look at some Ethereum ETF numbers on the week. And, uh, I, I want you to go full bull mode Anthony Sassano here because look at all of these. These are the totals from all of December. Basically we're looking at, I'm looking at the Ethereum ETF flows. And, uh, this totals column net inflows positive, positive, positive. All of the days in December have been positive, even yesterday, which was like, uh, you know, Wednesday, December 18th, at the time of recording was even a positive day on a sell off. And, uh, this, you know, like in, in previous months, it looked like the flows weren't actually ETF flows weren't actually coming into ETH. And now suddenly they are like it's, it's happening, but later, what do you see when you look at these numbers?

• 12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I'll, I'll just, uh, say for the audience who, who doesn't have this open, total net inflows right now on the week into the Ethereum ETF. This is a net new institutional buyer of ETH that we haven't had in previous cycles. 2.4 billion. I think that's like between two and 3% of all ETH supply here. Anyway, what do you see when you look at these Ethereum ETF numbers?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see a trend shift, to be honest. Like, obviously, I think anyone who's been following along with this stuff since the ETH ETF went live in July knows that it didn't have the start like Bitcoin did, because it launched in a different market conditions. July was still very bearish, whereas the Bitcoin ETF launched right in the middle of a huge uptrend in January of this year. So the ETH ETFs have had a slow start, as we're all pretty much aware of by now. But over the last few weeks, there's been a major trend shift with the ETH ETFs getting, I think, forty to fifty percent on average of BTC's flows, which is higher than its mark cap percentage, right? In terms of comparing it to BTC. And I think it hasn't had a negative outflow day since November twenty first. So almost a month now of positive inflow days.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And as you said, even on the sell-off, we had a positive flow here. So people need to be paying attention to the trend shift that's happening here and how this tends to accelerate as time goes on, especially as price keeps going up. Obviously, the institutions will also get FOMO. It's not just us, kind of, DJ and crypto natives that get FOMO. They get FOMO as well. But I think as long as the price is above thirty-six hundred, I think all ETF buyers are in profit, because that's when the ETH ETFs launched. People don't remember this, but ETH went from thirty-six hundred to like two thousand after the ETH ETFs launched. There was no appetite to buy an asset that's going down, of course. But now that it's going up, there is an appetite, but there is also a lot more education happening, too.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I've been hearing that there's a lot more education happening on the institutional side and that's ramping up as time goes on. So that's being reflected in the flows. But as I said, the main thing here is to notice the trend shift happening and notice that it is a shift that's happened over months now, not just days. And to, I guess, pay attention to this as we head into twenty twenty-five, because I feel like ETH is going to have a really good year in twenty twenty-five, and the ETFs are going to be a very big part of that.

• 15:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that that piece is understated, the amount of education that these issuers, like the BlackRocks of the world, the Fidelities of the world, are like prepping to do and have planned in twenty twenty-five. That's going to be like, and that's something that Ether the Asset has, I think, struggled with in mainstream, is kind of education, getting institutions to understand it. And they're basically all incented now to help investors understand Ether.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And I think a bigger deal is that these institutions traditionally have been selling Ether as, or Ethereum, as like a technology platform, right? Not as a store of value, because they don't want to cannibalize the BTC ETFs. And I think that obviously, within crypto, we know that Ether is a money, is a store of value. People treat it like this. And I think that's going to slowly bleed into the sales pitch that these institutions use. But they're going to start with the tech pitch first, because that's what resonates most, I think, with these investors, after they've just heard about the money and store of value pitch for BTC. But I do think that it's inevitable that the Ether's money, store of value story gets woven into the tech story as well. And that's definitely going to help flows.

• 16:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what I think is going to be a narrative that's like, the institutions aren't ready for, but I think it's going to be pretty exciting for those of us who think Ether is a phenomenal store of value? I just did a AI rollup with EJAS, where we just kind of recap AI-type agent-type news on the week. And we talked about an AI agent called Zero Bro, earned a whole bunch of fees through like, you know, trading, earned money through trading, through Spotify streams, all of these things. And you know what it did with those funds, Anthony? Is it took that fiat and all those token fees, and it actually purchased Ether, the asset. And it spun up a validator, okay?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 16:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it could have passive income, okay? So the big question is, what's the store of value for these new economic players, AI agents? Is it going to be fiat? Is it going to be stocks? Is it going to be real estate? Or is it going to be a programmable, non-sovereign money like Ether that generates passive income? It's kind of like the internet bond-type story here. And that's how Zero Bro is treating it. Anyway, you know. Emerging story, that kind of thing, but like, they're a new economic actor. And what they determine as money and how they store their value is actually going to factor in here and matter.

• 17:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  One topic I have for you in the realm of non-institutional assets, though, but also links with AI agents, is fart coin? Like, what the hell, man? I have not, like, okay, this is, there's an actual token called fart coin. It's been moving a crazy amount, it's up 27% on the week. Started in November, it was like 18 million, and now it's, wait, fully diluted, over a billion dollars. And its genesis was really another AI agent, like a token terminal type thing. And, you know, token terminals, if people are following that story, you know, created a, not created, but popularized a coin called Goat. Token terminal is an LLM.

• 18:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, it's, Token Terminal has adopted fart coin as like its memetic, you know, token of value. And the, you know, like, look at the, look at the price ascent here. What do you think of these types of shenanigans that are going on? What's your, what's your take here?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to these sorts of things, it's always hard to pick winners. Like, you look at this right now and you think to yourself, okay, well, this has done really well price action wise. Obviously, right now, it's at all time high and everyone's made money that has bought it and everything. But then there is usually a graveyard of other assets, like millions of these things that go absolutely nowhere. So really, what the meme coin and AI coin game becomes is a game of attention. Like, where can you direct people's attention to? And that's what coins usually tend to particularly do well and get outsized attention, sorry, outsized our price movement. And usually how that attention was given was via humans. Like, there'd be some influencer on Twitter that says, I bought this meme coin, I think

• 19:09Speaker 01

  it's going to go up for such and such reason, go buy this. But now we're entering the realm where these AI agents are doing it themselves, not just the humans, it's the AI saying, well, I like this meme coin for such and such reason, and this is the one I've chosen. So people are now following that. So it really is, it's the same kind of concept, but with an autonomous. Agent instead of a human doing it. And it it starts to get weird when you consider the, I guess, incentive here where you can say, well, uh, there is an identity attached to this AI agent. But at the same time, I know it's not a real person. I know it's not a human. So I can trust it potentially more than a human because I can actually see what it's doing on chain. Whereas a lot of these humans that promote these things, they've got backroom deals going on. They've got insider stuff going on. They're part of a cabal.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  AI agents can do this too. But if they're doing everything on chain from a public address, then it it becomes a bit more transparent, I think. But at the same time, it's still fundamentally the same concept of attention economy, I think.

• 20:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I totally agree. Attention economy. What we're looking at here is to your point is you can see inside of the AI's brain. So this is infinite backrooms. If you do a like search for fart, right? This is where a token terminal is literally dreaming up the idea of, hey, I should, we we should do a fart coin and airdrop it and instantiating it. So you can literally read the transaction logs of of what it's thinking. Anyway, bizarre stuff. In contrast to the institutions where we're like, hey, Bitcoin and Ether, they're serious asset classes. And then we have fart coin trading over a billion dollars. One last thing on the week that I noticed on the, from the Fed FOMC meeting. Somebody asked Jerome Powell about a strategic, a federal strategic Bitcoin reserve. Of course, that's been a Trump talking point lately.

• 20:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he said this from the Fed's perspective, Jerome Powell. We're not allowed to own Bitcoin, he said. And he was asked a follow up question in terms of like legal issues. Like, is it illegal even for the Fed to own Bitcoin? And he said, that's the kind of thing for Congress to consider. But we are not looking for a law change at the Fed. I don't think Powell or the Fed actually wants to own Bitcoin. And there's a question as to whether, you know, Trump or Congress kind of like forced them into it or forced the the rest of the US government into owning some Bitcoin. What's your take on the strategic reserve? Are you like in 2025, over, under on the probability that, you know, Trump does something or the US government does something here? Do you think it'll happen?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  I think they'll they'll try to do something and they'll talk about it a lot and try to get things kind of passed or or push through. I don't think it'll happen in 2025, uh, to be honest. I think that people underestimate how difficult it is to actually make this happen. It's not like Trump can just like wave a wand and make it happen. He has to go through all the bureaucratic stuff to do this and he's not like some god king who can just make anything happen, especially when it comes to the money. Like, it's a very different game when you're playing that game. So I I think maybe potentially it can happen eventually. Um, but I I mean, I've been following it and all I'm seeing is a lot of talk, um, with not much action yet, obviously, because there can't be action until at least the inauguration happens and and Trump's actually got in power and

• 22:15Speaker 01

  everything kind of changes over. But I I feel like it it should happen because I I do agree that it is is a strategic of strategic importance for nation states to own these assets. I I believe that they're better off owning ETH than BTC. I believe ETH is a is a more strategically important asset, of course. But I I think both of them hold their own importance for different reasons. And I think that you've already seen smaller nation states around the world, uh, you know, buy BTC. Um, I think some of them even bought ETH or or or are going to or have plans to. So eventually I can see the US doing it. But yeah, I don't know if it'll happen in 2025. There'll be a lot of talk about it, though, that's for sure.

• 22:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the one thing that Trump might be able to do, it's unclear to me, is just keep the the Bitcoin and other crypto assets that they have already that they've already seized. Whether you consider that a strategic Bitcoin reserve or not, I guess it's semantics. I think buying more might be a little bit of a higher bar. I I did point out, by the way, that, um, you know, China has like something like 10x the amount of Ether versus the US government. So, uh, you know, I I don't know if Trump wants to play for second place or if he wants to play for first place, but you better boost those Ether bags. And you can see him doing that in World Liberty Financial, his little DeFi outlet. We'll talk about that later. A lot more to talk about, too, including, Anthony, I want to get your take on the developer report. So we got some big insights from a 2024 developer

• 23:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  report. Also, Kraken's Inkchain. We'll get into that. It's a new layer two, of course. And, uh, an update on a vote in Congress for the very Very last remaining anti crypto SEC commissioner. There's still one of them. Is she going to be there come January or not? We'll talk about all of that and more. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange for 2024. That is Kraken. It's almost the end of the year. Go create an account.

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• 26:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Anthony, it's all about the developers. You know Steve Ballmer, developers, developers, developers, developers. So every year, Electric Capital puts together their annual developer report. And my take on developers is they're sort of like entrepreneurs. You know how regular nation-state economies, they'll do reports on how many small businesses started in a given year, or like, you know, what's the kind of the company activity of all of the startups? Well, this is a similar type of thing. I think it's a leading indicator for the crypto economy. So like, developer number go up, that's a good thing. That means more entrepreneurs. That means more businesses on-chain. So Electric Capital analyzes like a whole bunch of GitHub repositories, 1.7 million repositories, apparently,

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  and it produces this report at the end of the year. So a few things to look into. The number one is this chart. You seen this? So this is crypto developers grew 39% per year since 2015. And you can see kind of this chart up. It's not a vertical lineup of interest, right? It's kind of like, it's kind of bumpy. When you see something like this and 39% per year since 2015, we are at the end destination right now, as of November 2024. We have 23,000. So there's part of me where I'm like, I'm impressed at the, you know, 40% annual growth rate, but also, look, there's only like 23,000. I mean, that's a small town. There's not a lot of developers yet in crypto. What's your take on these numbers?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's not that many yet. I mean, obviously, the growth is great to see and it's up and up. But compared to the rest of the software development world and all the other developers out there, there are hundreds of millions of developers in the world, I believe. So this is a drop in the bucket and we have a lot more people left to onboard. And I think we're going to keep doing that as time goes on. I don't think this is going to slow down. Obviously, there's bumps along the way. A lot of these bumps tend to be correlated with price action. Obviously, as prices go up, you know, things tend to get hotter. People, developers, just like everyday, regular people, follow the money as well. If you're getting, you know, a higher salary working in crypto and you've got the skills to do it, you're going to go work in crypto. And then if there's a downturn and you get laid off because the company you're working for doesn't have much money anymore and you go work somewhere else.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  So it's the same kind of story here and you follow that boom and bust, but the trend is up. That's what we care about. That's what we care about in all, I guess, aspects of crypto. As long as the trend is up, we're doing something right.

• 29:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  The trend is up, but not in all places. Actually, the trend is down in North America. So maybe this was the hostile regulatory environment, but look at North America. It used to be the leader in terms of crypto developer share, market share, that is, and it's dipped below two other continents, both Asia and Europe. So now North America is number three and has been bypassed by Asia and Europe. I think that's the whole like Gensler anti-crypto army effect. Yeah, you agree?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, 100%. Like, as I think I said earlier, the last two years specifically have been really, really bad. A lot of different crypto entrepreneurs, developers have either moved their business offshore if they were based in North America or just not started anything in North America at all because they're like, well, it's a hostile environment. I'm not going to go there. You know, if you're a sheep, you don't go into the lions den expecting to be drinking beer. So, or the wolves then, I should say. But yeah, so I feel like if we get the positive regulatory change in 2025, North America should go back up in the next report that we see from Electric Capital at the end of next year.

• 30:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  From an ecosystem perspective, Ethereum was leading on every continent. Solana was like number two, and then there was some of the other ones, Bitcoin, et cetera. A couple of my takeaways is it's sort of interesting to see the differences between these chains. So this is a chart of total value locked, where Ethereum is like absolutely dominant. Like, nothing else is close, not even kind of the layer twos. So a lot of the kind of total capital locked up is on Ethereum. Whereas, you know, Solana has had an increase in terms of transactions, like number of transactions, and like exchange volume and that kind of thing. They're actually quite impressive on that dimension. So there's some differences between the markets. A lot of people pointed out, though, this, Anthony, I wanted to get your take.

• 30:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is a chart of the number of new developers in the ecosystem in 2024. And Solana, for the first time, this was the headline chart, Solana, for the first time, was ahead of Ethereum in terms of attracting new developers. Now, there's a few footnotes to this. If you include Ethereum, plus like you add, you know, Base, and plus you add Arbitrum, Optimus and other layer twos, Ethereum is still ahead on net new developers. It's also the fact that like, net new developers don't tend to stay. So, you know, there's kind of the tourists and the settlers, right? And anytime you get net new developers, 80% of them are likely to leave, according to some of the stats, and only a few sort of stay.

• 31:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they're less valuable than the veterans when it comes to staying powers. But still, pretty impressive in terms of attracting new developers. What's your take there as an ETH bull?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's no denying that obviously Solana had a big year in 2024, right? It grew a lot, the price of the token went up a lot, which created a wealth effect around the ecosystem, which tends to draw people in, both users and developers alike. As I said earlier, users, people, regular people, developers, they're all attracted to the same thing, which is money. You go where the money is, you explore new frontiers, you explore new kind of places to generate wealth, and I think that's exactly what happened here. As I said, Solana had a wealth effect, developers came in, they're like, what's this Solana thing? I haven't tried it before, because it says new developers, right? So it's like, okay, well, I haven't tried Solana before. Maybe they've tried the EVM before. You've been able to build on the EVM for a very long time now, which includes Ethereum, its L2s and also other L1s, right?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  There are many other L1s out there that are also EVM, but Solana is different. Solana is SVM. They have their own virtual machine that they use. So it's a different environment altogether. So if you had been on the fence about it until this year and you saw this activity happening there, you're naturally going to be like, well, let's see what I can build on there. What's the developer experience? Like, I want to check this out. I want to see what's what's going on over here. So I think that it's natural for this to happen. And I think that it's obviously impressive as well, like kudos to Solana for this. But as you pointed out as well, Ethereum is still is still huge, right? Ethereum still has plenty of developers on there, both at Layer 1 and Layer 2s. And that shows no signs of slowing down either. There was actually a good thread from Josh Stark that pointed out from this report, all the Ethereum related stuff.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  And Ethereum still dominates across pretty much everything else, like not the new developers chart you just showed, but for the reasons I explained. But across everything else, Ethereum still dominates. And it dominates, I think, where it matters as well. You mentioned TVL. That is a huge thing. People tend to underrate it, but I think that it is something that is not rated highly enough. Because it really does show where like the big capital likes to be and likes to stay. And even though there are other ecosystems, most of the money stays on Ethereum L1. Because, I mean, they probably fee insensitive users, obviously because fees are higher there, you have to be. But also you trust Ethereum L1 not to go offline, you know, trust it to be secure and resilient and decentralized. And you trust that there aren't going to be changes made to the network that's going to cause things to go wrong for you and your assets.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  And obviously, a lot of the DeFi protocols on there are extremely battle tested at this point and hardened, like Arve, for example, like Uniswap on there, been around for a long time. So I think that's what you're seeing there. But yeah, I feel like as the Ethereum community or Ethereum ecosystem continues to modularize, you're going to see more of a split here as well, because Ethereum also has Layer 2s that are not EVM. Going forward as well, they're going to be launching. I mean, Eclipse is already live, that's using the SVM. There's Fluent coming along that's going to be doing a bunch of blended execution stuff with Wasm, things like that. Fuel just launched one with a similar architecture to what Bitcoin uses, UTXR architecture with their Fuel VM. So there's just a kind of modularization pattern happening too.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  So I do hope that the Electric Capital report can highlight that and kind of dig into the intricacies of that in their next report, because that's what it's going to be like going forward for the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 34:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, speaking of all the Ethereum modules there, there's certainly a lot of Layer 2s that have launched, and one of which just launched this week. This was kind of a little bit of a surprise, I think, for a lot of people in crypto, because this is the Kraken Inc. launch. Okay, so Inc. is a Layer 2, it's built on the optimism stack. So similar in some respects to what we've seen from Base, which has chosen a similar framework. And it seemed like Kraken just like launched this ahead of schedule. I mean, they had announced that they were going to launch it, I think, about six weeks ago or something like this. And now here it is, it's live on mainnet this week. And people who are listening to this can go check out the Inc. chain. I've got here a dashboard, a list of kind of all of the apps, and it's everything you'd come to expect.

• 35:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, you've got like things like Curve down here, you've got like Frax on there. You've of course have the Kraken wallet support and everything that is you'd see in another optimistic roll-up EVM-type chain. What's the significance of Kraken, another major exchange? Probably the, you know, what are the top exchanges in the world right now, launching its Layer 2? And doing this on the back of a very successful Base program from Coinbase? What do you think this means?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  It just continues the trend of everyone wanting to be on-chain, right? And they want to be on-chain in their own way. They want to kind of create something that reflects their brand identity. And that's exactly what Kraken has done with Inc., that's what Coinbase has done with Base. There's others out there as well. You can go down the list on L2B and check out each of them for yourself. But they all have their own ecosystem, brand, community, identity that they try to build. Inc. seems to be trying to build its kind of branding and ecosystem around. I guess D Gen first, right? Like very D Gen kind of stuff first, like getting into the meme coin stuff. I I know they had like one of the GigaChad kind of faces on their website, like stuff like that, right? Whereas when Base initially started, they were going hard on things like SocialFi, for example,

• 36:48Speaker 01

  and they had Firecaster on board there and things like that, and they've kind of shifted over time. But yeah, it's all about creating that that new kind of, I guess, on-chain identity for these organizations here. So overall, I think it's really bullish that these organizations get to do this. Because you can imagine a world where there wasn't L2s, it was just one layer. Like Ethereum was just one layer, there wasn't L2s out there. These brands wouldn't have wouldn't have built an L2, obviously. And then they really, to come on chain, would probably have a harder time doing that. Because they'd maybe just create some kind of, I guess, like app on Ethereum instead of a whole L2 ecosystem and try to build an ecosystem around that. So it does become more more kind of difficult there. So I'm excited to see this go live ahead of schedule. I know that the Kraken guys have been working on this for quite a while now.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  And I really do like this dashboard that you have up on your screen because it shows you exactly what you can do straight away. You know, you have no need to ask, oh, what do I do on Inc? It's like, here's what you do on Inc. Here's all the apps, here's how you bridge in. Here's the infrastructure support we have right now. Here's how you on-ramp. Because that's what we need to see going forward. Because there's no use putting something out there and being like, okay, well, we're live. And people come along and go, oh, okay, you're live. What do I do on your chain? So I'm glad that they've done this. This is actually a really cool thing to see. But I think that going forward, you're going to see these chains launch faster and faster as the infrastructure matures as well and it becomes easier to launch these things. And you're going to see other companies around the world doing this. And I'm sure we're going to talk about one of them, as you mentioned, a big, big bank that's doing this as well.

• 38:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, let's talk about that next, because what we've seen, of course, is all of the, what we call on Bankless sometimes crypto banks. But what we mean is exchanges that are custoding crypto. They all have layer two strategies right now, almost all of them, except for like Binance, which has its own like, you know, layer one strategy with the B and B chain. The question is, what's the next kind of like group to to start launching chains? And the answer to that question might be like TradFi banks, actual traditional banks. So Deutsche Bank. Is a 1.5 trillion dollar bank. It's Germany's largest bank. And just this week, they announced that they were launching an Ethereum L2. Not just any Ethereum L2, a ZK Sync L2. So it's a ZK EVM on top of Ethereum. Here's the headline here.

• 39:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Deutsche Bank valued at 1.5 trillion, Germany's largest, is developing a layer two blockchain on Ethereum. Are we just going to get all of the banks to launch L2s as well? Is that, is that how this works? They're just like port all of their, their ledgers and their assets over?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I mean, if they want to, they can. That's the beauty of it, right? No one's stopping them from building these things on Ethereum because Ethereum is credibly neutral and decentralized. It will not stop you from, from doing this. And I, I think that you can see on the headline here, it says it's going to have regulatory oversight and people will maybe bulk at that and say, oh, you know, it's just like another centralized thing from a bank. It's like, yeah, but the, the point is, is that they're using crypto rails. They're coming on chain. They're going to interoperate with the wider on-chain economy. And if you don't want to use this, you don't have to. You have the entire decentralized on-chain economy to access. But they're saying, well, I want access, I want to access that too. I want to be involved with this too. And that's why I think they're, they're doing this.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And one of my, one of my dream things to see in crypto, and one thing that I've been speculating about for a little while now, is an entity like BlackRock coming along and launching their new stock exchange that they want to launch as a layer two on Ethereum, using real world assets that they've tokenized, like stocks and bonds and all that, and doing that there. That to me would be the holy grail because all of a sudden, if, if BlackRock was to do that, you would see an absolute flood of all of these banks and companies coming in and building their own L2s here, which obviously strengthens Ethereum beyond words. I think even though these are centralized entities, it basically says to the world Ethereum is the place that we're building. Just like when, I guess, like a nation state comes up, like America, for example, all the businesses went there and said, I'm building in America because of such and such reason.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  People are coming to Ethereum and saying, I'm building in Ethereum. I'm building my ecosystem on Ethereum because that is the obvious place to build.

• 40:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, do you know something about BlackRock, Anthony?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't have any insider insight. No, no. It's something that myself and others have speculated. But that's the thing, I think that's the point. You can see it, right? There is a path to that actually becoming a reality.

• 41:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, my take was when BlackRock launched the Bittl Fund, which has been a massive success on Ethereum. This is their tokenized treasury assets. And now, by the way, there's some news later in the episode where they're integrating into all of these other DeFi protocols. My take was that, okay, that's the first BlackRock bank branch on Ethereum. They just like opened up shop on Ethereum. And it totally makes sense that they would expand and eventually become a layer two. So let's see what they have in mind. Anthony, I don't know if you've been following this, but we have one remaining SEC commissioner as part of the Gary Gensler anti-crypto army. Her name is Caroline Crenshaw. And we, just an update on this, because she was supposed to go up for vote in Congress this week to be reconfirmed, renewed, another tenure.

• 41:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  And of course, the crypto community pushed back against this. We don't want more Gensler-style commissioners that are like super anti-crypto. An update on this, she was up for vote this week. And what happened? The vote was canceled. And what I think this might mean is it's likely that she's going to be out because we are running out of time for her to get the votes in the Democratic-controlled Congress to actually vote her in. And in January, this all flips to Republican, of course. So that's kind of crazy. And it's also crazy because it's another extension of the story of crypto advocacy in DC. This is Stand With Crypto, also part of kind of like the PAC.

• 42:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  They had crypto advocates send over 100,000 emails to US senators about a regulator, about Caroline Crenshaw, saying like, "Don't reconfirm her. Like crypto is watching your votes, members of Congress. And if you vote yes, that is an anti-crypto vote." I think a big story coming into 2024 is just like the political willpower of... The pro crypto army, which it seems like is composed by a lot of single issue voters, crypto zealots, a lot of capital, of course, industry support, all of these things, but it's like a force in Congress. We may be down to like zero anti crypto commissioners going into 2025.

• 43:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's absolutely crazy.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And I think that if you look at all of the stuff that's happened over the last couple of years as well on this front, the SEC is at the forefront of being the worst actor in the crypto ecosystem on the regulator side of things for sure. So having a positive SEC going forward, like once the inauguration happens and everything changes over, that's going to be a huge boon to crypto, I think. So we're definitely going to have a pro crypto SEC finally, like after so long. It feels like we've been waiting forever for this. We're finally going to have that. And, you know, I think it's funny because I think most people would settle for just an SEC that actually plays by the rules. People don't realize that, you know what I mean? It's not about being pro crypto. It's just that we want a regulator that follows the rules that they're supposed to follow.

• 44:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that was basically Hester Purst. I mean, she was just like open to it. She wasn't just like, oh, I support everything. You know, God bless all of your tokens or none of them are security. She wasn't like that. She was just like, why don't we create a sandbox? Why don't we just not stop this innovation in the US? It was totally reasonable. You're right. It's not even pro crypto. It's just like neutral. We just don't want anti crypto. Actually, last thing on politics before we leave this section, a Congressman French Hill, which has been on the Bankless Podcast, he's a congressman. He has been nominated to chair the House Financial Services Committee. It's a very big role in Congress. He is definitely pro crypto and he got that nod this week too. So big news on that. Anthony, we've got a lot more to talk about, including Athena. They introduced a stablecoin backed by what we were just talking about?

• 44:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  BlackRock, the BlackRock Biddle Fund? What does that mean? Also, there's some Aave versus Polygon drama, DeFi drama that I want to get your take on? All this and more, but before we do that, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the METH protocol is

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• 47:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Anthony, have you been following the Aave versus Polygon drama? I'm not sure what the lessons are from this, if this is a lesson in risk, a lesson in governance. Like, how would you summarize this?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since we've had some serious DeFi drama, I think, within Ethereum. So it was quite entertaining to follow along with this, if I say so myself. But I think if we zoom out a little bit and focus on what was actually being debated here. So essentially, there was a proposal put forward by a bunch of projects within the Polygon ecosystem that wanted to use the bridged funds, so the funds that were bridged into Polygon, and put them to work, essentially. Because right now, they're just sitting in the bridge. These projects were like, hey, we can use these stable coins to earn a yield. And we're leaving like $70 million a year on the table by not doing this. And then, of course, there was a whole debate kicked up about this. Once people started paying attention to it, saying, well, that's really risky. What if something happens to those assets?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Then the assets that were bridged over aren't backed by anything anymore, and essentially can become worthless. And we've seen all these bridge hacks over the years. And it's really ugly, they're huge honeypots, so on and so forth. It also breaks the kind of social contract you have with users that you won't use their bridge assets to do other things, and so on and so forth. So ultimately, the proposal was shot down, and it's not going to be going ahead right now. But the drama, I think, stemmed from a bunch of community members or a bunch of people within the Aver and Polygon ecosystems having a bit of, I guess, like, I don't know if I'd call it personal attacks, but more of like personal drama, where they said, oh, he said, she said, kind of thing. So that's what blew out the drama, I think. But the actual proposal itself, yeah, there was debate around that.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  But then there was also debate around the interpersonal drama that stemmed from that.

• 48:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay, so I wanna, so I haven't been watching this up close, but I've sort of seen some of it. And I guess my take is, so there's this proposal, as you said, to take bridge assets and do something else with it, like put it in Morpho and yield or something like that. Morpho and urine, get some additional yield on that. Like, my take on that is like, oh, that sounds like a really bad idea. Because, you know, none of the users who bridge their assets, you haven't consented with any of them. And what we're doing is like, it's almost like rehypothecation, right? We're stacking risk on top of risk. So like, at the outset, I don't like proposals like this. Doesn't sound like a great idea. However, it's just a proposal. Like, it's not- It hasn't happened yet. Open governance forums, proposals are messy.

• 49:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then what I saw is some members of the AVE community submitted their own proposal, which is basically like, if you do this, we're going to deactivate AVE on Polygon. Basically, set parameters to zero in their risk models so that nothing on Polygon. And then Polygon reacted to that, and some of the founders, Sandeep, etc., and said, wait, okay, hold on. This is just a proposal. You're like, why are you exiting? Maybe you're doing this for your own reasons, AVE, and you secretly wanted to use the bridged assets for something in AVE.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's the point, right? One of the projects that proposed this was Morpho, which is a direct competitor to AVE. So that's where a lot of the drama stemmed from as well. It's like this conflict of interests, I guess, and competitive stuff.

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and then, so there were some, like, Sandeep from Polygon and Stani from AVE, like, back and forth, like, back and forth. And, you know, I think Stani was saying, like, well, what are you guys getting from the Morpho community? Are you getting token incentives? Anyway, some messiness, some mudslinging. What did we learn from this? Other than, like, all of this happens in the open, such is the nature of DeFi. So this is probably not the last time that we'll see, like, a blow up from this. You're like, what else did we learn?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think from some of the discussions that I saw that fell out of this, just regardless of the projects involved, it was discussions around using bridged assets in other ways. Like, that's been a big discussion for a while. I know there are some, like, Layer 2s, for example, like Blast and Mantle, that will tell you, we're going to use your bridged assets to do things. Like, they just put the ETH into Lido and stake their ETH and a yield on that. But they tell the users upfront that they're going to do that. There is no, kind of like, after-the-fact bridging, oh, sorry, after-the-fact usage of assets once they're bridged in. So I fall more in that camp. As long as you let the people know that, hey, your assets are actually going to get used if you bridge into our L2 or use our protocol, whatever it is. Then that to me is fine.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  It's when, yeah, you do it after the fact where you've bridged in all these this money, billions of dollars of of of capital. And then you say, well, it's just sitting there right now. Why don't we use it for something? That's where things get very murky. So I think that we're going to be having more and more debates over the coming months over about this because there is a lot of money in these bridges that is doing nothing right now. And as that grows, it's going to become more and more tempting to put that to work to earn yield and to kick that back to users as well in order to get more users on your platform, especially when it comes to the L twos competing for users. This could be something that they use to to essentially even offer free fees, even though the fees are low, they could offer free fees because they could earn that yield and then kick that back to users as subsidization for fees.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  So there is going to be a lot of more discussion around that. But in terms of the other major lesson as well is the fact that these protocols compete with each other. People tend to forget this, but they compete with each other and it's cutthroat competition too, because it's all out of the open, as you said. So we're going to see more of this drama unfold as protocols start juicing incentives for these things. It's, hey, why don't you use your bridged assets in our protocol and we'll put some nice token incentives on top as well. And then you're going to get the users saying, well, I want those token incentives. So I want you guys to use the bridged assets. And then you're going to see capital flow around like that and projects fight with each other over users and so on and so forth. So I think this is really only the beginning of what we're going to see around using bridged assets for different things, but there's going to be lots of drama as well.

• 53:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I totally agree with you about informed consent. And for anyone who's looking at this and and like being like, oh, this is terrible. Like, I don't like you. You're you're watching how the sausage is made. And what I would remind everyone listening to is banks do this all of the time, except it's completely closed. They don't talk about it. They don't ask anyone's permission. They don't like, they just rehypothecate. Okay. And there's no accountability because none of it's on chain. So you have no idea what's actually going on. So these types of conversations, actually, and kind of the the the back and forth of it, and even the competing for for users here and the competitive pressures. It's good for us. It's good for DeFi users, okay? Because it's open, it's transparent.

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  You go right-click View Source in the code to see where the assets are, you know, what the risk profile is and all of that that you can't get in traditional finance. So I think it's like, in that way, it's like bullish, even though it just looks a little bit, you know, mudslingy. Pudgy Penguins launched their Pengu token. Seven million addresses were eligible, whole bunch of ETH addresses, whole bunch of Solana addresses as well. This is what the token is doing, Anthony. So almost a $2 billion market cap. What does this remind you of? Okay, so like, it feels like I'm getting flashbacks to Bored Apes. And they launched a coin. Am I right about that? I'm pretty certain they did at some point in the cycle. And it did something like this, multi-billion dollar valuation.

• 54:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you getting flashbacks to that?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I mean, they launched at a different timing in the market. I believe they launched in 2022, which was obviously the bear market. And like crypto had already topped in 2021. Whereas Pudgy Penguin seems to be launching at least halfway through the bull market. But the price action is interesting to see because there was another airdrop a few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two ago called Hyperliquid that happened. And then it went up only after the airdrop, right? But with Pudgy Penguins, it has gone, I believe, like mostly down only since it launched, basically, a few days ago. And obviously, the Pudgy NFTs, for anyone who saw, they also dumped, I think, 50 to 60% because people were buying those NFTs in order to farm the token. And then as soon as you got the token, that was baked into the price of the NFT. The arb was done. Everyone sold the NFTs.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  So what kind of happened is that there was a ton of hype. The broader markets sold off. You know, the NFTs sold off because that arb closed. And then the token just is already worth, you know, a fair bit right now. So it's kind of plateaued where it is. So I don't have any opinions of where it's going to go from here. I don't know much about the Pudgy ecosystem. I'm not a bull or bear on it. I'm relatively neutral on it. But I don't think it is that comparable to what happened with Apes because it was a different timing in the market. And also, I think from what I've seen, the Pudgy Penguin ecosystem is doing a lot more than the Board ape ecosystem is doing right now and they've branched out and doing a bunch of different things. They've got their own layer two coming out with abstract, you know, I, I don't think it's like the pudgy L2, but they're working very closely with it to, to launch that.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  So they're doing a lot of, a lot of different things. So I, I, I, I, um, respect the, the building that's going on there. But yeah, the, the token, I mean, who knows? I think they even called it a meme coin themselves. So we'll, we'll see.

• 56:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. It's, it's just another meme coin. I, I do really respect Luca and his ability to execute. Basically brought pudgies back from the dead and you're, you're right around this arb opportunity. So pudgy, pudgies has been up from the NFT perspective. And now it's like, it was down on the week because everyone's sort of got the proceeds from this. You know, one other dimension that's different than board apes or anything that we've seen before is actually there's actual pudgy penguin toys in stores. And so, uh, what's happening is pudgy penguins, uh, toys were sold with a QR code that entitled you to pengu airdrop. So what's been happening, Anthony, in stores like all around, uh, like I guess the world is, um, people are like, you know,

• 57:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  ripping open the package and, and yoinking the QR code in order to be eligible for that airdrop. There's, so they're just like, here's a package of pudgy penguins, you know, they, they, they left the stuffed animal, but they ripped off the QR code in order to be eligible for that airdrop. So some weird incentives when it goes into like, when it comes to airdropping, you know, physical products.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And this, this is funny because we like, uh, I, I pay attention to like the trading card game kind of arena.

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Program on cards and stuff like that. Uh, and this was happening with, with program on cards where people would go in, open packs, collect the rare cards and then resell them on eBay or whatever. And then they had to end up locking up all the cards behind glass. Imagine seeing these pudgy penguins locked up behind glass and you have to go to the tower and ask, "Hey, can I get one of the pudgy plushies, please?"

• 57:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  This is what happens though.

• 57:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  In America, I'm sure.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  You know, when there's money being made.

• 57:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can buy the guns, right? They're not locked up, but like the pudgy penguins are locked up behind the glass.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I speak to a manager? Show your ID, sir. All right, so that's the pudgy story on the weekend. And by the way, go check if you're eligible for this. A whole bunch of wallet addresses are eligible for this, so you might be as well. At Bankless Claimables, you can do that. Athena launched a new stablecoin, Anthony, on BlackRock's Bittl Fund. This was kind of new, so they have a stablecoin, of course, that, you know, works on sort of the arb-type trade, the carry-type trade between the kind of the price of ETH and the price of fiat and works with centralized exchanges. They've launched a different stablecoin, though, that is different. It's called USBTB, and it has a different yield source, a different backing, a different collateral base.

• 58:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that collateral base is all BlackRock treasuries. It's all the Bittl Fund. So this is an example, I think, of BlackRock really expanding into DeFi. So it's like, you know, Athena's like less than, I mean, maybe it's a year or two old. It's pretty new. It's all DeFi, it's all cutting-edge. And this is BlackRock, like, striking a deal with them and really expanding. They would just want Bittl to go everywhere in the crypto economy, it seems. And they're willing to partner with just about everybody. What do you make of this? The partnership between BlackRock and a DeFi protocol, Athena?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, for such a large organization, BlackRock being the largest asset manager in the world, the fact that they're this forward-looking and this fast-moving with coming on-chain is pretty staggering. As you mentioned, Athena is not an old protocol. It is relatively new, and they're already working with BlackRock. And BlackRock is already working with them. And it seems like this is just the very beginning of BlackRock's plans. They probably have some very ambitious plans of what to do. On-chain, and that's why I mentioned earlier where I do see a reality where they launched their own L2, which gives them the control and the ability to come on-chain in the biggest way possible and to interoperate with the rest of the on-chain economy. And they are a fee-in sensitive user as well. So they wouldn't necessarily be launching

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  the L2 for, I guess, scalability purposes. It would be more probably to be able to onboard a bunch of different things, a bunch of different real-world assets, which is what they're mainly focused on. Larry Fink always talks about tokenization of real-world assets. So bringing all of that on-chain and interoperating with the wider Ethereum on-chain economy is just such a thing that I can, I'd see them doing. And it would be such a massive unlock for Ethereum that I can't even begin to describe, to be honest. So it's great to see them being so forward-looking, to be honest.

• 1:00:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony, as we begin to close out this episode, I wanted to get into your personal on-chain wrapped. So somebody tweeted this out that we should, somebody in crypto should create a Spotify wrapped, but for your wallet, essentially. And so the devs at Bankless actually did this. So Anthony, I am going to plug in your wallet. This is bankless.com/wrapped. And just reveal what you've been up to on this address. I'm sure this is, so what is this wallet? This is not all your trading activity. I'm sure you have all sorts of secret wallets out there that you like, aren't docs, that no one knows about, where you're making like insane gains. But this wallet, what do you do in this wallet?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  So yeah, this is my very public wallet. I don't do that much on this wallet. It's stuff that I don't care if people know that I'm doing. I do have separate wallets. I have one wallet that like, I use just for trading like, different, very risky coins, like meme coins and AI coins, because I don't want anyone copy-trading me. You know, also because I don't want them seeing my bad trades too. Because there are some bad trades on there.

• 1:01:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm with you. So this is Anthony's most wholesome wallet, let's say. So you're not going to see any of the fart coin trades that he's been making behind the scenes, I'm sure.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here it is. Let's take a deep dive into Anthony's wallet. So you performed 99 transactions this year from sasal.eth. 45% more active than other bankless citizens. Your most traded token was USDC. I imagine you're just trying to sell all that fiat for like, you know, ether or something like this, right? You wake up bullish and you're buying ether with your fiat. You're most loyal to base. Your most commonly used layer two, uh, your spirit animal. Let's see. Brian Apex Armstrong. That's your spirit animal. So there you go.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Hey, we're both bald.

• 1:02:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bald.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  We're both bald.

• 1:02:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do we know this? It turns out your most active time was during July. 18% of your transactions. So you're, you know, summertime, you had some energy.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  It's winter for me in July, though. That's the thing. So.

• 1:02:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's probably why. He's indoors. What else? What else are you gonna do but trade crypto? Your crypto horoscope is a cancer. And how bankless are you? Let's see. Here it is. Drum roll. 71 on the bankless score. Anthony Sassano.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  I'd love to plug in some of my other addresses in that, like, on my own. Not on the stream, but on my own.

• 1:02:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we won't tell.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  To see my score. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just maybe just talk to you about it. But this is cool. This is actually a really cool thing. I hadn't seen this yet. Yeah, people should definitely plug their addresses into this, or other people's addresses as well, you know? I know there are a lot of people who have public addresses that they don't mind doing whatever on them because they want the attention, basically, and they want the fame, I guess.

• 1:03:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I don't know how this works, but I actually plugged in Vitalik.eth. And fun fact, do you know who his spirit animal was?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 1:03:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was you. It was Anthony Sassano. Yeah. It's a spirit animal.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:03:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know how the algo works. I'll have to, you know, consult the devs on that, but like, I don't know, you know? I'm sure the machine intelligence saw the similarities there with Anthony and Vitalik.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vitalik and I are basically twins.

• 1:03:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically twins, basically the same person. Okay, I want to end with this. So I was thinking that we would have more of a bull market going to this episode, but I think we will in 2025. And I want your seasoned veteran advice. When we go into 2025, and things are feeling frothy, things are feeling bullish, how do we know it's a top? You know, this whole thing around top signals, okay? So I've got nine top signals here for you, Anthony, and I want you to score them, if you will, one by one, from one to 10, okay? And one is, you're not seeing any of it exhibited? It's like deep bear market, your sensors aren't tingling, it's like whatever.

• 1:04:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  One is kind of low on the, you know, is it a, is it a top scale? And 10 is you're seeing it everywhere. It's like high alert, feels like the top, feels super frothy. Okay, you ready for this?

• 1:04:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I snatched this from a crypto Twitter account. I'll have to include in the show notes because I don't have it in my notes where these top signals are from. But here's the first one, okay? So are people you know asking you about crypto right now? Again, 10, a lot of them, super frothy, I'm like scared. And like one, not at all, it feels like a deep bear market. And they're like, feeling sorry for you that you're like in the crypto industry. So what are you from one to 10 on this?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  So a few days ago, I was a five, but that's at like an eight right now. And I'll tell you why.

• 1:05:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, no!

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, a guy that did some work on my house a couple of years ago that I hadn't spoken to in a couple of years, called me to ask about crypto. And he's got nothing to do with crypto at all. And I was like, oh, no, we're already at that part of the cycle. So, yeah, I went straight to an eight when I, when I got that call. I was like, no, not already.

• 1:05:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yikes, yikes, too soon, too soon. Okay, but no fear, guys, not, no need to panic yet. There's still eight more. How about people flexing on the timeline? Are you seeing flexing on the timeline going on from one to 10?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Not much, actually. I would say maybe like a three or a four, to be honest. I'm not seeing much. I saw some account post that he bought like a Porsche 911 the other day or something like.

• 1:05:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  I was like, okay, that's a bit of a flex, but it's just here and there. I'm not seeing a lot of it yet. So, yeah.

• 1:05:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that because we're in the ETH community, you and I?

• 1:06:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:06:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Moving on. How about, how about number three? Greed on the timeline. You seen any greed? It's a little bit different than flex. It's just like more like, um, oh my god, you got it. I'm investing in this thing and just like it's going to the moon, that sort of thing.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I've been seeing that all year because, you know, obviously we've had the meme coin mania going off and a bunch of other kind of ecosystems having a bit of a, a pump. So I, I would say that it's probably like at a five still in terms of

• 1:06:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  what I've seen. Like it's, it's definitely not like what I saw in 2021 just yet.

• 1:06:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's good. Okay. How about, uh, when the market stops going up with positive news? Okay. So that's when the market's fatigued. You get this super positive thing and there's just still not going up. So what's that for you? One to 10?

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, probably like a, a three or four, to be honest. But I feel like we've moved past that phase of the bull market so far. And we're in the phase of it doesn't really matter at this point if it's negative or positive. The trend is still up. So yeah, it, that we've kind of moved past that, I think.

• 1:07:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. How about crypto apps in the, uh, in the app store trending? You know, top 10, top 5?

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean Coinbase and, and Robinhood, which does crypto as well, have been there for a little while now, for multiple months. But I, I don't know if I would call that the same top signal that I would have last cycle. I feel like that crypto just has more general mind share now, uh, that, and people, more people are, uh, just generally aware of it and already have the apps on their phone and stuff like that. So, and they're just re-logging back in. So that again, yeah, maybe like a five, I guess, or a six.

• 1:07:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. That's not too bad. All right. Blood pressure going down a little bit. Search trends at historical high.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  But what, sorry, what was that?

• 1:07:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Search trends, like Google, Google results.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  From what I've seen, they're not anywhere near their highs yet. Or they're creeping back up, but they're definitely not at the 2021 levels. So yeah, again, like maybe even less than, maybe like a three or a four right now.

• 1:07:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, that's good. Okay. Crypto in mainstream news. You seen this in mainstream news?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yes. Bitcoin mostly though, not crypto. Uh, just Bitcoin, like in the mainstream news, especially because Trump's talked a lot about it. That's obviously a huge reason why it's in the news more. Outside of that, not as much, like just Bitcoin mainly. And, and that's usually not a top signal. That's usually just a signal of, oh, wow, the mainstream's paying attention to us again. It's when you start seeing the really kind of random D gen crypto stuff that is a crypto insider thing, start branching out into the wider ecosystem. That's when you can probably start like screaming. So I would say again, this is probably like a five.

• 1:08:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's just Bitcoin and Hoc Tua. It's the only thing. Hoc Tua worries me, okay? Hoc Tua worries me, okay? How about people quitting their jobs? This is a peak bull market when people are like, "I'm getting a job in crypto, and I've been doing corporate finance for 20 years, but now I'm doing crypto." We do this at the tops.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not necessarily. Not seeing much of that. I am seeing a bunch of people who joined a team like three years ago, now going and like starting their own thing or kind of leaving and saying, "I'm gonna take a break for a bit." Probably because they made a lot of money in the last three years and they're like, you know, "I'm gonna go and relax for a bit." So maybe a five. Yeah, I'm not seeing too much of that, yeah.

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, last one, then we'll sum this all up. Exaggerated price predictions. So that's where you start seeing people saying like, you know, Bitcoin to like, you know, 2 million or something. Or I remember last cycle, right? You and I were chanting, many of us were chanting ETH to 10K, ETH to 10K, right? As soon as we started saying that last cycle, people were like, "Uh, 10K is bearish. ETH to 100K, you know what I mean?" And that's at the point you're like, "Oh, okay, I don't know." Have you seen exaggerated price predictions yet this cycle? 1 to 10?

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I have. But the thing is, is that I've been seeing that on Bitcoin for a while now, like since even 2023, of people saying $1 million Bitcoin and so on and so forth. But what I will say is that I am seeing a lot of the people who were previously calling for maybe 150K to 200K Bitcoin, start calling for like 500K now because, for whatever reason, obviously the froth in the bull market. And same on like ETH. Like, people just like to raise their targets as time goes on. But if I start seeing people give ridiculous prices for assets that are fundamentally worthless, that's when it goes to like 10 for me because those assets have obviously been pumping a bit and people are like, "Oh, my God, it's gonna go to such and such." But no, I would say it's probably at like a 5 or... Maybe, nah, you know what?

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  That's just close to a 6, I think, at this point. But nothing too crazy just yet. But I think the common theme through all of this is that we're in the middle, right? That seems to be where all my answers landed.

• 1:10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally, intermediate. I think we are a 5 or a 6, which is actually a good place to be as we end the year. Anthony Sassano. Thank you so much for hanging with us. Remind people where they can get the Daily Guey. Fantastic Ethereum education that you're putting out on the daily? Almost, you know, like often a lot.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  These days it's a bit more sporadic, but I did make a new year's resolution promise that I'll go back to doing it a lot more frequently. But yeah, if people want to follow me, they can just go find all the links on my Twitter. I do my Daily Guey show, as you mentioned there, and I'm very active on Twitter. So I'm sure you'll link that in the show notes for people to check out.

• 1:11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Go check it out, guys. It's also available on podcast format, too. So if you're not tuning into Spotify, you can get on the podcast. We'll include a link to that. Got to end with this, of course. You guys know crypto is risky. It's been a good year, 2024, but you can lose what you put in. 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.