ROLLUP: Blobs Arrive | BTC New High | ETH ETF? | Bankless 4th Birthday

Bankless Weekly Rollup 2nd Week of March, 2024 ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 bankless.cc/spotify-premium https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🥩PRIMESTAKED | MINT primeETH NOW https://bankless.cc/Origin-pod ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP SMARTER https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/Arbitrum ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 7:48 Markets 9:00 Bitcoin’s market cap surpassed Silver this week https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/ https://twitter.com/robustus/status/1767164377969340419 https://l2beat.com/scaling/data-availability 18:09 Movers of the Week - Memecoins? https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1767170724446552159 https://twitter.com/blknoiz06/status/1766680047547494658 https://twitter.com/FTI_DA/status/1767969299350610040 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1766827037149343951 26:40 U. S. CPI rose faster than expected last month https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/12/cpi-inflation-report-february-2024-.html 26:58 Why are DeFi rates so high? https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1766326070545162321 https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1766669255100055866 https://twitter.com/ethena_labs/status/1768023077932380257 29:33 ETF Watch! https://dune.com/hildobby/btc-etfs https://dune.com/queries/3382000/5674971 https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1768022702294470855 https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1767206535879389332 https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1767175990285857006 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1767187618876305628 https://x.com/orb_land/status/1767278815791722629 38:28 Blobs arrived to Mainnet, L2 Fees plummet! https://x.com/parithosh_j/status/1767973626987606190 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1767913396777767361 https://twitter.com/sproule_/status/1767960271853686879 https://twitter.com/zksync/status/1767983026443579448 https://twitter.com/argenthq/status/1767917028013224370 https://x.com/Optimism/status/1768090982862803203 https://twitter.com/liamihorne/status/1768068293787615288 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1768091017021116562 https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1768071129854562698 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1768074308482400556 https://x.com/js_horne/status/1768075186824163698 https://fees-growthepie.streamlit.app/ https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1767912321618505954 https://dune.com/0xRob/blobs https://twitter.com/liamihorne/status/1767962414312521844 https://x.com/lightclients/status/1767957828969349148 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1768243873430552801 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1762589707756548566 1:01:59 Swell announced their Restaked Rollup https://twitter.com/swellnetworkio/status/1767889656451047505 1:03:00 Tensor introduced the TNSR token https://twitter.com/TensorFdn/status/1767616700609171508 1:03:25 Jito is getting rid of Mempool?! https://twitter.com/jito_labs/status/1766228889888514501 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/03/08/solana-client-developer-jito-announces-end-of-mempool-function/ https://twitter.com/smyyguy/status/1766234020076011865 https://twitter.com/jon_charb/status/1765923336138211353 1:08:59 Saylor has no chill https://x.com/MEMECOETH/status/1767690213877252485 1:10:18 Raises and BVC Investments https://twitter.com/EclipseFND/status/1767212277285969979 https://twitter.com/clique2046/status/1768277734113907127 1:12:27 David demo signing up for it while RSA highlights https://open.spotify.com/show/1y0zqrWsFxmCYcTnV7ExUn We recently celebrated 4 years https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1768269073354231826 1:14:22 MEME of the Week Name kids after what you love https://x.com/abbeyjazzy/status/1767890031824216551 1:15:27 Moment of Zen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5if2hthPCs ------ 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.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Ryan, I want to talk about the blobs. I want to talk about how Optimism is using the blobs. I want to talk about how Darkness is using the blobs. Arbitrum is using the blobs in a very special way. So we're going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about the blobs. We're going to talk about blob space. We're going to talk about the blob contention. There's a new phrase just dropped, blob contention. Gets me all like hot and bothered. I'm pretty psyched about blobs, Ryan. I can't talk to you enough about blobs.

• 0:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this is going to turn into a blobcast, I can tell.

• 0:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it's the third week of March.

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  Blob week, it's blob week. The blob week of March. Blobs everywhere.

• 0:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Dave, we've got to talk about the blobs because this is Ethereum shipping an absolutely major upgrade. Would you say this is the biggest upgrade since the merge? Biggest upgrade ever?

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  The second biggest upgrade ever. The biggest one being the merge. Yeah, now we have blob space on Ethereum. In addition to some other cool stuff that is in the Ethereum protocol now, it's really EIP 4844. That is now fully a part of the Ethereum protocol, entrining blob space into the protocol itself, allowing layer twos to become super fast. All the layer twos are celebrating and boasting they're super speedy, super quick, super cheap transactions. Transactions across the optimistic rollups right now, like even some of the more complex stuff are zero cents.

• 1:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god.

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  They're zero cents.

• 1:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels so good.

• 1:19David Hoffman?

  Will it last is the big question. Is this just a short blip in time on blob space? Or is this going to be the new meta in Ethereum layer twos?

• 1:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a good question for sure. So we're going to talk about all of that. Also Bitcoin hit another all time high this week. A legit David Hoffman all time high. You cannot dispute this all time high. Are you capitulating, right? Bitcoin all time high.

• 1:39David Hoffman?

  I'm not capitulating. I'm declaring the all time high has been hit by Bitcoin.

• 1:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It passed David's line, okay?

• 1:45David Hoffman?

  We're at like $73,000 or something.

• 1:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, ETH tipped over 4K. We're going to talk about that. Also, I want to talk to you too about the wider context of this. Like where are we in the cycle? How early is it?

• 1:57David Hoffman?

  The forever question.

• 1:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  And also, are we going to get this Ethereum ETF? A bit of banter on that. Justin Drake says yes.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Other people say no. Ethereum is getting its first restaked layer two. Another layer two on Ethereum. Ethereum as if we need it anymore. Just kidding. We need all of them. But it's a layer two with new superpowers. Who is building it? What to expect? Also, some things in the Solana world. Tensor has announced their token. It's one of the biggest protocols on. Solana is basically the blur for Solana. Very hyped. They're getting their token. Gito on Solana also getting rid of its mempool. Turns out Solana discovers MEV is a thing. And also a crypto project is going to be on the Vegas sphere. So maybe that Ryan answers a little bit about where we are in this cycle. And then also, the Bankless Podcast gets his fourth birthday ever. So something special for Bankless Podcast enjoyers. It's not the only birthday on the podcast today. Ryan, sup?

• 2:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  What? Is it my birthday today?

• 2:52David Hoffman?

  I don't know. That's a question to you, brother.

• 2:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have a question for you. Okay, so a mysterious package arrived on my front porch this morning. Okay, and it was addressed to not Ryan Sean Adams. It was addressed to Ryan Dad Adams. Okay, and I thought to myself, who in the world would do this? Like, it looks like it was a package from Herman Miller. I was like, did one of my kids do that? I'm like, no, my kids can't afford a Herman Miller piece of furniture. Like, what is this? So I brought it inside, still like having no idea who actually sent me this. But I'm thinking, David, and we haven't talked about this yet, I'm thinking it may have been you. And what awaits me in that package is a brand new chair.

• 3:33David Hoffman?

  Can you show the podcast viewers the chair that you have been sitting on?

• 3:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Four years.

• 3:37David Hoffman?

  Since the inception of this goddamn company?

• 3:42David Hoffman?

  Take a step back and show just like the absolute lack of lumbar support that this fucking stool has. This is like for the podcast listeners, this is like a counter height stool for your kitchen.

• 3:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a running thing.

• 3:57David Hoffman?

  Took from somewhere else in his house. And he's like, oh, I need a chair for my office. Has not invested in his lumbar spine whatsoever.

• 4:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's literally how it happened. This is just a chair from another place in my house.

• 4:09David Hoffman?

  For four years.

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  We talked about this. You've been absolutely incredulous. You've been like, Ryan, when are you getting a new chair? When are you gonna do this? So you just sent me one. Thanks, man. I appreciate this. So what am I getting? What awaits me in the package?

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  It's a Herman Miller embodied chair. It's the one that I use. It is a very fun chair. You get to bounce around on it. It like curves up in your spine. You get to sit on it all day. I don't know how your spine doesn't hurt.

• 4:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's expensive. You spent some money on this, David. It must be a bull market.

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  It was a company expense.

• 4:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  That would have a company credit card.

• 4:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, thanks for spending our money. I appreciate that.

• 4:43David Hoffman?

  You're welcome.

• 4:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  For my spine. I'm sure my spine appreciates that as well.

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I appreciate it. Hey, no, no, no, no. I want to talk one more thing with you because

• 4:52David Hoffman?

  All right, more banter?

• 4:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is in your apartment. All right?

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, okay, sure.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the plant wall. Tell us about the plant wall. I'm showing it on screen.

• 4:59David Hoffman?

  First, before, happy birthday, Ryan.

• 5:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh.

• 5:00David Hoffman?

  And happy birthday from the Bankless Nation.

• 5:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for the chair, Bankless Nation.

• 5:04David Hoffman?

  Thanks for the chair.

• 5:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Appreciate that. All right, so what are we looking at here? I have noticed in your background, some on kind of the left side, my left.

• 5:11David Hoffman?

  It's getting kind of green, yeah.

• 5:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's getting a bit more green. And I remember in the 2021 cycle, like you were in your San Diego apartment, it just kept getting more and more green. Every, every day that we would do a podcast, until your entire back, like, part of your apartment was covered with plants.

• 5:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you actually literally couldn't.

• 5:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you doing this again?

• 5:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, slightly off camera, actually. So there are some plants that have made it on camera, but you can see the wall of plants that is just to the left of the... The reason why this became relevant is because me and Ryan were prepping for the show this morning, and then my circuit breaker pops, and I just go completely dark. And it's because, like, I have these studio lights for podcasting, for whenever I want to do an in-person podcast, but they are also, like, very powerful plant grow lights. And so I have them, like, turned on and pointed to my plants, because, like, why the hell not? But then, they're also really hot, and it's a solid 69 degrees in New York right now. Nice. And my apartment gets very, very sunny, and so I had to turn on my air conditioning. In, what is it, March? And so between the grow lights and the air conditioning and my computer,

• 6:13David Hoffman?

  the circuit breaker pops, and I just, like, disappeared on Ryan during prep for the show.

• 6:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's, you're in a negative flywheel there. If you have more plants, more lights, more heat, more air conditioning, more electricity, these things could keep happening, David. Anyway, I'm really excited about your plant collection, and I want to...

• 6:32David Hoffman?

  I'm really excited about your chair.

• 6:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll keep the Bankless Nation updated on those two things.

• 6:37David Hoffman?

  Trans and shares, yeah.

• 6:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of updates, can you tell them about primed stake? Our friends and sponsors over at primed stake? This is a restaking protocol. Pretty exciting. What are they up to?

• 6:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, brand new Spiffy LRT protocol on the horizon. And primed stake, of course, it gives you liquidity for your assets that you deposit into Eigenlayer. So you can convert your staked ETH into prime ETH. Prime staked, kind of like prime steak, like you're.

• 7:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we get it. I see the prime red logo here.

• 7:03David Hoffman?

  Of course. So you get your Eigenlayer points, you get your ETH staking yield. You also get prime ETH XP points, which are, of course, the points for prime ETH. And so if you want to catch up on some Eigenlayer points, you can get 156 bonus Eigenlayer points per ETH deposited into prime staked. If you want to try out this new LRT protocol and catch up on some Eigenlayer points as well. There's a link in the show notes. This is Eigen bonus week, starting on the 18th of this month, which is in three days. And so there's a link in the show notes in order to get started.

• 7:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is the part where I gotta just mention, of course, restaking protocols are brand new. And so they are a little further on the risk spectrum. So keep that in mind as you think about restaking in any restaking protocol. All right, David, tell us about Bitcoin all time highs, because we have officially crossed David Hoffman's bar to all time highs. And thank you for tweeting that at me. I appreciate knowing from you that we had hit Bitcoin all time highs. I think it happened maybe sometime Sunday, something like this.

• 8:03David Hoffman?

  It was on Sunday.

• 8:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Where are we right now on the week?

• 8:06David Hoffman?

  Currently at 71,200, started the week at 67,400, up 5.5, a modest 5.5% on the week. Did you know, Ryan, that actually we've had one red week in the last seven weeks? And it was only a down 1% week that week. We are up 70% on Bitcoin in seven weeks. On the note of calling all time highs, I do, I did think this one YouTube comment from last week was pretty funny, which is like, maybe the guy who doesn't own any Bitcoin doesn't get to call when the Bitcoin all time highs are. Which I do understand. I do take that point.

• 8:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless owns Bitcoin, unless you spend all of it on my chair here, but we sell some Bitcoin. So by proxy, you own Bitcoin. Okay, well, that's exciting. So we are in uncharted territory. Bitcoin's been going up only. This is why people are actually asking, are we going to have a reversion to some local mean here? So maybe we'll get to that in a little bit. But another thing to celebrate is Bitcoin actually surpassed the market cap, the total value of silver this week. It's down a hair below.

• 9:09David Hoffman?

  Down below it.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, but look at this. Neck and neck.

• 9:11David Hoffman?

  It'll get there. Silver is a thing of the past and like next week.

• 9:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, silver is 1.4 trillion and Bitcoin is 1.4 trillion as well. So silver must just have a decimal edge here.

• 9:24David Hoffman?

  Silver has 80 million more dollar market cap than Bitcoin.

• 9:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, the number two asset. So I guess Bitcoin is gold silver then. And Litecoin has nothing to do with this, huh, David?

• 9:34David Hoffman?

  That's right. Well, Litecoin has always been irrelevant. It's just taken time for the market to realize that.

• 9:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Dan McGardle, keeping receipts as always. He says this, "They tried to tell you Bitcoin outperformance was a one-time thing due to 0% in government stimulus checks, but this is the long-term scoreboard." Look at all of that green, David. This is year by year Bitcoin returns versus gold versus S and P 500. And if you kind of compare it, yeah, that's a 14-year return of 2.4 billion percent on Bitcoin. Not so bad.

• 10:06David Hoffman?

  We have some measurement subjectivity going on here, but the point still stands that Bitcoin has been the greatest investment compared to all traditional investments since its inception.

• 10:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, over the past decade for sure.

• 10:20David Hoffman?

  It only was really bad if you got in at 2017, 2021, and maybe in 2025.

• 10:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people just missed out on, I think, once-in-a-lifetime gains by just fading crypto too early and thinking it's a meme, think it's a scam, think it's a Ponzi. The tulip mania thing has cost a lot of people a lot of money, I would say. Let's flip over to ETH. We're on the cracking charts as usual. What's ETH looking like on the week?

• 10:45David Hoffman?

  ETH starting the week at 38. Forty up 1% up $40 on the week. You know, actually ETH price action was more exciting than that really accounts for. Like we got up to $4,200, $4,100.

• 10:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 10:58David Hoffman?

  But we are basically down around full circle to where we started the week, $3,880.

• 11:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that above 4K, I mean, 4K is kind of a round number here.

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  Good round number.

• 11:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Haven't been that high since, like, for two years. It's been over two years since we've seen that.

• 11:14David Hoffman?

  We spent very little time, ETH spent very little time above $4,000.

• 11:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at this, like, a brief period in May, it looks like, May 2021, and then a brief period between November 21.

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, into January, I think.

• 11:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Into January. So, can I ask you, so we can have consensus on this, David, what is the ETH all-time high number? What, like, what is kind of, when will you celebrate hitting ETH all-time highs?

• 11:42David Hoffman?

  I think the true accurate number is somewhere in the 4,900, low 4,900-ish, if I remember correctly, like, high 488, low 49,000. But it's really, we gotta go for the round numbers. So it was 70,000 for Bitcoin, 5,000 for ETH. Once it hits 5,000, it gets unequivocal, like, we've hit a new round number.

• 12:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you're playing hard mode. You don't want to call a specific, you know, 4,800, something like this. By the way, that's CoinGecko all-time high price, 4,850 or something like this. You want to just square it up to 5K and then you celebrate.

• 12:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 12:16David Hoffman?

  I want to see that 5 number. Come on, like, the new all-time high is going to be something like 15, 20K. So I'm not going to just, like, get excited about the difference between 4,880 and 5,000. I'm just going to go for 5,000.

• 12:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  15 to 20K. Wow, David, I can't wait for that. Look at this. This is global crypto market cap. We are at 2.82 trillion.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Moving fast.

• 12:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Moving really fast. And this is, like, getting close to all-time highs?

• 12:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So look at this, we hit 3 trillion, just very briefly, 3 trillion. We're almost there.

• 12:48David Hoffman?

  We're basically there, yeah.

• 12:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Does this worry you? Does it feel like it's happening too soon?

• 12:53David Hoffman?

  No, I'm not worried generally about frothiness or anything until I will start to be worried about like the teeteringness of the market and the paper gains of the market after ETF inflows stop being insane. Until further notice, you are allowed to be as bullish as you want to be until the ETF flows like wean and there's no sign of them weaning whatsoever.

• 13:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So how far are we in the bull market, do you think? I mean, are we entering into the second half, would you say? Are we still in the first half? Or are we like, are we actually top signaling and you know, things are kind of like starting to flash?

• 13:33David Hoffman?

  The thing is like, we got one year of top signals from 2021 to 2022.

• 13:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:39David Hoffman?

  And there were still plenty of like gains to be made after top signal started to come. I had the same conversation with Mike Abellito on the podcast on Too Long Ago when we were like, it was the beginning of the fourth inning about is kind of what we said. But it also really depends on when you started counting the bull market. And I think we're, we are in the beginning of the fourth inning. If you count like a very early bull market and it's a very long game. I think really the like the GTO airdrop on Solana and then the Solana DeFi summer is kind of like the soft official unofficial launch of the bull market. If anyone can really put any date on it, but I think this thing could like kind of like,

• 14:21David Hoffman?

  if the ETH ETF gets approved by November, of which the odds are still pretty good. I don't care what anyone says. Like, that's just good continuation of more flows into crypto. And the ETH ETF, the Bitcoin ETF flows like have potentially a ton of life in them. Like potentially like three to six more months of net new buyers from different corners of TradFi coming in to buy Bitcoin. And so that has a ton of life and energy left in it. And so like, to me, I'm calling for like an idea is like, you have like six to nine months where like, we have like free paper gains because of all these inflows into the ETFs and everyone is speculating downstream. That being said, it doesn't matter how strong the fundamentals are. If there's too much total net paper gains in crypto, that will end the

• 15:05David Hoffman?

  bull market because people will take the chips off the table and selling will beget selling. And all of a sudden we'll discover a bear market.

• 15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm terrible at timing these things, David, but I feel like we have at least 12 months left. And again, I could be wrong. And I feel like 3 trillion is not the top in terms of total crypto market cap.

• 15:25David Hoffman?

  Oh, hell no.

• 15:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I think we're getting to 10. Now, what could happen is we could like spike up to like 3 or like 4 or 5 and then tank all the way back down. Like even below 3 and like people, you know, below 2 again. And people could think that that that was the top and we're heading back down. You know, but like I think we'll have multiple, multiple cycles of different top signals. And this is just kind of like the first class of top signals. David.

• 15:54David Hoffman?

  I think a longer, grander bull market because of ETF flows is like a reasonable base case.

• 16:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, let's talk a little bit about layer twos. I know our next section is going to be completely about blob space, layer twos, how cheap the gas fees are. You're gonna get sick of hearing it from us.

• 16:11David Hoffman?

  We're talking about Ethereum in this, in this weekly roll up. It's an Ethereum roll up.

• 16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  But before we get there, that's going to be in the next section. Let's just gander at total locked value because we are up on the week and there are some pretty big movers, including base. Uh, is up significantly on the week, um, to 1.4 billion on base and total value locked.

• 16:31David Hoffman?

  That's pretty good. Yeah, we had 38 total billion dollars inside of layer twos. I think that's actually stayed about the same week over week. Uh, we are threatening, we are teasing 10 million in layer twos in ETH terms, ETH nominated. Yeah, base has really had a killer week, but overall like layer twos are always kind of just up, up, up, up, up. Just kind of spit out some of the numbers just to give people an anchor point. Arbitrum, 15.6 billion, optimism, 8.9 billion, blast, insane, 2.8 billion. Yeah, some really good, really good, healthy numbers here. But yeah, the big outperformer right now is base, uh, blasting, base blasting its way with plus 25% uh, week over week to 1.4 billion dollars.

• 17:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer two beat added a new tab here where you can see where, uh, the, the chain itself, the layer two is, um, storing its data. You know, what data availability solution is it using? Is it using Ethereum mainnet or is it using something else? And you know, some are enshrined like Arbitrum OP, some like Manta Pacific. There's, there's really no DA bridge and others are using like Celestia and other third parties for this. So yeah, Layer 2 beat always kind of showing us, showing us the way here and showing us what's up with these Layer 2s. By the way, thanks to Mantle for sponsoring this section, which is one of our favorite L2s of this cycle and a sponsor of this show.

• 17:50David Hoffman?

  Especially as Eigenlayer AVSs come online and make Layer 2s better. That's like been Mantle's deal for a long time. A lot of people don't really realize. Mantle actually has been working with Eigenlayer on EigenDA. They're going to be the first ones to leverage EigenDA. And we're going to really see what 10 megabytes a second of data throughput can really do for a Layer 2.

• 18:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, this recurring theme we've been talking about the last couple of weeks is, is retail here? This is Eric Connor saying, yes, they are here. That is retail. They just aren't in Bitcoin and Ether. And he's looking at Google search index for meme coins and it is just a spike absolutely up. The clip that we played, the TikTok dude that we played last week, he was talking about some meme coin. He's definitely not talking about the fundamentals of Bitcoin and Ether. What do you think about this, David? Do you think retail's here? They're just buying meme coins instead of buying like, you know, our bags with great fundamentals?

• 18:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think maybe even at this point, like retail, quote unquote retail outside of crypto has heard of Bitcoin enough times where they're like, that's, that's not cool anymore. You know what's cool? A dog with a hat. I'm going to buy that thing or, or Joe Bowden or whatever. Some nihilist, nihilist financial stuff. Cause I think we're like, a lot of retail who comes like speculating and de-gening, like they're not taking like their entire savings and putting it into like dog with hat. They're putting like amount of money that they can be nihilist about and like see if it goes to zero, whatever. And I'm trying to like shoot for the moon and Bitcoin is just not going to do that for them anymore. So yeah, I think it makes sense that retail skips straight to meme coins. I mean, like they all saw JPEGs, tokens with JPEGs last cycle.

• 19:29David Hoffman?

  So why don't they just, they just go even more de-gen?

• 19:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's crazy, David? This is a tweet from Franklin Templeton, like the bank, you know, Franklin Templeton, the asset manager. And this is a report on the value between meme coins and their narrative networks. This is kind of like a bullish report on meme coins from Franklin Templeton. You believe that?

• 19:49David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 19:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought you'd find that interesting, right? They're catching a bid from the institutions as well.

• 19:54David Hoffman?

  What the hell?

• 19:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another what the hell moment. David, it's happening. So Dog with Hat is potentially going on the Vegas Sphere. And there was a fundraiser this week. I think they made the fundraiser. So apparently this will be what looks like the first crypto project on the Vegas Sphere. And David,

• 20:15David Hoffman?

  Saw it from a long time.

• 20:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  You and I pinned this as like, this could be an absolute top signal for the cycle. It's the first crypto project, just like the FTX stadium of the past, the first crypto project that is on a sphere. That's a top signal. And we were joking around like it's time to sell.

• 20:32David Hoffman?

  There was also a race to get your crypto project on the sphere. And like when I kind of made my tweet, like the first crypto project to get their, their, their project on the sphere loses. I actually didn't really consider like crowdsourced meme coins as like one of the ways to race to get there. I kind of was thinking about like some semi legit startup, layer one, brand new layer one Ethereum killer on the scene advertises themselves like a legitimate attempt at advertising. This is a farce attempt at advertising. Like it's, it's for the lols, it's for the memes. And I wasn't really counting for that.

• 21:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna count though.

• 21:06David Hoffman?

  I'm not counting this top signal.

• 21:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the problem with top signals is once they come, you just find a way to justify it. You're just like, eh, that's not really a top signal.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  As soon as I see an ETH killer on the Vegas sphere, that is, that's the top signal.

• 21:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I worry we're moving goalposts here in this, in this bull market.

• 21:23David Hoffman?

  It's what we do in bull markets.

• 21:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  This happened a lot earlier than I thought. I'll say that. But it's not that expensive to actually put your project on the Vegas sphere, at least in crypto terms, 650K. So maybe our top signal calibration.

• 21:35David Hoffman?

  650K worth of Dog with Hat donations had to be made. So that people are just giving away their Dog with Hat money in order to make this happen.

• 21:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  But because it's a meme.

• 21:45David Hoffman?

  Kind of, kind of cool.

• 21:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, because it's a meme, it's going to like increase the, you know, the price of Dog with Hat, like, I don't know, fivefold or tenfold, you know, just getting this, this kind of press. So there's good ROI for people to do that.

• 21:55David Hoffman?

  I don't think it'll do that. I think it's more for the lols.

• 21:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're doing an entire episode on meme coins, which I am disappointed to have to miss. But I want to get your take, high level on meme coins. Like, some people think that they're like fun, that this is what crypto is all about. Other people think that they're toxic. I guess my, my, my take is, I think they're fun. I think that I get annoyed at them when they start to suck all of the auction out of the room. And like, they get all of the attention and this is what crypto becomes.

• 22:24David Hoffman?

  The point.

• 22:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  But otherwise, I don't want to be a purist. Like, I don't like participate in many of these things, but it's just like, whatever. People are having fun, it's fine. It's what, one nice thing about it is it's completely transparent, right? So like, everyone knows it's a dog with a hat.

• 22:38David Hoffman?

  Yes, there are things that are less transparent about meme coins, right? Like, the genesis story of each one.

• 22:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. So like, more private keys and more hands is good. It stress tests all of our infrastructure, that's good. Like, bad things, I do think there will be some absolutely epic scams this cycle involving meme coins, right? And everyone now thinks they can kind of, you know, like, have the next meme coin. So, and there's some, there's some harm, I think, to the crypto branding as a result of this that could come. Like, what's your take?

• 23:08David Hoffman?

  Well, the meme coins are, first, just a very expected and acceptable byproduct of one of the great powers of crypto, which is giving people access to the money printer of financial assets. Like, any Joe, every, any average Joe can make a financial asset. And that's the power of an ERC20 token, it's power SPL token on Solana, or whatever you want. That's, that's a democratizing power that is going to the people. And then, like, what did we do when we got the internet? We put pictures of cats on there. What did we do when we got access to, like, Web 3? We made dog tokens. Like, it's just like a normal, like, progressive events. And so, that is, that part is good. Like, let's give power to the people, especially, like, let's not, like, you know, gatekeep the powers of Wall Street.

• 23:53David Hoffman?

  Like, let's open this up. And so, I think there is, the fact that we can produce Dogecoin. Dogecoin, to me, is an example of a good meme coin, like, good, like, good on the morality, like, ethics spectrum. I think that is a good thing.

• 24:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just like fair distribution.

• 24:08David Hoffman?

  Totally fair. Yeah. The fact that, the fact that a meme can become worth billions of dollars is like cool and neat and interesting. And it also opens up plenty of space for grifting and exploitation and extraction. And, and so kind of like more or less like the, I'll take the point that like, one of the reasons why people love meme coins is like, plenty of like layer one grifts who like grifts in crypto have been abundant and where like, they have been like touting some narrative, but they're really trying to get rich. And so like all of those grifts are plenty real and plenty like throughout the history of crypto. And so to your, to the meme coin point is like, well, at least these things are like honest.

• 24:50David Hoffman?

  But I don't think that makes them any better or worse. I think it's like a natural like reflection on like human incentive and human desires. And so it's the meme coins will be as good or bad as like human greed will be. And in the bull market, human greed can get pretty bad. It'll be, it'll be pretty gnarly.

• 25:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I also worry a little bit that it's not great for our financial literacy. Do you know if people think that they're investing in these things and like, what's an investment? You know, like they're doing more speculative attention gambling and, and not like what I would call like classically investing. That might be a bad side, but you know, back to kind of financial nihilism, right? The people say that like, people think the US dollar has turned into a Ponzi. The SEC won't allow our actual tokens to have real utility and cash flows. So like, no wonder people are all about this right now. Anyway.

• 25:39David Hoffman?

  I did see one meme that I really, really liked, which was, you know, the, the bell curve meme, right? Like left and right curve. And then you have the person in the center and the person in the center is like, no, you can't invest in meme coins. There's no fundamentals, like blah, blah, blah, blah, like crying eyes.

• 25:53David Hoffman?

  The left and the right curves are like, uh, it's, it's fun and I'm making money.

• 25:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally.

• 25:58David Hoffman?

  And that's great. But the thing is, is that like, these things are only fun because people are making money. And eventually people will not, making money will turn into losing money and then the fun will go away. And you know what will be left in the bear market? Fundamentals.

• 26:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  As they always will be.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I will point out, there is a fun in fundamentals, isn't there?

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  Yes, there is. There is. That is what that's what we're here for. Although I have, I will have to say, I did purchase one meme coin. I'm the owner of one meme coin.

• 26:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, do not.

• 26:34David Hoffman?

  So I'm playing in the game.

• 26:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't blame you for that, David. Just enjoy yourself, man, while it lasts.

• 26:39David Hoffman?

  I will.

• 26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  US CPI rose faster than expected last month, so we're about 0.4 in February and 3.2% from a year ago. So the Fed really having a hard time getting this under 3% and getting it towards 2%. So we'll continue to monitor that as we go. Do you know, another interesting thing is the yield, the interest on our stable coins in DeFi have come back, baby, like 20 to 30%.

• 27:06David Hoffman?

  Way bigger than last year, yeah.

• 27:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we're talking like in compound. And this is not just airdrop yield hunting. This is like actual real returns.

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  Sustainable yield, yeah.

• 27:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  In like a money market of crypto, which is sort of, you know, compounds. So it's fairly low risk, all things considered, right? And like the question Eric Forhees is posing is, why is this happening? Do you have a take on this?

• 27:28David Hoffman?

  I mean, I think Hayden Adams' follow-on take was, I think, probably the best explanation. He said that crypto natives getting 30% on our yield is just like too low in bull markets when things are going 3X minimum. Like, I'm personally looking for a 3X to cycle, so I'm not going to take 30%. But then also, taking your TradFi money and TradFi dollars and putting them into crypto and DeFi is like too risky for all the people that still have TradFi dollars. And so there's just like, that mismatch is producing very high yields, where the curves, the supply-demand curves actually meet, and that's meeting at 30%. This will attract outside capital. It's just like, outside capital is going to be slow to move to take up some of that, some of that yield.

• 28:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of yield, David, can you explain how Athena Labs got to 1 billion? This is a relatively new.

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  Happened really fast.

• 28:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethereum DeFi protocol. What's going on here?

• 28:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so if you know a brand new stablecoin, it's not a decentralized stablecoin, but it kind of fits in the decentralized stablecoin corner of how you design a stablecoin. So I need to like actually do my homework on how this works. But basically, there is a basis neutral trade that you can make where you have staked ETH on one side and the yield from staked ETH and like MEV on Ethereum, which is something like 4%, 5%, 6%. And then you also have the yield of funding rates for people who are shorting Ether on a non-leverage basis. And so like one way short, you get funding for that. One way long, you get yield from that. You put those two together and you have a basis trade where it nets out at like a $1, but you also get yield. And so that produces a stablecoin.

• 29:04David Hoffman?

  That part of the jump, I don't understand how it makes, but it does check out. I know that it checks out. Yeah, so they just crossed $1 billion. So congratulations with, you know, I did say on Twitter that if they hit $1 billion, they can do a podcast on Bankless. So I guess, reach out to us.

• 29:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we should, we should definitely do that. I'm curious about it as well. This is different than the algorithmic stablecoins of the past, like, you know, Terra Luna, right? It's like this yield is from a legitimate source, but...

• 29:29David Hoffman?

  Yes, and it's backed by real assets.

• 29:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. David, let's do an ETF scan really quick, like ETF watch. We are looking at a Dune board showing all of the ETFs right now. And we've got 4.2% of current Bitcoin supply in ETFs.

• 29:46David Hoffman?

  It's a lot.

• 29:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, this was very low when we started, yeah, a couple of months ago, and it's just shot right up.

• 29:52David Hoffman?

  It's gonna, it's gonna go to 10% by halfway through this year. It's gonna be at 10% by June.

• 29:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flow since launch, 10 billion. Just the past week was almost 2 billion. So yeah, a lot of crazy things going on. And MicroStrategy versus BlackRock BTC Holdings. Look at this chart, David. The blue line is BlackRock and it's going straight up.

• 30:12David Hoffman?

  Poor Michael Saylor, just getting demolished by BlackRock Bitcoin.

• 30:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Saylor's doing fine.

• 30:18David Hoffman?

  I think BlackRock had its number one record inflow day. BlackRock itself had a $1 billion of inflows, if I remember that headline correctly.

• 30:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think you're right. And Saylor's gonna return later in this episode. Got a clip that we want to play.

• 30:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about the ETH ETF like one last time because there's more banter back and forth on when this thing is going to actually happen. Actually, James Safer and Eric Balchunas put out some of their estimates and these are sort of some people call them the Bloomberg bros. I don't know if they appreciate that, but they've been right on with respect to like understanding the Bitcoin ETF landscape. And they put out their estimates that the odds of the Ethereum ETF getting approved by May are down to 35%.

• 31:02David Hoffman?

  Yikes. It used to be 60%.

• 31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Used to be. This is Eric Balchunas saying, I get all the reasons they should approve it. Okay. And we personally believe they should, but all science sources that we are making that were making us bullish for the Bitcoin spot ETF are not there this time. Note that the 35% isn't 0% still possible and long term, we think it will happen, but not by the May deadline. That's Eric Balchunas. So that carries some weight in my mind. Also Jake Chervinsky, did you see his, his take here?

• 31:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he's also being in the bear camp. I think the summary of just Jake's tweet and the Balchunas tweet is like more or less like the signs of activity and, and interest by the SEC of engaging with the ETH ETF issuers just aren't there. It's not that they are saying they're gonna not approve it, or they're not that they're saying that they're gonna delay it. They are just doing nothing, right? It's just like indifference. Jake Chervinsky says, it brings me no joy to be an ETH ETF bear, but I'm calling it like I see it. I see an SEC that dislikes crypto as a concept, seeks to please progressive elective officials, shout out Elizabeth Warren, who want to make anti crypto a core part of their platform. Who

• 32:12David Hoffman?

  could that be? Has a wrong but not insane basis for denial, i.e. spot futures correlation. Now, this, the spot price of ETH and the futures price of ETH on the CME futures, that is like mathematically been proven to have just as strong a correlation to the Bitcoin ETF. So this point, this line in Jake, in Jake's like reasoning, people have like in the Ethereum community has called into question. Yeah, called into question. Like we actually have like totally awesome, fantastic proof that they correlate. Just as strong as Bitcoin. So like, I'm not sure about that one. But like, it does go back to the, I think just the writing, the tea leaves is really just saying like, the SEC is just like not engaging with ETH ETF issuers in the same way that they were engaging with Bitcoin ETF issuers.

• 32:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the strongest pushback against this that I've seen is, but like, BlackRock wants it. And that's what we've been saying all along. Like, big finances now on the side of getting these ETFs approved. And the Bitcoin ETF was so successful, they would just want to run that same play back. So Jake Chervinsky and Eric Balchunas, what about BlackRock? This is Jake's reply to that. I agree, BlackRock's presence is a big deal, but ETH is a very unique asset and probably raises more legal and political controversy than any other ETF filing that BlackRock has ever done. "BlackRock always wins" is not a satisfactory response to all the arguments for denial, in his opinion. So.

• 33:35David Hoffman?

  And BlackRock could get their ETH ETF denied and BlackRock would just like not bat an eye and they would just reissue it until it got approved.

• 33:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:44David Hoffman?

  The ETH ETF.

• 33:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going to happen.

• 33:46David Hoffman?

  It's going to get approved.

• 33:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone knows this.

• 33:48David Hoffman?

  It's if, if it doesn't get approved in 2024, it'll get approved in 2025. Like, it's, I'm not concerned.

• 33:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  For 2026.

• 33:56David Hoffman?

  We're just trying to like, people are just trying to figure out whether they should take leverage on the ETH may approval or not, which you shouldn't be doing anyways.

• 34:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, actually, Justin Drake, who I consider an incredibly knowledgeable person, is on the side of it getting approved by May.

• 34:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Justin Drake is an ETH may bull.

• 34:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's thrown down a bet with Nick Carter on whether the ETF gets approved or not. And Justin Drake's team, it will get approved by May.

• 34:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So Nick, there is some backstory with Nick Carter bets. This is a tungsten cube bet. Nick Carter is famous for making bets with people across the crypto space, where the stakes are one tungsten cube. Remember the tungsten cube memes from last cycle? And Nick has like collected like three, maybe four tungsten cubes because he's always been right.

• 34:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's doing well.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  So he's collecting tungsten cubes as like, these are my spoils, the spoils of my victory. This is my plunder. And so he's made a bet with Justin Drake that if the spot ETF is denied in May or not approved in May, then Justin Drake has to give Nick Carter his tungsten cube.

• 34:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Justin Drake is not often wrong, but neither is Nick Carter. So I guess we will see what happens with that. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 35:06David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, we're going to talk about blobs, because I'm tired of not talking about blobs on this goddamn weekly roll-up. Ryan, I want to talk about the blobs. I want to talk about how optimism is using the blobs. I want to talk about how Darkness is using the blobs. Arbitrum is using the blobs in a very special way, so we're going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about the blobs. We're going to talk about blob space. We're going to talk about the blob contention. There's a new phrase just dropped, blob contention. Gets me all, like, hot and bothered. I'm pretty psyched about blobs, Ryan. I can't talk to you enough about blobs.

• 35:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this is going to turn into a blobcast, I could tell. What else, though? We've got a brand-new L2.

• 35:37David Hoffman?

  Brand-new L2 on the scene. Another one is coming online. Why is this one different? Tensor has introduced the Tensor Token. We're going to talk about GTO on Solana. But mainly, we're going to talk about blobs, Ryan. So let's go ahead and get right into these sponsors that make all the blobs possible on this blobcast. So let's go hear from them right now. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most-secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in just a few clicks.

• 36:19David Hoffman?

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• 37:03David Hoffman?

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• 37:47David Hoffman?

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• 38:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome back to the Bankless Blobcast.

• 38:30David Hoffman?

  Blobcast, blobs.

• 38:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  We were talking about, the blobs are live on Ethereum mainnet. Let's set some context. So this was a major Ethereum upgrade, a hard fork that just happened. It happened on March 13th, right? So this was Wednesday of this week. It's called DenKun. Can you give us the highlights? So why was this upgrade so significant and what did it do?

• 38:53David Hoffman?

  So EIP 4844, which is like the shining star of the upgrade of the DenKun hard fork, is what introduces BlobSpace to the Ethereum Layer 1 protocol. BlobSpace is a specific lane of transactions that's separate from BlockSpace. So we have all the normal transactions that everyone has ever been making on Ethereum has always been going into BlockSpace. What do blockchains do? Blockchains sell blocks. Well, now the Ethereum Layer 1 also sells blobs. And blobs is, Blob is kind of, it's actually a technical term, believe it or not, for just Like arbitrary data, we're going to package up arbitrary data and we're going to, that is a blob and we're going to put that blob in the layer one blob space.

• 39:33David Hoffman?

  Think of it like a high occupancy vehicle lane, an HOV lane for Ethereum layer two transaction. So on the Ethereum layer one currently, we're all driving in our individual cars, one car per person is not that efficient. And we're all having to pay high gas fees in order to do stuff on the Ethereum layer one. Even layer twos are inside of the same kind of congested lanes that all the individuals are using. Now, layer twos, because they are high occupancy vehicles, they're bundling up thousands of transactions from thousands of users. They are, instead of posting that as data inside a block space, they get to wrap that in a blob and post that into blob space. And so they all get to move faster through the carpool lanes and get, uh, get from point A to point B faster for cheaper because of blob space.

• 40:18David Hoffman?

  And so this actually is not affecting gas on the Ethereum layer one for a layer one transactors. This is significantly increasing the, or decreasing the fees on Ethereum layer twos. That's my summary. We've got blobs.

• 40:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. That's great. I've never heard that analogy, David, of a HOV lane, but I think that's a perfect.

• 40:37David Hoffman?

  Who made that, who made that analogy?

• 40:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, Vitalik?

• 40:41David Hoffman?

  No, well, maybe, but the first time I heard it was from our Josh at Bankless.

• 40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  Which made it, which made it into the, uh, the actual like live stream of just like, this is the way that you explain blobs. So if our Josh, who's actually the guy listening to this, uh, editing this podcast right now, if he made that, well done. It's become enshrined as like the best metaphor to explain blob space.

• 41:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, shout out Josh. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And, uh, here, here's another metaphor. This is one that Chris Dixon uses and this is kind of a, an internet metaphor. So this, this upgrade essentially made layer twos really, really cheap. And, uh, another like, um, way to phrase that is basically increase the capacity, increase the bandwidth of, uh, layer two block space essentially. So this is almost like us getting from the 1990s on the internet to the 2000s. You know, you had dial up modem or through your phone line. I mean, a lot of people don't remember that, but that's how. The internet used to be in the 90s and then in the 2000s, we started to get

• 41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  high bandwidth systems started to get broadband essentially and we just did that in Ethereum overnight. Phase one of increasing our broadband. So this is kind of Ethereum's broadband moment, I would say. And you're going to experience that not on Ethereum mainnet. It's going to be just as expensive as ever. Fees are not going down ever on Ethereum mainnet. I think we've, we've talked about that so many times before.

• 42:04David Hoffman?

  Well, well, we have the verge, actually.

• 42:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  True, true. The verge, but I don't want to get people excited about that. That should not be your expectations.

• 42:12David Hoffman?

  Be their expectations.

• 42:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's like a three to five year type thing, but fees are going to get really cheap.

• 42:16David Hoffman?

  That's a 2025 thing.

• 42:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my gosh. Well, just stop being so bullish, David.

• 42:20David Hoffman?

  I'm getting bullish.

• 42:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So, so anyway, what's happened is layer two fees have gone down basically overnight. And so let's, let's talk about them. Let's just like, yeah, go through it. So this is, what are we looking at? ZK Sync, which was the first layer two to start using this brand new high occupancy.

• 42:36David Hoffman?

  First, first blob on the layer one from ZK Sync. Well done.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at the transaction fees falling.

• 42:41David Hoffman?

  Just go into absolute zero.

• 42:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's how it looks in a chart, but if you're using something like the Argent Wallet on Starknet, right? Which is another layer two that has adopted a blob space. Your transaction fees for doing an in-app swap in your smart contract wallet went from $6.82 overnight to four cents for the same transaction.

• 43:03David Hoffman?

  And Argent is a smart contract wallet. So it actually has, generally have more fees. And so like specifically things like Argent and other like smart contract wallets have really been looking for this. Four cents is actually on the higher side of the types of transactions that I've seen. Here is a chart of optimism of the median gas fee on OP stack chains between OP mainnet, Zora and base, hovering around like 90 cents. And then now they are dropping down to somewhere between like one and five cents. Liam from optimism says optimism just enabled 44 a few minutes ago from 32 cents down to point 0004 cents for a transaction. That is optimism. Base is also a

• 43:46David Hoffman?

  This evening attracted the attention from Brian Armstrong because Base is also, of course, an OP stack chain. Brian Armstrong says, "This is huge. Reducing transaction fees and confirmation times on Layer 2s will open up so many more use cases for crypto. We are finally getting scalability." He's, of course, retweeting Jesse Pollak's tweet, saying, "After two years of hard work, blobs are now live on Base. Before, 31 cents. After, 0 cents." But he actually means .0005 cents. "The network fee quoted inside of the Coinbase app to get from Ethereum to just to transfer Ether from Base to Base Wallet is 0 cents." So like when Coinbase shows you like, "Here's

• 44:28David Hoffman?

  a network fee." It's 0 cents. Like imagine the delight of retail users at this point in time.

• 44:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of like, why even charge them at that point? It's so cheap, right?

• 44:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I went in and looked at this transaction that Jesse was showing, and just like the Ether scan on this is just absolutely hilarious. The transaction fee, .00000126 ETH. The gas price, there's too many zeros for me to even read out or count. That's like nine zeros. The gas price was .00000001. It's absolutely insane. For a $4 transfer. Zora, it doesn't stop there, of course. The gas cost to mint on Zora was 61 cents. Now it is .0009 ETH. Granted, granted, we are in day one of blobs. Actually, now this is day two of blobs base consumption. And so we are approaching an equilibrium of all these Layer 2s

• 45:22David Hoffman?

  leveraging blogface. Fees are definitely down across the board, but their blobs are about to go into price discovery.

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because, because when things get cheaper, when transaction fees get cheaper, we use more transaction fees, and that can increase the cost of these things over time. That's what you're saying.

• 45:41David Hoffman?

  Yes, that is what I'm saying, and we are also seeing activity on Layer 2's pick up. But also, we are approaching, if you, let's see. This is a Dune board that we're going to look at from 0x Rob. If you scroll down, you can see a blobs per block. And blobs actually have a very similar mechanism to EIP 1559, where we are targeting 3 blobs per block. And if we have more than 3 blobs per block, then blobs get more expensive. If you have less than 3 blobs per block, then blobs get less expensive. We are under 3 blobs per block, and we have been since the inception of Blob Space. If you want to scroll down a little bit, it's the blobs per block. There we go. So you can see that purple line. We are below the line, the target line of 3 blobs per block. And so this is why blobs are so cheap.

• 46:26David Hoffman?

  As more Layer 2's leverage Blob Space, we will get this thing called Blob Contention, which is the fee market for Blob Space. And so then blobs will start to increase the price of blobs, because it is congested. And then what do we do after that, Ryan?

• 46:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We make more Blob Space. Oh, yes, yes. We have to keep making more Blob Space, because we'll never have enough Blob Space ever at this point in time. One thing that was really interesting to me, this is a chart of the Layer 2's, the median price fee over time. And you're right, that many of these, most of these are like just now fractions of a penny, and this happened overnight. I was blown away at how fast Layer 2's actually adopted this.

• 47:07David Hoffman?

  They were ready to go.

• 47:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're in a competitive game to like, lower their fees as quickly as possible. But like, almost all of them did. One outlier is Arbitrum, which I believe may have, oh, look at this, it's spiked down.

• 47:17David Hoffman?

  They did it 2 hours ago, yeah. So actually, that's a really important part of the story, actually. So because Arbitrum, they were coming in at an 18-hour laggard into the Blob Space consumption. Why did they take long? Well, A, they have a DAO, so they have to actually get this through a DAO vote. But also, they have this thing called ArbOS Atlas Upgrade, which is just a normal Arbitrum software update for the Arbitrum Layer 2, that also, in addition to leveraging Blob Space, independently of the lowering gas fees of Blob Space. will also lower gas fees by another 90% just because it's optimizations on the Arbitrum

• 47:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's so cool.

• 47:58David Hoffman?

  And so like all of the layer twos are able to like squeeze out more juice from their own system and then they are also getting a 90% gas fee reduction on top of that because of BlobSpace.

• 48:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that happened overnight.

• 48:09David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is actually going to be one of the best tests to how much, how can we really juice these systems because now we have BlobSpace and Arbitrum is taking their next like additional 90% reduction in gas fees.

• 48:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels like, like I've called it before, like an economic stimulus in terms of capacity because it happened across all chains overnight and my timeline was just so wholesome. I'm talking about my social media feeds, right, of just people talking about, oh my god, like there was a lot of surprise at how cheap layer two fees actually got. I mean, some of these, I saw somebody tweet out something about optimism or Zohar or something like that being cheaper than Solana at this point.

• 48:48David Hoffman?

  That was me.

• 48:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, was that you, David?

• 48:50David Hoffman?

  That was me.

• 48:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you're trying to get some spicy tweets in? I mean.

• 48:53David Hoffman?

  It wasn't spicy. It was true.

• 48:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's factual. It's factual.

• 48:56David Hoffman?

  Factual tweet.

• 48:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:58David Hoffman?

  Ethereum layer twos are cheaper than Solana.

• 49:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really impressive. Now, whether they'll stay that cheap, I don't know, but it's so cool to see it happening in concert across all of the layer twos with this big Ethereum upgrade.

• 49:10David Hoffman?

  There's a really good tweet thread that I want to read out from Liam dot ETH, Liam Horn, who talks about the perspective of EIP 4844 as more than just a simple protocol upgrade to Ethereum because it was a bunch of cross-protocol dev coordination across layer twos and the Ethereum layer one protocol. And so there was so many moving parts to make this happen. So I thought this whole entire thread was fantastic. So I'll read through it. EIP 4844 is more than a tech upgrade. It's a substantial shift in how Ethereum core devs work at all, improving the relationship between research and client teams and welcoming layer two core devs. It might be the most important moment in the transition to the rollup-centric roadmap.

• 49:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 49:49David Hoffman?

  When we started two years ago, before the merge, there were tensions between the research and client teams. It wasn't always clear that the ideas on the research side were feasible to implement and took into consideration all the client complexity. One of the reasons why Proto Lambda and others conceived of proto Danksharding, which is Pro4844, which is what we just merged. It is a type, it was a sort of prototype or an early iteration towards full Danksharding that was technically feasible and ready to ship ASAP. ASAP turned into two years, but this was even only possible because 4844 was a compromise. It made a massive dent in scalability, future-approved full Danksharding, and took into account client complexity. It forced research, client, and Layer 2 teams to work closely together.

• 50:32David Hoffman?

  One, optimism made shipping 4844 a top priority and allocated multiple core devs to the effort. Two, base teams started working and contributing to 4844 before the idea of base was even conceived. Prismatic Labs, three, now a part of Off-Chain Labs, that's Arbitrum, evolved into Layer 2 development with 4844 as a gateway. And many, many more examples of the above. 4844 acted as a central project that unified the efforts of so many research, client teams, and Layer 2 devs. It feels like we're in a whole new era compared to two years ago. Ethereum is feeling substantially more productive and pragmatic. And with Layer 2 teams now a major part of the mix, the rollup-centric roadmap is in full swing. When I read this, I just got goosebumps because, especially with every single major hard fork

• 51:16David Hoffman?

  that we do in Ethereum, I'm just reminded about how we are doing this crazy new thing called decentralized consensus and decentralized governance and decentralized coordination in order to discover the best paths forward that, in my opinion, the Ethereum core devs and researchers all collectively agree and come to consensus on what those is, what those are, and then they successfully merge them into the Ethereum protocol. And I just get goosebumps that we as humans can even like manage to produce something like that. And so I'll just like take a moment and say thank you to anyone involved with Dankun, EIP 4844, all the other EIPs, and actually like getting this thing into the Ethereum protocol. So many stakeholders needed to be just juggled when it was done in just, you know,

• 52:01David Hoffman?

  super elegant fashion. So, big thank you to everyone getting involved here.

• 52:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. And this is so popular. Like, everyone loved it. Everyone loves cheaper fees. Everyone loves more bandwidth, more capacity. This was not contentious at all, and it's just a kind of a massive celebration. David, there was also some other upgrades that slipped in in the Ethereum upgrade. One is that beacon block routes are now accessible in the EVM. Why is that important?

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is another EIP that was in Dankoo that's aside from 4844. I just wanted to call out this one specifically because it's pretty cool. This is beacon block routes are now accessible to the EVM. The beacon block route is a consensus layer thing. The EVM is an execution layer thing. And so we have the beacon chain and the state of the beacon chain, which is a block root, is now being made accessible to the Ethereum virtual machine, AKA the Ethereum application layer, AKA DeFi. So, like clients brings out two exciting use cases, proof of validator behavior and then efficient O of log proofs for historical block data. Basically, the proof of stake, the internet bond that is Ethereum, the staking and also

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  restaking state of things is being made accessible to Ethereum's own DeFi application layer. And so the actual protocol, and this is really good for Eigenlayer for AVSs that need to know the state of beacon blocks. So who's got the ETH where? And the AVSs of Eigenlayer can now know that. Same thing with like LSTs and LRTs. And so this is just a stronger coupling between the proof of stake layer of Ethereum and the DeFi layer of also of Ethereum. I thought that was worth pulling out.

• 53:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think a big question is, we painted this picture of gas fees have gone down for now on layer twos, but demand is going to increase and so they will increase in cost as things go. So where do we go from here? And there's two kind of categories I want to talk about for further reduction of layer two fees and expansion of the bandwidth of layer twos. One is on the Ethereum upgrade path. I'm gonna let you talk about that. But the other is, in parallel to all of this, what's actually happening is the layer twos themselves are improving in their ability to support bandwidth, execution bandwidth, let's call it. And so a few things- Things that are happening. One, of course, we've talked about so much, which is

• 54:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  parallelization of the EVMs, right? So of EVMs and also other virtual machines, like the SVM, putting that in a layer two. So we can have a very high throughput layer two that also increases our bandwidth and our TPS. We also have room to maneuver on ZK proving and verification cost decreases. So there's a lot of projects that are specifically working on that that will really help our ZK VMs and our ZK rollups. And then there's also just generally, you mentioned Arbitrum deploying some more called transaction compression, some optimization in terms of how they're posting data to Ethereum.

• 55:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so that is ongoing work and will continue to get better. I mean, I think Vitalik said there could be like gains of three to five X just from compression alone. And then everything else is still a bit too expensive. You still need like fractions of a penny. There's third-party DA solutions, you know, one of which is Celestia, which we've talked about before. Then Eigenlayer DA is coming aboard as well, which will be an absolute massive expansion in terms of data availability bandwidth if Ethereum mainchain is getting too expensive. So all of these solutions combined are going to continue to drop gas fees towards zero. Every time it spikes back up, it'll, it'll, there'll be an improvement and we'll get back down to zero.

• 55:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's also mainnet improvements coming as well, David. So like, what are the next Ethereum upgrades in Hard Forks? What are they going to do for bandwidth?

• 55:56David Hoffman?

  I'll invoke the words of Mike Norder here. We get 3X in terms of data availability. So blob space, the thing we just shipped, will get 3X larger for the next three to four years in a row. So we'll get a 3X by just increasing the blob count and gas modifications. We can kind of do that today. We'll, we'll get that throughout this year. In 2025, we'll get this thing called PeerDAS, Peer Data Availability Sampling. And then in 2026, these are all like super hypothetical timelines. When dank sharding comes around, we'll get another 3X. And these are 3Xs on top of each other. These aren't like linear 3Xs. These are exponential 3Xs. And so like, gas fees are just dying on Layer 2s. They're going to zero. It doesn't matter how much induced demand we can get, we can also also get more block space to like,

• 56:41David Hoffman?

  the logical conclusion, if we can't get there with mir just adding more data availability, we'll get there with ZK. The conclusion of Layer 2 gas fees is that they go away. They go away for the end user. They are perceived to be zero. They aren't actually zero, but they are so close to zero that the meta will just converge on somebody. Some third party is going to pay for their users' transaction fees because that's a user acquisition strategy. Gas fees on the Layer 2 are just like, in the fullness of time, which is only 3-4 years, going away.

• 57:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 57:13David Hoffman?

  It's going to be a feeless ecosystem.

• 57:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Think about, think about the internet, right? You don't pay server fees for using a website or for, you know, going on X or like doing something on Facebook, right? You won't pay fees, I think, in the future in these Layer 2s and Layer 3s. So, David, we got more to cover, man. We talked a lot about blobs because we're so excited about them, but there's more.

• 57:32David Hoffman?

  Sad it's over.

• 57:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  What else?

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  A brand new Layer 2 is coming to mainnet. You thought we were over with innovating on Layer 2s. You thought wrong. Tensor on Solana dropping a token and Solana's Gito getting rid of its mempool. What's the deal with that? All of this and more, but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Especially Mantle, the Layer 2 with the highest native stake to yield in crypto that you can also get Eigenlayer points if you put your METH for Mantle on the Mantle Layer 2, which is now also 10x cheaper thanks to blobs. Let's go here for Mantle right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, is the first DAO-led Web 3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network. A brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack,

• 58:15David Hoffman?

  but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web 3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web 3 on-boarded, like Game7 for Web 3 gaming and Bybit for TV. And liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle.

• 59:00David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is revolutionizing the DeFi space, not just by enabling swaps, but by empowering you to swap smarter with a comprehensive suite of products for faster, safer, and more informed swapping. Say goodbye to pop-up wallet extensions. The Uniswap extension is coming soon, and this extension is not a pop-up. It is a sidebar in your browser that persists no matter where you are on the web. This means you can swap, sign, or send, and receive crypto anytime, anywhere, without obstructing your browser window. But that's not all. The Uniswap web app now features limit orders, so you can buy and sell any token at your price, on your terms, without having to watch the market. And the best part? Limit orders are built on Uniswap X, which means no gas fees. Also new to the web app is the data and insights pages with real-time candlestick charts, price data, transaction logs, and detailed pool data,

• 59:45David Hoffman?

  all integrated into the Uniswap web app. All of these new releases come together to create one platform to help you swap smarter every time, no matter where you are, on web, mobile, or on the extension. Click the link in the show notes to sign up for the extension waitlist and download the mobile app. Start swapping smarter with Uniswap. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world, driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile DeFi. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest-growing Web3 wallets, Cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Cello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a Layer 2. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition?

• 1:00:30David Hoffman?

  The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forums. Follow Cello on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Swell, the LST project that turned into an LRT project when Eigenlayer came out, is now building their Layer 2 with native restaking yields built in. So we're integrating all of the innovations that 2023 and 2024 have brought us with Swell.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Swell's own ZK EVM from the Polygon Chain Development Kit, built in collaboration with EigenDA, so DA for data availability, and Altlayer as their rollup as a service provider, along with Chainlink. And so they're getting all of the big players into the Swell Layer 2 as well. And I think, if I'm understanding this correctly, they are taking the BLAST playbook and putting in native yield into the Swell Layer 2, except this time not just with staking yield, but with restaking yield as well. So like Swell just putting a platypus of a Layer 2 together, taking all the innovations that they can from corners of Ethereum.

• 1:01:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really cool. All this stuff is brand new, right? ZK EVM, EigenDA is not even out yet. Altlayer is kind of brand new, and then Chainlink and smushing it all together on top of an LRT.

• 1:01:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the Gas Token is going to be Swell's LRT token, the restaked Swell ETH token.

• 1:02:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there's going to be a lot of these like kind of vertical stack type plays as well. So this came out, we haven't had a chance to really look at it, but do you know the crypto wallet Zirion? They're fantastic way to see your crypto portfolio. They have a, you know, Web3 wallet in your browser as well. They are building a Layer 2, and their take on it, their spin on it is it's going to be zero fees. This is exactly what we were just talking about before the break.

• 1:02:29David Hoffman?

  That's what I was saying.

• 1:02:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they're going to subsidize fees. Why? For user acquisition, for onboarding. If it only costs like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a year, why wouldn't you just subsidize fees?

• 1:02:40David Hoffman?

  Just get the VCs to pay for it.

• 1:02:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just server costs. So really cool to see Zirion do this. I don't think they'll be the last. I think we will see so many Layer 2s this cycle of different projects, DeFi projects maybe, like wallet providers, that sort of thing, going and just building a full vertical stack here. So pretty exciting.

• 1:02:59David Hoffman?

  Tensor has introduced the Tensor Token. Tensor, of course, it's the Blur OpenSea on Solana. And so there is an airdrop for all the Tensorians. Actually, the Tensorians are the people who don the PFPs. But I don't know, if you own the Tensor Token, you're maybe a Tensorian too. I'll leave you that up to the Tensorian community. If you have been paying attention to the Airdrop Hunter from Bankless, that's us. This has been in the Airdrop Hunter for a long time. So congrats to all of the Bankless Airdrop Hunters who hunted this airdrop.

• 1:03:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, tell me a little bit about GTO. So I saw this and you threw it in the agenda because I think you really wanted to talk about it.

• 1:03:32David Hoffman?

  It's a pretty big deal.

• 1:03:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  GTO is kind of like a mix between, for Solana, it's kind of like Flashbots a little bit and it's kind of like Lido. So they do staking for Sol and they also provide some kind of MEV protection type services and a way to harness that inside of a Solana client. So the news here is GTO Labs had decided to suspend the mempool offered through GTO Block Engine due to negative externalities impacting users on Solana. What the heck does this mean? What are we talking about here?

• 1:04:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the way that Solana works, Solana does not have a mempool. It has just rolling block construction, so blocks and like transactions are put into blocks as they come in. And then the validator just puts that block into the chain.

• 1:04:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the mempool itself, that's like the holding container for all the transactions that are in queue that have not yet been settled on chain, right? It's just this giant holding container.

• 1:04:27David Hoffman?

  Which is where typically blockchains, that's how they're constructed. Bitcoin has a mempool, Ethereum has a mempool, most blockchains have a mempool. Solana's goal is to move so incredibly fast that transactions just skip over whatever would be a mempool and they just go straight into the chain. GTO needed to make a mempool because GTO is this MEV organization orchestration optimization part of Solana, module of Solana, if you will. And so they need to have a mempool because they need people to reorder their transactions. And so there needs to be this way of waiting room for, call it like block builders in Solana to reorder their transactions, take out the MEV, because that's the business model, and then give it to the GTO Sol holders. Kind of in the same way that like this is basically how Ethereum works.

• 1:05:13David Hoffman?

  GTO turned off their mempool, which basically means that they turned off their product. Basically turning off all the MEV extraction that would go to GTO Sol holders. So there's now, there's not really any difference between holding GTO Sol and holding normally staked Sol, other than that you can use it in DeFi.

• 1:05:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why'd they have to turn it off?

• 1:05:31David Hoffman?

  Because they were getting sandwich attacked. And this is a very normal, very expected thing to happen in the MEV world. Like, sandwich attacking is MEV. And what does GTO do? It organizes off-chain MEV so that MEV can get extracted and put into GTO's soul. But there's so much sandwich attacking was happening that they just decided that this is just a net negative for the Solana ecosystem as a whole. Because like, these weren't like, these aren't like 1 to 3 to 5% sandwich attacks. These are people with like Tradingbots and Telegram, just like not caring about slippage and then getting sniped for like 50, 80%. And so, they just turned off the mempool because they couldn't get a grip on this MEV that was coming in.

• 1:06:14David Hoffman?

  I actually learned that GTO has a Terms of Service that says like, "Hey, you actually can't front-run or sandwich attack."

• 1:06:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:06:21David Hoffman?

  And the sandwich attackers are like, "I don't care about your Terms of Service." And so, this is putting like Solana GTO into like this interesting place. This is like, "MEV, what do?" Which has been like the big question that Ethereum asks itself when we discovered.

• 1:06:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a thorny, it's a hard question, isn't it?

• 1:06:39David Hoffman?

  So like, Solana is in like 2020 Ethereum land when like Phil Dian just discovered MEV. And they're like, "All right, what do we do about this?" And so, like, the GTO team are Chad's, like, super technically strong. So I'm interested to see the solution that they come up with. Like, this has kind of been my expectation for the Solana ecosystem. Like, they've always been like, "Yeah, how do we pay for validators?" Like, MEV.

• 1:07:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, the reason they haven't had that before, they haven't had this problem before, is basically there hasn't been enough like MEV opportunity. There hasn't been enough like upside in terms of block ordering.

• 1:07:13David Hoffman?

  Activity on Solana until now.

• 1:07:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now there is. A ton of the meme coin energy is happening on Solana. And I'm sure it's like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of MEV opportunity right now.

• 1:07:22David Hoffman?

  Right. Right, right. And so like, to be clear, the MEV opportunities are still there. They are just like, Gito is saying like, actually, that's not our problem anymore. There might even be like a legal concern here because like you don't want to be the thing that's facilitating MEV or sandwich attacks.

• 1:07:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're being pushed back to the valid, like the actual kind of validators.

• 1:07:39David Hoffman?

  It's just going back into the normal Solana Layer 1 validator set. And so like all now, all the validators are getting the MEV and like the MEV extractors are more efficiently able to extract without that going back into the protocol.

• 1:07:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  That doesn't mean it's not a problem. The sandwich attacks have not gone away.

• 1:07:53David Hoffman?

  It's an even worse problem now.

• 1:07:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now you just can't see them.

• 1:07:55David Hoffman?

  It's just now it's Solana's problem, not Gito's problem.

• 1:07:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, I do have some confidence that they will figure this out, right? But it, but it's a thorny problem.

• 1:08:05David Hoffman?

  It's a thorny problem.

• 1:08:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  No blockchain ecosystem has figured it out. By the way, Bitcoin is going to have to figure these things out as well. With all of the Bitcoin layer twos.

• 1:08:14David Hoffman?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:08:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. There will have to be some, you know, Gito for Bitcoin, some sort of flashbots for Bitcoin. So we'll see how that evolves.

• 1:08:23David Hoffman?

  It is currently March. Lucas from Gito is going to be at Permissionless. And so I think over the next six months, we're going to actually get a lot of clarity as to like how Solana as an ecosystem is going to solve its own MEV problems. I think Lucas is at the spearhead of this whole thing. So since he's at Permissionless, I think that's going to be one of the themes of content that me and Mike and the other Permissionless content organizers talk about.

• 1:08:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, Luke. You have, you have six months to work on this. We'll see you in Salt Lake in October. Thanks, Lucas. David, did you see this? I'm just going to play the clip. Michael Saylor.

• 1:08:53David Hoffman?

  Michael Saylor clip. Here we go.

• 1:08:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  He is on MarketWatch, traditional finance media. Here he is.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  To be honest, most of the people who are, yes, sure, some people pass it on to their children. But like, most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets at a profit. So I guess.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Let me say it a different way.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  People that use fiat currency as a store of value, there's a name for them. We call them poor. Okay? Anybody that's rich in the world, they own property.

• 1:09:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that sounds absolutely terrible. At some level, though, that is classic Michael Saylor.

• 1:09:28David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's some truth to it, too.

• 1:09:31David Hoffman?

  Decently savage, decently like correct. We don't have to call them poor, but like this has been the thing that you and I have been talking about on Bankless since the inception of Bankless. Fiat currencies and central banks make people who use those fiat currencies poor. That's why the stock market has been up only and savers have been down only since the inception of or the inception of fiat currencies in the 70s when we went away from the gold standard.

• 1:09:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Savings accounts suck.

• 1:09:56David Hoffman?

  That's what he's talking about. He's just being savage about it.

• 1:09:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, anyone who gets any amount of wealth does not hold their money in fiat any longer in dollars or in a bank account, right? They're buying real estate, they're buying stocks, they're buying like traditional store of value type assets, right? And that's kind of what he's saying, but wow, putting it so boldly, only Michael Saylor can do that. A few exciting Bankless Ventures raises that we wanted to bring up, both because we're excited about these projects and also you should know that Bankless Ventures is investing in them, one of which is Eclipse Labs. This is a 50 million Series A, a pretty exciting layer two. What are they building?

• 1:10:32David Hoffman?

  Eclipse, we had Neil on forever ago. It is the Solana virtual machine as an Ethereum layer two, using Celestia for data availability and risk zero for ZK proving. It was actually where I got the term platypus layer two. And so other investors include DBA, that's John Charbonneau, Polychain, Robot Ventures, but being led by placeholder and Hack VC, that's Chris Bernuski, and also the people over at Hack, along with some angels, Barnaby from the Ethereum Foundation, Austin Federer from the Solana Foundation, Hazu Eric Wall DC Investor, Santiago Santos. Pretty cool. It just explains itself. Take the Solana virtual machine that everyone knows and loves, place it as a layer two on Ethereum, make it go even faster and be even cheaper. See what happens. See what happens.

• 1:11:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  We also have Click. They raised their 8 million Series A, that's a Bankless Ventures investment. Click is doing a ton of exciting things right now. This is a compute coordination network. I think one big reason why you and I were bullish is they've created this like identity oracle, oracle, and you know, on-chain identity has been a thorny problem for crypto to solve. It's been an unsolved problem, but if you're trying to drop an airdrop, if you're trying to incent a community and you want to know who the humans are, who the Resistant unique humans are versus who the bots are and who the farmers are. You need a solution to do that and Click has this kind of anti-sibyl identity oracle where you can plug in your web two profiles and qualify potentially for airdrops.

• 1:12:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just one of like 100 different solutions this team is brewing up. So I'm pretty excited to back those guys as well.

• 1:12:06David Hoffman?

  Think about just like all the data that you leave around web two and your Spotify account and your Twitter account. Like whatever corners of the internet that you go about and Click is trying to get that data into just like a useful, composable bit of information inside of web three. So web two data allowing to unlock doors, create doors that could be unlocked inside of web three.

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we said we had something for bankless listeners, bankless podcast listeners. And it's time to unveil what that is right now. Yes. David, I'm a huge Spotify user, you know. I think you are too, because I see you on Discord. It's always like, David's listening to Spotify. I don't know if you're listening to podcasts or what you're listening to, but the news.

• 1:12:48David Hoffman?

  I'm listening to the sheepdogs, let me tell you that.

• 1:12:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome. The news this week.

• 1:12:51David Hoffman?

  Or lately, the Grateful Dead.

• 1:12:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay. It's Grateful Dead for the bull market. Yeah. I'm sure people are excited to hear that. But now the news is the bankless premium feed is on Spotify officially. So if you are a bankless citizen, the old way of getting the bankless feed was using the RSS feed on, plug it into Apple or something, you could still totally do that. You can also get the bankless premium feed on Spotify. And the premium feed gives you early access to everything we publish here, also bonus episodes.

• 1:13:24David Hoffman?

  Of which plenty are coming.

• 1:13:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the way you could think about this is the main public feed is sort of the 100 level content, the 200 level content and the premium feed all features all of that, ad free, by the way, and also 300 level content, 400 level content. And we are publishing more and more to the premium feed this year that I think like, you know, the casual bankless fans wouldn't be as interested in, but the deep fans and like the deep crypto journalists.

• 1:13:50David Hoffman?

  On the frontier, yeah.

• 1:13:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  With like all this innovation and. And exploration of the crypto frontier. There will be lots of research episodes, call them research episodes, going on to the premium fee as well, just some other fun goodies as well. So if you're already a citizen and you want to get this into Spotify, you want to unlock this door, this area is a link in the show notes to get the Spotify premium feed unlocked to you. If you're not a citizen, you can get 15% off because that's what we're going to give you for our fourth birthday on the podcast. Spotify 24 is the code. There is also a link in the show notes to unlock Bankless Premium for 15% off in Spotify.

• 1:14:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, let's get to the meme of the week as we end this. What are we looking at here?

• 1:14:28David Hoffman?

  Dad, why is my sister's name Rose? Because your mother loves roses, son. Thanks, Dad. No problem, Blob.

• 1:14:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a dad with his son. His son is driving. Apparently, the father named his child Blob, which, you know.

• 1:14:43David Hoffman?

  It's a great name.

• 1:14:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great name.

• 1:14:44David Hoffman?

  Shout out to whoever decides to name their kids Blob.

• 1:14:49David Hoffman?

  Babies get made every single bull market and at least some of you should name your kids Blob.

• 1:14:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, a class of 2024, babies of 2024, Blob babies. Guys.

• 1:15:00David Hoffman?

  We also have a moment of zen.

• 1:15:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is crazy.

• 1:15:02David Hoffman?

  You already heard the clip, but now have you heard the song?

• 1:15:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto remix, Michael Saylor. So enjoy that. Guys, got to end with this, of course, some disclosures. Both David and I are investors in Swell. We're also investors in a bunch of the layer twos we named today. You can always see our disclosures at bankless.com/disclosures. Also, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  What do you do with the Bitcoin besides it just gather value?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Real estate developers in New York City, they're not buying the real estate because they want to live in it.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  But like, most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets to add a profit.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  People that use fiat currency as a store of value, we call them whore. We call them whore. People that use fiat currency, we call them whore. We call them whore. We call them whore. We call them whore.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  We call them whore.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Okay. Right, like, the point is, if, if you have the superior asset, it's going up forevermore. Forevermore.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Right, I mean, right, but I mean, we can all look Bitcoin sort of as forevermore.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  People that use fiat currency as a store of value, we call them whore. We call them whore. People that use fiat currency, we call them whore. We call them whore. We call them whore. We call them whore.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  There's a name for it.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  We call them whore.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  We call them whore.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  We call them whore. Whore, whore. We call them whore. Whore, whore. We call them whore.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  Whore, whore. We call them whore.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Whore, whore. Okay.