ROLLUP: Bitcoin ATH's In Sight | Coinbase Crashes | Blast Mainnet Live

Bankless Weekly Rollup Last Week Of February ------ 🌐 CARTESI | MODULAR EXECUTION ON LINUX https://bit.ly/3SYkjzF ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ 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 ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:03:26 Bull Market Hype https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1762873948847440333?s=46 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1762977062225145933?s=20 https://warpcast.com/ssj2/0x365adfd3 https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1762611219121234165?s=20 00:12:09 Markets https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1762802897518215405?t=dgPNsdAH9BvMoJNsH8tqVA&s=19 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1762802897518215405?t=dgPNsdAH9BvMoJNsH8tqVA&s=19 https://twitter.com/jseyff/status/1763069374867427767?s=46 https://twitter.com/matt_hougan/status/1762846266093125793?s=46&t=iahr7Lh5v08SSM_Ery-bGw https://twitter.com/matt_hougan/status/1762846266093125793?s=46&t=iahr7Lh5v08SSM_Ery-bGw https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-23/ria-carson-group-greenlights-four-spot-bitcoin-etfs-for-retail-buyers https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/02/28/morgan-stanley-evaluating-spot-bitcoin-etfs-for-its-giant-brokerage-platform-sources/ https://twitter.com/HHorsley/status/1760763968187154923 00:20:27 L2 Update https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary 00:24:39 Coinbase Down https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1762933446194901140?s=46 00:25:52 Reddit Buys BTC and ETH https://twitter.com/QwQiao/status/1760767461253628254?s=20 https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1760763758467830016 00:31:07 Kraken vs The SEC https://twitter.com/DavidLRipley/status/1760829432292405368 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1761123526247916020?s=20 https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1761033870139613514?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1761033870139613514?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://blog.kraken.com/news/introducing-kraken-institutional?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2024_q1_institutional_launch https://blog.kraken.com/news/introducing-kraken-institutional?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2024_q1_institutional_launch 00:35:43 Gemini Earn Customers Bailed Out https://twitter.com/geminitrustco/status/1762954631150207226?s=46 https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1762966619112825249?s=20 00:39:22 Uniswap Fee Switch https://x.com/UniswapFND/status/1761029569983971567?s=20 https://twitter.com/eek637/status/1761029351263318151?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA https://twitter.com/eek637/status/1761029351263318151?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA https://twitter.com/TheiaResearch/status/1761077943563104613 https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1761048443756421259?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1761048443756421259?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA 00:49:16 Dencun Updates https://twitter.com/timbeiko/status/1762492163869614411?s=46&t=2SMKWt7-hlJuSdhYSlImeQ https://twitter.com/timbeiko/status/1762492163869614411?s=46&t=2SMKWt7-hlJuSdhYSlImeQ https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1762849105481441405?s=20 00:52:46 Blast Mainnet Launch https://x.com/Blast_L2/status/1762274684316405908?s=20 00:53:52 Coinbase Validator Report https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/discover/insights-analysis/execution-client-diversity 00:55:41 Lens Protocol is Permissionless https://x.com/LensProtocol/status/1762591256381927799?s=20 00:58:38 Uncovering Satoshi https://twitter.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1761040089075888292?s=20 01:02:06 Avalanche Goes Down https://status.avax.network/ 01:02:35 Donald Trump Crypto Take 01:04:07 Liz Warren Take https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1762612018312315069?s=20 01:06:52 Bankless Meetup https://x.com/banklesshq/status/1763247319951007923?s=46 https://x.com/mheinrich/status/1762990723992092796?s=20 01:08:33 Raises https://x.com/bounce_bit/status/1762874894520656120?s=20 https://twitter.com/ether_fi/status/1762841187356979302?s=46 Meme of The Week https://twitter.com/greg16676935420/status/1759688234672505103?s=20 01:14:24 Moment of Zen https://www.instagram.com/reed_harrington23?igsh=aWlla2d4N3A0bjc0 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

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

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Station, happy first week of March. Welcome to the bull market. David, how you feeling, man?

• 0:09David Hoffman?

  I'm feeling pretty good, Ryan. Yeah, it's ETH Denver week. Bitcoin is pumping like it's never pumps before. ETH is following on suit. Rest of the market is waiting patiently. But, you know, when Bitcoin adds $200 billion to its market cap in one week, yeah, yeah. Almost $10,000 to the Bitcoin price in a single week. Yeah, it turns out the Bitcoin ETF was bullish. Who knew?

• 0:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we're gonna have giant smiles on our face throughout this entire episode because we are definitely in bull market territory. Gotta start with Bitcoin.

• 0:42David Hoffman?

  I'm throwing my capitulation flag on the quiet all-time highs.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that didn't last long. Did that last a week, two weeks?

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  Coinbase went down. It's breaking into like the top 100 on the App Store. It's yeah, that was the quiet part of shout.

• 0:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Your heart was in the right place, but I kind of felt like that was not gonna work out, man. The market is not going to listen to you, to be quiet when Bitcoin is almost crossing, has crossed 60K and all-time highs are in sight. So we gotta talk about that first. What else we got?

• 1:11David Hoffman?

  Coinbase went down, people freaked out, and then it recovered and things went up again. But the point is that Coinbase went down, which is

• 1:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bull market.

• 1:21David Hoffman?

  It's a bull market. It's a bull market. But like also like retail is here. Like people are re-downloading Coinbase for the first time in a long time. Also Kraken making some very big moves, dropping a reverse Uno card to Gary Gensler and launching Kraken Institutional in the same week. Just feels like once crypto starts winning, Ryan, we can't stop winning. And speaking of winning, Gemini has released its settlement with Genesis. You're never gonna guess how much money you're going to get back, Ryan.

• 1:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, me personally. You're talking about me personally. Thank you.

• 1:54David Hoffman?

  And anyone who is a depositor of Gemini earn. Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna be happy with the number that you're getting back.

• 2:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some good news. Unexpected news too. We got Uniswap is back with a fee switch proposal and prices were pumping on the uni tokens. So there's another one that caught a dead.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  When a multi-billion dollar ERC 20 token pumps 70% off of a proposal, like we might be in a bull market.

• 2:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lens Protocol is now permissionless. Also Blast is now live on mainnet. We gotta check in with that. But before we get to all of that, A message from our friends and sponsors over at Cartezi. David, who is Cartezi? What do they want the Bankless Nation to know?

• 2:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Cartezi is working in the app chain ecosystem. I actually met some of the team and founders over at our Bankless meetup here at ETH Denver. It's ETH Denver week, that's why the background of my place is not my home in Brooklyn, because I'm in Denver. So they have a $1 million ecosystem grant initiative. So if you are a developer who likes to work in Linux, because this is a Linux alt VM modular, modular app chain platform, Cartezi. We're going to talk about that a little bit further on in the show. But if you are a developer who likes Linux and wants to build app chains and build your own custom VM, there is a link in the show notes to get some money to go build with Cartezi.

• 3:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's kind of, you have to like Linux and you have to like money, right? Because the $1 million, that's not a small grant here from Cartezi.

• 3:16David Hoffman?

  If you, if you like Linux and you like money, wow, that's a pretty good overlapping Venn diagram.

• 3:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, there's a link in the show notes where you can go apply for the Cartezi grants program. David, you know what? I think it's time, before we get into the actual numbers on the week, which we're going to get to in just a second, just to spend some time reflecting. Because we are on the cusp of crypto all-time highs. We're almost at Bitcoin all-time highs and pretty much everything else is going to follow. So I think we should just like enjoy this moment. We should just take a minute to reflect. And you wanted to share something over from Eric Wall.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  I think Eric Wall set it up just so perfectly. I'm going to read out a tweet from his. He says, "So the market did really wipe out SBF, Doquan, Three Hours Capital, and then it went shooting for all-time highs? Like, not as a joke, but for real? So Luna really did go to zero. SBF really is in a cell prison. Quan is really getting extradited. Sue had to drop every last one of his shitcoin logos from his display name, and Kyle is in a shed somewhere chopping wood." That's a Twitter meme for those who are on Twitter. "The cryptocurrency saga moves like poetry. How is this real? When did you experience something like this that you need to take it in with every fiber of your body? Every hair should be standing on your skin."

• 4:34David Hoffman?

  I do want to say that this, this week particularly... Was a monumental week in crypto history and we don't get many like those often. So it's worth appreciating, it's worth reflecting. And the kind of the cool thing about why it's such a big deal is because Bitcoin pumps so hard. Like actually, that is why this is such a monumental week. It pumped $10,000 inside of a week because of the Bitcoin ETF. We're going to get into some of the milestones, the new high watermarks, not just for Bitcoin ETFs, but global ETFs. And it's just a sign of just like a milestone that this entire industry has crossed over.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  Because a lot of just what Bitcoin's destiny, its manifest destiny has been finally achieved in this first week. Legitimacy, acceptance, adoption in TradFi with all the boomers buying the bags. And we also still get to have our own internal ecosystem where we have Bitcoin pumping $10,000 on one side, and then we have dog shitcoin meme coins also pumping on our side of things.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think Eric's reflection is really important here because he's basically saying, "Look at what we just lived through." Like, how is any of this real? It feels like we lived through some kind of simulation. Like, this is just such a bizarro world show. I can't believe we went through this over the last 24 months. It's been absolutely crazy, just like all of the character arcs, you know, all of the stories that were closed. It's just such a crazy time in crypto. I don't think I will ever forget the last two years, that's for sure.

• 6:09David Hoffman?

  And the sitcom that is crypto is absolutely unreal. Just to really tie off a loose end here, can you just scroll down so we can see Kyle Davies chopping wood?

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 6:22David Hoffman?

  This is a tweet that he made where he just says, "This is Kyle Davies. Let me share with you my newest passion, chopping wood. I spend hours every day in meditation, building fires from scratch. Each swing of the axes is physical, relaxing, unless my mind explores new boundaries." "I'm sure if everyone was chopping wood right now, we'd be at 1 million BTC." Just insane copy pasta.

• 6:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Former crypto billionaire, I think, probably, or close to that, Kyle Davies, and one of the co-founders of Three Hours Capital. And now he's chopping wood this bull cycle.

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  Chopping wood for heat, you know?

• 6:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I want to share another reflection, like to everyone who stayed during the bear market, you guys stayed for the last 24 months. If you're tuning into Bankless, you know, like you're probably not new here. You probably been around. You're probably listening during the dark period of the last 24 months. I just want to say this, in the upcoming weeks and days, a bunch of people will tell you, you didn't deserve these gains, right? Crypto, you got lucky. It's, you know, like all time high, like making money shouldn't be this easy. Let me, let me tell you, it actually was really hard. And for those who stayed, you did your research, you accumulated, when everybody else was running away, you resisted the overwhelming urge to believe

• 7:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  all of the FUD, that crypto was dead. You didn't follow the herd. They left and you stayed. And don't let anyone tell you, you don't deserve these gains. Okay? Because you earned it over the last two years of time. And that's really when you earn it is during the bear market season. So, congrats. Just, just spend a moment to, to think about that.

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  Big old congrats.

• 7:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well done. Now, don't get too high on your horse, though, right?

• 7:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not too soon, not too soon. We have to save some pats on the back for later, too, when we actually do cross all time highs.

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  Also, just big shout out to everyone's net worth who's higher now than it was at the peak of the market last cycle. We're not at all time highs now, but you know, shout out to the people who bought $20,000 Bitcoin. Shout out to the people who bought sub $1,000 ETH. Shout out to people who bought like $10 Solana.

• 8:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this meme-

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  Accumulating in the bear markets is like, you know, once every four years opportunity, and that last bear market won't be coming back again.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this meme that you sent before the episode really sums it up of what the balance we're going to have to strike during the bull market is, you know, like two buttons to click, like two choices, and somebody saying, this is David, the past couple of weekly rollups. One, button one is stay humble. Button two is, I effing told you so. You are shit, like, we are juxtaposed between those two options. Like, there's a little bit you want to stay humble, and a little bit like, eh, we were right, we stayed, it feels good.

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Surprise. Believing in crypto is the right answer. Who knew?

• 9:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  One thing I was thinking as well is as you sort of zoom out, you know how often we've compared crypto to the internet, the birth of the internet. And if you, if you, if you go to Google and you type like the consensus date of the birth of the internet was 1983, actually. Okay. So 1983 is very interesting. If you extrapolate that forward, 15 years later from 1983 was about 1998. All right. And I don't know if some people remember what the internet felt like in 1998. It was very much like new territory. It was this, this exciting technology that this horizon. And that was like right before the dot com boom. Okay. It was just like a little bit into it.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then of course, over the corresponding years, 1999 and 2000, you got an absolute explosion in market prices. Right. So that was 15 years into the internet. It's very interesting, David, if you, if you look at crypto right now, we are 2024 is actually 15 years now into crypto. So the Bitcoin just celebrated its 15th birthday from the first block. We are now 15 years. And so the question is, what's going to happen next? I feel like every cycle we talk about, well, it's like the dot com bubble, right? It's the dot com boom and the dot com bust. I wonder if we're actually going to see that this time. Do you have a take in like what year it is in terms of the internet? Do you think we're in 1998? Or do you think we're like after, you know, the, the dot com boom? Do you think we're in the, the 2000s somewhere?

• 10:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think really you can only understand patterns and I don't, I don't think you can really carry it over one to one. I think the biggest evidence to say as to why crypto will experience some sort of dot com boom sized movement in the markets is A, we are actually in tapped into traditional financial markets right now, and there is the colliding particle of AI as well. The AI crypto overlap and AI crypto retail speculation. And just innovation in AI where a lot of that value is going to be able to be much more easily expressed in crypto tokens, which are easier to mint because what is an ERC 20 token other than like a printing press for financial assets? I think like it's really those two things coming together.

• 11:11David Hoffman?

  That is like, A, we're redoing the internet, both on the crypto side of things and on the AI side of things, but crypto is offering the financialization of the AI side. Just like crypto is going to be able to tokenize to express value of AI innovations way better than any like public listing on a stock market. Unless we do like a whole like SPAC era again. But I think that crypto AI synergy, I think, is very, very strong.

• 11:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I also think, so for me personally, it's still my take that we're going to absolutely boom and then we're going to crash. Like, it's still my take that there's no such thing as the super cycle because this always happens in these fractal patterns.

• 11:46David Hoffman?

  Paper gains can become very weighty.

• 11:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think we're going to go higher than anyone thought this bull market and then that will be followed by a crash. What say you to that? Where are you on team super cycle? This time it's different.

• 11:58David Hoffman?

  No, like I think we have been in one super cycle since 2009.

• 12:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see how it plays out, man. We're in the bull market now. Let's get to some charts. What is Bitcoin like on the week? Thanks to Kraken for providing these glorious Bitcoin charts and Kraken Pro interface. What are we looking at?

• 12:15David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin is moving really, really fast. I have to update these prices in real time. $62,150. It is down a whopping $2,000 from the moment I woke up this morning. It is still at $62,000. It is up 21% on the week. We are 9% away from all time highs. 9% away from all time highs.

• 12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what is the number for all time highs that we got to beat?

• 12:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, previous all time high set on, what was the day? November 10th, 2021, $69,000. Nice.

• 12:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, 69,000. So we get above 69 and we're good. We get to 70 and we're good. Do you know Bitcoin has already passed all time highs as measured in the fiat currencies of about 30 countries? That includes China and India. This is a tweet from Balaji showing all of the countries where Bitcoin is already at all time high in terms of their their local fiat currency. We're not there with US dollars, but I mean, we're getting real close, David.

• 13:16David Hoffman?

  I mean, US dollars is the final boss, right? Like, all fiat currencies are losing to the dollar, and then the dollar will soon be losing to Bitcoin.

• 13:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of the big stories, one of the big reasons why, has been inflows. TradFi, retail, inflows.

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  That has been the big story. Every for the last two weeks has been the crescendoing volumes into the Bitcoin ETFs.

• 13:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's safe to say beyond anyone's expectations, right?

• 13:41David Hoffman?

  Well, beyond anyone's expectations.

• 13:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, even even the bulls are pretty surprised about the the success that the Bitcoin ETFs have having. So BlackRock and friends, they now have over 300,000 Bitcoin. Okay, so ETFs now hold 1.5% of all Bitcoin supply currently in existence. And just a quick reminder, it's been less than 60 days since these things have been released, right?

• 14:04David Hoffman?

  This is nuts.

• 14:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's absolutely crazy. So let's go into a James Safer tweet here. He is looking at inflows. Record inflows, he says. What's this showing us?

• 14:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. BlackRock, Ibit, took in $612 million of Bitcoin on its own. The whole net group of all Bitcoin ETFs took in $673 million, and then we had $216 million of outflows from Grayscale. Still sizable outflows from Grayscale, but is just getting completely overwhelmed by inflows into everything else. And this was just in one day. This was one day.

• 14:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Bitcoin purchased by ETFs one particular day last week. That was February 2028. The the amount of Bitcoin purchased by ETFs was about 10,000. The amount of new Bitcoin issuance, so that's supply, was 900. That's like a 10 to 1. 10 to 1.

• 14:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, over 10 to 1. Yeah, absolutely nuts. And then also, this big old reminder, we are in like inning two of the full might and power of the Bitcoin ETFs. So this platform with $30 billion in it, Carson Group, has been approved, it proved itself to offer the spot Bitcoin ETFs to its customers. And so Carson, like who manages people's money, just allowed the BlackRock, the Fidelity, Bitwise, Franklin, Templeton Bitcoin ETFs to its customers. So there are wealth managers, there are platforms, there are brokerages that have not allowed their users to yet buy the Bitcoin ETF, and they are also allowing that to happen. That's going to happen like starting now, moving forward.

• 15:40David Hoffman?

  And then later, in like, I don't know, inning four or five or six, there's actually going to be the sell side, where like, sales, where people go like, "Hey, client of mine, have you considered Bitcoin in your portfolio?" Like, that hasn't happened yet. And that is a lot of money.

• 15:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What you're talking about is this, this kind of second inning. So like, the first inning, we've had sort of, you could buy it directly on BlackRock, you can buy it directly in Fidelity. The registered investment advisors are now coming aboard. That's what the Carlson platform is. They are, you know, the, the Charles Schwab types of independent registered investment advisors that advise, you know, retail dollars. Well, now they can have exposure to these assets. They have the option to purchase these assets on behalf of their clients. Another one, just like that, David, 10 times larger, Morgan Stanley says that they are evaluating spot Bitcoin ETFs, and they have just a massive giant brokerage platform. So the RIAs are starting to get involved, and that's going to unlock a whole bunch of capital. So the pipe, the bandwidth

• 16:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  in this thing for liquidity inflows is just getting bigger. One other comment I'll say is like, I feel a little bit bad for some of those investors who are depending on their registered investment advisor, right? Because like, they haven't been able to purchase this, like, they've been front run by us, by crypto natives, even, even by the BlackRocks and Fidelities of the world, not having the option to purchase Bitcoin, right? This is the case for why you should take some of your investment decisions in your own hands, and not just Like go with the the flow and go with the system.

• 17:11David Hoffman?

  When the crypto industry was really getting excited about the Bitcoin ETF like November, December of last year, like Bitcoin was 26 to like $38,000. And so all of these institutions that are lagging their own customers' ability to buy Bitcoin are selling their own customers $60,000, $70,000 Bitcoin. This is why it pays to be bakeless.

• 17:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Front run the opportunity.

• 17:32David Hoffman?

  Touch the chain, you know, like go go into the deep end, you know, get your private keys. Anyways, I think Hunter Horsey said it best, Hunter Horsey from Bitwise, he says, there's just so much in the works with advisors and wealth platforms. Bitcoin is arriving, not in one week, but 2024 is going to be a great year. I concur, I concur. And I will say, putting on my ETH maxi hat, when the ETH ETF gets approved, $1 into the ETH ETF is going to move the ETH price at least three times more than it would move the Bitcoin price because of how Ethereum market cap is one third the size of Bitcoin, at least, and that's base case.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  Because also there's much less ETH on exchanges because we have DeFi, we have like ETH in AVE, we have ETH in Eigenlayer, we have ETH on layer twos. And so like the ETH price movements are going to be like 3X is like such a bear case versus Bitcoin. It's going to be like five to five to like 8X times in price movements, a $1 inflows into the ETH ETF versus the Bitcoin ETF. Like, I need to call a doctor sometimes when I think about this.

• 18:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So so I think the market is just beginning to front run that, right? As they did, they started with Bitcoin, you know, like nine months ago, let's say. So let's talk about Ether on the week. Where did we start? Where did we end?

• 18:50David Hoffman?

  Up 19% of the week, started at 2960, ending at the current price of, well, I wrote in $3,500, but prices have moved, yeah, $3,430. Who knows what it will be tomorrow? So ETH BTC, the ratio between Bitcoin and Ether, down on the week. Well, this is actually the pattern that I've been noticing is that it's going down on weekdays. And then it recovers pretty bigly on weekends when, when the boomers can't buy Bitcoin. Like the boomers can't buy unless it's outside of working hours.

• 19:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why don't they?

• 19:23David Hoffman?

  And then during the weekends, the ETH ratio has, has been going up. And so like, I think like crypto natives have been like buying ETH consistently, but it only is getting expressed in the ratio on the weekends. And then during the weekday, it's just like the massive inflows from Wall Street comes in and then Bitcoin just like dominates everything. Like Bitcoin dominance is up bigly right now.

• 19:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I do agree though, like given the success of Bitcoin ETFs, right? If you just like kind of extrapolate that to Ethereum ETFs that have a decent chance of happening this year, right? That's going to be absolutely explosive. Let's talk about total crypto market caps, David. Are we above a trillion? Oh, wow. We are well above a trillion.

• 20:00David Hoffman?

  What do you mean are we above a trillion?

• 20:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, I meant two trillion.

• 20:04David Hoffman?

  You have said that too many times. We are well, yeah. So we put on $400 billion in market cap in the last week. Bitcoin was 50% of that. Okay. So we are at 2.4, above 2.4. 3 trillion, Ryan, was the top last cycle.

• 20:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're almost, so we're creeping on all time highs for total crypto market cap.

• 20:22David Hoffman?

  We're almost at universal all time highs.

• 20:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Okay. Let's switch over to layer twos. And this is a layer two update brought to you by Mantle, which is a new and upcoming layer two that we enjoy. So total locked value is about steady in ETH terms?

• 20:36David Hoffman?

  $30 billion. $30 billion. Yeah. No, we're crushing it. That's way up. Well, this is what happens when, when ETH price goes up.

• 20:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH goes up.

• 20:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ETH goes up. Yeah. So we're actually flat in ETH on layer twos in ETH terms, but you know, ETH is going up in price. So therefore we cross 30, I'm almost at $31 billion. But also this, the scaling factor, Ryan, setting new all time highs, especially with the area under the curve, which is like, you know, the significant thing. 8.8 Ethereum. So all layer twos are putting in 8.8 Ethereum's. So just a ton of scale happening up on the layer twos. And of course we have Deng Kun shipping to mainnet next week. I just kind of wanted to take a moment and highlight Mantle. I was talking with some of the Mantle team here at ETH Denver. So like, there's all these different activities going on differently, too, because they're also differentiated, right? Like, all the ZK rollups have so much transaction volume because the transactions are so cheap. Arbitrum Nova 2, because it has the off-chain DA.

• 21:30David Hoffman?

  Mantle, I think it's actually kind of like one of the more least understood chains, I would say, just because it's actually has this crazy like genesis story where the actual mantle layer two was in voted in by the mantle DAO. In contrast to what the Bybit exchange, which is where mantle came from, once the Bybit, like some of the founders wanted to layer one, but then the DAO was like, we want a layer two, so they made a layer two, because that's what happened. The real yield that you can get on mantle, because they're subsidizing it from their massive multi bit, like two plus something billion dollar ETH treasury, is some of the craziest yields in crypto. So like, M ETH, the mantle native staked ETH, is getting something like 7%, but then some DeFi apps on mantle are offering you

• 22:14David Hoffman?

  30% real ETH yield, like Innit Capital is one of these like native DeFi applications on mantle that's not anywhere else. Like mantle also has, it's like kind of homegrown native DeFi ecosystem where like, you know, previously people are used to like AVE or something, like the traditional synthetics like DeFi apps. But like mantle's got its own like new DeFi applications, kind of pushing the field, Innit being one of them. And you can get 30% real yield on your wrapped Ether inside of mantle, inside of Innit Capital. And that's in addition to the points that you can get from Innit. I think like mantle, it's like turning into like the yield chain. That's kind of my takeaway from my conversations with the mantle folks.

• 22:56David Hoffman?

  They just want like all of the best yields to happen on mantle and like importantly, real yields, not like pool tool yields that we saw last cycle.

• 23:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that like the story of ETH yield this cycle is

• 23:08David Hoffman?

  is huge. ETH productivity is a huge theme.

• 23:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I remember last kind of like DeFi summer, basically. I think we're going to repeat something very similar to DeFi summer, except in kind of like restaking. We're already midway through that. I mean, just seeing how Eigenlayer is blowing up and all the restaking protocols are blowing up. Like, we've talked about that before, but it's interesting this cycle where the source of yield is Ether, the asset primarily. Certainly dollars a little bit, but last time the story was all about dollar-denominated yield. And now what you're talking about right here is ETH-denominated yield. I'll remind everyone the disclaimer is like yield chasing is dangerous. So like when you go into some of these

• 23:44David Hoffman?

  New apps are dangerous, yeah.

• 23:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You see 20%, 30% type yields, right? Like, make sure you understand the risks of that yield. Sometimes it's smart contract risk, sometimes it's economic risk. Sometimes it's like counterparty, like you don't understand type risk. So be careful chasing yield. But that's what the market's going to do this entire cycle is interesting that's ETH-denominated this time.

• 24:05David Hoffman?

  Last thing to wrap up the market section, actually, no, we have a few more sections after this. Movers of the week, Ryan, do you know what, in addition to Bitcoin, are the big categories of movers this week?

• 24:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm looking at them and I'm a little bit sad, actually. I see, I see Arweave here, which I get that, that's like the whole AI plus crypto kind of thing. But then I see Pepe, I see Bonk, Dogecoin.

• 24:26David Hoffman?

  I will never fade a Dogecoin pump.

• 24:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool, Uniswap, though. I guess we'll talk about that later in the episode.

• 24:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're coming up pretty, pretty soon on that. We'll talk about that actually in the big news. Okay, yeah, rounding out the market section, Coinbase app was taken down by heavy traffic. This is as Bitcoin was pumping at a very like $3,000 in a single candle. Brian Armstrong tweeted out, "We had modeled a 10x surge in traffic and they also had load tested it. And then the traffic exceeded that number. It's expensive to keep services over provisions," he says, "but we need to keep on working on auto scaling solutions and killing any remaining bottlenecks. Thank you for bearing with us." So yeah, retail just like came flooding into Coinbase like, oh yeah, Bitcoin, it's cool

• 25:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's back.

• 25:11David Hoffman?

  And then Coinbase crashed and then like a bunch of Coinbase user accounts started showing like a balance of zero.

• 25:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that was scary.

• 25:18David Hoffman?

  Freaked out, yeah. And then Bitcoin, after pumping to like $64,000, dumped, crashed down to like $58,000 and then resumed up again. It's like when we move this fast, this quickly, just like volatility is just like back on the menu.

• 25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, people were freaking out though when they saw the balance of of zero in their Coinbase accounts and not entirely sure why that glitch happened as well. But look, it wouldn't be a bull market unless the Coinbase went down, right? Every single bull market I've been in crypto, Coinbase has been overwhelmed by demand and that's always a bullish sign. David, speaking bullish signs here, Reddit, you know, they are about to IPO. I think we mentioned this on a previous roll up. In some of their SEC filings, they mentioned this, "We invested some of our excess cash reserves," of course, like any large company, they have cash reserves, "they invested it in Bitcoin and Ether." On the corporate balance sheet, David, this is a continuing story that I think is going

• 26:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  to be important where you see, you know, Fortune 500, stock company, publicly traded companies throughout the world, investing some of their treasury into non-fiat sources like Bitcoin and Ether. Another thing they mentioned is, "And we also acquired Ether and Matic as a form of payment for sales of certain virtual goods." So not only did they explicitly take their cash reserves and put that into Bitcoin Ether just as a better store of value, you have to presume, but they also acquired Ether and also Matic in order to purchase block space in the future. It's kind of like a hedge for future block space purchases. This is so bullish, I think, the fact that like, I know this is just a trickle, but it's

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  part of a broader trend where I think we're going to see more and more crypto assets on company balance sheets moving forward.

• 27:05David Hoffman?

  Well, this was the big narrative of last cycle, remember? Like this was the whole thing. Like this is where the Bitcoin Treasuries website came about. Now we're just like starting it all over again. It's easier to put Bitcoin on your balance sheet when it's inside of an ETF, let me tell you that.

• 27:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, all the best narratives are multi-cycle narratives because you get to a certain point and then whoop, the tide like comes back and then and then everything sweeps back and you have to restart and now we're just picking up where we resumed. Eric Connor makes the point, "It's Bitcoin and Ether." That's that's a difference this cycle. Last cycle, you said it was just Bitcoin. I think you're right. Now it's Bitcoin and Ether. And I think that's a little bit different this cycle.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  It always was Ether. Ether got onto corporate balance sheets last cycle, too. And also, yeah, never mind. All right, moving up. Coming up next, Kraken reveals their side of the story with the SEC. Turns out, the SEC was playing dirty. Gemini Earn customers are getting how much of their money back? We're going to tell you exactly how much. Talk of the Uniswap fee switch has changed the entire sentiment around DeFi 1.0. And Blast has actually launched its mainnet. And Lens is now permissionless. This is like the best good news weekly roll up that we've had in like two years. So we're going to go here and from all of this good news. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. 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.

• 28:25David Hoffman?

  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. And there's an award-winning client support team available 24/7 to help you along the way, along with a whole range of educational guides, articles, and videos. With products and features like Kraken Pro and Kraken NFT Marketplace and a seamless app to bring it all together, it's really the perfect place to get your complete crypto experience. So check out the simple, secure, and powerful way for everyone to trade crypto, whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned pro. Go to kraken.com/banklist to see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss.

• 29:08David 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? 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,

• 29:50David Hoffman?

  price data, transaction logs, and detailed pool data, 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. Are you launching a token? Is it already live? How are you managing the legal and tax obligations for providing token grants to your team? It's no secret that token management gets complicated. Between learning all the legal language and tax obligations in every country that your team is in, token grant management can feel like an obstacle course. But it doesn't have to. That's where Toku steps in. Toku provides practical tools to handle token grants, allowing for effective oversight of token distributions and payroll tax compliance

• 30:33David Hoffman?

  for employees, contractors, advisors, and investors. They also handle tax withholdings through their real time tax calculations that can be done by Toku or integrated into any payroll EOR providers in any jurisdiction. Toku is a trusted provider of Protocol Labs, DYDX Foundation, Mina Protocol, and many more. Get started for free and make token compensation simple at toku.com/bankless.

• 30:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  For the first time, Kraken reveals what actually happened between them and the SEC recently. And for Bankless listeners and David, if you recall, so last we checked in on Kraken versus SEC. The SEC had filed a complaint, basically taking Kraken to court. What did the complaint say? They were basically being sued for listing securities. And of course, the SEC won't clarify what's a security.

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  Things everything is a security.

• 31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  They think everything that is a token could potentially be a security, including many of the crypto assets that are obviously not securities anyway. They basically charged Kraken with operating a cryptocurrency exchange because like, yeah, of course, they're exchanging, allowing the buying and selling of crypto assets. And they also charged Kraken with co-mingling. They included this in the complaint, basically an allusion to FTX style, that they were co-mingling funds, which it turned out to be very much not the case. So this week, they announced that they are filing a motion in court to dismiss the SEC lawsuit. Not just fight against it, they're saying court, this is like a lawsuit that you shouldn't even consider

• 32:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  because it's not worth considering in a court system and they're filing for dismissal.

• 32:06David Hoffman?

  On the backs of what they are actually revealing. And so they are, this is, that was the action they were taking. But they, the reason why they are justifying why the court ought to dismiss the complaint is that they, the thing that they revealed is some backdoor shenanigans from the SEC. So in May, Kraken testified against the SEC's overreach in crypto, about crypto, before the House Financial Services Committee and the House Agricultural Committee. This is one of the hearings that we reported on way back when. They testified that, you know, all the things that you've heard on Bankless, current laws do not adequately cover the digital asset industry. Congress ought to do more to place a better set of rules to protect consumers and investors. Congress should limit the SEC's jurisdiction in favor of other agencies. Like all the things that we've been asking for Congress.

• 32:51David Hoffman?

  And Kraken just went to the hearing and testified that, hey, we should, they think we should do this. And then the next day, the SEC called Kraken to say it was going to sue. And so it was just like, the timing and the motivations are just extremely sus. It's like, okay, you guys are just suing us out of spite. And the whole point about the SEC and how it needs to be reined in is because the SEC cannot do things that are capricious and arbitrary, arbitrary and capricious. How many times have we said this, these words on the podcast? And so when like Kraken has a very normal day, you had a hearing in Congress and they testify their opinions in a public manner. And then the next day, the SEC says, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna sue you guys.

• 33:34David Hoffman?

  It's very personal, it's very spiteful, it's arbitrary and capricious. And so this was the information that we did not know, that Kraken is now like revealing to the public. And on the backs of that, that is their justification for why the court ought to just dismiss the whole entire complaint and tell Gary Gensler to pack his bags.

• 33:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, the, the facts here are kind of startling here, right? So Kraken tells Congress the SEC is overreaching and the very next day, the SEC goes and calls Kraken and tells them they're getting sued. By the way, not the first time they were sued that year. The second time they were sued in 2023. Completely caught Kraken by surprise because they had already resolved the first complaint. This feels like a mob boss scare tactic, David. And I mean,

• 34:17David Hoffman?

  It's a, what do you call this extortion?

• 34:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Extortion.

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  Kraken paid $30 million to settle with the SEC. And then the SEC is like, oh, I bet we can do it again.

• 34:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, absolutely crazy. So this is Jake Trivinsky here saying, yesterday, Kraken filed a motion to dismiss the SEC enforcement action. The brief is a great read. We'll include a link to this in the show notes, by the way. Strong argument for why the SEC is wrong. And in the blog post, it basically accuses the SEC over retaliation for its testimony in Congress. Wow. What is the judge going to think about this, David?

• 34:48David Hoffman?

  That is pretty cringe from the SEC.

• 34:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, cringe may be illegal. We will see.

• 34:55David Hoffman?

  But Kraken's not stopping there. So not only are they fighting about back about the SEC, they're also launching Kraken Institutional. So basically, the whole like, we're not effing leaving moves, like, SEC back off, and also, we are launching further products to satisfy consumer demand inside America. So they're launching Kraken Institutional, just to satisfy all the institutions out there. Hopefully, not getting more ETH and Bitcoin on institutional balance sheets. That's, that's what we enjoy. So just some big moves from Kraken this week.

• 35:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think once you get the institutions on your side, then you have like, a heat shield against the regulators, which is really what we need at this point.

• 35:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Gary Gensler is not going to be happy. Nice job, guys. Nice job, Kraken. All right, moving on to Gemini Earn. Gemini Earns will receive 100% of their capital back that they had in Gemini Earn. So a settlement was reached between Genesis and their creditors, which is, you know, Gemini Earn, that's most people. And so if you had lent one BTC in the Earn program, you will receive one BTC back. This isn't some FTX shenanigans where you're getting 100% of your dollar denominated value back when Bitcoin was like $20,000. If you had one Bitcoin in Gemini Earn, you will get one Bitcoin back, which is literally the best outcome possible. Congratulations to all people getting their money back out of Gemini Earn.

• 36:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless listeners will know, I got scammed by some of the banks last year. Not, not a lot, but you know, I like to test my Gemini Earn, I like to test my BlockFi, test my Celsius, right? So like, I was a beta tester for, for many of these things. So I was absolutely shocked when I received this email from Gemini Earn, saying, I thought, I thought it was like

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  fishing. Did you think it was a fish?

• 36:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, totally. So I went directly to Twitter, and I tried to verified from multiple sources. And yeah, this is the case. Now, there's one caveat to this. It's if the bankruptcy court approves this settlement in principle. So there's still a little thing to go through, but I mean, they should. The hard part is making sure the money's there. And it seems like from this announcement, the money is actually there. So this would mean earned users can expect to receive 97% of their assets in two months. And that's in kind, as you said, so you put in ETH, you get back ETH, you put in Bitcoin. So it was actually, they were, they were short like 700 million when you look at the bottom. But they're giving back in terms of fiat value in assets like 1.8 billion, something like that.

• 37:13David Hoffman?

  Cause of price appreciation?

• 37:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 37:14David Hoffman?

  Okay, so like, what are the odds that just like the forced holding of Gemini earned customers actually made them net more money than they would have otherwise had?

• 37:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very high, David. They didn't sell the bottom. They forced held the bottom.

• 37:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they forced held the bottom. And the worst thing is, is that they just didn't get the yield from Gemini earned. They just didn't have any yield. That's the worst thing that happened.

• 37:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you seen this? This is a little bit of Sam Bankman Fried's argument from, from jail where he's actually saying like, hey, people are getting their money back. And it does seem like FTX depositors will make back their money, not in kind. All right.

• 37:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's not making back their money.

• 37:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but he said.

• 37:55David Hoffman?

  They will have less Bitcoins.

• 37:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  His filing is I should only go to jail for six years rather than like the, you know, like what 20 plus lifetime. So.

• 38:03David Hoffman?

  He hasn't been sentenced yet, right?

• 38:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It hasn't been sentenced. So that's what he's, that's what he's arguing for.

• 38:06David Hoffman?

  I wonder if the positive crypto price movements will actually like make his sentencing more lenient. I wonder if that's true.

• 38:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who knows? By the way, he's telling, I read the story this week. He's telling his prison guards to buy Sol. That's what he's, he's advising. I'm sure they're asking him, right? If you, if you're a prison guard, you want to ask the crypto kingpin what to buy. And that's his advice from prison. Not financial advice, Sam Bankman Fried. All right. Anyway, so what's great about this Gemini earn, if it comes to pass, it looks pretty, pretty secure here. Like Celsius, the folks from Celsius only received like 20 to 30% of their funds back, like not in kind, right? In like fiat. So very little. Mishinsky just like totally effed up and stole everyone's money, basically.

• 38:52David Hoffman?

  Mishinsky was a scammer. He didn't have fun. Zach Prince effed up. Mishinsky was a scammer.

• 38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Well, Zach Prince, BlockFi, we still don't know. BlockFi people still don't know whether, how much they're getting back. But good news for Gemini earn and actually unexpected. David, let's talk about another thing that was unexpected is you have the fee switch we've been talking about forever for Uniswap, the token, right? Like uni token value accrual could actually happen if we just turn the fee switch on. Well, it seems like there was news that this might actually happen, at least something that spiked the price of uni token, something I haven't seen for like five, like three or four years. Anyway, 70% this week. Why? Why did we go up that high?

• 39:34David Hoffman?

  So a Uniswap Foundation governance lead. So anyone can submit a proposal to the Uniswap forums to turn on the fee switch. I'm sure that's happened. It's happened a handful of times. But when the Uniswap Foundation governance lead posts the proposal and it's a meaningful proposal with like actual thought out, you know, work being put into it, it means a little bit different. And so it would say, it would, the upgrade would reward uni holders who have staked and delegated their tokens with the fee switch. So if approved by the community, the fee switch might just go ahead and turn on. Like as you said, uni went up from $7 to $12.5. One of the biggest pumps out of a token, a DeFi token I've ever seen. 70% is a big move, especially for Uniswap, who's already had like a multi-billion dollar market

• 40:17David Hoffman?

  cap. Okay. So like how much, if the fee switch was turned on, how much would actually go to token holders? So if you analyze the best recent months of fees and assume a 10% take rate on the fees, so like, what is it? What is the fee? The typical fee is somewhere between 30 bips, Ryan, and 10 bips. If you take 10% of that, that would be $96 million for the uni system, for the uni system, which is not a great PE ratio. It's 120 price to earnings.

• 40:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's really good. That's like less than Zoom used to be. 120

• 40:55David Hoffman?

  I forgot, I forgot we're in a, we're in a low interest rate era.

• 40:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, it's basically that PE is like a high growth tech stock, kind of like PE.

• 41:04David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can expect Uniswap fees to like dominate this bull market just because that's what happens in bull markets. So like annualized total fees is almost a billion dollars, but then the take rate of 10% would give them 96 million dollars.

• 41:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  What I love about this price pump is it's nothing to do with memes. It's like fundamental. It's like cash flow is going back to uni token holders. Like that's new.

• 41:27David Hoffman?

  And then the uni price gets redirected. Yeah.

• 41:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what, what does this mean? The audacity of, again, this isn't the, like the Uniswap Labs company, right? This isn't Hayden Adams and crew, but the audacity of uni token governance to put this proposal through, right? There, there have been all sorts of-

• 41:41David Hoffman?

  How dare a DAO make their token a cash flowing asset?

• 41:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, Gary Gensler might be upset about this, but like, can he do anything?

• 41:50David Hoffman?

  I hope he is. I hope he is. Yeah. Okay. So this had ripple effects, kind of down the DeFi 1.0 stack. So Frax also kind of put out this tweet talking in the tailwinds of the uni pump. Should VE FXS holders, that's like the Frax token holders, vote to distribute revenue back to FXS stakers? Frax makes eight figures of annual, annual revenue being mostly converted into the treasury, should it go back to the stakers? So now like if Uniswap is bold enough to turn on the fee switch for its token holders, that has repriced a lot of the DeFi 1.0 cash flowing, yielding tokens. And we've also seen like a price appreciation kind of down the market cap stack on a lot of DeFi 1.0 tokens.

• 42:31David Hoffman?

  So this is, this is part of the whole theme of this week, which is like winning begets winning. We're just like doing all the things, covering up for all the things that were bearish in 2022 are now bullish in 2024. We're just doing all the things that, that we were suffering from.

• 42:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ave, Synthetix, Lido, DYDX, all up on that news on the week, which is great because without that, David, we do have just like quote unquote useless governance tokens. We just have a whole bunch of memes. So this is what's interesting is the SEC, if they decide to weigh on this, is put in a, like a really weird spot, right? Like, do they want, like, it's better for uni investors to have cash flows or else it's just a meme token? Do they want to make, do they, do you want to force all crypto tokens into memes? Or are they going to be okay with on-chain cash flows that are managed by like this decentralized community organization with immutable code on-chain, on-chain cash flows?

• 43:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the actions of the SEC has incentivized capital to go into actual meme coins because of the risks of actually being a real fundamental valuable innovation that's tokenized. And so this is the pendulum swinging back. Gary Gensler is like losing court case after court case. He's on his heels. People are getting bold enough to start to fight back. Like it's no, it's no coincidence. Like this, it goes back to Eric Wall Street at the very beginning. It's like this storyline, this arc, this poetry that is happening of like Kraken is going to give Gary Gensler an Uno card. Uniswap is turning on the fee switch. Everyone is like, boldness begets boldness. And all of a sudden crypto is cool again and Gary Gensler looks cringe.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. Uniswap Labs as well. So this is again, different than the Uniswap Foundation that controls the fee, the fee switch, but the centralized company Uniswap Labs is also continuing to build. So they just introduced the Uniswap extension this week, which is, you know, pretty cool. So this is like a browser extension and also limit orders as well are kind of like native to the app.

• 44:31David Hoffman?

  Browser extension, actually I don't think sells it very well. This is a browser sidebar. So instead of like a little pop-up like your MetaMask or Rami, this is like a little sidebar. So it doesn't like overlap over your window. It's kind of this persistent thing. So we had that Uniswap designer on the, on the show a while ago and he's just a big fan of just like rethinking stuff. And so this Uniswap sidebar, just think about like a module on your browser that is persistent. And it's just like a wallet for your browser. So the more web three our internet becomes, the more like nice it's going to have to have a persistent module there. And so that's what, that's what the Uniswap wallet is.

• 45:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I had to try that out. That looks really cool. I gotta try that out. David, we got a lot more to talk about. The blobs are almost here. What's the effect going to be on the Ethereum economy? Also, BLAST mainnet? And Trump weighs in on Bitcoin? Maybe he likes it now? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Mantle, the chain, apparently to get your yield. Go check it out.

• 45:27David Hoffman?

  Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 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, 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 Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and OnRats. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding

• 46:12David Hoffman?

  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. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading DeFi ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web3 gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.io. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum Orbit chain? Arbitrum Orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable,

• 46:56David Hoffman?

  customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you're a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitrum.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. 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 Mini Pay 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.

• 47:40David Hoffman?

  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? 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. Dankun is just around the corner, scheduled for mainnet activation at Epoch 29,696.

• 48:24David Hoffman?

  That's March 13th for anyone who is a normal person, at 8:55 EST. So if you run an Ethereum node, you need to upgrade your node software, because we have to upgrade for Dankun. So that is your last PSA, because the next weekly rollup we have... No, two weeks, it's in two weeks, it's the 29th. We got basically two weeks until Dankun, 12 days.

• 48:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so that means the blobs are coming. And that's like a weird way to describe what's happening. Like, here's a reframe, sort of a nation-state economics reframe of it, because I think people are really sleeping on this Ethereum upgrade. So on March 13th, Ethereum is actually injecting a massive stimulus into the Ethereum economy, because it's cutting rollup taxes by 90%. Okay, roll up taxes, the taxes they pay. That's what's actually happening. And if you look at kind of estimates, roll up transactions basically drop to something close to free, at least 80% of the roll up transactions, until they 4X. And then they start to become more expensive.

• 49:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So from my perspective, this is sort of like a stimmy check in a way, or like, it's like a massive tax cut to a sector of the Ethereum economy. It's a massive tax cut to the Ethereum economy in that way. It induces, it induces demand in the way that a tax cutting economic stimulus would. And to me, this is already fuel on like, what is already a bull market economy. And yeah, I'm pretty excited. I think people should start reframing it in terms of like, the protocol is doing this thing that's going to like induce more demand and cause increased economic activity, because that is actually what's going on. I think blobs undersells it, because no one knows what the F of blob actually is.

• 50:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we've got to translate this into normie speak and get some economists to start speaking this language for like macro updates.

• 50:15David Hoffman?

  Okay, so here's how I'll frame this. So Ethereum, Layer 1, it's Manhattan, right? It's expensive. The Ethereum protocol has improved the subway, the railway lines that go to Brooklyn and New Jersey and upstate. It is now cheaper and faster to take a train to go to the suburbs, which means that it's easier and more accessible to live in the suburbs. The suburbs are now a better place to live and they're better connected to the Ethereum Layer 1. And that's just because the costs of the blobs where Layer 2s put their data are going down. It's basically a subsidy for Layer 2s. You're being very bullish about just like the prices going down on Layer 2s, and I think that's going to be a blip.

• 50:59David Hoffman?

  And I think transaction fees are going to go, for a very short amount of time, they'll go to, drop to zero, but it's going to be like, under, for under a week, maybe even under a day. And then they're going to come back up to more or less about where they are now, except we will see a lot more total activity on Ethereum Layer 2s. I think the thing that is going to really benefit the most is going to be the P and L of the major Layer 2s. So you're going to see Arbitrum is just way more profitable, Optimism is way more profitable, their costs are going down, and their total volume is going to go up.

• 51:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, basically, they get they get something close to free transactions or massively reduced transactions until they all collectively Forex. That's how much net new bandwidth we have, which is

• 51:44David Hoffman?

  I just think they're Forexing very quickly, is what I'm saying.

• 51:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I hope they do. More economic value created. Speaking of that, Blast has already reached 2 billion in total value locked. And apparently, they just went mainnet. So that is as of today, the day of recording.

• 51:59David Hoffman?

  As of today.

• 52:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  What if folks need to know?

• 52:01David Hoffman?

  150,000 wallets with 2 billion dollars in TVL. I think Blast has kind of gotten, it has left a bad taste in his mouth for just the way that it launched. It's very controversial. And as a result of that, I kind of think people are under indexing, actually, the technical merits of Blast. I was under indexing on it. I thought, I was like, what's the point of having native yield when you can just use Lido StakeDeef inside of like your normal chain? But apparently, allegedly, something I'm looking forward to seeing, is that when you actually put native yield into the protocol, it actually does unlock a design space that's unique. It's different than just like

• 52:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this still a multi-stake, though?

• 52:40David Hoffman?

  Probab- I'm gonna guess it is.

• 52:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, you still got that. So I guess staker beware, you know, yield seeker beware with that. But I mean, it's cool to see another experiment going on here.

• 52:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Something else that's exciting is Coinbase has released their report, their Coinbase Cloud report about the composition of the Ethereum network on the execution layer. So this is came after we had a bug in one of the execution clients that was the minority client. And then the whole entire Ethereum community was like, well, if that was Geth, that would have been really bad.

• 53:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  And Geth has had this really high, strong dominance at 82%. It's come down to like 78, 77%.

• 53:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Still too high.

• 53:18David Hoffman?

  But Coinbase just released their, just announced their future plans to shift 50% of their validators, which are 100% Geth, to Met, to Nethermine. So they're doing a 50 50 split to Nethermine. And then they also said that they intend to support Aragon in the future, another client. Perhaps that means they will do 33, 33, 33. And then they also said that they're keeping an eye on Res, Res Ethereum, which Georgios from Paradigm is pioneering. And so basically, it's a commitment to truly balance out

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Equally, all of Coinbase's validators to materially diffuse the concentration of Ethereum's execution client.

• 53:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's great.

• 53:58David Hoffman?

  Which is just perfect.

• 53:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's in the best interest of Coinbase. That's in the best interest of Coinbase stakers. It's certainly in the best interest of Ethereum. So, post those changes, how low would this drive, kind of like Geth? Would it bring us below kind of 2/3? That's kind of where we're trying to get to, right?

• 54:13David Hoffman?

  Yes. Once Coinbase moves 50% of their validators from Geth to Nethermine, Geth dominance will be below the critical threshold of 66%. And a reminder, Ethereum is the only multi-client Layer 1 that exists. So like, this is one of the biggest weaknesses of Ethereum, is that we have like, concentration in Geth, which is getting removed post Coinbase migrating, and every other Layer 1 is a single client ecosystem.

• 54:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta say, that is very ethmaxy of you, David.

• 54:40David Hoffman?

  That's so ethmaxy of me.

• 54:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some more big news this week. Lens Protocol, which is the social protocol built on top of crypto primarily Polygon, is now permissionless. So, anyone can create a profile on Lens. Lens is pretty similar to Farcaster in some ways, in that it's kind of like...

• 55:00David Hoffman?

  It's a more chainy Farcaster.

• 55:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's more stuff happening on Polygon, but you know, it's kind of like decentralized identity. You kind of own, you have your own property rights with respect to anything, any messages that you send on it, any tweets that you make, or I guess I'll call them tweets, but I'm not sure exactly what they're called in the Lens Protocol world. It's really...

• 55:21David Hoffman?

  Transactions.

• 55:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Transactions, I suppose. There are now 125,000 users. There have been almost 40 million on-chain social transactions, including 5 million posts. So, a lot of activity, and that activity is kind of spread out across clients. You know, right now, Farcaster has just one central app, which is WarpCast. They're hoping that more apps kind of spin up over time. Lens hasn't really built its own central app internally. It's kind of like the community, a bunch of startups, entrepreneurs are kind of developing these apps. So it makes it, I guess, a bit more decentralized from that perspective, at least at the, at the kind of app layer. But also, there's not really a shelling point that I found for Lens yet, right?

• 56:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's not like a warp cast of one central place to go if you're trying to do something on Lens. But the big question is, how will Lens and Farcaster, you know, compete? Because we are in the very first innings, the beginnings of SocialFi. If you want to explore that a bit more, we'll drop a link in the show notes to a fantastic article we published on Bankless this week from William Peaster, kind of comparing Lens and Farcaster, how to get started, how they're similar, how they're different. And I would encourage everyone to go check out SocialFi, go check out Lens, go check out Farcaster, this bull cycle. I think there's going to be a lot of activity happening in these platforms, like in this bull market. It's a good time to check them out.

• 56:44David Hoffman?

  Next in news, Robert Leschner and his Superstate Fund has introduced their Ethereum-based short-term United States government securities fund. That was a mouthful. It's basically tokenized treasuries, short-term treasuries. So you get the yield of a treasury wrapped up inside of a stablecoin. So this is part of the whole real-world assets phenomenon. This is the first fund out of Robert Leschner's new Superstate, which they, I think, plan to just tokenize a bunch of stuff. So what does the fund do? Invest in short-duration United States Treasury securities, and then, which targets the Fed funds rate, and so it yields something close to the Fed's funds rate. And then Superstate takes a 0.15%, 15 bips management fee. So, cool.

• 57:29David Hoffman?

  Congrats to Robert Leschner for getting that out the door.

• 57:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tokenized, I guess, like a tokenized treasury. That's what we're trying to get to here. That's regulated in the US. David, some new Satoshi Nakamoto emails were made public this week as a result of, I believe, a court case. But people are pouring through the findings here. So here's a thread from Pete Rizzo going through some of the findings. And I don't think anyone has seen these, at least publicly, seen these emails before from 2009, the very genesis of Bitcoin, from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin. Was anything interesting here to you?

• 58:06David Hoffman?

  I haven't parsed through these emails. I'm kind of letting the Bitcoin historians do that work and I'm sure they're going to surface some of the best stuff. I think a big theme was Satoshi's interest in what would be categorized as like big blocker philosophy, like increasing the block size, increasing throughput. He definitely saw Bitcoin as like a high-volume Visa competitor. And so everyone is like, oh, Satoshi was a big blocker. I don't really think that that matters personally. Satoshi left to allow Bitcoin to grow on its own. He understood that Bitcoin was like a child that was going to grow up. I don't think Satoshi's

• 58:46David Hoffman?

  opinions, I don't elevate Satoshi's opinions to like God status, but like some people like to do that.

• 58:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's almost like a religious tax for some people.

• 58:56David Hoffman?

  Yes. So basically, this is what happened. It's like the Bitcoin historians are like parsing through these ancient scriptures that were just discovered in like a tomb, which was the emails of like Craig Wright and whoever like this legal case was. And now people are parsing it. I think the funniest one, Ryan, is that Satoshi was a big fan of jalapeno pineapple pizza.

• 59:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 59:16David Hoffman?

  That was revealed, yeah. So Satoshi is a pineapple pizza person.

• 59:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, what does that uncover about who Satoshi was? So anything like this, it drops, and there's always another fervor of speculation in terms of who he was, including this Reddit forum. The leading candidates are generally these three that I typically see. Nick Sabo as a possible candidate. So Nick, he's gone dormant. I haven't heard Nick speaking about crypto in a very long time, but did some early posts, is still alive. Hal Finney, who passed away in 2014, he's a cryptographer, and Len Sasseman. So he took his life, committed suicide in 2011. So it's always interesting to, I find it fascinating to read up on just the speculation of who Satoshi was. Do you think it actually matters?

• 1:00:03David Hoffman?

  I don't think it matters, and I kind of think Satoshi left. He left. He wanted to disappear. He needed Bitcoin to grow up on its own. I think speculation on who Satoshi is is fun, but also it also has real consequences. Like, Nick Zabo's wife, who's still alive, has been harassed on the potential of fact that she might have private keys that she doesn't know about, hidden in her house somewhere.

• 1:00:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, really?

• 1:00:26David Hoffman?

  Because Hal didn't tell her.

• 1:00:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder he's gone quiet.

• 1:00:29David Hoffman?

  In the Bitcoin community, there's definitely a repression of Satoshi speculation, because it impacts the safety of the people being speculated against, because there's the 0.01% of the population who's deranged and will do something crazy.

• 1:00:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  As long as those keys stay locked forever.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  I think they're burnt.

• 1:00:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You think they're gone? Yeah, I tend to think that, too.

• 1:00:49David Hoffman?

  If Satoshi had the spirit to leave and disappear, he also had the spirit to burn his keys.

• 1:00:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or maybe he's waiting for 1 million Bitcoin. He's gonna sell it. Market dump it all.

• 1:01:00David Hoffman?

  Could you imagine?

• 1:01:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  The 20-year-long con.

• 1:01:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:01:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, Avalanche was down this week. I don't know if you saw that, but the Layer 1 network Avalanche was down for a good number of hours.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Five hours.

• 1:01:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Five hours.

• 1:01:16David Hoffman?

  Five hours.

• 1:01:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. First outage this year.

• 1:01:19David Hoffman?

  This is what happens when you don't have a multi-client Layer 1.

• 1:01:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, some would call that grave dancing. Not me, though, David.

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  This is just important lessons about how we know that you need multi-client systems. This isn't grave dancing. This is what happens when you don't have multi-client systems.

• 1:01:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, let's talk about a tale of two politicians. So, is this Donald Trump saying something good about Bitcoin? I didn't know he was favorable to Bitcoin. Everything I've ever heard this man say has actually been opposing Bitcoin.

• 1:01:47David Hoffman?

  Anti-Bitcoin.

• 1:01:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anti-Bitcoin and propping up the dollar. But here he is on Fox News. Let's play this.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  I always liked one currency.

• 1:02:18David Hoffman?

  A lot of people are doing it.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  I like the currency. I like the dollar. But a lot of people are doing it and frankly, uh, it's, it's taken a life of itself.

• 1:02:27David Hoffman?

  People clap for the dollar, bro?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  We have to do some regulation, as you know, but many people are embracing it and more and more I'm seeing people wanting to pay Bitcoin. And you're seeing something that's interesting. So I can live with it one way or the other. I've always liked one really powerful thing and that's called the dollar.

• 1:02:44David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 1:02:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 1:02:45David Hoffman?

  Dollar maxi confirmed.

• 1:02:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Doesn't hate Bitcoin, loves the dollar though, but doesn't hate Bitcoin.

• 1:02:50David Hoffman?

  I love how everyone's clapping. It's like Donald Trump loves the dollar.

• 1:02:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Go dollar. It's great. Uh, David, here's a-

• 1:02:57David Hoffman?

  All right, but that was a big overton window shift for Trump.

• 1:03:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, yeah, I will say that.

• 1:03:01David Hoffman?

  All right. Has Elizabeth Warren changed her tune? Let's, let's hear it from her.

• 1:03:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's another contrast clip this week from Elizabeth Warren.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  I want to collaborate with the industry. What I don't understand is why the industry-

• 1:03:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Talking about the crypto industry.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  -seems to be saying that the only way that they can survive is if there's plenty of space for the drug traffickers and human traffickers.

• 1:03:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Human traffickers.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Oh, and the terrorists and the ransomware scammers and the consumer scammers and the rogue nations, North Korea, that is financing about half of its nuclear missile program with crypto, that all of that has to be left open. You know-

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  Okay, that last one was true.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Keep in mind, in our financial system, pretty much everybody follows the same set of rules. I'm talking banks and credit unions and credit card companies, uh, gold traders and stockbrokers, uh, private equity now has to follow the rules. Precious metal dealers, Venmo, Western Union, but not crypto.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  My view of the world is same kind of activity, same kind of risk should have the same regulation. I'm not looking for fancier regulation for them. I'm not looking for for anything tougher for them. I just want a level playing field here.

• 1:04:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not a big believer in DeFi. And when it comes to a level playing field, I think DeFi, being able to have your own private keys and use this in an open financial economy, the way that we communicate on the internet, that seems like that is leveling the playing field. But I think she wants to make us all, all of our apps, all of our validators, all of our activity, subject, she wants to make us all banks, basically, which, not a big fan of DeFi, I think from Elizabeth Warren here.

• 1:04:53David Hoffman?

  She opened up this clip saying, what I don't understand is why the industry, that's us, seems to be saying that the only way we can survive is if there is plenty of space for the drug traffickers, the human traffickers, the terrorists, or, oh.

• 1:05:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ryan, who's saying that?

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  I have not said that.

• 1:05:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is saying that? Are we saying that?

• 1:05:11David Hoffman?

  No.

• 1:05:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is anyone that we've ever had on the podcast saying that? Can she point me to the person that said that? So like, I sent this clip to my liberal family, and I just dropped this bomb in our text, our family text chat. And I was like, oh, so your guys, your girls live with Warren's just like making stuff up now. Great. They haven't woken up yet, but we'll see. Yeah, David, let me know what your family says. You know, I don't know if you're gonna have an awkward Thanksgiving ahead, but I'm hoping the best.

• 1:05:40David Hoffman?

  I bet you're just gonna be like, all right.

• 1:05:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a political year. What are we gonna do? David, tell me about the meetup. I couldn't make it. East Denver, Bankless citizens were there at a party, Bankless meetup in person. These are some of the photos. Fantastic looking people.

• 1:05:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was great. It was great. What was it? So I FaceTimed you for like 10 seconds.

• 1:05:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, who was I talking to?

• 1:05:59David Hoffman?

  As in, oh, just some Bankless citizens. Yeah. Because they, every time it's like we get through some of the, they're like, oh, like, thanks for doing the podcast. I appreciate what you guys do. Is Ryan here? And I'm like, guys, no, Ryan never comes. He's never here.

• 1:06:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you just dialed me?

• 1:06:14David Hoffman?

  But we can FaceTime him. So I just FaceTimed you. Yeah, I couldn't hear anything. So it was too loud.

• 1:06:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18David Hoffman?

  Dude, these are always, these are always some of the best events. The Bankless community is always just like some of the best people. Tons of previous podcast guests were there. Like Kevin Milwaukee was hanging out. Micah Bolito was there for a little bit. Just a lot of good old fam, you know, the fam's all in town. It was great. I had, I had three beers. I got very loose. It was lovely. Bankless Nation's fun to hang out with.

• 1:06:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's when you, you have some of your best ideas, I think, when you got a few drinks in you.

• 1:06:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're talking, talking to me about, you know, some breakthroughs in terms of understanding of Eigenlayer last night, I think. I received these texts in the middle of the night.

• 1:06:55David Hoffman?

  You did not receive these texts.

• 1:06:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I saw them in Discord.

• 1:06:58David Hoffman?

  I, I have, inside of the Bankless Discord, where we like, you know, run the company, I have a channel called David's Room, that no one else has gone into, except Ryan's there because he's also a moderator. And I'm having some like ideas, you know, some like, some like, you know, alcohol aided inspiration.

• 1:07:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  At 1:00 in the morning.

• 1:07:15David Hoffman?

  But I need to remember these things because my, it was at 1:00 in the morning. Well, 1:00 in the morning, your time. It was like 11:00 PM my time.

• 1:07:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just find it funny.

• 1:07:21David Hoffman?

  And so I like, you know, write, like, gotta write the notes because I'll forget it. And so I sent them in the Discord and then Ryan is like, "Oh, sweet drunk texts."

• 1:07:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27David Hoffman?

  They weren't to you. They were to me.

• 1:07:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  David drunk texts is gonna be about Eigenlayer or something. And I'm here for it. It's great. All right, let's flip to raises of the week. And these are some raises we mentioned because Bankless Ventures is part of them. So it's partially a disclosure as well. Bouncebit raised 6 million in seed funding. What is Bouncebit? All right. So this is actually kind of a funny one for Bankless Ventures to invest in because, because of two reasons. Number one, it's like Bitcoin centric, which is interesting for Bankless. And it's also banked. Okay? So what Bouncebit is actually doing-

• 1:07:59David Hoffman?

  Semi-banked.

• 1:07:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Semi, uh, mostly banked, I would say.

• 1:08:01David Hoffman?

  Mostly banked.

• 1:08:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's over, did you know, David? I think you did know, actually. But I'm gonna ask you like you didn't. There's 700,000 Bitcoin right now in Binance custody solutions. So just inside of Binance. So this is banked Bitcoin. It's held in the custody, custody of Binance. And there are, there is some segment of people that for whatever reason, they still trust custody in their crypto exchange. You know, I understand why to some extent, but you know, like, maybe they can't handle their private keys. Maybe they're an institution, something like this. What Bouncebit does is it basically takes that, that Bitcoin and allows you to use it on a sidechain in DeFi type protocols. I, I put "DeFi" in air quotes is because the entire thing is, is custody by Binance. At, you know, like, it's, it's fully banked already.

• 1:08:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  At some level.

• 1:08:48David Hoffman?

  Importantly, it is a BTC centric consensus solution, not a blockchain, not a Bitcoin to the blockchain. And so it is like, it's kind of like a proof of stake using the custodied Bitcoin.

• 1:09:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. And so they're, they're going to create kind of an open finance ecosystem where you can do collateralized lending and borrowing and, and trading and all of these things on top of the bank held in custody, Binance Bitcoin. And so there's a lot of this. I think that's an, an okay interim step for Bitcoin until it has like fully, um, like on-chain layer twos. And by the way, they're getting there with actual DeFi. So this provides a source of yield for Bitcoin that wants to be expressed in an open finance community. And for people that are fine custing their, their Bitcoin with Binance. So that's what Bounce Bit is all about.

• 1:09:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah. This definitely falls into the category that I've, I've seen emerging very, very strongly, which is all about BTC productivity. Like, how can we make Bitcoin more productive? There's like a flurry of Bitcoin layer two deals going on, all kind of ahead of the BitVM. And also another innovation that I was hearing about here at ETH Denver, there was a Bitcoin Renaissance Day here at ETH Denver. That like was unlocking proof of stake in Bitcoin where like, instead of slashing, uh, what would happen, Ryan, is like, if you violated consensus, your private keys would be revealed. And anyone can just like, take your Bitcoins from you, which is like basically slashing.

• 1:10:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. They have to do this because they're not fully expressive. Like they, like it's limited in terms of smart contract functionality.

• 1:10:21David Hoffman?

  Exactly. That is their version of, of proof of stake. And so basically, basically Bounce Bit is taking kind of the Polygon strategy, like the Polygon proof of stake sidechain before they have the Polygon ZK EVM. Just bootstrapping the chain, getting the TVL, getting the developer ecosystem. And then once the Bitcoin layer two ecosystem actually manifests at a technical level, because it's still kind of in the research phase, but people are betting on its future. Then Bounce Bit has plans to actually, you know, choose a solution there. But also fully EVM compatible. So all of Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem is able to be expressed on Bounce Bit.

• 1:10:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, be good as long as Binance doesn't rug. Uh, what else? We got EtherFi raised 27 million. This is in the restaking class and, uh, Bankless Ventures was part of that as well. Remind us what EtherFi is.

• 1:11:06David Hoffman?

  EtherFi, it is a liquid restaking token. It is one of the, like, like you said, the Eigenlayer ecosystem deals. It is the number one liquid restaked token by ETH deposits into EtherFi. I think they're at 1.5 billion right now. They were, they were at the Bankless meetup last night. So I was hanging out with the guys there.

• 1:11:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we're also hiring, by the way. So I gotta add the jobs board. We have not talked about the jobs board in a very long time, but we have two open positions. One is a senior product designer at Bankless. The other is a growth marketer because Bankless is growing. So if you're interested in those positions, go click the link in the show notes and apply. Be very excited to, to hear from you.

• 1:11:43David Hoffman?

  Think it's dropping crypto.

• 1:11:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, meme of the week. You ready for this, man?

• 1:11:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm ready.

• 1:11:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so this is a meme from Greg. Got an enormous amount of likes here. Don't forget to report, it's not a meme, I should say. This is actually a true story. Don't forget to report your income from illegal activities and stolen property as you're doing your taxes this year. Okay, it's tax season for everybody. It's an absolute nightmare in crypto. Did you know that if you go to the IRS website, the IRS actually makes sure that you know-

• 1:12:12David Hoffman?

  Guys, you must pay taxes on your income from illegal activities.

• 1:12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And stolen property. So here, on the IRS website, you go to look this up. They say, if you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it, unless you return it to the rightful owner in the same years. So David, if you steal something the last year, if you stole something in 2023, now's the time to report it to the IRS.

• 1:12:36David Hoffman?

  If you pay taxes on property that you steal, I feel like you own it. I feel like that's yours, then.

• 1:12:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know why they would expect a thief to comply with this, but thank you IRS. David, you got a moment of zen for me, right?

• 1:12:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I do. It is completely unrelated to crypto. It is an internet, it is a great internet story that I'm tracking, but it has nothing to do with crypto. So if you want to move on to your next podcast, yeah, another Bankless podcast, of course. Go ahead and feel free. Otherwise, I'm going to tell you about a funny internet story. But first, Ryan is going to tell you all about the risks of going Bankless.

• 1:13:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I gotta end with this, as we always do. Of course, crypto is risky. It doesn't seem like it on weeks like this, but I guarantee you, what goes up can come down. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot. All right, David, tell me about this moment of Zen. Give me, give me the story.

• 1:13:29David Hoffman?

  Reed Harrington, does that name strike a bell?

• 1:13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  No. Who do I know Reed Harrington from?

• 1:13:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he, he's a seventh, a seventh grader, uh, living in the United States. He goes, okay, when I hit 2,000, 200,000 followers, I will do whatever the top comment said on this video and post it. And he did this in a relatively like unfollowed Instagram account. And so the top comment, which this, this, it went viral through Instagram. The top comment, which broke the Instagram record of 2.57 million likes, came from this user, 59kid, who said, fly to a small town in Thailand. Get accepted by their people, learn the language, train Muay Thai for a year and a half. Fight in a tournament, win the tournament, return to the USA,

• 1:14:17David Hoffman?

  join the UFC, stay in shape and go undefeated in your weight class. Retire and do an interview saying this comment was the reason that you fought so hard.

• 1:14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:14:27David Hoffman?

  This Reed Harrington on his Instagram now has 750,000 followers. So now he has to do it according to his commitment. And there was a GoFundMe for $15,000 set up to fly this kid to Thailand.

• 1:14:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:14:44David Hoffman?

  So he can go train Muay Thai in Thailand.

• 1:14:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just step one, though.

• 1:14:49David Hoffman?

  That's, yeah, he's just, he's at the very beginning of this arc. The crazy thing is, is like the, the Tourism Authority of Thailand has made a statement saying that they are ready to take care of him and his dad when they come to the country. And so this kid has been posting him every single day practicing Muay Thai on his Instagram.

• 1:15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09David Hoffman?

  Cause he's gonna go to, and it's like, we're just at the beginning of this arc. But like, so far, so good. And if the internet wants this to happen, the internet is gonna make this happen. So long as this kid is ready to commit.

• 1:15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess the entire internet is cheering Reed on then, right? This is like, uh, it's a multi-decade destiny here.

• 1:15:27David Hoffman?

  It's, I guess, signed up for. He's got, he's got his next five years of his life planned out for this one Instagram comment, dude.

• 1:15:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know what? I guess letting the internet decide your fate, uh, not so bad in some cases. Um, that's incredible.

• 1:15:41David Hoffman?

  So like we're gonna keep tabs on him like every year or so. We'll, we'll check back in with Reed Harrington and see where he's at.

• 1:15:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got crypto prices and Reed Harrington, guys. This has been the moment of science. Take care.