ROLLUP: 2nd Week of April (Coinbase IPO, FEI Protocol, DeFi Shopify, ETH 2 Merge, BTC ETFs)

Download the crypto meta to your brain in this weekly show. Anthony Sassano's filling in for Ryan this week! Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassal0x?s=20 The Daily Gwei: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/ ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🦊 METAMASK | DEFI PASSPORT https://bankless.cc/metamask 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE http://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔀 KWENTA | SYNTHETIC ASSET EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kwenta ------ Topics Covered: Intro MARKETS DAO Treasuries https://open-orgs.info/ RELEASES DCinvestor Newsletter ‘The Catalyst’ https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1378378885516177409 Cryptex. Finance https://medium.com/cryptexfinance/introducing-ctx-governance-powering-the-tcap-protocol-c1b32ce084bc dYdX on StarkWare https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/sotn-41-scaling-defi-with-dydx-and MVI Index https://www.tokensets.com/portfolio/mvi BED Proposal https://twitter.com/indexcoop/status/1380247275625197570?s=21 Alchemix Upgrade https://twitter.com/AlchemixFi/status/1379072309735026690?s=20 Fei Protocol https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1379755790496641025?s=20 Connext & Polygon https://youtu.be/g4YggCqyLrI Coinbase https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/100235/coinbase-direct-listing-april-nasdaq NEWS Cuban - ETH is Money DeFi Shopify https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1378116793370349569?s=21 1 Week Until Berlin Upgrade! https://ethernodes.org/berlin Polygon Killing It https://twitter.com/CamiRusso/status/1379839772831662084?s=20 ETH 2 Merge https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1379052831982956547?s=20 Immutable X https://twitter.com/GodsUnchained/status/1380008581718757379 SuperRare Raise https://medium.com/superrare/superrare-raises-9m-to-build-the-future-of-art-collecting-e2b3ded227e8 CryptoPunks on Christie’s https://twitter.com/ChristiesInc/status/1380236081472364550?s=20 Tom Brady NFT Platform https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/tech/tom-brady-nft-autograph/index.html Overly Attached Girlfriend https://foundation.app/laina/overly-attached-girlfriend-17046 Grayscale ETF https://grayscaleinvest.medium.com/grayscales-intentions-for-a-bitcoin-etf-b11e4faf4c05 Rapid News https://twitter.com/michael_saylor/status/1379042960994668548?s=21 https://u.today/jpmorgan-adjusts-its-bitcoin-target-to-130000-predicting-strong-institutional-adoption' https://u.today/jpmorgan-adjusts-its-bitcoin-target-to-130000-predicting-strong-institutional-adoption https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/100860/ledger-shopify-class-action-lawsuit-filed https://twitter.com/sbf_alameda/status/1379791522908934146?s=21 TAKES Coinbase Takes https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1377849659058581507?s=21 https://twitter.com/jebus911/status/1380154418251849735?s=20 https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1379968147739017216?s=20 Balancer & Algorand…? https://twitter.com/immutbl/status/1379503694476021763?s=20 Ethereum’s Event Horizon https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1378488899849216002?s=20 What David is Excited About What Anthony is Excited About MEME Closing & Disclaimers ------ This Week on Bankless: 🧠 Decentralized VC (4/8): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/decentralized-vc-will-eat-venture ✏️ Index Coop (4/7): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/building-a-decentralized-blackrock 🏴 dYdX & StarkWare (4/6): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/sotn-41-scaling-defi-with-dydx-and ⚒️ How to Crypto Tax (4/6): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-to-do-crypto-taxes-for-the-lazy 📈 Market Monday (4/5): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/crypto-is-about-to-melt-faces-market 🎙️Hayden Adams Podcast (4/5): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-uniswap-hayden-adams 🗞️Weekly Rollup (4/2): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ethereum-visa-weekly-recap-526 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:08David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, welcome to this edition of the Bankless Weekly Rollups. We got a unique episode here today because Ryan is on vacation, and so we are bringing in a substitute teacher, Anthony Cizano. Welcome to the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Thank you for getting tapped in here, brother.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Hey, mate. Yeah, good to be here. Good to step in for Ryan, even though we don't look anything alike. You know, it doesn't matter. I think we were both like super Ethereum bulls, so this should be a fun show.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. If this is your first weekly rollup, happy Friday morning. We're bringing the energy. We're bringing a full week's worth of news in Friday morning. Get your coffee ready, because we are coming at you with everything that's happened in the last week of crypto, starting with markets. What's happened in the markets in the last week, then what got released in the last week, the news, what's happened in the news cycle, and then some ecosystem takes. Who had some interesting opinions? And then finally, we will finish up with what David and Anthony are excited about, and of course, last, but always the most favorite, the meme of the week. Anthony, are you ready to get into it?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:12David Hoffman?

  Before we do, however, I have an announcement out of the Bankless world to get your Bankless badge. There is a perhaps multiple long weeks of giveaways coming. We are going to give away a BAP, which is one of these shirts. So if you've ever wanted one of these shirts, we're going to give one away to a raffle, in a raffle, to a Bankless badge holder. We're also going to give away an ether, a whole ether, to a Bankless badge holder, as well as some NFTs. I'm talking with my buddy who's got a coffee startup for multiple year-long coffee subscriptions. The Bankless badge is something that you want to own. Anthony, do you have a Bankless badge?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I do, David. Yes, I do.

• 1:51David Hoffman?

  Good. You're gonna make it, brother. All right. Let's go ahead and get right into it. All right, guys, we are starting with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is at the kind of a high price of $58,300. Again, the last week, it was just over $60,000, I believe, and then it even got down to as low as $52,000. And now we are back up towards the north side of that, and $58,300. Anthony, any comments on the Bitcoin price?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean Bitcoins just seems to be continuing to go sideways as the rest of the market is starting to, I guess, like catch back up, right? Bitcoin had an incredible run over the last few months, or even like, I guess, the last year or so. And I think it's basically just consolidating in this area, giving some other kind of, I guess, crypto kind of coins, crypto coins, crypto tokens, a kind of like chance to catch up and everything like that. But yeah, I don't think it's going to stay like this forever. I mean, you know, this doesn't just apply to Bitcoin. But I think over the next few weeks, we have so many bullish catalysts coming up. One of those being, you know, the biggest one being the Coinbase direct listing that, you know, I can't see Bitcoin kind of like staying under 60K for much longer.

• 2:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, look at that, look at that 30-day chart, pretty all over the place, but overall flat over 30 days. And usually in bull markets, Bitcoin does not stay flat for very long. We have plenty of Coinbase-related things to talk about in the rest of this weekly roll-up. So we are going to, that will be a reoccurring theme of this specific roll-up. All right, Ether price, Ether price, over $2,000, almost $2,100 at the time of recording. We have a new high of Ether price at $21.51. Anthony, what are you thinking about the Ether price?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as I was just saying, now that Bitcoin's been going sideways, other things can catch up. And Ether has definitely been gaining, especially on the Ether-Bitcoin ratio. So that's why we see Ether back over $2,000 here. And, you know, Ether in particular, from what I've seen, looks much more bullish than Bitcoin, at least over the short term. And I think it's about time, right? Ether needs to, you know, I think Ether is still undervalued here. I think it should be, should be higher than where it is. So I'm very happy to see Ether making some, some real strides here while Bitcoin continues sideways.

• 4:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right, in that same time period that I was talking about, where Bitcoin over the last 30 days has been relatively flat, Ether has definitely been having a pretty strong uptrend. It started 30 days ago at $1,800, ending it at just under $2,100 in the 30-day period. And definitely showing that, that trend that happens when Bitcoin stays flat. And then, of course, Anthony, I know you like this token, the DPI, $436. I believe that's up from last week, but just by a smidge, just by a smidge. Anthony, tell us what's happening with DPI.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's funny to see the way the market's kind of, I guess, maybe changed a little bit. You know, there's this thing called an alt season where a lot of the other kind of coins rally and while Bitcoin stays kind of sideways. But I think we're now seeing kind of like a divergence that we have like an alt season and a DeFi season. Because the old season seems to be a lot of these other kind of like, I guess, like chains and a lot of these projects, like just random projects just going up in value. Where DeFi has stayed flat. But I think we're due for like a separate kind of DeFi season where people will realize, wow, okay, you know, DeFi, you know, isn't going anywhere. It's here to stay. Like, I need to buy up these tokens that are part of revenue generating protocols. But, you know, it's funny because you can look at DPI against USD, which is relatively flat.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And then against ETH, which is actually down against because, you know, you do want to measure DPI against ETH for sure. Because they're in the same kind of arena. But I think, you know, sooner or later, it will reverse against ETH as well. And then ETH will probably go flat for a little bit, go sideways for a little bit, and we'll have DPI kind of catch up here. So it's a good measure, I guess, of the overall DeFi market through USD, but also kind of how bullish DeFi is against ETH itself.

• 5:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. And I've been watching this downtrend versus ETH ever, ever since March. So DPI has been trending down versus Ether since the very beginning of March, where it hit the high of 0.28 Ether per DPI. And now it's gone all the way down to just over 0.2, 0.21. And I've been using this as an indicator of like exactly what you said, DeFi season, which is a good point. And that's something that we have not yet brought on as a topic on the Ben Bankless Weekly Rollup is the differentiation between DeFi season and altcoin season. And what we're seeing, what I'm seeing out of altcoin season is basically rotating into things that I consider the worst, worst aspects of crypto. Things like ADA, LTC, DentaCoin.

• 6:33David Hoffman?

  And I'm very happy to finally being able to like differentiate between what is alt season versus what is quality capital asset tokens season. Glad we have a differentiator there.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I, and I think the reason why it works in cycles is because people tend to rotate money around. So you'll see that the money rotate from Bitcoin down to the others, um, you know, and ETH down to, to other things like DeFi. That's why I'm saying when ETH finishes its run and, and starts going sideways for a bit, I think we can really see a DeFi season there because a lot of the kind of like ETH natives and ETH people would rather go into DeFi and they don't, they're not going to buy all this other stuff that's kind of going up right now.

• 7:12David Hoffman?

  People who are buying like AVE and Uni and, and, and YFI are not buying DentaCoin. Those are different cohorts of people. Uh, related to, uh, DPI is the Index Co-op. Uh, something I, I want to bring up here is, uh, Index Co-op, a hundred and fifty million dollar TVL, total value locked under DPI. Uh, Anthony, what does this mean?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it just shows the, the pure demand here for the DeFi Pulse Index, I think, you know, index products typically haven't been super popular within DeFi because of the fact that everyone, you know, I guess like likes to just buy into whatever they, they, um, kind of can find and try and like get like a 10x or something because, you know, the DPI isn't going to give you a 10x in a month, right? Maybe over the long term, it'll, it'll kind of give you that because it's supposed to be volatility dampened. But the fact that we've still got a hundred and fifty million TVL here from mostly, well, I would say like the DeFi native crowd because it's not on, um, kind of like any major centralized exchanges yet. I think that just speaks to the demand for this product. And I think to get to like one billion plus kind of TVL without a kind of like major price rise in DeFi would require some, some fresh blood from the centralized exchanges.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Because I think the, the audience is very different there. So I'm hoping, you know, the Index Co-op, and I know they're working on this, can get the DPI onto some exchanges like Coinbase or something like that. Where we can kind of like open this up to, to a more, I guess, like retail, non-DeFi crowd and give, give them exposure to DeFi as well at the end of the day.

• 8:35David Hoffman?

  Absolutely, yeah. Basically, what $150 million market cap means is there's been $150 million worth of buying demand on the DPI asset, right? When you go to Uniswap and you type in DPI and you purchase it, you are increasing the price of DPI, which means that the way that that gets arbitrage is that more assets come under the DPI index, right? And what's pretty cool to me is Lemonade Alpha, he's a part of the Index Co-op community, the Co-op perhaps, and he's doing the math of the streaming fees that comes out of DPI, and that's $1 million in annual revenue for the Index Co-op Treasury. Pretty cool. We will be talking more about the Index Co-op throughout this weekly roll-up.

• 9:16David Hoffman?

  Last subject in the market section, David Mihal, who's been an absolute machine in generating these really easy, really digestible websites, has made another one. He's the one that made the crypto fees website that Ryan and I talk about all the time, and now he has made an openorgs.info, open-orgs.info, which is, and he has this tagline, "Dow's are the new companies. What's on their balance sheet?" And this is something that we've been saying on the Bankless program over and over and over again, Dow's have money and they want you to go and produce labor for the Dow's to produce something that the protocol wants. Uniswap sponsored a Bankless, literally the sponsor, the call to action at the end

• 9:57David Hoffman?

  of the Bankless-Uniswap sponsorship is go submit an application, go get a grant from Uniswap. All of these treasuries have a bunch of money that they want to pay you. Anthony, what's your take here?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just looking at these numbers is crazy, right? And actually, if you look at something like Uniswap, that's just the vested amount. So Uniswap has a vesting on their treasury over, I think, three or four years. And if you take like the fully diluted value, I think it's like $15 billion plus. So they already have 5.2 billion vested here, which, as you said, yes, they can invest in like a bunch of different things out of the treasury, they're already doing so. You know, we make our way down the list, and it's just absolutely insane to see how big some of these treasuries are. And as I said, some of them are vesting, the Index Co-op is the same, it vests over three years, and so, you know, the total The best amount is fifty two million right now, which I think is really cool. Because this, I mean, speaking of like the index call, I know we're going to talk more about it.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  But you know, that treasury also goes to paying people to to work for the protocol, essentially to paying contributors in index tokens. Um, so I think a bunch of these other kind of DAOs are doing that as well. And that's the real power, I think, of this is not maybe not so much like investing in like ecosystem stuff. But like giving actual kind of uh monetary value in the form of this token to people doing work for for the organization, which truly does make it uh an open org or a DAO, right? Um, you know, or or a D O, maybe not as autonomous as we would like it to be, but a decentralized organization where anyone can come in, contribute work and get paid in uh these tokens, which I think is the really, really cool aspect of these treasuries.

• 11:30David Hoffman?

  Right, we we are, we know the web two gargantuan's in Facebook and Google and and all the and all those people. Uh, if you want to get a hint at what the web three gargantuan's might look like, go look at the size of these treasuries. Uh, speaking of that Uniswap ad, uh, we need to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum.

• 12:12David Hoffman?

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

• 12:54David Hoffman?

  That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 13:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  MetaMask is your go-to wallet for the bankless journey. If you're going bankless, you need MetaMask, period. Browser and mobile, get them both. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi. Here's my favorite part. Now you can swap tokens directly in MetaMask with a single swipe. This has got to be the easiest way to trade Ethereum tokens. Choose a token you own, a token to exchange it with, and get your quotes. If you like what you see, you hit swap. That's it. What makes swaps so useful is what happens behind the scenes. It compares DEXs, aggregators, and market makers to find you the best price with the lowest network fees and the least slippage. This means you can swap a wider range of tokens,

• 13:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  and swaps can even automatically split up your trade to give you access to better liquidity. You don't even have to think about it. Try it out. Download MetaMask for desktop or mobile now at metamask.io and start swapping.

• 14:02David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, and we are back with releases. The first thing that both I'm pretty sure Anthony and I are excited about is our good friend DC Investors released his new newsletter, The Catalyst. DC is really big in the world of NFTs and overall in DeFi. We had him on the Bankless Podcast with Anthony and Eric Connor for the Bull Case for Ethereum. Fantastic podcast, go ahead and go listen to that. But also, DC is releasing his new newsletter, The Catalyst. And so if you want to follow DC's thoughts, go and give that newsletter a follow. Anthony, have you followed The Catalyst yet?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Oh, of course I have. I mean, DC Investor has been writing things for a long time, actually. He used to be very active on Reddit. Still is active on there, but you know, pre-Twitter days was much more active, and he wrote a lot on there. And I used to read a lot of it. And it's funny, because like, when you read something on Reddit, you never kind of, I guess, look at the, I mean, sometimes you look at who's saying it, but you know, a lot of the time you miss it. I don't know, maybe that's just me. But then I went back and I saw, oh my God, like, all these amazing things that I used to read were from DC Investor. So yeah, definitely go subscribe to this. It's not like a daily thing or anything like that. I think it's a, it's a, just whenever

• 15:12Speaker 01

  He feels like writing something thing, which I think it works really well. I mean, his first piece was on kind of like, um, what I guess like mo- uh, what, what, what, what the ecosystem looks like as part of, I guess, like a multi-chain future. And like, you know, what it, what it takes to get there, sort of thing, and how that's, how he thinks that's going to play out. So yeah, if you're interested in, in just random thoughts, I don't think it's just going to be NFT. I think it's just going to be anything that's on his mind, um, you know, when he wants to write about it, then definitely go give this a, uh, subscribe.

• 15:38David Hoffman?

  Awesome. All right. Onto the next. Uh, there is a new protocol getting released. Uh, what is this called? This is called, uh, Cryptex, Cryptex Finance, and they are doing a, a synthetic asset, a collateralized synthetic asset that is tracking the value of the total market cap of all of crypto. Uh, and the, uh, the actually, the interesting thing about this is not only is that, is that synthetic asset really, really cool, but the, uh, the team behind this, I think is also worth noting about, um, but we will get into that team later. Uh, the Cryptex system uses, uh, chain link oracles to, uh, get an aggregate of, uh, five different total crypto market cap, uh, prices or valuations.

• 16:19David Hoffman?

  So like the total crypto market cap from CoinMarketCap, from CoinGecko, uh, these people have APIs and they are reporting the total value of all crypto assets combined. And the Cryptex, uh, Cryptex dot finance, uh, protocol, uh, which has its own governance token already, uh, is, uh, trying to generate a synthetic asset that's collateralized by, uh, by DAI and Ether and other ERC twenty tokens to produce this new synthetic asset. Anthony, what can you tell us about this?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I saw this last night just before, kind of went to bed here, um, and it reminded me of like, I guess, what's happening with the index corp, of course, like just the index product and things like that. But it's good to see kind of like teams, uh, tackling, I guess, like a, uh, I mean, I wouldn't call it like super different, but like something, something that's very unique. Like the total crypto cap is obviously something that a lot of people, uh, will, um, will quote, right? A lot of the time they'll, they'll talk about it, they're like, oh yeah, just got the two trillion dollars, like, look at the growth of crypto. And there was no real way to track it that I know of before, uh, and now you can just buy this synthetic token and you can track, uh, the, you know, you can basically track the entire growth of the crypto ecosystem. So if you, if you just want like a really safe token, because realistically, this is not going to increase like a tiny value over time, right?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Because, you know, the mark, total market cap's already at two trillion. If we go to like 10 trillion, you get an 80% kind of gain there. But if you if you think about it, right, that is like an eighty percent like to get to ten trillion from here is going to take a while, I think. And an eighty percent gaining crypto is is just like very, very kind of like small. Um. So it it's literally, I think, a very uh safe asset. So if you just want really safe exposure, you think crypto in general is going to grow. And you think it's going to become like a really big asset class, bigger than what it is now. I think this is the product for you. So really great product for that. I I mean, I could see it being part of anyone's portfolio. If you just want something that dampens the volatility in your portfolio uh and still gives you kind of like that exposure to to the growth of crypto, then this is definitely something that I I think people should take a look at.

• 18:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if this asset was created a year ago in January twenty twenty, it would have been uh I'm gonna make up some numbers, but the accuracy will still be there. It would have been twenty dollars and then today if that that twenty dollars would have turned into two hundred dollars. Uh. So a ten X over um just a little over a year. Uh. Again, and uh kind of like how I said at the beginning, the the interesting uh team uh thing about this to me is the team. Uh. Preston Van Loon is one of the the leads behind Prismatic Labs. Uh. And there are some other like core Ethereum Ethereum blockchain developers on this team. Uh. Anthony, what do you have any comments on that?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And actually, I just I did some head math. Sorry, I want to correct what I said. It's not an eighty percent game from two trillion to ten trillion. It's like a five X. I was working I was working back saying like if it was ten trillion to two, it would go minus eighty percent. So still very, very good, like very good exposure there. But yeah, anyway. No, that that's what caught my eye as well. It was like, you know, Preston Van Loon has been heavily involved with the ETH two effort for quite a while now. Um. You know, one of my favorite people in the space, of course, and working on kind of like Ethereum protocol work. Uh. But yeah, I mean, that's what I always look at, I guess, in general um for these new projects. It's like, who are the people behind it? Now, I know there are a lot of good projects right now that have anonymous um or at least pseudonymous developers behind them, but they usually come with a name as well. I know. For example, you know, Alchemix has Scoopy Triples, who's been around for quite a while.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I mean, it's not like someone just came out and created a protocol and then, you know, they're just totally anonymous, which is obviously like a quote unquote rug pull risk. So yeah, always looking. At the team, looking at kind of what they've done in the past and kind of like, you know, where their kind of head is, I think, in this space.

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  That's what something I remember back in 2017 that was always like chanted on the on the reddits and on Twitter saying like, hey, if you're trying to evaluate a project, go look at the team. And me as a crypto newbie, I'd be like, okay, I looked at the team like I still don't know anyone. And like, the only reason why I'm able to do this now is because I've been in this space for three years. I know who these people are. And that's the difference between maybe people coming in on their first cycle versus maybe their second cycle is like, oh, you understand and know people that have still that have stuck around. Because the people that stick through the bear markets are people who you know are convicted and have the right beliefs about this place. And that's why I feel good about about Scooby Triples. Like, he's anonymous, but he's been around. Like, he's not totally anonymous. He's more pseudo anonymous. Like, he has a brand, he has an identity.

• 20:41David Hoffman?

  And people like Preston Van Loon have have all that same thing, but he's actually not anonymous. And so that's definitely some of the benefits of being in this space a longer time. You start to pick up on names and people and it's easier to evaluate things.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  All right, moving on to D Y D X on Layer 2. We did a State of the Nation with both D Y D X and Starkware about this. So for those that missed that State of the Nation, go back and tune into that. It was really fantastic. But Layer 2 is actually starting to get deployed. Something that has always been a theme lately on the Bankless program is like, oh, we are one to three months away from this scaling protocol coming. Like, nope, this one is here. You can actually go trade on Layer 2 with D Y D X right now and escape all of the gas fees of Ethereum and only pay a small trading fee that you are used to paying when you trade on normal brokerages. Anthony, are you stoked for this or what?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Dude, like, this is just like some of the most bullish news. I mean, I think the most exciting thing was that they went from like an alpha to like an open public kind of Layer 2 in a matter of weeks, right? Didn't have to wait very long at all. And, you know, it's a full kind of suite built on Starkwest technology, which is some of the best in the industry for Layer 2 scaling. They're already doing I saw one of the Starkbear co-founders say that within the first 24 hours, they already did $10 million of volume, which is crazy, right? Because you know, you think about people still have to onboard into onto this kind of stuff, right? They still have to get their assets on this stuff to kind of like learn about it and do some trading or whatever. So and and it becomes like a a compounding or an exponential growth after that.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So I I do think that we're going to see some some incredible growth here rather quickly. Um, because I mean, something like D Y D X didn't even really work on layer one because it was an order book based exchange, right? On the on layer one, those things don't really work. We had the AMMs kind of exploding usage because they work much better. Now, and and this is what layer two enables, not just the fact that we can get like cheaper, uh, what much cheaper fees and and faster transactions, but we can also actually use a product like this now and grow it to rival the centralized incumbents, which is what excites me the most.

• 22:51David Hoffman?

  Hundred percent. All right, Anthony, I said we were going to talk about index stuff further on in the show. And here's where we talk about that. Something new out of the index team is the Metaverse Index from the Index Co-op. Uh, Anthony, what can you tell us about the Metaverse Index?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this has been in the works for quite a while now, something that the community was very excited about. It basically came from the community. Uh, the Index Co-op community came up with this idea that the Metaverse, all this kind of concept of a virtual worlds, um, you know, with within like the digital asset asset space, like NFTs, you know, um, collectibles, uh, you know, uh, in-game, uh, items and stuff like that. You know, the the the community kind of came together and said, well, you know, we should create an index for this. Like this is a huge theme right now. People want exposure to this, but there's so many tokens, they just don't know which one to buy. And they don't know what's going to be around in the future, of course, or or no, it kind of obviously no one knows what's going to go up in value or not. So this basically, uh, Met Metaverse Index takes 15, uh, different tokens, uh, and there'll be more added in the future.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  But 15 different tokens in the Metaverse kind of ecosystem and just puts them into an index and you can just buy this. And and just it's the same as like the DPI, automated kind of, um, you know, uh, rebalancing once a month. Uh, you know, uh, automated performance, you don't have to do anything. You can just buy and sell it. Uh, and yeah, I mean, I'm super excited for this and. Fun fact, the logo was also designed as part of like a competition as well. So we did an open competition where people could design different logos and there were a lot of really cool ones. Um, but this one kind of won out and I actually really like this one. It it kind of, I think captures it quite well. Um, this new kind of like virtual world that you can kind of go into. Um, and yeah, I mean, I, I just think in general, like I'm biased here, but the index corp is so great because of the fact that they work together and they're very cohesive

• 24:34Speaker 01

  and they can bring these products that are now at a 2.5 million dollar market cap to life rel- relatively quickly. Uh, and, and that's, that's already streaming, uh, revenue to the index corp treasury as well. So it's just, it's just been great to see this evolve and, and kind of go live.

• 24:49David Hoffman?

  And the index co-op releases aren't stopping. This is actually something that we are doing here at Bankless with index co-op. Uh, the bed index, the Bitcoin Ether DPI, uh, that is going to be a great meme. Get ready to hear a bunch about it on, on Bankless. Get ready to get in bed with Bankless. Uh, Ryan and I think that this is a great index, uh, just for really covering all your bases. You know, Bitcoin, how can you argue with Bitcoin? Ether, how can you argue with Ether? And then DPI is Ethereum's app layer. And it's kind of been the Bankless thesis is basically, this is basically all of what crypto has to offer. Uh, and so if you just want passive, like no thought exposure to the cryptocurrency industry, uh, we think the bed index, uh, will

• 25:34David Hoffman?

  be a great index to have. And it is going into a, a governance decision for the index co-op. It doesn't yet exist. We want it to exist. If you are an index holder and you think that this index should exist, go vote for it. And that's, that's the purpose of the index token is it's a governance token. So if you think the, uh, the bed index should be a thing, go ahead and, and vote for it. I think the cool thing about, um, what we could do with the bed index is not just have Ether, just dormant Ether, but have, uh, staked Ether. Um, the, the concept of, uh, our Eth from Rocket Pool comes to mind where it's Ether that is, is kind of like, um, these, the, it's got the passive income of staked Ether baked into it. And then there's also other things that we could do with the DPI, like there's other, like with the

• 26:18David Hoffman?

  Aave token, which is a pretty decent amount of the tokens inside of Aave. You can actually stake those Aave tokens into the Aave protocol for 4%. And so the the the social contract that we are trying to make happen with the bed index is making sure that the bed is as trust free and attuned to the principles of Ethereum and decentralization, yet is also being highly productive at the same time. So that's the goals of the bed index. Also, not the only index being added to a governance vote in the index co-op. Synthetix debt mirror index is also up for governance vote. The index team really making just churning out new indexes. Nice job, guys.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is this is great. I mean, I I've been following this stuff in the in the forum and on the Discord and definitely trying to churn out products, you know, much quicker and not just any kind of products, products that people actually want. So I definitely agree with you that the bed index is going to be super popular. You know, especially as as a bankless, you'll have like an audience to basically, you know, get on board with it, get them kind of like.

• 27:22David Hoffman?

  Get them into bed.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  You know, do the, yeah, exactly. Get them into bed. That's right. And the and the debt mirror index is also a one that I'm really excited about because it basically protects SNX stakers from this kind of volatility that they find themselves in within the debt pool. So it essentially allows you to kind of dampen that volatility there. So both of these products, I think, are going to be absolutely massive. So I'm very excited to see them see them go live.

• 27:45David Hoffman?

  All right, we talked about Scoopy Triples. The reason why I say that name is because it's so fun to say. But Scoopy Triples founder of Alchemix is now proposing Alchemix DAO. Anthony, I actually don't know too much about this, and I know you talked about it on the Daily Guey. Maybe you could give us a little prelude of what is in here. What's what's the Alchemix DAO? What's the goal of that?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I I guess like this posters details what they want the the Alchemix DAO to be and what they want it to look like. And kind of like their their commitments and their vision and mission sort of thing as well. So the Alchemix DAO, I mean, it's going to be very similar to other DAOs within the ecosystem. You know, as as we showed before, there's a the Alchemix has a lot of a lot of money in their treasury already, right? You can see.

• 28:27David Hoffman?

  Almost a billion.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, almost a billion, right? So, you know, i- i- it's definitely um time for them or almost time for them to to just transform themselves into a DAO. They have a very strong community already. I mean, I I I lurked the Discord. They're just they're just doing so many things on there. It's really cool to see. But the DAO will obviously include governance, so token holders will be able to um to vote on different things and and vote on different kind of like parameter changes and stuff like that. Um it'll obviously um uh accrue revenue as well um from from the product, so ta- token holders will have a have a claim on that revenue. Uh they did tease in the post um more stuff about, you know, if you're an Alchemics token holder, there's actually more coming for you, so more bonuses sort of thing. And I think they're going to work with other protocols to to kind of, I guess, maybe uh come up with like s- some sorts of uh revenue for for Alchemics token holders or

• 29:13Speaker 01

  other other sorts of things there. And then what they also did in this post is that they spoke briefly about their layer two plans. And, you know, what I really liked is that there's a quote here um somewhere where they basically said, you know, they are there, i- it's it's here. They say by harnessing, uh sorry, uh uh where is it? While layer two solutions come in several shapes, we can't arbitrarily pick any layer two because we have zero knowledge about which solution will emerge as the winner. But we're optimistic that that's converge on one during the development of Alchemics DAOs. There's like three puns in there. Um but basically, and then they go on to say, by harnessing the throughput of layer two solutions, Alchemics DAO will be inclusive of all Ethereum without sacrificing our ethos of decentralization first. So they are extremely Ethereum Ethereum aligned uh and and obviously really want to stay true to Ethereum's ideals.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  And that's, I mean, that's a major reason uh why I backed Alchemics and why I hold Alchemics tokens is because I know that they like this and the project itself is very sound. So any teams that are just like super Ethereum aligned like this is something that I want to be involved in. But yeah, thi- this post got me really bullish because they already kind of know what they want to do. I mean, they're already one of the top DeFi protocols. And for them to kind of go uh uh launch this DAO and give token holders a a a claim on the revenues uh is is going to be really, really awesome, I think.

• 30:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I guess I should just claim that I also hold Alchemix tokens. And so I'm biased as to perhaps the agenda, putting the agenda together. But I have been chanting this same drum over and over and over again. It's like, protocols that actually put, collect fees, which there are many protocols that do not collect fees for the token holders, I think are setting a new paradigm, quote unquote new paradigm, for what could be. And one of my biggest criticisms of the equity stock market is that, you know, it's, it's just, it seems to be a game of greater fools, because there's no meaningful difference if the equity isn't paying fees, then you're just trying to sell that equity to the, somebody who can pay for it at a higher point in time.

• 31:10David Hoffman?

  I'm hopeful that tokens on Ethereum will not fall into that same trap and will instead be evaluated by the actual fees they are collecting to their protocols. There's also a second Alchemix update, which is their transmuter, which is one of the core contracts that makes the Alchemix system work, got an upgrade. It took a number of hours for this upgrade to complete. But the, and the transmuter is how Alchemix turns, it turns AL, AL, oh boy, Al USD, which is their synthetic USD token into, or excuse me, it turns DAI into Al USD, so that the loans can automatically be repaid. And that is basically what the Alchemix system does.

• 31:51David Hoffman?

  It is a, you deposit your money and you get a loan based on the future yield of your, of your deposits. And it does that by depositing DAI into YERN. And so it's also very integrative. Anthony, what can you tell us about this transmuter V 1.1 migration?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is a, this is a pretty big upgrade here, I think. If you scroll down to the second tweet, they explained that the transmuter, and it's probably grown since, since here, now holds over 200 million DAI, which is, as you said, deployed to YERN finance here. And the effective yield on that, at the time, was 37% on your DAI deposits. And you put it well, what they do is they basically pay your loans automatically for you. So, I mean, this, this kind of like, I mean, it's funny, because when you think about it, this is something that naturally lends itself to DeFi. Very programmatic, right? We can do this in smart contracts. When you really grasp what's happening here, will you get a loan against your stablecoin? So, you know, the, the, the, there's no risk of kind of liquidation here because of the fact that it's a stablecoin kind of loan.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Um, and then you're paying back the debt. So over time, essentially your loan is being paid back by the yield generated on your principal. I mean, when you really grasp that concept, I know it's, it's been funny because like I think it's mind blowing. But I've been seeing a bunch of like traditional finance folks kind of attack this and say that this is like a Ponzi or a scam. But it's not like all of it is accounted for, all of the, the money is accounted for, the yield is coming from a, a year in vault, which is doing, you know, a bunch of different things to generate that yield. But it's all real. It's not like we're printing money out of thin air. Like if there is no real dollars to come in and back this up, or if there's no kind of, I guess, like, you know, uh, demand for, for borrowing assets or for like, um, buying the, the, the tokens that are being paid out sometimes.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Then that it's just not going to work, right? So I think a lot of people fail to grasp the fact that there is a lot of, um, uh, it's all backed by real assets at the end of the day and real demand. So, yeah. Once I really wrapped my head around Alchemix, the first time I was like, holy shit, this is going to be huge.

• 33:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Every time I think of loans that automatically pay themselves back, I'm like, oh, those poor students with all those student loans out there, they would really, they'd love, sure, sure would love to have that. Um, but there is a difference between uncollateralized loans and, and credit loans. So that is a categorical difference. Anyways, moving on, some drama that happened in the last week, uh, I guess we'll actually get to the drama second, but, uh, Faye Labs released the, uh, the Faye, stablecoin, which is an algorithmic stablecoin, uh, which is kind of a, a new frontier in the world of DeFi innovation. A lot of teams are trying to tackle the uncollateralized, uh, uh, algorithmic stablecoin. And there's a spectrum of to what degree that the collateral is or isn't there. Um, and this one, uh, was,

• 34:27David Hoffman?

  had this kickstart like a genesis event where people could come and put their ether into a contract and they would be minted these new face stablecoins. And that ether would then represent the liquidity that backstopped, uh, backstopped the Faye token. So I guess it was to, to some degree collateralized. And then the, the incentive behind this is that you could, we would also be able to access. The tribe governance token. Everyone likes governance tokens. And so because this was like kind of an open release and you know, permissionless. And what Ethereum is really, really good at is capital, um, capital formation. A lot of money got allocated into this, uh, into this tribe contract and uh, I, in my opinion, it's things started to break down or have been breaking down.

• 35:09David Hoffman?

  Um, but not, not completely. I would say, I would just say that it didn't, it wasn't the smoothest start because people's expectations were so high. People got this release and it was like, oh, I'm just going to ape into this because it's a brand new governance token. Forgetting that when everyone else also apes into it, that like this perhaps is getting a little bit out over the ski tips. Anthony, I know you're, you're a little bit closer to this system than I am. Did I explain that? Okay.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did. You did. And you know, I, I think I should say that I'm a small seed investor in, in Faye Protocol. So just to get that out of the ways of disclosure. But I mean, yeah, this was like the talk of crypto Twitter for the last week or so, like so many people were kind of, I guess, like hating on it because the sale didn't go exactly, um, you know, as planned. And for those who don't know, the TRDI is basically the sale finished and then the Faye peg was, uh, was not at a dollar. So basically immediately fell below peg. It hung around the 95 cent mark for quite a while, but the kicker here is that people wanted to sell their Faye to get their ETH back, right? Cause they were just going in to, to get the tribe governance token.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  But the way Faye works is that the further away from the peg that it is, there's this thing called, uh, uh, direct incentives. And what that means is that you're penalized exponentially, uh, uh, by, by selling Faye here. So yeah, you can see here for a band tag put out a chart that basically says if the Faye price, I mean, as a simple example, if the Faye price is 95 cents, you, you couldn't sell Faye and, and only take a five cent kind of haircut here. You would be taking an additional 30% haircut because the protocol would burn 30% of your Faye before giving you the ETH for it. And this is a mechanism that is supposed to discourage selling when Faye is under peg. But this only works if there's demand for Faye. Now, because Faye is a stablecoin, it's brand new. It is not integrated into pretty much any DeFi apps.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  It is not, um, you know, i- i- it is not something that people want to hold or that there's demand for. And naturally, there was just this absolutely massive kind of um cell pressure, which kept pushing the peg down. And now eventually the Faye team turned off the the burn mechanism so that people could exit. But the the but the coin is still off peg. Like Faye is at like, what, seventy cents now or something like that? So people are still taking this massive haircut. But you can see like how rapidly it dropped from like the nineties to the seventies when when the when the when the um, I guess like the burn mechanism was turned off. Because people just want their ETH back. You know, ETH's running up as well, right? Like, you'll probably like to say, okay, well, I'll take this thirty percent um haircut on ETH, but like, I'll make it back because ETH's gonna go up or uh, you know, or something like that. I'd rather hold my ETH than than than Faye. But,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  you know, from that point of view, and as I said, I am I am a kind of biased here because I'm a small seed investor. I don't think this is like a death for Faye or anything. I actually just think that the fact that there was just too much supply and like basically zero demand for the token is the reason why I ended up in this situation. But I do think the mechanism can work, you know, in the right conditions, given that there is not like this massive over overhang of supply. So I think that's what the team is trying to do now is basically get to a point where supply and demand reach an equilibrium, Faye gets back to peg, uh, and then all all is kind of, uh, I guess, well and good there. But yeah, very interesting kind of thing to follow along with. And, you know, at one point with the burn mechanism was on, and i- it the penalty got to a hundred percent. So if you sold your Faye, you would be left with zero. You wouldn't get any ETH. It would

• 38:20Speaker 01

  just burn all of your Faye. So obviously, they had to turn it off at that stage and and kind of go back to the drawing board and see what they can do here.

• 38:26David Hoffman?

  The nature of uncollateralized stablecoins is inherently a balancing act, and that that balancing point is always at the most chaotic point, right at Genesis, especially when, you know, in when there's a a contract, a brand new contract, which you get this brand new governance token, it incentivizes ape culture. This is what ape culture is. People just ape in, and people that are aping in to like way too much ETH, because like, how how much ETH was it? It was like six hundred and seventy thousand, six hundred and thirty-nine thousand ether, not dollars, ether. Uh, and people were looking to make a quick buck. And algorithms, algorithmic stablecoins, probably not the best place to make a quick buck. Uh, this is a long-term game that like to to what you say, the mechanisms probably

• 39:09David Hoffman?

  sound over time. People that are just having short time horizons just kind of need to get washed out. So the people with a longer time horizons can stay, and they're the people that's really going to to balance the Faye, the Faye price. Uh, how how do you feel about that take?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I I I think so. And and it's funny because like um it it really is what you said like ape culture where people didn't read how this worked. Because if you knew how it worked, you wouldn't have aped in like this. Because I I I didn't like I saw it and I I had people asking me. They're like, you know, should I go in? I'm like, you know, I I I I obviously, I I I can't really say much because of my biases and and kind of like my conflicts of interest here. But I said to all of them, like, do your own research. Just read up on what this is before you put your money into it. Um. Because yeah, I mean, this is exactly what happened. And, you know, I wouldn't say that I thought this was going to happen, you know, to to this extent or anything like that. I mean, I didn't expect there to be over six hundred thousand ETH going into this sale. But people thought that they could put their ETH in, right?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Uh, and then get this tribe token for free, and then also get their ETH back out by selling Faye. And that's not what happened. So now there's a lot of trapped ETH here, which I don't know, you know, maybe that's bullish short term for the price, you know, there's a lot of ETH taken out of circulation effectively here. Um. But yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely uh basically ape culture. And it's also scary because it kind of like shows that we're in like such a frothy market right now, like extremely frothy. And it it kind of gets like, you know, how long can that go on for? Maybe it can go on for a while. I don't know. Um. But yeah, it's still the Faye Protocol now has still almost a billion dollars to play with um as part of one of its mechanisms called Protocol Controlled Value, as you can see here. So now what it can do is it can basically keep

• 40:47Speaker 01

  uh reweighting itself to get Faye back to peg until eventually all the sellers are kind of exhausted, they're out. And then the ETH left is basically just the people who want to stay in and and support the project and be part of the, I guess, Faye pool.

• 40:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, to put this into perspective, six hundred and forty thousand Ether, there's roughly a hundred and fifteen million Ether. And total, total supply and six hundred and forty thousand of that, which is over one point billion dol- one point three billion dollars got deposited into this contract. So obviously, like, for something at Genesis, like, that's a big, big mountain of capital to have to try and balance at Genesis. Um. Anyway.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And and you know what? You know what's funny? Um. Thinking back to the last kind of um project that got such a big uh kind of amount of money in it so fast was maybe the the Dow. And at the time, it wasn't 1.3 billion dollars. It was more ETH. I think it was like 20 million ETH. But because ETH was only worth like $10, it was much less on a dollar value. Um, but it's just funny to see now, like how people just still do this, right? You know, the, the, the contract here could have just easily as been as damaging as um the Dow. There could have been a critical bug in it, right? Um, where, you know, thi- this ETH could have gotten drained. So imagine if we saw like the Dow 2.0 uh, you know, in, in 2021, that would have been a very interesting to see.

• 42:02David Hoffman?

  Right, right. We probably wouldn't have gotten rolled back, that's for sure. We probably would have left that the way that it was.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And there's no way it would have gotten rolled back.

• 42:12David Hoffman?

  Alright, so Polygon continues to make a ton of integrations. Uh, and this one's a little bit different, actually. Polygon and Connect partner to build the multi-chain future. Uh, Connect, we recently did a meet the nation with uh, Connect, uh, very founder, I think, co-founder Arjun Bhutani. Uh, and he took us through the history of Connect. And Connect has really been pioneering the world of state channels, which is one of the earliest primitives for scaling Ethereum. And, and state channels is just basically like a bar tab, right? Where Anthony's the bartender, I'm the, the, the beer drinker. And I come and I give him my credit card and then we make seven transactions because I bought seven beers. Uh, and then we close out the transaction at the end of the day. And that's one transaction that settles on the Visa network.

• 42:55David Hoffman?

  State channels are the same concept, you know, up, you know, up effectively infinite levels of transactions between two parties. And then they settle on the main chain after that. Uh, Connect is, has really pivoted into uh, something new, which is state channels across L2s. And that's where the, this relationship between Polygon and Connect comes in, where Connect is uh, helping bridge assets and liquidity across various L2s. And Polygon as one of the most in recently integrated uh, L2 network. You can't even go a week without seeing somebody integrate with Polygon. Now Connect is working with Polygon to get uh, assets and liquidity moving from L2 to L2 and even chain to chain uh, using the Connect state channels. And Anthony, anything, anything to add here?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the disclosure, I'm an advisor to Polygon quickly there, but essentially this is really cool to see. I mean, as you said, this is kind of like bridging different L2s, different kind of chains together. And Connect is basically at the heart of that because they've been working on this for quite a while now. This is, I think, a critical issue, not a critical issue, but like a big issue that is going to get solved by Connect. Is that we have these L2s all spinning up, but a lot of them are siloed right now. So how do we connect them, right? And I think, you know, Connect is similar to other projects that are out there, like, I guess, Thor Chain and things like that, that want to do this cross-chain kind of exchange and stuff like that. And that's what Connect is doing here. They're connecting Polygon, you know, to, I guess, like if you're a mainnet to other L2s. And it's doing it in a trustless way as well.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  So the Holy Grail is creating like a bridge that is like fully trustless. And it's very hard to do. A lot of the bridges typically these days are very, very centralized. They're not actually trustless. So if Connect can nail this and then kind of scale it as well, because I think scale is always the kicker here. It's like you can nail it, but like doesn't scale because if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. So if they can do that, then I think that's going to be a huge win for them as a platform and a huge win for the ecosystem. Because just having liquidity seamlessly go between L2s, between side chains, between chains is going to be a game changer, I think.

• 44:59David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. All right, we're going to burn through some of these because Anthony and I like to talk. But Coinbase active users grew in 117% in Q1 2020, 2021, revenue topping 1.8 billion. The reason why this is, of course, relevant is because Coinbase recently released its S1, which disclosed basically all of the information about Coinbase's internal books, right? Because Coinbase is going public in roughly two weeks and even less than that, I think.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  It's awake, it's, yeah, it's not even awake now. It's like the 14th of April, I think.

• 45:36David Hoffman?

  So close, yeah. I feel like people aren't talking about that enough. Some people are definitely talking about that, but not enough. Anthony, any comments on Coinbase's public listing?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny, the fact that, you know, they obviously wanted to bring out their Q1 earnings before the public listing was not an accident. Because if you look at their, their, their kind of results here, it's absolutely, you know, phenomenal. They have some of the most insane growth out of any company you would see, like in terms of percentage growth. This is just absolutely insane. And because they're going to be listing on, you know, doing a direct listing, there's going to be a ton of new kind of investors now that haven't touched crypto before. That are going to be buying Coinbase's stock. And I saw one of the financial institutions basically re-rate Coinbase's stock price up from, I think it was like $190 to $440. So basically, you know, more than doubled it, which means Coinbase is going to open at a $200 billion plus market cap more likely. And there's going to be so much froth around this.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  This is like, if you think about it, Silicon Valley-based company, right? Unicorn out the gate, like massive unicorn, like obviously like 200x a unicorn. In a, in an extremely hyper-growth industry being crypto, you know, the prospects here are just absolutely insane. So this is going to be one of the biggest events for crypto ever, I think, in terms of like general awareness, froth. I mean, you know, it's going to affect the rest of the crypto market as well. So trading this is going to be like pretty, pretty volatile. I think the, the market's definitely going to be volatile around this event. But it's the first time a lot of, I guess, like people outside of crypto are going to get exposure to crypto. Because Coinbase's revenues are directly tied to the performance of the crypto markets. Because it's all volume-based, the more trading volume, the more fees that they make.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  So if the crypto markets are quiet, Coinbase is quiet. If the crypto markets are hot, Coinbase is hot. So by buying Coinbase's stock, you are directly getting exposure to crypto, you know, and the crypto markets and the crypto volatility there. So, yeah, I mean, I, I can't see this being a small event, that's for sure.

• 47:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely not. Coinbase made $1.8 billion in revenue, meaning they were in profit in the quarter by somewhere between 700 and 800 million dollars. And get a load of this, this is absolutely crazy. For all of 2020, total trading volume on Coinbase was $193 billion. And in Q1 of 2021. Only is was a total trading volume topped 335 billion. Let me repeat, 193 billion dollars in revenue or in trading volume all throughout all of 2020. And then in just Q1, we are at 335 billion dollars.

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  That is crazy and I don't think it matters what the valuation of Coinbase is at day one. Everyone is buying that no matter what. We are in a late stage credit cycle. There's plenty of cash going around. Coinbase is the only asset on the stock market that gives you pure exposure to crypto assets in general. People are going to ape into coin no matter what, and we have some takes to talk about further on in the take section as well. All right, getting into Ethereum news, Mark Cuban says on a on a public interview on his cryptocurrency portfolio. I own a lot of Ethereum because I think it's closest to a true currency. Hot take from from Mark Cuban, one that I would agree with.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, very hot take and you know, obviously Mark Cuban's been very active within the, I guess Ethereum space. You guys have him on on Bankless to talk a lot about like the NFT stuff that he's been heavily involved with. But yeah, I think he just like, he's like us, right? He sees the utility of an asset to be the thing that gives it the most value. And I think that I totally agree with that, right? That's why I don't really hold any Bitcoin is because. I mean, you can do stuff with your Bitcoin on Ethereum with kind of like, I guess, tokenized Bitcoin. But that didn't exist for a long time and also a lot of that is centralized. So, you know, ETH being such a productive asset and you can do so much with it. I mean, the NFT economy is priced in ETH. All this kind of stuff happens. You stake your ETH, you put it in DeFi.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I think that's the reason why, you know, Mark Cuban kind of likes ETH as well is that the utility value is just so much greater than than Bitcoin. Even though I think you showed it just before, he owns more Bitcoin than ETH still. But I think that's just pure on like a portfolio construction perspective where it's like a market cap weighted thing. But if he's doing it market cap weighted, he's actually overweight ETH here, which is good, which is very nice to see.

• 50:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, wait, not even so. 60% Bitcoin, 30% Ethereum. 10% the rest and I off the top of my head, I don't know the valuations between Bitcoin and Ethereum. But I think Ethereum is roughly 1/10th the size of Bitcoin. And Mark Cuban's portfolio has Ether weighted at one half of his Bitcoin allocations.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  I think it's I think it's 1/5 now, actually. The size of Bitcoin's been gaining. But it's still it's still overweight. He's still overweight if you're doing a market cap weighted kind of index there.

• 50:30David Hoffman?

  And not only the big name to get interested into Ethereum, Toby Lutke, I think is how you pronounce his last name. The Shopify CEO tweeted this out the other day. Hey, DeFi Twitter, what are the commerce related opportunities that you are most excited about? What role do you want Shopify to play? So Shopify CEO getting his hands into the world of DeFi. Anthony, what's your opinion there?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and this wasn't the only tweet that he put out. He also put out another tweet. I don't know if it came before or after this one, where he basically said he was diving into Ethereum smart contracts, which was absolutely awesome to see. I mean, as you said, Shopify CEO, right? Someone who has, I guess, oh, there it is. He put it out before. He was dabbling with it smart contracts to understand how EFC 20's work. I mean, you know, given the fact that he's the Shopify CEO, you're probably going to see maybe down the line some integrations, direct integrations with kind of crypto here. And it's just, I mean, Shopify is the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. It is a huge company. I'm pretty sure they're public and they're worth like billions and billions of dollars here.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And obviously e-commerce just got like a massive boost in the last year because of the pandemic. So, you know, if he integrated some kind of like Ethereum sort of stuff within Shopify, that would be absolutely huge, I think, in terms of like integrations. I mean, and you know, this just follows on from the Visa news, right? Where Visa was just settling on Ethereum. Imagine Shopify doing settlements on Ethereum and things like that. I mean, yeah, I just, I saw this and I was like, this is just crazy. Ethereum's going mainstream. More and more people are going to be aware of Ethereum and everything that it can do. And it's just, yeah, I mean, it's just really great to see.

• 52:11David Hoffman?

  And the thing that comes to mind is that Toby, the CEO of Shopify has 190,000 Twitter followers, which is very respectable. But also, what about all the other CEOs who aren't on Twitter? Like, this guy just made a tweet because he's on Twitter and he likes to use Twitter. Obviously, he has 100, almost 200,000 followers. How many, like, you know, CEOs of companies, related companies, are thinking about these same things and just don't really engage on Twitter? Anthony and I are on Twitter an unhealthy amount, so of course, we see this. What about all the things we aren't seeing? What's below the scenes? Question mark. All right, moving on. The, there is one week left to update your nodes for the Ethereum Berlin upgrade countdown. You've got one week to do that. That is your PSA. If you run a node, you've got to update it.

• 52:55David Hoffman?

  Anthony, anything related to that you want to say?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Just, just update it. And if you're not running a node, run a node.

• 53:01David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. All right, moving on. We, we talked about this. Polygon is really just killing the game when it comes to L2 integrations. Here is a graph from the block tweeted out by Kami. Kami Russo of The Defiant. Where this graph shows value locked of Ethereum scaling solutions by type, right? Many different scaling solutions. There's Plasma, ZK rollups, Optimistic rollups, Vilidium. Plasma, according to this graph, is really outstripping the rest. While the others have respectable growth, Plasma is really in the lead. And all of that Plasma value locked is basically just Polygon. It's just Polygon. Anthony, what can you say about why Polygon has had such outsized success versus any of its other competitors?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and I think Mahalo, one of the Polygon kind of co-founders, actually put a clarification here that the, the TVL is split between Polygon Plasma and Polygon POS chain. So it's not just the Plasma chain. But, I mean, there's, there's kind of differences here. And I'm actually having debates with Mahalo over this and definitions and stuff. We're, we're both trying to come to like an agreed upon definition of what counts as like a, a layer two and like what that actually means. So a lot of this stuff is actually quite murky right now. But essentially, the difference between these two technologies is that with Polygon Plasma, you can go through the Ethereum main chain to withdraw your funds for example. Because it's a plasma chain, it it just it uses the Ethereum network to to process deposits and withdrawals and things like that.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Whereas the Polygon POS chain, which is sometimes called a sidechain, is using Polygon's own validators, of which that that, you know, they stigmatic tokens and it's it's kind of like that they're slashing involved. It's like a true proof of stake system. And they also commit themselves to to Ethereum as well. So from that point of view, there are there are differences there. It's all about trust assumptions. But the I I I think, you know, the the TVL across both of them is is huge, right? It's bigger than the other scalability solutions for Ethereum right now. But as you show, you know, uh, ZK rollup is gaining, you know, you can see it in the in the in the red or or the kind of like reddish color there. And that includes stuff like Loopring, uh, the uh, D I D X, it's going to include immutable X and things like that, too.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Optimistic rollups right now is really just synthetics, uh, because they're the only app live on optimism right now on mainnet. Um, and then Validium is a is a form of kind of a ZK rollup here as well, but it's it's distinctly different. So that's why it's kind of, um, I guess, like plucked out of there, and that's still very, very, very small right now. But this is going to grow exponentially, I reckon. As we go progress further, it's just going to get, um, more and more uh, kind of like, uh, I guess, like TVL locked in these things.

• 55:37David Hoffman?

  All right, last little bit of Ethereum news. A tweet out of Justin Drake says, "Early polling suggests possible support for a 2021 minimum viable merge target." The merge comes after EIP 1559. It's itself slated for the London Hard Fork in July or August. Uh, and then he says, "Minimum viable, meaning no transfers, no withdrawals, no statelessness, no major EVM change." And he posts a screenshot of a an unknown Telegram group where he asked the question, it's a poll. Um, "Safe minimum viable merge in 2021. It's possible. Let's dire, it's desirable. Let's ship it." And then 86% of people agreed, whoever, whoever in this Telegram group, uh, agreed with that statement. I'm assuming this Telegram group is

• 56:20David Hoffman?

  a decent amount of like Ethereum core devs. Uh, Anthony, what does this mean?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I guess like what minimum viable means here is as Justin has described it. It literally just means like the minimum viable kind of, I guess, like a state we can get to for the merger, which essentially would be just the getting rid of proof of work. So essentially the ETH one chain would get off proof of work and be validated by proof of stake, by the currently known ETH two chain. Then post that, like after that merger goes through, you enable transfer. So you can have like ETH two transfers to to ETH one. It's all one Ethereum, but you can have transfers from, you know, the stakeholders on that that are taking on the beacon chain right now to to kind of like ETH one there and withdrawals and things like that. Statelessness obviously is going to come later. That's basically the stateless client effort, which people can kind of Google and look up.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And then, you know, no major EVM changes, so there would be no changes to ETH on the ETH one side. This would just be getting us to proof of stake and getting off proof of work, which I think is the whole point. I mean, the major point of the merge at the end of the day, because, you know, we we want to get off proof of work as soon as possible. And this, you know, for those who who are kind of like keeping score here, this is a massive issuance reduction as well. We go from a roughly four percent per year ETH issuance reduction under proof of work to a zero point five percent currently under proof of stake. So this is bullish for the both of those reasons, getting rid of proof of work, getting rid of miners and getting that issuance reduced by a large amount. So very excited for this.

• 57:50David Hoffman?

  To me, this is the emergence of sound money culture really coming up out of the Ethereum community and saying, hey, like, we know we had this plan, but like, we can make ether sound money, ultrasound money sooner, and so let's get that done. And it's sound money culture in Ethereum is alive and well and starting to actually manifest itself in governance decisions about the way that Ethereum moves forward into the future. That's, I think that's great. I'm a big fan of sound money culture.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Same, same.

• 58:20David Hoffman?

  Alright, moving on to NFT news, leaving Ethereum news on to NFT news, almost the same thing, now just a subset of Ethereum news. Ethereum startup Immutable aims to cut NFT costs with new layer L2 scaling protocol. So Immutable released Immutable X, which is an open platform to scale NFTs. So disclaimer, I'm a seed investor into Immutable X. So I guess we're just passing off, passing out disclaimers back and forth. God's Unchained is a really fun trading card game out of the Immutable team. And it's very much like a combination of Magic the Gathering where you own physical cards. And that's kind of like owning cash, right? You own the physical cards. But it's also a combination of like Blizzard Hearthstone where you get this trading card game and you play, you're playing online and you get all the benefits of a digital game.

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  But you don't actually get any of the benefits of owning the actual cards. God's Unchained is the best of both worlds where you both own the assets and it's a digital game because they are NFTs on Ethereum. The problem is that Immutable with God's Unchained, they were trying to make this marketplace for trading cards and the cards were sell for between $1 and $5, yet the fees to trade these things were between $5 and $30. So it really just hindered their ability to make the game that they wanted to, wanted to make. And so what they did was they made Immutable X, which is an L2 scaling solution specifically engineered for NFTs on top of Starkware. And so I think this is going to be really hot. It's the combination of NFTs and scale, which both of those are hot, and Immutable X just getting released now.

• 59:49David Hoffman?

  Anthony, any takes here?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, this is really cool to see. This is built on, on Starkwest technology. You know, this is going to solve a lot of the pain points of NFTs, I think, especially for, for God's Unchained here. And you know, this is an early release as well. So the, the, what you can trade right now on there is one of the, I guess, like hard, kind of card expansion packs they brought out called Trial of the Gods. If you maybe participated in God's Unchained as part of the Genesis event with Genesis cards, those aren't available just yet to trade, but they will be. So still early days here, but it is live and you know, you can trade like lightning fast, you know, zero fees because they're. They're kind of like, there will be fees eventually, but they'll be like very small, but immutable is kind of like paying those fees for everyone right now. So yeah,

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  go check it out if you haven't yet. I think it's going to blow you away just how fast it is.

• 1:00:42David Hoffman?

  Yep. And this is the future of scale on Ethereum. It's finally arriving. Same same platform that D Y D X we were talking about earlier, Starkware, also powering Immutable X. So we're going to start to see announcements like these more and more and more. In the other world of N F Ts, SuperRare raises nine million dollars to fund the future of art collecting. For those that don't know, SuperRare is an N F T issuance platform, kind of more specifically and focused on kind of fine art, very not simply not open to everyone. You can't actually just go there and just mint an N F T. They want to kind of curate it and they have raised nine million dollars in a seed round. Congrats to the guys at SuperRare. I'm going to move right on Anthony because we have,

• 1:01:23David Hoffman?

  we're going definitely going over time. Nine rare CryptoPunks from Lava Labs own are now on Christie's and so Christie's is now has CryptoPunks. It started with Beeple, it's moved on to some other things and now we have CryptoPunks. What a crazy story that we have CryptoPunks on Christie's. Anthony, what's your take here?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this just validates CryptoPunks even more, right? Like Christie's is a huge auction house for all sorts of art and things like that. So, you know, and CryptoPunks have been obviously in the scene for quite a while now, but it's cool to see that, you know, these punks belong to Lava Labs, so the creators of CryptoPunks. So obviously they've come along and they're like, okay, well, you know, we've got these punks and we want to do it in like a big way. We want to sell them because obviously they want to be paid for their work because they're the original creators of it. And that they're going to auction it off here. So I think this is going to get quite wild. They have an alien to kind of auction off here, which is crazy because aliens are the rarest. CryptoPunks is only nine of them. So they have one here, which is which is absolutely insane.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, I actually saw as I kind of woke up today that the CryptoPunks kind of floor, the floor price raised from like 32,000 to 41,000 because someone just came along and just bought them all up because this is going to bring so much fresh attention onto CryptoPunks. It's going to be insane. I mean, I'm really bullish to see kind of like how how this goes on Christie's here.

• 1:02:48David Hoffman?

  I wish I had a DC Investors tweet pulled up here where he polled people, will we see CryptoPunks on Christie's in 2021? And I think like 40 people, 40% of people said no, and DC was like, you guys are all wrong. And that was a number of months ago. So tip of the hat to DC getting it right. That's why we shield his, his sub, new step stack at the very beginning. Perhaps maybe getting overheated on the other side of things, however, is Tom Brady, Super Bowl champion of many, many times over again, I'm not too much of a football fan, is now launching an NFT company. Anthony, do you think the NFT world is getting a little too hot?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, yeah, pretty hot, right? It is, it is at a point where like most of the stuff in the NFT world is not going to have secondary market value. So if you're buying these things, then you're going to have to pretty much come to terms with the fact that there's a high chance that you're not going to get your money back. It is not like a token where you can just dump it into Uniswap and get something back if there's some liquidity. NFTs are very different in that you actually have to find a buyer. If you buy a piece of artwork and you want to sell it, right? You have to go and find someone that wants to buy that off you. You can't just go to Uniswap and dump it into a liquidity pool. You have to buy, you have to find someone. So from that point of view, yes, it's super, super overheated. You know, I don't, I don't follow American football at all. I know who Tom Brady is, but I know how big of a star he is, but this is just like, you know, people like to

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  say just top signals, but at the same time, it might be adoption too. Like I know there's a lot of sports memorabilia. So maybe they're just like taking the physical memorabilia and creating like NFTs out of it, which I think is fine and actually a natural fit. So I wouldn't really, maybe I wouldn't call it a top signal. It's maybe just an adoption signal, right? I like to use that term these days.

• 1:04:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The, the thing I would like to know is to what degree is Tom Brady the actual founder of this thing? Or what degree is this just, is he just a name?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I mean, board and advisors. So he's really, I mean, I would say he's just like, yeah.

• 1:04:39David Hoffman?

  He just, yeah, you can sign my name on it. Yeah. Uh huh. Maybe that's what's going on here. Anyways, in that case, like the world of NFTs are continuing to grow out at the very least. Another fun little story is the overly attached girlfriend meme. This, this was one of my favorite memes a number of years ago. It's kind of phased out of popularity, but these old memes.

• 1:04:57David Hoffman?

  memes are going for insane values and so the actual over attached girlfriend I don't know what her name is I just call her the over oh I guess her name is Leanna uh she sold this meme for 200 ETH someone bought to uh this meme for 416,000 dollars um damn that's pretty cool Anthony any comments here

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  yeah I mean it's funny to see like all of these kind of people who had memes created out the uh uh created of them to come back and monetize it now right and I don't I blame them for at all for doing this the market is extremely hot why wouldn't you if I was a meme I mean I guess sometimes I'm a meme but if I was a meme as big as overly attached to girlfriend I would definitely be monetizing it as well because you know I mean not only is she get getting like money out of this but she's also staking her claim on this meme too like digital representation of her being like I am in this meme this is uh this is kind of like my original kind of um you know picture here and if you want to own uh this piece you can buy it off me essentially so I think from that point of view it makes sense but at the same time

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  I mean I don't know if this is an adoption signal or a top signal this one stumps me like I I don't know what I I wouldn't buy this meme for 400,000 dollars I wouldn't buy any meme for 400,000 dollars but I guess it's a percentage of your net worth so if you're really rich maybe 400,000 dollars isn't much to you so you don't care so maybe it works like that for some people

• 1:06:17David Hoffman?

  yeah to me the question mark that I have is like this this meme is definitely like retired it's a retired meme uh so like is that still worth almost half a million dollars uh I I guess to someone it is like beauty is in the eye of the beholder Synthetix is Ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol what does that mean Synthetix is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks traders can use the Quanta exchange which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by Synthetix traders on Quanta can trade synthetic tokens like sbtc, st oil, or sdfi because Quanta is powered by Synthetix traders experience zero slippage on their trades

• 1:07:02David Hoffman?

  no I didn't mean low slippage I meant no slippage because that is the power of the Synthetix Platform, no slippage on your trades. You can also easily short assets with iSynths, which are synthetic assets that move inversely to their target asset. Synthetics isn't just for traders. Developers can build on synthetics to access the infinite liquidity offered by synthetic assets. Or investors can stake collateral to the protocol and earn fees that the protocol collects. If you're a trader and you're looking for a trading platform and not found in the legacy world, check out quenta.io. If you're a developer or you just want to earn yield on your collateral, go to www.synthetics.io, where you can stake your SNX or ETH and earn fees from synthetics.

• 1:07:47David Hoffman?

  Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid DAI markets. Gemini just launched their Earn program, where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi, or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you.

• 1:08:28David Hoffman?

  Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/go-banklist. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/go-banklist. And on to Bitcoin news. Grayscale's intentions for a Bitcoin ETF. As we know, and we've talked about this a number of times on the Bankless Weekly rollups,

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  the GBTC premium is under the actual assets that Grayscale has in its treasury.

• 1:09:17David Hoffman?

  And they are making this statement that they are committed to rolling GBTC into an ETF, which would actually just immediately nix the fact that GBTC is trading under the actual value under their assets. The interesting part to me is that they made this infographic called "Life Cycle of a Grayscale Product", which is: 1. Launch private placement; 2. Obtain public quotation on secondary market, which means like make this thing available; 3. Become SEC reporting; and then 4. Convert it into an ETF. So is Grayscale just turning into an ETF churning machine? And they outline this for a number of their different products that they have, where they are starting all of these new Grayscale trusts,

• 1:09:59David Hoffman?

  the Basic Attention Token Trust, the Chainlink Trust, the Decentralian Filecoin, Livepeer, Stellar Luminous Trust. And then some of them have moved on into what they call "public quotation", this is where Bitcoin Cash is, this is where Litecoin is, Ethereum Classic, the Digital Large Cap Fund, and then the SEC reporting, which is just GBTC and ETH-E, the Grayscale Bitcoin and Grayscale Ethereum trusts. And then they have this last panel, which is unfilled, but they're trying to get every single one of their products moved into this ETF category, probably starting with GBTC and Ethereum ETH-E not too far along after that. So, pretty interesting development out of the Grayscale world. Anthony, what's your take here?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the ETF's kind of like thing has been talked about for a while for Bitcoin. I would be very surprised if we don't get Bitcoin ETFs this year. I mean, look at what's happening in terms of like, I guess, public companies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet, Coinbase now going live, like going live on direct listing and things like that. Like, traditional finance and the old world is merging with crypto. And the ETF is one of the biggest mergers that can happen. The ETF is an amazing product for a lot of people. The Grayscale products, as they currently exist, are not great a lot of the time because they either trade at a discount or at a premium to their net asset value, whereas an ETF it does not. And if it does, it gets arbitrage away, so it's very fair for people.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see a Bitcoin ETF go live or multiple ones go live, because then ETH is next in line, right? And ETH is coming straight up after, and it's not going to take, you know, years and years and years, because ETH already has futures on CME, which is a prerequisite,

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know if it's a hard prerequisite, but it's definitely a spiritual one to getting an ETF. So, yeah, I think...

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  There's going to be a handful of Bitcoin ETFs coming out. There's not just going to be one. And GPT, I mean, grayscale GPTC is definitely a top contender there.

• 1:11:55David Hoffman?

  Totally. All right, Anthony, I'm about to burn through the rest of these. So raise a hand if you want to lay a comment, but I'm just going to go really fast through these. Grayscale, or not grayscale, MicroStrategy bought another $15 million worth of Bitcoin at an average price of $59,000. Again, they have this little graphic that they have been using and using and using. And so this is just going to be, again, a reoccurring theme. Grace or RICO strategy is going to dollar cost average into Bitcoin perpetually. JP Morgan adjusts its Bitcoin price to $130,000. I always think announcements of raising price targets is hilarious because targets are supposed to be met, not raised, but whatever. So big institutions getting really bullish on Bitcoin.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  There is a class action lawsuit filed against Ledger for their data breach, which we talked about a number of months ago. There was a breach of the user's information. Now there's a class action lawsuit against Ledger. Also Shopify for completely unrelated to crypto, but again, a customer data breach as well. And then lastly, the FTX is officially becoming the, the name of the Miami, Miami Heat? I don't know. A stadium in Miami is now going to be called FTX Arena. Again, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but Sam Bankman-Fried literally just planting his name on an arena in America.

• 1:13:21David Hoffman?

  Crypto's taking over the world, in my opinion, perhaps not the best move because it's, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried is not somebody that wants to have all that many headlines about him, but I guess he doesn't really care about that. Let's get into some takes, Anthony. I think this is going to be where, where you're going to have a fun time here. Where the first three takes that we've got lined up are all about Coinbase. And so Eric Connor, your good friend Eric Connor, says, "Don't buy the Coinbase IPO after multiple insiders already got better pricing. Buy DPI instead." Anthony, what's your take here?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you do a relative kind of market cap basis between Coinbase, which might, you know, highly likely it'll open at $200 billion cap and DeFi, there is a massive gap there. And DeFi, you know, Uniswap is already doing more volume than Coinbase on some days. So, and that's just one app, right? And then you've got the rest of the DeFi ecosystem. And obviously DPI tracks that. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'd take a position from Eric is that like, do both, but like wait more DPI, maybe because that'll give you probably more, more, more, more growth prospects over the long term, I think.

• 1:14:26David Hoffman?

  All right. Continuing the bashing of Coinbase IPO or the listing, which I don't intend to do, but I thought this was a cool take too. Uniswap gave me 400 voting tokens valued at $12,000. Coinbase gave my information to the IRS. I don't mean to be shitting on Coinbase. I just think it's a funny juxtaposition.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's a funny tweet. I mean, I really would like Coinbase to airdrop their, they're kind of like equity or stock to people who use the platform. But I think there's a lot of regulatory kind of issues there and it'll be a nightmare for them. I'm pretty sure they, they probably thought about it and talked about it and probably thought, uh, we don't want the regulatory issues. This is going to cost us too much. Let's just, uh, let's punt on that.

• 1:15:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, never, never ever been done before. However, they do have KYC information of all US customers. And if they are public, they can give it away. The hurdles aren't all that high, but I would imagine that there's a bunch I don't know about, about how incredibly complex that would become. All right. Last Coinbase take. Ryan Selkis says, do you really want to sit on the sidelines in this dip? When 1,000 Coinbase millionaires are about to rotate out of STONK and into cryptos? I thought that was pretty funny. Coinbase is going to be the, one of the biggest IPOs in history. And there's going to be a lot of unlocked Coinbase equity being accessible and turned into capital from people with Coinbase equity.

• 1:15:47David Hoffman?

  And he said, he, he said, Ryan Selkis, founder of Mazzari, says that this rotation out of Coinbase STONK into cryptos is going to be epic. I think that's going to be a, a, a good take, good take.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen how much will rotate into crypto, but I think crypto covers stablecoins now too. So maybe people just go into stablecoins and then yield farm with it. That's to me, the same stuff like that going to stablecoins is fine, I think.

• 1:16:13David Hoffman?

  Sure, yeah, maybe it just adds a bunch of stablecoin liquidity to DeFi, absolutely. All right, our first non, uh, non Coinbase take. Uh, this came out, uh, not too long ago, and I wanted to highlight this as a learning lesson for, for just what it means to be in a bull market. Uh, there was a, a, an announcement made that Balancer would be integrating with Algrand and helping add balancers at DeFi app to Algrand. And this turned out to be basically a fake announcement and fake announcements are a very strong symptom of a bull market. Announcements are just the, the blood of bull markets because people, there's people are clamoring for attention. So people will do what they want to do to get attention. Turns out this was not actually, this didn't actually happened.

• 1:16:56David Hoffman?

  Uh, Balancer just gave Algrand a grant, and not even to do build Balancer. I'm not even sure why they gave them a grant and Al, and somebody at Algrand turned this into a big hype story. And so, uh, Jeremy, I'm not going to be able to pronounce his last name, sorry Jeremy, uh, gave this a TLDR in a tweet thread that saying, it kind of broke down this story saying, you know, this, this was a fake story that got turned into something that it wasn't. And that's a lesson to be learned. Anthony, any takes here?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you mean, you said it well, it's partnership season, as I like to call it, where people just love to announce, um, these things to pump up their token price. You know, I'm pretty sure the algorithm price would have probably gone up on this announcement, right? Because Balancer is a top DeFi protocol and people will be spinning the narrative that, oh, look, top Ethereum DeFi protocols are migrating to, you know, this Ethereum killer. And look at the headline, aims to be Algorand's Uniswap, like, come on, like, this is just ridiculous. Um, so yeah, I mean, yeah, just hype and, and this is how you get caught out as well. Like if, if something pumps on like news, I've always seen like, uh, the short term, it tends to just drop back down because it's not like real buyers. It's just speculators being like, I'm going to pump this up on this news and then I'm just going to dump it like, uh, you know, in, in a little while. So yeah, just, uh, be safe.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  out there with these sorts of things.

• 1:18:11David Hoffman?

  Be safe. Yeah. And the last take actually comes from you, but I, I was the one that tweeted it. Ethereum's event horizon only grows larger. And this is something that we talked about on our Friday weekly live stream, which by the way, for those that haven't tuned into those, Anthony and I do these every single Friday, except actually for this Friday, because I'll actually be gone. Uh, but that's why we have Anthony on the weekly rollups instead. But Anthony, you said, you said something about Ethereum's event horizon. Could you explain that metaphor to the listeners?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So essentially I can't remember exactly the context of what we were talking about, but I think, you know, once you're like in the Ethereum ecosystem, it's just like very, very hard to escape it, right? Just like it's basically impossible to escape a black hole. Uh, black hole's event horizon, um, in space, it's, it's very hard to escape Ethereum's pull on you. Like even if you're a fan of, I guess, like other chains and you want to spend time in other ecosystems, Ethereum is still gonna kind of like, uh, draw you in, right? It's still gonna keep you in its ecosystem. No matter what, because there's just so much opportunity to be had. There's so much cool stuff going on. You know, it's very hard to not be involved. And I would even go as far as to say that, you know, a lot of people who would then identify as Bitcoin maximalists,

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  uh, using Ethereum, they're just not talking about it. Because if you, i- i- if you want to make like even just make money, right? And, and you have Bitcoin, the opportunity to make the most money right now is putting your Bitcoin on Ethereum and yield farming with it. Like you're not going to get that from the centralized kind of institutions like BlockFi and stuff like that, which, you know, Bitcoin maximalists also love, but it doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter who you are and you could do it all anonymously. You don't have to tell anyone. You spin up an Ethereum address. No one knows who you are, right? Um, unless you kind of link it to a, to something, they could link it to you. But most of the time it's, it's, it's very hard. So from that perspective, yeah, Ethereum just has this incredible pull on everyone in the ecosystem. Doesn't matter if they hate Ethereum, if they love other chains, they think there's, their Ethereum killer is gonna, you know, kill Ethereum.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  There's just too much opportunity in, in Ethereum land and that, that's what pulls people in, I think.

• 1:20:06David Hoffman?

  Yep, absolutely. Alright, we are now getting into what we are excited about. Again, usually it's reserved for what's David and Ryan's excited about, but today we have Anthony. And so I'll start because I usually do start. And what I'm excited about this week is perhaps the acceleration of the merge. That is insane. And I alluded to this when we were talking about the Justin Drake tweet. But what is happening in my mind is a bunch of Ethereum developers and community members are planting a flag. And they are saying, yo, it is time for sound money culture. Let's get sound money up and out the gate. We have this proof of stake thing and it's ready to go. Let's use it. Let's prioritize it. Let's have some urgency.

• 1:20:48David Hoffman?

  And let's get this ultrasound meme actually into reality. And the fact that this is manifesting in both the values and prioritization of not just the community, but the actual Ethereum developers, I think is really, really cool. And that gets me excited about the future of Ethereum.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would definitely mirror that as well. But I would say that, just to be a little bit different, is that the thing that I am most excited about outside of that is the Layer 2 adoption that's been happening lately and will continue to happen into the future. I put a tweet out a few weeks ago, and I still believe this is true today. And I basically said, Layer 2 is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And what I meant by that is that all the technology is here, right? It is popping up in pockets, in silos across the ecosystem, but it's just not evenly distributed. We don't have bridges, right? We don't have people adopting them just yet. But that's going to come. It's going to come in waves, essentially, as the famous quote. We are coming in waves, right? That's what's going to happen. People are going to adopt it. More and more people are going to go to Layer 2.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  There's going to be bridges. There's going to be more liquidity. There's going to be more TVL. And that's going to happen much faster than people think over the next few months. I mean, I use the kind of example that in May of 2020, Uniswap's 24-hour volume was $10 million. Now it is consistently over $1 billion a lot of the time, or at least close to $1 billion. That's the same thing is going to happen to Layer 2. Today, it's 10 million, like on DYDX. In a few months, it can be a billion, right? And it can probably grow even faster because of the fact that we already have A massive DeFi user base, right? And then we already have a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that may have been priced out of layer one that will now be able to experience Ethereum DeFi again at layer two. So yeah, that's what I'm super, super excited about.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, the merge is just as exciting and just as critical. But I think, you know, scaling, I mean, the merge is like a part of scaling where we want to get rid of like a proof of work, go to proof of mistake, and then add sharding after the merge as well. So the merge is like a prerequisite to sharding. So which, which obviously adds more scalability to Ethereum. So that's what I'm most excited about right now.

• 1:22:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, the list could go on. We could talk about what we were excited about for hours. And in fact, we actually do on the Friday Daily Guay Bankless livestreams. Again, not happening tomorrow, or I guess today when you are listening to this. But literally happens every other Friday that, other than this one. So tune into those when we do those are a ton of fun. And well, the other thing that I'm excited about is the meme of the week. Here it is. The meme of the week from Crypto Wife, who's had a number of other fantastic memes out, just out of this Twitter account. A great, her Photoshop skills are absolutely insane. She says, guys, I think we're ready. Ask me where we're going. And it's Vitalik, Tim Bako and Justin Drake in astronaut suits. Ethereum themed astronaut suits.

• 1:23:36David Hoffman?

  And they look like that they are just ready to fucking send it. And that's the meme of the week.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And then there's this 1559 in the background, right? Little subtle kind of a shield there, I think. But yeah, Crypto Wife just killing the meme game. Absolutely love her memes. So, you know, keep it up, whoever you are, for sure. But yeah, I love this one as well. This is, this is great.

• 1:23:58David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. Congratulations, Anthony. We've made it through this marathon of the weekly roll up. Thank you for tapping in and being a great substitute teacher for Ryan. Do you want to give yourself a little bit of a self-shill? Where can people follow you? Because when I'm putting the agenda together for the weekly rollups, I basically just follow Anthony around the internet. It's like, oh, Anthony's talking about this. Anthony's talking about this. And so if people want to go straight to the source, where should they go?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So just easiest way to follow me is on Twitter at Sasso0X, which I'm sure you'll you'll link in the description there. But also, I do a lot of that, you know, a lot of stuff at the Daily Gway and Ethob. You can just Google both of those things. I do daily newsletter, daily YouTube recaps of the Ethereum ecosystem. And then at Ethob is a weekly newsletter and weekly recaps with my co-founder Eric Connor. And then, yeah, that's that's basically where I spend most of my time. So yeah, as you said, like you probably troll through a lot of the things that I cover and everything like that. I try to stay like at the bleeding edge of stuff. It's very hard these days because there's so much stuff happening. But yeah, that's the that's the self shield for everyone.

• 1:25:02David Hoffman?

  Fantastic. And again, thank you for being my news partner this week. All right, guys, risks and disclaimers. Ether is risky. Crypto is risky. DeFi is risky. Risky. You could lose what you put in. We are headed west. We've got our astronaut suits on. We're on the frontier. It isn't for anyone, everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. That's the first time I've actually ever said that.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan.

• 1:25:28David Hoffman?

  And and as a final send off, get your bankless badge. We want you to get your bankless badge. Cheers. We hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content, and even the bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today.

• 1:26:10David Hoffman?

  Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.