Where is Ethereum Headed? | Mike Ippolito & Mike Neuder

The exploration of the Ethereum Roadmap continues. Today on the show we’re bringing back Mike Neuder who was just on the show to give his defense of the Ethereum Roadmap and we’re also joined by Blockworks Mike Ippolito who brings a wealth of knowledge from around the crypto industry to add his thoughts to the conversation. We cover the essence of Ethereum, the current state of rollups, value accrual and much more. We end the podcast with just overall bullish vibes and reflecting on what will take to make the promises of the crypto industry manifest in reality. Enjoy! ------ 📣 JOIN US AT PERMISSIONLESS III https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-iii 🎉 REGISTER FOR THE BANKLESS PARTY https://lu.ma/yj5pdeqe?tk=lIr2oe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/71?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:29 The Essence of the Argument 17:50 Ethereum and Rollups 33:00 Ethereum’s Schism 40:23 Value Accrual 59:30 Nation State Resistance 1:04:52 The Bull Case for Crypto 1:10:03 What Will Take 1:16:25 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Mike Ippolito https://x.com/mikeippolito Mike Neuder https://x.com/mikeneuder ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If we have a better money that has better properties than exists today, and the financial infrastructure around that is much better, then what businesses could you build in that world that you couldn't build today? That's what excites me about crypto.

• 0:16David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we are continuing our exploration of the Ethereum roadmap. Today on the show, we are bringing back Mike Neuder, who was just on the show to give his defense of the Ethereum roadmap. And this time, we are joined by Blockworks' Mike Eppolito, who brings a wealth of pragmatic knowledge from around the crypto industry to add his thoughts to the conversation around Ethereum's current position. Before we get into the podcast, this is your final warning to get your ticket to Permissionless. This is our third Permissionless, and this is going to be a [bleep] banger. Just look at the speaker lineup. We've got politicians like Richie "Pokemon Card" Torres, Gary Gensler's bully, Tom Emmer. We've got investors like Van Spencer, Chris Dixon, Haseeb, and Balaji Sridhivassan. We've got builders like Sriram, Nick White, Alex Glukowski from ZK Sync.

• 0:58David Hoffman?

  And you guys know my thesis about podcaster-organized conferences. We simply produce the best conversations. That's what we do. So you're going to hear me debate Alex Thorne from Galaxy and Eric Wall about Bitcoin stuff. They think that they've won, but they haven't. Max Resnick and Kyle Somani are going to debate Mahalo from Polygon and Jill from Espresso as to whether or not Layer 2s are Ethereum. Even Ryan Sean Adams is going to be there in the flesh, opening up the whole entire conference with Chris Dixon from A16Z. And then on the last day, Kane Warwick and I will be on a panel together just a few hours before we go head-to-head in Karate Combat's most high-profile matchup to date. Their words, not mine. So there is a link in the show notes to make sure that you attend all of this good stuff.

• 1:39David Hoffman?

  There is also a party Wednesday for all of the Bankless citizens out there. So if you are not a Bankless citizen and you want to go to Permissionless, there is a link in the show notes to get tickets. And if you are a Bankless citizen and you're going to Permissionless, there is also a link to make sure that you guys have access to our party. So go get them. This episode will flow very nicely if you have been following along our recent podcast episodes around these topics, most recently with Mike Neuder's episode just last week, but also starting with Kyle Somani's episode, which many in Ethereum foundationally disagreed with, and also Max Resnick's episode, which people Also disagreed with, but I think nonetheless at least found some value from, even if maybe the delivery of his points were a little bit overly spicy. As for me, my ideas around Ethereum continue to be in flux. The direction we are going is directionally correct.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  And whether we want to reprioritize different parts of the Ethereum roadmap in different orders, I think is actually kind of a moot point. Since the development teams focused on, for example, the Ethereum Layer One execution, or the development teams around Ethereum Layer Two data availability, are different teams that are already working on both in parallel. All of these different parts of the Ethereum roadmap are all happening in parallel. So it's more about how the social layer around Ethereum thinks about our priorities as a community, as a culture. So what do? Are we even off track at all? Or is it all just narrative and price? I have more thoughts on that that'll be in the Bankless newsletter soon. So without further ado, I bring you Mike and Mike.

• 3:08David Hoffman?

  But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2024. If you do not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the links in the show notes to getting started with Kraken today. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in just a few clicks. And there's an award-winning client support team available 24/7 to help you along the way, along with a whole range of educational guides, articles, and videos.

• 3:52David Hoffman?

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• 4:35David Hoffman?

  And Toku can help optimize your taxes so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Have you ever felt that the tools for developing decentralized applications are too restrictive and fail to leverage advancements from traditional software programming? There's a wide range of expressive building blocks beyond conventional smart contracts and solidity development. Don't waste your time building the basics from scratch and don't limit the potential of your vision. Cartesi provides powerful and scalable solutions for developers that supercharge app development. With a Cartesi virtual machine, you can run a full Linux OS and access decades of rich code libraries and open source tooling for building in Web 3.

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  And with Cartesi's unique rollup framework, you'll get real world scaling and computation. No more competing for block space. So if you're a developer looking to push the boundaries of what's possible in Web 3, Cartesi is now offering up to $50,000 in grants. Head over to Cartesi's grant application page to apply today. And if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure you're vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Bankless Nation, we're live from the Bankless Studio. I'm here with Mike and Mike. Hey, guys. How's it going? Good. How are you?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Good. Well.

• 5:54David Hoffman?

  So how are we going to solve the issue of how do I call you guys when I want to talk to specifically one of you? You can call him Polyamory Mike. That's what I've been thinking.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  We're not making that a thing.

• 6:04David Hoffman?

  So we have Ethereum Mike. Mike, Mike Nordner, welcome to the show. Welcome to the studio. Thanks for having us.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  You can just call me Mike One.

• 6:12David Hoffman?

  And then we have the new perspective because we just did a podcast, Mike Ethereum, Mike here. We just did a podcast with Ryan. It's going to come out earlier this week when this goes out, all about the Ethereum roadmap, kind of in response to two of the episodes that we did with Max Resnick and Kyle Samani.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  That was a very popular one, right? The Kyle one?

• 6:30David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, a very extremely popular one that everyone loves.

• 6:35David Hoffman?

  And so we just did a kind of like a Ethereum roadmap in 2024, kind of answering to some of the critiques and like qualms presented by these two episodes. And we just did, so we just did that episode. So we're bringing Paul Niemri, Mike, on the episode today. I swear to that'll be the last time I use that. Just bringing in kind of a new perspective onto the Ethereum roadmap because Mike flirts with a bunch of different other ecosystems. You love Celestia, you love Solana, you love Cosmos, you love Ethereum. And so I think we can kind of have a very similar conversation that we just had with Mike Ethereum Mike, discussing the roadmap, but kind of also just discussing where the roadmap fits into the broader landscape of the crypto ecosystem because Ethereum is not in a vacuum. The Ethereum

• 7:19David Hoffman?

  central roadmap exists inside of the context in which it was born, which is all of the others ecosystems as well. How do you guys feel about that?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, sounds great.

• 7:29David Hoffman?

  Maybe we can start Ethereum, Mike, with kind of just like speed running through some of the main points of the episode that we just did. You had this article titled My E-thesis, and it was all about just a particular order of the three resources that compose Ethereum. Maybe you could kind of just run us through that.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. So the episode was basically structured like the article, which we kind of went through settlement, DA, and execution in that order. And so the kind of the high level take here is that first and foremost Ethereum should be and like should strive to continue being the most neutral censorship resistant base layer that exists in the ecosystem. And, you know, I don't think anyone argues about about that reality of today. And I think, you know, keeping that is the core kind of founding principle of all the decisions that are made seems very useful. DA obviously is kind of the thing that most people are talking about lately because it really ties into this idea of how do rollups play into Ethereum? How do they kind of interact and what value do they add to the Ethereum ecosystem?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  And so we talked a little bit about potential network effects of DA, how Ethereum DA could come to kind of be differentiated on different axes than just providing the best security and the best censorship resistance for L2s, you know, some of the different constructions. We got a little, maybe too technical in the weeds there. And so we can leave that there. But then the the third piece that I hope we can talk more about today, which I don't think we covered too much was was execution and kind of what is the end game vision for L1 execution? You know, I think there's kind of really, that's probably where the the biggest spread is among opinion in Ethereum ecosystem. You know, Justin, in his debate with Tully, basically said L1 execution is dead, like we should push all of that to the L2, including app deployment and everything. Max kind of swings

• 9:13Speaker 02

  in the complete opposite direction, saying like, make DeFi on Ethereum great again.

• 9:18David Hoffman?

  On Ethereum layer one.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, on the layer one. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, there's pros and cons to both of those, and we can definitely unpack it. But yeah, I think that's that's kind of high level of what we covered in the episode and hopefully can start us off here, too.

• 9:32David Hoffman?

  So Blockworks Mike, such a much easier name.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  It's like we should have started with that.

• 9:40David Hoffman?

  You haven't listened to the episode that we just did with Ethereum Mike and Ryan, but also you did listen to the Kyle Samani episode and the Max Resnick episode. Maybe you can kind of give us your high level thoughts and reactions as you were listening to those and the conversations that spawned out of them.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think that this I would I kind of reject the framing, actually, that this conversation tends to take on, which is it ends up getting divided in two camps, which is if you think that execution is the valuable layer that's going to generate a whole bunch of cash flows, and that's where value is going to accrue, then you're kind of a Solana guy. And if you're a settlement and DA person, and you think that's where a lot of the value is, then you're on the Ethereum camp. And my view is that I'm kind of in the camp where we're all building the same thing here. And I think these things, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think he's right about that. And I think my long term view on all of these L1s is that they're mostly commodities and that they're gonna converge on relatively the same architecture and stack.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And I actually, maybe a more contrarian point would be, you know, I kind of listened to, you know, the Ethereum argument, looking at the execution layer and saying, hey, all this MEV that you're generating today, the incentives aren't really good because your revenue is tied to a decreased or a not great user experience, which I generally agree with. And I think that MEV is going to end up going to the app layer and then get redirected back to users as well. And I agree with that. And then I think the execution maxi perspective is that, you know, just because everything settles down to one layer, doesn't mean that you have to pay a lot to that layer, that value necessarily accrues to that layer. And I actually kind of agree with that as well.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  I, I, I actually have a, a long-term, pretty neutral view on L1s as assets. I think that they're going to create an enormous amount of value in the next like decade or so, because I actually have kind of a Bitcoiner mentality. I think that the thing that's driving activity and adoption today is a structural problem with credit and fiat-based money. And I think that's what's moving all of this capital into mostly L1s, which is, I view them as commodity-based monies that have an improvement on the governance around their supply. And I think that a bunch of the L1s are going to do pretty well from that. But then I think that the desirable end state of crypto is, once that capital has migrated,

• 11:58Speaker 00

  that it gets redirected into applications that actually create value for people. I actually don't really agree with the whole framing of like, this one is better than the other one. I think it's all going to end up being commoditized and it's all going to end up flowing back to the apps and users at the end of the day.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Interesting. I guess I'd push back on calling it commodity because I guess, at least in proof of stake, kind of a core fundamental premise of having a staking token is that that token has value, right? Because there's like the economic security or the security of the settlement assurances of the chain are like fundamentally dependent on the token. And so like, if everything's commodity, That kind of implies they're all substitutable, like ETH is the same as Sol is the same as Atom or whatever.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  But how do you square that with like, there needs to be some core security like underpinning these applications if they are going to be like as secure as they need to be? Or do you think that's kind of like, I mean, altogether?

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Well, I think that, I mean, I think part of the, like, my perspective on polyamory in crypto for a while has been, I think that basically there's a very complicated problem that needs to get solved, which is how to build a blockchain and bootstrap an economy on top of that. And I think the way that it's kind of naturally wound up working is that you have different chains that are focused on different parts of that problem, right? You've got kind of Ethereum, which is maximally focused on how do you be a great settlement layer and be extremely censorship resistant? And then Solana is focused in the current timeframe on execution and how can you pack as many transactions as you can into one shared security layer and pipeline and all of that type of thing? But I think what's going to end up happening is that Solana is going to learn some of the lessons of Ethereum.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  I think Ethereum, I would be in the camp probably more of like the Max Resnick camp of increasing the gas limit, decreasing the block times on Ethereum, and I would move the base layer to look a little bit more Solana-like. And I do think at the end state, you're going to end up with, you know, five or six L1s that like have some differences and might be more specialized for some uses cases than others. But I think you're going to end up with stuff that looks pretty similar at the end of the day.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  I think I brought that perspective up to Vitalik and just about the idea like, hey, you know, there is some slack at the Ethereum layer one level, like we could add some capacity. And his response to that was, I think, drawing from lessons of Ethereum's past when we had this like Ice Age mechanism in the proof of work era, which was this, we actually would just like intentionally freeze the blockchain every six months until we shipped proof of stake. And it was a forcing function. It was a human layer forcing function and say, hey, we're going to set a

• 14:31Speaker 00

  It's like the debt ceiling.

• 14:31David Hoffman?

  We're going to set a bomb. Yeah, we're going to set a bomb off on the Ethereum layer one blockchain. And if we don't, we have to just manually diffuse it over and over and over again until we ship proof of stake. And he kind of alluded to a similar phenomenon. Going on with solving layer two composability. Whether if we just like add more layer one composability just to like, you know, buy us some time. We're actually just like easing off on the need to solve layer two composability. And that's actually the hard problem. And also the problem that mostly only Ethereum, Celeste is also working on this, but Ethereum is really leading the charge here. And so kind of just like reducing that pressure and like allowing a longer lifespan for like emphasis and priority of the layer one is actually reducing

• 15:14David Hoffman?

  what is probably Ethereum's biggest value driver in the near term future, which is solving layer two composability.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Interesting. So his argument there is investing kind of resources of the the community focus on the research and kind of all core devs layer. On L1 scaling actually is just kind of like missing the plot and somehow a mis prioritization.

• 15:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  It's like you're just kicking the can because you need to solve this problem eventually. So why not just confront it right now?

• 15:43David Hoffman?

  Right. And adding 20, 20%, 30%, maybe even a 2X, 3X to the Ethereum layer one capacity is actually just not meaningful. And also it's fun to talk about like, let's just up the gas fees. Let's just add some capacity to the Ethereum layer one, not thinking about how much political difficulty that's going to push into the Ethereum like core dev calls, which are already like pretty slow.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I guess I like this conceptually. And I do think it's it's totally true that it's kind of the natural progression that people are going to want the most control over the dev X, like their chains are going to be super specific to like, I think this is already kind of trending in this direction. You had a nice conversation with with Eugene and Frankie about Atlas, which is their kind of targeted DeFi domain specific L2. Like, I think that type of thing will will be pervasive. But I also see the other side of it, which is like, if you leave things as they are and just focus all energy on scaling the L2s.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  The interrupt problem only matters if or is only like valuable if the L2 ecosystem. Systems that attract and like are kind of the top of funnel for users and activity are willing to play ball. And I do definitely agree with Max in a lot of regards when he describes like the incentives of the L2 teams. And of kind of like how the market structure actually plays out is super important here. Because I think everyone loves the vision of like a united chains of Ethereum. And that's kind of like how I usually the mental model I like for the roll up. But there needs to be like some balance between the kind of like state level power and the federal power.

• 17:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  But if your market structure evolves into like a duopoly or an oligopoly of like a very small set of of L2s that have like outsized market power, then it looks a lot more like a Texas and California cessation than an actual like real kind of united chains of great interop that's like composable and neutral in the way that like could be if there were many, many chains.

• 17:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's like one outcome that doesn't feel good to me, which is like Ethereum created DeFi. Ethereum layer one created DeFi, like started with Maker Dow, Uniswap, Aave, Compound. And then DeFi kind of spawned off of that. And now we have these like states that are like, you know, states, but they're like, oh, there's equity in these things. Like the OP tokens, the ARB tokens, these are all startups with VC investors and teams. And if there was like, and a large amount of the reason why DeFi came to Ethereum was A, because they invented smart contracts. And B, it was credibly neutral. And so it was the breeding ground for DeFi. And the idea of, I take Stephen Goldfeder's point that DeFi is fundamentally better on a fast, cheap blockchain.

• 18:35David Hoffman?

  Lower fees makes more efficient markets, it's more accessible, more participants, more possible total liquidity. But then also if that means that like DeFi is only going to exist at the layer two level, then it's like not as credibly neutral. If there's like one dominant DeFi chain and it used to be the Ethereum layer one, and then it moved on to like one single layer two. Because finance and DeFi collectively is going to be better in one single spot. And we can, maybe we can have this united chains of Ethereum where like all of these chains are completely seamless with each other. But that's not even like a medium term goal, that's more of a like a long term goal.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  What do you guys see as the market structure for L2s like into the future? It's kind of an interesting spot, right? There are these incumbents, it's like the Optimisms and the Arbitrums of the world. And then there are new upstarts that have these different axes that they're choosing to compete on. There's like Mega ETH, which is, you know, crank that shit up to 11, make it go really fast. And then there is Atlas, which is, we're specializing and we're going to be kind of this DeFi, very specific chain. And they've got these cool optimizations that make it better for DeFi apps. But where do you guys see that all shaking out?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess on the kind of axis of the incumbents, I see it being very power law distributed. Like, there can only be one, maybe two general purpose rollups. Like, even the OP stack is, it's not totally clear to me, like, why Optimism and Base aren't like directly competitive. Like, I get they do this revenue, revenue share thing, but it's like, you're fighting for the same apps, the same developers, the same users.

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  You mean the Optimism mainnet and Base mainnet?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:10David Hoffman?

  I actually really like Victor Bunin's point that he gave me, which was, what is the one single point of the Optimism mainnet? And his answer to that is the ERC20 contract for the OP token. In fact, it's very much an Ethereum Foundation, um, growth by subtraction, subtraction mentality, which is let's take all of the transactions going on Optimism mainnet, make them into their own chain, part of the superchain, and then the OP mainnet does this one thing, which is has the OP token contract, and it governs over the superchain.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I see, I see. Yeah. But again, this feels a bit isolationist, doesn't it? Like, if you belong to this OP chain, then you have your OP legal tender and like everyone, like, yeah, I don't know. And it's also not totally clear how valuable this governance actually is. You know, I think especially if, if one chain like Base has, has like 90% of users, like, sure, the, the OP stack can vote whatever they want in, but like, once, once there's enough power, market power for one individual, like, they're really setting the rules here.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, what, what would the United States look like if California was 90% of the GDP of the United States?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  It would be challenging.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  I mean, that business model is a bundle. I do think that even some of the roll-up teams, I wonder if they're starting to rethink a little bit this stack model. And most of the roll-ups started with like OP main chain, and then they've got the stack, and there's going to be the superchain and all these different chains inside of it. Same thing with Arbitrum 1 and like CK Sync era, etc. I kind of wonder if some of these chains privately are starting to think, maybe we should actually get some activity back on like our chain in this stack, right? Because otherwise, to your point, right? If you're the United States and you're the federal government, and you've got California, and it's 90% of your GDP and population, how much, you know, control or say do you really have? But do you think it would be, this is actually something that I love that Ethereum does,

• 22:05Speaker 00

  which is their very free market mentality, which is the design philosophy is be max unopinionated at the base layer, and then just let people duke it out on the like L2 layer? I don't know. I kind of think that this is how it should work, actually. And actually, in Solana land, it's a little bit more, you know, integrated. It's a little bit more centrally coordinated or planned. And there are definitely drawbacks, I think, to the total free market approach. But, you know, we've kind of slugged through the worst of it, and it looks like the field is thinning, and we're going to wind up with a couple of like really strong, highly competitive incumbents. And then they can make that, you know, interoperability within their own stacks. And then maybe they can do, there'll be some kind of shared sequencer

• 22:48Speaker 00

  with like an ag layer type thing for okay interop in between frameworks.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess this kind of circles back to your original question, which is like, what is the end game market structure of L2s? And, you know, a big part of your conversation with Stephen from Optimism was From Arbitrum. Or sorry, from Arbitrum. He won't like that. We'll fix that in both.

• 23:09David Hoffman?

  I might leave that one in there, actually.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  But a big part of that discussion was like, are L2 symbiotic?

• 23:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Or are L2 parasitic?

• 23:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  And I actually think those two kind of biological terms are really the essence here.

• 23:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Which is like, sure, it's easy to do the lip service of saying like, yeah, L2s get are great because they have Ethereum security and Ethereum censorship resistance and XYZ. But like, that's also very great from the perspective of someone who's trying to like accumulate all the all the users and and cash flow and like value at their at their chain, right? And I actually wanted to push back against the idea of like Ethereum is TCP IP and the network and you know, the internet stack.

• 23:51David Hoffman?

  This is Stephen's take from Arbitrum.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:53David Hoffman?

  Like Ethereum is just this TCIP layer. It's like, it's just this protocol runs in the background. It's invisible.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, which I think would be great for Arbitrum, but I think would be quite bad for Ethereum because basically TCP IP is is just this set of dumb pipes. There's like no value accrual. It's governed mostly by this this group, the ITF, who's like mostly appointed by the biggest like app chains. So like, I think in the traditional internet sense, like all the value accrued at the application layer at

• 24:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  You know, Facebook, Google, Netflix, et cetera. And so like, sure, Ethereum could just be like these neutral pipes that facilitate the kind of backend of of money moving around, but the relative importance of Ethereum in that world is like very small compared to

• 24:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  A more like equally distributed outcome.

• 24:41David Hoffman?

  I think this is also kind of been where Ethereum has like directionally been heading over the last two years, at least in people's public perception of it, is this thinning layer one in that has the same like EF mentality. Again, I am Iago Chi's subtraction mentality. Like, you know, the EF wants to grow by getting smaller, right? Spin things out, like push complexity to the margins, capture nothing in the center because it wants to decentralize. And you're seeing a lot of that same kind of mentality show up in the Ethereum layer one, which is like, let's push users and execution to the layer twos and let's reduce complexity at the layer one, push complexity to the margins.

• 25:22David Hoffman?

  And what you're seeing is like, kind of a very similar thing. I remember a Sunny Augerwald epicenter podcast forever ago, where he was talking about like this Cosmos vision. And he called Bitcoin an app chain, which it is. And it does this one job of spit, it spits out BTC. And his vision was that it spits out BTC into the Cosmos app chain mesh layer. And it was just the money for that layer. And that's how Bitcoin fits into it. That is a pretty interesting take. And now you're actually kind of seeing that where you have this Ethereum coordinating protocol that just spits out ETH. And the ETH goes up to the layer twos, but for, for the rest of Ethereum, it's actually like pretty thin. It's pretty like constrained because all the complexity got pushed up to the layer twos.

• 26:06David Hoffman?

  And I think that's kind of, kind of aligned with the vibe of the last two years of Ethereum. All the users going to layer twos, all the assets going to layer twos. And then people looking at like, the falling fee metrics of the Ethereum layer one and the falling or stable user metrics of the Ethereum layer one. And that's where we're kind of seeing that like growth by subtraction.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think here, here's one additional thing I would just say about this whole, our L2s parasitic conversation is it presupposes the idea that Ethereum has some kind of choice, right? Or that Solana has a choice. These are permissionless networks. You can build whatever you want. This is, this was also a, something that Sunny Agarwal said that stuck with me said, you know, app chains, a permissionless app chain is a little bit of an oxymoron because you, by definition, you can build whatever you want. So how can you keep it to being one application? And so, I don't know, I kind of think that, I think there is something to the idea that, yes, we unbundled all the different functions of a blockchain from, you know, there's DA consensus,

• 27:07Speaker 00

  execution settlement, and you've unbundled those into different layers. And then you do have different cash flows that are associated with each of those layers. I do think that most of the cash flows are going to come from execution for the time being. But again, I think there's a lot of evidence that that's not what moves the price of an L1. I just, I just don't believe that. And you can look at Bitcoin, which has basically been down only. For a number of years, and it's because going back to this, the way that I view the world right now is that I view the mega trend, the structural driver of inflows is actually a problem with credit-based fiat currency. So I think it's coming in regardless. And then I think, I think in the long run, that eventually it will end up being about cash flows.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  But it's really, it's really tough for me to, it's really tough for me to paint a vision of that world far out where any L1 or L2 is able to really retain those. It's very difficult. Like, I think, I think it should go ultimately to the apps. And you're already starting to see very forward-thinking teams like the Sorellas of the world that are already figuring out ways to do that. And I think it's mostly an engineering problem, actually, in terms of how to redirect that value.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree with that overall, but I do think there is an argument about just like what the ecosystem prioritizes.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And in the, in the medium term, like, there is a decision that Ethereum, the community right now is like very set on one path. And like, that should be viewed as a decision, which is, we're gonna go all in on, on DA scaling. And, you know, I don't, obviously, it's not like one unified theme, as evidenced by like, the fact that after 4844, there's been a lot of different EIPs floated around. The Electra Hard Fork has like, very little cohesion and consensus around like what the network is actually doing. So I think that's kind of a reflection of, of the state of the discourse. But, yeah, I mean, if Ethereum were to kind of make a more concerted effort to, to scale the L1, then I do think that would have path dependency.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  In terms of like what the outcome is, for like where the users end up settling and end up interacting with the chain.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  There is some element of path dependence, I think, as well. I mean, which side, where do you sit on the whole, scale the L1 or?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think I'm still kind of coming to terms with, with both. I mean, one part of this discussion that I, I continue to find kind of intriguing, but slightly unclear, is, I guess, the, the ZK EVM op code end game here.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Which is, you know, it's something Justin talks about a lot, Vitalik talks about a lot, and they're both just like on a different plane than me in terms of understanding that. So I think I, I want to do a better job kind of understanding it for myself and maybe trying to communicate it out. But if there is a world where truly execution

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Is no longer the bottleneck because you have basically these off-chain proof generation engines that do all of the execution and to verify the proof is kind of very, very easy from the kind of everyday node perspective, then I could see kind of trying to go towards that end game by scaling Ethereum L1 kind of in the medium term.

• 30:23David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Which is like, yeah, I think even Vitalik has been open to the idea of raising the gas limit to 40 million. Like, it hasn't changed in whatever, however many years. There is like Moore's Law, there's the law about bandwidth increasing, I forget.

• 30:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 30:37David Hoffman?

  Some other dude names law.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I guess if we have super high conviction that this ZK EVM op code and what just in terms based or native rollups is kind of the right way to scale L1 execution, then I think there could be an argument to be made that we should try and kind of steer hard in that direction rather than like, kind of the direction we're going. I do think it would be intellectually dishonest to say that wouldn't be slight rerouting of the roadmap and stuff. But it's also like, the roadmap as a whole is so big that I don't think you can properly say we're going in all those directions at once with equal priority. So like, you do have to like place your chip somewhere and like, maybe that's where we should place the chips. But again, this is something I want to understand better and

• 31:23Speaker 02

  maybe we need Justin here to help expand it.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  I'm curious what you guys think because the direction that Max is sort of pushing people in, it feels like a, it feels like a pretty big departure, I would say, from the direction of the roadmap pre-Max. And, you know, I'm kind of reminded of this, I think that guy Emmanuel has shared this around, it's Naval Ravikant, like groups don't disagree or something like that, they create schisms. And in, you know, when you're a part of a group and a community, it's very difficult to disagree and discuss things in, you know, in unemotional ways. And that's why it ends up. Like you get these schisms and he actually used the example of the Protestant Catholic Church.

• 32:05David Hoffman?

  I was about to say Martin Luther.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Martin Luther. Yeah, yeah. The, uh, the, one of the OG schisms. You got it in, you got it in the Bitcoin camp as well around, uh, you know, the, the block size wars. And I don't know, it feels, I think one of the, I'd be curious to get your guys' perspectives on this, but it feels a little bit like, you know, if you were to poll 100 Bitcoiners and ask, what is the value proposition of Bitcoin? You'd get, you know, 99 or 100 people would say store value, digital gold.

• 32:33David Hoffman?

  21 million problems.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  21 million problems. And even on the Solana side, I think if you, you know, polled 100 Solonans, maybe 85 of them would say a single shared state, global NASDAQ.

• 32:44David Hoffman?

  NASDAQ on chain.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  NASDAQ on chain. And I think for Ethereum right now, it feels like we're in a little bit of a, you might get different answers if you polled those 100 people. So what do you, do you think that's an accurate statement? And if so, do you think there needs to be like, hey, we need to hard commit to one direction or another? Or what do you guys think?

• 33:00David Hoffman?

  Uh, I definitely agree with that, but I, I think that's also been, always been the case with Ethereum is that Ethereum has always, if you polled Ethereum's about anything, like mostly.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Like pre-merge, like.

• 33:11David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. The proof of stake was a North Star for sure. Uh, but I think once you start like picking off the most obvious North Stars one by one, then all of a sudden like, okay, then we get like a little bit of directionlessness about what we want. But also Ethereum has always had a values of pluralism, like we want to be a big tent. Uh, we want to incorporate as many ideas and philosophies and have room for all of these things inside of the Ethereum ecosystem. And so like, to me, having a plurality in thought is not like, that's kind of like, interests me about Ethereum. Uh, and like right now, like Peter Sigalgazi from Gath just was tweeting, tweeted out, tweeted out his like 15th take about ETH isn't money.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  Uh, and we have like core devs that says ETH is monkey. And then you have the Ethereum community is like, you guys, what, what the hell are you guys talking about? Like ETH is collateral. It's, it's used as in commerce, like it's used as gas, like of course it's money. Uh, and, and the plurality of Ethereum has always been the, the thing that attracts me about it. And that's why we have a plurality of layer twos. And I. I think maybe this gizem that's forming in the Ethereum land, which is like, I put out, I put out that tweet post like talking to Max Resnick, which is like, I'm in favor of scaling the Ethereum layer one. And that got like, they had a good amount of engagement from the Ethereum community, which is interesting. On the negative side? On, no, on the positive side, on the positive side. Yeah, like, like Sam Kasmanian was like, I totally agree, Eric Connor. All the builders.

• 34:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, like, well, it's like, it wasn't even clear like where this gizem was. Like you have like hardcore OG ETH people like Eric Connor, who's like, yeah, I totally agree. Let's pump the gas. You have Sam Kasmanian, who's building a layer two, who's like, I totally agree. Let's put DeFi back on the layer one. And then you have like Anthony Sisano and like Preston from, from Offchain Labs, who's like, this is like, why are we distracting ourselves from like the very obvious goal of having the Ethereum rollup centric roadmap? Like, that's a distraction. We all know that we can't put finance all on one chain. Why do that in the first place? And I think to answer your question, Mike, about like, Blockworks Mike, about like the priorities, about like, do we want to try and like make the layer one more like Solana? Or do we want to just focus more on the rollup centric roadmap?

• 35:19David Hoffman?

  To me, that's in the Ethereum land, that is a concave kind of

• 35:24David Hoffman?

  value judgment. Like, it's not going to be convex. Like, we're not going to go full Solana at the Ethereum layer one. But also going full rollup centric roadmap and being Celestia and having no execution or settlement at the layer one is also not what we want. And so right now, the schism is actually kind of having, happening pretty narrowly between a narrow, like, oh, let's take the late game priority of the Ethereum layer one, which was execution, and maybe we bump that up a few layers of priority. But we're still going to have the same outcome at the end of the day, which is like, eventually all chains will have commodity like execution properties and all chains will have a plurality of layer twos. So like the schism is happening on priorities, not on direction.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's fundamentally a trade-off, right? And what makes other ecosystems so easy to comprehend is how far along the trade-off curve they are.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Right? And it's just like, yeah, if you can just say NASDAQ on chain, or say 21 million promise, then the communication element of that story is much cleaner versus like the kind of truth, which is obviously more nuanced than, yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say I completely agree. I actually view it as a mark of maturity of any like Bitcoin. This was kind of a mark of maturity for them. It was like a hurdle rate that you have to pass this like, hey, are we going this way or that way? And I think honestly Solana is benefiting a little bit from being more in its infancy in a younger chain here. And, you know, I can imagine a world where, okay, they've shipped FireDancer. And okay, we've maxed out transaction throughput as much as we can. But now L2s are happening anyway. So like, wait a second, what are we here? You know, I can totally see that happening. I do think though, that it's important to just align around the one thing I would, you know, it's, I think plurality is definitely good, but like one mission statement that everyone lines up behind, I think is also important.

• 37:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was talking to Ryan about this this morning where he was like, man, Bitcoiners are just way better at us Ethereumians at memeing money. They're just really good at it. But my response to that was like, they also had no choice. Like that was the only option that they had. The reason why 99 out of 100 Bitcoiners will say BTC is money is because like, what the hell else is it?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:32David Hoffman?

  Like that's funneled and Solana does, it's not, doesn't have that in the same degree that Bitcoin has, but it's like 95% of Solana is like, oh yeah, you eat the complexity and you juice up the chain and that's what we are. And Ethereum, we are doing most things. We're kind of a little bit in all different directions. And so Ethereum has the most choices, which is why you don't have the same like dogma of thought.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Well, think about how many people Bitcoin pushed out.

• 37:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  You know, like they pushed a lot of people out.

• 38:00David Hoffman?

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• 38:44David Hoffman?

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• 39:29David Hoffman?

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• 40:23Speaker 00

  What do you guys think about, I'd be curious to get your guys' standpoint on value accrual?

• 40:29Speaker 02

  The big question.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Oh, big question.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Makes our bags go up.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Well, we were chatting a little bit about this and there's a timeline element to this, which is when should an L1 think about value accrual? And then what is it ultimately going to be? What is ultimately the mechanism going to be? Is it cash flows? Is it monetary premium? Is it network effects of kind of liquidity for the token? I'd be curious what you guys think.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, so we definitely talked about this a bit on our previous episode, but I guess I still really like the triple point thesis framing, which you outlined like a long time ago, but I do feel first and foremost that like the, the big fish is, is being money, is having that monetary premium. And I think that's fundamentally what ETH is like trying to do. And, and especially in terms of like money that doesn't just sit as a pet rock under your bed, but money that you can use in like a vibrant economy. And that kind of, you know, that, that crosses a bit of the line between like just a money asset into like this kind of consumable asset or even capital asset. Like you can maybe get some yield in DeFi, you can, you know, make a, make a stablecoin, a decentralized stablecoin out of it.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  But I still think first and foremost, like it's, it's trying to be money and, and that's where it should be. I do think the, the kind of cash flow element is important. Like, I definitely don't think, I think there's two things that get conflated here a lot. One is this idea that ETH needs to be net deflationary. And the second being that ETH needs to generate real cash flows. And I think people usually think, oh, unless ETH is net deflationary, it's not generating enough cash flows for me to like care about the cash flows. But I think, I think that's actually like a bit of a clumping of two things into one. Like, I do think ETH doesn't need to be net deflationary in the long run. And I don't know if there's like a compelling reason to expect it to be. Because net deflationary in the long run doesn't make sense, right?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Like you take it to the limit and it goes to zero. But that aside, I do think there should be some story about why like.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  It's almost like the baseline interest rate of holding ETH should be non-zero. And this is kind of like the internet bond analogy that you guys have used before. And, and you know, I ran some of the back of the napkin calculations. And if you have 128 blobs per block, which is kind of the maxed out DA that Ethereum hopes to get to with Danksharding. And if you, if you kind of scale up the L2s and they consume all those blobs and pay the, pay enough gas to like, you know, post all that data on chain, then even just from the DA itself, in order to like max out, or to match the level of issuance that Ethereum does per year, you need like subset, you know, one tenth of a cent transaction fees on the L2s.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  So there is this idea of like, you can generate real cash flows and still have like insanely cheap transactions on the L2. And this is kind of the like induced demand, like build all the highways. Everyone drives all the cars and you only have to charge a tiny toll to make like a massive amount of money.

• 43:27David Hoffman?

  Which inherently requires a very optimistic view about crypto at large, because

• 43:32Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 43:33David Hoffman?

  that requires so many transactions.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:36David Hoffman?

  But that's like taking the world's commerce and putting it on a bunch of different chains.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  For sure, for sure. But I will add one point here, which is this is only to be, kind of maintain the level, the total supply of ETH given just DA fees.

• 43:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Like, I still do subscribe to the belief and Donkrad was the first person who posted this on the Reddit AMA. And it really resonated with me, which is ETH L1 will benefit from being a neutral kind of bridge between all of these ecosystems. And, you know, I do think there's, there's market power within each individual ecosystem. But being like the Constantinople of the on-chain economy will be valuable, just because there's like port fees, you know, bridging, there's always going to be some amount of like tax that gets paid through the DA. And so even if L1 execution doesn't scale to NASDAQ on-chain levels, but it still scales enough that high-value transactions, like almost like the B2B price insensitive transactions,

• 44:32Speaker 02

  still choose to use Ethereum as their execution layer, then that in conjunction with like high amounts of fees, crazy retail activity on the L2s posting blobs down is compelling, at least to me. But obviously, this circles back to the point of like, is DA actually sticky? Does it have any network effects that lock in the L2s? Because if L2s see billions of dollars being generated, and then they're just gonna look and say like, what am I like? What am I actually getting from Ethereum here? Like, is the security actually something my users care about? Like, will I lose users if I just start posting to Google Cloud? Like, probably not.

• 45:06David Hoffman?

  Right. I think the moneyness of ETH does a lot better in a paradigm where a lot of Layer 2s balance each other out and check each other.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 45:14David Hoffman?

  Rather than a dominant or duopoly of Layer 2s. A duopoly of Layer 2s is much less moneyness around ETH.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:22David Hoffman?

  I would say.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have played with this one kind of random thought, and we were talking about it a little before, but I really like this concept of ETH as legal tender. And, you know, I'm kind of in my macro arc, so like, bear with me here. But the overall idea here is like, one of the core... And Charlie actually had a really fascinating tweet about this, which he posted a poll, and he said, "Which is better for Ethereum? Two choices. First choice, you have a sidechain that posts its blobs to Celestia.

• 45:52David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  However, it uses ETH as the gas token. That's option one. Option two, you have an ETH rollup, meaning they post to Ethereum blobs. They're, you know, they have the smart contract. Everyone's happy-go-lucky. However, they use a local, a different gas token. And the results were interesting. Fifty percent said it's better to be a sidechain that uses ETH as money. Twenty-three percent said it's better to be an ETH rollup that posts to DA. And 25% or whatever basically didn't respond.

• 46:21David Hoffman?

  So it's perceived by Twitter that the non-Ethereum, not a rollup, an independent chain that uses ETH as the gas fee is actually better for ETH, Ether,

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  than the like, formally rollup secured by Ethereum DA.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:38David Hoffman?

  It doesn't use, and that doesn't use ETH as a gas token.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  And the reason I call this ETH as legal tender is because it's like, if you want to belong to this United States of Ethereum, or United Chains of Ethereum, then you have to pay gas in ETH. And one really interesting thing you could do here, which is extremely hard to enforce, but, you know, there's a big Twitter debate over priority fees and base fees on the L2s. And in particular, looking at how base sequencer collected revenue. So... L2 has used the same transaction fee mechanism as L1, which is 1559. You have a base fee and then you have a priority fee. It's not first come, first served. There is a kind of batch posting mechanism here. And the way the sequencer orders those transactions when it collects a batch is based on priority fee. Right?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  So everyone pays that base fee and then it effectively turns into a first price auction on ordering, which is exactly what original Ethereum MEV started as, which is just a priority gas auction. And it turns out that if you actually look at the data, 80 to 90% of the fees that L2 transactions pay go to that priority fee, not to the base fee. And right now, that base fee is just going straight into the treasury. And same with the priority fee. And so actually, I think this is kind of customizable based on your OP stack chain. But I think for base specifically, both of those go to Coinbase itself. And so suddenly you get into this really weird thing where, you know, all of that revenue is just is getting completely extracted by one entity.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  So one way you could kind of try and socially encourage ETH as legal tender and improve the moneyness of ETH is say, hey, you have to take those fees and you have to burn them. Right? Like instead of the base fee in Ethereum L1, you have to burn the base fee as part of 1559. In this version, you just point the base fee to a contract that's controlled by the treasury. Like, no, don't point it to the treasury. Like, you're not going to pay it out to future airdroppers, whatever. Like, destroy it. That's like true neutrality and like true commitment to ETH or the asset. Obviously, like, this is a super opinionated thing.

• 48:40David Hoffman?

  But yeah, why would they do that? You're just asking them to destroy their revenue, right?

• 48:44Speaker 00

  It's gonna be a little bit of a tough sell.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, again, this is like coercive social pressure.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  You know, when 559 was getting designed, actually, one of the things that they were concerned about and why they settled on the burn mechanism was, you know, any out of channel, like out of band payment that would get, you know, in between someone who's trying to submit a transaction and a miner at the time, that could be paid in dollars, not necessarily ETH. And they called, there was a term they were calling economic abstraction, which is like, they were concerned back then about losing ETH as currency, like the default currency. The network, actually, which is kind of interesting.

• 49:18David Hoffman?

  That was actually a lot more of external concern trolling by Bitcoiners, I think.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  It might have been.

• 49:23David Hoffman?

  It was a little old. I think the reason, the real reason why to burn the Ether was always credible neutrality. And then like kicking out this concern trolling of Bitcoiners of economic abstraction was just like a nice cherry on top that we would have.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:37David Hoffman?

  But it was always about the neutrality of like, we need to do something with this. Let's do the most credibly neutral thing and burn it.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Right. Which is good. I, I, I think in that, in, in that Twitter poll from Charlie, I would be in the first camp, the side chain that uses ETH as gas.

• 49:53David Hoffman?

  Is better or worse?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Is better, is better. Although I would say there's a, the nuance that I would add to that is that ETH would have a brand issue there. Because if you have a bunch of chains and the security assumptions are different and people could lose their ETH is like, it could be a brand challenge for Ethereum. But I would still be in that, that first camp. Yeah, for, for me, I, this is where I start to think about RWAs and stablecoins, et cetera. Like that's the, I think that is, that's what it comes down to for me on the roll up centric roadmap. Is if we can somehow find a way to make ETH the native currency on these chains. I think that is much more valuable than the cash flows that you're surrendering. But I don't know how to do that. I mean, that's, I think the chance. So do you think that these users on, you know, optimism and arbitrage and base? Do you think they're going to prefer Ethereum?

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Or do you think they're going to prefer USDC? And I could actually see it going either way because one of the most bullish things, I think, in all of roll up them is if you just look at the bridge, the bridges right now, like the amount of ETH that flows into Arbitrum every single day. It's like this incredible vacuum. And I think they might, I think they might just end up, the liquidity network effects up there are just gonna outweigh even the preference to hold USDC or something like that.

• 51:03David Hoffman?

  In the fullness of time, I kind of think all gas payments can and will be completed in any currency.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:10David Hoffman?

  This is, I feel like there's just so many ways that this, I think, ends up as being like the local convergence. Cause there's so many different ways to abstract it at the layer two level. So they really, the only control that Ethereum has is that when a layer two settles and pays for DA and settles Ethereum layer one is. That's when they are compelled to buy and then use ETH and having some sort of reservation demand. But anything that happens on the higher level, it would be against Ethereum's ethos to like compel currency usage. It would also be a stunt on growth because any chain that was like, well, we have to use Ethereum as our gas token. Like, well, maybe we'll go settle on Celestia because they aren't making those same sort of like forces.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  This is the challenge. So here's a weird catch 22, or this is the way that I view it when it comes to value accrual for the L1 is the catch 22 is it's very tempting to say, you know, just, you know, don't try to lock in anyone. Don't worry about that. Just, you know, serve the developers that are your customers today and trust that you're going to create value. But there's this funny thing, I think, when it comes to blockchains, which is the total addressable market of those developers that are building on your layer is the amount of market cap of your token. That's why it's so attractive in my view to build on Ethereum today. That's why you have SVM L2s that are settling to ETH instead of Solana. Because Solana's got $80 billion worth of TAM, right? Or capital on that platform, ETH has 300 billion.

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  And so that's the weird catch 22 of this where you don't want to be overly greedy, right? And rake too much out of the value that, um, you know, you're creating in your ecosystem. But if you do none of that, the challenge is that your token won't do anything. And then people won't want to build on you because the, you know, your value prop is now lower.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally agree with that, but there is the fundamental thing. And I think it's kind of what David was hinting at, which is you can desire something to be true, but it's a permissionless system. And if there's a market value for something else existing, it's going to exist, right? And I think that what another example of this happening, which was really kind of funny and silly, but very related, which is restaking, right? Original, originally, and I didn't really understand this at the time and it, I was kind of confused by it. And we had our interview with, with Sriram back in Christmas time last year, but he was all in on using ETH as the unit of account for restaking.

• 53:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Right. And, and this was a money argument, right? Like this is fundamentally.

• 53:32David Hoffman?

  It's always been a money argument.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  It's always has been. And I, that was totally lost on me. And I remember asking him like, Well, you know, these ETH derivatives especially, like staked ETH, wrapped staked ETH, or I guess wrapped staked ETH is a bad example, but anything that's like a liquid staking token, it's not really restaking in that regard because the person who's deploying capital isn't actually the one who's staking in the first place, right? And so I was kind of just like confused by that and I was like, oh, why don't you just use USDC? And, and his answer was, you know, it's about the unit of account. It's about kind of spreading ETH as the denomination of economic security. And, you know, everyone was like, oh, this is sick, like very pro Ethereum. And then symbiotic spins up and what's their first branding thing, right?

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Any token, boom.

• 54:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  It's like.

• 54:17David Hoffman?

  But also, uh, Stryram and Eigenlayer have always been on the roadmap of, and eventually you will use any token. You just start, and we just, Genesis is with ETH.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just a funny thing of like, sure, you can try and like push the values top down or whatever, like grassroots even, like kind of our ethos generally seems to be grassroots.

• 54:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  But if there's a market demand for something like it's going to come up. And yeah, and to your point, as far as L2 is abstracting that away, I do think it's just going to be less and less people even know what they're touching in terms of the chain behind it. So like if I onboard on base, like the average American is going to know US dollars. And at the point of sale, maybe it converts to ETH and swaps, blah, blah, blah. But it's just not going to be something they pay attention to and think about. And I think that's where ETH loses its, because you can't be money without people being aware that it exists. You know what I mean? And I think that's a very important distinction there.

• 55:15David Hoffman?

  The last wallet onboarding experience I had was with Clave Wallet on ZK Sync. And I onboarded and downloaded the wallet, Face ID, no private keys. It was great. And then got my Clave ID, which is like an ENS version of Clave on ZK Sync.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:32David Hoffman?

  And then I like did like three or four transactions with zero gas in my wallet because Clave paid for my gas.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:38David Hoffman?

  And they actually probably used ETH in the backend because ZK Sync uses ETH. But like, I was not even exposed, so like not only am I not exposed to gas. I'm not, or the currency to pay for gas, I'm not even explosive gas at all.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Period.

• 55:51David Hoffman?

  And honestly, that like, that's going to be the actual convergence of where this goes. Like, it's actually not going to be like chains competing on, on which, which currency would you like to use to pay for gas? It's like, actually, well, no, we're just gonna solve your gas problem in the first place.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:04David Hoffman?

  And that's like, we have to go there as an industry. Gas has to go away, transaction fees has to go away. And then at that point, it's, it's actually more of a Ethereum layer one, B to B to it's a layer two. So that's two Bs and then layer two, B to B to its user front ends.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:19David Hoffman?

  Which are like paying the gas fees to the layer two.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:21David Hoffman?

  Uh, so that's actually really the concept. So it's actually not really about user preferences. It's now about app preferences to layer two preferences to layer one preferences.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, super interesting. I mean, it's, it's a great point because I use the, the main 4337 wallet that I've interacted with is Dymo, which is kind of like a peer-to-peer payment app. Um, disclosure, I am an angel investor in Dymo. Um, and yeah, it's, it's totally a great point. Like when I onboard someone, I just send them $5 and they never hold ETH in that wallet.

• 56:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Like it's a wallet on base. It, it has USDC in it, but the, the gas is getting paid by someone else in, in ETH, completely abstracted from the user. So yeah, that, that definitely feels like the right end game in terms of like how user experiences are gonna end.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Do you think that that, so this is where there's, I think, another element of path dependence. And I'm generally of a perspective that Cosmos was right from the beginning.

• 57:11David Hoffman?

  I also think, Cosmos' end game was right. Not, not the pre-game.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 57:17David Hoffman?

  The pre-game, they flopped so hard.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  No, but they, they tried to skim to the end. They tried to skip to the end.

• 57:22David Hoffman?

  Right to the end.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Cosmos has been on this forever. Don't require people that people can pay in whatever they want. But, but the thing is the user flow of most people getting into crypto is, hey, I've got a buddy who like tells me I should buy some ETH or Bitcoin. And then I buy it and then it goes up. And then it's like, oh, what else can I do with this? And then you go from your, your home base of ETH into, you know, whatever stupid meme coins or. Whatever else you want to lose money on. It's your casino on Mars. Your casino on Mars, yeah. But that was the user flow. And then, and then it created this common shelling point. And then it created this huge pool of crypto native capital. And that's when that attracted all the people that wanted to build around it. So I don't know, I still feel like that's not broken, actually. I don't know, I just, I don't know.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Maybe it's going to be different. The, it could be different with base this time. They, base has crushed it with their, I think they're going to do a really good job this cycle and getting new people because they've got a bunch of people on the exchange and then they've got the smart wallet. And they can just move people directly into base and it's super easy. But that would, yeah, that would make me kind of think differently about a lot of the stuff.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  If. One interesting point that kind of ties into this is kind of when we're talking about the asset and its monetary properties.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  On the L1, I think one of the unique differentiators of the L1 is that it is the ledger of record for ETH. Right? And I think this is a point that also gets lost on people. But when you bridge, you know, your ETH to a smart contract and then out, there is like counterparty risk now. And you kind of lose the, some of the censorship resistance properties, at least until the rollups like scale to, to stage two and have like really good forced inclusion mechanisms. So yeah, I guess the, the cipher puck in me is like, I wonder if there's a world where there's a few black swan events, like big asset seizures or kind of like large scale global censorship that like results in the value of censorship being priced in more meaningfully.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  And especially like holding the most kind of like trust minimized store of value is, is becoming increasingly important.

• 59:30David Hoffman?

  And this is a similar conversation I was having with Ryan this morning, actually, which is like Ethereum people, once upon a time, will just like laugh at the Bitcoiners. Because like, man, you guys are, you guys are doomers. Like you guys are hoping that doom happens so that your bags can go up. That's a inherently pessimistic version of the world. In Ethereum land, we're so much more optimistic. We like growth. We want to grow things.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  On a chain economy. And now you're like, global seizures, baby.

• 59:54David Hoffman?

  But now. And now, in contrast to like the the archetypes of the younger generation of crypto cohorts that find Solana this attractive shiny new toy. Solana is like way more optimistic on Ethereum because like, come on, like, is Solana gonna hold up against nation-state attacks? Like, they don't even talk about this in their ethos.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13David Hoffman?

  And it also doesn't matter because no nation-state is attacking Solana.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16David Hoffman?

  So it's even more just like kind of trusting of the world that it exists in. It's less priorities on censorship resistance. It's more less DeFi, more open finance, which is like

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  It's fintech.

• 1:00:28David Hoffman?

  It's fintech. It's more fintechy. And it's working just fine.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31David Hoffman?

  Nothing's, nothing's going after it. And so now, in that contrast, Ethereum is like, oh, but like, when the nation-states come, y'all are fucked, though.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39David Hoffman?

  And it's inherently, by contrast, like more Doomer version of the world. Because Ethereum has prioritized so much on just like censorship resistance, multi-client architecture, credible neutrality, you know, nation, World War III level attack. And, you know, if World War III never comes, then maybe all of that effort was wasted.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  I think, um, I have maybe a somewhat heretical opinion here to share, which is, I don't think that any blockchain is nation-state resistant.

• 1:01:10David Hoffman?

  Even Bitcoin?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Even Bitcoin. Oh, definitely not Bitcoin. I don't know.

• 1:01:13David Hoffman?

  Actually, no, I'd actually rate Ethereum higher than Bitcoin here, yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know if you guys just saw this Hezbollah attack where they exploded the pagers and then turns out they hadn't tampered with the pagers, they manufactured them. It's actually so. And I'm just kind of thinking to myself, I don't think any of these things like would really withstand. But what I do think the end game is for crypto networks is you, you kind of see parallels of it with like the Swifts of the world. There is some precedent in financial, uh, in the financial system for credible neutrality. Like, there are these shared bits of infrastructure that aren't fully owned by any one country. Swift is an example, although it's heavily leaned on by, you know, it basically is. Yeah. But I think one, one of the things that you could do, like, one goal for crypto could be, is to say, hey, we're gonna become, either become big enough that, uh, there's enough financial

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  activity that's happening here, and there's enough apps and people are a bit like That shutting, we would be like shutting ourselves off from this instead of actually, you know, trying to actually lock it down and prevent it. I don't know. I kind of think the way to winning this thing is winning hearts and minds, not. It's, yeah, maybe I'd be in the heretical camp of like, I'm not, I don't think designing for World War III actually makes a lot of sense because I think that nation states could blow this stuff up if they wanted to.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  I don't know. I, I'm not sure I totally agree with you.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Obviously, like, it's, it's very hard to speculate on something like this, especially around like the networking layer. But I do think there's an interesting point to be made here, which is like, if you look at the kind of early protocols of the internet, like you have BitTorrent, which is like the censorship resistant, you know, impossible to shut down. And like, they tried to shut it down, right? It's just like, the information wants to be free and I still feel like the value wants to be free is gonna be there. But, so this is kind of like the pro side. The con side is like, how much value is BitTorrent actually adding to the world? Like, is it that pro-social? Like, sure, if, if Netflix and Spotify and the main distribution channels of content started raking people in a way

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  that like, they had to go back to like, free distribution channel, then sure, it kind of like serves as a check and balance on, on that power. But still, like, 99.99999% of content is consumed on centralized platforms from like, the main clearinghouse.

• 1:03:30David Hoffman?

  The worst thing to happen to BitTorrent with Spotify, like I was a big torrenter way back in the day. And, I mean, it was kind of, kind of clunky. Like, you would get low-quality files, you would get files with like,

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Random extra files.

• 1:03:43David Hoffman?

  Voiceovers in it that weren't a part of it, that were just an ad. And then Spotify came and for $10 a month, you can get all the music and it's like a nice curated platform. And to your point, like, actually, maybe the reason why Spotify is only $10 a month instead of $40 a month or $400 a month is because Bitcoin, BitTorrent exists. Like, the alternative is a check.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  There is a counterfactual.

• 1:04:02David Hoffman?

  There is a counterfactual, but the counterfactual makes no value. Like, it doesn't actually capture anything. It just exists.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you price the social value of having an alternative? I mean, I still do think, this has all been like very bearish. I don't know. I, I still do believe that value, kind of of the monetary system and of a digital property manifestation, rather than just pure data. Will be stronger in terms of like preserving individual rights. And like, obviously, the copyright rules are basically what suffered here. It's like you didn't have any digital property. And so the seeding and kind of distribution channels, you just get, get very spread. But yeah, I think for value and money, like these, it's not comparing apples and apples and apples. So I think it's worth kind of at least pointing that out.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  I think there's a super bullish story to tell here, which is, I mean, again, this is just my, the way that I look at the world. But if you look at everything from the lens of what we're reinventing or creating a better version of here is money and a financial system. That, that is massive, right? That's not like a small thing. And if you view the driver of that as, hey, the debt and the, the issues with the way that money works today is actually going to push more and more people into this system. Then there's a really close linkage in between the money that sits at the center of a financial system and the financial infrastructure that's built around it, right? The issuer of US dollars is the US government and the central bank, right? But then you've got these network of commercial banks that sprung up around it.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  And they're the ones that actually control the money supply. They custody all of the money. They're basically, it's very, very closely interlinked, linked and related. And we have actually done something a little bit weird in crypto, which is because there's an issue with that money, we created the money first, right? And we just like, hey, we've got this commodity money that's really, has these really great properties. And we're in the beginning stages of building financial infrastructure around it. That's why all the apps that have really taken off have something to do with, hey, I want to do something with my money. It's like Uniswap, I want to trade my money or Aave, hey, I want to get a loan against my money, right? That's why we're in the beginning stages of that. And if we have a better money that has better properties than exist today,

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  and the financial infrastructure around that is much better, then if we have, I guess, one way to look at like a bright future for this new economy is what could you do in an economy if you had better money and a hundred times better financial system? What businesses could you build in that world that you couldn't build today? And that's the part where, you know, you can't really talk about it on. On a podcast because a lot of that hasn't been built yet, but that is the vision that that's what excites me about crypto.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for bringing us back there, Mike.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got you. I got you. We need a little bit of bull energy there.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  No, but I mean, this is fundamentally the the foundational argument I tried to make in in the thesis too, which is like fundamentally like this is a technology, but it's also like a coordination engine. And money is fundamentally like you guys have said for a long time, it's like a subjective thing. It's intersubjective. It's a shared collective story. And I think Ethereum is is telling a very credible story for why it should be money in a way that like, you know, is super valuable. I think it's extremely pro-social and I still believe in it.

• 1:07:17David Hoffman?

  One thing that I think is missing from this like money story with Ethereum, like this conversation in the last few months and in the with like the Max Kyle episodes. And then the rebuttal to these episodes is all about like layer ones and value capturing the moneyness around this thing. But what's been missing is like, honestly, like DeFi hasn't had like a renaissance in a really long time.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37David Hoffman?

  And a lot of monetary properties come out of DeFi, like Maker Dow was like was the first ETH as money application, followed by like the, you know, Uniswap, Olive, Compound, like Frax, all these, all these newer ones. And then we built DeFi 1.0, tried to build DeFi 2.0, turned out that was a Ponzi.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:55David Hoffman?

  And whoopsies. Happens, happens to the best of us. And like, we're starting to get some like DeFi like apps, like Sorrela, Sorrela is like putting, making Uniswap LPing great again. But like, I wouldn't really ever call it the same level of just like zero to one moment that we had with DeFi. And the moneyness conversations kind of stopped with like DeFi 1.0, I would say. And so like, I don't really know how much more Jude, maybe we just like need to get back on track with building DeFi. Maybe like DeFi 1.0 is actually most of it.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:27David Hoffman?

  And there's not that much more. Like, I don't really know if you guys have have thoughts here.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  I have thoughts. I think the coins need to go up. And once the coins go up, people will come in and they will build cool stuff. And that's how I really think.

• 1:08:38David Hoffman?

  But that's what DeFi 2.0.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  But here's the cool thing, here's just on the track of being bullish, what we haven't had. Before is a bunch of very abundant, very cheap, high-quality block space.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  We have never had that before going into a bull market. We were severely constrained last, like, seriously, just rewind the clock back to 2020. Like, there was Ethereum, which is great, but that was really the only network that you wanted to build on. And, you know, we didn't even have 1559. There were all of these challenges. Like, we are in such a different place now, and I just think we're gonna get a bunch of really cool stuff to surprise us to the upside.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, Vitalik had a tweet, I think, four or five days ago that was basically exactly this, which is, you know, he pulled up-

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  Me and Vitalik were always saying the same stuff.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Two sounds are the same.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Always saying the same thing.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  But the tweet was basically like a time series showing, you know, L2 fees. And, you know, there's a clear point. April 2024.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Proto Dang Sharding goes live and fees just go to zero. And it's been five months.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  And it's like, yeah, I get it, like, the price is down, whatever people are feeling, end of summer angst. But like, we are at the beginning of an abundant block space era. And I do think Ethereum block space is like, super valuable. People are gonna build on it, like, it's gonna be a Cambrian explosion, hopefully, when, when like, the real, you know, bull market picks up again.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I've got a question for you guys. What would you, at the end of this, there is a lot of, you know, I feel like in crypto, there are a couple of different groups, and they tend to talk past each other or not want to talk about the same thing. There's the money group, and that's like the Bitcoiners and Ethereum, which is like, hey, this is all about the money. And then there's the, hey, this is all about the financial infrastructure, which is like the NASDAQ, that's kind of the Solana.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  And then there's, hey, we can build all these cool new business models. And that's also a little bit of Ethereum, I think, and also kind of VCs, like, stop telling me that wishy-washy money stuff. You know, give me businesses with cash flow, etc. And I think that people kind of talk past each other. To me, those are all related things, but what would you guys say would make this whole crypto experiment that we're running a success at the end of the day? Like, okay, you know, we're getting bigger, some of the initial ideology, we might have to make compromises on, whatever. If this thing were to really take off, what would, you know, if we're having this conversation 10 years from now, what would you say, hey, this made it a really successful experiment?

• 1:11:03David Hoffman?

  Kind of a hard, hard question. I think you could take it in a bunch of different directions. Like digital identity or like self-sovereign identity that is

• 1:11:14David Hoffman?

  like legitimized by nation states, as in like your identity that's maintained by some crypto platform with some crypto mechanism is like your way to like check into some country going somewhere. Like that is extremely legitimizing and that starts to like kind of like in the pendulum of power, take power away from nation states and putting it on the internet, which to me is the individual. And so that's always been like why I'm here. It's like, hey, how, what crypto, crypto, cryptography has always been about pushing power towards the margins, pushing power towards the individual. And like, is like these money conversations, like why Bitcoin is so valuable, why Ether is so valuable is because now we have this money that's not a nation states, it's owned and operated by these like individually run networks.

• 1:12:00David Hoffman?

  And so like digital identity is like also very close with that. We've never really cracked that code. But like, once you have this like little cryptographic tool called your public key with your private key, and you can roam around the internet and be self-sovereign with like whatever like, you know, credentials that you want to have and you can unlock different things. And you can do that also in meatspace. Like that's kind of what I'm looking for is just like, and that could, that could go in like a thousand different directions, right? Like on-chain ticketing, we've never been able to figure out, but like,

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Ticketmaster needs to die.

• 1:12:30David Hoffman?

  Let's, Ticketmaster needs to die. Come on, let's like solve that problem. Like, I want to have,

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  That's what gets me up in the morning, baby.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  I want to go and like, when I go to this concert tomorrow, I want to show my davidhoffin.eth address, which has some sort of just like digital identity associated with it, which has my, my ticket that's associated with it. And that ticket is a bearer asset, you know, not a Ticketmaster IOU. Like stuff like this is kind of like where my head's at.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say super similar in spirit, but maybe even simpler in terms of the actual execution, which I, I view it very much as like self-sovereign money. Like, that's the inalienable right to send, store, transmit, you know, preserve value on-chain is, is kind of fundamentally what it's all been about. And I actually, You know, like you described earlier, I kind of view it as this check on existing powers at B. Like, people currently in these in these underdeveloped or like underbanked regimes, like, just don't have access to a way to store their capital. And like, this is what tears countries apart, right? Like, people suffer for like, under the monetary

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  policy of these regimes. And like, yeah, fundamentally, I think that is is kind of what what motivates me and what I hope all of this is is in service to it. Even if, you know, it doesn't become the one asset that that rules them all, still serving as like a credible, neutral alternative to the existing infrastructure that that these countries have, it feels critical.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, you know, we in crypto, people talk about money as being a social construct, but it's also a tech construct, or like, it's it's a technology. And one of the things that I'm really hopeful for is, you know, money, the way that money has evolved, if you think about money as gold, there actually what, there were some properties around gold that made it really nice. It was the original proof of work. You had to dig that shit up with your hands. So you weren't really worried about the supply. But it was it was challenging when the economy globalized and you needed to move it all around the world very quickly and divide it up really easily. And that didn't really work. And that's when you started relying more on intermediated forms of money like bank IOUs. And then it was like, oh, these banks are really trustworthy. So maybe we just make the IOU the same thing as as

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  money. And that technology setup just lent itself towards more of a surveillance state kind of centralized power at the top thing. And the crypto form of money, because it's programmable and you can send it around and you can do more with it, is actually much more conducive overall to just individual liberties and actually property ownership. It's like strong property rights, I think.

• 1:15:04David Hoffman?

  It's the self sovereignty of the gold, the technology of the internet.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  And the other thing I would say, too, is, I mean, for the thing that initially got me into it as well, it's just the risk reward and the opportunity and how fast paced this industry moves. Like, there is no industry like this where it just, the narrative has completely changed one year from the other. There's a bunch of new startups that you can go work at. Just the pace of change and, you know, the intellectual challenge of this industry is really high. And I'm really excited to see, it will be a success for me if in 10 years, there are businesses built on blockchain rails that could never have existed, you know, not on on blockchain rails. That would be successful from my standpoint. That's what I want to see.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Super cool.

• 1:15:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Kevin Milwaukee's, it's all coordination and always has been, this always stuck out to me. Whatever these tools are, I think they do allow for better coordination tools that we've ever had before. They do. And that's always been just like, I think like my personal like North Star, like, like all these tools I talked about a second ago, they're all kind of just like tools to help people coordinate better at higher levels. And so internet scale coordination, we've never really seen before because we don't have the tools to get there. But like, what, what happens when humanities ability to coordinate like gets a 10x software upgrade? Like you don't really, you can't really imagine. Exactly. Yeah. You don't really, you can't really imagine what we can do next, but that's always been like the power of crypto to me. Shall I wrap it here, guys?

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Bullish.

• 1:16:27David Hoffman?

  Bullish.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a ton of fun.

• 1:16:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is great. Yeah. So we're in New York. I'm trying to do these in real life podcasts on a semi regular basis. Who do you guys think I should bring on next? Since you guys know who our, our neighbors are.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:16:41David Hoffman?

  Oh man, great question. Probably get Victor Bunnin in here at some point.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  You should.

• 1:16:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  You should have my friend Nate on.

• 1:16:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  He's going to come to your party tonight. He's building this super interesting attention economy game sort of thing on WorldCoin. And I think it's going to be absolutely sick. It has this kind of like 24 hour. You know that, what was the app where you took a picture?

• 1:17:05David Hoffman?

  BeReal?

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  BeReal, yeah. It has that kind of like once a day viral loop thing.

• 1:17:09David Hoffman?

  That's cool.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  And yeah, I think once, once he ships it, it's going to take the world by storm. So I think it's going to be one of those things that we haven't really seen yet and hopefully it really goes crazy.

• 1:17:19David Hoffman?

  Cool. Let's go. Should I have Yana on?

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should, you should bring him on. Miss you, buddy.

• 1:17:29David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. Thanks for coming over to the studio. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, David. Bankless Station, you guys want to deal? Crypto is risky.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  ETH is risky.

• 1:17:35David Hoffman?

  ETH is risky. Other chains, more or less risky, maybe more. But we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.