ROLLUP: Visa buys a CryptoPunk | Budweiser Beer. ETH | NFT Mania | Michael Saylor Bitcoin | EIP1559

4th Week of August, 2021 ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Building DeFi Infrastructure. Join the Discord! https://bankless.cc/TracerDAO ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 1:50 MARKETS 2:01 BTC Price 3:00 ETH Price 3:48 ETH/BTC Ratio 4:35 DeFi Action 9:12 EIP-1559 https://ultrasound.money/ Dominance: https://twitter.com/kyoronut/status/1429585246849167361?s=20 13:17 OpenSea Volume https://dune.xyz/PierreYves_Gendron/opensea---metrics 70% of Ebay: https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1430323506609197059?s=21 Top 1000 Sites: https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1430372663223103488 20:00 TornadoCash https://twitter.com/paolorebuffo/status/1430440030405865474?s=21 23:29 ETH in Lido https://twitter.com/kazhiloti/status/1430608546689912833?s=20 26:00 RELEASES 27:30 Euler Lending & Paradigm https://twitter.com/euler_mab/status/1430486946523099142?s=20 29:12 Lyra on Optimism https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1430334558654767108?s=20 29:56 MEV Breakthrough https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1430652250226151425 34:20 Hop Protocol https://twitter.com/HopProtocol/status/1430630767042904074 36:16 Layer Zero Podcast https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1430254024964513792 39:00 tl;dr Show https://youtu.be/Yy9CY-KOxNQ 39:45 Raises Fractional: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/115122/fractional-nft-platform-raises-7-9-million-in-seed-funding Immutable: https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1430611200736337920?s=20 3LAU: https://www.coindesk.com/3lau-raises-16m-to-tokenize-music-royalties-for-artists-and-fans 46:55 Jobs https://jobs.banklesshq.com/ 47:48 NEWS 47:58 Visa Buys a Punk https://twitter.com/VisaNews/status/1429745230023208969?s=20 49:57 Budweiser Beer.eth https://twitter.com/dGenNetwork/status/1430330168095264768 51:24 Donating to ETH Client Teams https://twitter.com/ethereum/status/1430124634104545288?s=20 53:26 Aave Mobile App https://twitter.com/AaveAave/status/1428376672357605378 54:13 StarkEx $10B in Trading https://twitter.com/ukolodny/status/1430851025947316224?s=20 dYdX Success: https://twitter.com/AntonioMJuliano/status/1429933246704324646 55:39 CryptoPunks 90 Punks: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/115356/90-cryptopunks-get-snapped-up-in-one-hour-following-visas-150000-purchase Dune Analytics: https://dune.xyz/eliasimos/cryptopunks- 57:19 Youtube Bullish on NFTs https://twitter.com/Fwiz/status/1429108126234546182 58:45 Facebook Bullish NFTs https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/115631/david-marcus-facebook-and-novi-are-definitely-looking-to-integrate-nfts 1:01:47 Microstrategy Buying https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/115519/microstrategy-buys-even-more-bitcoin-again 1:04:44 Coinbase Investing in Crypto: https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1428489591665856512?s=20 Coinbase, Circle, Cash: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-23/coinbase-circle-to-move-all-usdc-reserves-into-cash-treasuries Esports Team: https://twitter.com/BIGCLANgg/status/1430560657670348808 1:10:30 TAKES 1:11:30 Networks into Economies https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1429585831899983876?s=20 1:15:31 New Types of Alpha https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is/status/1425950526651441158?s=20 1:18:42 Can’t Fork NFTs https://twitter.com/cyounessi1/status/1430325461767364613?s=21 1:20:32 DC Ethereum Dominance https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1429558574313791488 1:21:30 Early vs. Late https://twitter.com/cyounessi1/status/1430275250453979140 1:25:09 OnlyFans & Politics https://www.coindesk.com/onlyfans-shows-how-the-banking-system-is-politicized 1:30:06 What David’s Excited About https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1430672599420346374?s=20 1:31:56 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:35:56 Bankless Nation Member of the Week https://twitter.com/_t_shot/status/1429584536426401799?s=20 1:36:47 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1429413279424712707?s=20 1:38:11 Closing & Disclaimers https://twitter.com/Cryptob04989352/status/1423985084785254400?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, it is the 4th week of August. David, what time is it?

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  It is roll up time, time to roll up the entire week of news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. And it's always, for me, the most fun piece of content that we produce here out of the Bankless world. So Ryan, let's go ahead and get right into it.

• 0:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know what? I feel like we're not just rolling up the week here. It almost feels like we're rolling up the summer a little bit, David. Kids are going back to school, this sort of thing. We're creeping into September and it feels like we have a lot to roll up, maybe create some themes out of the summer because it didn't turn out how I thought it would. A little bit different. Wasn't necessarily DeFi summer. Layer 2 is kind of coming, but it's not entirely here. But oh my God, NFTs. I think that's going to be a major theme as we discuss it today.

• 0:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, unlike the weather, when you try and predict the future of the summer in the crypto industry, it just changes right around you. And so what we thought was going to be DeFi summer, which you know, still kind of was, like there's a lot of stuff going on on Layer 2 summer. But no, it was definitely like JPEG season for sure.

• 1:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  JPEG summer, that's what we got. Speaking of seasons, guys, we think a next season, a future season, don't know when it's going to become. It's going to be DAO season. And so it makes sense to start getting involved in all the DAOs you can, as many as are interesting and exciting. One of which are friends at Tracer DAO. They are launching a new perpetuals product, which is super cool. It's going to be a new money Lego primitive. They're deploying that on Layer 2 as well as Layer 1, I believe. And they're looking for contributors. They're looking for governors. They're looking for DAO members. If you think you can fill that role, if you want to experiment in a DAO, try your first DAO. Maybe you're a DAO master and you want to join another, then go ahead and do that. There will be a link to the Tracer DAO Discord in the show notes.

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can check that out. All right, David, you ready to get into markets?

• 1:59David Hoffman?

  Let's do it.

• 2:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Market time Bitcoin. What are we doing?

• 2:02David Hoffman?

  All right. Bitcoin started the week at the low, low price of $48,000, going up to the highs of right above $50,000. So Bitcoin breached $50,000 this week, hit the high of $50,400 and it's been down ever since then. So we are coming in right around the $47,000 mark at the time of recording.

• 2:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little crabbing, crabbing around this week, but like you zoom out.

• 2:28David Hoffman?

  New highs, new highs are fantastic. New highs are fantastic. Bitcoin, even though it didn't hold it, like getting up above 50,000 is, is really, really nice. The, the lows keep on creeping up. On August 4th, it was a low of 38,000. On August roughly like 19th, it was a low of 44,000 and we are currently maybe at a new high of a low at 47,000. If this is as low as Bitcoin goes in the, in like the, the local seven day time period, like that's really strong. That's strong.

• 2:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Looking pretty good on the month for sure. Okay. How about ETH? What's the story here?

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  Ether started at $3,050, which is also the low for the week. We climbed up to the high of $3,350 for the high. And then we are currently back down just above $3,100. And so again, a decently good week for Ether. But again, we, we, I mean, no, it's, it was a good week, but I did like that 3,300 number and I wanted to be back there.

• 3:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I wanted to be back there. You know what? I just feel like ETH deserves to be back there post EIP 1559. But when you start to talk about deserving, maybe you shouldn't talk that way, right? Like we are not entitled to any of the gains that we receive in crypto. Let that be a lesson to everyone who subscribes to bankless content. Okay. Let's talk about this though. ETH Bitcoin. What are we doing on the ratio here?

• 3:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we've been leading a little bit for the past like seven days or so. But again, a really high threshold currently at point 066 Ether Bitcoin ratio. And not too much to talk about, just kind of still in that ranging in that high plateau area. Maybe a little bit on the higher side, maybe higher middle. I don't know. Point 066 is still a really strong number.

• 4:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is starting to look like the conclusion of the summer, David, and it always brings me to the question of what will fall bring? What will the next season bring in crypto? And I'm curious if we're just hanging here and then getting ready to launch up, or whether we get some more crab or down. I guess those are all the options.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  It's gotta be one of those.

• 4:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Available. We promise you it will be one of those three options. All right, let's talk about total value locked in DeFi. Man, I'm hoping any day now, we're going to be reporting out that we hit that 100 billion mark, but we're not there yet. 82 billion. Any more thoughts on this, David?

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 8 billion away from breaking a new all time high in total value locked in DeFi. I believe we're at 80 billion last weekly roll up, and we are at 82 billion right now. AVE continues to dominate at the top number one total value locked in AVE. And yeah, I think all it really takes is like, man, if Ether can break $3,300 and some of the assets that are in DeFi all appreciate a little bit, like it'll absolutely break through the all time high of 90 billion locked in DeFi.

• 5:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, someone is talking on Twitter to me, David, I'm wondering your thoughts on this. So the fact that ETH has been so strong lately, and this is a tweet I mentioned about all the ETH we're burning. He asked the question, is that bad for DPI? Is that bad for DeFi tokens to have a very strong ETH with supply shrinking? I'll give you my thoughts, but I'm curious to hear yours first. Do you think that a strong ETH is bad for DeFi tokens?

• 5:45David Hoffman?

  In dollar terms, absolutely not. In Ether terms, perhaps, yeah. Like, I think Ether is going to be a really, really hard asset to outperform. Like, it's ultrasound money. How are you supposed to compete with that? And so DeFi tokens for ETH is like, it's going to be a massive tug of war. I kind of view these things as kind of like a binary star system. It's like, you know, they're kind of rotating around each other. One benefits the other, which benefits the other. But even when binary star systems, there's usually one star that's bigger than the other. And like, the compelling case behind Ether is that it's a really, really big gravitational black hole of a bunch of value.

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you definitely want to have both. You definitely want to have all three if you can. We'll get to the bed index in a minute, but let's talk about DPI. That is the DeFi Pulse Index. So where are we, where are we at for tokens on the week? DeFi tokens, that is?

• 6:35David Hoffman?

  A little bit down on the week. Still overall, a very strong monthly performance, but we started DPI at roughly around $400 to start the week and we have fallen down to $370 per DPI token, which is roughly about the low for the week. So a little bit down on the week for DPI.

• 6:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's check our seasons. Are we in DeFi season? No, you're not, David. Are we below point 1.3?

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  We are below point 1.3. We are at point 1.2. But again, the bottom is strong. The bottom is strong.

• 7:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  If your prediction was point 1.2 instead of 1.3, I mean, you're holding, you're holding pretty close to that, right?

• 7:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, horseshoes and hand grenades, right?

• 7:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it's NFT season, it's not yet DeFi season. And are we awaiting the return of DeFi? Is now a time to go check out these interesting DeFi token gems? What do you think?

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  I mean, we're always waiting for DeFi season, right? Like, it's always right around the corner. As soon as NFTs can shut the hell up, we can, we can have a DeFi season, maybe. But like, like I've been saying, like, the bottom on DPI ETH is, the bottom that is painting is like really, really strong. It's hit that point 1.2 level over and over and over again. Granted, it could just break through and fall and fall even more. Everything, anything is possible. It could go up, flat, or down. We all know this. But like, like we've been saying, NFTs are really, really loud. And generally, that's been kind of the time to allocate into really, really quiet things. That's kind of like a nice rule of thumb. You know, every rule of thumb has like an equal and opposite like counterpoint to make. But you know, generally buying things when things are

• 8:12David Hoffman?

  quiet has like worked out.

• 8:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, agreed. Especially if you are buying and holding. Let's talk about the bed index. That's another index that we track. This is a combination, 1/3 Bitcoin, 1/3 ETH, and 1/3 DPI all put together. What are we looking at on the week?

• 8:28David Hoffman?

  Deep, excuse me, bed started at the week of around $140, hit the high of $162, and is currently at $145. Ryan, can you hit the three month on, on the bed? Dude, it has ever since inception, Bed has just performed beautifully. It hasn't had like a down, maybe it's had like a down week here or there, but like no, the whole entire thing is a straight line up and to the right. On the, on the three month chart, which I think is really longer than the bed has even existed. So like it's really the maximum chart. Ever since bed launch, up 54%. Again, bed index, bed best crypto index of all time.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going to be interesting to see this one perform over time. I'm excited about it. Um, all right. Let's talk about a big story, which is, look dude, over 100,000 ETH is now burnt. We just passed that milestone, 100,020 days. It's by the time people are listening, it's 21 days from launch, over 100,000 ETH burnt. That's, um, what are some of the numbers here, David? And in terms of per day, per minute, seven ETH per day? Is that what that equals?

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So, uh, go ahead and scroll down and go to that fee burn. And then, okay. So we see it the all time, ever since EIP 1559 got launched, we've had an average of 3.3 ETH burned per minute. But if you go and, uh, turn those, those metrics more recently, like I think yesterday, the 24 hour level had like nine ETH being burnt per minute. Uh, today it's 6.2 ETH being burned per minute. So especially in the last week, we have seen very, very ultrasound ether. Uh, Ryan, go to that burn leaderboard and hit all, and you can actually see how much of this is actually NFT activity because of the 100,000 ether that's got burnt, the biggest burner is OpenSea.

• 10:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFTs are crushing it.

• 10:18David Hoffman?

  15,000 or 15 million ether. So NFTs just on OpenSea, not including the other NFT platforms. It's 15% of all ether burn, which means 15% of all economic activity flowing through Ethereum is OpenSea. And buying and selling NFTs, which is pretty crazy.

• 10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that burn rate, I think I said earlier that burn rate is 7 ETH per day. Of course, that's wrong. I meant ETH per minute.

• 10:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 10:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this OpenSea activity is absolutely crazy, dude. Like, why are people spending this much on OpenSea? I did a little, like, I haven't done much with NFTs. You know this, David.

• 10:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I definitely know.

• 10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I did a little bit this week, and I was like blown away by the gas fees. I've seen high gas fees in ETH before, of course, Ethereum, no stranger to that, but like, to buy an OpenSea NFT, $130 worth of gas?

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  For something that's, I don't know, some of these are trading under 100. Like, you're not gonna pay that. I can't believe people are paying this much for NFTs on OpenSea.

• 11:17David Hoffman?

  Well, the ERC 721 contract, which is the NFT, like, token contract, is much more gas intensive than a simple ERC 20 transfer. So it automatically gets the complexity premium associated with it as well. Plus, there's like Royals, he's involved with OpenSea, and so like, you know, there's, and so there's contract information with that. And overall, 721s are just overall more computationally intensive, so they come with a higher gas premium. But like, the reason why people are paying these gas prices is because like, they think that their $100 gas transaction will net them more than $100 worth of profit when they flip their NFT, if they're flipping their NFT, or they just wanna buy and hold the NFT, and it's worth $100 to them. So people are just baking in the gas prices into the valuation of the NFT when they buy it.

• 12:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a lot of NFTs, though, hanging out on mainnet, not so many on Layer 2 or sidechains. It's gonna be interesting to see. Yeah, so we did hit a new burn record. I think you mentioned some of those metrics. EIP 1559 dominance, the transactions, now we're at 50%. So that means 50% of all Ethereum transactions are now EIP 1559 transactions, not the legacy transactions. That's moved up a lot since last time we talked about it. I think last time it was like hovering around 20, 30% or so. Now we're up to 50. This is gonna go all the way to like 80, 90%. 100% saturation.

• 12:39David Hoffman?

  It's going, it's approaching 100% with certainty. And just for there's no confusion, every single transaction ultimately becomes an EIP 1559 transaction. There's a legacy transaction that like you're allowed to use and still is compatible, but like it's less optimal as in you might accidentally be overpaying versus the base fee. And so this is really on the wallet providers, people like MetaMask, MetaMask EIP 1559 support rolled out. And so it's really just allowing the users to optimally express their intent.

• 13:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Save some money, right?

• 13:10David Hoffman?

  Save some money, right?

• 13:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  But literally everything, everything ultimately becomes an EIP 1559 transaction at the end of the day.

• 13:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It all burns ETH. Okay, let's talk more about some of that OpenSea volume, David. So if folks can see the, the axis of this chart here, but that axis on the left is 200 million at the top. Look, man, this is OpenSea volume. I, earlier in the week, there was celebration of three days, over $100 million in volume. Those are days, 100 million per day. I'm looking at this and I'm seeing days over 200 million in volume now on OpenSea. Absolutely insane daily USD volume on OpenSea. It's crazy, man. And all of this is denominated in ETH as well, which is also staggering.

• 13:54David Hoffman?

  Right. Like you can actually sell your NFTs for USDC on OpenSea, but no one actually does it, which is crazy.

• 14:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 14:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the biggest three days, one is like 160 million per day, 193 million per day. And then the highest one is 208 million per day. So three really strong days in a row. And, and the fourth day today isn't even over yet. And it's, to me, it just kind of feels like when Uniswap finally experienced like DeFi summer in 2020, like Uniswap hadn't really experienced a bull market before then.

• 14:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It blasted up.

• 14:24David Hoffman?

  NFT platforms also have, are yet to experience bull markets, except for the one that's going on right now. And so we really see OpenSea really dominating in the volume on NFTs. OpenSea is like, kind of like the Uniswap of, of NFTs, except for the fact there's a very, very big difference on OpenSea centralized, blah, blah, blah. But like, as like market share and mind share, it's a killer app. Yeah.

• 14:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a killer app of NFTs now, and this might be 100 million dollar days, might be the new normal for OpenSea. I think it's really interesting when you start comparing OpenSea to like the traditional Web 2 companies we might be familiar with, or Web 1. This is Eric Connor saying, OpenSea is at 70% of eBay's volume now. 70% of eBay.

• 15:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  In terms of transaction volume, he makes that kind of a quip here. I'm sure this is all just money laundering and wash trading though. It's nothing.

• 15:15David Hoffman?

  DC's comment below it. DC's comment below it are so funny. He goes, shit, that reminds me, I forgot to move my drapes to the dryer.

• 15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. Wait, is that, is that a thing? Are, are people talking about NFTs and money laundering? As like a way to explain this? I haven't seen that narrative.

• 15:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've heard murmurs about this. I haven't actually seen any evidence for this, but like in theory, it's like super possible, right? So like you own an NFT, you like you P to P sell it to another wallet and then you sell it to that wallet. Turns out that wallet is also your wallet, but only you know that. And so you can kind of like get rid of your NFT and put ether in a different, I don't, I don't know. I don't.

• 15:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Whenever I've seen this comment though, David, it always seems like just a little bit of salt. Somebody's just angry about NFTs because maybe they're angry about Ethereum because just maybe they're an angry individual. I don't see any evidence of money laundering, substantiation, and that sort of thing going on.

• 16:06David Hoffman?

  I mean, the critics will say like, yeah, that's the point, right? Like no one can, it's completely deniable and completely unprovable. So maybe this actually does turn into a broader conversation. But like until, until like something, somebody like Chainalysis comes in and says like with definitive, because they're, they're the only ones who can really actually have the data enough to actually prove this out.

• 16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what it goes back to though? It's still going to be easier to money launder through traditional art. Just like it's easier to money launder through like briefcases full of actual cash. Anything that's digital is just inherently a 10x easier to track. Doesn't matter what chain you're using.

• 16:42David Hoffman?

  Oh Ryan, have you been reading the essay that's coming out on Bankless on Wednesday? I talked about this.

• 16:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 16:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah. NFTs, NFTs are all serialized, right? Like every single NFT is unique and traceable on Ethereum. The painting that I have in my bedroom that you can't see, you don't know what that's like. And it's not registered with the nation state. It's not deployed on Ethereum.

• 17:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have no idea.

• 17:02David Hoffman?

  You have no idea.

• 17:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't even know what the picture is.

• 17:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Like, is it, is it $50 or 50 million? You have no idea. Because, and like neither does the United States government. It's not $50 million.

• 17:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was wondering, but it might be though.

• 17:16David Hoffman?

  It might be.

• 17:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I value it that high. There you go. Okay, so this is another look compared to web two companies. OpenSea is about to break into the top 1,000 list of websites in the known universe. This is like an Alexa ranking, which ranks the most popular websites. So OpenSea, the top 1,000, just a little bit behind. Wow, look at these though, David. These are some other crypto native websites. EtherScan is already broke the top 1,000, 788 Coinbase is 764. Binance is 155.

• 17:52David Hoffman?

  Wow, wow.

• 17:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is crypto just bursting into mainstream. This is what this looks like, and I think we'll, we'll get to the top 100 for a number of these before long.

• 18:01David Hoffman?

  Okay, look, look at these numbers. He finishes up saying, gotta catch eBay at number 39 and Etsy at number 70, right? So like, think of the, how massive eBay and Etsy are from like a traffic perspective. And we're already almost, like Eric Connor said, we're at 70% of eBay's volume. And this, again, we were talking about this on the last weekly roll up. This just goes to show like how scalable digital goods are because you don't have to ship anything. They're not physical, they're not actually atoms. And so like one person can actually account for like 100 times more volume on OpenSea than they ever would on eBay or Etsy. And so there's, there's, and so like, we expect digital volume of digital goods to completely dwarf physical goods just because it's, they're unencumbered, right?

• 18:41David Hoffman?

  And so like, it's cool to see the volume flip, but also, it's also would be cool to actually see like the users flip as well.

• 18:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, how much more revenue per customer are you driving is another way to look at this. Like, I feel like web two's metrics primarily are about like daily active user, the number of visitors on the site and that sort of thing. And that's all important when you have an attention economy. But when you have like an economy that's all about capital coordination and capital, then you're looking at other things. You're looking at things denominated in like assets under management, trading volume, amount of revenue that's flowing through. These become more important metrics when we're looking at like web three and crypto.

• 19:19David Hoffman?

  Look, if OpenSea is at, just on, almost at spot 1,000 in the top websites and it's basically almost on par with eBay volume. Imagine what happens if like OpenSea turns into like something closer to like where eBay is on the websites at number 39. Like, how much volume do you think OpenSea is going to be doing then?

• 19:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the bookcase. This is why it's easy to say NFTs are in a mania. But then you also say, but like, are they?

• 19:46David Hoffman?

  But like, what about the future?

• 19:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't know. My neighbors aren't talking about NFTs yet. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not having casual conversations with anybody. So it's, what's the top signal, David? I don't know. We'll have to see. All right, let's talk about this tornado cash. This is another, I think, good indicator of market health. There's over 218,000 ether locked inside of tornado cash. I think this means Ethereum's value privacy. Tornado cash, of course, listeners are unfamiliar. This is a privacy protocol on top of Ethereum. So you push money in, it kind of jumbles it, mixes it around, and individuals don't know what your address is coming out of it.

• 20:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is great if you value privacy on chain. I think a lot of people do this. They don't want to dox themselves and their address by shuffling funds through an exchange. But then, of course, the exchange knows your identity, AML KYC. This is a way to do this purely on chain, and I think is a sign of good things.

• 20:51David Hoffman?

  Super cypherpunk application and just really instantiating the rights of the individual inside of Ethereum, right? You have the right to have private funds. Right now, it's ether only. But the rationale behind why ether inside of tornado cash, when that number goes up, that means like more and more people can access more and more privacy. The more ether in tornado cash, the more privacy that you are able to achieve. Think of yourself as like a little fish inside of a bigger school of fish. If that school of fish is massive, you're even more safe, right? You're more safe from the sharks. And so like the ability for individuals to access privacy tools is going up, which is the through line here.

• 21:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I've always wondered what the, what a potential authoritarian aggressive nation states reaction to something like this is, because there's been talk before about-

• 21:43David Hoffman?

  Other than confusion?

• 21:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, exactly. Well, they'll be confused at first, but there also could be, there, I mean, there has been talk about making privacy coins illegal, like something like a Zcash or Monera. But what's interesting about this is like, this is an app inside of Ethereum. So like, you don't want to make all of Ethereum illegal, do you, in your jurisdiction? So do you make this particular privacy app illegal? And what are the implications of that? And, you know, is there a world, David, in a, in a future dystopia where you have exchanges that are not allowed to interact with any ETH address that has interacted with tornado cash? I don't know. But if that's the case, we still have an entire decentralized banking economy.

• 22:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't have to use those exchanges. We can start trading on Uniswap and doing this sort of thing. So I'm not sure where this is all going to evolve, but I love where Ethereum is positioned in that it has these cypherpunk tools available to an individual who's trying to become self-sovereign.

• 22:48David Hoffman?

  There's, and there's definitely ways where like authoritarian or top-down controlling nation states can like get what they want. Because like if you have a docs address and you want to use tornado cash to become private, you are free to use it, but everyone can see your funds going into tornado cash. They just don't know where they're going out from. But like if you are like getting in trouble with your country because you forgot to pay your taxes, always pay your taxes. So you don't have to deal with this. But like they say, oh, like you sent a hundred ether into tornado cash. Like where'd that go? And you don't get to be like, well, I don't know. I don't know where it went. Like that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work.

• 23:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, exactly. All right, let's talk about this too. This is another good number indicator for Ethereum. Over 1 million ETH now staked in Lido Finance. Huge, huge for Lido. A number of other staking things haven't launched yet. We're waiting for Rocket Pool quite anxiously, but Lido has just been crushing it recently. And this is the closest- Thing, if you're looking for a staking provider, the best thing you could do is run your own validator at your house, stake ETH that way. But if you're not going to do that, and you're looking at staking service companies, aside from Rocketpool, which is probably maximally decentralized, Lido is probably second.

• 24:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And your only other option is some kind of a centralized exchange or centralized staking service provider. So it's good to see. I think it's good to see.

• 24:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and Lido's strategy has always been like go to market first decentralization later. And they have very like very concrete paths towards the whole decentralization thing. But they, the, the strategy has been like, well, if no one goes to market as soon as possible on like with, with a decentralization ethos. Then the staking as a service centralized exchanges are just going to take up all the, all the market share, right? And so they, their strategy has always been like market share first decentralization later. And I mean, the strategy has generally worked out for them. They have a million ether locked in the, inside of Lido. Now the path is can they actually decentralize?

• 24:50David Hoffman?

  Fun fact, I'm actually LPing a staked ether from Lido with ether, um, normal ether inside a balancer, earning a cool eight percent APY in ether denominated terms and also earning LDO, oh, LDO rewards. Uh, so that's what I'm doing.

• 25:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool. Did you buy that stake ether, David? Don't mind me asking.

• 25:09David Hoffman?

  Uh, no.

• 25:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that a result of actually staking it?

• 25:12David Hoffman?

  Result of actually staking it. I actually sent ether. And so like some of this one million ether is mine.

• 25:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some of it, maybe uh, nine hundred thousand or so.

• 25:21David Hoffman?

  I'm right. Yeah, give or take a little bit more.

• 25:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, give or take, you know, for that fifty million dollar paid thing.

• 25:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, uh, guys, we will be back with the hot releases of the week. Of course, some news and our takes, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 25:39David Hoffman?

  When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible prices without taking any commission. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your order across multiple liquidity sources if Matcha sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me into a single, easy-to-use platform and that has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking the wrong DEX to trade on

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  and accidentally getting a bad price. Matcha also allows for you to make limit orders on-chain so you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. New to Matcha is an integrated fiat on-ramp. You can purchase crypto directly with your credit or debit card and have that fiat be instantly traded for any token that has liquidity. When you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi. If you've been using Ethereum for the past 12 months, you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing DeFi. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us.

• 27:09David Hoffman?

  That's where Arbitrum comes in. Arbitrum is a layer two to Ethereum, which means Arbitrum can increase Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security. If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and make an overall better experience for your users, go to developer offchainlabs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps building on Arbitrum. Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects,

• 27:53David Hoffman?

  and will be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the Arbitrum Layer 2. To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter @Arbitrum and join their Discord.

• 28:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the news of the week. The first is this. Euler announced, this is different if you've heard of Euler Beats, this is Euler, which is a lending protocol, sort of a Uniswap for lending is kind of the original idea. This has been a long time in progress. What's the TLDR on this one?

• 28:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is supposed to be a governance minimized lending platform, which is why Ryan just compared it to Uniswap, but it's functions a little bit more like Ave or Compound, right? Borrowing and lending, money markets in between, determined by algorithms, but with fewer governance controls. And so we, we on the Bankless Nation like the ProtocolSync thesis. The less governance and the less powers that humans have over these things, the more systemically scalable they are, the more trustless they are. And so this is an experimentation on governance minimized lending platforms. Disclaimer, Ryan and I are seed investors in Euler with Paradigm.

• 29:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Okay, let's talk about Lyra on Optimism. So I think we've mentioned Lyra a few times, which is basically a derivatives exchange that wouldn't really be possible on the Ethereum base layer. Well, it is possible in Layer 2. They just deployed on Optimism. I haven't tried this out yet, but super exciting to see. Any other thoughts here?

• 29:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, I've never really been an options guy, kind of never really wrapped my head around them, always kind of just been a spot market individual. But options with Ethereum, with Ether, sounds really, really interesting. Maybe I finally dive into options on Layer 2. If anyone knows a really good like tactic or is interested in writing one, hit us up.

• 29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. I think we'll publish something with Lira here soon, for sure. This is cool, from Justin Drake, in the category of releases, kind of releases? Breakthroughs, baby? That's a new category. MEV research breakthrough. Okay, when Justin Drake says research breakthrough, there's lots of people talk about research breakthroughs all of the time in crypto, right? But when Justin Drake says it, I gotta take notice. Have you read about this? What's going on?

• 30:16David Hoffman?

  I have not read about this, but I actually was able to talk to Justin Drake. He mentioned this in the Layer Zero podcast episode I was recording with him. And he was like, wait, when is this coming out? Can I talk about this? And I was like, it's not coming out for three weeks, so you can definitely talk about this. So he talks about what's going on. The breakthrough is that Ether is becoming even more ultrasound. Okay, so we have the base fee, right?

• 30:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stop!

• 30:40David Hoffman?

  And, oh, yeah, right. Get ready for this, all right? Like, you know, grab onto your seats. The breakthrough is, like, Justin Drake accurately predicted that base fee would be between 60% and 70% of Ether burned. Turns out that's actually about right. We are around 70% Ether burned, with that 30% of tips being paid to miners. And that tip is largely MEV, right? Like, minor extractable value, or now really maximally extractable value. And this is just the fighting for the rights to have a certain transaction in a specific spot. And like, it's actually relatively significant. Like, most base fee, most transactions are just like, you know, the average base fee with no tip. But a few of them are a little bit of base fee and comparatively a massive tip.

• 31:26David Hoffman?

  And so that actually accounts for roughly 30% of all Ether fees being paid to actually validators rather than the Ethereum protocol. The breakthrough is that apparently, this guy that Justin Drake has been working with, his name escapes me, I haven't actually met him yet, discovered how we can burn the remaining 30% of Ether. This is the first time anyone has heard this, by the way. I'm pretty sure Bankless is the first content company, whatever, to actually talk about this. We are

• 31:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Burning the other 30%?

• 31:56David Hoffman?

  So with this, according to what Justin Drake told me, we are able to approach a 100% burn rate of Ether for all transactions because of the way that this committee-driven MEV smoothing mechanism allows us to, instead of taking that tip and paying it to one validator, smoothing it across a larger timeframe. I need to read this article, but I'm also going to be recording with Justin Drake and the individual who like sort of cracked this code. And so there's going to be a Bankless YouTube video about this coming soon. But basically, yes, they've found a way, a possible way to capture the remaining tip and actually burn it over time. I think, I think that's how this works.

• 32:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And also, that seems, that seems to have good ramifications for MEV itself in that MEV becomes less of a problem

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  Correct.

• 32:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  on the main chain. I'm sure it's not eliminated, can't eliminate it, but less of a problem.

• 32:53David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 32:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, that, that's enough of a teaser. Now, I'm definitely tuning in to both the Layer Zero episode and the Justin Drake episode coming out. So guys, another reason to subscribe to YouTube. I'm not sure if we're going to be publishing the full thing on the podcast, but subscribe to YouTube. You'll get that Justin Drake TLDR on MEV smoothing. That way, Ultrasound Money becoming more ultrasound?

• 33:15David Hoffman?

  How do you even get more ultrasound than ultrasound? Like, it just keeps on going.

• 33:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta tell you, you know, that the podcast, Ultrasound Money podcast we recorded with Justin, was that February, March, somewhere around that time? Look, that's going to be completely prophetic, right? Like even the estimates he did in the follow-up podcast where he was like, yeah, probably 70, 80%, you know, burn. Like, that's been right on.

• 33:38David Hoffman?

  On point.

• 33:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you're looking to understand the future of what's going to happen next, because this is like, not even the halfway mark, we're like a third into this ultrasound money experiment, go listen to that episode. Like, we laid it down for you. Justin Drake laid it down for all of us in the Ultrasound Money episode. Now it's just, you have to be patient and wait for it to play out.

• 33:59David Hoffman?

  The funny thing is when I recorded the Layer Zero podcast with, with Justin, again, not out yet, it'll be out in a few weeks. Like, we couldn't help to talk about Ethereum and like more, more like of like, you know, Ethereum and Ether stuff and like I was just having a casual conversation with him and like the alpha just kept on coming out. Alright, I was like, oh my god, I haven't even thought about that. So you gotta tune into that episode too.

• 34:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So good guys. Alright, Hop Protocol, what are they doing?

• 34:23David Hoffman?

  Hop Protocol, you can now hop your assets between Ethereum and Optimism using the Hop Bridge. Hop is trying to solve that seven day withdrawal period coming out of optimistic rollups. And everyone was kind of concerned about this. No one really wants to wait seven days to get their assets back. But everyone was like, oh yeah, well, we can just make bridges and you can pay a small fee and then you can bridge instantaneously. And so this got deployed. So the problem was actually solved even before anyone was even able to complain about it. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, it's literally...

• 34:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's live.

• 34:52David Hoffman?

  Right, so this this interface looks just like Uniswap, right? But like, there's one extra, instead of swapping tokens, you're swapping bridges, right? And so you, instead of all, in addition to going from Optimism to Ethereum, we can also go from Optimism to Polygon, right? And so you select your asset, and then you have your Genesis chain, and then you have your destination chain, and then it'll tell you how much like you have to pay in fees, right? So we have 420.759 USDC on Optimism, and then via hop exchange, hop dot exchange, you can go to Polygon for 420.69 USDC. Wow, nice, nice, nice joke, guys. Nice joke, guys.

• 35:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, look, man.

• 35:31David Hoffman?

  Okay, but you only pay seven cents to go from Optimism to Polygon, which is the point.

• 35:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's blown my mind is, this is all happening so quickly now. It used to be the case that there'd be a problem like, it takes a long time to withdraw from a rollup. And then it'd be like, okay, research, and then months and months of work, and then maybe six months later, you get kind of a partial solution and a half works. Now I feel like stuff is just happening in the DeFi ecosystem, like boom, boom, boom, so many different teams, so much capital deployed here, so much talent deployed in this industry, that we are just getting solutions to these problems, like, in the space of like...

• 36:06David Hoffman?

  Before we can complain about them. We can't even make any drama about it.

• 36:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like, I'm no longer angry about withdrawals now.

• 36:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  From Layer 2, I'm very happy. David, speaking of layers, tell us about Layer Zero.

• 36:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so some guy in the bankless world is releasing a new podcast, as if there aren't any enough already. So there's a Layer Zero podcast coming out on the Bankless RSS feed. If you are a deep bankless listener, you might have noticed that come out on the RSS feed this Tuesday with Dmitry Buderin, the father, co-founder of Vitalik. And this is all about a show that focuses on the people of the Ethereum community, not just the code or the tech, right? Because there are people writing the code and writing the tech, which means the the brain behind the code has other things going on in its life that also impacts the code that it writes. And I want to find out what those other things are. As we say on the Bankless program, it's always Layer Zero all the way down, and it always has been. And so

• 37:05David Hoffman?

  the persons behind the code become extremely important as the code that we all use dictate how we live our lives. And so I want to explore the lives of the people in the Ethereum community. So, like I said, Dmitry Buderin came out on Tuesday, Eric Conner's coming out next Tuesday, Justin Drake is coming out the Tuesday after that. And then I believe I got Anthony Cezano lined up as well. It's gonna be a fun time. It's gonna be a fun time.

• 37:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Plus one on the on this. It's just a great, it's a different format for bankless, one that works really well. So my wife like occasionally listens to our Bankless podcast, David, like, you know, here or there, she'll be interested in a guest or a topic. But like I told her, I was like, you know, I know it gets into the weeds in a lot of bankless content material, but you're gonna love Layer Zero because it's all people and stories. So it's relatable. And she loves that kind of content. And yeah, it's just a different format, really unique kind of interview style and experience. Like, you asked the co-founder of Vitalik different questions than we'd ask on a typical Ethereum podcast, like, you know, do you ever fear for Vitalik's safety? It's an interesting

• 38:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  question. How did you meet Vitalik's mom? Like, really, interesting life experience stories like, and Dmitry talked about growing up in Russia and what that was like, and how that has changed his And impacted his view on the world. So anyway, really cool stuff. As always, we are, we are bringing the, I think some of the most interesting crypto content in the space to the forefront. And we, we thank you guys for, for listening to us every week as we, as we do this, as we're on this journey.

• 38:40David Hoffman?

  Ryan's also stoked. He just gets to sit back and then listen to podcasts rather than produce them.

• 38:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I did no work on this and I just got it like popped up in my, my RSS reader, my podcast device. And I was just like, oh, this is great. Now I can just enjoy this.

• 38:55David Hoffman?

  Nice. And speaking of brand new content coming out of the bankless ecosystem, we also have a brand new anchor to the, to the bankless content sphere. We got Luke coming in with TLDR, which we have put out like at least like 10 to 15 hours worth of content on the bankless program. And so Luke does a fantastic job rolling it up for you in a TLDR format. So this is, these are like nine to like 12 minute long videos summarizing all the content that came out on bankless. And so if you want to roll up of the roll up, A, subscribe to the YouTube and also check out Luke's brand new show TLDR. I expect really cool things to come out of this.

• 39:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every Sunday. And you know what? This, this is great. You take a week off bankless. It's a long time. You're on vacation, whatever. We understand, right? Well, you just catch up with this episode in 10 minutes and you got the whole week in your brain. David, let's talk raises. So fractional, we've had them on the podcast. Fact had Andy from fractional on this week where we talked all about NFT mania. Go catch that episode too. But they just completed a $7.9 million raise seed funding from Paradigm. Really cool to see this team get funded.

• 40:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Fractional is such a silly, silly, stupid, simple concept. I'm not saying it's stupid. I'm just saying it's so incredibly simple that like every smart contract dev is like hitting themselves in the forehead. It's like, oh, why didn't I think of that? All you do is you put a ERC 721 into a contract, it fractionalizes it into a bunch of ERC 20s. And then it has some contract logic to allow all of those ERC 20s to be recalled and that have that original, you know, fractured NFT could be composed back into one. Such a simple concept.

• 40:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I got a billion dollar idea. Yeah, you take ERC 721s and we turn them back into ERC 20s.

• 40:40David Hoffman?

  Well, no, see, that's part of fractional. That's what that's half of what fractional does, right?

• 40:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 40:44David Hoffman?

  It does this. It does the fracturing and then it does the recomposition of them. And that's basically what fractional is. It's and so what this really allows NFTs to do is to become collateral in DeFi as an ERC 20 token. And Ave or Compound, they can feel secure about putting an ERC 721 or there are these these NFTs as collateral because of the way that the mechanism of fractional allows for the reconstitution of the NFT. It's an atomic swap between the NFT and Ether. So if the NFT ever gets sold, the ERC 20s of that NFT gets swapped out with Ether and all lending platforms accept Ether as collateral.

• 41:23David Hoffman?

  And so it's just a matter of an atomic swap between having an NFT as collateral or having Ether as collateral, which is why these lending platforms can feel so secure. And that's just one of the one of the first like use cases of fractional that that could come out. So congratulations to Andy on the raise.

• 41:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish JPGs, bullish composable JPGs. That's what that means.

• 41:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of NFTs and JPGs, but other things as well, immutable, they launched, they initiated the sale of IMX tokens behind immutable X. This is Ethereum's first layer two, a layer two using Starkware technology that is dedicated to NFT trading. Good time for this. Here's the kicker, David. People can purchase it unless they live where?

• 42:08David Hoffman?

  In the United States, right?

• 42:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 42:10David Hoffman?

  Because of the SEC. I feel I feel so protected by by the SEC protecting me from.

• 42:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  No drops.

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah. No purchase. You said the the sale is initiated. It actually starts on September 8th. So this is kind of like a fair fair warning to anyone who is interested in participating in the IMX token sale is starting on September 8th. L2s and NFTs, I think, are really, really important to unlocking a bunch of possible new activities. I really think where like the high value NFTs like CryptoPunks and like Fidenzas, they're going to stay on L1 just because those things are like millions of dollars. You don't necessarily. You need scale if you're gonna pay like you're gonna pay like $50 gas fees for a million dollar CryptoPunk, that's fine. But for things like gaming or or high frequency trading of NFTs.

• 42:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or even David, like we were saying earlier, like I don't want to pay $130 just to mint an initial NFT, right? But like, I don't necessarily want to go to a sidechain either. Like, I want to stay in the Ethereum ecosystem and have the security of Ethereum, particularly for high-value NFTs. And that's why this layer two is nice, because it provides you the security of layer one, right? This is not, this is not even roll up. It's Starkware tech, so it's all like ZK magic. That's what's super cool about it. And I wonder, in addition to trading, if we start to see some minting going on in layer two. And then, once it surpasses a certain amount of value, then maybe it moves to, back to layer one.

• 43:34David Hoffman?

  Absolutely, yeah. Think about all the people in the world who like are compelled by like JPEG trading, which are a lot. We've, we know that a lot of people come to Ethereum just because they like the game of NFTs, and they don't give a flying F about what Ethereum is, or like EIP1559 or Ether. And so like, think about how many of those people there are in the world. And like, that's what Immutable X unlocks, is people that don't care about Ethereum but really love NFTs. They're gonna find themselves on Immutable, because like, you know, minimize gas fees, instantaneous trades, you know, super scalable. It's just gonna be where a lot of people call home.

• 44:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you won't even know you're using it.

• 44:13David Hoffman?

  Also, just like Ryan and I are early seed investors in this as well.

• 44:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also true. Let's talk about this. Blau just raised $16 million to tokenize music royalties. Look, when we had him on Bankless, he said he was gonna do it. I guess this is him doing it.

• 44:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, he said that straight out. Like, that was one of the last things he said. It's like, yeah, I want to help artists tokenize their revenue. And like, in my mind, instantaneously went to like, uh, so you want to make a security?

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This dude's smart, too. He knows what he's doing.

• 44:41David Hoffman?

  Absolutely.

• 44:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Justin Blau, the DJ, Grammy Award-winning DJ, I believe. And the platform's called Royal.

• 44:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 44:50David Hoffman?

  Which is a fantastic name. That's a really hot name. Yeah.

• 44:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Royal.io.

• 44:54David Hoffman?

  Royal, royal as in like royalty and then royal as in also in royalties, which makes a ton of sense. I really hope, I really hope this gets instantaneous adoption. Like the whole, like if this is a security thing is one conversation, but like at the end of the day, let's democratize financial access and financial tooling towards creators. Let's make artists more easily able to tap into revenue streams. Like a security aside, like a security is like an invention of like nation state regulation. So that's a separate conversation. It would be unfortunate if this didn't work out because of securities. But let's generate financial tooling so artists can get paid for their creativity. So we can have this cultural revolution that we all want.

• 45:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you know what? This is going to force the conversation, David, because how stupid is it? If Blau or any other artist rolls out a portion of like their music and allows fans to participate in royalties? We have this infrastructure set up. How stupid is it for the SEC to then say, no, sorry. Are you an accredited investor? You have to have a net worth over a million dollars to purchase Blau's, a fraction of Blau's newest, newest album. How crazy. So it's going to force the conversation.

• 46:06David Hoffman?

  It is.

• 46:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Conversation we've never had because I remember Jay Clayton in the early days. He was like, we can use the securities laws from 1930s and the 19, because nothing's new here. Nothing ever is new. And I'm like, no, this is completely new. You can't just like take securities laws that were written for a stock market in the 1930s and try to apply that to today's DeFi infrastructure. We're talking totally different things. So it's going to force that conversation.

• 46:32David Hoffman?

  Right, right. If artists feel uncomfortable about this because of securities laws, like that is a huge loss towards you at United States innovation and United States cultural innovation, right? And cultural expression, like we literally will have a stunted culture because of this. If the SEC comes and like start, start preventing anything. So Blau, I know you listen to the show. If you need any of like our support, happy to help you out with this.

• 46:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  All this reminds me, of course, guys, if you are looking for a job in crypto, go find a job. One place to do that is the Bankless Jobs Boards. We will include that, a link in the show notes, some hot jobs this week. A senior front-end Web3 developer at Tracer DAO, we were just mentioning them earlier. And hey, there's Immutable. They need a senior product manager to work on that fancy new layer two that they have deployed. Also, a full-stack software engineer at Palette. Check out some of the best jobs in crypto and go to the Bankless Jobs website. A link will be there for you in the show notes. Just Google Bankless Jobs.

• 47:29David Hoffman?

  It's highly likely that all of these jobs, A, are way more fun than whatever your dumb legacy job is, but also probably come with tokens too, right? So think about that when you go onto this job board.

• 47:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  We all had legacy jobs, right? And we are just very excited for you to join the crypto industry and partake in this journey in a new way. So check that out.

• 47:52David Hoffman?

  Good cop, bad cop.

• 47:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we got both methods. News, David, let's talk news. Look, man, this is the biggest news. Visa, the plastic probably in your wallet, you probably have a Visa card if you're listening to this, they just purchased a CryptoPunk. Dude, that blew my mind. They purchased a CryptoPunk for their balance sheet. Like, the company went out, I don't think they bought some ETH, but they used ETH through a third party in order to purchase a CryptoPunk. ETH is money. CryptoPunks are cultural internet, cultural artifacts, and Fortune 500 companies are jumping into the fray here. This is insane to me.

• 48:33David Hoffman?

  It's so funny that, like, I mean, Visa has already had some sort of integration with USDC payments, and so they are already working on settling payments on Ethereum. But like, the headline of just like, you know, announcement, Visa announces that instead of settling payments on Ethereum, it's like Visa bought a CryptoPunk. Not even at all their core competency. Turns out Visa has a collection of historic commerce artifacts, from early paper credit cards to the Zip Zap machine, is what they say on the tweet. I have no idea what a Zip Zap machine is.

• 49:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's the Zip Zap machine?

• 49:03David Hoffman?

  No clue, but apparently it's a cultural artifact. And so they're adding CryptoPunks to their collection of cultural artifacts.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Hey, what do you think about this CryptoPunk? CryptoPunk expert?

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  Pretty ugly. Pretty ugly CryptoPunk. So it's got, it's got the Mohawk, green eyeshadow, red lipstick, female. So it was definitely a floor punk, but it definitely looks like a punk. It looks like a punk, that's for sure.

• 49:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a legit punk. That's what's important. Look, they even changed their profile picture. I think they changed it back.

• 49:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, damn, they've rug pulled us. They used to have the CryptoPunk as their profile picture, which is kind of funny because that means whoever is like leading this charge definitely knows, like the profile picture NFT game going on on Crypto Twitter.

• 49:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know who I think is partially leading this charge is a guy by the name of Q Sheffield, who we are trying to get on Bankless. Hopefully he's coming in September. TBD. We'll see, guys. He has a good point. Definitely be talking about that. Look at, this was big too. Budweiser just bought beer.eth.

• 50:02David Hoffman?

  For 30 ETH, for 30 ETH. They paid over $100,000 for a beer.eth ENS name.

• 50:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's crazy. Look, there's some symbolism, I think, here. I mean, they were one of the early purchasers of all of the alcoholic beverage.com's. Now here they are.

• 50:19David Hoffman?

  I didn't know that.

• 50:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Getting into .eth. Yeah, I mean, like Budweiser has to have their brand everywhere, right? And so now they're recognizing that with, I think this is related to NFTs. Not only are ENS names an NFT, but large companies are waking up to the fact that, hey, this is a new internet-inspired movement and cultural movement, and our brand needs to be part of this and associated with it. And so this is not the way I thought corporate America would enter crypto, David.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  With culture first.

• 50:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I didn't think that. I thought, well, you know, you know, there's a time I thought, well, maybe they'll do enterprise blockchain stuff and then kind of migrate over. Well, maybe they'll start to put crypto on their balance sheet. And yes, some of that has happened in various pockets, but it looks like the floodgates are just opening up because of NFTs.

• 51:08David Hoffman?

  Starting with the memes. Starting with the memes and working backwards from there, yeah.

• 51:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'll take it. I'll take it. Anyway, very cool. Visa buys a CryptoPunk. Budweiser purchasing beer.eth.

• 51:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first of many headlines like this, I think we'll see. Let's talk about this. The Ethereum client teams are getting a big donation from DeFi protocols, DeFi apps. This is pretty cool. What's going on?

• 51:31David Hoffman?

  The story here goes all the way back because in the depth of the like the 2019, 2020 bear market, like Ethereum almost ran out of funding, right? Like client teams didn't have enough money. The Ethereum foundation, it had their store of Ether, but that Ether was $90. And so they had something, I can't remember exactly the exact numbers, but they were, they were like, you know, running, not running on fumes, but like you could see the fumes on the horizon, right? And all of a sudden we had DeFi summer. We had like the Uniswap token, Lido's token has done fantastically well. Almost all of these tokens in the app layer have done fantastically. So we have Compound, Lido, Synthetix, Graph, Uniswap, which all have tokens that have significantly

• 52:11David Hoffman?

  outperformed and also Kraken, nice job Kraken, all donating $250,000 each to support Ethereum L1 client teams, Ethereum 1 client teams. And so that's things like Aragon, Nimbus, GoEthereum, Nethermind. And so we have the app layer returning the favor to the protocol layer, which I think is really, really cool in terms of funding, right? Like this is, this is how you get a flywheel of an ecosystem. Like, no, we don't have to go out and ask for dollars. We will build our own app layers with our own currencies, with our own like DeFi tokens. They'll go up in value because of the reasons that they do. And then we will return that value back to the people that built the damn thing in the first place. I think it's so self-sovereign. It's so awesome.

• 52:56David Hoffman?

  It's such a circular economy and it's completely inside of the values of Ethereum, which is absolutely fantastic.

• 53:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, total agree. I've got like nothing to add, except that better this sort of funding than issuance to protocol teams at the dev layer. That is less credibly neutral in my opinion. And that was a serious consideration in 2018 and we're solving it a different way, which is awesome to see.

• 53:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. Shout out Kevin O'Walkie for spurring a lot of this on. Let's talk about this. AVE, they're doing an app on your phone?

• 53:30David Hoffman?

  Mobile app.

• 53:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is awesome.

• 53:32David Hoffman?

  I've yet to see a DeFi mobile app really take off, especially for an app-specific one. But AVE has such a large ecosystem that it makes sense that they would go first. Plus, they also tend to develop in like literally every single direction and also do it really, really well. So that's going to be a little bit interesting. I wonder if this would be like a native wallet on your phone? It's also interesting to know that AVE is like significantly diving into the world of social media in Web 3.

• 53:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're doing everything.

• 54:00David Hoffman?

  The fact that they are building an app alongside like also experimenting with social media is kind of interesting. Like they are basically just building out an entire empire.

• 54:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's really cool to see. Good, good job, AVE, the team that keeps shipping. Speaking of other team that's shipping, StarkX, they're doing it more quietly, but this is powering a lot of the layer two ecosystem that's up today. The ZK Rollup ecosystem in particular, so DYDX and Diversify. And then also SoRare and Immutable coming up. We mentioned Immutable earlier, but the headline is StarkX just crossed 10 billion in cumulative trading across DYDX and Diversify. Super cool to see that. 10 billion in trading.

• 54:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a significant amount of this activity definitely comes off of the tailwinds from the DYDX token. Turns out tokens garner communities and garnered communities put volume onto layers that have the tokens involved with them. So that makes a ton of sense. And so, yeah, congratulations to StarkX and DYDX.

• 55:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's talk about some of the DYDX success metrics while we're at it. David, what are they doing here? What are some of the highlights?

• 55:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Antonio from DYDX, who we've also had on the show, if you guys want more details about this, says daily trading volume over 400 million for the first day and growing. 73,000 lifetime users with 34,000 added since launch. Again, the power of a token. And then also $1.8 million in revenue towards DYDX per week. So that's pretty cool. That is a successful app if ever I've seen one.

• 55:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. Sorry if you're a US investor, you can't have the DYDX token, just to remind you. Sad. 90 CryptoPunks. Hey, look, let's talk about CryptoPunks in general, but let me start with this headline. Cause it's kind of been CryptoPunk week, month, I'm not sure. The 90 CryptoPunks just got snapped up in one hour following Visa's $150,000 purchase. So, large company enters, it's bullish for the entire CryptoPunks market and 90 gets swapped up at once. That's not an individual. It's gotta be some sort of capital pool, some sort of a fund swapping these up.

• 56:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, no, that's just like everyone. That's not any one specific person. That's just like Visa announced that they got their CryptoPunk. And so everyone FOMOed and bought like 90 more in the next like couple hours or so.

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Raises the floor, right?

• 56:18David Hoffman?

  Right? Exactly. Right. Because people are just like, okay, this is now a financial asset. I don't even care where the punk is. I'll just buy the cheapest one. It's super, super ugly, but like it's also a quarter million dollars for the cheapest one.

• 56:30David Hoffman?

  CryptoPunks had an absolutely insane week. And so there, this Dune and Alex dashboard for CryptoPunks, which I really, really like. You can see the URL at the top. It has a weekly volume chart, a little bit further down, Ryan. And a couple of weeks ago, we had these all, the two all time highs bars in weekly volume. Keep going, just keep going a little bit more down. There you go. Right. There we go. Bar, bar chart, a little bit, there we go. Okay. Two super high, all time high charts and then, and that was two weeks ago before this week. And then this week, which again, it's Thursday at the time of recording. So probably by the time you're listening to it, the most recent bar is going to dwarf the previous two weeks in punk volume. So punk volume is on track to set an all time high in weekly volume this week.

• 57:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's incredible. Huge week for CryptoPunks. Um, let's talk about general bullishness on NFTs. This is one of the leads of YouTube. This is the head of gaming. Look, he follows Bankless. Look at that.

• 57:28David Hoffman?

  Oh, no shit.

• 57:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  "I'm bullish on NFTs," he says. "I believe play to earn is the next major gaming model as well as an open market for in-game digital assets. Most in-game assets are liquid, which is insane to me. All of this will change long-term though, through blockchains and NFTs. It's self-evident, self-evident." This is Ryan Wyatt, who is the head of gaming at YouTube. Calling NFTs for gaming now self-evident. And that's a wave we haven't seen hit, aside from Axis, but maybe that's where things are headed next.

• 57:58David Hoffman?

  Just imagine, think of Ryan, Ryan works at YouTube. So like his job is more or less to get more attention onto YouTube. And we already have an insane amount of attention with like, you know, esports and gaming, right? Like gaming has all the attention it needs. But now add financial assets on top of that, right? So like if you win or lose a game, you win or lose NFTs, right? Imagine some sort of like object permanence with the outcome of gamers. Think about how much more attention there is when there's financial loss or financial rewards at the outcome of some of these games. And so that is like the collision course that we are seeing behind NFTs on Ethereum and like the world of gaming. That is what we are seeing on the horizon.

• 58:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like it could happen so quickly too. Yeah. So you don't want to get lost, left behind on this trend. Neither does Facebook. So this is David Marcus, who is the lead of Facebook's, used to be called Libra, now it's called DM project. Facebook and Novi, that's the wallet behind Facebook are definitely looking to integrate NFTs as well. So Facebook, social media platforms, talking about the interaction, integration of NFTs, like this could be so huge. I mean, just imagine Instagram starts doing something with NFTs, right? It's a perfect platform for social sharing of NFTs, like

• 59:14David Hoffman?

  I mean, the platform where everyone tries and flexes on each other and has their influence.

• 59:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all social signaling, right?

• 59:19David Hoffman?

  It's all social signaling. That's exactly right.

• 59:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the whole, that's the whole platform. So like, why not do it with NFTs? Of course, that's going to happen. Like guys, David, sometimes I feel like so much of this is just right in front of us. It's like, if this happens, then this will happen. And look, I mean, we could trace exactly what's going to happen. Every single social media platform from Reddit to, to Facebook, to Instagram, hell, LinkedIn, I don't know. Like they're all going to incorporate NFTs in crypto.

• 59:47David Hoffman?

  You have to, you have to.

• 59:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going to happen. They can't get left behind. And I think that's going to be an outcome of JPG summer. It's basically everybody in the web two world's gonna wake up and be like, oh, this is a thing. What's our NFT strategy, David? You know, what should it be? And that's going to be an outcome. A lot of movement on that, I think.

• 1:00:06David Hoffman?

  Two weeks ago in the market Monday for Bankless, I talked about the intersection between DeFi and NFT. And Ryan, I know that you were in the same camp with me. I thought DeFi was going to be like how Ethereum goes mainstream. It's like, oh, we have these all financial primitives. You can literally make more money by living in this DeFi world. That's what's going to pull in so many people to Ethereum. It pulled in a fair amount, but no, NFTs are absolutely dominating DeFi as Ethereum's like marketing layer. I kind of call NFTs is like Ethereum peacocking itself to the world. And like, look at after just like two or three weeks of just like manic NFT activity. We get Visa to buy a CryptoPunk. We get the head of Facebook finances says he's interested in incorporating NFTs. We have YouTube head of gaming saying like, NFTs are absolutely a thing.

• 1:00:50David Hoffman?

  Like, everyone has like negatives, negative things to say about like a mania because that's everyone. Everyone gets really excited, but then a lot of people get really bitter. But no one can argue with how much positive marketing this NFT movement has done for Ethereum and what's about to come after it as a result of that.

• 1:01:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, you know, the other thing for these big companies, David, with NFTs? No regulatory risk. You're not going to piss off anyone with a JPEG.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:01:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like.

• 1:01:16David Hoffman?

  I bet you, I'm actually not so convinced about that. I bet you that, I bet you the SEC could find a way.

• 1:01:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe they will, but what I'm saying is like, this is not like the ICO market or something sort of tip is something like that is anti-bank, I guess, or AML KYC. They're just JPEGs. How mad can you get about like a Bored Ape or a CryptoPunk? And.

• 1:01:42David Hoffman?

  And if you can, you need to do some self-reflection.

• 1:01:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Far less regulatory risk. I think that's why they're making a move here. Bitcoin world, what's happening in Bitcoin is MicroStrategy is purchasing some more. Go Michael Saylor. He is nothing if not consistent. He just bought another $177 million worth of Bitcoin, just dollar cost averaging his way in.

• 1:02:04David Hoffman?

  Michael Saylor, come on, just one CryptoPunk. Just one, just one, like, it's the only thing we talk about.

• 1:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Personally?

• 1:02:11David Hoffman?

  What else is that? The other like Bitcoin news is that like hash rate is returning to Bitcoin. Also with Ethereum, you can see in the GPU markets as well. And like, other than that, like, God, Bitcoin is so boring lately.

• 1:02:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you know what? Look, so like for the listener, here are our notes, right? So I showed us, I like, I print them off because I know that's embarrassing.

• 1:02:29David Hoffman?

  I have it on my second screen as a younger guy would do.

• 1:02:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  As a younger guy, yes. But I'm old. I don't know. I can't see well, whatever. So I'm looking at the notes, but like, every week, we've been looking to add some additional Bitcoin stuff. And what I thought would happen is-

• 1:02:45David Hoffman?

  We try. We try our best.

• 1:02:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  In December of last year, when everyone was very excited about companies adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet, I thought by now, every single week, David, we'd be like, oh, you know, Mastercard, JP Morgan, here are the lists of companies adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet.

• 1:03:02David Hoffman?

  Central Bank of Argentina.

• 1:03:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. You know, boom, balance sheet. What have we got? Every week, we get Michael Saylor, like, once a month.

• 1:03:10David Hoffman?

  Just Michael. It's just him.

• 1:03:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cost averaging in. We had some news about El Salvador. Like, it just hasn't happened. And I'm not like, excited or gleeful about that. I'm just like, it's something that the crypto market, I think, has been wrong about.

• 1:03:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:03:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that aspect has not happened very fast, or as fast as everyone was thinking, you know, six, nine months ago. But the NFT thing hit a lot of people by surprise.

• 1:03:36David Hoffman?

  Right. I mean, we'll see how long the NFT like market lasts. It's lasted a whole entire quarter now. I mean, we were using that metaphor of like, you know, Michael Saylor starts allocating to Bitcoin, he does it again, then he does it again. And then like one more company does it. And then another company does it. And then another company does it. That did, that did happen. And then we were using that metaphor of like the guy like dancing at the festival and he's like dancing solo and then a bunch of more people come. It was kind of just feels like everyone else, except for that one guy, went back to their seats.

• 1:04:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just Michael Saylor out there?

• 1:04:07David Hoffman?

  There's just Michael Saylor left, just like dancing out there. Like, it kind of acts, everyone goes, ah, I'm bored, I'm going back to my seat.

• 1:04:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's weird. It still might happen. I mean, I remember he was putting on seminars and there were like supposedly hundreds of various executives attending these things, but I don't know, maybe they're all just waiting and seeing.

• 1:04:24David Hoffman?

  Hey, earlier in this episode, I said you should allocate to things when they're quiet. And so like, to be consistent, I'll say the same thing. Like, maybe Bitcoin is just quiet right now. And, and maybe, maybe this is the time to allocate to Bitcoin.

• 1:04:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 1:04:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  The time to allocate is when it's got one headline a week, which is Michael Saylor. The time to allocate, maybe. Let's talk about this. Someone who is buying is the crypto industry. And I think this is super bullish. This happened last Thursday or Friday after our last weekly roll up was recorded, but Coinbase has revealed a board approval to purchase $500 million of crypto on their balance sheet. That's adding 500 million to their existing crypto holdings. I'm not sure what the value of those are, but I imagine it's significant. And then on top of that, they're going to be investing 10% of profit moving forward into crypto. By crypto, what do we mean? Not just Bitcoin, not even just Bitcoin and ETH, Bitcoin, ETH and DeFi. Surprise, surprise. Those are the main investments,

• 1:05:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  according to the Coinbase blog post. Hey, look, super cool. You can't ever accuse the crypto industry of not being bullish on its own asset. We are very bullish on crypto. So is Coinbase, the exchange. I would expect nothing less. Good for them.

• 1:05:36David Hoffman?

  And that's just like where I said about the circular, like flywheel economies. Like, hey, we only need ourselves to be bullish. Like, we can just do it ourselves. So if we are buying our own assets, fantastic.

• 1:05:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just all getting bigger, right? And so Coinbase is now a publicly traded company. I mean, four or five years ago, this would not have been a major headline. Now it is because they're deploying 500 million cash from all the crypto industry profits. I can't pull up the headline because I'm getting the Bloomberg, or should I say the Bankberg firewall?

• 1:06:07David Hoffman?

  Bankberg firewall.

• 1:06:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Bankberg firewall from Bloomberg. But this is a headline about Coinbase and Circle. They are now backing USDC by treasuries, purely treasuries. It was some other things in addition to treasuries and dollars in the bank account. Now they're making a To back it all by basically T bills, right? And cash in the bank. And you know what this speaks of, I think, David, is they're getting ready to talk to regulators and talk to DC about USDC as a potential monetary tool that the US government can use. I think that's what this means. They're cleaning things up. They're saying, we're not like Tether.

• 1:06:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can actually start to export USDC to other economies around the world. And US government, don't you want that for US dollar supremacy, monetary supremacy across the world? We can help export this for you. I think that's really what they're gearing up for. And they're removing the objections, which is like, we don't know what's backing USDC. And they could say, no, you know exactly what's backing it. It's dollars and T bills. And they could say, yep, that's cool. I have another take on this, but I'll get your reaction first.

• 1:07:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And this goes back to the early commitments that we had about stable coins. It's that they are one to one swappable for the actual dollars, for all dollars. So they're 100% backed, right? This is what Tether has kind of failed on, but turns out the market didn't really care about that. But it is definitely what regulators care about. And this is definitely a strategy from Jeremy LaRue and Circle and Company to front run like future, like top down regulation coming to like impact their business. They're just doing it themselves. And so, you know, there's the whole risk of, you know, USDC becoming like too big to fail. What happens with this? Like regulators get concerned about too many US dollars on Ethereum. But at least they can say, we have all the money in the bank.

• 1:08:04David Hoffman?

  There can't be really all of that much risk because we have all the money. Think about the traditional banking system, which operates on a 10 to one fractional reserve. And now compare and contrast that to USDC, which operates on a one to one reserve.

• 1:08:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but actually also that same 10 to 1 because it's eventually it's it's US dollars in it in the same bank accounts is just like an overlay on top of it.

• 1:08:27David Hoffman?

  Good point.

• 1:08:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it's kind of interesting what I was thinking about when I read this, David, is if Facebook has had so much trouble watching Libra and DM, right? Here's the big brain play for Mark Zuckerberg. Go purchase Circle.

• 1:08:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:08:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take USDC, call it DM, roll it out on Facebook. Boom, you're done.

• 1:08:45David Hoffman?

  Keep it USDC.

• 1:08:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Easy, easy.

• 1:08:47David Hoffman?

  No, that is that is a logical conclusion.

• 1:08:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, this is also what I worry about, though, right? Is because this is why this cannot, USDC, as much as I love it, it's great. It cannot be the only stablecoin solution on top of Ethereum because at the end of the day, it is a banked coin. It is not a self sovereign unit of stable currency.

• 1:09:07David Hoffman?

  Anyways, for the bankless folk, denominate in Ether and also if you want more stability, use Rye.

• 1:09:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, Rye.

• 1:09:14David Hoffman?

  Rye is dope.

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rye is dope.

• 1:09:16David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:09:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coinbase sponsoring an esports team, they're joining the club, too. This is pretty cool. What's happening?

• 1:09:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Coinbase kind of like following in the footsteps of Sam Bankman Fried and FTX, trying to slap FTX everywhere. Now Coinbase is slapping Coinbase on an esports team. Seems to be a very logical place to get your your advertisement, you know, E standing for electronic, you know, very proximate to the whole like digital finance world. I think, you know, the community behind esports will be much more inclined to become crypto people than any other population in the world. So I think that's the right population to market to. So nice job Coinbase. Crypto is taking over.

• 1:09:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, that is the news for this week. We are going to be right back with the takes of the week. And of course, you can't forget the meme of the week that's coming up next. But before we get there, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:10:05David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto Services and favorite D apps all in one place. Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 1:10:49David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has. And stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D apps all in one place.

• 1:11:08David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.

• 1:11:52David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 1:12:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the takes for the week. Let's start with this one from Chris Dixon. This is all about how networks are turning into economies. He's talking about the Web 3 world, the world of crypto, the world of bankless. What do you think Chris is saying in this Twitter thread? We'll include the full tweet thread in the show notes for you guys to check out. Think it's worth reading, but what's the TLDR from your perspective, David?

• 1:12:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm reminded of this conversation I had with Chris Bernisky, who talked about how Ethereum and just all these tools on Ethereum are providing financial foundations for more and more cultures to be built upon Ethereum. They're providing the economic foundations for more and more culture. Chris is using the word networks. I would like to replace that word with community. It's all the same thing, like social networks, community networks, networks, networks. Like, they're all kind of the same things. And what Chris Dixon is talking about is that these financial primitives, like Uniswap, the ERC 20 token, NFTs, they all make it easier for networks and therefore communities to become bootstrapped and to be economically viable.

• 1:13:26David Hoffman?

  And so Chris is talking about just how these, all these financial tools are allowing more and more things to be created because they've done all the, like, the heavy lifting of, like, actually having a meaningful economic platform. So when I hear this take from Chris, it's a very long thread. Chris has been doing some threads recently, so go read the whole thing if you are interested. But what I'm hearing out of Chris is that communities are like the next frontier of financial, like, primitives, right? Like, the communities are what's next when it comes to the world of finance.

• 1:13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's basically talking about, like, take your, your social network, a community that you have, and then turn that into an economy and, like, see what you can unlock. And he goes in and he takes the example of a band who spent years building a following, but only gets pennies from its streaming service. And he says, "Use tokens and NFTs, the band can upgrade their networks, which is their community, into an entire economy." So you take an example, like, the goods that flow through the band's economy could be social tokens, digital art, collectible tickets, game objects. All of these things could be primitives. And then the band could get revenue from primary issuance, cuts of Sales, maybe owning a chunk of these fungible tokens. And the idea is all of these communities and economies will be composable.

• 1:14:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you create a base layer and then maybe like the fans of one band can build on top of the community that another band has built on. All of these services and systems and economies become like Lego blocks. And, you know, you don't have to fight these economies. You could just trade with them and build other things on top of them. So what I think is cool is it's what we're seeing right now, David, is it's just crypto natives picking up these tools and using them for crypto communities and crypto networks. But what happens when people outside of communities outside of crypto start to realize that these tools are here? And build and transform their communities into economies. That's going to be pretty exciting.

• 1:15:19David Hoffman?

  And the the bull case for this is that it actually becomes rational to turn your community into into some sort of like financial network. And because it's just better for everyone involved.

• 1:15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely, including the the fans. Let's take the Scott Lewis take. I really like this one. So he's comparing three different, I think, seasons, bull market seasons, maybe in crypto. And he says, in 2017, the winners were in the bull market of the ICO market were promoters primarily. In 2020, the DeFi bull market, the winners were engineers and finance people. And now in 2021, the NFT bull market winners are who? I don't know, people who know what will be cool, you know, cultural aficionados. He says, the cool thing about NFT summer is that it gives a different type of person a chance to have the most alpha. Really cool.

• 1:16:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there are a lot of people, I think, who missed out on kind of what was going on with with ICOs and with Ethereum during its early days. Okay, well, there's another bite at that apple with DeFi summer. But in order to understand DeFi, you have to really understand like financial geek stuff, right? And like, what are derivatives? What are options like lending and borrowing stuff?

• 1:16:32David Hoffman?

  Also, like, can you read the contract address? Because like, if you can read the contract address, you can ape way sooner than like people like me who just wait for their friends to go first.

• 1:16:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. So you had to have a different set of skills. But now in 2021 with this NFT bull market, you have to have a different set of skills. Again, you have to have like some cultural appreciation. Like David, I have no, I like, I look at these NFTs and I don't really know what I'm looking at, to be honest. Like I have no, I don't have the cultural sensibility, my friend. Like I just, what's good art? I don't know.

• 1:17:02David Hoffman?

  Does that mean you're a cultural outsider? You just don't know what's cool?

• 1:17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  But that's great, because like a new set, a new cohort cohort has done very well in this market. And it's different from the previous two cohorts. So I think that is, that is really cool. We're seeing multiple different groups win in these different bull markets.

• 1:17:22David Hoffman?

  I think what we are seeing, every single era of Ethereum is marked by some sort of mania, right? The ICO, DeFi summer, now NFTs. And if, I mean, there's only three data points here, but like the, the who can actually access these games keeps on getting spread to more and more people with every single era, right? Like, you know, even though I couldn't read contract addresses in DeFi summer, like I could still like click approve on my YAM token contract on Uniswap and, and then go from there, right? NFTs is like even more people, like you don't even have to understand like yield farming. You just have to understand that that picture is kind of cool and hope that you think other people also think that picture is kind of cool. And so like, hopefully, hopefully this trend continues of like the next mania after whatever this,

• 1:18:05David Hoffman?

  however long this NFT mania goes for, is also something that is even more like democratized and even more larger of a community, because that would just be, again, more and more marketing of Ethereum towards more and more people. And so, and so like every, like you said, like everyone gets a bite of the apple. Everyone gets a bite of the apple. More and more people are getting a bite of the apple. And the apple is also growing larger every single time.

• 1:18:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bigger apple, more bites, different cohorts with each bite. What's really cool is that's true from a builder's perspective too. So the artists have done really well in the NFT bull market, which is really neat to see. David, why don't you take this take? It's another take on NFT boom on Ethereum.

• 1:18:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is Cyrus Eunesi, who is a, I like to call him in certain moments. This is definitely one of them, Bass Cyrus. And so he goes, massively underappreciated aspect of the NFT boom on Ethereum. Scam coin copy chains like Tron, BSC, EOS, whatever the F, can't clone our NFTs on their chain. No Maker clones, no Venus or Pangolin, no PancakeSwap, no Vampire Tax, no Bridges, no Backroom bribes, nothing. Binance chain tried to, tried and failed with Binance punks, which was a huge failure, Soul punks, failure. Justin's son tried to steal every DeFi app, even though he even failed at that, but he'll never steal the NFTs because you can't copy or clone culture like that. The moat for Ethereum

• 1:19:27David Hoffman?

  is massive. The only exception I think for is of Ethereum friendly, friendly projects like Polygon. So yeah, Cyrus is a little, little aggressive with like, you know, talking smack about all the other non-Ethereum chains. So he definitely has his ETH maxi hat on. So trying to pull him back a little bit, like, all you have to do is understand that, like, all of the valuable NFTs, like CryptoPunks, Fidenzas, all the ARP blocks, the Chromie Squiggles, they're all on Ethereum, and that is an inarguable fact. And so as more and more, like, the moat around Ethereum as like the place where valuable NFTs become minted just grows even stronger. Because like, imagine if you have a fantastic, awesome art project, like, you need to mint it next to all the other valuable art projects. You can't go

• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

  over to some other chain and mint it there. You need to, to like, ride in the, the tailwinds of all the other NFTs that are being printed on Ethereum. So like Ethereum is pretty much establishing a monopoly on culture, which is a moat that, like you said, you can't fork that.

• 1:20:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't fork it, and you can't fake it, is what he's saying. It's a really good take. Let's talk about DC Investors' take. I didn't see it a year ago, but I could see it very clearly now. NFTs will cement ETH dominance. That's it. That's the tweet.

• 1:20:41David Hoffman?

  Yep. That's, that's basically what Cyrus said in like two sentences.

• 1:20:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Look, ETH being used as a store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange for NFTs is super bullish ETH as an asset class. The fact that NFTs have grown so, so large is super bullish ETH. But you know, the thing that sticks out to me so much is actually the first sentence in his tweet here, David, which is, I didn't see it a year ago. But I could see it very clearly now. It's crazy how even when you were in this space, day in and day out, you can't necessarily predict when big trends will emerge and pop, and you have to be ready for them. But the timing is so, so tricky. Hard to see how the space emerges. Now it's pretty obvious, but it wasn't a year ago. Anyway, good take by DC

• 1:21:30David Hoffman?

  there. Another one from Cyrus. Different, different topic matter here, but also kind of similar. Cyrus says, "Quick investment thread. One of the best investing abilities is to recognize trends ahead of time, find talent, etc. Like if you knew BTC or ETH or Punks were really going to blow up, awesome, you made a bunch of money. But that's really, really hard. I also think there's a second and equally valuable and maybe not often not talked about facet of investing, and that's the notion of feeling like you've missed the boat when you actually haven't. When I first found Bitcoin in 2015, I thought I was already, I was already too late and already and barely invested. It had already Bitcoin had already rallied 1,000x by then. When he found ETH in 2016, I thought, Cyrus says, "I thought I was too late and

• 1:22:12David Hoffman?

  I barely invested. It was already up 400x. When I found YFI, I thought, maybe I'm not so late? Even the price had already gone up a 10x. And so Cyrus did a tiny bit more than he otherwise would have. And then again, when he found Punks only this year, everything was already up 100 to 1,000x. But Cyrus says, "I've been training myself to think, hey, maybe I'm still early. Maybe if I'm spending 24/7 consuming in this space, it's actually unlikely that I'm late to recent popular trends. Just because some absolute Chad genius found it before me and has the extra 100x on his belt, doesn't mean there isn't huge upside left for the rest of us. I still didn't go mega hard, but again, a tiny bit more. It's a slow process that I am training myself for." Cyrus's point is, "He doesn't feel like he has to jump on every hot trend from the

• 1:22:56David Hoffman?

  start or discover things purely on his own. Sometimes being around and keeping your eyes open can be enough. To that end, I ached into a bunch of degenerative art lately. It feels bubbly, it feels toppy, he doesn't understand it all, but it's clearly becoming extremely popular. I'm just not convinced that I'm late to the game," says Cyrus. "I Care that I'm lifting highs if it takes off in a few years, I'll look back and realize I was actually pretty early. So, good perspective. The thing I've always been saying about the world of crypto is the moment you come into crypto, you are by definition like the latest one to the game, right? Like you can't be early if you just came in, but think about all the people that are yet to come in. So it's more about the belief of, do you think more people are going to enter this ecosystem?

• 1:23:41David Hoffman?

  And where do you, where are you on the global scale of adoption? Because that's the frame of reference you need to enter, not like, oh, literally everyone else has a CryptoPunk. Well, everyone else who's inside of Ethereum has a CryptoPunk, or everyone who's inside of Ethereum has a Bored Ape, or a Penguin, or insert your favorite NFT thing here, right? By definition. And so like, this industry is built on scarcity and it's engineered to make you feel FOMO. And so if you feel FOMO, that not only is that just like par for the course, but like, if you weren't feeling FOMO, this industry wouldn't be so powerful.

• 1:24:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's always the question. I think that's a huge impediment to people investing in this asset class in crypto is they feel like they're late, right? And they usually don't learn that they were actually early until a whole cycle goes by and they miss it. And then they like buy somewhere near the top, right? And they FOMO and so it's such a trap. If you're listening to Bankless, I could just say this from an asset class perspective as a whole. You are not late. You are still early to the party. People might say like, well, like I bought and now it's down. And I'm like, well, when did you buy? It's like three months ago.

• 1:24:46David Hoffman?

  Three days ago.

• 1:24:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, like you're only late if you leave.

• 1:24:52David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, you're only ready if you leave, yep.

• 1:24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so if you stay in, if you zoom out, you're not late. Look at these asset over years and decades rather than months. And don't fall into the psychological trap. This is Cyrus is saying of feeling like you are too late for this asset class. Wise words. All right, last take here. This is a headline from CoinDesk about OnlyFans showing how the banking system is politicized. OnlyFans debacle, maybe we could talk about that. And then how does that show how the banking system is politicized? I think this is an article from Nick Carter. We're just reading the headline here.

• 1:25:27David Hoffman?

  Right, so this is the importance of Ethereum being a politics-free, politically-neutral financial layer for the world, because we have OnlyFans who is going to ban sexually-explicit content from their platforms because their payment providers are going to stop servicing payments because the payments world is very conservative. It has political opinions about how money should be sent around and what can be purchased with money. And so, we now have these payment providers like Mastercard and Visa and also the banking layer dictating what our values are when we pay for things. They are saying, "No, you are not allowed to purchase sexually-explicit images because we are conservative and we don't like that."

• 1:26:11David Hoffman?

  Which is a bunch of BS upon human rights and human individual freedoms. If humans want to ape into sexy pictures, let them do it. Let them do it. Don't restrict them at the payments layer. And so, this whole OnlyFans debacle, which is what Nick Carter's writing about, is showing how the traditional banking system is a political system. It has political beliefs and it's imposing those beliefs upon people against their will. We didn't elect this. We didn't elect for this to happen. This is just like some centralized group of people determining what our human values are.

• 1:26:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think people don't realize that their banking system is political. It has some beliefs. It's not a credibly-neutral system that anyone gets access to. And if you're not concerned about OnlyFans or the pot industry, the marijuana industry, or other marginalized industries, because you're not into those industries, then just think about what if it happened to you and to your industry?

• 1:27:13David Hoffman?

  Political donations.

• 1:27:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what if, exactly, what if you had a politically controversial job or set of ideas or organization and you were cut out from the economic network?

• 1:27:29David Hoffman?

  So you worked at Planned Parenthood?

• 1:27:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Or like anywhere, whatever your values are. I think the base point of this entire movement, this crypto movement, is to separate

• 1:27:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Government from the money system, right? Like so that we have a credibly neutral base layer. Humanity has one, not the US, not Japan, not China, but all of humanity has an internet-native, credibly-neutral communication layer for transmitting value. That's really the bottom line. That doesn't make any distinctions on your ideology, your political belief, like your sex, your race, any of these things. I think about Afghanistan right now and what's going on there as the Taliban is kind of reclaiming the entire country of Afghanistan is ruling back women's rights. No longer, like they will know, women will no longer

• 1:28:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  have the ability to open bank accounts in that country, right? It's like, that's not right. You know, every, if you're a human being, you have access to internet, you should have the, you have the ability to open an ETH address. And the protocol doesn't make any distinction about your age. Like you can't, you know, David, you can't get a bank account unless you're over 18 or over in the US, right? Well, like, why not? A 12-year-old can open an ETH address. Like Ethereum doesn't care what you're doing with it. And we need that kind of base layer for, for basic freedoms as we enter into the digital age. That's why we're so passionate about this. We talk about it all the time because we really believe these freedoms are important to humanity's future.

• 1:29:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, one of the stories that I always like to recite for people that are more skeptical as to like the power of this industry is this, the story, a very, very true story of a Muslim wife who had a very abusive husband. And you, as a Muslim female in Muslim countries, you can't open a bank account. It's against the law. And so she started in her own time, while her husband was away at work, writing blogs for a blog page, and she was paid in Bitcoin. And she was able to save up enough Bitcoin to take her kids and divorce her husband and run away. Like, and the Muslim financial system, whatever that, or whatever that correct word is, was never going to be able to support her

• 1:29:52David Hoffman?

  in that endeavor because it was a political financial system. So this, this individual, this lady, used an apolitical financial system to express her individual desires of not being abused by an abusive husband.

• 1:30:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. There you go. David, what are you excited about this week?

• 1:30:08David Hoffman?

  I am excited about an article coming out on the Bankless Newsletter on Wednesday. I need to finish it by then, but I got the weekend ahead of me. And this also pairs with a take I have, saying that everything in the metaverse is getting serialized by NFTs on Ethereum. So we will expand on this more in the article, but as we all know, I'm super just like focused on the relationships or comparisons between Ethereum and nation-states and other previous like organizational structures that we've seen in humanity, religion also, and feudalism. Ethereum is a neo-nation-state. It's a nation in the cloud. It's a digital nation, and we are all a part of it. And not only are we putting our monies there, we're also putting our identities there.

• 1:30:53David Hoffman?

  We are also putting a like image on our identities. That's kind of like the NFT avatar movement. But we're also putting our art on Ethereum, right? Our fideszas that are worth like $3 million. Like Ethereum knows. Ethereum knows who we are because of NFTs. And it knows what our value, the items that we have valued. It knows what they are. And so nation-states like to account for everything, and it's a very imperfect science when it comes to the meat space nature of the world. But in Ethereum, Ethereum is all-knowing, and it also unlocks the existence of the metaverse by actually instantiating digital items on Ethereum by serializing it, right?

• 1:31:35David Hoffman?

  You actually get like a code to instantiate the value of your physical or digital art by putting it on Ethereum. So like the question you have to ask yourself is, if it doesn't exist on Ethereum, does it even exist in the metaverse at all? And so there's a bunch to unpack there, and I hope everyone reads the article coming out on Wednesday.

• 1:31:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really cool, man. I'm looking forward to reading it.

• 1:31:57David Hoffman?

  Right. What are you excited about?

• 1:31:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, so you know, the podcast that we did with Andy and Deezy earlier this week about NFTs. Well, so I haven't really gone down the rabbit hole of NFTs as you kind of know, right? It's like, I feel somewhat like, look, man, life's just busy. It's hard to keep track. Keep track of crypto, DeFi. I've been monitoring NFT space, but I haven't really

• 1:32:20David Hoffman?

  Life is busy. Is that why you don't have a punk?

• 1:32:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, that's why. Okay.

• 1:32:24David Hoffman?

  Sorry, this is your

• 1:32:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  They also got really, they also got really expensive, you know, it's like, but here's the thing for me with CryptoPunks is because I don't think I took the time to understand it fully and like I didn't grok it, didn't get it. It always like CryptoPunks always felt too expensive to me. And they're trading for like a thousand. I was like, a thousand? For a cheesecake? No, thank you. That's crazy. That's insane. And like, then 2000, then 4000. Now they're like 200,000, 300,000, 400,000, right? So after that episode, I figured like, you know what? I need to spend some more time and really understand NFTs. So I went on OpenSea and I took the advice from our podcast and I like, I tried to dabble and figure some stuff

• 1:33:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  out and I bought some like, you know, smaller NFTs, that sort of thing. And now I decided to embark on a little like trading experiment. So today I just posted this on Twitter. I am going to try to start with like the smallest, crappiest NFT possible on OpenSea. I found this like little turtle, David. It's like, it's got a Santa Claus hat and it's got a cigarette. It's smoking and it costs .01 ETH. And I want to experiment to see if I can trade up this NFT, this P, this profile NFT, PFP NFT, as my avatar, all the way to the highest possible

• 1:33:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  echelon. Okay. So like the highest possible echelon in the avatar space is a CryptoPunk. Do I think I'll get there? Probably not. But like, let's start with, let's start by being ambitious. And if you've ever heard Of that, you know, like that paperclip with a guy who starts with a paperclip and trades up. And like a year later, he's got like a car and all of these things. There's a Dow that launched that actually did it.

• 1:34:17David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:34:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And now they have like a token reward sort of thing that they're providing. As part of the, the trading up program, but I want to try this experiment and like, I don't know how far I'll get or if anyone will actually care and trade with me. Right. Um, but what's fun is it's going to be, I think it's going to be an interesting experience. It's going to get me into these various avatar communities and like actually figure out the NFT space. As I'm like trading and learning what's valuable and trying to make my way up. So the idea is start with a turtle, end up with what? Maybe a CryptoPunk? Probably not, but like somewhere in between and see how far I can take this thing and just learn about the NFT space the entire way.

• 1:35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's my little project. It's going to be fun. I hope, um, you know, we'll see where it goes.

• 1:35:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, hopefully you score a high score. I think the biggest hurdle you're going to have to overcome is actually convincing someone to buy your turtle. But like, hey, maybe, maybe there is like a generous individual who is interested in

• 1:35:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of cute though.

• 1:35:19David Hoffman?

  Taking your, your turtle off your hands. Yeah. This is the first time you've changed your profile picture in like four years, but god damn, is that a shitty turtle dude?

• 1:35:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It really is.

• 1:35:28David Hoffman?

  It's a pretty bad turtle.

• 1:35:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, I tweeted out and I asked like, uh, show me the, like the most garbage, lowest tier, cheapest NFT. And I got a lot of answers and the turtle was one of them. So I was like, okay, we'll start there. Anyway.

• 1:35:40David Hoffman?

  I think your best bet is somebody just wants this turtle just on the fact that like you bought it and now they kind of want it.

• 1:35:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're talking about it right now. That's why.

• 1:35:47David Hoffman?

  Sanitating more value into it. Yeah.

• 1:35:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see where it goes.

• 1:35:50David Hoffman?

  It's like, good luck on your journey, my man.

• 1:35:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's an interesting experience. Um, so we'll, we'll see where it goes. All right, man. You ready for me of the week?

• 1:35:57David Hoffman?

  Uh, no, I am ready for the newest Bankless Nation member of the, of the week.

• 1:36:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's that?

• 1:36:03David Hoffman?

  Uh, this girl Luna, apparently some guy in the bankless Wells Fargo T-shirt, who also is donning a cool cat picture over his face, gave birth to the newest member of the bankless nation Luna, who is also a cool cat and is also very cute. So congratulations to T-shot for growing the nation, one member at a time.

• 1:36:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  The, the bankless nation is growing one way or another, whether it's a new, new community members, or we're just like having kids.

• 1:36:30David Hoffman?

  Making our own, yeah.

• 1:36:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, making our own little members of the bankless nation. Really cool. Congrats to, uh, to Luna and Cool Cat. Uh, meme of the week. You ready for it now?

• 1:36:40David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:36:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Describe it for us, David.

• 1:36:43David Hoffman?

  Okay. So this is a 50s style photograph of a 50s housewife and her two kids. And then there is Ethereum, the, the dude coming home after apparently a long day at work. And the mom is labeled Bitcoin maximalist. One of the kids is labeled ETH killers and the smaller of the kid is labeled whatever Cardano is. And each one of them is having a knife, waiting for Ethereum, the dad to come home. I don't know why there's, there's such an inclination of, of kids and the mom trying to kill the, the father. But, but the meme is that Ethereum is like the, the super hardworking, bringing home the bacon father, and he's going to come home and get stabbed by his family. But the other takeaway I have, I generally think is that like, for some reason, all projects hate Ethereum. Bitcoiners don't like Ethereum.

• 1:37:27David Hoffman?

  Cardano, they don't like Ethereum. Avalanche, they don't like Ethereum. Like all the ETH killers, they don't like Ethereum. Everyone doesn't like Ethereum. And there is something to that. If every single thing is like trying to like, oh yeah, we're going to be the next Ethereum, or like Bitcoin maximalist saying, oh, Ethereum is like trash. Why does everyone hate Ethereum? Like, is that like some sort of signal in of itself? I think it is.

• 1:37:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. And what's interesting about this analogy is they're all in the same family, aren't they? Like, we're all in the crypto family. Why are you trying to knife us? I mean, it goes the other way too. Um, I, I don't see as much from Ethereum maximalist, but like any maximalism, you're just like stabbing within your family. Stop it, guys. Cut it out. Let's not, let's not kill Ethereum after a hard day of work.

• 1:38:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys. Risks and disclaimers for the week, of course. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. So is all of crypto. You could lose what you put in. We are in sort of a bull market season, at least it's an NFT bull market. Gotta remember what Anakin and Padme say in this meme. Anakin saying crypto is mooning again. Padme says, you're going to take profit, right? Anakin looks at her. You're taking profit, right? Just silence. Guys, remember to take profit when the market is up. Thanks so much. We're glad you're on the Bankless journey. We'll see you later.

• 1:38:42David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:39:27David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.