ROLLUP: Wonderland $TIME | Crypto Price Bear Market? | Odell Beckham Jr Bitcoin | Twitter NFTs

WRU Jan 5 4th Week of January, 2022 ------ 📣 ALTO IRA | THE CRYPTO RETIREMENT ACCOUNT https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:24 Tax Optimizooor https://twitter.com/Hedgeye/status/1485328439901052930 4:50 MARKETS 5:10 BTC Price 5:37 ETH Price 6:14 ETH BTC Ratio https://www.indexcoop.com/bed 6:52 Bear Market? https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1484926927718789122?s=20 8:33 Arthur Hayes https://blog.bitmex.com/bottomless/ 11:15 Top 10 Down https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1484966910102052864?s=20 13:22 Bearish Stocks https://twitter.com/MacroCharts/status/1484495998864920578?s=20 14:12 Prices Bounce https://twitter.com/MichaelGoodwell/status/1485719974522109955?t=CFswY5WhW_R7m2jzD7Br5g&s=19 https://twitter.com/MichaelGoodwell/status/1485719974522109955?t=CFswY5WhW_R7m2jzD7Br5g&s=19 15:22 DeFi Still Churning https://thedefiant.io/uniswap-crosses-milestone-with-greater-eth-stablecoin-volume-than-coinbase-or-binance/ 17:09 Ark Invest Report https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ARK_BigIdeas2022.pdf?hsCtaTracking=217bbc93-a71a-4c2b-9959-0842b6fe301c%7C2653a4d0-af35-42f0-853a-c5f90f002abb 20:00 RELEASES 21:30 Twitter NFT Hexagons https://twitter.com/TwitterBlue/status/1484226494708662273 25:36 Web3 Messaging https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1486000233486209043?s=20 27:30 SOS Prediction Market https://www.sosmarket.io/ 28:08 Opera Crypto Browser https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/opera-launches-a-dedicated-crypto-browser/ 29:11 Robinhood Crypto Wallets https://blockworks.co/robinhood-deploys-beta-crypto-wallets-allowing-select-customers-to-transfer-off-platform/ 29:52 Zora v3 https://zine.zora.co/zora-v3 31:45 Doola DAO Services https://twitter.com/arjunmahadevan/status/1486005697175334912?s=20 32:40 PAC.xyz https://www.pac.xyz/ 34:27 Raises https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1486722291870228492?s=20 37:39 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 39:00 NEWS 39:32 Wonderland DeFi Scandal https://twitter.com/JackNiewold/status/1486436910599860224?s=20 44:55 Quadriga Co-Founder 0xSifu https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1486591682728673282?s=21 48:10 Who is Michael Patryn? https://amycastor.com/tag/michael-patryn/ Statement: https://twitter.com/0xtuba/status/1486724157857415174?s=20 55:26 Community Takes 57:23 Youtube to Polygon https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1486060351473033218?s=20 58:46 L222 https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko/status/1486349045635465218?s=20 Synthetix: https://twitter.com/synthetix_io/status/1486024382988308496?s=21 Fees: https://twitter.com/BFreshHB/status/1486057303224856578?s=20 Fuse: https://twitter.com/RariCapital/status/1485661611838877699 zkDAO: https://twitter.com/zkdao_official/status/1486688440678850569?s=20 1:07:11 NFTs Prada: https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1484188307907035138?s=20 Gucci: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/24/gucci-taps-toy-brand-superplastic-to-drop-10-supergucci-nfts-in-february Bud Light: https://decrypt.co/91176/paris-hilton-gives-nfts-away-jimmy-fallons-tonight-show Paris Hilton: https://decrypt.co/91176/paris-hilton-gives-nfts-away-jimmy-fallons-tonight-show OpenSea: https://twitter.com/opensea_support/status/1486651385793769477?s=20 1:09:01 El Salvador Bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/21/el-salvador-purchases-410-more-bitcoins-amid-market-drop 1:10:20 Bankless Hayden Adams https://twitter.com/brianquintenz/status/1485329222453366790?s=21 1:12:47 Zuck Coin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/zuckerberg-s-stablecoin-ambitions-unravel-with-diem-sale-talks 1:13:31 NYC Mayor Paid in Crypto https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/131020/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-receives-first-paycheck-in-the-form-of-btc-and-eth 1:15:00 TAKES 1:16:00 This Isn’t 2018 https://twitter.com/ryansadams/status/1485979638698491909?s=21 1:17:34 Working Hard https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/scbw37/no_shit/ 1:20:38 The Real Metaverse https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1486494690136539136?s=21 1:21:26 5 Reasons https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/5-reasons-to-be-excited-for-the-bear-2eb 1:26:16 What David’s Excited About https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1486470697006166017?s=20 1:28:45 What Ryan’s Excited About https://chat.blockscan.com/ 1:30:30 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1486431620525694983?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. Do your own research. 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.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  News time, David.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Oh, boy.

• 0:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we ready to get into this?

• 0:02David Hoffman?

  Here we go. This is gonna be a mess. Let's do it.

• 0:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do we even talk about? What do we even call this?

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  How do we even start?

• 0:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, guys. It's the fourth week of January. David, what time is it?

• 0:15David Hoffman?

  Ryan, it's the Friday Weekly Roll-Up, where we roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, especially this week. Some drama has gone on this week. So we're going to cover all of that and more because it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up.

• 0:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know where to start with this roll-up, David, but I think it's gotta be somewhere with bear market, okay? Because we've been feeling some bear market vibes. After we hit the stop-record button after the last podcast, something happened in the market. We're gonna discuss it. It was not good. It was down only, it felt like.

• 0:45David Hoffman?

  It was the biggest oof we've seen thus far.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, stacked oofs. Massive raises as well. That's still happening. So we'll talk about that. Arc Investments, Kathy Wood's firm, has been on the podcast. She just put out some insane price targets for Bitcoin and ETH. I guess they're not bullish. We'll talk about that report pretty awesome.

• 1:03David Hoffman?

  They're not bearish. They are very bullish.

• 1:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, excuse me. They are not bearish. They are very bullish. Hayden Adams got canceled by his bank. Is Hayden Adams going bankless? We'll talk about that, too.

• 1:14David Hoffman?

  Forced banklessness.

• 1:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what about this last one? This is some of the drama you were alluding to. So, man, a lot of different names here. Blast from the past. Quadriga was a Canadian exchange. Apparently, the co-founder of the shady exchange popped up on the radar. He's a multi-sig manager for some pretty large DeFi projects. Who knew? We gotta discuss that as well.

• 1:35David Hoffman?

  An ex-convicted felon for identity theft is now discovered as the anon multi-sig signer for the Wonderland project. And a lot of drama is currently unfolding as Ryan and I were prepping this agenda. So we're going to do our best to unpack all of that story. It's some drama.

• 1:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is crypto, right? It's like bear bull markets, you know, change in the world, all this amazing thing, people making money. And then we've got like just entertainment.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Just straight shenanigans.

• 2:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some people are here for the money. Some people are here for the tech. Some people are here for the political change. Some people are just... Here for like the popcorn and entertainment, man, because that happens on a weekly basis as well. And I feel like it's one of those weeks too.

• 2:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so definitely grab your coffee because we have a lot to go through. And if it's for some reason in the evening time for you, also grab the popcorn because it's going to be one of those.

• 2:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coffee and popcorn bowl. All right, we got to start here, David, because you know, the last couple of roll ups. We've been talking about tax optimization stuff and I caught this from Odell Beckham Jr.

• 2:32David Hoffman?

  You know who that is, Ryan?

• 2:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's one of my favorite athletes. As you know, David.

• 2:38David Hoffman?

  He played sports.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, he played sports. Well, he started getting his sports paycheck in Bitcoin. I think this happened last year, maybe the year before. Anyway, here is a, here is a tweet from an article. On November 12th, Odell Beckham Jr. Signed a deal with the Rams worth 750K.

• 2:56David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 2:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  He announced he would take that in Bitcoin.

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  Ooh, also nice.

• 2:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  At that time Bitcoin was worth $64,000. Today it's worth $35,000. Today that deal is worth $412,000. That's where things get interesting.

• 3:11David Hoffman?

  So he lost 50% because Bitcoin went down, but you know, holders are holders, Bitcoiners are Bitcoiners.

• 3:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, okay, one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, but here's the problem. Okay. Taxes come in, David. Odell will be taxed on the 750K. And the federal and California state tax is about 50%. So that means net Odell has only made 35,000K or 35K, excuse me, from the Rams contract this year.

• 3:41David Hoffman?

  So he signed a deal for three quarters of a million dollars and his net on that is going to be $35,000. Because Ryan, you know what he didn't do? He did not optimize his taxes.

• 3:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  He did not optimize his taxes, David. That's why we talk about this. And you know what? I'm just going to fit this in because crypto IRA is something that I think people need to have. And this wouldn't have worked for Odell Jr.'s case, but this could work if you were a retail investor, because it is a tax-free account, tax-deferred until you retire. So any trades in and out, any income you receive to this account, any staking, anything like that is tax-free. You don't have to pay it. And I've set this up a couple of years ago. It was a lot harder back then, but crypto IRA, Alto IRA has created an easy button for this. So I encourage everyone listening as sort of a tax optimizer reminder, don't be

• 4:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  like Odell Beckham, okay? Figure out your taxes. This is one step you can take. It's one small step you can take. Open up a crypto IRA, start depositing, roll over a previous 401k, start depositing, turn that into crypto, and you don't have to worry about this. You don't have to pay taxes. You can find out more at altoira.com/bankless and check that out. There you go. Tax lesson for the day.

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Don't, don't lose 95% of your paycheck to, to depreciating crypto and taxes.

• 5:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's such a bummer, man. Sorry, Odell. Sorry that happened. Let's talk about markets, though, David. This is the sad music bear territory. We are down, down, down. What's Bitcoin showing us?

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin started the week at $43,000 and has gone down 12%, hit a low of $33,500. So almost down a whole $10,000 and is currently at the price of $36,200. Oof, oof.

• 5:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It gets worse.

• 5:38David Hoffman?

  It gets worse. Ether. It's the start of the week at $3,250, hit a low of $2,220. Down a full thousand dollars on the week. We are currently clocking in at $2,450, down a massive 20% on the week. Rut row, rut row.

• 6:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll take a look at that from all time highs in just a minute here, too. So, bad, going down, people feeling bearish. I think a lot of people have started capitulating and saying that this is a bear market. Maybe we should define that in a little bit, but before we do, let's talk about a few more numbers here. ETH Bitcoin ratio is going down as well. What happened this week?

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah. When markets go down, the ETH BTC ratio goes down. We started the week at 0.075. We are currently at 0.067. So down a pretty significant chunk on the seven day.

• 6:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bear market indicator as well. And the Fed index, that's gotta be a story of down as well.

• 6:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Started the week at $123, currently clocking in at $98. Oh, wow. It's up from when I wrote down these notes, but still down 13.6% on the week.

• 6:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not as down bad as ETH is, but still down on the week. So let's talk about this. I put out this like, you know, Twitter survey, are we in a bear market now? 60% of those answered said yes, 40% said no. What do you think, David? Are we in a bear market?

• 7:04David Hoffman?

  I don't actually think people are allowed to, according to markets, right? Markets determine whether we're in bear markets, not Twitter polls. But sometimes it doesn't really matter, just sentiment. It's like when people are feeling bearish, bearishness kind of begets bearishness, right? So like now that we've been talking about being bearish on this podcast for like the last five minutes, everyone else is probably feeling really down and bearish, right? Like these are how like market psychologies kind of work. So bear market, it's a vibe, it's a feeling. Do you feel like we're in a bear market? I actually don't.

• 7:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't feel like we're in a bear market?

• 7:38David Hoffman?

  We're up on the year, we're up on 365 days by a lot, by like 2S.

• 7:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, not up since January, but up on the year, yes. Definitely, it depends on your holding horizon, doesn't it? I mean, do you remember back in the days of $80 ETH?

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 7:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wasn't that long ago, still less than two years ago, that was going on.

• 8:00David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 8:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:02David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, $80 in March 2020.

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  2020, do you remember?

• 8:06David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 8:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Less than two years.

• 8:07David Hoffman?

  Also March 2019, also March 2018, $80 like three times.

• 8:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  But so I think like, you know, we've said before, under 3K ETH, we're not feeling great in general. So this is, you know, not feeling great. The question is, how long does this last and how low do we go, right? That to me is kind of the definition of a bear. It's like sentiment on Twitter just changes on a dime. But the question is, is this another crypto winter? Or are we going to come out of this? Arthur Hayes, founder, CEO of Bitmex, actually wrote a great post. And, you know, he's a trader, but like has, I think, some insight into this sort of thing that we can glean. You could read the entire post, it's a link in the show notes, but he talks about resistance levels of 28,500 Bitcoin price for ETH and 1,700, sorry, 28,000

• 8:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  500 for Bitcoin and 1700 for ETH. And he says, I don't believe in the bottom until these levels are retested. If the levels hold, amazing, this prong has been met. If it doesn't, then I believe a mega liquidation candle will happen in the 20K to 28K range for Bitcoin and the 1300 to 1700 range for Ether. And then he goes on to say, if we breach the previous all time highs, which were 20K for Bitcoin and 1400 for Ether respectively. He doesn't even want to think about it. So that's like a worst case scenario, then it's like down, down, down. But he feels like we're gonna test resistance at these levels.

• 9:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  1700 for ETH, 2800 for Bitcoin before all is said and done. What's your take on this?

• 9:44David Hoffman?

  Oh, I also don't want to think about it. Can we move on?

• 9:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, what do you think? You think this happens? How long, how long is this gonna last?

• 9:53David Hoffman?

  There's, there's a sentiment that I've had where like bear markets are when like you, you see the market coming to a decision point and it just always goes down. And we've kind of seen that happen like three times over the last like three, four weeks. It's like, oh, and it goes down, and it goes down. But like, we're also just following macro. Like the difference between this bear market, bear market is downtrend versus the last one is like the last one Ether went from like $6 up to $1,400 on this fake ICO phenomenon. Meanwhile, what's happening right now is that the Federal Reserve, which is completely an exogenous to crypto, is raising interest rates and doing quantitative tightening.

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  And so like it's less, not, not to say that crypto prices didn't get out over their ski tips. They were pretty high, 4,800 Ether, pretty high, like $69,000 Bitcoin, nice, also pretty high. But like, it's not, like, it's much more, that kind of felt much more real. Crypto feels much more real this time. And now this, this market pullback is simply just because the Federal Reserve is making the price of money higher. And so it's really a function of we are tied to macro. And as soon as the S and P stops going down, crypto will stop going down, probably. Knock on wood.

• 11:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Different flavor, different flavor than 2018. Yeah, I'm gonna take on that later, we'll save that to the end, but a few other things to do. The carnage this week, the top 10 coins down by percentage from all time high, I always think these numbers are interesting. Doge is down 83% from its all time high. These are sorted in order. Shib token, another dog token, down 77%. Cardano, down 67%, Solana 65%, AVAX, that's Avalanche, 61%. ETH, in the middle of the pack, 52% down from all time high. Bitcoin, 50%, Binance, 49%, Matic, 47%, Luna, 41%.

• 11:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's quite a spread, yet, you know, the coins you'd expect, like Ether and Bitcoin, they're kind of in the, in the middle of the pack. You'd expect them to be least down from all time high. And actually, Matic and Luna and Binance are the least down from all time high. So I think that's interesting to track as we get into the bear market.

• 12:09David Hoffman?

  Only 50% down, you know, only 50%.

• 12:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there's a silver lining, David. 50%, we've seen that before.

• 12:16David Hoffman?

  In previous dips, the typical average crypto dip is somewhere between 20 and 40%. And this dip is significantly higher than that, but also like, we've seen 50% pullbacks before.

• 12:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  For Bitcoin, David, it's happened four times in the last four years.

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so like-

• 12:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, it's an annual tradition.

• 12:35David Hoffman?

  We all know crypto's volatile, like this, there's, I think there's plenty of like rationale to say that like, this is just the one big pullback. Granted, like, Bankless is known for being perpetually bullish, and so, maybe, like, I have infinite amounts of conviction for crypto, and sometimes that blinds me to short-term price movements and a lack of willingness to accept.

• 12:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just hold through them, though, who cares? Like, there is, there is actually a silver lining, and I think we were talking about this a little bit, which is like, 50% pullback, you get to see who the tourists are and who the settlers are, right? And the tourists start to get- Scared. They start to leave.

• 13:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, the settlers that know why they bought with conviction, they're the ones who stay. And it gets a lot less noisy.

• 13:19David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 13:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think you've got some lessons for us to share at the end.

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  We'll share in the takes section.

• 13:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, but let's look at our friends in the equities world. Stonks.

• 13:26David Hoffman?

  Stonks.

• 13:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we doing here, man? Uh, it's pretty volatile.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  Nasdaq investor sentiment is worse now than it was in March of 2020 during the big liquidation candle back then. Uh, and historically, when everyone is like, oh, it's a bear market, it turns around. Uh, and so you can see that red line down in the bottom corner. Uh, the, just the market sentiment is so in the gutter. Uh, and typically like, look, look at, look at how low it was the last time it was this low. It was literally the bottom of, uh, the, the March, uh, dip that where there was a COVID crash.

• 13:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  The COVID.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  And then it was up only from then on out.

• 13:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  So, you know.

• 14:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of weird that all of this, uh, much ado, given, you know, because of Jerome Powell, because of the Fed intervention, you know, raising rates, uh, and just even whispering the raise of rates. This is a stat on the S and P. It had a really bouncy day. I think this was January 24th, so a few days ago. What happened that day?

• 14:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So we, we had the, the, this is the day where, uh, Bitcoin and Ether bottomed and then also resurged just a little bit. And the tweet, this tweet says, "The S and P 500 has recovered from an intraday loss of more than 4% only three times." Um, January, and so in October of 2008, and again, and in October, uh, 2008, again, I guess the housing crisis, um, the, the S and P went down negative 4.5% and negative 2.42% respectively. And then also respectively closed up 4.2%. So an intraday move of 8% and then 1.2% the next time. Uh, and so, uh, the, uh, in January 24th, uh, like three days ago, the S and P 500

• 15:03David Hoffman?

  went down more than 4% and then recovered positively. We had a green day.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was a green day.

• 15:08David Hoffman?

  Which is crazy. Uh, so, and then, and then, you know, like crazy, crazy volatile moves.

• 15:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Markets don't know what to do at this point. Even stocks up and down, don't know where they're going. We'll, uh, we'll see how that continues in the future, but let's talk about some happier news, which is DeFi metrics still knocking out of the park. Uniswap just crossed a milestone. They, they now have greater ETH and stablecoin volume than Coinbase and Binance.

• 15:35David Hoffman?

  Love it.

• 15:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it's happening. Decentralized exchanges are taking on the centralized exchanges. I think that's great news from a big picture perspective. Some other things going on. Phantom is becoming the third largest DeFi protocol by value locked. I consider that sort of a, I mean, it's its own layer one. It's sort of a side chain, very small set pool of validators. But they are onboarding more people to crypto as well. And some projects surged 52% last week, uh, you know, to, to bring the total value locked to all time highs on Phantom. Any thoughts on that, David?

• 16:12David Hoffman?

  No thoughts. Congrats to Phantom.

• 16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Overtaking Binance Smart Chain, no easy task. Coinbase is listing Solana ecosystem tokens as well. And I think this is part of their attempt to just list everything, just be like credibly neutral and be listing maximalists and not maximalist to any particular chain. Any thoughts on that, David?

• 16:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, the hard part about this is that Solana tokens aren't ERC 20 tokens. It's its own standard and, and it's easy for Coinbase to just add another ERC 20 token because they already have all the implementations. It's just like add a new contract address.

• 16:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is similar to anything on the EVM like Avalanche, for example.

• 16:50David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  ERC 20.

• 16:51David Hoffman?

  Solana tokens are a different, different beast because of how they just are a completely different standard than the EVM. So that's why, uh, Solana tokens haven't really been able to get on the Coinbase exchange up until now. And Coinbase is now signaling that, A, we're working on getting the Solana tokens on the Coinbase. So really important step for growth for this Solana ecosystem.

• 17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ark Invest has taken a hit from, from a stock price, but they put out this fantastic report and it was their big insights report, I believe for, you know, 2022, what's going to happen in the future. They are, of course, we talked to Kathy Wood a few months ago, just bullish exponential growth curves, bullish technology in general. And the largest section of their report was actually on crypto. What were a few highlights from that, David, that we should talk about?

• 17:38David Hoffman?

  The price targets, Ryan. I think that's the whole, they have a fantastic report that covers so many different things, but of course, since we're in the market section, we want to talk about the price targets of what they predicted Bitcoin and Ether to do. So they say that one Bitcoin could exceed $1 million by 2030. That is eight years. So according to Arc, what's Bitcoin at right now? $33,000? That $33,000 could turn into $1 million by the end of 2030, if you hold.

• 18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's, that's, that's the Hopian Bankless listeners sign up for.

• 18:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 18:13David Hoffman?

  Arc is also saying that Ethereum's market cap could exceed $20 trillion in the next 10 years. And so for those that want to do that math, that's 180,000 Ether, $180,000 per Ether. And that these two predictions put Bitcoin and Ether roughly at comparable market caps. She, Kathy Wood in Arc says that Bitcoin will have a $21 trillion market cap by 2030. And then they also say that Ethereum will have a 20 trillion market cap in the next 10 years. So just two years longer than that. So comparable market prices.

• 18:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are they more bullish than us, David? What happened here? Is that the real flipping?

• 18:52David Hoffman?

  Couldn't be.

• 18:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  20 trillion's a big number.

• 18:55David Hoffman?

  My price target for Ether is infinity, Ryan.

• 18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. All right, guys, we will be back with the releases of the week, the hot news items, everything else you come to expect from a roll up. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 19:09David Hoffman?

  Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof of stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midan, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases. If you're a developer who wants to build on the Polygon ecosystem, go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience In cheap DeFi, you can bridge over your ETH or other tokens and start playing around with

• 19:54David Hoffman?

  any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need L2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. A cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets back to the Layer 1. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by UMA's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. Across is critical ecosystem infrastructure, and ownership is being handed over to the community. You can be a part of this story of Across by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of Across.

• 20:39David Hoffman?

  If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.to to bridge your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba Networks. 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 wallet. But the Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet, the Ledger Live app, and soon, the CL CryptoLife card powered by Ledger. The CL card powered by Ledger is a crypto debit card with powerful features like an instant exchange to fiat, where crypto assets are only sold at the moment that you swipe your card. And also credit from crypto collateral, where you can collateralize your crypto assets in order to get a higher credit limit.

• 21:22David Hoffman?

  You'll be able to manage your CL card powered by Ledger inside the Ledger Live app, right next to all the DeFi apps and services that you're already used to using, making the Ledger Live app your one-stop shop for all of your financial needs. Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, and download Ledger Live to get all of your DeFi applications all in one place.

• 21:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with releases of the week. David, we have to start here with this release. In the midst of the bear market, when prices were getting slammed...

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  If this is the bear market, Ryan, we're not in the midst of the bear market.

• 21:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess not.

• 21:53David Hoffman?

  The bid comes ahead.

• 21:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  The beginning of it. Twitter just released a PFP profile feature to link your NFT to your Twitter profile. Instead of the classic Twitter circle for a profile, it would be displayed as a hexagon. So they released this fantastic commercial that we're looking at right here and the feature simultaneously. How big of a deal is this?

• 22:18David Hoffman?

  It's just lovely to see web 2 platforms adopt web 3 stuff. This isn't, in my mind, I'm a little bit underwhelmed by this, but I'm also just, it's not gonna just be a negative Nancy and just say, hey, Twitter, nice job for doing NFT verification. There are some kinks that need to be worked around in the sense that like, I can just like, take a screenshot of a JPEG, mint that as an NFT, and then boom, I have a hexagon with my fake NFT, and it's kinda like, it's kinda like a workaround. But like, then you can like, talk about verification via OpenSea APIs, stuff like that. It's a great, fantastic first step. People are loving it. People are having a fantastic time.

• 22:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not everyone, though. There's been some pushback.

• 22:58David Hoffman?

  Has there?

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's been a little bit like, if I see a hexagon, you know, I just automatically unfollow.

• 23:04David Hoffman?

  No, not from the crypto people, though.

• 23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not at all.

• 23:07David Hoffman?

  Oh, well, fuck 'em.

• 23:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  From the, from the, like, we hate NFT type community.

• 23:13David Hoffman?

  Sorry for swearing.

• 23:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's been that sentiment. But like, okay, so, um, did you do it? Have you actually tried it?

• 23:18David Hoffman?

  Well, no, because my profile picture is my CryptoPunk, but with some Photoshop stuff going on. So like, I have, I have my cool cat hanging out on the hat of my CryptoPunk. And so like, that's not an NFT. That's two of my NFTs. So I've decided to not, not do that.

• 23:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I did it, and some other downsides too. You have to have Twitter Blue, which is like this premium service. I've never looked into it until now. I just wanted that to try it, wanted the hexagon, because it's a new crypto feature. So I do think that Twitter can't always charge for NFTs. Like, I think this is gonna be table stakes. Every social media platform will have to include this for free, just to be competitive. The other thing I would say is, the other reason I do think this is a big deal, David, even if this is just a very small step, is because, look, Twitter has 400 million monthly active users. Okay? And like, we talked about memetic desire. You know, like, when I see someone with a hexagon profile.

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  I want that too.

• 24:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wanna do that too. And so I do think that there's this, again, this is another example of web 3 using web 2 to propagate itself. And that is also bullish. I'm also seeing, like, we saw Meta last week, Facebook, Instagram, say they were going to add NFT features just this week. We'll get to it. YouTube adding NFT features in the future? So this is also going to have all the other social media platforms bandwagon on to this feature set and add NFT and crypto features. So I think that is good, too.

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this was a fun little Twitter Spaces where this was something about the Lemons NFT project. I can't remember the full name of the Lemons, but there was a Twitter Spaces and two people showed up with the same NFT as their profile picture.

• 25:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, where? Where is it?

• 25:05David Hoffman?

  On the, on the right side, yeah. The lemon with a little sprout coming out the head.

• 25:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is a circle?

• 25:10David Hoffman?

  One's a circle and one's a hexagon. So you know who's got the real one. So there's an imposter among us.

• 25:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's, that's great. That's very cool. And it is great that it, that it validates directly on chain.

• 25:24David Hoffman?

  Little Lemons NFT.

• 25:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, Reddit as well.

• 25:27David Hoffman?

  Here's the table stakes you were talking about.

• 25:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the, the table stakes I was talking about. So Reddit is apparently working on NFT profile pics as well. Everyone's going to do it. Very cool to see that happening. David, this was another cool feature rollout from the makers of EtherScan.

• 25:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I saw you having fun with this.

• 25:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was having a great time with this. This is called a BlockScan Chat. And what's cool about this is you can basically just send a message from your ETH address to some other ETH address. So you're like davidhoffman.eth, right, David?

• 25:55David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 25:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I sent you a message. Did you ever respond?

• 25:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, that goes to my Argent Wallet. I need to get my ENS name on my Argent Wallet. Sorry.

• 26:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why. Okay. So I just had fun because like it's just, you, you know, login with an ETH address. If you have MetaMask or something, and I have one that's called bank.eth is my ENS address. And I just started like DMing some people I know. So I just like DM'd DC, I DM'd Anthony Sisano, I DM'd you somewhere in here. I think Vitalik, like this is DC, little back and forth. DC, I didn't know it was him at first. Like I had to actually label his .eth. And this is what he replies. He's like, hey, I'm launching a new one ETH giveaway. Please send me your C phrase to enter. So I'm like, oh my God.

• 26:37David Hoffman?

  Did you send him your C phrase?

• 26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I was like, okay, it's my first spam. It's my first spam message and I'm going to block this account. So I blocked him. And then like I tweeted out that I blocked it. And he was like, hey, why'd you block me? So anyway, it was just fun going back and forth with people. Actually Vitalik, I sent one to vitalik.eth. Is ETH honey? I asked him. And he replied, I think it's funny personally.

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny.

• 27:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Classic Vitalik.

• 27:03David Hoffman?

  Wait, go back to DC's chat with him, because you say, what did you say?

• 27:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did we talk? I hope we didn't talk bad about you, David. I don't remember.

• 27:11David Hoffman?

  No, I'm about to talk, I'm about to make fun of DC. You say, "We're living in the future, DC," and DC goes, "Ha ha, strong 1992 feels. I was born in 1992."

• 27:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, DC investor. Oh, man, that's great. Yeah, you know, DC always talks about like, when you did that Layer Zero with him, he was talking about like the birth of the internet being very much like the birth of crypto. And I was just thinking like, does David actually understand this? How much of this is he picking up?

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  I had an AIM. I had an AIM account.

• 27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. You had an AIM account. This is AIM. This is Ethereum Instant Messenger. So, super cool experiment that just rolled out. You guys can try it. This is another one, David. What's this? SOS?

• 27:53David Hoffman?

  SOSmarket.io, a new prediction market on the scene. So, in addition to PoliMarket, we now have SOS Market, which has prediction markets for stuff. So, check them out if you want to go bet on stuff.

• 28:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lot of ways to bet on stuff in crypto, that's for sure. I'm bullish on this. So, Opera just launched a dedicated crypto browser. Okay, Opera as a browser has like 1%, 2%, 3% of market share, so it's not widely used. But they are going all in on crypto features. So, imagine if MetaMask was also a web browser. How much more usable, how much more extensible would it be rather than an extension? And that's what Opera is doing here. Brave is doing some stuff. And I think Chrome and Firefox, they're going to be late if they don't join on the bandwagon as well. So, it's good to see Opera innovating here. Right now, this is in beta. I've used it. It's okay. It's kind of clunky. I can do some of my DeFi stuff, but not all of it.

• 28:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I'm sure it'll get better in the future. Anything to add on that, David?

• 28:53David Hoffman?

  More wallets is always better. Google should just buy MetaMask.

• 28:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Google should buy MetaMask?

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't want that, David. Mm-mm. They'll kill it. I don't want them to buy MetaMask.

• 29:03David Hoffman?

  Well, they gotta do something and they have infinite money, so.

• 29:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true. Now consensus does too. We'll be getting to that shortly. But let's talk about this. Robinhood is doing something. What are they adding?

• 29:14David Hoffman?

  Robinhood deploys beta crypto wallets, allowing select customers to transfer off-platform, which is a very needed feature so that you can.

• 29:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  About damn time.

• 29:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you can actually withdraw the crypto assets that you buy through Robinhood rather than just buying exposure. You can actually buy crypto assets.

• 29:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Imagine that.

• 29:30David Hoffman?

  This is them trying to catch up to like the rest of the crypto ecosystem. But a really important feature to unlock, because they're printing money with their, when they're with Dogecoin, they just printed a bunch of money. And so they know that there's money there. So they need to just lean into more crypto stuff. And so that's what they're doing here.

• 29:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's great. I don't know, 30 million users, 40 million users, like a lot of retail users using Robinhood. So another good onboarding. Also, Zora V3, this is an NFT marketplace. I feel like it's a bit more crypto-native, David, and V3 is rolling out. So what is coming on Zora V3?

• 30:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Zora V3, I think, is the most like bankless-aligned marketplace, NFT marketplace that exists. It's very much aligned with the Protocol Sync thesis. And if the word, the phrase Protocol Sync thesis doesn't land with you, go, please go listen to the podcast and or read the article on Bankless about it. It's a fundamental Bankless thesis. And but what the Protocol Sync thesis is in a nutshell is it's a very, it's a very deep protocol. There are very zero trust assumptions, very little trust assumptions. Things can be built on top of Zora. NFT marketplaces can be built on top of Zora V3. It's like a meta-protocol. And so not only is Zora a marketplace in of itself, but it's, there's the Zora marketplace, and then there's the Zora protocol.

• 30:46David Hoffman?

  And the Zora marketplace is built by the Zora team, and so is the Zora protocol. So they built their own marketplace on top of their own protocol. But many, many, many marketplaces can be built on top of the Zora protocol. So it's kind of like ZeroX and Matcha, right? Like Matcha is an application built by the ZeroX team that uses the ZeroX protocol. But anybody can use the ZeroX protocol. And so this is the same kind of idea with going on with Zora. Just trying to scale out trustless NFT marketplaces. So they released their Zora V3 article. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. And at some point, we're going to be doing some content with Jacob from Zora about this because he's a deep thinker and this is a very like bankless ethos marketplace that

• 31:29David Hoffman?

  we definitely need more of that in the world of NFTs.

• 31:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Almost everything on chain with this this style of NFT minting. Actually, William Peaster from Metaversal wrote a fantastic intro to Zora V3 too. So you can go check that out at metaversal.banklesshq.com if you want more on that too. Let's talk about this. Dollar HQ, they're just launching full support for forming DAO LLCs in the US from anywhere in the world. I just thought this was pretty cool, David, because you know Wyoming passed that legislation about being able to like link DAOs to Wyoming LLC type entities and get bank accounts. And now here is a third party dollar who is making that easy. So you can just kind of click and generate.

• 32:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have a DAO and you can generate an LLC entity for that DAO and register it in Wyoming, get a tax ID, get bank accounts. This is another form of interoperability, another form of bridging. This is a bridge from the the new world of crypto to the legacy legal world of of nation states, and it's cool to see that get developed.

• 32:36David Hoffman?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent.

• 32:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this.

• 32:39David Hoffman?

  PAC dot XYZ.

• 32:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we looking at?

• 32:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we discovered this after doing our curve episode last night. That was last livestreamed Wednesday night. Fantastic episode, by the way. And PAC dot XYZ is a way to vote on the quality of certain Congress members, certain representatives or potential representatives on how crypto aligned they are. So this is your, are you a friend of crypto scorecard? And it's public and everyone gets to vote as to whether they think somebody is crypto aligned or a crypto hater. And it's just basically calling out all the crypto haters out there that are

• 33:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Giving them a score.

• 33:17David Hoffman?

  Giving them a score from negative five to positive five. And so there's a number. You know crypto haters out there. There's also Mitch McConnell comes up top. Elizabeth Warren is a big crypto hater.

• 33:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this changed from yesterday, David. So yesterday Elizabeth Warren was on the top.

• 33:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, somebody came in and really dumped some negative five votes on a lot of people.

• 33:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Tom Cotton, John Kennedy, Susan Collins all got negative fives.

• 33:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the community votes on these things, right?

• 33:42David Hoffman?

  Community votes. Yeah, this is community generated. This is kind of like a community generated list. But we also have some winners on there. So we have Erica Rose at top. We have Tom Emmer coming on the podcast in a couple of weeks. Pat Toomey, Ted Budd, Cynthia Lummis. So if you are trying to figure out where your congressman stands, or if you have an opinion about where your congressperson stands about crypto, you can check it out at pack.xyz. Nice app, nice website.

• 34:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, that Curve episode is awesome. Go listen to that.

• 34:13David Hoffman?

  I learned so much. It felt like it felt like the finance MMORPG like things that I've predicted would come to crypto like years ago. Curve Wars are dope.

• 34:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally. This is a Curve Wars episode of Bankless. Go check that out, too. Let's get into the raises, David.

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  Raises.

• 34:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the story of raises.

• 34:30David Hoffman?

  Big raises.

• 34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, here's the theme, right? Just like a few months ago, many of these companies were like already massively valued. And now they're just raising at an even higher valuation. I'll start with consensus. So they just raised more, it looks like.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  They are raising. They have not finished raising.

• 34:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are raising at a $7 billion valuation. And just not less than two months ago, they raised at a $3.5 billion valuation. These private markets are just cranking. What's the next one, David?

• 34:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we got Fireblocks clocking in at $8 billion after raising $550 million. They just raised.

• 35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  They just raised during the summer. Do you remember this?

• 35:10David Hoffman?

  I think the last time we talked about a Fireblocks raise, we were also saying how they had just raised.

• 35:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 35:16David Hoffman?

  So damn, if you think you're...

• 35:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  $2.2 billion, I think, over the summertime when we talked to Fireblocks CEO.

• 35:22David Hoffman?

  Amazing, amazing. And it doesn't end there. We also have BlockDamon, which is a public blockchain's infrastructure service, like staking as a service, node stuff. Raised $207 million at 3.25 billion valuation. Crazy.

• 35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like the Oprah Winfrey meme, like you get to be a unicorn, you get to be a unicorn, just handing out these billion dollar valuations everywhere.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, meanwhile, while our crypto assets are taking a tumble, the valuations of some of these companies are just through the roof. And coming in, last but not least, FTX US scores an $8 billion valuation after raising $400 billion.

• 36:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is just FTX's US subsidy, okay? FTX writ large is like already in the 20s of billions, maybe 30s of billions by now.

• 36:09David Hoffman?

  But I have a take about this, Ryan.

• 36:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your take, David?

• 36:12David Hoffman?

  My take is some gargantuan raises happened last week, and every single one of these investments is going to underperform ETH and BTC over time. Every single one.

• 36:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, bold take.

• 36:21David Hoffman?

  So if you, as the listener, are frustrated that you were not able to get into some of these rounds, just buy Bitcoin and Ether because they're going to be the winners.

• 36:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you really, do you think that that's just like, that can't be true in 10 years? When the price of Ether is $20 trillion, as Kathy Wood and team predict, right? So like, it's gotta be the case that some of the value capture happens higher in the stack as the market matures, don't you think? And are you just saying that, like, ETH and Bitcoin still have a ways to go before that point? Or do you always think that ETH and Bitcoin will outperform kind of app layer style investments?

• 37:00David Hoffman?

  I think if we are investing hundreds of millions in dollars into billion dollar valuations,

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  then at that point, like, a lot of that upside has already happened. And so these are, these are like, these are people trying to take like risk off investments, which is weird because it's risk off investments onto an industry that is living on top of these risk on assets. So just take the risk, like it's hidden risk because like, they're trying like, oh, we're gonna take the, go the safe route and invest in equities rather than crypto assets. But the equities are based on the crypto assets, just buy the crypto assets.

• 37:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this has definitely been true historically. David, let's talk about another true thing historically. That's getting a job in crypto is awesome.

• 37:46David Hoffman?

  And also bullish. Also bullish for you.

• 37:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, bullish for you. Bullish for your career. Go to the Bankless job boards and see what jobs we have. Maybe 2022 is the year you get a job in crypto. A few I will read out. Senior Go Rust Engineer at Syndica, a Smart Contract Tech Lead at Star X, a Senior Full Stack Engineer at Syndica, a Lead Data Analyst at MakerDAO, a Data Engineer at Paperchain, a Senior Technical Writer for GoEthereum, the Ethereum Foundation. There's more to. Go check the Bankless job boards, bankless.pallet.xyz to sign up. Check those out. Get them in your inbox as well. You know, this is an interesting tweet from the Blockworks folks. It's a whole thread on all

• 38:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  of these weird job titles and the corporations that are starting to hire for them. Nike is hiring a Metaverse Director, apparently.

• 38:37David Hoffman?

  Who is?

• 38:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nike. Sorry. I said Nike.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  A Metaverse Director for Nike, and that's not the only one. They have a whole Metaverse category. So Principal Innovation Engineer, Metaverse category, Senior 3D Game Designer, Metaverse Engineer in at Nike, like crazy.

• 38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Metaverse Engineer at Nike. That is a...

• 39:00David Hoffman?

  Well, I bet they have like, you need three years' experience working in the Metaverse or something like that.

• 39:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably. But seriously, Nike, come post on the Bankless job board too.

• 39:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'll get you a job. We'll get you a true crypto native, a true person who's actually been working in the Metaverse.

• 39:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, there are a few people, maybe three years. Have you been three years in the Metaverse, sir?

• 39:19David Hoffman?

  Oh, my whole life, ever since I got into Diablo.

• 39:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've been bored in the Metaverse.

• 39:22David Hoffman?

  Diablo 2 was in the Metaverse.

• 39:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's when you started. All right. Back in the early 90s, when you, you know, started the, joined the internet with DC, right? All right. News time, David.

• 39:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, boy.

• 39:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we ready to get into this?

• 39:34David Hoffman?

  Here we go.

• 39:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a lot.

• 39:35David Hoffman?

  This is gonna be a mess. Let's do it.

• 39:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do we even talk about? What do we even call this?

• 39:39David Hoffman?

  How do we even start?

• 39:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is like, would you call this a DeFi scandal?

• 39:44David Hoffman?

  Yes, I think I would.

• 39:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  DeFi hubbub.

• 39:47David Hoffman?

  But it's scandals layered on top of scandals. We're invoking an older scandal because it's coming relevant again to talk about this DeFi scandal.

• 39:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, let's set the stage a little bit. We have to talk about Danny Sestegali, Danny Sesta on Twitter, who is a DeFi builder, very talented DeFi builder as well. Some people have compared him to like Andre Cronier. He's like the Andre Cronier of, you know, 2022. Andre, of course, you know, built YFI, tons of fantastic protocols in 2020. And like, I guess that's some background on him.

• 40:25David Hoffman?

  He's the guy behind Magic Internet Money, Wonderland, Time, Spell, like all of this, Abercadaabra, all this like DeFi mafia.

• 40:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's got quite a following too. So like, how would you describe like the tone and tenor of how Danny operates on Twitter and kind of messaging that sort of thing?

• 40:42David Hoffman?

  Very, very populist. His following is very aggressive, of which I personally discovered.

• 40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've been on the brunt end of that, right?

• 40:49David Hoffman?

  Been on the brunt end of this.

• 40:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  As am I.

• 40:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:53David Hoffman?

  And

• 40:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a very like working for the people, anti suits, I work for you kind of.

• 40:59David Hoffman?

  Big Frog Army leader. I think in his like Twitter bio, he's like CFO, COO, something, something.

• 41:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of the Frog Army?

• 41:09David Hoffman?

  Something, C of the Frog Army, yeah, of the Frog Nation. And so like very much like a 4chan populist type.

• 41:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the projects are interesting too, because he has a tendency to like, you know, ship fast, very fast. Forking things, taking whatever.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  Got to appease the frogs, right?

• 41:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. So Abercadaabra, and he's made a lot of people a lot of money, I would say, is some of the context. Like token price has gone up. Abercadaabra.money is a Maker fork, actually, that takes some of the guardrails off of Maker, I would say, makes it a little bit more risky, a little bit more, some people say, interesting.

• 41:42David Hoffman?

  Conservativism out of Maker DAO, yeah.

• 41:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and Wonderland is a more recent project. Time, the Time token is part of that. It's kind of an Olympus fork, and that's on Avalanche. Okay, so that's Danny, that's who he is. We got a first revelation this week, and this is You know, Twitter confirmed, so it's somewhat unconfirmed, but you know, it seems like it could be the case. What was this first revelation, David?

• 42:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so in the bear market, a lot of the, quote unquote, bear market, especially in the last week, a lot of the, his projects are based on collateral and collateralization. And when the value of collateral goes down, bad things happen. And so there's been a thread from Jack Newton Nealwall that like, I don't follow his projects too closely, and that's why I got the brunt of the frog army. But like, we'll go ahead and read this thread. "Time is the largest owned fork by market cap, Olympus Dow fork by market cap." Ryan, if you just scroll down. "And has been used as a playground by Dan, Danielle, I think is how Danny. VCs, ambitions, and more creative ideas. It's offered five-figure APYs to stakeholders, but now, as a result of the price crash, it's trading at its below its treasury value.

• 42:52David Hoffman?

  Abertadabra Money, which is the spell token, is a lending platform that lets users take out positions against crypto collateral and yield generating positions. This allows users to take out loans that pay themselves off. These loans charge interest and get liquidated, and fees go to the spell holders. Danny and other team members have also taken out loans against their wrapped memo, one of the tokens using spell, meaning they can cash out without actually selling. So using their tokens as collateral to borrow against. So they don't actually sell their tokens, but they can get the value out of them. But if those positions get liquidated, they have all the money, and it's basically for selling. They didn't press the sell button, but somebody did. And so people talked about how this strategy would be perhaps exposed or liquidated

• 43:37David Hoffman?

  if the value of these collaterals went down too much. So they borrow all the money that they can against it, and if it goes down, then everything gets liquidated, and like that you have a cascading liquidation. So this strategy was talked about on Twitter, causing time to crash below the value of the assets in the treasury, possibly triggering a liquidation event. Buybacks were supposed to be in place to keep the token price at the treasury value no matter what, but this didn't happen, and the devs were silent, leading to accusations of a soft rug. Danny locked his Twitter account during all this drama." But fired back with an admission that time buybacks were not working as expected and a plan to fix time embolsers spell came out simultaneously. And, and so that was kind of like the start of this whole thing and

• 44:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is this idea of a soft rug? That's an interesting term. What do you think that means?

• 44:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's just talking about how like he's not, he's not like capitulating his own assets. He's just putting his assets into a collateralized position, borrowing as much money as possible on that. And then if the value of those things go down and then there is a liquidation event, like it doesn't matter because he had, he borrowed, he borrowed all the money anyways. So it's like a roundabout way to exit without actually pressing the sell button.

• 44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got it. And that's the charge again, somewhat unconfirmed. And that was just the, the first part of it. If that alone happened, we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now, but something was added to that, which is the second revelation. And this is going to take

• 45:00David Hoffman?

  This is unrelated, actually. So same person, same projects, but a completely different bit of drama going on with this.

• 45:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So what is this, this bit of drama? Because it's, yeah, it's, it is unrelated, but it's kind of related to the entire, you know, scandal story.

• 45:15David Hoffman?

  Actually, before, before we get into that, it is TBD about whether Danny was, and some of the other big leaders of the, of the projects were doing the soft rug. That is an accusation. They also could be using that same money to pump the, to bolster the time price. That is what I think Danny has stated he was intending to do with that in order to prevent a cascading liquidation. So, so like there, this is not, this is still kind of unraveling and we're still kind of figuring, figuring this out. But in the meantime, in the meantime, there is a bunch of other drama that, that came about. So are we ready to go into this?

• 45:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's go into this and there's some backstory here. So I guess maybe the, the high level is that a former Quadriga co-founder just emerged and apparently he's been the right-hand man, right-hand person of Danny, managing a lot of the money behind the time treasuries.

• 46:09David Hoffman?

  On the multi sig.

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  On the multi sig. Yes, on the multi sig. This individual, Michael Patron, has an incredibly shady past. How, how should we best? Explain this, like, who is Michael Patron? What is this shady past? What is Quadriga? Do you want to tell us some of the story here, David?

• 46:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, Michael Patron has been off the radar, off the grid for a very long time. But this individual Zach XBT tweeted out private DMs in Telegram with Danny. And he says to Danny, "I came across something rather odd about OX Sifu, which is one of the multi-sig signers on the projects." And he goes, "I've discovered something about Sifu." And Danny goes, "What's up?" And Zach XBT says, well, he's the Quadringa guy. The Quadringa guy that was a convicted felon for identity fraud and has been off the grid for a while.

• 47:10David Hoffman?

  And Danny goes, "I cannot confirm, but I have thought a lot about that." And he responds, "Dangerous to be working with him, sir." And that's one tweet. And that's basically that. And so he tweets out, "This needs to be shared. Zero X Sifu is the co-founder of Quadringa CX, Michael Patron. If you are unfamiliar with that, it's the Canadian exchange that collapsed in 2019 after founder Gerald Cotton disappeared with $169 million. I've confirmed with this with Danny over messages." And so this is a really big deal because this is an individual with a very shady past and his discovery to be a multi-sig signer on this DeFi protocol on Avalanche that has a ton of TVL.

• 47:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Managing millions of dollars.

• 47:57David Hoffman?

  Millions of dollars of people's money.

• 47:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of a protocol.

• 48:01David Hoffman?

  And what's egregious about this is that Danny knew about this for about a month without raising the alarm about the significance of this individual. So there's this fantastic summarizing article that we're going to read some of the things about it just because it summarizes it so well. After all of this came out, after Zero XBT revealed this, Danny, if you want to scroll down a little bit, run. Danny posted on Twitter, "Today..." allegations about our team member zero x seafood will circulate. I want everyone to know that I'm aware of this and have decided that the past of an individual does not determine their future. I choose to value the time we spend together without knowing his past more than anything.

• 48:42David Hoffman?

  Danny also issued an official statement reiterating his beliefs in a second chances and reassuring everyone that all the funds are safe, even though a convicted felon is watching over the treasury. I found out about this one month ago and I am of the opinion of giving second chances as I've mentioned on Twitter. I've seen the community very divided about my choice of maintaining him as the treasury manager after finding out who he was and his past. He added that patron patron will step down from his position at Wonderland. And there will be a vote as to whether or not he rejoins the team. That vote is ongoing at the time of recording. Wonderland has has the say to who manages the treasury, not me or the rest of the Wonderland team, says Danny.

• 49:21David Hoffman?

  Yes, also, this is where this is of just again, fun and backstory on this Michael guy. Michael Patron is former convicted felon Omar Da Nani, who legally changed his name to cover up his criminal past. Patron left Quadringa in early 2016 after he and Cotton allegedly had a quarrel and split ways. Prior to founding Quadringa, Patron was one of 28 people arrested in connection to operating an identity theft ring called Shadow Crew. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in US federal prison. Upon his release, he was sent back to Canada where he went right back to doing the thing he was always doing all along, which was moving money. And so that's kind of the story. The take at the very bottom of this article has a take of on this individual.

• 50:04David Hoffman?

  He says Patron is a one-trick pony. He's not clever enough to reinvent himself and his hubris makes it impossible for him to simply disappear and go quiet and enjoy a life somewhere. Kind of pointing at he's like a serial shenaniganizer.

• 50:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, all right. So just I wonder if like, so just to follow this. Large DeFi protocol managing lots of money with a very esteemed builder, DeFi builder in the community, Danny. The community finds out that the person that Danny set in charge of the multi sigs. And this community treasury is a convicted felon, super shady individual.

• 50:43David Hoffman?

  Nefarious individual, yeah.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nefarious individual, probably many in the community would say should not be trusted with money. And furthermore, that Danny knew about this for a month, didn't disclose this to the community. And so, and then it was interesting because Danny decided to double down and say, hey, you know, second chances, I believe in giving people's second chances before then going back to the community and say, what do you want to do with this individual? Should he still be managing the funds or not? And so this created quite a stir on Twitter, I would say.

• 51:15David Hoffman?

  Quite, quite.

• 51:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Back and forth.

• 51:17David Hoffman?

  Quite the stir.

• 51:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  People were disappointed with Danny about the kind of the lack of transparency, disappointed with, you know, the project and some of the statements. Michael Patron made a statement as well. Do you want to get into that or skip that, David?

• 51:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's more or less like, hey, I've had a fantastic time working on Wonderland. I'm sad that I'm going to have to go. I understand why I have to go, but I'm leaving and I love all of you. And then a bunch of emojis from the community in Discord. You can, we'll put the tweet in the show notes.

• 51:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so here I guess some takes that I have early on. First, first of all, we reached out to Danny, actually, and he's going to come on the podcast, I think, hopefully next week and talk about this. So give him a chance to kind of explain.

• 52:00David Hoffman?

  Hopefully.

• 52:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  His actions.

• 52:02David Hoffman?

  I've given him my Calendly link before and he hasn't clicked on it. Hopefully he comes on the pod.

• 52:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bigger's cross. That's what he publicly committed to.

• 52:08David Hoffman?

  Danny, we are very fair and we are very fair and rational individuals. So we can, we can do this.

• 52:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. At least David is. I'm not so much, but takeaways for me, like, this is a very bad look for DeFi. This is kind of the fodder that Elizabeth Warren wants to bring to a Senate Committee. Like if she found out about this, right? So like, you've got a conflicted convicted felon managing millions of dollars of investors' capital without them knowing about it. What's her answer to that? Regulation, more regulation in the space. So you, one take for me is like,

• 52:41David Hoffman?

  Sorry to cut you off. This is a shadowy super coder. That's who this is. This is like, oh, yeah.

• 52:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I told you so. And we'd have to be, we'd have to say, okay, Elizabeth, in this specific case, you were right. And here's the take, I guess, if we don't regulate ourselves, they'll regulate us.

• 53:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. And I think this is why the original poster for this was it Zach XBT is doing God's work in surfacing this.

• 53:13David Hoffman?

  Taking a big risk because like, yeah, because this, the frog army is not something that you want to mess with. And this is like going straight for the heart.

• 53:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I'm sure he's gotten threats. I'm sure there are people in his DMs. I'm sure it's like, you know, even legal threats, all sorts of things. But an individual whistleblower shedding a light on this is more of what DeFi needs in order to keep itself going. Yes. Zach XBT.

• 53:38David Hoffman?

  Nice job.

• 53:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well done.

• 53:39David Hoffman?

  Nice job.

• 53:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for having the courage to surface this. And I guess my last takeaway on this is just in general, we have to be very careful of trusting people in DeFi. Okay. Like trusting people in crypto in general, or especially, it's a red flag for me whenever someone asks you to trust them. Okay. Like the takeaway here is never trust anyone in crypto that demands that you trust them. And people who are continuously saying, no, it's fine. Like, I've got the multi sigs. Just like, just like, trust me. I have your best interest at heart. That always sends red flags and shivers up my back because the whole philosophy is crypto of crypto is verify, don't trust. You shouldn't have to trust people. We have

• 54:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  systems in place to make this entire space trustless. And we don't want to depend on trusting a small set of individuals. It's not reputational trust in this space. It shouldn't be. Anyway, those are some of my takeaways. What do you have?

• 54:38David Hoffman?

  Anon developers are always a hairy topic because like.

• 54:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's good overall, but also.

• 54:44David Hoffman?

  I'm happy that people are able to be anon in this industry if they so choose, but also the combination of anons on multi sigs is a little bit rough because reputation is a fantastic piece of collateral to have, to hold someone accountable. And if you are an anon, like you remove the, that option from the community to hold you accountable. Because of how you're in on.

• 55:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  This guy, this guy, Michael literally changed his name.

• 55:10David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 55:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, literally changed his name. How much

• 55:13David Hoffman?

  To cover up the past, right?

• 55:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  To cover up the past. How much easier is that to do on the internet? Where you could just, you know, change an ETH address, create a new, you know, online reputation and start from scratch. Yeah, so it's something that we have to work on. Here are some takes from around the community. This is Andre Cronier.

• 55:29David Hoffman?

  Who works very, very closely with Danny.

• 55:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, once you read this.

• 55:33David Hoffman?

  This is just the, "Oh, it's so tiresome meme." It's also tiresome and Andre says, "I just want to code." And he has some commentary further down as well, where he says, "I still support Danny, still planning on working with him, but there are lines. A history of consent, consistent fraud, theft and malicious behavior isn't a mistake. That's intent. Having Sifu manage funds, especially user funds, can be argued as negligence. That's all I have. Danny knew for a month and in that time Sifu was handling funds. I don't know what psyops, I don't know what's going on. I want to get off Willy Wonka's magical ride."

• 56:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, from Andre, a similar kind of builder in the field. What's his take, David?

• 56:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Danny, Danny wrote somewhere that he said, like, "I thought I could fix him." Like, "Oh, I thought I could fix this convicted felon person." Which is a brunt of some jokes on crypto Twitter. And then Simona Pop, who's a fantastic female community leader in the space, goes, "The female urge to know that that never works."

• 56:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I can't fix him. And I think, look, I think the important thing here was transparency and disclosure, right? It's like if the community had have known who this individual was managing their funds, then they could have gotten ahead of this and voted on it. And they're in the process of voting now, and I expect they will not reinstate this individual as the manager of their millions of dollars in treasury.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  We would show the snapshot, but it's got the feature of the votes are being hidden. So we don't actually know like who's winning or who's losing this vote.

• 57:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably, it'll probably be available by the time you guys listen to this. Anyway, moving on.

• 57:08David Hoffman?

  It ends January 28th at 9:00 PM Pacific time, I think. Yeah.

• 57:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Well, that's what's happening in DeFi, the kind of the latest thing.

• 57:19David Hoffman?

  That was a good one. That was a good one.

• 57:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It took us a while to get through. I hope you're hanging with us. Let's talk about some Ethereum stuff. Big moves this week. So Ryan Wyatt, he is a executive at YouTube over their gaming division. He's leaving YouTube. He was. He's leaving. He's joining Polygon Studios. He's joining a layer two

• 57:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  development studio as their CEO. And we've, we've messaged him privately and he's basically said, yep, burning, burning the ships, all in Web three, here I come. Super cool to see that exodus. I think that's gonna be big things. He's coming on the podcast too, right?

• 57:57David Hoffman?

  Damn it, that's what I was gonna say. Do you know what? He's also joining Ryan?

• 58:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Front row.

• 58:01David Hoffman?

  The Bankless Podcast.

• 58:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, we're excited about that too. We're gonna talk all about it. YouTube also wants to help content creators capitalize on NFTs. That's the headline.

• 58:12David Hoffman?

  But apparently YouTube execs aren't, aren't satisfied by the rate of Web two movement. So just, you know, saying that you're gonna do NFT stuff, not enough to keep the talent on the ship.

• 58:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. But this is a cool message from the CEO of YouTube, who is stating that they are going to focus on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators capitalize on emerging technologies, including things like NFTs, while continuing to strengthen and enhance the experience creators and fans have on YouTube. YouTube adding NFTs. We'll see that this year at some point in time. That's big. David, something happening in the Solana ecosystem as well. We don't have the time to get into all of it. But what is the TLDR summary here?

• 58:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so during all the liquidations, during the big oof candles that happened last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Solana did the whole go down thing again, significantly again, significantly degraded performance that basically prevented the average individual from pushing a transaction through the Solana chain.

• 59:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  They couldn't even pay enough. Like with Ethereum, gas prices rise, but in this case, they couldn't even pay enough to get their transactions, just like wouldn't work.

• 59:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the network just wasn't accepting transactions. Transactions, except in like very specific scenarios. And Solana network consensus is different from what I'm used to. Anatoly, the CEO of Solana goes, "A quick summary of the recent performance issues in the network. Liquidator bots started spamming the network with 2 million packets per second, hitting a single node with mostly duplicate messages. These messages unearthed the bug in how the network was handling duplicates. The code responsible for de-duping messages was after the signature verification, blah, blah, blah, blah. Since then, the network has seen much better performance, but there's still some starvation happening with the liquidator spam. Underload blocks are smaller with fewer than expected transactions. And here's the part that I'm, it's a really big red flag for me.

• 1:00:01David Hoffman?

  "To address the general issue, engineers plan to introduce flow control in version 1.9 with QoS by stake weight. Stake weight is like the stake of the Solana token."

• 1:00:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  QU stands for quality of service.

• 1:00:13David Hoffman?

  Thank you. "But now implementing this feature in 1.8 is the highest priority. This implementation uses QUIC. Do you know what that one is?"

• 1:00:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Quick, no.

• 1:00:22David Hoffman?

  Okay, "to rate limit senders." This should be rolled out in the next 45 weeks. Okay. "Introduce flow control by stake weight." In plain English, which Anatoly seems to be allergic to, he is saying that transaction input, transaction inclusion in the blockchain will be controlled by your level of Solana stake. And so if you have significant stake, you get to add your transactions in more consistently. And this is the thing that has always bugged me about Solana, because if you cannot validate the chain, then you are at the whims of the people who can. And it's, and, and so-

• 1:01:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are, in this case, in this case, they are giving validators with stake as a proportion of capital. They're, they are elevating them. The validators with, you know, more capital have the ability to censor transactions, have the ability to capture MEV and get their transactions in ahead of the plebs.

• 1:01:19David Hoffman?

  So the significant stakers of the Solana ecosystem, the massive exchanges of the world that run the validators, are able to get their transactions in first before the users. So if you have a race condition to save your position from being liquidated- You will be losing to somebody with a significant amount of stake, which is always, almost always, a very well-capitalized individual. So your transaction as an individual to save your position is going to lose to somebody with a lot of capital who's going to liquidate you.

• 1:01:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Robinhood again.

• 1:01:49David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Robinhood. Why are we, why did we get upset by GME in the first place? Like, this is, this is the traditional finance system where the bankers win. Like, this is why, this is why this specific network design of Solana does not sit well with me.

• 1:02:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I just don't think it's situated to be a layer one settlement, you know, layer with this kind of design. I think that, you know, some in Solana might, might see this as a feature. Oh, okay, we're, you know, improving, we're making sure the network doesn't go down by implementing this, this quality of service by stake weight feature. But it is not a feature, it is a bug.

• 1:02:23David Hoffman?

  It's centralization.

• 1:02:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a bug in the system.

• 1:02:24David Hoffman?

  It's like, hey, we found another way to introduce centralization.

• 1:02:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Enough of that.

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  Sorry, I don't like being negative, but.

• 1:02:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's concerning, it's extremely concerning.

• 1:02:36David Hoffman?

  I'm concerned. Okay, one more thing about this, Ron. What happened in 2008, when the markets turned into a gigantic mess? When markets and financial markets, we had our episode with Tarun Chitra, who talked about every single financial innovation is about the process of removing lawyers. What happened during the bottom of 2008 was that markets broke. And because of the collateralized debt obligations and all the mess of who owns what, everything broke, and so they had to reintroduce lawyers back into the system to determine who owns what. If the Solana blockchain goes down and halts and like the clarity on who gets liquidated and how is broken, and people's legal rights feel violated,

• 1:03:17David Hoffman?

  it goes from a world where we have consensus determined by a blockchain to back to lawyers. And the goal is to never go back to lawyers. And so we need networks that have 100% uptime, because the difference between 100% uptime and 99% uptime is that all of the important stuff happens in that 1%. And that 1% is when the lawyers get called in, and that's where regulations happen. And that's where Elizabeth Warren gets. It's upset and then we do not want to piss off Elizabeth Warren.

• 1:03:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, especially not. I don't want her to find out about the Danny thing, to be honest. So I hope she's not listening to this podcast, Elizabeth. Yeah, then I hope people aren't hearing from that, that like, oh, David hates Solana, Bankless hates Solana, Ryan hates Solana. It's like, no, we don't. I mean, I think Solana is a fine execution layer. I think it is is fine in doing what it's doing and onboarding lots of people. What we are saying, though, is with things like this reveal that it is not suitable to be a layer one settlement layer for the world. It's not suitable to be compared to what Ethereum is doing. And anyway, enough said on that. Let's keep moving.

• 1:04:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer two, 2022. It is the year of layer two. Let's go through a few things. So Synthetix just launched incentives, token incentives.

• 1:04:35David Hoffman?

  Yo Farm, L2 Yo Farm.

• 1:04:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  On Optimism. This is great. Tokens on top of tokens. This is going to juice up the L2 ecosystem. I hope more projects do this. Any other thoughts, David?

• 1:04:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 50,000 SNX will be distributed over a one month period to people that LP Ether and SNX on Gelato Network on top of Optimism. So cool. Congratulations to Optimism. Congrats to Synthetix. Let's get these Yo Farms out the door, guys.

• 1:05:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is another cool thing that's going on. A battle for fees. In the battle for fees between all of the rollups, users win because fees just go down. Arbitrum just published an update that lowers transaction fees.

• 1:05:14David Hoffman?

  Once again.

• 1:05:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And their big transaction fee lower hasn't even been implemented yet. That is called Nitro. And look at them all competing. So Arbitrum is screenshotting that and they're like, haha, we're lower than Optimism now. Just last week, they weren't.

• 1:05:27David Hoffman?

  They keep trading blow for blow. It's like, oh, Optimism is like, well, we pushed an update and now our figures are lower. Now Arbitrum is like, well, we pushed an update and now our fees are lower.

• 1:05:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I love it, right? And so this is Optimism talking about transactions going up, savings going up as well. Get you a chain that can do both. This is the kind of competition we need in this space, right?

• 1:05:45David Hoffman?

  Can you click on the graph? Click on the graph.

• 1:05:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So, so on the, what's the, the red line is the number of transactions per day, which as soon as Optimism did their update last week, which reduced feeds by 30%. It just hockey sticks. And then also, what also hockey sticks is the black line, which is the multiple times cheaper versus the Ethereum L1. And so we went from like

• 1:06:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome.

• 1:06:07David Hoffman?

  50 ish, 60 times cheaper to over 200 times cheaper with that last update. And there are more updates to come.

• 1:06:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  When you make the blocks cheaper, there's more demand. That's what this graph is saying as well.

• 1:06:18David Hoffman?

  Crazy.

• 1:06:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's great. Fuse has also just deployed on our blockchain as well. That is from Rari, of course. This is a pretty big deal, too. ZK DAO.

• 1:06:30David Hoffman?

  Huge.

• 1:06:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was just approved. ZK DAO is a DAO specifically dedicated to the ZK sync ecosystem. That is, of course, ZK rollups from the folks at Matter Labs. They now have $200 million to play with. They're going to deploy that to users, to actually not users, developers, ecosystem participants in the ZK rollup network. And there's all sorts of ways you can reach out and get involved. So these layer twos are well capitalized as well. And it looks like they're going to use the funds to grow their ecosystems.

• 1:07:05David Hoffman?

  $200 million for the development and bullish. Bullish.

• 1:07:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. NFTs, you bullish NFTs still, David?

• 1:07:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, can we just burn through these?

• 1:07:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Brands and NFTs? Everyone's coming to board NFTs, okay? Do you want to start Prada?

• 1:07:19David Hoffman?

  Prada and Adidas, which has recently ventured into the metaverse, even once again, no one knows what that means, are partnering to launch a collection of NFTs later this month. So also on Polygon, also on Polygon. Gucci taps into toy brand SuperPlastic to drop 10 SuperGucci NFTs in February. I do not know some of these brands. SuperPlastic.

• 1:07:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bud Light.

• 1:07:43David Hoffman?

  Bud Light, the worst beer ever. Beer giant Hannah Hauser-Busch launches NFT project for Bud Light. Cool.

• 1:07:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we don't know if it's the worst beer ever. Have you had all the beers?

• 1:07:54David Hoffman?

  I've had it.

• 1:07:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some bad Bud Lights?

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  They're all the same category, the light beer shenanigans.

• 1:07:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, this link won't load, but Paris Hilton, apparently she's giving away Paris Hilton NFTs. She's a brand in of itself. He's giving those away on Jimmy Fallon. Again, we're propagating everywhere.

• 1:08:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Elite shows are becoming like NFT propagation engines. What's this? This is something different on the NFT side. So OpenSea is doing a thing. What are they doing?

• 1:08:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so OpenSea Support has tweeted out on Twitter, "To address feedback we've received about our creator tools, we've updated our collection storefront contract limits to only support a creation up to five collections and 50 items per collection." So basically what that means is that if you're using OpenSea to mint your NFTs, your NFT, you only have five different collections at 50 apiece. So you have maximum like 250 NFTs before you have to like make a new account or something. So like putting in like throttles on creators minting NFTs, and I actually don't know why that's going on. So definitely some negative pushback from the creator community on this one.

• 1:09:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's interesting. Wow. Okay, Bitcoin news. El Salvador, they just purchased more Bitcoin, buying the dip here.

• 1:09:06David Hoffman?

  410 more Bitcoins. The nation now owns 1,500 Bitcoins and also plans to issue a 1 billion 10-year bond this year. So we have Michael Say-

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  A 10-year Bitcoin bond, right?

• 1:09:17David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin bond, yeah. So we have MicroSailor and Strategy, and now we have Naib Taleb, or however, I can't remember his name, and El Salvador.

• 1:09:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not, not, Bukelley.

• 1:09:26David Hoffman?

  Bukelley.

• 1:09:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Taleb is a-

• 1:09:29David Hoffman?

  Taleb's the other one. Yeah, he hates Bitcoin.

• 1:09:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  He does. Great writer, though. All this, all the IMF is saber rattling and urging El Salvador to remove Bitcoin as legal tender, kind of threatening them, basically being like, hey, you're gonna be cut off from the IMF, from the global finance community, bye-bye credit debt facilities if you continue doing this. IMF not happy, waving their finger at Bukelley and El Salvador for doing this.

• 1:09:57David Hoffman?

  Granted, taking leverage on Bitcoin as a nation-state. It's like, well, you maybe you shouldn't be giving any more credit in that case.

• 1:10:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder, I wonder if Bitcoin like, you know, five or 10 Xs in the next few years. I wonder what the IMF will say.

• 1:10:12David Hoffman?

  And then banks are like, hey, guys want to borrow some money?

• 1:10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I wonder if this message will change at all.

• 1:10:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. I guess this is regulatory related ish, bank related ish. Hayden Adams, creator of Uniswap tweets this out, "This week JP Morgan Chase closed my bank accounts with no notice or explanation." I'm sorry, I'm laughing Hayden. This has happened to me. Okay, Bank of America, I've gotten canceled by banks as well. He says, "I know many individuals and companies who have been similarly targeted simply for working in the crypto industry." Yep. "Thanks for making it personal." This part's hilarious to me, David. It's like Hayden built Uniswap before he was pissed off. What's he gonna do now?

• 1:10:56David Hoffman?

  Laser eyes Hayden Adams. Let's see it. Let's see it.

• 1:10:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bad move, Chase JP Morgan. This is a take from Brian Quintez. What does he say here, David?

• 1:11:06David Hoffman?

  He goes, "Likely a shadow de-banking of crypto by the Federal Reserve or the USOCC." Office of the Comptroller, is that what that is? Bank examiners with direction from the top. So Brian Quintez, very highly informed individual, says that this is direction from the top.

• 1:11:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Former CFTC Commissioner, right?

• 1:11:25David Hoffman?

  And he says, "If the examiner told a bank that a certain customer is too risky and that bank ended that relationship, the bank is contractually prevented from telling that customer why." So I think my take is that like they saw Hayden Adams as their customer of their bank. They probably saw his bank account go from like zero to plus $1 million very, very quickly. And they were like, we don't like this guy. We're gonna rug pull this guy. This guy is getting too big.

• 1:11:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is he?

• 1:11:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51David Hoffman?

  He's a nerdy looking software developer with rainbow socks on, like we could.

• 1:11:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what's he gonna do about it? We'll just like, we'll just shut down his bank accounts.

• 1:11:58David Hoffman?

  Right. Meanwhile, all of his wealth is in crypto. Welcome to the bankless world Hayden.

• 1:12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, welcome. You're forced to go bankless.

• 1:12:06David Hoffman?

  Forced banklessness.

• 1:12:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, this is unfortunate, right? But this is going to happen more and more. And what it's going to do long term is completely erode the institutional credibility of the banking system. They can just exit Hayden from the banks, right? And people see this. People are smart. They'll know. They're figuring it out.

• 1:12:23David Hoffman?

  What happens to the money in his account? Like, do they just cut him a check or something?

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, this is what they did for me. They're like, they literally cut me a check. They're like, in 30 days, we're going to send you a check. And they sent me a check by mail with the money I had.

• 1:12:36David Hoffman?

  They hold on your money for 30 days?

• 1:12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  They can't... Did they give you interest?

• 1:12:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't log in? Yeah, yeah. 0.01% interest, probably. How do you know?

• 1:12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg, okay? Zuckcoin is dead. You remember Libra? Remember how that was going to take over all of crypto? That Facebook was going to be the blockchain? This was a narrative in 2018, 2019.

• 1:12:57David Hoffman?

  People thought that this was going to kill Ethereum. Everybody thinks everything is going to kill Ethereum. Just like, just stop saying that.

• 1:13:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mark Zuckerberg, his ambitions unravel around a stablecoin, Dm. Sale talks. So they're actually talking about selling Dm itself.

• 1:13:11David Hoffman?

  Whatever the assets are. Yeah, right.

• 1:13:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe JP Morgan, you guys could buy that.

• 1:13:14David Hoffman?

  Should we buy it, Ron?

• 1:13:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much? No.

• 1:13:18David Hoffman?

  I'll offer $5,000.

• 1:13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 1:13:23David Hoffman?

  It's probably overpriced.

• 1:13:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zuckerberg, if you're listening, $5,000. Bankless will buy Dm for you. And we'll complete that project. We'll just make it a stablecoin on Ethereum like it should have been.

• 1:13:31David Hoffman?

  Okay, next one. New York City Mayor Eric Adams receives first paycheck in the form of BTC and ETH. New York City Mayor receiving crypto. Make sure to sign up for Alto IRA, sir.

• 1:13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice. That's cool, though. Look, crypto-friendly politicians, it's happening. There's a few of them now. He's trying to boost his ranking on the PAC.xyz website. I think that's Eric Adams' strategy here. All right, guys, we will be back with some takes of the week. And there are a few hot ones. Of course, we'll end with the meme of the week as well. So stay tuned for that. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:14:31David Hoffman?

  Set yourself free with completely flexible self-repaying loan technology. Supported on desktop and mobile, seize the power of Alchemix, allowing you to spend and save at the same time. Leverage your wealth without the risk of liquidation.

• 1:14:49David Hoffman?

  Take out a loan that repays itself.

• 1:14:54David Hoffman?

  By using yield from your deposit to pay off your balance, your only debt is time. What was once inconceivable is now within your grasp.

• 1:15:10David Hoffman?

  If you're going Bankless, you need MetaMask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi without giving up custody over your private keys. MetaMask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any Decks or Aggregator. MetaMask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the DeFi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the MetaMask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. MetaMask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I use to collect PoApps, NFTs, and do all my DeFi things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded MetaMask, you gotta try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download MetaMask for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your Trezor, Ledger,

• 1:15:54David Hoffman?

  Lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Bankless is proud to be sponsored 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 that lets you trade any token at the current market price. 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. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org

• 1:16:37David Hoffman?

  and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 1:16:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the Takes of the Week. This is the first one. This is something you said in the market section.

• 1:16:48David Hoffman?

  Oh, did I recall your take, Ryan? Sorry.

• 1:16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, it's worth repeating. It's that good, okay? Do you want to read the take?

• 1:16:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure, since I already said it earlier. Ryan Shot Adams says, "This isn't 2018. In 2018, crypto died on its own. No macro to blame. The market decided the substance didn't justify the hype. Today is different. In 2022, crypto is crashing alongside all risk on assets. Fed policy caused this. This is a macro shakeout. This winter won't last two years." That's, that's great.

• 1:17:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's true. I don't think it's gonna last. I don't think that people are saying it's 2018. I don't think it is.

• 1:17:21David Hoffman?

  As soon as the S and P reverses, so does crypto, and it will reverse even harder.

• 1:17:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right, yeah. So temporary, maybe, I don't know how long it lasts, but I don't think it's gonna be 2018. I don't think it's two years. This is something I ran across in the r/antiwork subreddit, which was interesting and sad. There was some drama, by the way, this week in the r/antiworks subreddit. It's 1.6 million subscribers, I believe, to this subreddit. And, you know, that, that I guess is out of scope of the podcast. But I ran across this. It's the headline, "People No Longer Believe Working Hard Will Lead to a Better Life," survey shows. I feel like that is very much why r/antiwork got to 1.6 million subscribers. It's because people are fed up, they're tired,

• 1:18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  they're jaded, they're exhausted by their shitty corporate jobs or their shitty jobs in general. Okay, and it's, it's led to you them feeling like working hard no longer pays. And I, I just, I guess, I guess I just had the thought on it. First of all, like, I understand the sentiment completely, but also, it's not that working hard is the problem, is it? It's working hard in the wrong systems. That's the problem. The problems are all systemic, yet again. And I've seen so many people that work hard in the right systems. So I would say in crypto, like, it's much more meritocratic at this stage. So you work hard, you hustle, you connect with people,

• 1:18:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  you level up, you learn on a weekly basis. You spend time at this, you meet people, you, you develop some skills. It will pay off. It will lead to a better life. Like, you will benefit. And so I guess, I don't know if anyone from anti-work is listening, but I think that crypto actually holds some solution to the problem here. People being jaded with their jobs and isn't it a shame that working hard doesn't lead to a better life now? I think in crypto, it can. This is why we're on this journey as well.

• 1:19:25David Hoffman?

  Oh, I subscribe to anti-work crypto, so I'm hearing you, Ryan.

• 1:19:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  You hear me?

• 1:19:29David Hoffman?

  This, okay, reframed, this is what Chris Bernisky said when we had him on the podcast, not the ARC podcast, but the one before that, where he said, "The returns on capital will always outpace the returns on labor." As in, "The stock market is going to go up faster than your bi-weekly paycheck goes into your bank account. The house price that you are looking at is going to go up faster than how fast you can work for your money." And so that's why this headline is saying, "People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life because all the assets are stripped from their hands." And you know why that's an issue? It's because the Federal Reserve prints a bunch of money. It makes the cost of money easy to benefit all the people with assets. And that's why Ryan is saying that in crypto,

• 1:20:12David Hoffman?

  your work actually turns into actual capital because we have a new monetary system with new assets, with new upside. And so it's about the, when Ryan says the systems, I hear it's the assets. So go and work around the assets that are new and novel and working for you, rather than just like your wage slaves that you find in your typical nine-to-five job.

• 1:20:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Well said, David. All right, let's go to the next one. This is Hayden Adams again, firing some tweets this week with a take. "The metaverse is having an account, identity, history, digital assets, etc., that can be brought with you wherever you go. That's what the metaverse is," he says. "Not a bunch of Zuckerberg 3D avatars that hang out in virtual rooms together."

• 1:20:54David Hoffman?

  Look at, click on DC's. DC's response is just this metaverse guy thumbs up, clearly out of like some Facebook thing or something.

• 1:21:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's right, though. I mean, we've said it before in our Metaverse episode. The Metaverse is about property rights, digital property rights. That's what the Metaverse is. It's not like a weird 3D lobby we hang out.

• 1:21:15David Hoffman?

  I'd rather have a 2D lobby, and that's what Zoom is.

• 1:21:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. By the way, great episode on the metaverse earlier this week, too. If you guys want to tune into that, we talk about some of these themes. David, let's end this take with this.

• 1:21:28David Hoffman?

  Five takes.

• 1:21:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Five reasons to be excited for the bear market. You wrote this. This is a post in MarketMuddy and Bankless. I want to be excited about the bear market. Okay, David, tell me, why should I be excited?

• 1:21:38David Hoffman?

  This post was so easy to write, and it's these thoughts that I've been having ever since the bull market started. It's like, oh, wait, the bear market was actually nice.

• 1:21:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe it's a stock. David's been craving the bear market. That's why we're down.

• 1:21:51David Hoffman?

  Okay, so here's five reasons to be excited about the bear market. One, long-term wealth. One of the most frustrating things about the bull market, and when Ether was like $4,000 plus, is I would take my paycheck and I would go to Gemini, and then I would put in the number, and the number of Ether that I would get back from that paycheck would be so goddamn small. I'm like, well, what the hell is the point anymore? Like, I can't even move the needle. So that was extremely frustrating. And so now that Ether is like less than half those prices, like your money actually translates into more real money.

• 1:22:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  More ETH.

• 1:22:23David Hoffman?

  More ETH, more actual money. So it's very, just much more rewarding to be buying prices when they're lower. And so, like, yeah, you actually get to move the needle on the size of your stack. And so I'm looking forward to that again. That's reason number one.

• 1:22:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is when people build generational wealth during the bear markets. It's not during the.

• 1:22:42David Hoffman?

  People in the bull markets are trying to get wealthy, like, inside of 12 months. People in the bear market are trying to make their children's children wealthy. That is the difference.

• 1:22:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  The secret of the bull market is you actually aren't making the money in the bull market. You make money in the bear market as long as you stay for the bear market after the bull market.

• 1:22:58David Hoffman?

  Okay, also, number two, long-term relationships, financial capital. Money is just one flavor of capital, and this is not something that I realized I was doing during the bear market, but it actually has been the most rewarding thing ever since, which is building social capital. Social capital was one of the best things that I earned in the 2018 to 2020 bear market. What is social capital? That's your friends, your homies, your allies, your business partners. Did you guys know that the way Bankless started was that I got good at Twitter? Good at writing. I was in Discord all the time and at some point I realized that there's this nice guy Ryan out there. And so I DM'd him and I said, hi. And that's how Bankless started. And I have so many friends that I made throughout the 2018, 2020 bear market.

• 1:23:42David Hoffman?

  I'm going to people's weddings in countries and I was invited to people's weddings before I had ever met them in real life. And that can be true for you too. Build friends in the bear market, in the bear market because you know that those people that are around in the bear market are the long-term people, the long-term thinkers, the people that you want to be around, people that you could actually learn from. So build social capital in the bear market. Do it.

• 1:24:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can do it over the internet. David and I have never met in person. My mom still doesn't believe that.

• 1:24:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's next, David?

• 1:24:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this lends itself to the same one. The amount of signal during a bear market is significantly higher than the amount of noise. Bull markets are noise-dominated markets. Bear markets are signal-dominated markets. There are tons of projects that exist in bull markets that exist on just attention and attention alone, not fundamentals. And that is opposite of what's true in bear markets. Bear markets are only times that only projects with strong fundamentals can survive. And so the amount of alpha that you get comes to you and like it's kind of shocking. Like, oh, wait, this is just straight pure alpha. And like, the reason why no one's taking advantage of this is because it's the bear market. Like, all the bull market tourists are gone and they're leaving all of the value on the table for me.

• 1:24:56David Hoffman?

  That's what should be your attitude should be. Next one up is building. Just long story short, Bankless started in the bear market. It's easier to build in the bear market. Things are quieter. You can put your heads down. You can concentrate. You can think more clearly. There's not a new pumping dog token to like pay attention to. It's just easier to build in the bear market. And as a founder, you can find talent better because other people are also in there for the right reasons. They actually care for the right reasons. And then lastly, also, overall, the net effect of all of these things is that crypto gets stronger. Crypto itself is anti-fragile. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. And at this point in crypto's lifespan, there's no way to kill it. We've already won. We have already won the game.

• 1:25:38David Hoffman?

  It's just a matter of time for waiting for the rest of the world to realize it. And so, think about what, while you are going through this bear market, which I don't think lasts all that long. So you have six months to do all of these things. What friends will you make? What will you help build? What skills will you develop? What reasons will you create to make you stay in crypto? And so that is why I look forward to building throughout all this bear market with you, if it is really bear, of which I'm not convinced.

• 1:26:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well said, though. David is bullish on the bear market.

• 1:26:12David Hoffman?

  Bullish on the bear market.

• 1:26:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the bottom line. And hopefully, he's made you more bullish, too. David, what are you excited about? Besides the bear market, what do you seem to be very excited about?

• 1:26:21David Hoffman?

  OK, I have three things that I'm super excited about, Ryan. One of them, I was quoted in the Washington Post. And I was actually just kind of like cracking up with the Washington Post. Some of the quotes I had that they decided to use, I think were hilarious.

• 1:26:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Goodbye to all nonbelievers, says David Hoffman.

• 1:26:36David Hoffman?

  Co-owner of Bankless tweeted on Sunday as prices continued to plummet.

• 1:26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Listen to this. "We were all born in the bear market, so finally, we're back home," David says, noting Ethereum is now worth $2,400. And last time, it was $80.

• 1:26:52David Hoffman?

  Oh, God.

• 1:26:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love this, man. It's a great article. Thankless in the Washington Post.

• 1:26:57David Hoffman?

  And to summarize it up, I say, obviously, no one is happy to see their portfolio shrink 40% in seven days. But it's a question of, do you believe that crypto is the dominant financial platform of the future?

• 1:27:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  My man calling for conviction.

• 1:27:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's what I'm doing.

• 1:27:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's convicted out there?

• 1:27:12David Hoffman?

  All right, all right, sorry. Next thing I'm excited about, Ryan, is this link that I just sent you in Zoom, if you want to pull that up, is I finally set up my gallery, so you can check out all my NFT displays. And so I'm going to wait for Ryan to pull this up. There we go. Boom. gallery.s o, I recommend that you guys sign up for it. It's a great way.

• 1:27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are these the CryptoCovens?

• 1:27:31David Hoffman?

  These are the CryptoCovens, of which I think are fantastic. Pure, straight royalty. There's also my CryptoPunk. This is my NFT PFP section. There's my CryptoPunk, my Coolcat, my couple of Penguins, and also the DowPunks out of Bankless Dow. But then also, if you keep on scrolling down, those are my one-of-ones from Nate Muller, who I'm super bullish on. And these are just fantastic. And then if you go down, you have my Metaverse plants. I love plants of all types, including Metaverse plants. And so I'm just excited that I got Gallery up and running.

• 1:27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is awesome. How hard was that?

• 1:28:00David Hoffman?

  Super easy. Super easy. Just had to sign in with my Ethereum address.

• 1:28:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Might have to do this.

• 1:28:04David Hoffman?

  And then the last thing I'm excited about is the Layer Zero that's coming out on Tuesday, of which I did an interview with the two founders of The Boys Club. And The Boys Club is all about onboarding women into Web3.

• 1:28:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not what it sounds like, guys.

• 1:28:17David Hoffman?

  And it's a really funny name, and they really lean into the humor behind it. So if you are a lady who is looking to find other ladies to use lady-specific language and just onboard people that you know of that are of your vibe into Web3, Boys Club is for you. Check out the Layer Zero that's coming out on Tuesday. And if you are a dude who's trying to get your lady friend into crypto, maybe send them to The Boys Club.

• 1:28:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Send them to The Boys Club. That's awesome, man.

• 1:28:45David Hoffman?

  Thank you for bearing with me through my three things, Ryan. What are you excited about?

• 1:28:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, I'm excited to show you my gallery.soturtle collection pretty soon, because I'm gonna fire this baby up.

• 1:28:53David Hoffman?

  I'll be excited to see it, Ryan.

• 1:28:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the real thing I was excited about was I'm back to this blockscan.com chat, okay? Because this was, I think, the first time where I actually used my ETH address as an identity, like to log in and interact with somebody else who also had an ETH address. And there are some fun use cases. This is a silly app, but there are some fun use cases from this, like, you know, support emails for something. You know, you ship an NFT, how do you verify that the person who's owning the NFT is on the other side of a support message? This could work for that. Also, like, you know, talking to hackers, for instance. But also, if like, I see an NFT in your gallery that I like, maybe instead of going through OpenSea, I just like, I message you on this. I'm like, David, I want to buy some flowers.

• 1:29:39David Hoffman?

  Hey dude, like, .2ETH for that. And I'm like, no, Ryan, 2ETH, 2ETH.

• 1:29:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm like, I'll give you .2ETH and 2 turtles. And you're like, yes.

• 1:29:48David Hoffman?

  No, I'm like, no.

• 1:29:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool. This is cool. And it just reminded me of like, the AOL Instant Messenger days. And I'm really excited to see that. It was just a lot of fun, too. A bunch of people reached out and said how much they, you know, loved Bankless, got all these messages.

• 1:30:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't wait for all the spam. That's gonna be incoming in the future. So I'm sure, you know, EtherScan will add future. And make it cooler over time, but it was great.

• 1:30:13David Hoffman?

  New versions of Nigerian prince messages.

• 1:30:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's like, look, your ETH address is not just a bank account. It's also your digital identity. And I think this is one small application. We did say, I think 2022 is going to be a breakout year for some early use cases. People don't anticipate around digital identity.

• 1:30:28David Hoffman?

  Use cases of your private keys.

• 1:30:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, that's it. All right. Meme of the week time. Let's get to it.

• 1:30:33David Hoffman?

  Here we go.

• 1:30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do we got? Lynn Alden.

• 1:30:35David Hoffman?

  Lynn Alden with a meme that almost got 10,000 likes on Twitter. It'll probably be 10,000 likes by this time tomorrow. This is a Simpsons meme of Grandpa Simpson talking to all the kids. And Grandpa Simpson says, back then, the whole world would stop and listen to one guy say what he was gonna do with the price of money. This is what's happening. This is why we're talking about a bear market. It's because everyone's talking about what is, is the Federal Reserve gonna make the money more expensive? Or is it gonna make the money more cheap? And everyone's super fearful that the old guys at the Federal Reserve are gonna make the money more expensive. And the thing I love about this the most is it just just strips the way of the curtain. So the emperor without the robes. This is ridiculous that we listen to these old, old people

• 1:31:18David Hoffman?

  behind closed doors, take, talk to us about what the price of money is. Just let the money price itself is good at that.

• 1:31:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's definitely what we do. And the way they analyze your own pals, every word and like gesture and, you know, intonation. Is, uh, it's painful as well.

• 1:31:35David Hoffman?

  It's insane that we do that. It's insane.

• 1:31:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope we're not still doing it seven years from now. Guys, stay tuned right after this for your moment of zen.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  Down bad like Solana, net worth lost a comma. Constantly refreshing TV Ls on Defi Lama. I only catch knives when I'm trying to catch a bounce from my savings on a JPEG when I really need a house. Need a tax harvest? I got Ls I could lend you. Portfolio pegged to the frickin' dollar menu.

• 1:32:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're headed west.

• 1:32:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, this is the frontier. It's not for everyone. Glad you're with us on the make this journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:32:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  But of course, got to remind you, none of this has been financial advice. ETH and Bitcoin are risky. DeFi is risky as well. Sometimes it's extra risky and full of drama, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:32:38David 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,

• 1:33:19David Hoffman?

  Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.