ROLLUP: Solana Outage | Restaking Wars | Dencun Mainnet Date

Bankless Weekly Rollup 2nd Week of February, 2024 ------ 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024 ------ ❎ DYDX | Learn more about dYdX Chain https://dydx.zone/3SfJTP7 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:30 MARKETS 5:30 Layer 2s https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary 8:30 Genesis Selling Billions https://twitter.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1754516523304239326 10:20 Bitcoin Spot ETF https://defillama.com/crypto-etf https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1755336511791169574 13:00 Farcaster https://x.com/dwr/status/1754898218956329273?s=20 https://warpcast.com/jayg/0x6675c6e2 19:45 Solana Outage https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1754831404972552310?s=20 https://twitter.com/matthew_sigel/status/1754874183807307828 https://twitter.com/matthew_sigel/status/1754874192078549406 https://status.solana.com/uptime?page=5 https://twitter.com/dmihal/status/1754837377787609256?s=20 26:50 Eigenlayer Deposits https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1754596238761332939 https://defillama.com/protocol/eigenlayer https://twitter.com/0xVEER/status/1755069748981674113?s=20 31:30 Restaking Wars https://twitter.com/0xmurathan/status/1753888543951262181?s=46 https://x.com/pythianism/status/1755321346077397124?s=20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N_pfNWGCmw https://warpcast.com/hildobby/0xb843396f https://twitter.com/hildobby_/status/1755297005188915414?s=20 34:25 Finance Delisting Monero https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/binance-will-delist-ant-multi-vai-xmr-on-2024-02-20-f73b083ba6834771b07dbe5319917ae5 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1754988413579616559?s=20 40:30 Dencun Mainnet Date https://x.com/parithosh_j/status/1755198250456408297?s=20 https://twitter.com/terencechain/status/1755598083558437295 https://x.com/dapplion/status/1752766529559789938?s=20 42:00 Nounsdao Animation https://warpcast.com/trent/0x6055926f 42:55 Taproot Wizards https://twitter.com/QuantumCatsXYZ/status/1754644923461038499?s=20 https://www.quantumcats.xyz/ 45:00 Synthetix Chain https://mirror.xyz/kain.eth/kuLEnkUhJBPdJCs9gSIQ2_umGprJq3ZZCExmtc69zn8 48:30 Fraxtal Launch https://x.com/fraxfinance/status/1755386501926433087?s=20 https://x.com/fraxfinance/status/1755386523875181023?s=20 https://twitter.com/jon_charb/status/1751319646601371902?s=20 51:22 ENS GoDaddy https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/1754558153008538108 https://x.com/ensdomains/status/1754508567321981219?s=20 53:30 Spot ETF Staking https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1755268354355368379?s=20 https://x.com/SGJohnsson/status/1755273120317854066?s=20 55:35 Prometheum ETH Security https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/02/07/sec-prometheum-ethereum-broker-dealer-gary-gensler-coinbase/?taid=65c39d0ef9bf2c00019d4d42 https://twitter.com/MikeSeligEsq/status/1755296298918367445 https://tenor.com/view/mine-animal-pet-dog-cat-gif-5612364 58:40 Omega https://twitter.com/omega_infra/status/1754913327321358353?s=46 1:00:00 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/boldleonidas/status/1754076355036397910?s=46 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solana went down this week, David. I don't know if you noticed. I know you're on the Solana chain a lot.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  All the time.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was down for five hours, and that is the first time it's been down in almost a year.

• 0:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation is the second week of February. David, what time is it?

• 0:17David Hoffman?

  It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup, where we cover all the weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the bullish frontier. How you doing, Ryan?

• 0:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good. I'm glad you said bullish frontier. Are you having fun, man? Is this fun yet?

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  I'm having fun. There's a lot of interesting things going on. There's a lot of exciting things going on. There's a lot to look forward to, a lot that's happening now, a lot that will happen in the future. Overall, yeah, it's a good time in the market.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like it's a good time in the market, too. It hasn't gotten crazy yet. I don't know. We've seen some new things, a Farcaster episode. Well, let's unpack it. What are we covering today?

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  We're covering first Solana's five-hour network outage. Oof, we'll talk about that. There was a little bit of an autopsy, not the official one, but someone put a tweet thread together, so we'll go through that and talk about the significance. Second, the other very exciting thing that happened this week, the Eigenlayer LST tokens caps were lifted. How much TVL flooded into Eigenlayer?

• 1:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just piling in. It's absolutely piling in. We also got the Farcaster users hitting all-time highs, so we'll talk a bit more about that. And David, we have the date for the next Ethereum upgrade. I think, is this the official date?

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  The date.

• 1:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  From the devs. The devs said this.

• 1:33David Hoffman?

  The date that the devs said.

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought they didn't give dates.

• 1:37David Hoffman?

  Until they do.

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Well, fair enough. Well, before we get in, we get a message from our friends and sponsors over at DYDX. What do they want the Bankless Nation to know?

• 1:47David Hoffman?

  There are 37 markets on DYDX, now DYDX Chain. This is also a call to action for all DYDX token holders who still have the token on Ethereum that is no longer the home for your DYDX token. You should go and send that over to the DYDX Chain, where you can stake and be a validator of DYDX and get something like 15-plus percent paid in USDC. From the D gens that are trading on DYDX. So you can just maintain the DYDX chain, do your service to the network and collect some USDC feeds. There is a link in the show notes to learn more about how to do that. And also what are the other $20 million opportunities of incentives going on in the DYDX ecosystem? A lot to pay attention to, link in the show notes. Thank you DYDX for sponsoring this message.

• 2:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, David, let's pay some attention to the market price, shall we? And honestly, David, at this time in the market, I don't know if I'm more zen than usual or what, but this is like right before this episode was the first time I actually looked at charts since last week, since the last roll up. And I was pleasantly surprised to see this one. This is Bitcoin. Thanks to Kraken Pro for these excellent charts and thanks to the Bitcoin gods for the charts showing upward trajectory. What are we at on the week?

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  I'm guessing, Ryan, you don't have the page on your phone that like if you scroll over it like shows all the prices.

• 3:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I deleted all that. It's not healthy. It's not healthy for me to do that anymore.

• 3:07David Hoffman?

  On your main home screen on your, on your phone? You don't have that?

• 3:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't do that. So is that like every time you open?

• 3:13David Hoffman?

  The prices are until we do the weekly roll up?

• 3:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, really, unless something crazy happens and then I find about it some other way and like.

• 3:20David Hoffman?

  Cause somebody says something.

• 3:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  This doesn't, this is a nice price on the week, but this is not crazy activity. It's not crazy, so I just didn't check.

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  People are excited about the price action right now. A, because we're coming back out of the 30,000 range where it was like the bearish range. Like people were thinking we're getting it done at 36,000 and we're not. We're not doing that. We started the week at $42,500 on the Bitcoin, up to $45,200, up 6% on the week. Marshing our way back to the Bitcoin ETF approval highs of 49,000. And I think, Ryan, once we like hit 49,000 and break 50,000, like, I'm sorry, like all time highs are next. That's just, that's just how it goes.

• 3:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Highs of this cycle, right? This full cycle for about 49K?

• 4:00David Hoffman?

  49 is the new high watermark. Yeah, but we set that, we set that like two or three weeks ago.

• 4:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so 50K would be like kind of net new territory for this cycle. And what is, wait, what is all time high for Bitcoin now?

• 4:09David Hoffman?

  69.

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  69, really?

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  How could you forget?

• 4:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's silly me? Alright, 69. Uh, next, you're gonna tell me Ethereum all-time high was 4,200.

• 4:21David Hoffman?

  No, no, it was 4,900.

• 4:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, sorry. That's higher. That's actually higher than I remembered. Okay, well, tell me about ETH on the week. Where are we at?

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  $2,290 is where it started. We are up 2%, 6%, excuse me, 6% to $2,430. Uh, so some up weeks.

• 4:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So both Bitcoin and Ether up 6% on the week. You know, we'll take that one. Not double digits, but we'll take it. And the ratio, is that about steady?

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  It's steady, but it's low, but it's steady.

• 4:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lower than you want.

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  Lower than I want.

• 4:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a long

• 4:52David Hoffman?

  Plenty of room for upside. I'll reframe it like that.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lots of room in the ratio for upside. Uh, tell me about the total crypto market cap.

• 5:00David Hoffman?

  We just broke this morning $1.8 trillion.

• 5:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that, is that cycle all-time highs?

• 5:07David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, we have not, well, not all-time highs, uh, for the total crypto market cap. I think we got a little bit above that.

• 5:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, but I mean, it's cycle, cycle all-time highs, right?

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's what I mean. I mean, I think we, we hit 1.86 right at the Bitcoin ETF approval, and it's been down since then. Uh, so we are 60, $60 billion off of cycle total crypto market cap all-time highs.

• 5:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  I want 2, 2 trillion, 2 trillion.

• 5:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then what happens at 2? You just feel better?

• 5:34David Hoffman?

  You get to 3.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's never enough for you, is it?

• 5:39David Hoffman?

  No.

• 5:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, well, let's talk about something that's never enough, which is, uh, total locked value in layer 2s and transactions on layer 2s. It can never be enough for me, David. Uh, this layer 2 update is brought to you by Mantle, which is a new and upcoming layer 2 that we especially enjoy. By the way, I think METH, is that all-time highs? Speaking of all-time highs, she's Mantle's stake.

• 5:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, TVL on Mantle, all-time highs, also METH, also now in Eigenlayer. So there's a bunch of, uh, Mantle Ether in Eigenlayer. And what they're gonna do, they're juicing the Mantle ETH yields, which is like natively, so like the Mantle ETH yield is like 7%. And all of the Mantle METH treasury that's now in Eigenlayer, they're just gonna send the points over to the METH holders on the Mantle layer 2.

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, that's cool. You get some yield on your yield, huh?

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 6:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what I like.

• 6:25David Hoffman?

  Some points on your yield on your yield.

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some points on my yield on my yield. Wow. This is crypto in 2024, folks. Well, we're close to all time highs in total value locked in layer twos at 22 billion and activity. Yeah, not too bad. We're about five Ethereum's worth of activity.

• 6:42David Hoffman?

  Five and a half. Yeah, I want that number to be higher. I'm dissatisfied by that number.

• 6:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  I want eight. I want eight.

• 6:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want eight? How about, how about you think post the next Ethereum hard fork, YIP4844, you think that unleashes the beast here?

• 6:55David Hoffman?

  That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think that jumps to?

• 7:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I mean, transactions get cheaper. It doesn't mean that.

• 7:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, first transactions get cheaper and then there is more of them in that order of operations.

• 7:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Transactions get cheaper and that induces demand. Like, that would be the theory. And so, you know, we get more activity. Although, I don't actually know if cost of transactions on layer twos, how much of a constraint that is. It's got to be somewhat of a constraint, right?

• 7:22David Hoffman?

  Because, well, yeah, if you lower costs, you have more arbitrage opportunities.

• 7:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, how much does it cost? How much does a transaction, like moving ETH on arbitrage?

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  Optimism? I think it's like, it's like four or five cents.

• 7:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Four or five cents right now.

• 7:36David Hoffman?

  And then to swap on Uniswap, it's like 11 to 12 cents.

• 7:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we're going to fractions of a penny, right? Point?

• 7:43David Hoffman?

  Momentarily, and then it'll, it will come back up to about those prices, but then there will be like a 20 to 30 to 40% more transactions.

• 7:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess if transactions are like, you know, five cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 30 cents, that is a constraint, I think, on activity. That's, that's enough where you kind of like pause and like, do you actually need to do this or not? So it's enough.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  Well, it's enough to like, a lot of automated transactions don't happen. I think user transactions, users don't care about like, users don't think about 30 cents unless they're doing a ton of stuff. But, you know, how many times do you touch your ledger every single day?

• 8:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, not, not very often.

• 8:20David Hoffman?

  Not that often.

• 8:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think bots are big activity drivers here, right? A lot of, a lot of robots using our chains here. Well, let's get to some general market news. And there is some, you know, like downside, I guess, right now in the markets. This is a tweet from Matt Hogan. Here we go again, he says, 1.4 billion of GBTC from the Genesis bankruptcy. Ah, forgot about that. We still gotta clean that up, David.

• 8:44David Hoffman?

  Still got that.

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Potentially followed by another 1.2 billion in the future, again from Genesis. He says, "This is a lot for the market to digest in a short period of time." So, okay, we still have Genesis, I guess, to go through their liquidation process. And that's going to be some Bitcoin outflows. Do you think that'll be downward pressure on price?

• 9:04David Hoffman?

  It will cease upward pressure on price. It will delay upward pressure on price, in my opinion. Yeah. Which I think, I know we want upward movements, because that's what, of course, obviously. But also, the longer that we can go before all-time highs, in my mind, the better. The healthier, the less de-gen, the more responsible, the longer we can grow out the infrastructure.

• 9:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Listen to you.

• 9:29David Hoffman?

  If we can just stretch out the anticipatory period as long as possible.

• 9:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 9:34David Hoffman?

  You know? And just like...

• 9:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know where we're going with this.

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  Stay edging, you know? We just gotta edge our way there.

• 9:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Slow and steady. Slow and steady wins the race, is what my co-host is trying to say. You know what? I don't know if I would have heard this from the David Hoffman of 2019 in 2020. I don't know if I would have heard David Hoffman urging caution and slowness. I think you would just be like, "Bring it on, man." Like, "I want my 10x."

• 9:59David Hoffman?

  "I want my portfolio to go up, just like the next guy, but I know it's good for me." "I want it to go up slowly and surely and long over time, because I want the good times to stick around, not just like have a blow off top."

• 10:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy your beer.

• 10:12David Hoffman?

  I don't want to have a premature bull market. No one enjoys those.

• 10:18David Hoffman?

  It's a bad time for everyone.

• 10:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, moving on, David, let's talk about the Bitcoin spot ETF. This horse race of horse races, where all of the bankers have jumped into Bitcoin with their ETF products. Which is winning? Who are the winning horses at this stage, David?

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  Well, GBTC is still in the lead in terms of like AUM. It's got 71% of the market, but that number is going, that number's getting smaller, and then all the other numbers are getting bigger. So, IBIT from BlackRock... At 11 and a half percent, FBTC from Fidelity at 10%, ARC at 2.6%, and then Bitwise at 2.5%. But like, if you're watching on screen, the big blue shape is gonna get eaten by the smaller rainbows. These are technical terms.

• 11:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  The big blue, so it's opposite of Pac-Man then?

• 11:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Pac-Man's getting smaller, Rainbow's getting bigger. The rest of the pie chart, we're looking at a pie chart. Which also is like, kind of intimidating, because that GBTC definitely needs to like, flow out, but that doesn't mean sold. The people that are dumping GBTC are eager to dump, and then the GBTC that's left in the grayscale now ETF, they're just getting charged really high fees. And so they're gonna, if they want to hold, they will hold, they just need to transfer.

• 11:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, some of these, like with BlackRock, they were subsidizing it, right? It was like, free? Some of these ETFs are like, free for the first six months. Whereas GBTC is still...

• 11:40David Hoffman?

  1.5%, which is insane for ETF.

• 11:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and you can really see these flows in terms of volume, where actually, BlackRock's ETF is leading. It's 40% of the volume. I guess that's on the week, huh? Versus GBTC with 30%, so really picking a volume.

• 11:58David Hoffman?

  By the time listeners get this, there will be $30 billion of AUM inside of the Bitcoin ETFs. It's 29.2 right now.

• 12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you got a personal favorite ETF, David? Do you have any?

• 12:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, of course.

• 12:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 12:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, do you have a guess which one of my favorite is?

• 12:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say Matt Hogan.

• 12:17David Hoffman?

  Oh, absolutely. You gotta give it to Bitwise, of course.

• 12:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you ever had a favorite ETF?

• 12:23David Hoffman?

  They were here first. All of the BlackRocks, you know, Fidelity gets some kudos. BlackRocks, you guys are just a bunch of boomers, but hey, we love you too.

• 12:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 12:31David Hoffman?

  You guys have all the boomer wealth. Thanks for being here.

• 12:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're very wealthy.

• 12:35David Hoffman?

  But you gotta give it to Bitwise. They're like, the good guys.

• 12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about Van Eck with Hubble?

• 12:40David Hoffman?

  They also deserve a shout out, for sure. Super crypto natives, but no, Bitwise. Bitwise wins.

• 12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I agree with you.

• 12:49David Hoffman?

  I think they also have the lowest fees. The lowest fees.

• 12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is James Safer. Big, big volume day for BlackRock's ETF. Total volume over 1 billion for the group. So yeah, when ETHTF, huh?

• 13:01David Hoffman?

  When ETHTF? We got some things to talk about with the ETHTF.

• 13:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another number that is up in the markets we should talk about, a record day for Farcaster. David, 10x.

• 13:14David Hoffman?

  I think it's been a record day every single day.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this was from February the 5th. So that was Monday. Ooh, is that the same day? Oh, almost the same day. The, our podcast with Dan Romero dropped. I guess we probably hit new records on that podcast, David. That was a fantastic episode. I really, I really enjoyed that with, with Dan. But it's great to see the traction. I've been spending, as I mentioned, this far.

• 13:36David Hoffman?

  Wait, just, just for context.

• 13:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:37David Hoffman?

  Last week, we showed this graphic of Dan talking about daily active users over Farcaster, and it was hitting 10,000, then 11,000, then 15,000. And Dan was tweeting out, "Oh, new, new record for daily active users on Farcaster." It was 61,000 this week. It's four times higher.

• 13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does that still sound small, though, in the scheme of Web 2? 61,000 users? That's like.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  And I don't care about Web 2. I care about crypto. In crypto terms, it's massive.

• 14:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really great. It's really great. And this is, by the way, not a token incented app. Although, is it?

• 14:11David Hoffman?

  There are, there are, there are bots, there are fake accounts on there. Like, you can just tell, like, that, that's a fake account. Because I think people are now trying to increase their footprint. But it's still a big hurdle to get over to spin up a Farcaster account. Like, you have to make.

• 14:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's way more, there's way more fake bot activity, all that stuff on Twitter.

• 14:30David Hoffman?

  Everywhere else.

• 14:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  On Twitter, for sure. Oh, I've been enjoying the Farcaster community.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  It's been great.

• 14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the conversations there are just fantastic. A lot of bankless listeners as well. This is.

• 14:41David Hoffman?

  I've been tweeting out my morning latte arts on Farcaster in the morning.

• 14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've been casting out, David. You haven't been tweeting.

• 14:48David Hoffman?

  Well, Dan said it's okay to say Twitter. That's what he said. So you still Google on Bing.

• 14:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait. So you've been doing what? I'm gonna look up. Sorry, I haven't been following your timeline.

• 14:58David Hoffman?

  I've been trying my hand at art. Latte art. Yeah, this latest day was the worst day, day four. I finally figured out.

• 15:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a mountain. Or is it a poo emoji?

• 15:07David Hoffman?

  People said it looked like a fetus, which I think is correct.

• 15:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was that what you were going for? Explain the art.

• 15:13David Hoffman?

  Oh, wait, no, that was yesterday. Yeah, latte art day four was especially bad.

• 15:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, a circle blobby thing?

• 15:19David Hoffman?

  Circle blobby thing had a shape to it.

• 15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Wait, you are missing opportunities here because like you should be NFTing this collection. And you should be shilling it to your followers and then just.

• 15:29David Hoffman?

  Look at day two. Day two is the best one.

• 15:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  F'd up Christmas tree? That's actually good. I might buy that. One tokenization's got your foot in the bottom, too.

• 15:40David Hoffman?

  Somebody commented like, I can't believe you're showing off latte art on Farcaster after you talk shit about all these beverages that people are drinking.

• 15:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the kind of content I think people don't get on Twitter, though, from you.

• 15:51David Hoffman?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 15:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So wow, it's exclusive content. By the way, they're doing, Farcaster is bringing a lot of activity to Base, it looks like.

• 16:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is in the poster, this is a cast, David, not a tweet. Wow, crazy chart displaying Base dominance in the last few weeks for total transactions by chain. Farcaster users are now conducting two out of every three transactions using Base. So what's good for Farcaster is also good for our Layer 2's, David, transaction activity.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  Interesting. I kind of would think that it would be a competition between Base and Zora on Farcaster to be the big destination to do your NFT minting, like kind of consumer crypto stuff.

• 16:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems to be gravitating. Those two communities are really adopting Farcaster a lot. David, what do we have coming up in the episode?

• 16:41David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, we're going to talk about the Solana outage, the five hour outage. What happened? Why did it happen? All that kind of stuff. What does it mean? How did the markets react? Then we're going to talk about Eigenlayer and it reopening the gates for liquid stake tokens. How much ETH flooded in and the blobs are coming to the last testnet, which spoiler, testnet did just fine, which means that we have the date for Dencun. We'll talk about that and more, but first I want to talk about. Some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, a preferred crypto exchange in 2024. If you do not have an account with Kraken, how the hell are you getting dollars into crypto? Use Kraken. There's a link in the show notes. Kraken knows crypto. Kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade, and as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be.

• 17:23David Hoffman?

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• 18:07David Hoffman?

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• 18:51David Hoffman?

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• 19:35David Hoffman?

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• 19:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solana went down this week, David. I don't know if you noticed. I know you're on the Solana chain a lot.

• 19:54David Hoffman?

  All the time.

• 19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was down for five hours, and that is the first time it's been down in almost a year. Almost made it to a year without incident, but it fell over. Tell me a little bit about that.

• 20:06David Hoffman?

  So, we don't have the complete postmortem yet, but there was a tweet from Matthew Siegel, who kind of gave his autopsy. I'm sure the formal audit, the formal like situation report will say something similar to this. He says, "The BPF loader, the Berkeley Packet Filter, which is the mechanism to deploy, upgrade, and execute programs on Solana, which we would call smart contracts on Ethereum, failed. This seemed to relate to a previous SMID Solana improvement proposal that altered some of the features, including adding a block or two to stop metadata from being used in the BPF because it was no longer needed." Some technical stuff. Basically, I would say the culprit of this is that Solana changes a lot. And as it's changing a lot, that can always introduce new bugs to any software.

• 20:51David Hoffman?

  That's just the nature of software. And this recent upgrade to one of the things that makes Solana run implemented a bug, and that caused downtime. And so, this is what happens when you have a single client system and you have a lot of updates going into that single client system.

• 21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you mean by a single client system?

• 21:09David Hoffman?

  Single client system, there is one version of the software that runs and if that version of the software has a bug, then the whole system has a bug. And this is in contrast to a multi-client software, multi-client system like Ethereum, which has five different clients, where if one of those clients has a bug, the other clients don't care and then they keep on going. Unless, of course, that client is a majority bug, like a majority client like Geth and it has 80 something percent dominance, down to like 75, I think, right now. Anyway, over 66% is a problem. And if Geth had a bug, then that would be the bug of Ethereum because of the dominance. But if a minority client had a bug, then the other clients are just totally fine. Solana has one client, it's the Solana Core client.

• 21:52David Hoffman?

  They're working on their second FireDancer, which is the, like, it's basically the proof of stake equivalent and significance of Solana, like, they're gonna become super fast, super cheap, it's gonna be the second client of Solana. But then there's also nuance there because they want the FireDancer client to actually just replace the current client and then use the current client.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because the other one will be a lot slower, right? Compared to FireDancer?

• 22:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, by comparison, yeah. Uh huh. Anyways, Solana went down for five hours. They made a patch to the client and then that client was released just an hour later after it went down, but then it took a number of hours for all the validators to, there's like this kind of like process to restarting Solana, like, all the client needs, all the client validators need to like sync up with each other, I don't know. So it was down for five hours.

• 22:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the last time it was down prior to this was February 25th, 2023.

• 22:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, almost a year.

• 22:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and then before that, 2022 was pretty spotty with, I don't know, there was...

• 22:46David Hoffman?

  There was like six or seven or something.

• 22:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Six or seven outages, you can, you know, kind of see them. And when we say down, it means like no transaction activity, like completely down, it just like fell over completely. And so what is the process for restarting Solana, David? Like, what does that look like when Solana goes down?

• 23:04David Hoffman?

  There's a link in the show notes to check out Matthew Siegel's tweets, he can kind of explain the details of it in, at a technical capacity. I want to skip to the very last tweet in the tweet thread, and he talks about the second order effects of what happens when a chain goes down. He goes, "Once restarted, there will be a flurry of..." DeFi activity as arb bots, arbitrage bots, seek to take advantage of all the arbitrages that have materialized because when Solana goes down, the world goes on, markets continue, and Solana is as a state machine is not updating to the state of the world. And so he said that some estimates, there might be as high as $25 million in MEV. Really hard to measure this in like real time. But as soon as the Solana blockchain gets started again, like liquid, there are stale prices that need to get updated. There's people that needs to be liquidated. Like

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  there's a bunch of stuff that happens. And this is one of the concerns of having a system that has poor liveness is that when it restarts again, whenever it goes down and it restarts again, there's just this massive fight for all of that arbitrage. And this generally not a desirable property of a system.

• 24:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's also generally not a desirable property, of course, for a blockchain to go down in the first place, particularly when it's kind of like a layer one blockchain. Ethereum had an event not quite like this because of its multi-client architecture, but was it with the Prism client? My God, that was like.

• 24:23David Hoffman?

  It was with the Prism client. Yeah, you're talking about the non-finality event?

• 24:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. How would that have compared to something like this from your recollection?

• 24:33David Hoffman?

  Right. Okay. So the non-finality event was that blocks were being propagated around Ethereum. The blockchain was operating as normally from a user perspective. All transactions were going through, but they just weren't fine. They weren't being finalized because less than 66% of the chain was of was finalizing. And finalizing is just like economic security. So it's like the first line of defense in the Ethereum system before an actual outage. So one, one client of Ethereum went down and that was, and that brought down more than a third of the network. And so because of Ethereum's multi-client design, because Ethereum is larger than any one client, the rest of the clients are fine. It's just not finalizing as in there is a risk of reorgs if further catastrophe happened. So it's kind of like

• 25:18David Hoffman?

  you, you get to take two bullets rather than one. So in that time of Ethereum where there was like a non-finality event that I think lasted like half a day, maybe less, Ethereum took like a bullet. But it had body armor, but then for a moment that body armor was gone. And so if it took another bullet, then then we would have like a real big issue.

• 25:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like a castle with multiple walls and the first wall was kind of breached.

• 25:41David Hoffman?

  Exactly. Right.

• 25:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So it was really interesting. So first of all, something that didn't happen was the price of sold didn't tank. So the market kind of like shrugged this off.

• 25:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it went down like two or 3%, which I would consider not reacting.

• 25:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I didn't see much of this conversation on crypto Twitter because I just wasn't going out and looking for it. I'm sure there was some grave dancing by some. I'm sure there was others who, you know, from like maybe the Solana tribe.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  I think everyone kept it pretty tame, I would say.

• 26:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 26:08David Hoffman?

  I think like overall, it was a tame thing.

• 26:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 26:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there was definitely some grave dancers, but like, you know, how can it not be?

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, this is not great.

• 26:17David Hoffman?

  Wasn't me.

• 26:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  You should preface this. This is just a simple prediction. I recall, David, that one of your January 4th, 2024 predictions of this year, number five was Solana goes down. So I just wanted to say congrats on that.

• 26:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, your prediction, you called it. And yeah, Solana's like move fast and break things. And so they're moving fast and things are breaking. And yeah, this is David Mihal saying, honestly, I thought this prediction was unrealistic. Enjoy your W, David. So there you go.

• 26:50David Hoffman?

  Thanks, David. Solana, there's always next year. Moving on, Eigenlayer Caps open up hits $5 billion in total locked value. It was opened this Monday until February 9th, which is today at the time of listening, if you're listening to this on Friday. All pools are fully uncapped, so it's like a time opened gate. There's no caps except for the time. And so.

• 27:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, there's no caps for how long?

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  Until Friday at 12:00 PM Pacific time. So no caps until then.

• 27:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Friday the 9th.

• 27:19David Hoffman?

  Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow for us.

• 27:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Today.

• 27:20David Hoffman?

  Today for listeners. Today for listeners.

• 27:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much time, guys?

• 27:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not much time. So you and so infinite amounts of ETH can go in until, you know, the limit of ETH. But then once that time is, then the doors shut. And so.

• 27:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like how you said that. Infinite amount of ETH until there's no more ETH.

• 27:38David Hoffman?

  Until there's no more ETH. Yeah.

• 27:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're capped by the supply.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  Capped by the supply. Yeah. There is, we just crossed $5 billion in TVL in Eigenlayer, 5.3 billion. It was 5 billion when I looked at this. Now it's a 5.3. Eigenlayer is just hoovering up the ETH, bro. Absolutely nuts.

• 27:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's munching it. It is eating all the ETH that it can. Look at these like big, you know. So how, I wonder how high it could get, because this must be still climbing, right?

• 28:07David Hoffman?

  This is climbing right now.

• 28:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Until 12:00 PM PST on February 9th. And then what happens after that? Another pause?

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah. I'm guessing that this is probably the, maybe there's more. Uh, this could be one of the last openings of the gate until Eigenlayer mainnet. Um, I'm just speculating here. Uh, but there's just like a lot of ETH in there. How much more ETH do they want? Granted, everyone wants Eigenlayer points, which is why this is happening. Uh, I will say, everyone else should just totally un-stake their ETH and get out. Because I've got it and I'll take it from here. I'll just take the points. I will restake. Uh, it'll be fine.

• 28:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know why you're so, they're just points, David. It's not like there's any value attached to it. It's not like it's a token. It's just a point.

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  I volunteer to collect the points.

• 28:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's going to be interesting to find out is, once the, um, the limiters are off, the governors are completely off. Like what will the market, what's the ceiling for the market in terms of total deposits in Eigenlayer? And we haven't quite seen that yet, so we'll have to see. And of course, um, all of this is a lot of speculation on this whole AVS market. These Eigen applications that really are starting to get built, but nothing has come out that, you know, will do something, uh, you know, functionally fantastic. I mean, we're all betting on the future utility of the Eigenlayer ecosystem. Uh, what's your take on that? You think that's a good bet? Do you think there's real stuff being developed right now?

• 29:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a speculative bet. Uh, the people intending to build good stuff are numerous. The teams building AVSs are numerous. The, uh, excitement, the nerd sniping that is being done by Eigenlayer in both TradFi and in like Silicon Valley web 2, software as a service tech circles. Eigenlayer is opening up doors to these people that were not previously nerd sniped by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, all these different like waves of adoption that like, you know. Solana, to its credit, nerdsnapped people that did not get nerdsnapped by Ethereum. Ethereum nerdsnapped people that did not get nerdsnapped by Bitcoin. Eigenlayer is doing the same thing. It's nerdsnapping people on Wall Street. It's nerdsnapping people in San Francisco.

• 30:17David Hoffman?

  It's building, and because it's building out unique use cases that can like very elegantly and simply hook into, you know, Web 2 and TradFi without having to be all like Chaney and crypto-y. And so I think it's a new way to export crypto economics to the outside world. So that is, that's all of that is real. Right now, everyone is speculating on Eigenlayer points, on Eigenlayer airdrops. So my concern, actually, Ryan, is like when Eigenlayer mainnet ships, sometime Q2 is when, as Sriram said, when I did my Q and A with him, why will all of the ethers stay put? Because a lot of these AVSs still need to be built out, right? Like the incentives are the points, I'm assuming.

• 31:02David Hoffman?

  Some will stay because they want to stay committed to Eigenlayer.

• 31:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you think there's a potential, once we launch, some of this capital then floods back out of Eigenlayer?

• 31:09David Hoffman?

  I think that's a rational thing to assume. So some people are just here for the points.

• 31:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  The speculative mania right now.

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  Could you imagine just being here for the points?

• 31:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't even imagine.

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  Could not imagine.

• 31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of a sick person, you know.

• 31:22David Hoffman?

  Takes their points and leaves.

• 31:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so this is the restaking wars as well, the LRT wars. And yeah, give us an update. This is kind of like the Bitcoin ETFs we're talking about. And there's a number of horses in the races and some are winning versus others, but it kind of changes on a week to week basis. What are we looking at here?

• 31:41David Hoffman?

  This is a cool little graphic showing all of the liquid restaking protocols, the people that are aggregating AVS yields, putting them into a token, just like LSTs. And we are just watching them collect their ETH, to collect the TVL over time. And you see like EtherFi far in the lead at the very, very top, followed by Kelp Dow, Renzo, then Eigenpie, and then Puffer out of nowhere on the second, just like rocketing up in TVL to jump into second place. So EtherFi breaking 700 million this week, Puffer breaking 300 million this week, Kelp Dow coming in third, followed by Renzo. This graphic, the GIF is five days old, so now what Ryan's showing on the screen is now super up to date. 850 million for Ether5 coming in number one.

• 32:23David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, Puffer at $770 million. Wow, amazing. Apparently Justin Sun just put a bunch of Ether into Puffer. Puffer has taken only staked ETH from Lido. So all of the TVL in Puffer is Lido staked ETH, and then it is their tension. As soon as their validator, the validators mainnet launches, they will swap out the liquid staked ETH from Lido into puff ETH, which is the point. And so all of the Ether inside of Lido gets taken out of Lido and put into Puffer as a vampire attack, which is taking 1/30 of all Lido Ether away from Lido. So like really carving into Lido dominance.

• 33:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Huh. Well, that's a good thing, right? I mean, it's a good thing for the network. LRTs are, like, all of these are new names, like new projects in the fold. So this isn't some of the dominant liquid staking tokens that are kind of like taking the lead here.

• 33:19David Hoffman?

  So that's good. New names, new Linde clocks, the risk reset, everything is new again.

• 33:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's Vance Spencer saying what we just said, except in a more pithy form. He says Eigenlayer TVL is up to 5 billion from 2.15 billion just two days ago. All the L2s and restaking and staking apps are just black holes for Ether.

• 33:42David Hoffman?

  It was an Ethersmoney tweet, surprise.

• 33:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's taking our place, David.

• 33:48David Hoffman?

  And thanks to all of this activity, we have a new high in the share of all Ether that is staked. And that is 25%, 25% of all Ether is staked. I think the previous, in the previous era, the EF people all kind of thought that between 20 and 30% of all ETH would become staked, and that would be equilibrium. But that was really before the complete total acceptance of LSTs as an equilibrium. And that was before Eigenlayer. I think we're going to blow past that 30% number pretty damn quickly here. And we're going to, we're going to start to approach like 1/3, 1/2. But right now, 25%.

• 34:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, there was another announcement this week that I noticed that Binance was delisting Monero from its exchange. So tell us about that.

• 34:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think for the newcomers, the people who came in 2021 and beyond, this won't be perceived a very big deal. But I'll say this is, this marks the end of an era. Binance, delisting Monero, delisting the last privacy chain. Privacy chains used to be a huge sector in 2017 when you and I got into crypto.

• 34:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  There was Monero, there was...

• 34:57David Hoffman?

  Dash, Zcash.

• 34:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zcash.

• 34:59David Hoffman?

  There was a bunch of others. God, remember Mimblewimble?

• 35:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. The pitch was basically Bitcoin's perfect. The only thing it's missing is privacy. And so we need privacy-specific chains that deliver privacy at the base protocol layer and that these would all kind of like take off and finally deliver that missing functionality. Never came to fruition, did it?

• 35:19David Hoffman?

  No. And I would say Monero won the privacy chain wars, all the chains that were meant for privacy. Monero won, best privacy, best community, managed to be the best store of value, even though it was a poor store of value for the privacy chains. But now the king of privacy chains is being delisted from Binance. And I'm sorry, it doesn't matter what properties you have, if you don't have liquidity, you can't compete. And if you're delisted from, you're not being listed by Coinbase, you're not being listed by Kraken, that's not happening. So I'm kind of declaring Monero to be formally like dead as a money store of value, which is the end of an era. That is the end of a big era in crypto.

• 35:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it still can be used in very small niche use cases, but it's just going to be absolutely tiny because...

• 36:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not for like regular use cases, like the bad ones.

• 36:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yeah, my take on this was, this is why privacy chains don't work, is because they're not programmable. They don't have the other verbs, like you can just send Monero, but you can't exchange Monero from one asset to another without what? Going to Binance, going to a central, going to a bank. And what are the banks going to do? Well, they're going to be requested by, commanded by, pushed into by the state, not listing any of these privacy coins, because nation states do not necessarily want to encourage on-chain privacy, right?

• 36:37David Hoffman?

  Certainly not.

• 36:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's exactly, that's exactly what is happening here. I think you had a take on this as well.

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just think this isn't a coincidence that this is happening right after the, not right after, but just like not that long after the Binance Department of Justice settlement. The Department of Justice doesn't want privacy. So just a big old reminder, we're probably going to win the right to have DeFi. We're probably going to win the right to have our private keys. We're probably going to win everything that we want, except for privacy. Privacy is still on the table, something that we still need to fight for if we want the maximally successful version of crypto, and that's going to be a hard fight.

• 37:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think Ethereum is on the frontier of that fight as well. I mean, if it's not there, I don't know where else it is. So we'll see how that evolves. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 37:23David Hoffman?

  Registered Token Securities Exchange wants to list ETH as a security. Christ, we're talking about this again. And blobs are live on the last testnet, ready for mainnet. When is Dencun? I'll tease it for the third time this show. We're about to find out. We're going to tell you right after this. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, the Layer 2 with extra-high yields that are now giving you Eigenpoints if you use the Layer 2. Check it out. There's a link in the show notes. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle.

• 38:48David Hoffman?

  You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.500 Four trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bakeless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS. The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world, driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile DeFi. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest-growing Web3 wallets, Cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Cello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a Layer 2. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you?

• 40:17David Hoffman?

  With Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forums. Follow Cello on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. March 13th is the next Ethereum hard fork, the Den Kuhn hard fork that introduces blobs to the Ethereum protocol. Blobs, the second fee market alongside Blockspace. We now also have Blob Space, and Blob Space is reserved for Layer 2s. Totally reserved, there's probably going to be some inscriptions bullshit in there too.

• 40:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer 2s are going to be the big consumers of it. They use the most Blob Space of any.

• 41:05David Hoffman?

  There's gonna be some other upgrades as well, but mainly it's the blobs that we were excited about. The last testnet just merged, that's just updated to include blobs, to include 4844 on Hulski. It was totally successful. So the main net date has been decided as March 13th. Do you see a little graphic that they put in when the EIP 4844 was accepted? The little blob, ASIKi?

• 41:30David Hoffman?

  It's a blob. I don't even know what it looks like.

• 41:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It looks like your latte, man. I can't even tell what this looks like.

• 41:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so we got a blob in ASIKi format here, so that's great. Thanks to the devs for getting that through. So ETH Layer 2 transactions, price will go down. Optimism, Arbitrum, pretty much right away, like pretty close to the release.

• 41:53David Hoffman?

  And then they'll go up. To celebrate this and also just public goods in general, and also the Protocol Guild, there is a Nouns DAO collaboration with the Protocol Guild. They're mostly just sponsoring this like animation with all of these cute characters about all the Layer 2s. Is it anime? I think that counts as anime. I'm not an anime expert.

• 42:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a cartoon. I don't know.

• 42:15David Hoffman?

  Cartoon featuring Polygon Scrolls, Tarknet, ZK Sync, as well as of course Arbitrum, Optimism. Everyone has little characters. There's gonna be this cute little animation. And then the animation short is going to be released as an NFT at the Dencun upgrade. And then all the proceeds for purchasing that NFT will go to the Protocol Guild.

• 42:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you collect little artifacts, right, with every time Ethereum hard forks? Like people do this, right? There's like PoApps that happen every hard fork. There's things like this, and this would be a good thing to add to your collection.

• 42:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a collection about Ethereum history. And you'll be able to show your kids, and your kids are gonna think that you're super cool.

• 42:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they sure will. Okay, speaking of super cool things, the Taproot Wizards, the Quantum Cat sold out. Nothing more exciting than NFTs and Bitcoin, David. What happened in the Bitcoin NFT world this week?

• 43:06David Hoffman?

  I'm sensing a little bit of sass in your voice, but man.

• 43:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no sass.

• 43:10David Hoffman?

  3,333 OP Cat NFTs were sold.

• 43:14David Hoffman?

  At point one bitcoins.

• 43:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought they were quantum cats.

• 43:19David Hoffman?

  Quantum cats, the meme is coming out of the OP cat op code and op code. So all op codes on Bitcoin start with OP.

• 43:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  OP not, see, I'm such an Ethereum, I know OP is optimism. I don't know OP is op code for Bitcoin.

• 43:33David Hoffman?

  You gotta get your Bitcoiner on, man. Yeah, so yeah, it's a Bitcoin and it's like this OP cat thing. It's an, it's an ordinal, this is Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall. Yeah, quantum cats sold out immediately, very hyped NFT drop on Bitcoin. Denominated in Bitcoin, obviously, I'm not used to denominating in Bitcoin. Like I said, sold at point one bitcoins, current floor, point two seven bitcoins. Another sign, right, that the bull market is on is when mints are like tripling in price right after drop.

• 44:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask you a question? I don't know the full history here. I mean, if we had Anthony Sisano here, I'm sure he can tell, tell us. That guy keeps receipts of everybody in the space. Udi, was he previously like a NFTs are dumb, I hate NFTs type of Bitcoiner? Or am I just misremembering that?

• 44:21David Hoffman?

  Well, Udi is a amateur edgelord and so he thinks everything is dumb.

• 44:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I disagree, I think he's a pro edgelord. I think he's actually pretty good at it.

• 44:30David Hoffman?

  No, because by definition, if you're an edgelord, you cannot be professional at anything.

• 44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so that was a compliment, I get it. So you're saying that it's hard to know?

• 44:40David Hoffman?

  NFTs on Ethereum are dumb, but NFTs on Bitcoin are based.

• 44:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just want to know if that's actually what he used to say, because so.

• 44:48David Hoffman?

  I'm 100% confident you can find an Udi tweet somewhere talking about how dumb NFTs are.

• 44:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, man, well, you know what? If I cared more, I would go find that tweet and, you know, just resurface it. David, Synthetix is going to have its own chain because why not? Does every app need a chain? Does every DeFi protocol need a chain? Tell us about this.

• 45:12David Hoffman?

  Well, I think this is the Cosmos thesis. If you are a sufficiently successful DeFi protocol, and if Synthetix is not that, then who the hell is, then you get to elevate yourself to the status of app chain. It's like the highest order of app you can be. First, first app, then app chain.

• 45:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a Pokemon evolution. You just kind of like, you just grow into your app chain.

• 45:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, that's a great meme. Yeah, yeah. First app on a layer two, then you get to be big enough to go down to the layer one, and then you get to be big enough to justify your own chain.

• 45:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so Synthetix is putting on its big boy pants and it's launching its chain.

• 45:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and Synthetix has been just like along the optimism ride for a long time. Kane and the optimism team has been super close. Synthetix was the second app to leverage optimism after Uniswap. So first there was UniPigs, and then Synthetix had their own like custom optimism deployment. And so rather than Synthetix deploying on many, many, many different chains, Synthetix is just going to have an OP stack snacks chain. God, is that the name of it? Snacks chain? SNX collateral, of course. And that will be the home of all Synthetix perps activity, and will also be a part of the super chain.

• 46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I remember that last time I heard from Kane on this, I read a blog post, I think you did an episode with Kane not too long ago. And one of the big problems to solve for Synthetix was fragmented liquidity across the ecosystem. Does this solve fragmented liquidity? Because I'm seeing, this could mean a single place to borrow SUSD, Synthetix USD against SNX, and allows for the potential to leverage all of this to be used as collateral across many chains. Does essentially solve some of the liquidity problem that, you know, has faced Synthetix?

• 46:56David Hoffman?

  I don't think it solves some of them. I think it solves all of them, because it makes a single instance, a singleton instance of Synthetix, aggregates all the liquidity all in one spot. Kane has always just been so far ahead of the curve. Everyone thinks that Compound and Robert Leschner invented yield farming, but Kane invented yield farming like 18 months earlier than that. And remember when our recent Justin Drake fixing fragmentation episode where eventually, like, instead of- Uniswap deployment on 17 different optimism chains. You would just have a uni chain and that uni chain would actually just be like the uni smart contract on the Ethereum layer one, except it would be a chain that would be and that would be contract called by other layer twos.

• 47:39David Hoffman?

  And that would be the uni chain and chain cane of synthetics and the synthetic team are just getting ahead of the curve here. Even before some of the, uh, some of the other issues around fragmentation are solved, they're saying, well, this is where the puck is going. We're going to build our snacks chain now, S N A X chain.

• 47:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I still remember the days when, uh, synthetics pivoted to EOS. Do you remember that slight detour for a while? That was in the very early days. You don't remember this?

• 48:06David Hoffman?

  They did?

• 48:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. True story.

• 48:08David Hoffman?

  Holy shit.

• 48:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Afterwards.

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  You got received for that, bro?

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  A hundred percent. Yeah. They were, they were, uh, all in on EOS for some period of months.

• 48:20David Hoffman?

  Before the Haven, uh, they pivoted from Haven, Haven to synthetics. You're saying after it was synthetic.

• 48:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if it was actually, it may have been in between that pivot, but Haven, Haven definitely.

• 48:30David Hoffman?

  I will give them the pass then.

• 48:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  You give them a pass?

• 48:33David Hoffman?

  He can have, Ken can have his ETH maxi card back.

• 48:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Uh, Fracto launch, um, Frax Finance. They have, they are up to some cool things. This is actually really interesting ecosystem. Now they have launched, I believe their own chain as well, the Frax chain. It's also a part of the optimism super chain. Frax still? Okay.

• 48:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's going on here?

• 48:54David Hoffman?

  Kind of the same thing. Um, Frax started off as just another, um, decentralized stablecoin. Not to say just another, just a very successful decentralized stablecoin. And they were actually front running Maker Dow on what like everyone's super stoked on Maker Dow's end game. And Frax has been just like doing that end game for like a year now, building out, they, they forked Ave. I'm pretty sure they forked Ave. If they didn't, then they just built it off of a look alike, uh, to have their own lending market for, uh, the, the Frax stablecoin to build out liquidity. Um, their, their own AMM also on Frax. And so they just have this DeFi superstructure that was on the layer one. And now they are turning it into a chain. So this is like, all of the Cosmos people are watching this happen and be like, ha, ha, ha, we told you. And then all the Ethereum people are like, ha, ha, ha, but it's on Ethereum.

• 49:40David Hoffman?

  And this is what Frax is doing. And so they have this very sophisticated vertically-integrated DeFi financial suite of products, all put together into a single chain. I thought this picture was actually pretty illustrative of what they were doing. I think if you want to scroll down. And so this is the Frax-centric view of the world. You have the big Frax chain, which is an OP stack chain. And so the OP stack chain is the little dot that connects it to Ethereum and all of Ethereum's rollups. But since Frax chain can have its own interoperability solutions, it also gives its optionality to connect to like Solana or Bitcoin or like Polkadot or all the other ones.

• 50:19David Hoffman?

  And so if you are a, what they call a Fraximalist, a Fraxmaximalist, this is your view of the world. This is how the network topology looks like to you. Yeah, Frax at the center. Yeah. Really, really cool. Again, like you said, part of the optimism superchain. And I want to bring this to a John Charbonneau meme, which I thought was hilarious, which is an app launches an app chain and that app chain gets users' activity, wants more value capture and integration. Therefore, an app chain becomes a general-purpose chain for other apps to deploy on. That's where Frax is going next. And then that app that deploys on Frax chain grows in success

• 50:59David Hoffman?

  and then wants to be on a general-purpose app to optimize for more customizability, sovereignty and value capture. And then we start at the very beginning, which is, okay, that new app just launches an app chain. So this is going to be the iterative cycle of apps launching on the app chains, becoming app chains, becoming more general. And this is just how the industry is going to move forward here.

• 51:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fractals, fractals and chains, all the way down. Apps and chains and more chains and more apps and more chains. David, are you a GoDaddy? Do you ever use GoDaddy for your domains? Do you have any domains?

• 51:27David Hoffman?

  I don't have any domains. And I've always thought GoDaddy is a weird name, but whatever.

• 51:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty, it's kind of cringe. It's kind of like, I think 2000s.

• 51:34David Hoffman?

  What's the deal?

• 51:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like, why'd you name it that?

• 51:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, they're big domain name service for the internet. So like, we have some of our domains there. I don't know if you know this, but bankless.com is actually registered on GoDaddy.

• 51:48David Hoffman?

  I'm glad you take care of this.

• 51:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  They have a partnership with ENS now. So they've launched a partnership where you can actually connect your GoDaddy domain name, so your .com to your .eth with ENS. And you can configure this in the backend. I haven't fully figured out how this works because I've been wanting to get banklist.eth to actually work in the browser and render bankless.com, like connect those two things together. Haven't been able to figure that out yet. There like I have some configuration required with Cloudflare, Flare. But the fact that we were getting there, we are linking our ENSs with our DNSs. I think that is a big step forward for the industry.

• 52:27David Hoffman?

  What does that unlock?

• 52:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we can basically use, you know, potentially you could send me money to RSA.com if I own that. Or actually I have RyanSAdams.com. So you could send me money that way.

• 52:42David Hoffman?

  I'm going there right now.

• 52:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  To my ETH address, potentially. You're gonna do that right now?

• 52:45David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 52:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  It won't get to me. I mean, you could do stuff like that. We are connecting our worlds.

• 52:49David Hoffman?

  RyanSAdams.com is parked free. You are parked.

• 52:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's parked. I don't use it yet. You thought, what did you expect? You think it was like some kind of website, just like me?

• 52:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, no. A bio. It's like, yeah. It's like, hi, I'm Ryan.

• 53:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, I'm Ryan. Just some other side business I have.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  Welcome to my website.

• 53:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, you wish it was that. So that is the news. Receive, here's what you could do with it. Look at this. Receive crypto with your GoDaddy domain name.

• 53:17David Hoffman?

  I think it's got to start from there. That's got to be like the base, like, yeah, that's the simple one. You can type .com instead of .eth. But it's got to grow from there. Like, we're like, kind of in the same vein of cross-trained contract calls, like .com referencing stuff on Ethereum using ENS names.

• 53:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's gonna grow from there. It's gonna be a bigger deal than it sounds like right now, David.

• 53:37David Hoffman?

  Did you see this amendment to the spot ETH ETF from Arc21, Ryan? Do you see what's going on here?

• 53:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, what's going on?

• 53:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Eric Baltrinis goes, here we go again. Arc21 shares, same entity, just filed an amendment S1 for their spot ETH ETF. And this is something that we saw, you know, in increasing frequency approaching the spot Bitcoin ETF approval. This one was a little bit different, though. So- If you go to the next tweet, this was a highlighted part of the amendment, which talks about ETH staking inside of the ETH ETF. I'm going to read a quote here.

• 54:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is some fine print right here.

• 54:11David Hoffman?

  Super fine print, yeah. The sponsor may, from time to time, stake a portion of the trust's assets through one or more trusted third-party staking providers. The trust would receive certain staking rewards of Ether tokens, which may be treated as income to the trust. Staking activity comes with risk of loss of Ether tokens, including in the form of slashing penalties. Additionally, bonding and un-bonding processes of Ethereum may render the tokens inaccessible for a period of time, resulting in certain liquidity risks that the sponsor will manage.

• 54:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's all that mean?

• 54:42David Hoffman?

  We're getting a staked ETH ETF. Not now, not this year, probably not. It's not going to come, it's going to be vanilla out of the gate.

• 54:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're applying for it, they're filing for it.

• 54:51David Hoffman?

  We're shooting our shot for the staked ETH ETF. First, we're going to get the vanilla one, but people are lining up for the staked one, including Arc 21 shares, which is...

• 55:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You think we'll get the staked one?

• 55:02David Hoffman?

  Well, we will get the staked one in the fullness of time. It's more of a question of like, are we going to get it?

• 55:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Before Gary or after Gary?

• 55:08David Hoffman?

  Are we going to get it in 2025 or not?

• 55:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, will Gary allow it or not? It's kind of a question. Okay, got it. Well, that's, that's good news to see that continue to evolve. David, there is a wormhole airdrop incoming. That's a massive bridge protocol, one of the most-used bridges. The ticker will be W, got some max...

• 55:28David Hoffman?

  Which is pretty Chad, that's a pretty Chad ticker.

• 55:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, that's a great ticker, just, just one initial.

• 55:33David Hoffman?

  W.

• 55:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Back to Ethereum ETF-type stuff. Did you see this? This is in the news. The SEC may be forced to declare, this is Fortune Crypto. The SEC may be forced to declare Ethereum a security after a controversial new launch. I saw tons of headlines like this this week. So, do you remember that company, Prometheusum? Which is like...

• 55:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, with like the lizard man CEO.

• 55:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  A licensed security exchange, okay? And I can't remember this guy's name, Kaplan. He was in front of Congress, last time I saw him, he was in front of Congress, basically simping the Gary Gensler SEC message that, of course, Ether is a security. And by the way, Prometheusum, the exchange that I founded, is going to be a registered licensed securities exchange. And so his message was, "Don't tell me, those crypto renegades, you lawbreakers, that you can't come in and..." Just register with SEC because of course you can. I have. And he went on the podcast tour talking about Ether as a security. Anyway, the first asset that Prometheus has chosen to

• 56:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  list is Ether. Is Ether. Okay, so their securities exchange with the Ether as their first tokenized security. So what do you think that means, David?

• 56:49David Hoffman?

  They're gonna go out of business.

• 56:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't even know if that was the point. I don't know what this guy's doing. Honestly, there's some speculation. Look, I'm not a conspiracy guy, but it's just very congruent with the SEC's message and like government plant? I don't know. I don't know.

• 57:08David Hoffman?

  It's exactly what Gary Gensler wants to hear.

• 57:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just weird. Anyway.

• 57:11David Hoffman?

  Can you pull up? Can you pull up a picture of this man? Can you, uh, Kaplan?

• 57:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  We shouldn't like just his looks.

• 57:17David Hoffman?

  Do it. Can you do it? Can you do it? Can you do it? Can you do it? Please it. Right. Have you seen, uh, American Psycho?

• 57:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, no.

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you saying Patrick Bateman vibes here?

• 57:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, big time. Big time. That is a lizard man. That is a lizard human.

• 57:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's leave it at that then. Okay, here's the good news, though. The good news is apparently it doesn't work like this. So.

• 57:41David Hoffman?

  I'm just shocked.

• 57:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike Selly, crypto lawyer, says, "The SEC has effectively conceded Ether as a security multiple times." I guess they would debate that, but I think they have to. "But left ambiguity, Prometheus need only reasonably believe Ether is a crypto asset security to custody it. SEC permitting Prometheus to custody Ether as a security because of this ambiguity won't make Ether a security." All right. So just because Prometheus and Kaplan custody it as a security doesn't automatically make Ether a security. That's not how this whole thing works. So I think the Fortune headline is wrong there, David, and we can move on.

• 58:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we should move on. This is, this is my response to Mr. Aaron Kaplan. This is, I think, how the industry will respond to him. This is a dog petting a cat. Dog's way bigger.

• 58:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're there.

• 58:36David Hoffman?

  Cats, tiny. It's like, yeah, that's, that's cute. You're cute. You're cute, bro. There's a raise this week that Bankless Ventures was an investor in. This is Omega Bitcoin DeFi Infrastructure raised $6 million with participation from Bankless Ventures, that's us, Borderless Capital, Fraction, Lightspeed Blockchain, and a few other angels as well. YanO from Blockworks, Gmoney, OSF, and then a bunch of other participation as well. What is it? What is it? It is Bitcoin smart contracts, like a multi-sig on Bitcoin. Basically, very simple. You can either move Bitcoin out of these accounts or you cannot. Connected to a chain link or other oracle-type service that connects to trading strategies on Ethereum or any other smart contract platform.

• 59:19David Hoffman?

  So it's kind of like yearn-like accounts on Ethereum connected to an oracle that goes to Bitcoin. And then the last piece of the puzzle is that institutional capital will give Bitcoin holders on the Bitcoin blockchain a loan with their Bitcoin as collateral. So they don't have to move it off of Bitcoin. They don't have to move it at all. And then you can get some yield in crypto. You can get some trading activity, some trading capital in the Ethereum degen side of things without having to touch your Bitcoin on the Bitcoin side of things. There's also custodial solutions as well for people who like their Bitcoin in custody. Overall, adding productivity to BTC, the asset. So congrats, Omega, on the raise. And there's a link in the show notes if you want to learn more.

• 1:00:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's get to the meme of the week, David. What are we looking at?

• 1:00:02David Hoffman?

  This is a Farcaster meme. This is actually a Twitter account that I've been following lately. Bold Leonitis, he just, he just makes comments. And so it's a little, little frog guy who's looking at his phone, talking to Dan Romero's, like, profile picture. And he goes, he's looking at, he's looking at Farcaster, as implied. So it's Twitter, but with crypto? And Dan Romero goes, yeah, I guess. And so the little frog guy goes, so it's literally crypto Twitter. Do these ever land? Do these ever land?

• 1:00:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I...

• 1:00:34David Hoffman?

  You said you don't want to know, do you? All right, we also got a second meme of the week. It's also a Farcaster meme, this time on Farcaster. And this is what everyone's getting excited about. The top of the iceberg, this is the meme. Farcaster, it's the first non-speculative crypto app. That's the tip of the iceberg that you see. But then, once you get on Farcaster, you see the DGEN token, the OG NFT, which is worth like $5,000. OXIN, Far Market, Pearl Bets, Bountycaster, points, daylight notifications, warps, will be billions, mint frames, token sign five. So yeah, there's actually a bunch of degenerate activity. Apparently, people have collected like tens of thousands of dollars just by being on Farcaster.

• 1:01:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, as always, guys, we have disclosures always posted on bankless.com/disclosures so you can check those out. And I'll end with this, some risks. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.